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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Night And Day

71

My father would normally have my return flight from Colorado to New England arrive on the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, but this time, perhaps for a better price, it came back on the Wednesday after. While there would have been little chance to see my friends before they left for College, this assured it and I arrived in my home town which looked very much the same. But this time I wouldn't have the comfort of longtime friends to get me through this year, just familiar surroundings.

Nothing went wrong with the trip back and nothing had happened to my bedroom while I was gone. It was like the return home I should have had the previous year. My first full day back, I went to the grocery store to request my schedule only to find the assistant manager flustered as he hadn't planned on me being back and would 'have to look into it'. I touched base with Joe, the grocery store owner, and he said he'd work something out and to come in on Saturday as my first day. I don't know if it was the assistant manager or not, but for some strange reason the owner of the local book store tracked me down the Friday between and offered me a part-time job. He said he heard I was looking for a job, but I assured him I already had one. Further, having to dress up every day and stand behind a counter for less money, versus wearing what I normally wore while working a variety of tasks full-time left little chance that I'd consider the book store job.

By the weekend, the lack of my friends was starting to sink in, no after trip visit with Jonathan to discuss the new games I'd come across, no bumping into familiar faces at the grocery store... Well, actually there were a handful of new baggers from the previous year that were the seasoned baggers of this year and then, to my surprise, there was Peter. His upperclassman friend had waited at home a year after his graduation from High School until Pete graduated so they could join the Army together. Apparently things hadn't worked out for Pete at boot camp and he was back at the store's Meat Room while his friend was now trapped alone in the Army for the coming years. As with the lack of news of his mother, Pete kept what had happened with the military close to his vest. While an old familiar face, the slow drift apart in our friendship had left us as acquaintances at best, but no longer friends.

My Saturday was much like the previous two years of Bagging Saturdays while Joe worked out my full schedule then handed it to me by that afternoon. With the store always closed on Sundays, my second day off had changed from Thursdays, which synced-up with the high school's late bus schedule, to Tuesdays. My week would thus be six o'clock at night till two thirty in the morning Monday, Wednesday and Thursday working the whole time with the night crew. Friday was a hybrid of four till eleven, half with the baggers until store closed at eight, then the rest with the night crew, with Saturday a mixed duty day as well. For both Friday evening and Saturdays, I was like the chief bagger, where I would fill-in and organize lunch breaks for the regular baggers and help-out during crunch times. For the rest of the time on Saturdays I'd be in charge of keeping the dairy case and beer case stocked. My days periodically helping out with the Produce Department was now behind me for good.

For the night crew days, I got to meet a whole new group of employees I hadn't known before. Tasked with unloading trucks of new stock twice a week to keep the shelves filled, then using up leftover stock for the nights in between, it was like a little family headed by Geno and I would work with his second, Nick, in the canned and jarred food aisle. Effectively each aisle had its own employee to stock it during the night and Nick's sister to work in the Deli making the sandwiches and grinders for the next day. There was a young woman who worked the Health & Beauty section, too, but she often kept to herself and Joe spent some time in the evenings helping her finish up, so they could leave sooner in the evening and do something else. Apparently Joe hadn't been waiting around for my mother to return from Colorado...

I think I had actually first met Geno when I was age ten and left the family home on my first night staying with my father after my mother had moved to the apartment. My dad and Pappy spent the evening saying derogatory things about mom. I had run from the house and gone to the store to find my mother, then working on the night crew, and Geno was the one who eventually responded to my knocking on the store's windows. That having happened seven years earlier, I don't know if he remembered me from that one time or not.

He was like the patriarch of the night crew family with Nick the brother, Amelia the sister and the rest of the guys like various odd uncles. With the loss of seeing my friends at school every day, I couldn't have wished for a better replacement group of people. We'd have dinner break on our own or in pairs on the usual nights, but have spaghetti nights for a shared dinner on Fridays. Once two in the morning came, we'd hustle to clear the main floor of boxes and carts, then half of us would pull out the large push brooms and sweep with the other half of us bringing out the floor scrubbing machines. I was assigned a floor scrubbing machine and had fun taming the throbbing mass as one carefully guided it up and down the aisles. By two thirty we'd be saying our good nights and I'd then walk across the hayfield in the dark, and sometimes moon lit nights, to the house. It was my first experience nighttime nature walking and I came to like it and would take it up as a hobby in my later years.

With Wednesdays as the lightest workload of the Night Crew, I'd sometimes do maintenance work at the store with Nick, repairing tile, reinforcing truck unloading 'dock' areas or patching walls. Once we had to go to the first branch store and do some repairs and to my surprise the store I had originally worked at had changed dramatically. The gas station next door had been bought and the store merged with its space, adding a whole new wing to the main floor. The gas pumps were retained and the Meat Room moved to the new wing along with a new deli section. The old back room which had held the original meat and produce work areas had been opened-up to contain a Health & Beauty alcove at the back, with the produce work area now confined to a closet next to the loading dock. This was the rare time I didn't help out as much as I should have with the work as I was enthralled by the changes that had occurred to the store over the past three years, I just had to explore and Nick let me. On the drive back to the main store he asked about my fascination and I told him about my previous years working for the store chain as a child.

The hardest part of my schedule was the shift from Friday night to first thing Saturdays. Theoretically, I had eight hours of time to sleep, but with the routine of going to bed by four in the morning on the other days, going to bed three hours earlier on one night didn't work for me and I'd often just get four hours of sleep, then rush to the store after I got up, sometimes arriving a little bit late. But unlike the previous year where I was a lethargic lump at the store, I was back to my focused self this year and proud of my work. For Saturdays, I'd promptly fill-up the dairy case after Friday evening's shoppers, then give the baggers their morning break, top-off the beer case, then give the baggers their lunch break. As the baggers and myself worked the full day from eight until six, our lunch breaks needed to be an hour long staggered in two shifts, eleven thirty, then twelve thirty. Everyone wanted eleven thirty and to convince half the baggers to wait until the second lunch shift, I bribed them with trips to my house to play games on my computer during the later lunch time.

Once, Pete joined us, then I didn't see him again during a lunch break until one time in May when the rest of the baggers wanted the second lunch slot for some reason so I came home earlier than I normally would to find Pete in the house playing games on the computer during his lunch break without my knowledge. As kids in Elementary School, I had shown him where the hidden key was for the back door. It looked like he had remembered over the past decade and had been coming to my house for some time during his Saturday lunch breaks to help himself to games. As I got home and noticed this, I decided to play it cool and just pull up a chair and watch as he played. Assuming this hadn't been his first time doing this, he must have been walking the driveway and road back to the grocery store so I wouldn't see him while I was cutting across the hayfield. When the lunch break ended, we walked back to the store together. As I had not noticed previous signs of his visits, he was being respectful when he was using the computer and I feared that if I complained about his doing this without asking he'd take it out by damaging my now three thousand dollar computer system when I wasn't home, as he had ruined my maternal grandfather's heirloom watch back when we were kids.

After only my first two months working full-time, Joe called on me for other needs. Monday mornings became a four hour stretch to top-off the dairy case and go with him to the liquor store to load up on wine for the grocery store's wine aisle. For this we'd take his car, collect a trailer at his home and then load the trailer together and unload it at the store. This was the most we had worked together ever and it was nice to visit with him once again on these little drives. Sometimes when the home delivery driver needed a day off, I'd be called to come in for a few hours to be the muscle while the head cashier played the navigator. And once I was tasked with delivering spare stock from the main store to the new, second branch store in the southern part of the state. The first store of the chain to be built from scratch, it was like the new car equivalent of a grocery store, all bright and shiny. I imagined that if I stayed in New England, Joe would one day give me my own branch store to manage. But my heart was with computers, so Colorado it would be.

By the end of my ten months working full-time, I was briefly assigned to Amelia in the Deli department at night to make the next day's sandwiches as the college kids arrived home from College and took their summertime jobs at the store. Oddly enough, the visit from the store owner's wife to belittle me was the closest thing I got to an official send-off from the grocery store. Happening on a Friday, if it was just the core group I'm sure we would have said our goodbyes during the spaghetti gathering, but with the expanded work staff, we had to drop those as they were no longer practical. Instead when midnight came I quickly went to each core member of the crew in their aisles and said my final goodbye as they worked, then let myself out the back door of the store and made my final walk across the hayfield...

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Above Average

69

Imagine if you will a situation where you are going to graduate from High School by showing up at the school in the morning and turning in a paper. Then imagine that your father has ordered you not to leave the house or go to school that morning. What would you do?

Years later, when I'd tell people of this story, it'd be pointed out to me that my father had been trying to stop me from graduating since the very start of my Senior year of High School. How? I wondered. By starting out the year with him stating that I was disowned upon graduation. I had been set up for failure as my subconscious would realize that if graduation meant I was disowned, not graduating would save me from being disowned... Was that why I had done so poorly in my final year of High School? Perhaps it was a contributing factor, but the loss of my mentor and erstwhile protector Zack Hatch had a part to do with it, and my inability to figure out why I couldn't pass any 'Advanced Math' exam factored into it as well. Still, it was a good point: That my father had set me up to fail that year.

And as that had failed, he was now taking steps to assure I'd still fail by the end of the year, one way or another.

During the morning phone call when he ordered me to stay at home until he got there, he was formulating this plan where he was going to cancel my plane ticket to Colorado and I would be staying in town and taking Summer School in order to finish my classes and graduate. Despite my trying to tell him the issue was resolved, he wasn't going to listen to a word of it and I was to definitely stay home until he got there to give me a piece of his mind in person.

And so from that phone call at six forty-five that morning, I stayed at home and watched the clock pass seven fifteen. It was now too late to catch the bus. And I continued to wait until seven thirty. It was now too late for me to hop on my moped and take it to the school. And then seven forty came and went. And went with it, too, was any chance of catching a ride with a friend driving themselves to the school that morning. By seven forty-five, an hour after my father had called and told me he was on his way over to chew me out, it was clear he wasn't coming as he was only a twenty-five minute drive to the house when he called. At seven fifty, I decided to blow him off and realized I could take the spare key from the cabinet and take Lois's, his girl friend's, left behind truck to the High School. I did and got there with two minutes to spare.

I saw the English teacher and handed her my report, she thanked me, and I let the Principal know, and he thanked me, and I met my friends in the cafeteria. They were all going to go to Jonathan's house for an afternoon of fun and boating on the lake. I joined them and we picked up Pete's upperclassman friend along the way. At the far side of the lake, we tied-up the boat and bummed around the lake town and ate, then we boated back to Jonathan's house where I excused myself and went to work for my last day at the grocery store before I would have gone to Colorado later that week. Once done with work I took the truck home and parked it where it had always been and found that my father still wasn't home. He didn't get there with Lois until a few minutes later and apologized to me for making me wait all day for him to arrive. So I now knew that his order for me to stay home had been a rouse and I also knew that he had no clue that I hadn't stayed home.

So I told him it wasn't a problem as I hadn't stayed home.

A touch of his anger flared but with Lois there, he held it in check. But I wasn't going to graduate and he had told me to stay home! ''What are you talking about? They told me yesterday I was going to graduate,'' I said trying to suppress the smile at the corner of my lips. I was? ''Yes, I checked in at the school this morning and confirmed it,'' I noted, letting some of the smile out.

If his girl friend hadn't been there he would have had a yell fest at me and repeatedly called me a liar, but with her there, he couldn't and just said, ''Well that's nice to know.'' During dinner preparation he lamented that he hadn't had time to get ready for the graduation ceremony. At this I told him not to worry about it as I wasn't going. Now he had a new thing to bark about. I definitely was going to the graduation ceremony and he wasn't going to hear another word of it!

What was I going to wear, he asked during dinner. For what? For graduation. I guessed just my jeans and tee shirt. That wasn't acceptable the bark came back. I pointed out that I would be wearing a gown over it so no one would know. It still wasn't acceptable and we were going out first thing in the morning to buy me something appropriate!

whatever.

The next morning I pointed out that I could use my corduroy three piece suit from my eldest brother's wedding a few years earlier, it would only be the fourth time I had ever worn it. But no, it was too old and I needed something new for graduation and the three of us got into his car and we were off to the capital city. We went to the same formal wear place I had gone to two and a half years earlier for the corduroy suit and, as I didn't care, I let him and Lois pick out the suit, slacks, formal shirt and tie for me. They made me dressed up at the clothing store to make sure it all worked together. With the top button closed and the tie cinched up to my neck I felt myself break out in a cold sweat and wanted to tear them from my throat. Years later a psychologist would theorize the reason why I hated things tightly around my neck harkened back to the day of my birth. But I didn't have to worry about it now as my father and Lois were soon satisfied and I could quickly take off the suit. We drove back home as I had to be to graduation prep by the start of the afternoon.

Once back, we realized that we hadn't gotten any dress shoes so I'd have to wear my sneakers for the ceremony, but at least I'd be nicely dressed-up otherwise. I put on the slacks and shirt but kept it unbuttoned at the top and carried my tie & jacket over my arm as I left, I told my father I'd put them on at the school. Van picked me up and we were off. At the school it turned out that many of us who swore we weren't going to participate in the graduation ceremony were there as well, no doubt also upon demand of their parents. I left the tie & jacket in Van's car and everyone else went to get their gowns from the fittings of the previous Monday, I went to the office to find out about my gown. It turned out they had given it to a girl in our class who hadn't a gown of her own on Monday during the fittings, at the time they thought I wasn't going to need it, after all. So they pulled out a box of spare gowns and found one close enough in size for me to use, cap too, then I scrambled to the gymnasium where the rest of my classmates had already started 'procession practice'. I snuck into line where Luke showed me how to walk: Step, pause, step, pause. It reminded me of the 'King Tut' dance comedian Steve Martin had done on Saturday Night Live.

Once practice was done, there was a short break until the ceremony, this was when I should have gone out to Van's car to get the rest of my suit, but sure enough, with the gown on, all you could see was the line of the shirt collar and cuff of my slacks with the sneakers the most visible part. I didn't worry about it, just buttoning all but the very top button of the shirt and pinching in the collar underneath the gown to make it looked like it was buttoned.

The time had come and we lined-up in our places inside the gym and the band started playing. We processed from the gym's back door to our seats in front of the spectators already there and sat down. Various people spoke, but I wasn't paying attention as I just wanted to get this over with. Finally, it was time to be given our diplomas and we got up one row at a time to process to the stage. The Principal handed them out and the tassel of my cap moved from one side to the other, then I walked normally back to my seat and unbuttoned my upper shirt and pulled out the collar to let my neck breathe as I awaited the end of the ceremony. It came, some tossed their caps into the air, and then we could go to the parking lot to 'meet our loved ones'. In my case though, it was my father, his girl friend, and to my surprise my British Uncle Ronny had somehow found out about the graduation and come. He was the only one armed with a camera and all the pictures the family had of the event came from him. I don't even know if my eldest brother knew of the graduation day and time, nor if my not as older brother was still in town.

With Lois there as a witness, I decided to manipulate my father and asked him if I could stay at the house one more year to work full-time at the grocery store and save my money to officially move to Colorado. Knowing with her there hearing this request, he'd have to say 'Yes' so as not to reveal his true self to her. He said, ''Of course!''

He decided we should go out for dinner. Uncle Ronny couldn't join us and excused himself to drive home, and I 'went to change' and got the rest of my suit out of Van's car. I took off my gown and cap and carried them with the suit to where dad had parked and we drove to the house to get Pappy. After dinner, we got home and as they went to the living room to watch shows, I went up stairs to my bedroom. Using the headphones, I listened to music lying in bed throughout the night as I was so buzzed with the excitement of having graduated.

I couldn't sleep at all and watched the clock until it was time for my final trip to the school the following morning. It was the day after graduation and I remembered what I could do. I entered the school and went to the guidance counselor's office. He wanted to know what brought me back and I told him I wanted my file. He'd have to get it and a few minutes later returned, file in hand. It looked like a lot of paperwork had been removed, but the results of the I.Q. test were still there. I didn't know much about I.Q. tests, but as I left the school and peeked in at the results I knew that one hundred was an average score.

I was above average.

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Brain Dead

62

From high to low, when and how would my life bottom out?

I got through the first month of my Senior year of High School pretty intact and if I had been able to pass any test in 'Advanced Math' I may have rebounded and made it through the school year. During that time the 'Civics' teacher had warned us of the up coming military aptitude tests they'd be having us do. He pointed out that while they would say and legally couldn't use the test to come after us for recruitment, that they always did anyhow. How could we find this out for ourselves? When taking the test put down the wrong middle initial, then see how many recruitment fliers and visits you get using that wrong middle initial...! And so we were rounded-up for the military tests in the semi-balcony portion of the auditorium at the end of that week and took them.

Also in the early Fall I went to various Radio Shacks trying to buy the lower case kit by itself so I could install it directly. The majority of the stores said that I could only get it as long as they installed it for an additional fee, but not otherwise. I finally found one at a mall about fifty miles away that would sell it to me plain without questions asked. When it arrived nearly a month later, I pulled out my father's old soldiering set and called my friend Jeff in Colorado and he talked me through the process of installing it as he had installed a third party kit of his own. With the chip in place and jumper wires attached where I thought they should have been, it came time to cut a lead on the circuit board itself that would sever the old uppercase-only video chip from power. Had I gotten anything wrong, I'd not only have no lowercase displayed, but no text displayed on the screen at all. Knife out, I made a gouge in the lead, closed the computer case and tried it out. It worked! Buoyed by this, I went ahead and mail ordered the 'Expansion Interface' and first floppy drive that would bring the computer up to thirty two kilobytes of memory and allow me to get off the frustratingly slow cassette deck. When it arrived, the extra RAM worked fine, the but floppy drive didn't work, it lit up and spun, but no data was read or written with it. I returned it and received a replacement disk drive only to find it had the same problem and the mail order company said that they had found nothing wrong with the drive I returned. My early boost from the lowercase kit had become frustration from having plunked down all that money and only gotten some additional memory for it. Working out the problem with the floppy drive would have to wait until the next time I was in Colorado and my friend Jeff could take a look at it.

I had scored very well on the military exams and sure enough I started getting fliers and invites in the mail to join various armed service branches, all featuring the wrong middle initial of 'Q'. I looked over the application forms I'd gotten and found it interesting that when you reached the 'sex' check boxes, the answers were 'male' and 'a female'. Apparently for men, sex was an adjective, but for women, sex made you a thing in the eyes of the armed services. Intended to be a passive aggressive response to having to take women into the military, rather than referring to women as 'women', the military took up referring to women as 'females', but by fifteen years later women had started referring to themselves that way, as well. When Star Trek: Deep Space Nine came out, they tried to point-out that 'females' was a pejorative, but once another fifteen years had passed, not only had women been routinely calling themselves 'females', men had even started calling to themselves 'males' completely defeating the original intent of the pejorative. After my not responding to their mailed invites in the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-One, I got a recruitment visit at my house. I don't remember if it was one or two guys that showed up, but they were very keen on signing me up. I assured them it wouldn't work out and I wasn't interested. They asked why I thought it wouldn't work out but I just assured them it wouldn't.

With November the first quarter of school had come to an end and I was entering a dark spiral, both emotionally and cognitively. Of the two math classes I dropped, I used one of the empty slots to take additional English classes, one of them with the teacher that I had for my second go around of 'Basic Composition' the year earlier. The other free slot was first period of the morning and I kept that free. I was admiring the wheels of a student who had been coming to school on his moped. He asked if I wanted to buy it. I realized with it and my first period free, I could effectively sleep-in each day and come to school late without impacting my classes. I took him up on it, working out a payment plan that would have it paid off by the end of the calendar year. The rest of the Fall I'd putt along to and from school with the moped and then again once Spring came.

Yet with the payments on the moped, junk food purchases, house bills and exhausting my savings with the unsuccessful computer upgrade, I realized I couldn't make ends meet with my part-time grocery store paycheck. I asked Van if I could borrow some money from him and he agreed. I was paying him back twenty dollars out of each weeks' paycheck and one week when he asked for his twenty, I thought I'd have some fun and say, ''I already paid you.'' Meant to be some teasing to have a little fun, after the first volleys of 'no you hadn't/yes I had' he abruptly said I was right, and I had. This stunned me and I tried to convince him I really hadn't but he was adamant and wouldn't take the money for that week. I would later discover that he had been carrying some guilt concerning me and I guess letting me have the twenty dollars helped relieve some of it.

By the middle of the second quarter the sudden hot spells I'd been having once a day since the end of my Junior year of High School had now started to occur a couple times each day. But as they always went away after a few minutes, I just ignored them as best I could and continued with my day as if nothing was happening.

I had started to completely shut down in class. Any class. I had entered this mental fog and would just stare at the floor as each class went on around me. The English teacher, who had been so impressed with me the previous year, actually blew up at me in class demanding in front of the rest of the students what was wrong with me? This barely got me to look up from the floor to her but I had nothing to say and she went back to teaching the class for the rest of the period. Once done and the rest of the students had left I was lethargically the last one to leave and she came up to me and apologized for having done that, but I told her that she was right, there was something wrong with me and I didn't know what. She didn't know what to say to that as I left.

In 'Civics' class my staring at the floor became the mainstay of my class participation and the only time I perked up was when I heard a student talk about how not all youth culture was against the Reagan era, take for instance the recent Devo song 'It's A Beautiful World'. ''For you,'' I mumbled. Perhaps stunned that I showed any life at all, the teacher asked me to repeat what I had said. I pointed out that the Devo song ended with ''It's a beautiful world for you. It's not for me.''

Toward the end of the class, we were to read Machiavelli's The Prince and Marx's Communist Manifesto. While we could show we had read the books by turning in a written summary, I opted for the verbal one-on-one question & answer to avoid the additional writing by hand. Despite having read them, when the teacher asked me about them my mind was an empty void. When asking about The Prince I could only come up with the vaguest of answers to his questions, prompting him to ask if I had actually read the book. I assured him I had.

He moved on to the Communist Manifesto and started with the question, ''Name a form of socialism mentioned in the Communist Manifesto.''

There had been another form of socialism mentioned in the manifesto? I panicked as I desperately tried to remember what it could have been. But again there was nothing there. After a bit of me staring at the floor while I failed to think, he prompted me again with the question and I apologized with tears in my eyes, ''Other than Communism, I can't think of another one it mentioned, I'm sorry.'' He stopped asking me any more questions at that point and said I could go. I again apologized thinking I had just blown the oral exam. I hadn't realized at the time that Communism was the form of socialism he had been asking for. But he apparently realized from my answer that I was just trying too hard to answer his questions and gave me passing marks for having read both.

By the middle of Winter I had taken up finding empty classrooms just to sit in and stare at the floor, it gave me more privacy than staring at the floor in the study hall area, I guess. But in this open concept school, it wasn't like I couldn't be seen and one time Van found me and asked what I was doing. I just shook my head and lamented how I used to be able to think, I could come up with pages of computer code at a whim and now I couldn't think of a thing. ''I just can't think anymore!'' I repeated with a burst and started to cry. Van put his hand on my back as I slumped over and buried my face in my arms.

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Unraveling

61

With my educational options apparently coming to a dead end, perhaps I really could find fulfillment at the grocery store...?

Returning to the grocery store this year featured its own surprises. Having started at the branch grocery store at the age of eight and working there part-time until I lost interest soon into age fourteen, I had found myself irritated that my friends were getting 'official' jobs at the main grocery store without me. So at age sixteen I joined them and we all worked together for a year. But for this second year, that wouldn't be the case.

It turned out Pete had been invited to move up to an assistant role in the Meat department on Saturdays, with Van being offered a spot with the Produce department. I got to remain up front with the baggers, now featuring some new faces from kids that had just turned sixteen. As the store was going to get their first computer, I comforted my ego by saying that I'd soon be moving up to help with the computer. In the meantime a few more people off the street, as it were, found me up front at the grocery store and asked if I could help them with their computers. I did, but everything always seemed to end up being a variation of my data base program: Not very engaging.

When the computer arrived at the store, it turned out to be a 'turn-key' machine meaning that someone else had set it up and all the store did with it was turn it on, type in some recent sales figures, print a report and turn it off. There was no need, or for that case, no place for me there. With school success slipping out of my fingers, home becoming just an empty shell, and now even work seeming to have no future place for me, I was feeling damn insecure. Jonathan, whose father owned a scientific heavy hardware business and bought his son the first Trash-80 any of us had heard of, occasionally did some work for his father when not otherwise being stuck at home for additional studies at his father's behest. He showed up at the store to pick up some stuff and I bagged it for him and offered to carry it out. This was just an excuse to chat as it was just the one bag as I remember. Then it occurred to me that I could fill the ranks of the bagging crew with a familiar face and told Jonathan he should get a job at the store. He smiled and said he didn't think so, and I tried to sell him on the idea and he turned down the prospect as we reached his car.

''Oh, you're only able to get a job from your father!'' I spurt out, then stood there stunned looking at him. He too, stood there with a mixture of hurt and confusion as he glared back at me. I realized I had just channeled my mother, seeking a way of demeaning someone for what they rightly did in life. I silently handed the bag to Jonathan who took it to place in his car and I turned and walked away. Why didn't I apologize? I should have apologized right there and then. But instead I just kept my distance from Jonathan for a while...

As with all criticism of other people, it just reveals one's own weaknesses: I had been the one dependent on my earlier father figure 'Joe' giving me a job because I knew him already. Who the hell was I to talk? I fancied afterwards that Jonathan 'knew I didn't mean it' and thus I didn't have to tell him. But that was just a load of bull that I consoled myself with and I've been haunted by this incident to this day. The only recompense I could make was to ensure I never said something like that again and the easiest way of doing that was to not even let these ideas enter my mind... And when they did, I'd find my own example within myself that I should address.

In reality I still worked with Pete and Van at the front of the store, bagging, four afternoons a week, so it really wasn't like I had been left without any friends to work with. It was just that Saturday when they seemed to be moving up to in the grocery store hierarchy while I wasn't. A true example in my face of the lack of a future I appeared to have in the eyes of the school. So I skipped over the assistant manager in charge of such things and took advantage of my relationship with Joe to ask him if I could help with the Produce department one Saturday morning. He said I could and so I did, when Van showed up to find me there I said, ''Joe said I could do it today.'' This seemed to throw him for a loop but he acquiesced, after all Joe was the owner and even the assistant manager couldn't over rule him. After doing this for a couple weeks in a row, I arrived the next Saturday and Van had come in early and was already at the Produce department. While I was an ass at times, I wasn't a complete hole and didn't have Joe over rule and put me in his place. Well, definitely not more than once.

By the turn of the calendar year, I relented and Van let me do every other weekend at the Produce department for a while. As Spring came, the Saturday stints for Pete and Van expanded to include Friday evenings as well. With that expanded role, I withdrew from trading Saturdays and just accepted my role stuck with the younger baggers. I labeled myself the 'head bagger' but there was no true difference in my bagging duties versus the other baggers.

In fact coming to work, and even during the rest of my day, life had become an ever increasing labor as my limbs felt heavier and took far more effort to move around. With the longer Friday evenings, there would be a mid-evening break for dinner, and Saturdays had a lunch break, and I spent these just hanging out in the Produce department with Van. We'd chew the fat a bit and I'd sit on a shelf with my feet dangling and notice that if I touched my chin to my chest it would make my toes and legs tingle. Where I had once started working for the grocery chain based on my own initiative and energy, now I was becoming an immovable lazy lump, sneaking longer breaks, choosing cashier stands having those customers with fewer groceries so I wouldn't be needed to carry them out.

If knowing how low one's I.Q. score was might result in them no longer trying, knowing that I had no future had the same result in me.

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Environment

58

Despite my schizophrenic welcome home on my first day back, could I return to living there as normal?

The following morning I slept very late -- obviously given my previous thirty-four hour day -- and my exhaustion had protected me from dwelling on the otherwise Earthshaking news that I was disowned and my father's divorce from his second wife was due to 'what I was'. Even after roughly fourteen hours of sleep, I was still not one hundred percent and only slowly gathered myself, cleaned-up and got dressed. When I had finally gotten home after my 'birthday party' I discovered that my bedroom had undergone a thorough rummaging over the Summer. I don't know what whoever it was had hoped to find but what had been in my room at the start of Summer was still there, just displaced.

Often, upon returning to New England, my first day would be devoted to calling Jonathan and going to his place to show off my new computer game acquisitions. But as the day was already half over, I simply called and made arrangements for the following day. I went to the grocery store across the hayfield to let them know I was back and ask about my schedule. Everything was set up for a return to work after Labor Day and I met and briefly chatted with Pete and Van on the way out. Van said I could just punch in and start working with them right then, but I passed, blaming it on jet lag rather than let on about the previous day's events.

And so the stage was set for my return to normal life. My hope, now, was the same as it had been with the start of sixth grade, that the familiar environment of school and my friends would give me stability while my home life was less than perfect.

Within the first few weeks Roberta and her son came back to the house, when dad wasn't there, to look for more of her stuff that she had left behind. Always defended by her perpetual smirk, I still mustered-up the courage to apologize to her. She didn't know for what and I told her that dad had explained to me that I was the reason their marriage failed. She chortled and explained that the night of the variety show, when dad said he'd be working late at the park to me, but said he'd be at the variety show to her, he had actually been having an affair with Lois. And had been during the couple of months he had been 'working late' that Spring. The divorce had been based on my father being unfaithful and nothing to do with me. Dad blaming me for the mistakes he made, ultimately nothing new, that was just the kind of guy he was. This news left me off the hook for the break-up, but I didn't bother confront dad about his B.S. as I was afraid it might bring back up the topic of 'what I was' and I still didn't have an answer for that.

It was soon clear that Lois was blissfully unaware of the disowning or what was behind it. She made an effort at winning me over by, having heard that I liked lasagna, she made me some at the restaurant and brought it to the house for me: A large pan of ziti with melted cheese kisses between. I didn't complain as it tasted fine and lasted me several days. When she heard I was taking photography class at High School, she brought me her deceased husband's pricey camera to use and save me from relying on one of the high school's battered loaners. I soon figured out that dad wanted to impress Lois with how great a guy he was, and so I would ask dad about things where I needed to rely on his word when she was there. Whatever answer he gave in front of her, he was stuck with it as he didn't want to let-on to Lois how he actually was.

While my father was living with his new girl friend at her house, he was still putting on a show of being home to share dinner with Pappy, though he would often skip out on the evenings leaving Pappy to return to his apartment to have Prime Time T.V. viewing on his own. Then father would start skipping dinner times and Pappy apparently saw the writing on the wall; after nine years since giving up his snowbirding to Florida, he made arrangements to fly back to there for the Winter. Father was stunned and tried to talk him out of it, but Pappy wasn't interested in what my father had to say and was gone by October. Now I truly had the whole house to myself as my father wasn't going to come home to share dinnertime with me. He'd stop by once or twice a week just to get the pile of mail I had collected for him in the meantime, pulling out the bills for myself.

Between my father's car and Lois's truck, they would drive together in one of the vehicles and leave the other parked in the driveway. Lois said I could feel free to use her truck whenever it was left here as dad had told her I could use his car when left at the home. She showed me where the keys were hidden in a corner cabinet, it turned out all the keys were hidden there, including the key to the padlock my father used to keep me out of the basement workshop and away from my tools.

I decided to build myself a computer desk for my bedroom and used her truck to pick up sheets of plywood and two by fours. Built in place, like a tank, it worked well for my needs at the time, with the computer keyboard in a cut-out hole allowing it to be raised when I wanted to use it, but lowered and a snug-fit board placed over it for a writing surface during school work. When I say it was built like a tank, it unfortunately was: With all the half inch plywood and interlaced two by four framing, I once had to make an adjustment from underneath to the computer raising shelf and couldn't lift the desk up to give me the room I needed. It finally dawned on me to use the tire jack from a car and get the desk raised that way, then put bricks underneath while I worked. As the desk was wider than the door, I realized it was never going to leave the bedroom I had built it in, but as I wasn't planning on changing bedrooms it didn't really matter.

With Winter arriving and the heating oil bills rising, I soon realized I couldn't afford to heat the whole house with my part-time money from work, so I left the house in the fifties and pulled the bathroom space heater into my bedroom to keep it warm. Still, it couldn't fight against the draft from the early twentieth century windows of the house and I finally nailed one of the old family sleeping bags over it. That made all the difference in the world for keeping the room warm, but also cut off any daylight; there was plenty of daylight that could come into the rest of the house, I concluded.

One Saturday at work we had one of the biggest snow storms of that year and I got to walk across the hayfield back home through a two and a half foot blanket of snow. Leaving work soon after six o'clock and getting to the house by about twenty past, dad stormed into the house at six thirty and yelled at me as he and Lois had spent the past forty-five minutes stuck in the snow at the bottom of the driveway and I should have had it all cleared out with the snow blower before they had come. As this visit had been unannounced, I pointed out I was still working when he had gotten stuck at the end of the driveway, so I didn't see how I could have gotten it cleared in time for him even if he had told me they were coming. Dad realized that Lois had drifted in behind him and was seeing the real him and quickly finished the argument by yelling at me, ''That's no excuse!'' While they had come to have a surprise dinner with me, I instead went straight out to the garage and spent the next two hours clearing the driveway to make it faster for them to leave while they had dinner for themselves. Lois had left a plate for me once I was done. Eating it alone, I then went straight to my room, not having seen dad again before they left.

After that time, dad didn't make any attempts to come back to the home for any length of time until Pappy returned the following Spring.

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Respect

55

By the Spring, I was pining to my friends at school how much I wanted to take my computer to Colorado with me for that Summer's visit. While I could put the keyboard like computer back into its original packing box and take it as carry-on luggage, I couldn't very well do that with the cathode tube monitor. Jonathan perked up and said I could have a video converter box and use a regular television with the computer. I could? Yes, the Trash 80 Model I had been built with all the video logic in the keyboard/computer unit and sent the resulting picture to a monitor that was nothing more than a picture tube without a T.V. receiver. Radio Shack sold a kit box which could convert the computer's video output into a radio frequency signal that could then be hooked straight to the antenna inputs of a T.V.. While I wasn't sure about everything he had told me, the little black & white television from our apartment days was still in my mother's hands and about the same size as the Trash-80 monitor, so I asked Jonathan where I could buy that kit? He said not to worry about it, he enjoyed doing the kits and he would get it and put it together for me. Really? Great! The last week of school he brought in the completed box and I asked him how much I owed him? He said not to worry about it and I thanked him.

Given this act of kindness as well as all the help my friends had given me during the variety show, I realized I had truly earned their respect. It was a great feeling, but at the same time I wanted to look that gift horse in the mouth and try to figure out why they respected me...

Was it that I wasn't 'retarded'?

Let face it, that's the thought most people get when they meet a stutterer, never fairly, but it's there all the same. While people might have that first impression of me, most figured otherwise once they got to know me and realized that I was a person like them, just afflicted with a stutter. For those who didn't get to know me, they were swayed once my computer programming skills had become apparent to all my friends; they spread my self-mocking aside that I was 'A Computer Programming Genius' as a considered truth to the other students throughout the school, and those students who only knew of me from my stutter, came to think more of me as that.

Was it my ballsy stunt with the new Principal?

Between our Sophomore year and Junior year of High School, the original principal had left and our ninth grade English teacher, and father of the only twins in our school, had been promoted over the vice principal to become the new man in charge. While we felt a little bad for the vice principal, we felt better for the English teacher as he had been a stand-up guy that spoke to us students as people, rather than as burdens.

Soon after starting to officially work at the main grocery store, I walked down an aisle to find what looked like champagne bottles on the top shelf of the juice section. I was wondering why they would be here rather than with the wine section and took a closer look. They were actually 'sparkling grape juice' in wine-like bottles, one variety white and the other red. Curious, I wondered what it would taste like and picked up a bottle, and then I remembered something about the plastic cup area and hatched a plan.

Sneaking the bottle into school, I told Pete of the idea and he loved it and recommended that we do it during the study hall period we shared. We stopped by the office and asked the Principal if he'd have a spare moment then as a number of us wanted to get together and congratulate him on his new position. He was tickled and said he would. A few more friends found out about this and, when the time came, Pete went to get the Principal while the rest of us went to the cafeteria to set up a table of extra chairs and a place of honor. We opened up the bag of plastic 'wine glasses' which came in two halves and started putting them together as Pete and the Principal arrived.

He sat down a with the group of us, a smile on his face, and I pulled up the 'wine bottle' wrapped in a crumpled paper bag that I had kept hidden by my feet. His face went from a smile to horror as we pulled the bottle out of the bag and popped the plastic cork. He was likely thinking he'd have to perform his first mass suspension. We assured him it was okay as we filled up the 'wine glasses' and passed them around, then provided the bottle itself to him. As he read the label and found it was nonalcoholic, relief flooded his face and then the smile returned with a laugh.

We soaked up this moment of having pulled his leg, then we raised our glasses and congratulated him. He seemed truly honored.

Was it the bully incident?

Unlike large schools in urban areas where there were enough bully minded kids that they formed packs, our rural High School just had the one bully and we had to make do with sharing him as he was actually a grade ahead of us and he decided his territory was both his and our grades. You just had to make sure you weren't alone with him in a room or at the end of a hallway and you were pretty safe. In the light of day, the most he got out of his bullying was to give a furtive threat or name call as he walked by outside as we waited for the buses to arrive. The most common physical act of aggression he got to do was to try to trip kids as he walked past them in the hallway. In case any adults were watching, he'd stare straight ahead as he walked by, when the target was at the right place coming toward him, he would swing out his next step a little wide and get it on the inside of the coming kid's ankle, then pull his step in, capturing the ankle and planting his catch on the floor as he continued his walk down the hall as if nothing had happened.

While the best technique to avoid this was to move to the other side of the hall as he passed, this was not always possible when the hallway was full of other kids. He caught me once, after a couple of tries and I got my nose planted in the carpet. Thinking over why he had successfully tripped me that time, but not on his earlier tries, I realized that his technique didn't work if you twisted your foot to the outside. For all his next attempts, he'd capture my ankle with the toe of his shoe, as he'd pull it in, I'd twist my foot to the outside and his shoe slipped off and we both continued walking as if nothing had happened. I had gotten so smooth at this trick that I no longer worried about moving to the other side of the hall when I'd see him coming and instead we performed this dance. He'd try to trip me, I wouldn't be tripped, we both lived for another day. I started to suspect this was probably the most, non-violent, physical contact he had in his life with anyone, then it occurred to me the same was true on my side.

One day walking up to my group of friends in the hallway, bully-boy tried again and for no other reason than boredom of the dance, I wondered what would happen if I twisted my foot inward instead of outward? I got my answer as he went down hard and I followed his example of continuing to face straight ahead as I walked to my friends. I could see the delight from what had just happened light-up their faces, some getting off a couple of guffaws; their reaction matched my feelings while I held the straight face as I reached them. Expecting to greet them and chat about it, the smiles disappeared and they all abruptly stepped passed me. Confused, I turned to see what was up.

The bully had been stunned by his fall from grace. Somebody had tripped him? I'm sure he thought. After that moment laying on the floor in surprise he had gotten up and started charging for me while I was blissfully unaware, facing my friends. As the bully was about to reach me, my friends had stepped forward and made themselves a wall between me and the bully: Pete, Jonathan, Van, Luke, and Pete's upperclassman friend fearlessly stood between me and the bully wanting revenge. ''He tripped me!'' he yelled at them hoping to convince them to let him at me. But they stood their ground and explained to him that he had tripped each of them in the past and turn about was fair play. ''He tripped me?!?'' his second intonation, this time, was more of a vent of frustration. A teacher drifted over to ask if anything was wrong. ''Nothing,'' the bully bit out and stormed away. Apparently the teacher had gathered what had happened as he had a laugh with us once the moment of danger had gone.

I can never adequately explain the joy I felt at that moment of my life, not of having landed the bully, but that people had stood up for me and protected me. Something that I had so rarely experienced and so wished I could have happen again so I could revive and relive that moment of bliss.

This filly was a great horse with perfect teeth and I loved it!

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