70
What would greet me with the start of these last twelve months
before my permanent move to Colorado...?
Despite the horrible year, with overcoming the surprise developments
around my graduation and my effectively torpedoing my father's
disowning of me, I left for Colorado with a full head of steam like
the previous year. Unlike the previous trip, though, I also came
with my complete computer; during the course of the year I had
stumbled upon official luggage for the computer and its primary
pieces. I wasn't sure about their latches, but some strapping took
care of that and this time it was the Expansion Interface that was my
boxed carry-on. Given all the extra hardware from my expanded
computer, the heavy sewing machine desk at my mother's had to be
pulled even further from the wall and an old Ouija board placed on
top to give it a large enough surface. Jeff helped me figure out
what the problem was with the disk drive I had bought along with the
Expansion Interface: Turned out it was the Expansion Interface's
built-in timer chip was defective. Without it to keep the rhythm the
computer didn't know how to read the disks. He kindly replaced it
for me and I was in business!
Mother had found a boyfriend while I was away, or at least the first
Colorado boyfriend that I knew of. He was about the same height as
dad, which put him about half a foot shorter than mother. He was
diabetic and had developed a hobby baking sweets for friends. He
also worked at one of the big name computer firms. He
expressed interest in my computer and offered to take me on a tour of
'The Building' one day. Mother also had a new job, she was now
working as part of the kitchen staff at a local hospital, she didn't
tell me what lead to her leaving the grocery store turned deli, but I
did catch on that there had been a long gap between the jobs.
Over the years, mother had collected copies of her children's High
School graduation pictures, she placed these in various
configurations and living locations. By the time she was in the
mobile home, she hung them on the wall directly outside my bedroom
door, sister above, brothers side-by-side below. Clearly, once I had
a picture it would go below thus changing the triangle to a diamond.
That time had come as I brought copies of my official graduation
photo in various sizes to her. She took one look at the picture and
shrieked, ''You look like a girl!'' She then collapsed into her
chair and began sobbing. Before you have any misimpressions, my
photo was like my brothers' except I had shorter hair than my not as
older brother. I was wearing my corduroy three piece suit and had a
couple of acne marks on my face. No make-up, no dress, no
jewelry, nothing to socially identify me as a girl. Despite
having shorter hair than my brother and a three piece suit in the
photo, my mother took me as she saw me, and that horrified
her. ''You look like a girl,'' she bit off as a mumbled echo and I
left her to finish her cry.
My photo wasn't added to the wall of children, instead she demanded I
get my annual-visit hair cut, bought a dress shirt of her own
choosing and a three pack of pocketless white tee shirts. Her demand
was I dress-up and she would have my picture professionally taken in
town to her suiting. The dress shirt she had gotten me was a
bit translucent, which was a problem given my ACE bandage bound
breasts. So I put on one of the white tees which, given its smaller
size, was form fitting and again didn't help disguise my chest. All
of my baggy, left pocketed, tee shirts which had been my mainstay for
the previous five years were in colors, so I couldn't wear those
underneath the dress shirt. As mother was pounding on my bedroom
door as the time came to leave for the photo, I used the only thing I
had available and pulled the additional two pocketless white tees
over the first one and put on the dress shirt. It felt stupid and
was quickly hot as hell as we arrived at the photographers. Photos
of just my face was quickly discouraged as it didn't make me seem
manly enough despite the hair cut, so I was then told to take
various poses for full body and three-quarter body photos. Looking
over the proofs later on, mother found one that she deemed to be
macho enough for my graduation photo and had copies of it made in
various sizes for herself, our siblings, and her friends.
Left leg raised up with my foot on an out of picture foot stool, bent
over with my left elbow resting on my left knee, right forearm
resting on my left forearm, the sheen of sweat covering my face as I
looked off too the right, my irritation was not hidden from the over
one hour ordeal. When my not as older brother was next on leave and
saw the photo on the wall of graduation photos, he laughed. He said
it looked like I had just come in for the picture after beating my
slaves. I thought
it was an apt description. Of course the ultimate result of the
picture was that my three-quarter pose shot stood out from the rest
of my siblings head-only shots, just drawing the casual visitor to
immediately recognize that I didn't fit. While my mother patted
herself on the back for finally getting a proper picture of me, it
became what welcomed me each and every time I walked out of the
bedroom, reminding me of my discomfort and ire from the day.
With that first and only incident of conflict between mother and
me over, the rest of the Summer settled into what I would have
expected...
Jeff's computer had made a transition while I was gone and had taken
on a life running a dial up site. Largely serving as a message
board for other dial up users, I quickly doled out a little cash
to upgrade my computer to sport the necessary adapter for a dial-up
interface. The bad new was the room with the computer didn't have a
telephone and while I, at first, bridged this with a few long
extension cords from the living room area, that ended up not being
acceptable to mother. Realizing that the two built-in phone jacks
ran down the same long wall from the living room in front to the
master bedroom in back, I peeled away some of the external aluminum
siding from the mobile home when my mother was at work one day and
found the long phone cable between the two rooms. With some parts
and cable from Radio Shack, I spliced into the connecting phone line
and added a third jack in my bedroom which adjoined the room with the
computer. This would allow me to have a phone in my bedroom now,
then a plug-in splitter to provide a line to the computer room by way
of the two sided outlet the rooms shared. Jeff donated his first
computer modem for me to use, a wooden boxed acoustic coupler that
you placed the handset of a traditional style phone into, the round
ends of the handset making a tight seal to the round rubber rings of
the dial up modem.
One of Jeff's latest kids to wow with his set-up became my second
friend in Colorado, about two years younger than me, I actually made
him air-sick when he was watching me play Microsoft's first Flight
Simulator. Despite the blocky black & white graphics, it was
still an effective program. And I was back to tuning my magnum
opus game 'Star Quest'. Having taken the school year off from
working on it given my unexplained bout of brain fog, I was back at
it and came up with an exciting twist. Now as you found and blew-up
alien bases hidden in our local star cluster, there was a chance an
alien baseship would trace you back to Earth and you'd have to attack
it and blow it up before you could enter our solar system and dock.
It was more real time graphics where you had to center the ship into
your crosshairs while its shots at you caused flashes and an
escalating damage total; you had to struggle to aim at the small
vulnerable point of the attacking ship as it did evasive maneuvers.
If you hit it right, before their final shot killed you, their ship
would blow up and you could dock at Earth and get your ship repaired.
Not knowing when these base ships would show up added a level of
anticipation to the game which it had previously lacked and it also
taught the player to pace themselves as, if they blew-up multiple
planet-side bases before returning to Earth, there was a chance of
multiple baseships waiting for them when they arrived. 'Star Quest'
was now nearly there as the epic game I had originally
envisioned, but still lacked a climactic final moment. Further
still, the game was stuffed into every corner of the available
thirty-two kilobytes of memory, so any climactic moment I came up
with would have to be very tiny, code-wise.
The daily routine broke down to my working with the computer at the
mobile home during the daytime, either writing code, or participating
online. Then when my mother got home from work, if she didn't have
plans for the evening, I'd likely borrow her car and spend the time
at Jeff's, often until the wee hours of the next morning. This
worked for me, though in retrospect I wonder if mother might have
resented it a bit as this meant I spent very little time with her
during that Summer. I must admit, after the photo incident, I wasn't
looking to spend more time with her. Still, she had her friends from
the singles' club and her new boyfriend, so I no longer had to worry
about her being lonely as she had been during her first years in
Colorado.
The end of Summer came and it was time to pack-up the computer
components and fly back to New England for my final year living there
and my first year working full-time at the grocery store chain. My
goal was to save up a nest egg and move to Colorado for good and find
myself a computer job!
Instead I'd be cursed with the fate of being nothing more than a Hot
Dog vendor, if the grocery store owner's wife had her wishes...
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