Tales From The Lebowskis - Mornings at Hulka & Holly's

Growing up, I always wanted a brother. I had a sister, which has turned out to be nice in the long run, but growing up we fought miserably. Meghan and I really couldn't stand each other as kids, because we really weren't at all the partner-in-crime the other wanted. I wanted a sibling who would be interested in things like Ninja Turtles and robots and video games. She wanted a sibling who would be interested in things like American Girl dolls and sports. It was a bit of a mismatch, and neither of us were mature enough to be adults about it (WE WERE CHILDREN, LITERALLY).

Now, eventually, I did join a fraternity. I have lots of brothers now, which is awesome. But long before that, the closest thing I had to brothers was cousins. I have four cousins which were/are like brothers to me growing up. Chris and Kyle Rudedawg are like my younger brothers. Jimmy and Charlie Easterbreak were like my older brothers. Jimmy and Charlie weren't always my cousins. They are my Aunt Holly's sons from her first marriage. Hulka is now their stepfather, but when I first met them, Holly was still his girlfriend. The night I met them, at a Pizza Hut, I somehow erroneously believed at first that Jimmy was named Charlie and Charlie was named Jimmy. I absolutely refused to believe them when they corrected me, and I think I wound up in tears over it. This small hiccup did nothing to stand in the way of future awesome times for us three.

Jimmy was the oldest of us, then Charlie, then me. Jimmy was also the best behaved when we were together, and Charlie and I resented the fact that he would get in trouble the least, so we would periodically plot against him in minor ways. It was nothing personal, we loved Jimmy, we just resented his higher status. It was pretty standard.

We got to do all the dumb, fun stuff that brothers do (well, they were actually brothers, but I got to be part of it). We had burping contests, played war games outside, did stupid voices to make each other laugh, stuff like that. Actually, making Jimmy laugh was something Charlie and I liked to do a little too much sometimes. Jimmy has asthma, and we were too young to really fully understand how bad it was for him to have an attack. We would just consider laughing himself into an asthma attack as proof that we were being REALLY funny. Like a compliment. If we really knew what we were doing, we would've been the biggest assholes.

A major league bonus of hanging out with Jimmy and Charlie was the fact that they and Hulka had tons of video games. I LOVED video games as a kid. I still like them a lot, but obviously with appropriate moderation. Not back then, I was like an addict. And they had so damn many, we could play for hours. We would team up on hard games and try to beat them, we would replay our favorites, we would sing funny songs to the tune of the game songs, really it was a fun social thing, it just happened to be video games.

I was such a wired kid though. I would get excited and just be a total spaz. So nights when I got to sleep over, I would regularly wake up pre-dawn and want to start playing video games with Jimmy and Charlie again. I would just be too excited to keep sleeping. This wouldn't have been so bad, since they tended to be fairly excited to get up and keep playing too (although not always, sometimes they told me to go back to sleep). The problem was, when I got excited like that, I tended to have trouble regulating my volume. This caused problems for Hulka and Holly.

They liked to sleep in on weekend mornings, as do most people. The shrill sound of a child's laughter at 4 AM isn't the most welcome sound in the world. Nor is it at 5 AM. Nor 6. You get the idea. Holly was very kind in her reminders to try to be quiet in the morning. Hulka had slightly less patience, and would try to establish iron-clad rules. For example, I was not allowed to get out of bed before I could actually see the sun out of the window. Once I could see the sun, I could go into the kitchen to check what time it was, and if it was before a certain time (7, maybe?) I had to go back to bed again. No noise before 8 or 9, I can't remember which. That was the hardest for me. I would wake up and fully intend to be silent and keep Hulka happy this time, but nope, inevitably I'd get excited and make noise and incur Hulka's wrath.

Hulka's wrath pretty much consisted of him shouting my name, telling me to get my ass into his and Holly's room, then telling me very sternly to keep the noise down for a while longer, then sending me back out. This would frequently be repeated a few times per morning. It would work temporarily each time, you don't argue with a big angry man in his underwear. It's just that I would forget to be quiet again shortly thereafter. Oops.

Something Jimmy, Charlie and I liked to do was make funny tapes. They had an old boombox with a record function and we had a couple of cassette tapes we would pop in, then record ourselves being jackasses. Some classic moments included a skit involving a mystical "Geeenieee Bear!", Charlie singing INXS in the bathroom, and Charlie and I ruining Jimmy's well planned out sketches with fart sounds. That last one was pretty common. Being the oldest, Jimmy would actually come up with lines of dialogue for us to learn and make a funny tape. We'd usually go along with this for a minute or two, mess up a line somehow, and when he'd get upset at us, we'd just make fart noises on tape. One time in particular he decided to get his revenge on me for being a brat in his skit by narrating gross things to happen to me. I got poop on my face, he claimed. Somewhere there exists a recording of me angrily shouting that "If I get poop on my face one more time, you're gonna have poop in your stomach!" A comeback for the ages.

The greatest recording we ever made, though, happened early (although not ungodly early) one morning. It was probably 7:30 AM or so. The three of us were awake and ready to make another classic tape. This time, Jimmy thought we could use musical backup, so he was going to play the old, out-of-tune piano along as we recorded. I wish I had the audio recording to post here, but it's lost to the sands of time. I will try to transcribe it from memory.

The skit begins. Jimmy narrates while Charlie and I call comments from the peanut gallery. Jimmy begins playing the piano to enhance the mood of the story. Suddenly, although it's coming from an entirely different room, you can hear Hulka's voice on tape, clear as a bell. "REMUS! GET YOUR ASS IN HERE!" For a few moments, you can only hear Jimmy and Charlie whispering to each other. Then, in the most shit-eating, smug, childish, sing-songy voice you can imagine: "Jiiiiimm-myyyyyyyy, he's mad at YOOOO-OOOUUUUUU!" and then immediately, "REMUS! GET YOUR ASS BACK IN HERE!!"

For once, for fucking once, it actually was Jimmy who pissed off Hulka. It wasn't me spazzing out and making noise early in the morning. It WAS Jimmy! This never fucking happened, it was a one-time shot! I felt so goddamn vindicated when I went in there the first time for a tongue-lashing and could legitimately insist that I was innocent, and it was Jimmy who was to blame. Jimmy, who never got in trouble while Charlie (sometimes) and I (nearly always) took the fall (usually deservedly). I just couldn't contain my satisfaction at this stunning upset, and ruined it all by being a smug little shit. There's a moral in here somewhere. I flew far too close to the sun on wings of wax, my friends. Pride goeth before a fall.

NES Nightmare Fuel

Like so many people in my age cohort, I had the pleasure of having my childhood years coincide with the explosion of the video game industry. While my loving parents, Steven and Diane Thirty successfully kept video games out of our home until I got a Nintendo Game Boy in the third grade, I had been playing them for years prior to that, courtesy of my dear uncle Hulka and his stepsons Jimmy and Charlie Easterbreak. Hulka actually spent a few years working for a local video game story that was actually (unknown to him) a front for a media pirating racket. Hulka got tons of games through this position, and Jimmy, Charlie, and I reaped the benefits.

However, video games aren't all fun and... uhh... games. At least not when your age is in the single digits and fear is a still a difficult emotion to regulate. There are scary games today. They tend to try to be scary, sometimes to awesome effect (What up Resident Evil and Bioshock?). Old video games, if they were terrifying, were often terrifying without particularly trying to be so. Their anxiety was more one of a feeling of impending, inevitable death at the hands of some relatively cartoonish looking creature.

I would like to share with you today a rogues gallery from my young childhood, a veritable who's who of my most hated and feared 8-bit nemeses. Those of you of comparable ages to my own, be warned, this could trigger long-buried anxieties. Without further ado, here are the five NES-era video game baddies that taunted, tortured, and traumatized me more than any others.

#5 - Duck Hunt Dog

Alright, this guy would be higher on the list for the sheer amount of hate he caused me to spew, but I wasn't actually afraid of this dog from Duck Hunt. I hated him. I hate him still. This smug god damn dog would act like my friend, eager to help me shoot some ducks. But when I inevitably eventually missed one or two, he would laugh at me. He would laugh at my failure, giddy with contempt. A boy can only take so much of this before he turns his NES Zapper on his faithful four-legged companion. But wait. What's this? Oh dear god. Dear god in heaven. YOUR FIREARMS ARE USELESS AGAINST HIS DICKISHNESS! The only thing to be done was eventually to turn off the NES through tears of frustration. God damn you, dog. God damn you to hell.

#4 - Dodongo

Dodongo, a level boss and later mid-boss in the Legend of Zelda, wasn't really that terrifying. Look at his picture. He's just a little yellow triceratops. But beating Dodongo took careful timing. You had to place bombs directly into his mouth (or apparently you can stun these guys with bombs that explode NEAR them, then hit them with your sword. I did not know this as a child). Getting the timing on this right as an adult is tricky but not that bad. As a child, coupled with a genuine desire to not screw up at Zelda in front of my beloved uncle, getting that timing right was awful. 3/4 of the time, I wouldn't even fight Dodongo. I'd wander around the dungeon, putting it off, until finally giving the controller to Hulka and begging him to just beat this one part for me. This strategy was also useful for the #2 foe on the list.

#3 - Baron Von Blubba

When I was really young, I loved Bubble Bobble. In nursery school, we made an "All About Me" book that was a cross between a scrapbook and a yearbook, and my favorite song is listed as "The Bubble Bubble Song" because my nursery school teacher didn't know what a Bubble Bobble was. There was a restaurant in my town that had a Bubble Bobble arcade game. I loved that game so much. But there was one problem with Bubble Bobble. Taking too long to beat a stage caused the game to generate an invincible, deadly, and scary looking enemy: Baron Von Blubba, the ghost whale. Nothing can hurt him. Nothing can stop him. He will chase you until you finish the level or die at his ghastly white flippers. This was so much worse than just dying when a timer ends. Here you had the faintest glimmer of hope for escape and a grinning death's head cetacean ripping that glimmer out of your 5-year-old hands. If I knew who Captain Ahab was at age 5, I would've understood him. White whales are trouble like whoa.

#2 - Queen Medusa

I don't know why, but the Medusa boss in Castlevania earned the name Queen Medusa in the American manual for the game. Maybe because she was the queen of the lesser-but-still-unbelievably-frustrating Medusa enemies. Whatever. I don't know what it was about Queen Medusa's grinning, snake-haired head that filled my heart with ice and stopped my brain in its tracks, but she did just that every time I neared the end of level 2. I would literally stop advancing down the hallway to the battle against her for minutes at a time, trying desperately to think of a way to keep playing without having to face her. Maybe it was something about the way she moved in those sinuous arcs, maybe it was the perfectly cast sinister smile on her face, but Queen Medusa reduced me to the scared little child I was, leading to me begging Hulka to "please just beat her for me!" I would even leave the room when Hulka was playing while he fought her. Hulka put up with a lot. I owe you one, buddy.

#1 - Phanto

I do not have a good track record with floating heads that smile evilly. Medusa may have been the queen of my video game nightmares, but Phanto was king. Phanto appeared in several levels of Super Mario Bros. 2. His gimmick was to appear as a simple wall hanging until you picked up a key, necessary to proceed through the stage. Once you picked up the key, Phanto would fly around, his gleefully sadistic expression unchanging, until you either narrowly made it to the door, or he murdered you in cold blood, grinning all the while. The fact that you could get him to back off by putting down the key seemed like mercy, but in fact it just made lifting the key again all the more panic-inducing. Touch the key and Phanto will get you. Phanto was the monster under the bed, the boogeyman, the man in the van with free candy. Everything you fear when the lights go out, that was Phanto. The grin of pure evil.

Some of you may be wondering why the Angry Sun from Super Mario Bros. 3 isn't on the list. Honestly, I didn't like him either, but he didn't fill me with terror like these other guys did. By all rights, a big face moving in an arc pattern fits the description of my hit list, but maybe his fiery grimace scared me less than an ice-cold smirk.