Ode to a friend

By Ed Piper

This is an ode to a childhood friend.

Jenny was funny, clever, and exploratory. Her brother Steve called her "Bugs", after Bugs Bunny, because of her prominent front teeth.

She and Steve introduced my brother and me to top 40 music when that was the thing on radio. Their family had moved from Long Beach, where our families met, to Bellevue, Washington, just outside Seattle.

When I was nine, we drove from Long Beach to Bellevue for New Year's and had a great two-week vacation at their place in Bellevue, which was then a small city, just started--not the Century City of the Pacific Northwest that it is today.

An unusual thing we experienced during our stay at their house in Bellevue, at the end of a partially-completed residential street, was the two letting their pet rats out in their bedrooms overnight. Sleeping in Jenny's room, with the door closed so the rats wouldn't get out, I felt them climbing over me as I lay on my pad on the floor, the rats, with long tails, sniffing, moving, in a friendly way.

Soon after, and I don't know if our stay with Jenny and Steve's family had anything to do with it, we moved two months later to Camarillo for our dad's job, and we started a whole new life without Jenny and Steve around.

Back to "Bugs", we would visit Jenny and Steve in Hermosa Beach, when they would visit their grandmother's during the summer. We got introduced to Icees or Slurpees, I forget which, at the Green Store on the corner, where we valued their candy and other junk food.

There was a homeless man who wandered the pier at Hermosa Beach. This doesn't fit our sensibilities of today, but Jen and Steve nicknamed him "Icky", and we all kept an eye out for the poor man so that we could avoid him. He was kind of icky.

Both kids knew all the music from the radio, as it evolved into harder rock from the top 40. They would lead us in singing the songs as a group, playing imaginary riffs on air guitars. (That was still new back then.)

A favorite of Jenny's from the earlier days was "96 Tears". We would imitate the voice and repeated taps on the keyboard, and really live it up.

Jenny and her brother had this ongoing interplay, which also included a competition on who knew the nuances of a song better, or other bits of trivia from pop culture.

The two introduced my brother, also named Steve--so we always had to clarify which Steve we were talking about--and me to the James Gang, led by guitarist Joe Walsh, who went on to Eagles fame (and persistent substance abuse).

They loved Jimi Hendrix, who grew up in Seattle, not too far away.

Alas, Jenny's cleverness and curiosity led her into hard drugs, at least according to their older, now bitter sister (all three of us kids had buddies of the same age in the other family, which really made it work in the younger days).

Sadly, the last word I heard of her was that she was disabled and confined in a hospital in western Washington state in Bellingham.

The other Steve, too, fell into Scientology, and lived at the international headquarters of the cult in downtown L.A. He seemed to have given decision-making for himself over to other people. I picked him up for a family event, and he had lost the life in him that he had formerly enjoyed in our top 40 imitation days.

Their parents were loving, vibrant Christians. But sadly, this didn't seem to carry into their generation.