Burning Money

66

There were rules for my lump sum disability back payment when I got it and one of them was I couldn't hold onto it as personal savings otherwise it would show me as having too much money to qualify for benefits. But as this was a known issue, they had worked out a grace period that one could have that cash on hand before they would count it against you. Thus of my over four thousand dollar amount, I needed to burn up all but a few hundred dollars of it before the end of Summer.

Of the things I used the money for was new clothes. I had actually been living in the original clothes my parents had bought me during High School and not only had they worn out in the intervening years, they were a few sizes to big for me given my emaciated state. And so I was off shopping!

One department store had not only come out with a new line of neon bright and cheerful tee shirts, they were also offering chances to sign up for their credit card. Given how my lack of a credit history had interfered with my getting an apartment, I readily accepted and bought much of the line of tees as well as several new pairs of jeans. Given my awkward puberty, I was sticking with the jeans & tees style as it was pretty much the only style common between men & women in America. This allowed me to dress and not feel like I was presenting myself as something I wasn't.

Gone too, was the ACE bandage I had worn to strap down my breasts since the age of thirteen. Given my extreme weight loss my breasts had also withered, leaving me with just protruding nipples. In the year and a half I had lived solely in my mother's mobile home without any job, I had gotten use to no longer wrapping myself up each day. With my technique of rolling my shoulders forward to cause my tee shirts to drape like a curtain, that alone would be good enough to keep my nipples hidden in public. I retained the best of my old clothes for house work type chores, but on the whole I was publicly in my new clothes the moment I got them.

I debated about replacing the winter coat I had held for over five years, but I decided to wait a bit longer until I found one that really caught my eye. While I did have light jackets for Fall and Spring in New England, since moving to Colorado I had just gone between no coat or winter coat with nothing in between. That was to change as with Fall my not as older brother, stationed in Europe for the Air Force, bought me a grey leather jacket and sent it to me. I don't know if it was another example of mother drumming up gifts for me from other people to reward me for moving into my own apartment, or if my brother had coincidentally bought the jacket for me that year. Either way I quickly fell in love with it and it's unique, for America, styling. It became my Fall/Spring coat.

One thing that ate a sizable hole in my remaining lump sum amount was an upgrade to my computer and an associated piece of software. The software was a typeface foundry which would allow users to create and/or modify type styles and fonts for Microsoft Windows to use, and thus have as new options when creating documents for desktop publishing software. It made great sense on paper given the amount of desktop publishing work I had fallen into doing. As typefaces were highly dependent on curves, the program did a lot of math and as IBM PC clones had no built in chip for that, the program would crank away for hours as I tried to work on a single letter. To compensate for this I also bought the 'math coprocessor' upgrade for the computer and once that was installed it changed these hours into several minutes per letter instead. Ultimately while I had great plans of creating original fonts and even hand importing existing ones from printed source material, I ultimately did little more than tweak an existing font or two. The only thing of value I got out of this upgrade was a higher resolution monitor which was a huge help on all the subsequent publishing work I did. But that was only a little over one hundred dollars, whereas the typeface foundry and math coprocessor ate up short of nine hundred. I could have gotten a vastly bigger hard drive for the computer and other more useful tweaks for that kind of money.

Oh well, live and learn.

Another, much smaller, purchase I made was to buy myself a small synthesizer keyboard. All my life I've had original music flowing through my head but no way to express it other than humming. Oddly enough, even though I was a writer, it was the tunes themselves that flowed in my head, not any words. I had originally dabbled with a next door neighbor's organ as a child and my hope was I would be able to come up to speed on the keyboard and start making the music in my head come to life. But first I'd have to learn how to play it and that I'd do in dribs and drabs over the coming years.

By the time Fall came I had successfully burnt through the lump sum amount, with the final portion used to bridge the gap in the money needed to order the Doctor Who radio play ''Slipback'' from Britain so it could be played on our local public radio station as part of The Doctor Who Report's activities in town. Having traded letters with the production office a few times in the past, I only had to learn how to have an international money order made up for the purchase. Once that was done, I dropped the check and order form into the post knowing we'd soon have new Doctor Who to listen to and hopefully raise the club's profile that much higher!

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Errors

65

Shouldn't have done that.

One of the first things I did with my lump sum check was write a letter to the State requesting a copy of my State Aid hearing tape from the previous year. Had Legal Aid appealed the decision, they would have made such a request but, as they hadn't, I could make the request myself if I was willing to pay the fee. At the time I couldn't afford the fee, but now with the lump sum, I could easily afford it. I wanted the copy simply for my records, as another objective marker of the strange events of my medical care via what the woman doctor had said. After a couple of weeks, I called the state about it and they confirmed having received my request and that they were hunting up the tape and I should have it soon.

After I moved into my first apartment I happened to fold my arms and grasp my upper arm area with my hands. To my surprise, I realized that my thumb and index finger could wrap around my bicep and touch at the finger tips. I now had a different way of gauging how much weight I had lost. After another horrifically painful experience in the bathroom, I decided to look into visiting the community health clinic and once again see if I could get medical care for my weight loss and intestinal issues. I gave them a call and, as they'd have to financially qualify me for service, they told me what documentation to bring in with me. Once they confirmed I could receive service, I would be wait-listed for that day.

The clinic was in an old business building on a forgotten stretch of the main road and not directly next to a bus route. Looking the routes over carefully, I found one that had a stop about four blocks away and I was on one bus to transfer to another until I finally arrived and made the walk to their door. Qualifying was pretty easy and then I was in a waiting area chair. After a bit over an hour I was called and taken in back where, by chance, I was assigned to a male Vietnam Veteran Nurse Practitioner, 'Michael'. He was great and I told him of my weight loss issues and bowel issues and existing diagnoses of fructose intolerance and fat malabsorption problems and various allergies. He was friendly and said, ''What we need to do is slow down how quickly things are moving through your system.''

He gave me some free packets of food additive that was to do this and then asked me if there was any other treatment I had over the past few years that made my condition better. Thinking it over, I remembered the joint doctor who thought I had Lyme Disease. He put me on antibiotics but when he found out I didn't have it after all, he terminated the treatment before it was done. I had felt better at first, but then I quickly returned to my condition a week or so after the antibiotics had been terminated. ''How about a shot of penicillin?'' he asked. I wasn't sure what he meant and he asked more directly if I was allergic to penicillin as he was willing to see if it would help my health issues. I told him I wasn't allergic and he left the room for a bit, and then returned with a syringe to give me a long acting inter-muscular injection. Done, I was on my way out to the side desk to make my follow-up appointment.

I was thrilled by the polite and friendly response I had gotten and began to think that what I had needed to do all along was to see nurse practitioners rather than doctors to be treated professionally and with care. While setting the follow-up date, I began to feel a little weak and shaky. Once the appointment had been set, it was the perfect time to make the walk to the bus stop a few blocks away, but I was feeling even worse and didn't think I'd make it and instead went back to the waiting area and took a seat. A few minutes later I was having shakes and troubles holding myself up in a sitting position and went to the front desk to ask if they had somewhere I could lie down for a bit. One look at me and suddenly many medical staff members were called to help lead me to an exam room with a short bench where they lay me down.

As they scrambled they asked me if I'd eaten something that had made me sick, I told them I hadn't. Michael came in and told them he had given me a shot of penicillin and there was a debate if I was having an allergic reaction. One nurse was sent out to get me something to eat and brought back some orange juice, I noted the fructose intolerance and she ran off to get something else. The lead doctor of the clinic came in and lifted up my legs so I was lying in a sitting position as the nurse came back, this time with peanut butter crackers, I had to tell her I was allergic to peanuts. There was a quick discussion and she was off again. The main doctor let go of my legs and they slowly settled down and he became angry as hell and demanded I let my legs fall. As he again grasped them, still yelling at me I finally caught on that he wanted me to actively push down against his arms. Given my weakened state that was a challenge but I did my best, pushing my legs down on his arms until I felt my lower back slightly lift off from the table. The nurse came back with some corn chips for me to eat where I had to tell her I was allergic to corn as well. I asked for water, instead, but they wouldn't bring that feeling I needed to eat something more substantial. The main doctor asked if I could eat cheese and I said yes and he directed the nurse to get a piece of cheese from the lounge refrigerator. Once my heart rate and blood pressure were checked, they felt confident it wasn't an allergic reaction to the penicillin. The main doctor let go of my legs to fall off the end of the short table and he left, Michael was showing signs of anger and left soon after followed by the other medical personnel. I lay there for a bit alone until the nurse came back with the cheese and a small cup of water for me. Then she left me as well as I finished and then lay on the table a bit longer before sitting up.

There was no one left in the room to ask if I could go, and the door had been left open, so once I felt good enough I just left the clinic and made my way to the bus stop and took the bus back home.

To my shock, some of the first mail I got forwarded to my new address was a collections notice. It was for the two emergency room visits I had made earlier in the year which had been paid for with my brief Medicaid coverage. Unlike when they returned my old primary doctor's false collection request, when I went to the collections agency to tell them the hospital bills had been paid, they weren't interested. As this was the hospital that had filed the collections request, it was deemed to be unquestionably accurate and all I could do was pay up or go to the hospital and have them withdraw the filing. Thus I went to the hospital about it, bringing my paperwork, and they told me that someone in their billing office must have 'fat fingered' in the wrong code, marking the billing dates as 'default' rather than 'paid'. Once it was corrected in their computer, it took another month for the collections agency to confirm it had been withdrawn and I had no outstanding issues left.

After a month since my last call to them, I called the State office again asking about the tape and when I'd get my copy. They confirmed that the tape was in the judge's office and once he was done reviewing it, I would get the copy. A few weeks later I received a letter stating that the tape had been erased and under Colorado law they were allowed to erase tapes after a little over a year's time so they could be reused for other hearings. When I called up the State office about it, they confirmed that the judge himself had erased the tape and it was legal under the law and there was no recourse or back-up copy. I was livid! Apparently once the judge reheard the tape himself he felt he couldn't let a copy get out and reveal how the hearing had actually gone.

The packets of powder the clinic had given me 'to slow things down' made my bathroom bouts more frequent and much worse. Wondering why, when I read the ingredients I discovered they were mostly corn starch, so I stopped taking them. When I returned to the clinic to see Michael to follow-up on the results, he was hateful and glaring as I told him the packets of powder had made things worse so I had stopped taking them and handed the unused ones back to him. Then I noted that the antibiotics shot had made no difference. He barked at me that he wasn't surprised as he had since found out that I was a faker who was faking all of my health problems. Dumbfounded by this I asked him what he was talking about and he returned, ''You know what I'm talking about!''

A lesson I've learned in life: When someone acts like they know something about you, you ask them what it is and they refuse to say, that's because they don't know themselves. They claim that 'you know' what they are talking about in the hopes that you will fill in the blank for them. So whenever someone acts like they know something about you, but won't say what it is, that's because they have no frigging clue.

At least I can say Michael didn't flee the room after dumping this crap on me. He told me our appointment was done and I was to leave. I felt like I should argue, but given his mood and my not knowing what he was talking about anyhow, I just left. My hopes that the community health clinic would be a new chance to have my health issues addressed fizzled and I was again left to wait until things took their natural course. I honestly didn't believe I was going to be around for many more years.

Reflecting on the whole experience and what I could have done so as not to have angered Michael, all I could figure was I shouldn't have gone to the desk and asked if they had some place I could lie down when I felt shaky after the shot. I should have left the building and then laid down on the ground out of sight until I felt strong enough to make it to the bus stop on my own. That was the only thing I could imagine doing differently...

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Hitches

64

Settling into my new apartment, and effectively the next leg of my life, there were some surprises of both sorts and some new goals to achieve.

When I went to fill the water bed on my first evening, I discovered that the bathroom faucet had a crack underneath its spout. Unable to get that addressed right away, I walked to the hardware store and bought myself an extension hose so I could fill up the bed from the kitchen sink. This worked, though I hadn't realized how long it took the waterbed heater to bring the surface to a comfortable temperature. No problem, with the long couch in the living room area I could sleep on that my first night. Not so, as lying down on it for the first time I realized just how course and scratchy the upholstery was; while I had checked the springs to make sure they were good, it never occurred to me to rub my arms against it to check for smoothness. I quickly figured that I could use the water bed comforter like a sleeping bag, the bottom half on the couch, the top half wrapped over me for warmth. While it didn't make the best night given the pinching pain of bones pressing on nerves, it did get me through.

By the second day my computer was all set-up as well as the stereo and television and I made my first walk to the grocery store to stock up on food. I made the mistake of buying food that fit into the shopping cart and not that I could comfortably carry. But I huffed and puffed and got it all back in one trip, though my arms ached for most of the rest of the day. Now it was a question of what key things I wanted to do with the rest of my lump sum back payment.

The first was to find an agent and see if I could sell my first scripting attempt for 'The Other Show' I liked and had started to write for, in practice. I got a listing of all of the registered agents from the Writer's Guild Of America, all in Los Angeles, and wrote up a base query letter noting my background and asking if they'd be willing to represent me. Then for the one hundred or so names and addresses, I popped in their information at the top of the letter and printed it up, etc.. Buying a box of envelopes from the office supply store as well as a roll of stamps from the post office, I spent much of the next two days stuffing the envelopes, sealing and stamping them. As luck would have it, there was a postal box just a few blocks away and I made a trip to mail the letters.

On the way back I noticed the 7-Eleven and stopped there next to discover I could use my food stamps to buy Big Gulps. Now with the full amount of food stamps to play with rather than the reduced amount I lived off of at my mother's, I decided to dedicate a dollar food stamp each day for a soda. This gave me a daily reason to get out of the apartment and walk the three blocks to pick it up. Even though it used thirty food stamps a month, with the greater amount I was now receiving I still had more to play with for regular groceries.

With the agent query letters out of the way, I decided to buy myself a lifetime membership in the local Science Fiction club. As the club had been underfunded due to the lost membership checks by the earlier staff, I had been making ends meet by printing up the various monthly and Quarterly newsletters at a self serve copier rather than having the copy store do it. I further supplemented the club coffers by trading in the spare books that the publishers sent to us. While they were free for club members willing to write a review for the monthly newsletter, invariably there were still some books left over. At first, these had started to pile up as I didn't know what to do with them and then I got the idea to take them to used books stores for cash. They liked having new books to mix with the used ones on their shelves and the few dollars I got helped to keep the club afloat. Now with my lifetime membership money credited to the club, effectively the club membership times twenty years, we now had a comfortable cushion to pay for all the other existing membership mailings, cash to reimburse visiting author traveling expenses, and plenty of spare money to buy the club some supplies to make my life easier: Such as a rubber stamp with the address on it to save me from repeatedly writing it by hand, and a long armed stapler to make stapling the folded, magazine-like Quarterly issues so much easier. In the previous years I had been carefully piercing the center of each unfolded copy with a small stapler and then pushing through and bending over each staple by hand for both the club's Quarterly as well as my own The Doctor Who Reports. This process took a lot of patience and skin off my finger tips. With the long armed stapler I could now just slip in the unfolded pages and clump-clump, staples were in and all I had to do was fold. This reduced the assembly time for the issues by nearly two thirds.

While I had driven my car to the apartment's parking lot, I couldn't afford the gas and upkeep for it on my monthly income and so I listed it for sale, saying I'd take the best offer. After a week of people coming, looking, and passing, I finally had someone offer one hundred and sixty dollars for it. I think he was planning on it being a starting place for price dickering, but I just accepted it so I wouldn't have to worry about the car anymore or possibly extending the ad for another few weeks until another buyer came. Another reason for wanting to get rid of the car was that I was no longer sure of my driving skills. The last few times I had driven I had some close calls due to my lagging, emaciated, reflexes and possibly emaciating nerves as well. Once the car was gone, when it came time to renew my adult driver's license in Colorado, I didn't, instead opting for a state identification card which would work for all non-driving purposes.

With the apartment nestled between four bus routes, and the bus system being based on a spoke & hub system that used transfers with a one hour grace period, I found I was able to take a bus downtown on one route, get the transfer and then rather than boarding a connecting bus, I would spend forty-five minutes in the downtown area to visit my credit union, pick up the club's mail at the post office, or visit the comics and science fiction & fantasy book store before returning to the bus hub and using the transfer to take a different bus route that also passed by my new apartment. Essentially I was able to make downtown return trips for a single punch of my fare card. While I would rarely do all three downtown tasks with one trip, I remember I did so once.

With the broken bath room faucet, I decided I didn't want to make my first impression as a new tenant to be of a complainer. So I decided to replace it myself using my own money. I had done it before at my mother's mobile home for her so I was familiar with what needed to be done. Picking up a faucet of the right size at the hardware store, and using my tools collected over the preceding decade of my life, I had it installed and working in only a couple of hours. Slow for a plumber, but much cheaper for me. It wasn't until I had been at the apartment for a few weeks that I discovered the woman manager had a husband who was designated the repair man and, in reflection, I supposed I should have asked him to repair it himself...

My mother was still bugged that I wouldn't tell her where my new place was. She called my father back in New England thinking I might have told him. But when it was clear to her that I hadn't spoken to him in years, she covered up the reason she had called by twisting it into ''notifying him'' that I had moved into my first apartment and as a good father he should help chip in some 'congratulations money' to help me settle in. As she didn't have my address, she told him to mail it to her. Before it arrived, she next decided to take me out to a 'congratulations lunch' and offered to pick me up. And where would that be? Not in a position to turn down free food, I told her to pick me up at the 7-Eleven a few blocks away. After lunch and talking to me about the move and the great news on my disability income she decided we could browse at the local Salvation Army thrift store in case there was anything else I needed for the apartment. Even though there wasn't, it had been years since she had last been nice to me and I didn't want it to end so quickly; I accepted.

Sure enough I didn't see anything I needed for the apartment, but then my eyes caught the encyclopedia set they had for sale. Before the age of Wikipedia and other online reference sites, an encyclopedia set was the easiest way to find out about something you might need to know of when writing a story. And I wrote stories... Still, they wanted too much money for it and so we browsed at other things before my mother drove me back to the apartment. Or at least that was her hope but I had her drop me off at the same 7-Eleven and in case she might get a clue based on which direction I started walking in, I went inside the store for my daily soda and made sure she was gone before I walked to the apartment. But it was too late, I had already made my mistake.

She called me an hour later. She had decided to buy that encyclopedia set I had been eying, where should she bring it to...? I told her not to worry about it but she said that she had already spent the money and couldn't return it. I envisioned having her take it to the 7-Eleven but given the number of hardcover books and weight of it all, I knew I couldn't carry it back. I debated having her leave it at the mobile home and my taking the bus several times to pick up a few volumes at a time until I had brought it all to the apartment by myself. But that would use up a fare punch card in no time as well as waste tens of hours riding the bus. And still, as a writer it'd be awfully handy to have a set of my own. My resolve broke and I told her to meet me at the 7-Eleven, while I hoped it would seem to her I still wasn't going to let her know where I lived, I realized it would be easier for me to show her once I met her at the car, than to explain the cross streets to her.

Once she met me, I showed her how to get to my apartment and she helped me carry in the book set. She looked around and was very impressed with the size given the amount I was paying. She also liked the water bed as well and within a few months bought one for herself and set it up in my old bedroom at the mobile home.

The following week she brought by the card and check from my father, telling me how she had called him... And she gave me back my copy of the key to her mobile home, in case I ever wanted to visit sometime.

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Disappearing

63

As May Nineteen Eighty-Nine came, so too did my Social Security Disability back payment check. A lump sum for the year and a half I had been out of work, it made my savings account very happy as I considered what I most wanted to do with it. But with it, also came notice that my newly granted Medicaid coverage had been canceled.

As it turned out Medicaid coverage was tied to Social Security's Supplemental Security Income, SSI, a disability welfare program for those who had not worked long enough to have earned the 'better' Social Security Disability Income benefits. As SSDI didn't kick in for the first few months of the disability period, everyone deemed to be qualified for benefits first started out with SSI which included Medicaid coverage. Then, as I had worked enough in my lifetime, I had earned the upgrade to SSDI which included forty dollars more a month and no healthcare benefits... At least not for the first two years. This was nonsensical and I decided to appeal the loss of the Medicaid coverage out of necessity. Yet for the brief moment, on paper, that I had Medicaid coverage it did retroactively cover my two emergency room visits earlier in the year. Everything else had been handled by my own continuing work health insurance until the extended COBRA coverage period had expired.

As the appeal wheels turned, I decided to get my ducks lined up for my apartment move in June. Obviously everything I had in my little bedroom at the mobile home would be going with me, but taking it from a sixty-four square foot space to a an apartment around ten times the size meant I had space to fill. Further, in my emaciated state, sitting and lying down constantly hurt as bone pressed down against veins and nerve tissue with only one's skin for comfort. So on my wish list for the apartment was a new bed, a couch of my own, and a television. I could have easily exhausted all of my new saving to buy each one of these as new, but I saved that for the most important item. So for the couch and television I was off to our local Goodwill thrift store to see what they had.

To my surprise, they had a long green couch, long enough so I could completely lay down on it if I wanted to, something I hadn't been able to do in a decade since I reached just shy of six feet in my earliest teenage years. I sat on it and it was evenly firm all the way across, no caved in portions that many used couches could have. And the price was right, so I reserved it. They had a selection of used color televisions, none had a great picture, but rather than using up my bus pass punches going to other Goodwill locations in search of a used television in perfect condition, I just took the best one they had available and also reserved it to be picked up later.

For my new bed, I decided to buy myself a brand new water bed! Why? Well my not as older brother had one as his first bed when he moved to Colorado in Nineteen Seventy-Eight and I had always been curious. Not a good enough reason? Well, having seen years of advertisements about how the waterbed form fitted your contours, evenly distributing your body weight without any pressure points, I thought this was a great solution for my painful bone against nerve issues. Was this a better reason? I say 'yes', given that my tests of waterbeds at two different stores were much more comfortable than anything I'd lain on in years. Of the two stores, one didn't seem to care if I bought a bed or not, the other one was very interested and was willing to throw in a sheet and comforter set and padded railings. Given my pressure point pain response, the padded railings made tremendous sense for when I'd get in & out of bed, so I bought the package. It would take them a week to get everything ready, but by that point I only had a week and a half left before I could move into my apartment, so the timing was spot on.

As losing one's healthcare coverage was deemed an urgent issue, the Medicaid appeal was scheduled promptly and I arrived to represent myself at the hearing. Given my perfect track record of two wins for both times I represented myself, I had high hopes for this outing. Oddly enough, this hearing had the most representatives of any of the hearings I had been to, I can't say why. When the judge noticed I was without a lawyer, he told me we could reschedule the hearing for later and I could get a lawyer at Legal Aid. I assured him my luck with Legal Aid had been poor, in part, due to their budget cut backs. Then we could postpone until I found a private lawyer to represent me. I assured him I didn't have the money to spend on a private lawyer and I wanted to proceed. And so we did.

The facts were simple, I needed some sort of health coverage and SSDI health coverage wouldn't kick in for another year. And the law was simple, if someone received one dollar more than what SSI paid, then one was 'too financially well off' to qualify for Medicaid coverage. I said that I'd be willing to pay the difference of my 'higher income level' in return to keep the coverage, they told me it didn't work that way. I noted that Medicaid had covered my two emergency room visits even though, technically, my SSI coverage period would have ended in early Nineteen Eighty-Eight. With SSDI taking over from that point forward, why were those visits covered? Because, factually, I hadn't received SSDI yet, thus SSI covered it until the point I received my first SSDI check, in this case the lump sum back payment. And that was that. Nothing more I could say.

But I discovered one of the other people present in the hearing was a representative of the local community health clinic. A program put in to place as the health care system for low income Americans who didn't have insurance. Given my less than five hundred dollars a month, I would easy qualify to see them for a one or two dollar co-pay per visit... So the hearing wasn't a complete loss as I found a new healthcare route I could pursue.

That over, my next task was to schedule the phone company to hook-up a line at my apartment. They could come a few days before the start of June and I asked the manager if they could hook up the phone early. She said they could and she handed me my key then. The silly part was, as I had no significant credit history, in order to get a phone line I had to pay a rare security deposit of over a hundred dollars. While I grumbled about this, given how much of my life involved online connectivity, it was worth it and they promised to pay back the security deposit when I stopped having a phone in town. The good news was, given my disability finding I would receive a discounted monthly fee for my phone service. I would find out years later it was only for those people receiving SSI, not SSDI, but at the time they hooked up my phone the state records hadn't been updated to show I was now upgraded to the 'better benefits'. I guess they felt people on the largess of the full SSDI system had money to spare and could easily afford double the monthly price!

My move day was the first of June and I had asked my best friend in town, Jeff who had a truck, to help. It was a day my mother worked so she wouldn't be there. Jeff was to be at the mobile home by eleven in the morning... By noon I called and he told me he was running late. He finally showed just before two o'clock. Everything in my bedroom, that I was taking, fit right into his truck bed, no return trips needed, so we were at the apartment and emptied out by three in the afternoon. Then came the trip to Goodwill for the couch and television, which was done by four, and finally the drive to the water bed store which was actually only a few blocks away. That trip was done by five and Jeff helped me assemble the bed frame before he had to go for the day and I had to catch the final bus back to my mother's mobile home.

I didn't want to list my car for sale in the local classified ads until I had my new phone number, thus I had to pick up my car and drive it to the apartment. Originally, I had hoped to have all my moving done in time so I could be back and take my car before my mother got home, thus leaving her with the empty bedroom and free parking spot to surprise her when she arrived. But as Jeff was late, I didn't walk home from the nearest bus stop until mother was back from work.

She was agape as I came in the mobile home for the, seemingly, last time and handed her the key. I told her she could keep the old bed. For someone who had been wanting me to move out, and floating stories that I had 'made up' my health issues to embarrass her in front of her coworkers, she was surprisingly interested in where I was moving to. I told her that Social Security had confirmed my health issues and granted me disability payments and as to where I was moving to, I wouldn't tell her. She had been such an ass over the preceding year and a half that the last thing I wanted was to have her being an ass at my new apartment.

But she followed me out to my car begging to know. After all, what if she got some mail for me and I needed to pick it up? Even though I had already filed a change of address with the post office, I concluded that perhaps I should be safe and give her my new phone number, and that was all. I started up the car for the last time I'd drive it and left. I saw her in the rear view mirror, motionlessly standing as she watched me go, my old key grasped in her hands.

I will admit, I was impressed: She was actually able to wait two whole days before calling me! With the day I left and the day she called we had talked more than in the last full year I had lived with her in the mobile home.

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Places To Be

62

Knowing that I would have a steady source of income on the way, I decided to apartment hunt in the Spring of Nineteen Eighty-Nine. As I had grown comfortable taking the bus and my own car was starting to need more maintenance than I could afford on my estimated monthly amount of just under five hundred dollars, I decided to find myself an apartment that would fully take advantage of the bus routes. So the hunt was on for not only an apartment I could afford, but one near at least two different bus routes. Given my comfort using a computer, I decided to be very systematic about it and create a spreadsheet. Opening the phone book I popped in all of the names, phone numbers and addresses of the apartment complexes in the yellow pages. I then called each one to ask if they had apartments available and the going rate for a single bedroom or efficiency, and other details. I didn't actually know the difference between a single bedroom or an efficiency at first, but quickly caught on.

Info in hand, I cut out all apartments that didn't include utilities as part of the rent. My monthly income would be fixed for at least the next few years and so I needed a monthly apartment whose costs would be fixed as well. As I had gotten used to living on next to nothing each month, I concluded that seventy-five to one hundred dollars should cover my other monthly needs and thus the apartment had to be below four hundred and twenty-five dollars. As I had been income free for the last few months, I was getting a far higher share of food stamps than when I received the state aid and, surprisingly, Social Security Disability Income didn't seem to count against food stamps so I would actually be receiving more food money each month than when I had less income.

Once the apartments had been narrowed down by cost, I then pulled out my city map and hunted up the various addresses and marked them, comparing them to the number of bus routes within a few blocks of each. This produced a nice, sortable numeric score and everything with a zero was now cut. Having watched elderly people struggle to get their groceries home using the bus, I next concluded I needed an apartment within six blocks of a grocery store. As I wouldn't be going to the store as often as taking the bus, I figured I could handle the extra walking when shopping. This cut out nearly half of the apartments that were left and of the fifteen remaining, I picked my top five to visit in person and took a look.

One was an efficiency and I quickly discarded it as it was along only one bus route that ran infrequently. The second one I visited was great! The price was right, it was next to three bus routes, it came with extra apartment amenities like a game room, meeting room, and swimming pool. While I didn't see myself swimming, I thought could probably put the meeting room to good use with occasional science fiction club organizational meetings and perhaps even a few writer's group meetings if needed. I applied for the apartment and was summarily refused. They only wanted people of a certain income level and even though I could afford the apartment better than most others on my list, my income level was deemed too low for me to be accepted. I felt this was unfair, but they assured me there were no laws about discriminating against people due to income level.

The next day I was off to another apartment. It actually had four bus routes passing by within a few blocks on all four sides. While it didn't have the meeting or gaming rooms, the apartment itself was very similar to the one at the place which turned me down. They didn't have any minimum income level that would disqualify me and I applied for the apartment. But there was a hitch: Their application included a credit checking fee of thirty dollars. I was leery of paying unrefundable money to apply for an apartment, but given the great location, bus wise, and the office staff assurances that they rarely rejected people unless they had terrible credit, I went ahead and wrote them the check.

When I returned the next day to confirm my apartment number and move in date, they told me they hadn't gotten around to calling me. I had been rejected, not because I had a terrible credit history, but simply because I had so little. The management had decided that given my skimpy credit history, for all they knew I would be a terrible risk. I was fuming as I felt I had been mislead and they'd got to pocket my money at the same time. Walking out of the apartment complex I knew I'd have to kill some time before the next bus would come to take me back to my mother's place. It was such a shame I couldn't get this apartment as it was the only part of town where four bus lines passed so closely together other than the downtown area.

Meandering toward the main road, I realized I was walking next to an apartment complex that I had not seen in the phone book. I decided I might as well check into it as I killed time and hunted through the buildings until I finally found an apartment marked 'Manager'. It was an older lady with a bit of a foreign accent and I asked about their apartments. She showed me the common two types of one bedrooms that they had and while not as good as the first two places I had applied for, they were good enough. They weren't as cheap as the other two places though, coming in at four hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. Still, the location was great with a grocery store just four blocks away and all the coinciding bus lines. There wasn't a minimum income level required, as long as you could pay the rent that was all that mattered, and when I asked if they did credit checks she said a handshake was good enough for her. I told her I'd think about it and caught the bus back to my mother's and my little room.

Being back in my eight by eight bedroom quickly helped me make up my mind to accept the apartment. I returned the next day to let her know and fill in the paperwork, but when she saw me at the door, she was excited. There was another apartment that had been reserved for someone, but they had fallen through. It was a garden-level apartment directly below the manager's so I concluded that I wouldn't have to worry about noisy neighbors and, when she let me in to see, it was definitely a step up from the other apartments she had shown me the day before... And it was only twenty-five dollars more a month than the others.

At four hundred and fifty dollars, this blew my budgeted amount and I would have to pass. Yet, it was a much better looking apartment and I liked the layout and it had a great storage closet... Of my monthly cash in hand, I reserved fifteen dollars of it for the monthly after club meeting dinner so with this apartment it would leave me with just over thirty dollars of 'everything else' money each month. If I sold the car I wouldn't have to worry about insurance, gas, or maintenance money... I took the apartment. I figured that I wouldn't be moving in until June and six months later I'd get my first cost of living adjustment, so as long as the apartment rent didn't grow faster than my cost of living increase, I would gradually end-up with more money in hand with each passing year. As I'd have leftover back payment cash in the bank, I could use some of it to cover my monthly expenses until the end of this year.

Signed-up and confirmed, I decided to celebrate my coming freedom and went to that year's Starfest Science Fiction convention for the first time in years. I used the last of my unemployment savings from the previous year, but as I was going to have that Social Security back payment arriving in just a few weeks, what could possibly go wrong...?

When I got back to my mother's mobile home after the convention, I found my bedroom unlocked and it had been rummaged through. As the keyed door knob was intact, I concluded that mother must have found my spare key while I was gone for the weekend and let herself in. While disordered, there wasn't much missing. But of the things missing was my high school student file with my class records and original I.Q. testing scores. Oddly enough, what was untouched was the paperwork on my computer desk which included my disability reward letter, so it appeared that my mother probably still didn't know of my new found income and my soon to come move.

However she got in my room, I couldn't allow her to keep rummaging around and taking or throwing away more of my belongings when I wasn't there. I promptly went to the hardware store and bought a replacement keyed doorknob for the bedroom using my overdraft protection to cover the amount.

I could pay it back when I got that Social Security back payment check...

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Smack In The Head

61

 

I woke up soon after midnight with this profound pain in the left hand side of my head. I could tell something was wrong and I needed to go to the emergency room. Unusual for me I actually went to my mother's closed bedroom door and knocked on it to wake her up and tell her I needed to go to the emergence room. I discovered I was talking strangely and she simply answered back through the door ''Take the car!''

Ignoring my car parked right next to hers, I did as I was told and took her car to the hospital. Yet given my condition, I didn't feel comfortable about it and largely let the high idle of her automatic pull the car along on the road while I struggled to pay attention to keeping the car within the lines. After the first couple of miles with the car rolling along at idle speed I realized that I could probably go faster and touched my foot to the pedal bringing the car up to twenty-five miles an hour on the thirty-five mile an hour road; being one in the morning meant there wasn't much other traffic I had to worry about. When I arrived at the emergency room entrance I shuffled into the reception area and gave my name and affirmed I didn't have any insurance and I came to realize what the sound of my 'talking funny' was like: A loud monotone with a clumsy tongue, oddly enough with no stuttering. I was asked who my primary care physician was and I told them I didn't have any. Was I sure? Yes.

There weren't many patients this time of night so there wasn't much delay as I was taken to one of the examination beds. While having curtains to provide privacy from one bed to the next in this large room, there wasn't a need to pull the curtain as all the other beds were empty. Still, as I waited for the doctor, I found myself fascinated with the rainbow striping of the curtains and thought it'd be pretty if pulled out. But as the nurse hadn't pulled it out I just sat there and stared at it.

When the doctor came I told him of the profound pain in the left hand side of my head and the fact that I was talking funny in a loud monotone and couldn't stop it for some reason. He decided to check my left ear but it wasn't red or inflamed and he didn't know what the problem could be. He asked who my primary care doctor was and I told him I didn't have any. He assured me I must, but I again told him I didn't. He left the room for a while and then the nurse came back, angry, shy of an hour later.

She told me that, despite my attempts to hide it, they had found who my primary care doctor was and it served me right: What I was going through for not finishing the antibiotics for my ear infection. She handed me a script for a 'new' batch of antibiotics and the discharge papers and was off as I called after her, ''WHA-WHAT EAR INFECTION?'' She ignored me and left the room. After a bit I got off of the bed and trailed her down the hallway to the glass window of the nurse's station and rapped on it. The three nurses behind the window ignored me and I again rapped on it until another nurse opened up the window and demanded: ''What!''

''I--I DIDN'T HAVE AN EAR INFECTION,'' I said in my loud fumbly tongued monotone. The nurse who had seen me at the bed yelled back at me, Yes I had, I had seen my primary care doctor about it just last week and I should have told them. If I had finished my bottle of antibiotics I wouldn't have been here wasting their time, tonight.

I told her I didn't have any primary care doctor nor had I been told of any ear infection. She yelled back at me that I obviously did if the emergency room doctor had been talking to him. Now go home! She told the nurse by the window to slide it closed. Averting her eyes, she did and I kept on standing there without a clue what to make of this. I rapped on the window again asking to see the doctor so I could find out who this 'primary care doctor' was he had spoken to. But the nurse yelled back through the glass that I knew who my primary care doctor was, the emergency room doctor wasn't going to see me again and I was to go home and stop wasting their time.

''I DON'T,'' I said half as protest that I didn't have a primary care doctor and half as notice that I didn't know who it was. But the nurses just ignored me, all finding other things to look at as I stood there dumbly. After about a minute or more the third nurse who hadn't been involved yelled through the glass for me to go home and without any other apparent option, I did.

This time on the drive I was feeling more confident and was able to make the whole drive back at twenty-five miles an hour, briefly touching thirty by the time I got back to the mobile home. Starting to feel somewhat better and in a suddenly giddy mood, I went straight to my bedroom and warmed up the computer. With a burst I had this series of obviously hilarious Doctor Who based strips in my head. You know, like in the newspaper there would be three or four panel comic strips? What do you mean there are no longer newspapers? Anyhow I had these amazingly funny Doctor Who strips in my head and I quickly typed them up one after another.

Then I went back to bed by five in the morning, satisfied that I had just written some of the most hilarious stuff in all my life. When I woke up by around noon, all pain was gone from the side of my head but I went ahead and got the prescription of antibiotics anyhow that afternoon as I had been told to.

When I next saw my Doctor Who artist, I printed up and showed him these amazingly funny strips I had come up with. I hadn't reviewed it at all myself as I had always been a one draft writer. He looked at the print-out and looked again. He finally looked to me and said he was having problems understanding it. I looked over his shoulder to see I had written mostly gibberish on the paper.

When I finally saw a neuropsychologist once I again had insurance coverage in hand, given my description of the events of that night and my resulting permanent deficit, she concluded that I had experienced a stroke.

Regardless of what it was, all I knew is from that day forward I was never again a one draft writer...

notes on a page

iv

I never did find out who the supposed primary care doctor had been. Had the emergency room doctor dug through my hospital file to discover the name of my mother's primary doctor whom I had not seen in nearly a year and a half? Or did he confuse me with another patient in the hospital's computer and called that doctor and been told of an ear infection not realized I was not the same person? If it was my mother's primary care doctor, then I could easily image him making up a story about me having had an ear infection given all of the other stories he had made up about me during that time.

As for my writing skills, what you see on the page is the result of many-many-many proof reading passes as I review the gibberish I type out and then guess what it was I must have meant and correct the text. If not for word processors I would have given up writing entirely, but as they allow one to go in and fix just the errors without having to retype the whole page, I can 'get text done'. If I had to retype each whole page, I would unknowingly introduce all new gibberish errors into the text and thus it would be a wasted effort.

What the stroke did was damage the part of my brain that translated from my writing thoughts to my finger tips, causing me to randomly type any small word, typically prepositions, pronouns, and conjunctions, rather than the word I had thought of. Let's take the classic typewriter version of chopsticks: The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dog. What I typed was: You Quick Brown Fox Jumped With To Lazy Dog. Yes, if you're wondering, I have the same problem writing sentences out by hand, but the good news there is, as I'm so slow at it, I typically catch I'm writing the wrong word by the first letter or two and stop myself.

I pretty much stopped writing entirely for the next year until I figured out a way around the brain damage. Rather than thinking of the words I wanted to type, I instead thought of the letters of all the small words I might mix-up, such as 'T' 'h' 'e' Quick Brown Fox Jumped 'O' 'v' 'e' 'r' 'T' 'h' 'e' Lazy Dog. Then what would end up typed would be correct and I could reduce my proof reading to just a few times each story, note, or email. Yet another fifteen years later, I had lost the mental stamina to do that work-around while typing and am now back to a vast number of proof readings before anyone else sees my next work.

As you may have already discovered for me: This story of my life needed, yet, a few more proof readings!

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My Reward

60

So with February came a thick packet in the mail for me from Social Security. As I would typically get the mail for the mobile home from the park's box during the middle of the day while mother was working, I was able to open it up and scan through it in the living room. Many pages of dense text which talked about the decision of the hearing but nowhere in it was ''You Won!'' Looking it over a second time I did see a line on the front page that said 'Notice Of Favorable Decision' though it didn't say for who. I collected up all the pages and went to my bedroom for a detailed read, making sure I didn't leave anything behind that my mother might find and take.

Reading it word for word, when I reached the section noting that I would be hearing from Social Security soon about my benefit level and back benefit payment it started to sink in that I had actually won the appeal. Now I had two wins to Legal Aid's zero. Fifteen years later Social Security accidentally sent me the detailed judge's determination notes and I learned from them that, since the judge decided there was truly something wrong with me but there wasn't enough medical information to support a claim, he looked to the original psychologist's report from my hospital stay where he noted that I, at most, suffered from an 'adjustment disorder'. Not knowing how serious an 'adjustment disorder' was, the judge found that to be my debilitating condition and granted my Disability claim... For those not familiar, an 'adjustment disorder' is a response to an actual stress in your life that you haven't overcome. When I told a psychologist friend about it those fifteen years later, he burst out laughing as it ''was deemed to be one of the least significant psychological disorders'' and ''in fact was likely to be removed from the list.''

Reflecting on it now, though, I've come to find the label very apt for me at that time. As I was having emotional stress from the fact that I couldn't get a doctor to treat my intestinal problems. And further, I was unsure about my strange puberty which I didn't know how to address. So, in retrospect, I think it was an accurate diagnosis which helped to get me out of a terrible situation and into only a bad one. What? You thought winning disability benefits would put everything to rights?

I subsequently found there would be a two to three month period while Social Security sorted everything out, paid the state a refund for any aid they had given me in the meantime, and then retroactively cover any unpaid medical expenses with Medicaid.

For the first time in a long time I saw a short term future for myself. With luck I could get my first apartment with the assured monthly income and be out of my mother's mobile home for the first time in six years. When I moved in, in Nineteen Eighty-Three, she had been longing for company and was happy to have me there, but it was only after the first few months that it started to sour and since being out of work due to my health problems, it had become downright unpleasant. Yet now with the monthly check and Medicaid coverage I would be able to once again try to find a doctor to review and address my health problems and possibly, one day, cure them and I could go back to work.

Thrilled by my coming escape, I avidly delved into my writing projects. After the first few comic serial scripts I had made for The Doctor Who Report, I had finally gotten the hang of it and came up with a block buster two-parter that I was sure was going to knock our reader's socks off. I wrote the first part and the writer in me wanted to write the second part, but I fought off the urge as I wanted to pace myself and instead wrote my first speculative script for 'the other show' I was interested in on television. Once done and happy with it, I decided to provide it to the writer's group for review and input. It was the first thing I submitted to them that didn't get good reviews. Digging into why, it simply stemmed from them not understanding or being familiar with television script format and not knowing what to make of it. Ultimately, I decided for myself I should have done better with that script after reviewing it merely a year later.

But part one of my new two-part comic serial story went over well with the artist as he delivered the next issue's drawings. Then he really got excited when I told him how the second part would go and he took the new script with him to get to work on the next issue's installment. With all other content ready for TDWR I was off to Jeff's to assemble it in the desktop publishing software and print up the masters. I then took the masters to the copy shop the next day to produce all of the reduced pages and get them home to assemble into the booklet issues. They were mailed off by the end of the week.

Toward the end of February, while I had been keeping late night hours of going to bed around seven in the morning and getting up by two in the afternoon over the previous years as part of avoiding my mother. I found myself feeling very wobbly and ended up going to bed barely more than eight hours later. I would later wake up feeling very strange and would later have this experience diagnosed as my first stroke...

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