James Warren in the middle, Mark Peterson left, Jeff Crowder right
James and Eddie, Eddie and James, two brothers, two friends I’ve known since my first day of Kindergarten in 1977. My bromance started with Eddie in the sandbox at Ocean Beach Elementary, with climbing the schoolyard tree, and chicken fights on the monkey bars.
Standing at the school gate to walk each of us home, Eddie’s mother Katie and my Grandma Grace. Every day after school, the first place I wanted to go was James and Eddie’s: The Warrens, 4572 Long Branch Avenue. My Grandma Grace said: “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, it’s all about Eddie, …and James!”
All the toys I wanted to play with spilled out onto the ground of the Warren’s backyard. This was the stage for Fisher Price Castle sieges, the WWII battlefield for thumb-shooting marbles at plastic German and American army men, the dark carpet backdrop of space for Battlestar Galactica, the Millennium Falcon and STAR WARS action-figure adventures. Our minds melded together in shared fantasy worlds that only young boys dream of.
Being friends with both brothers was a delicate dance, a tight rope walk, and I pendulummed between Eddie and James. One year older, James made sure Eddie and I knew he was boss. We underestimate how hard it can be for a younger brother to compete with his big brother. Ed often evaded competition with James, I didn’t. A dramatic dice-roller, James didn’t just roll them, he made a spectacle, shaking them excessively in his hands above his head and clattering the dice into the box yelling “MIRACLE SIX!” James made you believe he had supernatural power to influence probability when he diced you with boxcars at RISK, the boardgame he was master of. The more sixes he rolled, the louder he got, the more powerful he felt! Yeah!! When we played AXIS and ALLIES, he had to roll low. James would pick up a BIG handful of dice and roll all his attacks at once: and this is how we gave him his nickname, because every time he rolled he’d shout “BIG DEATH!”
The Warrens were a portal that opened worlds to me. Their Dad, Mr. John Warren, one of California’s earliest longboarders, served as an MP in Korea, was a forgery detective, a twinkly-eyed joke and storyteller, who amused himself by making us laugh so hard it hurt. John’s humour rubbed off on James and Eddie, and me too. A window into 50’s and 60’s Ocean Beach, Mr. Warren was a master free diver and abalone hunter, who’d come up from a single dive with multiple “abs” suctioned to his chest inside the breast of his wetsuit.
Mr. Warren wasn’t just their Dad, he was our Cub Scout Master, who made us little bears hungry to go to den meetings. He trained us Webelos to perform skits that made us boys ecstatic, like the “Enlarging machine” for which we Cub Scouts painted stage scenery of a big computer interface panel with a slot door in it. During the skit, Mr. Warren asked the audience for objects to feed into the machine, and hiding behind it, James shook the set, made rumbling computer sounds, and threw a giant-sized version of the object out onto the stage. One Cub Scout from the audience ran up with a Chiquita banana and stuffed it into the computer slot, the machine rocked, grumbled, and “boop-a-bleeped” and James hurled a giant stuffed-toy banana over the interface that flopped down onto the stage. The audience of Cub Scouts laughed their asses off! Mr. Warren called for another audience member to insert an object into the enlarging machine. I walked up with a Boba Fett action figure and held it high for all to see. A sudden silence of suspense gripped the audience as I handed the Boba Fett figure to James through the slot. The machine trembled, roared, and a “man-sized” version of Boba Fett marched robotically out from behind the interface panel with a laser rifle blazing and squirting at the squealing troop of Cub Scouts: “I-TER-MI-NATE-YOU!” and everyone knew it was Eddie, the major ham, who ended the skit by slipping on the giant banana peel. Den mother Katie, Mr. Warren, Eddie and James were legendary!
At the Ocean Beach Elementary school talent show Eddie brought down the house with a comedy routine using paper-bag hand puppets of his family. Sometimes it was hard for big brother James to stand in the shadow of his cuter chubby-cheeked younger brother. Back then James was the spindly one and assumed the role of grumpy and dominant big-“bad” brother, putting Eddie in headlocks until his face turned red.
Once when I teased and taunted James, he chased me down with an inexhaustible determination through Ocean Beach. We were on our Huffy bicycles, and after a half an hour of cat and mouse he finally caught me by my t-shirt. But he didn’t beat me up. He spared me.
When Dungeons & Dragons came out, we rolled up our first characters together. Strength was James’s favoured attribute. He played fighters, the toughest, the most physically powerful and armoured, the warrior who could do the most damage! In Dungeons & Dragons you gain experience by killing monsters and gaining treasure. James competed for experience with the other players and meticulously tallied his kill sheet: “Look at how many orcs, lizard men, and ogres I’ve killed!” He’d brag: “54 and 1/5th kobolds!” As Dungeon Master, I enabled James to take the combat spotlight away from other players. James would take a keg of oil strapped to his back, throw it into a group of monsters, and torch them all! Manna hated that I let James do this, and James got a good laugh outta that.
Like his Dad, James was a collector, and their packrat collecting habits drove Katie and Eddie up the wall! John collected pigs because he was a police officer. James had an elephant collection because the elephant was his spirit animal. James embodied elephant strength, steadfastness, and stubbornness, and he had an elephant’s memory too. James enjoyed inviting weaker people to arm wrestle him. I never had a chance, both his strength and technique were superior.
The summer before junior high-school, James underwent a dramatic physical change. He drank soda-pop and ate junk food non-stop, watched movies night and day, put on a lotta weight, and bench-pressed all day, every day. The spindly boy he had been, could now be mistaken for a Samoan. If he went outside, it was to punch his punching bag like Rocky Balboa, and he practiced punching walls to broaden the surface area of his fists.
For me, going from Ocean Beach Elementary to Correia Junior Highschool was like being fed to the wolves. Cliques of Stoners, Surfers, and bussed-in ghetto kids, entire gangs of bullies would hunt, intimidate, and assault me in the halls and on the athletic field. James walked through these gangs like one of Alexander the Great’s elephants. He’d stare them down, and in the safety of his wake I could reach my student locker. When chased by a bully, I’d run to James and hide behind him. James would polish his fists, and the bully always backed down. I paid for James’s protection with Playboys I stole from my Dad. And James made a killing, selling them at school.
The movies I was forbidden to watch, I saw at the Warrens: Terminator, Alien, and Heavy Metal. The Warrens had a vast VHS film collection, and James lay on the couch and watched movies day and night. James would watch the same film over and over, like Conan the Barbarian, Mad Max, The Road Warrior, Jaws, Blue Thunder, Ghostbusters, Romancing the Stone, Predator, Bladerunner, and Indiana Jones. The credits were always rolling in the Warren’s living room, and through them I learned a lot! We watched Godzilla, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, and Bruce Lee films, and James hit me with his padded nunchucks! We fought as if were Kato and Inspector Clouseau in a martial arts scene from the Pink Panther.
When watching Alien, I recoiled in shock when the Facehugger lept out of the screen. James and Eddie laughed so hard at me.
James was a movie buff, who quoted films like Casualties of War: “As I walk through the Valley of Death… I shall fear no EVIL…because I’m the meanest em-effer in the valley.”
James quoted Conan’s father: “The secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its discipline. For no one – no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts… (points to sword) …this you can trust.” James I could trust.
James collected knives. He taught himself how to use and throw knives and ninja stars. He’d spin them in his hands like a master. Once, Josh Webster tried to copy James’s knife skills and stabbed himself bloody through his palm. James laughed at him: James was quite a sadist! James’s favourite knife was his Ghurka knife and he told great stories about the Ghurkas. James and Eddie did Judo when they were boys. Fighting, wrestling, and martial arts were passions of James, and he and Carl Beattie and Josh Webster invented and played their own physical combat game called “FULL CONTACT”.
James beat me at chess once by distracting me with a movie. Not to be outdone by James, Eddie did the same. At a certain point in my late teens, I learned to be less competitive and lose gracefully. Once after arguing about rules for an hour with James, I proved him wrong, and he threw the Spacehulk board-game Genestealer up in my face! We didn’t talk for a month.
When I first brought James over to meet Mark Peterson, Mark talked smack to him and James instantly put Markus in a headlock and it took me 5 minutes to coax James to release him. Mark and James became friends. We watched movies, played video games, and war games together, like Axis and Allies, and Advanced Squad Leader, and all-night gaming sessions of the Battle of Stalingrad, where James and Mark put up a strong Russian defense against my Germans, and they said as a team to me “We press the Night Attack!” James’s favourite general was Patton.
I drove James home from our late-night gaming sessions that often ended at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, and I was so tired I had to slap my face, so as not to fall asleep at the wheel and James would say “Did you see that tree run across the road?” I always felt guilty for waking Katie and John up to the sound of their garden gate opening when I dropped James off. James never had any trouble staying up late. Staying awake was his superpower! He’d say: “Sleep is for the weak!” and “I’ll sleep when I’m dead!” At slumber parties, he’d challenge me to see who could stay up the longest. I always lost. He could stay awake for days, was proud of this ability, but it was eventually his undoing. A few years ago, James joked about a conversation he had with his doctor.
His Doctor said: “Your blood pressure is high!”
James said: “Hey Doc, how high can I get it? What’s the record?”
Doctor: “If you cut out the salt and you sleep more, your blood pressure goes down.”
Since his teens, James rarely slept more than 2-4 hours a night.
Doc asked: “Well do you eat a lot of fast food and Mexican?”
“Sure, sucks that I like it then!” James said, “Yeah, carne asada burritos!”
“Who cares what he has to say. It’s always bad news anyway.”
James did change his diet to get his diabetes under control, and he lost a lot of weight. He got so thin and scrawny again, I joked it was time I kicked his ass! He laughed: “I’d like to see you try!” As far as I know, he undertook no medicinal measures to correct his lack of sleep or lower his blood pressure.
James could’ve been a comedian. His voice, his delivery, his darkness, he made me laugh so hard:
Here’s a James joke completely out of context:
“I would have chopped them up and turned their skin into sausage and fed them to diseased dogs in Rumania. These people make the tastiest sausage casings possible. Diseased dogs line up for’em!” he’d chuckle to himself.
James’s humour wasn’t everybody’s taste or wavelength. But he made a lot of people laugh. James would arrive late to a party where the guests were many drinks ahead of him and mix himself a hard cocktail, he’d say: “You know what I call this drink?”…
“Caught up in ONE!”
James had something John Belushi about him. James had a running loop rotation of songs replaying in his head, that he’d sing out of nowhere, like Yello’s “Oh Yeah”—-“Chukka-Chukka- Chukk-ow--bom-bom-bom--Chukka-Chukka-Chukk-ow!” … Tone Loc’s: “Funky Cold Medina”, and only now did he stop singing Patrick Hernandez’s “Yes, he was born— born—- born—- born—- to be ALIVE!”
At Blue Oyster Cult concerts we sang together: “He picks up a bus and he throws it back down as he parades through the buildings at the center of town…. GODZILLA!”
James was a Godzilla, a Beast! Barechested, with only a pair of swim trunks on, James went Boogie boarding with me in giant winter storm surf at Ocean Beach. Surfers in their wetsuits yelled at him:
“You’re insane!”
James was always out to prove his toughness, and that others were wussies!
Together we got caught on the inside by an icy 12-foot storm wave. The WAVE smashed us down to the dark sandy bottom, we whirled through the washing machine until some 30 seconds later we popped back up into the light, gasping for air on the foamy surface, we celebrated our survival together and shouted “THE WAVE!”
We all used to live within a 4-block radius of each other. The nerds of Ocean Beach, Andy and Roman left us, but James and Eddie, Josh and Manna, and me grew together with another branch of roleplaying dweebs to form the PLD: The Point Loma Dorks: With Chris and Kevin Potter, Dave Osmonson, Steve Quillen, Paul Crowder, Jeff Tanita, Josh Klem, Orion, Leah Cluff, Kat Castelblanco, Tish, Dana and Lisa, and Jen, John O’brien, Kendall Harr, Paul Marx, Chris Ahumada, Mark Peterson, Marty, Leonard Guy, Eric and Bruce, Mark Clay, Shad and Shawn Fleming, Rich and many more who joined the mix: we formed a friendship tree, the PLD, a family of dorks.
James was often a loner, an outsider, but his pack found him. At Chris Potter’s game store “The Name of the Game,” James was an avid DnD player with Evil Chris and others, where they’d also play Magic the Gathering with guys like RIP.
James and Dave Osmonson were a bowling team. At dive bars Dave liked to try to pick fights knowing James was there to back him up. Dave and James joked they shared one brain: “You got the brain?” “No, I thought you had the brain!” To round up friends to join him to celebrate Mardi Gras in New Orleans, James said: “Kiss the appropriate amount of ass and get there, no excuses!”
Together, James and I emceed Paul and Rosie’s wedding, I fear we embarrassed them. James and I had no filter. It was just after Dave’s suicide, and to lift people’s spirits James trotted out this old quote and gave it his own twist at the end, he said. “Dance… like nobody’s looking! Work…like you don’t need the money. Love… like you’ve never been hurt before…. And Drive it like you stole it!”
At Tish and Eric’s wedding, James spoke “The first thing you notice about Eric is he’s bald, and he’s got this tremendous organ!... Hey, hey, get your minds outta the gutter. The organ I’m talking about is in the middle of his chest… he’s ALL HEART. All the women there were saying, ‘ahhhhh, that’s so sweet!’ and I said besides I was talking to Tish this morning and believe me guys you really don’t wanna know!”
When Jeff Tanita arrived with a ton of luggage to visit me *alone* in Vienna, I looked around puzzled to find James sneaking up behind me. Life was fun and games for us. As boys we snuck out at night together, adventured through Ocean Beach after curfew, and never got caught.
Videogame arcades were our habitat, Slices and Skills, The Yellow Brick Road, Wonderland. Before and after junior high and high school at 7-Eleven, we played Kung Fu Master and Karate Champ. As a team, we kicked ass at Double Dragon, and Gauntlet. At the OB Laundromat we constantly beat each other’s high scores at 1942 and left our initials at the top of the Top Player’s list. As the flipping hairy monster Blanka in Street Fighter, James was hard to beat! Nearly no one ever beat us at Cyber Sled: With Chuck we dueled each other in a digital maze in futuristic hover tanks, James always played the strongest and toughest, the slower and heavily armoured Hans Baird. Games People Play, The Black, Game Towne were our game stores. James managed 3 comic-book stores for “Comics’n’Stuff” and was a regular booth organizer at the San Diego Comic-Con, his love of this, movies, pop culture, and memorabilia, he got from his Dad. James did what he wanted, and we didn’t put things off until later. We never stopped playing: We had Peter-Pan syndrome. We never grew up. We didn’t want to.
Miss my Warrens.
Miss you, BIG DEATH!
MIRACLE SIX, JAMES!
James Warren left, Mark Peterson right
Mark, James, & Jeff playing Advanced Squad Leader.
Jeff, Chris Ahumada, James, and Mark
JAMES GANG in the front and background
James making fun of Mark’s glasses.
Mt. Rushmore of buds
JAMES Charles WARREN
January 20, 1971 - April 5, 2022
My last photo of James, New Years 2019
Paul Crowder, Mark Peterson, me-Jeff Crowder-in-friend-ecstasy, James Warren, Chris Ahumada, Chris Potter
