Prelude — The Sad Short Life of a Loser

The first thing 15-year-old Peter Shipley remembered when he awoke in the hospital was the celebration party at A&W after they took the district title in BB division football. He was the starting quarterback of the game and enjoyed no small amount of praise for his role in capturing the win. He was athletic, cunning, and sly to the ways of the defending team (Kent HS). Thus, he was able to run the ball not just once but three times across the goal line, emerging unscathed at the end of the game to the applause and cheers of his team, his school — and the parents who braved the chilly weather to make the trip on the final away game of the Season. It was Friday, October 27^th, 1989, and Halloween was approaching.

As the youngest Junior at Southern Auburn High School, Pete was an unprecedented overachiever who was young enough to enjoy the prestige and fun of the holiday parties, and old enough to recognize that he would soon become one of the youngest freshmen at UW. He easily maintained the highest marks in his overloaded curriculum and worked as hard as everyone else on the field and during practice. His only regret was attending a B-rated school where athletes were less likely to fall under the eyes of talent scouts.

Then — in the blink of an eye (literally), it was all gone. One moment he was jogging along the dark road towards his home, less than a mile from the popular restaurant — and the next, tragedy. He opened one good eye to the harsh brightness of the surgical lights glaring down at him. Voices were loud and disjointed ringing out from all sides. His entire body hurt and he tried to cry out, gagging and coughing harshly for the attempt, causing even greater pain to spasm through his neck and head. The voices faded away as his vision blurred and then darkened.

Several days later he was awake and aware enough to learn what had happened. During his jog home from the celebration, he was struck from behind by a drunk driver who was behind the wheel of a Johnson Controls company car. The news coverage was widespread and litigation attorneys lined up vying for the opportunity to sue the company on his behalf and win his family a large settlement. The only members of his family who came to visit him regularly were his mother Janet and older sister Veronica. His father was either too busy or too drunk to make the effort and it was telling that the man who was once proud as punch of his all-star son — couldn’t be bothered to visit what was now certain to become a massive burden on his life. Even his classmates and close friends seemed to avoid visiting him after the first week of his hospitalization. The vast array of flowers, balloons, stuffed animals, and get-well cards that decorated his room were but a thinly veiled façade to the utter solitude that surrounded him.

Peter knew almost immediately that he had lost the use of his legs. Even if he weren’t paraplegic because of the spinal injury, his legs were too badly damaged for him to even remotely rehabilitate. Eventually, an infection claimed his right lower leg and the ‘pressor’ agents that kept him alive for the first tenuous hours caused him to lose his left toes and eventually the entire left foot. When his girlfriend Brittney finally came to see him during his second week, he could feel the trepidation surrounding her. Hushed whispers could be heard in the hallway from her friends that she brought along for moral support. She couldn’t have picked a worse time to visit as he had just undergone the amputation of both feet and he was still heavily medicated and suffering intense denial at the loss. Her fear and hesitation served only to anger him and he lashed out in rage. The last thing he wanted was to suffer the pity of others while he wallowed on his own. She ultimately fled in tears with his harsh vindictive words following her into the hallway.

It would be nearly two months before he was transferred to a skilled nursing facility to continue his rehabilitation and another three months after that before he returned to a broken home. Only his mother Janet awaited him and not with happy anticipation. His father Robert had left several months previous and Veronica had moved to Pullman where she began her studies at WSU. His room was located on the second floor but — due to his condition, he had to sleep in the living room. Knowing the burden he placed on his mother he gave everything he had to his rehabilitation and was eventually able to take care of himself provided certain conditions were in place. With his wheelchair, he was able to cook for himself using the microwave. A ramp in front of the kitchen sink enabled him to take care of the dishes, and laundry became possible when they used part of the settlement money to acquire a front-loading washer.

At first, his mother felt as if they could live for ages on the nearly half-million-dollar cash settlement so she balked at returning to the workforce. Peter finally coaxed her into sitting down, allowing him to explain their expenses and the projected depletion of their savings. That resulted in a double-edged sword effect in that she did return to work as an office assistant for their family dentist. But she also became downright miserly in what she would consider spending any amount of money on.

Completing his high school education from home became his sole priority, and the district worked with him. He was absolved of all athletic requirements due to the nature of his disability and he was able to focus on his academic studies. Even though he missed two semesters he was able to catch up and surpass the academic calendar — completing his senior high school curriculum in less than four months after the school year started.

Try as he might he could not convince his mother to allow him to purchase one of the new personal computers that were coming out. He tried applying logic to her, assuring her that it would soon become as household as television — and he could use it for his upcoming college studies. When she refused, he found himself making the arduous trek to the main city Library where he spent many hours a day taking advantage of the new desktop units and the recent expansion of the ARPANET protocols for email and intranet communications. While he was there, he also reviewed the latest copies of MAC World and PC Magazines. He watched the cyber world blossom and began teaching himself original coding in BASIC, DOS, and Turbo C.

Without the athletic scholarship he was anticipating, his university dreams vanished. What few scholarships he applied for offered him little more than a pittance toward the tuition fees he would need. When he pleaded with his mom about his future, she refused to budge, insisting they would make it on the settlement and her meager income. When she learned of a night course where she could study to become a certified dental assistant, she felt no such qualms about funding and completing the program. Eventually, she commanded a higher wage and enjoyed a sense of personal accomplishment.

Her celebrated achievement proved to be her ultimate undoing when she contracted a deadly aberrant hemorrhagic fever from the particulate droplets of a patient who had just traveled from an endemic region of South Korea. Sadly, her symptoms were missed until the clinical signs of the disease were too conclusive to ignore. Her untimely death was a blessing to the medical community who became hyper-vigilant for future transmissions — and tragic for Peter who, at the age of 17 was deemed an incompetent minor and made a ward of the state. When he asked his sister to come home and stay on as his guardian she refused. The house was made the property of the State and auctioned off to help cover the cost of his continued care. Peter was moved into a group home of similarly disabled men, where he stayed until he reached the age of 21 and successfully sued for his autonomy.

It was no blessing being on his own and having no friends or family to rely upon for assistance he wound up living in a dilapidated studio apartment that was paid for as part of his settlement with Johnson Controls. For income, he worked as a clerical assistant for Puget Sound Power & Light Co. where he was able to make better use of his computer skills. In three months, he was able to save enough money for his own IBM 486 DX personal computer. In the coming months, he saved up and added a CD-ROM and eventually upgraded his system to the vaunted Windows-95 OS.

He stayed on when his company merged with Washington Energy Co. to become Puget Sound Energy and slowly advanced, climbing the corporate ladder until he achieved the status of IT Project Manager.

He was 25 when he first became romantically involved with another coworker and eventually married. Margaret Yu was a Taiwanese native who relocated to Washington State as a student and extended her Visa with a work permit sponsored by PSE. To become a permanent resident, she had either to become a citizen through a protracted immigration process or marry an American. Recognizing the introverted, quiet, and self-conscious supervisor as an easy mark, she plied her exotic Asian charms to full effect and broke through his defensive barriers. When she asked him to teach her the programming language used by their company, he readily agreed to meet with her after hours. Sometimes they met at her place and sometimes he met her in the local public library where they could use the public computers to access the company mainframe. Never once did he invite her to his own home, where he lived in a single-studio apartment outfitted for his disability.