I’ve been talking about The Banana Seat Squad forever. This week, I finally shared the first chapter on the podcast. If you’ve been wondering whether I was ever going to get this thing out of my head and in front of people, we’re making progress!

The book is inspired by five of us who grew up together on West Broadway in Enid, Oklahoma. We had bicycles, wild imaginations, and plenty of time to come up with things to do. A lot of those memories are finding their way into the story.

But this isn’t simply a collection of childhood stories. Somewhere along the way, it turned into something bigger.

Originally, I planned to write about growing up in the 70s—the games we played, the places we hung out, and the trouble we managed to find. Those memories are still the foundation of the book. But I wanted a story that would give readers a reason to keep turning pages, even if they’ve never ridden a banana seat bike or spent an entire summer outside until the streetlights came on.

So I built a fictional adventure around those real experiences.

I’ve always loved stories that make you think, “That couldn’t have happened.” Then, after a minute, you start wondering, “Well, maybe it could.” That’s the feeling I’m going for.

The opening chapter takes place in 2027, but the bulk of the book will take readers back to the summer of 1977. That’s where the friendships, neighborhood adventures, and bigger mystery come together.

At the center of it all are five boys: Shags, P.J., Sci-Fi, Sooner, and Dash. They’re loosely based on our real group, but I’ve changed names, mixed personalities, and moved experiences around. Something one of us did in real life might happen to a different character in the book. That gives me room to tell the story without pretending every conversation and adventure happened exactly as written.

If you grew up in the 70s, I hope parts of it feel familiar. And if you’re a regular listener of the 70’s Buzz Podcast, pay attention. I’m planning plenty of Easter eggs along the way.

Getting the first chapter ready for the podcast became its own little project. I initially thought I’d just post it on my blog. Then I decided it would be fun to let people hear it, too.

I experimented with AI narration before settling on recording myself reading the chapter and using AI to transform my voice into a narrator’s voice. I wanted that warm, looking-back-on-your-childhood feeling you got from the narration on The Waltons. On video, you’ll see me reading, but the voice has a different sound. I’d love to hear what you think of how it turned out.

As for the rest of the book, the characters are outlined, the story is mapped out, and there’s already quite a bit written throughout the remaining chapters. Now I’m filling in details, working through scenes, and adding memories that keep coming back to me.

That’s part of why this has taken so long. The story keeps evolving. I’ll remember something we did or think of a connection that makes the whole thing more interesting. Honestly, I’m glad some of those ideas had time to show up.

My goal is to finish the book and, hopefully, get it printed in hardback. Beyond that, I’d love to explore turning it into a screenplay and eventually a movie. There’s plenty of work between here and there, but I can picture these boys and their neighborhood adventures on a screen.

If you have experience with publishing, adapting books into screenplays, or getting a story in front of filmmakers, I’d love to hear from you. I’m also open to conversations with someone interested in helping back the project or discussing film rights.

For now, I’d really like your feedback on the first chapter. Does it leave you curious? Do you want to know what happens next? And are there things from growing up in the 70s that you’d love to see worked into the book?

Give me a ring or send a text at 601-568-2220, or email buzz@buzzheadmedia.com.

I’ve carried these memories around for a long time. It’s been fun giving them somewhere new to go.

Chapter 1: Dreams

“Now, here I go again, I see the crystal visions, I keep my visions to myself”

August 20, 2027

The needle dropped into the groove with a soft pop and a familiar crackle, and a few seconds later Fleetwood Mac filled the upstairs bedroom. Tucker smiled as Dreams began to play. Of course it was Dreams. Somehow that song always seemed to find him when his mind drifted back to 1977.

He crossed the room and stopped at the tall north-facing window, looking out over West Broadway. From the second floor he could see much of the old neighborhood where he had spent so many summer days as a boy. The houses hadn’t changed much over the years. Some had been remodeled, some neglected, and many looked exactly the same. Still, enough remained that Tucker could look down the street and, with very little effort, see the old neighborhood exactly as it had been fifty years earlier.

The sidewalks were still cracked in many of the same places, and the old maple trees still reached over the street, their branches swaying lazily in the Oklahoma heat. Tucker watched them for a moment, and in his mind he could see the boys racing past on banana seat bikes, joking with one another as they pedaled down the bumpy sidewalk. PJ was usually in the lead popping a wheelie. Brandon was never far behind. Chasen and Davey were trying to keep up, and Tucker could picture himself somewhere in the middle of it all, laughing so hard he could barely steer.

Then he blinked, and the street was empty again.

Behind him, the record continued to play.

It still amused him that the house he now stood in had once belonged to Brandon’s family. Back then, none of the boys ever called it by its real name. It was simply the mansion. To a bunch of kids on bicycles, it had seemed enormous, mysterious and important, part clubhouse and part landmark. In their small world, it had been one of the places where everything seemed to happen.

Now it belonged to Tucker.

He had bought it years earlier, long after he had made enough money to live almost anywhere he wanted. People had asked him why he chose an aging house on West Broadway when he could have bought something newer and easier to maintain. He usually gave them some excuse about loving old homes or wanting to preserve a piece of the neighborhood. Those things were true, but they were never the whole truth. The real reason was harder to explain, especially to anyone who had not been there in the summer of 1977.

Tucker rested one hand against the window frame and looked down the street again. August 20. He didn’t need to check the calendar. He had known exactly what day it was from the moment he woke up that morning. Fifty years had passed since that night, and although he rarely admitted it, some part of him had been waiting for this date ever since.

“Are you still packing?”

Tucker turned and saw Deni standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. She looked from him to the open suitcase on the bed. Inside were two shirts, a pair of shorts, one sock and little else.

“Technically,” he said.

She laughed. “Technically?”

“I got distracted.”

Deni stepped into the room and glanced toward the record player. “Let me guess. Nineteen seventy-seven?”

Tucker looked back out the window and smiled. “Maybe.”

“Tucker.”

“Okay. Definitely.”

She came over and stood beside him. Deni knew the neighborhood almost as well as he did by now, not because she had grown up there, but because she had heard the stories for years. She knew about the mansion, the trampoline, the Gremlin, Spider Tunnel and the five boys who seemed to spend every waking hour together during that summer. She had heard most of those stories many times, including the one Tucker could never quite tell without wondering how much of it she truly believed.

“What if it was just a dream?” he asked.

Deni looked at him. “What?”

He didn’t answer right away, and after a few seconds she understood what he meant.

“You’re thinking about that again.”

Tucker nodded.

Deni leaned lightly against the window frame. “You know I’ve never decided whether I believe you.”

Tucker looked over at her. “Yes, you have.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“You married me.”

“That proves questionable judgment, not belief.”

Tucker laughed, and Deni smiled with him before becoming serious again.

“I believe that you believe it,” she said.

Tucker turned back toward the window. “That’s not the same thing.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

That was the problem. When he was fourteen, there had been no question. It had happened. They had all been there. He remembered the heat, the sounds, the fear and the excitement. He remembered details that still seemed impossible to explain, things too strange to forget. But fifty years could do strange things to a memory. Time softened edges and moved details around. It could turn fear into adventure and coincidence into fate. Sometimes Tucker wondered if telling the story over and over had changed it somehow, until he remembered the story more clearly than the event itself.

There were nights when he woke up absolutely certain it had all been real. Other nights, he wondered if five boys with wild imaginations had somehow convinced one another of something that had never happened at all.

Except for one thing.

There had always been one thing.

Tucker pulled his phone from his pocket and looked at the date.

August 20, 2027.

His heart began to beat a little faster.

“I need to go somewhere,” he said.

Deni glanced at the half-packed suitcase. “Of course you do.”

“I won’t be long.”

“Where?”

Tucker reached for his keys, then stopped. He didn’t need the car.

“Grandma’s old house.”

Deni raised an eyebrow. “The boarded-up one?”

“That’s the one.”

“The one they’re about to tear down?”

“Yep.”

“The one you refused to sell for years even though everybody told you to?”

Tucker pointed at her. “That one.”

She stared at him for a moment. “You’re going to see if something is there.”

Tucker froze.

Deni smiled. “You’re not as mysterious as you think you are.”

“You don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“No, but I know you’ve driven by that house every August for as long as I’ve known you. And today, suddenly, you have to walk over there to check on something.”

Tucker slipped the phone back into his pocket. “I’ll be back.”

“Should I ask?”

“No.”

“Should I be worried?”

He thought about that for a second. “Probably not.”

“That wasn’t convincing.”

Tucker smiled and headed down the spiral staircase and out the door.

The Oklahoma heat hit him the moment he stepped outside. Even after all these years, August in Enid had never learned mercy. The late afternoon sun washed the sidewalks in pale light, and the pavement shimmered in the distance as he started down West Broadway.

It was only three blocks to Grandma’s old house, a distance he had covered thousands of times as a boy. Back then, three blocks had been nothing. On a bicycle it took seconds. Now he found himself noticing things he never would have noticed at fourteen: porch railings that had somehow survived, driveways where old cars once sat, and trees that had outlived families, fashions and entire generations.

He passed the corner near the little white church where the boys used to gather on their bikes and discuss what to do next. Some days they had plans. Most days they didn’t. Those were often the best days, when there was no schedule, no phone you could answer, and no adult keeping track of where they were. There were simply five boys, five bicycles and an entire summer ahead of them.

Tucker smiled at the memory, but the smile slowly faded.

He wasn’t walking there because of bicycles.

One street over at the end of the block, Grandma’s old house appeared behind a wall of overgrown trees and bushes. What had once been a proud two-story home was now barely visible from the street. The paint had faded to a dull green, several windows were covered in plywood, and weeds had pushed through the cracks in the walkway. A notice on the front fence announced that the property would soon be demolished. Some kind of restaurant was supposed to be built there.

Tacos, of all things.

Tucker had to laugh at that. Fifty years of memories, flattened and replaced by salsa and a drive-thru.

People had thought he was crazy for keeping the property as long as he had. Over the years he had received offers to sell it. Family members encouraged him to let it go. Friends called it a money pit. Eventually even the city began asking what he intended to do with it. Tucker always found a reason to delay.

He had never told anyone the real reason.

There was only one.

The mailbox.

The porch groaned beneath his weight as he climbed the wooden steps. The sound carried him backward so suddenly that he almost stopped. For a moment he could hear boys running across the porch, someone shouting from the yard, a screen door slamming shut and a bicycle dropping into the grass.

Then it was gone.

Tucker ran his hand along the porch post, and flakes of old paint came loose beneath his fingers.

“Fifty years,” he whispered.

The rusted metal mailbox still hung beside the front door. A spider had built a web beneath it, and the hinges were stained orange with age. Tucker stood in front of it for several seconds without moving.

His heart was pounding.

He almost felt embarrassed by it. He was a grown man, a husband and father who had built a successful life. He had made money, bought the mansion in the neighborhood, traveled, lost friends, gotten married, had kids, lost hair and lived an entire lifetime since the summer of 1977. Yet standing on that porch, staring at an old mailbox, he felt fourteen years old again.

For fifty years, the same thought had followed him.

What if there was nothing there?

What if he opened the box and found only dust, a dead bug and one more reason to believe that the strangest summer of his life had been nothing more than a collection of mixed-up childhood memories?

Tucker took a breath and lifted the lid.

The mailbox was empty.

His stomach dropped.

Of course it was.

He stared into the dark metal box, feeling foolish. What had he expected? That a promise made half a century earlier would somehow survive everything that had happened since?

He was about to close the lid when something white caught his eye.

Tucker leaned closer.

An envelope had been pressed tightly against the inside of the mailbox, almost completely hidden from view.

For several seconds, he didn’t move.

“No way,” he whispered.

He reached inside and touched the paper. It felt new. Crisp. Nothing about it belonged in that rusted box. He pulled it free and stepped into the sunlight.

His hands began to shake.

His name was written on the front in careful handwriting. Below it was this address, not the mansion on Broadway but his Grandma’s house on Randolph. Whoever had mailed it knew exactly who he was, where the letter needed to be sent and when he would know to look.

Then he noticed the postmark.

Columbus, Ohio.

August 18, 2027.

Two days ago.

Tucker stared at the date.

“No freaking way.”

He turned the envelope over.

A small red wax seal held the flap closed. Pressed into the wax was a tiny symbol that stopped his breath. Tucker brought the envelope closer, his eyes narrowing as he studied it.

He knew that symbol.

He had not thought about it in fifty years, but he knew it.

The insignia on the bracelet.

Tucker sat down hard on the porch steps.

Somewhere down the street a lawn mower hummed. A dog barked behind a fence. Cars passed along Randolph. Everything around him sounded perfectly ordinary, which somehow made the envelope in his hands feel even more impossible.

For fifty years he had wondered. For fifty years he had questioned every strange detail of that summer. He had waited for something that could prove to him that it had all been real.

Now he was holding it.

Tucker slid a finger beneath the edge of the envelope, then stopped. Beneath the wax seal, written in small, careful letters, were four words.

I kept my promise.

Tucker laughed, and then, unexpectedly, his eyes filled with tears.

“Holy crap.”

He looked out toward West Randolph, and for just a moment the years disappeared. He remembered five banana seat bikes scattered across a lawn. He could hear his best friend PJ yelling at somebody and Brandon reciting a Star Wars quote. He could picture Chasen and Davey arguing over who was going to get the green Jolly Rancher.

And somewhere, impossibly far away and impossibly close, a girl named Tuesday had kept a promise.

Tucker pulled his phone from his pocket. There were people he needed to call, people who had spent fifty years wondering about the same impossible things he had.

He looked down at the unopened envelope, then back toward the street where five boys had once believed summer would last forever.

Shaggs, PJ, Sci-Fi, Sooner and Dash, the Banana Seat Squad, were going to ride again.

PODCAST
Listen to “The Banana Seat Squad Chapter 1” on Spreaker.

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