At some point while she was living on Cherokee Trace, Granny became dissatisfied with the house and decided to build a new one. Her selected location was a good ways outside of the city proper on a street called Orchid Lane. She picked the spot because it was remote enough to be quiet and peaceful, yet close enough to town that you didn’t have to drive 30 minutes every time you needed to get groceries.
Anyway, after Granny sold her house on Cherokee Trace, we needed to live in a temporary house for a few months until the new one was constructed. For some reason, Granny picked an incredibly shitty rental on Randall Street, which was halfway between Cherokee Trace and Orchid Lane and sat right next to a small gas station and convenience mart named Loretta’s. This house was seriously bad. It had warped floors. It was poorly insulated. It had lighting and ceiling fan fixtures that were so loose, I was afraid they would fall and hit me on the head. Granny absolutely hated the place, but I guess it was the only thing she could find that fit her budget.
The most prominent feature of my life at that time was a close friend I developed by the name of Charles Fudge. We met in my first year of Saint Academy and hit it off almost instantly. I think the genesis was the game Final Fantasy II. I had rented it a few weeks before and desperately wanted to play it, but it was too long, and it had magic in it which I still viewed as Sinful. So I returned it, disappointed. However, Fudge offered to loan me his copy, and liked to talk enthusiastically about the game and other nerdy subjects in general. Fudge is enough of a big subject to warrant his own entry, however, so I’ll leave him for later.
I do remember one thing about him that ties directly into Randall Street, however. One day he called me and said he was coming over and he would bring a video game that he was “sure I’d love.” He showed up with a copy of Splatterhouse 3 for the Sega Genesis. I told him we couldn’t play that, it was too graphic and Sinful for kids like us. He was flabbergasted. I think I relented under the immense peer pressure and let him play it for a little while before its difficulty turned us off and we distracted ourselves with something else.
Another thing I remember about the Randall Street Time was that Wild Palms came on television. Wild Palms was a television miniseries by Oliver Stone that dealt with a drug called Mimezene which in combination with holographic projections could create a sort of virtual reality. I remember being incredibly enamored with this show and especially its soundtrack which featured various classic rock hits like “House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals as well as emotional, atmospheric music composed by a Japanese composer named Ryuichi Sakamoto. I don’t remember the series being particularly good, and we would even make fun of it at times by randomly shouting, “It’s the Mimezene!” in a shocked tone, which the characters on the show were prone to doing.
I also had a brief Spiritual Revival while I lived here. I think it coincided with one of my Uncle’s frequent “retreats” or excursions into the countryside to pray and sing and listen to uplifting sermons. I went to one of these or something and came back renewed and rededicated to Christ. I remember feeling intense internal conflicts as I tried to rectify my spiritual desires with my more carnal demands. I don’t fool with such problems anymore, because no matter how “powered up” a person might get from a spiritual event, they still have to come home and cook dinner and wash underwear and do all of the banal, mundane things humans have to do in order to live.
Oh yeah, another thing I did obsessively while I lived here was prepare for National Spelling Competitions and listen to The Phantom of the Opera soundtrack. (My obsession with The Phantom of the Opera was obvious after much consideration: I considered myself a hideous, tortured, unlikable soul who would never have companionship.) The spelling competitions were held by Accelerated Christian Education and they were an absolute joke compared to something like the National Spelling Bee. For example, a spelling word at the ACE competition might be something like “oxymoron” whereas one at the National Spelling Bee would be something like “cymotrichous.” Nevertheless, I prepared from the entire list of words very well and even won the whole thing at Nationals one year.