Unsolicited confession: woah!
"This guy . . . he worked at the SeaFirst on Sherman Avenue in Coeur d'Alene. I'm not saying his name - as if it matters now. No. I will say his name. His name was Allan. So I've said his name. I've never done that before." A pause. "Allan."
Bug removed the roof completely from the house and plucked out, brick by brick, the interior.
"I came in one day around lunch hour - just before lunch hour - and I asked if he was into a quick bite nearby. He said yes. We went to a Sizzler, and it was such a loser lunch. Anonymous food, but it didn't matter. Allan was acknowledging the fact I existed, and I was half crazy for him. Hell, I was totally crazy for him."
Bug asked Susan if she had some extra six-stud white beams, and she gave him some.
"I asked Allan what he did on Friday nights. He said he went to this one bar. I don't even think it had a name. A dive. Truck stop with grease burgers and piss beer. I went there three weekends in a row, and on the third weekend, he showed up, and I tried to be so casual. And we talked, and we got really deep really quickly - that scary kind of deep you experience when someone has you entranced.
"And he asked me to go for a drive with him. And so ask me, did I go?"
"Did you go?" asked Michael.
"Oh yeah. We drove around for an hour in his pickup and we talked and drank Bud Light, and I kept waiting for it to go somewhere, but my problem was I didn't know what it was, or where it was supposed to go . . . where there was.
He'd swig and wipe his mouth and wipe his hand on the upholstery and nothing seemed to happen. Finally we returned to the bar. Back there, at the bar, he said he had to go, back to his . . . girlfriend. But before he went he held my hand and he stroked it, and I thought I'd die of excitement."
Bug sighed.
"What happened next?" asked Susan.
"Me? I hounded him. Oh fuck, what a loser I was. I made all these needless deposits and withdrawals at the bank. $20. $50. $10. The manager finally came over and pointedly showed me the ATM machine. Allan always managed to elude me, so I never talked to him again.
"Around the same time, I got a job offer at Microsoft and I took it - talk about escape hatch! And so there was never any closure with Allan. He's probably married now, and has 44 kids. I've been avoiding people ever since.
"But there was one final incident, though. The weekend before I left for Microsoft, I went back to the dive, and there was Allan. I felt something swell in my heart, that maybe I'd have a second chance after all to really find out what it was that I wanted to happen, and I bought two beers and was carrying them over when I saw him go out to the parking lot with some other guy, taking some other guy out for a drive, and my heart fell like a bowl of goldfish smashing onto a cathedral floor. I guess it's his gig - little drives that go nowhere, with lonely boys. Whatta sleazebag."
Total silence had fallen over our office, save for a few machines purring. Bug picked up his Lego house and held it and smelled it.
"Sure, I know I'm a geek, and I know that predisposes me to introversion. And Microsoft did allow me to feed the introversion. But as you're all noticing for yourselves, you can't retreat like that here in the Valley. There's no excuse anymore to introvert. You can't use tech culture as an excuse not to confront personal issues for astounding periods of time. It's like outer space, where the vacuum makes your body explode unless you locate sanctuary."
Ethan said, "You mean to say you haven't . . . done anything since the mid-1980s?"
Susan said, "What do you mean, done, Ethan?"
"You know - made whoopee, for Christ's sake."
Bug said, "More like ever, Eth . . . I had my hand held once. Woo-ee! I'd be a lousy contestant on The Newlywed Game."
Michael had gone to the bathroom when this subject came up.
Susan asked, "Well, Bug, what about now?"
Bug said, "Now? I don't know if it's because I was afraid of being gay or because I was afraid of being rejected, but all I know is that now feels like the first chance at having some sort of go at being in love with someone else. I was so busy geeking out that I never had to examine my feelings about anything. I jumped into one of those little cartoon holes they use in old Merry Melodies, and I just came out the other side, and the other side is here. Didn't you ever wonder where the other side was?"
This was actually a pretty good question, and I got to remembering that I did sort of used to wonder where the cartoon holes would take you if you hopped into them.
Bug got quiet and put his head on Susan's legs. "You know, Sooz, I would have come here for nothing. I never had to get paid." Bug looked up. "Oh God, Ethan. you didn't hear that." He relaxed. "Well you know what I mean. I just wanted to leave the old me behind and start all over again. It's not the money. It's never been the money. It rarely ever is. It wasn't with any of us - was it? Ever?"
I don't think it ever was. We lay around and were silent while Bug pulled himself together. I put on an old Bessie Smith CD and we sat, alcohol scrambling our codes, our thoughts, our lives, if only for the remaining darkness, until work made its claim upon us once more.
MONDAY
Today was one of those days where I was snapped awake by a bad dream and a hangover. Beware of those layered Eurodrinks - they're made with scary, bee-sting-filled liqueurs!
* * *
All of us received an e-mail from Bug:
Hi kids. Me here.
Remember back in high school, there were always those peple who were in relationhips starting in eighth grade, and they're still in relationships today? They know all the logical sequnce of the way things are supposed to happen. Like in the third week, they have a spat, and they say, "Oh, well this is just the Third Week Spat," and it passes. Never having had a relationship, I don't know how all the steps in a relationship are suppossed to go. I have to learn all the steps, decades later. But I'll do it.
Sorry I lost it last night. I'm off to a B&B in Napa for a few days to think things through. Leisure and all of that. Freaky but necessary. Live and love. Bye kids.
* * *
It appears we might be getting a publishing deal lined up - with Maxis, the Sim City people. Apparently the fish are biting at the bait: Broderbund, Adobe, and Alias have also shown a bit of interest, too. So I guess we're doing something worthwhile, or more to the point, possibly profitable. Uh oh! Am I losing my integrity, my One-Point-Oh sensibility?
* * *
I drove with Abe and Ethan to Electronic Arts up the 101 in San Mateo, on Fashion Island Boulevard - a geek party friend of ours was going to let us beta-play a new game - and we got to drive the Highway 92-101 cloverleaf I like so much.
Like most Silicon Valley buildings, EA's headquarters, the Century Two complex, are sleek and clean, a Sony-based aesthetic, where a sleek, machine-shaped object contains magic components on the inside that do cool shit. Susan says it's a "male" aesthetic. "If men could have their way, every building on earth would resemble a Trinitron."
EA's parking lot was so odd - entirely composed of brand-new cars. I felt like I was in the lot at Alamo. In the fountain out front there was a big plaza sculpture plus a bunch of rubber float toys in water crested with Joy dishwashing liquid bubbles.
"I smell nerds," said Abe.
The lobby had a vitrine containing a football signed by John Madden and a basketball signed by Michael Jordan, game licensees, both.
Played their new game all afternoon. It was almost completely bug-free and they'll be shipping within weeks.
* * *
Fashion Island, BTW, is really great - it's all these huge dead department stores that got marooned by new freeway ramp construction.
* * *
After we drove back down the 101 from San Mateo, I checked my answering machine at the office. Michael left a message to phone him, so I did - even though he was sitting in his own office just a spit away. No matter. I got his machine's message, cobbled together from old Learn how to speak Japanese tapes:
[Reso
nant Berlitzian voice:]
Japanese at a glance
[Befuddled U.S. tourist:]
I can't find my luggage
[Japanese bimbette voice:]
Nimotsu ga mitsukarimasen
[Candice Bergen-type female:]
My luggage is here
[Studly Toho Studios leading male voice:]
Nimotsu wa, koko desu
[Game show host voice:]
Is there a good disco nearby? [Japanese nerdy male voice:]
Chikaku ni, ii disco ga arimasu ka? [Game show host:]
I have cramps
[Candice:]
I have diarrhea
[Studly male:]
There's something wrong with this camera
[Bimbette:]
Cauliflower
[Game show host]
Eggplant
[Candice:]
Prosciutto with melon
[Studly guy:]
Shrimp cocktail
BEEP...
* * *
I told Todd to dial Michael's number and he did, and we had to agree that Michael's messages always indeed rocked the Free World.
Todd, I should add, like many 1990s people, equates his self-worth with the number of messages on his phone answering machine. If the red light's not blinking . . . YOU ARE A LOSER. Todd's almost cybernetic relationship with his answering machine (who am I fooling - this goes for all of us) seems a precursor of some not-too-distant future where human beings are appended by nozzles, diodes, buzzers, thwumpers, and dingles that inform us of the time and temperature in the Kerguelen Archipelago and whether Fergie is, or is not, sipping tea at that exact moment.
Todd says that at least with e-mail you have a "loser backup system" so if you didn't get a phone message, you can at least have text.
Anyway, three minutes later my phone rang and it was Michael, asking if he could take me out for a late afternoon snack, but his voice was so hesitant in an un-Michael-ish way. He was stuttering and I began to freak out, the way you do when you pass a customs guard at a border, even though you're not hiding anything. I said yes and braced myself for what seemed could only be terrible news.
* * *
We drove up the 101 to Burlingame, driving and driving and driving and driving and driving and I realized that in the Valley, the formula really is, NO CAR = NO LIFE. We arrived at the SFO Airport Hyatt Regency of all places, and I asked him why on earth we were there.
"Daniel, I love this building. It resembles the world's most piss-elegant nuclear power plant - look at the copper-oxide-colored roof, turret-like center structures, and the delightful Bayside location providing cooling waters for all those toasty transuranic fuel rods." His expression never changed during this ode.
We talked about the games at Electronic Arts, but in the back of my mind, I was trying to remember if I was pulling my weight with Oop!. Everybody's been doing such amazing work lately - the freedom and freefloat of intellectual Darwinism is bringing out the best in all of us - and maybe Michael doesn't think my work is as amazing as everybody else's. But I think it is. I mean, not only am I doing some really hot Object Oriented Programming, but I think my space station is going to be truly killer. The injustice of it all - especially after Abe made us liquid.
Michael was trimming his finger nails and nudging the keratoid crescents into his shirt pocket, and I was getting so PaRAnOId.
We arrived and were sitting in the Swift Water Cafe, and Michael ordered a decidedly non-two-dimensional piece of apple pie, flaunting in my face his betrayal of his Flatlander eating code. He seems to be abandoning it of late. It's like an alcoholic going off the wagon. He's changing.
And then, from nowhere, he asked me, "Daniel, do I seem alive?" I was so taken aback. I think this is the oddest question anybody's ever asked me.
I said, "What a silly question. I mean - of course you do - a bit machine-like at times, but. . ."
He said, "I am alive, you know. I may not have a life, but at least I'm
alive."
"You sound like Abe."
"I always used to wonder, do machines ever feel lonely? You and I talked about machines once, and I never really said everything I had to say. I remember I used to get so mad when I read about car factories in Japan where they turned out the lights to allow the robots to work in darkness." He ate his apple pie, asked the waitress for a single-malt scotch, and said, "But I think, yes, I do feel lonely. So alone. Yes. Alone."
I said nothing.
"Or I did."
Did . . . "Did? Until when?" I asked.
"I'm -"
"What."
"I'm in love, Daniel." Oh man, talk about a gossip bomb. (And thank God I'm not fired.)
"But that's great, Michael. Congratulations. With who?'"
"I don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know who."
"Well, I do and I don't. I'm in love with an entity called 'BarCode.' And I don't know who he-slash-she is, how old or anything. But I'm in love with . . . it. The BarCode entity lives in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. I think it's a student. That's all I know."
"So let me be sure I understand this. You've fallen in love with a person, but you have no idea who the person is."
"Correct. Last night you were all talking about getting bar code tattoos, and you kept saying the word 'bar code' over and over, and I thought I was going to go berserk with love. It was all I could do to contain myself. And then Bug was so open and honest I thought I would die, and I realized things can't go on as they have been going."
Michael's scotch arrived. He rolled the ice around and gulped - he's shifted from Robitussin into the hard stuff.
"BarCode eats flat food, too. And she-slash-he's written a Flatlander Oop!-style product with immense game potential. BarCode is my soulmate. There is only one person for me out there, and I have found it. BarCode's my ally in this world and . . . "
He paused and looked across the restaurant.
"Sometimes when I'm loneliest, life looks the most dreadful and I don't want to be here. On earth, I mean. I want to be . . . out there." He pointed to the sun coming in a window, a beam coming down, and the sky over the Bay. "The thought of BarCode is the only thing that keeps me tethered to earth."
"So what are you going to do about it, Michael?"
He sighed and looked at the other businessmen in the restaurant.
"But what are you going to do about it?" I asked again. He looked up at
me. "Is that why I'm here, Michael? Am I getting involved in this?"
"Can you do me a favor, Daniel?"
I knew it. "What."
"Look at me."
"I'm looking."
"No, look."
Michael put himself under the microscope lens: pudgy; eyeglassed; ill-clad; short-sleeve shirt the color of yellow invoice paper; pale complexion; Weedwacker hairdo - the nerd stereotype that almost doesn't even really exist anymore - a Lockheed junior draftsman circa the McCarthy era. But for his almost Cerenkovian glow of intelligence, he might be mistaken for a halfwit or, as Ethan would say, a fuck-wit. I said, "Is there something I should be seeing?"
"Look at me, Daniel - how could anyone be in love with me!"
"That's ridiculous, Michael. Love has almost nothing to do with looks. It's about two people's insides mixing together."
"Nothing to do with looks? That's easy for all of you to say. I have to work everyday inside our body-freak world of an Aaron Spelling production. You think I don't notice?"
"Point being . . . ? From what I can see, if one person is feeling something, there's usually a pretty good chance the other is feeling the same thing, too. So looks are moot."
"But then they see me - my body - and it's over."
In a way I was losing my patience, but then who am I to be an expert in love? "I think you're perfectly lovable. Our office is a freak show and no indication of the world at large."
"You say that like a father whose son just got braces and headgear."
&
nbsp; "What do you want me to do, Michael."
He paused and looked both ways and then to me: "I want you to visit Waterloo for me. Meet BarCode. Offer . . . it . . . a job. BarCode's the smartest programmer I've ever conversed with."
"Why don't you go, Michael?"
He looked down at himself and clamped his arms around his chest and said. "I can't. I'll be . . . rejected."
Well, if there's one thing I know, it's Michael and his unbudgeability. "Michael, if I were to do this, under no circumstances would I be willing to pretend, even for one microsecond, that I were you."
"No! You wouldn't have to! Just say that I couldn't make it and you came in my stead."
"What if BarCode turns out to be a 48-year-old man wearing a diaper - a diaper with spaghetti straps?"
"Such is love - though I hope that wouldn't be the case."
"How long have you and BarCode been e-mailing each other?"
"Almost a year."
"Does BarCode know who you are? What you are?"
"No. You know the joke: On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog."
"Oh God."
"You'll do it!"
"BarCode could be anybody, Michael."
"I love their insides already, Daniel. We've already blended. I'll take what fate throws me."
"But tell me one thing - how can you talk to somebody for over a year and not even know their age or sex?"
"Oh, Daniel - that's part of the thrill."
* * *
Back at the office I went on a walk with Karla and told her about it right away and she said it was the most romantic thing she's ever heard of and she smooched me right there in the middle of a downtown street. "Michael is so brave to love so blindly."
When I told her that it was private and that Michael would prefer Dusty and Susan didn't know, her face expressed slight peevedness, but she understood. They can be merciless.
* * *