Chapter 19: North and South, Part I

October, 1981, Chicago, Illinois

I was still a bit tired when I woke up Monday morning because of the lack of sleep on Saturday night. I dragged myself out of bed when the alarm rang and went out to run. I could tell I was going to be dragging all day, but because there were no exams and my homework was done, I figured I’d manage through the day and just get to bed a bit earlier tonight.

In calculus we received our graded test and I was happy to see a 94, which kept my solid A. I’d made a mistake on one of the problems and only had half-credit. I’d also lost one other point because despite doing the problem correctly, when I’d written the answer on the line, I’d transposed two numbers. That resulted in an audible sigh that led Mike, a guy who sat next to me, to ask why I was sighing when I’d got an A. I showed him the mistake and he laughed, agreeing that a mistake like that was indeed worthy of a sigh. He’d scored 88 on the exam and was pleased.

When Stephie came into chemistry class, she smiled at me and sat down. As usual, she had walked in just ahead of the professor, so other than a quick ‘hello’, we didn’t get to chat. Class went mercifully quickly and afterwards, we headed to The Bog for lunch and sat at our usual corner table after getting our usual burgers, fries, and Cokes. We ate before she decided to talk about her call with Daryl.

“In the end, he basically told me I had to decide between him and having guy friends. He said that he doesn’t think it’s appropriate for me to be with other guys now that we’re out of High School and no longer ‘children’,” she said, making air quotes with her fingers.

“Seriously? I mean, he told you that now that you’ve graduated from High School you can’t have any male friends?”

“He said that it would be ‘improper’,” she said, with air quotes again, “to be in the company of men except for him. I asked him about going to races with Red and he said I should find a girl to go with or go with my parents. There is no way in tarnation that I’m going to stop going to races with Red. We went to our first race together in second grade, for Pete’s sake!”

“And he’s giving up all his female friends?”

“He never had any, really. Just one girl he kind of hung out with in his youth group before we started dating. Remember, he thinks dating is part of the whole engagement and marriage ritual. You meet someone in a social setting like the youth group. If you start dating, then everyone in that group assumes you’re on the path to engagement and marriage.”

“That sounds exactly like Kara’s dad’s way of thinking. That’s nuts. Dating is part of growing up and figuring out what kind of person you should be with. You can’t learn enough about people in a group like that. You need to have some time alone together to talk and stuff.”

She giggled, “And stuff? Seriously, though, his parents didn’t think guys and girls should be alone at all. Too much temptation, they say. Daryl and I didn’t spend a lot of time alone, and really we didn’t talk all that much about important stuff. I’ve talked to you more in the few months I’ve known you than I did in the last year with Daryl.”

“What the hell kind of relationship is that?” I asked. “I’ve had more in-depth conversations when I was fourteen and fifteen than you and I have had, and you say we’ve had more than you and Daryl?”

“It’s crazy, I know. But I talk more to Red about stuff than Daryl. Red’s more like me ‘n you. Do you have the same kind of problems with Kara?”

“No. Well, not now. When we first started talking to each other, we did, but I spent a lot of time working to get her to think differently. I’d say that she’s pretty much changed her evangelical mindset about a lot of things.”

“I wish Daryl would be like that. But he’s not.”

“What’s your situation with Daryl, then?”

“I’ll see him when I git home at Thanksgiving, but he’s not my boyfriend. And yeah, he knows. So we can hang out without you worryin’ ‘bout him, Yankee! What’s your situation with Kara?”

“We’re not exclusive, and she knows I’m dating. She and I are just taking things one day at a time until she graduates from High School. Then we’ll figure things out.”

“So if’n I want you to kiss me, that’s OK?” she smiled.

“Yes, Peaches, you know that I’ll kiss you!” I said with a grin. “Remember, I told you that I like tasting the sweet ones that you can just kind of suck the juices from and get it all over your face!” I smirked.

“Careful there, Yankee, I might just make you prove that!” she exclaimed.

We both laughed and finished our Cokes. I had to get to Physics class, so I told her I’d see her tomorrow for lunch and then the computer lab. She gave me a quick kiss and headed off to her class as well.

When my last class of the day, German, let out, I got in my car and drove out to Cicero to meet Richie. I pulled up in front of a nondescript house on West 24th place. I parked the car across the street and walked up to the door and rang the bell. A big guy in his early 20s opened the door.

“Yeah?”

“I’m the kid from Cincinnati. I’m supposed to meet Richie here.”

“Oh yeah, the computer whiz kid. Come on in,” he said.

He led me into the house, which looked remarkably like the one in Milford. There was a large room that had pictures of the girls on the wall and a couple of men sitting waiting. I saw a couple of girls walking around as he brought me into the office. Richie was there waiting and got right to business.

“It’s having trouble trying to do matches. When I run the program, it takes forever and eventually just returns either no list or crashes. It doesn’t happen every time. Let me show you one that crashes.”

I watched it crash, then asked him to show me one that worked. He did. I had a pretty good idea what the problem was. First, I inserted the new program disk and ran the program. Then I inserted the data disk and replicated the problem. That led me to believe that somehow the data disk was damaged. I ran a small maintenance program that simply read every record on the data disk and output it to the screen. It stopped at a very specific place every time.

“Have you been making the regular backups the way I showed you?”

“Yeah,” Richie said, “I got the instructions here. They do it every day. Let me get the backup disks for you.”

I took the backup disks and ran the maintenance program on each one to find when the corruption had started, then I ran another program I had that compared the actual raw data in the files byte-by-byte. I found the problem fairly quickly. I had been using linked lists to store the data, and one of the links was garbled. I spent about thirty minutes sorting out where the link should point and then used a disk sector editor to fix it. I ran the maintenance program, and it completed successfully. We tried the match again, and it worked.

“OK. I’m not sure how it happened, but I can update the programs to make it so that it can recover from this just by selecting a menu option. I can give you a new program disk next week. It’ll be fine until then. I’ll also check to see if I can figure out why that error happened.”

The change I would make would be one I’d want to incorporate in the veterinarian software as well, because it used the same kind of data file. I’d have to let Beth and Krista know about it.

“Sounds good. Want a beer or a Coke?”

“I’ll take a Coke. Not a big beer drinker. I prefer bourbon and vodka, but I’m driving.”

He went out and came back with a bottle of Coke and handed it to me.

“You can sit in the private lounge if you want. I can probably rustle you up a sandwich if you’re hungry.”

“Yeah, that’ll be cool.”

He pointed to a door, “Go on in. Enjoy, Kid,” he smirked.

I went through the door and found a nicely appointed room where five very pretty women were sitting in short silk robes. Private lounge indeed! Hookers were not my thing, but it was certainly a nice sight. Stacey Nelson had always been sweet to me, and I wasn’t surprised when a couple of the girls gave me big smiles and walked over.

“Hey, big boy, I haven’t seen you before. What are you doing here?” a beautiful platinum blonde with huge breasts who I guessed was around 30.

I figured I wouldn’t get in trouble so long as I gave a very brief answer.

“Fixing the computer.”

“So you’re some kind of child prodigy, then?” she said with a small laugh.

“Child? I’m eighteen.”

“Want to be a man?” she smirked.

This was just like Stacey Nelson all over again.

“Well, Miss...”

“Starr.”

“Well, Starr, I doubt there’s anything you could think of that we could do together that I haven’t done!”

She laughed hard, “Sure, little boy!”

“My friend Stacey back home who was in your line of work, made the same joke. Trust me. I’m that good and that experienced.”

“Sure, sure. You boys are all talk.”

“The other thing is, I stick to girls my own age.”

“Older women are better!” she said with a smile.

“My roommate is the wildest, most sexually adventurous woman I’ve ever met, and even she can’t shock me.”

Just then, Richie came in with a sandwich.

“Starr, leave the poor kid alone. You tease everyone new we bring in!”

“I thought he might like to have some fun,” she said, winking at Richie.

“Kid, if you want, go for it. I’ll clear it with the management.”

“Thanks. I’ll just have my sandwich and Coke. I need to get back to the city.”

“Suit yourself. And Starr isn’t the only one who’s available.”

I nodded and sat down to eat. When I finished, I headed out to my car to drive home.

“Hi, Honey! How was your day?” Elyse said as I walked in.

“Good. Got an A on my calculus mid-term. Also, I have some work to do on the programs I sell. We found a problem that I can prevent in the future with a new technique I learned in class. How was your day?”

“Good. Got an A on my Macro Econ mid-term and a B on my English mid-term, but with homework and papers, I have an A in the class.”

“I have a couple of hours of homework, and I want to do some programming. I’ll probably be up until 11:00pm even though I wanted to get to bed early. You don’t have to wait up if you don’t want to.”

“I always have reading to do. I’ll wait so we can go to bed together.”

“Did you eat? I had a sandwich and a Coke at my customer, so I’m not hungry.”

“I grabbed Chinese on the way home. Also, there’s a message for you from Kathy.”

“Thanks. I actually need to make a couple of calls, then I’ll be back out.”

I went to my room and shut the door. My first call was to Bethany to check up on her. She was doing great, and she sounded very happy. She wanted to know if it was OK for her and Gene to visit sometime, and I told her just to let me know. She figured maybe the weekend before Thanksgiving break. I told her things were going well with me and that I’d call her again in a week or so.

My second call was to Kathy. She wanted to know if it was OK for her and Kurt to come on Saturday and stay until late Sunday afternoon. He had a car so they could be more flexible. I told her that was fine and that she and Kurt could use my bed and I’d sleep with Elyse. She thanked me and said she’d see us early Saturday morning.

My third call was to Beth to let her know about the changes I planned to make. She laughed because they had just covered double-linked lists in her data structures course. She knew exactly what I planned and agreed it was a great idea. I told her I’d have the code in a couple of weeks and that I’d send it to Krista to test. Of course, they didn’t need to know that I’d fix it first in the code for the brothel, then replicate the changes in the veterinarian software.

When I left my room, I picked up Tatyana’s letter because I wanted to mail my reply to her as soon as possible. I went to the kitchen, poured some of the tea that Elyse had made and sat down to do my calculus and Physics homework. A couple of hours later, I’d finished those. Before I studied German, I took a break to write letters to Tatyana and Tina Hoff. I gave Tatyana the details of my breaks from school over Christmas as well as Spring Break and let her know I’d be happy to see her. My letter to Tina was one of my normal breezy letters about life and what was going on. I was somewhat surprised that she was writing so faithfully, given that we’d met exactly one time.

When I finished my letters, I pulled out my German book and did the assigned exercises. I also spent a bit of time going through my flashcards. By the time I was done, it was after 10:00pm. I had about an hour’s worth of reading in Chemistry as the last thing I had to do. My eyes were barely open when I finished, but I felt I’d taken in enough of the chapter that I’d be able to review quickly on Tuesday night. When I closed the book, I was done with homework until Wednesday night, except for that brief review. I’d do my Computer Science assignment during lab on Tuesday as I normally did.

“I’m ready for bed, Elyse,” I sighed, putting my Chemistry book on the coffee table in front of me.

“You seem really tired, Steve. Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I just didn’t sleep much on Saturday. I’ll be better in the morning, I think. I only have my computer class tomorrow and it’s pretty easy. I’ve finished my homework, so except for reading that chapter in Chemistry again tomorrow night, I can relax. I have my martial arts class, but that actually helps me relax. Well, that and the long warm shower afterwards,” I smiled.

“You like those?” Elyse smirked.

“I really do. It’s tender and loving. I appreciate it. Hey, I meant to tell you, Kathy and Kurt will be here this weekend. I told her they could use my bed. I assume you’ll let me sleep with you in yours?”

“If you’re a good boy! And you did promise to play on Sunday morning. I guess I can’t be TOO loud!”

“Kathy won’t care!” I chuckled. “Let’s go to bed.”