I wonder if Bill ever runs into John Sculley or Steve Jobs at a 7-Eleven.
* * *
We all wanted to go to the Luxor and play the games and do the rides there, inside the pyramid's interior. Emmett informed us that SEGA has its only showcase arcade there, where you can play the brand-new-almost-beta games. It's a brilliant marketing idea because normally arcade games don't enjoy the same kind of brand recognition and loyalty that home games do, but after visiting the SEGA arcade, the logo is burned into your brain permanently. It's like allowing a McDonald's orange drink machine at your child's birthday party. Later, we ran into Dad and we were gamed-out, so we all went to the Tut's Hut. We were starved.
The Tut's Hut kitchen was closed and we were begging for food - any sort of food - and the waitress brought over a plastic cup full of garnishes: pineapple wedges, maraschino cherries, and strawberries. I made a joke to her, that my Dad was an alcoholic barfly, and that growing up I ate garnishes as meals almost every night - but then the waitress got all weird, and Karla reminded me that people often move to Las Vegas to forget things, and she stopped coming to our table, and Dad, sitting two seats over, was embarrassed because he's not used to this kind of joke.
* * *
The Luxor has a laser beam of pure white light that shoots up from the tip of its pyramid and I'd never seen anything so tall, and never knew this beam of light existed. Pure and clean, and seen from the ground, it's so powerful that it really appears to puncture the atmosphere. I started rambling on about the laser, but everyone thought I'd gone loony and Abe told me to be quiet.
Ethan would have liked the light beam because the whole Luxor pyramid thing is sort of like the pyramid on the dollar bill, so I sent him a postcard. Instead of having a faux Egyptian theme, the Luxor should get to the point and have a U.S. Mint theme.
* * *
Todd was in the lobby of the Hacienda when we walked in, at around 2:30 a.m. He had a plastic container full of Kennedy dollars and was drunk on free drinks, but his meanness was gone. The casino noise was horrendous. It put Palo Alto's gas-fired leaf blowers to shame. As Karla and I were walking to the elevator bank, Todd came with us and did his impression of the machines: "Dollar slots go koonk-koonk-koonk-koonk-koonk; quarter slots go kathunka-thunka-thunka-thunka; dime slots go nink-nink-nink-nink-nink." He did a really good job as a machine. I think he bonded with the slots. We commended him on his performance and sent him wonkily tottering back onto the floor to lose his remaining coinage. He said, "It's an upperbody night!" and flexed his bicep at us.
* * *
Karla fell asleep quickly, but as ever, sleep eluded me, and I went downstairs to the casino and half-assedly played the slots until my $20 in quarters was gone.
* * *
Sands
stolen watches
abandoned wedding rings
buried cinderblocks full of $100 bills.
You want to surrender.
Subjected to the random, you acknowledge your inability to comprehend logic and linear systems.
royal flush
barbecue sauce
garage door openers
antenna
La Quinta
21
three lemons
plastic bucket
woofer
touch-tone
calling card
We generate stories for you because you don't save the ones that are yours.
FRIDAY
Todd made out last night with a Lisa-unit from the Sony party, which he returned to after screaming at us. This morning he burst into Karla's and my room and confessed, teary eyed, and carrying a basket of croissants. It was a bad start to a weird day. He was sick with remorse.
Anatole was in the bathroom borrowing Karla's blowdryer, so he heard everything through the door. Todd made me, Anatole, and Karla swear on a stack of Bibles that we would never say anything to Dusty. Anatole launched into one of his "een my couwntree . . ." tirades about how French men all had mistresses, but he stopped when he saw how sad Todd looked.
Todd was morose and silent all day. I thought about Dusty and Lindsay Ruth at home, and was glad he felt miserable, but he'd been in such denial over his new family unit that he was bound to explode. At least he didn't SLEEP with a Lisa.
Also, it was raining outside. Raining. It was so odd to think of Las Vegas having weather, like it was a real place. But since everyone's always indoors in the casinos, I guess it doesn't really matter.
* * *
There was once a Twilight Zone episode where adults were prisoners of the whims of a ten-year-old boy, Anthony, who could change the world simply by thinking the change into existence - he could make snow fall on crops - he could erase people - he forced everybody to watch TV that showed nothing but dinosaurs and cartoons. And all anybody could say, to prevent themselves from being erased themselves, was "That's good, Anthony, that's good." A focus group of one.
* * *
The CES is a trade show like all other trade shows: thousands and thousands of men, for the most part, wearing wool suits with badges saying things like: Doug Duncan, Product Developer, MATTEL . . . or NASA, SIEMENS-NIXDORF, OGILVY & MATHER, and UCLA, and so on. Everyone loads up on free promo merchandise like software samplers, buttons, mugs, pins, and water bottles as they dash from meeting to meeting. The booths are all staffed by thousands of those guys in high school who were good-looking but who got C+'s; they're stereo salesmen now and have to suck up to the nerds they tormented in high school.
We Oop!sters were in and out of meetings all day, mostly earnest affairs held in little rooms above the convention floor. They look the same in every hotel: chrome & glass rental furniture, extension telephones, and a water cooler. All these people meeting inside, wearing the first good suit in their life, turning old right before your eyes.
We were really just there to schmooze and do PR, since our distribution's taken care of, and to approach people to develop Oop! starter modules. Standard stuff. We also did "seed plants" . . . who you give your hardware to prerelease is a high status issue.
But I must say, there's something timeless about the false sincerity and synthetic goodwill of meetings, the calculated jocularity and the simian dominant-male/subordinate-male body language. At least the presence of Karla, Susan, and Amy saved us from the inevitable stripper jokes. Karla pointed out how in marketing meetings at Microsoft, everybody was trying to be fake-perky, and trying to fake having ideas, while at CES, everybody's trying to be fake-sincere and trying to fake not looking desperate.
Also, later, during rare, quiet moments, I'd look through the windows at other people's meetings, and they looked like Dutch Master cigar box people, but modernized. Old, but new . . . like a cordless phone resting beside a bowl of apples.
* * *
We had a "hunch lunch" in the hallway outside the Intel theater to compare notes on how the meetings were going. The Convention Center has the worst food on earth, served in the most humiliating, chair-free, low-dignity manner possible. People looked like dogs, hobbled over, eating high-sodium, by-product enriched, grease-lathered guck. Convention Center food in your stomach is like having fifty chest X rays, it's so toxic. In fact for the rest of the day, the "chest X ray" became our official standard of measurement for something that is probably very bad for you, which shortens your life, but which won't take its toll until much later on. If we met someone really horrible, we said they were like "ten chest X rays," and we'll probably die three days earlier than if we had never met that person.
* * *
After lunch, we went to see the Pentium movie at the theater Intel put up in the main lobby. It was about how interactivity was going to make your life better in the future, and we couldn't stop giggling because of all the Pentium jokes about decimal points being spammed around the Internet. You knew that every single person watching the show was, too.
"0.999999985621," I whispered, setting everybody off into spasms again, and finally we had to leave because we
were annoying too many people with our giggling.
I guess if you find jokes about decimal places interesting, then you truly are a geek.
* * *
In the afternoon, in between meetings, Susan spent most of her time in the SEGA-Nintendo building, and reconnoitered with her fellow Chyx at the Virgin Interactive mini-bar. There was a rumor that supermodel Fabio was signing autographs in another building, so Susan and Karla dashed over to check it out. Sure enough, His Hairness himself was signing calendars and paperbacks among the booming car stereos. Susan and Karla stood in line for an hour and finally they each got their "magic moment": a few snatches of intimate conversation, sealed with a kiss and, more important, a Polaroid. Susan's going to post hers on the Net. I asked Karla what he said to her and she said, "Stereos are my passion . . . but only after you." Gag.
Todd got sullen because Susan and Karla kept on discussing Fabio's pectoral muscles . . . "They're like beef throw cushions . . . they're like fifty pound flank-steak Chiclets . . . they're like . . ." and Todd would say, "Enough already."
* * *
Went to about seventeen meetings altogether. At CES, everybody name-drops their hotel all the time. Hotelmanship is a big CES status issue - people kept on asking us during the day where we were staying. They'd say, "So, uh" (charged moment) "where are you staying?"
And we would casually reply, "Oh, the Luxor."
Las Vegas hotels are similar to video games - games and hotels both plunder extinct or mythical cultures in pursuit of a franchisable myth with graphic potential: Egypt - Camelot - the Jolly Roger. We found ourselves feeling a little sorry for hotels that couldn't afford to lavishly re-create mythical archetypes, or were simply too stupid to realize that the lack of a theme made them indistinguishable. It was as if the boring hotels couldn't figure out what was going on in the bigger scheme of Western culture. Hotels in Las Vegas need special effects, rides, simulators, morphings . . . today's hotel must have fantasy systems in place, or it will perish.
* * *
Todd went to see Siegfried and Roy, and afterward made this big deal of showing Karla and me his program when we were standing in line waiting to go on the virtual reality theme ride. We were underwhelmed to say the most. Todd was quite impressed, however, with Siegfried and Roy themselves as proud examples of science and surgery combining in the name of entertainment and tanlines. He seemed wistful for his bodybuilding days of not even a year ago. "Siegfried and Roy are very obviously at the extreme end of some exciting new paradigm for the human body," said Todd. " 'See Tomorrow's Face, Today.' "
But then the big drama du jour was when Todd caught his parents gambling . . . right there on the main floor of the Luxor! They were at the quarter-slot video poker machines, and talk about weird. They were glued to their machines, really scary, like those mean old pensioners who smoke long brown cigarettes and scream at you if they think you might be contaminating their machine's winnability karma. Todd ran up and "busted" them, and it was really embarrassing, but also too good to miss. I mean, they were all screaming at each other. Todd was truly freaked out to see his parents so obviously engaging in the "secular" world. And wouldn't you just know it, his parents are at the Hacienda, too, and it really seemed like one of those foreign movies that you rent and return half-wound because they're too contrived to be believed, and then real-life happens, and you wonder if the Europeans understood everything all along.
Todd came to our room and ranted for a while about what hypocrites his parents were, and it took all my restraint not to remind him that he had "sinned" himself with a Lisa-from-Sony just the previous evening. Karla took him out on the Strip for a walk and I had some peace for the first time all day.
* * *
I called Mom from the hotel during this period of peace. I'd turned out all of the lights and closed the curtains in pursuit of sensory deprivation. It was black and sensationless. All there was in the room was my voice and Mom's voice trickling out of the phone's earpiece, and this feeling passed through me, this feeling of what a gift it is that people are able to speak to each other while they're alive. These casual conversations, this familiar voice heard through a Las Vegas hotel room telephone. It was strange to realize that, in one sense, all we are is our voice.
SATURDAY
BILL was in town launching a new product, and it was so bizarre, seeing his face and hearing his voice over the remote screens inside the convention floor. It was like being teleported back to eleventh-grade chem class. Like a distant dream. Like a dream of a dream. And people were riveted to his every gesture. I mean riveted, looking at his picture, trying to articulate the charisma, and it was so odd, seeing all of these people, looking at Bill's image, not listening to what he was saying but instead trying to figure out what was his . . . secret.
But his secret is, I think, that he shows nothing. A poker face doesn't mean showing coolness like James Bond. It means expressing nothingess. This is maybe the core of the nerd dream: the core of power and money that lies at the center of the storm of technology, that doesn't have to express emotion or charisma, because emotion can't be converted into lines of code.
Yet.
I kind of lost focus after a while, and I wandered around and picked up a copy of the New York Times lying next to an SGI unit blasting out a flight simulation. There, on the third page of the business section, not even the first, was a story about how Apple shares were going up in value as a result of rumors of an impending three-way buyout by Panasonic (Holland), Oracle (USA), and Matsushita (Japan). My, how things change. That's all I can think. Apple used to be the King of the Valley, and now they're getting prospected like a start-up. Time frames are so extreme in the tech industry. Life happens at fifty times the normal pace. I mean, if someone in Palo Alto says to you, "They never called back," what they really mean is, "They never called back within one week." A week means never in the Silicon Valley.
* * *
Todd was off all day having ordeals with his parents, and Bug, Sig, Emmett, and Susan walked around hoping they'd "accidentally" bump into Todd in order to eavesdrop a little, but to no avail.
* * *
MacCarran Airport is right next to downtown Las Vegas, and a plane flies over the city every eleven seconds. Karla and I were walking between pavilions and we saw Barry Diller in a gray wool suit (and no name tag). We sat down on a riser near the piled-up plywood freight boxes to rest our feet, and watched the planes fly by. We were both over stimulated.
Karla was fiddling with the Samsung shoelace holding her badge, and she looked up at a plane in the sky and said, "Dan, what does all this stuff tell us about ourselves as humans? What have we gained by externalizing our essence through these consumable electronic units of luxury, comfort, and freedom?"
It's a good question, I thought. I mentioned how weird it was that everybody keeps on asking, "Have you seen anything new? Have you seen anything new?" It's like the mantra of the CES.
Karla pointed out that there's really not that many types of things a person can have in their house in the end. "You can have a stereo and a microwave and a cordless phone . . . and the list goes on a bit from there . . . but after a certain point you run out of things to need. You can get more powerful and expensive things, but not really new things. I guess the number of types of things we build defines the limits of ourselves as a species."
Nintendo's Virtual Boy seemed the most advanced thing we'd seen here. SEGA won the Noisiest Booth award, and that's saying a lot at CES.
* * *
Bug, Sig, and Karla were all a bit annoyed by how "family-oriented" the city had become, and we yearned for traces of its proud history of sleaze and corruption. I mean, if you can't get lost in Las Vegas, then what's the point of Las Vegas?
During a 90-minute between-meeting lull, we decided to go to the Sahara to check out the porn component of the show, a highly secured second-floor salon room chockablock with the latest in, errr . . . cyber stimulation.
There were no empty
cabs to be found so we ended up sharing a stray Yellow Cab with the worst transvestite on the planet, Darleena: great big hairy knuckles and five o'clock shadow like Fred Flintstone. Darleena kept on talking about the day last year when she met Pamela Anderson of Baywatch at the Hefner Playboy mansion. For half a mile she discussed breast augmentation with Sig (the doctor).
As a joke I told Darleena that Karla sometimes likes to dress up like a small Edwardian boy, and Darleena got all interested. It was a fun ride.
The porn pavilion itself was creepy. This weird porn energy and lots of women with breasts like basketballs. It sounds so great in that bachelor fantasy way, but then you see it, and you freak out. Actually, pornography really just makes sex look unappealing.
After about thirty minutes we'd reached our limit, and were heading toward the door when we saw the crowd surge in the direction of one particular booth, and we looked, and there was John Wayne Bobbit, dressed in Tommy Hilfiger, like a Microsoft employee, standing amid all of these silconized inhabitants of the planet Temptron 5.
Bug said, "Here it is, one day you're just a nothing buttwipe who cheats on his wife living in the middle of nowhere and then, BAM!, two years later you're wearing Tommy Hilfiger windbreakers surrounded by eleven women with seventy-inch breasts in Las Vegas, Nevada, with the whole United States of America wondering if your dick works."
The real world is a porno movie. I'm convinced.
* * *
I got to thinking about sin, or badness, or whatever you want to call it, and I realized that just as there are a limited number of consumer electronics we create as a species, there are also a limited number of sins we can commit, too. So maybe that's why people are so interested in computer "hackers" - because they invented a new sin.
Microserfs Page 30
