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??
SUNDAY
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.
MONDAY
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.
* * *
Michael has a new obsession: he sits on the patio beside the pool and watches the automated Polaris pool-sweeper scrape decomposed eucalyptus leaves off the pool's bottom. The pool sweeper looks like R2D2 as it hobbles about its duties, and I think they're becoming best friends.
* * *
Oh - we have this Euroneighbor named Anatole. He started dropping by when he found out there were other nerds in the neighborhood. As he used to work at Apple, we don't mind his presence as much as we would otherwise. He's a repository of Apple lore (gossip ahoy!). He's a real turtlenecker - one of those French guys who'd be smoking in the rain up at Microsoft.
He said that it was at Clinton's congressional speech when John Sculley sat next to Hillary Clinton that everybody realized Apple was way out of control. Personally, I thought it was glamorous. Then he hit us with a bombshell, which was that Apple never had a contingency plan in the event that they lost the Look & Feel suit. They totally believed they were going to win. Maybe the PowerPC will save them. We warned Anatole not to discuss Look & Feel with Bug, but he said they'd already discussed it and that Bug had seemed bored by it. Bug's forgetting his roots! California's turned him mellow.
Also, Anatole says nobody's simply at Apple; they're still at Apple. It would appear that none of what we hear matches the One-Point-Oh, Gods-in-the-Clouds mental pictures we have of the company. But like most gossip, it merely makes us want to be closer to the core of the gossip itself. We're all drooling for a chance to visit Apple, except a chance never seems to appear. Anatole is useless in this regard. We think he burned some bridges before he left - expense report fudging?
* * *
And of course Anatole is a genius. In the Silicon Valley the IQ baseline (as at Microsoft) starts at 130, and bell-curves quickly, plateauing near 155, and only then does it decrease. But the Valley is a whole multi-city complex of persnickety eggheads, not just one single Orwellian technoplex, like Microsoft. As I said - it's sci-fi.
* * *
Bug accidentally used the term information superhighway, and so we were able to administer a beating.
TUESDAY
Our money situation is tight.
Trying to find money through venture capital is a long, evil, conflictual process full of hype and hope. If I have learned anything here, it's that snagging loot is the key struggle and obsession of any start-up. Fortunately for us, Michael and Ethan have agreed that the best thing to do is to be an R&D company (research and development) and get another company to "publish" our products. That way we don't have to hire our own sales and marketing people, or shell out the enormous amounts of money it takes to market software. We still need funding to build the product, though.
Susan's freaking out worse than anybody. Maybe that's why she and Ethan disagree on everything. He always says everything's "fabulous," while she fumes.
Today Ethan called Silicon Valley "the 'moniest' place on earth," and he's probably right. Everything in this Valley revolves around $$$ . . . EVERYTHING. Money was something you never had to think about at Microsoft. I mean, not that Microsofters don't check out WinQuote daily, but here, as I have said, there's this endless, boring, mad scramble for loot.
* * *
For financial reasons, we have to work at Mom and Dad's place, until we're flush with VC capital.
We work at the south end of the house in a big room that was supposed to be the rumpus room, back during the era when society still manufactured Brady children. It has been completely converted into the tasteful carnage of our "Habitrail 2." We call it Habitrail 2 because it's a big maze, because its ventilation hinges on the anaerobic, and because paper is everywhere, just like gerbils nesting inside a Kleenex box. Michael has installed his own two pet gerbils, "Look" and "Feel," inside his astoundingly large yellow plastic Habitrail kit, which encircles the o
ffice . . . decades' worth of collecting. We get to hear Look and Feel scampering about endlessly while we work. Karla likes the Habitrail setup because it reminds her of the old cartoon with the chipmunks trapped inside the vegetable factory. She and Michael are continually adding on to it. It's their common bond.
At a glance around the Habitrail 2, there are Post-it notes, photocopies, junk mail, newspapers, corporate reports, specs, printouts, and litter, plus thumbed-to-exhaustion copies of Microprocessor Report, California Technology Stock Letter, Red Herring, Soft•Letter, Multimedia Business Report, People, and The National Enquirer. You get the feeling that if you only reached into this paperstorm you could withdraw a strand of six pulsating rubbery pink gerbil babies. Paperless office . . . ha!
There is a billiard table covered with SGIs, MultiSync monitors, coding manuals, printouts, take-out food boxes, coils, cables, dry-erase pens, and calculators. Over by "The Dad Bar" (diamond tufted leatherette; "Tee Many Martoonies"-style knickknacks) there are compiler manuals, more monitors, and an EPROM chip toaster stacked alongside cases of Price-Costco diet Cokes and fruit leather whips. (My workspace, I am pleased to say, is spotless, and my barely scratched Microsoft Ship-It Award rests proudly underneath a Pan-Am 747 plastic model.)
Needless to say, Far Side cartoons are taped everywhere. I think techies are an intricate part of the life cycle of The Far Side cartoon, the way viruses can only propagate in the presence of host organisms. Susan says, "We are only devices for the replication of Far Side cartoons." Now that's one way of looking at humanity.
And of course there are two long couches for those flights to Australia.
Mom is happy to have our pittance of rent money, and my commuting time is ninety seconds, as I live with Karla in one of the guest bedrooms.
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