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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