Forgotten

64

Out of the blue during the third quarter I was called to the high school office. Had I done something wrong? Was there a family emergency? No, it was a note that I was to meet with Dr. Drysdale of Dartmouth College who wanted to see me, including a phone number, an address, and a date & time. Stunned, I had no idea what to make of it. Having recently read a Larry Niven story called 'Dry Run', in part about making a trip ahead of the time just to make sure a planned route would work, I decided to make the long drive to Dartmouth the preceding Sunday to make sure I could find the address and office.

I eventually found it and it turned out he was with the computer science wing. Had he heard about me from my computer fair touring days in my Sophomore and Junior years? Had my absent mentor Zack Hatch bumped into him during his sabbatical and dropped my name? Or had Dr. Drysdale recently bought a Trash-80 and heard I was the one to talk to about setting it up? This little mystery gained my attention at a time when very little caught my interest.

While my first quarter had respectable grades amongst the blank slots from withdrawn classes, the second quarter I only had a couple of 'D's to break-up the string of 'F's. I hadn't even thought to use the trick of withdrawing from a class before the grades were in to avoid the 'F's. Having the first period of the day free had worked out so well for me in the previous quarter that once my two quarter last period of the day class ended, I kept that period free as well for the third and fourth quarters allowing me to show up to school late and leave early. Being able to leave early was going to be a good thing as I'd need the extra hour to get to the Dartmouth appointment from the school as it had been scheduled for a weekday.

Arriving at the College, I discovered finding a parking space during regular hours much harder than during off hours, but I fortunately found one and got to his office only a few minutes late. I introduced myself and he introduced himself and told me who he was. I wondered what the appointment was about and it turned out he wasn't so sure either... So a third party had made the appointment and hadn't thought to let either of us know why? He asked if I had interest in computers, which I told him I did and so he warmed-up the terminal in his office. He asked how my interest had started and I mentioned how it began with typing in games from magazines and by the next year I was writing my own. This prompted him to bring up the College's local version of 'Colossal Cave', a text based adventure game consisting of text descriptions with the player able to type in simple directions such as 'go north' or 'take ax'. Having played more advanced variations on my home computer, it was interesting, but the College's version didn't catch my attention.

Dr. Drysdale asked me about some terminology, which I was unfamiliar with and we seemed to have come to an impasse as what to talk about. Then it occurred to me that maybe I should show him some of my code and asked if I could make a follow-up appointment with him and bring my computer with me so I could show him what I could write. He agreed and I had little doubt that once he saw my magnum opus game, 'Star Quest', he would be duly impressed. While it still lacked a climactic ending, all of the flashy graphics along the way should make 'Colossal Cave' pale in comparison!

Appointment made, the following week I loaded up my computer into my dad's car in the morning before going to school. I whiled-away the school day with anticipation, a great improvement for me versus staring at the floor. And I was even able to get out of my second to last period class early just to provide me that extra time to get to Dartmouth and set-up my computer. The drive went by fast and I arrived; leaving my twenty-five hundred dollar computer in the car hidden under a blanket to be safe, I went to his office. A quick greeting and I asked where I could set-up the computer and he took me down to the garden level staff lounge and said I could set it up there. He'd be going to a quick meeting but would be back within the hour. That sounded great and I went out to the car.

I brought in the computer piece by piece and hooked it all together, then attached the cassette player and began loading the game. Out of paranoia, given that the cassette tape interface was known to be flaky, I brought a second copy of the game on another tape just to be safe. But I didn't need it. Having arrived just before four thirty, I was all set-up with the program loaded into the computer's memory and ready to show-off by four forty-five. I knew I was going to impress Dr. Drysdale when he got back.

All original code, my program was replete with algorithms containing: Inter-language calls, time slicing routines, real time graphics, data compression logic, constrained data generation, line algorithms, and a universal user input routine with program state dependent data parsing. My only regret was I wouldn't be able to show the doctor the Bubble Sorting technique I'd come up with to provide my school its random number list in the previous year.

Some professionals in the computer field had made their reputations, in part, on originating one of these logical techniques apiece. The problem was I didn't know that as I was unaware there were books on computer programming beyond the Trash 80 Level I BASIC manual. All other books I had come across had been little more than programming language syntax references. The thing was, I was self taught and thus hadn't realized there was a whole world of computer programming jargon out there that I should know in order to communicate with other people in the computer field.

While I waited for Dr. Drysdale to return, I got to show off my program to a number of Teaching Assistants that came into the lounge, but I think it only totaled around three. I assumed the doctor would arrive by five thirty and when that came and passed, I assumed he was running late and would definitely be there by six o'clock... By six thirty I was starting to feel a little antsy and daringly left my computer unattended in the lounge while I went up a few sets of stairs to check his office. Locked and dark, I realized he might be at the lounge right then and wondering where I was. I flew back down the stairs and reached the room. No one was there. Six thirty spanned to seven fifteen and I asked the last T.A. I saw that evening if they knew where Dr. Drysdale was, he assumed he'd gone home by now. This startled me as I began to wonder if he had forgotten about me after his meeting and simply went home. By seven forty I went up the stairs to check his office again simply because it was the only other place on campus I knew of to look for him.

Once eight o'clock came, I realized he probably wasn't going to show. As the campus was obviously closed for the night and I hadn't a clue where any centralized office might be where I could ask about Dr. Drysdale's location or off campus contact number, I realized I should probably go. Still, I waited until after eight just to be safe and reluctantly disconnected the computer and took the parts to the car. By eight thirty, just over four hours since I'd gotten there, I started my long drive home.

In subsequent days I tried calling his office number but it just rang. Before the days when answering machines were common place, I couldn't just leave a message for him. At my High School I asked if they had some alternative phone number or contact information for him. They didn't have anything beyond the note they had originally given me. Nor did they know who had originally set-up the first meeting with him. I toyed with the idea of just driving back to his office one day and linger by his door until he showed-up at some point but, given the driving distance involved, that seemed like a silly waste of gas.

Surely he would have called me if he had really wanted to see me again, and I concluded that he didn't. Of course, in the days before answer machines were common place, for all I know he had been calling my home time and again to apologize and make an alternative appointment...

But with no one there, there would be no one to answer the phone.

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How Dungeons And Dragons Saved My Life!

63

By December, I could tell there was something up. A number of my friends, Pete and Luke most obviously, were keeping something secret from me. They would talk about it quietly at the cafeteria and then claimed to have no idea what they had been talking about when I'd show-up and ask. Secret get-togethers would be happening with Pete's upperclassman friend, now graduated and just living at home. Eventually, it came out: They had started a D&D group.

Before the age of multiplayer online games, there was Dungeons & Dragons to fill the evenings and weekends of avid hearts. If the 'Go Fish' playing card game were a typical board game, then Dungeons & Dragons would be 'Baccarat'. Okay, I've never really played 'Baccarat' but I'm assuming it's involved. Rather than a board, Dungeons & Dragons uses books, many books. In Nineteen Eighty One, the typical set of books to play totaled around thirty dollars. To have the complete set including all of the various monster manuals and such you were looking at over one hundred dollars. Once you had these books, then you needed the actual games. The books set up the structure of how the game was played and what could be in it, but then the game folders themselves had an adventure your players could go on. At the time these puppies, I think, went from seven dollars to just under twenty dollars a piece. Oh yes, dice! I forgot to mention the dice. Unlike most other dice-based games using six sided dice for all purposes, this game used dice ranging from four sides to twenty sides. A cheap set would put you back under ten dollars, a good set twenty to thirty...

Okay, now are we ready to play?

Luke, Pete and friend were with a couple of the upperclassman's friends and they were apparently having a great time of it, especially on Saturday nights. Once I found out, I wanted in. But nope, the group was too full and the upperclassman back to rolling his eyes with the prospect of me being around. But the word was out and now Van and Jonathan wanted in too. So by the start of Nineteen Eighty-Two, the upperclassman agreed to start a second group on Sundays at Jonathan's house.

Unlike other games where each player had an equal placement and the game flowed forward from there, Dungeons & Dragons required a 'Dungeon Master' through whom the actions of the other players filtered and, the new play to be had, revealed. We started out by spending the first day creating our 'characters' based on high fantasy archetypes, there were so many skills and playing roles to chose from. Did you want to be a magician or a fighter? Did you want to be a human or an elf? There are opportunities and drawbacks to each choice and you needed to find the balance that suited you and fit within your initial allowance of skill points. Always wanting to do everything, I discovered the role of 'Bard', effectively a human role which combined a little bit of many of the other player types, I named him after a Dark Shadows television character.

During this warm-up period, Jonathan, Van and myself were fervently ordering the various initial books needed to play the game from the local book shop or making trips to the capital city to hopefully find them on the shelf. While we could use other people's dice, there was a karma sort of thing about it, and so we'd make trips to the big mall outside the capital city where there was one store with a wide selection of dice and colors, even little dice bags and little playing figures. While playing figures weren't necessary and you could use a pencil eraser to represent yourself during game play, a little pewter guy that appealed to your sense of who your character was truly helped with the immersive quality of play.

With the upperclassman as our guide, we entered our first dungeon the following week. Using graph paper we would be given clues of where our group had entered, say a ten foot by twenty foot room. A description of the place would be read to us out of the game folder and we would have to figure out what the heck we were going to do. Sometimes it was obvious as you enter a room with monsters and then we'd set out our playing figurines in a space representing the place we were at, the Dungeon Master would show where the monster was, using a token of his own, then one by one we'd say what we'd do and roll dice to see if our player could do it. If so, good, if not, at least there were other members of the team with a chance. And the monster would get his strike. With luck, the monster would be dead at the end of several of these 'attack rounds' and your players alive enough that you could heal them when possible, or nurse them along until you found more supplies.

But more fun for me, were the rooms we'd enter that you didn't know what was going on. We'd get a description of the room: Was there a clue to a trap in that description? Was there something valuable that we were over looking? As these questions came to us, we'd ask the Dungeon Master and he may or may not tell us more details based on what he felt we could or couldn't see. Sometimes these disclosures had a level of chance to them and dice would be rolled. Was the door to the next room trapped? A roll of dice, sometimes 'yes', sometimes 'no', and sometimes you couldn't tell. A sense of anticipation would come over us as we would creep around the next corner... And sometimes one of our characters would die. If no one had the magic to bring them back, then the affected player would have to race to create a new character on the side while the rest of the group continued playing. Once assembled and affirmed by the Dungeon Master, the group of characters would 'bump into' this new character already somewhere within the dungeon and they'd join the group after some dubious ribbing by the rest of the group as to whether or not this new fellow could be trusted.

What appealed to me so much with this game was the sense of camaraderie and teamwork necessary amongst the players to get through a full 'Dungeon' over the course of a few weekends; sometimes with evenings spanning into the wee hours of the next day. Where I was feeling progressively alone and abandoned in my real life, this game afforded me the sense that I was not alone, at least for a few hours each week. That connectedness at this dark period of my life, I really believe, saved me from falling into oblivion from the spiral I had been living in during the Fall and early Winter.

After our first Sunday adventure, the upperclassman had found some promise in me and asked if I'd become the new Dungeon Master for the Sunday group. It turned out, once becoming a Dungeon Master one was so busy managing the flow of the game that you couldn't really play it yourself any more. Sure, you could have your own character in with the group, but since you already knew everything that was going to happen you really couldn't discover it for yourself. Your player became relegated to the role of an extra sword for the group when a fight broke out. Given his desire to play and complaints about not being able to participate, I agreed with one condition: That I could join the Saturday night group as a player. Agreed.

Being a Dungeon Master really suited me, not only did it give me that sense of being respected that I had enjoyed in the previous year, but it also gave me reason to pull out my cache of funny voices and devious twists of mind. While I had come to parrot the voices of puppets and cartoon characters in childhood, using such voices on a day to day basis got one strange looks. But applying them in the role of Dungeon Master added to the atmosphere of what the players were encountering. My creative mind helped to add moments of humor to the less challenging points of an unfolding game, yet also let me see opportunities to add to the atmosphere as the characters walked through the map and notice, say, a thread laying on the floor. Was it a trap? Was it a clue? Or had a monster recently darned his socks? Even if it was just a monster having darned his sock, did it give a clue as to what type or size of monster they'd see around the next corner?

The upperclassman seemed to enjoy these little twists I'd toss into the maps he was already familiar with and he soon welcomed me as a -- lower tier -- friend. Going to his house to be tutored on the details of being a Dungeon Master was like going to the fount of wisdom. His bedroom was couched in the peak of his home's roof, resulting in a sloped ceiling; entering his room was like walking into a temple... But it was just his bedroom and he made it clear that he was tolerating me because he really wanted to play for his own fun on Sundays.

The Saturday and Sunday Dungeon & Dragons games lasted for the rest of the school year, providing me a place to gather with friends and feel a sense of connectedness and purpose that was otherwise lacking in my life at the time. Sometimes, when a different playing location was needed, we'd go to my otherwise empty and unused house. Though ultimately, as I was using these games to escape my own circumstances, I would prefer the games to be at other locations whenever possible.

Once the end of the school year came, the upperclassman left to join the army and the moment was gone. While I tried several times in the following years to recreate a Dungeon & Dragons group, they always seemed a pale imitation and never achieved that same level of cohesiveness and belonging as I had found in that first group during a dark period of my life.

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Brain Dead

62

From high to low, when and how would my life bottom out?

I got through the first month of my Senior year of High School pretty intact and if I had been able to pass any test in 'Advanced Math' I may have rebounded and made it through the school year. During that time the 'Civics' teacher had warned us of the up coming military aptitude tests they'd be having us do. He pointed out that while they would say and legally couldn't use the test to come after us for recruitment, that they always did anyhow. How could we find this out for ourselves? When taking the test put down the wrong middle initial, then see how many recruitment fliers and visits you get using that wrong middle initial...! And so we were rounded-up for the military tests in the semi-balcony portion of the auditorium at the end of that week and took them.

Also in the early Fall I went to various Radio Shacks trying to buy the lower case kit by itself so I could install it directly. The majority of the stores said that I could only get it as long as they installed it for an additional fee, but not otherwise. I finally found one at a mall about fifty miles away that would sell it to me plain without questions asked. When it arrived nearly a month later, I pulled out my father's old soldiering set and called my friend Jeff in Colorado and he talked me through the process of installing it as he had installed a third party kit of his own. With the chip in place and jumper wires attached where I thought they should have been, it came time to cut a lead on the circuit board itself that would sever the old uppercase-only video chip from power. Had I gotten anything wrong, I'd not only have no lowercase displayed, but no text displayed on the screen at all. Knife out, I made a gouge in the lead, closed the computer case and tried it out. It worked! Buoyed by this, I went ahead and mail ordered the 'Expansion Interface' and first floppy drive that would bring the computer up to thirty two kilobytes of memory and allow me to get off the frustratingly slow cassette deck. When it arrived, the extra RAM worked fine, the but floppy drive didn't work, it lit up and spun, but no data was read or written with it. I returned it and received a replacement disk drive only to find it had the same problem and the mail order company said that they had found nothing wrong with the drive I returned. My early boost from the lowercase kit had become frustration from having plunked down all that money and only gotten some additional memory for it. Working out the problem with the floppy drive would have to wait until the next time I was in Colorado and my friend Jeff could take a look at it.

I had scored very well on the military exams and sure enough I started getting fliers and invites in the mail to join various armed service branches, all featuring the wrong middle initial of 'Q'. I looked over the application forms I'd gotten and found it interesting that when you reached the 'sex' check boxes, the answers were 'male' and 'a female'. Apparently for men, sex was an adjective, but for women, sex made you a thing in the eyes of the armed services. Intended to be a passive aggressive response to having to take women into the military, rather than referring to women as 'women', the military took up referring to women as 'females', but by fifteen years later women had started referring to themselves that way, as well. When Star Trek: Deep Space Nine came out, they tried to point-out that 'females' was a pejorative, but once another fifteen years had passed, not only had women been routinely calling themselves 'females', men had even started calling to themselves 'males' completely defeating the original intent of the pejorative. After my not responding to their mailed invites in the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-One, I got a recruitment visit at my house. I don't remember if it was one or two guys that showed up, but they were very keen on signing me up. I assured them it wouldn't work out and I wasn't interested. They asked why I thought it wouldn't work out but I just assured them it wouldn't.

With November the first quarter of school had come to an end and I was entering a dark spiral, both emotionally and cognitively. Of the two math classes I dropped, I used one of the empty slots to take additional English classes, one of them with the teacher that I had for my second go around of 'Basic Composition' the year earlier. The other free slot was first period of the morning and I kept that free. I was admiring the wheels of a student who had been coming to school on his moped. He asked if I wanted to buy it. I realized with it and my first period free, I could effectively sleep-in each day and come to school late without impacting my classes. I took him up on it, working out a payment plan that would have it paid off by the end of the calendar year. The rest of the Fall I'd putt along to and from school with the moped and then again once Spring came.

Yet with the payments on the moped, junk food purchases, house bills and exhausting my savings with the unsuccessful computer upgrade, I realized I couldn't make ends meet with my part-time grocery store paycheck. I asked Van if I could borrow some money from him and he agreed. I was paying him back twenty dollars out of each weeks' paycheck and one week when he asked for his twenty, I thought I'd have some fun and say, ''I already paid you.'' Meant to be some teasing to have a little fun, after the first volleys of 'no you hadn't/yes I had' he abruptly said I was right, and I had. This stunned me and I tried to convince him I really hadn't but he was adamant and wouldn't take the money for that week. I would later discover that he had been carrying some guilt concerning me and I guess letting me have the twenty dollars helped relieve some of it.

By the middle of the second quarter the sudden hot spells I'd been having once a day since the end of my Junior year of High School had now started to occur a couple times each day. But as they always went away after a few minutes, I just ignored them as best I could and continued with my day as if nothing was happening.

I had started to completely shut down in class. Any class. I had entered this mental fog and would just stare at the floor as each class went on around me. The English teacher, who had been so impressed with me the previous year, actually blew up at me in class demanding in front of the rest of the students what was wrong with me? This barely got me to look up from the floor to her but I had nothing to say and she went back to teaching the class for the rest of the period. Once done and the rest of the students had left I was lethargically the last one to leave and she came up to me and apologized for having done that, but I told her that she was right, there was something wrong with me and I didn't know what. She didn't know what to say to that as I left.

In 'Civics' class my staring at the floor became the mainstay of my class participation and the only time I perked up was when I heard a student talk about how not all youth culture was against the Reagan era, take for instance the recent Devo song 'It's A Beautiful World'. ''For you,'' I mumbled. Perhaps stunned that I showed any life at all, the teacher asked me to repeat what I had said. I pointed out that the Devo song ended with ''It's a beautiful world for you. It's not for me.''

Toward the end of the class, we were to read Machiavelli's The Prince and Marx's Communist Manifesto. While we could show we had read the books by turning in a written summary, I opted for the verbal one-on-one question & answer to avoid the additional writing by hand. Despite having read them, when the teacher asked me about them my mind was an empty void. When asking about The Prince I could only come up with the vaguest of answers to his questions, prompting him to ask if I had actually read the book. I assured him I had.

He moved on to the Communist Manifesto and started with the question, ''Name a form of socialism mentioned in the Communist Manifesto.''

There had been another form of socialism mentioned in the manifesto? I panicked as I desperately tried to remember what it could have been. But again there was nothing there. After a bit of me staring at the floor while I failed to think, he prompted me again with the question and I apologized with tears in my eyes, ''Other than Communism, I can't think of another one it mentioned, I'm sorry.'' He stopped asking me any more questions at that point and said I could go. I again apologized thinking I had just blown the oral exam. I hadn't realized at the time that Communism was the form of socialism he had been asking for. But he apparently realized from my answer that I was just trying too hard to answer his questions and gave me passing marks for having read both.

By the middle of Winter I had taken up finding empty classrooms just to sit in and stare at the floor, it gave me more privacy than staring at the floor in the study hall area, I guess. But in this open concept school, it wasn't like I couldn't be seen and one time Van found me and asked what I was doing. I just shook my head and lamented how I used to be able to think, I could come up with pages of computer code at a whim and now I couldn't think of a thing. ''I just can't think anymore!'' I repeated with a burst and started to cry. Van put his hand on my back as I slumped over and buried my face in my arms.

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Unraveling

61

With my educational options apparently coming to a dead end, perhaps I really could find fulfillment at the grocery store...?

Returning to the grocery store this year featured its own surprises. Having started at the branch grocery store at the age of eight and working there part-time until I lost interest soon into age fourteen, I had found myself irritated that my friends were getting 'official' jobs at the main grocery store without me. So at age sixteen I joined them and we all worked together for a year. But for this second year, that wouldn't be the case.

It turned out Pete had been invited to move up to an assistant role in the Meat department on Saturdays, with Van being offered a spot with the Produce department. I got to remain up front with the baggers, now featuring some new faces from kids that had just turned sixteen. As the store was going to get their first computer, I comforted my ego by saying that I'd soon be moving up to help with the computer. In the meantime a few more people off the street, as it were, found me up front at the grocery store and asked if I could help them with their computers. I did, but everything always seemed to end up being a variation of my data base program: Not very engaging.

When the computer arrived at the store, it turned out to be a 'turn-key' machine meaning that someone else had set it up and all the store did with it was turn it on, type in some recent sales figures, print a report and turn it off. There was no need, or for that case, no place for me there. With school success slipping out of my fingers, home becoming just an empty shell, and now even work seeming to have no future place for me, I was feeling damn insecure. Jonathan, whose father owned a scientific heavy hardware business and bought his son the first Trash-80 any of us had heard of, occasionally did some work for his father when not otherwise being stuck at home for additional studies at his father's behest. He showed up at the store to pick up some stuff and I bagged it for him and offered to carry it out. This was just an excuse to chat as it was just the one bag as I remember. Then it occurred to me that I could fill the ranks of the bagging crew with a familiar face and told Jonathan he should get a job at the store. He smiled and said he didn't think so, and I tried to sell him on the idea and he turned down the prospect as we reached his car.

''Oh, you're only able to get a job from your father!'' I spurt out, then stood there stunned looking at him. He too, stood there with a mixture of hurt and confusion as he glared back at me. I realized I had just channeled my mother, seeking a way of demeaning someone for what they rightly did in life. I silently handed the bag to Jonathan who took it to place in his car and I turned and walked away. Why didn't I apologize? I should have apologized right there and then. But instead I just kept my distance from Jonathan for a while...

As with all criticism of other people, it just reveals one's own weaknesses: I had been the one dependent on my earlier father figure 'Joe' giving me a job because I knew him already. Who the hell was I to talk? I fancied afterwards that Jonathan 'knew I didn't mean it' and thus I didn't have to tell him. But that was just a load of bull that I consoled myself with and I've been haunted by this incident to this day. The only recompense I could make was to ensure I never said something like that again and the easiest way of doing that was to not even let these ideas enter my mind... And when they did, I'd find my own example within myself that I should address.

In reality I still worked with Pete and Van at the front of the store, bagging, four afternoons a week, so it really wasn't like I had been left without any friends to work with. It was just that Saturday when they seemed to be moving up to in the grocery store hierarchy while I wasn't. A true example in my face of the lack of a future I appeared to have in the eyes of the school. So I skipped over the assistant manager in charge of such things and took advantage of my relationship with Joe to ask him if I could help with the Produce department one Saturday morning. He said I could and so I did, when Van showed up to find me there I said, ''Joe said I could do it today.'' This seemed to throw him for a loop but he acquiesced, after all Joe was the owner and even the assistant manager couldn't over rule him. After doing this for a couple weeks in a row, I arrived the next Saturday and Van had come in early and was already at the Produce department. While I was an ass at times, I wasn't a complete hole and didn't have Joe over rule and put me in his place. Well, definitely not more than once.

By the turn of the calendar year, I relented and Van let me do every other weekend at the Produce department for a while. As Spring came, the Saturday stints for Pete and Van expanded to include Friday evenings as well. With that expanded role, I withdrew from trading Saturdays and just accepted my role stuck with the younger baggers. I labeled myself the 'head bagger' but there was no true difference in my bagging duties versus the other baggers.

In fact coming to work, and even during the rest of my day, life had become an ever increasing labor as my limbs felt heavier and took far more effort to move around. With the longer Friday evenings, there would be a mid-evening break for dinner, and Saturdays had a lunch break, and I spent these just hanging out in the Produce department with Van. We'd chew the fat a bit and I'd sit on a shelf with my feet dangling and notice that if I touched my chin to my chest it would make my toes and legs tingle. Where I had once started working for the grocery chain based on my own initiative and energy, now I was becoming an immovable lazy lump, sneaking longer breaks, choosing cashier stands having those customers with fewer groceries so I wouldn't be needed to carry them out.

If knowing how low one's I.Q. score was might result in them no longer trying, knowing that I had no future had the same result in me.

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Glossing It Over

60

You know, as we go over things in our lives, we sometimes gloss over those little bits that didn't fit the pattern? Such as by the close of my Junior year of High School I was experiencing these sudden 'fevers' toward the end of the school day. The first time this happened, I went to the school nurse and she checked my forehead and found it hot and moist and concluded I had a fever. But since the school day was nearly over anyhow, she didn't see any point in calling my father in to pick me up and take me to the doctor. I agreed, especially since I knew I shouldn't see a doctor in my mother's eyes, and decided to worry about it once I got home on the bus. Yet only about fifteen minutes later the feeling of heat was gone as if nothing had happened, so I ignored it... Until the next day when it happened again. Checking with the school nurse she again felt my hot forehead and again recommended I wait until I got home then talk to my father about seeing a doctor. But strangely enough, the feeling of heat went away again about fifteen minutes later and so I didn't do anything about it. When it happened again the following day, I didn't bother see the nurse about it as I expected it would go away on its own, and it did. So for my last month of Junior year and through the Summer, I just got used to ignoring it...

Another example of 'Glossing It Over' was what happened with 'Spanish II'. After having a great time with 'Spanish I' during my Sophomore year, given its mixed approach to learning the language, I readily signed-up for 'Spanish II' during my Junior year. But with the start of 'Spanish II', the original teacher was gone and a new teacher had taken her place. Probably just out of College herself as she seemed like she could have been a senior at our school given her apparent age, she had a totally different approach to teaching Spanish. Rather than a mix of reading and writing Spanish, listening to tapes & translating, and the occasional task of engaging in low level conversations, the new teacher believed that the only reason to learn a language was to speak it. Gone was the book, gone were the tapes, our grades would be solely based on our verbal fluency. Had I mentioned before that I stuttered?

Without any book of the language to at least use as a reference, class was given over to the teacher talking to us in Spanish and wanting us to answer in turn. As the days went on, she would introduce a new word here and there, but unlike 'Spanish I', there was no discussion of how the words would fit into the gender classifications or how the verbs should be conjugated, we were just to pick that up as we spoke. Toward the end of the first quarter, given my stuttering and the teacher's frustration with it, I knew I was in trouble. The Spanish teacher pulled me aside and pointed out that if I dropped the class before first quarter grades were due, then I wouldn't have the 'F' show up on my report card. I got the hint and dropped 'Spanish II' which gave me the free time to select other classes for my Junior year such as my highly successful 'Public Speaking' class.

So for my Senior year, I signed-up for 'Spanish II' again, hoping that there would be a different teacher and thus a new chance. Great news! There was a new teacher. Bad news! He had the exact same 'verbal fluency is your grade' philosophy, no book. I dropped the class right there and then and looked for what other class I could take in its place. There was a slot open in 'Basic Photography' and I picked it. Though, as I had missed the first day, they had to get approval from the teacher first. The wood shop teacher taught photography on the side, while he wasn't the same wood shop teacher I had during my Freshman year of High School, we hit it off well and he accepted me in his class. Also taking this class was another classmate of mine which I had known over the years so it added to the comfort level of parachuting into a class at the last minute.

One hole in my Senior year schedule patched, I then had to face the other hole. My mentor of the previous three years of High School, Zack Hatch, was missing. I was to have had 'Advanced Math' with him this year while simultaneously taking 'Calculus' with the second most senior math teacher. Instead, with Zack gone, the third math teacher was taking his place for the class. Just as I had gone up through the high school grades with Zack, my friend Van had gone up with this teacher and we both now had 'Advanced Math' together. He vouched for this teacher and I got over my initial concern with Zack being gone. Still, I asked his son, Pete, where his father was a few times, each time he wouldn't say anything. I finally found out from the office that he was on sabbatical due to personal reasons.

Anyhow, I went ahead with both 'Advanced Math' and 'Calculus'. While the second most senior math teacher tended to mumble during his class lectures and lacked the flare of Zack, I caught on what was being taught and scored well with the homework and tests in 'Calculus'. But with the third math teacher in 'Advanced Math', while he was very engaging during class, and I got all the homework questions correct when we'd go over them in class, I was somehow getting every test question wrong. Stunned at first, I looked over my answers again and again and couldn't for the life of me understand what I was missing. By the second test of all wrong answers I asked the teacher after class if he could walk me through where I was going wrong because I couldn't understand it. He pointed out that, with Zack gone, he was very busy with the additional class load and that I'd have to figure it out for myself. And that's just what I tried to do. I could have asked one of my classmates for their insight, but as I had been the hot kid at math during the preceding three years, the last thing I wanted to do was admit to anyone that I was clueless about my tests. And so I obsessed over my failing tests, now three in a row, and repeatedly went over the work again and again and would always come up with the same result, that my answers should have been right, and yet were marked wrong. I toyed with talking to the 'Calculus' teacher about it, but realized he would be slammed with teaching additional classes with Zack gone, as well.

As the end of the quarter neared, I did the same trick as the 'Spanish II' teacher taught me and pulled out of 'Advanced Math' before the 'F' grade was turned into the office. This broke my heart but I didn't have a clue what else I could do. Worse, 'Advanced Math' was a required course in order to take 'Calculus', and while I was sure I was going to have an 'A' or a 'B' in it for the quarter, I was forced to withdraw from that class as well. When I got my report card for the first quarter, there were two holes amongst the otherwise acceptable scores. Ultimately it didn't matter as I lived on my own and no one else would be seeing it.

By the middle of October, after the incident with my guidance counselor, it occurred to me to make an appointment with the 'other' guidance counselor. A woman, she was stunned to see me as there had been the implicit understanding that the male guidance counselor was for the boys and she for the girls. When I explained to her that I was seeking a second opinion and wanted to know what my college options were, she just told me to go to the office where they had volumes of books listing careers and courses of study for them. Once I'd selected what course(s) of study I was interested in, then I could make a second appointment with her and we could go from there. I told her I didn't need to see those as I wanted to go into computers. While she appreciated my enthusiasm, I'd have to go through those books and dig out exactly what courses of study pertained to computers.

And so for the next few days during my free period I plowed through those books, one by one, and could find nothing to do with computers. Was working with computers and computer programming not a career field? Then it occurred to me that Zack had once mentioned that, to program computers, you had to understand math so I looked through the books again for math related fields, but soon realized that without 'Calculus' or even 'Advanced Math' in High School, a math career and college course of study wasn't an option either.

My life had come to a dead end.

I drowned myself in caffeine and carbohydrates.

(my guess, now, is that the volume of books I had been looking through were from when the High School had first opened in the late nineteen sixties, and that was why they didn't show any computer related career fields... but that's just a guess now decades later and I have no way of looking back at those books to check their printing dates.)

Getting Clubbed

59

At the start of my Senior year of High School, I was already shaken by the surprise disowning, but I knew by returning to school I'd return to the continuity and friendships which had sustained me during the previous years' rockiness in my home life.

Right off the bat, the guidance counselor was pulling aside each of my friends one-by-one over the first two weeks to talk with them about their college options and provide suggestions; they would talk excitedly about these meetings and what they were going to pursue. Having entered High School with the goal of going to the Air Force Academy as a stepping stone to the Astronaut program, that goal had been dashed when I discovered that, in order to get into any military service, one needed to first pass a physical. Given my 'situation', I couldn't imagine how I was going to do that and my life long thoughts of becoming an astronaut disappeared. I never imagined doing anything with computers in my childhood, but by dumb luck in my Freshman year I had stumbled upon one and by my Sophomore year I was a 'Computer Programming Genius', so some felt. It was now clear to me that I would, of course, be going into the computer field, maybe even taking it by storm...! Suffering from a bit of ego are we? Yes, but not unjustifiably given how Zack Hatch had been touring me to various computer fairs in my previous years and people showing-up at the grocery to request my help with their computers.

Back in seventh grade, when two of my best friends moved away with the turn of the calendar year, I got a little nervous about losing friends and began the new year talking to my friends about starting a 'Club', we could come up with little rules and by laws, but essentially I just wanted to make sure no other friends in my life were going to abruptly go away. Once I satisfied myself with this, I let the whole club concept fade away. To over compensate for my home life this year, I felt compelled to gather my friends around me once more and revived the 'Club' concept, but this time I was adding the twist of it being a Computer Club. Effectively, once a week we would stay after school on late bus night and have classes to essentially teach computer programming and end the sessions with a bit of game playing.

Luke really liked this idea, whereas my other friends had other things they needed to do. Still, with Luke's enthusiasm, he said we could have the club officially registered with the school and went to the office to see what was needed. Turned out we had to have a teacher as the club sponsor. Zack would have been the obvious choice, but he wasn't available. So we went to the other two math teachers, but one already had the math club and didn't want to sponsor another club, the other math teacher didn't have the time as he had taken on the bulk of Zack's classes for the year. Roaming the school and racking our brains, we checked back at the office and verified that we just needed a teacher, not one who was familiar with the topic of the club, so then we went out to search for any teacher who'd be our sponsor.

The wood shop teacher was a nice guy and we knew he also taught some of the other cool classes, such as 'Photography' and we thought... Okay, I'm lying: We were just walking down the hallway and he walked out of the wood shop door and bumped into us. We each excused ourselves. Then, as an after thought, Luke and I turned back to him and said, ''Hey, we're forming a computer club? Would you like to be our sponsor?''

''Do I have to know anything about computers?''

“Nope.''

''Okay!''

And we were off to the office to register the club. Now 'official', we started recruiting for the next few days. We posted a sign-up sheet and when that didn't attract much attention, Luke and I flat out trawled the school soliciting recruits. We only got a couple of takers from our grade level and began trying to recruit from the Junior level, rounded up a few more takers, and Luke felt that was a good enough start, but ultimately as I was doing this to fill a hole in my soul, I decided to go through the latest Sophomores as well and found two girls who said they'd be interested.

Next was the question of where to meet. The original Trash 80 Model I had been moved from the teacher's lounge to its own little closet halfway through our Sophomore year. This didn't seem like a great place to stuff in a group of ten students and show them how to use a computer. Fortunately, the school had just bought a Trash 80 Model III for the office this year. It came with a printer and, as they didn't have anywhere else to put it, they placed it on a side table in the office's conference room. This room was not only much bigger but had the newfangled 'white boards' mounted on a couple of walls which were pretty futuristic for the nineteen eighties. I checked with the office and they said we could use it for the club. Great news for the club, but also great news for me as it'd give me a chance to familiarize myself with another variation of computer.

All was set and we'd have our first meeting with the first week of October.

By the end of September, I noticed that the guidance counselor had finished going through my friends and even all my other classmates that I knew of. Clearly, he'd forgotten about me and so I took the initiative of making an appointment with him. When I arrived, he wanted to know what was up. I noted that he had talked to all of my friends about their college options but seemed to have forgotten me. He told me he hadn't, he just didn't see any reason to talk to me. Oh? Yes, as I already had the job at the grocery store. Huh? Some of my other friends also had jobs at the grocery store and he'd spoken to them about college options:

''Well, yes, that's true. But given your I.Q., staying at the grocery store would be the best option for you. You might even one day work yourself up to the position of stocker,'' he concluded with a reassuring smile.

As I had started out at the branch grocery store stocking shelves at the age of eight, the thought of one day working up to that level seemed like a foolish goal. But what had most caught my interest in what he said, I asked about: ''So you know what my I.Q. is?''

''Yes, they had tested you as well as a number of other students back in Nineteen Seventy-Three.''

''So what is it?'' I asked but in truth I wanted to know how it said that being a grocery stocker was my best option in life.

''Oh, well, it's often counter productive to tell people what their I.Q. score is as they will often give up and not try anymore.''

And I continued to sit in the chair in his office with this slowly-sinking feeling, ''But you can give me an idea of where the score the falls, can't you?''

At this he started flipping through the pages of the folder on the desk in front of him. It dawned on me that the folder must be about me as he continued, ''Actually, I shouldn't, as even giving that could...'' And his words trailed off as he reached a page that caught his attention. ''Well, actually,'' he started again, but suddenly closed the folder and told me I needed to go.

What? What about the I.Q. score? He didn't have time to talk about it any more as he realized he had another appointment or something else he had to do. Apparently he wasn't sure which, but the message was clear: It was time for me to go.

I drifted out of the counselor's office, past the other counselor's door and into the hallway. I realized something had really bothered him when he saw my I.Q. score in the folder and I wondered what it was. I'd later learn that, upon graduation, we could take the school's copy of our file with us. This was what I ended up planning to do.

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Environment

58

Despite my schizophrenic welcome home on my first day back, could I return to living there as normal?

The following morning I slept very late -- obviously given my previous thirty-four hour day -- and my exhaustion had protected me from dwelling on the otherwise Earthshaking news that I was disowned and my father's divorce from his second wife was due to 'what I was'. Even after roughly fourteen hours of sleep, I was still not one hundred percent and only slowly gathered myself, cleaned-up and got dressed. When I had finally gotten home after my 'birthday party' I discovered that my bedroom had undergone a thorough rummaging over the Summer. I don't know what whoever it was had hoped to find but what had been in my room at the start of Summer was still there, just displaced.

Often, upon returning to New England, my first day would be devoted to calling Jonathan and going to his place to show off my new computer game acquisitions. But as the day was already half over, I simply called and made arrangements for the following day. I went to the grocery store across the hayfield to let them know I was back and ask about my schedule. Everything was set up for a return to work after Labor Day and I met and briefly chatted with Pete and Van on the way out. Van said I could just punch in and start working with them right then, but I passed, blaming it on jet lag rather than let on about the previous day's events.

And so the stage was set for my return to normal life. My hope, now, was the same as it had been with the start of sixth grade, that the familiar environment of school and my friends would give me stability while my home life was less than perfect.

Within the first few weeks Roberta and her son came back to the house, when dad wasn't there, to look for more of her stuff that she had left behind. Always defended by her perpetual smirk, I still mustered-up the courage to apologize to her. She didn't know for what and I told her that dad had explained to me that I was the reason their marriage failed. She chortled and explained that the night of the variety show, when dad said he'd be working late at the park to me, but said he'd be at the variety show to her, he had actually been having an affair with Lois. And had been during the couple of months he had been 'working late' that Spring. The divorce had been based on my father being unfaithful and nothing to do with me. Dad blaming me for the mistakes he made, ultimately nothing new, that was just the kind of guy he was. This news left me off the hook for the break-up, but I didn't bother confront dad about his B.S. as I was afraid it might bring back up the topic of 'what I was' and I still didn't have an answer for that.

It was soon clear that Lois was blissfully unaware of the disowning or what was behind it. She made an effort at winning me over by, having heard that I liked lasagna, she made me some at the restaurant and brought it to the house for me: A large pan of ziti with melted cheese kisses between. I didn't complain as it tasted fine and lasted me several days. When she heard I was taking photography class at High School, she brought me her deceased husband's pricey camera to use and save me from relying on one of the high school's battered loaners. I soon figured out that dad wanted to impress Lois with how great a guy he was, and so I would ask dad about things where I needed to rely on his word when she was there. Whatever answer he gave in front of her, he was stuck with it as he didn't want to let-on to Lois how he actually was.

While my father was living with his new girl friend at her house, he was still putting on a show of being home to share dinner with Pappy, though he would often skip out on the evenings leaving Pappy to return to his apartment to have Prime Time T.V. viewing on his own. Then father would start skipping dinner times and Pappy apparently saw the writing on the wall; after nine years since giving up his snowbirding to Florida, he made arrangements to fly back to there for the Winter. Father was stunned and tried to talk him out of it, but Pappy wasn't interested in what my father had to say and was gone by October. Now I truly had the whole house to myself as my father wasn't going to come home to share dinnertime with me. He'd stop by once or twice a week just to get the pile of mail I had collected for him in the meantime, pulling out the bills for myself.

Between my father's car and Lois's truck, they would drive together in one of the vehicles and leave the other parked in the driveway. Lois said I could feel free to use her truck whenever it was left here as dad had told her I could use his car when left at the home. She showed me where the keys were hidden in a corner cabinet, it turned out all the keys were hidden there, including the key to the padlock my father used to keep me out of the basement workshop and away from my tools.

I decided to build myself a computer desk for my bedroom and used her truck to pick up sheets of plywood and two by fours. Built in place, like a tank, it worked well for my needs at the time, with the computer keyboard in a cut-out hole allowing it to be raised when I wanted to use it, but lowered and a snug-fit board placed over it for a writing surface during school work. When I say it was built like a tank, it unfortunately was: With all the half inch plywood and interlaced two by four framing, I once had to make an adjustment from underneath to the computer raising shelf and couldn't lift the desk up to give me the room I needed. It finally dawned on me to use the tire jack from a car and get the desk raised that way, then put bricks underneath while I worked. As the desk was wider than the door, I realized it was never going to leave the bedroom I had built it in, but as I wasn't planning on changing bedrooms it didn't really matter.

With Winter arriving and the heating oil bills rising, I soon realized I couldn't afford to heat the whole house with my part-time money from work, so I left the house in the fifties and pulled the bathroom space heater into my bedroom to keep it warm. Still, it couldn't fight against the draft from the early twentieth century windows of the house and I finally nailed one of the old family sleeping bags over it. That made all the difference in the world for keeping the room warm, but also cut off any daylight; there was plenty of daylight that could come into the rest of the house, I concluded.

One Saturday at work we had one of the biggest snow storms of that year and I got to walk across the hayfield back home through a two and a half foot blanket of snow. Leaving work soon after six o'clock and getting to the house by about twenty past, dad stormed into the house at six thirty and yelled at me as he and Lois had spent the past forty-five minutes stuck in the snow at the bottom of the driveway and I should have had it all cleared out with the snow blower before they had come. As this visit had been unannounced, I pointed out I was still working when he had gotten stuck at the end of the driveway, so I didn't see how I could have gotten it cleared in time for him even if he had told me they were coming. Dad realized that Lois had drifted in behind him and was seeing the real him and quickly finished the argument by yelling at me, ''That's no excuse!'' While they had come to have a surprise dinner with me, I instead went straight out to the garage and spent the next two hours clearing the driveway to make it faster for them to leave while they had dinner for themselves. Lois had left a plate for me once I was done. Eating it alone, I then went straight to my room, not having seen dad again before they left.

After that time, dad didn't make any attempts to come back to the home for any length of time until Pappy returned the following Spring.

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