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By Alex Morton
For the first couple of years out of high school, I was living with the girlfriend in a
killer apartment in Saint John. I had a job keeping the computer systems running
down at the IGA, an old Valiant with four new tires, and all the time in the world for
coding..
Because nobody at the IGA knew that my job took only about two hours a week and
they were paying me to sit in front of a computer for thirty-seven, I was free to do
what I wanted all day. For me, it was like winning the lottery. I worked on my own
code and learned everything I could about whatever interested me. Aside from a lot
of other technical stuff, I became an expert on an old alternative to Windows and
other operating systems, called Unix.
At night, the girlfriend and I went to hockey games, drank beer down at the tavern
with our friends, and occasionally visited the folks. Even though the girlfriend and I
were working all the time, we never had any money in the bank. She never said
much, but just got very quiet and things sometimes became a little numb between us,
and there were too many nights when we did nothing but sleep. Things were
obviously a little out of balance, but I didn’t know what to do to recalibrate until one
day the girlfriend says, “Eddie,” we’re getting out of here and going to Silicon Valley.
You may be the world’s greatest programmer, but as long as we’re living in Saint
John, it won’t even buy us a plane ticket out, so we’re gonna have to drive.”
I never argue with the girlfriend because she’s beautiful and a whole lot smarter than
me, even though she doesn’t know shit about code. On the drive across to California
I once tried to explain it to her and she just got all blinky eyed and told me we should
buy a house as soon as we could. When I mentioned how much easier it was to rent,
she told me that in this world you have to own your own place. “The rest is just for
the friggin tourists.”
When the Valiant finally got us to the West Coast, the girlfriend found a little cabin to
rent until we could buy a place. Although I knew it was literally for tourists, I didn’t
mention it to the girlfriend because I liked the place and didn’t want to stir anything
up. It was made of logs and had a fireplace and even a hot tub out back. Because it
was out of season, the place was cheap so we could stretch our dollars while I looked
for a job. Unlike Saint John, out of season didn’t mean six feet of snow and more
coming. We sat out in the hot tub, with the smell of sage in the air, and watched the
stars without fear of freezing to death. We still weren’t quite back to normal, but
things were starting to develop
Getting a job was another story. The girlfriend had gotten me so high on the idea of
the adventure of coming to Silicon Valley, that it hadn’t occurred to me to think about
what I’d actually have to do to get hooked up once we got there. I didn’t even know
where to buy a bag of pot.
The first few days, I’d leave in the morning, drive down to a restaurant near the
beach, and drink coffee while I tried to figure out what to do. Next to the girlfriend, I’
ve always been the smartest person in the room, but this was way outside anything in
my head. Every morning, the girlfriend circled the jobs in the paper, but what was I
going to say if I called them, “I’ve worked at the IGA in Saint John, New
Brunswick.”? It was incredibly depressing, so instead of doing anything, I just hung
out.
After the third day of accomplishing nothing more than a huge caffeine buzz from all
the coffee I’d been drinking, I got tired of sitting in the restaurant and went around
the corner to where I’d seen a computer store. It was pretty early in the morning,
maybe eight or nine o’clock, and although I wasn’t sure if the place was really open,
the door was unlocked, so I figured it would be okay to look around inside.
The shelves had the usual cables, boxes of disks, and packages of crappy software
that you’d have to be fucked to buy. You could get the same programs in Unix for
free, but people seemed to want to pay. On the display tables were computers,
printers, scanners and neatly stacked piles of data sheets. The walls had a couple of
posters of babes in blue suits and glasses, holding sound cards and looking amused.
Typical computer store, except that someone had obviously just fired up a big one,
because the whole place reeked of dope.
“Anybody here?” I called out. “Cause I’d like a hit of that.”
A voice responded from somewhere in the back of the store, “Out in a minute. Just
look around.”
Since there wasn’t much that I hadn’t already seen, I sat down at a computer and
moved the mouse around until the whirling stars screensaver changed to a screen full
of Unix programming. I felt like I was home. According to the commenting at the top
and between the lines of code it looked like somebody was writing a time
management program. Right away, I could see a major error that would be easy to
deal with.
“Hey,” I called out, “Your code is screwed where it’s supposed to display an
appointment in the calendar. Do you want me to fix it?”
The voice, which I noticed had a California drawl and a light cigarette huskiness,
called out, “Wait till I get out there, pardner. I was trying to find that bug all night.
You want some coffee?”
“I wouldn’t mind the coffee, but it’s too late on the code. I already fixed it.”
“Hope you didn’t fuck anything up.”
A little fat guy, in his late thirties, with muscular arms, and thinning, blond hair slicked
back into a ponytail, came out of the back room, with a big joint in his mouth and a
cup of coffee in each hand. When he reached me, he put both cups on a display table,
took the joint from his lips and handed it over. “What did you do to my code, man?”
I took a long hit off the joint and reached for one of the coffees. “Here, take a look,”
I said, and pointed out where I’d changed a couple of lines.
He stared at the screen, scratching his head for a minute until his eyes suddenly fired
up.
“That’s good, man. I see it now.” He pulled his head back and looked at me like a
farmer appraising a cow. “Well, what do you know, a real Unix programmer! I owe
you one pardner. What can I do for you?”
“Know of any jobs?”
“There’s a guy who stops in here. His name is Steve something. He works for a
company up in the valley and I think they’re looking for programmers. I don’t know if
they’re doing anything in Unix, though.”
“I can do all the other stuff too.”
“Maybe I should put you together with him.”
“What’s he like?”
“Same as all of the other assholes in marketing, but he might have a job for you. I
have his card here, somewhere.”
While he searched through the piles of paper on a desk in the corner of the store, I
took a couple of hits off the joint and drank more coffee, thinking that if this is what
it took, maybe I could handle Silicon Valley, after all.
“Here it is,” he said, holding up a dark brown card with silver lettering. “Like I told
you, man, he’s the marketing guy, but he thinks he runs the company. Doesn’t know
shit about code, but that never stopped any of them. Probably can’t hire you, himself,
but he can connect you with the engineering honcho, who’s the real president. He’s
all right, but kind of aloof, you know? They call him Bojo. According to what I hear,
he mostly stays in his office and writes code. Maybe Steve does run the company. You’
ll see. Hey … you get the job, you can buy me coffee.”
Holding out his hand, he said, “Name’s Barry. He pointed to the sign at the front of
the store. “Minor’s Computers. That’s me. Barry Minor. You?”
“Eddie Brayman. No sign, though, unless you count Libra.” When the girlfriend was
coaching me on adapting to the new culture, she made sure I understood how
important astrology was to Californians. But, judging by Barry’s puzzled look and
nervous laugh, I think she might have been wrong on that.
Nevertheless, he reached out to shake my hand, which for me that was like something
out of an old movie. Back where I grew up, people just nod to each other and
mumble when they meet. But, as the girlfriend says, when you’re on land, wear
boots, in the water, put on your fins.
“Why don’t you give Steve a call right now?” Barry sniffed the air. “While I spray
some freshener around. It’s getting kinda strong in here. Phone’s on the desk.”
Two minutes into the phone conversation, Steve asked me, with far too much
incredulity, “You’re from where?” His voice was very loud, filled with _expression,
and overly enthusiastic. What an asshole.
“New Brunswick,” I told him.
“New Brunswick, like in New Jersey?”
“No. New Brunswick, Canada. It’s a province. Like a state.”
“Oh, Canada. Hey, that’s your national anthem, isn’t it? Oh Canada? I know about
Canada. I watch hockey. You don’t sound like you’re from Jersey, anyway.” He said
the last with a put-on New Jersey accent. I think I was supposed to laugh, but all I
could manage was a lame simper, which I tried to make sound sincere.
Even doing that turned my stomach, but the girlfriend had warned me to keep my
cool. “After you get the job and they become dependent on you, then you can treat
them like shit,” she told me. “But get the job first. You can even-up later for having
to be nice to them now.”
When I mentioned who suggested I call, Steve’s response was, “Barry? Barry who?”
“Barry with the computer store in Santa Cruz. That’s where I’m calling from.”
“Oh. That guy. Probably got you high the minute you walked in the door.”
“Well …”
“Good guy, that Barry.” He paused for a minute “What do you want, anyway?”
“Barry said you might be looking for a programmer.”
“I’m looking to avoid programmers, if you want to know the truth. They make me
crazy.” He chuckled. “But, yeah, seriously, we do need to add a couple. Are you any
good?” Steve spoke like a standup comedian with bad material.
“Yeah,” was all I could manage. It sounded lame, but what else could I say, that I’m
the best? That I’ve been able to code my way in circles around anyone out there
since I was twelve? That I can write code in C, Pascal, Assembler, and any of a dozen
other programming languages and that I dream in code and my nightmares all
revolve around being prevented from writing it. The girlfriend warned me, though.
She said, “Go easy. Let them find out on their own. The other programmers will tell
them soon enough.”
After a few minutes of discussing my background, Steve asked to talk to Barry. I
traded the phone for the joint, and listened to one side of the conversation.
“Yeah, I think he’s good, man. No. I just met him, but he fixed a bug in my code that
I couldn’t find my way around with a road map.” He paused, listened for a few
seconds, and then continued, “Yeah, I can get that for you. When do you want it?
Sure. I can go see my man tonight. Come by tomorrow.” He listened, again, for a
minute or two. “No problemo, pardner, it’s always good. I’ll see you then.” He
handed the phone back to me and said to hang on for a minute while Steve set up my
meeting with the engineering honcho.
I took another hit on the joint, and sipped coffee, both of which were a hell of a lot
richer than any of the shit we had back in Saint John.
The girlfriend went berserk that night. Back in Saint John, I was always the one who
started things up, but things were suddenly very different. She almost drowned me in
the hot tub, and near beat me to death in bed. She’d let me rest for a while, and then
shout something like, “We’re going to have a house! I’m only friggin nineteen and I’
m going to have a house in friggin California.!” Or she’d pipe up with, “Do you know
what they pay programmers here?” And then she’d jump me again. It made me think
of what my father once said when he was describing what he had to do to save the
barn in a hurricane: “It was one wild night, boys, and I tell ya I’ll never forget it, but
if I kept up that pace I’d be dead in a year.”
In the morning I drove up away from the ocean, on the most dangerous road the
Valiant and I had ever seen. I learned later that they called it Blood Alley, and by the
skid marks along the center divider, I could see why. If I was going to drive it every
day, the trick would be to keep my guts off the concrete.
At the office, a major babe, who introduced herself as Annamaria, asked me to wait
while she went to find Steve. She was short, dark-haired and very curvy. “He could
be anywhere,” she said. “He can never sit still.”
Annamaria turned to go, but before she could leave the reception area, a red-headed
guy in a suit with a tie and all the rest of that shit, came out like he’d just been
released from the starting gate at Exhibition Park Raceway. He bounced from one
foot to the other, and his hands never stopped moving. He looked like he was being
hit with two hundred twenty volts of electricity, and loving it.
“Looks like I don’t have to find him for you,” Annamaria said. “Eddie, this is Steve.”
“You the programmer I spoke to on the phone?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m Steve.”
He held out his vibrating hand as if he were about to give me something special. I
gripped it, but didn’t have to do any of the shaking.
“Bojo’s meeting you in the boardroom. There’s a pot of coffee and some fresh
croissants in there. I’ll show you the way, eh,” he said, with a mock Canadian accent.
Real asshole.
I followed his bright, red hair through a maze of cubicles filled with nervous looking
people talking into phones and staring at computer screens. Outside of the
boardroom, he turned to me and said, “Barry says you’re a real programming
superstar. Come to work in this company and soon you’ll be dating models … even
better looking than Annamaria.”
I didn’t say anything back because as the girlfriend says, “When you hear a noise
coming out of an asshole, there’s no sense in replying.”
Bojo, the chief engineer or president or whatever he was, turned out to be all right.
He asked me a few questions that showed he knew what he was talking about, and
once he’d earned my respect that way, we could talk. Even though he was the
president of the company, Bojo told me that he really wasn’t into micromanaging and
that he left most of the details of running the company to Steve and Annamaria. He
just mainly wanted to work on the code. I didn’t blame him. Everything else in the
company is just there to support the coding, anyway.
The girlfriend told me that I should be the one to bring up salary. She showed me, in
the want ads, what they were offering programmers. “Just remember, you’re in the
high range,” she said. “Don’t name the price. Just bring up the issue, and then let
them make the first offer. If it’s even higher than what you’re expecting, add another
friggin twenty friggin percent, and they’ll probably go for it.”
When I mentioned salary, Bojo gave me a serious look, and said, “I learned a long
time ago that if you pay peanuts all you’ll get are monkeys.” Then he made me an
offer that was twice what the girlfriend thought I’d get. I figured that would be good
enough, even for her, but before I had a chance to say yes, Bojo added on stock
options and a benefits package that apparently even paid for a chiropractor.
The next morning, I could have used one. The girlfriend managed to raise a hand
about ten centimetres off the pillow to wave me out the door, and I hobbled out to
the Valiant and took off for my first day of work in Silicon Valley.
When I got to the office, Annamaria was the only one there. “Nobody shows up this
early,” she said. “None of the programmers, anyway. Although sometimes they work
until now. You’ll see. Hope you’re not married?”
“Girlfriend.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Live-in?” She asked. Aside from the girlfriend, she was the
most direct woman I’d ever met, and might have been attractive, except for a set of
sharp little teeth that were frightening.
“Came with me from Saint John.”
The eyebrow went down. “Girlfriend from back home, huh? Take my advice. As soon
as you get settled this morning, call her right away and let her know how late we
work here. Just slip it into the conversation. If she knows the score up front, maybe
she can be all right with it, cause if she goes back to Saint John, she’ll never even let
you write to her. It’s your only hope.”
She looked at me pointedly. “Or do you want to dump her?” An eyebrow lifted again.
“This would be a perfect opportunity.”
“I love her.”
“You’re fucked.” The eyebrow lowered.
“We’re buying a house.” Up and down went the other eyebrow.
“How long you been here in California? She looked at me intently with an interested
smile on her face.
“Four days.”
“The house her idea?” Both eyebrows went up.
“Yeah.”
Her eyebrows levelled out. “Maybe you’ll be okay, after all. Sounds like your girlfriend
has her head screwed on right.”
An hour later, when Steve bounced into the office with a little white powder clinging
to his nose, I could pretty well guess how he screwed on his head in the morning. He
raced me through a tour of the office, at a pace that was nearly top speed for the
Valiant. Then he headed off for a week-long trip to New York.
After I’d been working at the company for a while, I learned that Steve travelled
more than he remained still. He’d be gone for days at a time, and for all I knew he sat
on his butt on a beach somewhere, because even though the company had a finished
product, there didn’t seem to be any sales.
The rest of us worked our asses off. We coded through the night, living on way
better pizza than we ever had in Saint John, and Chinese food that was from a whole
other China than the crap they delivered back home. The company picked up the tab
for lunches, dinners, and whatever other food or drink we wanted. The work was
easy, but sometimes interesting, and although they didn’t know shit about hockey
and drank cabernet instead of beer, most of the other programmers weren’t too
stupid, so it turned out to be a decent job. None of it was Unix, but I still had half my
time to work on my own code, since it turned out that even in the midst of a room of
programmers, nobody had any idea what I was doing. As long as I gave them
spotless code way before they figured they’d get it, they thought I was busting my
ass for the company.
At home, it was like we’d struck gold. The girlfriend got herself a late shift job in a
bookstore, and a little car to get her there. She bought clothes and I got a motor job
for the Valiant, and a rear projection TV that was so big it barely fit in the cabin. Then
we bought a waterbed and learned how to roll with the tide. Fuck, it was wonderful!
I bought pot from Barry, tried to keep my head on straight, and generally steered
clear of the white powder, although from what I saw if it wasn’t for cocaine, most of
the industry would never have gotten out of bed in the morning. It was everywhere.
When I’d drive to work on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road, there’d be someone at every
traffic light with a spoon up his nose, and at the end of the day, they’d be doing lines
in the bars. I avoided it all and went straight home after work. Sometimes it was two
or three AM, but the Valiant and I made the drive down Blood Alley as if a magnet
was pulling us from the other end.
For the first time in my life there was nothing wrong. I missed hockey and a couple of
friends, but not enough to be really bothered. The girlfriend was happy, and some
nights had to be convinced that I needed sleep. The only worry was how long the
company could survive without sales. The girlfriend was the one who brought it up,
because she knew it wasn’t the kind of thing I’d realize on my own.
“You’ll be okay as long as you don’t friggin start to believe in the company,” she told
me. “Remember. There’s nothing there to believe in. If they run out of friggin money,
you’ll see that soon enough. It’s just like the emperor’s new clothes, only these
friggin clowns won’t be naked under there, they’ll be broke.”
The girlfriend refused to come to the office to meet any of them. “Listen,” she said,
“They’re not important. You always have to remember that, as far as you’re
concerned, the only friggin reason the company exists is to pay you. If it looks like
there’s going to be friggin trouble on that score, then jump fast. There are lots of
friggin jobs out here, but only one a you.”
A couple of months into the job, the company got very shaky. Steve was gone most
of the time, and each time he checked back into the office, his nose was always
running and he shook more than ever. When I told the girlfriend about it, she said
that instead of making sales he was probably treating his nose like a friggin slot
machine, hoping that if he stuffed enough nickels in it he’d hit the jackpot.
Whenever Steve wasn’t around, Bojo and Annamaria seemed to be conspiring in a
corner, or maybe they just had something going together. You couldn’t tell with
Annamaria, because she tended to cling to whatever man was closest. When Steve
was in the office, he was the one she leaned against. When he was gone, it was Bojo,
the engineering honcho, although he always seemed a little awkward and confused
about the continual physical contact. I’d met his wife at the office one afternoon,
when she wheeled in, whispered harshly at him in a corner and, and then turned on
her heel and motored back out. She looked like an angry prune and I couldn’t blame
Bojo if he did have something going with Annamaria.
The other programmers began to spend a lot of time worrying about the company
and staring out the windows as if looking for another place to work. The buzz was
that
Steve was spending all of the company’s money and that if he wasn’t gone soon, the
money would be. It didn’t worry me much because, although I kept it to myself, one
afternoon I overheard Annamaria telling Bojo that the report had arrived and that
Steve was now dead meat. But I didn’t say anything, except to the girlfriend. I just
did my work and let them all amuse themselves, while for my own fun, I wrote
software for Unix that would make it prettier and easier to use than Windows. It
wasn’t done with any particular plan in mind, but just to see what I could create. I’d
started work on it back in Saint John, and with the long hours I was putting in, it had
progressed to the point where it was pretty much usable. I didn’t show it to anyone,
until the afternoon Barry came into the office, and looked over my shoulder when I
wasn’t expecting him.
“What the hell’s that, pardner?”
“Well … you know. Something of my own. Don’t say anything.”
“Don’t say anything is my middle name. I don’t say anything about a lot of things,
pardner.” He studied the screen. “This thing I’m not saying anything about, what is
it, exactly? I know it ain’t Windows, but it looks even slicker.”
“It’s built around Unix.”
“No shit?”
“I just put some stuff on top of Unix to pretty it up and make it easy to use. There’s
also an easy install.”
“Hey, I’ve seen shells on Unix before, but this is something else.”
”It’s coming.”
“What are you gonna do with it?”
“I don’t know. I just wrote it for the hell of it.”
“Can I get a look at it?”
“Soon as I get everything working.”
“I’ll hold you to it, pardner.” He dropped a little plastic bag of pot on my keyboard.
“Little present for you. Bet you never smoked anything like this back in Saint
wherever you come from.”
“Saint John.”
“I’ll see you later, Eddie,” He held up a little glassine envelope.” I did Steve a little
favor that I have to drop off to him.”
“Seems he’s getting a lot of those favors.”
“Hey, for me it’s just business, pardner. I’m not his bishop. It’s up to him what he
does.” Barry stared out at the office while he spoke. “He does what he does, and I do
what I do. That’s the way the world is set up.” He grabbed my shoulder, “And, hey,
pardner, you do some spectacular code. Don’t forget to let me have a copy of your
Unix stuff to play around with when you’re ready. It’s pretty cool all right.”
One afternoon, there was a lot of yelling coming out of Bojo’s office and then Steve
tore out of there with blood streaming down his leg. When I told the girlfriend about
it, her comment was, “It’s worse than I thought. They’re friggin savages. Maybe you
should carry a weapon.”
Whatever had happened, Steve never came back, and not long after that, Annamaria
left, but her departure was bloodless. She had a big smile on her face and both
eyebrows raised as she said goodbye to everybody, so I figured she was just going
on to a better job. A couple of days later, they brought in a new marketing guy who
seemed to know how to do something besides snort cocaine and travel, and soon
even Bojo woke up and there were suddenly lots of sales, and money flowed like
water and washed away the only real worry I had.
My salary went way up at the end of the first year, and they gave me a whole whack
of stock options to make sure I didn’t make a jump to the competition. The girlfriend
found us a little house to buy in the Santa Cruz mountains, where the adults buy
dope that’s probably grown by their neighbor’s kids, and ninety percent of the people
commute to Silicon Valley.
Along with the salary raise and stock options, they also gave me my own office, which
made it easier to keep developing my version of Unix, re-working all the programs
until I got it to the point where even my old grandmother on the farm would be able
to install and use it. It wasn’t something I even bothered to tell the girlfriend about
because it didn’t seem important. She knew that I spent half my time at the office
working on my own projects, but while she approved of the idea, she wasn’t
interested in the details. “Just don’t let them friggin catch you at it,” was her only
comment. I never mentioned that Barry had seen it, because it didn’t seem to matter
since he didn’t work for the company.
It was all just about perfect, but leave it to the girlfriend to find the flaw in paradise.
Not that she was wrong. She just noticed it first. As we got close to Christmas the
second year, she started to get quiet and distant, like she did back in Saint John just
before she decided we should move. When I asked her what was wrong, she just
looked at me strangely and said, “Why should there be anything friggin wrong?” and
turned her back on me and fell asleep.
Finally, when I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she opened up. “All I really
want is a trip back home. You’re not gonna believe this, but I miss friggin Saint
John.” I knew what she meant, but I’d been pushing the thought aside each time it
tried to enter my consciousness.
When I asked if she wanted to visit or move back, she just stared at the ceiling for a
while before she said, “Sometimes I wish we could move home, but I can’t see you
working back at the friggin IGA, and I don’t want to get stuck in some friggin
apartment, again. Let’s just go there for a visit. See what we think.”
Before we left, I gave Barry the copy I’d promised him of the latest version of my
brand of Unix. It was pretty much finished and really slick. There was software for
anything from word processing, to spreadsheets and databases. Most of it was just
built on top of already-existing Unix software, done to make it pretty and easy to use.
I had a computer set up at home running it, and so far it seemed pretty stable.
This time, when we travelled, I left the Valiant at a body shop for a paint job, and we
flew. The girlfriend talked nicely to the airline people when we were checking in, and
they put us up with the suits in business class.
It was weird. I never fly, and the one time I did, there was someone I knew on the
plane. Annamaria got on just after we took our seats. It had been a while since I’d
seen her and she’d lost a few pounds, but her teeth were still just as sharp. When
she saw me, she stopped beside my seat to talk, pressing herself against my forearm,
so that the other boarding passengers could pass behind her.
“Hey, Eddie,” she said, “This the girlfriend?”
When I introduced them they eyed each other like the time I put a pair of Siamese
fighting fish into the same tank. It was no wonder with the way she was pressing
herself against me. I had to forcibly pull my arm away from where she’d pinned it
against the armrest with her crotch.
“I heard you and Steve left the company,” said the girlfriend, getting in the first
blow. “What happened?”
Annamaria furrowed her eyebrows. “Steve’s a slime bucket and never got anything
done. I heard he was in rehab for a while down South.”
“That why he was canned?”
One eyebrow raised. “He’s bad in all directions. They didn’t even know about that
part.”
“And you? What happened to you?”
The eyebrows turned down and angry. She didn’t like the girlfriend’s implication that
she, too, had been canned. “Better opportunity,” she snapped. “I’m VP marketing of
another startup, now.” She stared down the girlfriend. The eyebrows went up into a
straight, nasty line. “And what do you do, dear?”
“Whatever I friggin want.” The girlfriend wiggled her eyebrows and then cracked up.
Annamaria stared at her for a minute, unconsciously raised her eyebrows, and then
realizing that she’d just helped illustrate a parody of herself, tried to laugh. It was no
more genuine than when I had laughed at Steve’s humor.
After Annamaria excused herself to go to her seat, there was no more chance to
speak. The flight landed in Chicago, where we were changing planes. By the time we
had our packs out of the overhead, Annamaria was gone, without a word of
goodbye. The thought struck me that she might have been trying to warn me about
Steve, but I wasn’t sure, and the girlfriend was too busy talking about how much fun
it would be to stay at the Hilton, instead of in the TV room at the folks, for me to
bring it up.
When we landed in Saint John, it was snowing like a bastard. The plane rocked in the
wind as it came down, but other than that we landed okay. We picked up a rental car
at the airport and drove into town like a couple of business people. The weather was
shittier than we’d remembered, and by the time we got to the hotel, I was ready to
turn around and go back to California.
Saint John is not one of the prettier cities. The Saint John River may sound
picturesque, but it’s a mass of bubbles from the pulp plant and right in the center of
town is an oil refinery, a paper plant and a power plant, all contributing to a
symphony of greys.
But the girlfriend said we should enjoy Saint John, even if it was friggin horrible. “It’s
different, now,” she said. “We’ve got some friggin money, so maybe we won’t be
bothered so much by the place and the friggin weather. But it sure is friggin cold.”
That night she went for the record.. “Let’s get a friggin suite with a hot tub,” the
girlfriend said. “We can afford it this once.” After we dropped off our stuff, we went
to a restaurant where they called me Mr. Brayman and the girlfriend, Mademoiselle.
After a bottle of champagne with the lobster, brandy after dinner, and a big toke in
the alley behind the restaurant we caught a taxi back to the hotel. Before we were
out of the elevator, even in the elevator, hell, while we were still in the taxi, she was
celebrating. Things got even wilder than they ever had in California, and we didn’t
even get near the hot tub until daylight.
Somewhere around four in the afternoon we crawled out of the room and the
girlfriend still couldn’t stop smiling. “I never thought Saint John could feel like friggin
paradise,” she said as we were leaving the hotel. “Even the friggin snow looks good
to me right now, and that’s something.”
Saint John is the opposite of California, where people flash whatever they can, so
when we visited the folks we tried to keep our success to ourselves, downplaying it
as much as possible. That night at the tavern, it was pretty much the same, and
although me and the girlfriend were drinking Heinekens instead of tap beer and we
bought a couple of rounds for the table, we didn’t say much about how we were
doing in California, except that it was a lot of work.
.
When we got back to California, after the grey of Saint John, it was as if someone
had turned on the lights again. It was the same at the office, where they were getting
ready to take the company public. Everything was bright and everybody was on stage
whenever the financial people came to the office. We were told by management that it
was our mission to tell everybody we could how well we were doing, because it
would create more excitement around the stock.
“Do whatever they friggin say,” the girlfriend told me. “These clowns are going to
make you a lot of money with their circus and all you have to do to make us rich is
play in the band and keep smiling.”
Barry seemed to have disappeared while I was away. His computer store was closed,
and there was a “for rent” sign in the window. The only phone number I ever had for
him was at the store, and since I had no idea where he lived, he was effectively out of
my life. Barry still had the copy of my Unix code, but I didn’t think anything of it,
because I’d already lost interest in the version that I’d left with him. While I was in
Saint John I’d thought of a way to make it much better, and it wouldn’t take more
than a couple of weeks to implement.
The girlfriend was happy. She’d gotten over the homesick thing and was taking
courses in wine, yoga, and Chinese cooking, because as she said, “If we ever go back
to Saint John I’m not ever again eating that shit Chinese food they serve there, I’m
also staying off the beer, and I’m never gonna wind up with a fat ass like the girls
back home.”
One afternoon, when the girlfriend came to meet me for lunch at a place down the
road from the office, we ran into Steve. He was sitting two tables over with someone
who had his back to us. I was going to ignore Steve, but the girlfriend told me to go
over and say hello. “Bring him over, she said, I want to meet this character.”
Steve’s lunch companion turned out to be the long missing Barry, who had chopped
off his pony tail and was dressed in a suit. They both looked as if they saw a skunk
when I popped up next to their table.
“Barry, you disappeared,” I said.
“Couldn’t sit in the store forever, pardner. I’m into something else, now.” He looked
nervously at Steve.
“That program you were working on the first time I went into the store, is that what
it is? Did you finish it?”
“No, I’ve got something else, now.” He sneaked a look at Steve. “Can’t talk about it
yet, but I’ve already got some financing.”
“What’d you think of that Unix stuff of mine?”
“Didn’t have much chance to look at it. I’ll get the disk back to you next time I see
you, pardner.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m onto the next version.” The eyes went back and forth
between the two.
“Can I get a look?” Barry asked, a little too anxiously.
“Be a little while,” I said. “Things are too busy right now for me to do much work on
it.”
“I heard you’re doing a public offering,” Steve said, not looking too happy about it.
If he’d stayed he would have made a lot of money from his shares, but he lost them
when he was fired.
“As I remember it,” Steve went on, “you have a lot of shares. Don’t forget your old
friends when you’re rich.”
The girlfriend came over to where I stood talking beside the table shared by Barry
and Steve. Back in Saint John, we would have been asked to join them for lunch, but
I’d heard it said that while they shook hands when you met in Silicon Valley, you just
as often got stabbed in the back on the way out. Manners only went so far.
The restaurant was too busy for us to stand beside them talking for long, so after a
quick introduction of the girlfriend and a couple of minutes in which Steve made lame
jokes about Canadians and Barry stared at his fingernails, we went back to our table.
When I tried to talk, the girlfriend just glared at me. “I’m not gonna say a friggin
thing with that pair of snakes so close to our table. Those boys are playing a game,
and Eddie, you’re it.”
Until we were in the car on the way back to the office, all the girlfriend would talk
about was the food. Then she let me have it. “What does that pair of clowns have on
you, Eddie? Is there something you haven’t friggin told me, because there’s some
kind of shit going on there.”
Ever since I met her, the girlfriend has been warning me that two and two doesn’t
add up to four just when you’re programming.
“They’ve got my Unix code,” I told her.
“What are you friggin talking about?”
“You know that project I was working on?”
“You mean what’s on that computer you leave running in the corner all the time?”
“They’ve got a copy, and I think they’re probably going to try to put it on the
market.”
“You let them steal your friggin code?”
“I just loaned a copy to Barry to have a look at.”
“You friggin gave away your code?”
“That’s okay, I have a better version I’m working on, anyway.”
“Eddie, could people use the old version of the code they stole from you?”
“Sure. It’s pretty nice, actually.” I explained to her what I’d built, how it could be
used to replace Windows and all of it’s expensive programs and was easier to install
and use. Before I was finished, I thought she’d kill me.
“There’s one important thing I need to tell you,” I said, but I could see that she was
at her boiling point and not about to listen to anything more I had to say.
“What? That you gave away a friggin diamond mine too? Just friggin shut up, Eddie.”
For the next three nights she slept on a cot in the back room and wouldn’t talk to me.
In the morning, she stayed in bed until I’d left, and when I’d come home late at
night, she’d already be asleep.
Meanwhile, my company was racing toward its public offering, and I was about to
have a ton of money. The day before it was scheduled to happen, I only went to the
office for a couple of hours, and then left, determined to get the girlfriend to talk to
me. She was in the hot tub, sulking and soaking, when I got home.
“I need to talk to you about something.”
“Not a friggin thing you say will interest me.”
“The company goes public tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“We’re about to have a lot of money.”
“Could have been a friggin lot more.”
“And you don’t even want to celebrate?”
“No more celebrating around here.”
“You’re not thinking straight.”
“About what? How you friggin gave away a fortune to that pair of clowns?”
“They didn’t get anything.”
“What do you mean, they didn’t get anything, they already have everything.”
“Can’t sell it.”
“Why, cause you friggin say no?”
By the time I finished explaining it to her, she was out of the hot tub and on me, and
it’s a good thing we have a high fence and shade trees around the back yard. It might
have been a good idea if we’d had loud music, too, but life isn’t like code and you can
only do so much planning. Nobody called the police, so I guess there’s no problem,
although a couple of the local farmer kids have been grinning at me even more than
usual.
Listen. Like I say, next to the girlfriend, I’m always the smartest in the room.
Mozart would have freaked out at anyone laying claim to his music, Picasso would
have stabbed any bastard stupid enough to attempt to put his name on one of his
paintings, and my reaction was no less passionate. I just did it in advance.
The next morning, the company was suddenly public, and for the first time in my life I
had more than a few months of money in the bank. The girlfriend said that while she
didn’t think we should work on having kids yet, we should get in a lot of practice, and
took me to Mexico for a week to get started.
When I got back to the office, everything was humming. Nearly everybody had
enough stock options to keep them smiling, and for a while there was wine and
cheese in the coffee room at lunchtime, and pate and little cakes in the late afternoon.
Sometimes there was also a little not-too-discreet snorting going on, but I mostly
kept my intake down and spent my time working on my own code. My new version
was finished just about the time Steve and Barry announced the launch of the Unix
suite they’d stolen from me.
It didn’t get very far because of a little time bomb I’d built into it. Exactly three
months after Barry had gotten his hands on my code, every copy erased itself as soon
as it was run. Although it never reached the papers, the word was soon out all over
the valley and a few people called me who were interested in a version of my Unix
code that wouldn’t blow up after three months.
I finally sold it for more money than I could make programming in the next fifty
years, but after all the celebrating when the company went public, I decided not to
tell the girlfriend until after I’ve had a good rest. Otherwise, I might not survive.
So, I’m sitting here, at the computer with a joint in my hand, waiting for the girlfriend
to come home from the store, thinking that although I’ve made all this money, my
priorities haven’t changed at all. When you come right down to it, there are only
three things in the world that matter to me. And I’ve got them all covered. The rest is
just for the tourists.
About Alex Morton:
I live on a mountain overlooking Vancouver, BC,
and write for several magazines, including Nuvo
("important" serious articles for a very slick, very
expensive Canadian publication), and Pacific Yachting.
