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The Alex O'Connor Trilogy
We all have skeletons hidden in
private little closets in our memories, secrets never to be revealed.
Most will go to our graves with us, but some will, in time, see the
light of day – usually unexpectedly.
I had been invited by a very old
friend to Thanksgiving dinner in 2003, when as we sat around drinking
an after-dinner liqueur my friend's wife mentioned that her brother
had been involved with the CIA and spooks. Perhaps it was the
thirty-five years, or the liqueur, but I laughed and said, "So
was I, but it wasn't the CIA." Then I briefly explained
that for a two-year period, I had covertly worked for a
"governmental agency" doing what we would today call
computer systems administration.
It was during the Viet Nam war, and I
was a graduate student mainly for the deferment it offered. I
was also working part-time at the university computer center, where I
had become an unofficial systems programmer on the IBM 360 mainframe
computers. Back then, IBM 360 systems programmers were scarce as
the demand for their services was very high and their pay scale astronomical.
Thus most universities utilized willing graduate students to fill
in. While I never did "real" systems programming in
that I did not write new programs for the system, I did do quite a bit
of system maintenance, applying Software Performance Reports (SPRs) as
IBM called their bug fixes to the operating system. As I said, today
we call it "system administrator" work.
Someone learned of my skills, which
although low-level in the realm of system programming, were
nevertheless in high demand. A "Mr. Brown" visited and
made me an offer I could not refuse. Either I covertly worked
for them on a part-time basis, or I would be drafted and sent to Viet
Nam as a soldier. And part of the deal was I was to remain
a graduate student as my "cover". Sounded
sweet. What they didn't tell me about was the occasional field
trip I would have to make and that I was expendable. Thus I
enter the wondrous world of Wonderland, as I called it after Alice
in Wonderland, which came complete with mad hatters, punctilious
rabbits, the Queen of Hearts, and losing your head if you broke The
Rule – Thou Shall Not Talk.
It took me nearly 18 months to get up
the courage to break "The Rule" that had
been instilled in me some 35 years earlier, but I finally decided to
do an embellished fictionalized autobiography. Thus Alex
O'Connor came into being and with him a fictional university, air
base, Wonderland site and a complete list of fictional
characters. As for the embellishments, one is I never did snap
my fingers, and another is I did not have a pet cat until I was dating
Gail. As for the rest, those are for me to know and you to
guess, but there are a few for plausible denial purposes.
Naturally, I titled the book The
Rule and began writing during the summer of 2005. However, I
found that I was making continued references to my first great true
love, Negrita, and as I continued, more and more of her story was
appearing as footnotes and such. Finally I realized that I had
three stories to tell, and that I had to write a trilogy. Thus Negrita,
the book, was born. It is her story and how she teaches Alex to
love a woman and her crusade to free her American sisters of what she
considered their sexual repression.
That completed, I returned to The
Rule, now stripped of its many pages of footnotes about Negrita,
and completed it in the late fall. The Rule is not only about my
time in Wonderland, but also about my second great love. And
yes, it is true that I never knew her real name.
That left the third book, Gail,
which I toy with from time to time. Gail is my third great love,
and very different from the first two. It is a bitter sweet
story about a young man and woman trying to understand each other and
never quite succeeding. Part of the problem was she was bipolar,
and part of the problem was he was too immature. I have still
not started it for it is beyond my present skill to write about, and
perhaps always will. We will just have to see what time brings.
After all it took me 35 years to write The Rule.
© Copyright 2006 Poitin Inc. All rights reserved.
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