Pat had a bachelorette’s fridge—half a lemon, two eggs of indeterminate age, a six-pack of Tab, and a nearly empty pint of Safeway vanilla ice cream in the freezer—so we decided we’d go get tacos. Why not? It was 2 p.m.
We put away three each at La Cumbre, then grabbed a sack of six more to go and walked over to CF. She’d quizzed me on the business all through lunch and I had a half-formed thought that maybe I could get this hotshot programmer to come on contract with CF and attain heroic status after she rewrote everything or created a dozen new programs beyond Art’s shareware.
I carried the sack of tacos in one hand and she slipped her hand in the other. We strolled down Mission, the midafternoon sun just perfect, the skin-to-skin contact even more perfect. I led her to the door and took my hand back to fish for my keys.
But the door was still deadbolted, which was weird, since the first person in that morning should have unbolted it. I knocked and cupped my hands over the glass to peer around the lobby. Usually one of the factory workers would be in there, going to or from the bathroom or just having a break and a chat. It was empty.
I hit the doorbell, but no one came. I hit it again after half a minute, as a sense of foreboding stole over me. That turned to alarm when I realized I couldn’t hear the bell ringing inside the building.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Let’s go around back.”
The loading dock had a gate and a door, and the door had a deadbolt that opened from the outside. That was how I’d left the night before, when I’d locked up and headed to Maggie’s. A lot had happened since then.
More than I knew.
We circled the block and entered the alley that led to the old theater’s rear entrance and loading area. I found the right keys and unlocked the metal safety door and then took a deep breath and opened it.
The factory stank.
It wasn’t more butyric acid, thankfully—more a smell like nail-polish remover. It was overpowering and I got an instant headache. I fumbled for the light switch but the lights wouldn’t come on.
“Marty,” Pat said, “this doesn’t feel right.”
“No,” I said, “it doesn’t.” I swallowed. “But I’m going to go in anyway. Hold the door open so I’ve got some light, okay?”
You see, I knew there was an earthquake kit on some utility shelving just a few steps in from the door, a big stamped-metal shelving unit where we kept coffee supplies and spare work gloves and birthday party decorations. The earthquake kit had a flashlight. A flashlight would let me move around inside the windowless, blacked-out theater box and figure out what, precisely, was going on here.
The slice of light from the open door illuminated a long, slanting rhombus of scuffed wooden floor, but beyond its sharp lines, the room was in perfect blackness.
I followed the light to its edge and then crossed over the terminator, eyes straining to make out details. I shuffled slowly, in a straight-armed Frankenstein march, feeling for danger—or for the shelves—and it’s a pity I was holding them out at shoulder height, rather than sweeping them at knee height, because if I’d been doing that, I might have encountered the fallen shelving unit before it took me mid-shin and sent me face-first into a jumble of coffee supplies, spare work gloves, and birthday party decorations. I didn’t knock any teeth out, because the bridge of my nose absorbed all the punishment when my face hit the edge of the shelf.
“Are you okay?” Pat called from the doorway.
“Ow, fuck,” I said, with characteristic eloquence.
“Marty?”
“I’m okay?”
“Was that a question?”
I got to my feet. My face was wet. I tasted blood. My shins hurt. A lot.
I staggered back to the slash of light from the door, and then back out.
“Jesus,” she gasped, and rummaged in her purse for a crumpled ball of Kleenexes, which she pressed to my face.
“Ow, fuck!” I said.
“You said that already. Your nose is bleeding.”
I put my fingers to my nostrils.
“Not there,” she said. “You’ve sliced it open across the bridge.” She lifted the tissues. “It’s shallow but wide. I’ve seen worse in the mosh pit. I don’t think you’ll need stitches.”
The middle of my face was a hot blob of pain surrounded by a salad-plate-sized region of numbness.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s sit.”
The loading dock had a ledge that some of the factory workers would smoke on. I sat down on it and yelped.
“What?”
I gingerly rolled up my pant legs and discovered twin horizontal bruises under my knees, each of them seeping a little blood where the skin had broken.
“Ugh,” she said. “Poor guy. What did you trip over?”
“Shelves,” I said. “Someone had knocked the shelving over. I was heading for a flashlight. Someone really did a number on that place. No one’s in there. I don’t think we should try to get in today, either.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That is a bad, bad scene.”
*
Apparently we missed the cops by five minutes. If we’d eaten our tacos a little faster, we would have been able to talk with the detective who debriefed Rivka, Sister Maria-Eva, and Liz.
Rivka had been the first one to arrive that morning. She’d flicked the switch a few times, then locked up again and walked around the corner to a smoke shop and bought a penlight and a package of AAA batteries. By its light, she had explored the factory floor, which stank of the acetone that had been splashed over every circuit board on every workbench. Whoever had done it had brought gallons of the stuff and they’d used some kind of big awl or pick to systematically puncture every box on the warehouse shelves before pouring a big glug of it onto the floppy drives, printers, and other components inside.
The power was out throughout the building, but before Rivka could go and flip the main breaker, Liz arrived and called out to her from the doorway. They were debating whether to try to turn the power back on when Maria-Eva arrived and insisted they call the police first.
Maria-Eva was right. Someone had turned off the main breaker, removed all the fuses, inserted pennies into the screw holes, and then loosely screwed the fuses back in. If they’d powered the box back up, the power would have come on . . . at first. Then, sometime not long thereafter, the otherwise indestructible box would have burst into flames, or possibly exploded.
The cops showed up with big cop flashlights, the kind that doubled as billy clubs and took six D batteries, and then retreated quickly with orders for no one to enter until the Department of Public Health had come and gone.
Maria-Eva figured out that Rivka was having flashbacks to what happened to her apartment, and whisked her off to walk around Dolores Park while Liz waited with the cops for the DPH and told all the factory women who arrived to go home and wait for a phone call before coming back, assuring them that they would get their paychecks as usual on Friday.
They came, they inspected, they left. The acetone fumes were bad enough that no one should go into the place until someone had aired it out, which meant opening the doors and getting big industrial fans in to create a cross-breeze, while removing anything acetone-soaked from the premises. Before they could do that, they’d need an electrician who was rated to work in hazmat conditions, and before that could happen, a police hazmat team would need to do an evidence sweep.
It was an extremely efficient piece of sabotage, in other words. Not only had the saboteurs destroyed all of CF’s stock and its business records—before they’d sabotaged the power, they’d used some kind of big magnets to wipe all the floppies in the office—but they’d sent the building itself into a kind of bureaucratic limbo, where the cops couldn’t come until the electrician did his job, and the electrician couldn’t do his job until the cops were done.
That’s where I came in. After calling everyone’s phone numbers and getting machines, I finally had the bright idea of calling my own machine and picking up my messages, which were a procession of increasingly distressed messages from Maria-Eva, who must have fed several dollars in quarters to the corner pay phone in between waiting with the cops.
That’s how I found that everyone had decamped to Zeitgeist, a grimy beer garden on Valencia. It was an odd choice for three pious, religious women, but I guessed that Maria-Eva was ready for a beer, and Rivka had brought her own kosher sack lunch anyway.
“I love their burgers,” Pat said, and with that, invited herself along. Why not?
Maria-Eva was on her second burger and her third beer by the time we arrived. Pat ordered cheeseburgers for both of us and then surreptitiously offered around our sack of tacos, which were a lot colder and less appetizing than they had been when we’d arrived at CF.
“This is my friend Pat,” I said. “She’s a really good coder,” I added, as all three of the CF founders looked from her to me and back again. It wasn’t like I was going to tell them I’d spent the night having carnal knowledge of her—and it wasn’t like they hadn’t figured that out for themselves.
“Marty’s told me about your company,” Pat said, coolly unselfconscious. “It’s impressive.”
“It was,” Maria-Eva said. She ran down the situation while we waited for the burgers and sipped our own beers. Pat made disgusted noises of increasing intensity, and when Maria-Eva was done, she let fly with a string of curses that were impressive even by the standards of the oil-patch kids I hung out with in Alabama. By the standards of, well, for example, a nun, it was off the charts.
But it made all three of the CF women smile, then giggle, then laugh. Rivka ended up doubled over, tears streaming down her face. Pat wound down eventually and chugged her beer. “Seriously, that is fucked up,” which set poor Rivka off again.
Maria-Eva clinked beers with Pat, and Liz and Rivka joined in with their root beers.
Pat finished her beer and set the glass down on the graffiti-carved picnic table with a wild clunk. “Well, let’s get you going again, right?”
*
Pat’s boss was Leon Boudin, an optimist with a good line of patter. He’d been offered admission at Caltech, MIT, and Princeton, but after reading about the Arpanet project, he’d turned them all down for UCLA, where his long-simmering love affair with high-performance computing had boiled over. He ignored the profs who tried to talk him into getting a master’s and instead talked a rich family friend into letting him pitch a wealthy Japanese investor on his computing idea.
He had finagled access to UCLA’s Prime Computer workstations, and when he learned that one of Prime’s founders, William Poduska, was starting a new workstation company called Apollo, Leon sent him a fan letter that was practically a love note. Poduska rewarded him by adding him to the press list, and soon Leon was receiving fat envelopes of marketing materials for the forthcoming DN100.
Leon’s silver tongue, combined with those marketing materials and some testimonials from his UCLA profs, was sufficient to extract one million U.S. dollars from one starry-eyed Japanese investor who was obsessed with the idea that young American men possessed an entrepreneurial zeal that his own stuffy countrymen couldn’t match.
A year later and the whole million dollars was gone, and the integrated CAD/CAM software Leon had hired Pat to work on was on “hiatus,” and its offices—a floor in a century-old, renovated brick factory building at the bottom of Potrero Hill—were sitting empty as Leon tried to figure out how to break his lease.
Leon was frankly relieved to hear that CF was interested in a short-term sublease while they negotiated with their insurer over the damage to their old movie theater. Though Potrero Hill was a twenty-minute walk from their old Mission digs, it might as well have been in a different city: whiter, straighter, and wealthier.
The women who worked in the factory now made a point of packing lunches rather than going out for tacos, and they went home from work in groups, ready to close ranks if some old white guy decided to start shouting about “greasers” needing to “go back where they came from.”
But the building had a better loading dock, a freight elevator, and easy access to 80 and the 101.
Unexpectedly, the hardest-hit casualties of the attack were the Brothers Kohler, specifically Benny, who thrashed around looking for some way to blame Rivka, Liz, and Maria-Eva for the damage, even though they had insurance and even though they had installed a top-notch burglar alarm that somehow failed to go off, despite the fact that the burglars had simply taken a pry bar to one of the fire exits at the back of the theater.
I kept my mouth shut about that for the whole time the Kohlers were in Pat’s old office, berating the supremely calm Sister Maria-Eva, who gave them a hard nun-face while Benny raved. Eventually, Benny ran out of steam and then Ted talked him all the way down off the ledge. They wrote a check. Of course they did—they’d already committed to the money, they were just moving it up a little to cover the gap while the insurance adjusters ground their slow way toward the inevitable payout.
Recovering the order book would have been impossible, except for Rivka’s daily practice of backing up all her working files to floppies and bringing them home every night. As it was, all we needed was a couple of Apples and a copy of Lotus 1–2–3 (which I supplied, after Art slipped me a floppy with a tool to break the copy protection) and they were literally and figuratively back in business.
Took two weeks, tops.
Would have taken longer, except for Pat. She was a dervish: setting up workbenches, finding deals on used computers, even automating Rivka’s lifesaving backups based on all the problems they hit as they got set up again. She called it a “living will”—the instructions needed to keep CF running even if Rivka, Maria-Eva, and Liz got hit by a runaway trolley. She presented it to the Kohlers when they came over for an inspection, separating the fanfold printer paper with dancing hands, making it into a juggling act that wowed Ted.
Benny was impressed by the living will itself and tried to talk Pat into starting a “commercial living will” business working his family stationery store’s customer list, selling each of them an annual planning session. I thought it was a pretty good idea, but it was clear that Pat was completely uninterested in devoting even ten seconds more of her life to that kind of work: the fact that it was work for CF had made it worth doing. As a technical challenge, it wasn’t worth another second’s thought.
When Benny pressed her, she busted out some pretty salty language, seeming to enjoy Benny’s purpling face. She got as far as “I wouldn’t fuck that business with your dick and him pushing—” when I stepped in. Luckily, Ted thought it was a gas.
As for me, listening to Pat swear was hands-down the second-most-erotic experience of my life. The most erotic was what happened those nights I stayed over at her place, which became more and more frequent until Art started to make “jokes” about advertising for a new roommate because he was getting lonely all the way down there in Menlo Park.
The jokes were half serious. It was less than a month, but it felt like a lifetime. Living in the heart of San Francisco, with a beautiful woman, going to punk shows and getting six kinds of shit knocked out of me and then going back to her place for an altogether more pleasant form of physical contact—it got to me.
All the people I’d been before—the kid in San Diego, the high schooler in Alabama, the college kid in Cambridge—they faded into distant memory. My self-image was transformed, and I became a new man—I became a man—with a mate and a city and a tribe and a real, grown-up job.
For a charmed month, I shuttled between Pat’s place and the new, temporary Potrero Hill headquarters of CF, stopping at the laundromat to drop off a wash-and-fold in the morning, juggling the bundle of still-warm laundry with a sack of burritos and a six-pack of beer on the way back. In between, I crunched numbers, building the models that helped Maria-Eva plan the sales strategy and identify struggling reps who needed support; that helped Rivka plan the inventory and production; that helped Liz manage the payroll and shift schedules.
I went to war with the insurance adjuster, keying his figures into Lotus 1–2–3 and revealing their miserly deficiencies and shaved corners, and wrung from him an extra 17 percent, which Liz celebrated by bringing me a six-pack of my favorite Anchor Steam beer. That it was Liz’s gift made it especially sweet, given that she would no sooner drink beer than Rivka would order a BLT.
Pat came to work with me, or didn’t, and she would just sniff around, paging through the product plans while she nodded in time with the sound leaking out of her Walkman headphones, then staring out the window, or going for a walk around the block—sometimes coming back with a fragrant box from Goat Hill Pizza—and then commandeer someone’s computer and page through Art’s code and start twiddling it, fingers keeping time with her bobbing head and the tinny thunder from her headphones. After a few days of this, she’d hand Rivka a floppy with a new version number—3-Lotus-3 1.3—and a scribbled list of improvements and new features.
Liz insisted on paying me, and I booked it in the company financials as an advance on my commission. But we all knew that was a shuck. I was a salaried employee in everything but name, the CFO of a successful start-up.
After their final shove, the Reverend Sirs had observed the women of CF bounce back and had decided to call a truce. We hadn’t heard a peep out of them in weeks, and Liz’s contacts at Fidelity told her that the company’s internal seething fury had simmered down. Even when a new rep defected from Fidelity to CF, it barely rated an announcement from Bishop Clarke, let alone a furious memo from Father Marek.
I had wandered the country, from San Diego to Alabama to Cambridge to San Francisco, a jewel of a city with a picture-postcard harbor. I rode the cable car, I took the ferry to Alcatraz, I ate a lobster roll on Fisherman’s Wharf and pretended it was as good as the ones I used to eat in Boston.
One night I tried to go for tiki drinks at Trader Vic’s—I was working my way through the Bay Guardian’s Best of the City list—and took a wrong turn and found myself in a bar in the financial district where I quickly realized that every table was full of computer programmers, all talking about the hot companies they were working at, the products they were developing, the millions that were sloshing through the streets. I realized that I had my own pan out in that river of gold. CF had just experienced its third consecutive month of one hundred percent growth, and every day, we hired: factory workers, sales reps, warehouse guys, and junior programmers to work under Pat and Art.
I ordered Anchor Steam after Anchor Steam and got progressively drunker, on the beer and the talk. Not the talk. The buzz. The sense that there was so much money out there that I could just pull it out, like a bear grabbing salmon out of a stream.
Pat wasn’t with me. She wasn’t interested in Trader Vic’s, called it “a racist colonial fantasy with sugary drinks.” I sloshed out of the door and poured myself into a taxi and rode back to her place with the window open and the heavy, cold, fog-drenched air whipping past my face. It was so intoxicating, I think I was even drunker when I got to her place. I stumbled up the stairs and let myself in—she’d given me my own key after the first week—and found her shuttling back and forth between her DN100s, making $70,000 worth of computers whirr and dance to her tune.
“I love this town!” I declaimed, as I staggered into the apartment.
She rolled her eyes. “It won’t love you back, you know. San Francisco is a fickle bitch.”
I shook my head so violently that it threw off my balance and I flopped onto the bed/futon. “I love it,” I said. “Sincerely. I found a place tonight and they were all computer programmers. By accident! I found a place full of my people, just by accident! Now I know how Art feels, all his life he was surrounded by people who couldn’t understand him and then he came here and there’s so many people who just get it, you know?”
She took her hands off the keyboard. “Baby, unless you want to fuck a compiler, that’s a terrible analogy. You have a hobby, not a sexual orientation.”
“That’s what you think,” I said. “Maybe I do want to fuck a compiler. I mean, they are fucking gnarly. The brains it takes to make one of those, shit. Shit! I do want to fuck a compiler. Can we have an open relationship?”
She snorted and hammered at the keys for a while. I drank in the sound, willing the room to stop whirling around my head. Finally, she gave up on her machine-gun typing.
“You’re not entirely wrong,” she said.
“About compilers?”
“About this city. Look,” she said, and tore a piece of flip-chart paper off the huge pad she kept leaning against the breakfast nook. She used two pieces of masking tape to mount it on the wall, covering the Grateful Dead poster. She uncapped a marker and sketched a shape, a kind of elongated, irregular oval, with a narrow opening on the left side, toward the bottom. “What’s this?”
I focused on it, willing my drunken brain to make sense of it. It was naggingly familiar, but . . .
“Here,” she said, “more clues.” She drew a couple of dots inside the oval. I cocked my head left, then right.
“All right, some more,” she said. She slashed three vertical lines across the oval, and drew another circle in the middle of one of them. “Come on, now, don’t make me give it away.”
“It’s . . . Ugh. It’s right on the tip of my mind.”
“All right,” she said. “Final clue.” She drew a series of scalloped horizontal lines, inside the oval and to the left of it. The light dawned.
“It’s the San Francisco Bay,” I said. The dots were the islands: Alcatraz, Angel Island, Treasure Island. The lines were the bridges: the Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate, the Dumbarton.
“Finally,” she said. “We’ll make a Californian out of you yet,” she said.
“You’re from New Jersey,” I said. “I was actually born in San Diego.”
“All the best Californians were born somewhere else,” she said. “As you have just demonstrated. Back to the geography lesson now: this harbor has a lot of obvious military value, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “You can put a fort or whatever at the narrow harbor mouth and blast away at anyone who tries to get at the city.”
“Exactly. That’s the Alcatraz story, it was a fort. Spanish-American War, Civil War. It’s why we had all these shipyards here, why the navy was such a big deal.”
“Right,” I said. The harbor cruise captain had recounted some of this over the distorted speaker.
“Right. So where you have the navy, you have sailors, and where you have sailors, you have gay guys. Those guys, when they were discharged here in the city, a lot of them stayed. It made San Francisco the gay capital, and soon lesbians and gays from all over America moved here, looking for a place where they could be themselves.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “The U.S. Navy made San Francisco gay?” I giggled. The beer was still working its way through my system, clearly. My dad had enlisted in the navy, but was washed out after they found his heart murmur at his end-of-training physical. I wondered how he would feel about that bit of intelligence.
“Yup,” she said. “Insert salty seamen joke here.” I snorted. “Now for the bonus round. Apart from ships and homosexuals, what else is the navy known for?”
“Uh,” I said. “Hang on.” I thought about it. “Barnacles. Rum. Grog, which I’m pretty sure is different from rum. Keelhauling. Cannons.”
“The plural of ‘cannon’ is ‘cannon,’” she said. “You’re not even warm. How about radar?”
“Radar,” I said. “Sure.”
“A little reverence, please. Radar was an amazing accomplishment, and its development required a huge electronics industry. Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley—why do you think we’ve got so many top electrical engineering programs in-state?”
“Oh,” I said, affecting a broad Boston accent, “I don’t know that I’d call them ‘top programs.’ Now, MIT is a top program. You have to be wicked smaht to get into MIT.”
“You flunked out of MIT,” she said.
“You’re from New Jersey,” I rebutted.
“Enough,” she said. Then she snapped her fingers, sat down at the keyboard of one of the DN100s, and made the keys clatter. A few minutes later, she looked up and nodded. “Where were we?”
“New Jersey,” I said.
“Radar. My point is, why do you think we’ve got all this high-tech in the area? It starts with the navy. And why are we the Queer Capital? The navy. The navy, which is here because of that—” She gestured at her diagram. “Geography begets strategy, strategy begets sociology and industry. So when you talk about coming here and finding your people, the way Art did when he came out west and then came out, you’re not wrong.”
I grinned. “You say the nicest things.”
She waggled a bitten-nailed finger at me. “You’re not right, either. Because Art came out west and came out, and he didn’t just find his sexual people, he found the people who loved computers, too. Whereas you—”
“Whereas I only found computer people. Sure. Art’s definitely getting the better end of this deal, I get it. But my point still stands: I love this town.”
“And my point still stands: it won’t love you back. San Francisco has had gold rush after gold rush, and each one was a disaster. Nearly everyone went broke. The city was mobbed and everything the locals loved about it was destroyed. Sometimes it even burned down. They chopped down all the fucking redwoods. This gold rush won’t be any different, mark my words.”
I was still trying to think of a rejoinder when she was struck by another bolt of inspiration and went back to making machine-gun noises on the keyboard, and long before she finished, I had fallen asleep, fully clothed and mouth full of residual beer that spent the night turning into a disgusting, sour paste that coated every tooth and my tongue by morning.
*
CF was doing so well that it was possible to forget that we were being sued. Even the Kohlers didn’t mind the hefty lawyers’ bills on every financial statement I prepared for them. In fact, when Rivka proposed that we hire Pat full-time to explore designing a CF PC—one that integrated the ideas she’d been exploring on those twin DN100s—it was Benny who insisted that we take more money than we’d asked for. We never did payroll Pat, instead paying her whenever she bothered to invoice us for whatever sum she named. It was always less than what she was worth, but I couldn’t convince her to take more.
Benny had the same fever as me. Our revenues were still doubling, and we couldn’t buy enough parts to keep up with orders for modified floppy drives that could read one of Fidelity’s gimmicked floppy disks, or get enough sprocket replacements to produce the kits for converting their printers to take normal paper. We bought out Leon Boudin’s lease on the Potrero Hill space and I started negotiations to take over the ground floor as well, so we’d be able to relocate the shipping area and load up the trucks without having to move everything down that slow-moving relic of a freight elevator.
Art still came by, but he was barely needed by then. All of his code had been rewritten by Pat, and she had hired some of her former AT&T brat pals to maintain it long-distance, airmailing floppy disks back and forth across the continent. I missed him, but only when I wasn’t running around doing eleven things at once, which was always.
One night, I came back to Pat’s apartment to find her gone, which wasn’t that unusual. She kept weird hours that let her see every Dead Kennedys show—and every other show—in town. I made myself a cheese and cold cut sandwich, brushed my teeth and folded down the futon and smoked one of the pre-rolled joints that she kept in a mint tin on her bookshelf, a habit that she’d imparted to me, which I found absolutely indispensable for finding sleep quickly.
I barely roused when she came in and padded around, brushing her own teeth, fishing the joint out of the ashtray and finishing it, sliding open the window to admit the night fog and the distant hiss of car tires. She slid under the blanket next to me and nuzzled my neck, waking me up in the nicest way possible.
“Hey, babe,” I said, turning to kiss the top of her head, which smelled of a cocktail of sweat, smoke, and beer. “You go to a show?”
“It was amazing,” she said. “MDC opened for the Angry Samoans. My ears are still ringing.”
“That does sound great,” I said. “MDC?”
“Millions of Dead Cops,” she said.
“Not really.”
“I bought you a T-shirt.”
I threw my arm over her and gave her a one-sided hug. “You always know just what to get me.”
As I drifted back to sleep, I felt a sense of warm satisfaction pour over me, thick as syrup. I had a great woman, a great job, a great apartment, in a great city. I’d confronted the worst the world had to throw at me and I’d overcome it. I’d come west for gold and I’d found a mother lode. I was going to be rich. I was going to change the world. I was going to go to punk shows and get the stuffing knocked out of me and wear MDC T-shirts to my corner taqueria and then come home and play with $70,000 worth of computers. I had it all figured out.
That’s what I thought.