December 26-29, 1997. I made another movie. (#157)

March 19, 2023March 19, 2023 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

Author’s note: I’m back.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to post weekly, like I’ve always tried to. I don’t want this project to become stressful. But I’ll do the best I can, and hopefully my small handful of loyal readers will stick with me even I take a week off here and there.

A month ago, when I went home to Santa Lucia County for Thanksgiving, I showed my family the Dog Crap and Vince movie that I had made with the kids from the youth group at church. I first created the characters from Dog Crap and Vince when I was still in high school, with a lot of input from my brother Mark, and I have always credited Mark as a co-creator of Dog Crap and Vince. They all enjoyed the movie. Mark said that when I came home for Christmas, we should get together with his friends Cody and Boz and make another movie.

We did not own a video camera. I had always wanted one growing up. I had tons of silly ideas for TV shows and movies, sometimes Mark and I and some combination of his other friends would even act them out and even record the audio, but we never had the capability to record video. Video cameras cost a lot of money back then, and it was never a priority for my parents to have one. But Mark said that Boz had one we could probably borrow.

It was now the Friday after Christmas. I was planning on driving back to Jeromeville either Monday night or Tuesday morning. I was getting bored at home. Three and a half years after graduation, I had lost touch with all of my high school friends. There was not much to do at home except hang out at home. The closest thing I had to friends at home were Mark, Cody, and Boz. I was going to graduate from the University of Jeromeville in six months, and they were sixteen, still in high school. This was less of an age difference compared to when I was seventeen and they were twelve, but they still did not feel like a primary social group for me.

Despite how bored I was, I had made no progress on this movie that Mark and I were supposedly going to make. I had not done much of anything the whole time I was home. We had our family Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa and the Lusks, who were in the area for the holidays. Jane Lusk was my aunt, my mother’s younger sister; she visited every Christmas with her husband Darrell and their children, nineteen-year-old Rick and seventeen-year-old Miranda. Uncle Darrell’s family was also in Santa Lucia County, so they spent a week going back and forth visiting both sets of their relatives.

Mark had a new game for Nintendo 64, GoldenEye. The game follows the story of the James Bond movie of the same name, which I had seen once. The most well-known feature of this game was a multiplayer free-for-all mode, in which two to four players battle each other. Rick and Miranda and Mark and I spent many hours of that winter break playing GoldenEye, as well as Mario Kart. In both games, Mark almost always won, and Miranda almost always came in last place.

In those days, Mark would often record what he was watching on television on a VHS tape, so he could watch it again. He watched Saturday Night Live regularly, because in the 1990s it was actually funny much of the time. Whenever the show would run a sketch that was not worth rewatching, he would back up the tape during the next commercial and record over it immediately. Whenever I would go home, Mark would share with me his Saturday Night Live highlights.

Saturday Night Live had been in the news recently because Chris Farley, a cast member on the show a few years earlier who was also in a few movies after that, had died of a drug overdose a couple of weeks earlier. Two months before his death, Farley had returned to SNL as the weekly guest host, and Mark saved that entire episode. Earlier that week, I had watched Farley reprise many of his past recurring characters. He also portrayed an exaggeratedly intoxicated Hank Williams Jr. and the weather phenomenon El Niño, acting like a professional wrestler. Throughout the whole time Mark and I watched the episode, Mom kept interrupting, commenting on Farley’s visibly poor health.

The next day, Mark and I watched other things he had recorded since then. We watched what was then considered the final episode of Beavis and Butthead, although unbeknownst to anyone at the time, the show would be revived in the 2010s and 2020s. After this, we watched another SNL in which a Bill Gates character announced that Microsoft had bought Christmas, and that Mac users were now Jewish. Bill Gates then proceeded to spy on Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who was dancing to the song “Tubthumping.” Oddly random, but hilarious.

Mark got home from basketball practice while I was eating dinner Friday night. Mark got all of the athletic talent in our family. He also had a great deal more artistic talent than me, and he and some of his teammates had begun a new tradition of drawing temporary tattoos on each other with permanent marker. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the tattoo that someone had drawn on Mark today.

“A polar bear,” Mark explained. “John McCall drew it.” The polar bear on Mark’s arm was floating on a piece of sea ice, with the letters POLAR BEAR underneath in a style imitating the Old English blackletter font.

“And why do you have a tattoo of a polar bear?” I asked.

Mom and Dad were in the room with us. “That’s the nickname the others on the team have come up with for Mark,” Mom said.

“And why is Mark’s nickname ‘Polar Bear?’”

Dad answered this time. “Because he’s big and white!”

I laughed. “That does make sense.”

Later that night, Mark and I were playing Mario Kart, and Mark said something that reminded me of something from Dog Crap and Vince. As my brain started thinking of related things, I said out loud, “We never made that movie we were going to make while I was home. Do you still want to?”

“I don’t know,” Mark replied. “Do we have time? How long are you gonna be home?”

“I’m leaving probably late Monday night or early Tuesday morning. So we’d have about 72 hours.” As I continued steering Luigi around the course, throwing banana peels behind me, I got an idea. “I think this sounds like a challenge. We have 72 hours to make a movie. And we’ll call our production company ‘72 Hour Films.’”

“Sounds good. I’ll ask Boz in the morning if we can go get his camera. Boz was probably going to come over this weekend anyway.”

“Great! And if Rick and Miranda are around, we can get them in our movie too! So what’s it going to be about?”

“I don’t know. This was your idea.”

“Well, you’ve been saying this whole time that you want to make a movie.”

“I do, but I don’t know what it’s about!”

I saw the GoldenEye cartridge sitting next to the Nintendo console. “What about a spy movie? Like GoldenEye?”

“Maybe, but it seems like that might be too hard if we only have 72 hours.”

I thought about other things I had done at home during previous school breaks, and suddenly it came to me. “Moport,” I said. “Let’s make a sports movie about Moport. Like, maybe, there’s a Moport team that’s terrible, they finish last in the league, so they get the number one draft pick, but the player they draft ends up just making things worse.”

“That could work.”

“Ooo. Better idea. They accidentally draft the wrong player. Like, the general manager gets the name wrong at the draft, and the player they pick is this weird crazy goofball.”

“But all the goofy stuff he does is so crazy, they still end up winning!” Mark said.

“Yes! Perfect!”

“As long as we get Boz to play the goofy guy. He’d be great in that role.”

“Definitely.”

Moport was a game my brother and I invented, based on a game I played in PE class in high school. The game I learned combined elements of football and soccer; Mark and I added hockey sticks to the mix, and Moport was born. For the last few years, we had held a two-on-two Moport tournament in the front yard with Cody, Boz, John McCall, and some of Mark’s other friends.

By the time Mark and I went to bed that night, we had a workable script, and we had decided to title the movie #1 Draft Pick. I suggested that the team in the movie have a geographically appropriate, yet ridiculous-sounding name, like many actual low-level sports teams. The Gabilan Valley in Santa Lucia County is known for growing vegetables, so we named our team the Gabilan Fighting Salads. The movie would open with the Salads losing badly, finishing in last place again, giving them the number one draft pick for the following year. After drafting the wrong player, as we had previously decided, we would show scenes of this player, whom we had named Evan, practicing and playing and still somehow finding ways to score. We added implied references to Evan being on drugs. I suggested that Evan played college Moport for North Coast State, because that was a well-known hippie stoner school, and it was also where Rick went, although Rick was not at all a hippie or stoner.

After the Salads’ first win, the team practiced the next day, and Evan accidentally kicked a ball that left the field and hit a supervillain-like bystander in the face. The villain vowed to get revenge on the Salads and sabotage their season. He sent a henchman to break into the locker room and plant drugs on Evan. When Evan’s name was cleared, the villain hired another henchman to shoot Evan. Mark and I both agreed that Rick should play this other henchman, since Rick’s side of the family were gun enthusiasts. “But we should use the Nintendo Zapper as the prop gun,” Mark suggested.

“That would be hilarious,” I replied.

We continued brainstorming the ending of the movie. Evan survived the shooting, so the villain drove his car onto the field and ran over Cody’s character, whom we named Bob. Cody did not look at all like someone who would be named Bob, so we thought that was funny. Bob needed to play injured since the Salads were out of replacement players, and they managed to score a goal on a ridiculously improbable shot.

“Then we should end by showing Fidel Castro dancing,” Mark said, laughing, referencing Saturday Night Live.

“Let’s name your character ‘Castro,’” I suggested. “And at the end, you’re not there, and Evan and Bob talk about how you went to visit your Uncle Fidel in Cuba.”

“Yes!”

My least favorite part of doing a creative project with other people involved is getting everyone together at the same time. Fortunately, the Lusks were already planning on coming over today, as was Boz. Mark called Cody, and he was free to come over as well. Ronnie and D.J. Lusk, Rick and Miranda’s other cousins on their dad’s side, lived about an hour drive away, and they were also in town for the day. That gave us two more people to use as extras in the movie; Ronnie and D.J. played one of the opposing teams.

“Dad?” I asked as we started filming Saturday morning, shortly after Boz showed up with the camera. “Can you be in our movie for one scene?”

“Ahh,” Dad grunted as he got up from the couch, faking being annoyed although I knew he was going to enjoy helping out. “What do I have to do?”

“You’re the general manager of the Salads, but you get the player’s name wrong at the draft,” I explained. I placed the script on the table where he would be sitting in the shot, so that he could glance down at his lines if he needed to.

I sat next to Dad, in character as Coach McAfee. Mark and Boz faced us, with Boz holding the camera. “Where’d you get the camera?” Dad asked.

“We’re borrowing it from the Bosworths,” I explained.

Dad turned to Boz and asked, “That’s your camera?”

“Yeah,” Boz replied.

Dad played his part perfectly, speaking in an absent-minded manner that would make it believable that he would select the wrong player. As an added bonus, he called his own team the Lettuce instead of the Salads. To this day, I do not know if that was intentional, adding to the mood, or if that was just Dad being Dad and actually getting the name wrong. After Dad called Evan’s name, Boz ran into the scene, in character as Evan, doing a silly dance and hugging Dad’s character. Evan wore a sleeveless top with his arms covered in tattoos, drawn by Mark with a permanent marker.

Next, we went outside and set up the Moport field in the front yard, with the same scoreboard and goals that we used for the actual Moport tournament. When we got to the part with the supervillain getting kicked in the face, we filmed Boz and Cody, in character as Evan and Bob, kicking the ball around in practice. Evan then kicked the ball so hard it flew off camera. My plan was to have the villain, played by me in a different costume from Coach McAfee, looking out of a second-story window with the ball coming in from off screen to hit me in the face. But I had to change clothes for this.

“What are you gonna wear?” Mark asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let me go look.” I went inside to the closet in my old bedroom and dug around, not really sure what I was looking for, but hoping I would know when I found it.

In eleventh grade, five years earlier, I had to do a group project for history class, a presentation on one decade in American history. My group got the 1950s. We talked about President Eisenhower, the war in Korea, McCarthyism, and the Cold War. We also included some references to the culture of the 1950s, which my classmates decided would include getting me to dress up as Elvis Presley and lip-synch and dance. Mom got in on this, decorating an old thrift store shirt with fringe and sequins for my Elvis costume. When my classmates recorded me for the class project, I could not keep a straight face for more than ten seconds, but we decided that would be enough, because the stuffy 1950s father would turn off the television after ten seconds and refuse to let his children watch that garbage.

I found the Elvis shirt in my closet, along with a trucker cap printed in a cow pattern, which Dad had gotten from a local auto parts store, and a pair of oversized sunglasses. I walked to the window where my villain character would get hit in the face and opened it. “I’m ready,” I said to Mark, Cody, and Boz, still outside below.

“What the hell are you wearing?” Mark shouted.

“It’s my villain costume,” I replied.

“How is that a villain costume? You look ridiculous!”

“Hey, we’re not exactly trying to win an Academy Award for costume design. I was going for something that would look different from my coach character.”

After we finished, I went downstairs, taking off my villain costume as I walked outside. “Is that the Elvis shirt?” Dad asked as I walked past.

“Yeah. You’ll just have to see the final movie when we finish.”

We had just as much ridiculous fun for the rest of that Saturday and Sunday as we finished filming. For the scene where Rick’s henchman character shoots Evan, Rick wore a black cowboy hat and boots, with an actual holster on his belt. We all had a hard time keeping a straight face as Rick, trying to be serious, pulled the Nintendo Zapper, the gun from the old Duck Hunt game, out of his holster, complete with cord dangling from the bottom.

Although we kept the plot basically the same, we added two scenes that were not in the original script. In one, Boz, in character as Evan, wakes up in the middle of the night and has a vision of two-time Moport champion Mark Dennison giving him encouragement. Mark Dennison was, of course, just Mark playing himself, wearing his Ice Monkeys uniform from the Moport tournaments. Since this was an extremely low-budget film, many of us were playing multiple roles, and the audience would just have to accept the fact that Mark Dennison looked exactly like Evan’s teammate Ben Castro. Although Mark Dennison had some encouraging words for Evan, he acted kind of obnoxious, eating Evan’s food and sitting right on top of him on the bed. Pee-Wee the cat was in the room at the time, and Mark picked her up and started petting her.

The other scene that we added happened after the villain’s plan to plant drugs on Evan failed. Boz played a double role as the henchman who planted the drugs, and only Boz and I were in the room when we filmed this scene. The camera did not need to move, so I just placed it on a table. On Monday morning, when I had finally finished editing, I watched the final cut of #1 Draft Pick with my family and the Lusks, and I had not yet realized that none of them had seen this scene, not even Mark.

“The plan didn’t work!” Boz’s hunchbacked henchman character shouted on screen. “Evan was proven innocent, and he’ll be playing in tomorrow’s game!”

On the screen, in character as the villain with the Elvis shirt, I looked directly toward the camera and said, “Then it’s time for Plan B.” The henchman walked off screen, tapping his fingers together. A few seconds later, the villain reached over and pressed Play on a portable CD player. Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” began playing as the villain began doing some kind of dorky, ridiculous dance.

As my family watched this scene, hysterically laughing, Mark looked at me, confused. “That’s Plan B?” he shouted. “What is going on here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, laughing so hard I began crying. “I was just doing something weird.”

“But… really? That’s your Plan B?”

Mom and Dad laughed particularly hard at later scenes in the movie, like when Rick’s character shot Evan with the Duck Hunt gun, and when the villain drove his car onto the field. “So that’s why you drove on the lawn the other day,” Dad said. As the final scene played, with Mark and I in character as Ben Castro and Uncle Fidel, dancing to Tubthumping, then transitioning to the credits, I looked around the room to see everyone’s reaction. “That was very good,” Mom said.

I made a copy of #1 Draft Pick to leave with Mark and packed the other one that night to bring back to Jeromeville with me. Mark showed the movie to Cody and Boz the next time he saw them, and they both enjoyed it. I showed it to a couple of my school friends over the years, but not nearly as many people saw this one compared to my earlier Dog Crap and Vince movie. But, considering how quickly we had to put everything together, it turned out fairly good. This was definitely the highlight of my winter break that year.

And of course, to this day, my family still laughs whenever we hear the phrase “Plan B.”

Rest in peace, Uncle Darrell. He lost his battle with cancer in 2023 as I was outlining this episode.

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November 22-25, 1995. Thanksgiving with the Dennisons. (#61)

September 7, 2020December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 11 Comments

I stood outside 109 Wellington waiting for my math class, as I did every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Another class met in that room right before mine, and about a minute after I arrived, those students began leaving. Jack Chalmers from my class always said hi to Lizzie, a girl from that class whom he had known back home, as she passed by, but Jack was not here now. I saw Lizzie walk past, and I made eye contact and attempted to smile.

Lizzie noticed me making eye contact. She was fair-skinned with dark brown hair and eyes, and she wore a dark red sweatshirt. “Hey,” she said.

I did not expect her to actually say hi to me, considering that the few words she had said to me had all happened on days when I had been talking to Jack as her class left. Trying to think of something to say, I blurted out, “Jack’s not here.”

“Yeah. He was going to leave early this morning for Thanksgiving. He has a long drive, you know.”

“That makes sense.”

“What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” Lizzie asked me.

“We always go visit my dad’s relatives in Bidwell. Mom and Dad are picking me up tomorrow morning on their way.”

“Where are they coming from?”

“Plumdale. That’s where I grew up. Near Gabilan and Santa Lucia.”

“That sounds like fun! I’m flying home tonight. I could have carpooled with Jack, but I have a midterm I can’t miss later today.”

“Good luck on your midterm! And have a great Thanksgiving!”

“You too!”

One of the best parts of being a university student was being surrounded by other people around my age at the same point in their lives as me. That makes it so much easier to make friends, compared to adult life with its compartmentalized and isolated experiences. And sometimes my friends would have other friends, and my friends’ friends would become my friends. This seemed to be happening with Lizzie, now that we had had an actual conversation without Jack being there.

This Wednesday felt more like a Friday, with tomorrow being Thanksgiving. But I was annoyed that the University of Jeromeville and its sister schools only take two days off, plus a weekend, for Thanksgiving. This was the same as I always got in elementary school, but in high school, I had gotten three days off, and in the 21st century I know many schools that take the entire week off. It was disappointing, not having more time off for Thanksgiving, but many real life jobs only have one day off, so it could be worse.

During math class, as Anton lectured about eigenvalues and eigenvectors, I thought about the rest of my day. Bowling class, two more lectures, and two hours of tutoring, and I would be done for the week. ready to go see family and stuff my face with food.

I had two tutoring groups on Wednesdays after my classes. Calculus with Yesenia and Kevin went as it always did. But in the precalculus group after that, I sat at the table for ten minutes waiting for the four students in the group to show up. If I waited fifteen minutes, and no one showed up, I was allowed to leave and still get paid for the fifteen minutes. One of the students, Jennifer, arrived just as I was getting ready to go home.

“I didn’t think anyone was going to come,” I said.

“We just got a midterm back, and I have a lot of questions,” Jennifer replied.

“I wonder if everyone else left early because it’s Thanksgiving?” I wondered aloud, remembering what Lizzie had said about Jack.

“Probably.”

“Are you going anywhere for Thanksgiving?”

“Yeah. Just back home, to Pleasant Creek. My dad is coming to pick me up tonight.”

“I’m going to visit my dad’s relatives in Bidwell. That’ll be fun.”

Jennifer and I got a lot of work done. We talked about every problem she missed on the midterm as well as today’s lecture, and she really did seem to understand better by the end of the hour. After we finished, I walked to the Barn and caught the bus home, then proceeded to waste the rest of the night playing around on the computer and reading. Before I went to bed, I threw a few changes of clothes and my personal bathroom items in a bag for the trip.

Mom and Dad and my brother Mark arrived to pick me up around 10:00 Thursday morning. After everyone used my bathroom for their mid-trip pit stop, we left, turning north onto Highway 117. “We made good time,” Mom said as we left Jeromeville and our surroundings abruptly changed to fields and pastures. “We left right at 7:30, like we wanted to. And we’ll still get to Bidwell in plenty of time to check into the motel before we eat.”

“Sounds good.”

“Oh. You’ll like this. We were on the phone with Aunt Carol earlier this week, talking about that time years ago when you brought your Game Boy to Bidwell and we played Tetris. I told her I always liked Dr. Mario, and she said she didn’t know that game, but it sounded fun. So we brought the Super Nintendo, so we can play Tetris and Dr. Mario with Aunt Carol.”

“That’ll be fun,” I said. Tetris & Dr. Mario was a cartridge for the Super Nintendo that included both games, which had been on separate cartridges for the earlier Nintendo Entertainment System. We had lost our Dr. Mario game when someone borrowed it and never returned it; last summer Mom had wanted to play Dr. Mario, so we got the Super Nintendo Tetris & Dr. Mario as a replacement.

The trip from Jeromeville to Bidwell took just under two hours, north on Highway 117 to where it ends, then north on Highway 9. In most of the towns between Jeromeville and Bidwell, the highway becomes a city street, which slows the drive down a little but gives a more close-up view of life in those towns than freeway travel would. Fields and orchards covered the land between the towns.

My great-grandmother Christine Dennison used to host Thanksgiving at her house in the hills on the outskirts of Bidwell. Her son, my great-uncle Ted, was a cattle rancher; he had sold the land around her house some time ago but kept the house for his mother to live in. We used to stay at her house when we came to Bidwell, and I always had so much fun exploring the old ranch land, going on long walks, even in the last few years of her life when the new owners of the land began building a country club and golf course there.

Christine had been my last great-grandparent, and this was our second Thanksgiving since she passed. Last year, in the absence of anyone wanting to take over the cooking and hosting duties, someone had decided to hold the Dennison extended family Thanksgiving at HomeTown Buffet. I thought that was a bit tacky at first, but having so many choices of food last year was kind of nice, so I was looking forward to it this year.

We checked into the motel and rested a bit before heading to HomeTown Buffet in mid-afternoon. “Hey, you guys,” Aunt Carol said as we approached the group of Dennison relatives waiting outside. Her husband, Uncle Chuck, Dad’s next-youngest brother, said hi and shook all of our hands. “Did you bring the game?” Aunt Carol asked.

“Yes, we did. Greg is waiting to play with you guys.”

“Oh, good.”

“Greg,” an elderly bald man said, patting me on the shoulder. “How’re you doing? How’s Jeromeville?”

“Hi, Grandpa Harold,” I said. “I’m doing well. Classes are good this quarter. And I’m working part time as a math tutor.”

“A math tutor? That sounds perfect for you.”

“It is.”

I looked around to see who else was here. Grandpa Harold’s wife, Grandma Nancy, saw me and waved. I knew her as my grandmother, but she was not biologically related to me. Grandpa Harold had been married three times, and my dad, Harold Dennison, Jr., came from the second wife, who lived out of state and died when I was in high school. I only met Dad’s real mother twice. My dad’s cousin Tina, whose father had had the cattle ranch, and her four daughters stood at the end of the line. I made a note to say hi to them next. The oldest girl was 18 and the youngest 12; they used to play with Mark and me at Great-Grandma Christine’s house when we would visit. When Mark was around 10, he went through a phase of fascination with amphibians and reptiles, and we used to catch tadpoles in Bidwell Creek in the summer with the girls. I overheard Tina say that her parents would not be joining us, since they were having Thanksgiving with her brother’s family.

Uncle Glen, Dad’s older half-brother from Grandpa Harold’s first wife, showed up about ten minutes later, and we all went inside after that. Dad had one other brother, Uncle Jimmy, whom I never met; he died in a motorcycle accident in his 20s while Mom was pregnant with me, and I got my middle name of James from him. Grandpa Harold had three daughters with Grandma Nancy, but they all lived out of state and did not often come for Thanksgiving.

I stuffed my face so full that day. I ate three whole plates of actual food: turkey, ham, stuffing, fried chicken, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and all sorts of bread. Then I went back for dessert, returning with a giant ice cream sundae in a soup bowl, since the ice cream bowls were small, and two different slices of pie. “Are you going to be able to move the rest of the night?” Mom asked when I returned to the table with dessert.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” I replied, laughing. While we ate, we all caught up, sharing everything going on in our lives. A number of people asked me how school was, and I repeated the same thing I told Grandpa Harold outside. Mark just kind of grunted and shrugged when they asked him that question. I did not have the long walks around the old ranch to look forward to this year, but this was still going to be a fun holiday.

Today, many Americans associate the day after Thanksgiving with shopping. In the 1960s, police officers fed up with rioting crowds of shoppers beginning their Christmas shopping referred to this miserable phenomenon as “Black Friday.” By the early 2000s, stores began encouraging these rioting crowds, offering deep discounts, completely unrelated to buying gifts for others, only available early in the morning. The retail industry even fabricated a story about the term “Black Friday” referring to profits being in the black rather than rioting and vandalism.

Black Friday was never a big deal to me, not today and certainly not in 1995. While the rest of the world went shopping that morning, we ate a nice hotel breakfast, then went to visit Tina and the girls. We set up the Super Nintendo to play with them while the adults talked about adult things. After that, we stopped to see Grandpa Harold and Grandma Nancy for a while. I always found their house boring when I was a kid, and this year was no exception to that, except that Grandma Nancy had homemade pumpkin pie.

In the early afternoon, we drove about 20 miles south to a town called Rio Bonito. A few years earlier, Uncle Chuck and Aunt Carol had driven past a large old house in Rio Bonito that was painted a bright yellow color. The house had a For Sale sign outside, and Aunt Carol said that she wanted to live in that Damn Yellow House. So they sold their house in Bidwell and bought the Damn Yellow House. Everyone in that town of 1500 people knew the Damn Yellow House. Someone once even sent them mail addressed to “Chuck & Carol Dennison, The Damn Yellow House, Rio Bonito,” with no street name or address, and it was delivered correctly.

We parked next to the Damn Yellow House and walked inside; I carried the Super Nintendo. “Hello,” Aunt Carol said as we approached. “Oh, good, you brought that game.”

“Yes. Should I go set it up now?” I asked.

“We’re not going to play right now,” Mom said.

“That’s okay,” Aunt Carol said. “He can go plug it into the TV now, and it’ll be ready when we’re ready to play later.”

I connected the Super Nintendo to the TV while the adults caught up and talked about boring adult stuff. Most of the family vacations I remember involve the adults sitting around talking about boring adult stuff while I had to entertain myself. The 1989 invention of the Game Boy, Nintendo’s hand-held video game console, was a lifesaver for me on these trips, although I did not bring it this year.

After dinner, it was time to teach Aunt Carol to play Dr. Mario. I turned the game on and started a single-player game. “So there are three different colors of viruses,” I explained as I played the game. “You line up the pills, and whenever you get four of the same color in a row, they disappear. So you want to make a set of four that includes a virus. Like, watch those red ones on the left side.” I dropped a pill on the red virus, making a set of four; the red virus disappears.

“I see,” Aunt Carol replied. As I dropped another pill, she asked, “What happened there? You made a set of four that didn’t have a virus in it?”

“Yeah. That still makes the pills disappear. It clears space on the board. There’s also a two-player game where you compete to see who clears the viruses first. And whenever you get more than one set of 4 with a single pill, it drops garbage on the other player’s board.”

“That sounds like fun. Can we do that?”

“Sure.”

I started a two-player game, putting Aunt Carol on an easier level than me since she was a beginner. The two-player game lasts until someone wins three rounds; I won the first two rounds, but Aunt Carol had gotten the hang of it enough to win the next round.

“This is fun!” Aunt Carol said.

We spent the rest of the night taking turns playing two-player Dr. Mario. Mom played against Aunt Carol, I played against Mom, Aunt Carol played against Uncle Chuck. Mark did not join in; he preferred sports and fighting games to puzzle games, so he sat in the corner listening to gangsta rap on a Walkman and occasionally making sarcastic comments.

“I want to try the one-player game for a while,” Aunt Carol said after a couple hours of multiplayer games. “Is that okay?”

“Sure,” I replied.

We spent some more time just talking and catching up while Aunt Carol was playing. Eventually Mom looked at a clock. “Oh, my gosh, it’s already 10:00,” Mom said. “We need to get back to the motel.”

“Are you gonna take my game away?” Aunt Carol asked.

“We don’t have to,” I suggested. “If Aunt Carol is still playing, we can leave the Super Nintendo here and pick it up tomorrow morning on our way out of town.”

“Oh, could you? That would be so nice.”

“Does that work, Mom?”

“Sure, if you’re okay leaving it here. Mark, is that okay with you?”

“What?” Mark asked, taking off his headphones.

“Aunt Carol wants us to leave the Super Nintendo here so she can play until we go home tomorrow.”

“I don’t care,” Mark said indignantly.

“You don’t have to get snippy. It’s your Super Nintendo too.”

“Have you heard me talk about the Super Nintendo once on this trip?”

“Well, it’s polite to ask.”

“I said I don’t care!”

We said our goodbyes and drove back north to the motel in Bidwell. “Aunt Carol sure got into Dr. Mario,” Mom commented.

“I know. That was fun.”

“It was nice of you to offer to let her borrow the Super Nintendo.”

“We’re leaving in the morning. I wasn’t going to play any more.”

“Still, that was nice of you.”

“Thank you.”

“What are we doing in the morning?” Mom paused, waiting for someone to answer. “Harry? What are we doing in the morning?”

“Sorry,” Dad replied. “I didn’t know you were asking me. I figured we’d stop by my dad’s on the way out of town.”

“What time do you want to be on the road?”

“I was thinking around 10 or 11.”

“Does that work for you guys?” Mom asked. I nodded. Mark, still listening to music on headphones, said nothing.

Dad had a nice visit with Grandpa Harold and Grandma Nancy in the morning, and by “nice” I mean that it was short enough that I did not get bored. We left their house around 10:30 and got to the Damn Yellow House to pick up the Super Nintendo a little before 11. I was the first one to the door, so I knocked.

Aunt Carol opened the door. “I suppose it’s time to give you your game back,” she said. We followed her into the living room, and I noticed that she looked disheveled and unkempt. The game was on, paused. “I was wondering if that special screen that shows up after levels 5, 10, 15, and 20 shows up again at 25.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never gotten that high.”

“The best I got to last night was level 23. But I had started that game at level 20. That’s the highest you can start at, I guess.”

“Yeah, “I replied, thinking that was still very impressive for a beginner

“This was a lot of fun. I might have to get this game.”

“You should.”

Mom and Dad said their goodbyes to Aunt Carol and Uncle Chuck as I disconnected the Super Nintendo. I joined them in saying goodbye, and we went back to the car and continued driving south on Highway 9.

“She stayed up all night playing,” Mom said. “Did you notice? She was still wearing the same clothes as when we left last night.”

“I was wondering that,” Dad replied.

“I didn’t notice, but now that you mention it, you’re right.”

To this day, whenever the topic of Dr. Mario comes up, Mom always brings up the time Aunt Carol stayed up all night. Aunt Carol passed away in late 2014; I did not attend the funeral, since she and Uncle Chuck had moved 500 miles away by then, but if I had, I would have shared the Dr. Mario story. In 2016, my cousin Pam, Aunt Carol’s daughter, commented on a Facebook picture I had shared of me and my friends playing retro Nintendo games. Pam said that they had an Atari when she was a kid, but her mother would always hog the controller. I told her about the time we brought Dr. Mario for Thanksgiving and her mother stayed up all night playing, and Pam replied, “So that’s how her addiction to that game started! She played that for years until the controllers broke.”

As a child, I loved visiting the Bidwell relatives and wanted those trips to last forever. This trip seemed short, only two and a half days, but I was growing up, as were my cousins, and life was changing. Uncle Chuck and Aunt Carol’s children were grown and did not live with them in the Damn Yellow House anymore. Mark had outgrown his tadpole-catching phase. And we didn’t have Great-Grandma Christine’s house to explore anymore; the old ranch was a gated country club now. Life moves on, but family stays family, even when those family relationships change over the years.

*In 2013, I followed someone through the gate to see what the old ranch looked like now. Notice the golf course down below.*

July 18, 1995. The day we went to Jeromeville with Rick and Miranda. (#46)

April 12, 2020December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 20 Comments

One of the major annual events in Santa Lucia County was the Gabilan Rodeo, a legacy of the cattle ranching in the area’s past, which had mostly given way over the years to various fruit and vegetable crops. I was never a big fan of rodeo, but my mom’s sister had married into a family that was very involved with the Gabilan Rodeo. So, for me, the arrival of the rodeo every July meant getting to see my cousins Rick and Miranda. They were in between me and my brother Mark in age; Rick would soon begin his last year of high school, and Miranda was just starting high school.

Last week, Mom had been thinking of things we could do when Rick and Miranda were here. She asked me if I wanted to take a day trip to Jeromeville, so that Rick and Miranda could see where I was going to school. I enthusiastically approved of that idea. So, on the morning of the day before the rodeo started, Mom had been driving north for the last two and a half hours, I was in the passenger seat, and Rick, Miranda, and Mark were in the back. Mark had been listening to music on headphones, and Rick had been showing off a fancy money clip that his dad had gotten him recently. Dad stayed home; he had to work.

“Greg?” Mom said as we approached the exit for Highway 117. “Tell me where to go. Do I take 117?”

“Where are we going to park the car?”

“I don’t know. You’re the one who lives here.”

“Are we going to start from the MU? Or from where I lived last year?”

“Let’s do that. Start from your dorm.”

“Turn here, then,” I said just in time for Mom to move over a lane and exit on Highway 117 north. I guided Mom to the Davis Drive exit, and then to the parking lot next to the South Residential Area.

“Where do I go?” she asked.

“There’s a little yellow machine where you can buy a parking permit.”

“Do I do that?”

“Yes, Mom. That’s how parking at places like this work. You buy a parking permit, you put it on your windshield, and then you park. The permit tells the parking police that you paid.”

“I know that!” Mom shouted as she bought a parking permit from the machine.

“Then why did you ask?”

“I don’t know!”

“Sometimes you don’t make sense,” I said, suddenly feeling tense over the way that something simple like parking the car had to become a major ordeal.

“Well, sorry.”

We stepped out of the car. “It’s hot!” Mark exclaimed, the first thing he had said in quite some time.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what it’s like here in the summer.”

We walked north on Dairy Road toward the South Residential Area, across the street from the dairy, which was exceptionally aromatic today. I stopped in front of Building C. Pointing to my window on the second floor, I said, “This is where I lived last year. And that was my room.”

“Nice,” Miranda said.

“It was a tiny room,” Mom said.

“Yeah, it was, but I was by myself, so it was all right,” I added.

“You got your own room?” Rick asked. “No roommate?”

“Yeah. It just happened. I didn’t ask for it. There were only six single rooms in the whole building.”

I pointed out the dining commons as we continued across the South Residential Area. We continued walking as I pointed out campus buildings and narrated anything interesting I had to say about them. We walked past the engineering buildings and the buildings where my chemistry and physics classes were. Heading toward the Quad, I pointed out Wellington Hall, where many of my classes had been held, and Kerry Hall, the location of the mathematics department offices. We passed the tall cork oaks lining the Quad, where I pointed out the Coffee House and the Memorial Union and the campus store. We walked around the corner at the campus store, where I pointed out the gray, oddly-angled building on the other side of the street.

“They call that building the Death Star,” I said, “because of all the steep concrete and metal canyons. One time, a bunch of us from my building played Sardines there at night.”

“What’s Sardines?” Mom asked.

“Isn’t it kind of like hide-and-seek?” Miranda asked.

“Yes,” I explained, ”except when you find the person hiding, you hide with him and cram in there like sardines. Taylor was hiding, and I wandered around this crazy building for over an hour looking for him. I hardly saw anyone the whole time. I thought everyone else was probably wondering what took me so long. And then when I finally found Taylor, I was the first one there.”

“Oh my gosh,” Mom said. “No one else had found him? After an hour?”

“I know.”

“College sounds fun,” Miranda said.

We continued walking toward A Street, which divides the campus from downtown. I pointed out the field where I had learned to play Ultimate Frisbee and the small, unimpressive football stadium. “I can see where all the parties are,” Rick said.

“Huh?” I asked.

“All those frat houses.” Rick pointed across the street from the football stadium.

“Oh, yeah. And there are a bunch more around the corner on Fifth Street.”

“Do you ever go to fraternity parties?” Miranda asked.

“No,” I replied. “I don’t hang out with that crowd.”

“Rick!” Mom said. “Put that away! Someone’ll steal it.”

“They’re not gonna steal it!” Rick argued, playing with his money clip and the large wad of cash it held. I decided to stay out of this argument.

We turned around and walked south on A Street. I led the group back toward the Quad, past the brown buildings with shingle exteriors which were the oldest buildings on campus. I pointed out the library as we headed around the corner back to Davis Drive.

“What in the heck is that?” Rick exclaimed loudly.

“What?” I asked.

“That!” Rick pointed to a large metal pipe, suspended about a foot above a concrete slab in the ground. The pipe curved a few times, ending in a section pointing about ten feet upward, like a chimney. On one of the pieces of metal attaching the pipe to the ground, ominous letters proclaimed YOU’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE.

you've been here before (yoinked)

“It’s art,” I said.

“What the heck kind of art is that? It looks like scrap metal!”

“You know how it is. Anything can be art. It’s a university. There’s weird stuff here.”

We got back to the car about ten minutes later and drove all the way across town to McDonald’s. Mark was a very picky eater, and I had not explored the Jeromeville culinary scene (other than the dining commons) enough to recommend anything, so we went with something familiar. After we finished eating, I stepped outside to find a pay phone. I stared at the phone for a minute, trying to compose in my head what I would say. I took a deep breath, knowing that I was being ridiculous and that there was no reason for me to be nervous. It was not like I was going to get rejected or anything. I was calling a guy. I quickly dialed the number.

“Hello?” a familiar voice said on the other end of the line.

“Taylor?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“This is Greg.”

“Hey, man! You’re here?”

“Yeah. Is this a good time to stop by?”

“Sure! I’m just hanging out, and Jonathan is studying.”

“655 Andrews Road?” I said, repeating the address I had written down.

“Yep! That’s it!”

“I’ll be there in probably around 15 minutes.”

“Sounds good! See you then!”

“Bye!”

After we all got back in the car, Mom asked, “Where are we going? I directed her toward the house where Taylor and Jonathan were living, going a different way than we went before, crossing over Highway 100 and working our way to Fifth Street. “And who are you going to visit?” Mom asked.

“Taylor Santiago, from the IHP last year. The one who hid in the Death Star building. And Jonathan, who was also in the program, is living there too. I didn’t really know him as well.”

“Which one is Taylor? Is he the Filipino boy who waved to us from the balcony that time we came to visit?”

“Yes. That’s him.”

“Weren’t you going to try to visit someone else today too?”

“Megan McCauley. But she emailed me back late last night and said she was busy today. She had a midterm this morning, and then she was going to do something with her family tonight.”

“Does her family live in Jeromeville?”

“Oak Heights. Just past Capital City. About half an hour away.”

“Which one is she? Didn’t you say she did something funny with her hair last year?”

“Cut it off and dyed it green.”

“You have too many friends,” Mom said. “I can’t keep track of all these people.”

“I don’t know.”

“No, that’s a good thing. Remember how in high school you always felt like you wanted to have more friends and a social life?”

“I guess.” Mom was right, but it felt embarrassing to talk about this with her, especially in front of Mark, Rick, and Miranda.

As we approached Taylor’s house, Mom asked, “So we’ll leave you alone to hang out with Taylor, and we’ll be back in an hour. Did you say there was a park somewhere around here where we can go sit and walk around?”

“Yeah.” I gave Mom directions to get to Maple Drive Park, about a quarter mile away. As the rest of my family drove off, I walked up to Taylor’s door and knocked. I waited nervously on the porch, even though I knew Taylor well and had nothing to be afraid of.

“Hey, man!” Taylor said. “Come on in!”

I walked into the living room and looked around. I sat on the couch. Jonathan was sitting in a recliner with a textbook, which he put aside to say hi to me. Taylor sat on the other side of the couch where I sat. “So whose house is this?” I asked.

“A guy I know from church. He’s away working at a summer camp.”

“That’s cool. How are your classes going?”

“Pretty good. I just got a midterm back. I didn’t do as badly as I thought.”

“That’s good.”

“How’s your summer? How’s life back in Plumdale?”

“Pretty boring, honestly. I’m working at an old lady bookstore. My mom knows someone who works there, so I didn’t have to go out and find the job or anything, but business is kind of slow.”

“When you say old lady bookstore, do you mean they sell books for old ladies?”

“Oh, no. It’s just a bookstore. But the owner is an older woman who listens to classical music, and not a lot of people our age come to the store.”

“That makes sense. Are you hanging out with your friends a lot?”

“Not really,” I said. “Plumdale is so spread out, I don’t really have neighbors, and most of my school friends aren’t near me. I’ve really only seen two of them. Some of them didn’t come home for the summer. I’ve been going to San Tomas Mountain Lions roller hockey games, though. That’s been fun. I went to two with my family and one with a friend.”

“I haven’t been to one of those yet. My sister and a bunch of her friends went to one. She said they kept showing her on the camera and made her Fan of the Game.”

“I saw that!” I exclaimed. “I was at that game!”

“Really? That’s funny!”

“Jonathan? What about you?” I asked. “How’s your summer going?”

“Good,” he said. “Just studying. Trying to get some more classes in.”

“You came here with your family, right?” Taylor asked. “Where are they now?”

“They didn’t want to get in the way while I was visiting you guys. They wanted to go find a park and hang out for a while. So I pointed them toward Maple Drive Park. They’ll be back to pick me up at 2:30.”

“That’s cool. Are they having fun? You said someone else was here too?”

“My cousins Rick and Miranda. They’re visiting this whole week.”

“Where do they live?”

“In the middle of nowhere. A little town about four hours north of here. But both of their sets of grandparents live in Gabilan, so I get to see them a few times a year.”

“That’s cool.”

Taylor and I spent the rest of the time talking about his classes, our plans for next year, things he had been doing with Jeromeville friends during the week and friends back home over the weekend, and friends from our dorm whom we had heard from over the summer. Jonathan talked a little as well, but eventually went to study in his bedroom. Taylor told me that Bok and her family went on a camping trip to the Pacific Northwest, and Caroline was visiting her relatives in Australia. (Both girls would send me postcards from their trips eventually.)

At 2:30, I looked outside the front window and saw the rest of my family sitting in the car waiting for me. “I need to go,” I said. “My ride’s here.”

“It was good seeing you,” Taylor replied, standing up and walking to the front door, which he opened for me. “Let me know when you move back up for the fall. Or if you’re up here again.”

“Definitely. I’ll see you then.” I raised my voice and called toward the back of the house, “Bye, Jonathan!”

“Bye, Greg!” Jonathan’s muffled voice called out from his room. “Good seeing you!”

“You too!”

After I got back in the car, Mom asked, “How are Taylor and the other guy?”

“Jonathan. They’re doing well. Just studying. And Taylor goes home on weekends.”

“Where’s he from?”

“El Arcángel. North of Bay City.”

“Oh, okay. So what are we doing next? Looking at your new apartment for next year?”

“Sure. Head that way,” I said, pointing north and continuing to direct my mother to Las Casas Apartments. When we got there, we got out and began walking around.

“This is where you’re gonna live next year, Greg?” Miranda asked

“Yeah,” I said. “Apartment 124. Right over there.”

Miranda looked where I was pointing. “This looks nice.”

“I like it.”

“Can we walk around a little?” Mom asked.

“Sure,” I said, I turned the corner of the building where my apartment was. I pointed out the path that led to the Greenbelts. “That’s a great place to take a walk or go for a bike ride,” I said. “Like a trail connecting a long park area.”

“That’s cool,” Miranda said. I pointed out the swimming pool and the laundry room. Miranda seemed the most interested; Rick was playing with his money clip again, and Mark was quietly listening to music with headphones.

After walking around for a while and returning to where we parked, Mom said, “Well, we’ve done everything we were going to do here. Is there anything else we’re doing here? Or is it time to go back home?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I could not think of anything else we were going to do, and I knew we still had a long drive ahead. But I enjoyed being in Jeromeville again, even if only for a day, and I was kind of sad to see the trip coming to a close. “I guess.”

We stopped for gas and got back on the freeway. About ten minutes later, we were approaching Nueces, the next town to the west, when Rick exclaimed, “I lost my money clip!”

“Oh no,” I said.

“I told you not to keep getting it out,” Mom said, sounding slightly exasperated.

“So what are we going to do?” I asked.

“Do you know where you lost it?” Mom asked Rick as she exited and pulled over.

“I remember seeing it at Las Casas Apartments,” I said. “So either he lost it there, or at the gas station, or in the car.

“It’s not in the car,” Rick insisted. “I’ve been looking.”

“Do you want to go back and look at the apartment and the gas station?”

“Well, yeah, if we can. Duh.”

Mom turned back onto Highway 100 east, the way we came. She took 117 north to the Coventry Boulevard exit and remembered on her own how to get back to Las Casas. We parked in the same part of the parking lot where we were before and began looking around. I could tell that Rick was upset, and that Mom was annoyed.

After walking around for about two minutes, I saw a glint of metal in the parking lot. I walked closer and saw a $20 bill with other bills folded behind it, held together by a metal clip. “Rick!” I called. “Isn’t this it?”

Rick came running over. “Yes!” he shouted. “Found it!”

“Good,” Mom said. “Mark! Miranda! We found it!”

“Can we go home now?” Mark asked, sounding like he would rather be anywhere else than here.

On the drive home, Rick played for us a CD of his new favorite comedian, someone named Jeff Foxworthy who made jokes about the South and rednecks. I thought he was somewhat amusing. Mom told me later that she thought Jeff Foxworthy was stupid.

After having been in the car so much that day, I felt a little relieved to be home, knowing that I would be sleeping in my own bed that night. But I also felt disappointed. It was disappointing that I did not get to see Megan. But, more generally, today I had had a taste of what it was like to be back in Jeromeville, and I was ready for more. My life in Plumdale really was going nowhere. I was more ready than ever to return to Jeromeville. I had been there for a year (YOU’VE BEEN THERE BEFORE, I thought, like that weird sculpture), and I would be back someday. My friends were there. I had new people to meet there. And I felt so much more free there, not having to wonder if my family would question my every move. This boring time in Plumdale working at Books & More would pass, and six weeks from now I would be free to continue living my new life in Jeromeville.

Author’s note: I apologize to whomever took the photograph of YOU’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE. I stole it from a Jeromeville local wiki site. As soon as the COVID-19 lockdown is over, I’ll go to Jeromeville and take this picture myself and replace this with my own picture.

Thanks to Mom and Taylor for helping me out with a few details relevant to this day.

This episode kind of feels like one of those TV shows where they keep showing clips from previous episodes. I told tons of stories about the previous year in Jeromeville and linked to all of them, for the benefit of new readers who might have missed those.

And, I doubt that she will ever see this, but from one writer to another, happy 104th birthday today to Beverly Cleary. I often forget about her when I think of my favorite authors, since she writes children’s books and I haven’t read anything of hers since elementary school. But I loved the Ramona books and the Henry Huggins books as a kid, and somewhere back at my parents’ house in Plumdale I have an autographed first edition copy of Ramona Forever. From what I have read about her as an adult, and what I remember of her books, she really did a great job of capturing what life is like for an ordinary child, and as someone who doesn’t always relate well to popular works of fiction, that’s important to me. And besides all that, just living for so long is pretty awesome in itself.

— Greg