Microserfs

futuristic BuildX logo on them and they looked like the Osmonds or the Solid Gold Dancers. We didn’t talk to them the whole flight.

Ethan couldn’t come. He’s back in Palo Alto, staying with Mom while he does his chemotherapy, which appears to be going well, even though it makes him crabby. He’s starting to lose a little hair, not too bad, and this is a terrible observation but his dandruff is finally clearing.

Dusty is still in disbelief that her baby wasn’t a grapefruit and is also at Mom’s house for a few days while we’re at CES, nursing Lindsay Ruth and keeping Ethan company. Mom is giving her a crash course in motherhood, dragging out embarrassing baby photos of me and tiny little jumpers that I had no idea she kept. Dusty sits and stares at Lindsay for hours on end, saying to anyone who’ll listen, “Ten toes! Ten fingers!” Lindsay was delivered on the evening of the final round of the Iron Rose IV competition, and Todd told me on the flight down that Lindsay Ruth was named after movie-of-the-week star and Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner, as well as for a Bible person. He hasn’t really talked about the baby yet — I think it’s finally sinking in that he’s a father, now that he’s got the physical proof.

Luggage lost; luggage retrieved; Vietnam veteran taxi driver; Gallagher billboards. We checked into our hotel in a daze — a creakingly old hotel called the Hacienda. (Best not discussed. It’s sole redeeming feature is its location right next door to … the extravagant-beyond-all-belief pyramid of the LUXOR.)

We left the hotel to register at the Convention Center, many football fields’ worth of sterile white cubes, which are as attractive as the heating ducts atop a medical-dental center. The look on all the registrees’ faces was great. You could tell that all they could think of was sex and blowing their money later that night. It was so transparent. Las Vegas brings out the devil in everyone.

Las Vegas: it’s like the subconsciousness of the culture exploded and made municipal. I was so overwhelmed by it that I ended up reviving my old-style subconscious file from last year. Herewith: vasectomy reversal billboard breakfast moccasins Siegfried & Roy Sahara Compaq Nokia NY Steak & Eggs $2.95 47-Tek control. remote. keno forgotten cocktails social interface name tag cardboard IBM box Cheddar is it loud? interactive virgin tanked girl Flamingo reflective surfaces dry ice

Moon

American

Floyd

Heywood cities destroyed fight win win win morphin mighty Nam-1975 VFX-1 monster lab colonize air lock thrust Bob boy game orb 64 bits tatami pods rings Softimage object popping anti alias lemon BAR

trilinear MlPmap interpolation

Ultra 64

gravy

Samsung paper napkin cherry

synthetic

emotional

response Nye County, Nevada Dept. of Energy traffic lights White Tigerzoid computer personal floral carpeting Howard Hughes Parkway *69 cinderblock walls escort leaflets First Interstate 00 implant beverage strip bell Big Endian I Endian

When we returned to the hotel to change, Karla’s and my room somehow became the party room. None of us except for Anatole, who’s here to schmooze Compaq, have ever been to Las Vegas before, let alone a CES. (Amy called us “bad American citizens.”) We were all giddy at the prospect of an evening’s unchained fun; sleazy adventure divorced from consequences.

Anatole and Todd brought up vodka, mixer, and ice. Our ancient queen-size bed was as concave as a satellite dish — the same mattress must have been mangling the lumbars of low-budget gamblers since the Ford Administration — so we sat clustered in its recess like kangaroo babies inside Mom’s pouch. Chugging V&Ts, we surfed through the channels, high on simply being in Las Vegas, even just watching TV in a hotel room in Las Vegas.

The TV began showing these three-minute pay-TV movie clips. (“Hey, let’s watch Curly Sue!”) Then one came on touting the AVN Awards, the Adult Video News awards. Susan yelled, “The Stiffies!” It’s an actual Academy Awards-style show for porn people. We had to pay. It was simply too juicy not to. People were sashaying up the aisles to collect awards for things like “Best Anal Scene” and they were getting all teary and emotional making acceptance speeches. It was unbelievable. Awards for, like, “Best Group Scene.”

Dad was fortunately in his own room, talking on the phone with a friend from Hewlett-Packard he was having dinner with that evening. But really, the whooping we all made … we were just the sort of people you don’t want staying in the room next to you.

Anatole said, “Oh look—that actress there—she was in the booth across from my old company six years ago — and now she’s won an award!” Anatole actually seemed quite proud. “In the old days, you had 12 computer game geeks and 12 porn stars all crowded into the most remote corner of some remote convention building. We were the freaks of the convention. Now we run it. Ha!”

Amy and Michael went into the bathroom and emerged with Kleenex boxes on their feet: “We’re Howard Hughes!”

We phoned Mom, and she said Ethan was woozy from today’s treatment. Lindsay is pleasingly, Gerberishly plump, and former bodybuilding enthusiast Dusty is eating my family out of house and home. Misty, who hasn’t shed an ounce since starting her diet last year, follows the “Madonna and child” everywhere. “Dusty’s a sucker for dog- begging,” says Mom, “and I keep trying to tell Dusty not to feed the dog, but it’s not working.” Mom sounds pissed, but she has to learn that her dog is never going to be slim. So, all in all, it sounds like things are fine there.

Mom asked, half-jokingly, but also for real, if Dad was pulling his weight as our company rep, but I said we wouldn’t be able to tell until tomorrow.

The ten of us double-cabbed (20-minute cab wait) up the Strip (clogged) to a Sony party Todd had gotten us semi-invited to, and dropped Dad off at the MGM Grand along the way. All three Chyx in the two cars shouted in practiced tra-la-la voices, “Good night, Blake Carrington, you hulking piece of man meat!” Dad’s ears turned bright red. I think the porno awards were a bad influence on them.

At the Sony party, we all got weirded out because suddenly all of the people at the party looked like they were porn stars, even though they were just real people. It was only because all of the Stiffie Award winners and their film clips were still in our brains that we were perceiving this. And then we realized that viewed from a certain perspective, all people can look like porn stars. So for a few minutes there, humanity seemed really scary indeed. I wonder how porn people’s mind-body relationships are — I can’t imagine. Their bodies must be like machines to them, or products to ship, but then they’re not the only ones — Olympic athletes and geeks and bodybuilders and people with eating disorders.

But the Sony party … we checked out the live-action footage in the new Sony games, and the acting — it was so cheesy. It was like porn acting. This merely reinforced our collective impression that the real world is a porn movie. Talking to a Sony executive named Lisa, I asked her how they went about recruiting talent for games, without actually saying that their live action sucked. She told me that industry people aren’t realizing yet just how unbelievably expensive it is to shoot any sort of game with live action. “Just say the words ‘live action,’ and the price goes up a million dollars,” she said.

I then wondered out loud if starring in multimedia products is going to be the modern equivalent of appearing on the Hollywood Squares. Michael and Amy lapsed into a lovebird recital of questions from an old version of the Hollywood Squares board game they both had as children:

“Q: True or false: Frank Sinatra never wears jewelry of any kind. “ “A: False.”

“Q: True or false: The average person can hold their breath for 45 seconds. “ “A: True.”