Living Arrangements

40

What's a mother to do when her plans don't pan out?

The apartment had always been temporary, but not in the way it turned out to be. By Spring of Nineteen Seventy-Six, I had settled into the big bedroom and I had even gotten a modular shelving system which you could choose how it fit together. I used one section for a bed table between the two beds and the rest made a blocky pyramid shape for the far wall of the room which finally left no more empty looking areas. By May, mother rewarded me with a small black & white television set for the room and it fit nicely on the top shelf of the unit. The following month, I discovered the trick of the 'selfless gift' of the T.V.: It would now be her room.

Her three pieces of furniture were moved into the area where the big round throw rug had been while mine was moved piece by piece into the now empty smaller bedroom. The bed had to once again be stacked into bunk beds with my pieces of furniture squirreled into the handful of available corners. She kept the shelving system and the T.V. though I needed to clear my stuff and put it into boxes as I didn't have shelves in the smaller room. After a year of slowly expanding my belongings to fit in the large room, my stuff now seemed cramped in the other room whereas mother's, which had just fit the smaller room, now looked lost in the large room.

Mother explained that we were doing this because Joe, the store owner, was separating from his wife and would soon be moving in with us and bring his son, William. William would be taking the lower bunk of my bed and the larger bedroom would soon be full because of Joe's stuff when he moved in. Mother also bought a large brown faux leather recliner for the living area of the first floor and the original third chair of the living room set was pinched into the smaller bedroom with me. It was nice having a club chair in my bedroom as I had never had one before, but it now meant a bit of careful maneuvering when crossing the room.

In July, mother arranged a play date for William and me which was the rare time I had seen him outside of school since second grade five years earlier. But this play date was nothing more than Joe arriving at the apartment with William; mom and I got into his car and we drove to an out of town burger stand for lunch. Once done, we returned to the apartment where mom and Joe talked downstairs while she had me show William around upstairs. About a half hour later Joe left with William and that was the last of it. She later told me that Joe's wife wouldn't let him leave without taking William and mother didn't want to deal with William. I suspect in reality Joe had never signed-up for the deal and mother set-up the lunch date saying it was at my request. Once we'd been sent upstairs, mother had lobbied Joe about how well the lunch went and how he should move in, and he declined. To me, that theory makes more sense. But it is just my theory.

For New Years Nineteen Seventy-Seven, mother decided it was silly having the large room mostly empty to herself and me stuffed into the smaller room and we swapped back to how it had been, only this time I had the chair in the large room along with the rest of my original two bed layout. I also got to keep the television.

While it was nice to have the black & white T.V. in my bedroom, mother was so rarely home during the early evenings or Sunday afternoons that I had plenty of time to watch the color set on the main floor, so it sat mostly unused in the large bedroom until my thirteenth birthday. For that year's twenty dollars and my additional ten, I discovered a video game console I could afford at a capital city department store and snatched it up. Featuring 'Pong' and the single player version called 'Squash', it also had a plastic gun and you could do target practice. The pong dot would wander around the dark screen and you'd aim and press the trigger button and if the light sensor in the gun saw white, you scored a point. When Luke would visit my house we'd play this and he marveled at how good I was at it as I most always scored. In reality, I had accidentally found out that aiming at the white wall behind the T.V. worked just as well as aiming at the dot, and the white wall didn't move around either. I'm so evil.

If Joe wasn't going to move in, mother decided to make the apartment his full service retreat away from home. Specifically, as the branch grocery store was open Friday evenings, mother would take the evenings off to prepare dinner for 'us'. Since moving into the apartment, I had been on my own for food preparation, the only exceptions being when other family members had visited during the holidays. But now mother was actually making dinner for 'us', meaning her & Joe... and I was welcome to join. The most common two meals were fondue, where we could stick various small bits of food into boiling oil or melted cheese, and 'True Italian Spaghetti'. For the latter, mother explained that Joe had told her that true Italian spaghetti sauce was very chunky with clumps of vegetables and chicken and so she made that for him. These dinners lasted for about six months, then Joe started to find excuses not to come anymore. Mother would prepare the meal and we'd sit and wait for Joe to come. Then she'd call to find out when he'd get there and then a couple hours later we'd eat without him. She stopped making Friday night dinners after three weeks of this and returned to 'work' on those evenings instead.

We settled back to the old practice of once a month for Fridays, Joe would take us to the burger stand out of town. Over the four years I'd see this stand expand, starting out as a box with two serving windows in front and a couple of picnic tables to the side. First they made a back room with tables and chairs protected from the weather where you could have something fancy like burger patties without the buns as if it were therefore a ground steak dinner on a paper plate. Then a true dining room was built in where the picnic tables had been. Half high walls and a roof, it was enclosed with windows all around making a rather nice space with full dinner tables and a really expanded menu featuring items other than burgers and fries. By the time the four years had come to an end a chain had bought them out and it was officially a full service restaurant. Once that happened, Joe no longer wanted to go there, perhaps because it was too public, and we instead went to a dank greasy spoon room attached to a small interstate highway side-motel. Obviously intended for truckers, I wondered if this was where mother and Joe had been coming too over the years when 'staying at the store late to count the money'. Given the atmosphere, I soon bowed out of joining these dinners and any pretense of being a 'family' disappeared.

Actually, as a side note, during those four years the kids in the apartment town took it as 'common sense' that I was Joe's illegitimate kid. This impression was enhanced when my Iroquois nose hump sprouted in my preteens and they took it to be an Italian nose. It turns out generations of Native American actors had made a living playing Italian mobsters in the movies and on the small screen.

By the Spring of Nineteen Seventy-Nine, mother had realized that this was all that her life with Joe would be and she started house hunting. There were a few I could see living in, but mother compared the color-painted or wall-papered walls of those houses to the bright white walls of the apartment and found them wanting. And in fact, she found her life of the past few years wanting and prospective future as well.

Suddenly, I was told we were moving to Colorado.

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Trashed

39

Three kids playing games on the school's computer: What could possibly go right?

Getting a note from my math teacher to use the school's computer was no problem given how much I had impressed him. Then I followed the example of Jonathan and Luke as they entered the Auditorium at the start of Directed Study and handed their notes to one of the monitoring teachers. I did the same and we turned around and left. The school's computer was in the 'teacher's lounge' on one of the tables, so we got to take the back entrance to the 'office area' of this open concept school and settle down. While Jonathan and Luke were a little wary of a third wheel joining them, I soon proved my worth.

This desktop unit, then referred to as a 'microcomputer', was the TRS-80 Model I with a built-in Level I BASIC programing language and four kilobytes of memory. TRS stood for Tandy Radio Shack, the corporation and chain of stores which sold it, but lovers and detractors of the computer line just called them Trash-80s. This unit was missing a very important item: A cassette recorder. The only means of persistent storage for the computer, without it meant we would spend the period typing in a game program out of a magazine and, with luck, have the last ten to twenty minutes of the period to actually play it. Often, though, the process of typing it in manually meant typos leaving the program to crash or worse play oddly leaving us to wonder if that was how the game had been intended to work or not. When on their own, Jonathan and Luke would trade off who read the computer code out of the magazine and who typed it in. With me there, we now had someone who could watch the screen and verify that what was told was what was typed in. This lead to a far better chance of having a game we could play once we were done.

And play we did.

Still most of our time was spent looking at the gibberish of the computer code and typing it. After several months of this I started to notice patterns in this gibberish that seemed to correspond to what happened once the game was running. With this in mind, I encouraged small variations as we typed in the code of a familiar program and sure enough they resulted in a desired change in the game appearance and flow. By the fourth quarter of our Freshmen school year, I felt I was now familiar enough with the patterns of gibberish to write my own game. One of the nights I was at my father's house, I pulled out the family's old manual typewriter and started typing away. A few pages later I had completed what I intended to be a tank battle game not unlike the Atari game of the time.

The next day, rather than type in a program from a magazine, I convinced Jonathan and Luke to let us use the program I'd typed up at home. After a little hesitation they agreed and we spent the next two thirds of the period typing it in and the last third trying to debug it as it didn't run at all. After this failure, I decided not to subject Jonathan and Luke to another lost period and sought out other times during the school day when I could squeeze in a little one on one time with the machine. But those opportunities were fleeting.

A few months after the start of the school year, my new friend Ed had disappeared. He was no longer on the bus or at High School and I went to his apartment to see what was up. His parents told me he was gone and they didn't know to where. About six months later I bumped into him at the combination drug store/diner in the apartment town and asked where he'd been. Turned out he'd been 'thrown out of house' by his family, but now had a job and was living with another family. He asked what I'd been up to and I told him about the school year, but more excitedly about using the school's computer. It turned out the family he lived with had one and they didn't know what to do with it. In short order I was invited over to their house to show them how to type in games out of magazines and discovered they had something I had never seen before: A manual. They also had the cassette recorder so once we got the games typed in and running, I figured out how to save them allowing the owner to load-up and play a game on it whenever he wanted. In return for this, I was allowed a couple hours each weekend to play with their computer on my own.

I used this time to read the manual and tryout the examples it had. The TRS-80 Level I computer manual was essentially a cartoon book with a stick figure that talked about the basics of computer programming and language structure. Soon the gibberish we'd been typing into the computers for the past many months started to have meaning and the structures of the code were the patterns I'd started to see. With this new information, I was ready to review my tank battle program and get it working, but looking at it I realized that I really had no clue what I was doing at the time I typed it up and tossed it aside.

My chance to use this family's computer also fizzed after a couple months when I showed-up at the house to find that Ed was gone. No news where he had gone to. As I'd been so helpful in the past few weeks, they let me have one more chance to use their computer for a few hours, though after that I should find another place to go to...

But where was another place? While I had money stuffed away in the bank, it was no where near enough to buy my own Trash-80. So, I'd have to find a place where the computers were sitting around and not being used. It occurred to me a Radio Shack store was the obvious place, but with one at the capital city twenty miles away, or the other one twenty miles west of my family's home town, there seemed little hope. And the end of the school year was here, so access to the school's computer would soon be gone, too.

As it turned out, I would be gone as well.

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To The Nines

38

And so we reach High School. Renown for many things, in my case it would take my life in a totally unexpected direction.

The teachers kept classes light for the first Freshman week as, I assume, they thought we might be experiencing a little shock. Gone were lockers, in were 'cubicles'. No, not the office kind, more like cubbyholes. The majority of the school was an 'open concept' floor space with these large boxes on casters. These five foot high boxes divided the 'hallways' from the 'classrooms', closed on three sides with the fourth side an open face; this side had the ten inch by ten inch by two foot deep cubbyholes and students got to pick whichever empty one they found when they first started. Pete, Jonathan, Van, Luke, and I found a group of free cubicles in the same box that we claimed as our own. It turned out that Pete's elusive upperclassman friend from the preceding three years had his cubicle in this location so he became a fixture in our lives for the next three years.

The entry hallway was lined with coat hooks, though no one ever used them, likely due to the fact that they were so far away from the cubicles, they seemed a little exposed to hanky-panky while students would be in class. Actually, these coat hooks had a long shelf above them and it left me wondering if perhaps these were the original replacements for the student lockers when the building first opened a decade earlier: A coat hook and a length of shelf above for all your needs! The entry hallway was lined by cinder block walls which divided the classroom open floor from the auditorium and cafeteria. The school office door lay halfway down the cinder block wall to the classroom space, it held the walled-off Principal and Vice Principal offices, two walled off meeting rooms to the other side, and the office staff in an open space between. This open area continued as, behind the office staff was the 'Teacher Lounge' area which held a couple tables, the school's walled off dark room, and circling around in a 'U' a line of teacher desks making a row to the back door of the office area which lead back to the entry hallway. This administration section was sandwiched between the two typing classrooms on one side and the two foreign language classrooms on the other.

The center of the open classroom floor was the 'Resource Center', essentially an open space library with two walls to either side for ceiling high book cases, additional book cases were like elbow high 'X's spread-out across the area with a sprinkle of tables between. Our group claimed one of these tables and it became our pseudo homeroom as the High School didn't actually use the homeroom concept before classes as Middle School had.

'Classrooms' were just a chunk of the floorspace with the cubicle wall behind, and thin, portable dividers to either side. At the far end was the chalkboard mounted on the exterior cinder block wall. Actually, that whole wall was a never-ending string of chalkboards between sliding glass doors. The glass doors were the only source of natural light and acted as the emergency exits, sometimes they would be open on fair weather days, though only very rarely. How much of a chalkboard versus glass-door mix each classroom got was based on how wide the space between the dividers, thus some 'classrooms' were wider and used for the more in-demand classes, and some were only ten feet apart for the smaller classes. These spaces had the same sort of right-handed desktop attached to chair as Middle School had featured. Some of the the dividers between classrooms included its own built in chalkboard allowing that 'room' to face a different direction.

At the far end of the open class area were the science classrooms boxed between one of the Resource Center's bookshelf walls and the secondary entry hallway's cinder block wall. Open area class rooms made up the Science Rooms on the far side of which was a built-in Science experimentation space with equipment cabinets and lab tables. On the other side of the secondary entry hallway was the gymnasium.

I actually knew this entire building very well already. As I had often taken Pete with me, during our elementary school years, on some of the days my father took me to the ski area during the vacant off season, Pete had once taken me to this building when his father went there to catch-up on paperwork when it was closed. We'd had the run of the place and explored all the nooks and crannies. Then the preceding Summer before my Freshman year, my mother found there were free community enrichment classes being held at the High School building during the evenings. My mother took the art class and brought me along. As the class was for adults, though, I used my time there to reacquaint myself with the building. The Art Room was behind the Auditorium with a Drafting Room next to it, then next to the Auditorium was the Metal shop and Wood shop sharing the same open space. The only walled classroom, the music room, filled the gap on the far side of the Auditorium before returning to the Cafeteria Space.

Once here as a student, I took my Freshmen classes. 'Social Studies' was very successful. 'English' was with the father of the twin girls of our grade, it went well on the whole. 'Science' suffered from there being too much hand written material versus tests, but I muddled through. For one period a day was 'Directed Study', essentially the students were to sit in the auditorium chairs and do classwork; without a flat surface attached to these seats, and the dim lighting of the space, it was neither good for writing or for reading, so I didn't see what the point was. I had this with Jonathan and Luke and the only challenging part of this period was finding out how much visiting we could get away with before a roving teacher noticed and scolded us.

'Wood Shop' I pretty much completely wasted. The first class of the morning, it turned out Mathew had signed up for 'Metal Shop'. Our projects for both Wood and Metal shop were self selected and the instructors would help and provide insight and guidance as requested, but otherwise left us alone. The metal lathes were next to the wood lathes and Mathew was doing a project requiring the lathe so I chose a project placing me at the wood lathe. As an echo to our original sixth grade Social Studies class, we spent much of the time visiting. Though we did end-up finishing some projects, in my case a pillar base for a wooden chessboard my eldest brother had made for me and, once that was done, to have an excuse to still be at the lathing area, I chose to do a bowl.

Unlike the pillar, which had been held by the lathe machine at both ends as it spun, the wood for the bowl had to be mounted to a screw-on plate, then that plate screwed onto the lathe head. I had apparently not screwed the plate tightly enough to the lathe on one day, it held on fine while spinning, but when I shut it off, the machine stopped but the bowl continued to spin, unscrewing itself as it did. Thoughts of the bowl completely unscrewing and either zipping across the shop floor and hitting someone, or just bouncing off the floor and breaking my work, lead me to stop it manually. As my hands were full with tools, I panicked and used the skin of my left wrist to brake the edge of the spinning bowl. It worked, but left a large wound on my arm and I was off to the nurse's office. Second degree friction burns now adorned my wrist, about two inches wide and three inches long, it made a glorious scar and provided me with a conversation piece for years to come!

Mathew was kind of cagey as to what his project was, though it was made up of many component parts that took two thirds of the course to finish. The teacher could grade him as the parts he had made were well milled & detailed, but he too was curious what it would be once all put together. It included a long metal rod with a grip pattern at one end and screw treads at the other, a sphere with one large screw hole and many other smaller screw holes in it, and then a series of conical pieces with sharp points at their ends and screw threads at their bases. It was done by third quarter and Mathew fully assembled it to reveal it was a Spiked Mace. Essentially, a Medieval hand weapon. Once the metal shop teacher saw it, he was afraid what the administration would say if they found out he'd let a student spend the course making a weapon and getting good grades for it. He had Mathew sneak it home and had him spend the rest of his time in shop class under a more directed course of work.

Oh, yes. 'Intro To Algebra', the forbidden class. Also with Mathew, it was taught by Pete's father, Zack Hatch. And it didn't have a dedicated classroom space and thus was in whatever empty space there was each quarter during the course of the school year. Once in the back of the auditorium where the semi balcony area also served as three classroom spaces with chairs featuring fold-up writing surfaces. One quarter it was in one of the open area class rooms and then two quarters in a science class room. Starting out in the Science classroom, Mathew and I sat side by side at the back of the room and the stage was set for visiting rather than paying attention. But as it turned out Zack was a very engaging teacher and thoughts of visiting were soon pushed aside by the interesting subject matter. Zack had been warned that he would need to 'guide me' to a different math class after I failed the first quarter. Grades were based purely on test results and in my case that meant I was at the top of the class after the first few weeks. I'm not bragging or inflating my ego here, it's just what Zack announced to the class after he noticed my steady stream of perfect scores on both expected tests and pop quizzes. Rather than consider moving me to an easier math class, he was wondering if I should be in the 'Advanced Algebra' class after the first quarter. We talked about it but, as it wouldn't be with him, for all I knew the teacher of the other class might be requiring vast quantities of hand written home work. I didn't tell Zack that was why I didn't want to change classes, but he accepted my decision and told me that students of 'Intro To Algebra' had the chance to skip a level and go straight to 'Geometry' the following year if the teacher gave a recommendation. He was certain I would earn that recommendation by the end of the year. And I did.

After the first quarter of Directed Study in the Auditorium, my two friends Jonathan and Luke stopped coming. I finally asked them what they were doing one day and they said they were getting notes from their math teacher in 'Advanced Algebra' to use the school's computer. Really? I asked, What do you do?

Oh, they played games on it.

I thought: I could do that!

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Talking Too Much

37

One thing was clear after I'd told mom of my 'situation', regular visits to the doctor came to a halt. To be honest I might have found that a good thing as much as my mother had felt it necessary. By the end of the school year, it was quite clear to me that what was happening to my body must be puberty related, just not in anyway I'd come to expect. And yet, what if my mother took me to see the doctor after my thirteenth birthday revelation? What would he have made of 'the situation'? What would have been his recommendations? Being thirteen, those choices would have been whatever mother would have wanted, I wouldn't have found any say in the matter. By keeping things a secret, while it was a disconcerting situation to be in, it allowed me time to slowly consider it and what this meant to me while holding onto the semblance of normality and continuity that school provided.

Lying in bed at night, I'd think about this and what the likely fall out was. I concluded I'd never be able to have any children, then what would be the point of getting married? Beyond wanting to be an astronaut, I had never planned out my future of marriage and kids and the like. I had just assumed that these things would come into my life when they found me. As a result, losing marriage and kids as options didn't have a big emotional impact on me, it just became a fact for me. Some might say there was always adoption, but at that time in history even mixed race couples were having problems being allowed to adopt, how could someone with my 'situation' be allowed?

After learning research skills for the eighth grade term paper, I spent the final quarter of eighth grade in the library applying those skills to find out anything I could about my 'situation'. Unfortunately the school library didn't have any information on any such thing, the closest I could find was information on Renée Richards. A Navy man transsexual who became a woman professional tennis player, information on her was, oddly enough, available at the school's library as they carried back issues of Sports Illustrated magazine. But the more I read about her, the less it seemed to have to do with me.

As with the previous years, I continued inviting friends over for the Friday night to Saturday sleep overs. When on the camping trip with Pete's family in the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Four, Pete and I had shared a tent and after getting into our own sleeping bags, we chatted for a while before going to sleep. With the sleep overs at the apartment, we'd kept up the tradition and one of these nights, early into the school year, I had brought up the subject of how girls and boys were different. What would it be like versus being a man? I doubt Pete suspected why I was pondering these questions, though by the following morning I concluded that had been a dumb thing to have brought up and made sure I didn't make that error again.

By this time, mother had taken up hitting me. The first time it happened was a school morning in the Fall when I was getting ready for school and my mother for work. I entered the kitchen to go to a cabinet and get something for breakfast, she was there and abruptly hit me in the face. Stunned, I asked what that had been for, what had I done? But she was silent and continued getting ready for work as if nothing had happened. Then a couple days later it happened again, another hit completely out of the blue, this time a punch to the shoulder blade. Again, no reason was given, my mother didn't say a thing, just kept on as if deaf to my questions. Christ! As I type this it occurs to me this was where I had gotten my tactic from when I pulled the 'Intro To Algebra' card at the end of eighth grade. When the adviser told me to put it back and followed me for a bit demanding that, I had just gone on with what I was doing as if he wasn't there and as such he didn't know what to do. The lesson was, the easiest way not to get into an argument with someone is simply not to respond to them.

Anyway, from my mother hitting me without explanation, I eventually concluded that it was due to my 'situation' and this was my punishment for it happening. By Winter, as there was no way of stopping these randomly timed hits, I instead learned methods of avoiding them. Rather than sit at the end of the couch near the end of the stairs and other chair, I'd start sitting at the end that was in a corner, and pulled in the coffee table to effectively act as a wall between me and any passer by. I stopped ever walking in front of her and instead stayed behind as she then couldn't see me to aim a blow. When in the passenger seat of the car, I would sit on the outside edge of the seat with my back against the door, thus keeping my mother's hands in view, allowing me to fend off any budding blow. By the end of the school year, I'd taken up no longer riding with her to the branch store and just always walked to the bus stop behind the town hall. I'd stay in my bedroom until she left for work in the morning, then rush down, grab a bit for breakfast and walk quickly to the bus stop all the way from the apartment.

Yet, with all of these tricks, she would still find moments to hit me when I wasn't expecting it. By the start of my Freshman year of High School, I had realized that the best way to handle her blows was to recoil my body at the first touch, thus if she was aiming for the face, I would start to turn my head making her hit glance off. If I felt a touch to my shoulder, I would immediately sink it in to reduce the impact of the presumed blow. By the winter break of my Freshman year, this had developed into a full-on tick where, whenever she moved her hands, I would start to recoil only to notice she was reaching for something on a near by table. One day it was the salt at a restaurant and my mother demanded I stop it. How? These new demands that I stop flinching whenever she moved her hands or came close to me meant nothing as I would just end up in her blows once again resulting in red marks and bruises. By the following Spring my mother had figured out what she had to do to stop my flinching and that was to stop hitting me. While this made the most difference, even to this day if I get an unexpected touch, or a hand moves quickly into my field of vision, I find I will still flinch or recoil sometimes, resulting in an awkward moment between me and the innocent person moving their hands or patting me on the back.

Toward the end of the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Eight, I found a new friend who had moved into a near by apartment complex with his family. 'Ed', a year older than me, had already finished his Freshman year of High School and as I was heading there in just a few weeks, he became my fount of wisdom. He was the one with the sister he described as being 'big-boned'. Once High School commenced, he decided to show me the skills he had learned in his first year of High School and asked me what I wanted to be. An astronaut of course. I had stumped him as he had learned how to look up college courses based on a chosen profession, but there was no college course to become an astronaut at the time. But in this case, I knew that astronauts had most all started out as pilots for the military and thus I was aiming to go to the Air Force Academy and, if I didn't get in there, my back-up plan was to join the regular Air Force. This worked as a point of reference and he took me to the library to pull out the encyclopedias and look both of those up. In the case of the Air Force Academy, one would have to get a letter of recommendation from a Senator, but not so for just the Air Force. While Ed thought that would be the hardest hurdle for me to pass, my eyes got stuck on the fact that either option required first passing a physical examination by a doctor.

Given my 'situation': How the Hell was I going to do that...?

 

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Sidelines

36

It turned out I had been fortunate that gym class showers had become opt-in when we started sixth grade, because now I didn't have to come-up with some explanation why I would no longer take them. And in fact, had I participated in sixth grade, there may have been some obvious differences between me and the rest of the boys that might have been immediately apparent and have brought unexpected scrutiny.

In the previous two years the gym teacher had distinguished himself by providing us a nice variety of activities and introducing us to many different sports than we wouldn't otherwise have gotten to try out on our own. One was likely something many students got to do which was running a lap around the field. In our case the gym teacher had us group together, first the boys, then with the girls behind us and we started our run. By the time we reached the far side of the field, the rest of the boys were pulling away from me and the girls were falling behind. By the third corner of the field, the boys had all left me in the dust and I did the last long leg of the run alone, between the group of boys ahead of me and the group of girls behind me. When I reached the end of the run the gym teacher gave me this long, strange look.

Another time he and the assistant coach had set-up an obstacle course in the gym. We were shown the route and every twist and turn to take, items to go under versus things to go over. And he had us go one by one, each starting a couple minutes after the previous so we would have enough space between us so one wouldn't have to wait for the one before. When it came my turn, I did the course and all the appropriate twists and turns. I thought I'd done everything right, but once done and returning to the benches, rather than pay attention to the kids going through the course after me, the coach again gave me that long, strange look as if he suspected something. If he did, I never found out about it, though at the same time I was left wondering about those two occasions.

The final side note concerning school itself was from the tail end of the school year. Between classes I went to my locker one day to exchange books only to find the padlock cut off, apparently with a bolt cutter, and my locker ransacked. I went straight to the office to report it and they told me they already knew... And yet hadn't let me know? I asked about the details but they wouldn't tell me anything beyond they already knew and it had been taken care of. Again, it had been taken care of yet my padlock was destroyed and my locker in disarray? I wasn't feeling very taken care of. I asked to see the Principal.

The Principal had been the new Vice Principal when I had joined the school in first grade. As the elementary wing had its own main office that was no longer used as such, it was provided to him as his office. Over my elementary school years, I had often seen him in the hallway and nodded respectfully to him and occasionally said ''Hi'' when passing by him on my own. By around seventh grade the Principal retired and the Vice Principal moved up the ladder. Given my years of seeing him and saying ''Hi'' from time to time, I felt like I knew him and as such, I was comfortable requesting to talk to him even though I was a lowly student.

The office staff was startled by this request and went into his office to talk to him, then the secretary emerged and said I could see him first thing the following morning to talk about it. I did show up and met with him at the appointed time. I told him of the locker incident, he already knew and wanted to know what I had wanted. I asked for some details and he explained that a student said he had locked himself out of his locker and asked the shop teacher to borrow the bolt cutters. The shop teacher let him and they didn't realize he had used it for my locker until after the fact. He wasn't going to say who the student was, but assured me it was taken care of. Was there anything else? I recommended that in the future they verify who's locker it is before allowing the bolt cutters to be used. He agreed and assured me that a policy had now been put in place to guard against that happening again. I also mentioned that I had not been informed of the incident, just went to my locker to discover it for myself; I recommend that for something like this the student should be notified once the office staff finds out. He agreed it had been an oversight and they would add that to their procedures. Then I pointed out that I was out of a padlock and asked if the school would be reimbursing me for it. The Principal thought about this for a bit, then said I could use one of the standard issue school padlocks without placing a deposit for it. While it didn't make the situation whole, as technically the school padlock would only be a loaner till the end of the term, I agreed to that as the Principal had shown me the respect of meeting with me to discuss the issue. The meeting ended and I felt it had gone very well. As the only stutter in school, it was a given that I might be shown less than full respect, but he had left me feeling fully respected. I like to think that this encounter with him, showing that I had a thoughtful side and could discuss issues as an adult, was one of the contributing reasons why he let me keep the 'Intro To Algebra' class card for my coming high school year, against the recommendations of the adviser. Ultimately I will never know for sure.

At the branch grocery store, it turned out, not only was I no longer in charge of the beer case and stocking its shelves, but I was also no longer allowed to bag groceries or be the temporary relief cashier. It was felt those activities were too visible through the large glass windows at the front of the store and I ''might be seen by somebody.'' I guess the fear was the State Labor Inspector would be minding his own business, driving by on the street, glimpse me through the window working at the store, and slam on his brakes to file a report...? After four years of working at the store, starting out wrapping meat and produce and working my way up to stocker and relief cashier, I was increasingly dispirited by now being curtailed and hidden away in my fifth year. By the end of eighth grade, I had phased-out working at the grocery store and subsisted on my Summer lawn mowing income at the meat cutter's house. This left me with more free time during the Summer days and I spent many of them visiting my new friend Luke and often taking bike rides with him around the more rural south end of town.

As fate would have it, the lawn mowing job came to a surprise end by the middle of that August. I don't know why or what happened, I just know that my mother was the one to tell me and she scrambled to find me another lawn mowing job to replace it, I guess in fear that I might start showing up at the store again on Sundays and cramp her and the store owner's activities. I was to now handle the lawn at a retired couple's home. They kept a larger area mowed than the meat cutter had, but their lawn was proper grass, not a mix of wild grass and cut back hay. The husband had reached the point where he had become too frail to continue mowing it himself using his riding mower and spent the first week teaching me how to use the mower and showing me the cut pattern he had been using over the years. A riding mower was a nice change of pace and saved me from the excessive sweat I was getting that summer doing the meat cutter's yard using a walk behind mower while wearing the ACE bandage around my chest. But this new job only lasted a month as the husband died early into September and his widow only had me mow the yard a final time two weeks later to prepare for the Fall season.

My mother needn't have feared, though, as I had gotten use to not working at the store on Sundays during the previous year's fall and winter breaks from mowing. With neither the income from working at the grocery store or from mowing, I started to use the money I had saved up at the bank in the previous three years for my spending money during my last year living at the apartment.

During my eighth grade year, my not as older brother had worn out his welcome living with my eldest brother and his girl friend. Mother explained that my eldest brother had moved to a smaller apartment that didn't have a spare bedroom as a hint that my not as older brother wouldn't be able to join them at the new apartment. For whatever reason, the split came. My not as older brother again returned to living with my father at the family home, though this time, he decided not to move back into the bedroom that had originally been my eldest brother's, the one he had moved into after my eldest brother had left. He got himself a used, larger bed and moved into the empty bedroom that had originally been my sister's and then my mother's for the three years my parents had slept apart while in the same house. My own bedroom at the family home remained the bedroom I had inherited from my not as older brother years earlier and still used it twice a week when I'd stay over with my father on his days off. Though, without mother living there to tend to it, my sheets were getting a bit gamey and the room a bit dusty. I would have to learn how to wash my own stuff and clean house, I feared.

My not as older brother returned to working at the main grocery store, though this time, rather than save up money for another term at College, he decided to buy a car and plan a permanent move out west. As the job prospects in the rural west near my sister had turned out a bit thin, he decided this time to move to a place that was sure to have plenty of jobs, yet be near plenty of skiing as well: The City Of Denver. As the start of Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Eight came, he packed-up his belongings tightly into his small compact car and drove off. First with a trip through lower Canada, then south to visit my sister, then to Colorado.

His move would turn out to be pivotal to my life.

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The Eights

35

How would I be sized-up in Eighth grade...?

No new friends developed outside of school as my mind was on other things during the summer break of Nineteen Seventy-Seven, and those few friends I had developed earlier had moved away so eighth grade started out with Jonathan, Van, Tim, and frenemy Pete. Just before getting to school on the first day, I decided I needed something more than just pushing out my tummy to get people focused on that rather than the chest area. As a television show, The Incredible Hulk, had become popular in those years, I riffed off of the title and when I saw Pete in the hallway that first day I stopped long enough to mention how I'd gotten a bit fat during the Summer and the kids around town had taken up calling me 'The Incredible Bulk'.

Sure enough, in Pete's hands that nickname spread and I was soon deemed the fat kid in class. Which was oddly successful as another kid, who had been retained at the eighth grade level, was now part of our class. Not only was he larger due to age, but probably weighed as much as two other students put together. Perhaps it was just a case of no kid wanting to dub him the fattest kid in class simply because he could probably crush them without a second thought if he found out. Thus I held the title.

A few weeks after classes started, Van had found a new friend. Luke, it turned out, lived in the same town as the apartment, but he wanted nothing to do with me. Perhaps it was an assumption that I was mentally retarded given my stuttering. But he did join our lunch table and by the end of the calendar year he had warmed up to me, my guess being that seeing me in a different light at lunch showed him that I was much more than just my stutter. By the turn of the year we had become friends and were spending time at each others' houses chatting, playing games, and even cross country skiing in the back woods.

When it came to classes, eighth grade was my most successful year in Middle School as I evenly did well amongst the classes, in fact I spent a good amount of time on the honor roll which might have been a first for me. Homeroom was again science class, but the teacher was more ambivalent about me than the previous year's science teacher who was pleasantly surprised by my performance. Perhaps it was a case of each previous year's experience shaped the following year's expectations. Sixth grade science teacher told the seventh grade teacher I wasn't going to do well and when I did, he was surprised and happy and told eighth grade teacher I'd be great but the eighth grade teacher found me 'okay' when measuring me against his expectations of greatness. Either way, I did well enough in class and I feel I learned the most that was relevant to my adult life during his class, though that's an entirely different book.

Perhaps it was the same expectations game that lead me to what I had for eighth grade math. While the majority my grade level was having algebra, I was in the math class where the students spent the year learning metric and how to convert between English and metric measurements. Similar to science: Had the sixth grade math teacher, being thrilled with my success by the end of her class, heartily recommend me to the seventh grade teacher? Had that teacher instead found me wanting on so many levels that she insisted I not be challenged by anything too tough, like algebra, for eighth grade? Whatever the reason eighth grade math, back to a full-time self study class, was in no way taxing for me and grades were based primarily on test results, not quantity of homework pages turned in. By the end of the first quarter, I decided to pace myself by spending half my time doing work for other classes and half the time on the math work so I wouldn't finish the math book too quickly. By the very beginning of fourth quarter I had still completed the math book early and I spent that quarter with the rest of my time there being an official study hall for other classes.

'Math' class was also my chance to discretely use the bathroom each day. During all my school years, boys bathrooms were devoid of stall doors or privacy dividers for the urinals. Given my new 'situation', using one of these bathrooms was going to be chancy at best. Next to the math room, though, was a small boys bathroom with just the one toilet stall and one urinal in its own stall. Each day, halfway through math class I'd ask to use the bathroom, thus it would likely be empty at that time, and given the greater level of privacy that urinal provided, I was able to do what I had to do in order to pee cleanly while standing.

'Social Studies' class was sort of fun as it mixed in a balance of projects with reports and tests. The two most notable moments for me was the test on World War II and one of the activity projects I couldn't do. For World War II, the teacher told us all the contributing reasons why we'd gotten into World War II: Ties with England, our global interests, etc. So when the test came and we reached the question, ''Why did the United States enter World War II?'' we all put Our ties to England, our global interests, etc. The Social Studies teacher was horrified that all but two of us had gotten the question wrong and demanded that we take the test over the very next day and told us to think about our answer on that question before filling it in. But as she had quite clearly taught us about our ties to England, our global interests, etc., that's the answer we gave except for a couple more of us who put down the correct answer this time. The Social Studies teacher was again stunned and spent the following day berating us on how could we not know about ''Pearl Harbor''? Apparently it hadn't occurred to her that our generation was so far removed from the event that it was no longer common knowledge that kids chatted about and so she hadn't taught it. But rather than realize that, her rant boarded on her wondering about why we would all conspire to choose to give the same wrong answer on the test. Why had we done that? Why had we done that? Those brave students who raised their hands to point out that she had only told us of our ties to England, our global interests, etc. were shot down with a flare of anger because everyone knew of Pearl Harbor!!!

The project I couldn't do was a project I was willing and wanted to do. It was to get with one of your parents and do something for the community, like clean-up trash by the side of the road, tend some trails in the woods and so on. It was a pass/fail project and all that was needed was a statement from your parent that 'we' had done it. Mother felt she had enough things on her plate and felt dad should do it, dad felt since I only spent two days a week with him, it was mother's responsibility and I knew I was screwed. As the three weeks to get this project done came and went, I repeatedly went to the teacher asking if there was something I could do for the school or in her classroom, but she assured me it was a project for me and a parent. By the third week I heard that some leeway was going to be given and the coach would be taking a few kids to paint the dugout buildings at a nearby, non-school, ball field. Once I heard of this, I ran to see the coach but he already had enough kids. The three weeks were up and I was given a letter that I was to give to my parents about how I had let myself and the community down by not doing this project and I would have had an 'A' for the quarter except for not having done this project. As with all other paperwork from school over the years, neither of my parents took any interest.

This year was my favorite English class. Unlike the rest of the eighth grade students, we had the new teacher. She was just out of College and had a limited schedule for this year to break her in before she took over eighth grade English full-time next year. As a result she was full of enthusiasm and lacked any of the jaded frustration that established teachers gained as the years ground on.

This would not be a self study class, but more like a talk show where topics about the English language would be brought to us and discussed and debated, then a page or two of homework where we were to apply what we had learned. This was when I learned that most words weren't just arbitrary sounds chosen to mean something, but things that meant something and over time came to mean something else. An example was: Did you know that 'testify' in olden times meant that if a man was found to have been lying when giving a sworn statement, he would be castrated as his punishment? That's why the whole concept of women 'testifying' was laughable because they literally had nothing to lose if caught lying. Over time the meaning of testify had become unlinked from the punishment and instead became the term for any sworn statement verbally made, thus people no longer understood why women couldn't testify.

One day she had us do a two page essay for homework that night and the following day taught us about rough drafts by telling us that what we had written last night was our rough draft and we were to do a final copy from it in class using a pen. As I had grown to be a one draft writer over the years given the pain and effort involved, I had done my homework in pen. I gauged the amount of time doing a new draft would take versus the time we had in class and I cheated; I pulled out my pencil and instead wrote a page and a half 'rough draft'. Comparing it to my 'final copy' I would copy much of it, but leave out a sentence here and there, use smaller words in pencil for the more colorful words already in my pen draft, then put a line through them to make it seem like I had thought better of those words. Once done, the pencil page I wrote in class had all of the things she expected to see as we reconsidered our rough draft in order to make our final copy. We turned in both drafts of our work and to my horror, she felt the need to point mine out in class the next day. It turned out I had been so successful, at making the paper I did in class look so perfectly like what she wanted to see us do to our rough drafts, that she had been convinced that I actually had done the pencil draft first and had learned so much from it that it made my pen draft so great! She thought there was much the rest of the class could learn from me... And I just wanted to crawl under my desk and hide, but instead fought to keep a poker face that didn't give any hints of my deception.

For the third quarter, the English teachers and Social Studies teacher had concluded that we had never been taught how to write a proper term paper. So they decided to do a joint term paper between their classes, our Social Studies teacher would help us each pick a topic and narrow its focus while providing us time at the library to research. Our English teachers would explain to us the process of finding books and looking-up periodicals at the library and taking notes from them without plagiarizing. They would then teach us how to take those resulting note cards and assemble them into a chapter based grouping and how to keep track of those points as footnotes referencing each point's source. Being an astronaut want-to-be, I chose to write my paper on the newest NASA craft, the Space Shuttle, as my topic.

I loved learning this report writing process and was on track as we reached the outlining stage to sort out our chapters. Then we were told it was time to write our rough drafts... I actually started to write a rough draft in pencil for a couple of pages before I realized the brick wall lying ahead of me. As we had been told that the term paper would be a major portion of both our Social Studies and English grade for the quarter, I knew I couldn't duck it to avoid the expanse of hand written material I'd have to do. So, as it didn't need to be turned in, I chucked the whole idea of doing a rough draft and started on my pen draft. Given how slowly I wrote, it gave me plenty of time to think out my words ahead of time, debate them, and chose a better way of expressing my point as I reached the period of the preceding sentence. Then I'd start writing the sentence I'd been thinking so much about while reflecting on what should follow. Still, two weeks later as the Friday deadline loomed, I realized I still didn't have enough time to finish. We had been told that each day a term paper was late would be a letter grade off. By Wednesday I settled on a plan and feigned being sick Friday morning when the paper was due and stayed home from school. This not only gave me Friday to continue writing, but the whole weekend as well.

Grueling through the weekend, I had reached the 'summary' potion of the paper by Sunday night and debated what to do. I thought a second sick day would make it too obvious what I was doing. As one sick day would save me from losing a letter grade on the paper, would two days still work for that? I thought there was a good chance I could finish the paper during my spare time at school during Monday, so I went in. But since Monday English and Social Studies classes had other things to focus on, I couldn't use that time. Even with skipping lunch, I ended up only having about two hours more to work on the paper and the summary wasn't yet done. But if I turned it in before going home at the end of the day, I wouldn't get that letter grade off. As it turned out that Monday was the night that there was a late bus going to the apartment town; I stayed at school after hours and continued on the paper and was a couple paragraphs shy of finishing when it was time to catch the late bus. Pondering if the missing last few paragraphs would mean the loss of more than a letter grade, I gave in and took the paper home with me that night to finish it and have it perfect before I turned it in the following morning. By the end of the week, the graded term papers were given back to us. Sure enough, not only had my paper achieved a great grade, but both the Social Studies and English teachers had written notes stating what a shame it was that it lost a letter grade for being a day late. But to me, that meant I had made the right decision playing sick to insure I'd only get one letter grade off and not two or three...

The end of the school year came and the good news was all the Honor Roll students would be going to the advance science studies track at High School and I was on the Honor Roll! And yet, I wasn't on the resulting advanced studies student list. I went to the science teacher and asked why, he explained to me that there was limited room and they had already gone over their student count for that track. When I asked why I had been the one bumped and not someone else, he explained that if I thought about it, I would understand why it was me and not someone else. I did think about it and later told him I didn't know what it was and wanted to be included with the advanced studies group. He said it wasn't going to happen and as for what it was about me, he assured me it was something obvious about me and I should realize what that was. To this day, I don't know what it was, though if it was something obvious about me that pretty much narrowed it down to either my mixed race background or my stuttering.

To prepare for the first year of High School, we students would be going to a room at the end of eighth grade to select cards with class names and time periods on them. These cards would then be used to create our personal curriculum for Freshman year. Those on the Honor Roll would have first pick as it was a first come, first serve basis and once the cards for one class were gone, so were the seats available. Being on the honor roll, in my case, meant I could go in with the first group of non-honor rolls students. I glanced around at what was available. English was already a full year class so there was no choice there other than what time of day to take. We were to have a year's worth of Social Studies made-up of a half year class and two quarter year classes of our choice. Science had to be a full year, but we could pick from two non-advanced studies choices. With spare time during our day, we could pick up two elective courses so I took Wood Shop and various specialty gym classes that wouldn't require changing clothes.

Then came math: Math had to be a full year choice as well, the advanced studies students had already cleared out the 'Advanced Algebra' cards leaving 'Intro To Algebra', 'Basic Math', and 'Math For Home'. I took a card for 'Intro To Algebra' and the adviser behind the table told me I couldn't take that one and had to put it back and chose from the other two; 'Math For Home' would be a good choice for me he said. I kept the 'Intro To Algebra' card tightly in my hand as I circulated the room one more time to see if I wanted to reconsider my other choices. The adviser from the math table got up and chased after me demanding I give the 'Intro To Algebra' card back to him. I didn't and ignored him as I glanced over the other tables, then made my way to get in line with the other students to turn in our cards. The math adviser went straight to the Principal standing in the room and talked to him heatedly and pointed at me. This caused the Vice Principal to join them and the three huddled together in discussion with continued furtive glances in my direction. When I reached the front of the line, the staff member accepting the cards had become aware of the kerfuffle and rather than taking the cards from my hand, looked to the three, instead. After a moment, the Principal nodded and the staff member took my cards as I had them, no changes were made and my Freshman year was locked in.

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Uniform

34 

Once my mother had gotten comfortable telling degrading stories about me to my face, this soon meant she was comfortable saying them to any friend I might have visit. By the end of Nineteen Seventy-Six, she started telling a story of the time she dislocated her knee soon after moving to the family home. This happened when she was in the yard and fell to the ground and found she couldn't get back up. I was with her, she said, around two or three years old, and the rest of the family were away at a game. In response to her being stranded and in pain, she told me I picked up rocks and threw them at her.

Now this story had something to it that the other stories she would tell didn't: Physical evidence. She had kept the ACE bandage once used to wrap-up her relocated knee in the medicine cabinet at the family home, and it was one of the things she had brought with us during the move and put it into the apartment's medicine cabinet. I remember when I was younger seeing it in the family home and one day asking her what it was. She told me it was the bandage used to wrap-up her knee after it was dislocated, but she didn't tell me any details at that time.

By early the next calendar year, she had started telling this story to any friend I would bring over. This was exasperating but I didn't know what I could do about it. I couldn't call her a liar because I didn't know if it was a lie or not, but at the same time I had grown up hearing her tell bogus stories about me to other people in the next room, let alone derogatory stories about other people to me that I had doubts about. Then the solution occurred to me, she had a small brown birthmark on her forehead. When she would tell the story to my friends in the future, I would seem to acknowledge the story by saying, ''That's how she got that bruise on her forehead.'' Mother seemed befuddled by that response, but at the same time didn't know what to do beyond giving me a glare. And it was effective for my friends as they didn't know if that was another detail to the story that she had told me privately and if so, how could she still have a bruise after so many years? A grain of salt was added to the story in their minds.

The morning after I told mother of the strange thing that was happening to me, I found that ACE bandage on my bed. I picked it up, wondering why it was there and asked mom. She said, ''It's for...'' and she motioned toward her chest. It took me a moment to guess what she meant, then a longer time trying to figure out how to use it. Wrapped around my budding breasts it did help with the pointiness and chaffing, but not as much with the bulging.

Along with the breasts, my hips had started to fill out and I was having problems pulling on my pants over them. As it was normal to need larger clothes as one grew up, this didn't cause any concern when I said I needed new pants. We went out and looked for some and I found a problem. Guy pants are largely the same size from hip to waist, girls' taper inwards from the hip to the waist as the waist is usually smaller. By getting guy pants that made it past my hips, there was a lot of loose space between my mid section and the waistband. This would let the pants slide off, not an ideal situation, but if I got a pair too tight on the hips that might show more of them than I felt was good. I got the larger pairs of pants and solved the sliding-off problem by having one or both hands in my pockets when walking. While it looked casual, it was, actually, so I could hold up my pants.

The following week, I was at the family home for the mid-week father visit and noticed the various bits of army equipment leftovers that he kept on shelves at the top of the basement stairs. Looking it over, I caught a glimpse of a belt. Unlike typical belts with holes, this was a continuous band of woven material without holes but with a pinching clasp allowing the belt to be set to any length needed. This was perfect for my needs and I took it and used it on my pants. While it worked, it gave the waist a draw-string bag look, but this was easily solved by no longer having my tee-shirts tucked into the pants.

When it came time to go back to school for eighth grade, I spent the week before looking in the mirrored sliding doors of the apartment closet. Earlier I had found my baggiest tee-shirts had been the ones with pockets sown on the left side and that leaning forward for pictures let the material drape and hide the chest-level bulges. While I could lean forward sitting at school desks, I couldn't very well walk down the school hallways while leaning forward all the time. Then I realized how flexible shoulders are and I could roll mine forward, this pulled the material from my chest and it draped to a flat surface.

Still, this looked rather dorky with my arms hanging before me like this and I put them in my pockets. This kind of worked as it looked like my shoulders were rolled forward so I could reach my pockets. Yet with both hands in my pockets it still looked a little funny. Also, how was I going to carry my books? One hand out, I grabbed my new notebook folder for the year and held it, first to my hip, but that didn't allow my shoulder to be rolled forward enough, so I held the notebook in front of my pants pocket. That worked, but I realized it would be better to always use the right hand for this as holding the books allowed for my shoulder to be rolled forward more than if I had a hand in a pocket. With the left, if the draped shirt should blow back as I walked, the shirt pocket would distract from any bulge that might touch from underneath.

Everything seemed set for my return to school look, but the draped, hanging shirt front still seemed to stick out as people's shirts normally touch the front of their body. The final touch was when I remembered back to second grade and the twin girls at lunch with one of them bulging out her tummy in order to pretend she was pregnant. If I bulged out my stomach, it would make contact with the lower half of the shirt and I could even use that as another distraction by peoples eyes noticing it rather than anything that might be going on at chest level. But how to do it?

I could loosen my stomach muscles, but that didn't cause much of a bulging tummy; I needed to push it out as well as loosen the muscles. I realized that as I breathed in the chest filled and expanded, but if I tightened my chest, the diaphragm made the abdomen push out instead. And I had it! While having my diaphragm lowered like this all the time reduced the amount I could breath in and out, it wasn't as if I'd be panting walking up and down the halls at school.

Staring in the mirror to check out the final look, I felt this could work.

It became the uniform for the next decade of my life.

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