The explosion happened without warning. One second, some children were playing on an outdoor basketball court. The next second there was screaming. I only saw the aftermath of it. A small blast mark on the concrete was all that was left. I remember thinking that it only looked like a scorch mark that might have been cleaned up with a brush and a rag. It couldn’t have been something that caused third degree burns to a child and landed him in the hospital for over a month.

It wasn’t intentional. But that didn’t matter. The result had nearly killed someone. The way it was explained to me was that the gunpowder had been placed inside an air tight mason jar. The chances of it exploding were a thousand to one. But it happened anyway. When the jar hit the ground it broke with the contents under pressure. Perhaps the metal clasp sparked as it struck the pavement igniting the entire jar as it broke. Metal and broken glass shot across the court injuring four children. One child in particular had tried to catch the jar as it fell. He was the one that spent weeks in the hospital trying to recover from his burns.

I asked if his clothes caught fire, but they said “no.” In fact, his shirt was almost completely shredded off in the blast. The expanding heat vapors scorched him in an instant. After the initial shock he ran around screaming with bits of skin and hair peeling from his body. No one who was a witness to the event was older than ten. They really didn’t know what to do. They just watched as he ran around the school yard.

It’s odd how someone’s life can be changed like that in an instant. Or perhaps it wasn’t that instant. So many things led up to that event. And it wasn’t just the boy who was injured whose life had changed. The boy that gave him the jar full of gunpowder…his life changed forever too. They said he was a latch key kid. They said his parents didn’t raise him right. They said there was something wrong with him, and that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. And I felt in some way responsible for this.

He was my best friend.

*          *          *

It’s hard to explain to someone one just how hot it was in Dallas, TX in the Summer of 1980. Whole weeks would go by without the temperature ever dropping below 110 degrees. In looking back at the weather records, there were two days in June when the temperature reached 113. I remember playing in a little league baseball game on one of those days. It was miserable. The coach put a cooler full of ice water in the dugout and we would periodically dunk our heads in it to try and cool off. After pulling our heads out of the ice bath, we just felt sick and disoriented. It didn’t help at all. After a while one of the outfielders passed out and they finally called the game and sent everyone home.

There was a kid who lived across the street from me who had become by default my new best friend. The pickings were slim in my neighborhood. Raquel lived directly across from me and next door to my new best friend. But she wouldn’t even acknowledge my presence. She was popular and I was not. To say that I was not popular was actually a bit of an understatement.

I had just moved from another part of Dallas during the previous year. I had a stuttering problem, so I had to go to speech therapy every week. I hated to talk in class because it took me about three minutes to say “hello.” It was also determined that I had trouble reading so I was taken out of regular class everyday to go to a special ed session with three other kids who were behind. The teacher of that class sat down with me and put me through a bunch of aptitude tests which placed my vocabulary at the same level of someone attending college. She had a few conferences with my parents and it was determined that I was actually very accelerated in aptitude, but my speech impediment and shyness kept me from wanting to participate in class. So for about a year and a half I had to endure a lot of special sessions, appointments, and classes. Meanwhile, all my classmates would point at me and yell “Retard!” while I walked down the hall. By the summer of 1980 my stutter was almost gone. The only time it was noticeable was when I became nervous or excited. This meant that my speech impediment was still well known to my classmates, and it cropped up at the most inopportune times.

There were other kids in my neighborhood. Mike lived just a couple of streets over, but we fought all the time. He was one of the ones that would point and yell “Retard!” We got into a couple of fist fights over the years and I was always the one who got into trouble over it. Once we were playing touch football during recess which quickly turned to tackle whenever the teachers turned their backs. I had made a few yards during a run and was tackled a few feet from the end zone. Mike ran up, jumped in the air as high as he could, and landed in the middle of my back with both knees after the play was well over. “Yucky Bucky!” he shouted. “Yucky fucky Bucky!…Retard!” So I didn’t go out of my way to play with him.

Jeffrey lived a couple of streets over as well. But he was one year younger than me, and even less popular. If that was possible. I liked him and was always nice to him, but he was the whiny asthma inhaler kid. It seemed like everything we did was too rough. Or it was always too hot. Or too cold. Or he was allergic to it. He was constantly sniffling. His sleeves were crusty with snot. I don’t want to even tell you what happened when he wore short sleeves.

Near Jeff were a set of twins who were actually distantly related to me. But we were never close and actually fought a lot. One of them was the first kid on our block to get a pocket knife from his dad. So what did he do? He slashed my bike tire with it.

My only hope was the kid across the street. He liked me. He was nice. But he had a lot of baggage. He was two years older than me, but only ahead by one grade. He had been made to repeat the fourth grade and that’s where he was in 1980. It was hot. Dreadfully hot. I was the stuttering retard. He was the latch key kid who was repeating a grade who didn’t suck as much as the other kids on my block. We were friends by default. We were friends out of self defense.

*          *          *

“Hey, dad!” I exclaimed at the dinner table one night, “Guess what my new best friend told me!”

“What?” inquired my father looking like he was wary of what I was about to tell him.

“He told me that his Dad was a flying ace in the Korean War, and shot down 12 planes!”

“Son, the Korean War was 30 years ago. His dad was probably about three years old. He didn’t shoot down any planes. Your friend is lying to you.”

“Are you sure?” I asked dejected.

“Of course. Look, I actually went to ROTC in college because I thought I might be drafted into Korea. The war ended right when I finished college and I went into the Army after the war. I am a good bit older than your friend’s dad. He must have just been a kid. Besides, planes really didn’t dogfight much in Korea. We were flying Saber jets, and the enemy stayed on the ground.

A few days later…

“Hey dad! My new best friend told me something really cool!”

“Oh yeah? What’s the boy genius done now?”

“He said that his dad wrote this song when he was in the Army, and people still sing it to this day!”

“Really? How does it go?”

I started singing a silly little song about biscuits and rolls that I had heard from my friend It was a song about army food.

“Buck, that song was on M*A*S*H last week. Your friend is pulling your leg again.”

After getting me twice I pretty much gave up listening to my new friend’s story telling. We had a good time together, but he often felt the need to tell me these wild stories about his father. I remember a bit later him telling me that his dad was a champion skeet shooter, and was so good at the sport that he had a setup to reload his own shells. I dismissed it as more lies. Little did I know that this story was true and that there was a large amount of gunpowder in his house.

*          *          *

So why were we friends? We had one thing in common. There was this one thing with which we were both fascinated. It consumed us, and to some extent it does to this very day.

Computers.

We had met in 1977 when my family moved onto that street. After a few interactions like the ones above, I was wary of him. But we kept coming back to each other because of this common bond. Home computers weren’t standard equipment back then. We were the only people we knew who had this hobby. And we were quite young, and most of what we were dabbling with was beyond us.

His dad worked for the Teledyne Corporation. I think he helped design some sort of chip or microprocessor. Whatever he did, he was fairly important and had to work from home quite a bit. Because of this he had a Digital Equipment Corporation VT52 terminal at home. For readers who are not so familiar with primitive computers, it is important to note that there was no internet, and home computers like the Apple II had just been invented and were not common. Most computers were quite large, taking up most of a room. Digital Equipment Corporation produced two lines of computers back then, the PDP series and later the VAX series. Simply ‘sitting down at the computer’ didn’t make any sense. The computer was incredibly huge and expensive. A company the size of Teledyne would only own a few of these systems and employees would access them through these VT52 terminals. It was a fantastic way to give several people access to the same computer that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Although the terminals had microprocessors in them, they were not fully fledged computers in and of themselves. They would allow you to connect to the larger computer through a modem to feed it instructions and run programs.

My friend’s dad told us that everyone at Teledyne went home at about 5pm. If we waited until about 5:15, we could attempt to logon with the VT52, and if it was not busy we could play. What were we playing on such an expensive machine? The Colossal Cave Adventure of course. I had no idea of the significance of it then, but I now know that this was the first widely distributed computer game ever written. It was a wildly popular text-only game that took the user through several locations in a system of caves designed to be similar to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky which the programmer had visited. It had a Dungeons and Dragons feel and involved solving logic puzzles to gather treasure and points. We were most likely playing it in its original FORTRAN on a PDP 10 (or possibly an early VAX machine) located across town. I can still remember sitting at the terminal with my friend watching the seconds tick by on the clock. At exactly 5:15 we would furiously dial the rotary phone and jam it in the cuffs of the modem to logon and start playing.

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

Later on we were able to play the more well known Zork through the same system. A couple of years later my friend’s dad also got a home computer that looked similar to the VT52, but it had its own disk drive and was a complete system. (I am fuzzy on the details of this, but this machine may have been a VT100 with an add-on card which allowed it to emulate a PDP 8. I truly can’t remember any details other than we could finally program on a machine at my friend’s house without worrying about taking up time on the mainframe at the office.)

In contrast, my dad worked for Texas Instruments and was in charge of advertising for the TI99/4 and later the TI99/4a. While the original system was being developed, my dad’s bosses wanted him to be familiar with competing machines. Around 1977 or 1978 he was given an Apple II to take home. He loaded it up with software and watched my friend and I play. Our favorite game was a version of Star Trek. There were no graphics, just text arranged in such a way as to represent a ‘sector’ in space. The letter ‘E’ represented the Enterprise, while ‘K’ stood for Klingon and ‘B’ stood for base. I played it for hours while my disgusted father looked on.

It is important to point out that even though both our fathers worked in the golden era of the personal computer, both men absolutely hated their jobs. My father was clinically interested in my fascination with these machines from an advertising standpoint. But he was also a never ending fountain of lectures telling me what a waste of my time it was. In 1979 he brought home a TI99/4 home computer with every peripheral and piece of software the company made. Despite the fact that our house was dripping with computer equipment, I was lectured every time I spent more than fifteen minutes playing with it. My friend got similar lectures from his dad and so we often bounced back and forth between houses trying to use the VT52 or TI99/4 as long as our fathers would tolerate it, and then run across the street to the other house.

This is why the Summer of 1980 is so important. It was hot. So hot that none of our parents dared make us play outside. Finally we were given unlimited access to thousands and thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment. We decided to make our own adventure game. 1980 was the Summer of programming.

*          *          *

You are in a small room. The walls are composed of a dark, almost black form of smoky quartz; they glisten like teeth in the lamp-light. The only exit is the passage to the south through which you entered.

“No, no, no. You can’t just start out programming a person and a room. Here’s what we do,” It was my turn to sit on the floor between the two Galaxy box fans we had carried from across the street. It was my friend’s turn to type. My nine year old mind had an epiphany and I was pontificating. “You have to think of the player himself as a location. The player is location zero. Every room has a variable of one, two, three and so forth. So if the lamp has a location value of zero, it’s in your inventory. If it has a value of one it’s in the first room, a value of two puts it in the hall.”

“Oh I get it,” he started typing furiously, “We can have a subroutine that checks the location of each object. If your command is ‘Inventory’ then you goto the location subroutine and it prints everything with a value of zero!”

“Exactly!”

“What the hell are you doing with all this paper!?” My friend’s dad had barged in unexpectedly. He was angry and he wasn’t hiding it. To be honest he scared me a little. I had my problems with my dad. That was pretty evident. But at least he was nice to company and was genuinely glad to see me every once in a while. From what I could gather, my friend’s dad was never happy to see him, or anyone else. I tried to steer clear of him. “I have to account for all of this! Teledyne gave me this paper to work with! This isn’t for play time!”

We both looked down. There were piles of dot matrix paper everywhere. One of the problems with teaching yourself to program a computer when you’re nine is that you never really get good at it. We got lost a lot. So we took to printing out subroutines and placing them on the floor trying to figure out why the axe disappeared after the dwarf threw it. It was supposed to stick in the wall. But, you see, that was a problem. An axe being stuck in the wall and merely being in the room are two different states for the same object. Under our current system an object either had a value of 4 and was in the antechamber, or it wasn’t. There was no being in the antechamber and being stuck in the wall at the same time. My friend was of the mind that one object should be switched out for another depending on its level of wall stuckness but that was complicated and I was looking for a better solution.

“And what the hell is this?” Now he was pointing at our ASCII animation of Star Wars. Now that was cool. Someone had made this giant text document, and every page was a frame of the Star Wars movie, only done in ASCII text. You were supposed to print it out, stack it up backwards, and flip through it to see the movie. The resulting stack of paper was massive. Much too much to staple through. That’s where the hole punch and his mother’s yarn came in handy. Then my friend had this awesome idea. Since we had a whole box full of accordion paper, why don’t we just print the document backwards on every other page? Then we didn’t have to spend hours with the hole punch and the yarn. It took twice as much paper, but it worked better.

I looked up. He was angry. Both he and his son were built the same way, short and wiry. They were so thin and ropy that it gave the appearance of them being tall. But when you got next to them, you found out they were just short. And angry. And he had tinted glasses. I have always hated that. They are never really clear, and never really dark. They are always just a shade of grayish red. Always hiding your eyes from others, never letting you see fully, always making the wearer look like an angry dork.

“I’m sorry, dad. You’ve got boxes of this stuff that you never use, and we were just having fun. It’s like watching Star Wars. Look.” My friend held up the stack of paper and started flipping the edges.

“I don’t want to look at this, I’m tired of it. I want this cleaned up. I know it’s hot outside, but you two need to go somewhere else. I don’t want to see you on this computer for a few days. I need to work, and I can’t do it with you ruining everything all the time. Both of you get out!”

*          *          *

There is a small wicker cage discarded nearby. A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing. A three foot black rod with a rusty star on an end lies nearby.

“Alright, let’s see if this works.” I was now staring at the blue background on the TI99/4. Why they chose light blue at a background to their BASIC work screen is beyond me. It was hard to look at. I typed ‘run.’

We had been working on the dwarf for days. At first we could only have him in one room. He was an object just like anything else. Consequently he had a location variable just like all the other objects.

Take dwarf.

You take the dwarf.

“You can’t pick up a dwarf! We need to fix that!”

So we set about it a completely different way. Before long the dwarf had his own subroutine and was part of every turn. At the beginning of every turn a random number was chosen between zero and three. If the number wound up being zero, then the dwarf would move. If the dwarf was going to move, the program executed another subroutine that calculated what room he was in and which rooms were adjacent. The adjacent rooms were assigned variables, and then the dwarf’s location variable would be switched to the next location. At the end of this subroutine, if you were in the same place the computer would print, “An angry dwarf walks into the room.” However, if upon the initial location check it was found that the player location and the dwarf’s location were equal the computer would print, “There is an angry dwarf here, staring at you.” We had also written another piece of code that gave the dwarf a one in four chance of leaving the room as well. We had been working on this for three days. Now it was show time.

We started off in the main room as always. I walked into the antechamber and the computer printed, “There is an angry dwarf here, staring at you.”

“Okay. So far, so good. Jack around for a minute. Look at your inventory. Look at the sign again. Use up some turns!”
I did, and after two turns…

“The dwarf leaves the room.”

“Okay, looking good. Keep your fingers crossed. There are only two rooms he could be in, and only a one in four chance that he will move from there immediately. Hopefully we can find him.” We walked out into the hallway.

“There is an angry dwarf here, staring at you.”

“Yes! Yes! The dwarf moves! The dwarf moves!” We were both dancing up and down. We had done it. The dwarf actually walked around in adjacent rooms. We wasted a couple of turns to see if he would move again, and lo and behold he did. We were able to follow him. “Yes! Yes! Awesome!”

“What’s going on in here?” My dad came into the room looking annoyed.

To date this was the most impressive programming feat my nine-year-old mind had conceived. We had a dwarf walking around just like in the real game. And we had plans. Oh yes, we had plans. The dwarf could be a location just like the room or the player. And if the dwarf was in the same room as an axe, the dwarf could pick up the axe. And before the computer printed, “There is an angry dwarf here, staring at you.” it could check the location of the axe. If the axe location equaled the dwarf then the computer could instead print, “There is an angry dwarf here holding an axe.” And if he was just in the same room as the axe it could print, “The dwarf picks up an axe.” And from there we were just a hop, skip, and a jump from him throwing it. An aggressive dwarf! That’s what we needed!

“D-d-d-dad! W-w-we figured out how to m-m-m-make the dwarf move!” I got so excited I started to stutter again. It was still early in the day. If we buckled down, I knew we could finish the whole axe thing by dinner time.

“Buck…that’s…great. You’re stuttering again. You need to slow down. Why don’t you boys give it a rest for today? I’m sure your friend would like to go home and see his folks for a bit.”

“But dad! W-w-w-we almost have the axe thing w-w-worked out!”

“You boys can work on that tomorrow.” He looked at my friend, “You run along now. I want to talk to Buck.”

After he left, my dad sat down next to the desk. He gathered all of our print outs and looked for a clear spot to put them. He couldn’t find one so he just set them down on the floor. He absentmindedly lit a cigarette.

“Son, is this what you are really interested in?”

Uh oh. I was in for another lecture. I had been working on an answer for this for days. I knew it was coming.

“Dad, it’s 110 degrees outside. What else are we going to do?” That part was rehearsed. Notice the absence of stuttering. If I thought about what I was going to say ahead of time my stutter disappeared.

“I know it’s hot outside, but look…I work with this group of engineers at work. And I was supposed to be talking to them about the software they are developing because we are starting a new ad campaign. And those guys are barely functional. They wear double knit polyester pants that don’t match anything. They talk funny.”

“I stutter sometimes.”

“Yes, Buck, but we’re working on that. Anyway, I was listening to them talk over lunch and they were getting really excited. One of them had spent the last week trying to figure out how to make some program shorter. After forty hours worth of work he was able to reduce 88 lines of code to 81. And that was his big news. That was his big revelation. And he was taking about it like it was some big event.”

“It might have been dad. The TI doesn’t have much memory. We think about that all the time with our game. My friend has been trying to calculate how many rooms we can add and it isn’t much. His dad told him something about this thing called an array and he says we can fit all our variables into one place without them being spread all over the program. We could save so many lines of code that way and have more rooms!”

“Sure. But, I mean, is that what you really want to do with your life?” My dad was searching around for an ashtray but couldn’t find one. He gave up and tipped in his hand. “I mean, 88 lines of code to 81…a few more rooms…how many hours do you spend on this stuff? People actually get degrees in this stuff. It’s madness. And my bosses actually think they can sell this machine. Lines of code, dwarves, and rooms Buck. What’s it matter? Who cares? You need to give it a rest. You need to practice batting some more.”

“B-B-But I’m terrible at b-b-baseball dad. And it’s hot.”

“You know what? I already thought of that. Your school has that big black top. You guys can pitch and do some batting practice under that. It would be hot but it would be out of the sun. It would do you guys some good to get out.”

“I guess we could do that for a little while. B-b-b-ut we aren’t even having a game this week.”

“Well you’re going outside tomorrow, and that’s final. Now go downstairs and find something to do. Turn this off for awhile and do something that doesn’t have anything to do with midgets, and knives, and lines of code.” Some ash fell on the ground while he was talking. “Damnit.” He cupped his hand, held it to his chest and walked downstairs slowly.

I paused to save our work and shut down.

“I said get down here!” I heard him yell from downstairs.

*          *          *

A rickety wooden bridge extends across the chasm, vanishing into the mist. A sign posted on the bridge reads, “STOP! Pay troll!” A burly troll stands by the bridge and insists you throw him a treasure before you may cross.

My friend and I met up over the next few days to go play baseball under the black top. We had ported our moving dwarf over to the program on his dad’s computer and it worked. But our dad’s had gotten together and now my friend’s dad was telling us to play under the black top too. Just walking onto the front lawn was a chore. I felt like an ant under a magnifying glass. But my friend was excited and waving his arms wildly as he ran up to me.

“Buck! Buck! One of my dad’s work friends came over to the house last night to drop something off and he wanted to talk to us!”

“What? Talk to you and me? What about?”

“He said that he had played our game! At first he thought it was weird that someone in the office was making an adventure game. He thought it was even weirder that they were using BASIC. So he asked around to see who it was and found out it was a couple of kids. He said after he heard that we were 9 and 11 that he thought we were brilliant and everyone in the office has been playing our game! Everyone got really excited when the dwarf started moving!”

“What else did he say?”

“He asked if we had tried FORTRAN. I told him that we had but it was just too hard. He told us we were doing great and that we should definitely keep going. Everybody in the office is pulling for us and checking up on the game each time the file changes! One thing he did say is that we are going to run out of RAM unless we come up with a language parser.”

“What’s that?”

“He told me some stuff, but it was hard to understand. We have to somehow process the two-word commands in a different way. Instead of having a whole string of possible commands for each move, we have to come up with a way to have the computer process the words mathematically and shorten the code.”

“How do we do that?”

“I don’t know, but we are not going to get that done under the black top.”

“So where are we going,” I said sounding worried.

“The library,” he replied with a smile on his face.

*          *          *

The walls are quite warm here. From the north can be heard a steady roar, so loud that the entire cave seems to be trembling. Another passage leads south, and a low crawl goes east.

Later in the week we went back to my friend’s house, but we weren’t allowed to play with the computer. No one was home but we didn’t dare logon. It was in the middle of the day when people would be using the system. My friend and I would get together and do other things every now and then, but it seemed like we never got along when we did. He was just too mischievous and prone to getting me in trouble. If we concentrated on computers, it would give him something to do and he would stay focused.

There was nothing in the library on language parsers. There was very little on programming period. We found a few of books on the subject but many of them were for older computers that were programmed by hole punching cards and feeding them into a slot. There were a couple of books about FORTRAN, COBOL, and PASCAL, but at this point we were committed to BASIC. We were only kids, and the other languages just assumed too much computer knowledge. There were a few books on BASIC, but they all seemed to cover subjects that we had already mastered. We were on our own.

But that didn’t stop us. We actually designed a rudimentary language parser in BASIC that worked fairly well for what it did. We came up with a list of words that were allowed to be used in commands. Each word was given a three digit number as a value. These values were assigned in a large array that was loaded at the beginning of the program. When the user typed in a two-word command, the words were split apart and the numerical values were determined. Those two values were added together and the sum was used in a large subroutine to figure out what the user wanted to do.

This saved tons of lines of code. It was more complicated, but in a way it made things easier. For one thing, synonyms were given the same values. For instance, the commands ‘drop’, ‘put’, and ‘leave’ all had the same value. If those verbs all had a value or say, 150, and the knife had a value of 2, no matter which word was used the sum of both words would be 152. It was a lot easier to write a line of code that would perform an action if the value of the command input was 152 instead of writing three separate lines of code for each possible synonym.

This made other tricks possible as well. We grouped similar verbs so that they would produce sums in a known range. That way we could make the computer answer a certain way to a broad range of statements. For instance, if the user typed in something that contained a violent verb such as hit, punch, or kill it would generate a value between 900 and 920. Nothing else would make a number that high. So in certain rooms where it wasn’t possible to do anything violent we could write a line of code that would print “Why are you so angry?” if the command sum was anything higher than 900. It made the computer seem intelligent and it allowed us to erase bunches of redundant code.

But there would be no computing on that day. We talked about it a lot but got bored not being able to do anything.

“I know!” said my friend, “I want to show you something really cool.”

He ran off to his parents’ bedroom, and came back with a small set of keys. He motioned for me to come down the hall with him. There was a bedroom down the hall that served as an office. The computer we used was in there. “Are you going to show me the computer we have been using?” I asked jokingly. He rolled his eyes and led me to the closet. It had never occurred to me to ask him what was in there. He took the key and unlocked the door revealing not a closet, but a tiny little workshop. There was a narrow bench with something that looked like a drill press, and several little bags and boxes of all sorts of things I had never seen before.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“This is my dad’s gun closet,” he said pointing to the cabinet on the far end, “and this is where he reloads his own shells.”

The hair on the back of my neck started to stand on end. My palms got sweaty. My dad had given up hunting for years at this point, but he had antique guns on display in the house. He threatened me with death if I ever touched one of them. I knew we weren’t supposed to be in this closet.

“Hey, I bet your dad doesn’t want us in here. We better leave.”

“No one is home. Dad is at work and mom is out trying to sell houses. It’s no big deal. My dad showed me how to reload shotgun shells once. This is so cool. There is gun powder in this bag. See?”

He took all of the components of a shotgun shell and fed them into the machine that looked like a drill press. He turned the crank that compressed them all together and unceremoniously tossed the finished product into a bag of live ammo.

“Hey, why don’t we go over to my house? We can play pool. That would be fun.” I nervously backed out of the closet.

Then we both heard the front door opening. My friend jumped out of the closet in a flash and closed the door. His older sister came strolling down the hall. My friend’s older sister was in high school. I never really saw her much. She was always out. I always looked forward to seeing her though. My nine year old mind didn’t understand it, but my nine year old body did. She was sixteen or seventeen. I was fascinated by her body for some reason. She had breasts. They weren’t like my mom’s. They stood out more. I was also mesmerized by the fact that her waste was so narrow yet her hips were so wide. She looked like that hour glass that they showed at the beginning of ‘Days of Our Lives.’ I didn’t see her very often, but when I did I couldn’t help staring a bit.

“What are you dorks doing?”

“Nothing! Nothing.” My friend had thrust the keys in his pocket. But he was looking nervous. Too nervous.

“Hey, you two aren’t supposed to be in here! Dad said for you to leave that computer alone for awhile!”

We glanced at each other. This was our way out. Getting in trouble for messing with the computer was one thing. Getting in trouble for playing with gunpowder was on a whole other level.

“Hey, sis! Come on. Give us a break. Look, the thing isn’t even turned on. We know we can’t program anything right now, we were just looking something up in one of the manuals.”

“Jesus, you two are hopeless.” She got this conspiratorial look on her face. It almost looked like she was about to be friendly to us, which wasn’t normal. She usually wouldn’t give us the time of day. But right now I didn’t care because she was leaning over to make a deal with us and I could see down her shirt a little. Why was that hint of a curve so distracting? “If you two can keep a secret, I won’t tell dad you were in here.”

“Alright,” said my friend hesitantly, “that sounds fair. What secret are we keeping?”

“My friend Jimmy is here and I would like to hang out with him for awhile.”

“You know that mom and dad don’t want you to have boys in the house.”

“And you know that dad doesn’t want you in here,” she said smugly.

He hesitated, “Okay, deal.”

She ran off to go let her friend in the front door. I shot a rotten look at my friend.

“Look,” he said shrugging his shoulders, “We got out of trouble. Everybody wins.”

“Why don’t we just go to my house,” I pleaded again, “It’s been a few days since we were on the computer there. I bet I could talk my mom into letting us program today if we promise to be done by the time dad gets home.”

“No way. I have to find some way to get these keys back in my parents’ bedroom. If I don’t we’re sunk. And I want to see what my sister is doing with this guy. I don’t like him. He’s a real jerk.”

“Hey, what’s up douchebags!” The boyfriend Jim had made his grand entrance. He was tall and lean. He was wearing athletic shorts which wasn’t strange considering the heat, but for some reason he was wearing a coat. It was one of those coats made out of felt with leather arms that were such bright colors. I didn’t understand at that young age what a letter jacket was, much less how much it could mean to such a small minded person. Wearing a lined coat in 110 degree heat would seem like insanity to anyone other than a 17 year old jock trying to get in the pants of trashy girl like my friend’s sister.

At that age I was just confused and concerned. He looked way too cocky, like he was about to spring up and punch someone. And she laughed as if on cue to just about anything he said. It all seemed so strange and fake. I wasn’t sure what was worse, the gunpowder in the closet or the tightly coiled jock in the hall. Playing pool seemed like heaven. I was anxious to get the closet locked and leave.

“Come on Jim, leave those two dorks alone. We can go back here. You two find something to do, but stay close and shout if you see mom’s car.”

They both disappeared down the hall. I heard a door close.

“That’s was close,” whispered my friend.

“Alright, p-p-p-put those keys away and let’s g-g-g-get out of here,” I whispered back.

“These keys are going back, but we aren’t going anywhere. I want to see what my sister is doing. Besides, she told us to watch for mom. I’m going to sneak down the hall and put these away. I’ll be right back.”

He disappeared down the hall without a sound. I was thankful to see my friend leave. I wanted nothing more than to get as far away from him as I could. But the feeling of relief only lasted a few seconds. It was quickly replaced with a feeling of dread. His sister and her creepy boyfriend were in the house doing something wrong. My friend was sneaking around the house trying to put his dad’s keys back without being noticed. I was in a room I wasn’t supposed to be in next to a closet filled with gunpowder. I was absolutely paralyzed with fear. What if his mom came back? What if his dad came back? What if the creepy jock came back in the room and wanted something? I wanted to just run out of the house and down the street, but I was too racked with fear to move. My knees started to fail me and I started to shake. I was fighting back the urge to cry. Finally he came back.

“Okay, it’s all fixed. Whew that was close!”

“We need to leave,” I pleaded. “C-c-c-ome on, I don’t feel good. Let’s just g-g-g-go across the street and do something else.”

He looked at me for awhile and must have determined that I had had enough. His life was so chaotic compared to mine. He was used to this constant background hum of bad things going on in his house. I had my problems too, but not like this. My brother and sister had already gone off to college. If there was any sort of trouble in the house, it was because I did something. Having to deal with all these unknown factors was just too much. He was sensing my panic and decided to relent.

“Okay. Pool sounds fun. My sister probably wants us to leave so she can be alone with her boyfriend anyway. Let me just tell her we’re leaving. I have to find her though. I passed her room on the way to my parents’ room and they aren’t in there. Wait here and I’ll be back.”

“Hey, I really have to pee, like right now. Can I use the bathroom across the hall and just meet you outside?”

“Sure. I’ll see you across the street.”

He ran off to go find his sister. I was so relieved that this would be over any second. I was glad to be leaving the room that we weren’t supposed to be in. I felt like a giant weight had been lifted. I bounced across the hall and opened the door to the bathroom.

“Hey!” It was the boyfriend, Jimmy. I looked down in horror. My friend’s sister was on the floor of the bathroom and her boyfriend was on top of her. At that age I wasn’t sure right away what they were doing. I remember seeing her ankles wrapped around his hips, her toes pointing straight towards me. She squealed and reached for his coat which was on the floor next to her. I started to back out of the room, but I couldn’t look away. So that’s what breasts looked like…”You’re dead you little fucking punk!”

The spring uncoiled and he leapt across the room and into the hall. He grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against the wall. One hand was holding his underwear which had fallen down around his knees, and the other hand was choking the breath out of me.

“What the fuck is your problem, kid? I ought to kick your ass right now!”

“Stop it!” my friend’s sister screamed. She was now out in the hall, pulling on his shoulder and wearing nothing but his jacket. It looked so strange on her. I could see the hair between her legs. My mother had never bathed with me so I had never seen that. Was that what girls looked like down there? I was scared, shocked, confused, and had to pee all at the same time. And I couldn’t breathe. “He’s just a kid. He’s not worth it. He’s just a stuttering little retard. He couldn’t tell on us if he tried.”

He released his grip around my throat and grabbed me by the face, shoving his right thumb in my eye. “What about it, retard? You gonna tell anybody?”

“T-t-t-tell who? I just n-n-n-n-needed to p-p-p-pee.”

“Well if you tell anybody about this I’m going to k-k-k-kill you! Now get the fuck out of here you little twerp.” With that he pulled my face away from the wall and shoved me backwards making my head hit the wall again with a resounding thud. That last thump against the wall hurt more than anything that I could remember. It hurt so much I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t even see straight. All I could do was just try not to fall down or pee myself.

“I told you to scram. Are you too much of a retard to even run home right?”

My legs finally came back to me. I tore off in a run that didn’t stop until I was across the street again. I ran into my house and locked the door behind me. I ran down the hall to the bathroom and shut the door. I must have stayed in there for twenty minutes trying not to cry so I could come out looking normal. I didn’t want my mom to know what had happened. My friend never came over, and I was never more relieved. I decided it was time to take a break from him for a couple of days. Sex, gunpowder, and death threats were just too much for my nine year old mind to handle.

*          *          *

You are in the Hall of the Mountain King, with passages off in all directions. A huge green fierce snake bars the way!

I laid low for the next few days. I told my parents that I felt sick and did not want to play with anyone. They seemed to accept that and leave me alone. My dad was at work most of the time and my mother was just distant. She didn’t work, but she took a long nap every day. I was left alone most of the time. I found out that she really didn’t care if I was on the computer or not. She never came upstairs, and never really asked what I was doing. If she did I would just tell her I was playing with my Star Wars toys and that seemed to satisfy her.

I took the uninterrupted time to port the game back over to the TI99/4. The chance to rewrite the language parser actually allowed me to tighten things up quite a bit. I was able to erase large chunks of redundant code and add some vocabulary to the parser.

I was relieved to have some time off, but I was also missing my friend. It was easier to code if he was there. When I worked on the TI there was no chance of anyone playing the game either. My friend had not heard back from the man from the office, but it was nice to know that someone was playing it and that we might hear from them again. When I saved my programs on the TI I saved them to cassette tape and there they stayed.

It wasn’t long before dad came to me and gave me a big speech about me not being sick anymore. “I think the heat may be letting up,” he added. “Why don’t you go outside and play?”

I went out on my own. I wasn’t ready to talk to my friend yet, and I just wanted to be left alone. I thought I would sneak around to the vacant lot on the next street where the other kids played. Maybe I would find my tire slashing cousins or asthma boy venturing out into this chilly Texas day where the temperature was barely above 100. But I found no one. I knocked on a few doors, but no one seemed to be home. I had been out for about an hour looking for someone to play with and had come up empty so I was walking home down an alley a few streets away covered in sweat. I looked up and cringed to see my friend waving and running in my direction.

“Where have you been?” he asked out of breath. “I haven’t seen you for a week.”

I was really hoping that I wouldn’t run into him. I wasn’t very good at lying. I just didn’t have it in me.

“I was just trying to take a break man. Your sister’s boyfriend freaked me out slamming my head into the wall. The whole gunpowder thing was too much. I just needed a break.”

“Great! So you don’t want to be my friend now either?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said that I needed a break. A lot of stuff is going on in your house, and I don’t need naked people slamming my head into the wall and threatening me. That’s all.”

“Well why don’t we go play at your house?”

That was the last thing I wanted to hear from him. “Maybe in a couple of days. Maybe then. But I’m going to go home now.”

“Oh yeah!” I could see him getting tense. When he did this I could see his father in him. He was ropy and lean. When he got like this his muscles would tense up and he would ball up his fists. His father used to do the same thing and it scared me. But I was starting to get angry myself. I just wanted to play by myself. And my parents wouldn’t even let me do that. Every time I talked to someone else they would make fun of my stutter or call me a retard. Every time I played with my friend I was afraid of what kind of trouble I would get in to. He was escalating and I had had enough. “I didn’t need you anyway! I have plenty of friends! I was only hanging around you because I felt sorry for you!”

“What?” Now I was mad. “You can’t even pass the fourth grade! You’re family is out of control. You feel sorry for me? You’re the loser!”

He glared at me for a moment, and just stormed off. I was ready for a fight, but I was relieved it didn’t come to that. I was drenched in sweat and still a long way from home. I just wanted to get in the shade, cool off and play by myself for awhile. I decided to take a shortcut between a couple of houses. That’s when I heard the footsteps behind me. Before I could turn around he had run up behind me and slammed into me. Now he was the one with his hand around my throat. He wasn’t strong enough though. I could still breathe. I stared him down.

“No body, nobody calls me a loser!” I had obviously struck a nerve. I could see he was about to cry. “Nobody! You hear me you stuttering retard? Nobody!”

He let go of my neck, and stormed off again. It would be the last time I saw him that summer.

*          *          *

You are on the edge of a breath-taking view. Far below you is an active volcano, from which great gouts of molten lava come surging out, cascading back down into the depths. The glowing rock fills the farthest reaches of the cavern with a blood-red glare, giving every- thing an eerie, macabre appearance. The air is filled with flickering sparks of ash and a heavy smell of brimstone.

Summer was almost over, and the heat had finally let up. A cool, almost chilly breeze was starting to cause dust devils to swirl papers and dried grass in the street. It was late afternoon and suddenly there was a greenish yellow hue to everything. Dark clouds rolled across the sky, and in an instant our lawn was covered in a cold shade that continued to blanket the neighborhood. Drops of water started to dot the pavement. One fell in the small of my back. It should have been refreshing, but it wasn’t. It was invasive. It was angry. It was cold. Suddenly I heard screaming from the other side of the street. It was shrill and sharp, cutting through the crescendo of water drops now slapping the pavement.

“What are we going to do now? Huh? What are we going to do now?” It sounded like my friend’s mother. She was furious. Her voice was cracked and broken. Uncontrolled.

“Well if you could sell a house, maybe you could help us out a little! But no! You just drive around all day using gas and buying lunch for people!” It was my friend’s dad now. His sharp nasal voice was unmistakable. I could imagine him stalking her through the rooms of the house as he yelled, his tinted glasses hiding his eyes.

What I heard after that was unintelligible. I heard the sound of dishes breaking and more yelling. Even though their windows were open, their voices were starting to be drowned out by the sound of the rain. I was startled by the feeling of a hand on my shoulder. It was my dad. He had come out to see the storm.

“You best come inside, son.”

“What’s going on over there?”

“I’m not sure, but the rumor is that they made some bad investments. Oil well that went bad or something. That would be just like him. Oil was the 70’s. That’s gone now. Everyone knows it. So a guy in the booming electronics industry sinks all his money into a bad oil well. Typical. He never was very bright.”
“What about my friend?”

“I don’t think either of those kids are anywhere near that house. If they had any sense they would stay out of that storm and this one.” My dad looked up and a couple drops of rain dotted his glasses. An earth shattering thunderclap startled me. It felt like it struck just a few feet away. My dad didn’t even flinch. “Come on inside son. This is none of our business.”

*          *          *

You are standing at the north end of the Valley of the Stone Faces. Above you, an incredible bas-relief statue of an immense minotaur has been carved out of the rock. At least sixty feet high, it sits gazing down at you with a faint but definite expression of amusement.

After school started I hardly saw him. We weren’t in the same grade. There were periods when we would try to hang out with one another. We even tried working on our game every now and then, but bigger and better things had come out and we just felt overwhelmed. A game called ‘Tunnels of Doom’ had come out for the TI994/a, and it was incredible. You could actually see a 3D view of the hallway you were walking down. We had played with graphics on and off but that just blew us away. We played it incessantly. We also played Dungeons and Dragons occasionally. We came up with this complicated way to port characters from our ‘Tunnels of Doom’ game over to D&D. In this way we had an excuse to start with ridiculously high level characters after only an afternoon’s worth of work. If you could survive to the 10th floor of ‘Tunnels of Doom’ you could port over a character with 9th level spells in D&D.

1981 was also the year MTV started. My friend had cable, and I remember sitting on the floor of his living room one afternoon watching ‘Rapture’ by Blonde for the first time. My friend knew all about it and had already memorized the rap part. Even the part in French. I was just confused and kept asking questions. “Where are they? Who is the guy in the top hat? What is rap? Why does she look so bored?”

But every time we would try to be friends for any length of time he would do something to ruin it. He would lie, or something strange would happen at his house. Then one day my dad took me aside and said he needed to talk to me. He told me that I was not allowed to go to my friend’s house anymore. I asked him why, but he never explained. He just said, “I’m not kidding about this. You are not to go over there. You understand me? Not under any circumstances. If he tries to talk to you I want you to come and tell me, okay?” It took me a couple of weeks to find out what had happened.

*          *          *

You are standing on the brink of what appears to be a bottomless pit plunging down into the bowels of the earth. Ledges run around the pit to the east and west, and a passage leads back to the north.

My friend had become more distant and daring with age. His parents were having financial trouble and they were ignoring him more and more. He was left alone for long periods of time, and he started playing basketball at the outdoor court at the school. One day he got it in his head that if he took a little of his dad’s gunpowder, that he wouldn’t miss it. Perhaps he wanted to sell it. Or maybe he thought the kids up at the basketball court would think it was cool. I never found out.

He ran all the way from his house and took the air tight jar out of a paper bag. He shook the powder in the jar. “See, I told you guys I could get you some!”

“Hey, let me see!” yelled one kid.

“No, no! Me first!” exclaimed another.

One child ran up to him and took the glass and held it up to the light. The others gathered around to see, and argue about who would hold it next. My friend had actually backed away and started talking to someone on the edge of the crowd.

And then it slipped.

There was no reason really. The boys weren’t fighting over it. The one boy just inexplicably dropped it. Some of the other boys instinctively jumped back knowing what might happen. But the boy who was holding it didn’t have the same forethought. He fumbled with it in mid air trying to recover his grip. He followed it all the way down to the edge of the concrete slab. He was bent over at the waste. His arms were out stretched.

One of the boys told me that the explosion really wasn’t very loud. In the open air of the outdoor court it sounded like a really large fire cracker, not an explosion. Almost everyone felt the sting of the flying glass. No one was really badly hurt except for the boy who was doubled over with his arms outstretched at ground zero.

He stood up slowly. His shirt was shredded. They say he really didn’t bleed at first, but all his skin was blackened. It took a few seconds for the screaming to start. Then a slow high pitched cry began to grow as the child ran away from the court. Even as he ran away the cry got louder and louder. My friend looked on in horror. Speechless.

Up
You can’t go in that direction.

“Someone do something! Go get somebody!”

My friend stood there for a moment, not knowing what to do. Not knowing what to say. He looked to his right and saw the screaming child running across the playground. He had no direction, no purpose. He was just reacting the in the only way he could.
“Do something! He’s burning!”

Xyzzy
Nothing happens.

In the end, my friend just ran. He ran all the way home at locked the door. Eventually one of the children ran and got an adult. They loaded the child in the back seat of a car and drove him to the hospital where he stayed for over a month.

There were surgeries and infections. There were accusations and lawsuits. In the end, their marriage didn’t survive. I never saw my friend again before they moved away. My dad had gotten wind of what happened. That’s why he told me to never go over there again. A couple of weeks later I found out what happened and went to the basketball court. That’s where I saw the blast mark. It looked so small. So much can happen in an instant.

*          *          *

Would you like to play again? Y or N

Will Crowther was the programmer that originally designed the Colossal Cave Adventure game. It is interesting to note that he worked on some of the original assembly language programs for the original routers for the ARPAnet which was the precursor to the internet. I have since learned that he wrote the game in 1975 when he became divorced from his wife. He was an avid caver and loved to play Dungeons and Dragons. He was separated from his two daughters and became very lonely. He wrote this program thinking his daughters would enjoy it and it might allow him to do something he loved which would make them closer. It is strange how such an odd thing can be born out of loneliness.

The locations of the Colossal Cave Adventure are taken directly from surveys of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky where I now live. My wife and I once took a trip to Mammoth Cave and toured the caverns. I knew that the tour would not take us near any of the locations in the game, but I kept looking for a small brick building from which a stream flowed down into a gulley. She didn’t really understand why I wanted to find this building so much, but she was indulgent and continues to be. One of my favorite things to do is sit down with my five year old daughter and play games on the computer. She is too young to yet say, “Oh dad, that game is so old…” so I often emulate older computer systems and play classic adventure games with graphics with her. We are currently playing Grim Fandango, and she loves it.

The TI99/4 and TI99/4a are widely known as one of the biggest business disasters of the home computer market. Texas Instruments lost millions of dollars, and they are no longer in the consumer electronics market. My father was later laid off from Texas Instruments when they shut down their consumer products advertising division. He had worked there for 32 years and was only two years from retirement. To this day he vehemently opposed to technology and doesn’t even own a cell phone or have an email account.

In time Digital Equipment Corporation failed as well. The advent of powerful desktop computers proved too much for them in the 90’s. They were split apart and sold off to various companies. Hewlett-Packard now owns what is left of the company and their logo. If you have ever had to use Telnet to do anything on the internet (most common users don’t have to do this, but web designers wishing to have shell access to a business server often still do this) you may be surprised to know that what you used was most likely an emulator meant to mimic a DEC VT100 machine.

My friend’s parents separated soon after the incident. A lawsuit from the parents of the injured child sent them further into financial ruin, and they moved away. Sadly, neither parent wanted their son, and he was raised by his grandparents.

Years later when I was in my 20’s I returned home for Christmas. There was a knock at the door and I got quite a surprise when I answered it.

“Hi Buck, do you remember me?”

It was my old friend. It was startling how much he looked like his younger self. He had the same face, and the same short, thin, ropy frame. He was wearing a dark leather jacket, and wearing glasses that were shaded a color of redish gray. It looked as though everything had come full circle.

He had brought his girlfriend with him. She looked extremely bored. He had been showing her where he grew up and he saw the lights on in our house and thought he would see if we still lived there. We must have stood in the entry way of our house talking for an hour. It was a very uncomfortable conversation for me. I wanted to know how he was doing, but there were so many topics to politely avoid that navigating the discussion was difficult.

Like me, he had found a way to be in college for years without ever getting a degree. Like me, he had never taken a class in computers, yet everyone wanted him to fix theirs. We talked about all the different systems we had owned over the years and the games we had played. He told me that at one point he had tried to join the army, but in basic training his elbow started to swell horribly when he was doing pushups so he was discharged for medical reasons. Currently he was between jobs and just trying to avoid most of his family during the holidays. It was a long uncomfortable conversation, and I was relieved when he finally left. I never saw him again.

I hope that my friend, and the child who was burned, and Will Crowther all found happiness in the end. I finally have. My daughter is the smartest, most wonderful and creative person I know. Almost to a fault, I indulge her and let her follow whatever her mind takes her. She has recently expressed an interest in taking ballet lessons. To be honest I can think of nothing more distasteful. Tutus, expensive shoes, and expensive classes. But I will be there every time she dances. In a year’s time I am probably going to be the most informed ballet fan in Kentucky, because I want to be there for her. Whether she wants to be a ballerina, a computer programmer, a cheer leader, or a bio chemist, I will be there with an encouraging word and love and interest by the truck load. History will not repeat itself. This is family 2.0. And my daughter can be whatever she wants to be.

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