Memories of Friends

When I got married in 1985, I had a lot of friends. Now, they've pretty much all lost touch except for a few key ones. Here's what I remember about my friends. Warning: some of this stuff is NOT for kids. Please don't read this if you're a child!

High School Buddies

Dean Lorey

• Dean Lorey was my best friend in high school, bar none. We worked well together. Dean is one of the most creative, intelligent, and driven people I've ever known. He is a Scorpio, which means he is also steadfast, loyal, and plotting the eventual demise of everyone who ever ticked him off. Dean was kinda short in high school, especially compared to me, but he was muscular to a certain extent and his father made him learn all these wrestling moves. He had the kind of dad and mom you wish you had - they were both bright, supportive, conservative but relatively open-minded, and fun to talk to. And they both could cook like demons. Heck, even his grandma and grandpop were cool. His aunt and uncle were cool. How could he have an entire family full of cool people? And yet, he did. Does. Whatever.
• My favorite story involving Dean is our drunken Senior summer weekend of 1985 in NYC. We stayed in his aunt's apartment. His aunt was (and I guess, still is) quite a beautiful woman, so it was kind of strange staying in this beautiful woman's apartment. Her clothing was hung up on this rod across the top of the room you'd look up and see some sexy naughty something or something and then blush and look down. She was gone from the apartment, of course, which was cool. We were two adult guys, still kids really, out on the town for the first time ever. We stomped into liquor stores and bought alcohol with such verve that they didn't even card us. This was not because we were specifically very sly, it was because for fully half of the weekend, we fervently believed that the drinking age was 18. At least, I did. I wouldn't put it past Dean to fake me out.
• Once with the alcohol, we also had to buy porno magazines. What we were going to do with them, who knew. We just bought them, because dammit, we were 18, we could so we did. We didn't have a snowball's chance in hell to find a woman in NYC at that point, and we both knew it. We set about doing the things that tourists do while trying not to appear too touristy. We went to an off-broadway theatre and saw Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and the Theatre Pandemonium (strangely enough, years later, I would write a short story about lesbian vampires...). We saw La Cage Aux Folles on Broadway, a matinee, after getting the tickets from a scalper who worked just out in front of the theatre. We went to the Village and went music shopping in Tower records. We went to Times Square and took in a porno movie. This was way before they put a police district down in the middle of the place, and cleaned it all up. I remember getting seriously squicked by all the hungry looks our young male bodies got from all the men who were there in theatre, exercising their critical....acumen. We left rather quickly. We saw "Night of the Living Dead" at a crappy theatre where the popcorn came from a vending machine and the hot dogs were so frickin' old that they had entered the broth around the turn of the century.
• On our way back to the apartment after going to 42nd street and Times Square, Dean made a navigational error (and I say Dean, because I had no idea how to go through the subway system - Dean was our native guide this evening) and we ended up on the other side of Central Park from where we needed to be. This was not a Good Thing. One of my favorite Dean quotes happened at this time. We were walking through the Park, alongside the street that was built to go through it. I was really quite scared. Here I was, this young guy in the middle of Central Park on a dark street at 2:00 am on a Saturday morning. I did not think it was quite the safest place to be. I mentioned this to Dean and he said, "Well, Sam, if you're gonna live in fear..."
  For years later, that became my rallying cry when I was forced to consider doing something that might be scary, "Well, Sam, if you're gonna live in fear....."
• Dean and I were great friends in high school, so much so that my mother thought we were carrying on a torrid homosexual affair. This is the funniest thing, as most of the time we spent together we were playing D&D, playing computer games on his shudder Commodore 64, or ogling, planning to ogle, or attempting to talk to girls. We were about as gay as Hugh Hefner on viagra. Maybe what people couldn't understand (especially my mom) was that we really liked each other, and guys don't usually like each other that much.

Early Cora-Ni Gamers

• Dale, Tony, Terry, "Roscoe", Gilbert, Richard, you guys rocked.

The Marvel Super Heroes Gamers

• I once ran Marvel Super Heroes (MSH) for a bunch of guys in high school. They were great friends and the times we spent together playing MSH were really cool. We took their characters through endless challenges and they soon grew to be quite powerful. I remember the characters were also cool: Poltergeist, Tank, Micro, Darkflame, Weyr. It was great to be able to do something so cool and play so frequently as we did. I credit games like this with my staying out of trouble as a teenager.

Sweethearts, Lovers, and Might-Have-Beens

I've placed this section on a special page all its own. Before you go there, you have to agree that you're over 18, and that you're willing to be surprised and understand that this was my high school life, not my life today, ok?

Click here when you're ready.

College Friends

Coming Soon. Hi Gary, Sean, Glenn, Michelle, Bert, and many others!