Microserfs (11 page)

We switched vehicles and I drove Karla's Microbus for a while, but the Panasonic rice cooker in the rear filled with rattling cassette tapes drove me nuts. It was buried too deeply inside the mounds o' stuff to move, so around Klamath Falls we switched vehicles again.

We crossed the California border and had dinner in a cafe. We talked about society's accelerating rate of change. Karla said, "We live in an era of no historical precedents - this is to say, history is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes. You can't look at, say, the War of 1709 (I made this date up, although no doubt there probably was a War of 1709) and draw parallels between then and now. They didn't have Federal Express, SkyTel paging, 1-800 numbers, or hip replacement surgery in 1709 - or a picture of the entire planet inside their heads."

She glurped a milkshake. "The cards are being shuffled; new games are being invented. And we're actually driving to the actual card factory."

Psychosis! We were discussing Susan's new image at dinner, when I told Karla about this really neat thing Susan's mother did when Susan was young. Susan's mother told Susan that she had an enormous IQ so that Susan could never try and pretend she was dumb when she got older. So because of this, Susan never did feign stupidity - she never had any fear of science or math. Maybe this is the roots of her whole Riot Grrrl transformation.

On hearing this news, Karla went nuts. It turns out that Karla's parents always told her that she was stupid. Everything in life Karla had ever achieved - her degrees and her ability to work with numbers and code, had always been against a gradient of her parents saying, "Now why'd you want to go filling your head with that kind of thing - that's for your brother Karl to do."

"Karl's nice, and we like each other," Karla said, "but he's a total 100-center of the bell curve and no way around it. My parents drove him crazy expecting him to be a particle physicist. All Karl wants to do is manage a Lucky Mart and watch football. They've always refused to see us as we are."

Karla was off and running:

"Here's an example - once I went home to visit and the phone was broken, so I began fixing it, and Dad took it away and said, 'Karl should give that a try,' and Karl just wanted to watch TV and couldn't fix a phone if it spat on him and so I was screaming at my Dad, Karl was screaming at my Dad, and my Mom came in and tried to discuss 'women's things' and drag me into the kitchen. Meatloaffuckingrecipes."

Karla was just fuming. She can't bring herself to forgive her parents for trying to brainwash her into thinking she was dumb all her life.

Later, we got too bagged to drive, so we pulled into a Days Inn in Yreka. During a pre-bedtime shiatsu break we started talking about Spy vs. Spy, that old comic in Mad magazine, and how the very first time you read it, you arbitrarily chose either the black Spy or the white Spy and you voted for your color choice unflinchingly for the remaining period of your Mad magazine-reading phase.

I always voted for the black Spy; Karla voted for the white. Silly, but for a moment we had a note of genuine tension.

Karla broke the tension. She said, "Well, it's at least binary, right?" And I said, "Yes," and she said, "Are we geeks, or what?"

(Insert one more foot massage here.)

Even later on, Karla spoke to me again. "There's more, Dan. About the stupid business. About the sunstroke."

I wasn't surprised to hear this. "I figured as much. So . . . you want to tell me?"

The stars outside the window were sort of creamy, and I couldn't tell if I was seeing clouds or the Milky Way.

"There was a reason I was back at the house a few years ago . . . the time I had the sunstroke episode."

"Yeah?"

"Let me put this another way. Remember back up at Microsoft when you brought me the cucumber roll. . . just out of the blue like that?"

"I remember."

"Well -" (she kissed my eyebrow) "- it's the first time I can remember ever wanting to really eat, in like ten years." I was quiet. She continued talking: "Back when I had my sunstroke episode, I hadn't eaten in so long and I weighed about as much as a Franklin Mint figurine. My body was starting to die inside and my parents were worried that I'd gone too far, and I think I even scared myself. You think I'm small now, Buster, you'd better see . . . well you won't because I destroyed all photos . . . pictures of myself taken during my 'phase' as my parents call it."

She was fetal and I had my left hand underneath her feet and my right on top of her head. I cupped her closer and pressed her against my stomach and said, "You're my baby now: you're a thousand diamonds - a handful of lovers' rings - chalk for a million hopscotch games."

"I didn't want to do what I was doing, Dan - it just happened. My body was the only way I could get my message across and it was such a bad message. I crashed myself. In the end, it was work that saved my life. But then work became my life - I was technically living but without a life. And I was so scared. I thought that work was all there was ever going to be. And oh, God, I was so mean to everybody. But I was just running so scared. My parents. They just won't accept what was going on with me. I see them and I want to starve. I can't let myself see them."

I put my forearm in the crook of her knees and pulled her as tightly together as she could go. Her neck rested on my other arm. I pulled the blankets over us, and her breath was hot and tiny, in little bursts like NutraSweet packets.

"There's just so much I want to forget, Dan. I thought I was going to be a READ ONLY file. I never thought I'd be . . . interactive."

I said, "Don't worry about it, Karla. Because in the end we forget everything, anyway. We're human; we're amnesia machines."

It's late and Karla's asleep and blue by the light of the PowerBook.

I'm thinking of her as I input these words, my poor little girl who grew up in a small town with a family that did nothing to encourage her to use her miraculous brain, that thwarted her attempts at intelligence - this frail thing who reached out to the world in the only way she knew, through numbers and lines of code in the hope that from there she would find sensation and expression. I felt this jolt of energy and this sense of honor to be allowed entrance into her world - to be with a soul so hungry and powerful and needful to go forth into the universe. I want to feed her.

I . . .

There's this term used in computers, where you try and squish something into another operating system holus-bolus, and the results are not always effective. The term is called "spooging." An example might be, "Consumers don't know it, yet, but Microsoft is going to spooge a lot of the interface of Word for Windows into the Word for Mac 6.0 version, and rumor has it the new Mac version will operate slow as a glacier, too, because of it - it's too nonintuitive for the Mac-user."

I say this because I think I'm about to spooge here, but I can't think of any other way to express what I feel.

For starters, it was funny, but after Karla told me about her and her family some more, about her eating problems, now a thing of the past, we got into a discussion of what may be the ultimate question: Is our universe ultimately digital or analog?

After this, as I said, Karla fell asleep, but I couldn't sleep myself. What else is new?

I remembered something Antonella from Nintendo once told me about her job at a day-care center, about storytelling to kids - about how the stories the children liked the best were the ones in which the characters fled their old planets amid great explosions, leaving everything behind them to start a new world.

And then I remembered this book-writing program my mom told me about from someone in her library. The big deal in book writing is to quickly establish at the very beginning what it is that the characters want.

But I think that the books I really enjoy are the ones in which the characters realize, only in the end, what it was that they secretly wanted all along, but never even knew. And maybe this is what life is really like.

Anyway, I have spooged. Good night little PowerBook - my world will shortly end for today, as will the universe, whether digital or analog - with sleep.

Personal

Computer

Stars

drinking glasses

wrapped in tissue paper

burnt arborite

dial telephones

[Formatter's note - 2 pages (104 - 105) of nothing but 0's and 1's were deleted here]

We took a few hours off to attend a Halloween barbecue at the chic San Carlos home of Oop!'s president and CEO, Ethan, Mr. "Let's-Ship-Units!"

Also in attendance were a crew of Apple workers Ethan is scanning for "hireability."

The evening was a typical geek get-together, and conversation stayed along conventional lines: the Menendez brothers, consumer and military aviation, and hiring/firing gossip. But the mood was also tinged with an atypical moroseness: Crunchy Frog jokes blended with tales of fiscal woe. Apple people are all trying to get laid off so they can get the layoff financial package - so everybody's trying to be as useless as possible. It's a shock, let me tell you. And they're all frightened the PowerPC's going to bomb and they're worried about the Newton - and they're frightened they might merge with Motorola or IBM and lose their identity, and - gosh, they have a lot to worry about, it seems.

"It's all so . . . anti-coding" said Todd, dressed as Atlas. (Speedo swim-suit and a globe tied to his shoulder. Show-off.) "It's the total opposite of Microsoft. It's not the way, you know, we've been raised to think about Apple."

"Hey, Pal - just goes to show you what happens without a Bill to whip

people into shape," said Ethan, dressed as "Money" - his face painted green underneath a green George Washington wig that was actually a rented Marilyn Monroe wig misted with green hair spray. "Without a charismatic at the helm, you're history."

Apple is kind of depressing, we agreed dispiritedly. Not at all what we expected, but we bravely try and Keep the Faith. We're trying to find somebody to give us an Apple campus tour.

Nobody rules here in the Valley.

No Bills.

It's a bland anarchy. It takes some getting used to.

Ethan, Oop!'s president, is somewhat evil. Well . . . amusingly evil. Smarmy? Perhaps that's the right word. White-toothed and always impeccably dressed, he's what Karla calls a "killer nerd." For some reason, he's paying a lot of attention to me and keeps giving me all sorts of confidant-type information. I'm not sure whether to be flattered or to consult an exorcist.

Sitting next to a burning Tiki torch spiked into the ground, beneath an orange tree, Karla said to me, "You know, Ethan's been a millionaire and filed for Chapter Eleven three times already - and he's only 33. And there are hundreds of these guys down here. They're immune to money. They just sort of assume it'll appear like rain."

While decoding Ethan's existence we were removing stray grass seeds from each other's Clockwork Orange thug costumes. I said, "There's something about Ethan that's not quite oxymoronic, yet still self-contradictory - like an 18-wheeler with Neutrogena written on the side - I can't explain it. The whole Silicon Valley is oxymoronic - geeky and rich and hip. I'm undecided if I even like Ethan - he's definitely not one of us. He's a different archetype."

Inspired by Ethan's costume, we discussed money. We decided that if the government put Marilyn Monroe on a dollar coin, it would be popular enough to succeed. "And if they want to replace the five-dollar bill with a coin," said Susan, approaching us from the hibachi, "they can use Elvis."

Susan didn't go out of her way to dress up this year and came as a biker chick. She was miffed at discovering that the assembly language programmer from General Magic she'd been chatting up all night was married. She swigged Chardonnay from a bottle, yanked an unripe orange from a tree, and

said, "You guys are talking about Ethan? Being with Ethan is kind of like, well . . . like when you're sleeping with somebody who doesn't know what to do in bed but who thinks they're really hot stuff - and they're rubbing one part of your body over and over, thinking they've found your 'Magic Spot' when all they're doing, in fact, is annoying you."

Susan and Ethan never agree on anything, but it's not sexy disagreeing. It's just disagreeing.

There was a pause as the party slowed down, and Karla said, "Isn't it weird, the way Michael arrived without a costume, but he still looks like he's in costume?" She was right. Poor, unearthly Michael.

Ethan was telling us the story of how he hooked up with Michael, how they met shortly after Michael's mystery trip to Cupertino, at the Chili's restaurant on the Stevens Creek Boulevard strip - a few blocks away from Apple - a tastefully landscaped four-lane corridor of franchised food and metallically-skinned tech headquarters.

"Michael was inking out all of the vowels on his menu," Ethan reminisced fondly, sitting down with us under the tree. "He was 'Testing the legibility of the text in the absence of information,' as I was later informed. And when I saw him order a dozen tortillas, some salsa, and a side of Thousand Island dressing, I knew there had to be something there. How rrrright I was."

"Michael is going to be your mother lode for the mid-1990s?" Susan asked ingenuously.

"Well, Miss Equity - for your sake, you'd better hope so."

We went in the house to warm up. Ethan's living room is painted entirely in white enamel, and lining the ceiling's perimeter are a hundred or so 1970s Dirty Harry bank surveillance cameras whirring and rotating, all linked lo a wall of blue-and-white, almost-dead TV sets. A surveillance fantasy. "I used lo date an installation artist from UC Santa Cruz," is all Ethan says about his art.

His house is small, but I think he enjoys being able to tell people he lives in San Carlos. San Carlos, just south of Palo Alto, is called Nerd Hill. The big problem in San Carlos is, apparently, deer - which eat all the rose shoots and the young tree buds. "There's this guy there who sells bottles of mountain-lion urine he collects at zoos. You spritz the stuff around the yard to scare the deer away. It's like, 'Hey, pal - check out the cougar piss!'" Ethan held up a small, clear-yellow vial. "I'm investing in a biotech firm that tricks e. coli bacteria into manufacturing cougar pheromones."

Ethan is so extreme. He has this Patek Phillipe watch, which cost maybe ¥2,000,000 (purchased at Tokyo's Akihabara district, the nirvana of geek consumption, with all signage apparently in Japanese, English, and Russian). He says that every time he tells the time, he's amortizing the cost.

"Well, I'm down to $5.65 a glance, now. If I check the time every hour from now to the year 2023, I'll be down to a dime per look."

Ethan's nine blender settings are labeled with little LaserWriter labels in 7-point Franklin Gothic:

1) Asleep

2) In flite movie

3) Disneyland at age 25

4) Good $8.00 movie

5) IMAX with Dolby

6) Lunch w/ D. Geffen and B. Diller

7) Disneyland at age 10

8) Aneurysm

9) Spontaneous combustion

Ethan's dandruff is truly shocking, but you know, life isn't like TV commercials. Karla and I spent thirty minutes trying to think of tell-your-friend-he-has-dandruff scenarios that wouldn't insult him, and in the end, we couldn't. It's so odd, because every other aspect of his grooming is so immaculate.

3:10 A.M. Just got back from Ethan's party. We're "flying to Australia" tonight - that's our in-house code word for pulling an insane, 36- to 48-hour coding run in preparation for a meeting Ethan has with venture capitalists.

E-mail from Abe:

You actually left.

I never thought that could happen. How could you have left Microsoft so EASILY!?!? It's such a good set up. The

stock's supposed to split in Spring.

Who's yourBill?

I'm putting word out on-wire at Microsoft to locate new roomates, but still it feels pretty strange to be without roommates. A whole month now! I'm writing my ad for the inhouse BBS:

"SPACE! . . .

Not your final frontier in this instance, but there's lots of

it here and its not a bad deal: Redmond, 5 minutes from

Microsoft. Live in regal early 1970s splender. DolbyTHX sound. Adirondack style chair made from old skis. Trampoline. Own bathrooom. Pets okay.

$235.00"

BTW: Did you know that Lego makes a plastic vacuum cleaner shaped like a parrot to pick up stray Legos??

Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that's the surest way to tell which company to invest in. "If the techies aren't grinding, the stock ain't climbing."

Karla doesn't like my being friends with Ethan. She says it's corrupting, but I told her not to worry, that I spent all of my youth in front of a computer and that I'll never catch up to all the non-nerds who spent their early twenties having a life and being jaded.

Karla says that nerds-gone-bad are the scariest of all, because they turn into "Marvins" and cause problems of planetary dimensions. Marvin was that character from Bugs Bunny cartoons who wanted to blow up Earth because it obscured his view of Venus.

Oh - earlier today, driving up Arastradero from Starbucks, the sunset was literally almost killer.

It was all we could do not to crash the car looking at the pinks and oranges. And the view from Mom and Dad's house on La Cresta Drive was staggering: from the San Mateo bridge to the north, practically down to Gilroy in the south. The Contra Costa Mountains were seemingly lit from the inside, like beef-colored patio lanterns, and we even saw a glint from the observatory atop Mount Hamilton. And the dirigible hangar at Moffatt Naval Airfield looked as if the Stay-Puft marshmallow giant was lying down to die. It was so grand.

We sat there on the sagging cedar balcony to watch the floor show. The balcony sags because the sugary brown soil underneath all these older ranch houses is settling; floors bump; doors don't quite close true. We threw chew toys to Misty, Mom's golden retriever that she bought two years ago second-hand. Misty was supposed to be a seeing-eye dog, but she failed her exam because she's too affectionate. It's a flaw we don't mind. It was just a nice moment. I felt like I was home.

Karla also keeps a diary, but her entries are so brief. For example, she showed me a sample entry for the entire trip to California, all she wrote was: Drove down to California. Dan drew a robot on my place mat at lunch in south Oregon and I put it in my purse. That was it. No mention of anything we talked about. I call it Reduced Instruction Set Computation diaries.

Karla and I took an R&R break and drove 40 miles up to one of the Simpsons bars in the City - the Toronado, where they play The Simpsons every Thursday night. Except I realized it was Monday, so no Simpsons. I can never get the dates right anymore. But soon enough they'll be syndicated on the junky stations every night until the end of the universe, so I suppose I'll survive.

We took the wrong off-ramp (a deadly mistake in San Francisco - they STILL haven't rebuilt after the 1989 quake; the 101/280 connector links are so unbelievably big and empty and unfinished) and we got lost. We ended up driving through Noe Valley by accident - so pretty. Such a VISION, this city is. I suppose the City is putting all its highway-building energy into building the mention-it-one-more-time-and-I'll-scream information superhighway.

Speaking of the information superhighway, we have all given each other official permission to administer a beating to whoever uses that accursed term. We're so sick of it!

On the mountain coming in from the airport they have what has to be the world's ugliest sign saying, SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, THE INDUSTRIAL CITY, in huge white letters up on the mountainside. You just feel so sorry for the mind set that would treat a beautiful mountainside like it was a button at a trade convention.

"If they changed it to POSTINDUSTRIAL city, it might be meaningful," said Karla.

Anyway, we couldn't find the bar and wound up in a coffeehouse somewhere in the Mission District.

San Francisco is a weird tesseract of hipness: lawyers don tattoos and

listen to the Germs' first album. Everyone here is so young - it's like Microsoft that way - a whole realm composed of people our own age. Because of that, there's an abundance of dive bars, hipsterious coffeehouses, and cheap-eats places. It's a big town that feels like neighborhoods: a municipal expression of Local Area Networks.

And I must admit I'm impressed by the level of techiness - people here are fully jacked in. Should some future historian ever feel the need to duplicate an SF coffee bar circa The Dawn of Multimedia, they will require the following:

• thrashed PowerBooks covered with snowboarding and Chiquita banana stickers

• a bad early 1980s stereo (the owner's old system, after he upgraded his own personal system)

• used mismatched furniture

• bad oil paintings (vaginal imagery/exploding eyes/nails protruding from raw paint)

• a cork bulletin board (paper messages!)

• sullen, most likely stoned, undergrads

• multi-pierced bodies

• a few weird, leftover 1980s people in black leather coats and black-dyed hair

• nightclub flyers

Parking in San Francisco is a nightmare. There are no spots. We decided that the next time we came we'd bring our own spots with us. We decided to invent portable, roll-up spots, like those portable holes they use in cartoons. Or maybe a can of spray-on parking spot remover to get rid of other cars. It's crazy there, that way. Just crazy. In the end we said a prayer to Rita, the pagan goddess of parking spots and meters. We shot out beams of parking karma into the hills ahead of us. We were rewarded with fourteen luxurious feet of car space. Rita, you kooky goddess you!

Learned a new word today: "interiority" - it means, being inside somebody 's head.