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 / 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
3. Interiority
SATURDAY
(Several weeks later)
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 I Mil. 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.