April 12-13, 1997. Alaina’s coffee house party, and a plan for next year. (#127)

March 20, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 7 Comments

I looked up Box Elder Court on a map before I left the apartment. It was a few miles away, in east Jeromeville, just past Power Line Road. I was told that the party started at seven o’clock, but I did not leave the apartment until 7:17, and it was almost 7:30 by the time I turned onto Box Elder Court. I did not feel comfortable being the first to arrive at a party where I knew few people.

But I wanted to go. I saw Alaina and Whitney on campus a few days ago between classes, and Alaina had reminded me, “Greg, you’re coming to the coffee house party, right?” Besides, I liked this new group of friends.

In hindsight, I sometimes humorously referred to early 1997 as my Rebellious Period. Right around the same time I got frustrated with the cliques at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, I had made some friends who went to another college-age Christian group, University Life. I went to University Life a few times, although I did not stop attending Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, or my church. I had not been around U-Life enough to notice if cliques were a problem, but I did seem to notice that they were not obsessed with putting people in categories like JCF was. Everyone at JCF wanted to lead Bible studies for future student leaders, or for transfer students, or for students of a certain ethnic or cultural background, or for women, but there were no specific groups for any category I fit into. I had heard that there would only be one small group at JCF next year that was not category specific. I wondered if there were others like me who did not fit into the categories; if so that would be a very large small group. More like a medium group.

Box Elder Court was a cul-de-sac, long enough for eight houses on either side. (Every time I use the word “cul-de-sac,” I have to mention that the term literally means “bag’s ass” in French.) Both sides of the street were mostly lined with cars already, so I had to park at the opposite end of the street from the house where the party was. Either this party was going to be crowded, or many people with cars lived on Box Elder Court, or both.

I walked along the east side of the street, now in shadow. The sun had dropped below the houses on the opposite side and was just setting. Twilight was descending over the neighborhood. I approached my destination, a pale blue house with a garage protruding from the front right side, the number 1402 on the wall next to the garage door. As I walked to the left of the garage toward the front door, I could hear muffled noises suggesting a large crowd inside. A sign on the door, on a sheet of poster board of the kind typically used for school projects, said “BOX ELDER HOUSE OF JAVA – OPEN! COME ON IN!” Next to these words was a drawing of a mug of coffee.

I opened the door slowly and peeked my head in, then I quietly walked forward in the direction that most of the noise seemed to come from. The house had a small living room on the left, with couches and a television; two people I did not know sat on the couch talking. Straight ahead was a dining room area, opening to a kitchen on the left. A hallway to the right of the dining room led to what appeared to be a bathroom and at least one bedroom, and to the right, a stairway descended from what were probably more bedrooms upstairs. This house looked big for three girls; I did not know how many lived here in total.

Someone had pushed the dining room table aside and set up a bar stool with a microphone on a stand in a corner of the dining room. A sign near the stool said OPEN MIC NIGHT, keeping true to the coffee shop theme. About ten or twelve people were milling about the kitchen and dining room; a few faces looked familiar, but the only people I recognized for sure were the three girls I knew who lived here: Alaina, Whitney, and Corinne.

Whitney spotted me first. “Greg!” she said. “You made it!”

“Yeah,” I replied, looking toward the kitchen. Alaina stood over an espresso machine making some kind of drink; next to the espresso machine was a conventional coffee machine.

“Hey, Greg!” Alaina said, sounding excited to see me. “Can I get you a drink?” Alaina gestured toward a white board, on which had been written a menu of coffee drinks.

“I’m probably not going to have coffee, but thanks,” I said.

“There are other drinks in the refrigerator if you want. Help yourself.”

“Sounds good.” I opened the refrigerator and took a can of Dr Pepper. I noticed a few drawings and paintings adorning the walls around the dining room; I was no trained judge of art, but they appeared to be intentionally silly. “I love the coffee shop decorations,” I said. “Right down to the art on the walls.”

“Yeah,” Alaina replied, pointing to a piece of paper that had been profusely scribbled on with crayons. “That one is mine.”

I looked more closely; a sign next to the drawing had indicated that its title was Studying for Finals, and that Alaina was the artist. “Studying for Finals,” I said. “That’s fitting.” Next to Studying for Finals was a drawing in black charcoal of some kind of monster with large eyes, abstract amorphous spots vaguely suggesting a nose and mouth, and no limbs. This drawing had been attributed to Corinne, and its title was Alaina.

“Corinne drew you as a monster?” I asked Alaina.

“Huh?” Corinne said, overhearing me call her name.

“Your drawing,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. You know how it is, how sometimes your roommate can act like a monster.”

I chuckled at this, then noticed a sign that said PAINTINGS $5 – ALL PROCEEDS GO TO JEN’S MISSION TRIP TO BRAZIL. “These paintings are for sale?” I asked.

“Yeah!” Corinne said. “We thought this would be a fun way to help Jen raise a little money.”

“I don’t know if I know Jen,” I replied. Jen was usually short for Jennifer, the most common name for college-aged girls in the United States in 1997, so there were probably multiple girls named Jen who the girls in this house knew.

“She’s coming later,” Corinne explained. “She had something else to do today.”

“Oh, okay. I still think this is a great idea, though. Can I buy this one?” I asked, gesturing toward Corinne’s Alaina.

“You want to buy my painting? Yeah!”

“Should I give you the money?”

“Just put it in the tip jar over by Alaina. We’ll give you the painting after the party.”

“Sounds good,” I said. I walked to the tip jar and put five dollars in it.

“What’s that for?” Alaina asked.

“I’m buying Corinne’s art.”

“Really? Are you sure you don’t want to buy mine?”

“See?” Corinne told Alaina. “Greg thinks you were acting like a monster the other day too!”

“I don’t want to get involved in any drama!” I said. “I just thought it was funny.”

“We’re just messing around,” Corinne said reassuringly. “Do you and your roommates ever argue?”

“Not really that much,” I said. “Our apartment has been pretty peaceful. And I lived alone before that; this is my first time having roommates.”

“Lucky.”

“And I don’t know where I’m going to live next year. People always seem to make their housing arrangements without asking me.”

“What about your current roommates?”

“They’re older. I don’t think they’ll be in Jeromeville next year.”

“That’s too bad,” Corinne said. “But, hey, if I hear of any guys from U-Life who need a roommate, I’ll let you know.”

“Cool. Thanks!”

“No problem! I’ll be right back. Corinne left toward the bedrooms, then returned with a sticky note that said SOLD and placed it on the Alaina drawing.

I found a chair and sat and watched people for a while. Ben Lawton had arrived while I was talking to Corinne, and Carolyn Parry was just walking in now, carrying a guitar case. Corinne took Carolyn’s guitar back to the bedrooms, presumably to keep it out of the way of everyone. That made a total of five people I knew by name at this party. Carolyn looked in my direction, and I waved.

“Hey, Greg,” Carolyn said. “Good to see you here! What’s up?”

“Just the usual,” I said. “Are you singing later? Is that why you brought the guitar?”

“Yeah! I’ll be singing a song I wrote.”

“That’s so cool!”

“How do you like the pieces for chorus this quarter?”

“I’m learning them okay. I like them so far. I don’t know German at all, though, so that’ll take some practice to pronounce right.”

“Yeah. You’ll pick it up fine with practice.”

“Thanks.”

Around eight o’clock, Alaina got everyone’s attention and announced, “Make sure you sign up for the open mic! We’ll start at 8:30.” She put a clipboard on the dining room table, and when she saw that I was watching her, she said, “You’re gonna do something on the open mic, right, Greg?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“Yes! Sign up! Just, like, get up there and do a math problem or something, and say it’s a poem about math. That would be hilarious!”

“You know,” I said, “I think I’ll do something like that.” I signed my name on the clipboard.

I did more people-watching and mingling until eight-thirty, at which time everyone gathered in the dining room around the microphone. Carolyn went first, with the guitar she had retrieved from the bedroom. “This is a song I wrote,” she said. “It’s about God’s love for us.” She then proceeded to play a fast rhythm on the guitar, singing from the perspective of God, calling someone who has been running away back into the love and hope that he offers. I knew how it felt to want to hide from God, and his love and truth. Carolyn was quite good as a singer, and these lyrics showed her to be just as good as a songwriter.

Next, a guy I did not know walked up to the microphone and began reciting a poem. “Once, there was this kid, who got into an accident, and couldn’t come to school,” he said. This was a dark poem, I thought. “When he finally came back, his hair had turned from black into bright white. He said that it was from when the cars had smashed so hard.” As he continued reciting words, next about a girl with an embarrassing birthmark, I realized why this poem had sounded familiar. He was reading the lyrics to a strange song that was popular a few years earlier, “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by the Crash Test Dummies. Despite being so dark, I always thought the song was oddly catchy.

A few more performers came up, performing various types of music and poetry readings. Some were serious, others were silly, and others involved inside jokes among the U-Life crowd that went over my head. After about seven or eight performers had gone, Alaina called out, “Next up, Greg!”

Hey, that’s me, I thought. After signing up, I had prepared something according to Alaina’s advice. “This is a dramatic reading of the Pythagorean Theorem,” I said. A few in the crowd giggled, and when the giggles stopped, I began. “In a right triangle!” I shouted dramatically. “The square! Of the… hy-pot-en-use!” I continued, taking frequent breaths and carefully enunciating each syllable of “hypotenuse.” “Is equal! To the sum… of the squares! Of… the other. Two… Siiiiidessss.” I drew out that last word, pronouncing it slowly. I walked away from the microphone, and everyone applauded.

“Good job!” Corinne told me as I returned to the crowd. “That was perfect.”

“Thanks!” I smiled.

I stayed at the coffee shop party for another couple hours, until it wound down and the girls who lived there had begun cleaning up. I took Corinne’s Alaina drawing off the wall when I left and hung it up in my room at the apartment, right next to Tear Down the Wall, the painting I had made freshman year with Bok and Skeeter and some others from my dorm.

The next day was Sunday, and by mid-afternoon I was still in a good mood after having had so much fun at the party the night before. It was a beautiful day, sunny and a little on the warm side, but not hot. Josh, the roommate I did not know as well as the other two, was actually home for once, and he seemed to be the only one home. “Hey, Greg,” Josh said as I came downstairs to the kitchen for a snack. “What’s up?”

“Nothing. I’m just relaxing the rest of the day. I don’t have any homework or studying.”

“You wanna come play disc golf? I was just thinking, this is a perfect day for it.”

“Sure!” I said. I grabbed the flying disc that I had gotten from Brian on the day of last year’s Man of Steel competition and got into Josh’s car. Josh had an entire bag of discs of different shapes and sizes; he was obviously a more experienced player than I was.

We drove about a mile and a quarter south on Maple Drive and parked next to a city park near a cluster of apartments just north of campus. I followed Josh to a concrete slab marked with a number 1. “There’s the hole over there,” Josh said, pointing at a pole with chains around it, making a cage-like structure, and a tray below.

“So this is an actual disc golf course? And the goal is to get the disc in the tray there?”

“Yeah. You’ve never done disc golf here?”

“I haven’t. The only time I’ve played disc golf was last year at the Man of Steel competition, and they just made up a course where the holes were trees or poles you had to hit.”

“Aim for those chains,” Josh said. “Your disc hits the chains, they’ll slow it down, and it’ll land in that tray.”

“Cool,” I said. Josh got his disc in the hole in two throws, using a different disc for the second, shorter throw than he used for the first throw. My first throw went wildly off course, and it took me a total of five throws to make it in the hole.

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” Josh said as we walked to the next tee area.

Uh-oh, I thought. This was a classic move; Josh got me alone, just him and me, because he wanted to talk to me about something serious. Maybe I was being a bad roommate, and he wanted to call me out. Maybe I was acting inappropriately in front of the youth group at church. Fortunately, it was not a bad thing at all that Josh wanted to ask.

“Do you have a place to live next year?” Josh asked.

“No, I don’t. Why? Do you need a roommate?”

“I do, actually. You know Sean Richards, right?”

I attended Catholic Mass until about six months ago, when I got involved at Jeromeville Covenant Church instead. Sean was one of the few other Catholic students who also attended Jeromeville Christian Fellowship. “Yeah,” I said. “I know Sean.”

“What about Sam Hoffman? Light blond hair, physics major like me, he goes to JCF sometimes?”

“I think I know who you’re talking about.”

“Anyway, Sean knows four guys who live in a three-bedroom house, and their landlord approved Sean to take over their lease. So, Sean and Sam and I are going to live there, but we need a fourth. You would be sharing the large bedroom with Sean. But you two would have your own bathroom. Are you interested?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That sounds great!” Sharing a bedroom was not ideal, but I had been doing it all this year, so it would not be that difficult of a transition. It was somewhat amusing that I would go from sharing a bedroom with someone named “Shawn” to sharing a bedroom with someone named “Sean.” “Where is the house?” I asked.

“It’s on Acacia Drive. Across the street from the Acacia Apartments.”

“That’s a great location!” I said. Three different groups of people from my freshman dorm lived in the Acacia Apartments sophomore year, and I used to visit them there occasionally. I knew the area. “I could walk to church from there,” I added.

“Yeah! We’re gonna take a look at the house sometime next week. I’ll let you know for sure when we do. But we’re all pretty sure we’re gonna go for it.”

“Sounds good! This certainly takes a lot of stress off of me.”

“I think we’ll be a fun group of guys. And it’ll be nice having an actual house.”

“Yeah!” I said.

Josh continued to dominate our game of disc golf. He tried to teach me to throw more straight; his pointers helped a little, but I obviously needed more practice to throw a disc straight. The Man of Steel competition, among the men of JCF, was coming up in less than two months, and I would need to throw much straighter than that if I wanted to avoid repeating my near-last-place finish. I found myself getting a little frustrated, but we were not strictly keeping score. This time was more about hanging out with Josh. He told me that he would be doing the teacher training program next year, to be a high school science teacher. I told him about my internship helping in a math class at Jeromeville High, and about the summer internships I had applied for, so I would be able to decide between teaching and graduate school. Josh also asked if I had heard that Shawn, our roommate who was currently doing teacher training for math, had become disillusioned with it and was considering leaving teaching. I told Josh that I had heard this, and that it was unfortunate.

I answered emails from a few Internet friends when I got home, and I had told each of those people that I had a great weekend. I went to a fun party with new friends, and my housing plans for the following year had fallen into place nicely. And no one seemed to care that I was part of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship but hanging out with University Life people. It was okay to have multiple groups of friends. It was a good thing.

Corinne Holt
*Alaina*, 1997
Charcoal on paper

Courtesy of the G. J. Dennison personal collection.

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February 21, 1997. A productive day, in more ways than one. (#121)

February 6, 2022February 11, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 8 Comments

“So when Jesus said, ‘Before Abraham was born, I am,’ the people he was speaking to would have recognized ‘I am’ as what God said to Moses,” Dr. Hurt explained. “Where’s Lorraine? I feel like she would have something to say about this.”

Lorraine Mathews was a religious studies major, specializing in Christianity; I knew her from Jeromeville Christsian Fellowship. I was not a religious studies major. I took this Writings of John class, and its prerequisite the previous quarter, because I wanted to learn more about the Bible. I had gotten involved with JCF sophomore year, through friends, and a year ago this month I made a decision to follow Jesus. I grew up Catholic, where Bible reading consisted of a couple of paragraphs from three different books read aloud by the priest each Sunday, and I wanted to know more about the Bible.

I did not know why Dr. Hurt thought Lorraine would have something to say about this passage, but I did know exactly why she was not in class today. In a somewhat uncharacteristic move for me, I spoke up, drawing attention to myself and hoping to get a laugh. “She’s watching Empire Strikes Back,” I said, loud enough for all 150 students to hear.

“Oooooooh,” a few students said, as others chuckled.

“She skipped class for The Empire Strikes Back?” Dr. Hurt repeated. “Hasn’t she seen that a bunch of times already?”

“This is the new one!” an unidentified student said.

“There’s a new one?”

“Yeah! With added scenes.”

“Really. Well, that’s too bad she missed class today.”

After the fact, I felt a little bad. Maybe I should not have said that. Maybe Lorraine would be unhappy with me. She can be a bit feisty sometimes. But I said what I said. I wished that I had been watching The Empire Strikes Back with them. Lucasfilm, the Star Wars production company, was in the middle of rereleasing the three movies with added and changed scenes to better match director George Lucas’ original vision. The Star Wars movies were not a large part of my childhood, but my roommate Brian was a huge fan. Brian had watched the new Star Wars multiple times in the last few weeks. Today he and his friends were watching the next movie, on the first day it hit theaters. I had seen Star Wars with my friend Barefoot James a few days ago, but Brian said that I could tag along the second time he saw Empire Strikes Back, and James could too.

After the John class ended, I wandered over to the Memorial Union to find a table and get homework done. It was sunny but cold, so the indoor tables were crowded, but not as crowded as they would be on a rainy day. I saw Ajeet Tripathi and Brent Wang from JCF sitting at a table. Ajeet had a book open but did not appear to be actively reading it.

“‘Sup, Greg?” Ajeet asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just looking for a place to sit for a couple hours. May I join you?”

“Sure,” Brent said. “How many more classes do you have today?”

“None–”

“Why are you still here, dude?” Ajeet interrupted. “It’s Friday afternoon!”

“I need to go to office hours for geometry. We have a midterm Monday, and I have a few questions.”

Todd Chevallier, another of Ajeet and Brent’s housemates, arrived at the table and said, “Greg. How’d you beat me here?” He was coming from the John class also.

“I don’t know. I guess I just walk fast?”

“Maybe. Oh, yeah, I had to pee too,” Todd said.

“Greg, did you say you’re taking geometry?” Brent asked. “Like we all took in high school?”

“It’s a lot more advanced than that,” I explained. “In this class, we get a lot into the theory behind it, and how to construct a proof. We also learned about the undefined terms and the foundations of geometry as a logical system.” I looked up and saw the blank stares on the others’ faces, a familiar sight when I explained anything I learned as a third-year mathematics major to non-mathematics majors. “It’s the theory behind what you do in high school geometry.”

“Uhh, sure,” Todd said after a pause. The conversation went into a lull, and I got out my geometry book to work on homework. Ajeet started singing, “Da da,” followed by some clicking noises, then “Da da da da da da,” six notes of equal duration with the two notes in the middle a minor third lower than all the other notes. Ajeet repeated the riff, and Todd joined in; I recognized it from a song I had heard numerous times on the radio.

“What are you guys doing?” Brent asked.

“I’ve had that song stuck in my head all day,” Ajeet explained.

“What song?”

“‘Santa Monica,’ by Everclear. ‘We could live beside the ocean, leave the fire behind…’”

“I’ve never heard it.”

“Really? It’s on the radio all the time.”

A while later, I looked up from my studying to see Alaina Penn walking by. Alaina was involved with University Life, another Christian group on campus, and I knew her through mutual friends. Alaina saw me and waved, walking toward our table.

“Hey, Greg,” Alaina said. “Mind if I pull up a chair? If I can find one?”

“I actually need to get going,” Brent said. “You can have my seat.”

“Thanks!”

“See ya, Brent,” Ajeet said.

“Have a great day,” I added as Brent said goodbye to us and walked away.

I was about to introduce Alaina to Ajeet and Todd, but I was quite well acquainted with the embarrassment of trying to introduce people who already know each other, so first I asked, “Do you guys know Alaina?”

“No,” Ajeet answered as Todd shook his head in the negative.

“She goes to U-Life. I met her through mutual friends.”

“Were you at U-Life this week, Greg?” Alaina asked. “I didn’t see you.”

“No,” I explained. “I had other plans on Tuesday.”

“That was the night you went to see Star Wars with James, right?” Ajeet asked.

“You ditched us for Star Wars?” Alaina asked. “It’s okay, I’m just messing with you.”

“Wait,” Todd said. “Greg? You go to U-Life too?”

“I’ve been once. Two weeks ago. Alaina and her friends invited me, and I thought it might be nice to check it out.”

“I went a couple times freshman year. Their large group meetings were a lot like JCF.”

“I noticed that too.” I did not tell Todd or Ajeet the complete reason why I wanted to try out U-Life, that I felt frustrated at being on the outside of the cliques within JCF.

“Spring training is starting soon!” Ajeet announced. “Do you guys follow baseball?”

“No,” Alaina answered.

“I used to,” I replied. “I went to maybe three or four Bay City Titans games every year with my family. I moved out right when the players went on strike, and I never got back into it.”

“Bummer, But at least you like the right team,” Ajeet said. “Baseball is of God.”

“Whoa,” Todd replied. “Blasphemy? ‘Baseball is a god?’”

“I said baseball is of God, not a God. Baseball is God’s gift to us.”

A while later, I heard a new voice say, “Hey, guys.” Ben Lawton and Whitney Felton, two of Alaina’s friends from U-Life, approached. “Mind if we join you?”

“Go for it,” I said. The table next to us was now empty, and I moved aside so that they could push the empty table next to us and make more room. Whitney introduced herself to Ajeet and Todd; Ben had met them before, since he occasionally attended JCF also. It was Ben who had first introduced me to Alaina.

“What are you up to the rest of the day?” Ben asked me a bit later.

“I’m going to a professor’s office hours. What about you?”

“I have a class at 3.”

“A class Friday at 3,” Todd repeated. “That’s brutal. It’s bad enough that Ajeet and I have class Friday at 2.”

“We should probably get going for that,” Ajeet added. “It was nice meeting you guys. Greg, I’ll see you tonight at JCF?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Have a good one.”

I continued working on homework. A few minutes after Ajeet and Todd left, Alaina said, “So Whitney and I had this great idea the other day. We’re gonna throw a coffee house party. We’ll make all kinds of special coffee drinks, and we’ll decorate the house like a coffee shop.”

“And we’ll have poetry readings, and we’re hoping someone will play live music for part of the night,” Whitney added. “And we’ll make art to put on the wall.”

“That’s a great idea,” Ben said. “When is this?”

“Oh, not any time soon. We’re too busy this quarter. We’re thinking maybe April.”

“Sounds like fun!”

The three of them started discussing who they could ask to play music and make artwork, naming people I did not know. At one point, Alaina asked, “Greg, what do you think?”

“Oh,” I said, unaware that I was included in this discussion since it seemed to revolve around U-Life people. “That sounds like a lot of fun! Keep me posted.” I left out the detail that I did not like coffee; it still sounded like fun even without coffee.

At around quarter to three, I stood up and said, “I should probably get going.”

“Me too,” Ben replied.

“You know what’s really funny?” I added. “When I sat down here two hours ago, it was all JCF people at this table. And the table gradually transitioned into U-Life people.”

“That is funny!” Alaina said. “Greg, you just have a lot of friends.”

“I guess I do. Have a good weekend, you guys!”

“Thanks!” Whitney replied. “You too!”

For the last year, I would have said that Dr. Thomas was my favorite mathematics professor, but now it was a toss-up between her and Dr. Samuels. Dr. Samuels was a much better teacher than most of the professors I had. His was the only math class I ever took that did not feel like just a lecture. He called on students at random, like a high school teacher might, and he would pause class a few times each hour and tell us to turn to our neighbors and summarize what we just learned. This helped, especially on days when I could not stay awake.

Four other students came to Dr. Samuels’ office hours that day; apparently I was not the only one who needed refreshing on these topics. From this class, I was beginning to see geometry in a new light. My high school geometry textbook had said that every logical system had to begin with undefined terms, and that “point,” “line,” and “plane” were undefined terms in Euclidean geometry. Why were they undefined, I thought? It seemed lazy. One could at least describe the concepts of points, lines, and planes using English, right?

After Dr. Samuels’ class, the concept of undefined terms made more sense. Geometry begins with basic postulates, such as that two points determine a line. The terms are undefined because these assumptions determine all the properties that a geometer would need to know about points and lines. Furthermore, one could construct a geometric system where “point” and “line” were understood to mean something else, and all of the theorems would still apply in that system, since they were based on those basic assumptions. If “point” were understood to mean what would normally be called a line, and “line” were understood to mean what would normally be called a point, some of the basic postulates would still be true. Two lines, in the real world sense, determine one point. This thought blew my mind.

After Dr. Samuels answered my question, he said, “By the way, Greg, can you stick around for a while? I want to ask you something after we’re done here.”

“Sure,” I said. “I was going to listen to everyone else’s questions anyway.” I felt a little nervous over the next twenty minutes, wondering what Dr. Samuels wanted to talk to me about. Was I in trouble? I did my best to concentrate on what my classmates were asking.

After the last person left Dr. Samuels’ office, he said, “So, Greg. What are your plans for after graduation? I always ask this of strong students like you.”

“I’m not really sure,” I replied sheepishly. If Dr. Samuels thought I was a strong student, I should have a better answer than that. “I’ve been trying to figure that out. I went to the Math Club’s career fair, and nothing really stood out to me. Dr. Thomas told me about REU programs, so I’m thinking about that for this summer, to get a sense of what grad school would be like.”

“Have you ever considered being a teacher? I’ve done some work with secondary education, and I’ve heard the way you explain things to others in class.”

Of all the reasons Dr. Samuels might have wanted to talk to me individually, this was not what I was expecting. For years, I had said that I would never be a teacher, because of the politics involved in public schools. Many of my high school teachers were active and outspoken politically, with views that I disagreed with. I had always assumed that I would stay in school forever and become a mathematician, but my disillusionment with the career fair had left my future plans undecided.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t think much about teaching at first, but everything feels up in the air now. And I work as a tutor at the Learning Skills Center, and I do enjoy that.”

“If you ever want to give it a try, you can get two units on your transcript as Math 197. You’ll help out in a classroom at Jeromeville High for the quarter, and at the end you’ll write a short paper about what you did and what you learned. If you’re trying to figure out your career plans, it would be a great way to immerse yourself in the world of teaching.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It sounds like it. When do I have to let you know by?”

“Sometime next week should be good. Think about it.”

“I will. Thanks for letting me know about this.”

“You’re welcome. This state is always looking for good teachers, especially ones with strong mathematics backgrounds.”

“Yeah.”

I left Dr. Samuels’s office and walked toward the bus stop. This was a new wrinkle in the fabric of my life. Could I be a teacher? I tried to picture myself in a classroom with thirty sullen teenagers who called me Mr. Dennison. I was sure it would be challenging, but it could be fun and enjoyable as well. I enjoyed my tutoring job, I always enjoyed explaining math to people, and I had been spending a lot of time around younger people through volunteering with the youth group at church.

“Greg!” an enthusiastic female voice shouted as I approached the bus stop. I saw Yesenia Fonseca, one of the first students I ever had as a tutor, waving at me. “What’s up?”

“Just thinking,” I said. “My professor just asked me if I had ever considered being a teacher. I’d never really pictured myself as a teacher.”

“You’d totally be a great teacher!” Yesenia replied. “I had another tutor last spring quarter, and she wasn’t good at explaining at all, like you were.”

“He said I could get units for helping in a classroom at Jeromeville High. I’m thinking I might do it.”

“You should!”

Yesenia’s bus arrived just seconds before mine; we said goodbye and headed home. Shawn, one of my roommates, was studying to be a math teacher. He was doing his student teaching at Laguna Ciervo High School, across the Drawbridge in a suburban neighborhood just outside of Capital City. When I got home, I told Shawn about what Dr. Samuels had said.

“You should go for it,” Shawn said. “I think you’d be a good teacher. We definitely need good teachers. The teacher I’m working with is terrible.”

“Oh yeah?”

“He’s just mean. He keeps telling kids, ‘It’s my way or the highway.’ I mean, I get you have to establish authority, but there’s got to be a better way.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t see you like that. I think you should try it.”

All weekend, I could not get this off my mind. This had been a productive day, in more ways than one. I had gotten a lot of work done sitting in the Memorial Union. I had learned of an upcoming party at Alaina and Whitney’s house, another connection with a new group of friends. And Dr. Samuels had given me something to think about regarding the future. Me, Mr. Dennison, teaching high school kids about algebra and geometry.

Sure, Shawn was not having the best experience with student teaching. But I was not Shawn. Hopefully I would have a better experience. Yesenia had told me that I would make a good teacher, and as a former tutee, she would know. I would tell Dr. Samuels on Monday that I wanted to help out at Jeromeville High; the worst that could happen was that I would discover that I would not like it. I would still get two units for it. It was an option to explore, and that was what I needed right now.

Author’s note: Who was your favorite teacher, and why?

August 1-3, 1996. Another group, one that included people I did not know. (#95)

June 14, 2021December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

The final two weeks of my summer class, Introduction to Software, overlapped with the Summer Olympics in Atlanta. I wrote code as I watched Muhammad Ali on the television climbing the stairs with the Olympic torch to light the flame at the opening ceremony. While I was debugging my project, looking through hundreds of lines of code to find mistakes, gymnast Kerri Strug was landing a nearly-perfect vault despite having sprained her ankle on her previous attempt. Her remarkable feat won the gold medal for the United States in the women’s team all-around competition. And I was taking a break from studying, trying to meet girls on the Internet using IRC, while American runner Michael Johnson won gold in the 400 meters, but I was keeping an eye on the other American in the race, Alvin Harrison. He and his twin brother, Calvin, had spent part of their high school years in Santa Lucia County, where I grew up; after these Olympics, my brother met both of them at an autograph-signing event. Alvin Harrison finished fourth in this race, but would go on to win gold as part of a relay team. Both brothers were on a winning relay team in the following Olympics, but unfortunately were later disqualified as part of an incident involving performance-enhancing drugs.

From the moment I walked out the final exam, I knew that I did well. Everything was very straightforward, and I had been studying, so there were no surprises. After I dropped off my backpack at home, I went for a bike ride, then I showered, took a nap, and made dinner After that, it was time to go to Bible study. I did not get to watch any of the Olympics that night.

Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, a chapter of the nondenominational campus ministry organization Intervarsity, did not have regular meetings during summer break, but two small group Bible studies still met, one in the Pine Grove Apartments near campus and one in south Jeromeville on the other side of Highway 100. I drove on Maple Drive toward campus for about a mile and turned onto a cul-de-sac which dead-ends into the parking lot for Pine Grove. I parked on the street, walked to Lillian’s apartment, and knocked on the door, and someone told me to come in.

“Greg!” Lillian said as I walked into her apartment with my Bible. Amelia Dye, who lived in a different apartment in Pine Grove with her cat who had the birthday party, had arrived before me. So had Ramon, Jason, and Caroline, friends from my freshman dorm who all lived near me. “How are you?” Lillian asked. “Have you had your final yet?”

“It was today,” I said. “I think I did pretty well.”

“Good! So no class tomorrow?”

“No. I only had class this summer on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.”

“Four day weekend every week!” Amelia said. “And now you’re done for the summer, right? No class second session?”

“Right,” I replied.

“Any big plans for the weekend? Are you going to Dan and Adrienne’s wedding?”

I paused as my brain tried to process what Amelia had just asked me. Did Amelia have me confused with someone else? Apparently some people named Dan and Adrienne were getting married this weekend, but I did not know these people. Or did I? If I did know these people, they never told me about their wedding. Was I supposed to receive an invitation? “I don’t think I know these people,” I said.

“Dan Keenan? From 20/20? The college pastor?”

With this additional information, my brain began making connections. Students at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship attended a few different churches on Sundays, and I had heard some of my friends who attended Jeromeville Covenant Church use the name 20/20 to refer to the college-age Sunday school class. “From Jeromeville Covenant?” I asked Amelia. “I’ve never been there.”

“Oh, that’s right!” Amelia said. “I guess you don’t know them. I’m so excited for the wedding!”

“A lot of people will be in town for the wedding,” Ramon added. “Liz is coming up for it, and the Morocco team gets back tonight, so they’ll be there too. A bunch of us will be hanging out afterward. I’m sure you’re invited, if you want to come.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That sounds good. Where?” Ramon told me the address, and I wrote it down. “What time should I get there?” I asked.

“It depends on how late the wedding reception goes. But if you show up by eight or nine, someone will probably be there by then.”

“Sounds good. I’ll stop by.”

Two days later, I sat in my apartment watching the beginning of the Saturday evening broadcast of the Olympics. Ramon had said to show up by eight or nine; it was now just past eight o’clock, and I sat on the bed staring at the paper on which I had written what Ramon had told me: 1008 Walnut St. I did not know whose house this was, and I had never been to Walnut Street, although I had easily found it on a map earlier. I was excited to see my friends, especially the ones who had been away for the summer, but they were all coming from a wedding reception, and I did not want to be the only one there waiting for everyone else. I played around on the computer wasting another half hour chatting on IRC before I left the house.

Walnut Street was in an older part of Jeromeville, in between my apartment and Pine Grove. The neighborhood was all single-family homes, and it was not readily obvious at first whether they still housed families or had been converted to student rentals. Tall, leafy oaks and sycamores provided shade. The house at the address I wrote down had lights on in the living room, and there were so many cars in front that I had to park a few houses down the street. My fears about being the first one to arrive at an unfamiliar place were apparently unfounded.

I walked up to the door slowly and knocked, hesitantly. “Come in!” someone shouted from the living room. I opened the door and walked inside, looking around. I saw a few unfamiliar faces on the couch. I could see into the kitchen, where Ramon and Liz and Jason were standing around talking, but they did not see me yet.

“May I help you?” the same voice who told me to come in asked. It belonged to a girl with light brown hair.

“Some people from my Bible study told me that a bunch of people were in town for a wedding,” I explained. “They said that they would be hanging out here afterward.”

“Yeah! That’s us! Were you at the wedding?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know the people who got married.”

“I’m Vanessa,” the girl said.

“I’m Greg,” I replied. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too! Who did you say you knew here?”

“Ramon and Liz and Jason,” I said, gesturing toward them. “And Caroline Pearson, and Amelia Dye. They all told me about this.”

“Oh, yeah. They’re all here.”

“Greg!” I heard Ramon say from the kitchen. I turned and waved.

“I made it,” I said.

“Cool.”

“I’m going to go say hi to them,” I told Vanessa. “It was nice meeting you.”

“You too! I’m sure I’ll see you around later.” I walked to the kitchen where Ramon and Liz and Jason were standing. Caroline was also there, seated at a small dining table, talking to Taylor Santiago, Pete Green, and Charlie Watson, who had all just returned from a month-long mission trip to Morocco.

“Greg!” Taylor said, reaching to shake my hand.

“Hey, Greg,” Pete added, as I was shaking Taylor’s hand.

“Hey, guys. How was the trip?”

“Uhh, I’m so tired,” Taylor replied. “I’m still adjusting to the time difference.”

“Oh, I bet,” I said.

“But, yeah, it was a good trip. There were a bunch of people on our trip from all over the US, and the three of us got split up for a while. We’ll be presenting more about our trip at 20/20 after school starts again.”

“You should come,” Pete told me.

“Maybe,” I said.

I got up to snack on some tortilla chips and saw Amelia, who had first mentioned this party at Bible study two days earlier. She was with Scott Madison, her boyfriend who had gone home for the summer. “Hey, Greg,” Amelia said.

“Good to see you,” Scott added.

“You too.”

“Having fun?”.

“Yeah. There are a lot of people here I don’t know. But there are people I do know here too. Are the people who got married here?”

“No,” Amelia replied. “They’re on their way to their honeymoon.”

“Oh, yeah. That makes sense.” I was relatively unfamiliar with how weddings worked, and that felt like a dumb question in hindsight. “So the people here who I don’t know, are they from 20/20?”

“Yeah. 20/20 is the college group at J-Cov. We have a class before big church, and we usually have a retreat sometime during the year, and fun events too. And some people go on mission trips in the summer.”

“I see.” I was not sure what Amelia meant by “big church,” but it sounded like she was talking about the actual church service, as opposed to Sunday school classes, so I did not ask. But I did ask something else: “And a lot of people from 20/20 also go to JCF?”

“Yeah. Some of us, at least.”

“Why is it called 20/20, anyway?”

“I don’t know, now that you mention it,” Amelia replied.

“I think it’s, like, 20/20 vision,” Scott explained. “Because we want to see God clearly.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

I wandered back into the living room, where people had begun to gather around the television. They were watching the Olympics; the gold medal game for men’s basketball between the United States and Yugoslavia was on. A shorter-than-average skinny guy with dark hair sat on a couch next to a tall guy with wavy brown hair and an empty seat; I gestured toward the empty seat and asked, “May I sit here?”

“Sure,” the skinny guy said. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Noah.”

“I’m Greg,” I said, shaking Noah’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“I’m Martin,” the tall guy with wavy hair said as he also shook my hand. “Do you go to 20/20? I don’t think I’ve seen you before?”

“No. I go to JCF, and some people from my Bible study invited me to come hang out tonight.”

“Cool.”

“Have you been watching the Olympics?” Noah asked.

“Off and on,” I said. “The women’s all-around gymnastics was pretty impressive, with Kerri Strug’s sprained ankle.”

“Yeah. I hope she’s okay.”

The United States was heavily favored to win this game, but both teams were undefeated so far in the Olympics. The score remained close throughout the first half. At one point, I looked up to watch Reggie Miller shoot a 3-pointer for the USA. Noah and Martin and a few others who were watching the game cheered.

“I hope Yugoslavia wins,” I said quietly.

“What?” Noah asked incredulously.

“You Communist,” Martin said.

“I’m a purist,” I explained. “I don’t think NBA players belong in the Olympics. The Olympics are for amateurs. And their endorsement deals get in the way. Like last time, when some players had to cover the logos on their warmup suits with flags because they had contracts with rival shoe companies. It’s ridiculous that that has to be an issue.”

“I see your point,” Noah said. “But, the way I see it, other countries were letting their professionals play, so it’s only fair. And after the Dream Team in the last Olympics was so popular, they’re probably not going back at this point.”

“I guess.”

“NBA players from other countries can play for their countries too,” Martin added. “Vlade Divac is playing for Yugoslavia.”

“That’s right,” I said.

As the game continued, I overheard parts of the others’ conversations, in which Noah talked about being something called the “junior high intern” this year. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Last year, we both volunteered with the junior high youth group at J-Cov,” Noah explained, gesturing toward himself and Martin. “This year, I’m an intern, so it’s going to be my part-time job to lead the junior high group.”

“That’s cool. Is that the same youth group that Taylor Santiago works with?”

“Yeah! I’ve known Taylor for years. We went to high school together. How do you know him?”

“We were in the same dorm freshman year.”

“Oh, okay.”

“We’re going to camp with the junior high kids the week after next,” Martin said. “Taylor will be there too.”

“That sounds fun. Where is the camp?”

“Near Mount Lorenzo.”

“Nice. It’s pretty there.” I looked at Martin’s shirt while he was talking to me. It was white, with the words “VOTE BOB & LARRY IN 1996” at the top. Below it was a strange cartoon drawing of a round, almost spherical red character and a tall green character, cylindrical with a rounded top, standing behind a podium like candidates running for President. Both of these characters had oddly-shaped asymmetrical eyes. Apparently their names were Bob and Larry, but whatever cartoon they were from was unknown to me. I did not ask.

The game remained close until late in the game; neither team led by double digits until only 10 minutes remained, when the United States began to pull ahead. Vlade Divac had fouled out by then. When it became apparent that Yugoslavia was not going to make a miraculous comeback, I got up, used the bathroom, and wandered around what was left of the party. It was getting late, and the crowd seemed noticeably smaller by then; the living room and kitchen were filling up with empty cups, soda cans, and paper plates.

“Are you having fun?” Vanessa, the girl who had answered the door when I arrived, asked me.

“Yeah. I didn’t know much about this 20/20 group before tonight.”

“You should come check it out sometime. Do you go to church?”

“Yeah. I go to the Newman Center,” I said

I waited for Vanessa to give the predictable response that Catholics aren’t real Christians, and that the office of the Papacy is un-Biblical. But instead, she just said, “That’s Catholic, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re always welcome to check out 20/20 and J-Cov if you want. The class starts at 9:15, and the service at 10:45.”

“Thanks. I might someday.”

By midnight, the party had quieted down even more. Noah and Martin were still watching the Olympics; the final round of the men’s 5000-meter run was on. “I don’t think I even realized the 5k was an Olympic event,” I said.

“They show it late at night because Americans don’t do well in it,” Martin said.

“Yeah,” Noah added. “Usually those African long-distance runners dominate.”

The race took fourteen minutes to finish. The lead changed several times, and the lone American runner in the race, Bob Kennedy, remained in contention but fell to sixth place on the last lap. Half of the contenders finished within a few seconds of each other, but a few others had fallen far behind. The final runner, Aissa Belaout of Algeria, did not cross the finish line until 20 seconds after the next runner ahead of him, almost a full minute behind the winner.

“I always wonder with guys like that,” I said. “You’re so far behind, there’s no way you can win. But you just have to keep going, because making it to the final round of the Olympics is such an accomplishment.”

“Yeah,” Noah replied. “Never give up. Keep running. They earned their spot in the Olympics. As long as you’re still alive and still running, you never know what’ll happen.”

I said my goodbyes a few minutes later and drove home, going straight to bed after I arrived. I learned a lot of new things tonight. I knew that my friends from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship attended a number of different churches, but I always assumed that church was just something they did on Sunday. Apparently I was wrong. Jeromeville Covenant Church had a whole group for college students with activities and retreats, and this group included some people who did not also go to JCF. My JCF friends who attended J-Cov had other Christian friends whom I did not know.

After the events of the last few weeks at the Newman Center, I was starting to question whether or not it was the best place for me, as a newly committed Christian, to learn about the Bible and grow closer to Jesus Christ. Too many students at the Newman Center did not seem to take their faith very seriously, and the leadership put their agenda ahead of Scripture and the Church with their emphasis on liberal feminism. Maybe I would try J-Cov and 20/20 sometime. But, on the other hand, I was committed to singing at Newman, and I did not want to turn my back on the traditions of my Catholic family. I did not have to decide right now. Maybe, like the runners I had just watched waiting for the right time to surge ahead, I would just have to wait for the right time to try something new, and then see what happened. Even though my life was full of unanswered questions, I was still alive and still running.

(Remember, I am almost 6’4″. I really am that much shorter than him; it’s not an awkward angle.)

January 10-13, 1996. Another hopeless crush and a party. (#66)

October 20, 2020December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 10 Comments

I have always had a good ear for music, but I rarely did anything with it other than sing along in the car. I played piano for a few years in elementary school, but according to Mom, I quit because I thought music was for nerds. I do not remember saying that, but it definitely sounds like something that 10-year-old Greg would have said, not yet mature enough to embrace being different. I did not perform music in front of people again until three months ago, when I started singing at 11:00 Mass at the Newman Center.

Our experience levels in the church choir ranged from people like me who just liked to sing for fun all the way up to Claire Seaver, a third-year music major who had been performing all her life. I did not have much formal training in music, but I would occasionally try different harmonies with some of our usual familiar songs, because my ear could pick up harmonies easily. I was excited this week when Claire brought a new song for us to learn, with four parts. We had been practicing it all night, and the sopranos and altos had just finished doing their parts all together. “Let’s hear just the guys now,” Claire said.

Phil Gallo and I sang the bass parts, while Matt Jones and Ryan Gambrell sang tenor, Matt playing guitar as well. We sounded okay, although there were a few wrong notes sung and played. After this, we tried the entire song with every part singing, and after three times, it seemed like we finally had perfected the song.

“I thought that sounded good,” I said afterward.

“Yes!” Claire agreed. “I think we’re ready for Sunday!”

“Yes,” Danielle Coronado said. “Now I get to go home and write a paper.”

“Already?” Claire said incredulously. “It’s the first week of class!”

“It’s only one page. Not really a paper. Just an assignment.”

“Good luck,” I said.

“Thanks,” Danielle replied.

“See you guys Sunday,” I said, turning back to Phil, Matt, and Ryan.

“Take it easy, man,” Phil replied. I waved at the guys and went to find Heather, since we were neighbors and had carpooled here, but she and Melanie Giordano were busy talking, and I did not want to interrupt. I stepped back, waiting, when I heard a soft female voice behind me say, “Hey, Greg.”

I turned around and got nervous when I saw Sabrina Murphy looking up at me. There was just something about her that was cute, but I knew that she had a boyfriend, so any of these thoughts were hopeless. I was not sure how to explain it, she was not drop dead beautiful by Hollywood standards, but I found something about her attractive. “Yes?” I asked awkwardly.

“I just wanted to say you really have a strong bass voice,” she said. “It really comes out well when we sing harmony like that.”

“Thank you,” I said, smiling and blushing a little.

“Have you ever thought about being in University Chorus? They always need more male voices.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about singing in any kind of group at all until Danielle talked me into doing this a few months ago. She’s in chorus, right?”

“Yeah. And Claire. I did it freshman year, but I haven’t been able to fit it into my schedule since then.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

“You should. I think you’d be good.”

“You ready?” Heather asked me, having walked up beside me and Sabrina a few seconds earlier.

“Sure,” I said. “Sabrina? I’ll see you Sunday?”

“Yes,” Sabrina replied. Have a great week!”

In the car on the way home, Heather asked me, “So what was Sabrina saying you would be good at?”

“She asked if I had ever done University Chorus.”

“You totally should!”

“I don’t know. I sing in the car, but I’m not good at, like, real singing.”

“I’ve heard you sing, I think you’d be great! Give yourself more credit.”

“Maybe,” I said.

Twenty-four hours later, I was sitting in my apartment alone, doing math homework. It was a Thursday night, and I was in a good mood. Thursday was my lightest day of class this quarter, and my tutoring job did not start until next week. But my good mood was mostly because I was still on a high from Sabrina’s compliment last night. Maybe I sang better than her boyfriend, and she was going to leave him for me. My attention drifted from my math assignment as I played out this scenario in my head, imagining what I would say if Sabrina came out of nowhere and confessed her love for me. I heard a knock at the door, and with this on my mind, my heart rate spiked and I almost jumped out of my chair.

I got up and peeked out the window; it was not Sabrina. Heather Escamilla stood in the dim glow of the porch light. I opened the door, wondering what she wanted, since there was no choir practice or church tonight. “Hi,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I was just thinking, I forgot to tell you last night. Saturday we’re going to have a birthday party for Gary at our place. And you’re invited.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sure! What time should I be there?”

“I’ve been telling people 7. I don’t know when everyone will get there, though.”

“That sounds good. Do I need to bring anything?”

“No. Just yourself.”

“Great! I’ll see you then!”

“Have a great night!” Heather said, waving as she turned back toward the parking lot. I closed the door and went back to my homework. I just got invited to a party, my first actual college party, other than the one in the dorm last year that I had walked in on uninvited.

As I worked on homework, I kept thinking about Heather and Gary’s party. I wondered if I would know anyone there. I wondered if anyone else from church would be there. Maybe Sabrina would be there. That in and of itself was enough to make me want to go.

My high had worn off by the time I got home from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship on Friday night. All day on campus, the universe seemed to be throwing in my face the fact that other people had boyfriends and girlfriends and I did not. I saw a lot of couples acting coupley all over campus today. This all-American jock type guy sitting across from me on the bus home was making out with a hot girl in a sorority sweatshirt the whole time. At JCF, I sat next to Liz and Ramon, who were two of my best friends, and had been a couple since early in our freshman year, but something about them being a couple bugged me tonight. And I overheard someone saying that this junior girl named Amelia Dye was going out with Scott Madison now, which meant one fewer girl left for me to possibly end up with.

As I sat at my desk listening to the whirs and whistles of the modem connecting to the email server, I saw in the corner of my eye the contact list for the Newman Center choir. Sabrina’s name was misspelled on the contact list; it had her listed as “Sabrina Murpy.” I would have spelled it right had I typed the list; maybe Sabrina was into guys who could spell. Maybe I would call Sabrina sometime this weekend, just to talk, to be friendly. Was that okay? I did not know. She probably would not be home. Her roommate would answer and tell me that she was out with her boyfriend. Sabrina and her boyfriend were out there driving a knife through my heart, unknowingly digging my grave.

“She’s out there, unknowingly digging my grave,” I said to myself. Very poetic. That has a nice rhythm to it. It was 9:45, I was home alone on a Friday night; maybe tonight would be a good night to write poetry. I put my sweatshirt back on and took a walk around the apartment complex and through a little bit of the Greenbelt behind the apartments, trying to think of more lines for this poem. When I returned about twenty minutes later, I wrote down all of the words that had come to mind, and by the time I went to bed, I had this:

“Hello, kid! How are you? How’s everything been?”
I’m really stressed out, if you know what I mean.
And how about you? Got exams coming up?
“I’ve got one on Friday, I need to catch up.”
I called you to see if your roommate was home.
“She’s not, at the moment, I’m here all alone.
Today, it’s not homework that keeps her a slave,
She’s out there, unknowingly digging your grave.”

In November, I had started writing a novel; it was about a high school student who changes his name and goes to live with relatives to make a fresh start. I had written around forty pages so far. I had named the novel Try, Try Again, referencing the old saying about what to do if at first one does not succeed. The character, Mike, felt like he was not succeeding in his old life, so he is trying again. I worked on Try, Try Again for a few hours the next morning. It had been a month since Mike had made his new start, and he had found his way into a popular group of friends. A girl named Erin had taken an interest in him, and after spending a lot of time together at and after school, Mike got brave and asked her to a movie.

Three previews came on before the movie. Mike did not think any of the movies previewed looked good. When the movie itself started, he got comfortable in his seat, placing both arms on the armrest. A minute later, Erin placed her hand on top of his. Mike looked at her and smiled. He liked Erin. After a while, while he was watching the movie, he felt Erin’s hand move from his hand to his knee. He liked it there too. Eventually Erin moved her hand off of Mike for good. Mike, instead, reached over the armrest and took her hand in his, placing it on the armrest.

Mike took his eyes off the movie and looked at Erin. She did the exact same thing a few seconds later. He tightened his grip around her hand for a couple seconds, then loosened it again. Erin began to kiss him. He liked it a lot. It was nothing too unusual for most kids his age, but he had never been kissed so passionately in his life. He tried to return it the best he could, and he felt that Erin liked it as well. Their mouths slowly separated. “Thanks,” Mike whispered. Erin gave him a huge smile.

Mike’s eyes turned back to the movie. He reached his right hand over to her right shoulder and touched it. Erin moved her body a little to the left, closer to Mike. They stayed in that position for the rest of the show.

I wished I could be at a movie with Sabrina, kissing her lips, running my fingers through her pretty red hair, and seeing her cute smile as she looked at me afterward. What did her boyfriend have that I did not? A few months ago, I wanted to be kissing Megan McCauley, until I found out that she also was with someone. And before Megan there were lots of other girls who either had boyfriends or were just not interested in me. Sometimes it felt like the entire single female population all over the state were conspiring to make sure I never had a girlfriend.

Later that night, I left my home and walked to Heather and Gary’s apartment, in the same complex as mine. The party started half an hour ago, but I did not want to be the first one there, since I did not know if I would know anyone. I knocked on the door, and Heather answered. “Hey!” she said. “You made it!”

“I did,” I said. “Happy birthday, Gary!” I called out across the room when I saw Gary wave at me.

“Thanks!” Gary replied.

I looked around the room. Six other people were there besides Heather and Gary. I recognized Melanie from church, but no one else; Melanie was there with her boyfriend. Sabrina was not there. I made small talk with Heather and Gary for a bit, talking about school and my trip to Disneyland with my family.

“You actually drove past O.J. Simpson’s house?” Gary said, laughing. “That’s hilarious!”

“I know. Mom kept saying she couldn’t believe we were actually doing that.”

“What about O.J. Simpson’s house?” a girl I did not recognize said, walking up as she overheard us. She had long straight hair and olive skin. I repeated my story in abbreviated form, and she said, “My apartment isn’t too far from O.J. Simpson’s house.”

“This is my sister, Mariana,” Heather explained. “She’s visiting from California.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m Greg.”

“So how do you know my sister?” Mariana asked.

“From church. We both sing in the choir.”

“How fun! I wish I could hear you guys sing in the morning, but my flight back home leaves at 12:15, so I need to be on my way to the airport by then.”

“Aww.”

“I was in choir in high school and college, but I graduated last year, and I’m not doing any kind of singing right now.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“Santa Teresa,” Mariana said as Heather and Gary went to greet more people who were just arriving.

“That’s cool. I’ve never been there, but two of my friends from high school go there.”

“Oh yeah? What are their names?”

“Paul Dickinson and Jackie Bordeaux. They would have been freshmen last year.”

“Nope, I don’t know them. It’s a big school.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“You go to Jeromeville? What are you studying?”

“Math.”

“Math,” Mariana repeated, making a face. “That was not my class.”

“A lot of people say that,” I said, laughing.

“Well, if you’re good at it, go for it! Do you know what you want to do with your degree? Do you want to be a teacher?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think I want to be a teacher, though. Too much politics involved in education. I just figure I’ll stay in school until I figure it out.”

“I understand that. I majored in English, but I’m not really using it. I work in an office.”

“Yeah. I was never very good at English in school. I never understood what I was supposed to get from the novels and poems that we had to read.”

“I did a lot of BS’ing on assignments like that, to be honest.”

“I see,” I replied, chuckling. “But the weird thing is, even though I was always bad at English class, I like to write.”

“Oh yeah? What do you like to write?”

“Sometimes I have a thought stuck in my head, and it’ll become a weird poem. And last year I wrote a short novel. I had a really interesting year when I was a senior in high school, so I turned that into a novel.”

“That’s so cool!”

“And right now, I’m working on another novel. It’s about a guy who runs away to live with relatives, because he wants a fresh start. But he pretends to be sixteen instead of eighteen, because he realized he missed out on a lot of experiences in high school, and he wants a second chance.”

“That’s interesting. Where’d you get that idea?”

“Probably just because sometimes I wish I could do that.”

“You feel like you missed out on a lot?”

“Yeah. Like I said with the first novel, I grew a lot my senior year, but then we all graduated and moved away. I feel like if everything that happened my senior year had happened earlier, I would have graduated as an entirely different person.”

“I’ve never thought of it that way,” Mariana contemplated. “Hmm. Interesting.”

“If you want, I can send you some of my writing,” I said. “Or at least I’ll send you what I have so far.”

“Yeah! That would be so cool!”

“Do you use email?”

“I don’t,” Mariana said, disappointedly. “Is that a problem?”

“You can give me your address, and I can mail it to you.”

“Sure! I’ll do that. Let me go get a piece of paper.” Mariana walked off and came back a minute later, handing me her address.

“Thanks!” I said.

Mariana and I talked for about another hour, about life, the past, the future, and many other things on our minds. I could not help but wonder, could there be something here? Might she be interested in me that way? She was a few years older than me, that would be different; hopefully she did not see me as some immature little kid. I had a way to keep in contact with her, and that was the important part at this moment.

“I’m going to get another drink,” Mariana eventually said. “But, hey, it was really good talking to you! Send me your story!”

“I will. Thanks.” I smiled.

“We’ll probably talk more later tonight.”

“Yeah,” I said.

No one else that I knew ever showed up to the party. I talked to Melanie for a bit about my winter break, and one of Gary’s engineer friends was drunkenly asking me about math at one point. The party got louder as the night went on, and I went home around 10:30.

As soon as I got home, I printed out a copy of the unfinished Try, Try Again to send to Mariana, and I excitedly mailed it with extra stamps the next day. This weekend sure turned into a great one. I met a girl who talked to me for a long time and was interested in my creative work. Maybe I did not need to hope for Sabrina to leave her boyfriend after all. Life was finally looking up for me.

Except it never happened. I never heard from Mariana again. I never found out if she read my story. She never wrote back, and Heather never mentioned her around me again. I could have asked, of course, but I never asked others about girls I was interested in. I was embarrassed for anyone to know that I liked a girl, ever since eighth grade when Paul Dickinson told the whole school who I liked.

Why did Mariana act so friendly if she did not want to talk to me again? Things like this had happened before. Jennifer Henson had been friendly to me all through senior year of high school, then that summer she moved away suddenly without leaving me a way to contact her. Many other girls would treat me like this throughout my life, and I had a tendency to misunderstand the intentions of others. People are complicated, reading and understanding them is hard, and I still had a lot to learn. Maybe I would figure all of this out someday. Until then, I had plenty of material for poetry and fiction.

May 20, 1995. Not my typical Saturday. (#39)

January 18, 2020December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 13 Comments

I nervously left Building C and walked to the other side of the South Residential Area. It was a warm night, but not warm enough to wear shorts, in my opinion. I wore a t-shirt and jeans. I kept trying to reassure myself that I didn’t have a reason to be so nervous. They invited me, after all; it’s not like they are suddenly going to reject me. But what if they do? What if they something weird happens and they never talk to me again? What if I embarrass myself in front of these people, who don’t know me as well as my Building C friends do?

I tried to tell myself I was being ridiculous. Just because I was going to be hanging out with a different group of people did not necessarily mean that something bad was going to happen.

I got to the main entrance of Building K and saw Megan and Tiffany already in the lobby. I knocked on the door, and Tiffany let me in. “Hi, Greg,” she said. “Come on in.”

Megan turned around and looked at me, smiling. “Hey, Greg. We’re just waiting for Maria and Ron. They said they’d be down in a few minutes. You ready?”

“Yeah,” I said, looking around. Building K looked just like Building C, except the walls were painted a different color, and there were different flyers on the bulletin board. Megan was one of the resident advisers for Building K. She wore shorts and sandals with a T-shirt, and her short dark blonde hair still had a few traces of green in it. She had cut her hair short and dyed it a few months earlier, but it looked like she was growing it a little longer again. Her hair had been somewhere between chin and shoulder length when I met her. Amy, one of the RAs in my building, had introduced me to Megan in the dining hall during fall quarter, and we had gotten to be friends just from seeing each other around and talking. I wanted to get to know her better, and I wanted to know if she had a boyfriend, and if not, if she was interested in shy younger guys like me.

Earlier this year, my friend Brittany, who lived in Texas and met me online in a chat room, had asked me if I had met any girls in college yet. I mentioned that I kind of had a crush, but it probably would not work out because she was older. “How much older?” Brittany had asked. “If she’s also a student at your school, then you can’t be more than three or four years apart, right? That’s nothing. You shouldn’t worry about that, unless this Miss Megan is 40 or something like that.” Brittany was probably right. Megan was only older than me by a year and three days, and that isn’t really a significant age difference. However, I was inexperienced enough with dating and relationships and girlfriends that I still felt way too young to be dating a sophomore. Megan was going to turn 20 in August. That was a grown-up age. She was almost done being a teenager.

“How’s your weekend going?” Megan asked.

“Good. I’ve mostly just been studying. Trying to get it out of the way. One more math midterm on Monday, and that’ll be the last midterm until finals.”

“That midterm is gonna be hard,” Tiffany said. “Greg’ll probably ace it, though.” I smiled.

“You two are in the same math class, right?” Megan asked.

“Yeah,” I explained. “I don’t think it’s that hard so far. But it seems like the quarter is going by fast in general. The first midterm still feels like it wasn’t that long ago.”

“I know! This quarter is flying by!”

A girl with dark hair and brown eyes, whom I had seen around the dining commons and met a couple times before, emerged from the stairwell into the lobby with a spiky-haired thin guy. I assumed this guy must be Ron, since I knew Maria was the girl.

“You guys ready?” Megan asked.

“Let’s go,” Ron replied.

The five of us walked out of Building K, along the bike path past Kent Hall and the barns, turning left at the chemistry building, and getting into a line at the large outdoor steps leading to 199 Stone, the largest lecture hall on campus. The room held around 400 students, and that lecture hall was the only room in Stone Hall. The front of the room was one building story lower with the rows pitched downward as they would be in a theater or stadium, and a door on the right side of the back wall connected to the basement of the chemistry building, which was right next to Stone Hall. The room number 199 was chosen to be consistent with the numbering of the nearby rooms in the chemistry building.

On weekends, a division of the Associated Students organization called Campus Cinema used 199 Stone as a movie theater, showing movies that had been in theaters a few months earlier but were usually not available to rent on VHS video yet. (Those are those giant cassette tapes for watching movies at home, before DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and streaming video were invented.) A different movie would show every day, and tickets only cost three dollars.

About an hour ago, I sat down with Megan, Tiffany, and Maria at dinner. They said that they were going to watch the movie Quiz Show at 199 Stone and invited me along. I said sure. I needed to get out and do something tonight, and more importantly, this was an opportunity to hang out with Megan. I had also seen commercials for this movie when it was released last fall, and it looked intriguing. The movie was based on a true story, about a television game show from the 1950s with outcomes that were rigged by the producers.

On the walk to 199 Stone, Maria and Ron were acting very much like a couple, holding hands and kissing a few times. Does that mean I was Megan’s date? Or Tiffany’s date? Of course not, but I kind of wished I could be Megan’s date. I was walking in the back of our group of five, and I realized at one point that I had been staring at Megan’s butt and legs in front of me for long enough that Tiffany might have noticed. I looked up, hoping that she hadn’t.

After we bought our tickets, and Ron bought popcorn, the five of us sat down toward the top of the room, in the right section. The room was filling up, but we were still able to find five seats together; I sat between Megan and Tiffany.

One of my favorite parts of Campus Cinema was that they showed an old cartoon before the main movie, like movie theaters of my parents’ and grandparents’ time would do. Tonight, it was the Bugs Bunny cartoon where he has a feud with an opera singer, ending with Bugs pretending to be the conductor at the singer’s concert and making him hold a long note until he runs out of breath and the stage collapses. I had seen that one many times over the years; I grew up on old Warner Bros. and Disney cartoons.

As I watched Quiz Show, I felt like this movie was exposing a dark underbelly of the game show industry. The producers of the show in the movie entice their returning champion to lose on purpose, because a new contestant is presumed to be more likable to audiences. In order to keep the new contestant on the show, they provided him with the questions and answers in advance, and the producers manipulated the air conditioning and ventilation around the contestants to make them sweat and experience physical discomfort.

At one point during the movie, Megan crossed her legs, and I could feel her crossed leg inadvertently brush up against mine a few times. I looked up one of those times. “Sorry,” Megan whispered, and moved her leg away from me. I didn’t want that. I kind of liked her brushing up against me. But I said nothing. That would be inappropriate, and probably a little creepy. Also, someone would probably find a way to make fun of me for it, just like in 8th grade when Paul Dickinson figured out who I liked and told the whole school.

I hoped that the game shows I enjoyed watching as a child in the 1980s had not been fixed like the one in the movie; that would be disappointing. I do remember as a child watching an episode of Press Your Luck where one contestant went on a ridiculous winning streak, always stopping the spinner on the best spot on the board and never getting a Whammy. I suspected that the contestant himself had somehow figured out how to beat the system, but I did not know if the show’s producers were involved. Hopefully the show was not fixed, because after the incident that the movie described, new laws were passed to prohibit fixing of prizes on television shows. However, television never tells the full story of what is really happening. I would learn years later that the contestant I watched on Press Your Luck had cracked the code on his own. He was a compulsive gambler and get-rich-quick artist who lost much of his game show money in a robbery and the rest in a bad investment, and he would eventually die alone, broke, and fairly young.

On the way home from the movie, Megan asked, “Are you guys both going home for the summer?” The question was directed to me and Tiffany; Maria and Ron were walking more slowly, arm in arm and no longer in earshot of us.

“Yeah,” Tiffany said. “I’m probably not going to be doing anything. Maybe getting a job.”

“My mom said she has a job for me,” I said. “Someone she knows works at a bookstore, and they’re looking to hire someone part time.”

“That’ll be good,” Megan said. “You’re from, where was it? Somewhere near Santa Lucia, right?”

“Yeah. Plumdale.”

“And you’re from Ashwood?”

“Yes,” Tiffany replied. I realized that I had known Tiffany since January but had no idea where she was from until this moment. Ashwood was at the far end of the Valley, about as far away as Plumdale but inland, to the southeast, whereas Plumdale was more due south.

“I’m going to miss all my friends here,” I said. “I want to get everyone’s address so I can write. Or email, for people who have computers at home.”

“Definitely,” Tiffany said. “Give me your address before the end of the year.”

“I will.”

“I’ll be here taking summer school,” Megan added, “so I’ll have email.”

“Great. I’ll write you.”

By this time, we had returned to Building K. “Thanks for coming with us, Greg,” Megan said.

“Thanks for inviting me! It was a good movie.”

“I know. I’ll see you around. Have a good weekend, OK?”

“I will.”

Megan hugged me, and I smiled. Tiffany hugged me too. I turned around toward Building C, turning back one last time to wave to my friends from Building K as they entered the building.

As I climbed the stairs toward Room 221, I could hear the muffled sound of music playing somewhere else in the building. It seemed to be coming from directly above, from the third floor on my end of the building. Instead of going to my room, I continued up to the third floor, curious to see what was going on. I began to hear muffled voices along with the muffled music, as if many people were being loud trying to be heard over the music.

When I was on the landing halfway between the second and third floor, the third floor door opened, and the music and voices became louder. Gina Stalteri and Karen Francis walked through the door. Karen was giggling and leaning on Gina, having a hard time standing on her own. She was holding a can of Coors Light beer.

“Hey, Greg,” Gina said, noticing me on the landing. “Come on up.”

“Greg!” Karen shouted, giggling. “I’ve never been drunk before!” She tried to step forward but staggered to the ground instead.

I continued walking up the stairs toward them and walked into the third floor hallway, my mind still processing what I was seeing. This appeared to be a party. My first college party. I had never been to an actual party like this, but I had seen parties on TV and in movies, and this looked exactly what I imagined a party to look like.

At each end of each floor, the hallway widened in front of the last room on each side. The hallways on the second and third floor opened to a balcony at the end of the building, like the balcony on which Taylor Santiago had been sitting when he met my parents, but that was at the opposite end of the building. A few months ago, someone had hung strings of beads where I was now, over the hallway at the point just past the door to the stairs, so that one had to pass through the beads in order to get to rooms 322 through 325. Brendan Lowe in room 322 had started referring to himself and his neighbors at the end of the third floor as “The Bead People.” Derek Olvera in room 324 had put a sign on his door proclaiming that “Cool people live here.”

The door to Brendan’s room was open, and the music seemed to be coming from there. I didn’t recognize the song. Brendan listened to a lot of weird, really dark music that I was never exposed to in Plumdale. I peeked my head into room 322, where Brendan, his roommate Will, Jenn from the first floor, and two guys I didn’t recognize were sitting, talking, and drinking something from plastic cups.

“Hey, Greg,” Brendan said, pointing to a case of Coors Light in cans. “You want one?”

“No, thanks,” I said. I stood in the doorway observing their conversation for a few minutes. I didn’t understand what they were talking about, so I went back into the hallway and walked around all the people sitting against the wall drinking beer.

Room 324, where cool people supposedly lived, was also open. Derek, a tall guy with reddish-blonde hair, sat on his bed. He had his arms around a dark-haired girl named Stephanie who lived at the other end of the third floor; I had seen them together a lot lately. Pat Hart sat on the other bed. The other bed belonged to Jared, the guy who often played Scrabble in the common room, but I did not see Jared at this party.

“Hey, Greg,” Derek said when I walked in.

“Hey,” Stephanie added. “What’s up?”

“Just looking around,” I said.

“Take a seat if you want,” Derek offered, gesturing toward an empty chair. I sat. Derek lifted his leg and farted. Pat laughed. Stephanie gave him a disgusted look. I chuckled.

Karen walked into the room. “I’m back!” she said. She attempted to sit with Pat on Jared’s bed, but fell over on her side instead. Pat picked her up and kissed her deeply for quite a long time. When they finished, Karen looked up and announced to the room, “This is the first time I’ve been drunk!” She had told me this same thing just five minutes earlier. “Nate said he’s bringing more beer,” Karen continued.

“Good!” Stephanie shouted.

“I’m going to go see who else is here,” I said.

“See you around, Greg,” Derek said. Stephanie waved. Pat and Karen were making out and did not seem to notice that I was leaving.

A voice coming from Brendan’s stereo started singing something like “bow down before the one you serve.” This was still not the type of music I was most familiar with, but I had heard this song before, unlike the song that was playing before. I thought this song was by that band Nine Inch Nails. Brendan really liked them, as did Skeeter. I didn’t see Skeeter at this party.

I stood outside of Derek’s room in the wide part of the hallway at the end of the building. A few people were sitting there on desk chairs taken from nearby bedrooms, and some other people were sitting on the floor. Mike Adams and his girlfriend Kim, Dan Woodward, Schuyler Jenkins, Tracy Lee, Yu Cheng, and two guys I did not know who did not live here sat talking. Mike was telling a story loudly, interrupting to laugh every few sentences. Others laughed as well. I missed the beginning of the story, so I wasn’t sure what it was about. I saw Pat and Gina come through the beads with a case of Budweiser cans, but then I realized it wasn’t Pat because he was busy sucking face with Karen in Derek’s room. This was Nate, Pat’s twin brother who lived in a different building. “Hey, Greg,” Nate said when he saw me. “You want one?”

“No, thank you.”

Nate went into Brendan’s room to put the beer down, and then into Derek’s room where his brother was. I felt something brush against my leg; I looked down and saw Schuyler lean her head on my leg, from a position of sitting against the wall. “Hi,” she said, looking back up at me.

“Hi,” I replied.

“Having fun?”

“I just got here. I was watching the movie Quiz Show at 199 Stone with some friends from another building.”

“Did you like it?”

“I did. It’s interesting.”

“Really? I’ve seen it before. I thought it was boring.”

“I grew up watching game shows. It was fascinating to see the dark side of the game show world.”

“I just thought it was dumb. Not my thing.”

Mike was laughing loudly again at something, and everyone reacted as if he had been the funniest human being alive. Schuyler took another sip of beer. “I think I’m going to go back downstairs now,” I said.

“No!” Schuyler replied. “Don’t leave.” She put her arms around my legs, giggling. I carefully stepped out of her tenuous, drunken grasp.

“This party isn’t my thing. Just like how the movie isn’t your thing.”

“Are you ok?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“Come back later if you want.”

“I might.”

Before I walked into the stairwell, I looked at the door to room 321, where Amy, the RA, lived. On the small bulletin board on her door, she had put a piece of paper telling people where to find her, with a push pin indicating where she was.

Amy is

Here. Come on in!
Here, but please knock first.
Studying hard. Please do not disturb.
In class.
Eating at the DC.
At the Help Window.
Somewhere else on campus.
Off campus.
Not in Jeromeville.

The push pin was next to “Not in Jeromeville.” Amy must have gone home for the weekend, which explains why the Bead People had chosen tonight to throw a party right next to the RA’s room.

I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of Karen emerging from Derek’s room. “I’ve never been drunk before!” she announced to the people sitting in the hallway. I turned around and walked back down the stairs to the second floor. It was ten o’clock at night, and quiet hours started at eleven. If this party didn’t shut down in an hour, I would not be getting any sleep that night. I knocked on the door of room 215, where Gurpreet, the other RA, lived. He did not answer either. I was not surprised; of course the party would happen when there was no one in charge in the building.

I went back to room 221 and sat on my bed, angry. How did this happen? I knew no one here was 21 years old; who bought the beer? Did they have fake IDs? Did they have older friends buy it for them? Maybe one of the other people at the party who was not from this building was older. And what about Karen? She was drunk enough to be staggering, and she was not even a legal adult. She had skipped a year in elementary school and graduated from high school early, and she had just turned 17 a month ago. In health class in high school, we learned about drugs and alcohol, and everyone kept talking about how kids could get drugs and alcohol anyway even though they were illegal. Where? How? Who were these kids? Everyone seemed to know how to get drugs and alcohol except for me, and it made me angry. I had no desire to do drugs or drink alcohol, but it made me angry nevertheless because these people had some kind of secret knowledge about how to flout authority that I did not have, and they felt no remorse for doing something illegal and unsafe.

Sometimes I wished I had gotten invited to more parties in high school. That way, I would know when and where kids were getting drunk, breaking the law, and I could call the police on them and get them in trouble, and justice would be served. Now I finally had my opportunity, and the people in charge were gone. It was frustrating. What should I do now? Should I call the police? Should I go to the Help Window and tell whichever RA was on duty tonight? Maybe I should call Megan. She was another authority figure who might be able to do something about this. And that would give me another chance to talk to her.

As I sat on the bed thinking about what to do, I realized that I knew all along what the right decision would be. I did nothing. I got over it and let it go. If the Bead People and the others who went to that party wanted to make poor choices, that was their life. No one was hurting me, and a bunch of college freshmen drinking cheap beer and playing loud weird music is not exactly the greatest threat to America’s freedom and well-being. The police might not even consider it a high enough priority to respond. And these people were my friends. I had come a long way to be at this point in my life where I actually had friends, and I didn’t want to ruin that by being a stickler for the rules. Following authority is important, but so is friendship.

I didn’t go back upstairs to that party that night. But I also didn’t report them to any authority figures. I just sat quietly in my room playing around on the computer. I played Tetris. I got on IRC chat and looked for girls to talk to. I played around with this new thing I had gotten recently called Netscape, where I could look at these things called Web sites that had text and pictures to read. If the text was underlined, I could click on it and a new page would open. The pictures took several seconds to load, but it was still more interesting than the text-based Internet I had been using all year. That night I kept myself busy looking up Pink Floyd lyrics and album artwork. And I was far enough away from the party that the noise didn’t keep me awake. I never did find out what happened the rest of the night at the party on the third floor. I don’t know if anyone got in trouble. And it was not my business. I slept just fine that night.

November 19, 1994. The Help Window. (#14)

March 30, 2019December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 16 Comments

After being in Building C for eight weeks now, it was inevitable that couples would begin to form. And being that I was generally oblivious to this sort of thing, I’m sure there was probably more going on than the two obvious couples I knew about. And, sadly, as usual, I was not a part of any of these couples.

It was a Saturday night, and I saw one of those couples, Pat Hart and Karen Francis, at the dining commons. Pat was tall and athletic, with blond hair and a stereotypical golden-boy appearance. Karen was short and sassy, with brown hair and eyes and an occasional hint of Southern mannerisms, because she had spent the first half of her life in Georgia. She was younger than the rest of us, since she had finished high school early. But I didn’t know if any of that made Pat and Karen a typical couple, or an unlikely pairing, or what, because I knew nothing of relationships and was oblivious to a lot of things.

Pat and Karen sat at a table with Mike, Keith, and a girl named Gina Stalteri who lived next to Mike on the third floor. Two other people who did not live in Building C were with them as well; one was Pat’s twin brother, Nate, but I did not recognize the other one. There was one empty chair at the table; I approached and asked if I could sit there. They looked like they were almost done eating, so I might have the table to myself eventually.

“Go for it,” Mike said.

I sat quietly eating and listened to their conversation. “We’re gonna have to take two cars there,” Pat said. “It’s too far to walk. Can anyone else drive?”

“I will,” Mike offered. “Where did you say he lives?”

“An apartment in north Jeromeville, on the corner of Andrews and Alvarez. Las Casas Apartments, he said it was called.”

“‘Las Casas.’ That’s kind of a dumb name. It means ‘The Houses.’”

“That’s kind of like one time, I was visiting my relatives in Bidwell,” I said, “and we went to this Mexican restaurant called ‘La Comida.’” Everyone laughed, except Karen.

“What does ‘La Comida’ mean?” Karen asked. “I took French in high school, not Spanish.”

“‘The Food!’” shouted Mike.

“There’s actually a restaurant called ‘The Food?’” Gina asked.

“It’s real,” Keith said. “I’ve been there. My sister went to Bidwell State.”

“We should probably get going,” Pat said. “You guys ready?” The others nodded and answered in the affirmative. “Greg? You want to come with us?” Pat asked.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“My friend from back home, he’s a senior, he’s having a party at his apartment. I’m sure he’d be ok with more people showing up.”

A party off campus was probably not my scene. It was probably going to be loud, with lots of drinking. But maybe I needed to get out of the dorm for a night. “Maybe,” I said. “I was going to get stuff done tonight.”

“Just show up if you decide to. It’s at Las Casas Apartments, number 109. Somewhere near Andrews Road and Alvarez Avenue,” he said. “Sorry I can’t give better directions. That’s what my friend told me”

“Greg will be able to find it,” Mike said. “He’s good with maps and directions, remember?”

I chuckled. “For sure,” I said.

“Bye, Greg!” Gina said as the seven of them began picking up their food trays.

“Maybe we’ll see you there?” Pat asked.

“Maybe.”

I got back to my room around fifteen minutes later. I really didn’t want to go to that party. I didn’t hang around with partiers growing up. If anything, the mere existence of these kind of parties made me angry that everyone else seemed to know how to get alcohol when younger than the legal drinking age, except for me, and that there were no consequences for these lawbreakers. And yet, I had no desire to drink; I had seen and heard about too many lives ruined by alcohol.

I didn’t have any other plans tonight. This was the last week of football season, and it was an away game, so there was no game to go to. I had a very small TV in my dorm room; I got six channels from its antenna, four of them came in fuzzy, and none of them was showing anything good on a Saturday night.

I got on the computer. I checked my email; I had a message from a girl in Wisconsin whom I had met in an IRC chat a couple weeks earlier. I wrote her back, nothing too important, just telling her about my day and answering some questions she had about what classes I was in and what UJ was like.

I got on IRC next. Nothing exciting was going on in my usual chat room, nor did anyone I knew appear to be on. I tried unsuccessfully to talk to a few people over the course of about fifteen minutes, after which I gave up and signed off.

I went to the bathroom. I walked all the way up and down the second floor. It was quiet. The only door that was open was Pat and Charlie’s room, and it was only open a crack. I poked my head in the door to say hi, and Charlie told me that he had a huge paper to write by Monday, and he was thankful that Pat was gone for the night, so he could have the room to himself. I figured he probably didn’t want to be bothered.

I went back to my room and played a few games of Tetris on the computer. After I got bored with that, I walked down to the first floor. The common room was empty, and the only person I saw was Phuong, who was also busy writing a term paper.

I walked up to the third floor and thought about how lifeless Building C was tonight. There weren’t many signs of life on the third floor either. When I got to the other end of the hallway, where the other staircase was, I saw the other Building C couple that I knew about: Liz Williams, thin with straight brown hair, who lived just down the hall from me, and tall, curly-haired Ramon Quintero, who lived in the room which he and Liz were just leaving when I saw them. They were holding hands as they approached the stairwell. “Hey, Greg,” Liz said. “What’s up?”

“Nothing. Just bored. What about you guys?”

“We’re going out to dinner,” Ramon said.

“Have fun!” I said.

“You too!” Liz smiled. “Hope you find something to do.”

“I’ll be fine.”

I walked back downstairs and down the hallway to my room. I tried reading the chapter I had to read by Monday for Rise and Fall of Empires, but I couldn’t concentrate. Something just felt discouraging about all these happy couples and drunken revelers out having fun, while I was here being bored.

I put the book down.

Depression sucks.

I got back on IRC. I messaged a girl in the room. “Hi! How are you?” I typed.

“Leave me alone, you ugly fat virgin,” she replied.

How did she know?

I signed off after about an hour of wasting time with nothing interesting happening. I checked my email again; no one had written.

I tried reading for pleasure for a while. I was currently working my way through all 1100-plus pages of Stephen King’s It. This had been one of my mom’s favorite books, and I borrowed it when I had been home three weeks earlier. Creepy book, but in a good way. That kept me occupied for about an hour, but I couldn’t become completely immersed in the story because I kept thinking about how I hated being lonely like this, and I wished I knew how to be more social.

Maybe I should have gone to that party at Las Casas Apartments after all. Maybe it’s not too late.

No, I don’t belong there. That’s not really where I want to be.

I went to the bathroom and walked up and down all three hallways again. Still nothing going on.

I went back to my computer and played a few more games of Tetris. By now, it was after ten o’clock, and I was starting to get tired. I tried going to sleep, but my mind was racing, and I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept thinking about Liz and Ramon, Pat and Karen, the party at Las Casas, all the cute girls I didn’t know how to talk to, and all my friends back home who had mostly abandoned me. The situation with my friends at home wasn’t all bad, though: Renee had finally gotten her email set up, so we had been back in touch for a couple weeks, and I had gotten a second letter from Melissa. However, that wasn’t going to help me tonight

I eventually decided to give up on trying to sleep for a while; the clock said 11:19. I was tired of being cooped up in this boring room. I put on the jeans I had been wearing earlier and my UJ hoodie, and I walked outside. I circled the entire South Residential Area, then came back toward the dining commons building.

The dining hall was on the second floor, and it was dark this time of night. The first floor entrance opened into a lounge with a pool table; no one was there. In fact, the whole building appeared to be empty. To the left of the room with the pool table, a door opened up into a study room and small sandwich and yogurt shop called Betsy’s. I had no idea who Betsy was, but her shop was closed this time of night. Behind the pool table, another door led to the mail room, and to the only place where I knew I would definitely find a conscious human being in this building.

The Resident Help Window was open all night, every night. One or two of the twenty-five resident advisors for this area would take turns staffing the window at night, so that residents would have a place to go for questions and concerns after hours, when the RAs in their own buildings would (theoretically) be sleeping. I walked through the door, looking down at the ground, into the space that contained the mailboxes and the Help Window. I had already checked my mail today, so in my mind, I was expecting to just peek up at the window and then leave after a few seconds, and if I got asked if I needed help, I would just mutter something about not being able to sleep. But instead, I heard a friendly “Hi, Greg!” coming from the Help Window.

I looked up. The RA on duty tonight was Megan McCauley from Building K. I met Megan a couple weeks ago, when I sat with some of the RAs at dinner and Megan gave me some tips for biking in the rain. Since then, I had seen her and said hi to her a couple of times around the dining hall. A textbook was open on the desk in front of her.

“Hey,” I said. “How are you?”

“I’m good. It’s a pretty slow night so far, so I’m studying for physics. This class is a lot of work.”

“Which physics?”

“9B. Are you going to have to take that? What’s your major?”

“I haven’t decided yet. Math and physics and chemistry were my favorite classes in high school, and they all need the Physics 9 series, so I’ll be taking it next year.”

“Sounds like you’ve at least narrowed down your potential majors to things that have a lot of the same freshman classes.”

“Yeah. What’s your major?”

“Chemical engineering.”

“That sounds hard, but interesting.”

“Exactly! A lot of Chem-E majors don’t finish in four years without taking really heavy class loads. I’ve kind of accepted that I might need five years.”

“I feel like I need to hurry up and decide. Most of the people I know in my building know their majors already.”

“There’s nothing wrong with not having a major right away, but the sooner you decide, the sooner you can plan ahead, and you’ll be more likely to graduate on time.”

“That’s true.”

“Are you considering engineering at all?”

I paused. “I don’t know,” I said eventually. But in those few seconds of thinking, I realized something: I grew up very sheltered, in a mostly blue-collar part of the state. The true reason I hadn’t considered engineering as a major was because I really had no idea what an engineer was. But I didn’t say any of this to Megan. It was a little sad and embarrassing.

“It wouldn’t hurt to look into it. But engineering has different grad requirements, remember.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you going anywhere for Thanksgiving? Where are you from?”

“Plumdale. Near Gabilan and Santa Lucia. But I won’t be going home probably until Christmas. For Thanksgiving, my parents will be picking me up on the way to my grandpa’s house in Bidwell.”

“I love Santa Lucia! Growing up, we’d go there every summer to go to the beach. It’s so pretty there!”

“Yeah, it is. Where are you from?”

“Not far away. Oak Heights, just outside of Cap City. I can get home in half an hour if there’s no traffic.”

“Are you going home for Thanksgiving?”

“Yeah. Nothing too big. Just my family. And my great-aunt.”

“That’s nice. We used to have it at my great-grandma’s house. This is our first Thanksgiving without her. She was my last great-grandparent.”

“I’m sorry,” Megan said. “Were you close?”

“Kinda. We went to visit her twice a year, and we stayed at her house for a few days. She lived up in the hills outside of town. There were great views from her house. We’d go up there for Fourth of July, and from her front yard we’d be able to see two fireworks shows off in the distance.”

“That sounds nice!”

“It was.” I yawned.

“Getting tired?” Megan asked.

“Maybe I should go try to sleep.”

“I think that’s a good idea. I hope you’re able to sleep this time.”

“Me too,” I said. “And, hey, it was good talking to you.”

“It was good talking to you too!”

“Thanks.”

“Any time, Greg. You go get some sleep.” She smiled.

“Good night,” I said, awkwardly smiling back.

“Good night!”

I walked back to Building C, swiped my ID card at the door, climbed the stairs, went to the bathroom, returned to room 221, and went back to bed, a little after midnight. As I drifted off to sleep, I kept thinking about what had happened tonight. Megan seemed really, really nice, at least from our few interactions so far. She was cute too, with her dark blonde hair slightly above shoulder length and pretty blue eyes. I usually like longer hair on girls, but that length worked on her. It seems like I think a lot of girls are cute, but in Megan’s case, talking to her didn’t really feel weird, like it did with some other girls. Was it bad that she was older? Could there be something there more than just friends? Could she ever see me that way, or was I just a silly freshman to her? I didn’t even know how much older she was, although I guessed it was probably just one year, since the Physics 9 series is usually taken in the spring of freshman year and first two quarters of sophomore year. Was I mature enough to date a sophomore? Of course, I was getting way ahead of myself, but these thoughts comforted me as I finally drifted off to sleep.

The resident advisors’ jobs were to help dorm residents with anything we might need, as well as to make sure that people were being quiet after eleven o’clock, and the Resident Help Window was open all night for any concerns we may need help with. Now that I think about it, I don’t remember if I ever actually used the Resident Help Window for its intended purpose. But sometimes, a friendly face and a listening ear were all the help I really needed.