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It's All in the Game Ch. 01

By: Stultus



A "Love in Lovett County" Story (#1)

A series about a strange rural coastal town in Texas where despair soon becomes hope and sadness turns instead into happiness; and miracles have an odd way of becoming commonplace. Currently eleven stories – there will be many more.


Summary: A young computer programmer loves the girl next door, but she loves the other boy next door instead. He marries her and they have a daughter, but she hasn't forgotten her first love and ultimately leaves him to rejoin her original lover. Nearly alone he starts to gain great commercial success, but who is there by his side to share it with him? A slightly sad but romantic story with very little sex. The first main Lovett County story. Like most of my stories, it starts off a bit slowly to better develop the plot and the characters.


Codes: Slow, MF, FF, tears, cheat, group, exhib, voy


Theme: Romantic

Sex: Some Sex (mostly towards the end)


Originally Posted on SOL: 2007-06-01 (concluded 2007-06-03)

Revised: September 2009

*******

This is one of my earliest stories and it seems to escaped receiving any external editing after it was hurriedly written back in 2007. Later readers have found innumerable typos, wonky grammar and lots of other weirdness that I've finally now getting around to correcting. This story has been extensively rewritten, and much for the better.

For their help with the modern editing revisions, I need to especially thank Dragonsweb, The Wayward One and (as always) Sue.

Technically, this is not really the 'first' Lovett story. That tale ("Confrontations") is still unpublished at this time, but this story does provide a suitable starting place for the series.

*********

Chapter 1

I thought the happiest day of my life was when I married my long time sweetheart Becky from my hometown of Brownwood, Texas. Now I know that this was possibly the worst day of my life, and in more ways than one this event nearly utterly screwed up the next twenty years of my life.

To be simple, Becky was the proverbial girl living next door to me and we had lived our entire childhood together. We were both born in the same month and year (August 1960), went to the same schools, had mostly the same classes and on most Saturday afternoons we went to the same movie matinees together. By the time we were both sixteen, nearly everyone in town assumed that we would undoubtedly marry later as "High School Sweethearts", but it didn't quite happen that way.

Late in the summer just before our sophomore year of high school, one Anthony (Tony) Brown moved into the vacant house on the other side of Becky's and our love triangle was born. His family had moved into Brownwood from a smaller nearby town in order that Tony might be able to play football for our local high school, which was considered a real "powerhouse" and was always heavily scouted by the college recruiters. 

Tony was tall dark and extremely athletic, and I knew I was in trouble the first time I watched Becky stare at him while her was mowing his lawn with his shirt off. It was immediately obvious that her heart began to beat in a way that it apparently never had for me. I wasn't a total pasty skinned fat blob or a scarecrow; I was admittedly slightly chunky and wasn't much into sports but I did enjoy baseball and could pitch well enough to be our schools #2 starter right off the bat during the spring season of my freshman year.

As soon as school started, Becky began to devote her every effort into making Tony her new main boyfriend, and as she was easily the prettiest girl in school she soon had few other rivals for his attention. Within weeks they were "an item" and after the Homecoming game a few weeks later it was common knowledge around school that Becky and Tony "had done it" under the stadium bleachers after the game.

Naturally, this angered me considerably, and I never surrendered without first putting up a fight. After I heard about the bleacher incident I immediately confronted her about her relationship with Tony the next time she came over to ask me for help with her homework. The conversation got off to a bad start and soon I was directly complaining that apparently now she only remembered me when she had homework to be done at the last moment, obviously so that she could spend more time the rest of the week spreading her legs for her new boyfriend. Some other unpleasant words were exchanged; the most biting comment from her being that, "Tony was at least a man, while I was still apparently just a jealous boy."

We parted immediately afterwards in considerable anger, and we had very little to do with each other for at least the next year and a half. I became obsessed with my studies (I had decided that I wanted to be an accountant just like my father), and refocused all of my outside school activities to purely academic ones instead of athletic ones. Once I saw that Becky had no interest whatsoever in watching me pitch for our school baseball team the next spring, I dropped the sport to the considerable dismay of my coach, and instead became active in the Astronomy, Science, Math and Chess clubs instead. Tony had destroyed any love I might have had for sports and I concentrated myself on improving my mind instead.

Early in my senior year the school bought its very first Apple Computer, and I found my new heaven. I read and reread the limited manuals that came with it until I knew them in my sleep. I took every odd job that I could find, mostly involving pretty hard work I would have preferred to have avoided otherwise, and bought more computer books from a specialty bookstore in Dallas. It didn't take me long at all to write my first computer program and I felt like there was nothing I couldn't accomplish with it. I was pinching every penny I could earn to save up for my own computer. They were expensive then, nearly the price of a car, but I had my goals set for after graduation.

With my head stuck either in a programming manual or squinting at a computer monitor, I honestly hadn't been paying much attention at all to what Becky and Tony had been up to; frankly, by that point I really didn't care. Tony became, of course, a "High School Football Legend" and by the time his senior year had started, he had been offered full scholarships to every top University and College in the state, and was even considering offers from a number of out of state schools with "elite powerhouse" football reputations. In the end he selected a school in southern California and was openly bragging to his many friends about all of the "fine tanned tail" he had banged on his recruiting visit there. 

It was no secret to anyone that Tony always had a "girl or two on the side", but Becky had apparently pretended never to notice this, and was clearly planning for their "life together in California". It came as quite a terrible and sudden shock to her to find out immediately after graduation, that she was very much now on his back-burner. He immediately left for college in California... without her, or even saying goodbye.

She was devastated, and naturally the shoulder she ran to cry on was mine. In those days we considered it "just being a friend", but nowadays there's a new and better term for it. I was her "Intellectual Whore" whom she would now run to and tell me all of her emotional and relationship problems, repeatedly telling me how much she "cared for me", but yet keeping herself emotionally detached enough to never show the slightest inclination towards accepting me as her lover - but making me believe that it was still a possibility. And I let her get away with it, for nearly the next two years! 

Bitter? Darned right I was!

By the end of 1979, I had bought my first computer, a used Apple II, and had programmed my first useful piece of accounting software that I now used daily at my part-time job as a bookkeeper while I attended the local Junior College at night. Becky was casually working part time and going to school but was showing little enthusiasm for either activity. Our relationship was getting a bit closer; we were actually dating again now and going regularly to the movies and dinner, if I could afford it. She still had her heart set on Tony, although he never called her anymore and barely even wrote occasional postcards, and he rarely came home for visits from school... but when he did, Becky would race back to his side.

That changed the next Christmas time when Tony rode into town like the conquering hero he always pretended to be. He was already a big shot in college football and his eyes were already looking towards his Pro career. Everyone in town treated him like a rock superstar, and Becky, forgetting that he had dumped her several times before, ran back once again into his arms and once again spread her legs willing for him, which naturally he accepted.

A few days later I got the expected tear filled phone call from Becky that she had once again been dumped by Tony. This time, just moments after having sex with her, he had told her to leave because he needed to "get ready for a date with another girl." This was too much even for Becky, who ran crying into my arms yet once again immediately afterwards. 

I still don't know how or why it happened, but a few minutes later she was naked and in my arms and I soon lost my virginity into the womb of the woman I had loved, not an hour after she had been previously used by her boyfriend. Yes, I was weak and should never have let this happen. More fool me!

After our frantic but unplanned coupling, Becky became upset and started into a crying fit shortly thereafter, as she "hadn't meant for this to happen" and she was "confused". She dressed nearly immediately and ran for home. I didn't see or talk to her again for nearly three months, until she announced to me that she was pregnant and I was "the father". At the time it never occurred to me to question her further about her prior sex with Tony (unprotected of course), not to mention that on our only coupling I had been getting his sloppy seconds. 

I guess in the end it was a "man thing". We did have unprotected sex together, and it was indeed barely possible that the child was "mine". It was therefore my 'responsibility' to own up to my actions and do what I could to make things right.

I offered to marry her, but she did not accept right away. I know now that she spent a considerable amount of time on the phone trying to call Tony in California trying to get him to take responsibility for "his child" and marry her. Allegedly, Tony had laughed and told her to "let your geek friend raise it for me" and then he hung up on her.

In the end, there was a small private ceremony at the local Justice of the Peace's office with Becky and her mother both competing to see who could be the most unhappy about the wedding. It should have been a day of joy and happiness for us; instead the mood was like everyone was at a funeral. It ought to have been the happiest day in my life - but it sure didn't feel like it. She had wanted Tony, but had to "settle" for me.

*******

Money was a terrible issue from the beginning; neither of us had any. We lived at home with my parents who had always liked Becky and had been supportive of us "doing the right thing". Becky dropped out of Junior College and worked as much as she could, but she was having a troublesome pregnancy and nearly miscarried a few times before being put on bed rest for her last two months before delivery. 

Becky, I believe, prayed every day that she would miscarry the child and probably only the strong religious beliefs of her parents kept her from aborting the child as soon as it was discovered before our marriage. On the other hand, it is quite possible that she really believed that Tony wanted her to keep and raise his child and possibly her would return for it and her someday. 

Nearly from the very start it was obvious that Becky and I were married in name only, and she certainly never shared any of her inner thoughts with me.

I reduced my school schedule a bit so that I could work as a bookkeeper full time for a full forty hour week paycheck, and I also took every little part time job I could get, but there weren't many. Even while only paying a small token rent to my parents, with all of the doctor bills, pregnancy clothes and a small car payment for a used junker that got me to work, school and back, we were just barely making ends meet. Instead of "glowing" as soon-to-be mothers are said to do, Becky instead become more and more depressed. We didn't talk much, and hardly ever had sex at all and none at all her last three months. 

Even what little sex we did have wasn't very good. Becky would just lay there motionlessly on the bed and let me do her, often with an obviously bored or distracted expression on her face. Clearly, I didn't match up or compare at all with her dream stud lover, Tony.

Our daughter Olivia was born a little early in late August and even her naming started another fight between us. Becky had written in the child's name on the birth certificate without even asking for my input. More importantly, Olivia was the name of Tony's mother. From my viewpoint, she had named "our baby" after her ex-boyfriend's mother. Naturally, that Olivia was very pleased by this and always treated the baby as if it was her own granddaughter, and I think she strongly suspected that it really was.

Rather than reviving after the difficult birth of her child, Becky spun herself into an even deeper cycle of anger and depression. Today, everyone knows about 'post partum depression' but that treatable illness was virtually unknown then. Becky became even colder to me and seemed to have little or no love for the child whatsoever. More and more, I had to assume more of the childcare responsibilities in addition to all of my other duties, and soon everything was suffering as a result.

I believe that Becky would have wanted a divorce by this point, except that then she would probably would have received sole custody of the child - a virtual guarantee in that era, especially in a small town in rural Texas. Instead, for the next two years we became strangers living in the same house, with our sex life or any other meaningful signs of any real emotional attachment, quite nonexistent. I tried to provide little Olivia with a bit of the extra love that her mother seemed incapable of showing to her, but I knew that it wasn't enough. How do you explain to a two year old that her mother doesn't love her and obviously wishes daily that she had never been born? 

At work my marital unhappiness was soon well known, and I had several offers of 'companionship'. Once, when I was at a very low emotional moment during the joyless Christmas season of 1981, I accepted one of those offers from a young coworker named Marlie. We went to a motel on the outskirts of town and had fun for 3 hours. I felt guilty over the breaking of marital vows, but what vows had she kept for me? I was certainly not loved or cherished, let alone honored or even remotely obeyed.

Those 3 hours of sheer joy probably saved my own mental health. For those few brief moments someone 'cared about me' and I was able to experience genuine and compassionate lovemaking! I realized then that my current life utterly sucked and something had to be done other than the current status quo of both of us wallowing in utter misery. 

I returned home and proudly confessed my affair and told her that I'd 'do it again' if Becky didn't get her ass off of the floor and contribute something – anything, to this marriage. This earnest and very sincere confession seemed to shock Becky out of the worst of her malaise. We had a huge fight that lasted for days, but at the end of it we decided that we would not divorce and would try and work out some of the mess that was our relationship.

********

For the next six months, we in fact had the best time together of our entire marriage. Becky could laugh and smile again upon occasion and seemed to have gotten over the worst of her depression. We went back to the movies again and had 'dates' with each other, and slowly our sex life crawled out of the cellar and became almost regular. Becky also began to take a closer interest in her daughter who was already showing signs of being extremely precocious and quite interesting as a little girl.

An excellent sign that our relationship was out of the toilet was when Tony came into back into town in late July, driving his big brand new Cadillac that his new Pro team had offered him as a signing bonus and Becky appeared to take no interest in him. He sniffed around once or twice, but mostly stayed at his parents' house down the street or was visiting old friends. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief; maybe she was at long last over him and that could only help us in rebuilding our own relationship.

The next Saturday, Becky had gone out with a friend taking Olivia with her and I was distracted with a long list of things I had been meaning to do around the house. Not to mention that I had wanted to get some quiet programming time in later. I got a few of my chores quickly done and had decided that it was time to take a short break when I realized that I had promised my mother that I would take a look at her basement furnace also this weekend. Becky's parents had gone out of town to visit an Aunt that lived in Waco and I would have the place all to myself. We still didn't exactly 'get on' very well, and I think her Mother never quite forgave me for marrying her daughter. To this very day she believes that Tony would have been the better man. Regardless, I had promised to take a look at her furnace, as a 'blue northerner', a sharp cold front could sweep down at any time now. 

I used our spare key to open their back door and next to the kitchen I found the stairs that led into the small cellar where the furnace was. As I descended down the steps into the dark cellar, I realized that I could hear voices, but there didn't seem to be anyone else down in the cellar with me. Still I began to move quietly, curious as to what the voices were saying and where the speakers were hidden. As I walked over to the furnace and slowly opened its maintenance access door, I could now clearly hear every word being spoken in the house, transmitted quite clearly via the furnace ducts. Becky was in the house, in her old bedroom upstairs from the sound of it, and was not alone. Tony was with her.

They talked for a while, Becky showing Tony "their daughter" and soon I could clearly hear kissing. Soon I heard other rustling and grunting sounds, followed by Becky saying, "Oh, it's so nice and big and I've missed it so much." 

If that statement wasn't obvious enough, soon I heard other obvious sounds of fucking with Becky encouraging her lover to "Give it to me hard, just the way I like it!"

I was transfixed. I didn't dare make any sound, fearing that since I could easily hear them, then they could also hear me. I debated going upstairs to catch them in the act, but I also wanted also to find out more about what was going on, and I eventually did. They had been secretly seeing each other from nearly the very moment Tony came back into town, and this was at least their fourth or fifth meeting from what I could tell. They fucked (I really wouldn't call it making love) at least three times and Becky spent a good deal of time in-between sucking Tony's apparently "huge cock" that she loved so much and could never get enough of.

Tony talked a lot about himself and his forthcoming Pro career, but increasingly he talked about 'their future life together'. Apparently, Tony was eager to prove to his coach that he could 'settle down a bit', demonstrate some responsibility and not be the utterly wild man that he had been in college. Becky seemed more than willing to go with him, but the only catch was Olivia. His child or not, Tony wanted nothing to do with being "Daddy". If she wanted to go with him Olivia would have to stay with me... permanently. I prayed that this would become the 'deal breaker' and that she would then repent and choose to remain with me.


It's All in the Game Ch. 01



Silly me.

"That won't be any problem at all, I'll leave her with the Geek," she said and again took Tony's cock once more into her mouth. 

My heart utterly broke at that moment.

Becky left with Tony the next night. I never heard her leave nor did she say anything to me in the way of a goodbye. There was a short note, but it didn't really say very much. I put it into my wallet and read and reread it 20 times a day for the next year or two but never discovered any secret or hidden meanings within it. 

Olivia and I were now alone together. She had left our checking account untouched; I guess compared to Tony's new millions our petty $57.38 held no attraction to her.

It was enlightening, to say the least, to discover that very few folks in town felt much in the way of pity for me. Tony was after all the local town Hero, the local boy who had made good, and nearly everyone thought it inevitable that Becky would eventually choose him over me. He was now going to be a star in the NFL and I was just a local nobody... a geek with his head permanently wrapped inside a computer. He had a future; I didn't. 

The unparalleled joy of my mother finding out that her wayward daughter had finally made the 'right choice this time', unfastened the last real bolt that held me to this town and its people. I waited for the divorce papers to come and signed them immediately; they confirmed that I was now Olivia's sole legal guardian. Ten minutes later, all of Olivia's things were in the back of my beat-up old car and my few possessions packed along with them. 

The first northerner of the season had blown in the night before and I was chilled to my bones. Without even thinking about it, I aimed my car south and drove aimlessly until the next afternoon when my junker broke down for good in a little small town near the coast called Lovett. I'd never heard of it, but it had to be better than where I had come from.

I sold the car for barely above scrap value and used the money to pay the first months rent on an old beat-up house near the old Towne Centre. The house looked vaguely Victorian with perhaps a hint of an extra Gothic feel to it. In a big city it would have sold or rented for a lot of money, even with its broken floorboards, leaky roof and highly suspect plumbing. In desperately poor Lovett, even my pitiful rent was money that my equally impoverished landlady was pathetically eager to earn. Nearly every house on my block had either a For Sale sign or a notice that the property was available for rent, some had both.

I put out my shingle that I was a computerized bookkeeper and I pressed the flesh with every single one of the handful of shopkeepers in town until I had enough potential customers to maybe be able to play the next months rent. Just to be safe I spent the next week stalking every local farmer and rancher as well, offering to handle their financial recordkeeping for starvation wages. I don't know if it was the utter look of desperation on my face, but a few of these kindly rural folks gave me a handshake deal, some paper bags full of random invoices and receipts, and remained incredulous for years that I could make some kind of proper financial order out of the mess.

Olivia and I settled in and began to call Lovett home.

********

There are at least a thousand stories about Lovett, and an awful lot of them might actually be true. Certainly the strangest thing that took getting used to was that about one-third of the town on the northern and eastern sides towards the beach was in fact a registered Nudist Colony. Frankly, the vast majority of the townsfolk's liked it that way. The resident naturalists paid their taxes and kept the remaining surviving businesses alive. During the summer, a small but thriving crop of northern snowbird tourists rented houses and further supported the depressed local economy. I learned pretty quickly that the happy smiley faced 'Sun' emblem on many of the doors and mailboxes meant there was a better than average chance that the person opening the door might not be wearing any clothes. I soon discovered that the Colony had become the #1 money maker for the county as slowly folks that enjoyed the naturalist lifestyle discovered the town, its warm gulf coast climate and friendly neighbors everywhere and more visitors started to put down roots to stay.

At the actual center of the town in the old business district was a hodge-podge of old and mostly unrestored dilapidated Victorian, Edwardian and Art Deco office buildings and retail shops over an extended, and peculiarly laid out two block radius that constituted the 'Town Centre'. The vast majority of the shops were closed and shuttered. 

Most rural Texas town are build on nice and neat square grid patterns, but not Lovett. At least not near the Town Centre. From the tall black basalt rock pillar monument to something or another which was right smack in the center of downtown, the streets were laid out in a pentagon shape for five blocks. The first two center rings being the commercial district and the latter three pentagonal streets being residential. At each the five points, a two lane road headed out from town to connect to the local farms and ranches, and surrounding points of interest to the edge of the county line, exactly five miles away.

Apparently Lovett is its own independent county, as well as being a town. Its borders are perfectly round, exactly five miles in each direction from that large and unsettling pillar that was planted in the exact center of the pentagonal Towne Centre. Even to the casual observer, this bizarre configuration hinted loudly at pentacle magic, as if the town had been created inside some sort of vast protective circle. The locals never speak of this and the best way for an outsider to find themselves completely ostracized is to ask too many question about this sort of think. Lovett, and its people, like to protect their secrets and live their lives as much out of the sight of strangers as possible, but when they trust and befriend a newcomer they give that respect completely and without reservation.

Supposedly, the town was founded in 1832 right before the War of Texas Independence from Mexico, by a very peculiar and semi-mythological individual possibly of Balkan origin called Alexandru Lovettiu. He and a few followers assimilated nicely into this brave new world and promptly Americanized his name into Alexander Lovett. According to popular legend, he was alleged to be a wizard or sorcerer of such repute that even after Texas became a State his 'Lovett County' retained exceptionally unusual freedoms from most State regulations. Stories of weird mumbo-jumbo aside, Lovett does enjoy an unusually independent status from the state government.

Allegedly Lovett, like Romulus and Remus the founders of ancient Rome, plowed an exact furrow planting silver dust into an exact and complete circle around the county in just a single night. The town quickly grew and soon developed a reputation for welcoming immigrants from unheard of eastern and southern European countries, particularly ones with odd or unusual religious customs. This trend continued after Lovett's death, or rather his disappearance sometime around 1890, with fresh waves of immigrants arriving well into the 20th century. The latest wave of newcomers was during the late 1960's and early 70's, as disappointed hippies and 'alternative lifestyle' families discovered this Mecca of religious and social tolerance and came in droves, mostly to stay. 

There was a nominal Mayor, and sort of an unpaid City Council that met rather infrequently and passed even fewer laws. Nominally, the County Judge was at the top of the local power pyramid and the infamous elderly lady 'Hanging Judge' Rebecka Tucakovic was accounted by all to be a benign and very wise autocratic leader. For practical everyday matters, the real town power resided in "The Church". It was of no particular denomination, and its creed was an unfathomable assortment of antique old-world ritual and superstition combined with modern "new age" enthusiasm. It was a very odd place to say the least, but if its head preacher (a very nice middle-aged man called "Father Al") said jump, nearly everyone in the town said "how high?" I actually took quite a liking to him. He was, of course, a nearly full time nudist, but if you could actually understand what he was saying to you, then it usually made a great deal of sense. I can't think of a single piece of bad advice he ever gave to anyone.

There were several other churches in town, including very small Catholic and Baptist church buildings on the outskirts of town that were barely larger than small shacks. Nearly everyone attended The Church, at least casually or upon occasional. Even the dyed to the bone atheists and agnostics could never find a bad word to say about The Church or its doings.

It was into this strange new world of superstitious farmers and ranchers who lit occult bonfires at night, and crystal or love bead wearing ex-hippies and nudists, that Olivia and I now found ourselves drawn. The learning curve was a bit steep, but it began to feel like 'home' in no time.



It's All in the Game Ch. 02



Things were extremely financially tight for that first year. I had months that I could either pay our bills or we could eat. I think we once had just soup for dinner for nearly two months straight, and even today the sight of Ramen noodles disgusts me. I had a few steady clients, but there just wasn't that much need for a full-time bookkeeper, except at tax time, and I learned to budget our feast months' income so that there would be some money left over saved for the lean ones. There were too many nights when I just didn't eat at all so Olivia could be assured of having something for her next day's breakfast and lunch when not in school.

The only thing that saved my dear daughter from a childhood of near malnutrition was that The Church sponsored the local school lunch program.

Our irregular eating habits came to a final end our second Thanksgiving Eve in Lovett. We were in the small town supermarket and I was counting my pennies to be exactly sure I had just enough money to pay for the small scrawny chicken, a few wilted vegetables from the bargain bin, and a loaf of "reduced for quick sale" hard as rock bread from which I thought I could make a little stuffing. This was to be our Thanksgiving feast the next day. I was holding little Olivia in my arms and she kept looking at the "big chickens" (turkeys) the other shoppers in front and in back of us in line had in their carts. She kept asking if we could have one of the big chickens instead. Finally I said gently, but just a shade too loudly that, "Daddy can't buy one of those big turkey right now sweetheart, this tiny little one is all we can afford to buy."

You could have heard a pin drop in the store, and every eye seemed to be fixed upon me. I immediately wanted to just crawl into a corner and die of shame. 

I couldn't pay for our few purchases fast enough and we just about ran from the store all the way home. I cried for hours. My life was a failure, and my wife had been right to want to leave me all along. My 'feast' for the only person in the world that I cared about, and who cared about me was to be a few tired scraps of produce, a stale hunk of bread and a tiny bird that was probably 90% bone by weight, and I was already plotting how to boil the scrawny carcass to become stock for our soup meal for the next week.

A few hours later, I happened to look out on my front porch and found a box with a note on it. Inside were a number of boxes and canned food items. The note just said that these items were for my daughter and me and that no repayment was necessary. I was signed by Ralph, the owner of the town market. 

I rushed right back to the store and found Ralph in his office, and told him that I had no way of repaying him, at least anytime remotely soon. He cared nothing about that, and asked me if there was any milk for Olivia in the house. I admitted there wasn't any, and almost immediately he handed me a gallon and told me to take it home. I could "pay him later" when I could. My eyes were again filled with tears as I thanked him and left.

The next morning, I was sorting out the boxes and cans to plan a slightly better holiday dinner for my daughter and get a rough outline of what the week's menus was likely to be, when there was a knock at the door (my doorbell, like almost everything in the house, never worked). Outside were a couple of ladies from "The Church" (thankfully dressed, but my little house I was on the 'clothed side' of town anyway).

They were bearing a large cardboard box with a towel under it. It was an "extra turkey that was left over" they earnestly said, and marching right in they planted it upon my dining room table and started to investigate my kitchen to see if I had any worthy plates or platters fit for public service. They checked my cabinets and refrigerator and 'tut-tutted' quite a lot in disapproval, and I think only the fact that I now did have some milk in the refridgerator for Olivia saved my hide from a legendary tongue flaying.

At length, after making sure that Olivia was clean and obviously loved and well cared for, to the best of my ability, the church ladies left us in piece, but it wasn't long before I saw yet another pair of them coming up the walk. This continued all morning and into the early afternoon, and before I realized it there were at least two dozen people in my house talking with me and sharing their 'extra' food they'd brought. 

There were cakes, pies, and desserts that to this day I don't know the names of, and every other sort of main and side dish. I didn't have many places for folks to sit, and my very ratty sofa received a number of dubious looks, but somehow folks made themselves comfortable wherever they could and little Olivia made a lot of new admirers. She always was a delightful and well-behaved child.

By the time I cleared out the last of my unexpected guests at 5 p.m., I was still left with a mound of leftover food that would only just barely fit into the refrigerator. We ate leftovers and enjoyed them greatly over the next week. I had also made five new 'business arrangements', none of them were large accounts, but this gave us just enough regular income coming in now to settle our irregular eating habits. I was actually even able to start saving a very little bit of money. 

For all of that winter, I think quite a number of folks were 'keeping an eye' on us, and we received several more canned and boxed food donations that while not being of critical necessity for us, allowed me to spend some small amounts of money elsewhere. Olivia had desperately need new clothes for awhile and there was enough left over to buy a few cheap pieces of well-used but sound furniture. Olivia was also now in a pre-kindergarten 'play' program sponsored by The Church three days a week and this let me take on a few more part time jobs. 

I was not a member of the Church, and really had no strong religious feelings one way or the other, but they were willing to spend their time and effort to help Olivia and myself without asking for anything from me in return. I still didn't attend their Church much afterwards, but I let it be clearly known to them that I owed them a considerable debt of gratitude and I would always help them in return any way I could when I was able to do so in the future.

******

Our next year was a bit better still. I had the offer now of a full time bookkeeping position with the small County Tax Office that paid me a livable wage, that along with my part-time jobs, finally gave us a comfortable and secure income. I made some loud noises about 'paying off a few of my debts' but no one would accept a dime of repayment from me. 

"Return the favor to others in need," was the usual answer I got, and I was more than happy to do so. I'd ask Father Al, or one of the horde of church ladies about whom they knew of in town that needed assistance that week and once told, I'd attend to it. That's pretty simply how things worked in Lovett; nearly everyone was poor and if someone had anything extra to share they did, without thought of payback or making a big scene or production out of their charity or generosity.

Christmas 1984 was fairly memorable for us. As I still did not own a car, my parents drove down to spend the Holiday with us, and they bore a couple of interesting gifts for us. I rarely got to see them, but did try and keep in touch over the phone (I could afford one now). Becky was back in town, they said. She was separated from Tony and they hadn't gotten many details from her, but they got the impression some abuse was involved. Tony apparently drank and partied very heavily still, and it was affecting his Pro career. Far from being the expected Superstar, Tony was barely holding on to his roster spot and his team's coaches and fellow players were all pretty much fed up with his act. She was preparing for divorce and seemed eager to hear the latest news of Olivia and myself and what we had been up to.

"She's made a number of bad mistakes," Mom said, "but she seems to want to try and put things right. She still believes that the two of you have a chance. Was I "willing to come up and see her again in a few weeks?" 

I really wasn't sure, but I put the question to Olivia: did she want to see her Mommy? Of course she did. I agreed that I would try to come up and visit her in mid-January; I had some important reports that would be due by the end of that month and I would be unable to take a few 'days vacation until those were done. 

Olivia made out like a bandit and received a full sack of toys and lovely dresses from 'Santa' and her doting grandparents. Dad had one final gift for me. He had received a large unexpected holiday bonus check from his work, and had used a great deal of it in buying me a new computer, an Apple IIe with a floppy disk drive. I was in heaven.

The year end property tax report took me longer to do than I had hoped, and it was almost the end of January before I could take a week off, borrow a car, and drive back up to Brownwood. A nagging little voice had been bothering me about delaying so long to visit Becky, but I was still very angry with her for the way I had been cuckolded and abandoned, and I thought the extra wait would do her good. 

Instead I arrived to find that I was just two days too late. Tony had driven down to effect a reconciliation of his own, and in the end (and with some private misgivings expressed to my parents) she had returned to him.

For some reason this new loss seemed to uncover all of the old hurt and anger that I had mostly rid myself of and had largely successfully buried. I let Olivia have a delightful evening with her grandparents and we returned to Lovett first thing the next morning.

*******

I threw myself back into my work and started to spend evenings converting my old Apple II financial programs into much better IIe ones able to use its new programming features. I also had far more memory to play with now as well. With the floppy drive I could now save different versions and do testing of new program features for the first time. By Easter I had a working suite of accounting applications that would share a common data directory and could be easily maintained and updated. With a disk for each customer that I had, I could now do 4-5 hours worth of manual handwork in about an hour using this new improved program. 

I was sure it was better than anything else that was commercially available. I decided to risk $25 for a small three-line text ad advertising my program buried in the back of a national magazine for Apple users and waited to see what would happen. Initially nothing happened; it seems to take months from the time a magazine page is 'laid out' at the publishers to when it actually comes out in print. I spent months looking at a mailbox that was empty except for bills, until one day things started to happen. 

That first week I had five orders for my program, each at $49.99. Elated, I copied my disks for the customer, checked that they were good and mailed them out the same day. The next week there were about ten orders, then over twenty the following week. Finally I averaged about fifty sales a week for the next month or two. Soon it was taking all of my spare time just copying disks and I reluctantly shelled out several hundred dollars of my new fortune to buy a second floppy disk drive to vastly speed up my disk duplication.

When orders started to taper off, I realized that I had only placed that one ad in only that single month's issue, and I had to madly phone the publisher to see if I could squeeze in a last second slightly larger ad for the very next issue, and each of the months following. Orders were soon rolled back in once more and I was quickly quite a bit behind on keeping the orders tracked, making sure that payment checks had cleared and their order shipped

Soon, my own finances were now an incomprehensible mess, but fortunately it was now time for me to 'return one of my favors'.

At the height of the madness, I received a phone call from one of the Church Ladies asking by any chance if I had any work for a young lady with a young daughter that "needed help". The only possible answer was, "Absolutely. Yes, send her over!" 

Marsha Waters and her four year old daughter Ashley became Black Enterprises employee's number #3 and #4. Olivia was always trying to help me put diskette label stickers on (usually wrong) and was our second employee, but she was cheap payroll and accepted milk and cookies cheerfully instead of cash payment.

I put Marsha right to work to straighten out my fulfilled orders from ones that hadn't been shipped yet. We worked out an hourly salary that was frankly probably inadequate and I warned her that the 'boss' was probably insufferable and that little Olivia was undoubtedly a better conversationalist than I was. 

Forewarned about all of my likely evils, Marsha jumped right into the job and in no time had my clutter organized by the end of the week. Once I figured out how much money I actually did now have in the bank, I offered Marsha an immediate pay raise, which she laughingly accepted.

Olivia and Ashley took their new jobs very seriously. They were to be good girls and play nicely with each other, which they did and soon became best friends and rarely ever squabbled or fought over any toy. I asked Marsha what her living situation was and was told that they were staying temporarily at The Church until she could find a place to stay. Like me a few years ago, she had driven into town escaping a "bad relationship situation". Her car had broken down right in front of The Church and she about had a heart attack when a bunch of naked folk ran out towards her offering to help. I laughed and filled her in a bit about the very weird town we lived in, and rested most of her fears. 

"The church folks are very, very strange, but there is not a bad heart among them."

Without fully realizing it I invited her to make other, much closer arrangements.

"I have at least four bedrooms in this house and we only use two of them. Would you like to stay here for a few days until you can find something better?" 

To my surprise, she immediately accepted, and suddenly Olivia and I had roommates. I warned her about the dubious plumbing in the house, but thought I could now probably afford to do something about fixing it, and directed my new assistant to find a phone book and call The Church to see what plumber they would recommend. 

That's another of the odd way things work in this town, there is no yellow pages, and no 3-1-1 Information. Everyone just calls The Church, 24/7, and every problem seems to somehow get resolved. It took nearly a week and an eventual bill for services rendered that exceeded my regular monthly salary at the Courthouse, but Marsha and the girls could now take a hot bath. It was money very well spent.

Marsha learned everything I could teach her about computer operation within a week, and soon she could handle everything all by herself, and seemingly without any stress, unlike when I had handled things all by myself. I soon left most of the routine business operations to her and I started to spend more time programming, each month adding a new feature or function to my accounting package suite. That fall, after all the new State and Federal tax and accounting laws were announced for the following year, I incorporated all of my new changes and had Marsha generate a mailing to all of my customers offering the "New Updated for 1985" Suite. Previous purchasers could "upgrade" for only $19.99, otherwise new sales would be for $59.99. It sold like hotcakes, and after a favorable Product Review for my Suite appeared in a major computer magazine, our average orders per week began to double. 

The PC era had not yet really begun; if bookkeepers or accountants had a computer in those early days, it was undoubtedly an Apple. The IBM PC was starting to knock on the door, but it wasn't quite there yet. Eventually even Marsha started to look a little frazzled around the edges and we started using a few more part-time folks to handle the simple disk duplication job to free her time up to do other things.

It was nice having a woman around the house again, the cooking certainly was much improved, and she tended to do Olivia's and my laundry for us without even asking me about it. She didn't talk much at all about her personal life either, but I know her first paycheck went to the only lawyer in Lovett to start the divorce proceedings that then seemed to drag on for years. Her ex lived in Austin and apparently had money enough to keep filing motions and counter-motions on every little detail that kept her case tied up forever. He was fighting for custody of Ashley and Marsha was determined that would never happen. Supposedly she had enough documentation to prove an 'abusive relationship' and 'child mistreatment' that in a fair courtroom he would stand no chance at all, so he tried to wear her out financially, hoping the expense would break her and force her to settle on his terms. Marsha was quite willing to spend every cent I paid her, and more, to protect her daughter. Her lawyer here gave her a reduced rate, but the expense was still mind-boggling. 

I told her she could continue to live with me rent free until the long sordid affair was finally settled, and she gratefully accepted.

********

Marsha and I did not have any relationship at all outside of work. We were friends, soon very close friends, but not lovers. She was in no way emotionally ready for another relationship, and I probably wasn't really either. We were two fairly angry people who were unhappy about our early skirmishes in the life long "Battle of the Sexes". We got along well as friends and co-workers, but even an accidental overly long hug would trigger in each of us the urge to retreat. I got to often watch her walking around the house in just a shirt and panties, and sometimes even got a nipple peek from inside a bathrobe, but I kept my behavior gentlemanly at all times.

With the girls growing a bit older and nearly ready for kindergarten now, I, for the first time, began to think about making a few 'quick and dirty' educational games for the girls to help them learn. I had bought a few programs other people had written but I hadn't been very impressed, so I thought it would be simple to make a few of my own. Silly me.

I now found myself in the arcane land of assembler language and archaic screen graphic commands. This was all new territory for me and I had to learn an entirely new set of skills that I hadn't needed before for simple mathematical based accounting programs. I had to buy an entirely new Apple IIe just so I could get some programming time, as our other computer was now seemingly in constant use for the business, often both day and night. I was tempted to also buy a Commodore 64 as well, as it becoming the leading 'game playing' home computer, but I decided to wait a little bit. One set of problems at a time.

It took forever, but I wrote a nice little graphics based program that would teach the A-B-C's with slightly animated characters that would make smiley faces if the correct answer was chosen or a sad frown with a tear if the wrong answer was selected. The girls absolutely loved it and wanted to play their game nearly all day long. Marsha asked me if I was going to try and sell that program, too, and I stopped dead. I hadn't even considered that option, and I didn't even know if there was really that much of a market for that sort of thing. 

I put another small ad in a couple of magazines and spent a few days "cleaning up the program a bit" to make it vaguely a bit more professional looking.I and figured I'd sell maybe a hundred or two at my $7.99 listed price. It ended up selling 20,000 copies, and I had to buy another new computer just to run the disk duplication for this program.




It's All in the Game Ch. 02



More interestingly, I received an interesting letter from the publishers of an Apple magazine that every month included a disk with a few new programs on it. They offering me a one-time payment of $2000 for every program that I could send them for publication for that monthly magazine.

This presented interesting options. A few days of work, and I wouldn't have the time, labor or expense of disk duplication or packaging and shipping. Sure, I might make more if I marketed it myself, but that could be risky, and I could use the time that was saved for other programming. I talked it over with Marsha and she agreed to handle all of the daily operations from now on to free 100% of my time for programming. 

It took me five weeks to come up with my first game for the magazine, but a lot of that time had been spent learning some new faster ways to code graphics plus fixing a screen bug that defied all attempts at troubleshooting for an entire week. I was starting to really understand computer graphics, and had thought of a neat trick or two that might make my next game a whole lot better.

My next game, "Billy and the Mushroom Cave", took only three weeks to create and was certainly a major improvement. I had wanted a fun game that I thought my daughters would play (I already began to consider Ashley as part of the family) and didn't want any violent elements to it. The plot was simple: Billy wanted to pick some mushrooms, but once picked the mushroom would grow back slightly faster and eventually Billy would have to run home to empty his basket before picking any more. Eventually, the cave becoming totally filled with mushrooms with Billy stuck outside. Game over. Simple mindless fun, and I forgot about it almost immediately after I sent it off in the mail and started on my next one, a variant of this that had a little girl picking five kinds of flowers from a field to fill orders for her Mother's Flower Shop.

The fan mail flooded in, mostly from other jealous and appreciative programmers who hadn't discovered my 'side scrolling' trick, so that the main character could walk forwards and backwards in the game but would always stay fixed in the center of the computer screen. Apparently this was something brand new, and within months nearly all of the new games for the Apple market now featured this trick.

Another fan offered me a flat $500 offer if I would grant him the Commodore-64 'rights' for this program. I said 'sure' and cashed the check. Supposedly, with only minor game-tweaks, this new version of 'Billy's Mushroom Cave' supposedly sold over 25,000 copies at about ten dollars each. Sure I can count… but since I didn't have the time (or multiple computer systems) to make conversions for other computer systems, I just chalked it all up to 'Free Money'. But I did require slightly better contracts for other game conversions in the future.

I delivered a new game every month for a little over a year until the Apple II market had declined enough to put the magazine out of business. My accounting suite was also declining steadily in sales and it looked as if the "fat days" were over. Pretty soon our revenue in was just about the same as our expenses. We had to eliminate the part time help entirely for a while and soon there wasn't really much even to keep Marsha busy on a full-time basis, but I of course kept paying her full time anyway. She was family.

It was time to rethink things a bit. We had gotten much too comfortable and hadn't done nearly enough strategic thinking and let ourselves become "obsolete". The Apple II market was virtually dead by late 1986.I, in fact its real creator, Woz, was no longer at Apple at all, and Steve Jobs had been fired by his own company as CEO. For the gaming market it was now either the Commodore 64 or their new Amiga (an insanely brilliant computer ruined by inept marketing) and for business, it was now the IBM PC/XT/AT and so forth, or rather a rapidly growing market of 'clones' from manufacturers no one had ever heard of. 

The PC was not a particularly good game machine, but it was clearly going to completely own the entire business market soon, or at least 98% of it. The Apple Mac seemed like an interesting idea, but it just didn't have enough market share at this point as it was way too expensive for most buyers and marketed a bit too heavily towards academia. It did appeal to the computer snobs but it would probably never have quite enough market share to be worth my time to properly learn. We bought one anyway just to play with it and Marsha used it for years doing desktop publishing for our software manuals and company newsletters and brochures. I did break down and make a Mac version of my accounting suite but it never paid for the time it took me to create it, let alone the costs of advertising.

I made a couple of Commodore-64 and even a game for the Amiga, but they didn't pay back much in the way of big profits either, but at least the sales covered the advertising costs. There were already too many other folks doing the exact same thing and demand was becoming pretty tightly close to the supply of available games.

With a heavy heart, we decided to retire all Apple and Commodore development and convert everything to the PC. I had to buy all new reference manuals, naturally, and we bought two brand new Compaq 386 computers that just about cleaned out our entire company savings. I began to make jokes that Ralph was going to show up on our doorstep with another Care package of canned goods again sometime soon. I had long ago cut my bookkeeping hours for the County down to just a very minimal part-time, my salary much reduced accordingly, and now it looked very much like I might have to return to full time work there to keep the roof over our heads.

Slowly, my 'Updated for the PC' Accounting Suite got hammered into some sort of usability, and using the very bottom scrapings of my savings I placed a few small ads in several PC magazines. At that moment when finances looked especially tight, Marsha handed me her own savings of about $1200 to help keep us afloat for another month. I didn't find out until about a week later that she had sold her car to come up with this money for us. 

My feelings were a little hurt that my employee had had to "bail her boss out", but I got over it. She believed in "us" and it was my job to deliver the goods.

Now it was a race to see if I could get the last bugs out of my conversion and make everything look corporate and professional before people actually paid me money for my not quite finished product. It was a very near thing and the last week was a sleepless nightmare for everyone. Marsha had designed a retail box with some attractive packaging and put the final touches on a quality documentation manual for the Suite. Our previous user documentation in the Apple days had been very minor and wholly inadequate in comparison.

When at last the first of the orders came in, the feeling of relief was overwhelming. We had a small ceremony in which four packages of Ramen Noodles were burned in the fireplace and we all swore that we would never eat them, ever again (let alone live on them solely for nearly a month). It was not quite the overnight success that our original Apple version had been; the business software market was maturing and there were many more alternate choices now, but still it looked as if we would be financially back in the black again, if not quite rolling in the green.

We paid off some of our 'past due' bills and got settled again into productivity once more. Marsha designed a beautiful four page promotional flyer that described our new PC Accounting Suite and we scraped up the money to have 5000 of them printed. Marsha then printed mailing labels for every single previous customer we had ever had and set the girls to mailing out the flyers. We didn't win back everyone, but we gathered enough repeat customer business to remove our financial worries for the summer, so that I could still stay part-time once again with my day job so that I could put in some serious programming time to develop some new products.

Game designing for the PC was not half the fun it had been on the Apple. Everything seemed to take at least twice as long and the results only looked half as good. The less I say about the EGA graphics card format the better. 

I was not a happy camper, but at last I had done 'tolerable' conversions of all of my Apple II and Commodore games for the PC, which fit onto two floppy diskettes. Marsha created a nice packaging coversheet for the bag (we still used mostly Ziploc bags for packaging in those days) and she designed a catchy 4x6 inch magazine advertisement proof ready for mailing out to a few magazines. 

Sales of my 'Black's Classic Game Package' were slow, but steady and we got a surprising amount of fan mail from folks who had remembered and played the original versions and were delighted to have "their old favorite games" now available on the PC. I think Marsha's ad ran for nearly two straight years before sales finally declined enough to make the expensive advertising costs prohibitive. Then I offered the package for free to a Shareware company and for another few years we received small, but steady royalties.

I started working on a few new games, but nothing spectacular until I leaped at the opportunity to upgrade both of our Compaq's with the brand new (and far superior) VGA card. The old EGA cards enjoyed a proper Viking funeral in our fireplace. 16 colors at 640x480 or 64 colors at 320x200 with 256kb of video memory doesn't seem like much now, but it meant goodbye to stupid block characters entirely. You could now have real smiles on faces and show semi-realistic movement and far, far more background detail. 

More computer technical reference manuals were ordered and I buried myself deep in them, especially enthralled at the possibilities of doing 3D graphics rendering. Instead of just having two directions available for a character to move, all six were now possible. Sure, this had been done years ago on the Apple, but now with VGA graphics it could be done on the PC where it looked quite good!

Sitting with Marsha that Christmas of 1987 while watching our girls playing with their new toys I received two unexpected bombshells. First, her ex was finally throwing in the towel and her divorce should be finalized soon. Great news! Second, would I be at all put out or angry if she began to date again? There was a particular man (not me) that she was kind of interested in and would I be greatly upset if she started a relationship with him? 

I think she could tell by the crestfallen look on my face that the answer was really "Yes," even while my mouth was saying silly things like, "Sure, go ahead," and, "No problem." She confided later after the girls had been put to bed (they shared a single bedroom now and hated to be parted from each other), that she did have 'feelings for me', but that she was too scared of something 'going wrong' and thus also ruining our perfect working relationship. 

Frankly I did understood her reasoning; I had much the same fears myself and earlier reached an identical conclusion that I'd rather keep her nearby me, but platonically, rather than risk losing her.

This was, of course, a terrible mistake that we both regretted for almost the next ten years.



It's All in the Game Ch. 03



1988 began quite well, and the year just seemed to fly by. Marsha's new romantic relationship didn't quite pan out, nor did the one after it, but she was back in the game to stay and by the end of the year had a new steady boyfriend, Jeff, that seemed to suit her well enough that she often now sometimes spent nights at his home. Despite all odds, I found that I liked him and we got along well together. 

He was a member of The Church and was a nudist at home, but always wore clothes when visiting our house. I just never could get into the whole nudism thing and my pasty white skin virtually never saw the sun, but I didn't begrudge anything that made someone else happy in their own life. Now that I was eating regular meals again I was also putting back on weight and was getting very self-conscious of that, but not quite enough to diet. 

They stayed together for several years, but she never quite 'moved in' with him although her clothes were about evenly scattered between the two houses fairly quickly. She also sometimes 'forgot' what house she was in, and I got a good many looks at a very pretty naked Marsha walking down the hall or into the kitchen before she'd laugh and go put on a robe. I swear, sometimes I think she even did it on purpose!

Don't say it -- I was an idiot in those days!

This year also saw the genesis of my first and possibly favorite game 'series', and I owed it all to Olivia and Ashley. They were playing together one Friday night right after dinner and Marsha had gone out for the evening with Jeff. I was sitting in the living room rather low on ambition and reading a graphics manual while listening to the girls play. To my surprise their conversation seemed more and more interesting than my book and soon I was listening to them with fascination. 

It seemed one of their dolls, "the Princess", needed to get on a horse and ride to get help for her father the King, but something was always going wrong, and some last piece she needed always remained missing. It was an elaborate story telling plot that the girls were concocting and the Princess had to do a great many quests and gather many necessary things first before she could actually ride off to save her father.

It all clicked to me at once. A graphic 'Quest' story that both boys and girls could enjoy that didn't involve much (if any) hacking and slaying of nasty monsters to complete. Solving riddles and getting helpful information from other game characters would be far more important than slaying dragons or leaving a battlefield covered with dead Orcs. By their bedtime, I had the entire storyline worked out in my head, and I started coding a rough modular outline of all of the individual quest steps. I worked all night long without a break until Marsha returned the next morning. She loved the new concept and, with the help of the girls, created a map for me that contained all of the locations that would be travelled to in the game, all the necessary 'clues' and important characters with the information essential to complete the different quest stages. Finally we ran everything by Olivia and Ashley to make sure that the game's plot pathing was all directly linear and easy enough for a child of eight to twelve to follow.

Now the serious programming began as I created a 3D modeled world, very rough but 'state of the art' for the time, and slowly the game took shape. The hardest part of course was the 3D graphics, the tools available to me were not that sophisticated and I soon began to grumble about wanting to create my own 'graphics engine' and manipulation tools instead. 

The game took six months to code, and that only really covered about a third of our original plot outline. No matter, I had something done to show for my twelve to eighteen hours a day of programming during this time, and it was a game I was very, very proud of. 

Marsha pulled out all of the stops and found a local artist to paint us a box cover and a pretty piece of fantasy art to be used for the advertising. I asked Marsha to create a 1/4 page ad proof for "Princess Quest", but the result was so pretty that we sent it out as an outrageously expensive full page ad for several of the new computer game magazines. This expense once again nearly bankrupted us and almost forced us into eating Ramen noodles once again, but if anyone cared they didn't mention it. 

That done, I launched into another ten months of creating "Princess Quest II" that continued the next third of the story. I could have done it a bit faster except SVGA video (1024x768 with 256 colors and up to 2Mb of video memory) had been launched and I had to redo a big chunk of my modified graphics engine. Prettier and more beautiful is always better.

PQ-I was an overnight sensation, and probably broke all sales records for a 'self published' computer game. The industry reviews of the game were all fabulous, with the words 'genius' and 'truly unique' often repeated by each reviewer. We didn't win 'Game of the Year', or sell the most game boxes, but many folks wrote to us expressing their love for our game. 

Our part-timers were soon back with us, and we were able to give our local printing shop in Lovett nearly all of the work they could handle for a few months just churning out game boxes, maps and the documentation booklet.

We started to get letters of inquiry from software distribution companies asking if we were interested in having a publication and distribution deal for retail stores. I wasn't sure, but Marsha thought that the days of self-publishing software were pretty much over. It was decided that we would split the difference. We continue to design and print the game materials (to help keep our local print shop in business) but we would allow PQ-II to be distributed solely via normal retail channels and 'see what happens'. We would make much less money per box, but maybe we'd sell a whole lot more boxes. Lower Gross but maybe high Net profits, and that is exactly what happened. PQ-II sold over ten times as many boxes as the original had done. 

At last I could quit my 'day job' for good, and I bought Marsha a new car to replace the one she had sacrificed to keep the company afloat when times were hard. For the first time we now had money to go along with our ideas for company growth.

Now we were no longer worried about rent and grocery money, the question started to emerge about what to do with all of this money that was coming in now faster than we could spend it. I bought the house we had been renting for all of these years and dropped a chunk into getting her all fixed up like a proper Victorian painted lady. The small cellar was enlarged to become my main office and programming area for all of my computers. I now had about six and was adding new ones as fast as Compaq could release a newer and faster model. Besides the car I'd bought Marsha, I'd even bought one for myself, a midsized 4WD SUV to handle the piss poor local County roads that could become dangerous quickly in bad weather.

I dutifully started work on PQ-III but the game was really becoming larger than I could now handle alone. I really now needed some programming assistance, but none of the kids locally had the necessary skills as the local high school just had a few tired Apple's and an old 286 computer. As a gift from Marsha and myself jointly, we bought a dozen good Compaq 386/25's for the high school to establish a computer training lab and after-school computer club, and we donated another group of cheaper 386/20's to both the local elementary and middle School so that the youngsters could have an early start at gaining some computer skills.

This was undoubtedly the best money we ever spent. It didn't pay off immediate returns of course, but it set the stage for Lovett to eventually become one of the most 'wired' towns in the country. For help now, I would have to look elsewhere. 

We placed a small help wanted ad around some of the bigger BBS's (sort of the popular public precursor to the Internet - local computer 'Bulletin Boards' where a few users with modems could log in at one time and chat, share files or leave messages for each other). Nearly overnight we started to get resumes from all over the country. We picked out the three best and paid for them to travel down and visit us, and picked two of them to join us as full time employees. Money was relatively unimportant to these newcomers, they just wanted to be able to 'create'. We gave them the opportunity for both.

Dennis, the older of the two, was a better analytical coder than I was and soon handled the lions share of the main programming. He followed my notes for exactly how I wanted the games code modules set up and 99% of the timed churned out exactly what I wanted. The other 1% of the time he usually came up with something better. He was young and barely out of college, tall and extremely thin and wasn't especially sociable; he just lived to code. When he started to 'discover girls', especially the cute, very underdressed ones we had no shortage of here locally, his social skills and manners began to improve.

Clyde, called "Barker" by everyone, was a short roly-poly and flamboyantly happy kid straight out of high school that seemed to be a graphics genius, and instantly had dozens of ideas on how to improve our limited and rather basic graphics design tools. It was too late to change much of PQ-III, but I bought a couple of huge chalkboards for the walls of the basement and we started to plan out what we could do differently for PQ-IV. Barker, despite his youth and lack of an impressive male physique, was a natural babe magnet and soon developed an outrageous and very full social life. He didn't work the insane hours that Dennis and I tended to put in, but his work somehow got 'done' right when it had to be. What more can you ask?

A final new addition came a few months later, literally walking right into our front door. Erica was a want-to-be computer artist and had an excellent portfolio of superb conventional "fantasy" style art. She had driven down to see us from her home in Indiana on virtually no sleep. She didn't have the computer 'experience' we would have preferred, but no one else we had found yet really did either. We took her on-board 'on trial' and she slept mostly on the couch. Dennis and Clyde were sharing the last available bedroom. She learned the necessary skills fast, and contributed enough interesting new ideas that PQ-IV actually turned into quite a different new game entirely.

This new game "PQ-IV: Roger, the Squire" was in much of the same vein as the first PQ trilogy, and took place in the same Kingdom and shared many of the same cast of characters. In fact, this time it was the Princess who was now missing, and undoubtedly much in need of rescue, which the poor bumbling and hapless Squire managed to do in three annual installments, concluded by a Royal Wedding at the end of PQ-VI, as he eventually won the fair Princess's hand and heart.

The girls, getting older every day it seemed, provided the bulk of this new plot line and created many of the sometimes hilarious side adventures. Clyde and I developed a new 3D graphics engine to power this series that took twice as long as we had hoped, but looked in the end about twice as good as we had expected. RtS was a little late getting to our Publisher and we missed the crucial Christmas delivery window to the retail stores, but it didn't matter much at the end. RtS outsold any of our previous PQ titles and won for us our first serious 'Game of the Year' award.

This was the first and last gaming industry show that I would go to for a very long time. If Marsha hadn't been at my side keeping me from running away, I probably would have. I was treated as if I was a rock star, but I didn't know at all how to react. I felt like a small boy dressed up in my fathers best suit wearing shoes several times too large for me. I think it was my appearance at this computer industry trade show that created the lasting public image of me as the 'eccentric and reclusive genius that was very ill at ease with fame and fortune.' I wouldn't at all argue with this.

They were probably exactly correct. Other than my daughter and co-workers, I had no one to share the little joys and triumphs of my life with. I had found out some time before that Becky had finally divorced from Tony (his short NFL career was now over and was considered to be very much an utter failure) and she was living back at home with her mother. I didn't see her on any of my very irregular visits home, but Olivia did go over to her grandmother's house a few times to visit, and we did speak together a few times on the phone. She was doing 'better' and trying to get her life straight. She was back at the local Junior College and hoping to get a better job as a secretary or something in business after graduation in a year or two. 

I wished her well and offered her a little financial assistance if she would accept it, which she gratefully did. Our old times together were not discussed, and that seemed to leave a huge hole right in the center of our conversations, as if each of us wanted very badly to speak of things that we dared not do. I think Olivia and her mother spoke a bit more freely, and the two of them would phone at least monthly now to 'catch up', but Olivia would rarely offer me any details of their conversations. My hurt feelings aside, for the way I had been treated, Becky was still my daughter's mother and Olivia wanted her to have at least a small place in her life.

About this same time, Marsha's long term relationship with Jeff seemed to run its course, highlighted by some sort of disagreement that occurred at the big Lovett Fall Harvest festival on Halloween day. I was not present, but Ashley supposedly was. She naturally told Olivia, who eventually gave me a few very censored account of the details. Supposedly, Marsha had sat for a Fortune Telling reading with Sarah Hampton, Lovett's beloved fabric store and quilt shop owner, and was told a great number of very unsettling things.

That was definitely mistake number one. Anyone with an ounce of common sense knew that Sarah wasn't a 'fake', and while she didn't have the powers that her own mother had allegedly possessed, anything that she predicted would be very, very likely to occur. For the locals, it was very much a case of never asking Sarah any question that you really didn't want to hear the answer for. I liked Sarah a lot, and knew that her gift was erratic and not entirely dependable, but even I had the sense never to ask her anything beyond what the next day's weather was likely to be. Sarah very much had her principles and never volunteered anything that was not directly and specifically solicited from her. 

Her oldest daughter Lorelai didn't have her gift at all (she was already quite troubled enough with other problems) and neither did her youngest daughter Susan, who was the happiest young lady I have ever met in my life. To hear her laugh and joke you would never know that she had been in a wheelchair since she was 10 years old (hit on her bike by a car that ran a stop sign). Lorelai's daughter, Sarah's granddaughter, Lucy, was just a toddler but allegedly she already showed signs of being 'extremely fey'.

Marsha split with Jeff fairly abruptly afterwards, and by the following spring he was engaged and soon married to a nice gal that worked at the horse riding stable on the nudist colony near the beach. She moved the rest of her things back into our house to stay and announced that she was 'done with romance for a while', and later gently rebuffed my one vague attempt for us to go out on a date of our own together.

We already had one 'office romance' as Dennis looked up from his monitor one day to realize that Erica was indeed the prettiest woman that he had ever beheld before. Their romance was fairly hesitant, sometimes comically so, as neither of them possessed much in the way of interpersonal skills. They resolved to try and learn some together, and soon they were very much attached at the hip. Clyde cheerfully gave up his half of the bedroom and took over the sofa, and let Dennis and Erica share the bedroom together. They're a complicated couple and enjoy a bit a drama in their relationship, but they seem to fit each other perfectly and I don't think anyone has ever heard either of them utter a single word in anger to the other.

*****

By 1994, the company had grown way beyond our house. We now had ten full time employees and another dozen or so part-timers that handled the oddball stuff so everyone could remain focused on their core responsibilities. We currently had two very successful game franchises, and a number of smaller games that each added new little pieces of the 'World' we had created. Olivia and Ashley were now young teenagers and were also virtually full time employees themselves, when not in school. 

Olivia had become our 'Keeper of the Keys'; she was the last and final word for what was 'canon' and established game lore for our gaming world. She compiled the master list of every in-game character that players could ever possibly meet, and created for each of them an unique identity, giving each motives (good and not so good) and possibly a secret or two for players clever enough to ask the right questions to discover.

Ashley was the more visual of the two, and soon she was Erica's shadow and learning all there was to know about computer artwork. She became our Art Director and her opinion about a games 'look and feel' was usually the last and final vote. More than once, we tore up thousands of hours of development on a game to fix things until they became 'just right'. Her instincts were very good, and in the long run everything was much better than it otherwise would have been otherwise.

We needed a bigger workspace, a real office where everyone could work without being all crammed in like sardines next to each other. I sent Marsha off to do some office hunting, but there really wasn't much available. Lovett has never been filled with big commercial office buildings, and I think the tallest structure in the city is the City Hall/County Office/Courthouse building that is just four stories tall. Nothing on the Town Centre was large enough, and that mostly left us with the idea of either buying another larger house or else having a brand new building constructed. Everyone grumbled, but no one had the perfect solution, so we decided to suffer in silence for awhile longer.

We also had the problem that we were now a multi-million dollar company, but we were being run like it was still just the four of us. It was getting to the point that all of Marsha's time was being spent doing administration and I was spending more time talking to our CPA and our business attorney than I was doing actual game development. In theory, my job was to 'create concepts' and flowchart a modular software design for the game that the others would then complete into a working game, and I was getting less and less done, and feeling far from creative whenever I got the chance to do it. There was a solution to this, but I was not at all sure I'd like it. Everyone agreed though we needed some sort of 'professional management'. 

I called a company meeting of everyone, including the part-timers, and we exhaustively listed all of the pros and cons of bringing in some more outsiders to help manage things at the expense of maybe losing some of our previous independence. The listing of the Pro's ended up being much longer than the negative. In theory, we could have full time administration being handled by folks who were trained (and hopefully good at it), leaving the 'creative' folks free (and hopefully inspired) to be more inventive. 

We just had to make sure that the new people would fit in well with our rather peculiar company culture, let alone able to deal with the normal weirdness of Lovett. We needed smart, but mentally (and morally) flexible folks, and that seemed to be a hard combination to find. 




It's All in the Game Ch. 03



We ran a small advertisement in the Wall Street Journal) looking for a MBA to handle our business affairs along with a CFO that could take over our accounting (which was now way beyond my ability as just a former bookkeeper to deal with). We got a flood of resumes, but most of the applicants were obviously 'too corporate' for our tastes, but a couple did stand out from the pile. We selected the most promising ten and mailed a long questionnaire that we had devised that was intended for us to better scope out their management styles. The winner, by far, was a videotape that we received from a couple of young graduates with the ink still wet on their MBA and CPA diplomas. 

Thomas and Justin were old childhood friends who had grown up playing our early Apple, Commodore and PC games and loved what we were doing and insisted that they would almost work for us for free, if hired. Each gave a long interview in which they talked about what they liked very much about our games, but also offering some suggestions for how they would recommend we should grow for the future. Most of those ideas were very good ones and agreed in principle with things we'd already discussed earlier in our company meetings.

We held another company meeting and I played the full tape of this interview for everyone, so they could decide if we wanted to give this kids a shot at managing us. It was unanimous; we had our new CEO and CPA. 

That afternoon I gave them a call asking when they could come down for a final interview, and I was told their bags were already packed and we'd see them in about three days. This final interview was just a formality and we welcomed Thomas and Justin into our family. Well, actually, they also both had lovely and talented wives that nearly immediately started work for us as well. 

Thomas became our CEO and overall business guru and his wife Roberta took over all of the HR duties and did a superb job. Justin was a brilliant CPA and became our Chief Financial Officer and his wife Mia soon become our Director of Sales and Marketing, which she was obviously a genius at.

Marsha gladly gave up all of her existing duties and become our Senior Vice President and Director of Special Projects, her main job being our 'coordinator between management and talent'. She was the one who knew what everyone else was doing and made sure that all problems got passed up and down the chain and personally saw to it that everything was handled and resolved properly. 

I retained my nominal title of President of the company, but my working title was closer to Chief Software Designer. 99% of my time could once again now be spent being creative, and I was soon starting to enjoy every single minute of it.

Once we reorganized ourselves, the paperwork for the next few months was a bit of a nightmare. Technically, Black Software Enterprises (our company name) was really just a limited partnership between Marsha and myself. We now needed to form a proper LLC Corporation with a business address other than my personal home. Fortunately, they had a suggestion for that long standing problem that the rest of us had not considered. On the southeastern edge of town there was an abandoned office/warehouse structure that was long closed and empty. With some relatively simple remodeling we could use this as our main corporate office. Behind the office area on the next street was the old large long closed two-story warehouse building which could be redeveloped into large airy offices for all of the development staff, with just a quick walk across the street to pass between the two areas. It wasn't perfect, but it was the best idea anyone had come up with so far, and I agreed.

We bought these properties and moved our corporate management in nearly immediately. I had a nice corner window office that had a nice view of county road leading into town from the beach, but frankly I never used it much. It took a bit longer and a whole lot more money than was expected to refurbish the warehouse into something everyone was happy with that didn't look as much like an old warehouse. It wasn't quite 'Termite Terrace', but the place still showed its age. Everyone took to working while wearing speaker headphones to block the sounds of construction that lasted much of the year, and the renovation wasn't considered 'done' until after Thanksgiving, by which time our number of employees had once again doubled (and would double yet again every year for the rest of the decade).

I designed a large office space for myself upstairs in a far corner of the warehouse that was completely covered on all walls with whiteboards, where I marked notes and comments constantly for our growing listing of games in development and included a small conference table for the brief morning meetings for the head coding staff for each project. It got to the point where folks would just stick their head inside my door take a look at my latest scribbles and run off to their own computers with their work instructions given. This left Clyde and myself more time to focus on our needs for the future and design ever improved graphical engines. 

Dennis was, in theory, now our Chief Coder, but he really had no interest or aptitude for supervising other programmers. We gave him the tricky parts to figure out and let everyone else pretty much report directly to Marsha if there were any problems, and those were rarely ever major ones. With no one actually really cracking a whip, things could be very loose in the "Barn" as we soon called our new home, as we could never really get it heated or cooled properly in any season.

Nearly right from the very start. the corporate dress code started to become extremely casual; in fact once we discovered that the Barn technically fell into the land designated as part of the nudist area, some areas started to quickly become 'clothing optional', especially in the warmer summer months. At first, I worried that this could become a legal problem as we started to get more female employees, but no one but me seemed to think so. Roberta assured me that we were legally covered and protected and to go do something useful other than worrying. Pretty soon, Fridays were designated as 'Pajama Day' and the guys wore boxers with hearts on them (or nothing at all), while the ladies tended to wear lingerie, which was more and more revealing and outrageous as time passed. Productivity on Fridays probably wasn't very good, but we had great employee morale. 

I gave up worrying and made sure the 'Sunny' stickers got posted by all of the main doors, letting folks know there were probably some nude folks running around and cavorting about, and I gave up entirely trying to worry it.

*******

Our new 'Corporate Overlords' as the development folks called our new Management, started to earned their keep nearly immediately. Our next retail distribution contract was much more lucrative, and our money was being more wisely spent. Also now for the first time we now had an effective marketing plan that presented our company in a fun but professional manner to the gaming industry and our public. While our payroll continued to increase, our revenues increased even faster. 

I soon let Thomas and Mia handle all of our tradeshow events and mercifully I was now mostly entirely out of the public spotlight. Roberta was masterful at finding just the right people and gave preference to local 'homegrown' talent rather than hiring outsiders. Certain we could trust her judgment, we soon gave her full and final hiring authority without needing mine or Marsha's input.

There was only one decision Roberta ever made that I disagreed with, but I did not overrule her. She hired Becky as her assistant and gave her the responsible of handling our company benefits package. I'll explain this situation in a moment.

I guess now is as good a time as any to mention one of the reasons why Thomas, Roberta, Justin and Mia fell instantly in love with our town and bonded so closely and quickly with everyone. They were all swingers, and had been 'sharing their love together' since their college days. They together bought a large house of their own, another lovely Victorian that needed "rescuing" which was on the same street as mine, and made no secret of the fact that they all shared the same bedroom. Furthermore, Roberta and Mia were openly bisexual, and anyone who preferred not to become embarrassed soon learned to knock and wait before entering any shut door that both women were behind. I made that mistake once by entering right after a brief knock and caught them frantically occupied in a 69 position, eating out each other right on top of Mia's desk.

I discovered that my ex-wife Becky had joined the company not too long afterwards, suddenly and with considerable surprise on one Pajama Friday morning when I walked over to our main office to ask Roberta about a quick payroll question. Stepping into her office, I found her and Becky both wearing tiny teddie nightgowns with a nearly transparent robe over them. Dark outlines of nipples were easily visible. I was used to seeing Roberta's rather nice dark nipples by now, but the sight of my ex-wife's barely clothed body threw me for a terrible loop. I backed out and left immediately and, when I found I couldn't concentrate at all in my office, I went home to sulk and stayed there in a grouchy mood all weekend.

Marsha eventually knocked on my office door the next Monday and we had a long and very personal chat, the likes of which we had never had before. She dropped the A-Bomb right way and with little preamble.

"You still love her, don't you?" The truth was I didn't know anymore. 

Part of me was still fifteen years old and wanting to take her back into my arms and forgive her once more, but the rest of me (the darker cynical thirty-four year-old part) knew that to trust her yet again would be asking for more heartbreak later. She had betrayed me, and on several occasions. My heart wanted her but my head couldn't trust her one little bit. I was at an emotional impasse, and no longer knew what I wanted to do about much of anything. 

I had one pet project I really wanted to get finished and then I thought I'd maybe take a vacation and try to get myself straightened out. Marsha liked the sound of that, and we had a good long hug together. Then she gave me a very lingering kiss on the forehead that I thought I could still feel an hour later when I finally felt able to concentrate on getting some work done.

My current big master project, the work of several years, seemed patently impossible. I wanted to a huge 3D rendering of our entire kingdom world, where there was not just one possible quest outcome, but players could choose their own destiny out of hundreds of possible opportunities. Many players might want to hack and slash, slaying monsters and become a heroic knight guardian of the Kingdom. Some might instead seek to learn magic and become famed wizards or sorceresses to help serve the Kingdom in other ways. Others might prefer a life of a skilled trade; never once lifting a virtual hand in violence. 

I wanted a world with limitless capabilities, and even for the possibility of other players being able to dial in on a modem to the host player's computer and for friends to be able to adventure as a group together. The Internet was out there, waiting to be used but few people had heard of it and even fewer had the simple easy to use software to access it. That changed with Windows 95, and we ripped up whole chunks of code to allow remote multi-player game play via the Internet.

It set everything back (including my vacation) for at least a year... but it was worth every minute of the wait.

By the early spring of 1997, "The Kingdom of Blackwood" was 98% finished, and my work was more or less done. Only bug fixes, on-line play glitches and the final user documentation remained to be completed before we could release the game for public on-line Beta testing. Tom and Mia were chomping at the bit to promote this anticipated blockbuster and had made arrangements with our distributer to launch the game in two months at the huge E3 Convention in Vegas. 

I had just one task left to do before my vacation break, and it involved a promise I had made to Olivia at Christmas.

Before Christmas, Olivia and I had taken a weekend trip to Houston so she could shop until she dropped at the Galleria, and she had seen a billboard for a DNA testing service with the words, "Who's the Daddy?" Frankly, this was a question that had begun to bother us both, and for Olivia, being a normal and healthy angst-struck 15 year-old girl, this was now very much the burning question in her head. Was I really her genetic father?

Frankly, I did not want to know the answer, as there was no conceivable 'good news' that could result from it. I truly believed that the probable news would be that the asshole Tony had been her sperm donor, and that I had spent my life raising the child of the man who had cuckolded me. I wasn't sure how my ego would take that, but I had made a promise. 

We went to the lab and both gave blood, and now two months later the results were sitting in a sealed envelope on my desk. The envelope, in fact, had been on my desk for several weeks, but I could not bring myself to open it. Now that I had absolutely nothing meaningful left to do before my trip, I had no choice but to open it, which I eventually forced myself to do. I couldn't understand most of what it said for the first two pages of lab results, but the concluding paragraph summed it up succinctly. The odds of Olivia being my genetic daughter were so small as to be nearly astronomical. Tony was Olivia's natural father.

It was exactly what I feared.

I resealed the results and wrote a short note to Olivia, put the papers into a new envelope and put it on the top of Olivia's desk. She was at high school at the moment, but normally came into work every afternoon afterwards. She and Ashley were starting to discover boys and sometimes now got a bit delayed on the way here.

I had to look up the phone number in the company directory, as I had never dialed her up before, and for the first time I called Becky at her desk. I told her of the lab results and that Olivia was likely to be very upset and hurt for a while. I told Becky I was now going on vacation and Marsha had already made arrangements to watch after Olivia (she and Ashley being utterly inseparable), but that 'she would be needing her mother' and for her to please be there for her now. I hung up without saying goodbye, but I did give Marsha a sad hug farewell, telling her I'd keep in touch, but this vacation "just might be a long one." 

And off I went. 



It's All in the Game Ch. 04



I had no particular agenda, and I really had little idea where I would be stopping for each night. My credit card limit was nearly astronomical, and Marsha was going to keep my bills paid while I was gone. It was in Santa Fe, I think, that I traded in my old SUV and bought a brand Ford Mustang convertible, and that was definitely a whole lot more fun to drive. I tried very hard to avoid thinking about much of anything and was largely successful. I drove into California and decided quickly that there was nothing whatsoever I liked about LA so I headed up north. I ended up spending nearly a month at a bed and breakfast hotel that I adored in Half Moon Bay, between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, and I spent the days taking very long walks along the coast or in the nearby redwood forests. Some days I would cruise through Silicon Valley and I secretly did the visitor tours of all of the famous computer tech companies. On other days I'd head into San Francisco or even Marin or Napa counties and play tourist there.

One day, just for fun, I stopped into a big local computer gaming shop in San Mateo and found the place in a total uproar. Apparently it was the launch day for "Blackwood" and the store sold out of its initial two hundred copies of the game in less than an hour. The store was crowded with kids and even adults my age and older raving about the game and its unique game play elements. This gave me the chance to secretly talk to my fans a little bit incognito to find what they liked and, more importantly, what they felt the game still lacked and they wanted to see in the future. My questions probably got too probing, and after awhile I heard someone say, "They, Isn't that Warren Black?" followed by a, "Holy Shit, I think it is." It was time to run, and I left in a hurry, pealing out of the parking lot burning rubber.

A new chapter in the bizarre mythology of Warren Black had begun. Internet sightings of me, like Elvis or Bigfoot, started appearing all over the place as the word got out and it was confirmed in all of the major computer gaming magazines that the crazed and eccentric genius was 'on a sabbatical road tour of the country'. I definitely didn't dare set foot in any more computer stores; it was once again just like I was just a small kid trying to wearing my dads oversized clothes.

Summer came and went, and so did most of the fall. I was still driving around the country pretty much aimlessly, and was just bouncing now among the three coasts, but trying to avoid Texas as much as possible. I visited St. Louis, New Orleans, Atlanta and all the cities of the east coast up to the very tip of Maine. Now I was meandering westwards again, crossing over the cascades and I had stopped for the night in Medford, Oregon. 

I had been calling Marsha about once a week to check up on things, and her hints that she'd like to see me back home 'yesterday' were beginning to tell on me. I was rested, leaner and trim, and even tanned a bit, but I seemingly hadn't resolved any of my personal issues yet. I still wasn't in the mood just yet to go back to work, and I was beginning to wonder if I really ever would be.

My map showed that the most direct way to the coast was a road that hit Hwy 101 near Gold Beach, and not knowing any better, I took it, probably not ten minutes before the local Grants Pass Sheriff's department closed off the road for the winter. The road was bad as it wound through the Coastal Mountains of Southern Oregon, and soon became worse. Now I wished I had my old 4WD SUV back. Pretty soon I realized that this was really just a seasonal logging road through the mountains, unpaved and probably utterly impassable in bad weather, which looked like it was soon on the way.

If the road was bad dry, it became a nightmare when wet. There were no guardrails and I soon didn't do much more than a crawl down parts of the road for fear that I would slip and skid right straight over the edge, sometimes 1000' or more down. When it got dark I didn't dare drive at all, and just stopped there in the middle of the road and slept in the car until the next soggy morning. Suddenly my adventure was a whole lot less fun, and going home was starting to sound pretty good. The rain continued nonstop and there were even hints that ice and maybe next snow would soon follow. I somehow managed to make it about halfway though the Coastal Range when I came into a small town in a central river valley.

My arrival was a wonder and a miracle to everyone, because they had heard that the road had been already closed for the winter, and not one of them on a bet would have driven it even in summer in a two-wheel-drive convertible! I think I became something of a local legend, but I was told repeatedly that I was probably insane for even taking this road in the first place. For one night though, my money was no good in the local tavern, and nearly everyone in the town of about two hundred folks showed up at one time or another to see 'the lucky idiot' that survived the winter drive from Grant's Pass. Apparently most unprepared drivers don't.

By morning I realized I was stuck here for the duration of winter. It was now snowing, and the road would be utterly impassable until at least March, possibly even April. My Mustang was put up on blocks near the tavern, and as far as I know it is still sitting there today. 

The sleeping arrangements were simple. There were a lot of summer cabins in the area for folks who came up for the excellent hunting and fishing, and most of these were now empty, and would remain so throughout the winter. I had no problem renting one of these vacant cabins a few minutes walk from town and was delighted to meet its caretaker, Gloria.

Gloria was a bit younger than me, maybe about 30 or so, and lived in the next cabin up the hill trail from mine. She was an outdoorsy sort of gal, a hunting guide in season and in the winter earned a good living tending after the vacant cabins of the 'summer people', and in her spare time, was a writer working on a novel. She was probably getting a good split of my rent money as well. She was not a classic beauty, or at least didn't give much of a hoot if she had dirt on her hands and she never ever wore any makeup. She did look good in flannel, with a comfortable sized butt and large sized breasts that didn't seem to be encumbered by any bra but still were winning the fight against gravity.

She showed me around the cabin, which was a good sized one that had a huge master bedroom, a big kitchen that one could cook an entire deer in, fireplaces in every room and even a big hot tub on an outdoors fenced patio outside the master bedroom. Gloria joked that she usually spent most winters in this hot tub, as it was the largest one she knew of in the valley. Being neighborly, I told her she was welcome to use it any time she wanted. 

Last, she showed me the underground wine cellar, that I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. There must have been 10,000 bottles inside, at least. The owner, she said with some amusement, was a hot shot Hollywood producer with an unhealthy fondness for underaged girls. He now spent most of his time nowadays in Europe where he could better indulge his tastes, and I was invited to feel no guilt in drinking up 'the 'bastards stock'. I wasn't much of a drinker, but I gave it a good shot that winter and did get an excellent education in appreciating good wines.

I invited Gloria to dinner and she accepted. There was some stuff in the freezer and a few boxes and cans in the pantry, but not a lot, and I made two trips to the local shop to buy whatever looked good and some staples that I would use all winter. Venison and fish, I was told, should be constantly available all winter, but for anything fresh I was encouraged to buy it now because no further groceries would be coming in until spring, and so I did. I was also encouraged to make all of my necessary phone calls now, because sooner or later a storm was going to knock down some of the phone wires up in the mountain passes and they might not get fixed again until spring.

Good idea. I called Marsha to tell her where I was and what sort of mess I had gotten myself into. We had a good laugh and she filled me in on the latest news. The girls were doing fine, and Olivia had almost forgiven me for not being home for her sixteenth birthday, or Ashley's, too, for that matter. Both were now dating and had spent most of their summer nude sunbathing on the beach and flirting with boys, to the slight distress of both of their mother's. The girls had known the 'facts of life' for a good many years and had been on the pill for at least the last two, and were under strict orders that 'if they can't be good, then at least be safe.' 

She had one another more serious topic, but thought it could wait until I got home. However, since I reminded her that was likely to be at least four months or longer in the future, she fessed up.

Her other issue was more of an FYI, that Becky was regularly attending the weekend parties hosted by our swinging corporate management foursome, and had met a very nice local gentleman, and there were rumors it could be 'serious'. I would have expected this sort of news to shock me and put me back into an emotional panic, but for some reason it just didn't. Instead there was almost a feeling of relief, I think.

I finished off our conversation by telling Marsha about my amusing landlady Gloria and her fetish for flannel and long wintery hot tub soakings. Marsha didn't find it quite as funny, saying that it just made her crazy with sexual frustration with everyone fucking like bunnies around her. I hinted that maybe I could do something about that after I got home and got a firm 'I hope so!' in reply. She told me everyone around her was getting laid except for her, and she started to mutter about some 'nude quality time on the beach herself chasing down some young hot things,' or borrowing a few of her 'daughters boyfriends once Ashley and Olivia were done with them'. 

We laughed and said goodbye, and I'm almost certain I heard an "I love you" before she hung up the phone.

There wasn't much else to say about my four month long 'lost weekend' in my snowy cabin in the wilds of Oregon. Needless to say Gloria showed no hesitation in stripping nude in front of me and enticing me to join her for a long hot tub soak, which we ended hours later together in the big oversized bed. After that we were lovers almost daily for the rest of the winter. We had nearly nothing in common and both of us were smart enough to recognize from the start that this was 'just fun' and nothing at all serious. My lovemaking skills, which had never been highly trained to begin with and were now about ten years out of practice, soon became much improved. I was also using the gym equipment every day and taking long walks in the snowy mountain wilderness with Gloria nearly every day that weather permitted. Soon my last remaining bit of belly paunch was gone for good.

Gloria had a troubled teenaged daughter named Debbie that I virtually never saw, always invariably staying at a different friend's house anytime that I went over to their house. I joked once that I guessed that she didn't like this house very much, or else once got a bit too close to the nutbag who owned it. Gloria replied without humor that the terms of the financial settlement precluded her from discussing that matter, and we very quickly changed the subject.

We talked about our love lives, or rather our lack of them, and after quite a few late night tub discussions and post coitus cuddlings, I felt that I had worked out pretty much everything emotional I had wanted to ponder on during this vacation, so in retrospect I don't regret a minute of my time "trapped in the wilds of central Oregon". 

Gloria and I had one last big bang, so to speak, before I left that morning in late March, and although she would never admit it I think she knew she was going to miss my company. She made sure I had her phone and fax number written down in at least eight different places so I couldn't lose them all. I was expected to come back when I could and 'bring my girlfriend with me', and maybe, she hinted, 'we could all have fun in the hot tub together.' I agreed we would try to visit again sometime soon, but that it would probably not be this year.

I was given a ride to Medford in a four-wheel-drive truck by one of the locals who wanted to get some early spring business done and having learning my lesson the hard way, I bought another 4WD SUV to replace my old one that I had traded in for the convertible. I wasted very little time meandering on the road and drove nearly directly straight back home to Lovett, getting back late on a Saturday evening at the beginning of April.

**********

Driving back into town seemed strange to me, as if I had been gone for just a few hours, instead of over a year. Seemingly, nothing much had changed. Our offices all looked good and just the way I had remembered them and my house seemed unchanged as if I had just left it earlier this morning. 

There did seem to be a few cars down the street in front of Tom and Justin's house, and I remembered Marsha's comments about their Saturday night parties. I was in a jovial mood, and glad to be home, so I decided to stick my nose in their door and say "Hi" to everyone. I had a pretty good guess as to what I'd find there, but I figured at least one of the two people I most wanted to speak with would likely be there anyway.

I just parked in my own driveway and walked down the street to their house. Around the back I could hear laughing and splashing sounds from the pool in their back yard, and that sounded like a good place to start and make my hellos. The folks having fun in the pool were a bit too absorbed to pay much attention to me, as was also the cute pair of naked ladies making out on the deck. Perhaps no one quite recognized me, as I was at least sixty pounds thinner now than when I had left over a year ago. No matter.

The back door was wide open and there were a lot of sounds of fun coming from inside there, so in I went. No one was in the kitchen, but the kitchen doorway to the living area provided an excellent view of the frolicking going on in the living room. I had a particularly good view of the bare ass of ex-wife Becky as she was kneeling on the rug in front of a sofa sucking the rather large cock of a gentleman that I didn't recognize. Another dark haired lady I didn't recognize at all either was wearing a leather corset with both hands apparently tied behind her, and was earnestly licking Becky's clit from below. Roberta was bouncing up and down on Justin's cock at the time and happened to look in my general direction. She jumped up rather startled but happy to see me, but I smiled and held up a finger to my lips that I wanted to keep my presence secret for just a little bit longer.

There were quite a few other couples cuddling and enjoying themselves and there even seemed to be a group of four ladies over by the dining room area that were quite enthralled in a daisy chain, each eating out the cunt of another. Becky seemed to have completed her blowjob and now had her head lying in the lap of the gentleman whose cum she had just swallowed, and they were sharing a tender moment as they were whispering to each other and he was caressing her hair.

This was exactly the moment that I had hoped to see, and now my heart knew what my head had figured out quite some time ago, that I was in fact no longer at all in love with Becky. I could watch her now, obviously very much in love with her new man, and not feel any pains of hurt or even regret. This was an unimaginable weight off of my shoulders.

More folks had noticed me now, including Becky, but I just smiled and waved at her and then blew her a kiss, and headed back into the kitchen to get a better view of the action in the dining room. From just a glimpse of ankle, I thought I had recognized my other quarry, and in fact sitting right there in a chair at the side of the dining table was Marsha. She had not joined in the Sapphotic oral circle of lusty young ladies, but was watching the action quite intently and she had her skirt pulled up to her waist and her right hand seemed to be quite busy masturbating herself to the scene. 

I snuck up behind her, put my hands over her eyes and said, "Guess who? I see you couldn't wait even an extra few minutes for me to get home."

She squealed and jumped up and grabbed me, hugging and kissing me closely. The front of her shirt was nearly fully open and I got nicely mashed by a fine pair of breasts in the process. I should go on vacation for a full year more often. Or maybe not... 

I was soon surrounded by the full crop of my more sexually adventurous friends and co-workers who lengthily proceeded to give me very large pieces of their minds about my overly long absence. Marsha, Roberta and Mia enjoyed my verbal reaming enough that they lined up to give me a second round of scolding. Becky then came over and gave me a full hug and kiss and chipped in her two cents worth as well, but soon forgave me long enough to introduce me to her fiancé Edward Spade and their 'partner' Maggie.

Edward had moved into Lovett right before I left on vacation, and in fact had taken over the practice of the only law firm in town. He had been a successful corporate attorney in Houston but had moved here in search of a simpler and slower life; instead he found himself with an extremely submissive secretary and a woman who had become his soul mate. This would be the third marriage for each of them, but there wasn't a single person who doubted that this one was going to last for keeps.

I got comfortable on the sofa with Marsha right next to me (her shirt still mostly wide open) and the partying pretty much died down for awhile as we all filled in for each other the events of the last year. Business was good, probably much better than good, but all that could wait until Monday when I'd be at the office. I was warned, though, not to try and use the main development conference room on Mondays (apparently now 'Moanday'), as it was the now the resident home of a very popular oral-only orgy for the staff. I had to laugh hysterically at this and wondered how any work was now getting done at all! Morale was apparently still very, very good among our employees.

Soon, though, Marsha began to squirm very impatiently and before I knew it I was being towed out the front door after making some very hasty farewells as Marsha rushed me back home and into our house as fast as she could, and the trail of clothing started right at the front door. There was no conversation whatsoever for quite a long time, as we made total and unrestrained love to each other for the first time.

Cuddling in bed afterward, Marsha just said simply, "It's all settled now, isn't it?"

"Yes, I think it really all is. I just had to know for sure in my heart that I was 100% emotionally all done and finished with Becky, and that someone else now held that place in my heart. I know now that I love you, and in fact have loved you for a very long time now, and I never wish to be parted from you again."

"Well it's about time!" She said with a smile, and we kissed and started round #2, which was even better than our first. 

I gave her more details of my 'lost weekend' trapped in the mountains, and gave a frankly candid blow by blow of my education in the skilled hands of Gloria which earned me a few good-natured smacks, but she didn't seem too terribly jealous. I gave her some kidding in return, as I got the impression that she hadn't been entire celibate herself over the last year. She did eventually admitted (with the help of a little tickling) had she had been attending Roberta and Mia's parties for a while and 'sometimes participated... a little'. Being constantly around so many openly bisexual women had made her a bit curious, she admitted, and this curiosity, once satisfied, had become even appealing. 




It's All in the Game Ch. 04



"Would that be a problem?" Marsha asked me seriously.

"Just as long as I get to watch," I said with a leer, and that started another round of wrestling that culminated with a very successful round #3. 

We spent just about all of Sunday in bed, crawling down a time for two for drinks and snacks, but soon ending up right back in bed again. I did get a couple of ground rules established for our relationship.

Having waited over ten years to obtain Marsha as my lover, I wanted to make her also my wife, and as such I was unwilling (at this time) to share her at all in any way with other men - and that most definitely included penetration. Despite living in Lovett for most of my adult life, I was still a little bit skittish with the whole open sexuality thing, let along organized polyandry. I was growing up a bit now, but there was still a good deal of the adolescent kid left in me, one that had been brought up on old-fashioned small town morals. I think this would soon start to change, especially as I had promised to spend much less time in front of a computer monitor and 'live a little bit'. I even agreed that we could attend an occasional Saturday party and 'do a bit of watching together'. I just wanted to make sure our relationship was solid and stable first before getting into anything remotely exotic, and Marsha laughingly agreed.

Marsha had a few compromises for me to make as well. First, there would be no more working around the clock at work. I was now on a very fixed 9-5 schedule during the week and not allowed to work more than 4 hours on Saturday and never on Sunday. This was fully enforced by her or there would be Hell to pay! Secondly, Marsha had started attending The Church in my absence and had found it extremely personally fulfilling. I didn't have to go with her, but she would take it as a big personal favor if I would attend with her at least occasionally. The fact that she had my cock in her mouth while asking was a very great motivation for me to agree, and I did go with her the next Sunday. I was extremely uncomfortable at first, the idea of being nude in public made me extremely nervous at first. But as The Church (just like the Barn) was inside the boundaries of the Nudist Colony and everyone else was naked there also, I quickly got over my embarrassment. 

It was nothing like any church service I had ever attended in my life, everything was very "new age", and there was little talk of God (and nothing at all of Jesus). Instead as I discovered over the next few months the focus was on honesty, trust and all of the other ways of making one's self a better person inside. I found a lot of value in this, and Marsha and I began to make even closer ties with The Church and its community that had helped us in over a thousand ways over the years and had never asked for anything in return.

Getting back into my office on Monday, most of my whiteboard notes were gone, already implemented into existing or developing projects. I stuck my head inside our big conference room around noontime and definitely established that not a lot of work was getting done at the moment (usually more than made up for later, I was assured), and I spent most of the day saying 'Hi' to old employees and friends and meeting all of the new folks; there were a lot of those, mostly working in our new customer service department that handled problems for our wildly successful on-line game. The last few hours of the day I spent feverishly scribbling new notes for several different projects that I had devised while on Sabbatical. The key one being a Massive Multiplayer Game that could have at least several thousand players all adventuring in Blackwood simultaneous via the Internet. That day, the concept was probably impossible, but we were going to find a way to make it work - and later we did!

I did start one new 'community improvement' project right away, a few blocks away just off of the northern side of the town center was an old 1920's movie theater that had been closed for decades. It had glorious art deco features, inside and out and lovely external neon sign lighting that just cried out for repairing. I soon discovered that the Hanging Judge personally owned this property and refused under any inducement to sell... but she would give me a month-to-month lease to use and even renovate the theater, within certain very strict limits. The vacant shop next door to it I could buy outright and we started the long slow renovation process. This vacant shop was planned to become a coffee shop/snack bar annex for folks to meet and eat before and after the shows. 

The plan is to acquire a library of 35mm 'cult films' and show those midnights on Friday and Saturday with free admission, and get a popular current run movie or two to show during the day and evenings on weekends at $1 or something like that. We haven't found our Theater Manager yet, but since this is Lovett, I'm sure the perfect candidate will suddenly appear out of nowhere the moment we really need him or her.

********

Later that summer at the Lovett Fourth of July Picnic, I was walking with Marsha hand in hand and enjoying the view. Marsha was topless, but then again, nearly every other lady within sight was as well, (and some were bottomless as well) when she saw her quilt shop friend Sarah and bounced over to greet her warmly. They chatted for a few minutes and I took the opportunity to chat with her granddaughter Lucy who was now about seven or so.

"It's going to be big, you know, huge. The game you're thinking about. It's going to make the town and you a lot of money, more than anyone can ever spend, so you can buy me an ice cream the next time you see me. I like Marsha, and so does Gramma - I'm glad she told her to 'wait for you'. You can be such a poopie-head sometimes, but you're getting much better. Can I be the ring girl at your wedding? And get the lemon cream frosting for her cake, it's going to be a very hot day and if she got the butter cream frosting it would go bad and some folks would get sick eating it." 

With that she kissed me on the cheek and went back to her grandmother. Lucy was obviously going to be a very scary young lady when she grew up.

********

Our wedding that August was indeed the hottest day of the year with Lucy as our ring bearer, and yes, yes the lemon cream frosting did hold up just fine although my chocolate frosted grooms cake became a wet sticky mess. I wish she'd warned me of that, and, yes, she got all the ice cream her Gramma would let her have the next time we met.

The wedding ended up being a double wedding of sorts, David and Becky said their vows with Maggie as their ring-bearer (she was well qualified - I've never seen so many erotic piercings in my entire life) and then Marsha and I together said ours. The vows were each quite long as each couple was required to write their own. Neither bride wore a wedding dress, per se, and each wore a matching outfit that consisted of just a long veil for their hair and a white garter belt with white hose and heels. For the audience this made them quite overdressed, but gloriously beautiful. 

I'm afraid us men were quite nude except for bow ties around the neck. This was apparently the more traditional wedding attire, but by now I was pretty used to this and even stranger customs.

Later that evening, after all of the partying and a very long sunset walk on the beach, we were alone together in our bed and I finally received an answer to the question that I had posed to Marsha right after my July 4th meeting with Lucy. What exactly had Sarah told her all of those years ago that got her so upset and made her break off her romance that at that point showed every sign of being extremely serious?

"Sarah told me that I would never find true happiness with him, that like your relationship with Becky, each was really the wrong fit for our hearts. He would marry another soon and be happy, but if I would wait for a while longer still, the true love of my heart would also discover that I was also his."

Really, there was nothing more that ever needed to be said after that!