Everything I do is deliberate. California was a deliberate choice. I was about five years away from getting out of prison, maybe a little more, eight years away. Carole and I were on our plan. The revenues that I was generating from writing supported her so that she could go to school.
I said, “I don’t have roots anywhere. You don’t have roots anywhere. We’re a prison family.” I needed to go to the best possible place for me to start a career and have a meaningful impact on the world. California is an innovative, disruptive place. And you know I like the sunshine . . .
After twenty-six years, I was released on probation. Carole picks me up on August 13, 2012. I’m not free yet, I’m going to the halfway house in the Tenderloin, San Francisco. But I’m free as far as I’m concerned. The Tenderloin is Newport Beach, man. I do not care.
I’m stuck in there for a couple of days. I tell them, “Look, I know you’re looking at the file. You’re seeing I’ve been in jail twenty-five years, but I’m different. Don’t take my word for it. Here are these letters.” I had invitations to go to Stanford, to Berkeley. I had a job waiting for me. I had all these things. “I’m ready.”
Three days later, I got a two-hour pass to go to the DMV. He said, “Are you going to take the bus?”
I said, “I’ll run there.”
“It’s four miles.”
“Dude, I can do it.”
It was amazing. I ran to Fell Street. I ran the whole way, I was so excited. It was the first time I had walked without chains in society in twenty-five-plus years.
But I didn’t know where I was going. I had to call my buddy and get him on Google Maps. He coached me the whole way, saying, “Turn here.”
“Okay. I see it.”
“Go right.”
I wait in line. I pass the written exam—I had studied—but it’s too late for me to do the driving. They said, “You got to make an appointment.” Good thing too. I was so excited, I didn’t realize I had forgotten how to drive.
I had some extra time, so I kept running, I was so happy. I ran to Burger King. Dropped $25, eating french fries, two Double Whoppers, a milkshake, Diet Coke, and more french fries. I just wanted an American cheeseburger so bad I couldn’t wait. Let me tell you, a Whopper is priceless when you’ve been in jail as long as I have.
The next week, I get a pass to go out for my first day of work. I’m going to go meet Lee Nobmann, CEO of Golden State Lumber. We were both in prison; I worked with him every day on his book. He wrote a letter to the probation board that helped get me released.
He says, “Meet me at my office, and let’s go out for lunch.” Now, I’m not allowed out for lunch, right? So I’m not sure what we’re going to do.
I get on the bus. There was a lady bus driver, and she could see how excited I was. I told her, “I just got out of jail after twenty-five years.” She smiled, “My brother’s in prison.” I’m taking pictures with my iPhone. My iPhone. It’s just an amazing experience.
I get off and go to Golden State Lumber. The secretary said, “Lee’s got something special for you. But he’s going to be another few hours. Just hang out.”
I said, “Do you think my wife can come here? My wife is in the area, and I need to get a computer and stuff.”
She said, “Yeah. By all means, do what you need to do.”
Carole couldn’t come to the halfway house, so this was the first time we were alone together. Ever.
I said, “Honey, I want to kiss you.”
She said, “What if somebody comes in?”
“Honey, come on.” We’re like high school kids at forty, fifty years old.
When Lee got there, he said, “Let’s go to lunch.” I told him I wasn’t allowed, and he said, “Oh, come on, man. Twenty-five years.”
I said, “No, Lee. I got to stay. Do you mind if Carole goes and gets something, and we can just talk?”
We sit. Lee just looks at me and says, “What do you want to do? Don’t tell me shit about prison. . . .”
I said, “I just want you to hear me out. I’d be an idiot not to honor your friendship and what you’re offering me, especially considering my background. But I’ve been preparing for this for twenty-five years. I’ve got a story to tell. And I think it can do some good and really make a difference in the world. The prison system is the greatest social injustice of our time—”
He laughed when I said it. “You know that. I know that. But nobody cares except you and me.”
I said, “Don’t you think that’s the reason I need to do this? Because it doesn’t only affect people in prison and their children. It affects everybody in this office. The hundreds of billions of dollars that go to fund this monstrosity is taken out of health care. It’s taken out of infrastructure. It’s taken out of education. It’s taken out of all of these other areas where it could have stronger use. I need to have a role spreading awareness. I can’t do it without support. I don’t want you to look at me as what I am right now. I want you to see where I’m going to be in five years. You were with me for nine months, and you saw how hard I work every day. I promise you I’ll work even harder out here. You’ve just got to give me a little time, because I just need a job.”
He said, “You come work for me, and we’ll figure it out.”
Every morning, I’d leave the halfway house at six and drive up to Petaluma. We’d talk business, talk over my plans. I used to give motivational talks at the office, practice public speaking. And I just started sowing seeds.
He financed my first house in a new development—helped me pick out all the appliances, all the granite, everything.
So when I left the halfway house, I drove Carole up to Petaluma. We walked into this beautiful, brand-new home. I’m taking pictures of her as she walks up the driveway, walks in the front door, telling her, “This is your house, honey. This is ours.”
For want of a nail, I lost the war. But the reverse also works. If you take preparations, you’re going to find people who believe in you. And when they support you, other things will open up too.
If we focus on building hope, if we focus on showing people their highest potential, people will aspire to that and strive. If we only tell people, “Maybe you can get a job,” we’re feeding the problem. This world needs to see success. It needs to see people do what nobody thinks is possible.
Last year, I took out a mortgage and started renting the place, took a tenant—we have people living there, paying for our retirement right now. I’m going to buy another house soon. I’m determined to do it. I’m not going to live in it. I’m going to rent it too, because I’m all about saving.
Carole jokes, “Why can’t we live in our own house?”
And I say, “Honey, if I die, I want you to say, ‘My husband took care of me.’ ”
OLIVER AND ALLEN
Oliver was born and raised in Northern California. He went to UC Berkeley and became a journalist who covered the AIDS crisis and helped shape the city’s sense of its own identity. Allen is a son of the Midwest and a graduate of the seminary. He worked for a suicide prevention program and walked the Tenderloin at night in a clerical collar. They have lived together for forty years, most of it in the Castro, where they built a family together. San Francisco gave them a home, and, in a way, they did the same for others—not just in their careers, but as partners and fathers. We sit at the breakfast nook in their kitchen, surrounded by artifacts from their travels and photos of their family.
Oliver: We say that we probably saved each other’s lives, by having a fairly—I mean, it wasn’t totally monogamous—but we met in the ’70s and were together and very involved from ’78 on. And the AIDS crisis started in about ’80, I think, ’81. We had to be more responsible with each other.
Allen: We met at a cocktail party—we were both in Puerto Vallarta at the same time—kind of a gay cocktail party that was given by someone—
Oliver: It was given by a Catholic priest. Oh, what was his name? He picked me up. I was buying postcards on the stre
et. Only later did I find out he was a priest, when he wanted me to go to the Epiphany mass with him. [They laugh.]
Allen: Oliver lived in Oakland. I lived in San Francisco. I invited him for dinner. And he stayed for a week.
Oliver: At first, we kept our places, but we would go back and forth. And then—I guess about a year after we met—you moved to the Haight where I was living.
Allen: We eventually moved to this place in the Castro in 1989.
Oliver: And have been here ever since.
Allen: We traveled a lot. We always loved Mexico—Latin culture—the Andes when we went to visit. We went to Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil.
Oliver: We always used to joke with our friends in Puerto Vallarta that we were Mexicans trapped in gringo bodies.
Allen: We went to Peru and that is how we met Teresa, who is the mother of our daughters. She and her boyfriend were coming to the States to visit her sister, who was already living in Kentucky. We told them, “You guys should come out and visit us!” We had an extra bedroom. So they came—
Oliver: On the Greyhound bus. They showed up at our front door in the Mission—
Allen: Dressed in tribal—
Oliver: Total indigenous Andean outfits.
Allen: It was exciting to have them in town.
Oliver: We did the whole thing up. We took them to Beach Blanket Babylon.*
Allen: The two of them stayed for a month or two.
Oliver: Teresa eventually got a job as a housekeeper. The boyfriend had to go back to Peru, because he had family down there. He and Teresa became very estranged. And then, nine months later, we learned that Teresa was pregnant. Unbeknownst to us.
Allen: She visited us every weekend.
Oliver: But she would wear her outfits, and we had no clue she was pregnant. She called me up and told me she was in the hospital. And I said, “Did you get hit by a truck or something?” And she says, “No, tengo baby.” And I’m going, “You’re kidding!”
Allen: So we rushed over there.
Oliver: Picked up her and the baby and brought them back the next day. I said, “Most people have nine months to prepare for this. I’ve had a day and a half. Do you have an operating manual?”
Allen: It’s easy to fall in love with a baby. We helped name her. Clara.
Oliver: And we said, “To hell with it. You can just stay with us.”
Allen: That just evolved into our feeling like we were a family.
Oliver: It was pretty easy for us, because Teresa was like Supermom.
Allen: She really was a saint.
Oliver: She took good care of everything. For us, it was just, “Goo goo, gaga”—you know, play-play kind of thing. It didn’t seem as difficult as it might have been.
He shows a photograph. The family: a woman at the center holding a baby, two men, one on each side. Oliver has a phenomenal late-century moustache.
Oliver: Years passed, we lived together. Clara was in school, probably five or six. And Teresa suddenly says, “I have to go back to Peru.” She had an older daughter, Rita, still there. “If I don’t, she will end up sixteen years old and pregnant, and I’m not going to have that.” And we’re going, “Well, you can’t leave us. You just can’t pick up with Clara and go off!” Because we were all pretty well attached by then. And so we hatched a scheme that Allen and Teresa would get married.
Allen: We talked to an immigration lawyer first. We brought Teresa and Clara. We said, “We are already a family. We just want to add Rita and we don’t know what to do.” And the lawyer said, “You know, people get married for a lot of different reasons.” He and his law firm would support us. But he said, “Be sure to have your mother at the wedding!”
Oliver: We brought Allen’s cousin, who is a minister, over from Iowa. We had a full-scale wedding in a neighborhood church.
Allen: It wasn’t a religious wedding, the church was a backdrop.
Oliver: We had a big reception at a restaurant nearby.
Allen: We invited about twenty friends. And my mother came.
Allen shows another photo of him tall and in a white tuxedo standing next to Teresa. Oliver stands nearby. They are all smiling.
Allen: The whole process getting Rita over took months. We had to arrange the wedding. We needed to legalize Teresa, because she was here illegally too—she had come on a student visa. And then we could bring Rita: family reunification, you know, the whole thing.
Oliver: We had to go back to Peru and do this all at the American embassy.
Allen: We had a little interview. It was at a bank window with some young staffer. And he asked me two questions: “Were you married in a church?” and “Does your wife have a ring?” And of course, we were married in a church—it was right on the wedding certificate. And on the way to the interview, Teresa stopped and bought a ring, because she thought that maybe she needed one.
Oliver: I was staying nearby. They came back and told me all of this. And of course I went into a total rage, saying, “What business is it of the State Department of the United States whether you were married in a church or not?!”
Allen: When we came back to Miami from Peru, they pulled Teresa aside and asked her all these questions about my mother and my father. Well, of course, she had the answers—she had met them—and they consider her part of the family too.
Oliver: When Rita got here, we sent her to Newcomer High School—San Francisco schools had a program where they bring all of the immigrant kids. They had Filipino, Chinese, Latinos, European kids, everybody. Seventeen different languages, and they throw them all into this one high school and do English immersion. And it worked like a charm. Within a year and a half, she was perfectly fine.
Allen: She went to UC Santa Barbara. She and her husband bought a house in Marin. Now she works at a Bay Area foundation.
Oliver: To raise a child from another ethnic group, that is a real eye-opener. They were very dark-skinned, especially as little girls. And the school assumed a lot of things. They assumed Clara didn’t speak English and put her in the remedial classes. English was her first language, and we had to straighten them out. Even then, they would look at me and wonder where she came from. There were a lot of comments about “Who is she?”
Allen: Teresa was a constant presence. And she is really an indigenous activist.
Oliver: She is involved in community groups in the Mission.
Allen: She knows Carlos Santana, the musician. She knows Rigoberta Menchú, a famous human-rights activist from Guatemala. She was the main force in keeping the language and the culture alive in the family. We go back to Peru every couple of years to visit and see all the cousins. I mean, we feel like they’re our family too.
Oliver: But it’s interesting. Clara, born in San Francisco, raised in the Castro, is more attuned to her background and culture than Rita is. Rita is moving on. From a hut high in the Andes to an Eichler† and a Prius. She has a five-year-old daughter, and she is not teaching her Spanish.
Allen: But Clara kept up her Spanish really well. She works at a tech company, but every Saturday or Sunday she works at a street fair in the neighborhood.
Oliver: A little bazaar. Clara has a booth there, and she sells stuff that the family sends up from Peru.
He shows me a photo: Oliver, Allen, and Teresa, in the center. To their right, Rita, her husband (who is incredibly tall), and their daughter in their arms. To their left, Clara smiling broadly.
Allen: We started a family before it was fashionable. We still send Christmas cards out with pictures of our family.
Oliver: We encourage the kids to stay in touch with their father in Peru, but Clara doesn’t even recognize him or speak of him.
Allen: She said, “I only have two dads, you and Oliver.”
SAAD KHAN (CONT’D)
Perhaps in part because he spent much of his childhood in Pakistan, something challenged him to ask the hard questions of the tech industry and push his work in it to serve the right mission: “Getting off of a plane
from Karachi and driving into San Francisco—or going back—it was always a bit of a phase shift. It gave you a sense of the bigger world out there and that there’s a lot of people in the Valley not connected to it. So how can technology affect that bigger world? And how can we get the means of production in the hands of as many people as possible?” Starting his own firm, he has become a bridge figure between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world and works to put the industry’s vast resources and creativity to the world’s most urgent challenges.
It was always clear that the kinds of problems you could go after could be infinite.
Having grown up abroad, I saw this whole other world that was not being served—and if you looked in the right way, it was a really interesting market opportunity. I could see how much energy there was—and how much talent there was—untapped both here and in other parts of the world. It maybe was an obvious thing for me, but it wasn’t necessarily obvious to a lot of other people.
I started teaching a little bit at the design school at Stanford. I was an industry guest a couple of times at a class called “Designing Liberation Technology”—seeking creative solutions, for example, in parts of the world without electricity. The d-school was a magical place for people who are empathetic (empathy is a staple in “design thinking”) and applying it to different kinds of opportunities. It felt like home for me.
Then, through a series of coincidences, I started teaching in the Middle East. I wrote this piece that was called “Why the Arab World Needs Heroes.” And it happened to get published five days before the Arab Spring started, totally coincidental. I was watching these events unfold on a world stage, and I got the call from a friend of mine, “Hey, you should come talk about this at the State Department.” It was surreal. My topic was the political implication of social media, and the day of my talk, President Mubarak stepped down in Egypt.
I was the right person at the right time, I suppose. The next thing I know, the State Department was like, “Hey, we want someone to host and mentor this start-up weekend in post-revolution Egypt, and USAID will fund it.” I mentored at a developer conference with Google in Saudi Arabia. The government of Malaysia invited Silicon Valley to come—it was an event for local entrepreneurs called “Silicon Valley Comes to Malaysia”—and so I went. I even got the opportunity to meet the president of Turkey.
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