Microserfs

dollar bill with a coin,” said Susan, approaching us from the hibachi, “they can use Elvis.”

Susan didn’t go out of her way to dress up this year and came as a biker chick. She was miffed at discovering that the assembly language programmer from General Magic she’d been chatting up all night was married. She swigged Chardonnay from a bottle, yanked an unripe orange from a tree, and said, “You guys are talking about Ethan? Being with Ethan is kind of like, well … like when you’re sleeping with somebody who doesn’t know what to do in bed but who thinks they’re really hot stuff — and they’re rubbing one part of your body over and over, thinking they’ve found your ‘Magic Spot’ when all they’re doing, in fact, is annoying you.”

Susan and Ethan never agree on anything, but it’s not sexy disagreeing. It’s just disagreeing.

There was a pause as the party slowed down, and Karla said, “Isn’t it weird, the way Michael arrived without a costume, but he still looks like he’s in costume?” She was right. Poor unearthly Michael.

Ethan was telling us the story of how he hooked up with Michael, how they met shortly after Michael’s mystery trip to Cupertino, at the Chili’s restaurant on the Stevens Creek Boulevard strip — a few blocks away from Apple — a tastefully landscaped four-lane corridor of franchised food and metallically-skinned tech headquarters.

“Michael was inking out all of the vowels on his menu,” Ethan reminisced fondly, sitting down with us under the tree. “He was ‘Testing the legibility of the text in the absence of information,’ as I was later informed. And when I saw him order a dozen tortillas, some salsa, and a side of Thousand Island dressing, I knew there had to be something there. How rrrright I was.”

“Michael is going to be your mother lode for the mid-1990s?” Susan asked ingenuously.

“Well, Miss Equity — for your sake, you’d better hope so.”

We went in the house to warm up. Ethan’s living room is painted entirely in white enamel, and lining the ceiling’s perimeter are a hundred or so 1970s Dirty Harry bank surveillance cameras whirring and rotating, all linked to a wall of blue-and-white, almost-dead TV sets. A surveillance fantasy. “I used to date an installation artist from UC Santa Cruz,” is all Ethan says about his art.

His house is small, but I think he enjoys being able to tell people he lives in San Carlos. San Carlos, just north of Palo Alto, is called Nerd Hill. The big problem in San Carlos is, apparently, deer —which eat all the rose shoots and the young tree buds. “There’s this guy there who sells bottled mountain-lion urine he collects at zoos. You spritz the stuff around the yard to scare the deer away. It’s like, ‘Hey, pal — check out the cougar piss!’” Ethan held up a small, clear-yellow vial. “I’m investing in a biotech firm that tricks e. coli bacteria into manufacturing cougar pheromones.”

Ethan is so extreme. He has this Patek Phillipe watch, which cost maybe ?2,000,000 (purchased at Tokyo’s Akihabara district, the nirvana of geek consumption, with all signage apparently in Japanese, English, and Russian). He says that every time he tells the time, he’s amortizing the cost.

“Well, I’m down to $5.65 a glance, now. If I check the time every hour from now to the year 2023, I’ll be down to a dime per look.”

Ethan’s nine blender settings are labeled with little LaserWriter labels in 7-point Franklin Gothic:

1) Asleep

2) In-flite movie

3) Disneyland at age 25

4) Good $8.00 movie

5) IMAX with Dolby

6) Lunch w/D. Geffen and B. Diller

7) Disneyland at age 10

8) Aneurysm

9) Spontaneous combustion

Ethan’s dandruff is truly shocking, but you know, life isn’t like TV commercials. Karla and I spent thirty minutes trying to think of tell-your-friend-he-has-dandruff scenarios that wouldn’t insult him, and in the end, we couldn’t. It’s so odd, because every other aspect of his grooming is so immaculate.

3:10 A.M. Just got back from Ethan’s party. We’re “flying to Australia” tonight — that’s our in-house code word for pulling an insane, 36-to 48-hour coding run in preparation for a meeting Ethan has with venture capitalists.

E-mail from Abe:

You actually left.

I never thought that could happen. How could you have left Microsoft so EASILY!?!? It’s such a good set up. The stock’s supposed to split in Spring. Who’s yourBill?

I’m putting word out on-wire at Microsoft to locate new roomates, but still it feels pretty strange to be without rfoomates. A whole month now! I’m writing my ad for the inhouse BBS:

“SPACE! …

Not your final frontier in this instance, but there’s lots of it here and its not a bad deal: Redmond, 5 minutes from Microsoft. Live in regal early 1970s splender. Dolby THX sound. Adirondack style chair made from old skis. Trampoline. Own bathrooom. Pets okay. $235.00”

BTW: Did you know that Lego makes a plastic vacuum cleaner shaped like a parrot to pick up stray Legos??

SUNDAY

Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that’s the surest way to tell which company to invest in. “If the techies aren’t grinding, the stock ain’t climbing.”

Karla doesn’t like my being friends with Ethan. She says it’s corrupting, but I told her not to worry, that I spent all of my youth in front of a computer and that I’ll never catch up to all the non-nerds who spent their early twenties having a life and being jaded.

Karla says that nerds-gone-bad are the scariest of all, because they turn into “Marvins” and cause problems of planetary dimensions. Marvin was that character from Bugs Bunny cartoons who wanted to blow up Earth because it obscured his view of Venus.

Oh — earlier today, driving up Arastradero from Starbucks, the sunset was literally almost killer.

It was all we could do not to crash the car looking at the pinks and oranges. And the view from Mom and Dad’s house on La Cresta Drive was staggering: from the San Mateo bridge to the north, practically down to Gilroy in the south. The Alameda Mountains were seemingly lit from the inside, like beef-colored patio lanterns, and we even saw a glint from the observatory atop Mount Hamilton. And the dirigible hangar at Moffet Naval Air Station looked as if the Stay-Puft marshmallow giant was lying down to die. It was so grand.

We sat there on the sagging cedar balcony to watch the floor show. The balcony sags because the sugary brown soil underneath all these older ranch houses is settling; floors bump; doors don’t quite close true. We threw chew toys to Misty, Mom’s golden retriever that she bought two years ago secondhand. Misty was supposed to be a seeing-eye dog, but she failed her exam because she’s too affectionate. It’s a flaw we don’t mind.

It was just a nice moment. I felt like I was home.

Karla also keeps a diary, but her entries are so brief. For example, she showed me a sample entry for the entire trip to California, all she wrote was: Drove down to California. Dan drew a robot on my place mat at lunch in south Oregon and I put it in my purse. That was it. No mention of anything we talked about. I call it Reduced Instruction Set Computation diaries.