Head Of Steam

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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On The Bubble

56

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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Transitioning

49

As the sophomore school year rolled to a close, more and more of my friends reached sixteen. They got to take the High School's Drivers' Education class and then get their drivers licenses. With my birthday in August, I was out of luck and would have to wait until the next school year. But what really surprised me was how I felt when some of my friends, Pete and Van, picked-up jobs at the main grocery store: Annoyed. After all I was the one who had first started working at the chain, now featuring a third store, and yet my friends were the first ones to legally have a place there. Still, I stuffed the feelings down as I understood the reasons... That was until Van's year-younger brother got a job; his parents had filled-out some special paperwork to allow it.

That was that and as my bank account had been slowly dwindling over the past year and a half down to the low double digits, I went to the store owner, Joe, and asked what I would need to do to get a job at the main store once I returned from summer break. He said I could let them know once I was back. I thanked him and for the trip back to Colorado I pulled out the majority of my remaining bank funds from the money machine knowing I'd be replenishing it the following Fall.

I packed my one suitcase worth of clothes back into their one suitcase, left my winter jacket behind and flew out to Colorado. While my stuttering had faded a bit over my Sophomore year, it flared again when my mother picked me up at the airport and I had to struggle to say any words. As a result she did most of the talking. During the Spring, my not as older brother had joined the Air Force and left the state. She gave me an involved story as to why this happened, but my brother later told me it was a crock of bull. She, herself, had moved out of the one bedroom apartment and bought a mobile home to the extreme east side of town. It had a living area, combination dining room/kitchen space, two smaller bedrooms, a bathroom and the master bedroom at the back. I would have the second of the smaller bedrooms.

To my surprise, mother had actually kept some of my stuff while she lived at the single bedroom apartment as it was now set-up in my new room. This included the modular shelves, my chest of drawers from the first apartment, a couple of models I had made as a kid and the few record albums and record player I'd collected during the apartment years and our first Summer in Colorado. I guess these must have been in storage or something when she had told me she'd gotten rid of them. But gone was the custom mattress and box spring set that mother had ordered for me to entice me to stay in Colorado for my sophomore school year, it had been replaced by a standard sized twin bed. This bedroom also included the spare club chair from the living room set as it had at the first apartment, but in the eight foot by eight foot bedroom, it made everything feel a bit snug; yet unlike returning to the family home where my bedroom and its contents had been truly discarded, it was nice to come to a bedroom that looked somewhat familiar even if different.

Mother was tiffed that I had been wearing tattered clothes when I got off the plane and when I told her I was wearing the best clothes I had, she found that hard to believe and had me open up my suitcase. It was then she realized that I had lived the past year with just this one bag of clothes and she was pissed. She took me out to get some new clothes, but called up dad to inform him that, as the primary parent, it was his duty to supply me with clothes during the year, not hers. What she said did the trick as soon after I arrived back to New England at the end of Summer, dad took me straight out to fill up my closet with enough new clothes to last me the next few years...!

While I liked her new digs, there was a problem with its location for me, it was six miles away from the Radio Shack I went to. And as the mobile home was significantly further away from where my mother worked, she couldn't drive out and pick me up during her lunch hour to take me there. But I discovered that she had also saved the bicycle she had gotten me for my twelfth birthday so I came up with the plan where I would ride the bicycle to the Radio Shack around lunchtime, a mostly downhill trip, and then she would pick me up on her way home from work. She wasn't thrilled with the idea given her dislike of the traffic, but we found a series of side roads that would get me there and stopped at the nearby K Mart to buy a bicycle rack that could be temporarily mounted on the back of her car.

And thus I was once again doing my Monday-Wednesday-Friday visits to Ralph's Radio Shack to use the display computer. Though by this time, the second computer on display at a pillar was gone and the computer with the display desk at the window had been moved to the center of the store in its place. During my time away, this computer had been enhanced with the expansion interface, giving it an unimaginable thirty-two kilobytes of memory and two floppy drives. It still had the cassette player, which I needed for my stuff, and also had a printer, which I was discouraged from using as that cost money in ink and paper.

Ralph was happy to see me and let me continue using the store's computer and, given the slightly longer time I spent there on my days, I started to treat it like a job: I would work for a couple hours on my code and exploring the reaches of the upgraded machine, take a ten minute break by walking to the grocery store next door and buying a snack, then returning to the Radio Shack till the end of the day. He was impressed by the number of new games I'd come up with and coded while I was away and he even started using me as part of his sales pitches, noting that the computer was so simple given a kid could use it. Or sometimes customers would watch me for a bit without first talking to Ralph or his assistant, and ask me about the machine and then I'd do my own little sales job, pointing out the features the computer had and noting the various things it could be used for.

And of course, there was Jeff, who I once again got to visit, though this time it was more of a once every weekend affair given the longer distances mother would have to drive me. While Jeff was willing to occasionally pick me up for a visit, mother felt that was inappropriate for some reason and wanted to make sure I arrived at Jeff's house and was leaving Jeff's house with her own eyes. As the Radio Shack computer now had floppy drives and Jeff had floppy drives, it made sense for me to get my first pack of disks for the huge speed improvement it provided.

Jeff had continued to collect more games while I had been back in New England and two names stood out: Leo Christopherson and Big Five Software. Both of these had brought Trash-80 games to a whole new level by using 'machine code', the most elementary code level of the computer where the very bytes of a program directly controlled the computer, rather than having to be interactively translated from a text based code into actions by the computer. Big Five's games were pure machine code which made them this tantalizing mystery where I could see the results, but not how they were put together. Leo Christopherson's work was a hybrid of BASIC and machine code, where he hid the machine code bytes as strings of text embedded in the program, then fooled the program to execute the 'string of text' as if each was a small machine program. Using this method, he could code the guts of his games in easy BASIC, but then call the bits of machine code when something fast or flashy needed to be done.

Both of these coders also incorporated sound in the their games! They did this by tricking the computer's built in cassette interface from sending data to the recorder to instead send sound effects or beepy music. Radio Shack cassette recorders had this thing that if you pressed down the wrong combination of buttons, it would send any data sent to it out the built-in speaker. With other cassette recorders you would need to use an ear piece or external speaker plugged into the ear phone jack of the recorder to hear the sounds.

I knew I'd truly have to work my ass off to approach the level of these guys during the coming school year!

Oh, yes, what non-computer things did I do that Summer in Colorado...? I'm drawing a blank, but I'm sure my mother and I did something touristy once or twice and we probably made a trip up North to visit my sister. The complete absence of any non-computer memory of that Summer shows how consumed I had become with the burgeoning digital world.

When I arrived at Radio Shack for the start of August, I settled down to do my work. Ralph's assistant was there as well as some other older guy with a white beard, I assumed Ralph was away for the afternoon or just out for lunch. After most of the first hour, Ralph's assistant pulled me aside and quietly told me that Ralph had been transferred to a different store and the new guy in charge was incensed that I had come in and started using the computer as if I had always done that. While he and I knew I had been, the assistant couldn't tell that to the new manager without possibly getting Ralph into trouble, so I was to go and if asked I was supposed to say I hadn't known any better...

My days using the local Radio Shacks' computer was abruptly over. I grabbed my snack early and sat outside of the Radio Shack baking in the heat next to my bike as I expected I'd have to wait for the next three and a half hours until mother came to pick me up. Then about a half hour later I happened to notice Jeff's wife had come to get some stuff at the grocery store. I flagged her down and told her of the Radio Shack situation and asked if Jeff was home and I could join him? He wasn't but she said I could come over and use his computer for the rest of the afternoon. I thanked her and we figured out how to squeeze enough of my bicycle into the compact car's trunk so we could get to their place. Once there I called my mother to let her know of the change in plans and she agreed I could stay there and she'd pick me up once she was done with work.

Without being able to fill-up my weeks with Radio Shack visits, August became a bit of a boring month. So I decided to work on a problem that Pete had noted to me by the end of May and I had kept it in the back of my mind ever since: He noticed that my voice hadn't changed. As boys reached puberty, the first noticeable sign was often the cracking of their voice, and then some whiskers some months down the road once their new voice solidified. Yet, my voice hadn't changed at all and I realized this might be a problem.

As a kid I had automatically parroted voices that I had heard, such as from Sesame Street, cartoons, even music. I don't know why, but I just naturally did and my friends at school found it a fun trick. In the case of music, if I sang along, without thinking I would sing in my best approximation of the original vocalist's voice. As a result of years of exposure through my siblings records, I had gotten down a pretty good impression of each of the Beatles. I didn't realize this was a problem until we would have elementary school functions where we kids were to learn and perform some Christmas songs as a chorus. I assumed they would first play a recording of the song and then I'd try to mimic the voice but, no, they were common Christmas songs and we were to just sing them together using our own voices. Not having a clue how to sing sounding like myself, I decided to just move my lips during the first go through and listen to the combined sound of my classmates' voices. Then I had my anchor and for the rest of practice and the show itself, I sang in the best approximation of my combined classmates' voices as I could do.

So with free time on my hands during my last month of Summer, I thought I'd figure out what to do with my voice. Oddly enough, trying to come up with a voice on my own just sounded like a girl trying to sound like a guy. I thought this might actually be worse than staying with my own boyish voice. Then while watching a variety show, they had on the Oak Ridge boys and I noticed how, when doing the lowest notes, their bass singer would tuck his chin down to his chest. I played with doing this a few times and stumbled upon how it worked: Squeezing down like this constricted the throat and made the vocal chords looser, thus producing a deeper tone. While the sound worked, again, I'd look kinda suspicious if I spent all my time talking in school with my head tucked down. So I spent time with my head tucked and time with it not to feel how the throat felt different. With practice, I then learned how to tighten the muscles around my throat to loosen the chords rather than tucking in my chin. It worked! And I could now return to school with a deeper voice. I couldn't start doing it during my last days in Colorado as the change would be sudden and, again, suspicious. But I could start doing it once I got off the plane as people could imagine my voice had changed over the course of the summer months. Or so I thought.

For my other activity, I could only hand write so much code into notebooks before I'd get too back logged in trying it out. Jeff was nice enough to let me spend longer weekend days at his home trying out my code rather than him showing off other games he'd found. But I only ended up completing one final game before the month came to an end. When mother asked if there was anything special I'd like to do before I left back to New England, I told her I'd like to see Ralph again. We went to the original Radio Shack and I asked the assistant if he knew where Ralph had been transferred to? It was a store at the west side of town and mother was nice enough to drive me all the way there where I briefly said, ''Hello,'' to Ralph; I thanked him for the past years of letting me use the other Radio Shack's computer during my school breaks and then finished-up by showing off my latest creation, a cityscape game with buildings on fire and the helicopter you flew to drop water on it and stop the fire from spreading. With the necessary stops to fill-up with more water, eventually one could put it out if they were lucky. He was very impressed.

On the flight back, I sat next to a nice young woman who chatted with me during the flight to discover we were going to the same neck of New England, we talked of the places we knew in common and that I'd be working at the grocery store. As we approached Logan airport, we agreed to bump into each other in the coming weeks and visit. I never saw her again.

By the time the flight landed at Boston, I found I couldn't do it: The deeper voice that is. For some reason doing a voice for fun was okay, but the thought of intentionally trying to fool people into thinking I had a deeper voice weighed on my soul. Strapping down my breasts hadn't struck me in this way as, in truth, it was to retain my original appearance as much as possible when interacting with people. But using a 'put on' voice with the intent of misleading my friends that my voice had changed was just something I couldn't bring myself to do. So I got off the plane with the voice I had and I never regretted that decision.

No surprises greeted me when getting back to the house. I spent the traditional day-after at Jonathan's home showing off all the work I had done and other software I'd gotten, the only difference was he picked me up at my house, himself, which was the first time I'd ridden in a car with a friend driving. That weekend I went to the main grocery store to see Joe and let him know I was back. He asked how my mother was doing, and then said I could start the following Saturday, coming in a half hour before the store opened.

And thus began the, then, greatest year of my life.

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Landing A Catch

46

By December Nineteen Seventy-Nine, my father was spending time away from the home during some evenings. It turned out he'd found himself a girl friend, the first in several years. He excitedly confessed to me that 'Roberta' was the hot girl of his High School class and she was now available and he thought he had a chance whereas, back then, he didn't. Seeing her as a sort of Red Neck Princess, as part of his method of wooing her he suddenly bought and wore long sleeved red plaid flannel shirts. As he had never worn anything like it during my life time, I had to fight back the urge to laugh every time I saw him 'dressed-up' like that as it reminded me of the Monty Python 'Lumber Jack' song.

When Christmas came and it was time to see my mother, I put all of my clothes back into the one suitcase I had come to New England with and wore the old puffy jacket to the airport and carried it with me on the plane. Once set down in Colorado, my mother thought it was time I got a new coat.

In the intervening few months she had moved to a new, one bedroom, apartment and this meant my stuff was gone. She told me how she gave away all my games and toys since I hadn't wanted them anymore. Whatever made her sleep at night. I was gung-ho to sleep on the couch, but she had bought a roll away bed for me to use during the week and a half I'd be there. Also, she seemed to hope that my not as older brother would come down Christmas Eve and stay overnight on the couch himself. The roll away was more of a steel trap; both ends would fold-up making it a four foot high, two foot thick and three foot wide cage. With the ends folded down 'it was a bed', though with the steel hinge base smack in the middle, it was more of a torture device. I found the only way to sleep on it was on my side with my hips just beyond the steel bar and ribs just above it. It was like sleeping in the back of the car, except less comfortable.

Mother had found a new grocery store to work in since the one she'd started at just four months earlier. As she was working all but Christmas day, this meant I got to enjoy the apartment and its surroundings... Mainly just empty weed fields on the eastern outskirts of town. I somehow talked her into picking me up during her lunch hour and taking me to the Radio Shack of the previous Summer where Ralph worked and was happy to see me again and let me use the display Trash-80, still with the desk. I'd spend the afternoon there, then mother would pick me back up on the way home from work. For this small accommodation during my stay, I thank her. Not wanting to wear out my welcome, I was doing every other day there and on the second afternoon a large man stepped up behind me as I tried out a game I'd just coded. He said, ''Hey, if you think that's cool, you should come over to my place and see the games I have...''

Given his long hair and long beard, he could have been mistaken for a biker except that he wore jeans and a tee shirt. I told him I had to wait for my mother to pick me up at four thirty, but he assured me he'd have me back by then. So I gathered my things and hopped into his truck off to his house. Once there, he lead me up some steps to an older house in the downtown area, inside he brought me to a dark room in the middle of the base floor and had me go in first. He turned on the light which was pretty much a bulb hanging by a chain from the middle of the ceiling -- For some reason, when I tell this story nowadays, people start to get really nervous and cringe for fear of what happens next, but I need to explain that I was from rural New England and my parents had never expressed any concern about me talking with people I didn't know -- So anyhow, we get down on these really low seats, it might have actually been some cushions on the floor, and on this coffee table was a fully tricked-out Trash-80. By fully tricked-out I mean it had the Expansion Interface, this clucking box to the side called a floppy drive, whatever that was, and a printer.

Turned-out the floppy drive was a much faster cassette recorder for loading and saving games. And he loaded-up and showed me quite a few. Many of them were the text based games that I'd seen before, some called 'adventure games' where it gave you the description of a room and you got to either pick up or leave stuff there, then move to another room. But some were graphics oriented and more dynamic than anything I'd seen before on a computer. Behind the computer he had a few cassettes of a game called 'Interlude' and I asked him what that was, but he felt I was too young to see those games. When I noticed we'd passed three thirty, I mentioned I needed to get back to the Radio Shack before my mother got there.

So he got me back to the store a bit after four and stayed with me noting the many other games he had while I settled back down into the display desk. I expressed enthusiasm and he gave me his number and I wrote down his name at the top, 'Jeff'. He left soon after and not knowing how long I'd have to wait until mother arrived, I started to load the game I had been working on. When she came, I hopped in the car and, as we were driving to the apartment, I told her of my exciting day and she just about had a heart attack and told me I should never have left the store and gone with someone I didn't know. I told her I did know him, now, and had his name and phone number. Once back at the apartment, mother promptly snatched the phone number from me and gave him a call to give him a piece of her mind. When Jeff mentioned to her that he was married, mother asked to talk to his wife and soon calmed down. She said I could see him again the Saturday before I flew home that Sunday. But I was told in no uncertain terms: When at the Radio Shack I was to stay there until she picked me up!!!!

I did see Jeff that Saturday and picked some cassette based games to see. As we waited for them to load, we'd chat and he showed me his record collection of all these bands I hadn't heard of before; he would play a few songs off of one as he pointed out a few prized albums to me. A few hours later, it was time to go, have a final meal with my mother and pack for the flight home.

My father and Roberta picked me up at Logan airport and brought me back to the house. Once there I was surprised with the present my father had gotten me for Christmas. It was soft under the wrapping, not like a box with paper over it. I eagerly ripped the wrapping-off to find it was a set of long sleeve red plaid flannel shirts. My hands shook in revulsion as it dawned on me that this wasn't a present from my father, but a present for my father as he apparently thought he needed me to 'dress-up' as a lumber jack as well to finally land his catch.

I dropped the plastic wrapped shirts to the nearest side table and mumbled that I had to go and unpack my suitcase and fled the room. The shirts lay untouched on that side table for the next three to four months collecting dust until they finally, thankfully, disappeared.

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Displacement

43

Discovering she was going to be living in Colorado indefinitely, how would my mother get me to stay with her?

By the middle of August, mother decided she should job hunt now that she was living in Colorado, it seemed Joe might need a few extra months to realize how much he missed her. She found a job at a downtown supermarket and began a regular work routine after having two months off.

Meanwhile, I reminded her that I would be going back to New England to continue High School. This was a great thing to note on my end as it wasn't like I had a plane ticket, or any means of getting to an airport. In fact I only realize now how tenuous my return was as all she had to do was not buy a plane ticket, or not let me know dad had sent her one for me, and I would be trapped.

With her working, I pretty much stayed to the same routine of writing code at home and trying it out three days a week at the local Radio Shack. By the end of the Summer I had five working computer programs under my belt and saved to tape. The reason my friend Jonathan had sought out the TRS-80 Computer in school was because his father had bought him one as part of preparing him for his eventual career as an Engineer. As a result I was eagerly anticipating my return to New England so I could show off the games I had created over the summer break.

With the end of August rapidly approaching, mother took her new found earnings and tried to woo me to stay in Colorado by giving me money to buy a number of record albums. She also bought me a customized bed; as I reached my early teens, I had neared my adult height of just under six feet tall. This left my feet and head bumping into the head and foot boards of the bunk beds and I had taken up sleeping crouched sideways to fit. The bed mother had built for me was longer than the typical twin bed. The good news was I could lie flat in it and my feet wouldn't be hanging over the end, the bad news was stores didn't have sheets that size for sale, so mother took the more worn sheets from my bunk bed days and cut them up into quarters. She then sewed them to the end of the better looking sheets, thus giving me sets long enough to fit the bed. She made sure all the sown-on pieces were at the foot of the bed so they'd be hidden by the blanket and comforter, but when lying on the bed I'd feel the sown ridges against my calves and I had to be careful sliding my legs in and out of the bed less my toe nails catch.

She further made sure she and I filled-in my bedroom by unpacking everything, getting it nicely in the closet, hung on the walls, on the shelves and generally make the new apartment's bedroom everything I'd want in a bedroom. She then started talking about where I'd go to school. I reminded her that I was returning to New England for school. She then started to openly lobby me to stay as she didn't want to be alone. I reminded her of my not as older brother living nearby in Denver but she said she had been disappointed that he hadn't visited more often. I think he had come at least once every other week which seemed more often than when we lived at the New England apartment, but in reality what she meant was she didn't want to be in a town where she knew no one and she wouldn't even have me anymore as her unwilling confidante.

I assured her that I was going back to New England to finish school. So she then tried the threatening path. If I went back to New England, I would lose everything! All my stuff, all my books, all my games, all my record albums, my stereo, etc. All I'd have to take back with me was one suitcase of clothes. I felt that was a fair deal in return for finishing High School with the friends I had known for all my years. Further, I already had my bedroom at dad's house with much of my stuff in it and, most importantly to me at the time, I had the cassette tape of my computer programs. For me, it was the true measure of what I had gained during that first Summer in Colorado. But I didn't share any of this with her, I just said: ''Okay.''

I don't know who bought the airplane ticket back to New England for me. And in fact, during all my summers visiting mother in Colorado I never knew who did, but I suspected there was a little trade-off between the parents. The Wednesday before Labor day I stopped by the Radio Shack one last time and said goodbye to Ralph and the new guy who'd recently joined the store. Mother actually made dinner for us that night and I packed my one allowed suit case, cassette tape hidden inside and I was taken to the airport. The flight back was, thankfully, non-stop so I didn't have to worry about changing planes, this being my first flight alone. Father met me at the gate in Logan airport, and drove me home.

It was a quiet drive back to the home town and I was so thankful to be getting back. As we arrived at the house and I got my suitcase out of the back of the car, this was when my father mentioned that I would need to stay in another bedroom, now. During the Summer, he had emptied out my family home bedroom to make it his library. He had mounted all the walls with board and bracket shelves and his science fiction book collection was now housed there. This stunned me as I hadn't expected to come home to find my bedroom was gone. All my belongings in it, he had gotten rid off. No trace remained. Despite the fact that the adjoining bedroom next to his was the empty white room where my eldest brother had sketched the nude on the wall six years earlier, my father didn't use that. My eldest brother's original bedroom, that even my not as older brother hadn't used for over the past two years, that remained untouched as well. The empty bedroom that had originally been my sister's, then my mother's and eventually my not as older brother's during his last year living at the house, my father hadn't used that room either even though all it had was the bed frame and bare mattress.

It was that last bedroom that my father pointed me to as the place where I could stay. My eldest brother's bedroom was right next door as a ready to use bedroom, but as I'd been pointed to the room with the bare bed, that's where I went to. As my father picked me up late at the airport given the two hour difference between Colorado time and New England time, it was after dinner and Pappy was already watching evening shows in his apartment, if not to bed, so there was little to do but go to bed, myself.

But as I was on Colorado time, I wasn't sleepy at all. I looked out the bedroom window for a bit, the same one I had first spied the haying machines from twelve years earlier, but the hayfield was too dark to make out anything. Instead my eyes were drawn to the main grocery store lights peaking through the trees beyond and the edge of the shopping strip that had been built next to the store during the intervening years. After a while, not knowing where any bedsheets or pillows might be kept and not wanting to disturb my father who had gone to bed, I just curled up on the bare mattress and tucked my elbow under my temple for a pillow.

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A New Hope

42

With the move to Colorado, the question was: What was my mother's ultimate goal?

My mother used a moving company for our belongings in part because there would be a week long gap between the time we left New England and the time we were in the apartment. With the moving company, she could have them place our stuff into holding for two weeks, then finish delivering it to us in July. The problem was, once in holding, there was a strike and we were just a pair of a vast group of people who suddenly discovered they would have to make do with what they'd taken with them. For us, it was a small black & white television, two sleeping bags and what we fit into our luggage to last two weeks.

It was kind of odd to have a bedroom all to oneself and you're to one side with your sleeping bag looking over the far reach of the carpet at floor level. Needless to say, our laundry went into a frequent washing rotation. Unlike the old complex, this apartment complex had roughly three times the number of buildings and each building had three times the number of apartments. For 'entertainment' I would roam the complex and get the lay of the land. It had a pool, but it was always busy so my using it was out of the question. Next to the pool, though, was a club house with a coin operated pool table and pinball machine. Having never played pinball, only hearing about it in one of my brother's 'The Who' albums, I asked mother for some quarters, she gave me two. When I returned, it was in use and I watched the teenager play it for a bit. When his friend arrived, they left and I gave it a try. The two quarters went fast and when I returned to mother for more, I was told there weren't going to be any more and to find something else to do with my time.

After a couple of days of sitting on the floor, my mother got sick of it and came up with a clever idea: Rather than buy indoor furniture as ours would eventually arrive, we would buy lawn furniture! It was cheap, and we could use it indoors for the next few weeks, then move it to the little balcony once our stuff arrived. During one of our exploring car trips around our neighborhood we found a drug store, but again with the change in scale, it was at least four times the size of the largest pharmacy I'd ever been to and had some grocery aisles, electronics room, and more importantly the lawn furniture set out for sale in the entry. We picked-out two pieces, a short upright chair and a lower lounging chair. Now we had the chance to watch the black & white while sitting in the otherwise empty living room area in lawn chairs. Everything seemed so novel to me at this time.

The antenna on the T.V. didn't pick up the stations very well, but the apartment came with free 'cable', whatever that was. In rural New England, I had never heard of cable and we all just had roof mounted antennas, so this idea of a 'cable' which held all the signals that would normally be out in the air was a new concept for me. The small T.V. didn't have a cable inlet in back so my mother found out there was a Radio Shack a little ways from the apartment. On the drive I realized it was within walking distance and once there the manager, 'Ralph', helped us find the necessary adapter to attach the cable to the television. As we checked out I noticed they had two TRS-80 display computers, the typical one on a mid-chest high pillar placing the screen and keyboard at standing level for customers milling in and out. But they also had one in the display model integrated desk, with chair, looking very lonely by the window. On the way out I asked Ralph if I could come back sometime and use the computer, he said I could.

This town had five malls at the time, mind boggling as in rural New England malls were few and far between and only near the capital cities. We visited three of the malls in this new town regularly, at first so we could buy some additional clothes, but to also give us a break from the heat. Air conditioning was something only the rich people had in their cars and houses when I grew up, so there was no surprise that our first apartment, nor our Colorado one, didn't have any. To console me over not being able to play the pinball machine given its thirst for quarters, mother found me an electronic 'Master Mind' game which worked for a single player. This kept me busy for a few hours.

The next time at the drug store, I asked mother to buy me a notebook and pencils and I started to write code. Except I didn't know what I wanted the code to do. Unlike the past year taking programs out of magazines, I was starting with a blank page. Then it occurred to me to write a program that worked the same way as the mastermind game. Given the slow pace of my hand writing, it gave me plenty of time to reconsider any change my code might need as I scribed. Once done, I took the fifteen minute walk to Radio Shack and confirmed with Ralph that I could still use the computer on the desk. I could and typed in the program. To my surprise, with only one quick to find and fix bug, it worked! As the computer had a cassette recorder attached, I bought the cheapest tape they had and saved the game. I then spent the majority of my time at the apartment writing code into the notebook and then visiting the store to try it out. After a couple days in a row, Ralph encouraged me to come less often and so I made it a Monday-Wednesday-Friday afternoon trip with code writing at the apartment to tide me over between visits.

At first, to fill our time waiting for the furniture to arrive, we went to all the tourist traps in the area. On the drive into town on the interstate highway our first time, the 'Chamber of Commerce' had a stand on either side of the highway in the dirt shoulder where people could pull off and look through the fliers. We had collected quite a few then and, now these weeks later, had been going through them one by one until we ran out.

There was also another problem which horrified mom. In rural New England, where we knew everyone and everyone knew us, as puberty dawned I was still me and everyone knew it. Sure, I was a little awkward given my 'situation', but we had all been told that puberty was an awkward time and none of my friends or classmates seemed to take any particular notice. But in Colorado, where everyone was a stranger, they took me as they saw me and occasionally referred to me as my mother's daughter. This was despite the fact that my breasts continued to be strapped down with the ACE bandage. After a couple times of this, mother's solution was to have my head shaved to a military cut. This horrified me as, in the nineteen seventies, guys didn't have short hair like that anymore. Still, the times people assumed I was mom's daughter decreased, so it made her happy.

There was a problem with the new apartment, the neighbor above us owned a dog and had him use the balcony above us to 'do his business'. Urine would come down to our balcony at random times of the day, and rain storms would break-up and wash down the feces. Complaints to the neighbor or landlord didn't help. Eventually, as we still didn't have any furniture, the complex offered to let us move into a different apartment at the start of August. Mother took up that offer and soon, before my birthday, the strike had ended and our stuff was finally delivered. Well most of it, they told us that the storage warehouse had been robbed during the strike and some of our belongings stolen, like my bunk beds and gaming console. As I had long since become bored with Pong, it was no great loss for me, but mother was very upset, I don't remember what stuff of hers had gone missing.

Once the phone was installed and activated, mother quickly called Joe to let him know of her number. This lead to the once a week Friday evening phone call where Joe would be working at one of the stores late and give mother a call. On these nights, mother would make sure to be at the apartment and pensively wait near the phone for the call that eventually came. Between the first few of these calls, she explained to me her plan: The whole move to Colorado was to let Joe realize how much he missed her and needed her in his life. He would thus finally divorce his wife Dorcus and come to Colorado and sweep mom off her feet and take us back to New England!

This would happen any day, now...

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Confined And Breathless

41

Fort Collins is a city north of the Colorado state capital of Denver. After hearing about the vast size and traffic congestion of Denver from my not as older brother, mother decided that she'd move to a smaller city like Fort Collins that would still be near to him, but have a slower pace of life comparable to the various larger towns of New England.

As mother had just been looking to buy a house in the apartment town that we had lived in for the past four years, I was stunned by the news that we were moving to Colorado. Not just that, but we'd move only days after my Freshman year of High School let out. Unlike the move to the apartment town where I didn't realize I had any choice in the matter, this time I told my mother that I'd stay behind and move in with dad so I could continue school with my friends. She was speechless by this, then told me I didn't have any choice. I told her I did and she decided we'd talk about it more later. The next time I was at the old family home with dad for his mid-week days off, I told him that mom was moving to Colorado and asked if I could move in with him. He seemed surprised that I'd be willing to leave mom, but at the same time saw it as a feather in his cap if I did move back to the house full-time, thus 'choosing him over her'. I didn't care about the politics of it, I just didn't want to get stranded in another new town with no friends as when we'd first moved to the apartment town, this time over a thousand miles away from any other place to stay.

Knowing that my earlier bluff of moving in with dad was now a true option, I affirmed with mom that it was what I'd be doing. She came up with a compromise. I would move to Colorado and help her settle in, then, if I still wanted, I could fly back and live with dad for the school year. I reluctantly agreed and, soon after, packing began. I have no idea what Joe had to say when he heard the news, but it turned-out mother had a plan...

We had one day between the end of school and the moving van to make sure everything was packed up. My mother had convinced my not as older brother to fly back to New England and trade off making the drive with her. In reality he did all the driving. Most all of our belongings went into the moving van except for the small black & white T.V. and two sleeping bags which ended up in the car with me, my brother, our mother, and the luggage crammed into the trunk and the floor of the back seat. I had the back seat, itself, though with no place to put my feet, I osculated between sitting sideways across the seat with my legs stretched out, or lying on my side on the seat with my legs tucked in... For the next four days.

While we didn't have time for sight seeing during the trip, we did stop briefly at a Great Lake's beach with its tall sand dunes. Then later in the trip, once mother was settled into the motel, my not as older brother took me to see a new movie. It was 'R' rated and it was science fiction! And it blew my mind: Alien. Having the chance to see the movie made the otherwise endless days on the road worth while.

Mother had my brother go apartment hunting for her the month before while she was still in New England and he was in Denver. From those he saw and recommended, my mother had picked a two bedroom apartment that wasn't available until the first of July. Thus with about a week to kill, we spent our first night in Colorado at Denver which allowed my brother a chance to check on his apartment and have a night to sleep in his own bed. We'd found a motel nearby and I stayed behind and had the room to myself while mother and brother went to see his apartment. When he lead her back, him now in his own car and mother following in her car, she was thankful that she had decided not to live in Denver itself after her brief experience driving in it.

The following day he lead us to the interstate highway and off to mom's new home town. With the apartment unavailable, we already had reservations at a motel where mom and I would stay for a few days. We took a drive to where the new apartment was located and a brief trip downtown before my brother returned to Denver and we stayed behind. This motel had a pool and, more importantly, there was no one interested in using it; so I spent much of my first two days using the pool for hours on end. Given my 'situation', I kept my shirt on in the pool and would grab a towel from the side of the pool to bunch up and hang on the back of my neck and over my chest whenever I got in or out of the water to keep things hidden. But, it wasn't a big problem, as I said, no one else was using the pool. This was my last time in a pool or doing any swimming for that matter. And the only reason I did this for just the first two days is because I was hit with a massive case of altitude sickness.

Crushing pain in my head and chest, I winced with every breath. Had I known I needed to get used to the altitude ahead of time, I wouldn't have spent the first two days holding my breath in the pool. Now it was time to pay the piper and I lay in bed for the whole following day and most of the next. By the fifth day my chest and head no longer hurt badly and I could walk around again without leaning on the walls and furniture. Mother went off to see if the apartment would be ready in time and left behind some money so I could walk to the local supermarket and get some food.

Up till then I had known two supermarkets during my lifetime, the branch and the much larger main store that Joe owned, but the store up the street from the motel was about half again the size of both of those stores combined. I roamed the endless aisles and ducked oversized shopping carts being pushed by the bustling people inside. I finally found the deli section and discovered that I had to take a number rather than wait in line, another first for me. With no menu, I had no idea what to ask for once my number was called and the girl had to lead me through how to order a sandwich: Bread, meat, cheese? Back at the motel I found I had enough sandwich to last me two meals. Even though not in Denver itself, there was a different scale to life in Colorado that I would have to get used to.

Finally, the new apartment was ready and we left the motel to move into the empty rooms. We had a black & white T.V., two sleeping bags, and our luggage as the Summer commenced.

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