Blurb For Volume Two

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After the strange twists and turns of my childhood I now enter the first decade of adulthood & beyond as I deal with the consequences of what I had been given, and the options I had yet to discover. As with the first part of my life, I find I can't say what is to become of me in a sentence or two that adequately explains how I went from being named after someone's pet dog, to getting that fateful phone call from Hollywood that dramatically changed my life, while leading to nothing. But my move out west also brings me many happy surprises, as well as devastating turns, and seemingly culminates in my untimely death... But this is A Freakish Life, after all, and even fate can be baffled by what happens next.

This is the continuing story of a ''professional'' writer who is failing to write a Tell All Blog, as the text leaves out a few decades, names and dates, coming to an apparent end that explains everything and resolves nothing. C'est la vie.

Enter Volume 2...

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Volume One: Paper, eBook

The Car

74

About a year after my parents separated, my father bought a new car. An import compact station wagon, it was burnt orange in color and I immediately fell in love with it. Yes, I'm that kind of person who falls in love with import station wagons. It's freakish, I know. As the car was replacing my father's little import pick-up truck, he had a trailer hitch added to the new car so he could tow a trailer when he had to cart off the trash to the dump or get some building materials. This was around Nineteen Seventy-Six and six years later my father drove into the driveway with a brand new Subaru wagon. He had never been someone to trade in his cars, so the old wagon became consigned to the far end of the driveway loop.

Showing off his new prize, he explained that the old wagon had reached the point of needing more repairs than it was worth so he got the new car. He did mention in front of his girl friend Lois that, if I wanted, I could have the old wagon if I paid to have it repaired, and in fact he'd pay half the repair costs. Coming from him, this was a stunningly generous offer and left me suspicious that the old wagon was going to be a money pit. Still, I could look into it, couldn't I?

The ski area was just opening for the season when I took the car to an auto shop run by high school friends of my eldest brother. They had built a business working on imports and I thought they'd give me a straight deal. Other than the engine running a bit rough and the driver side seat being broken, they couldn't find anything significantly wrong with it. The driver side seat's back brace had been broken by my father in the past year and left the seat back a bit soft and wobbly when you leaned back on your left. I told them not to worry about that and they replaced the engine's head gasket and tuned the motor. Five hundred dollars later, the car was running just fine and I drove to the park to let dad know the total so he could plan out paying his half. But when I told him the amount, he became enraged and called me a liar and that the guys who had worked on the car didn't know what they were doing. My guess is, my father had been told the repair costs would be substantial in order to urge him into buying a new car, or the garage he took it to was filled with people who worked on American cars and simply didn't know what they were talking about when it came to estimating import car repairs. Either way, dad wasn't going to pay his half.

This just shows how his mind worked. If the repairs had been two thousand dollars, he would have paid half? But only needing to cough-up two hundred and fifty dollars was out of the question?

Needless to say, given how low the repairs costs were, I didn't miss the half that dad never paid and my driving the car for the next several months without problems proved that it had been repaired. During the spring college break, new friend Dave was in town and looking for something to do. I mentioned the broken car seat back while we were running around town and he said we could find a replacement at a junk yard. Really? Yes, all we had to do was go to a junk yard, find the general same make & model and unbolt the old seat and bolt in the replacement seat. This sounded like a great idea and he knew where a junk yard was. We then spent the next few hours driving to and walking around the back of the junk yard and climbing some of the stacks of cars looking for a matching seat. After all this time, we couldn't find an exact match, but found a seat from an earlier model and bought it, observing as we had the junk yard owner take it out. We brought it back to my house to install it only to find, once the original driver side seat was out that the bolt mounts were different on the replacement seat. The seat was also a different color anyhow, so Dave and I took it to the basement work area and debated what to do.

We decided to at least take the covers off both seats with the idea of exchanging them so the replacement seat would visually match the interior of the car. But once the metal frames and springs were exposed, we realized that the hinge where the back met the base were the same for both seats, so I thought why not just swap the seat backs thus keeping the original seat base which matched the bolt mounts. This actually worked, though when laying the seat backward, it tilted a bit, but that wasn't a big issue as I never put the back down anyhow. With the seat problem fixed, I decided this was the car I was going to drive to Colorado.

Then it came time for the car's annual inspection and it failed, labeling the car as not road worthy. They gave me a week to resolve the problems but I didn't have a clue. Talking about this with Nick at the grocery store as we worked, he explained that it was probably the rusted holes at the back of the car. In New England, salt was used to de-ice the roads during Winter and that resulting salt/slush mixture clung to the underside of the body and ate away the metal, leaving holes. He bet the fear was that exhaust fumes would come in through the holes and get the people inside. If we patched those holes, then it would pass inspection. Not only this, he knew how to patch these sorts of holes and offered to do it for free...! Holy Mother Of Luck! Following his directions, I got to his house in the afternoon before work hours and he showed me how to use Bondo putty and leftover fiberglass sack material to cover over the holes and seal them tightly. While not pretty, these patches did the trick and the car passed the second inspection.

Everything was ready for the trip to Colorado except for the little tiny detail of dad not giving me the title to the car. I realized I was having all this effort put into improving the wagon, but ultimately it was still his car. When I broached the subject with him, he'd just get a smile on his face and be very vague about when and if I'd get the title.

Now what do I do? I wondered.

As dad had made the claim in front of Lois that I could have the car if I got it repaired, I just decided to act as if it was my car and bought a radio/cassette deck to install for the trip. This would serve me well on the drive from New England to Colorado, I thought, and bought myself a component cassette deck for my eldest brother's leftover stereo system so I could tape my record albums ahead of time for the trip. Mother would later tell me that dad had called her up and laughed about me squandering all my money on car repairs and stereo upgrades that I would be arriving to Colorado penniless. In reality I had thirty-five hundred dollars saved up and mailed a check to her ahead of time to deposit into a new bank account under my name in Colorado. It was then that mother told me of the story, saying the last laugh was on dad. While I normally would have suspected the story might not be true, just mother making up another damning tale of dad, I didn't know of any other way she would have found out about me buying the tape deck for the stereo.

I left work for the last time and had five days to get ready and pack the car for the long drive. I was originally going to rent a trailer to hook to the back of the car, but once I tallied all my stuff, I realized I could squeeze it all into the back of the wagon and the passenger seat. As this blocked the interior rear view mirror, and this was before passenger side rear view mirrors were standard, I bought some temporary trailer mirrors which I could hook to the front fenders and give me a clear view to either side.

I say I could fit all my stuff, but in reality I had to leave the moped behind. It had served me well over the previous year and a half, but with the car I felt I wouldn't need it ever again. I gave it to my eldest brother as a going away present. I'm sure he soon listed it for sale or found someone else to give it to.

For some reason, during my last week, Dad and Lois lived at the family home rather than at her place. As I was leaving for Colorado a few weeks later than I normally would, was this simply a case that they always spent the Summers in the family house and I hadn't known it? Or was dad actually trying to get some more time with me in the last few days before I left?

With the car nearly packed except for my clothes, Lois came out and looked at the car and said it looked like I was ready to go. This was a perfect time to mention that I would be, but that dad still hadn't given me the title to the car. She was shocked as he had said he would in front of her. While I could have told her of dad's history of reneging on promises, I felt that would add bad blood and instead played it as a shake of the head and say ''I don't know why...'' The next morning, dad handed me the title when I came down stairs from bed, I assume Lois had a talk with him over the night and he couldn't think of an excuse as to why he was keeping it.

With it in hand, I went to the local Department of Motor Vehicles branch to register the car in my name. The problem was, you couldn't get a license plate for less than three months and the plate had to expire on one's birth month, so I had to buy a fourteen month license plate for the car, despite the fact that I was moving to Colorado in a handful of days.

whatever.

I closed out the bank account I had held with the bank in the apartment town for nine years and turned in my money machine card. I had come to love machine based banking and hoped I'd find it in Colorado when I got there. Of my remaining fifteen hundred dollars, I converted one thousand dollars of it into traveler's checks and kept five hundred as cash on hand for the trip. This was before the days of common place credit cards so using cash was normal for all of one's needs.

The car was packed and before I drove it over to Pete's house for my going away party, I noticed a nail head in the driver side back tire. As the tire was maintaining pressure, I decided it wouldn't be a problem and not to worry about it. After the party, I got home and said my goodbyes to Pappy as I expected to leave very early the next morning and he'd not be up yet. Pappy didn't seem to care either way; once my parents had separated he had labeled me as 'her kid' and had kept his distance from me ever since.

That last night at the house, I couldn't sleep. This would become a typical issue for me as I'd always have problems sleeping the night before a trip. On plane trips it didn't matter as I could sleep on the plane, but for the drive to Colorado, it would be an issue. Mother had bought an associate membership to the American Automobile Association for me and I had gotten the trip planned with them. Looking over the maps on the tank-like computer desk before settling to bed, I made a significant change to the first day. They had planned for me to go south out of New England and into Pennsylvania before heading west. But I instead decided to go straight west into New York state before settling down to Interstate 70 and lining up with the AAA planned route.

I think I finally fell asleep by two in the morning but was awake again by six. I debated whether to lay in bed for another few hours before I got on the road, but I didn't see the point in killing the time when I could be driving with it. Intending to quietly get out of the house and to the car, to my surprise dad and Lois were having none of that and chased me to the side of the car in their night wear to say goodbye to me, he shook my hand and she gave me a hug. It was probably the most positive moment I had with my father in seven years and it was a shame he couldn't have seemed this caring throughout my childhood.

Either way, my bag of clothes stuffed into the passenger seat, I started the car and was heading down the family home's driveway for the last time. Stopping at the end of the driveway, I took a moment despite there being no cross traffic, just to realize this was it.

Turing left and pulling onto the road, New England and my childhood were now left behind.

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The New Upperclassman

73

Toward the end of Fall Nineteen Eighty-Two, the younger baggers started to ask me about Dungeons & Dragons. One of them had participated in the Saturday group last year and, despite the fact that the upperclassman who had organized the two groups was now gone, this bagger was keen to get a group started again without him and given my experience being a Dungeon Master for the Sunday group he asked me to put my DM hat back on. I wasn't sure if we'd have enough players and sure enough he found a good number from his school mates. One of them was Van's year younger brother who also worked at the store, this added a note of familiarity as Van had never been an exclusive older brother keeping his younger brothers at bay, so I knew his younger brother, home, and family. I agreed to the idea, as long as we kept to a Sunday group. While I liked the ambient evening and late night darkness during the Saturday group, given my Friday night to Saturday day work schedule, I couldn't imagine going from that to a full night's gaming.

And so we gathered. Unlike before, where we pretty much always met at the upperclassman's house or Jonathan's house, this time we rotated where we gathered to play so as not to wear-out our welcome; the upperclassman's parents had gotten exasperated by the late night gaming fracas a few times and we didn't want that to happen again and find ourselves scrambling for a new place to meet at the last moment. The first session was devoted to building the player's initial characters and explaining how the game was played, purchase of the 'Player Manual' was suggested, but we shared what books we had. After that first gathering, Pete heard about the new group and joined us for most of the games thereafter.

After a few weeks of this, I realized I had become the new upperclassman, a figure of assumed wisdom being from the class before... But if one thought about it too much, such as why they were left behind when their classmates moved on, one might glimpse the upperclassman as a Wizard Of Oz figure, more reputation than true power. Still reputation was a good starting point and, despite my stuttering, I was a good enough Dungeon Master.

We added another player from my old apartment town: Mathew, who I had periodically known since sixth grade, but despite hitting it off well, we never developed a one-to-one friendship for some reason. At the time I hadn't thought about it, but I've wondered about it ever since. With Mathew came the news that his family had recently purchased the next best thing in video tape systems, a Betamax. Betamax was the HD DVD breakthrough of its time... What, so I now have to explain what HD DVD was? Fine, let's just say Betamax was going to leave VHS tapes in the dust and as we had a video rental store in our home town and Mathew had the bestest cassette player we knew of in the region, Pete soon organized movie nights where he'd rope me in for a ride, he'd pick the tapes, then we'd go Mathew's house to watch an average of two movies in a row.

What once started out looking like it'd be a solitary year for me had turned into a full schedule by the turn of the calendar year. Heck, even Christmas was surprisingly busy as my not as older brother was on leave and Lois, my dad's girl friend, decided to host a Christmas Eve dinner for us, including our eldest brother and his wife. It was probably the closest thing I had experienced to a true Christmas family gathering in seven or eight years.

And yet I had all the privacy of having my own house for most of the year.

I realized that the monster of a computer desk I had originally made was not going to ever leave the bedroom I had built it in, so it was time to build a better computer desk for my ever growing machine. As Lois had accidentally shown me the hidden key to the basement work area, I planned out and built a light frame desk with three open support frames, two bracing bars in back and a Formica covered board for the top which featured cut-out, and bolt suspended, wing-nut positioned shelves for the keyboard and expansion interface to sit within. The Formica surface hid the bolt heads holding the sunken-in computer pieces and the whole thing rivaled the professional Trash 80 work desk one could have bought at Radio Shack. In reality, I probably spent more money building the two desks for my computer than it would have cost me to buy the Radio Shack version, but then I would have lost the fun of figuring out how to make them.

With its new desk, my computer was freed from my bedroom and in the dining room area of the house, giving me a new place to be in rather than the claustrophobic everything in it bedroom I had lived out of for my Senior year of high school. With its new placement, it allowed me to host the computer game playing lunch breaks from Saturday bagging, but also seemed to inspire my mind as I could look out the large dining room window into the driveway loop and woods beyond and dream up new code.

I devised the final nut to make a climactic moment for my 'Star Quest' game, most importantly it took very little new code so it fit in the few bytes of spare memory I had. Where I had a chance of the player's ship being intercepted on the way home after destroying a planet based alien outpost, I knew I also had the chance of multiple ships intercepting the player if they had destroyed multiple planet-side outposts before returning to Earth. This chance element added surprise and anticipation to the game. So for the climax I realized all I had to do was flip a switch after the last new star had been visited by the player and greet him or her with five awaiting alien ships on the way home. I spent a lot of time playing with the number of ships at the end and fighting five seemed like a good nail biting time. But in order for the player to likely survive this climax, I had to reduce the amount of damage the attacking ships did. Yet this only helped, as well, as it lead the player into a false sense of security when taking on the ships one-on-one or in pairs. My magnum opus was complete and I couldn't wait to show it to Jeff when I returned to Colorado the next Summer.

But unlike previous years, I was keeping in touch with Jeff through his dial-up online site. Given the long distance charges, I'd wait until the late nights to dial-up his system, check my mail and then buzz the chat mode to see if he was there. He very often was and we'd chat for about an hour or two at a time once every few weeks. I was feeling highly connected then, to a level my parents would never have comprehended. Today, others are connected to a level I don't want to comprehend!

Luke and Van were going to a College a few hours drive away. While in New England that would seem like a prohibitive drive, after having lived in Colorado where towns are hours apart and I had shared long drives with my mother through Wyoming to visit my sister, the drive to Luke and Van's College didn't seem like it would be that daunting. So about four times during the college year I made the drive to their dorm room to visit them, talk about music and what we've each been up to. They shared their room with a third student, 'Dave', another one of our High School classmates who hadn't been part of our core group, but I soon warmed-up to him with these trips to their College and we became friends who'd visit during the college breaks when he'd be back in the home town.

Luke, too, I'd visit with when he'd be on his college breaks, but Van... For some reason Van was keeping his distance, it seemed. He was nice enough in person, but would then avoid contact once he was home during the breaks. Had I somehow offended him? I couldn't see how as he'd kind of been the one looking out for me during my tumultuous final year of High School. Maybe there was something going on in his life...?

By the end of my days in New England, the new Dungeons & Dragons group had been a success, though it didn't eclipse my experiences with the first group, perhaps because of how much I needed that group at that time in my life. I felt fully restored computer programming wise, even creating a science fiction book database for myself where I could enter details of the books I'd read and rate them to help determine which authors I should look into more. And at the grocery store, I had been doing a variety of work as I had originally done during my initial years helping out at the first branch store as a kid. I had even become a respected member of the store staff and during one break where I went to the back room to sit on a pallet, I found a number of other employees there on break as well including Van's younger brother. I was in a musical mood and so I got the group into doing a spur of the moment song. It was fun and I suggested we do a second, but it was felt that a second one wouldn't be as much fun as the surprise of joining the first...!

All and all this final year in New England had been very rewarding for me and very healing. What a dramatic difference it made to my foundation of memories, leaving with this as my final taste of New England, rather than running out of town to Colorado after my father had disowned me and the subsequent tumultuous final school year I'd had.

The night before I was to hop in the car and drive off, Pete organized an impromptu going away party for me. I say impromptu party for me as it turned out his upperclassman friend was on leave after his first year of service and the gathering seemed to be more for him and also included a couple of his friends, though I knew them from the first Dungeons & Dragons group. This was my first time in Pete's house, probably in over four years. His father, my former mentor Zack, was nowhere to be seen, nor Pete's mother. I wondered how they were doing, but given Pete's past unwillingness to talk about personal matters, I didn't bother ask.

After sharing pizzas and catching-up, Pete next planned for us to have a video night. Having exhausted the Betamax collection at the local video store he had gotten himself a VHS player, though I don't remember if it was a rental or one he bought for his family home. While the television was in the living room, for some reason Pete brought in the dining room chairs for us to sit in rather than using the couches and easy chairs already there. He lined them up in a row, then he pulled out the movies he'd gotten for the night. Porn. My first chance to see some, I was actually interested, though for a completely different reason than the rest, I assume, as it gave me a chance to see how normal adult body parts looked... Well, I don't know how normal they were, but the first two movies were kinda hokey and fun. I only remember the title of one of them, 'The Spirit Of Seventeen Seventy-Sex'. When we reached the end of it, I excused myself from the evening as I needed to try to get some sleep before my first day's drive to Colorado, they remained and saw at least another movie. Given that the third movie was about to start, the final goodbye was more of a brief 'see you' on the way out than the actual 'I'm moving to Colorado and will never see you again' type of goodbye.

But maybe it was better that way.

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