When you’re twenty-one years old, breaking a contract seems like the easiest thing in the world. I got home from San Francisco around dinnertime, with a sack of cold, but still delicious-smelling, burritos I’d bought at a place between CF’s converted movie theater and my parking spot.
I owed Shlomo a report the next morning by 9 a.m. If I was going to write it, I’d need to sit down and start work as soon as I got through the door, pound on the keyboard until 2 or 3 a.m., then drive to Colma and put it through Fidelity’s mail slot.
Instead, I ate burritos. Art came home and changed into tight jeans and a Crisco T-shirt that we both laughed at. He ate half a burrito and listened with interest as I told him where I’d been that day and what I’d seen that day.
“That’s the craziest Silicon Valley story I’ve heard yet,” he said. “Those women sound like they’re something else.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They’re amazing. The Reverend Sirs made me feel like I was some kind of heathen, while those women were more like an ad for how religion can make you a better person.”
He looked at his watch. “Dammit, I gotta go. I’m meeting some friends at a club.” He wrapped up the rest of his burrito in foil and put it in the fridge. Even half eaten, it was a whole meal. “You wanna come?” He was always good like that, inviting me out to his clubs, making sure I felt included. Sometimes I said yes. It had been weird at first, but in those days, the weirdest thing was how weird it had been. “Wait, you’ve gotta write that report for tomorrow, right?”
“Uh, no,” I said. “I’m not gonna do that. I’m not gonna do anything for those creeps.”
“You’re quitting?”
“I guess so. I’m not doing it, so that means I’m quitting. Plus, I think I want to help those women and their homebrew gadget factory. It’s pretty clear to me that they’re the Rebellion and Fidelity Computing are the Empire. It’s not enough to reject Darth Vader, you’ve gotta grab a lightsaber and fight him, right?”
Art snorted and slapped me on the back. “When you put it that way, brother, it’s a moral imperative. Just . . .” He trailed off. “Just be careful.”
“Careful?”
“Like, you’re hitting these guys in the wallet. They don’t strike me as the shy, retiring types who’ll take that lying down.”
It was my turn to snort. “They’re clerics, not fighters.”
“What does that make you? A thief?”
“No, dude, I’m a magic-user.”
He laughed. “Another programmer who thinks he’s a wizard.”
“Naw,” I said. “You’re a wizard. I’m just the guy who helps with the spellbook.”
He left. I finished my burrito. On my way to the kitchen to throw out the foil, I looked at the monstrous purple Fidelity 3000 and its peripherals on our kitchen table. I’d have to give that one back.
Later.
The burrito had given me the torpor, and all my missed sleep was catching up with me. I went to bed. A moment later, I got up and took the phone off the hook, then went back to bed. I was asleep in seconds.
*
I woke the next day with a feeling of great freedom and moral clarity, and a half-digested burrito still in my stomach. It was past noon, and Art was already gone for the day. He’d left the phone off the hook. I scrounged in the fridge while I brewed coffee and found Art’s half-burrito leftover stump and decided it could keep the one working its way through my guts company.
I put it in the toaster oven and pushed down the “toast” lever a couple of times in a row until it was warm (on average—scalding on the outside, still cold in the center). I wrapped it in a dish towel and puttered around the apartment, tidying things away and bagging up the kitchen garbage.
Moving in with Art after a couple of years as roommates back east was the easiest thing in the world: we’d just picked up our old division of labor, though I’d been letting my chores slide while I crunched on the Fidelity contract. Another reason to be glad about quitting.
I forced myself to get my bankbook and my checkbook out of the side table in my bedroom and put them down on my office desk beside my computer. I’d also been slack about keeping my own financial spreadsheets up to date, and a little nagging voice in my head had been growing more insistent on the subject ever since I’d decided not to take Fidelity’s money.
I fired up my Apple][+ and propped open my bankbook with a stapler and got ready to face the music, and that’s when the phone rang. I’d absently returned the receiver to the cradle when I had been tidying up.
I looked at it and looked at it. It rang and rang. It could have been anyone—my dad, the landlord, the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes—but I knew it was Shlomo.
I stared at the phone. It wasn’t a sturdy Western Electric number like the one we’d had bolted to the kitchen back in Boston: it was a beige touch-tone phone I’d bought at Radio Shack the week I’d arrived, after a couple of hours perusing the shelves and exploring the exotic SKUs of the West Coast Shack. It had an electronic ringer, piercing as an alarm clock. Every time it rang, I thought about going back to Radio Shack and seeing if I could figure out what components I’d need to make it sound less sinus-piercing.
It was ringing now, and not stopping.
Fuck it. I was twenty-one years old. An adult. I wasn’t gonna duck this guy’s call.
“Martin Hench,” I said as I put the phone to my head. It was the first time I’d ever done that, answered with my name instead of an all-American “Hello?” I liked it. It sounded confident. Like a private eye (or my dad). Even better would have been to just say, “Hench.” One syllable. Forceful.
“Mr. Hench?”
“This is Hench,” I said. I really liked the sound of that.
“Mr. Hench, this is Shlomo Spinka of Fidelity Computing.”
I sat down on the sofa, stretched out my legs, and crossed my ankles. “Shlomo, how can I help you?”
“We were expecting your report by nine a.m. today. Was there some problem?” He sounded brusque.
“There’s no problem, Shlomo.”
“Then when can we expect the report, Mr. Hench? Our attorneys are hanging fire on it. This delay represents a significant legal expense and business risk.” He sounded pissed.
“I don’t see how that’s any of my business, Shlomo.”
“I beg your pardon?” He sounded nervous.
“I said, it’s not any of my concern. I don’t work for Fidelity Computing. I decline to complete the contract.”
“Mr. Hench, this is quite unprofessional—” More nervous now.
“Don’t worry, I won’t bill you for the work to date.”
“That’s not my concern, Mr. Hench. You were contracted to—”
“I’ve changed my mind. Something better came along.”
“Something—” Scared now. Definitely scared. The Reverend Sirs were not going to like this. “Mr. Hench, we were expecting a report on your progress today. If there’s been some problem—”
“No problem, Shlomo. Here’s the report. I have made no progress. I will make no progress. Report ends.” I was actually enjoying this. I should have racked the phone hours ago. Quitting a job was amazing. I couldn’t wait to tell the CF girls about it. They were gonna love it.
“Mr. Hench.” His voice turned husky now. “I don’t think you appreciate the gravity of this situation. You have a legal duty to this firm, you signed a contract. We have remedies in the event of the breach of that contract.”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “I read it carefully. If I’m in breach of the contract, I’m supposed to return all the money you’ve paid me to date. That won’t be a problem, seeing as how I haven’t billed you yet. As I recall, I have forty-eight hours to return your equipment. You can have a courier come and get it anytime. I’ll give you the address. Do you have a pen?”
“Mr. Hench, this is a very serious matter. I urge you to think about your actions carefully and govern yourself accordingly.”
I made a note of that phrase, “govern yourself accordingly.” It was a good one.
“Oh, Shlomo, I’ve thought about this very carefully. You just give me a ring when you’re ready to pick up this computer, all right?”
“You will hear from me, Mr. Hench, I assure you of that.” Shlomo had a kind of nasal, high-pitched voice, not so different from Art’s to tell the truth, but when Art spoke, it was sarcastic and smart. Being upbraided by Shlomo was like being beaten about the head and shoulders with a Nerf bat. They should have gotten Father Marek to make the call. He could turn your bowels to water with a single phrase.
“Let me know when you’re coming to get the computer, okay?”
The silence stretched on so long that I thought he’d hung up. I was about to do the same when I heard him draw a shuddering breath and let it out in a shaky puff. The line went dead. I pictured him sitting at one of the desks in that buzzing, hushed cubicle farm at Fidelity, trying to intimidate me down a phone, thinking of how the Reverend Sirs would react once he passed on the news.
I felt bad for the guy.
*
I balanced my checkbook and updated my spreadsheets, took a shower and got dressed. There were new issues of Dragon, Creative Computing, and a new magazine that Art had subscribed to after finding an issue at the health food store, CoEvolution Quarterly, put out by the same people who did the Whole Earth Catalog.
I thumbed through each. An article in Dragon delivered four pages of technical notes on designing monsters that were consistent and challenging.
I clipped an ad from Creative Computing for an Apple program called “Tax Manager” out of Illinois that promised to automate tax filing, wondering if I could do the same thing with some ambitious Lotus 1–2–3 formulas, and if so, whether I could take out an ad in Creative Computing and compete with these Tax Manager jokers. Thumbing further, I found an ad for something called a “Logo Turtle” billed as a “cybernetic toy” that you programmed in “a language for poets, scientists and philosophers.” I decided I liked whoever had written that ad.
I flipped through CoEvolution Quarterly without landing on anything—the article on farts looked promising but then I saw it was four pages long. A long feature on nonviolent warfare made my eyes glaze over.
Then, right at the end of the magazine, I landed on a short, odd little editorial called “Uncommon Courtesy.” The author, Steward Brand, was a hippie icon I was moderately familiar with, and the essay was the kind of hippie thing I expected from him, about practicing kindness. It reminded me of the way Lucille made me feel. Then I came to the part where he proposed founding something called the “Peripheral Intelligence Agency,” with three “injunctions”:
It was like I was a tuning fork that had just been struck and I couldn’t stop vibrating. Do good. Try stuff. Follow through. I’d done plenty of the first two, but not much of the third, and somehow I’d never noticed that fact.
Those two words, in tiny type on cheap newsprint, changed my life, just as surely as my decision to listen to people the way Lucille did. In its own way, it was just as momentous an occasion as the first time I touched a computer.
I’d failed to follow through on MIT. I’d failed to follow through on Process Engineering Models. The accounting and bookkeeping jobs I’d found since I came west were all short-term arrangements, pinch-hitting for someone on vacation or helping with a one-off.
I’d even failed to follow through with Fidelity Computing. I mean, thank God (or whatever) that I had, but there it was.
I stood up. I paced. What was I going to do in this world, in this life, in this moment? All around me, I could see the beginning of a change as momentous as the Industrial Revolution. What was my role going to be? Spreadsheet jockey?
I needed to get out of the house. Art had taken his van that day. It was Friday and he was going to go clubbing in the Castro. He’d told me I was welcome. I could call him at work and ask him to pick me up, but it was only 1:30 p.m. I didn’t want to spend the rest of the afternoon in the apartment, balancing my checkbook and packing up the piece-of-junk Fidelity 3000.
I studied the Caltrain schedule magneted to the fridge, did some mental math, and realized I had time for a quick shower and a bike ride to the Santa Clara Caltrain station, where I could get the 2:03 to the San Francisco station in Dogpatch. I sluiced under the shower, grabbed a clean pair of jeans and an MIT Science Fiction Society tee, and hit the door running, shoving all three magazines into my backpack with one hand and fumbling on my key ring for the bike-lock key with the other.
*
My second Mission burrito experience was even better than the first. I ordered cabeza, thinking sure, I’ll gnaw a cow skull, can’t be any worse than a hot dog. Turned out to be beef cheek and not brains, but I still gave myself points for adventurousness.
I washed it down with a Tecate and decided I liked it better than Corona, the only other Mexican beer I’d tried. I made a note to sample Dos Equis and Negra Modelo and figure out a favorite. A favorite Mexican beer felt like a pretty sophisticated, Californian thing to have.
Full of beans and cheeks and a little tipsy, I found I still had hours to go before it was time to meet Art in the Castro. Also, I needed to find a pay phone and call him to figure out those details.
But mostly, I just wanted to go back to CF. I wanted to follow through.