I flew out to Frisco for a week. It was bittersweet to be back in town; the memories of my time there seemed both vivid and impossibly remote, a dream recalled all at once in the middle of the sidewalk. I spent the first half of the nineties eating three dollar burritos in a flop on Haight Street, then stole a grayscale PowerBook from a temp job to try my hand at copywriting. That was the summer of the Netscape IPO. The rest is history.
I was living with Amy by then. Her alarm would ring at four-thirty and she'd roll out of bed and down to the Lexus for the commute to the Valley. I'd lie in bed awhile, let Bob Edwards wake me up slowly. Another record day on Nasdaq … Altoid blowjobs in the Oval Office … Everest-mania … an embassy or two blown up somewhere in East Who-Gives-a-Shit. Carmelita arrived at six or so, appearing shyly at the bedroom door. "Señor Ehyansen?"
"Yes, good morning, honey. The usual today, I think."
"Righ' eway, sir."
Over quail eggs, toast points, and a steaming carafe of Jamaica Blue Mountain, I checked my stocks (up, up, sideways, up), made a few fantasy trades, perused the dailies (Suck, Salon, Wired, Slate) and thought about the day to come. Dinner tonight at Food in SoMa — sweet. But first: "Carmelita, darling?"
"Esir?"
"The yolks were a little overcooked this morning. See? You see how I can't dip into it? It's like paste or something. Come over here — see? You see what I'm talking about? Here, you try it. Well, you had to push pretty hard — don't get smart with me, Carmelita. You know how I feel about this. Didn't we talk about this? Haven't we talked about this more than once? Don' eyou unnerstan' Eeenglish, cariña? Shou' we esen' jou hhhome for more elessons?"
She clutched her apron and began sobbing and simpering in a way that would have been sexy in a woman thirty years younger — but not in a middle-aged mother of five. "Stop that," I barked, and threw a stack of embossed paper at her. "Here — take a few Pets.com warrants and buy yourself something nice." Ignoring her effusive thanks, I pushed past to my office and slammed the door. Good help … well, you know what they say. At least she didn't steal.
What an office I had in those days. In one window, the sun rose over the Mission and the Bay; in the other, it set behind Twin Peaks. In between were a handmade cherrywood desk, a state-of-the-art media system, and a different Herman Miller chair for every day of the week (I never could decide which color I liked best). I'd paid some guy to build a rock garden and koi pool with a Buddha in the corner of the room because, you know, I was all about Zen.
First order of business: responding to the latest pleas for my services. A press release for e-Flings? Twenty-five hundred, half up-front. Dummies book jackets? Sure, I could squeeze in a few — say, a grand apiece. Company blurbs for a day trading site? How about fifty options and two inside tips per dozen. All subject to scheduling and availability, of course; I'm pretty booked at the moment. You can ping Carmelita on her Blackberry to set something up.
As my fingers danced across the keyboard, a powerful flow of copy poured forth to drive the turbines of progress. You could feel it in the air — innovation, synergy, interactivity. We were revolutionizing every aspect of life and business, and doing it in Internet time. My text pager buzzed — "Sell," I replied. The cell phone rang — "Not for less than fifteen K." An email from Hector — "Sure, twenty-five hits if it's really that good." Exterpricity e-Business Solutions on the land line, desperate for a fix — who am I to say no? "Scalable multi-tier architecture. Extensible, integratable, and interoperable to leverage back-end legacy investments. Robust, carrier-class, and 100% Pure Java. Don't mention it — eight hundred bucks."
I dabbled a little in venture capital analysis, writing quarterly features for a newsletter. The pay wasn't that great — four thousand words at five bucks apiece — but I got a kick out of swinging dicks with the big boys on Sand Hill Road. They were giants among men, inking hundreds of millions in deals with a single disposable pen. Their names were traded among hopeful entrepreneurs like Pokemon cards — Hubrison, Chang, Khoener, Muffinfield, each one with the power to grant a dream or crush it underfoot. Over lunch at Buck's in Woodside, they joked about the stiffs getting funded lately and bragged about their home runs-to-be (oxygen bar franchising, e-massage, live yacht racing on the Web). Now and then, one of them would get all starry-eyed and drop something like, "The current wave of telecommunications investment is the most fundamentally important infrastructure build-out since the railroad — and it'll happen in one thirtieth the time." That's when I'd get the pen out.
Why ruin a perfect day writing that white paper for Katherine? She'd made me swear up and down to come through for her, but fuck it — she could find another job. The driving range beckoned, but I knew I should put in some time on the novel. Golden afternoon light drenched my office and glittered in the ketamine and crystal piled high on a picture frame at my side as I rendered Faulkner and West obsolete.
When Amy got back from the office, she parked on the sidewalk and dashed upstairs for a couple of cosmos to whet our appetites, then off to Food. Dangle the keys at the valet; "Try not to scratch it — that paint job cost more than your car." The concrete walls magnify a cacophony of real estate bitching, strike price bragging, gadget comparing, wine steward stumping.
"You know, that Bush kid is starting to look pretty good to me. I mean, Al Gore funded the creation of the Internet, he's good on the environment, lots of foreign policy experience — but Naomi Wolf told him to wear earth tones and he did. I mean, he's a little tiresome, right? Maybe a moderate, pro-business Republican could help us consolidate our massive gains under Clinton."
They were wonderful times, right up to the end — even afterwards, really. The month after the crash, Amy and I had a fairy-tale wedding with horses and kilts, and honeymooned trekking in Tibet (that Dalai Lama is such a charmer), never once realizing that it would be years before we would earn back the amount we'd just spent. We were history's children, and our legacy would endure a thousand years.
Frisco was fun, all right. But Brooklyn is pretty nice, too.
