Chapter 33: Friends And Neighbors

Saturday, November 10, 1984

We spent a lot of the day studying and writing papers. We were past the exam cycle for the most part, but the next cycle would come up in early December. No one wanted Thanksgiving or the first week of December to be completely consumed with studying or writing. We had other things to do!

For one thing, we were seeing Bruce Springsteen on November 30th.

For another, the A&M - t.u. game was on December 1st.

Those two things would have us driving from College Station, to Houston, to Austin, and back to College Station, with us spending both nights away. At least, I didn’t imagine we would drive back after the t.u. game. It was a night game, and I had a very good feeling about it. We might actually go out and celebrate that one a bit, along with thirty thousand or so of our closest friends.

Sixth Street was going to be crazy!

Angie grabbed me just after lunch and pulled me into my bedroom. Jas was in the living room at the time.

“Rob Reiner didn’t direct ‘The Shawshank Redemption’!” she said. “That was Frank Darabont.”

“I’d say I’m impressed that you know that, but...”

“Yeah,” she said, giggling. “Best prison movie ever! We all loved that one. Damn, that’s a good movie. But it’s not Rob Reiner’s.”

“That’s not the one I meant.”

“Oh,” she said, blushing and giggling. “Which one, then?”

“‘Stand By Me’,” I said.

“That was Stephen King?” she said.

I nodded, and said, “That was indeed Stephen King. It’s an adaption of his novella ‘The Body’.”

“Why do I not know this?” she said.

“Because the producers — wisely, I think — really downplayed the Stephen King connection. It would’ve totally failed in the mid-1980s. Everyone would’ve been looking for a horror-fest, been totally let down by the body not even being scary or possessed or undead or an alien or whatever, and gotten all grumpy about how talky the whole thing is.”

“That does make total sense.”

“Great movie. Great cast, too. But, yeah, it’ll be a trivia contest winner for years. A whole lot of people never knew that was a King story.”

“I really like his books,” she said. “Even the not-scary ones.”

“Yeah,” I said. “One of my favorites just came out — again — and I need to read it again for the first time.”

The whap was inevitable, as was the giggling.

“‘The Eyes of the Dragon’?”

“Yup.”

“Love that one! We need to go rampage through a bookstore, you know. It’s been too long.”

“We do,” I said, nodding. “We also need to do something we should have done months ago.”

“What’s that?” she said.

“Get library cards. Sterling C. Evans is great, but it really sucks for popular fiction. Not enough content, way too many borrowers.”

‘That ... is a great idea. We need to hit up both Bryan and College Station!”

“We do indeed!”

Once we emerged from my room, Jas wanted to know what we’d been talking about.

“Things that would get us both whapped,” Angie said. “But just fun things.”

“And library cards,” I said.

“Yeah! That!” Angie said. “We need to go get library cards!”

That got everyone moving. It was as if we’d all had a blind spot for the local libraries and imagined that bookstores were the only place to get books.

I think it had to do with who we were and when we were. In the 1980s, and even in the 90s, I’d wanted to own everything I read. After all, I might reread it. I reread a lot of things, after all.

By the 2000s, though, I’d given up on that. By the 2010s, I read nearly everything on some sort of electronic device. Paper books were a rare exception. I had whole shelves of books I’d bought back in the 80s and 90s sitting there, collecting dust, having never been opened in two or three decades.

I was, of course, the only one of us who’d had that experience, and ebooks were a long way in the future. Still, ‘Borrow it, read it, then decide if you need to own it’ turned out to be a persuasive argument.

For the six of us, it helped that we had an ‘all for one and one for all’ attitude to books, records, and tapes (and, soon, CDs). As much as possible we shelved everything in the living room. Anything any of us owned was fair game for everyone else, with the owner getting priority if there was a conflict (which there nearly never was). For music, we could always make a copy. None of us were audiophiles, so a lousy cassette-to-cassette copy was just fine. We were just playing it on a Walkman with cheap headphones anyway!

So, we piled in the car and went to both libraries. College Station just signed us up with our A&M student IDs, but Bryan wanted an A&M ID, a Texas driver’s license, and — since all of our driver’s licenses showed our parents’ addresses — a local utility bill. We finally convinced them that we all lived in the same house and that nearly all of the bills were in Jasmine’s name (except for the cable bill). Mostly, I think they just wanted to be difficult.

Each of us left each library with a few books. Studies or not, we were always reading something for pleasure.

Over dinner, we did some planning for upcoming events.

This weekend’s Aggie football game was at Arkansas. We’d been discussing whether or not to go for quite a while, and tonight we closed the door on it. The odds weren’t great for an Aggie victory, and Fayetteville, Arkansas is not a short drive from College Station.

I’d never been there, not in either life. Most likely, we would go there two years from now.

This year? We’d enjoy the weekend here and watch the game on TV.

The other planning was further out. We were starting to run up against planning deadlines for Winter Break. Mel was out, as expected. She fully expected to go on the family trip unless they pissed her off so much that it was worth making a major break with them. If she did, she would want to stay with Cammie, not go somewhere.

Cammie was out, too. Even if we’d paid for her, there were things she’d rather spend the money on. What she really wanted to do was stay here and enjoy the peace and quiet, aside from a brief Christmas trip.

When she put it that way, it made me rethink a few things. She’d clearly enjoyed staying alone in the house over the summer, of course, but it hadn’t dawned on me that it wasn’t just a feeling of immediate safety after what had happened a few months before. Instead, it was really the feeling of being home. Ever since she’d realized that she was gay, her parents’ house had no longer felt like ‘home’ to her. It was ‘their’ house, and ‘they’ were a threat. ‘They’ were people who clearly didn’t approve of her at all, who would be desperate to ‘change’ her and ‘fix’ her.

Having a home was special to her, and having it all to herself was nice sometimes.

That left Angie, Paige, Jas, and I discussing (or, in some cases, debating) our plans. A&M had cheap ski trips to Winter Park or Crested Butte. Winter Park was more expensive, but the cost included meals. The $100 we saved (per person) for Crested Butte might not go that far compared to two meals a day.

Mexico remained an option, as did the Northeast. One advantage of the Northeast would be that (outside of New Year’s Eve!) it would be relatively uncrowded. Who goes into the snow and ice for a holiday if they can avoid it? Crazy college students — that’s who!

We didn’t settle on anything. We had until November 23rd to book a ski trip, so there was time. It wasn’t guaranteed that we would all do the same thing, too. At various points we discussed each couple planning something different. That could still happen.

In a rare repeat, everyone wanted to go see Spinal Tap again for the second midnight showing. Obviously, we’d all really enjoyed it.

It was just as good the second time. It might have been even better, since we all knew when to pay attention to the thing we’d missed last night while laughing at something else.

‘Stand By Me’ was probably a year or two away. I couldn’t wait to see it again ... for the first time.

Sunday, November 11, 1984

Today was another of those days where one or another of us, sometimes in pairs or more, were on the phone.

For instance, everyone wanted to tell Lizzie and Janet about the ‘Straight Slate’ election. They’d actually heard the good news, but not all of the side issues. We’d never even gotten around to telling them that Memorial’s prom had apparently turned Houston into either Sodom or Gomorrah, according to one letter writer. They really got a kick out of that!

I checked in with Marshall, Gene, and Amit, too. We’d just checked in with Laura, so that could (and did) wait.

While I was talking with Marshall, I told him about meeting Carl. Marshall was extremely amused. He did suggest shoving Carl’s head in a toilet, but he was clearly joking. He later made it clear that he respected Carl a lot and that he was happy Carl was meeting friends like me (and, of course, that I was meeting friends like Carl, too).

Candice was (of course) thrilled with the election returns. We made a plan to get together with her and Sherry on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

That felt appropriate to me. Candice’s continued good health and well-being was definitely something I felt most thankful for.

I gave Michael a call just to check in, and also to keep it clear I wanted to be friends as much as I wanted to be business partners. The call turned into mostly business, anyway. He’d hired five more people and expected to possibly double his staffing within the quarter. We didn’t get into the nuts and bolts of it, but I think it helped him that I didn’t even question that.

For my part, it just made sense. Companies selling three million dollars a quarter of fairly complex electronic devices need people. There’s a lot of assembly there. There’s testing, too. Parts need to be ordered, stocked, restocked, reshelved if unused, and so forth. Failed systems need to be examined to figure out what went wrong. Someone needs to box up and ship things. Manuals need to be written, proofread, printed, and assembled. People have to do advertising and sales, not to mention billing and collections.