Deedee

Today would have been my friend's 84th birthday.  She died three years ago, and I didn't even mention it in my blog.  To be fair, I had literally just arrived in New Zealand and was dealing with my pop-up family, but it is high time I made up for it.

I met Deedee when I was 14 and she was 50  Of course, I didn't know how old she was at the time; I only found out later that she had attended the same high school as my father, and then I found out she was one year ahead of him because he was in her yearbook.  Actually, to go right back to the beginning, when we first met I didn't even know she was a woman.

Christmas 1982, my parents bought us a brand-new Atari 1200XL computer with all the peripherals.  Why they did this is still beyond me: they didn't have any money, none of our friends had a home computer and there was no guarantee we'd actually use it.  Sure, we had an Atari 2600 game console, so perhaps they thought it would play better games?  (It didn't.)

The peripherals consisted of a floppy disk drive (considered optional even though the system didn't have a hard drive!), a dot-matrix printer and this crazy thing:

My brother and I literally had no idea what it was for, but we discovered that if you connected it to the computer and whistled into one of the rubber cups, random characters would appear on the screen.  I'm embarrassed to say, but this kept us entertained for *weeks* before I finally read the manual to discover it was a "300 baud acoustic-coupled modem."  "Acoustic coupled" meant you dialed a phone number and then stuck the handset into those rubber cups!

"Baud" meant bits per second, and one character was 8 bits, so 300 baud meant it could download 2,250 characters per minute.  A screen held 2000 characters, so it took nearly a minute to update one page (and there were no graphics).  Someone actually posted a YouTube video showing how painful this was:  

https://youtu.be/gnAAJ1FGudE?t=106

Of course, this only worked if you had someone to call, and it was another 6 months before the movie "War Games" came out to show that you could use one of these to break into highly secured government networks and override the launch codes.  (It was also 16 years before Google was invented.)  I did dial into Compuserve but it wasn't a local call, and when my parents got the next phone bill they put a stop to that.

Somehow--and I have no memory how--I did find out about some local bulletin board systems ("BBS" as we called them) and dialed in. I discovered people posting messages on all sorts of topics, and I was immediately hooked.  If my parents thought I'd use the computer to play better games, they must have been sorely disappointed that I was using it to read text scrolling very slowly across the screen.  And I spent every free moment doing it.

One particular bulletin board had a higher level of discourse than others, and I lurked in the background for a month or so before I couldn't contain myself and I just started typing.  The messages had a character limit and I ended up writing 27 messages in a row. 35 years later, it's still cringe-worthy, and it immediately got me banned from the BBS.

Of course, I didn't realise that was a thing; I thought it was some sort of technical error, but since I couldn't even log in to tell the operator there was a problem (email as we know it hadn't been invented yet!) I was a bit stuck.  However, there was one person on that BBS that I'd seen on another BBS, so I left them a message on the second BBS.  They had actually read my 27-message screed and thought there was a hint of intelligence somewhere in there, so they intervened on my behalf and I got reinstated with a warning not to do that again.

Needless to say, that person turned out to be Deedee.  BBSes often organised social activities so I eventually met her, and I found out she lived not far from my school so I would occasionally walk over to her house after school.  She was a single mom with three kids in their 20s; two still lived at home and were heavily into drugs.  She had developed rheumatoid arthritis in her 30s and was badly crippled; she could walk with crutches but sitting was a chore (she had to literally throw herself backwards into a chair) and her fingers were so curled it was hard to believe she could type.  (In fact, she'd gotten a computer because she didn't have the strength for a manual typewriter.)  She had a gang of misfit friends, and somehow a 14-year-old just fitted in.  Perhaps it was just a more innocent time, but nobody seemed to question our unlikely friendship except my mother, who seemed to think it was more Harold and Maude.

In hindsight, I can't really blame my mom; it was weird, but it worked.  We both loved computers, 60s rock, Arby's, sci-fi, plus she had a car.  We were best friends and completely inseparable for two years, and then she moved in with us.

Now, before you rush to judgment, I mentioned two of her kids were druggies, and the eldest went on a cocaine bender and started destroying her house.  I did what any friend would do: I told my dad.  My dad had a heart beyond reckoning, and I remember to this day he never hesitated: He drove to her house, picked her up and gave her the pull-out sofa for as long as she needed it.  It turned out she needed it for three years before her son took himself off to Northern California to get clean. My parents handled it with such grace that today I find it awe-inspiring.  My mother even helped get her a job with her company, and they carpooled every day.

The irony is that Deedee and I had grown apart.  I started dating a woman, and when I was 17 I moved in with her while Deedee was still living with my parents!  I still kept in touch but I started working and didn't have time for BBSes.  I'd go visit Deedee a couple of times a year, and often it was out of guilt.  That's because not long after she'd moved back into her home, her youngest son discovered crack cocaine, and he continued for another 25 years.  He stole everything he could to fund his habit, leaving her completely destitute.  The only time she had any respite was when he was in jail, but at some point he married a similar piece of trash and moved her into Deedee's house, so even when he was in jail his wife was still there.  She refused to throw them out, and eventually all of her friends deserted her because it was an impossible situation.  I think I was one of two or three friends that continued to visit.

In hindsight, I can appreciate how afraid she was of getting old, and not being able to take care of herself, and she clung to the belief that her son would take care of her despite all evidence to the contrary.  When he wasn't high, he was perfectly fine, but those times were few and far between.  The house was in a horrific state, but she wouldn't accept help cleaning it up, as she became a bit of a hoarder.  I think everyone needs some degree of control in their lives, and she had precious little so she just kept what she had.

Just before I moved to the UK in 2008, I took Deedee on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, because she'd always wanted to go.  It was a crazy, impetuous thing to do, especially with a frail 75 year old, but she loved every minute of it.  On the way back I took a sidetrip to Vegas, although that turned out to be a mistake: There was a huge boxing match in town and hotel rates were eye-watering.  Between the room, dinner and a show, I think I maxed out my credit card in one day, but she was so happy.

I saw her once in 2010 and again in 2013.  That last trip was particularly memorable because I was with my friend Lucy, and knowing me I didn't tell Deedee I was coming.  (I always did crap like that to her.)  I showed up at her door and was shocked when she answered: She'd tripped and fallen face-first onto the floor--her joints were so bad she couldn't even lift her hands to break her fall--and the bruising had just started fading, leaving her in shades of purple and green.  Worse, her dentures had been giving her problems and she couldn't afford to replace them, so she had been eating soft food for the past couple of years and had lost about half her body weight.  Her skin hung off her like drapes.  I may have been taken aback, but Lucy was in complete shock.

I got Deedee in the car and we drove to the nearest Arby's.  She didn't want to get out of the car so we drove to the local mission and parked in the shade by the rose garden, and we reminisced about the last 30 years.  I knew I'd changed a lot since I was a snot-nosed 14 year old, but at 80 she seemed exactly the same as when I'd met her.  She complained about her son, of course (who was now in his 50s) but I let that go.  There was no point in arguing with her anymore; I just listened.

Lucy had gotten out of the car and came back with a perfect red rose for Deedee. (I'm sure you're not supposed to pick them!) We took her home and said goodbye, then drove up north to see my family. That was the last time I saw her. In March 2014 she sent me an email which started with, "Tell Lucy that her beautiful rosebud lasted a whole week and bloomed all the way out to a full rose." She complained about her son, who had moved some junkies into her garage, and one of the wild cats was about to have a litter, so she was trying to sort homes for them. Her last words were, "Hope everything is going well for you. Love you much."  I sent her a couple of emails but never got a response.

In August 2014, on the day I was flying to New Zealand, I got an email from her son letting me know she'd had an aneurysm and was in a medically-induced coma. She'd just turned 81, which was longer than any of us thought she'd make it (rheumatoid arthritis tends to shorten the lifespan by 10 to 15 years).  A few weeks later her son asked me for my address, because Deedee had asked to be cremated and her ashes split between her three best friends.  (I didn't honestly expect her son to follow through, and I never received her ashes; I have no idea what happened to them.)

So that's the story of my oldest and longest friend, who watched me grow up and helped me pull my head out of my ass. She was around through three failed relationships, and passed away just as I started my next one. She knew me when I was flat broke, when I was flush with cash, and when I was flat broke again. She never made any demands on me; she always accepted me as-is, where-is. If I treated her to something, she was always extremely grateful. She didn't have a mean bone in her body, and if it hadn't been for her sons she would have led a happy and fulfilling life. She taught me what unconditional love looked like, and she taught me that you can't save other people.

In August we used to watch the Perseid meteor shower, and in March we'd go see the poppies,  I have her to thank for introducing me to the Moody Blues, the Limeliters and Arby's Jamocha shakes. I hope Deedee found peace, and I hope she knows that I'll always remember her fondly, and that I wish I'd been a better friend over all those years.

P.S. That Atari computer was the most used gift ever, and I credit it with my entire career.  I held onto it long after I'd switched to PCs, but when I was 26 or 27 I had a general clean out, and it went in the trash along with the floppy disk drive and dot matrix printer. I'd long since upgraded the 300 baud acoustic-coupled modem to a 1200 baud direct-connect modem, then 2400 baud, then 9600 baud, then a staggering 14.4 kbps, then 33.6 kbps, and finally a 56kbps modem (even though that was only a theoretical maximum that could never be achieved in the real-world).  Today my VDSL modem gets 42Mbps download, which is 140,000 times faster than my original modem.  Sadly, there's no way to whistle into it to get random characters to appear.