Beard Bits

3

During the last two months of my Senior year of High School, a hair started to sprout out of a cheek. After a few weeks of this single hair growing there, the store owner walked up to me and silently handed me a disposable razor. I accepted it as the message was received, that it was time to start shaving... The one hair. A couple months later I was visiting Colorado for my last temporary summer visit and, as I hadn't brought the razor with me in my luggage, I used the same method my mother did and plucked out the five hairs I now had growing on my face. By the following Fall, when I returned to New England and started working at the grocery store full-time, I took up shaving full-time as well for the handful of whiskers I'd developed.

After my permanent move to Colorado, effectively between jobs, I decided to let my beard grow and see what would come of it. Being around my birthday month, mother wanted me to tag along on another long drive up to visit my sister at the Wyoming/Montana border. I really didn't want to, but I concluded I really couldn't say no.

As my sister's father-in-law had died in the intervening years, my sister had moved into her husband's parents' home as his mother had found a new, smaller place, for herself in town. When mother and I arrived, as there weren't enough guest bedrooms, I was assigned a roll away bed in the unfinished basement. I actually liked this setting as it allowed me to sleep late in the morning, as there was no natural light to wake me, and read my science fiction books by the light of a provided lamp. I remember very little else about this trip other than being in the basement for the few days we were up there. On the drive back my mother pleaded with me to shave given how terrible my beard looked!

Checking in the bathroom mirror once we got back, I found that rather than having a beard, all my face produced was a smattering of hairs widely spaced. The best looking bit was a 'Soul Patch' under my lower lip, about an eighth inch wide and not much longer. The closest thing to a 'beard' I had was a scruffy patch under my jaw. As my brothers had mustaches in their years after High School, I decided to shave all but the upper lip and see what developed. If it hadn't been for the scruffy bit under the chin, I might have just turned to plucking it. After a few years, no one had noticed my 'mustache' as they assumed it was just the shadow of my large nose above. So I started shaving there as well and lose the shadow. My 'beard' never filled in more than that and I discovered I didn't have to shave more than once every four days as people didn't start to notice until day five.

I had sent a two thousand dollar check to Colorado ahead of me for my mother to deposit into a bank account under my name before I moved out. One thousand dollars I brought with me as travelers checks and another five hundred as cash on hand for the drive out. As I hadn't needed the travelers checks, I found I could simply deposit them into the bank account mother had set up for me, but she had another idea.

During an employment gap between the grocery store turned deli and finding a job at the hospital, my mother had borrowed some money from my not as older brother in the Air Force. As he had been single and didn't need much of his paycheck as he lived on base, his savings had been piling up and thus he was able to help out mother during that time. While she had gradually paid him back during the preceding year and a half since she'd gotten the hospital job, she still owed him about a thousand dollars.

As my not as older brother had let her know he was going to get married to someone he met in the Air Force, mom decided she should pay him off in a lump sum as well as send him money for a wedding present. And my fifteen hundred dollars was the right amount! Could I instead cash in the traveler's checks and loan her one thousand dollars so she could pay off my not as older brother? Then she'd use the remaining five hundred dollars as the wedding present from 'her & me' and pay me back half of that as well, later. Always wanting to be helpful, I thought, Why, not?

As Al, of the local software start-up company, had gotten an invitation to visit the local big name computer company nearby, he asked if I'd like to come along...? Absolutely! The previous year, my mother had a boyfriend who worked there and I thought I might be able to get my foot in the door through him this year, but mother had since dumped him as, she explained, ''He was the same height as your father and I decided I couldn't deal with that again.'' So much for romance, I guessed and wondered how I'd get into a good computer job once I got to Colorado. But with this invite to join Al on his visit, I perked up as we arrived at one of their overflow facilities, they had grown so big they no longer fit into a single complex, and we got the tour with someone Al knew. It was a sprawling single floor with a mix of mainframe and mid-range machines housed in air conditioned rooms nestled between blocks of work cubicles. It was sort of like I had expected to see, still, I found myself impressed as what I had imaged ahead of time was actually now surrounding me. At the end of the tour, his friend asked if we had any more questions and then handed Al and me job applications to take home.

Getting back I was thrilled as my great plan of saving-up my money for a year, then moving out to Colorado to get a computer job by Fall was running right on schedule. All I had to do was fill in the application where I would note 'my degree', 'field of expertise', and check a box saying 'I could pass a physical examination' as part of being hired...

Not having a degree would be problematic, but as I had quickly impressed Al with my skills, I thought I could get passed that. I didn't know what the official title of my field of expertise would be and wondered if I could just put 'Computer Programming' as my answer. But could I pass a physical examination? I didn't think so given my 'situation' and had even given up on entering any military service because of it.

I didn't bother send in my application and even though Al did and had a year of working at the start-up under his belt, I soon heard from him that they wouldn't consider him without a degree either. Working at a big computer corporation wasn't going to be in either of our futures.

Toward the end of Nineteen Eighty-Three, jobless and living off my savings, my bank balance had dropped in half and was soon being eaten up by undisclosed bank fees. When I asked what those were about, the bank explained that there was a 'maintenance fee' for having a balance below a thousand dollars. That was news to me as I had never encountered such a fee with my original bank account in New England but that's just how they did business in Colorado.

Finding this out, now five months after mom had borrowed the money from me to pay-off my not as older brother, I went to her and asked when she might start making payments toward the twelve hundred and fifty dollars she owed me? She paused, then explained to me that I had been privileged growing-up with her during those four years at the apartment town, with just her and me and having the large bedroom for myself. She had been thinking about it recently and, in retrospect, she realized that I actually owed her that money and so she wouldn't be paying any of it back...

I protested in shock, but what could I do? With my savings dwindling, and no job prospects on the horizon, I couldn't very well move out.

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New Settings

2

Despite using other means of keeping the gas petal pressed down during the nearly two thousand mile drive from New England to Colorado, my right foot still ended-up without any sensation on the ball of the foot and toes. This made walking odd as the next day I hobbled from my mother's mobile home to the row of community post boxes to get her mail. One of the tasks I'd do to break-up my day during my summer visits, it was immediately assigned to me on my return. Having gotten in just after nine o'clock the night before, we probably visited for about an hour before mom went to bed and I unloaded my clothes from the car and the computer components. The components I placed on the dining room floor for safekeeping during the night and I left everything else locked in the car as I went to bed myself. I slept through my mother getting up for work the next morning, but the mailbox key was waiting for me on the dining room table.

Part of me wanted to get right to it in Colorado, visiting Jeff, another friend of ours, getting the computer up and connected online. But after three days on the road, I found just settling on the couch with the swamp cooler on, a glass of ice tea in my hand, and watching the daytime talk shows, suited me just fine. I did compromise and call my two friends in town to let them know I was there and I'd see them the following day. Once mother was back from work, I asked where I could set-up my computer desk? In the past years, I'd used her sewing machine desktop for the computer, but as I'd brought my light frame custom made desk with me in the car, that wasn't needed, but now floor space was. The spare bedroom where the sewing machine had been still made the most sense so it was rearranged to open up the far corner nearest the phone jack and my desk was soon assembled and the computer together and online. In short order: The rules were I could use the computer online only when mother was not home or asleep as she didn't like to pick up the phone line to make a call and hear the computer ''screechy-talk'' buzz back at her. She further didn't like the thought that her friends wouldn't be able to call her when she was home if the computer was hogging the line.

Jeff had picked up another new computer friend while I was gone and he had actually recreated and expanded Jeff's online site to feature more than just mail and chat. 'Al' was the local computer prodigy kid. His math teacher had been so thrilled with his work that he had founded a business featuring Al as its sole employee who could write code for those needing it. I came to know him in those first summer nights visiting Jeff and even seeing his office as Jeff helped to get it connected, he had grown-up using the 'Apple' side of the microcomputer family tree and so his rewriting of Jeff's site was a means to familiarized himself with the Trash-80 side of things. His proudest achievement during his high school computer programming years was a game I'll call 'Toad Blow-up' where the game would draw a lily pad in the center of the screen, then a toad on top of it and wait for the player to press the space bar. Then it would shoot from the four corners of the screen to the center and blow up the toad. Oh, so did the toad move or you had to aim? No. Could you only shoot when things blocking your aim moved out of the way briefly? Nope, the toad just sat there waiting for you to kill it using the space bar.

During an evening when Al wasn't at Jeff's house, I showed Jeff my finished 'Star Quest' game with the new climax at the end. He was very impressed and made a copy for himself. He showed it to Al about a week later when I wasn't there and he couldn't believe I had done it. But as Jeff had seen it slowly grow to what it was over the course of three years and even helped out with some key bits of the machine code, he assured him I had. Al was duly amazed and wondered if his math teacher should hire me as well, but as they were a tiny start-up with limited investors, they couldn't afford to. Which was fine with me as I was looking forward to having the Summer as free time as I had during all my previous years. Still, Al kept me in the loop and would occasionally invite me to other computer related activities.

Jeff, to, invited me on one of his common activities. Being a huge science fiction buff, he would often go to the various science fiction conventions in the country and as there was one coming up in Omaha, and I had money where I could pay my own way, he invited me to join him for the drive there and the three day weekend event. I agreed and as I'd finally gotten the feeling back in my right foot, I even traded off on the driving to Nebraska in Jeff's fully loaded Datsun 280Z sports car. What a world of difference true cruise control made and I was thrilled the drive wouldn't take us through Kansas as I had come to loath my driving experience amongst the endless corn fields and pledged never to drive through it again.

Before the age of 'media' focused conventions, Omacon was run and focused on written science fiction and featured Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle as the headlining guests that year. While it was great sitting in on the various panels, what caught my interest was the 'media' room where people had brought video tapes of all of these short lived science fiction television shows I had never heard of before, and even surprises from the ones I had. Having grown-up with the Star Trek mythos of being the only television show to have to go through two pilots before being picked up, I was seeing the original pilot episode of Lost In Space that didn't feature 'Dr. Smith' at all. Much as the Star Trek first pilot show was cut up and used during the first season's run of shows, so too had Lost In Space's original pilot, a year before Star Trek hit the air. Yet not only these unknown gems were being shown, but shows from England as well as other ones from the United States. After a second day spending most of my time in the 'media' room soaking-up all they had to offer, Jeff tracked me down and assured me there was so much more to see and people to socialize with. I finally skipped the last few hours of the media room on the final day and saw some more panels and visited with some people Jeff had befriended. We were then on the road back to Colorado that evening.

Unlike most all of my past drives which took place in daylight hours, we were driving into the sunset. After a few hours, Jeff pulled into a rest stop with the plan of sleeping for the night. As this was his trip I agreed, but found I was too buzzed to sleep. The car was parked facing west and I watched the last remnants of the sun setting and the sky transitioning from the orange glow of evening, high lighting the scattered clouds above, into the purplish glow ushering in the twinkle of the stars and the blackness of night. I loved seeing this as in rural New England there were so many trees you could rarely see the sun rise or sun set unless you were on a high hill overlooking a large field. I thought the the western sky was beautiful and looked forward to seeing this each and every day to come.

I still couldn't sleep, but closed my eyes and leaned back in the passenger seat and rested. A bit before midnight, Jeff woke up and used the restroom and when he came back I asked if perhaps I could drive while he slept in the passenger seat. He was a little leery as he didn't want me driving and dozing, but I assured him I was wide awake so he agreed. Over the next five to six hours of driving through the night, I discovered that was my favorite time of day for long distance driving. Maybe because traveling in the blackness with the white road side markers zipping by somewhat reminded me of the star ship Enterprise zipping through space. I don't know, but I just loved that drive back to Colorado and we reached town just in time for the first touch of the sun rise. I pulled-up to Jeff's house and, as he had awakened as we reached town, we parted and he walked up to his house while I drove back to my mother's mobile home in my car to the east with the sun rising in front of me.

As I came to love the glory of sun sets and sun rises in the West, I would rarely see them in the years to come, only savoring them once in a great while over the years and reminding me of them from this first science fiction convention trip.

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why am I writing this?

ii

For those of you who haven't read Volume One of these tales, or perhaps have come to Volume Two after a long break and need a reminder, I'd like to take a moment to explain myself.

I've had an odd life and decided that I should write about it before it goes away. But at the same time, since I've had an odd life, I've decided to write it under an assumed name. As you read more of this, I'm sure you can guess why. Similar, too, I've decided not to use the real names of those I've met, those I've loved, and those I've loathed. The goal of my work here isn't to dish on people but to explain my life & times in the hopes that you might gain something from them. Perhaps some insight, maybe some humor, or possibly you're reading it just to kill some time between meaningful moments of your own life.

So when it comes to pseudonyms used in this text for other people: I'm first introducing them in single quotes, to make them obvious, then just using them as names in the continuing text to make them flow better in the prose...

I'm such a proser!

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The Drive

1

When I say I had 'made' the drive from New England to Colorado before, I'm just noting that I had ridden in the back seat of a car. Nothing prepares you for your first multiple day drive alone except doing it. The longest drive I had done before driving to Colorado was an hour and a half trip to the family grocery chain's new, second branch store. And that was a forty-five minute drive one way, help unload the truck, walk around the new store for a couple of minutes admiring it, then do another forty-five minute drive back. For my trip to Colorado, I was to drive around two thousand miles on a route I'd never taken before.

While I had a tape deck installed in the car and over ten hours of albums taped to listen to, I got through the first few hours of the drive silently. I don't even know how often I stopped for gas, I suspect I only did so when the tank was nearly empty or when I needed to reacquaint myself with the maps. So maybe I stopped for gas thrice a day with a fourth stop as needed for other stuff. As the car didn't have cruise control, that was still an upper crust sort of option for the mid-nineteen seventies when the car was made, my right foot began to get tired of ceaselessly pressing down on the gas peddle. I tried using my left foot for a bit, but while reaching the brake with it wasn't an issue, reaching the gas pedal, comfortably, was. After just shy of eight hours from the time I left my family home, I had gotten through the center of New York state and entered North Central Pennsylvania. Given my abbreviated sleep of the previous night, I was done driving and found a hotel off the highway and checked in by two thirty in the afternoon. Exhausted, I used the bathroom, then fell onto the bed and was out for the next twelve hours.

When I awoke and got cleaned up I realized I needed to think this through a bit better. Rummaging through the car, I found the long handled ice scraper for the windshield; I suspected I could use this on the highway, when I didn't have to worry about shifting gears, to hold down the gas pedal with my right hand from time to time to give my foot a break. Also, I had gone through three hours of my tapes the previous day and realized I would need to pace myself so I wouldn't just end up playing the same tapes over and over again during the drive. I concluded I would use the radio from time to time, but would save the tapes for the times I was struggling to pay attention and a stream of loud unbroken music would keep me from making a mistake, or dosing off! Checking out that first morning I found that I could have left the key behind in the room and just locked the door behind me as I had paid cash upon check-in. This was the tactic I used for the rest of my nights.

Actually getting on the road an hour or more earlier than the previous day, I was on my way to link-up with the original AAA planned route and join Interstate 70. My time thinking things through before I got on the road really helped. While traffic was heavier than the day before, this actually kept me more alert and the first time I used the long handled window scrapper for the gas pedal, I discovered that the end near me fit perfectly in a grove of the center emergency brake lever housing, allowing me to not only give my foot a rest, but also my hand. Technically not ideal, but I was more relieved than worried at the time doing this. The car was holding up well and while disappointed that I had only gotten through a few states the day before, I was through to just the other side of the Indiana and Illinois border before I decided it was time to end my second day on the road. All and all I was happier with this day's driving and looked forward to day three. I've since learned looking forward to anything often leads to disappointment.

The third driving day started off well, and I was across the Mississippi river and through Saint Louis before lunch. I had learned that the best time to use the window scraper 'cruise control' was on the stretches between the major cities, then use my foot for the more varying conditions driving through them. As I had gotten through two and a half states, roughly, each day of the trip so far my goal was to get through another two and a half for this day... Forgetting that the states get wider as you go west.

My scariest moment was when nearing Kansas City as there was road work taking place significantly east of the city and traffic abruptly stopped to a crawl. This caught me by surprise and I put my foot on the brake, but then remembered the window scraper holding down the gas pedal. Releasing that made the car slow down much more quickly and this was when I discovered that I had placed a weighty box of something just above the driver's head rest and it slid forward pushing my head to the windshield. Fortunately I finished the maneuver of: Taking the scraper off the gas pedal, braking to stop before hitting the car in front of me, and pushing back with all my neck strength against the box while keeping my eyes on the road. I drove more carefully through the rest of the city's road construction until I was on the west side, then pulled off to stretch, gas-up, and rearrange the boxes behind my seat so I wouldn't have to worry about it again.

This would have been a good time to figure out where I wanted to stay for the night, but as I was feeling 'good enough' and it was only the middle of the afternoon, I felt I could go further before I pulled-off for the night. In retrospect, Topeka -- Yes, Topeka! -- should have been the place I stopped off at. But, with the time change, I realized it wasn't even dinner time yet and kept on driving. After all there were exits with hotels and motels every tens of miles so far on the trip.

This was when I learned that not only did the states get wider as one drove out west, the towns became much more sparse... Not only did the towns get more sparse, but there were no longer hotels and motels visibly at the handful of exits along the way.

After two thirds of driving through Kansas, with Interstate 70 nothing more than a straight line through a never ending corn field, my car started to weave back and forth a bit. I would compensate for this using the steering wheel for the next few miles, but it just got worse. Finally I stopped on the shoulder of the highway and got out to discover what was going on with the car. It turned out the rear driver side wheel was nearly flat. Then I remembered the nail I had seen in the tire the night before I left New England. Perhaps I should have been checking on the tire once or twice during the course of the drive. Either way it didn't matter now as I needed to change it.

The spare tire mounted underneath the car made that easy to reach, but the tire jack was in the back of my import station wagon and the back of it was loaded with all my stuff. Still, I knew where to find it and was able to transfer some stuff to the passenger seat rather than leaving it out on the ground as semis swooped passed with a gust of wind each time. I finally got the jack out and then realized I'd have to kneel on the driver side of the car to jack it up as cars zipped by. I was pretty brave and could have been right at the edge of the highway and kept my eye on the coming traffic and not been affected, but to jack-up the car I was placing myself back first to the lane of traffic and having to trust the passing drivers not to drift ever so slightly out of their lane and into the shoulder and me. I soon got the shakes, but knew I didn't have time to get over it as the sky was just starting to turn amber before the coming sunset. Car jacked up and tire off, with various moments to move to the far side of the car and wait when I heard the sound of semis approaching, I was ready to get the spare tire from under the car and soon got it free... I realized it was virtually flat itself.

I'd like to take this moment as a public service to tell everyone to please check the tire pressure of your spare, at least once a year.

My shakes were soon joined with despair as this was before the age of mobile phones and I was in the middle of nowhere after driving past hundreds of miles of never ending corn fields. I struggled to fight them off and clear my mind enough to think. I guessed that the spare tire's softness was from a very slow leak that had taken place over the six years since my father had bought the car. Whereas the leak of the rear driver's side tire had been pretty fast, in comparison. So I concluded I was still better off using the spare than putting the other tire back on. Still, once the spare was bolted down and I had the other tire hung under the car in its place, my heart sank as I lowered the jack and, with the descending car, the rim of the spare tire got closer and closer to the pavement. But then it held with, maybe ten pounds of pressure in it?

I'd like to take this moment as a public service to tell everyone to please keep a tire pressure gauge in your car. You never know when you may need it.

With the change of tire completed, I now found it was harder to control my case of the shakes as I no longer had something to focus on. I got back into the driver's seat and let it support me and hold me as I just concentrated on starting the car and getting back on the road. Once in the lane, I kept to the minimum speed allowed as I wasn't sure how much I could trust the spare tire, yet. I scrutinized every new exit for any sign of a service station. Nowadays Hays, Kansas, has become the stop for all those crossing Kansas and needing a place to stay over night. But in Nineteen Eighty-Three it wasn't, or at least not as obviously so as it is now. I think I drove for shy of an hour before I found a service station just off the highway and pulled in to fill-up the spare tire to a reasonable pressure. But it was nearing seven o'clock local time and the single guy at the station counting the money before closing for the day wasn't interested in a late comer. But he had made the mistake of leaving his garage door open and I entered though it and asked for his help. To get me out of his face, he pointed me to where the air hose was in the maintenance section of the garage. I pulled my car up and then tried to use it, but he had apparently already turned off the compressor motor and all I could do was equalize what little air was left in the compressor tank with what little air was in my tire. Perhaps this brought my tire up to eighteen pounds of pressure...?

Had there been a hotel or motel apparent at this exit, I would have stayed the night, then filled up my tire to the proper level the next morning. But there wasn't and I was back on the highway and soon reaching the border of Colorado. It occurred to me that I had gained another hour crossing the border and it was once again before seven o'clock. I determined that I would go all the way to mom's place before turning in for the night. After all, it was only two-fifths of a state away at this point! Reaching Limon was a welcome relief, the biggest town east of Denver, I knew I could get off the exit here and find the local 7-Eleven which would have coin operated air machines. I soon had the spare tire to the same pressure as the other tires. I knew this because their machine's nib had a pressure gauge built into it! I used a payphone to call my mother and let her know where I was and that I'd be there tonight. She was relieved as she hadn't heard from me that day and was wondering how I was doing. Had I mention this was before common long distance calling cards? So I grabbed myself a 'Big Gulp' and got back in the car as twilight settled to night and turned on the radio to hear a song of the like I'd never heard before: ''Sweat Dreams'' by the Eurythmics.

This song perked me right up and I hoped I'd find more music like it when I got to my new home town...

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searching for a cause

i

Leaving rural New England behind, I'd hoped to use my surprising computer programming skills to land one of the plentiful computer jobs in Colorado and define it as my destiny...

It was merely four years after my move that any hope had been lost. Any chance of getting a degree had been dashed, any stopgap of having a part-time computer job to keep my skills fresh until that golden opportunity found me was now a distant memory. My entire life had narrowed down to my one, part-time grocery store job I had found a few years earlier.

Given my long experience in the business from working at the family owned grocery store chain across the hayfield from my childhood home, I had found my time at this Colorado store easy, if not always pleasant. Now as I had little left to my life & hopes but this one job, changes in the management had brought in a desire for a fresh face. And that face wasn't mine.

Still, there was nothing noticeably wrong with my job performance that they could pin a termination on and that frustrated the new 'Powers That Be'. Finally a desperate plan was hatched. During my next two days off from work they would do a top to bottom review of the section I shared with another coworker. There must have been something, anything I had gotten wrong during the preceding weeks and months!

And once they found it, the third leg of the three legged stool of my life could be pulled out from under me...

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