Departure

120

It was a Sunday evening that Daina and I parted ways. Given how much of our time together had been to share watching television shows, it seemed to make sense to end with the last new show until a span of repeats began.

Originally, I was shocked. When I told Daina of my 'situation' years earlier she had actually seemed enthusiastic about helping me research it and even lent me her car for my trips to see the specialist in Denver. But as time went on, she had become irritated and despondent and wouldn't say why. I just ended up assuming it was from the news of her mother's cancer and subsequent death. But now that I had contacted my family to let them know of my 'situation' and decision to normalize as female, the source of Daina's resentment toward me became clear: It was this decision. She wouldn't talk to me about it but finally agreed to join me to some visits with Samuel in the hopes that he could tease out the issues behind the resentments.

Daina and I sat side by side on his couch as he sat in the single chair across from us and gently prodded for what the issue might be. Finally Daina burst out that she didn't think I should be a woman as I made ''Animal Noises''. I burst out with an incredulous smile, fighting back the urge to break out laughing and fought to guess what she meant by that. Finally I did put two & two together and noted that, indeed, I sometimes would say ''meow'' to a cat, or ''woof'' to a dog, or ''moo'' to a cow, but I didn't see how that was a problem. Samuel turned to Daina and she wasn't going to explain it any further and the first of these three appointments soon came to an end with little more than Samuel getting some general information on Daina's background. Leaving his office I couldn't help myself and asked Daina, ''Animal Noises?'' She didn't want to talk about it or the session any further.

For the second visit, Daina had little to offer other than my height as to why I shouldn't choose to be a woman. That was easily addressed as I noted, because of my intersexed background, I had actually ended up a bit shorter than my mother and the same height as my sister. While in the transsexual field there had developed a race based conclusion of who should and who shouldn't change ''from a man to a woman'' based on how their height and weight fit into the idealized Caucasian norm, as I was from a mixed race background and, for that matter I was addressing an intersexed condition not a transsexual issue, that sort of gauge didn't seem relevant to me. Daina didn't have a response and the meeting was soon over without any new insights as to what was causing her irritation about my decision.

During this time I had gotten my RMT job offer and accepted it and Vocational Rehabilitation actually paid for cab fare to take me to and from the complex each day I worked for the first two weeks until I received my first paycheck and could use it as a down payment for my own a car. As a result, between dinners and Daina helping me decide on my business wear wardrobe, we would visit various used car lots in search of a car I might like. During these times it had become the rule that we were not to talk of the cause of her irritation until our next appointment with Samuel. So the irritation just persisted creating a wall between us as the weeks wore on. We finally found a car for me, but as I had only just started a new job after years of being unemployed, I couldn't get financing for it on my own and Daina finally agreed to cosign my car loan so, if for any reason I stopped making payments for it, Daina would be on the hook for the balance and the financing company would feel safe. I thanked her, but she saw my getting a car as a means of us spending less tense time together in her car.

By the third meeting the dam broke at Samuel's office:

When Daina had first met me she had been with a coworker friend, 'Rochelle', and as Rochelle was the extroverted one of the pair, she befriended me first. Given Rochelle's comely appearance and her propensity to talk of her many past boyfriends as conquests, her limited presence in my life had lead people to believe I had chosen her as a girlfriend and thus this had given me 'a reputation'. While the friendship with Rochelle didn't last long, she had then started listing me at Daina's & her workplace as one of her past boyfriends, thus giving me 'a reputation' at their school in the rumor mill as well. Daina saw this as her chance to establish her own 'reputation' as she had never had a boyfriend of her own, nor had even been on a real date for fear of ending up in a relationship like her parents had during her lifetime.

By befriending me, Daina had been leading her school friends to believe we were an intimate couple over these past few years. Then when I told her of my 'situation' Daina had come to realize that God had sent me to her. In her mind I truly was that 'perfect boyfriend for her'. We had so many interests in common and given my physical 'limitations' she would never have to worry about me wanting anything of her sexually that she was uncomfortable facing. So for me, while we had been friends these past few years and she had been helping me out as I regained my health and tried to reclaim my life, to her friends she had portrayed me as her boyfriend having fresh stories of our frequent times together doing stuff and letting her coworkers and family assume more was happening 'after hours'.

That was why Daina was against my normalizing as female as: What would she tell her friends? Her family? That nothing had been going on all along and she had been intentionally misleading them? Of course she couldn't. Daina originally thought that when I looked into my intersexed 'situation' it would result in my finding ways to become 'more of a man', but once it was clear that wasn't going to happen, Daina wanted me to remain as I had been living my life since the age of thirteen, bound and pretending to be a man as best I could, that way I would continue to ''be the man'' in her life.

I told her after so many years of already living my life that way, I definitely didn't want to spend the rest of it like that as well. Drawing from her wealth of classical readings, Daina tried to point out that ''Your life story makes such a great classical tragedy. Why would you want to give that up and have a life just like everyone else?''

I was speechless as was Samuel and when the end of the appointment came Daina made her way back to the car while Samuel held me back for a moment. He recommended I end my friendship with Daina as soon as possible...!

But I still felt we could work it out. Daina could just let it come out to her friends and coworkers that we weren't 'a couple' but 'just friends' during these years but that wasn't what Daina wanted to do. She liked the reputation she had gained in their eyes. As the subsequent weeks went on, she further explained to me that another reason she didn't want me as a 'female' friend in her life was because all of her female friends had subsequently found a boyfriend and coupled up, leaving Daina behind, forgotten. She couldn't bear the thought that I might, also, find myself a boyfriend 'afterwards' and not only would she be left behind, again, but having come from a mixed-sex background be ''more successful being a woman'' than she had been during her lifetime.

While I told her I didn't have any dating goals in mind, I also wasn't willing to swear I would never be open to them in the future. With that, Daina concluded for herself that we needed to end our friendship and while I tried to comfort and assure her it wouldn't be an issue, her slowly welling hostility toward me made it clear that the past fun of our friendship was going to disappear either way and I finally relented and agreed to the end.

After finishing our final television show for the night, I followed Daina out to her car and we chatted for a bit and then I thanked her for all of her help and support over these past many years I had known her. Given how she had fed me and helped me when my apartment had been destroyed as well as assuring I was able to go back to College and frequently provided me rides as part of it so I could complete my degree, I thanked her for ''saving my life'' as my final words to her. That seemed to coax a smile out of her for the first time in months and she got into her car and started it while I made my way back to my apartment.

I moved to my bedroom window and opened the curtains to watch her car drive by... And she was gone. I stood there for a while looking to the grassy vacant lot beyond the parking lot for a time and it dawned on me I was back to my childhood place starting out my sister's bedroom window to the hayfield beyond, waiting for the time when she would come back and see me again.

But in this case I knew Daina never would.

want a copy? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

Hiding Dead Bodies

72

By the Spring of Nineteen Ninety, the friendship between me and Daina had grown with our partnership running the local science fiction club and the subsequent regular dinners she had been treating me to a few times each week. She had also been inviting me on occasional errand trips when they involved passing my end of town and with the warmer weather she noted that she liked to hike. Having grown-up with the ski area my father managed, I was used to hiking as well and this soon became a Saturday morning routine for us. Sometimes it would be in local parks, other times on the edge of the mountains with steeper, but more scenic terrain. And we'd spend this additional time talking about ourselves.

I avoided all topics of concern such as my 'situation' and my problems with the medical community. I would later find out she was holding back on some issues as well. So we talked of our family backgrounds and previous jobs. In her case, growing up in Denver, she had concluded to be a teacher in her final years of High School and, as the awareness of the need for Special Education grew, she had decided to specialize in it as did her two closest sisters in age. She was a student teacher at a Denver public school as part of her last year in College. She then moved to Yuma, Colorado, where she had landed two part-time jobs as the special education teacher for two rural schools, spending half a day at one school, then the other half day at the other. She noted how one of the school's gave her a room, but the other gave her the back of a semi truck in the parking lot. One school paid for minimal supplies while the second insisted that cost was included as part of her pay and she should buy what was needed for the students. Daina quickly found herself using the supplies of the better school to squeak by with the other school. After two years of it, the better school offered her a full-time job and she didn't look back.

For the next seven years of her life she lived in Yuma while teaching at that one rural school. As all new teachers starting out, she had formed part of a group of new girls in town and then one by one over the years each of the other girls found a local boyfriend and eventually settled down to marry and make a home. But in Daina's case this didn't happen, she didn't explain this much other than how she had gradually become lonely as these friends she used to do things with were now focused on their husbands and coming children and no longer had time for her. By her ninth year living in Yuma she had decided that there would be no future for her there, beyond what she already had, and decided to let the school district know she was leaving at the end of the school year.

She assumed she'd find a replacement teaching job pretty easily in the Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Six but soon discovered that school districts had been locking up new special education teachers from the coming college graduates during the Spring and by the time she started looking in the Summer, the job openings were few and far between. Often, if there was still an opening it was for a reason, a bad administration or job location. She finally had her first solid job nibble in Commerce City, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. It served as the city's industrial district and according to her had all the ambiance of a polluted gravel pit. The interview went well enough and she soon had a call on her answering machine saying that they wanted to hire her. Rather than return the call that day, she decided to wait until the morning.

When morning came, she got a call from my town for an interview at one of our school districts and she accepted it and was soon there. She liked the neighborhood and the interview went well and she was offered a job on the spot. She accepted, then returned home to let the Commerce City school know that she had already accepted another offer. And that was what brought her here. She soon joined the other new teachers who had started at the school that same Fall and one of them, Rochelle, had decided to explore the social opportunities and had stumbled across a listing for the science fiction club and brought Daina along...

How about me? She wondered. What about me? I bounced back. She was curious about my own personal history and social life and I pretty much told her about my computer programing skills and being part of the club, but offered little else that she already didn't know. Remembering how much fun it was to discover the thoughts my high school friends had about me based on what was in our year book, I instead asked her what she thought I was like, and up to, in my spare time?

I soon discovered that Rochelle had been talking about me as part of her long line of past boyfriends as if I were another notch on her bedpost. I found that very funny and assured Daina nothing of the sort had happened. For if it had, Rochelle would have had a much bigger story to tell about me! I laughed to myself. I wanted to know what other rumors were out there about me. Daina didn't have much else other than to share that I seemed to fit the profile of a serial killer.

This brought another laugh for me as I was curious why. Well, my being a single male, the feel of the 'trashy tale' I had written and brought to the Writers' Group as my first submission, etc.. All seemed to fit the preconceived notion of what a serial killer would be like. ''And so you decided to spend more time at my place and take up hiking with me?'' I asked with a huge smile. Well, she had concluded that I probably wasn't...

''Probably?'' I echoed back and then spent the next couple of years during our subsequent hikes pointing to little copses of bushes & tress, gaps between large boulders and saying to her, ''That'd be a good place to hide a body!''

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

New Jobs

44

As the revelations concerning my health treatment were coming to light over the period of a couple months in the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-Seven, I actually had other things going on in my life. Since I no longer had a job, these things kept me from completely dwelling on the numbing medical records review...

While in the hospital for four days I borrowed a friend's laptop and worked out a format for a Doctor Who newsletter, I'm calling it 'The Doctor Who Report' for this text. After working out what each of the sections would have and creating temporary example content for it, I went to my regular copy shop and asked that they print me up a few copies that I could use as demos and also gauge the pricing for the complete issues I hoped to come. Once done, I realized I'd made a small mistake in having the whole issue printed on colored paper and concluded that the actual subscriptions would have a cover on colored paper, but the inner content would be on white for ease of reading.

As the most readily accessible people who might be interested, I called for an off monthly gathering of the local science fiction club members who might be intrigued and roped in a friend to host the gathering. There I showed the example copies I'd made and told them of the concept and goals of the fanzine, short for 'fan magazine'. Many liked it and quickly signed up for the first year's subscription and I had the minimum number of subscriptions I'd need to fund the initial issues.

After that meeting, I then created flyers for the pledge drive volunteers who had helped me during the Doctor Who pledge drive and mailed them out with the remaining example issues. It worked and I got even more subscribers and I was off to write the first full issue.

Earlier in the year I had met the show's producer, John Nathan-Turner, and he had welcomed me to submit a sample script and a collection of new story ideas, which I had completed and mailed off. For the first fictional tale to be serialized in TDWR, I picked the second Doctor Who story I had written up a few years earlier and based my sample script upon. The text was already done and I simply had to transfer it from my old TRS-80 computer floppies to IBM DOS compatible floppies so I could format the story in Microsoft Word and figure out the best segment breaks for the serialization. For the news page of the issues, I trawled for the most interesting news stories from Doctor Who magazine as well as from my meeting with John Nathan-Turner and created my own take on them. The opinion piece I had used in the example issue was for fun and I discarded it to instead jot-up a more suitable, serious piece to close out the final pages of the issue. A bit of tweaking, I then printed the seven and a quarter by eleven inch proofs on my printer and taped the appropriate pages together to create the master sheets. Once reduced by seventy-seven percent, the roughness of the dot matrix printed text would coalesce and give the issue a respectable look & feel, just shy of professionally published works, I hoped.

What crushed me when I went to pick up the first batch, though, was the price tag. It turned out that for the demo issues, since the copy store staff knew me they gave me a break on the pricing but never told me. As I had calculated the price of an annual subscription based on the cost of the demos, when they charged me full price for the complete issues I ended up shelling out about half again my own money to pay for it. As I didn't have a job, this would be impossible to maintain, but at the same time I couldn't very well go back to the subscribers and ask them to pay half again more toward their subscription, or else. It would sound like extortion. I ended up just losing the money out of my own pocket and immediately upped the subscription price listed in the future issues for renewals and new subscribers. While this would eventually help me break even, some of the initial subscribers had ponied-up for subscriptions covering a few years, so their entire subscription run would be at below cost pricing. Ignoring the problem for now, with the blessing of the comic book store owner I knew, I was able to put a few copies 'on the shelf' at his two stores to give TDWR greater exposure and bring in more people.

The first issue printed, folded, stapled and mailed solely by me, I was glad to have it out of my sight as I desperately mulled over what I was going to do for the cost of the subsequent issues...

I went to that month's meeting of the local science fiction club and at least saved myself a few dollars on postage by hand delivering some issues to the subscribing club members who showed up. The meeting was a disaster. The group had devolved into having meetings about what the meetings should be about and after nearly a year of this, they were ready to break up and dissolve. As I wasn't one of the core members, and neither were my failed Dungeons & Dragons group cohorts Rochelle & Daina, we didn't know what we could say about the problem and the meeting broke up into what was expected to be our final post meeting dinner at a local restaurant.

The mood was somber as the core members lamented the ending of the group as none of them wanted to run it anymore. Curious, I asked what was involved in running the group and they mentioned figuring out what to do with the meetings such as inviting authors to speak etc., organizing the occasional special event such as an art auction or convention to raise money, and creating and mailing monthly newsletters to the members and associated groups. The members there looked at the nicely printed copies of TDWR and then looked to me as someone who could get things done and asked if I'd like to volunteer to take over the club for a bit? I said I wouldn't be able to without help and looked to Rochelle & Daina. Rochelle flat out said she couldn't as 'she had so much else to do.' Daina, though, said she'd be willing to help as long as she wasn't directly in charge. With two new willing volunteers, the existing treasurer slash publisher of the club was willing to stay on and, as I had no other job to keep me occupied in life, I agreed.

My one condition was that I could have four months to get a handle on things, review the current membership, organize upcoming meetings and then I'd have things rolling by springtime. As the group had already been expecting to never again have another meeting, trading that in for just a four month break seemed like a good deal to them.

Suddenly, within two month's time frame, I was now in charge of two science fiction fan groups at once! My secret reason for wanting the four month delay was so I could get the rest of my health issues cleared up and out of the way before focusing on my new group's needs.

Surely, I could get my health issues addressed by then...?

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

Holes

37

Why not, I thought in the Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Seven. By the latter half of the eighties, more and more guys were getting their ears pierced, so why not me? Perhaps it was because Rochelle had given me a reputation for 'liking the girls', even though nothing of a sort had happened, that I felt I could get away with piercing my ears and not having people in my life 'suspect' me for it. Or perhaps it was my ever continuing weight loss and other physical issues that lead me to want to defiantly show that I controlled this body, not nature. Whatever had triggered the interest, I decided to pursue it and gave Ilda a call asking if she'd come along for moral support. She was surprised by the idea but was more than willing to echo my ''Why not?'' sentiment.

Off to the mall first thing in the day, it turned out the ear ring place didn't open up until an hour after the mall and Ilda and I shared a food court meal and mall walk as we waited and talked about what sort of ear rings I was thinking of. I debated about getting double piercings in each lobe and then I could have my two favorite colors as over lapping discs in each ear, orange and violet. I could have the orange one over the violet edge on one ear and dub it moon rising and have the violet disc over the edge of the orange disc for the second ear and dub it sun rising. While Ilda admired my enthusiasm, I believed, she may not have been in sync with the thought.

Once the ear ring place opened up, the clerk felt I was too enthusiastic and said we should start with a single piercing and let that heal before I decided on a double piercing for each lobe. Also their piercing technique required the initial set to be studs before looking into other choices. So Ilda and I looked the choice of studs over and settled on a basic gold set. As longer hair styles were still acceptable for guys in the eighties, my hair would cover the studs and thus it wouldn't be a problem at work, I believed, as management and customers wouldn't see them.

The following day the local science fiction club had its summer picnic and I got to show off my new studs to the other members there as a conversation piece. Sure enough work didn't notice, but I felt the need to show off my studs to a couple of my coworkers anyhow so the cat was quickly out of the bag. My mother didn't notice until a week and a half later and when she discovered them she said, ''Oh my God, you're going to get beaten up!'' She then questioned my mental health and so I then questioned hers back, giving examples from my years spent with her. She didn't like that at all, but as I was already on my way out the door to visit Jeff that evening, I didn't much care and didn't get back home until after she had already gone to bed. The subject wasn't brought up again.

I don't know if it was because of the piercings, my stuttering, my mixed race background, or a mixture of it all, but the grocery store decided not to promote me. I didn't even know I was going to have the chance. Once our group of four employees had been cut into the Dairy and the Frozen Food pairings, I got to see my frozen food coworkers much less, typically as we passed in the back room to get more stock for our various display cases. The least experienced of us became the head of the dairy section and, as I was committed to going to College at the time, I was his assistant at fifteen minutes less in weekly hours. When he had gone on vacation for a week I took over ordering for the area and many coworkers were surprised how well things had gone with me in charge, apparently thinking I wouldn't be able to 'stay on top of the ordering process' given my stuttering and thus presumed I.Q.. My department boss was happy too as, when he returned, everything was in shape and I'd even gone ahead and worked out the next order sheet as well for him. Then a few months later he was gone and the frozen food head was working the dairy case when I got into work one day.

I was surprised to see him there but, as we had been direct coworkers during our first two years at the store together, I was happy to have a chance to chat with him as we mutually filled the dairy case from the morning's truckload. But oddly enough, the one thing he didn't want to talk about was why he was there working the dairy cases rather than the frozen food cases he had been exclusively assigned to do when the new owner took over in the previous year. Eventually he explained to me that he had been explicitly told not to explain anything to me and finally said we could talk about it off the main floor when break time came. When it did, we went to the rarely used back office and made sure no one else was around. Our coworker, who had started the same day as us in the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-Four and eventually became my lead in the dairy section, had been found taking kickbacks from the suppliers in return for stocking various items over more popular items in our display cases. This had actually been a routine practice under the original owners who all shared in the gifts it got them. But in the case of the new owners, it was a fireable offense and the head of the dairy department was gone and they had called in the head of the frozen food department to take over, rather than promote me.

Was it the piercings, the stuttering, or the mixed race background? I suspect it was mainly the stuttering with the piercings being an added reason as to why I had been passed over despite my greater years of experience and recently proven ability to handle the department on my own.

So the frozen department head was now my boss, but he was to remain as the frozen department boss as well. I asked if this meant we were once again back to being a unified department but he told me No, he was the boss for both, but I was the dairy-only assistant and his original underling in frozen foods would remain as that department's only helper.

It was just a couple of months later that this coworker friend, and now new boss, was apologizing to me. While I had been away for two consecutive days off, the store management had decided I ''needed to be written up for something'' and they had lead my coworker/boss on a two day end to end check of the dairy department in search of something to be wrong in my work. By the end of the second day, they had found a cup of yogurt that was expiring that day and thus they had written up a report on me and I was to sign it my first day back. ''Really?'' I asked as the only way of avoiding this occurrence would have been for me to start pulling stock from the shelves two days before it went out of date. Was this a new standard? I asked. No, we were still to keep the stock on the shelf until the day it expired I was told. So then I was supposed to have come in after my first day off and checked the stock during my second day off for expiring items on my own time? Yes, was the answer and as I hadn't I was supposed to sign the report stating I had been negligent at my job. I declined.

When my coworker/new boss returned from letting management know I wouldn't sign it, he told me that they had been shocked and didn't know what to do about it, finally deciding to put the report in 'my file' anyhow even though it wasn't signed. He said he would have fought that too but, honestly as he had just been promoted to be the boss of the dairy department, he didn't feel he had the clout to argue. I didn't blame him and just made a mental note that my days at the grocery store were numbered.

In this case, I believe it was the pierced ears that prompted the store management to write me up. As it wasn't against store policy to have pierced ears, I had to 'officially' be written-up for something else. I was actually proud of the fact that they had spent two whole days trying to find something to write me up for and couldn't find anything legitimate...!

The silly thing is, we never checked the dates of the existing stock until the next day's truckload arrived when then we checked the dates before putting the new stock behind the old stock on the shelves. As we didn't have a truck on my first day back, they could have easily waited until the end of that day and 'found the cup of yogurt', then. It would have been outdated on a day I was actually working and I couldn't have denied it, but clearly they wanted to make the whole thing as transparent as possible so even I would understand why I was being written up.

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

Thumbs Up!

35

I was leaving Jeff's house at the end of Spring. As my passenger continued to my car, Jeff called softly to me and I turned to see if I'd forgotten anything. Instead he was beaming at me and gave me a big thumbs-up. I think it was the only time in all the years I'd known him that he'd done that...

When we started the writers' group, about three quarters were people from the local science fiction club and the rest were new faces. Those from the science fiction club included the two new girls in town Daina and Rochelle. In the first couple of meetings, we'd quickly resolved who the people with the writing bug were and who the people who liked the idea of being thought of as a writer were. In the initial gatherings we'd be asked to bring a short story of our own and read it to the rest of the group, of those that did, there were the quarter of new people and a third of the science fiction group people, the remaining half of the group soon didn't return to the meetings and we settled down to the routine of reading each others work during the off weeks and giving feedback about it once a month to each other. Rochelle was amazed by the opening sentence of a trashy tale I had started writing the previous Fall. After reading what I had to the group she was one of the first to avidly want more of it... Though she herself was soon out of the group, her friend Daina became one of the mainstays.

After hearing of the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado, I asked if Wayne, Chet and Karl of the Dungeons & Dragons group wanted to come along on a road trip to see them with me. Karl passed on the idea, but Wayne and Chet were up for it. When mentioning the plans to Rochelle she asked if she could come along. As we had the spare seat, I didn't see why not. On the morning of the trip, Wayne and Chet bowed out, perhaps they had both had long nights or something and so I called Rochelle to see if she wanted to cancel, but she decided she'd still like to do the trip, just herself and me.

Along the many hour drive she told me much about herself, her childhood in California, the many boyfriends she'd had and the fact that she'd moved out to Colorado with a boyfriend, but they had quickly split once here and she found herself on her own but stayed as she already had the teaching job confirmed. When she started at her school she soon found Daina as another newcomer to town and they quickly joined-up to discover the sights and surroundings.

Once Rochelle and I reached the Sand Dunes, we parked in the little lot and took our shoes off to cross a small stream and get to the dunes, proper. They were stunningly taller than I had imagined and we ultimately only got about two thirds of the way up one of the dunes before we decided to sit down and take a breather. While there, Rochelle told me that she knew my 'trashy tale' had been about her when I read it at the writers' group. This was news to me as I had conceived of the story two months before I'd met her and wrote it the following month, still before I met her. But rather than dissuade her, I took this as a compliment: People hearing my story could see it being about themselves.

Another male member of the writers' group would later tell me that, based on reading my 'trashy tale', I really knew what it was like to be a man and how men thought. Again, given my 'situation' this was news to me, but I again took it as a compliment rather than argue otherwise.

Rochelle soon became a regular tag-along with Wayne and myself and we invited her on a trip to our local metaphysical store to look over the books, clothing and many other trinkets & novelties. On the drive back, I was playing Berlin's 1982 Pleasure Victim album in the car and Rochelle remarked that it was an example of why she didn't like ''New Wave'' groups as they only ever did one album and disappeared, never having a follow-up hit song. This was a surprise to hear given their successful Love Life album of 1984 and huge hit ''Take My Breath Away'' song that had owned the charts just a few months before she made this comment. It was all I could do to keep a straight face and not burst out laughing. It wasn't that she had gotten something wrong that made it so funny to me, but the air of authority she had put on when stating it, making it sound like a fully considered and unquestionable fact.

I soon realized that Rochelle was a bit full of herself, but I had found that everyone had their peculiarities in life and didn't worry about it.

She and Daina came to my mother's mobile home to find out more about Doctor Who and I showed them a selection of episodes while explaining the background of the series. They also joined Wayne and me to a movie outing and they even visited me at the grocery store to see for themselves where I worked.

One day Rochelle needed some PC software disks and asked me if I could help her with them. It wasn't something I could, but I recommended my friend Jeff and as she didn't know where he lived I ended up playing chauffeur for her to his place as they worked out what she needed. Once done, this was when we were leaving Jeff's house and he gave me that big thumbs-up. At first I was befuddled as to why, but when I later asked him about it he told me that he thought I had landed Rochelle as a hot girl friend. Hearing this, I just smiled. After years of others furtively wondering about my lack of interest in sexual matters, people seeing me hang around with her gave me a reputation for liking the girls. Given that I've now cataloged every interaction I'd ever had with Rochelle to this point, I'll let you decide if that reputation was earned.

Still, by the end of the Summer, I decided I was finally going to tell someone about my 'situation' and thought Rochelle would be a good choice. I called her home and got her answering machine and mentioned that I'd like to talk to her about something when she was available. I never heard back from her and thus I never got to tell her.

I would hear through the social grapevine years later that when she'd talk about her long list of boyfriend conquests, I numbered among them. This was news to me and I think she would have been very surprised and had a very different story to tell had we become that 'familiar'. She told her friend Daina that she had cut contact with me because I was getting to be ''too serious''. This became a head-scratcher for me as I tried to figure out what that meant.

Did she think I had called and left the message about wanting to talk to her as a pending proposal for marriage or something?

Given the amount she had been talking about me to her friends even though nothing had ever happened between us, in retrospect I realized I had ducked a major bullet. I came to believe that if she had been the first person I had talked to about my strange puberty 'situation' it seems she would have immediately tossed it out there as fresh meat into the rumor mill rather than respectfully listening and giving me advice...

And so for the few times I'd seen her and had little else to do with her, she remained the girl who gave me 'my reputation' and made me a man in the eyes of my long-time friend Jeff, if not others. I guess if she was going to give me a reputation for something, that was the best I could have hoped for.

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

Withdrawal

34

I had continued to gradually lose weight over Nineteen Eighty-Six, in fact new friend Daina said she saw me as a walking bean pole, though I didn't let on that it was an involuntary condition at the time. Rochelle said she liked my cheek bones, but when I asked her why she said it was because they were prominent, I didn't bother to mention it was just the sunken-in cheeks below that made the bones above stand out. Along with my weight, my hair had started to thin out as well as my stamina. My hope was, by dropping my Saturday computer monitoring job, it would help me retain enough energy to continue college classes and work. By January of Nineteen Eighty-Seven it was clear that it would not be enough and, unless I got whatever condition was wasting me away under control, I would have to give up College next as I still needed a job to pay for food and fruitless doctor visits.

Starting with headaches months before my bout of walking pneumonia in the Spring of Nineteen Eighty-Four, after the pneumonia had been treated I had started to painlessly lose weight and become intolerant of direct sunlight. I had subsequently gained joint pains in my knuckles and knees by Nineteen Eighty-Five. By the Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Six an emergency room doctor had discovered I was having dangerous blood pressure spikes when drinking soda with corn syrup in it and recommended I switch to diet soda, after I did the headaches had gone away. After years of small moments in sunlight leading to longer exposures, I gradually gained a new tolerance to sunlight, functionally putting that silly problem behind me. If I hadn't been starting to lose my stamina by the end of Nineteen Eighty-Six I would have been happy enough with my health because, lets face it, who doesn't want to lose weight? Especially when they didn't even have to try!

By the turn of the year, some of my coworkers were complimenting me on how much weight I had lost over the years and I would smile and thank them, but their compliments only reminded me of the Burt Reynolds movie ''The End.'' For those not familiar with it, it opens up with his character perplexed at the doctor's office as he's just been told he's terminally ill. He tries to argue with the doctor that it couldn't be as everyone had been complimenting him on his recent weight loss! In my case though, it was more a question of getting a doctor to take notice rather than discouraging one.

To hide how much weight I had actually lost, and to help me with the cold of frequently working in the refrigerated room at the grocery store, I had taken up wearing two to three shirts at a time to keep me warm. When I had started at this grocery store, I would load the milk cases four gallons of milk at a time, two gallons held in the fingers of each hand. But now, two and a half years later, I was having to use both hands to maneuver a single gallon of milk from the box into the display case. Where once I would unload a pallet of boxes a few at a time, now I was huffing & puffing to get a single box off the stack and to the case were it needed to be unpacked. Ultimately this reduction in the amount of work I could accomplish just wouldn't do if I wanted to keep my job and I was back to my mother's primary care doctor's office to find out what was going on and what to do about it.

He had sent me to the joint doctor two years earlier for my joint pains but while I had experienced a brief improvement on a course of antibiotics, the joint doctor had discontinued it early as he found I didn't have the disease he had assumed I had. After that relationship soured I had taken about a year off from having any doctor check my long term health and so this was my first time talking to the primary doctor about it. He was of the impression that one could never lose too much weight, though, and simply suggested I eat more food. I assured him I had been eating plenty of food but it only slowed down my decline, not stopped it.

He seemed perplexed by the whole idea of why losing weight would be a bad thing and didn't have a clue where to start looking into it. He finally concluded we should start by my having a physical examination and I should see the girl at the front desk to schedule a day for it. I left the examination room in a panic. Ever since my thirteenth birthday my mother had discouraged me from seeing doctors for fear of what they might find. While I had grown-up wanting to be an astronaut and planned to get there by first becoming a military pilot, I had concluded that given my 'surprise puberty', I wouldn't be able to pass the necessary medical review needed to get in, thus those dreams were discarded. While I had been successfully seeing doctors at the emergency room and at their offices during the past three years since moving to Colorado, none had needed to see me fully undressed as they did their examinations of my limbs and reflexes.

But now that I had a physical examination scheduled what was going to happened?

Going to my night classes, I debated canceling that next doctor visit and go back to ignoring my health issues, but given the struggle of making it through the night class and then do a full day's work before returning to my next night class, I realized I didn't have that option if I wanted to continue with College. While I had been top of my classes at both the original Business College and now attending the accredited big brother school, my studies had started to slide as I was having problems paying attention and staying on top of my homework due to the fatigue. Ignoring the never ending weight loss I could choose, but the dwindling stamina meant I'd either have to pick between finishing College or quitting my one remaining job. I couldn't afford College without the job so the choice was a no-­brainer. But losing College meant losing my hoped for destiny as a software developer. Even though it was already a job I could do for these past many years, being a stutterer without a degree meant I was never seriously considered at interviews for such jobs.

I couldn't give up either my job or College if I wanted to have a future and I only had a year and a half of night classes to go before I had that degree... So I went to the physical.

The nurse lead me to a different examination room with a table and told me to undress and put on only the gown and sit on the table until the doctor came in. She told me to have the opening of the gown in front and left the room. I did as I was told and sat on the cold table and waited. After a bit, the doctor came and untied the gown and opened it up. He burst-out laughing and fled the room, slamming the door behind him.

I assumed he had left to just regain his composure and would be right back. But after a few minutes I decided to at least close the gown to keep warm and I sat there and waited. After about twenty minutes, the nurse opened the door to walk in with another patient and was surprised to find me still there. She quickly took the patient to another room and then came back confused that the doctor hadn't seen me yet. I told her he had briefly come in but left before he had actually done anything and I was assuming he'd be back. She left the room to check, then came back and told me that the doctor was done and I could get dressed and go home.

That was all there was to a physical examination? I had always thought they were more involved than just glancing at the naked patient and then leaving the room. Still, I did as I was told and when I got to the front desk to find out about my follow-up appointment, I was told the doctor didn't need to see me again.

As I went to my class that night, I realized this meant that he wasn't going to address my weight loss & stamina issues and, as the spring semester had just started, I concluded to withdraw from my classes while I still could and not get charged for them. Withdrawing from College, I left my future hopes behind and just focused on a life of working to make ends meet without any prospects for advancement.

Yet, with my ever declining health, even that working for the sake of living goal would soon slip from my grasp.

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

New Friends

33

When not writing, or at College, or at work, or noticing my continued wasting away, I spent time with friends. Mostly Jeff, but as the years had gone on I had gained Pat, the one who had replaced me at the software start-up. 'Karl', 'Wayne', and 'Chet' were friends of Jeff's whom I'd come to know and had been trying to get a Dungeons & Dragons group formed around. 'Dan' and 'Shelia' were husband and wife science fiction enthusiasts from Denver who not only attended their group, but had been coming to our little city to help found our science fiction club and be monthly attendees. While trying to befriend some of the folks I worked with or went to College with, nothing much ever came of that beyond a brief chat about the weather during breaks.

In the case of the Dungeons & Dragons group, we simply didn't have enough people to make it fun, still we got together at my mother's mobile home off and on over the previous year on Friday evenings to give it a go. It seemed to me Pat and I had become the closest friends given our common computer programming, music, and writing interests. As Nineteen Eighty-Six progressed, he had successfully moved from the defunct software start-up to other software firms in town and had his work successfully published and was even toying with redefining floating point arithmetic. We would often get together to trade recently finished stories, debate the latest music group, and even philosophy. By the end of the year, he had found himself a regular girlfriend and was eying marriage and his first house.

Dan's and my friendship centered mostly on our music interests and trading record albums to listen to between science fiction club meetings. In fact, if not for the allure of his record collection, I might not have even bothered with the local science fiction group as it often seemed they would just get together each month to wonder what they should do with the coming meetings and never settle on anything, only to repeat the process all over again with the next meeting. My favorite part of the group was when it ended and we would go out and get a table at the nearby diner for an additional two hours. For some reason, when no longer dwelling on what the group should be doing at the next meeting, they livened up... Or maybe it was just the food.

The club had permanently reserved the community room at a local bank for our once a month Saturday night gatherings and I once again arrived at the December meeting to simply trade albums with Dan. As it turned out he was sitting apart from the group, I settled down next to him and we chatted about what else we had in our libraries to trade in the next month. It was then that I noticed the 'fresh faces' at the meeting table, two new girls were here and had gotten the group off the topic of what to do for the next years' meetings and instead onto the topic of who these new girls were and what they did. Once Dan and I had agreed upon the following month's record trade, I scooted my chair up to the table to hear more about the new girls.

Both were teachers who had recently moved to town and were exploring the various local social options. Of the two girls one was the shy one, 'Daina', and the other the gregarious one, 'Rochelle'. Rochelle was making the biggest splash while Daina mostly talked when asked questions. It turned out Daina had the science fiction interests more than Rochelle, but when Rochelle heard about the monthly meetings she had encouraged Daina to get out of her apartment and actually attend this night. Daina was about nine years older than me whereas Rochelle was only a few. Soon the group got ready for the post meeting dinner and the two girls joined us. This gave me a better chance to talk with just the girls and I struck while I could: ''Have you ever played Dungeons & Dragons?''

Neither had but were willing to give it a try and we were at my home the following month to learn about the game, and join in. We finally had barely enough players to make the game fun but, as it turned out, we now had more people than my mother was willing to let me have at her place after a week or two. Given the need to find a new home for the game, Daina offered her apartment and we spent the next several Fridays there getting their characters ironed out and into the first adventure. Ultimately the group still failed. After a long day of work, Wayne routinely fell asleep and would start to snore, Chet was finishing up his Senior year of High School and would soon be away to a traditional College and Karl was Karl. He kind of reminded me of my childhood friend who lived at the defunct dairy farm, part charm and part mischief, but in the case of Karl there was also a randomness to him and we never knew if he was going to show up or not to each game, leaving us to wait for him needlessly or wonder what to do about his character in the game when he wasn't there.

But the girls kept on searching for new social activities in town and found that a new 'writers group' was forming where a bunch of writing enthusiasts would share their work with each other and cajole themselves into getting published one day. As they learned I dabbled in writing, the girls let me know of the group and we attended its first meeting along with a few more of the science fiction clubbers. Being at the same south end of town, with the writing group at the organizer's home to the north end, the girls and I soon car pooled and within a few years time one would become my best friend and the other not.

As for me, though, the clock was winding down.

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop