Chapter 48

Author Notes.

I have had a lot of questions and responses over this story, and thought I would try something. If you do not want any backstory or information feel free to stop reading now. This is in no way required reading or part of the story itself.

Background, this started as an idea I had to try and drag the actual sex in a story (sex as in the main character’s penis entering a vagina) as long as I can. So many stories are ten paragraphs long, and the main characters are fucking by the end of the third paragraph. Now there is a place and time for stories like that, but I wanted to do something different this time.

Then the thing became “how long could I drag this out”?

Well, I did finally find the answer. 20 chapters. I was able to build up the tension and suspense for 20 chapters until I finally gave in and let them “do it”. And it was a hell of a fun ride, trying to find ways to keep things sexy and exciting without turning into dull repeats chapter after chapter.

Now the time frame starts in 1981 in the San Fernando Valley. At that time still the northern suburb of LA, with a few ranches and farms still dotting the area. The Valley Girl craze was at it’s peak, right before the song and movie with that name came out and quickly turned it from a cultural craze to an overused and dying fad. Roller skating was a craze again, as the drug and sex crazed roller discos of the 1970’s gave way to more family and kid oriented places.

And it literally seemed like every few miles on the major streets in The Valley there was a roller rink. Some from converted bowling alleys, others from closed grocery stores or ice rinks that had been converted to roller skating.

As far as Skate!, it was a real place (although I do not remember the actual name, that is entirely a figment of my imagination). And indeed as a 17 year old kid who just moved to LA after living in Idaho, it was a huge shock. A converted bowling alley near the Burbank Airport, it was the place where the Punks and New Waver crowd went. Punk rock dominated though. Rainbow colored spiked hair, safety pins through cheeks and ears, spiked leather collars around the neck and torn black shirts with punk rock bands on them.

But also a scattering of the New Wave crowd. Guys in dark suits with pencil thin ties loosened over shirts with the top button open. Girls in pastel colors and a lot of skirts and dresses, and legwarmers. And the strange guy from Idaho, in boot cut jeans and a plaid western styled shirt.

In addition to a lot of sex, this story is also an homage to an era of time that is mostly forgotten. Where the loose teen sex had not quite become what it is today. Contraception was tricky to get, so most teens used what is known now as “safe sex” methods to have fun. Finger action in the back of cars or movie theaters, maybe a little oral if you had been together long enough.

And an amazing number of those Valley Girls were virgins. At least as far as having actual intercourse went. A lot of that can actually be seen in the teen movies of the era. They would go quite far, but not TOO far. And since most kids did not have a car of their own, double (or even triple) dates were not all that uncommon. Each couple close to the others. Pretending that nothing is going on even though they can see, hear, and smell what the others in the car were doing.

It was also the start of the “Geek Revolution”. Where computers were just entering the home, and teen programmers still in High School were making thousands of dollars writing programs. D&D moved from the college campuses to high schools everywhere, and the geeks finally found their own groups (that sometimes crossed over into other groups).

This is going to be a continually updated blog-diary of my thoughts as I wrote this story. Chapter by chapter pointing out things that pop culture may have forgotten.

Chapter 2

Val Speak was mostly used by the girls of the time when they were around others. Not spoken much around friends and family, but almost constantly where they were “on display” at places like malls, schools and arcades. This is why the girls in the story often seem to slip in and out of it. This is not my being sloppy, it is actually accurate to the time.

And The Castle Arcade is a real place. In Sherman Oaks, on Sepulveda Blvd. A few blocks north from the Sherman Oaks Galleria. The arcade is still there and open for business to this day. But the Galleria is vastly different from the era. In the early 2000’s it was gutted and replaced with what is there now. But the original can be seen in movies like Terminator and Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Chapter 3

The International Harvester Scout was a real vehicle, made by the same company that makes farm equipment and big rigs. Kind of a smaller version of the Chevy Blazer, they are now largely forgotten, except by collectors that still try to find ones in good shape.

And Van Nuys Blvd. That was the major cruising street in the Valley at the time. They even made a movie on it by that name (Van Nuys Boulevard), and on Friday through Sunday nights it was packed with cars full of kids, making a circle North and South, turning around just south of Victory Blvd, then going north to just north of Sherman Way before heading back.

Chapter 4

And Paula, the girl Keith claims to have banged the year before was indeed the Head Cheerleader, Senior Class President, and Class Valedictorian of Van Nuys High. And had already appeared in a few small movies. She then went on to become a “Laker Girl”, and a choreographer for The Jacksons, Janet Jackson, then movies like Big, The Running Man, and Coming to America. After that, Paula Abdul released her first album and became really famous.

And yes, I am well aware she is of Syrian descent. But Pete would not have recognized that, and simply thought the was Mexican.

Chapter 5

Hollywood in the early 1980’s.

Yes, “Hotel Hell” was a real place, and that was the name everybody knew it as. Formerly a quality hotel built in 1917 during the “Golden Age” of Hollywood, by this time it was abandoned and taken over by street kids, junkies, and prostitutes. The Garden Court Hotel (later the Garden Court Apartments) even has a page on Wikipedia. Don’t look for it now, it was destroyed in 1984 and a corner mall now sits in it’s place.

In Reseda there really was a game store called the Competitor’s Castle. The front half was the store with games and accessories for sale, the back half had several tables for playing games. Pretty much the prototype of game stores to this day, very original for 1982. Sadly it also is long gone.

This area is mostly captured accurately for the time in the movie Boogie Nights. It was filmed a block or so away at the corner of Sherman Way and Reseda Blvd. The Country Club (the main club in the movie) was still open, and had a variety of bands on weekends. The old Reseda Bowl across the street from it had indeed been converted to a skating rink for a few years.

Balboa Park at the time was going through the start of its decades long update. The home of the old RKO movie ranch, movies like It’s A Wonderful Life, Stagecoach, and The Day the Earth Stood Still were filmed there. At this time in history all that really existed as would be seen today were the golf course, and the main park and tennis courts across the street.

The Runway had just been completed, but was still a dirt runway, they had not yet paved it like it is today. And the Japanese Garden had only started being built. Today the Japanese Garden is familiar to viewers of various Star Trek shows from the 1990’s onward, as it was a frequent stand-in for Starfleet Command or alien planets with it’s distinctive buildings. At this point, it was a single gazebo, a few wood footbridges across a small artificial stream, and that is about it. Much of the old flood basin at this time was actually still a working farm.

Yes, if you knew where to look you could find bootleg videotapes. At this time the rental market was really starting to boom, because a new movie on video averaged around $40 bucks (and this is in 1982 dollars – around $100 today). So almost nobody bought movies, they recorded them off of TV or rented them. It was about a decade later that the movie companies realized they made more money by charging less and making it on the volume.

And the quality of bootlegs was often garbage. Second, third, even fourth generation copies that had degraded to the point that they were sometimes almost unwatchable. But unless you had the money to own two VCRs (at over $600 each, over $1,500 today) this was the only way most could afford to own a favorite movie other than waiting for it to come on cable. And in that era, that often took 2-3+ years.

To give an idea, Star Wars was released in 1977. But it did not appear on video tape and cable until 1982. For a big movie this was fairly normal for the time as they would release a movie over and over again until the theaters were tired of playing it. And they often had theater runs that lasted 3-6+ months. My usual theater in Idaho actually ran Star Wars for just under a year (50 weeks). A theater I remember in California played ET for over 9 months.

Unlike today, where it seems like a movie hits the theaters on New Year Day, and is on streaming and DVD by Memorial Day. And if you do not catch it in the first 1-2 weeks you are pretty much out of luck.

Chapter 7

And yes, I actually did get many letters from people asking what in the hell I thought I was doing calling “Dune” a bit of “Light Reading”. That was actually my being a bit sarcastic, kind of like what a geek would say instead of somebody else describing “War and Peace” as light reading.

I have read all of the books in the series, and own all the movie versions. You all can stop writing to tell me I do not know what I am talking about, it was a joke.

Ahh, D&D.

Yes, this was a major love of mine in this era, so I am adding a lot of it into the story. I dated girls that were into it, and I got one or two girls I dated into it. Almost all of us geeks played it, and some of the jocks played it. Some of the drama kids got into it as a way to practice improv acting.

One thing I have tried to do however is give it as “D&D Light”. Concentrating on the stories being told, and skipping over all of the actual mechanics other than some really basic ideas how it works. And in a way this is also a “story in a story”, by following the made up characters along with the ones actually being written about.

And yes, Kaos was a real NPC I made for a campaign in 1982. But patterned after the generic “Valley Girl” persona and not any one girl. A wand of Fireball and a Wand of Wonders which caused random effects each time it was used. Ditzy Kaos could never figure out which was which. She was a riot to play, and always brought the game to an uproar the first time she did that.

Chapter 8

Thieves World. Yes, it is an actual game expansion, based on a series of fantasy anthology books that were very popular at the time. Created by the late Robert Asprin, it was about a series of characters and adventures in the capitol of a small kingdom known officially as “Sanctuary”. It included pages and pages of charts you could roll on and get random encounters and events. It was a “Universal” expansion, that covered all of the big games of the era, from hard Science Fiction space opera types to D&D and other fantasy systems.

It was a main part of my games that everybody loved. And it kept a game master on their toes because it could completely derail a planned adventure from what was written and scripted into a three day long adventure to solve something random that just happened (in one case it was rescuing a cousin of one of the characters from a slave gang).

Chapter 10

Yes, the “gold strike” up in the hills (along with the hyper inflated prices of any gold prospecting equipment) was something I had used many times over the decades to siphon off a lot of gold from a party. As well as finding out that the “Seven Dwarves” had only conquered a dragon, and were slowly returning to town with their treasure and the dragon in tow.

An absolutely classic MacGuffin that is always a riot when the party realizes that in reality they fooled themselves. After all, I never actually said there was a gold strike, it was just a rumor and that a few dwarves had been in town buying a lot of things with gold.

This is also real life, just look up the economy of the California Gold Rush, where a gold pan (20 cents) was suddenly over $8, in 1849. And eggs were being sold for $3 each (25 cents per dozen in the rest of the country). When I first used this, the dwarves were simply taking the dragon to sell to an arena purveyor. Then after reading “Guardians of the Flame” by Joel Rosenberg, I changed it to they were selling it to the city as a sewage disposal system.

Chapter 11

Yes, there were many “weekend game conventions” in addition to the big ones. Often in rented wedding halls and ballrooms for a single weekend.

Mr. Cummings and his game company are entirely fictional, but they are based loosely on the Judge’s Guild company. A small company that was not known for making their own games, but additions (licensed and unlicensed) for games other companies made. And at the time there were probably 20 or 30 different game companies dedicated to the industry, and they often had representatives prowling though the convention looking for new ideas, games, or talent to hire (or steal from).

And yes, Thieves World is indeed a licensed copy of another work made by a company called Midekemia Press. If that sounds familiar to fantasy readers, it is a company created by Raymond Feist to publish game expansions based on his long-running RPG campaign that was the inspiration for his Magican-Riftwar series of novels.

During this time a lot of Fantasy and Sci-Fi authors were also involved in RPG games. Many would even create an adventure, play it, then use the actual playing as inspiration for a novel they were writing that was based on it. Some later moved to computer games and did the same thing.

Chapter 14

Yeah, the Valley was mostly considered the home of the “Acclimatized Jews” of the LA area. Not many Hasidic Jews like you would see in the Fairfax District, but a large number who were just like anybody else other than their religion. And if like me a lot of them were your friends you made careful when planning meals to accommodate their dietary restrictions. Which really was not all that hard. No mixing meat and dairy, and no pork or shellfish. That is really it for the most part.

And the video being discussed is “The Damned”, by punk band Plasmatics. The video really does climax with a schoolbus crashing through a wall of television sets. The lead singer of the group was Wendy O. Williams, who actually had a brief porn career.

Chapter 15

Ah, the Dagger of Healing. This and similar weapons are something I try to throw into every campaign (along with spears of healing, swords of healing, maces of healing, and even once arrows of healing). Never fails to cause a lot of confusion until they figure it out. And a real mind fuck when you try to think about it. Because of magic, you can actually have a weapon you stab somebody with that actually heals them instead of hurts them. Makes absolutely no sense. But hey, it’s magic.

Anaheim. At this time the city was not full of $200 a night hotels catering to the rich crowd, but lots of little ones for $15-20 a night that catered to families with less money. There were probably 30 of them within a mile of Disneyland, with many literally across the street from the park.

And yes, a “Holographic Copyright”, I have gotten a lot of comment about that little bit. Essentially mailing yourself or a third party a copy of your creation to establish a copyright in court. Yes, it is horribly outdated and obsolete today. And yes, it never really holds up in court. But at the time it was not uncommon for this technique to be used if somebody had little to no money.

Getting a copyright at this time was a very expensive, and a complex procedure. Much more so than today, where simply putting a “Circle C” after the title and a quick blurb about ownership is enough. At this time, you normally needed a lawyer, fill out forms, and submit it (and the fee) to the “US Copyright Office”. And it took on average from 3-6 months or more. And I have had my own dealings with this several times in the last 20 years. Most recently having to go to a major on-line company because somebody had taken one of my stories and was selling it for $5 a copy as an e-book.

Thankfully that was resolved, mostly because I had originally published it on ASSTR 20+ years prior, and was still using the same email address I had originally posted it with on Usenet. They verified that it had indeed been published by me in the 1990’s and removed it.

Word of advice for any authors, occasionally Google your own works. Take a sentence from the first paragraph or two and search it in quotes. Since most intellectual property thieves are lazy and offer part of the first chapter as a hook to get people to buy it they often pop up fast. I have now had 4 copies of a single work struck because of their doing this.

Chapter 16

Another love of mine, music. During this era in real life I often worked as a DJ at roller rinks and small teen dance clubs for extra cash. And slipping in The Ventures was not uncommon as the “Surf Punk” style of them and Dick Dale was popular once again.

And in case nobody caught it, my not naming the Bass Player was done on purpose. The Bass Player being ignored is a long running trope, and I wanted to have some fun with it. In “Almost Famous”, he only has three lines in the entire movie. The Bass Player in “School of Rock” only has a few lines, and is not even listed in the end credits on purpose. In the “Josie & The Pussycats” movie, Val is constantly pushed to the sidelines. In “So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish”, Douglas Adams has a planet where a bass player can be shot for playing their notes wrong.

And most famously, in “That Thing You Do”, the Bass Player is not even given a name in the movie. In the end, he is only credited as “T.B. Player”.

Chapter 18

For anybody that has not seen a roller skating competition, it is almost totally unlike what you see on the ice. As in ice skating you often have the compulsories, which are never broadcast because they are fightfully dull. Literally everybody does the exact same routine that never changes, to the exact same music. It is judged on skill only, there is no originality allowed.

But a couples event, is very different than on ice. If you the reader have never seen one, there are many on a popular streaming site. Instead of the slow lifts and spins ice skaters use that may last 20-30 seconds, roller skaters use what is almost violently fast lifts and spins, where the girl is almost thrown into the air and she will do 3 or 4 spins or movements before being back on her feet 5-10 seconds later. It is like the difference between ballroom dancers doing a waltz, and watching jitterbuggers dancing to fast jazz.

Chapter 19

Ah, the era where there were no cell phones, or smart phones with cameras. Such a trick with motel phones would never work today. But at this time you could only be called at a specific location, not anywhere you happened to be. And a parent could not have you turn on a camera to prove you are where you said you would be.

Chapter 21

Earlier I mentioned that many writers were involved in games. Tunnels & Trolls was created by Ken St. Andre (a well known fantasy and science fiction writer), and Michael Stackpole (famous for his Star Wars novels). The two of them later in 1988 created an early computer RPG with those base rules called “Wasteland”. Years later they got into a copyright conflict, which caused the game to rename their sequel to “Fallout”. So any Fallout players, you are actually playing a game based on a 1988 computer game, based originally on a 1975 table top roleplaying game system.

Who knew?

Chapter 23

Yes, adding a cup of salt into a bucket full of ice and spinning a bottle inside is indeed a fast way to chill it down. I am not going to get into the chemistry of it, but it is the same way home ice cream makers work. If you ever need a bottle chilled fast this is the way to do it in about 10 minutes.

Chapter 24

Saddleback Community College at this time had a well respected AV department. And this was just at the point where digital editing systems were first appearing in common use at TV stations. A video switch would start at $15,000 and run to over $100,000, but quite a few of the quality older analog ones (often less than 5 years old) were starting to appear on the market as stations switched to digital.

Something you can get at a department store now for under $50 back then was a huge investment.

Chapter 28

In this I wanted something to not work right, so I basically had the character attempt to create a game like Dungeon Keeper (an early computer game where the player tries to protect a dungeon from invading adventurers), then realizes it would never work as an RPG. Then adding in elements from the classic tabletop game “Magic Realm”, which used a map made out of hexagonal 2 sided tiles for the playing field.

After all, what fun is a story where everything always works out right for the character? I am not writing a Mind Control story, where whatever the character wants the character gets. Or where he finds a book of “Magic Tickets” in a field and after torturing a girl sexually she becomes the love of his life. (yes, a meta-reference to one of my favorite erotic stories).

And the Jeep Wagoneer, another one of my favorite vehicles of all time. Really ahead of it’s time as it came decades before the SUV craze.

Chapter 29

Now this is a bit of my game philosophy when designing an adventure.

First, I really do take ecology in mind when making an adventure. There has to be a reason a monster is in a certain location, near another monster. Not just throw them near each other with no explanation. Otherwise they would have killed each other long before the adventurers get there.

And MacGuffins. Something glowing in a briefcase from Pulp Fiction is one of the most well ones in modern cinema. Somebody trying to figure out what “Rosebud” is, or deciding to raise the Titanic to obtain crates of rare “byzanium” that is stored in the hold ... What the item is makes absolutely no difference, it is just the excuse used to get the story moving. I make extensive use of them myself, both when I was still making games, as well as when writing stories.

Chapter 30

Ahhh, the wood paneling on walls which was a huge craze in the 1960’s and 1970’s making an appearance in the 1980’s. During that decade it became known as “old fashioned”, and was most commonly either painted over, or ripped out altogether. But I did in help a friend decades later stain his from a light to a dark wood in what would become his Home Theater.

Also in here I decided to answer a question that I got a great many times by people demanding to know how the main character lives the way he does. A teen with a single dad, living what appears to be almost an upper class life in a middle class neighborhood, with no worries about expenses.

In short, life insurance is a big part. Also this is when many who had made it big in various industries in California started to move to Idaho where the land (to them) was amazingly cheap. And then add in rehabbing a derelict house, which were still not terribly uncommon in the San Fernando Valley of the 1980’s as the original WWII era owners were dying off and sometimes leaving no heirs.

The main character had a vehicle he bought himself, and the dad being a RADAR technician would be making a very good income. Many people do not realize that the more skilled “blue collar” type jobs can actually pay more than the “white collar” jobs many think they need to get rich.

When I worked for Hughes Aerospace in the 1990’s I knew guys that fixed RADAR systems would frequently drive a new BMW or Mercedes home to their $2.5 million dollar home. Such an individual would probably be pulling in around $50 an hour. Then add in the extra amounts he would make at $75+ an hour (plus per diem) on a 2-3 day remote job (which I have his dad do fairly regularly). The dad would be easily making over 6 figures, and this is in the early 1980’s. When lower class income was $21k and under, middle class was $60k and upper class was over $130k.

And in rural places like Idaho, water rights are king. Most land does not come with it, and you can not pull water from a river or canal without those rights. It is not unheard of for a 5 acre plot with water rights to sell for 10 times that of a 100 acre plot without water rights. Some will even buy such plots of land simply for the water rights and never actually use the land itself. Without water rights, your only source is either buying it or drilling wells, which in areas may still be restricted or metered.

So now hopefully everybody will understand why the family is so well off. They literally made a killing selling the old ranch, and the dad makes good money. Combined with frugal living and paying for everything in cash and not credit.

Now hopefully the letters will stop, demanding why the father would toss off money so casually. Income wise, they are upper class. Asset wise are in the middle upper class (with assets probably in excess of $2 million in current money). But being a middle class blue collar family prior to that, they simply do not live as or see themselves as “rich”. With almost no expenses since everything they live in and drive was paid for in cash.

And earlier I made it a point to show their frugality by having them go to a junkyard to get replacement parts for a broken down car (after diagnosing the problem themselves), then rehabbing a used convertible top rather then just go out and buy a new one. They could easily afford to have the Scout customized with entirely new parts and then replace it with a new one. But they simply do not think that way, they still live the way they always have before.

OK, for those that are to young to know this, Datsun was the name of Nissan in the US until 1982. At that point they started a re-branding to the name they were known by in the rest of the world. First in 1982 by using “Datsun by Nissan”, then finally in 1984 just to Nissan.

And like Toyota and Honda, in that time period Datsun was common for kids as they were cheap no-frills cars. A high school kid working at McDonald’s could save up and buy a used one in 3 months or so at minimum wage.

Chapter 31

Ah, the “Army College Fund”. In reality, the exact same VEAP VA college program that everybody in the military could get. And that was a dog of a program, designed around 1970’s economics. You could put in up to $2,700, and the VA matched it. Which you could then use to pay for college. Your payout could max out at around $140 a month for 3 years. Even by the time of the story, it was horrible and no longer matched the economics of the time. And by 1985 it was replaced with a better program.

And for the real world counterpart of Skate!, that is exactly what happened. I was going with some friends as I had told them about it, and when we got there it had closed a few weeks before. The last time I drove by, it was a large discount shoe store.

Ahhh, the Suzuki Jimny. At that point it was not available in the US, so the imports were rare and quite popular. A few years later they would call it the “Samurai” for the US import model, and they were a smash. But the rear bench seats which faced the center (like the original WWII era Jeep) was changed to a more conventional rear seat arrangement.

And what is unquestionably one of the top 3 porn movies I have ever seen, Misty Beethoven. This is often considered to be the best porn movie ever made, and for good reason. Real cost and production value, a quality script and great acting. Some colleges and film schools even used an edited version with the sex removed for an example of what could be done on a limited budget.

And also proof that “pegging” is not a new thing. This is the first known instance on film of a gal using a strap-on on a guy. Rather shocking in the day.

And yeah, “cum shots”. I had sex for the first time when I was 15, and saw my first porn at 18. And the very idea of pulling out and cumming on their belly bizare to me the first time I saw that. But at least in that era, it was generally pulling out and shooting on their bush (no girls really shaved then). At least that was better than what followed, when they first moved up to shooting on their breasts, then faces. I always thought that demeaning, and never got that unless it was part of oral sex play and directed by the gal.

And yes, I will admit I despise modern porn, which tends to degrade the women, implying they are all whores. Whores that will cheat and fuck for money if given a chance, and things like face slapping with dicks, slapping their asses, choking, picking up a random chick then banging her in a car as it drives around before dumping them broke and naked in a strange part of town, all that trash. It all disgusts me, and I revere and respect women far to much to ever do that, or want to see it done to them.