In Search of Captain Zero

[Glenn Scheper]

 Part 2 of 2.

 On career day,
 I dressed in a almost unused suit and tie (or did I then
 have only sweater and tie?)
 and visited a lovely IBM branch office on Wilshire.
 When they started the work day by sharing doughnuts and a
 corporate song,
 I thought of a future problem:
 I don't know how to sing!

 Incredibly,
 like a flower touching the earth only at its root in the
 family,
 I was untouched by drives or necessity,
 a cantilevered mind towering ever further from reality.

 I ached with the longing,
 "someday I will be married"
 and somehow plugged into a still foreign adult world.

 There was a novelty in Santa Monica,
 an ice rink I so wished to try,
 but I had no one to invite me to cross the new threshold.
 So I took up a lonely sport,
 bicycling up and down Pacific Coast Highway.

 A fellow geek,
 but he all about money and finance,
 and I tried to bicycle (with the wind)
 from Oregon,
 but heavy with camping equipment and him needing to stay in
 hotels,
 we never made it out of the forests.

 I think it was he introduced me to the computer room,
 a cold room where the IBM 1620 with its freestanding 60000
 bytes of core memory drew power from a monster power cable
 exceeding an inch in diameter.
 When I was a junior,
 they had neither a disk unit,
 nor a printer.

 Thereafter,
 I was never available,
 dashing up between classes to punch a few more Hollerith
 cards and run my deck under the stainless steel brushes of
 this friend,
 the only validator sharing my private mental reality.
 The highest point had to be my 3-D Tic Tac Toe opponent,
 typing out four planes of X's and O's between my moves.

 Late in my senior year I went to my first movie in years,
 cajoled by another science effete who'd already watched it
 eight times:
 2001 A Space Odyssey.

 I had a crush on one girl,
 and scanned the raw sectors of the school platters for text
 patterns to learn her home phone number,
 but I never called.
 I actually rode with her in her car,
 a VW bug,
 on graduation day from high school,
 then never saw her again.
 Damn inaction!

 Father exhorted in the abstract,
 but did not inquire,
 nor require,
 in the particular.
 Hard to believe with my modern credit consumer fetishism,
 but I was proud the day of my senior year he took me to
 Sears to buy a pair of pants,
 black jeans,
 balloning with failure to fit far ahead of their time.

 He never suggested the possibility of a life plan,
 but I think he worked behind the scenes,
 magically:
 Like,
 one day a one page college application form with no cover
 or explanation came addressed to me from UCLA.

 So I went to UCLA.

 I failed to connect,
 and to be mentored,
 and to thrive.
 So after a year I enlisted.
 I guess because I did not know how to drive,
 I stated my preference was to drive armored personnel
 carriers.
 But I got Russian school.

 Had I any buddy in school to turn me on to wallowing and
 dissipation,
 like I found in the Security Agency,
 my tower might have bent over,
 touched down,
 focused on something,
 and I'd have engaged and been powerful.

 Indeed,
 the closest thing to a Rex Snuvvle might be my
 conversational French teacher,
 who invited us,
 his few French students,
 to a book-filled apartment,
 to sample fondue,
 and wines I suppose,
 and odd-smelling cheeses.
 Struggling with French,
 I never asked him about ideas.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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