YOUR OWN PERSONAL SATAN

Glen David Gold

 

 

 

I published my first piece of paid writing in March 1994, in the East Bay Express, a free weekly distributed across Berkeley and Oakland. I spent much of that week going from café to café, waiting for someone to pick up the paper and begin reading my article so I could come up to them and tell them I wrote it. Typing that, I cringe. Nonetheless, I recall my dedication on my lunch hour, on my way home from work, on the little walks I took after dinner that just happened to amble past the Coffee Mill, Café Roma, Sufficient Grounds. I was relentless.

I’d spent six months working on that article, eight thousand words on my internship at Suicide Prevention. My byline’s appearance was the culmination of a dream I’d had since grade school. And, goddamn it, I wanted to see someone who was ignoring his or her latte in favor of my piece. “Yeah, I wrote that,” I imagined saying, with a squint into the noonday sun, and a tilt of my chin into the wind, as if I led safaris, as if this encounter was no big deal.

After four or five fruitless days, time was running out. I saw a woman in her late sixties reading the Express in Café Trieste. In fact, she was halfway through my article. I couldn’t believe my luck.

I stalked her. I pretended to look at the paintings on the wall. I went to the phone and gazed back at her. She wasn’t looking up. She didn’t touch her scone. Instead, she folded the page back and kept reading. This was awesome.

Finally, I approached her. When I said, “Hey there,” she looked up.

“You liking the story?”

“Yes, I am,” she said. She pursed her lips, gazing past me as if she had something to add.

But I just plowed on. “Great, because I wrote it.”

“I’m hoping this article can explain to me why my son killed himself.”

Pow.

In my fantasies of surprising readers with my presence, this was never the response. What did I say back to her? I must have mumbled something acknowledging her loss, but I would like to replace whatever I said, from the beginning, from the approach, with a slow backward tiptoe away, hands extended, occasionally whispering a sincere “I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry.”

To find a reader engaged in your work is incredibly rare, up there with finding a unicorn laying his head in a virgin’s lap. Stripped of pretence, my ambling up to her and grinning, dusting my nails and blowing on them, actually meant, “I am insecure and looking for reassurance and hoping to perform this bait-and-switch: If you loved my words, surely you’ll love me, here I am now, love me! Have I mentioned I am so trapped in my desires that I can’t even conceive that your reading is a private act? LOVE ME!!!”

This was a blunt-force lesson that should have ended for me a fantasy that I think writers have had as long as there have been readers: the desire to be a fly on the wall, what Paul Bowles calls “the invisible spectator,” as your work is being discussed. Seeing that woman’s pain ended, forever and ever, my desire to know what people think of my work as they’re reading.

Sort of.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is Glen G and I google myself.

If, as Depeche Mode promises, we all have our own personal Jesus, then Google is my own personal Satan. It pains me to explain Google, as it’s like trying to rationally describe what fishnet stockings are: They’re just clothes! Why all the fuss? Google is a search engine whose effectiveness at ferreting out online information is sublime and terrifying. It is the site that chews up all other sites and digests them, an enzymatic action leaving a fibrous residue that reflects only the subject you’re searching for. And I look for Glen David Gold.

The results come back in fiendish little packs of ten, the name of each site crowning strips of text lifted from that page, often rendered broken and opaque. Google works like an ocean storm, scattering upon my own particular beach all the pretty seashells that reflect my name. For instance, it reports back to me that the City Insider of Glen Clove, Maine, features a fortune cookie summary: “Glen David Gold finds meaning of holiday in poor man’s soup.” This is a bizarre tease, for, alas, the page itself is no longer found, the meaning of that soup long gone, Google simply savoring the aftertaste.

Google is mighty, like Uranus, and, like Uranus, eats its own, sitting on a lonely, towering throne made of zeros and ones that, in macroscope, are actually the crushed and mangled egos of every poor soul on earth who types his own name in the “search” box. When you look into Google, Google looks into you, and not to get Miltonic on your ass here, but like the moon shining at the whim of the sun, the reflected glory you find is actually the unremarkable glow of the second-best, not what you’re actually looking for, a spark of human love.

Which might be a bit overdramatic. When considering my own vices, I tend to reach for the rafters, if only to beat my head against them.

A bit of genetics here. My father has worked with computers since the 1950s. We had a computer terminal in the house in 1970, a bulky plastic podium whose every key made a resounding ca-chunk sound, like crushing pistachios, whose protorenaissance of a brain required punchtape that cast off extremely satisfying confetti into a translucent side pouch fantastically attractive to six-year-olds in search of things that went well with the wind. There was a phone umbilicus, which connected this little beast to its mother downtown, a mighty DEC 10 mainframe. My father spent hours every day hunched over it, typing away in BASIC or FORTRAN, and being separated from it caused him enough anxiety so that our housekeeper called it his mistress.

I believe I learned from my father that it wasn’t wrong to spend sunny afternoons and Saturday nights immobile in front of a computer. The dishonest and lazy side of me would like to drop the blame for my Internet addiction at my father’s feet, but I can’t quite hold my head up to that. It’s entirely my fault.

In 2001, I wrote a novel called Carter Beats the Devil. If (as of today) you put my name into Google and hit “search,” you will come up with the first 10 of a claimed 6,950 pages that mention me. On the right-hand side of the screen, you’ll see “sponsored links,” which make intriguingly related promises. At eBay, for instance, you’ll find “Low Priced Glen David Gold! Huge Selection!” Which I have to admit makes me feel rather cheap (and mildly excited). And eBay has in fact an astonishing heap of my novel, in aggregate a tower perhaps thirty stories tall, with frighteningly low opening bids. The next sponsored link, Reunion.com, is more personal and less about turning me, Glen David Gold, into a commodity. “Reunite with David Glen,” it promises, which honestly tugs at my heart in a sappy kind of way until I remember that my name is Glen David.

To follow the results on Google takes a kind of obsessivecompulsiveness matched only by chain-smoking insomniac laboratory gibbons who feed slot machines for cocaine pellets. After Google automatically removes all similar sites, there are 730 web pages that mention me. I have looked at each and every one of them, all the way from the Duran Duran fan site (a fan recommended Carter to Simon LeBon) to the Suicide Girls Web site (a patron of the Suicide Girls has Carter as a favorite read) to sites memorializing Philo T. Farnsworth (who appears in Carter) to the alt.sexuality.spanking newsgroup (it was suggested that a scene I wrote in which a pirate burned the back of a pretty girl’s hand with a cigarette “capture[s] perfectly a certain type of intense emotional connection that can happen—if we’re very very lucky—as we do what it is that we do.”).

Ah, the intense emotional connection. Is that dangling carrot why I do this spinning on my wheel? There is the obvious desire to be paid attention to, but I have to admit that straightforward reviews of my novel, even if they’re generous, aren’t what catch my attention. I am charmed by the tangents, the way people all bring their own perceptions to the party (I hadn’t intended to make a sub/dom statement using a pretty girl and a pirate as my mouthpiece, but hey, cool!). I like how, as with the best of all grace, we touch people in unexpected ways. But that’s not all of it—there’s some underlying anxiety that sends me back to the well.

I notice this most when Google pops up with a phantom sentence in its display, random poetry dragged out of hyper-space and slammed still between the glass sheets of a microscope slide. One of Google’s findings has the bizarre heading “Re: paleonet Freshwater Coccoliths,” which caught my attention (there are no coccoliths, freshwater or otherwise, in Carter). And below it, I saw the terrible-looking incomplete phrase, “ . . . Carter as woefully inadequate,” and I clicked, almost shaking with rage (“Who the hell finds my Carter to be woefully inadequate?”) to find that the phrase was my own, part of a quotation I’d used in my novel and now part of the signature for the Chief Consultant, Industrial Nannoplankton Gower Street Laboratory in the UK. I was relieved.

And perhaps that’s one key to this obsession: the sudden emotional shock and then return to normal. It’s like watching a horror movie. Perhaps that’s it, entirely.

Or not.

Recently, I was standing around with a group of friends, all writers, and I cheerfully announced I was going to write an article about googling yourself.

There was a cough, a lonely sound, a tumbleweed rolling across the floor.

“Looking people up on Google?” one guy finally asked.

“No, yourself.”

“I only look up other people,” he declared, adding with a certain triumph over me, “It’s handy when you’re dating.” There was much agreement, and the conversation turned elsewhere. It closed the metaphor: Googling yourself is like masturbation. Only not sanctioned. You are allowed the shame but there has of yet been no Jocelyn Elders, no Joani Blank, to tell you it’s OK to do it.

I’m not sure I’m the fool to rush in with that particular message. Unlike masturbation, which has a genuine end point and—when done adequately—some satisfaction, self-googling just goes until it stops. Even though my father was actually getting work on the computer done rather than whatever the hell you’d call my obsession, I think I know how he felt when being called to dinner or to bed, or when confronted the next morning and asked if he’d been at the computer all night: There is a suspicion that just after the next mountain, awaiting you is the finale of truth, a completed task, and you can finally log off once you’ve laid it bare.

A few months ago, Google reported that my name appeared on a Web site I’d never heard of. It was called fivesandwiches .com. Fivesandwiches.com’s heading said it was a site dedicated to reviews of audio and print books. The text below, as often happens, was noncommittal. There was no way to tell what the site had said about me. So I clicked on it.

My cursor turns into a small yin-yang sign when something is downloading. I suppose I chose it to remind me of patience. You know, the way you do.

Fivesandwiches.com took its time. First the frame showed up, with a logo in the upper-right-hand corner: five cartoony, triangular wedges, speared with toothpicks, boasting olives, greens, and layers of meat, iconic 1950s man-about-town sorts of sandwiches, the kind of sandwiches Rock Hudson would have toyed with in The Pajama Game.

The site ranked novels on a scale of one sandwich to five sandwiches, five being the best, one being the worst. But the information specific to me was slow, oh so slow, to download. The yin-yang sign spun as all the side text and links appeared, along with invitations to save Angel, the television show; updates to Doctor Who newsaramas; interminable links to sponsors that sucked up processing time; and then finally there was my author photo, with a link next to it: Show me the books by Glen David Gold. Nowhere was it mentioned exactly how many sandwiches I’d been given.

So I clicked again on the link to my work, and once again my cursor arrow went Eastern philosophy on me, and while I pondered the ironic collision of Taoism and unbridled egotistical impatience, I wondered: Was my novel just three sandwiches, perhaps? Four? I’m sure I was a five-sandwich book, and any fewer would be an insult. What if the bastard gave me only one sandwich? What did he know anyway? What books did he like? Bad books, I was sure of it. I remember Lou Reed complaining on Take No Prisoners, “How would you feel if you spent a year and a half on an album and some jerk from the Village Voice gave you a B+?” and I felt an even more savage kind of formula: five years on a novel and a judgment of only one sandwich? How dare he judge me! And judge me via a measure of sandwiches? Why sandwiches? Who the fuck would use sandwiches as a critical yardstick? Surely anyone whose judgment was so impaired as to rely on sandwich-as-paradigm couldn’t be trusted to render a proper opinion on literature.

And why five? If anything, my novel deserved to be off the friggin’ scale. I wanted the first-ever rank of six sandwiches. No, a hundred sandwiches, a hundred million billion sandwiches. Goddamn it, then, the dream of raw, unconditional love: I wanted Google sandwiches.

Finally, my review appeared on the screen. I had five sandwiches! It took a moment to recognize it, and to retreat from feeling disappointed that I hadn’t gone off the charts. Five sandwiches was solidly on top. Which was great. There they were, lined up, bounteous and wholesome and friendly. Clearly, the webmaster was of uncommon thread and perceptive eye. Sandwiches were cool. And amusing, if you thought about it. He followed his own drummer, and I loved him. The review below it was one sentence long, “Glen David Gold presumably spent his life working towards this excellent book,” which was a wonderful thing to read, and then it concluded, “and I doubt he will have another such novel in him.”

Pow.

There was nothing else. No explanation or follow-up. There is no real way to pick up a Web site, turn it over, and shake it, but I more-or-less did the equivalent with my mouse, following every single link, wondering why the hell he thought I was finished, until I realized that was that. Judgment rendered.

I looked at my watch. I’d spent twenty minutes on this site, coveting imaginary sandwiches. The review was so perfectly written, such a sucker punch of a single sentence, the thrill of “excellent,” followed by the train tracks falling five hundred feet, “I doubt he will have another such novel,” that I felt shame at having pursued it. And it dawned on me: All it would take is a lifetime of working mornings scrolling through sites like this, and he’d be absolutely right.

Not that it can simply be hand-in-glove like this, but ever since fivesandwiches.com, I haven’t looked myself up on Google. Oh, it’s one day at a time, and if there were meetings for people like me, I’d go to them, but then I’d probably spend hours online looking up everyone else in the group.

But no, now I’m free, and so I can spend my long afternoons awash in the spirit of true creativity, playing epic, consecutive hands of computer solitaire.