Blurb For Volume Two

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After the strange twists and turns of my childhood I now enter the first decade of adulthood & beyond as I deal with the consequences of what I had been given, and the options I had yet to discover. As with the first part of my life, I find I can't say what is to become of me in a sentence or two that adequately explains how I went from being named after someone's pet dog, to getting that fateful phone call from Hollywood that dramatically changed my life, while leading to nothing. But my move out west also brings me many happy surprises, as well as devastating turns, and seemingly culminates in my untimely death... But this is A Freakish Life, after all, and even fate can be baffled by what happens next.

This is the continuing story of a ''professional'' writer who is failing to write a Tell All Blog, as the text leaves out a few decades, names and dates, coming to an apparent end that explains everything and resolves nothing. C'est la vie.

Enter Volume 2...

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Volume One: Paper, eBook

The Car

74

About a year after my parents separated, my father bought a new car. An import compact station wagon, it was burnt orange in color and I immediately fell in love with it. Yes, I'm that kind of person who falls in love with import station wagons. It's freakish, I know. As the car was replacing my father's little import pick-up truck, he had a trailer hitch added to the new car so he could tow a trailer when he had to cart off the trash to the dump or get some building materials. This was around Nineteen Seventy-Six and six years later my father drove into the driveway with a brand new Subaru wagon. He had never been someone to trade in his cars, so the old wagon became consigned to the far end of the driveway loop.

Showing off his new prize, he explained that the old wagon had reached the point of needing more repairs than it was worth so he got the new car. He did mention in front of his girl friend Lois that, if I wanted, I could have the old wagon if I paid to have it repaired, and in fact he'd pay half the repair costs. Coming from him, this was a stunningly generous offer and left me suspicious that the old wagon was going to be a money pit. Still, I could look into it, couldn't I?

The ski area was just opening for the season when I took the car to an auto shop run by high school friends of my eldest brother. They had built a business working on imports and I thought they'd give me a straight deal. Other than the engine running a bit rough and the driver side seat being broken, they couldn't find anything significantly wrong with it. The driver side seat's back brace had been broken by my father in the past year and left the seat back a bit soft and wobbly when you leaned back on your left. I told them not to worry about that and they replaced the engine's head gasket and tuned the motor. Five hundred dollars later, the car was running just fine and I drove to the park to let dad know the total so he could plan out paying his half. But when I told him the amount, he became enraged and called me a liar and that the guys who had worked on the car didn't know what they were doing. My guess is, my father had been told the repair costs would be substantial in order to urge him into buying a new car, or the garage he took it to was filled with people who worked on American cars and simply didn't know what they were talking about when it came to estimating import car repairs. Either way, dad wasn't going to pay his half.

This just shows how his mind worked. If the repairs had been two thousand dollars, he would have paid half? But only needing to cough-up two hundred and fifty dollars was out of the question?

Needless to say, given how low the repairs costs were, I didn't miss the half that dad never paid and my driving the car for the next several months without problems proved that it had been repaired. During the spring college break, new friend Dave was in town and looking for something to do. I mentioned the broken car seat back while we were running around town and he said we could find a replacement at a junk yard. Really? Yes, all we had to do was go to a junk yard, find the general same make & model and unbolt the old seat and bolt in the replacement seat. This sounded like a great idea and he knew where a junk yard was. We then spent the next few hours driving to and walking around the back of the junk yard and climbing some of the stacks of cars looking for a matching seat. After all this time, we couldn't find an exact match, but found a seat from an earlier model and bought it, observing as we had the junk yard owner take it out. We brought it back to my house to install it only to find, once the original driver side seat was out that the bolt mounts were different on the replacement seat. The seat was also a different color anyhow, so Dave and I took it to the basement work area and debated what to do.

We decided to at least take the covers off both seats with the idea of exchanging them so the replacement seat would visually match the interior of the car. But once the metal frames and springs were exposed, we realized that the hinge where the back met the base were the same for both seats, so I thought why not just swap the seat backs thus keeping the original seat base which matched the bolt mounts. This actually worked, though when laying the seat backward, it tilted a bit, but that wasn't a big issue as I never put the back down anyhow. With the seat problem fixed, I decided this was the car I was going to drive to Colorado.

Then it came time for the car's annual inspection and it failed, labeling the car as not road worthy. They gave me a week to resolve the problems but I didn't have a clue. Talking about this with Nick at the grocery store as we worked, he explained that it was probably the rusted holes at the back of the car. In New England, salt was used to de-ice the roads during Winter and that resulting salt/slush mixture clung to the underside of the body and ate away the metal, leaving holes. He bet the fear was that exhaust fumes would come in through the holes and get the people inside. If we patched those holes, then it would pass inspection. Not only this, he knew how to patch these sorts of holes and offered to do it for free...! Holy Mother Of Luck! Following his directions, I got to his house in the afternoon before work hours and he showed me how to use Bondo putty and leftover fiberglass sack material to cover over the holes and seal them tightly. While not pretty, these patches did the trick and the car passed the second inspection.

Everything was ready for the trip to Colorado except for the little tiny detail of dad not giving me the title to the car. I realized I was having all this effort put into improving the wagon, but ultimately it was still his car. When I broached the subject with him, he'd just get a smile on his face and be very vague about when and if I'd get the title.

Now what do I do? I wondered.

As dad had made the claim in front of Lois that I could have the car if I got it repaired, I just decided to act as if it was my car and bought a radio/cassette deck to install for the trip. This would serve me well on the drive from New England to Colorado, I thought, and bought myself a component cassette deck for my eldest brother's leftover stereo system so I could tape my record albums ahead of time for the trip. Mother would later tell me that dad had called her up and laughed about me squandering all my money on car repairs and stereo upgrades that I would be arriving to Colorado penniless. In reality I had thirty-five hundred dollars saved up and mailed a check to her ahead of time to deposit into a new bank account under my name in Colorado. It was then that mother told me of the story, saying the last laugh was on dad. While I normally would have suspected the story might not be true, just mother making up another damning tale of dad, I didn't know of any other way she would have found out about me buying the tape deck for the stereo.

I left work for the last time and had five days to get ready and pack the car for the long drive. I was originally going to rent a trailer to hook to the back of the car, but once I tallied all my stuff, I realized I could squeeze it all into the back of the wagon and the passenger seat. As this blocked the interior rear view mirror, and this was before passenger side rear view mirrors were standard, I bought some temporary trailer mirrors which I could hook to the front fenders and give me a clear view to either side.

I say I could fit all my stuff, but in reality I had to leave the moped behind. It had served me well over the previous year and a half, but with the car I felt I wouldn't need it ever again. I gave it to my eldest brother as a going away present. I'm sure he soon listed it for sale or found someone else to give it to.

For some reason, during my last week, Dad and Lois lived at the family home rather than at her place. As I was leaving for Colorado a few weeks later than I normally would, was this simply a case that they always spent the Summers in the family house and I hadn't known it? Or was dad actually trying to get some more time with me in the last few days before I left?

With the car nearly packed except for my clothes, Lois came out and looked at the car and said it looked like I was ready to go. This was a perfect time to mention that I would be, but that dad still hadn't given me the title to the car. She was shocked as he had said he would in front of her. While I could have told her of dad's history of reneging on promises, I felt that would add bad blood and instead played it as a shake of the head and say ''I don't know why...'' The next morning, dad handed me the title when I came down stairs from bed, I assume Lois had a talk with him over the night and he couldn't think of an excuse as to why he was keeping it.

With it in hand, I went to the local Department of Motor Vehicles branch to register the car in my name. The problem was, you couldn't get a license plate for less than three months and the plate had to expire on one's birth month, so I had to buy a fourteen month license plate for the car, despite the fact that I was moving to Colorado in a handful of days.

whatever.

I closed out the bank account I had held with the bank in the apartment town for nine years and turned in my money machine card. I had come to love machine based banking and hoped I'd find it in Colorado when I got there. Of my remaining fifteen hundred dollars, I converted one thousand dollars of it into traveler's checks and kept five hundred as cash on hand for the trip. This was before the days of common place credit cards so using cash was normal for all of one's needs.

The car was packed and before I drove it over to Pete's house for my going away party, I noticed a nail head in the driver side back tire. As the tire was maintaining pressure, I decided it wouldn't be a problem and not to worry about it. After the party, I got home and said my goodbyes to Pappy as I expected to leave very early the next morning and he'd not be up yet. Pappy didn't seem to care either way; once my parents had separated he had labeled me as 'her kid' and had kept his distance from me ever since.

That last night at the house, I couldn't sleep. This would become a typical issue for me as I'd always have problems sleeping the night before a trip. On plane trips it didn't matter as I could sleep on the plane, but for the drive to Colorado, it would be an issue. Mother had bought an associate membership to the American Automobile Association for me and I had gotten the trip planned with them. Looking over the maps on the tank-like computer desk before settling to bed, I made a significant change to the first day. They had planned for me to go south out of New England and into Pennsylvania before heading west. But I instead decided to go straight west into New York state before settling down to Interstate 70 and lining up with the AAA planned route.

I think I finally fell asleep by two in the morning but was awake again by six. I debated whether to lay in bed for another few hours before I got on the road, but I didn't see the point in killing the time when I could be driving with it. Intending to quietly get out of the house and to the car, to my surprise dad and Lois were having none of that and chased me to the side of the car in their night wear to say goodbye to me, he shook my hand and she gave me a hug. It was probably the most positive moment I had with my father in seven years and it was a shame he couldn't have seemed this caring throughout my childhood.

Either way, my bag of clothes stuffed into the passenger seat, I started the car and was heading down the family home's driveway for the last time. Stopping at the end of the driveway, I took a moment despite there being no cross traffic, just to realize this was it.

Turing left and pulling onto the road, New England and my childhood were now left behind.

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The New Upperclassman

73

Toward the end of Fall Nineteen Eighty-Two, the younger baggers started to ask me about Dungeons & Dragons. One of them had participated in the Saturday group last year and, despite the fact that the upperclassman who had organized the two groups was now gone, this bagger was keen to get a group started again without him and given my experience being a Dungeon Master for the Sunday group he asked me to put my DM hat back on. I wasn't sure if we'd have enough players and sure enough he found a good number from his school mates. One of them was Van's year younger brother who also worked at the store, this added a note of familiarity as Van had never been an exclusive older brother keeping his younger brothers at bay, so I knew his younger brother, home, and family. I agreed to the idea, as long as we kept to a Sunday group. While I liked the ambient evening and late night darkness during the Saturday group, given my Friday night to Saturday day work schedule, I couldn't imagine going from that to a full night's gaming.

And so we gathered. Unlike before, where we pretty much always met at the upperclassman's house or Jonathan's house, this time we rotated where we gathered to play so as not to wear-out our welcome; the upperclassman's parents had gotten exasperated by the late night gaming fracas a few times and we didn't want that to happen again and find ourselves scrambling for a new place to meet at the last moment. The first session was devoted to building the player's initial characters and explaining how the game was played, purchase of the 'Player Manual' was suggested, but we shared what books we had. After that first gathering, Pete heard about the new group and joined us for most of the games thereafter.

After a few weeks of this, I realized I had become the new upperclassman, a figure of assumed wisdom being from the class before... But if one thought about it too much, such as why they were left behind when their classmates moved on, one might glimpse the upperclassman as a Wizard Of Oz figure, more reputation than true power. Still reputation was a good starting point and, despite my stuttering, I was a good enough Dungeon Master.

We added another player from my old apartment town: Mathew, who I had periodically known since sixth grade, but despite hitting it off well, we never developed a one-to-one friendship for some reason. At the time I hadn't thought about it, but I've wondered about it ever since. With Mathew came the news that his family had recently purchased the next best thing in video tape systems, a Betamax. Betamax was the HD DVD breakthrough of its time... What, so I now have to explain what HD DVD was? Fine, let's just say Betamax was going to leave VHS tapes in the dust and as we had a video rental store in our home town and Mathew had the bestest cassette player we knew of in the region, Pete soon organized movie nights where he'd rope me in for a ride, he'd pick the tapes, then we'd go Mathew's house to watch an average of two movies in a row.

What once started out looking like it'd be a solitary year for me had turned into a full schedule by the turn of the calendar year. Heck, even Christmas was surprisingly busy as my not as older brother was on leave and Lois, my dad's girl friend, decided to host a Christmas Eve dinner for us, including our eldest brother and his wife. It was probably the closest thing I had experienced to a true Christmas family gathering in seven or eight years.

And yet I had all the privacy of having my own house for most of the year.

I realized that the monster of a computer desk I had originally made was not going to ever leave the bedroom I had built it in, so it was time to build a better computer desk for my ever growing machine. As Lois had accidentally shown me the hidden key to the basement work area, I planned out and built a light frame desk with three open support frames, two bracing bars in back and a Formica covered board for the top which featured cut-out, and bolt suspended, wing-nut positioned shelves for the keyboard and expansion interface to sit within. The Formica surface hid the bolt heads holding the sunken-in computer pieces and the whole thing rivaled the professional Trash 80 work desk one could have bought at Radio Shack. In reality, I probably spent more money building the two desks for my computer than it would have cost me to buy the Radio Shack version, but then I would have lost the fun of figuring out how to make them.

With its new desk, my computer was freed from my bedroom and in the dining room area of the house, giving me a new place to be in rather than the claustrophobic everything in it bedroom I had lived out of for my Senior year of high school. With its new placement, it allowed me to host the computer game playing lunch breaks from Saturday bagging, but also seemed to inspire my mind as I could look out the large dining room window into the driveway loop and woods beyond and dream up new code.

I devised the final nut to make a climactic moment for my 'Star Quest' game, most importantly it took very little new code so it fit in the few bytes of spare memory I had. Where I had a chance of the player's ship being intercepted on the way home after destroying a planet based alien outpost, I knew I also had the chance of multiple ships intercepting the player if they had destroyed multiple planet-side outposts before returning to Earth. This chance element added surprise and anticipation to the game. So for the climax I realized all I had to do was flip a switch after the last new star had been visited by the player and greet him or her with five awaiting alien ships on the way home. I spent a lot of time playing with the number of ships at the end and fighting five seemed like a good nail biting time. But in order for the player to likely survive this climax, I had to reduce the amount of damage the attacking ships did. Yet this only helped, as well, as it lead the player into a false sense of security when taking on the ships one-on-one or in pairs. My magnum opus was complete and I couldn't wait to show it to Jeff when I returned to Colorado the next Summer.

But unlike previous years, I was keeping in touch with Jeff through his dial-up online site. Given the long distance charges, I'd wait until the late nights to dial-up his system, check my mail and then buzz the chat mode to see if he was there. He very often was and we'd chat for about an hour or two at a time once every few weeks. I was feeling highly connected then, to a level my parents would never have comprehended. Today, others are connected to a level I don't want to comprehend!

Luke and Van were going to a College a few hours drive away. While in New England that would seem like a prohibitive drive, after having lived in Colorado where towns are hours apart and I had shared long drives with my mother through Wyoming to visit my sister, the drive to Luke and Van's College didn't seem like it would be that daunting. So about four times during the college year I made the drive to their dorm room to visit them, talk about music and what we've each been up to. They shared their room with a third student, 'Dave', another one of our High School classmates who hadn't been part of our core group, but I soon warmed-up to him with these trips to their College and we became friends who'd visit during the college breaks when he'd be back in the home town.

Luke, too, I'd visit with when he'd be on his college breaks, but Van... For some reason Van was keeping his distance, it seemed. He was nice enough in person, but would then avoid contact once he was home during the breaks. Had I somehow offended him? I couldn't see how as he'd kind of been the one looking out for me during my tumultuous final year of High School. Maybe there was something going on in his life...?

By the end of my days in New England, the new Dungeons & Dragons group had been a success, though it didn't eclipse my experiences with the first group, perhaps because of how much I needed that group at that time in my life. I felt fully restored computer programming wise, even creating a science fiction book database for myself where I could enter details of the books I'd read and rate them to help determine which authors I should look into more. And at the grocery store, I had been doing a variety of work as I had originally done during my initial years helping out at the first branch store as a kid. I had even become a respected member of the store staff and during one break where I went to the back room to sit on a pallet, I found a number of other employees there on break as well including Van's younger brother. I was in a musical mood and so I got the group into doing a spur of the moment song. It was fun and I suggested we do a second, but it was felt that a second one wouldn't be as much fun as the surprise of joining the first...!

All and all this final year in New England had been very rewarding for me and very healing. What a dramatic difference it made to my foundation of memories, leaving with this as my final taste of New England, rather than running out of town to Colorado after my father had disowned me and the subsequent tumultuous final school year I'd had.

The night before I was to hop in the car and drive off, Pete organized an impromptu going away party for me. I say impromptu party for me as it turned out his upperclassman friend was on leave after his first year of service and the gathering seemed to be more for him and also included a couple of his friends, though I knew them from the first Dungeons & Dragons group. This was my first time in Pete's house, probably in over four years. His father, my former mentor Zack, was nowhere to be seen, nor Pete's mother. I wondered how they were doing, but given Pete's past unwillingness to talk about personal matters, I didn't bother ask.

After sharing pizzas and catching-up, Pete next planned for us to have a video night. Having exhausted the Betamax collection at the local video store he had gotten himself a VHS player, though I don't remember if it was a rental or one he bought for his family home. While the television was in the living room, for some reason Pete brought in the dining room chairs for us to sit in rather than using the couches and easy chairs already there. He lined them up in a row, then he pulled out the movies he'd gotten for the night. Porn. My first chance to see some, I was actually interested, though for a completely different reason than the rest, I assume, as it gave me a chance to see how normal adult body parts looked... Well, I don't know how normal they were, but the first two movies were kinda hokey and fun. I only remember the title of one of them, 'The Spirit Of Seventeen Seventy-Sex'. When we reached the end of it, I excused myself from the evening as I needed to try to get some sleep before my first day's drive to Colorado, they remained and saw at least another movie. Given that the third movie was about to start, the final goodbye was more of a brief 'see you' on the way out than the actual 'I'm moving to Colorado and will never see you again' type of goodbye.

But maybe it was better that way.

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What Am I?

72

Now, on the very rare occasions when I decide to tell someone about my background, I've figured out a quick statement that both gives them the gist and puts them in my place at age thirteen: ''I thought I was a boy and when puberty came, I got a big surprise.'' I've found that one sentence very effective, without having to get into the physical details to explain things. Details that I had to admit I'm not terribly comfortable talking about and most people are even less comfortable hearing from me. But that one sentence took me almost twenty years to come up with and thirteen of those years I was trying to figure out the answer myself.

With the return to New England in Nineteen Eighty-Two, the living arrangements were much the same as the previous year. Father was living at his girl friend's house and would come to the family home for five evenings a week to share dinner with Pappy and evening television shows. By October, Pappy was again off to Florida to snowbird and with him gone, dad found little reason to visit the house except to pick up the accumulated mail once every now and then. This left me with the house to myself and also the monthly utility bills, the good news there was, with the greater income from the full time job, I could better afford them and used the heating for the full house this year, rather than just my single bedroom.

With my friends all off to College, I had plenty of time to reflect.

At first the loneliness was bone aching, but as I'd gone through similar patches during my first Summer at the apartment town and similar first Summer in Colorado, I now knew these periods would come to an end, eventually, and it didn't drown me like that first time at age ten. And so I spent more time thinking about my life and about my 'situation'.

Over the years I'd watch any television show that might shed some light, typically these were the daytime talk shows and before the nineteen nineties they were still pretty straight-laced in their approach and the audience members thoughtful in their reactions. Ultimately, none of them shed any light on my 'situation', but I did end up learning quite a bit about homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals. One of the first things I learned, though, was that most people in society were dumbfounded by it all.

During the seventies when talk shows would come on to discuss being Gay, many American audience members would struggle to understand it as they only had the one box in their head, heterosexual, so they tried to find someway to get Gay people 'in the box' by asking them ''So which one is the man and which one is the woman?'' This sort of mind set made producers seek-out Gay couples where one was obviously masculine and the other feminine. This helped the audience grasp the concept more easily as it spoke to their own existing world view, even if it wasn't accurate to the full spectrum of homosexuality. With transsexuals, audience members seemed to grasp this more readily unless the person being interviewed expected to be homosexual after surgery, then the audience members would really be stunned as they tried to wrap their heads around it. When it came to transvestites, the common response was, ''What's the point?'

Eventually a second box was formed in the public mind, 'Straight' for heterosexuals, and 'Gay' for everything else. Let's call this a stage one understanding. Homosexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, pedophiles, anything other than heterosexual were all deemed 'Gay'.

Toward the late nineteen seventies and into the early eighties, when discussing these things through the talk shows, eventually the audience members reflected more sophistication on these issues as they were now able to understand that there was more than just a catch-all box of 'Gay' and they could now see that there was more than just heterosexual and homosexual, there was also the 'Other' category. The general public could now see that homosexuality was 'same sex' interest and everything else wasn't. This was a mixed blessing as they would now lump same sex pedophiles in with homosexuals, everything that was left over fell into the 'Other' box, even opposite sex pedophiles as common heterosexuals knew this had nothing to do with them. So 'Straight', 'Gay' and 'Others' gives us a stage two understanding of sexual variation.

By the mid-to-late nineteen eighties, things had evolved even further in the common mindset and there were now four boxes. 'Straight', 'Gay' (including same sex pedophiles), 'Transwhatever' and 'The Rest'. Clearly a stage three understanding.

By the cusp of the nineteen nineties the 'Transwhatever' tag was becoming subdivided as the rest of the 'Transwhatever' community would dub themselves 'Transgendered' to distinguish themselves from the 'Transsexuals'. But by the mid-nineteen nineties, the Transsexuals liked that term better as it got the 'sex' out of it and they felt that their condition was more about a gender recognition rather than a surgery goal. Sex changes were now 'just an option' for 'Transgendered' people.

By the turn of the century, the American public was finally starting to understand that there was a new category and that category meant re-evaluating the previous categories. It was becoming clear that there was a significant difference between same sex pedophiles and same sex adult interests. Finally, the categories provided a respectable separation for homosexuals and even a label subdivision: 'Straight', 'Gay/Lesbian', 'Transgendered', 'Pedophiles', and 'The Rest'. If this placed society at a stage four understanding for the first decade of the twenty-first century, where does that place your level of understanding?

In the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-Two I was still just as clueless about my 'situation' as I had ever been. Watching all these talk shows provided me insight into everything else, but not myself. I didn't have any sexual interests, so the whole heterosexual/homosexual/pedophile categories seemed to have nothing to do with me. When it came to 'Transsexualism' I didn't find I fit there either as it seemed to be about functional members of one sex wanting to be members of the opposite sex to some degree. I didn't find myself to be a function member of any sex. I wasn't a 'Transvestite', if anything I was the opposite of that as I felt most comfortable in whatever clothing was most common between men and women. As young men and women commonly wore jeans and tees in America, that was the clothing I felt most comfortable in as it wasn't sex specific. As clothing gets more formal it becomes more sex specific and I find myself increasingly uncomfortable in it.

The label of my father's 'What You Are' statement had haunted me since the previous year, not because he didn't know what to label me as, to my face, but simply because I didn't.

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Night And Day

71

My father would normally have my return flight from Colorado to New England arrive on the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, but this time, perhaps for a better price, it came back on the Wednesday after. While there would have been little chance to see my friends before they left for College, this assured it and I arrived in my home town which looked very much the same. But this time I wouldn't have the comfort of longtime friends to get me through this year, just familiar surroundings.

Nothing went wrong with the trip back and nothing had happened to my bedroom while I was gone. It was like the return home I should have had the previous year. My first full day back, I went to the grocery store to request my schedule only to find the assistant manager flustered as he hadn't planned on me being back and would 'have to look into it'. I touched base with Joe, the grocery store owner, and he said he'd work something out and to come in on Saturday as my first day. I don't know if it was the assistant manager or not, but for some strange reason the owner of the local book store tracked me down the Friday between and offered me a part-time job. He said he heard I was looking for a job, but I assured him I already had one. Further, having to dress up every day and stand behind a counter for less money, versus wearing what I normally wore while working a variety of tasks full-time left little chance that I'd consider the book store job.

By the weekend, the lack of my friends was starting to sink in, no after trip visit with Jonathan to discuss the new games I'd come across, no bumping into familiar faces at the grocery store... Well, actually there were a handful of new baggers from the previous year that were the seasoned baggers of this year and then, to my surprise, there was Peter. His upperclassman friend had waited at home a year after his graduation from High School until Pete graduated so they could join the Army together. Apparently things hadn't worked out for Pete at boot camp and he was back at the store's Meat Room while his friend was now trapped alone in the Army for the coming years. As with the lack of news of his mother, Pete kept what had happened with the military close to his vest. While an old familiar face, the slow drift apart in our friendship had left us as acquaintances at best, but no longer friends.

My Saturday was much like the previous two years of Bagging Saturdays while Joe worked out my full schedule then handed it to me by that afternoon. With the store always closed on Sundays, my second day off had changed from Thursdays, which synced-up with the high school's late bus schedule, to Tuesdays. My week would thus be six o'clock at night till two thirty in the morning Monday, Wednesday and Thursday working the whole time with the night crew. Friday was a hybrid of four till eleven, half with the baggers until store closed at eight, then the rest with the night crew, with Saturday a mixed duty day as well. For both Friday evening and Saturdays, I was like the chief bagger, where I would fill-in and organize lunch breaks for the regular baggers and help-out during crunch times. For the rest of the time on Saturdays I'd be in charge of keeping the dairy case and beer case stocked. My days periodically helping out with the Produce Department was now behind me for good.

For the night crew days, I got to meet a whole new group of employees I hadn't known before. Tasked with unloading trucks of new stock twice a week to keep the shelves filled, then using up leftover stock for the nights in between, it was like a little family headed by Geno and I would work with his second, Nick, in the canned and jarred food aisle. Effectively each aisle had its own employee to stock it during the night and Nick's sister to work in the Deli making the sandwiches and grinders for the next day. There was a young woman who worked the Health & Beauty section, too, but she often kept to herself and Joe spent some time in the evenings helping her finish up, so they could leave sooner in the evening and do something else. Apparently Joe hadn't been waiting around for my mother to return from Colorado...

I think I had actually first met Geno when I was age ten and left the family home on my first night staying with my father after my mother had moved to the apartment. My dad and Pappy spent the evening saying derogatory things about mom. I had run from the house and gone to the store to find my mother, then working on the night crew, and Geno was the one who eventually responded to my knocking on the store's windows. That having happened seven years earlier, I don't know if he remembered me from that one time or not.

He was like the patriarch of the night crew family with Nick the brother, Amelia the sister and the rest of the guys like various odd uncles. With the loss of seeing my friends at school every day, I couldn't have wished for a better replacement group of people. We'd have dinner break on our own or in pairs on the usual nights, but have spaghetti nights for a shared dinner on Fridays. Once two in the morning came, we'd hustle to clear the main floor of boxes and carts, then half of us would pull out the large push brooms and sweep with the other half of us bringing out the floor scrubbing machines. I was assigned a floor scrubbing machine and had fun taming the throbbing mass as one carefully guided it up and down the aisles. By two thirty we'd be saying our good nights and I'd then walk across the hayfield in the dark, and sometimes moon lit nights, to the house. It was my first experience nighttime nature walking and I came to like it and would take it up as a hobby in my later years.

With Wednesdays as the lightest workload of the Night Crew, I'd sometimes do maintenance work at the store with Nick, repairing tile, reinforcing truck unloading 'dock' areas or patching walls. Once we had to go to the first branch store and do some repairs and to my surprise the store I had originally worked at had changed dramatically. The gas station next door had been bought and the store merged with its space, adding a whole new wing to the main floor. The gas pumps were retained and the Meat Room moved to the new wing along with a new deli section. The old back room which had held the original meat and produce work areas had been opened-up to contain a Health & Beauty alcove at the back, with the produce work area now confined to a closet next to the loading dock. This was the rare time I didn't help out as much as I should have with the work as I was enthralled by the changes that had occurred to the store over the past three years, I just had to explore and Nick let me. On the drive back to the main store he asked about my fascination and I told him about my previous years working for the store chain as a child.

The hardest part of my schedule was the shift from Friday night to first thing Saturdays. Theoretically, I had eight hours of time to sleep, but with the routine of going to bed by four in the morning on the other days, going to bed three hours earlier on one night didn't work for me and I'd often just get four hours of sleep, then rush to the store after I got up, sometimes arriving a little bit late. But unlike the previous year where I was a lethargic lump at the store, I was back to my focused self this year and proud of my work. For Saturdays, I'd promptly fill-up the dairy case after Friday evening's shoppers, then give the baggers their morning break, top-off the beer case, then give the baggers their lunch break. As the baggers and myself worked the full day from eight until six, our lunch breaks needed to be an hour long staggered in two shifts, eleven thirty, then twelve thirty. Everyone wanted eleven thirty and to convince half the baggers to wait until the second lunch shift, I bribed them with trips to my house to play games on my computer during the later lunch time.

Once, Pete joined us, then I didn't see him again during a lunch break until one time in May when the rest of the baggers wanted the second lunch slot for some reason so I came home earlier than I normally would to find Pete in the house playing games on the computer during his lunch break without my knowledge. As kids in Elementary School, I had shown him where the hidden key was for the back door. It looked like he had remembered over the past decade and had been coming to my house for some time during his Saturday lunch breaks to help himself to games. As I got home and noticed this, I decided to play it cool and just pull up a chair and watch as he played. Assuming this hadn't been his first time doing this, he must have been walking the driveway and road back to the grocery store so I wouldn't see him while I was cutting across the hayfield. When the lunch break ended, we walked back to the store together. As I had not noticed previous signs of his visits, he was being respectful when he was using the computer and I feared that if I complained about his doing this without asking he'd take it out by damaging my now three thousand dollar computer system when I wasn't home, as he had ruined my maternal grandfather's heirloom watch back when we were kids.

After only my first two months working full-time, Joe called on me for other needs. Monday mornings became a four hour stretch to top-off the dairy case and go with him to the liquor store to load up on wine for the grocery store's wine aisle. For this we'd take his car, collect a trailer at his home and then load the trailer together and unload it at the store. This was the most we had worked together ever and it was nice to visit with him once again on these little drives. Sometimes when the home delivery driver needed a day off, I'd be called to come in for a few hours to be the muscle while the head cashier played the navigator. And once I was tasked with delivering spare stock from the main store to the new, second branch store in the southern part of the state. The first store of the chain to be built from scratch, it was like the new car equivalent of a grocery store, all bright and shiny. I imagined that if I stayed in New England, Joe would one day give me my own branch store to manage. But my heart was with computers, so Colorado it would be.

By the end of my ten months working full-time, I was briefly assigned to Amelia in the Deli department at night to make the next day's sandwiches as the college kids arrived home from College and took their summertime jobs at the store. Oddly enough, the visit from the store owner's wife to belittle me was the closest thing I got to an official send-off from the grocery store. Happening on a Friday, if it was just the core group I'm sure we would have said our goodbyes during the spaghetti gathering, but with the expanded work staff, we had to drop those as they were no longer practical. Instead when midnight came I quickly went to each core member of the crew in their aisles and said my final goodbye as they worked, then let myself out the back door of the store and made my final walk across the hayfield...

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Head Of Steam

70

What would greet me with the start of these last twelve months before my permanent move to Colorado...?

Despite the horrible year, with overcoming the surprise developments around my graduation and my effectively torpedoing my father's disowning of me, I left for Colorado with a full head of steam like the previous year. Unlike the previous trip, though, I also came with my complete computer; during the course of the year I had stumbled upon official luggage for the computer and its primary pieces. I wasn't sure about their latches, but some strapping took care of that and this time it was the Expansion Interface that was my boxed carry-on. Given all the extra hardware from my expanded computer, the heavy sewing machine desk at my mother's had to be pulled even further from the wall and an old Ouija board placed on top to give it a large enough surface. Jeff helped me figure out what the problem was with the disk drive I had bought along with the Expansion Interface: Turned out it was the Expansion Interface's built-in timer chip was defective. Without it to keep the rhythm the computer didn't know how to read the disks. He kindly replaced it for me and I was in business!

Mother had found a boyfriend while I was away, or at least the first Colorado boyfriend that I knew of. He was about the same height as dad, which put him about half a foot shorter than mother. He was diabetic and had developed a hobby baking sweets for friends. He also worked at one of the big name computer firms. He expressed interest in my computer and offered to take me on a tour of 'The Building' one day. Mother also had a new job, she was now working as part of the kitchen staff at a local hospital, she didn't tell me what lead to her leaving the grocery store turned deli, but I did catch on that there had been a long gap between the jobs.

Over the years, mother had collected copies of her children's High School graduation pictures, she placed these in various configurations and living locations. By the time she was in the mobile home, she hung them on the wall directly outside my bedroom door, sister above, brothers side-by-side below. Clearly, once I had a picture it would go below thus changing the triangle to a diamond. That time had come as I brought copies of my official graduation photo in various sizes to her. She took one look at the picture and shrieked, ''You look like a girl!'' She then collapsed into her chair and began sobbing. Before you have any misimpressions, my photo was like my brothers' except I had shorter hair than my not as older brother. I was wearing my corduroy three piece suit and had a couple of acne marks on my face. No make-up, no dress, no jewelry, nothing to socially identify me as a girl. Despite having shorter hair than my brother and a three piece suit in the photo, my mother took me as she saw me, and that horrified her. ''You look like a girl,'' she bit off as a mumbled echo and I left her to finish her cry.

My photo wasn't added to the wall of children, instead she demanded I get my annual-visit hair cut, bought a dress shirt of her own choosing and a three pack of pocketless white tee shirts. Her demand was I dress-up and she would have my picture professionally taken in town to her suiting. The dress shirt she had gotten me was a bit translucent, which was a problem given my ACE bandage bound breasts. So I put on one of the white tees which, given its smaller size, was form fitting and again didn't help disguise my chest. All of my baggy, left pocketed, tee shirts which had been my mainstay for the previous five years were in colors, so I couldn't wear those underneath the dress shirt. As mother was pounding on my bedroom door as the time came to leave for the photo, I used the only thing I had available and pulled the additional two pocketless white tees over the first one and put on the dress shirt. It felt stupid and was quickly hot as hell as we arrived at the photographers. Photos of just my face was quickly discouraged as it didn't make me seem manly enough despite the hair cut, so I was then told to take various poses for full body and three-quarter body photos. Looking over the proofs later on, mother found one that she deemed to be macho enough for my graduation photo and had copies of it made in various sizes for herself, our siblings, and her friends.

Left leg raised up with my foot on an out of picture foot stool, bent over with my left elbow resting on my left knee, right forearm resting on my left forearm, the sheen of sweat covering my face as I looked off too the right, my irritation was not hidden from the over one hour ordeal. When my not as older brother was next on leave and saw the photo on the wall of graduation photos, he laughed. He said it looked like I had just come in for the picture after beating my slaves. I thought it was an apt description. Of course the ultimate result of the picture was that my three-quarter pose shot stood out from the rest of my siblings head-only shots, just drawing the casual visitor to immediately recognize that I didn't fit. While my mother patted herself on the back for finally getting a proper picture of me, it became what welcomed me each and every time I walked out of the bedroom, reminding me of my discomfort and ire from the day.

With that first and only incident of conflict between mother and me over, the rest of the Summer settled into what I would have expected...

Jeff's computer had made a transition while I was gone and had taken on a life running a dial up site. Largely serving as a message board for other dial up users, I quickly doled out a little cash to upgrade my computer to sport the necessary adapter for a dial-up interface. The bad new was the room with the computer didn't have a telephone and while I, at first, bridged this with a few long extension cords from the living room area, that ended up not being acceptable to mother. Realizing that the two built-in phone jacks ran down the same long wall from the living room in front to the master bedroom in back, I peeled away some of the external aluminum siding from the mobile home when my mother was at work one day and found the long phone cable between the two rooms. With some parts and cable from Radio Shack, I spliced into the connecting phone line and added a third jack in my bedroom which adjoined the room with the computer. This would allow me to have a phone in my bedroom now, then a plug-in splitter to provide a line to the computer room by way of the two sided outlet the rooms shared. Jeff donated his first computer modem for me to use, a wooden boxed acoustic coupler that you placed the handset of a traditional style phone into, the round ends of the handset making a tight seal to the round rubber rings of the dial up modem.

One of Jeff's latest kids to wow with his set-up became my second friend in Colorado, about two years younger than me, I actually made him air-sick when he was watching me play Microsoft's first Flight Simulator. Despite the blocky black & white graphics, it was still an effective program. And I was back to tuning my magnum opus game 'Star Quest'. Having taken the school year off from working on it given my unexplained bout of brain fog, I was back at it and came up with an exciting twist. Now as you found and blew-up alien bases hidden in our local star cluster, there was a chance an alien baseship would trace you back to Earth and you'd have to attack it and blow it up before you could enter our solar system and dock. It was more real time graphics where you had to center the ship into your crosshairs while its shots at you caused flashes and an escalating damage total; you had to struggle to aim at the small vulnerable point of the attacking ship as it did evasive maneuvers. If you hit it right, before their final shot killed you, their ship would blow up and you could dock at Earth and get your ship repaired. Not knowing when these base ships would show up added a level of anticipation to the game which it had previously lacked and it also taught the player to pace themselves as, if they blew-up multiple planet-side bases before returning to Earth, there was a chance of multiple baseships waiting for them when they arrived. 'Star Quest' was now nearly there as the epic game I had originally envisioned, but still lacked a climactic final moment. Further still, the game was stuffed into every corner of the available thirty-two kilobytes of memory, so any climactic moment I came up with would have to be very tiny, code-wise.

The daily routine broke down to my working with the computer at the mobile home during the daytime, either writing code, or participating online. Then when my mother got home from work, if she didn't have plans for the evening, I'd likely borrow her car and spend the time at Jeff's, often until the wee hours of the next morning. This worked for me, though in retrospect I wonder if mother might have resented it a bit as this meant I spent very little time with her during that Summer. I must admit, after the photo incident, I wasn't looking to spend more time with her. Still, she had her friends from the singles' club and her new boyfriend, so I no longer had to worry about her being lonely as she had been during her first years in Colorado.

The end of Summer came and it was time to pack-up the computer components and fly back to New England for my final year living there and my first year working full-time at the grocery store chain. My goal was to save up a nest egg and move to Colorado for good and find myself a computer job!

Instead I'd be cursed with the fate of being nothing more than a Hot Dog vendor, if the grocery store owner's wife had her wishes...

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Above Average

69

Imagine if you will a situation where you are going to graduate from High School by showing up at the school in the morning and turning in a paper. Then imagine that your father has ordered you not to leave the house or go to school that morning. What would you do?

Years later, when I'd tell people of this story, it'd be pointed out to me that my father had been trying to stop me from graduating since the very start of my Senior year of High School. How? I wondered. By starting out the year with him stating that I was disowned upon graduation. I had been set up for failure as my subconscious would realize that if graduation meant I was disowned, not graduating would save me from being disowned... Was that why I had done so poorly in my final year of High School? Perhaps it was a contributing factor, but the loss of my mentor and erstwhile protector Zack Hatch had a part to do with it, and my inability to figure out why I couldn't pass any 'Advanced Math' exam factored into it as well. Still, it was a good point: That my father had set me up to fail that year.

And as that had failed, he was now taking steps to assure I'd still fail by the end of the year, one way or another.

During the morning phone call when he ordered me to stay at home until he got there, he was formulating this plan where he was going to cancel my plane ticket to Colorado and I would be staying in town and taking Summer School in order to finish my classes and graduate. Despite my trying to tell him the issue was resolved, he wasn't going to listen to a word of it and I was to definitely stay home until he got there to give me a piece of his mind in person.

And so from that phone call at six forty-five that morning, I stayed at home and watched the clock pass seven fifteen. It was now too late to catch the bus. And I continued to wait until seven thirty. It was now too late for me to hop on my moped and take it to the school. And then seven forty came and went. And went with it, too, was any chance of catching a ride with a friend driving themselves to the school that morning. By seven forty-five, an hour after my father had called and told me he was on his way over to chew me out, it was clear he wasn't coming as he was only a twenty-five minute drive to the house when he called. At seven fifty, I decided to blow him off and realized I could take the spare key from the cabinet and take Lois's, his girl friend's, left behind truck to the High School. I did and got there with two minutes to spare.

I saw the English teacher and handed her my report, she thanked me, and I let the Principal know, and he thanked me, and I met my friends in the cafeteria. They were all going to go to Jonathan's house for an afternoon of fun and boating on the lake. I joined them and we picked up Pete's upperclassman friend along the way. At the far side of the lake, we tied-up the boat and bummed around the lake town and ate, then we boated back to Jonathan's house where I excused myself and went to work for my last day at the grocery store before I would have gone to Colorado later that week. Once done with work I took the truck home and parked it where it had always been and found that my father still wasn't home. He didn't get there with Lois until a few minutes later and apologized to me for making me wait all day for him to arrive. So I now knew that his order for me to stay home had been a rouse and I also knew that he had no clue that I hadn't stayed home.

So I told him it wasn't a problem as I hadn't stayed home.

A touch of his anger flared but with Lois there, he held it in check. But I wasn't going to graduate and he had told me to stay home! ''What are you talking about? They told me yesterday I was going to graduate,'' I said trying to suppress the smile at the corner of my lips. I was? ''Yes, I checked in at the school this morning and confirmed it,'' I noted, letting some of the smile out.

If his girl friend hadn't been there he would have had a yell fest at me and repeatedly called me a liar, but with her there, he couldn't and just said, ''Well that's nice to know.'' During dinner preparation he lamented that he hadn't had time to get ready for the graduation ceremony. At this I told him not to worry about it as I wasn't going. Now he had a new thing to bark about. I definitely was going to the graduation ceremony and he wasn't going to hear another word of it!

What was I going to wear, he asked during dinner. For what? For graduation. I guessed just my jeans and tee shirt. That wasn't acceptable the bark came back. I pointed out that I would be wearing a gown over it so no one would know. It still wasn't acceptable and we were going out first thing in the morning to buy me something appropriate!

whatever.

The next morning I pointed out that I could use my corduroy three piece suit from my eldest brother's wedding a few years earlier, it would only be the fourth time I had ever worn it. But no, it was too old and I needed something new for graduation and the three of us got into his car and we were off to the capital city. We went to the same formal wear place I had gone to two and a half years earlier for the corduroy suit and, as I didn't care, I let him and Lois pick out the suit, slacks, formal shirt and tie for me. They made me dressed up at the clothing store to make sure it all worked together. With the top button closed and the tie cinched up to my neck I felt myself break out in a cold sweat and wanted to tear them from my throat. Years later a psychologist would theorize the reason why I hated things tightly around my neck harkened back to the day of my birth. But I didn't have to worry about it now as my father and Lois were soon satisfied and I could quickly take off the suit. We drove back home as I had to be to graduation prep by the start of the afternoon.

Once back, we realized that we hadn't gotten any dress shoes so I'd have to wear my sneakers for the ceremony, but at least I'd be nicely dressed-up otherwise. I put on the slacks and shirt but kept it unbuttoned at the top and carried my tie & jacket over my arm as I left, I told my father I'd put them on at the school. Van picked me up and we were off. At the school it turned out that many of us who swore we weren't going to participate in the graduation ceremony were there as well, no doubt also upon demand of their parents. I left the tie & jacket in Van's car and everyone else went to get their gowns from the fittings of the previous Monday, I went to the office to find out about my gown. It turned out they had given it to a girl in our class who hadn't a gown of her own on Monday during the fittings, at the time they thought I wasn't going to need it, after all. So they pulled out a box of spare gowns and found one close enough in size for me to use, cap too, then I scrambled to the gymnasium where the rest of my classmates had already started 'procession practice'. I snuck into line where Luke showed me how to walk: Step, pause, step, pause. It reminded me of the 'King Tut' dance comedian Steve Martin had done on Saturday Night Live.

Once practice was done, there was a short break until the ceremony, this was when I should have gone out to Van's car to get the rest of my suit, but sure enough, with the gown on, all you could see was the line of the shirt collar and cuff of my slacks with the sneakers the most visible part. I didn't worry about it, just buttoning all but the very top button of the shirt and pinching in the collar underneath the gown to make it looked like it was buttoned.

The time had come and we lined-up in our places inside the gym and the band started playing. We processed from the gym's back door to our seats in front of the spectators already there and sat down. Various people spoke, but I wasn't paying attention as I just wanted to get this over with. Finally, it was time to be given our diplomas and we got up one row at a time to process to the stage. The Principal handed them out and the tassel of my cap moved from one side to the other, then I walked normally back to my seat and unbuttoned my upper shirt and pulled out the collar to let my neck breathe as I awaited the end of the ceremony. It came, some tossed their caps into the air, and then we could go to the parking lot to 'meet our loved ones'. In my case though, it was my father, his girl friend, and to my surprise my British Uncle Ronny had somehow found out about the graduation and come. He was the only one armed with a camera and all the pictures the family had of the event came from him. I don't even know if my eldest brother knew of the graduation day and time, nor if my not as older brother was still in town.

With Lois there as a witness, I decided to manipulate my father and asked him if I could stay at the house one more year to work full-time at the grocery store and save my money to officially move to Colorado. Knowing with her there hearing this request, he'd have to say 'Yes' so as not to reveal his true self to her. He said, ''Of course!''

He decided we should go out for dinner. Uncle Ronny couldn't join us and excused himself to drive home, and I 'went to change' and got the rest of my suit out of Van's car. I took off my gown and cap and carried them with the suit to where dad had parked and we drove to the house to get Pappy. After dinner, we got home and as they went to the living room to watch shows, I went up stairs to my bedroom. Using the headphones, I listened to music lying in bed throughout the night as I was so buzzed with the excitement of having graduated.

I couldn't sleep at all and watched the clock until it was time for my final trip to the school the following morning. It was the day after graduation and I remembered what I could do. I entered the school and went to the guidance counselor's office. He wanted to know what brought me back and I told him I wanted my file. He'd have to get it and a few minutes later returned, file in hand. It looked like a lot of paperwork had been removed, but the results of the I.Q. test were still there. I didn't know much about I.Q. tests, but as I left the school and peeked in at the results I knew that one hundred was an average score.

I was above average.

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