THAT FUTURE WITH A FUNNY NAME (1995)

How do you spell the future to make sure it happens in the right way?

How do you stop 1984 from ever arriving?

How do you freeze Big Brother in his tracks?

It has always seemed to me that while the politicians are hoisting themselves up in their hot-air balloons with no ballast, going nowhere, you run along ahead of them and …

Invent the future, build it while no one is looking. Dream the cliché-impossible-dream that everyone doubts and no one believes in until they wind up next door to or surrounded by it and, too late, they’re in love.

Go ahead and smile, laugh quietly even, as I change the name, date and place of Orwell’s 1984 with:

Wimberly, Allison, Tong & Goo.

No, I’m not writing and sending this from Hyperbole, Kansas.

I have seen the future, and it is more than a promised land, and we don’t have to march there; it is near at hand, its roots are in Southern California, and its gardens are across the world.

I expect at this point you will heave a great sigh of gloom and doom, slam this book shut, and hurl it across the room. But wait. How did I come to this uncomfortable position, this glorious view of tomorrow morning?

Prepare yourself for coincidence.

I did some minor consulting work on the Orbitron ride at Euro Disney outside Paris, a few years ago. Attending the opening-day ceremonies, in the late afternoon I went up to the second floor of the Disneyland Hotel to sit with a cold beer and a fine view of the new park, musing on its many qualities.

Halfway through my drink, a stranger walked up with his wife and asked permission to sit at my table. I agreed, amiably, and we chatted for a few minutes about the park, the happy celebration, and tonight’s fireworks. I looked around at the hotel and praised it, saying it was very fine.

“But,” I added, “I know a hotel finer than this. The greatest, to me anyway, hotel in the world, and I’ve lived in dozens of them!”

“What hotel is that?” said the stranger.

“The Grand Floridian, at Disney World, Florida,” I said, working up steam. “Everything about it invites. The shape, the size, the colors, the restaurants. And the main lobby, which rises at least six floors above the conversational area below and gives kids notions about running up there to circle ’round and think about spitting down at their parents below. What a place! The Grand Floridian. Go there!”

“I’ve been,” said the stranger. “That’s mine.”

“Yours?”

“Ours, I should say. Our architectural firm in Newport, California.”

“My God!” I cried. “And here I’ve been shooting off my mouth … !”

“It’s all right,” said Gerald Allison, reaching out to shake my hand, laughing. “Don’t stop.”

I haven’t. I’m still saying the same, only more so. Since then I’ve stayed again at the Grand Floridian and see no reason to change. I’d still like to run up to the sixth floor to sail paper planes or spit. I always leave there a foot shorter and ten times louder than when I came through the door.

Needless to say, Gerry Allison and I started the swiftest friendship in history that afternoon. And I haven’t changed my mind about him or his cohorts since. Little did I know that when I shook his hand, I was shaking the hand of a kid who once dreamed of clearing the jungle to fast-find a lost city. This was my blood brother, raised late nights on awful radio shows and reading Tarzan and the City of Gold with a flashlight, totally forbidden, under the covers halfway toward morn.

So what you have here are not, as they claim, postcards of the future. They are good promises that can and will be kept.

Wimberly, Allison, Tong & Goo, like Gaul, exists in four parts, but the four parts make a whole that can lick the bejesus out of a small part of the future.

Can Gerry and his pals solve and improve everything? No way. But they can nibble and nick and munch around the edges of time and, bit by bit, change cities that have fallen to skeleton and skin, and make viral implants in dead tissue to watch long-dormant towns revitalize themselves, said viruses giving life rather than taking it.

Politics seem to have no cure for our empty boulevards and parks, but corporate cash and architectural imagination can guarantee at least safe walking and living places. Schweitzer once said, Do something good, someone may imitate it. Allison and Associates can, then, set examples, near cities if not in them, to be seen and imitated.

While a good part of Africa self-destroys, Wimberly, Allison, Tong & Goo discovers a civilization that never was and promise a future not over the rainbow but underfoot. I would go there, to their bee-loud glades.

Big Brother will never be dead.

But they’re giving him a rough time.