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And so I arrived back in Colorado, Trash-80 computer, video signal
adapter box, two hundred or so dollars, and the gloss of a great
school year. Mother picked me up at the airport and on the drive to
her mobile home asked me how things went. And I stuttered-up a storm
and couldn't get anything out. ''What does your father do to you
to make you stutter so much!'' she shouted at me. This gave
me pause as I wondered why I was stuttering so badly again and
pondered if my father had something to do with it. The rest of
the drive back to the mobile home was silent and when we arrived I
took my things in.
Years earlier at the family home, mother had what she called the
'Sewing Room', it had actually been the foyer between the front porch
and the living room where she had her integrated sewing machine/desk
unit placed. She used the coat closet for her sewing supplies and
when the time came to move from the family home to the first
apartment, she left the closet behind and the supplies in it, and it
remained that way for the rest of the time I knew that house. While
she almost never used the sewing machine itself after that move, the
desktop she used for all her bills during the subsequent years on her
own. With the mobile home, there was a third bedroom that she didn't
need and so she placed the sewing machine/desk in there and once
again had a 'Sewing Room' after a six year gap. Having told her of
the plan to bring the computer and use the old black & white T.V.
she said I could use the sewing machine desk for it during my summer
stay. The desk was too close to the wall for the computer to fit on
top with the T.V. behind it, so I had to move the desk away and
discovered just how heavy it was with the sewing machine hidden
inside. How had my mother been moving it around all these years?
I finally got enough space and good placement and I was settled in
for the Summer.
Some changes had taken place in Colorado, the grocery store mother
had worked at had fallen on hard times when a chain store had opened
up just down the street. Being a small independent store, they
reevaluated their business and transformed into a full service Deli.
Mother was perplexed as she was used to working at a grocery store
filling shelves and occasionally dealing with people, but now her
role was almost entirely dealing with people and she didn't like that
change. But still, it was a paycheck and she couldn't turn it down.
The second change was mother had finally found herself a friend.
After a year and a half living in Colorado with only a child or two
to visit her and break up the loneliness, she had found out about a
singles group. While she had gone intending to find a guy, she
instead found another woman who had also gone to meet a guy and they
hit it off quite well. Mother would try to pair us up to give her a
break from entertaining me and I ended up doing a few things with her
friend during the Summer. In retrospect, I wonder if mother was
going on dates and wanted me kept out of the way...?
The one thing that hadn't changed was mother's demand that I have
my head shaved back into the military style haircut she insisted I
have.
Without the need for the Radio Shack visits as I had my own machine
here, I spent the majority of my time curled away in the sewing room
working on my great game, 'Star Quest'. Having gone through several
variations and boring renditions, I was finally nailing down a game
play logic that was fast and fun, though it still had some kinks in
the machine code bits. I would visit Jeff's house and he would test
play, look through the code, and even helped me sort out those kinks.
By the end of Summer the game was mostly worked out except for a
climactic ending and some surprises, those I would have to come up
with during the next school year. Given the complexity of game play,
Jeff felt I needed some way of introducing players to the whole
concept of flying from star to star, planet to planet, finding new
races and fighting the evil aliens. Pounding my head on this, I
found I didn't have enough room left in the computer's sixteen
kilobyte memory to hold extra code for this sort of thing, but
realized I could have a completely separate program which did and it
could load the game proper at the end of its run. This first program
kind of served as the Star Wars introductory crawl explaining the
fictional background of the game and showed images of the bad aliens
and the ships involved. With this new program my focus for the last
few weeks in Colorado, I felt I could glimpse the coming horizon of
the game's completion. In reality it was shy of another two years
away.
Other things had changed in Jeff's life as well: His wife was gone
and I wasn't supposed to ask about it. In her absence, Jeff's house
had become a bit of a gathering place for many of his friends and
this was when I discovered that I was not the only kid Jeff had found
at a Radio Shack over the years. One of these parade of friends
asked me if I was a lesbian given my shaved head. I said 'No' and
left it up to someone else to explain that I was 'a boy'. Given my
driver's license, I was no longer dependent on mother being able to
drive me to visit Jeff's house only once a week and thus saw him
several times each week as we talked about coding, looking at the
latest games, talking of recent science fiction books, and perusing
his music collection. His own Trash-80 computer had migrated to a
spare bedroom on the second floor and the original room it had been
in with his music and book collection now featured a drafting table
in its place. His father's business was expanding and to save money
on hiring professional architects to draw up blueprints of each new
store, Jeff had taken on that duty.
Jeff told me that Ralph, the manager that let me use the local Radio
Shack's computer in earlier years, was now working at the chain's
first 'Computer Center' in town. I went there a couple of times to
say 'Hi' and browse all the options available in the store. As
August came around I found that I could get a 'lowercase kit'
installed in the Trash 80 allowing one to see more than just
uppercase text. For some reason, while the computer supported upper
and lower case, when the Trash 80 Model I was finished it
had been installed with a video chip that could only show uppercase
characters. Apparently they felt people would be so thrilled having
any computer that they wouldn't notice the lack of seeing lowercase
letters on screen. But with Apple computers slowly gaining ground,
Radio Shack developed a 'lowercase kit' which could be installed into
the computer for seventy dollars. Once I found this out, I counted
my remaining money to find I only had sixty dollars left. I asked my
mother if she would be giving me my usual twenty dollars worth of
birthday money and she said she would so for my birthday I took my
computer in to Ralph to have the lowercase kit installed. He
accepted it and let me know that it would be ready in a few days with
only a twenty-five dollar labor charge. Labor charge?
Yes, the kit was seventy dollars and labor was separate. I
realized I didn't have enough money and went out to the car to ask my
mother if I could borrow an additional twenty dollars on top of my
birthday money and I would pay her back once I got back to New
England. ''Absolutely not,'' she told me and I assured her I
would be paying her back, but it wasn't going to happen. I sullenly
went back into the store and asked Ralph if I could have my computer
back as I wasn't going to be able to get it. It was my only
embarrassed moment with Ralph, but he understood and fetched it for
me from the back room.
Except for that last bit, this year's trip to Colorado had been very
fulfilling and I couldn't wait to get back to New England to have a
final year of High School to top the previous year!
This was the last happy period of my life for quite some time.
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