Yeah. That would be a great place to end this story, wouldn’t it? Drama. Sad ending. The hero fades into the burnt orange sunset.
They thought it was over, Texas did. My family certainly did, once Mom’s estate was settled. Adios, psycho. See you – nowhere. And, you know me, I soak up emotions around me like a sponge.
Okay, it’s been a good run. Let’s do this.
I thought about it, suicide. MANY times. I’m schizophrenic now – big time. Audio hallucinations. Voice overs. The whole shooting match. Suicidal ideations were my new BFF.
Soon thereafter I learned what was wrong with my vision. Severe, extreme dry eye. The VA docs put punctal plugs in (blocks what tears you do make from draining into the nasal cavity). Maximum Restasis Rx. Legally blind. Another 100% disability.
My worst fear just came to pass. Going blind. Not being able to read. The one last escape in life. Closed. SLAMMED!
Bummer.
But a true thriller has two endings. The first one is where the anti-hero learns something important about himself. Duh. I really am schizophrenic. What that means, in the present context, is that everything I’ve written is wrong.
Not wrong in the facts. Wrong in perspective. It’s time to fill in the blanks. To fess up that it wasn’t me against the world. It was me with a ton of moral and emotional support.
Let’s start with ORA. My first three years with the firm were awesome. My learning curve was screaming in an upward trajectory. Manual drafting. HVAC. Electrical. Computers. CAD was a titanic change in the industry. Computers too, doing all our calculations.
The going joke was, “Think back before computers. Remember all the free time you had? Now. Tell me – how much free time do you have now.” None. Absolutely none.
For year after year. Just the regular engineering workload was brutal enough – now you add transforming EVERYTHING to CAD and computers? Slow machines. Clunky software. Networking 20 computers together. Establishing new drafting standards. Layers. Colors. Fonts.
Once you figure everything out – boom – it changes. New plotters. Faster computers. A new mouse. Work like hell figuring it out. Then – boom – it all changes again. Windows. Spreadsheets. New commercial software everywhere you look. It’s no wonder I had no social life. Not with having to spend two hours a day on the road, commuting to Lago Vista.
A year after I started with ORA a THERMONUCLEAR EVENT hit the HVAC industry. The Montreal Protocol, better known as the Freon Ban. Freon-12 was banned. The total cost of renovating all existing commercial HVAC systems over the next ten years or so was $1 trillion. We did that.
Or, rather Bill Adiar did that, in our office. That’s why I never saw him. He was overwhelmed doing the extremely complicated chiller renovations.
By the time I was fired, hey – the Montreal crunch was over, and they didn’t need the staff. It was a layoff.
Sure didn’t look or feel that way to me. A short scene in one of my screenplays had me in my little bull pen office when Bill Adair showed up, a pink slip in his hand. I hugged my computer. “I don’t want to go. Texas is a right-to-work state. I have a right to work!”
The truth is, a whole l lot of my skills were now being done automatically by REALLY sophisticated CAD programs. They could draw ductwork automatically. Circuit lights. Do lighting calculations. Even fill out light schedules on the blueprints. Remember NPS when one computer program to do piping support design put our whole engineering group out of work? Bam! Same thing at ORA.
Good work. Gone.
I have a lot of wonderful memories from ORA. Noel Robertson always arrived almost as early as I did (at least when the express bus was on time or when the traffic was light). He was a friendly, jolly fellow. A great leader.
Jerry Hammerlun the lawyer? At least he brought me along to meetings with SECO. I met his skinny wife at company functions. We talked some. It’s not as if I was that congenial myself, with a perpetual dislike of AUTHORITY thanks to Captain Hodory and all that happened a White Sands and BAMC.
Bill Adar (Aggie, grew up in Guam, a military brat, commuted from Dripping Springs in a rusty old pickup, true Texan, runner, ankles were always CRACKING as he walked) would stop by my little office area now and then. “Okay, you’ve been awful quiet lately. What’s going on?”
Ummm. Well, I just bought this dBase program. Building a lighting calcs program. I – I’m using my own computer. On my own time.
“Sure. Go ahead. Put your hours on your time sheet. Good work.”
Say – what? Really!?
After the evil patent attorney turned on me; well, Bill Adair was working on a marketing plan to sell the software commercially.
Bill Adair even had a contractor friend of his (robust dude, always wore shorts even in the winter) try out the energy analysis program. I had it on a 3.5 inch floppy, self-extracting executable. Very commercial-esque. Same with my lighting program.
If Bill Adair hadn’t supported my computer exploits, I’d never had a chance of doing the Mars algorithm. Thanks, Dude. Sorry I was such a disgruntled employee toward the end.
That bull pen office space? We were a smooth, engineering machine. We had to be. Even though I never did any chiller retrofits (the big, complicated projects to get the world up to speed with the new ozone-safe refrigerants), I handled the heavy lifting on all the smaller projects. Bill Adair and Noel always reviewed my designs, though. Zane Burley, too.
But over time I was getting more and more right.
There was constant chatter in the bull pen. Clark Lilly (electrical, extreme extrovert, cheerful and exuberant, US Navy Vietnam vet) on one side and Larry Werner (tall, balding, deep voice, talked slower, superman worker, tank driver in Vietnam) were my buddies.
Roy Phillips (Christian, quiet, the adult in our little group) was there, too. He was Bill Adair’s draftsman. Complex engineering projects needed the best damn draftsman in Texas.
We were always fooling around.
One time the big bosses had a photographer in the office to take PR pix for marketing. We spent DAYS cleaning up the place. Right before the photog arrived, I snuck over and put a small bottle of white-out on the giant blueprint plotter.
It showed up in the final PR photos!
Rene, the secretary, ordered out breakfast tacos sometimes. Popcorn smelling up the whole office in the afternoons. Long weekends working on rush projects. Working with extra help brought in for the really BIG projects. My sister Leigh Erin came in to help Patricia House (young, I convinced her to get her P.E. License later on, gave her a reference) with the SHEMP energy audits, and my brother John came in for another rush.
Then, when the blueprints went out the door, we got back into the routine again.
It was effortless, that constant ebb and flow. Well done, Bill Adair and Noel Robertson. (Similarly on the architect side of the office.)
It’s too bad once the Montreal Protocol Chiller Retrofit days were over, and CAD took over, I was shown the door. Me and every other “triple threat” (folks who could design HVAC, electrical, and plumbing; I was unique, because it could also SEAL all three disciplines – plus energy conservation and now software) in the industry. I really did like the manual drafting. All the stuff computers started doing.
My hate has heretofore been grossly misdirected. I should have taken my angst out on the goddamn computers, not my superiors.
All things considered, it was fun and challenging, stimulating and VERY creative, too. But nobody will ever have that experience again. There won’t be any Aston Martin (made completely by hand) A/E (architectural/engineering) projects all done by hand like we did. Never!
I know it sounds like progress to you – computers doing the grunt work – the “hard” work. But you can’t beat it. As the fighter jocks used to say at the Academy, “Accelerating off a carrier flight deck is better than sex.”
It’s true. Engineering design at ORA was that way. Exploration drilling at Exxon. Structural steel design at NPS Industries. Building the Mars FORTAN routine at Texas.
Nobody even does research in orbital mechanics anymor. A current professor at Texas told me – “Nobody’s interested in Mars trajectory analyses. Anywhere.”
I was the last grad student at the last university in the world to offer a doctorate in celestial mechanics.
Where’s the fun and challenge and thrill of accomplishment that defines engineering anymore? Gone. Obliterated by computers.
Tell me again why the F we have computers doing all that fun stuff? It makes me cringe to think of all the really excellent jobs AI will obliterate. Why kill yourself throwing away four years of your life studying for an engineering degree? Computers will have eliminated that dream job by the time you get there.
And if not, your professional life will be just like mine – constantly moving from one career to another, one industry to another – barely one step ahead of “progress.” (Never having any free time for a life because you’re learning a whole new trade.)
And guess what? If this sh*t happens in engineering, it will happen everywhere.
Watch out. It’s coming to your career field. When it does come, it will effing knock you flat. Just like it did me.
My mentor at Texas, Dr. Roger Broucke was in his late 60’s. Short. Chubby. Frail. Disabled. Sure, he “neglected me,” but we had some nice talks. His dissertation was on the Three Body Problem. Nobody, I mean NO BODY, in the universe knew more about the 3BP than Dr. Broucke.
Going through all my old Texas records – angry, FURIOUS – trying to get back at Texas – I found an email he sent me early on, when I was starting the Mars problem. He was SO excited.
“It has been 22 years since I have studied the Three Body Problem.” I know I made his life miserable, and it makes me sad what an absolute boor I was. But it helps to know that I brought him at least a little bit of sunshine.
Dr. Broucke was a computer nut, just like me. FORTRAN fan. There’s not a language more elegant or functional than FORTRAN. Not a compiler more efficient than the Lahey-Fujitsu, either. (I bought it, loved it).
Dr. Broucke gave me his 7/8 Runge-Kutta integration routine to use in my Mars Pathfinder program. (OOPS. Would you look at that – he really DID help me out!!) His RK 7/8 is extremely compact and as accurate as you can get. It’s the engine that runs the whole machine. Absolutely flawless program. A real Mona Lisa. Michelangelo’s David.
Dr. Broucke didn’t like the Aerospace Department any more than I did. Not one bit. And I’d only had a couple of years to build up resentment. He’d had DECADES of abuse.
He HATED having to teach Statics and Dynamics – which is like having Einstein teach kindergarten math with wooden blocks. Even after his vision was so bad – he would ask me to please sit in the front row so he can see me – teaching statics to a hundred students in a giant LECTURE HALL!?
Dr. B told me he and Dr. Szebehely were on a committee in 1960 that was set up to decide if Relativity or Celestial Mechanics had the correct explanation for all the “Relativity” phenomena. Bending of light by the sun. Time slowing slightly in orbiting satellites.
Relativity is all STATISTICS. Celestial Mechanics is pure MATHEMATICS. Equations. Often very SIMPLE equations. And, yes, we have explanations for all the “Relativity” phenomena.
The committee voted for Relativity. R.I.P. Celestial Mechanics. That’s me, the last starfighter.
Dr. B was Catholic, and not shy about it. He used to remark often in his lectures about the many “little miracles” in our field. Awesome phenomena, extremely complex – mind-boggling complex (even for a steel-frame brain like mine). . . all boiling down to a single equation. And not just any equation. ALGEBRA. At most high school TRIGONOMETRY.
It’s staggering! Truly, even an ingrate like me can’t help but marvel at the “Intelligent Design” of the cosmos.
You don’t have to wonder anymore why evil, heathen statistics and Relativity won.
Dr. B worked an innocent little problem in one of his C Mech graduate classes. I found it in my notes: Assume light is a photon (a particle of pure energy). Now calculate how the sun’s gravity affects that tiny bit of MASS as it goes by the sun. The result: The sun’s gravity bends that PHOTON exactly HALF that observed in actuality.
My theory, years later, is: what if light turns into photons as it approaches the sun and, because of the extreme gravity, two photons spiral in a DNA-type double helix? Which bends exactly as observed.
Would you rather that or four years of graduate school to understand tensor calculus and astrophysics? That’s the power of Celestial Mechanics.
But, alas . C Mech was banned in 1960. It. Is. No. More.
Full disclosure: I wrote a book called The Geometric Derivation of Relativity, which showed all our “Relativity” explanations.
Isaac Newton’s Theory of Gravity was created strictly from geometry, by the way.
Dr. Broucke received his doctorate in Belgium. He was fluent in Dutch and Russian (an important scientific language, especially in Celestial Mechanics). He told me he and his wife (they had one daughter) went to Moscow on a vacation one time.
He spent the whole time in the library, studying Russian tech papers!
Dr. Broucke started his career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL. “The girls are very pretty in California,” he said. Many of the students in his C Mech classes were female. After growing up with three older sisters, I can understand how the rigorous math appeals to them.
(Actually, the math wasn’t so bad – at most calculus and differential equations – hell, kids learn that stuff in HIGH SCHOOL now. More power to you.)
One of the intractable problems I had was setting up the motion of the spacecraft when you’re very close to Earth or Mars. It acts like a singularity when you’re programming it. Pulled my hair out (and by this time, I didn’t have any to spare).
Dr. Broucke suggested a way to approach that problem. I figured out a different way and moved on. But he kept right at it. Not long after I was expelled, I found out he published a paper on that problem. Something about motion around unity. He passed away not long after I left Texas.
Thanks for the memories, Dr. B.
One more plug for C Mech from my last dissertation. The N Body Problem studies the sum of the forces of MANY bodies on a single, much smaller object. Imagine the Starship Enterprise zooming through a cluster of stars, spinning the turbines approaching Warp One (the speed of light). The N Body Equations reduce down EXACTLY to the same equations as for static flow in fluid dynamics.
What that means is that, according to Relativity once Scotty announces “Engines can’t take it, Captain” it’s too late: The Enterprise has been smashed to smithereens.
They literally hit a BRICK WALL.
Well, in C Mech’s universe, that “brick wall” is a FLUID. And fluids aren’t just water or oil. An extremely thin vapor is a fluid.
Albert Einstein stole the whole idea of Relativity from the French worker in Celestial Mechanics, Henri Poincare, who developed it based on a super-thin “aether.” This is an old-fashioned term for very thin vapor. And so, in a C Mech world, Warp One is no problem. A million dust particles per parsec. Warp Two? A thousand particles per parsec. (Well a parsec is technically a unit of length equal to 3.26 light years, but you get the idea.)
Tell me, do you like Poincare’s “aether” or Einstein’s BRICK. WALL.
Now that I think back on all that happened at Texas, it occurs to me that Dr. Broucke was a real champion. Who else would let a grad student choose their own courses (you want your specialty to be in solid state physics? I absolutely forbid it) at registration time?
While I was doing my Mars thing – first getting a seamless trajectory, then figuring out how to save 15%, then the semiconductor model (and a dozen other informal papers which by the time all was said and done turned into a whole Fractal Theory) I was absolutely UNTOUCHABLE.
Nobody dared offend Dr. Roger Broucke. He was my shield of immunity. I didn’t know this. He never even hinted at it. But there he was. Jolly Dr. B puttering along, teaching his C Mech classes that I absolutely adored.
Even if trajectory optimization wasn’t his thing, he knew I was moving right along.
One semester he gave out a list of potential dissertation topics. Our semester grade would be based on a short discussion of how to approach the problem. I chose something with the Mars trajectory. I SOLVED THE PROBLEM. A DISSERTATION problem, did it in a few days, brushed it off – I sure hope I get an A in that class. (Didn’t even keep a copy. Can’t duplicate the process, but I still have his assignment paper from the class. One day I’ll give it another go.)
Dr. B gave seminars sometimes. I remember one was a study of all the planets that orbit Jupiter. (Most comets that enter our solar system DO orbit Jupiter, which is pretty amazing.)
Why would Dr. B give me free reign?
Maybe Professor Szebeheley mentioned my NASA project to him, the one I did on the solar system model.
Dr. B had access to the letters of recommendation when I was accepted to grad school. Also my transcript where I got an A in that class. Dr. Hull my Graduate Advisor may later have felt justified in REFUSING to let me use those 3 credits toward my Master’s Degree (which I got right before I was expelled – smart move. For once in my life I read the writing in blood on the walls – did all my paperwork around Halloween. Folks in the graduate dean’s officer were all in costumes), but Dr. Broucke knew better. Sure he did.
And all the angry letters I wrote. No advising. No help on my research. I bet Dr. B thought, “This young man had better get used to the haters because everybody hates Celestial Mechanics.”
Or maybe even, “This guy is a real fighter. Perhaps he will have the strength of will to save our Celestial Mechanics.”
I was a bull in a China shop, literally. Once the Mars Pathfinder 2.0 algorithm was done, I was cruising.
Then, when Dr. B told me that Celestial Mechanics was banned and doomed?! We’ll see about that.
My mission hereafter was to crank out a menagerie of ideas to breathe a little life back into the discipline. Something, anything. Didn’t have to be a formal paper. Just a sketch. An outline. A summary of an approach to a problem, like Dr. B’s dissertation homework problem.
Anyway, about that NASA research and the Schrodinger Electron Cloud plot model. The original model of the atom, the Bohr Model, was based on the Two Body Problem (one large body + one very small one; nucleus + electron).
The equation for gravity is EXACTLY the same as the equation for electrostatics except for a constant to account for the difference in scale.
You remember that C Mech is 100% mathematics? Well, that MATHEMATICS in its entirety is derived from Newton’s Law of Gravity. Just like an upside-down pyramid: everything can be traced directly back to that ONE gravity equation.
So, you know what? NASA was right. Using the waveform of my Solar System Model to generate plots of atoms around a nucleus was SPOT ON.
(C Mech people regularly publish work on subatomic phenomena as well as Relativity phenomena.)
Too bad I didn’t realize my old Schrodinger Plot atomic model was viable until long after I was expelled. Not that it would have made any difference. But my point in mentioning this is: Dr. Z saw that value of my Solar System model right away.
That NASA letter was in my application to grad school. It was in my department file. Hell, it was hanging on the wall of my office space in the grad student ghetto up on the top floor of the Aerospace Building, Woolrich Labs.
THAT’S why all the orbits people HATED me. THAT’s why the whole goddamn campus plutocracy HATED me.
(After I was expelled, waiting on the appeals, I made copies of that NASA letter and put it on bulletin boards all over campus. The physics department. Astronomy. The Union. Every. Where.) It was me versus Relativity.
They won. Game. Set Match. I was “obliterated” after all that, or at least I should have been. But I wasn’t. How come?
You remember how I had to boycott all my classes one semester before Dr. Dolling the Chairman of the ASE Department set up a seminar for me to talk about my Mars Pathfinder 1.0 routine? Did you, just for a second think – “That’s odd. They were already wanting to get rid of this reprobate. How come they just didn’t let the S.O.B. wash out right then and there? Doh! Problem solved.”
Well. It just so happens I was at this time a regular columnist for the student newspaper on campus, The Daily Texan.
I think it was Captain Franco in the army who told me while we were preparing my defenses before the PEB tribunal, “People at White Sands are absolutely TERRIFIED of your writing skills.” Given the circumstances, it took some time for this to sink in. Years of time. But sink in it did.
I tried out this new superpower in 1999, two years after I started at Texas. I wrote a novella called Behold Leviathan and self-published it with First Books. (I recently released a new edition called Eyes Only.
The book was a dark, scary regression into the horrors of my Army situation SMASHED into a modern satire of the environmental situation. Got some decent reviews. Never sold any copies. (One chapter is an excerpt of my Army tribunal transcript.)
My nephew Adam Normand read it, “Boy, did you get hosed.”
A few years ago, Adam wanted to bring his young family to visit my house in the Appalachians of western North Carolina. “My kids want to meet their brilliant Uncle Bill.” I told him they could come if you tell them “your brilliant schizophrenic Uncle Bill.”
They never came.
Anyway, we’re back at Texas, a couple of years into grad school. I get upset about something, write an angry column, and fire it off the editor of The Daily Texan. They print it!
I bring another one in. I meet the nice lady editor (had a crush on her). “Love to have columns from the engineering nerd side of campus.” (Oops, this is gonna take a heap of work, Mr. Bill.)
She asks me to be a regular contributor. So I write a few more. Bring them in, hook up with one of the staff to fix all my typos and grammar mistakes.
One of the columns was an absolutely vicious, rabid attack on Professional Engineers. “How could you let all those Aggie students in College Station build that gigantic mountain of logs without an ounce of oversight?” The bonfire of logs had collapsed that year, killing 12 young people.
And so, when I threatened Dr. Dolling he likely thought, “This jerk is going to write a fu*king column in the paper.” So I got my Mars seminar.
Big sigh. A few days later, I was also asked not to write any more columns for The Daily Texan. Damn, that very same day I brought in a stack of editorial cartoons I had created. Left them there.
(Not a pretty hand, but decent enough, after my manual drafting training – certainly good enough for a Podunk college paper).
With all due respect, I suspect the real reason I was let go was the Ralph Nader versus Patrick Buchanan debate on campus I’d set up (using my cred with the paper – doh! – without the pretty lady editor’s permission).
“You – WHAT? Two fucking LIBERALS debating in George Bushe’s backyard? Are you INSANE?! People ELECT me for this editor job. You want them to IMPEACH me now? Tar and FEATHER me?”
Sorry, lady. I still love you. I made you the hero of my smash screenplay JUMP GATE, about my grad school years. Will you forgive me? Go out on a date?
Lunch. tea… i’m still at t-sip you know. . . really. . . i. . . am. . .
Oh well, at least I got to do the Mars seminar. That was key to everything.
I also kept writing columns. “Take an angle and go with it,” the love of my life taught me. OMG. Another superpower! I added a section on my Mars Pathfinder 2.0 website online for “The Pelican’s Briefs,” with my cartoons and new analyses of news and events.
My favorite cartoon shows a goofy Saturday Night Light puppet SMASHED by a hammer of SPECIAL INTERESTS.
“Mr. Bill for PreSidEnt.” Oh no, Mr. Bill…..
Anyway, this is the point at the end of Act Two where the anti-hero, on his journey, has failed miserably. But he’s learned something about himself (“I’m schizophrenic. No big deal.”) It’s where you can bring back characters from very early in the story. In this case, the folks I grew up with: Family.
That year after Mom was diagnosed with bone cancer and until I got the final letter from UT President Faulker? We should talk a little about that year. It’s important.
So far it looks like Mr. Bill is a strong, valiant, soldier of fortune taking on the powers that be. A bit quirky. Somewhat outspoken. “You’re such a nice person when I talk to you,” Dr. Fowler wrote when he retaliated against me and quit as my advisor for contacting ABET. “But in writing you’re a – monster!” (Excuse me, sir – but, back at you.)
So far it was just me against Leviathan.
Not so. Saturday mornings I always played tennis with Mom out in Lago Vista. I talked about all this grief with her. With her psychology degree, I’m sure she said all the right things.
Once or twice a month somebody or other visited Mom in her gorgeous house overlooking Lake Travis with the beautiful pool in the side yard. Leigh Erin and Regan (both of whom were single mothers with three kids each) lived nearby. John lived in Austin. EVERYBODY loved Mom’s wonderful cooking.
When Mom visited Leigh Erin in Dripping Springs or Regan in Johnson City, I always drove her. There were plenty of occasions. Birthdays for us and all the kids (Regan’s Adam, Alicia, and Jonathan alias “Norm” and Leigh Erin’s Luke, Joe, and Sarah). Graduations. Christmas. Mom’s birthday at Thanksgiving.
I must admit to spending everything I could for my nieces and nephews. I gave Adam my favorite programmable calculator (the HP that I created the SECO nomograph equations with – I really liked that calculator. Leather case and all).
(You’ll notice I have more of an affinity for tech than people – thanks to my fond memories of my surrogate incubator mother. One day, in a not-so-distant dystopic future when nobody wants to be engineers, they’ll RIP babies out of the womb six weeks early and raise them in an incubator.)
Adam teaches high school math now (Regan’s profession.) Norm is a coach. Alica married an electrician who works in refineries up north. (She enlisted in the Air Force with the sole purpose of finding a husband. Hey. It worked.) Sara is a genetic engineer (went to A&M – maroon carrots?)
Luke got a degree in physics and works for an oil company in Houston. Joe was the smart one – skipped college to work at a convenience store, making good money right off the bat. They all have kids now, I suppose. I’ve never met any if their kids. Hell, I’ve never SEEN any of THEM for 20 years. But they’ve been there.
“I’ll be a good uncle one day, I swear I will.”
I’ll cut my teeth as “anchor man” of the Class of ’78 at the Academy, too. Do right by Dr. Z and Dr. Broucke. Make Mom proud so she can rest in peace. Carry on the engineering tradition of Grandpa Howard and Pop.
Mom was on the Lago Vista School Board for many years. When I was at ORA I ran for an opening on the board. Sarah and Alica stormed the phone lines, exhorting folks to come and vote for me.
My one campaign event was a debate with the other guy. “Lago Vista needs a football team like they need a hole in the head. We should concentrate on academics!” I said.
“You’re campaigning with a hidden agenda,” was his response.
Excuse me? Who’s? Hiding? What?
And since when is ACADEMIC an evil “agenda” in SCHOOL? (Oh, I get it now – 25 years later. Ha-ha. School isn’t to teach kids the three R’s. School is for indoctrination.)
Well, all the whole family, they all had front-row seats as Bill picked up his britches after the Army debacle and made a name for himself at ORA. Felt my disappointment when I was fired. Then all the terrible sadness, when working for Jasmine the lady entrepreneur turned out so badly.
Then the triumph of getting accepted at grad school. The Mars success. (Mom was absolutely enthralled by ALL my research.) The crashdown when I was expelled with such malice.
Remember how Dr. Hull barred me from registering? Well Mr. Bill, he wasn’t going nowhere. I had to raise hell to even take classes the next semester, which was the spring of 2001. I mean REALLY raise HELL. The Dean’s office. The Registrar. I guess they assumed I’d slink away with my tail between my legs.
Sorry, I got FAMILY.
My whole damn family was expelled when you fu*kers booted me. They were CRUSHED every bit as much as I was. More!
I’m a schizophrenic. My feelings are at an absolute minimum volume level. Not theirs. They’re all very smart people. Noble. Never took a penny from the government for nothing. Never been to jail. Never did no wrong. This is OUR country. We’ve been here since the goddamn Mayflower.
How DARE you do what you’ve done.
How did I remain on campus? Well. Going by the University’s own precious rules, I got my bachelor’s degree at Texas, back in ’78. With honors. Engineering scholar (Regan and Pop came to campus for the nice presentation that summer).
Anybody who graduates from UT is automatically eligible to take classes on campus. Hell, I’d just received a 2nd degree, a Master’s. And this jackass Dr. David Hull barred me from registering??
I went in to the math department to register for classes. I was going to carry on the family tradition and get a teaching certificate to teach mathematics. The counselor sat me down and (with all due respect to Dr. Broucke, whom I am now back to hating with all of my energy) spent a goodly amount of time with me, going over all my transcript, talking at length about my goals and interests and overall spending more time with me, figuring out my path than all the aerospace professors had done with me in all my registrations and counseling for the entire previous four years.
I ended up with a couple of undergraduate classes that were my favorites of the whole Texas episode. An introductory class in complex analysis. Another in advanced applied linear algebra. And a history of science and technology in the ancient world, taught by Dr. Riggins. My paper for that class was on Roman Aqueducts.
I once told Dr. Riggins, “I’ve spent more time with you talking about this project than the sum total of all the time I spent with my advisors and professors and mentors the previous four years in grad school.”
You’re kidding he said. “Most definitely not,” I responded.
I didn’t take classes that summer. I dropped out of my fall classes (more math) as soon as I got the final letter from President Faulkner.
Never got the math certificate.
Otherwise, that year – well Mom went through chemotherapy but continued to get worse and worse. My three sisters and John all took several months off work so they could stay in Mom’s house and look after her. Staggering their time off.
The only time I had alone with Mom was one night “babysitting,” when I got a DVD movie, Godzilla (1998) with Matthew Broderick. I liked the film. Mom was so not happy that evening. (Maybe you can see why they never let me alone with her again; I sure can’t).
My brother John? He found reruns of Magnum PI for them to watch together. Mom LOVED Tom Selleck. That hunk of a hero.
Kelle came all the way down from Canada and her job as a city planner in St. Johns to spent a few months with Ma’. Regan, too, teaching little kids math in Johnson City. They were good times, quality times, until the end.
My little green house was a mile or so away at the bottom of the hill near the POA campgrounds. I walked up to Mom’s house most evenings after I got back from classes on campus. I helped prepare supper. Had dinner (Mom spoiled us on all her best dishes.) Did the dishes afterward – that was always my job, as in since, forever.
On weekends Mom’s grandkids would show up when they could. I don’t think there was a single moment when Mom was alone that year.
That Christmas Eve – right after the cancer diagnosis, which was around Thanksgiving. I went to services with Mom at the beautiful Anglican Church in Lago. I wore a bright green – I mean BRIGHT green – shirt.
Musta caught the preacher’s eye because he stood me up and with two other unwilling victims, wrapped a rough rag round our heads and appointed us the “three wise men” for his sermon. I still have that green shirt. I wear it once a year, every year – around Christmas time, thinking about that evening. Thanks, Jesus.
Sorry, those people who strung you up like they done.
The last thing I told Mom – we’d just received President Faulkner’s letter a day or so previous – was that I swore to never, ever give up the good fight. How could I? With a champion Mom like her? All my wonderful family? I’ve been a real jerk since then; but, hey – they deserve better.
Mom died in her sleep when Leigh Erin was on watch.
Mom was always a big swimmer. Loved the ocean. One of the highlights of that year was taking her to an IMAX show on campus of dolphins. Amazing creatures. So smart. Corralling a whole school of fishes with consummate ease.
Anyway, Leigh Erin took Mom’s ashes out to California and poured them into the ocean.
So, Mom’s gone now. The matriarch of the family. She was a good friend and my champion. With her gone – well, evidently it was through her sheer force of will that everybody had to be nice to Bill the schizophrenic black sheep.
Now that she’s gone, the glue holding me to the family just kind of disintegrated. It was part them and part me. Can you blame them? After all this time, pumping me up to succeed in grad school and I fu*king blow it.
Who wants a loser in the family? We’re winners. Mom could waste her energy on you as much as she wanted, but not us.
Regan decided she was going to buy Mom’s house from the estate. I wanted to, but Regan was the executor of the estate and the new matriarch. I could have easily afforded it. My share of the estate plus sale of my house plus a small mortgage.
I mean I REALLY wanted that nice house. I helped BUILD it. I LOVED swimming. I’d lived in Lago Vista since 1984. But no, that wasn’t to be.
As it was, folks still kept going to Mom’s house. Birthdays. Holidays. More and more, I wasn’t invited.
I may be crazy, but I’m not dumb. I can read the writing in matador red lipstick on the walls, too. They put psycho Bill to work painting Mom’s rent house for sale. Then painting some in Mom’s house for Regan to move in.
Once my usefulness was done, that’s all she wrote. I’m not a Clark anymore. New administration. New rules. I never even played tennis with Regan – she was still quite good.
Okay. This is me. I just got put on disability by the VA. I’m now officially “the sickest of the sick.” Who wants somebody like that around their young kids?
Would YOU?!
Mom didn’t have a prejudiced bone in her body. She had a degree in psychology. That was a keen interest for her: helping people. She’d been right there with me since day one, seen all the horrors I’d been through, like I’ve been telling you about.
She’d seen the sickly little boy grow through a whole war of confrontations on account of my schizophrenia. She was always the wannabe doctor, with a psychology perspective on life.
I was her creation, from the scars on my arm and toe all the way up to my balding head. I was her Frankenstein. Had all the stitches to show for it.
Nobody else in the family knew even a fraction of what I’ve told you. I’m sure this will be as much a shock to them as to you. More!
The mild-mannered, happy, shy, “most courteous camper” – wrecking a full-fledged broadside against Texas? The Naval Academy? The United States Army!
When I started this chapter, it felt like thus far I was writing about a different person, the “old me.” It’s true! He’s my hero. That strong, bold, sensitive engineer.
I’m not that person anymore. I’m schizophrenic now. I finally realized that, after the VA’s evaluation. SUDDENLY I realize I’ve been schizophrenic ever since Dr. D-H said I was. Well, more or less.
Dr. D-H said the catalyst was when Pop died. It’s more like when Pop had his first heart attack. THAT was the real shocker. He wasn’t immortal after all. Perfect!
The Almighty Father. (It was always, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name . . . “)
Pop, with his stick figure drawings. Always writing in print letters. My engineer old man. The Esso mechanical pencils I had when I was growing up. The cross-hatched engineering pads of paper. Steeling his tools. Repairing my mini bike to impress him. Doing chores without a peep of complaint.
(Maybe you get a sense now that Dr. Broucke and I had the same kind of relationship? “Give this poor kid some slack. He’ll find his way. And dazzle me when he gets there.”)
Getting lost on the subway in Paris when everybody else was enthralled by the Louve. Wow. Their subway runs on rubber wheels. How’s that work?
(Yeah – they actually let a young boy loose in the middle of Paris. Go for it! Get lost – I did. . . But I found my way back, not knowing a word of French.) Fascinated by Roman ruins.
Bullfights in Madrid. Lunch on beef you could cook on the SIZZLING hot plate (or not). The Nazi dagger Pop stole out of the place in Aravaca. “Look, Bill – it still has no rust.” Coats of armor in the Paradors (old castles in Spain converted into hotels).
I was thrilled by all the same things he was – that nobody else in the family noticed. Pissed off at his Red Corvair because it was designed so badly. Beating the living CRAP out of that damn car.
Yeah, this kid’s an engineer, all right.
There was a bond between Pop and me. An engineering bond that nobody else could ever understand. Tools. Tech. Machines. My favorite book he gave me was a series on How Things Work. Learning to fish. Hunting. I love the outdoors, just like Pop always did since he was a desperately poor kid growing up on an apple orchard in the Ozarks. I gave up a career in the Navy so we could hang out for a precious couple more years. It was worth it. Wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.
So, yeah. Dr. D-H was right, damn him forever. I really AM schizophrenic. Been that way since the day I drove the forest-green Audi Fox out of The Yard at the Naval Academy.
So, now what? This is an old, familiar place for me: Failed. Fired. Booted out. But it’s worse this time, much worse. Mom is gone. My family – those silent heroes who were there supporting me all these years? They’re gone too.
It’s me and Jaxx my cat (long hair, bright blue eyes) in my little green house near the lake. It’s pretty damn lonely.
Right up there, at the top of the hill – I can hear Max, Mom’s black German Shephard BARKING at all hours. I loved that animal. He’d go berserk whenever saw my faded blue Geo Metro show up to drive Mom to the tennis courts.
Mom had an indoor cat, too. Pluto. We always played when I went over. He used to climb up on the counter in the kitchen and JUMP up into a wood slat trellis over the fluorescent overhead lights and we’d make a game of it.
When Mom died (he was there on her bed 24/7 the entire time, never more than an arm’s stretch away from her), nobody wanted him. John tried to make him an outdoor cat. Got ticked off when Plated started moping at the door.
I adopted Pluto. He stayed for a while. But it was a very small house. Jaxx was already there. Well, Plato got loose one day. I hope the dog catcher never found him. That he didn’t have to spend the rest of his life in a cage at the SPCA.
Nobody else in the family cared about Plato (Kelle was a real cat lover too) or how much Mom loved that damn cat. Mom was gone now. Plato’s a nuisance. Good riddance.
Same with brother Bill.
But, guess what?
Cats have nine lives.
Mine ain’t used up yet.