“Evergreen Lodge: A Memoir”
Biblio File column
The cover shows two best buds in the summer of 1982, in front of Half Dome, Tom on the left and taller Brad on the right. Tom Bross would go on to graduate from Chico State in 1986, then to careers in marketing, advertising, and (now) memoir writing.
“Evergreen Lodge: A Memoir” ($16.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle and audiobook format read by the author) takes the reader to the summers of 1977 and 1978 and “an often dysfunctional family business located near the west gate of Yosemite National Park.”
Brossie, raised by a hippie mother who calls him Jupiter, is 15. Lots of extended family members and friends round out the cast for a joyous romp of a teen sex comedy reminiscent of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
Bross superbly captures the ethos (and raunchiness) of the times, and there are (sweet) pictures. He writes that the events in the book “are mostly, but not exactly, true. Duh. How could they be? … I was fifteen and sixteen years old and twenty-two percent hormones by body weight…. This is an homage to the era when we were no longer children and not yet adults, and a new song was enough to blow our minds.”
For Bross and Brad and chums, the sex jokes come hot and heavy, especially when new babes move into the nearby lodges. Flights of fancy stoke their imagination, like when a drunken woman twice Brossie’s age makes eyes at him. “She’s a mammal. She’s female. She’s alive. She meets my minimum requirements. But this woman is also attractive and sexually mature. And she’s wasted. Now all my boxes are checked. I’m thinking, I’m getting de-virginized tonight.” But, uh, “consent requires consciousness.” Duh.
Though he never does get de-virginized, he does (reluctantly?) peer through the peephole made to the women’s shower, check out the female guests (a “smorgasbord of hotties”), and play with--words. If there’s Boise, Idaho, “shouldn’t there be a Girlsy, Wyoming, too?”
Pringles, beer and pot round out the food groups, and a Half Dome hike with buds makes a forever memory. Bottom line: “We’re fifteen, we’re idiots, and you only live once.”
Copyright Chico Enterprise-Record; used by permission