“Frustrated,” he adds. “And definitely not Polly.”
He wears a smooth brown suit that costs more than I care to guess, but on his feet are flip-flops that I know for certain from personal experience go for $6 at Walgreens. His hands and face seem rugged. His accessories—a short but carefully shaped hairstyle and expensive suit—scream refinement. I place him in his late thirties.
“That makes two of us who aren’t Pauline,” I say.
He chuckles. “Is she around?” he asks. He’s pointedly relaxed, aggressively nonchalant, like his footwear.
“I’m wondering the same thing.”
He steps in and extends a hand.
“Chuck Taylor, just like your high-tops.”
I stand and extend mine. He shakes with a strong grip that he lets linger an extra beat.
“Nat Idle.” I pause, and feel a need to explain myself. “I’m a freelance writer here.”
“I know who you are.”
Our eyes briefly meet. There’s a mild sty beneath his left eyelid that undercuts his aura of perfection.
He sees my gaze fall on the small blue words tattooed at the edge of his neckline, just above the line of his crisp white shirt. They read: “Semper Fi.”
“Grandpa was at Anzio, Dad at Quang Tri City,” he says. “I sat at a desk in Kuwait when the smart Bush ran things.”
He smiles, revealing whitened teeth.
“It’s gotten competitive out there if Pauline’s retaining the military,” I say.
“Actually, we’re retaining her.” He reaches into the inside breast pocket of his suit and pulls out a worn brown wallet, stuffed thickly. From it he extracts a business card and hands it to me. It reads: Chuck Taylor. Defense Investment Corp.
Another venture capitalist, one of the high-risk investors who troll the region’s labs, campuses and garages for fresh ideas and entrepreneurs to back. He belongs to the breed’s military subset. For decades, the military has invested in myriad Silicon Valley technologies that have few or speculative military applications. Sometimes with spectacular returns. Witness the birth of the Internet.
“You’re investing in Medblog?” I ask. I’ve known Pauline has been looking for funding.
“I thought she’d disclosed it already. I saw something brief in the Wall Street Journal,” he responds. “We’re taking a small minority stake.”
“The help are the last to know.” Unless this deal’s a big one, I don’t know that Pauline would tell me about it, particularly in light of our choppy communications the last few weeks.
“When I get involved with a new company, I like to stop by unannounced,” Chuck says. “Polly usually works late. She’s got that quality we venture capitalists love in entrepreneurs in that she will work nonstop until she keels over from exhaustion.”
He glances at her computer, where the password screen remains.
He pulls out his phone. “Under natural law, she’s not allowed to ignore the calls of an investor.”
He dials. The phone goes to voice mail. He shrugs. We stand in silence, which I finally interrupt.
“What’s Uncle Sam’s interest in Medblog?”
He smiles; he’s gotten this question a million times.
“You want the canned answer?”
I shrug. Why not?
“We need to be a real-time army. We need the best and latest information and we need to disseminate it quickly. The site could help us develop better ways to distribute up-to-date medical information to troops—perhaps over mobile devices.”
“That is canned.”
“To be honest, I’d also love to see the site make money. I don’t want to be totally passive here. I want higher traffic, more eyeballs.”
The Bay Area vernacular; our currency is attention span.
“Get me some scoops, would ya?,” he continues, trying to sound friendly. “I like your writing a lot, but your posts can be snarky. Not just yours, y’know, but the whole nature of blogging. I know that it’s fast-twitch and all that. But there’s a place for serious journalism to change some of the ugliness in this world.”
I feel my defenses rise and want to say: Will do. Just as soon as bloggers get paid enough to write the stories that take time and resources.
He’s touched a nerve. I left medicine to write about things that interested me and that mattered. I do that a lot less than I’d like. I suppose that’s because the journalism economy has come undone, banished to unprofitability by the Internet and awaiting rebirth—and because I’m no longer sure what matters. Anyhow, all news will soon be delivered solely through rapid-fire twitter feeds from seven-year-olds using their native emoticons.
I smile thinly and nod.
“Let me know if you need sources,” he says. He explains he has powerful friends in various industries and military branches if I need help with a story.
We’ve reached the end of our obvious common ground. We fall silent. The light tension is broken by the shuffling of feet and heavy breathing.
Pauline enters at high speed. She carries a bottle of wine and two glasses. When she sees us, she comes to an abrupt stop, caught off guard by our presence, or our pairing.
It’s the first time I can recall seeing Pauline this disheveled.
In an instant, she straightens and smiles.
“Why if it isn’t the two most important men in my life.”
Like Chuck, she is overdressed for a dot-com ghetto. Her fearless designer T-shirt looks like one of those paintings where the artist got drunk and threw colors against the canvas. The shirt, like her knee-high skirt, fits snugly against her form. Her hair sprays out of its ponytail and her brow glistens with perspiration.
“The chief executive materializes,” he says.
She winces. “The CEO just turned her ankle.”
She’s wearing low heels with straps that clasp around her ankles.
“Did you jog here?” Chuck asks.
“I move as quickly as possible under all circumstances.”
“Nat tells me you two plan to have a drink,” Chuck says.
It strikes me that, from his perspective, all has returned to normal.
She looks at me. “Did you bring the snacks?”
“I failed you miserably.”
“Then you can reschedule,” Chuck says. He looks at Pauline. “Could you spare a few minutes to talk about . . . that one issue?”
She walks to the desk. She sets down the wine bottle and glasses. She tucks a few loose strands of hair behind her right ear. She smoothes her T-shirt.
“Boring financial stuff,” she says to me. “Rain check?”
“Sure.”
I feel Chuck’s eyes and look up to see him studying us.
“Don’t forget your file,” Pauline says to me. She reaches across me, leans over the keyboard and pulls the drive from the computer. It seems like she’s being deliberately nonchalant about the drive, making sure to send no message at all to G.I. Chuck that it bears any significance. She hands it to me, and for an instant, I feel her arm brush mine.
“Any luck with it?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Call me later if you want to brainstorm. I’m sure the secret is somewhere inside that complicated head of yours.”
She looks at Chuck and says: “One of the best bloggers in the business.”
She smiles and clears her throat. “Call me later,” she reiterates. For an instant, she looks unusually vulnerable, like she did when she wobbled in.
My cue to go.
I grab my backpack, walk out and down the hallway, and take two steps outside, then pause. The air is still but crisp, high clouds obscuring the stars, conditions portending rain. I smell something irresistible like french fries and then realize that’s exactly what I’m detecting. It’s coming from a man sitting cross-legged on a nearby park bench under a streetlight, eating from a McDonald’s bag, reading something intently on his phone. E-mail and McDonald’s, two of modernity’s most powerful lures. If they can somehow combine the concepts into a wireless french fry—wi-fry?—or maybe one that can be delivered wirelessly, we’ll all die within a few years on our couches, obese and blissful.
I walk back inside and poke my head back into the office. Pauline looks up and smiles but I quickly shift my eyes to the venture capitalist.
“Chuck? May I have a quick word?”
“Sure.” Then looks at Pauline. “Back in a sec.”
He follows me outside.
“You want a raise? I don’t even own the place yet?”
He wants to buy us, me. “You said that you’d be willing to lend a hand if I needed help on a story.”
“Go on.”
I’m thinking about the shooting and the phone call. Can I get help from Chuck, who professes to have friends in high places?
“Someone keeps calling me from a private number. I’d love to figure out who it is.”
Until that moment, he is looking me in the eye. For a moment, he looks away. “This is for a story?”
“An anonymous tipster calls, leaves information, hangs up,” I lie. “It could be nothing. But serious journalism often requires you to drop down a bunch of rabbit holes.”
“I probably can’t do much. But I know one guy who does telecommunications intel. What’s your phone number? I’ll have him check it out.”
I pull out my wallet and extract a business card.
Without taking his eyes off the card, he says: “You seem to know Pauline well.”
I clear my throat.
“Does she look okay to you?” he continues. “She seems off her game.”
I shrug.
He extends his hand and we shake. We part, awkwardly.
I head to the car. In my pocket, a thumb drive. In my head, bewilderment. I need refuge, answers. Beer.
I live nearby in Potrero Hill. It’s a neighborhood of steep inclines, a place best suited for donkeys and sherpas. Architecturally, it has an industrial feel, the ghost of a manufacturing past paved over with residences built for people who can’t afford Pacific Heights, the Marina, or sunnier and flatter neighborhoods.
Like much of San Francisco, Potrero is populated by transplants and transients, devoid of local roots and memories—people looking ahead in life, not behind, the embodiment of manifest destiny. Like the pioneers who settled this place, we can’t move any further west, the Pacific Ocean intervening, but we can keep upgrading our devices to feel like we’re in constant motion.
My home and home office are contained in a one-bedroom flat on Florida. Two blocks away is the Pastime Bar, where I did my residency and fellowship, specializing in studying the effects of Anchor Steam and quasi-wry bar commentary on the brain of a single male.
I drive to the bar, park in front, and wander to the bar’s door, uninviting to the point of foreboding. A veritable prisoners’ entrance. It’s thick and covered with numerous coats of cheap brown paint, peeling and frayed, graced with a single bumper sticker, haphazardly placed years ago, that reads: “Get Yer Beer Googles.” There are eyeballs in the misspelled words, two o’s and eyebrows over them. Tacky and stupid. Home.
I peer through the circular submarine window, I see a half dozen regulars. The Witch and Bullseye anchor the seats on the bar’s far right, their regular spots.
The Witch turns around. Maybe she senses my presence—she claims such powers. I back out of her view.
I’ve lost the energy to analyze the last three hours of my life: the shooting, the mystery thumb drive, and the weird military dude. Plus, if I go inside, I become the source of entertainment, the circus monkey, the unmarried guy spinning tales from the real world—while everyone else gulps down the drama along with hops and barley, plus a shot of envy and superiority.
In my car’s backseat, I spy my albatross: the ratty black backpack that carries my laptop—and that I tote wherever I go like an oxygen tank. It’s my mobile blogging unit. Call me old-fashioned, but when I need to research and file an on-the-go news update from a press conference, roadside or (yes, it happens) bathroom stall, I prefer to type on a full keyboard, not the touch-screen phone like the fancy prepubescent competition.
Time to take the laptop home for some answers.
Ten minutes later, I’m on my couch. From the backpack, I extract my computer. I insert the mystery drive. I retype the passwords I tried earlier, and new ones. No use.
I feed Hippocrates.
I call Magnolia Manor. A nurse tells me that Grandma is sleeping.
I consider calling Pauline. Tomorrow.
I should call my parents and tell them what’s going on with Grandma. Maybe they have counsel. Probably not.
Besides, I don’t need to hear Dad talk about the latest deal in the Sunday circular and Mom try and wake from the dead at a phone ringing at 11 p.m. in Denver, which is the clinching excuse. I try the laptop one more time. Several more passwords fail.
I fall asleep on the couch, my gray matter spinning with questions. Eight hours later, I wake up with one answer.