Part 10 — A Stairway to Heaven
Monday, June 19, 1972
By the time we finished the morning orientation session, it was already 10:30 and I was surprisingly hungry. I was scheduled to meet with Dr. Ellis, the chairman of the Electrical Engineering Department and my research mentor, at 1:00, right after lunch. With some time to kill, I decided to head back across the river to pick up my allergy serum and take it to Student Health.
It took a while to find Student Health, which was located on the ground floor of the sprawling University Hospital complex, but not far from my dorm. Although I’d sent in the required paperwork, they still made me fill out a ton of forms about my past medical history. The process took over an hour, so it was a good thing I’d left time for it. Before I left, I scheduled an appointment for my next allergy shot, the following week on Wednesday morning.
With that taken care of, I was starved and it was almost noon. I’d have preferred to have beaten the lunch crowd, but it was already too late for that. Joining a long line in the Quad cafeteria, I showed my ID and perused the available section, which wasn’t much better than what might have been served in my high school cafeteria. Exiting the line with a pork tenderloin sandwich, a small salad, some French fries and lemon meringue pie, I looked for anyone I recognized from the SSTP.
Finding no one, I found a seat at an unoccupied table and started to wolf down my food. Suddenly, Paul and Gary plopped themselves down at my table. “Hi,” they both said. With a mouth full of my sandwich, all I could do was to nod my head and wave at them.
“We need to switch our lunch over to Burge Hall as soon as we can,” Gary said. “Trudging across the river and back every day is gonna get old real fast if we don’t change it.”
“How do we do that?” I asked.
“We can put in a request with our dorm supervisors,” Paul answered. “There was something about that in our packet. The change will take a few days, and then it’ll be permanent. They hafta issue us new ID cards.”
“Why didn’t they just set it up that way in the first place,” I asked.
“Because half the SSTP’ers are based on this side of the river,” Gary explained. “The medical center complex is over here…”
“Don’t I know it,” I interrupted. “I spent over an hour this morning in Student Health, filling out paperwork for the allergy shots I have to get while I’m here. I had to even bring my own allergy serum from home, and it has to be refrigerated.
“Anyway, as I was about to say before I was rudely interrupted,” Gary went on, “the Bio-Med folks have all their sessions over here.”
“Bio-Med?” I asked.
“It’s what everyone calls the Biology and Medicine Track,” Gary explained. “A lot of the research folks are based at the medical center too. Just as we’re gonna switch our lunch to Burge, a lot of the girls are gonna switch to having their lunch here at the quad.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” I chimed in. After talking another bite of my sandwich and swallowing it down, I asked, “So how’s the Physics Track?”
“We’re only just getting started,” Paul replied, “but apparently much of the early coursework is spent just in learning calculus. I’m gonna be a junior and I’ve taken advanced algebra. I’m gonna be in trig next fall, but I’ll be learning calculus here, which is a senior course at my school. That’s just weird.”
“It’s pretty hard to do anything in physics without knowing calculus,” I explained. “That’s why I was advised against taking any physics in high school. High school physics is pretty much worthless, ’cause you don’t have the math background for real physics. Even something as simple as Newton’s Second Law requires using derivatives.”
“Good God,” Paul exclaimed. “My roommate’s a friggin physics professor.”
I then explained how I’d been attending a college physics program for junior high and high school students at Butler University, and how I planned to skip from my junior year of high school to my sophomore year of college.
“Damn, I wish there was something like that in Omaha,” Paul declared.
“What are you complaining about?” Gary responded. “You’re thirteen. We’ll all probably get enough advanced placement to start college as sophomores, but I’ll be eighteen, Jeff’ll be seventeen and you’ll be only fifteen.”
“I wish I could go to college now,” Paul lamented. “High school’s so lame. No matter how many grades I skipped, it still doesn’t make the classes I’m in run any faster.”
“I know what you mean,” I replied. “I’m in the accelerated program for all my classes — what other schools call gifted or advanced placement. I’m not the top student in any of them except for math, but I always do better when I can take a section of a class by independent study.”
“Guys, we need to get going,” Gary interrupted, “It’s almost one!”
“Shit!” Paul exclaimed. We wolfed down our lunches and sprinted across the river.
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“We could always use more pencils and paper clips,” one of the two women in the electrical engineering office said to the other.
“How about paper for the copier?” the second woman said to the first.
“Unless Professor Clark writes another book, we have enough to last us through fiscal ’74.”
“Spiral note pads? We never have enough of those,” said the second.
“Good idea,” replied the first.
I was sitting in the secretaries’ office in the Department of Electrical Engineering, waiting for Dr. Ellis, who was fifteen minutes late. I was listening to two secretaries blabbering back and forth about how to spend money. I gathered that the university budget ran on a fiscal year basis. The fiscal year was drawing to a close, at which point unspent funds would revert to the state.
I appreciated that the secretaries were trying to find useful things to purchase, rather than spending the money on frivolous items like party favors. However, multiplied by all the departments in the university and by all the state universities, not to mention the other state agencies, it amounted to a lot of waste.
An older man with close-cropped silver hair whisked into the office and seeing me, asked, “Jeff?”
Standing, I responded, “Professor Ellis, I presume?” as I reached out to shake his hand.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, but when the dean schedules a lunch meeting, you can’t exactly leave when it runs over. Let’s go to my office.”
Closing the door behind us, he asked, “Did you have any trouble finding us?”
“None at all,” I replied. “There’s only one Engineering building and only one set of elevators, and as far as I know, only one fifth floor.”
“Are you all settled in?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you,” I answered. “My roommate’s only thirteen, but he’s way more social than I am. Thanks to him, I’ve already made friends.”
“I’ve had a few other students like that over the years,” Professor Ellis related. “Dealing with kids that young can be a challenge. A lot of them don’t know how to relate to others at all, and some of them are downright anti-social. It’s good to hear that your roommate is fitting in.
“So, did you have a chance to do any reading before coming here?”
Laughing, I replied, “You told me Knuth’s books would be light reading. They’re easy to understand, but there’s a lot packed into each one. I think I understand the essence of what assembly language is, or what a compiler does, but I’m not sure what a state machine is or how it works.”
“How far did you get?” Dr. Ellis asked.
“I skimmed through both volumes,” I answered. “I’m in the process of reading the sections I didn’t understand in more depth and working my way through the problems.”
“That’s impressive, even for someone with your background. Do you think you could write a program in Mix?”
“Not well, but that’s why people study computer science,” I answered. “It would be like trying to solve a problem with nothing but a slide rule.”
“Or better still, an HP35 scientific calculator,” Dr. Ellis related.
“Like I’ll ever get my hands on one of those,” I replied.
Rather than answer me, Dr. Ellis opened his desk drawer and took out the real thing, and he handed it to me. Holding it in awe, I was amazed by the quality of the finish, but then for what it cost, it had better be a lot nicer than a cheap calculator made in Japan. Turning it on, it took me a minute to figure out how to use the quirky Reverse Polish Notation it used, with its enter key instead of an equal key. With RPN and four registers, I could calculate just about anything.
“I take it you already knew about RPN?” Dr. Ellis asked.
“I’d read something about it, but didn’t really understand it ’til now. It’s way more practical than arithmetic entry for scientific calculations.”
“Take one college exam and you’ll realize you need one of these things,” Professor Ellis continued. “There’s no way to compete with a classroom full of students with calculators when all you have is a slide rule. Yes, you can get by with a $20, four-function calculator, but this works so much better. By the time you start college, the HP45 will be out and you’ll be able to get an HP35 at a discount. I hear Texas Instruments is working on their own version, so that may be a possibility too.
“Now, did you have a chance to study Fortran?” he asked.
Handing the calculator back to him, I replied, “Yes, I bought a book on Fortran IV programming — a paperback.”
“Did you understand it? Do you think you could write programs using it?” he asked.
“I understand it, but writing programs is about a lot more than punching Fortran instructions onto a card,” I replied. “I think I can convert just about any algorithm into a computer program, but coming up with an algorithm in the first place is the key.”
“And there are entire textbooks on the subject,” Dr. Ellis noted. “We have several in our library and you’re welcome to use them, provided they don’t leave the library. But first, let’s look at one example. How might you go about designing an algorithm in Fortran to calculate the value of π to 100 decimal places.”
“I’ve actually given some thought to that since we spoke on the phone,” I replied. “The mathematical formula is quite simple — it’s just the reciprocals of all the odd integers, alternately added and subtracted, and multiplied by four. That’s the Leibniz formula. A more rigorous approach involves a series with real and imaginary parts, but that would be overkill for our purposes.”
“How about the calculation of e, the basis of natural logarithms?”
“That’s just the sum of the reciprocals of all integer factorials. Make that the ratios of x to the n over n factorial and you have the exponential function. Throw in imaginary numbers and you have the trig functions.” The calculations of π and e involved iterative additions of fractions, in which the denominator progressively became larger.
“Yes, go on.”
“The problem is with precision,” I continued. “Even with double-precision floating point numbers, there isn’t enough precision to calculate one hundred decimal places. In fact, integers might be a better option. I’d set up a linear integer array to represent the needed precision in hexadecimal.
“For calculating e, it might be better to set up one array, just to calculate the factorials since that’s a cumulative operation. However, the numbers would become very large, very quickly. Perhaps I should instead use the reciprocal factorials and divide instead of multiply. That would work for π as well. Then the numbers would get smaller with each iteration and the algorithm would terminate when it reaches zero…”
“You’re off to a great start, Jeff,” Professor Ellis interrupted. “That’s exactly the kind of thinking that goes into writing efficient computer programs. However, I’d like you to give some thought to what kind of metrics you could use to gauge success. How efficient does your algorithm need to be to be adequate to solve your problem within a reasonable amount of programming time? There’s an inherent tradeoff. Is it worth it to spend five days of your time, to save thirty seconds of computation time? Probably not.
“You mentioned state machines and there’s a class going on right now on state machines and computer architecture. There’s an associated lab, but it’s not worth sitting in on that in the time you have. The lectures are in room 508 on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:00 to 2:30. The course is already underway, but I have no doubt you’ll be able to get up to speed in no time. I’ll make sure the instructor knows to expect you.
“What I’d like to do is to pair you up with one of my graduate students. Glen will get you situated at an empty desk in his office. He’ll set you up with a computer login, so you can access the mainframe and use it to send and receive messages and to write your reports. He’ll show you how to punch cards and assemble them into a valid stack that can run on the IBM 360. He’ll show you how to submit your programs at the service window, how to have the CPU time billed to the department, and how to pick up your cards and the printout when it’s ready.
“I’d like to meet with you at least twice a week to monitor your progress. Otherwise you’ll pretty much be on your own, but if you have any questions, you can always send me a message, or just ask Glen. Would Tuesday and Friday afternoons work for you, right after lunch?”
“You just assigned me a class on Tuesday afternoons, and I have an SSTP research forum on Fridays, all day.”
“Okay, how about we meet over the lunch hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” he suggested, “right before your class?”
“You mean brown-bag it?” I asked. “Can I take food out of the cafeteria?”
Chuckling, he replied, “I think I can handle lunch. I’ll send out for Chinese or Mexican, or maybe pizza, or I can order sandwiches from a great deli nearby. Is there anything you’re allergic to or that you can’t eat or don’t like? You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”
“God no,” I replied, “and I’m game for just about anything. It’s very nice of you to buy me lunch.”
“Your project is doing something for me, so it’s a fair trade, I think,” he answered. “Let’s go see if we can find Glen.”
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“He has thick glasses, was wearing a plaid long-sleeve shirt with blue jeans and cowboy boots,” I said as my friends and I ate our dinner at the Quad. I was describing Glen, the graduate student I’d be working with all summer. “He talks with a slow drawl and looks so much like a cowboy, I asked where he was from. It turns out he’s from some dinky town in Iowa I’d never heard of before. Obviously, he’s no slouch. He’s already got his masters and he’s going for a PhD in electrical engineering.”
“If any of us went to MIT or Stanford, people there would think that we’re country hicks,” Greg suggested.
“Undoubtedly true,” Gary agreed.
“I can’t believe your mentor is the department chair,” Kyle chimed in. “My mentor’s a lowly fellow in the Cardiology department. It seems I’m his gopher for his own research project for the summer.”
“Yeah, but you have a defined research project. You won’t hafta spend so much time formulating a question and all that crap,” I pointed out. “I hafta come up with my own metrics for success. How do I define success when it comes to the practicality of solving problems by computer?”
“You can always compare the time spent solving it by computer to the time needed to solve it by hand, or the number of times you have to submit your punched cards before your damn programs run,” Larry suggested.
“Yeah, I suppose I could, but actually calculating the value of π to 100 decimal places by hand would be a chore,” I said. “I’m sure it can be done, but one little error and the whole calculation would be ruined. Of course I could always just look it up in a book, but somehow, that sounds like cheating.”
“I think that’s essentially how computers do it,” Paul said. “π is used so often in computations that it’s way easier to just store the value in memory.”
“An interesting concept,” I agreed, and then I continued, “My mentor’s a really nice guy. He wants to meet with me twice a week, but the times he suggested conflict with our forums and with a course he wants me to attend. So instead he’s gonna meet with me over the lunch hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and he’s gonna send out for a real lunch for the two of us.”
“I’m jealous,” Kyle related. Then seeing we’d all finished our meals, he asked, “You guys ready to head back to the dorm?”
Everyone agreed, so we dropped off our trays and headed back to Rienow II, where we took the elevator to the fourth floor. After we made ourselves comfortable in Greg and Gary’s room, Gary took out an album without any title or artist identified on the cover. There was a weird painting on the cover, hanging on a wall with peeling paint, of a man who was hunched over and carrying what looked like a bunch of twigs on his back.
When the record started to play, the music was familiar, but I still wasn’t sure who the artist was. The first track was a hard rock song that wasn’t my style of music, but it wasn’t awful, and the music kind of faded into the background. When the fourth track played, which was the last track on the first side, however, the song was mesmerizing. It started out slowly and gradually built to a frenzy. Then it stopped abruptly and the artist sang in a clear, voice, “And she’s buying a stairway to heaven.” What a cool song!
“I love this song,” Larry said, echoing my own thoughts. “I love the way it builds slowly as if it’s literally working its way up a stairway, and then it falls off a cliff.”
“Me too,” Kyle chimed in. “The theme of our high school prom this last year was ‘Stairway to Heaven’…”
“Ours too,” Gary chimed in, “not that I went. Lowly sophomores aren’t allowed.”
“I go to a very large high school, with 3600 students in three grades,” I related. “We have separate junior and senior proms, but I’m not exactly a socialite. I doubt I’ll go.”
“Proms aren’t for nerds like us,” Larry said. “They’re for the beautiful people, but never say never. Who knows how you’ll feel by next spring?”
As Greg turned the record over, I noticed from the label that it was Led Zeppelin IV. I’d heard of Led Zeppelin, but never been a fan before. I’d hafta remember this album.
“Sex to Sexty?” Paul asked as he picked up a magazine from on top of a stack of them, from on top of Greg’s desk.
“Yeah, my brother collected them and gave them to me when he left for college,” Greg explained. “They’re pretty harmless. Just silly soft porn comics. They’re not even in color. You guys are welcome to read them as long as they don’t leave this room.”
Paul passed them around to the rest of us and I started to read the one he handed me. The comics were kind of funny in an off-beat way. I’d not heard the term ‘soft porn’ before, but if this was soft porn, I’d hate to see what hard porn was like. I did learn some new words though, like ‘cunt’. I’d heard the word before but never knew what it meant. It didn’t take me long to figure out from the comics what a cunt was, both literally and figuratively.
After reading for a while in what I’d consider companionable silence with an occasional laugh or chuckle, Larry stretched his arms over his head, briefly exposing his belly button in the process, and said, “Guys, it’s been a long day and I’m ready to pack it in.”
“Yeah, that does it for me too,” his roommate agreed.
“Same here,” I chimed in.
“Yeah, time for a shower and jerkin’ off,” Paul said, causing me to nearly gag on my saliva.
Laughing, Larry said, “Leave it to a thirteen year old to say what’s probably on all our minds. Rub out a good one, Paul. I’ll be doing the same.”
“What time shall we meet downstairs in the morning?”
“Does 8:00 work for everyone?” I asked.
Shaking his head, Greg said, “We start our classes at 8:00. Would 7:00 be too early?”
“How about 7:15?” Paul suggested. “That still leaves enough time to eat and get where we’re going.”
“Sounds good,” Gary responded and we all agreed.
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“I can’t believe you said that,” I exclaimed after Paul and I got to our room.
“You mean about taking a shower?” He asked.
“You know what I mean.” I replied.
“But we all do it,” Paul countered.
“Yeah, but that’s kind of private, you know?”
“Not at camp, it wasn’t,” Paul answered. “I learned about jerkin’ off at camp when I was nine. When you’re in a cabin with a dozen other boys, and when the showers are communal, there’s no such thing as privacy. You either jerk off by yourself in front of everyone else, or you jerk off with everyone else.
“If it embarrasses you, jerk off in the shower, but unless you’re gonna make a big deal of it, I intend to jerk off right here in my bed. If you’re a good boy, I might even let you watch,” he added with a giggle.
“Stripping off his shirt, toeing off his sneakers and dropping his pants, he said, “I’m gonna shower first, so I can go to sleep right after.”
He peeled off his socks, dropped his briefs and put on his robe. Grabbing his towel and shower stuff, he headed out of the room. I followed suit, but I had a problem — I had a raging boner. Therefore I put my briefs back on to keep it hidden on my way to the shower, and grabbed a clean pair for the trip back.
When I got back, Paul was naked and lying on top of his bedsheets. His arousal was hard to ignore, pun intended. “’Bout time,” he exclaimed. I’m ready to shoot my load.”
“Are you asking me to join you?” I asked with a gulp. The scary thing was that I really kind of did want to join him on his bed, but I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea.
“I meant at the same time, not together,” Paul clarified. “What I had in mind was that we’d each jerk off on our own beds. It might be a lot more fun if we really did do it together — we’re two horny teens, and a lot of boys my age and even old ones like you sometimes fool around. That doesn’t mean they’re queer or anything. I just don’t want sex to get in the way of being friends.
“So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m game if you’re game, but it’s probably not such a good idea to do anything more that JO at the same time in our own beds — not for now anyway.”
Did I want to do things with Paul? That was a stupid question — I’d wanted to do things with him since we met. The question was, was I willing to take a chance it would lead to crossing a line I was afraid to cross? Could we do things without risking our friendship? I just wasn’t ready for that.
Rather than say anything, I put my things away, removed my robe and sat down on my bed. We both sat cross-legged and facing each other. I was so hard, it felt like my boner was gonna rip through my skin. Paul grabbed his dick and started to stroke; I did likewise with mine.
It wasn’t long before I felt myself building toward the inevitable conclusion. I could tell from Paul’s flushed face, rapid breathing and increased speed that he was getting close too. Suddenly, Paul threw his head back, stifled a scream and erupted with fury. That pushed me the rest of the way over the edge as I, too, exploded with more force than I’d ever felt before.
Recovering, Paul grinned at me, and I grinned right back. He looked like a mess, with his spunk in his hair, dripping down his face and all over his chest and abdomen. For some reason, it made him look sexy as hell, but that I even had that thought was beyond scary.
Then he shocked me when he started to lick his spunk off of his hand.
“You eat your own cum?” I asked in surprise.
“Haven’t you ever tried yours?” Paul asked in turn.
“No!” I exclaimed.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s gross,” I replied.
“But queers suck dick,” Paul countered, “and they swallow. Not that I’m queer, but aren’t you the least bit curious?”
“Not really,” I replied. Then looking down at my cum-covered hand, still wrapped around my softening dick, I said, “I guess there’s no harm in trying it just once.”
Tentatively, I stuck the tip of my tongue into the jizz covering my hand. It was a bit like sticking the tip of my tongue into a tub of yogurt — not that I liked yogurt — I hated it. But I couldn’t really taste it with just the tip of my tongue. It was just hard to get past the revulsion factor. Jizz was just so slimy, but delaying it wasn’t gonna change anything. However, my jizz was getting cold, and it was running down my face and my torso. If I did nothing, soon it would run into my mouth on its own.
So I licked a good swath of it off my hand and swallowed. The surprising thing was that it didn’t have much of a taste at all. It was salty and slightly bitter, kind of like undercooked egg whites. It didn’t taste bad, but I couldn’t say I liked it, and there was no denying it was kind of icky.
“Well?” Paul asked as he scooped up his cum from all over his body and feasted on it as if it was mana.
“It wasn’t horrible,” I replied, “but given the choice of eating it or jumping into a tub filled with ice water, I’d choose the ice water.”
Paul visibly shivered, and then said, “I guess it’s an acquired taste. Do you think it’s weird I like eating mine?”
Thinking about it for only a moment, I said, “Maybe a little bit, but sex is weird when you get down to it. People get turned on by a lot of weird things.”
“Like water sports,” Paul chimed in.
“What do water sports have to do with sex?” I asked.
“Boy, are you naïve,” Paul responded. “Water sports refers to people pissing on each other.”
“People do that?” I asked.
“And more,” Paul replied. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what ‘more’ was, or how Paul came to know about it.
“I don’t think it’s all that weird that you like eating your sperm,” I finally admitted, “and I guess it makes the cleanup easier. Speaking of which, I think I need another shower,” I stated as I got off the bed.
“You can’t go out into the hallway looking like that,” Paul exclaimed with a giggle.
“I’ll just wash up at the sink,” I said as I grabbed my washcloth and started to wash the jizz off my body. “What would be weird is if you liked eating the sperm off of other boys’ bodies.”
Blushing as he joined me at the sink, he said, “Been there, done that.”
Taking a guess, I responded, “At camp?”
“Yeah,” Paul replied. “Not that it was queer or anything. We fooled around a lot at camp while the counselors just looked the other way. For all I know, they got off on watching ten-, eleven- and twelve-year-old boys playing around with each other. Anyway, it was all for fun. We were just learning about our bodies and experimenting.”
“I understand that,” I replied. “In a way I’m jealous. I’ve never had a sexual experience. The closest I got was when my cousin got me naked with her in her bedroom on New Year’s Eve.”
“You had sex with your cousin?” Paul practically shouted.
“It wasn’t like that,” I replied. “She spiked my drinks with vodka I think. The alcohol had no taste and after the third drink, I was drunk. She got undressed, and she got me undressed, but then I came to my senses and put an end to it. On top of it, I had a pretty nasty hangover on New Year’s Day.”
“Why’d you stop?” Paul asked. “She’d have probably let you go all the way. Weren’t you curious?”
“First of all, I didn’t have a condom, and I’m not ready to be a dad. Secondly, she’s my cousin, for Cripes sake. Thirdly, she’s not at all my type. She not very attractive, but on top of that, she’s one of the most stuck up people I know. Finally, we were in her house during a party. Her parents and my mom were only a few feet away.”
“You do realize none of that would’ve stopped 99.9 percent of boys,” Paul said.
“So I’ve been told,” I replied with a laugh.
Putting away his washcloth and towel, Paul said, “We better go to sleep. We hafta get up in seven hours.”
“For sure,” I replied as I put away my own things, set my alarm clock and got under the covers. “Good night, Paul,” I said as I turned out the lamp next to my bed. “I really enjoyed what we did tonight. More than that, I enjoyed talking with you.”
“Likewise,” Paul agreed. “I’m really glad you’re my roommate,” he added.
“Me too,” I replied.
