In retrospect, the plan was obviously flawed. Even if we could have driven Fidelity Computing out of business, we’d have carried over a giant load of debt. Half of our factory workers had been smarter than us and they’d gone off and found other jobs, treating those paychecks I dutifully mailed out to them as a long and uncertain severance pay. If we’d started up again, we’d have struggled to fill orders, needing to hire and train a fresh round of workers.
I’m a forensic accountant, not a CFO. Yes, I can build models as well as anyone and predict cash flow, but my real skill is to look at someone else’s models and spot their errors—or, more often, their deceptions. I never signed up to be CF’s finance guy—at best, I was supposed to be their bookkeeper and competitive intelligence analyst, combing through smuggled Fidelity spreadsheets to find their crimes and misdemeanors.
You know what got Fidelity Computing in the end? This is great. Waves of PC clones tore up their business far more efficiently than we ever could have. Turns out that the combined sales forces of Gateway, Dell, Compaq, and Acer were much better at convincing people to give up their purple Fidelity computers than we ever would be—and that held true even for Orthodox Jews, Mormons, and devout Catholics.
The Kohlers and Fidelity Computing should have disappeared at that point, but they hung on for one more caper. I learned about it in the papers, when the California attorney general raided Fidelity Computing’s offices and confiscated three truckloads of merchandise.
These weren’t PCs, though. They were cash registers.
When Fidelity’s business started circling the drain, the Kohlers and the Reverend Sirs had hunkered down to save their business, which had accumulated sizable debts and which had some extremely impatient, violent men who had grown accustomed to taking very large withdrawals whenever they needed some pocket money.
This is where the Kohlers and the Reverend Sirs discovered some of that legendary “synergy” that made Silicon Valley such a hotbed of innovation. It turned out that both groups of men knew large numbers of small businesspeople who were desirous of a highly specific kind of cash register: one that would add an extra couple of percentage points to every sale, tack on a sales tax, and produce two register tapes and two end-of-day reports reflecting two different counts.
For a dry cleaner or a Wendy’s franchisee or a watchmaker turning over a million bucks a year, squeezing three percent, tax-free, out of your customers was an easy sell, provided the customer didn’t mind committing a lot of very serious felonies.
It worked. For a while. The Kohlers and Fidelity found lots of small businesspeople who loved the convenience and accuracy of their funny cash registers, and were even able to branch out into selling funny time clocks and payroll systems to their lineup.
In hindsight, this isn’t surprising. There’s never just one ant. Once a business is willing to steal from its customers and from the taxman, a little wage theft is a no-brainer.
It was the wage theft that got ’em. One of their customers—a discount jeweler in downtown LA—skimmed the wages of his receptionist, whose son was on a full-ride scholarship to UCLA Law, where he was specializing in labor rights. He grabbed that loose thread and yanked, and one of his profs was an ex–U.S. attorney and still had some friends, and one thing led to another, and then one day I turned on KRON4 to watch the news and there were the Reverend Sirs being led away in handcuffs, their merchandise disappearing into California Highway Patrol vans.
Joe later told me that they asked him to build the damn things for them, even had Nick Cassidy III put a heavy arm on him, try to convince him that this was the best thing for the Irregulars. Joe told Nick Cassidy III to fold his floppy disk until it was all corners and then insert it where it would do him a world of good.
Today, Nick Cassidy III is a top-tier VC with a good firm on Sand Hill Road. He’s considered a genius.
*
I kept tabs on Maria-Eva, Liz, and Rivka for a few years after that. Zion found Liz a job at Compaq in their hardware-design department and collected a fat finder’s fee that they used as a down payment on a condo in the Marina.
Maria-Eva went to Mexico, then made her way to Nicaragua. She disappeared for a while, and we got worried, but then Liz let me know that she’d got a late-night, crackly call from Buenos Aires, Maria-Eva reassuring her that everything was fine and she was safe. Much later, I found out about the time she spent in detention in the south of Nicaragua, close to the Costa Rican border, in a hellhole that the CIA knew all about and did nothing to prevent.
Rivka ended up in Israel, running the technology for Shulamit Aloni’s campaign for gay rights. She and her parents didn’t speak for nearly twenty years, not until 2003, when they came to Toronto to attend her wedding, to the woman she’d lived with in Haifa for decades. Moshe Pupik was her best man.
*
I never made the mistake of actually joining a company again. From then on, I stopped pretending I was a finance guy and stuck strictly to being the anti-finance guy—the guy you called when you wanted to catch the finance guy red-handed.
Anti-finance guys don’t have steady work, but we also don’t have any long-term responsibilities. You call me up, tell me about the job, and then I make the call. If I take it, I get 25 percent of whatever I recover. It pays well. Paid enough for my mother’s funeral, when the fast-moving leukemia got her a couple of years later. A lot of the oil wives went that way.
And it was enough to pay for my dad’s care after his stroke, just a couple of weeks after her funeral. He wouldn’t let me move him to San Francisco, so I flew out to Alabama twice a year to sit with him and tell him about my adventures, waiting while he laboriously ground out questions. They were shrewd questions. He wasn’t a fool, my old man. He lasted seven years in the home, though the last two were bad.
I miss him.
I don’t get emotionally involved with clients. Maybe I’m working for a company, or for an investor, and maybe that person is something like a friend, but not while I’m on the job.
One thing I never, ever, ever do is get romantically involved with anyone remotely connected to any client. I explained this thing to a delightfully vulgar client one night after an extremely frank offer came at the end of a long session going over the spreadsheets she’d paid me to analyze and she’d said, “Oh, that’s the deli rule.”
“The deli rule?”
“Don’t get your meat where you get your bread.”
(She renewed the offer some time later, when a sufficiency of time had passed since our professional entanglement, and I took her up on it, and I was glad I did. Delightfully vulgar, she was.)
I practiced the deli rule assiduously after that.
Pat and I lasted for a while—longer than either of us would have imagined. We both liked going to Dead Kennedys shows, and we made a good team in the pit. We got to be tight with Jello Biafra’s roommate, a racoon-eyed, razor-tongued tiny woman from Montana, and we spent a lot of time at their place, eating potluck dinners and experimenting with some laboratory-grade substances.
We eventually figured out that we were better tripmates than lovers, and then she took a job with an encryption start-up inside the Beltway and disappeared into a world of secrecy for a decade. When she reemerged, she was married and had a rambunctious little girl whom I got to meet when she came to San Francisco for an RSA conference. We still keep in touch, sporadically.
*
I knew Art Hellman before he was Art Hellman. We made great roommates. We had both grown tired of our little apartment and wanted a life in the city, so we went in together on an amazing place on Russian Hill. That had the added advantage of putting our last known address behind us, and we stopped looking over our shoulders for CONSULTANTs and other thugs on the Reverend Sirs’ payroll.
But of course, we weren’t hard to find.
They found us.
Art had settled in with a new modem company, working out the kinks in their compression algorithm, a gnarly sort of problem that required that he simultaneously debug their custom circuit boards, the acoustic properties of their carrier signal, and the compression system itself. It was the problem he was born to solve—and it was way, way over my head.
At a certain point, he hit a wall. He’d hack on the problem all day, come home ferociously angry and frustrated, and I’d cook some dinner, and he’d slowly unwind while we ate together and made small talk and drank a couple of glasses of wine.
Then we’d pile the dishes in the sink and go for a walk, down Russian Hill to Washington Square, then back again, while he talked through the problem and I hung on for dear life and tried to follow along. Every once in a great while, I’d be able to suggest a possible avenue of attack, but really, just having someone listen patiently to him while he verbally worked through the problem was useful. Me, I liked the company and valued the exercise.
We were practically on our doorstep when they jumped us: two big guys in tracksuits who’d been waiting in a pickup truck, who sprang out and blocked us, fore and aft.
“Hench,” the one in front of us said, and the one behind us gave me a little shove.
Art didn’t hesitate. “Bashers!” he shouted. “Gaybashers!” A couple of guys had been hospitalized the week before, so his confusion was understandable, but I didn’t think these two were—
“Bashers!” he shouted again.
The guy in front of me swung, but I’d been taking self-defense classes, and I slipped under his big, slow fist and got a knee in, missing his balls and hitting his thigh. Art grunted behind me and gave a loud, angry yell. “Baaashers!”
The guy had me in a clinch, and I could smell his sweat and the Big Mac sauce he’d spilled on his shirt and I burrowed my face into his arm, trying to bite him and also to avoid his face punches, catching them on the forehead instead of in my nose.
I had a mouthful of tracksuit and maybe a little skin that I was biting down hard on, and the guy’s arm was around my head, so I didn’t hear the approaching footsteps, but a moment later I was free and the guy was on the ground, surrounded by four extremely fit young men with the kind of well-groomed mustaches and lumberjack shirts I’d learned to think of as Castro Clone.
Three more were helping Art out, or, more precisely, had dropped Art’s attacker and were methodically going over him with Kodiak boots, and a moment later, my attacker was down and getting the same treatment.
The guys were nicer than I would have been, avoiding spine, balls, face, and kidneys, making it hurt without making it permanent, and they moved with grace and speed.
The men on the ground cried out, squirmed, tried to grab at the kicking feet and got their fingers mashed for their trouble. Eventually, our saviors relented and two men lay on the sidewalk, whimpering.
“You okay?” said one of the rescue party, a blond with a deep southern drawl.
Art moved his hand away from his eye to reveal an incipient shiner. He opened and closed the eye a couple of times. “I’ll live,” he said, and gave Mr. Deep South a winning smile.
“I’m fine,” I said, patting myself down. “Fine.”
One of the other guys, also blond, tall, and broad, said, “You’re bleeding, sir,” and pointed to a spreading stain on my shirt. I lifted the sticky cloth to reveal a shallow slice, bisecting the still-tender scar from my last knife wound, turning it into an uneven X. I touched it gingerly. “Not deep,” I said. I marveled at the new wound. “X marks the spot, I guess.” I was giddy, almost giggly. I looked around and spotted the knife, an ugly clasp knife with a cheap handle, lost in someone’s flower bed. I started to bend to pick it up but now I could feel the slice and I thought better of it. The big guy handed it over to me.
The two guys on the ground were stirring, and the one who’d called my name got to his hands and knees.
Suddenly, my giggles gave way to fury. I wound up and kicked that motherfucker with everything I had, square in his ass, sending him face-first back onto the pavement, sanding the skin off his chin and lips. I was winding up for another kick, this time in the beautifully exposed target between his splayed legs, when Art caught me, assisted by the big guy. I struggled against them, then relented.
“Fuck off,” I shouted at the guy on the ground, who was groaning and just beginning to get back to his knees. “Both of you, fuck off.” Art shot me a wounded look. “Not you,” I said. “Those assholes.”
The one who’d gone for Art was on his feet now, staggering to his friend and helping him into the pickup.
“We’ve got your license plate number,” one of our rescuers said. “Drive safe now.”
The one whose face wasn’t a bloody mess put the pickup in gear, stalled on the slope and rolled back, then, after two more tries, managed to get rolling.
“Tourists!” another rescuer shouted, and that broke the tension and we all cracked up.
We thanked the guys, who were all from the same choir group and who had started their nightly patrol around the neighborhood after their practices when those two poor guys had been beaten up the previous week. Art offered to make them tea or pour them a glass of wine, but they were adamant that they had to keep up their patrol (but one of them gave Art his phone number).
We said our goodbyes and watched them power-walk up the steep hill, joking and laughing with each other, disappearing with a trail of song behind them.
“Let’s get you patched up,” Art said. “I’ve got some superglue in the kitchen drawer.”
We turned toward the steps leading up to our front door, and that’s when I saw the big guy’s front tooth, knocked loose when I’d kicked him. It made my stomach do a slow roll, but I pointed it out to Art and made him get it for me. It wasn’t the whole tooth, just a broken-off half, bloody and sharp at the line where it had cracked.
For years afterward, I flinched whenever I met someone with a broken front tooth, but as far as I know, I never saw those two guys again. The Kohlers and Fidelity Computing were indicted the following week, and I suppose their “partners” decided that they’d better lay low.
By the time the trial finished—plea bargains all round, no jail time for anyone, because “white collar” crime isn’t really a crime—everyone seemed to have forgotten my role in the whole affair.
But I never did.
The Dead Kennedys broke up in 1986. That same year, Microsoft went public. It was the starter pistol for a new race whose finish line was the West Coast tech scene.
That was the first year I truly felt like a San Franciscan, finding myself grousing about the awful computer people who were piling into the city, ruining its character. In so doing, I was continuing the brave tradition of centuries’ worth of my forebears, who’d voiced the same complaints about the gold miners, sailors, hippies, and queers who just didn’t understand the authentic character of San Francisco, which was the character of the city when I arrived.
My favorite restaurants closed in droves, replaced by yuppie places that I refused to eat at on principle. Oh, I could afford them. There was no shortage of demand for the services of an expert in untangling the cack-handed scams of tech’s amateur con artists. But I hated the company.