Transitioning

49

As the sophomore school year rolled to a close, more and more of my friends reached sixteen. They got to take the High School's Drivers' Education class and then get their drivers licenses. With my birthday in August, I was out of luck and would have to wait until the next school year. But what really surprised me was how I felt when some of my friends, Pete and Van, picked-up jobs at the main grocery store: Annoyed. After all I was the one who had first started working at the chain, now featuring a third store, and yet my friends were the first ones to legally have a place there. Still, I stuffed the feelings down as I understood the reasons... That was until Van's year-younger brother got a job; his parents had filled-out some special paperwork to allow it.

That was that and as my bank account had been slowly dwindling over the past year and a half down to the low double digits, I went to the store owner, Joe, and asked what I would need to do to get a job at the main store once I returned from summer break. He said I could let them know once I was back. I thanked him and for the trip back to Colorado I pulled out the majority of my remaining bank funds from the money machine knowing I'd be replenishing it the following Fall.

I packed my one suitcase worth of clothes back into their one suitcase, left my winter jacket behind and flew out to Colorado. While my stuttering had faded a bit over my Sophomore year, it flared again when my mother picked me up at the airport and I had to struggle to say any words. As a result she did most of the talking. During the Spring, my not as older brother had joined the Air Force and left the state. She gave me an involved story as to why this happened, but my brother later told me it was a crock of bull. She, herself, had moved out of the one bedroom apartment and bought a mobile home to the extreme east side of town. It had a living area, combination dining room/kitchen space, two smaller bedrooms, a bathroom and the master bedroom at the back. I would have the second of the smaller bedrooms.

To my surprise, mother had actually kept some of my stuff while she lived at the single bedroom apartment as it was now set-up in my new room. This included the modular shelves, my chest of drawers from the first apartment, a couple of models I had made as a kid and the few record albums and record player I'd collected during the apartment years and our first Summer in Colorado. I guess these must have been in storage or something when she had told me she'd gotten rid of them. But gone was the custom mattress and box spring set that mother had ordered for me to entice me to stay in Colorado for my sophomore school year, it had been replaced by a standard sized twin bed. This bedroom also included the spare club chair from the living room set as it had at the first apartment, but in the eight foot by eight foot bedroom, it made everything feel a bit snug; yet unlike returning to the family home where my bedroom and its contents had been truly discarded, it was nice to come to a bedroom that looked somewhat familiar even if different.

Mother was tiffed that I had been wearing tattered clothes when I got off the plane and when I told her I was wearing the best clothes I had, she found that hard to believe and had me open up my suitcase. It was then she realized that I had lived the past year with just this one bag of clothes and she was pissed. She took me out to get some new clothes, but called up dad to inform him that, as the primary parent, it was his duty to supply me with clothes during the year, not hers. What she said did the trick as soon after I arrived back to New England at the end of Summer, dad took me straight out to fill up my closet with enough new clothes to last me the next few years...!

While I liked her new digs, there was a problem with its location for me, it was six miles away from the Radio Shack I went to. And as the mobile home was significantly further away from where my mother worked, she couldn't drive out and pick me up during her lunch hour to take me there. But I discovered that she had also saved the bicycle she had gotten me for my twelfth birthday so I came up with the plan where I would ride the bicycle to the Radio Shack around lunchtime, a mostly downhill trip, and then she would pick me up on her way home from work. She wasn't thrilled with the idea given her dislike of the traffic, but we found a series of side roads that would get me there and stopped at the nearby K Mart to buy a bicycle rack that could be temporarily mounted on the back of her car.

And thus I was once again doing my Monday-Wednesday-Friday visits to Ralph's Radio Shack to use the display computer. Though by this time, the second computer on display at a pillar was gone and the computer with the display desk at the window had been moved to the center of the store in its place. During my time away, this computer had been enhanced with the expansion interface, giving it an unimaginable thirty-two kilobytes of memory and two floppy drives. It still had the cassette player, which I needed for my stuff, and also had a printer, which I was discouraged from using as that cost money in ink and paper.

Ralph was happy to see me and let me continue using the store's computer and, given the slightly longer time I spent there on my days, I started to treat it like a job: I would work for a couple hours on my code and exploring the reaches of the upgraded machine, take a ten minute break by walking to the grocery store next door and buying a snack, then returning to the Radio Shack till the end of the day. He was impressed by the number of new games I'd come up with and coded while I was away and he even started using me as part of his sales pitches, noting that the computer was so simple given a kid could use it. Or sometimes customers would watch me for a bit without first talking to Ralph or his assistant, and ask me about the machine and then I'd do my own little sales job, pointing out the features the computer had and noting the various things it could be used for.

And of course, there was Jeff, who I once again got to visit, though this time it was more of a once every weekend affair given the longer distances mother would have to drive me. While Jeff was willing to occasionally pick me up for a visit, mother felt that was inappropriate for some reason and wanted to make sure I arrived at Jeff's house and was leaving Jeff's house with her own eyes. As the Radio Shack computer now had floppy drives and Jeff had floppy drives, it made sense for me to get my first pack of disks for the huge speed improvement it provided.

Jeff had continued to collect more games while I had been back in New England and two names stood out: Leo Christopherson and Big Five Software. Both of these had brought Trash-80 games to a whole new level by using 'machine code', the most elementary code level of the computer where the very bytes of a program directly controlled the computer, rather than having to be interactively translated from a text based code into actions by the computer. Big Five's games were pure machine code which made them this tantalizing mystery where I could see the results, but not how they were put together. Leo Christopherson's work was a hybrid of BASIC and machine code, where he hid the machine code bytes as strings of text embedded in the program, then fooled the program to execute the 'string of text' as if each was a small machine program. Using this method, he could code the guts of his games in easy BASIC, but then call the bits of machine code when something fast or flashy needed to be done.

Both of these coders also incorporated sound in the their games! They did this by tricking the computer's built in cassette interface from sending data to the recorder to instead send sound effects or beepy music. Radio Shack cassette recorders had this thing that if you pressed down the wrong combination of buttons, it would send any data sent to it out the built-in speaker. With other cassette recorders you would need to use an ear piece or external speaker plugged into the ear phone jack of the recorder to hear the sounds.

I knew I'd truly have to work my ass off to approach the level of these guys during the coming school year!

Oh, yes, what non-computer things did I do that Summer in Colorado...? I'm drawing a blank, but I'm sure my mother and I did something touristy once or twice and we probably made a trip up North to visit my sister. The complete absence of any non-computer memory of that Summer shows how consumed I had become with the burgeoning digital world.

When I arrived at Radio Shack for the start of August, I settled down to do my work. Ralph's assistant was there as well as some other older guy with a white beard, I assumed Ralph was away for the afternoon or just out for lunch. After most of the first hour, Ralph's assistant pulled me aside and quietly told me that Ralph had been transferred to a different store and the new guy in charge was incensed that I had come in and started using the computer as if I had always done that. While he and I knew I had been, the assistant couldn't tell that to the new manager without possibly getting Ralph into trouble, so I was to go and if asked I was supposed to say I hadn't known any better...

My days using the local Radio Shacks' computer was abruptly over. I grabbed my snack early and sat outside of the Radio Shack baking in the heat next to my bike as I expected I'd have to wait for the next three and a half hours until mother came to pick me up. Then about a half hour later I happened to notice Jeff's wife had come to get some stuff at the grocery store. I flagged her down and told her of the Radio Shack situation and asked if Jeff was home and I could join him? He wasn't but she said I could come over and use his computer for the rest of the afternoon. I thanked her and we figured out how to squeeze enough of my bicycle into the compact car's trunk so we could get to their place. Once there I called my mother to let her know of the change in plans and she agreed I could stay there and she'd pick me up once she was done with work.

Without being able to fill-up my weeks with Radio Shack visits, August became a bit of a boring month. So I decided to work on a problem that Pete had noted to me by the end of May and I had kept it in the back of my mind ever since: He noticed that my voice hadn't changed. As boys reached puberty, the first noticeable sign was often the cracking of their voice, and then some whiskers some months down the road once their new voice solidified. Yet, my voice hadn't changed at all and I realized this might be a problem.

As a kid I had automatically parroted voices that I had heard, such as from Sesame Street, cartoons, even music. I don't know why, but I just naturally did and my friends at school found it a fun trick. In the case of music, if I sang along, without thinking I would sing in my best approximation of the original vocalist's voice. As a result of years of exposure through my siblings records, I had gotten down a pretty good impression of each of the Beatles. I didn't realize this was a problem until we would have elementary school functions where we kids were to learn and perform some Christmas songs as a chorus. I assumed they would first play a recording of the song and then I'd try to mimic the voice but, no, they were common Christmas songs and we were to just sing them together using our own voices. Not having a clue how to sing sounding like myself, I decided to just move my lips during the first go through and listen to the combined sound of my classmates' voices. Then I had my anchor and for the rest of practice and the show itself, I sang in the best approximation of my combined classmates' voices as I could do.

So with free time on my hands during my last month of Summer, I thought I'd figure out what to do with my voice. Oddly enough, trying to come up with a voice on my own just sounded like a girl trying to sound like a guy. I thought this might actually be worse than staying with my own boyish voice. Then while watching a variety show, they had on the Oak Ridge boys and I noticed how, when doing the lowest notes, their bass singer would tuck his chin down to his chest. I played with doing this a few times and stumbled upon how it worked: Squeezing down like this constricted the throat and made the vocal chords looser, thus producing a deeper tone. While the sound worked, again, I'd look kinda suspicious if I spent all my time talking in school with my head tucked down. So I spent time with my head tucked and time with it not to feel how the throat felt different. With practice, I then learned how to tighten the muscles around my throat to loosen the chords rather than tucking in my chin. It worked! And I could now return to school with a deeper voice. I couldn't start doing it during my last days in Colorado as the change would be sudden and, again, suspicious. But I could start doing it once I got off the plane as people could imagine my voice had changed over the course of the summer months. Or so I thought.

For my other activity, I could only hand write so much code into notebooks before I'd get too back logged in trying it out. Jeff was nice enough to let me spend longer weekend days at his home trying out my code rather than him showing off other games he'd found. But I only ended up completing one final game before the month came to an end. When mother asked if there was anything special I'd like to do before I left back to New England, I told her I'd like to see Ralph again. We went to the original Radio Shack and I asked the assistant if he knew where Ralph had been transferred to? It was a store at the west side of town and mother was nice enough to drive me all the way there where I briefly said, ''Hello,'' to Ralph; I thanked him for the past years of letting me use the other Radio Shack's computer during my school breaks and then finished-up by showing off my latest creation, a cityscape game with buildings on fire and the helicopter you flew to drop water on it and stop the fire from spreading. With the necessary stops to fill-up with more water, eventually one could put it out if they were lucky. He was very impressed.

On the flight back, I sat next to a nice young woman who chatted with me during the flight to discover we were going to the same neck of New England, we talked of the places we knew in common and that I'd be working at the grocery store. As we approached Logan airport, we agreed to bump into each other in the coming weeks and visit. I never saw her again.

By the time the flight landed at Boston, I found I couldn't do it: The deeper voice that is. For some reason doing a voice for fun was okay, but the thought of intentionally trying to fool people into thinking I had a deeper voice weighed on my soul. Strapping down my breasts hadn't struck me in this way as, in truth, it was to retain my original appearance as much as possible when interacting with people. But using a 'put on' voice with the intent of misleading my friends that my voice had changed was just something I couldn't bring myself to do. So I got off the plane with the voice I had and I never regretted that decision.

No surprises greeted me when getting back to the house. I spent the traditional day-after at Jonathan's home showing off all the work I had done and other software I'd gotten, the only difference was he picked me up at my house, himself, which was the first time I'd ridden in a car with a friend driving. That weekend I went to the main grocery store to see Joe and let him know I was back. He asked how my mother was doing, and then said I could start the following Saturday, coming in a half hour before the store opened.

And thus began the, then, greatest year of my life.

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