Mother American Night

by John Perry Barlow

  On every level, Steve was a trip. He truly was, and I really miss him. After he started getting sick, I went to his office one day to talk to him about something. When some people are dying, it can be good for them to broach the subject and talk about it openly. But there was no way in hell Steve was going to do that. To his way of thinking, he was not dying. He was not. He had done some other challenging things in his life, and he was going to beat this as well.

  I never think of people as being happy or satisfied. On a good day, Jerry Garcia was joyful and so was Steve. I saw him experience glee many times. He would give these demos introducing a product and somehow in spite of the fact that they were not ready to give the demo at all, it would work and he would be delighted. But there would be other times when it would work and he would still just be kicking himself all the way up the aisle.

  In his fascist way, Steve imposed a lot of syntactic conventions that have made it a lot easier for users to interface with all the gnarly stuff that happens down close to the metal within their own devices. For Steve, that was a serious part of the proposition because he was a fanatic about design and didn’t ever think of it as a decal that you put on top.

  For Steve, design was something that went all the way to the core, and he knew there weren’t many people who understood that. It’s hard to say where that came from, but what I do know for certain is that we will never see his like again.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  MEETING CYNTHIA

  Right across from the banquet room in which the Steve Jobs celebrity roast was about to take place, the American Psychiatric Association was having a session of its annual conference. I was standing outside the entrance before going in to roast Steve and all the psychiatrists were milling around in their corner and I saw this tall, slender woman with long blond hair in a very crisp Armani suit.

  Even before I saw her face, I knew I was in love with her in a way I had thought was fictional. I had never experienced anything like it in my entire life. She was standing with her back to me, and then she turned and looked right at me over her left shoulder. Her gaze was direct and penetrating and went on for a long time.

  I had always thought that the idea of love at first sight was a literary monster created to make people feel less satisfied about what they had, and I could not imagine any mechanism that would cause it to actually take place. But we locked in on this beam, and I felt like I was having a hallucination and hearing voices. The whole thing was so dreamlike that I stepped back and rubbed my eyes and tried to figure out what I was going to do about it. Before this woman and I had ever said anything to each other, I felt I had finally found my other half.

  Whatever was going on between us, I was not going to let the moment pass without investigation. So I circled her a couple of times. Once I realized she was not going into the Steve Jobs roast but into the psychiatrists’ meeting, I hustled over and said, “Look, this is presumptuous of me but you are something.” And she said, “So are you.” I said, “Where are you from?” And she said, “A little town in British Columbia.” I said, “I’m from a little town in Wyoming, which is sort of similar. Where do you live now?” And she said, “New York.” I said, “Me too.”

  I told her where I lived and she said, “Oh, that’s very interesting.” I said, “Why?” And she said, “I just rented an apartment in that building to be my office.” In fact, she had rented the apartment precisely two floors above mine.

  She had to go into her meeting, so I said, “If you get out of your thing before I get out of mine, please do me the favor of sticking around.” We did not exchange names. I just told her to wait for me. Later that evening, I was busy running the roast when I looked up and saw her standing at the back of the room.

  This hacker I knew who was a strange character was there that night and he said, “I can see what’s happening to you, Barlow. But I’ve got some bad news for you. That woman has a diamond the size of the Rock of Gibraltar on her finger. She’s married.” I hadn’t seen the ring yet, but when I did, I knew it hadn’t come out of a Cracker Jack box. To that point, I had studiously avoided noticing it, but I said, “We’ll see how married she really is.”

  I took her to the roast after-party and she immediately went off and flirted with every guy there but me. For some reason, I felt perfectly okay with that. It was just her way. Toward the end of the party, I came over to her and said, “Look, I would like to do something right now, but I know you’re married and I hope it’s okay with you.” And she bent forward and let me kiss her. That was pretty much the ball game.

  Her name was Cynthia Horner and she had grown up on Vancouver Island in Nanaimo, a beautiful old mill town right across the strait from Vancouver. One of the things that set it apart is that they have an annual bathtub race from Nanaimo to Vancouver. It’s about thirty miles across the strait, and they sail it in bathtubs with outboard motors.

  British Columbia is a part of the world that has a wonderfully well-developed sense of absurdist self-deprecating humor, and one of the things they love to make fun of is Nanaimo and its culture. Because Nanaimo is semi-isolated, the people there have come up with their own way of pronouncing quite a broad variety of words. They speak Nanaim-ese.

  Both of Cynthia’s parents were doctors. Her mother was a dermatologist and her father had grown up on a great big ranch south of Calgary. His side of the family included big-time politicians, like the Speaker of the Canadian Senate and the head of the Canadian National Railway. They were all right-wing ranchers in much the same way my father had been.

  Cynthia had attended the public high school in Nanaimo and then gone to the University of British Columbia. After graduating from the medical school there, she had gone to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to become a psychiatrist.

  The two of us spent the night together, but we did not make love. The next night, I was cohosting a party for a NeXT database software company whose only customer was the CIA. So everybody at the party was CIA. I knew these guys loved to feel hip, so I hired a theatrical group from San Francisco that was entirely composed of really enormous people who were crawling back and forth on heavy ropes over everyone at the party. You would look up and there would be three hundred pounds of flesh above you. It was art.

  Cynthia had never taken a psychedelic before or ever done anything wild or bohemian in her life. She had never even smoked a joint, nothing. We took MDA together that night, and she loved MDA and she loved the party.

  The next night, the Grateful Dead were playing at Cal Expo, the state fairgrounds in Sacramento, and we went backstage tripping on acid. Cynthia was not a music person at all, and the fact that I was a lyricist for the Dead was not particularly relevant to her. Even though she was the kind of person who would never have been caught dead at a Dead concert, Cynthia liked it a lot and thought the music was great and the Deadheads fascinating.

  We were both so completely and hopelessly besotted with each other that I think I could have taken her to a dogfight and she would have thought it was okay. Even though she looked completely incongruous standing by the soundboard in her black Armani suit, Cynthia became a Deadhead.

  We spent several more nights together without making love, and I found out a lot more about her marriage. While she had been at the Mayo Clinic, Cynthia had met Diego, who was from Argentina. On paper, he was a perfect match for her. Before anyone had even cracked any part of the eggshell on AIDS, he had been a rising star in research on the disease. I think his family was worth at least half a billion dollars.

  Diego moved to New York to continue his AIDS research work, and Cynthia went with him to do her residency at Beth Israel hospital. They got married, once in secret and then again in a big splashy wedding in Nanaimo about six months before I met her. In every way, Diego was the answer to her parents’ prayers.

  When I met Cynthia, she and Diego had been together for a couple of years, but they were
having problems. In some Latin cultures, a woman has two roles she can play. She can either be a Madonna or a whore. And nobody had ever explained that to Cynthia. After they got married, Diego wanted her to be a Madonna, and she was completely not into that. Cynthia was a pretty sexual being, and she’d already had a number of affairs before I met her.

  As I found out more and more about her husband, I thought, “Jeez, I can’t do this. I can’t disrupt their marriage, and this guy is much better qualified to be married to her than I am. Truly.” It was not self-effacing. It was just obvious to me. At one point, I said to her, “It’s a good thing we haven’t made love yet, because I think it’s probably best for you to stay with your husband.” And she said, “No, I think it’s best that we do so you’ll see why I am not going to.”

  We moved in together a week after we met. It was one of those completely unexpected acts of providence where two worlds collide and something wonderful comes from the point where they touch.

  THIRTY-SIX

  LIVING WITH HER

  My time with Cynthia was the happiest I had ever been in my life. Many of those who saw us when we were together still talk about us, because it was an extraordinary thing to be in our presence. People would come around us like cats to a fireplace.

  On occasion, it was also the most miserable I had ever been. Our relationship was not completely without conflict, because we could get ourselves pretty cross-threaded at times. There was so much passion and need that we overidentified with each other despite the fact that we were very different people.

  Periodically, we’d have these pretty stark little meltdowns, but we knew—and this was the most important thing—that the relationship was indispensable and that we couldn’t live without it. It was a little like living in the tropics. Most of the time, the weather could not be better but on occasion, a big blue storm would erupt out of the sea and tear the shit out of everything.

  Therefore, whenever trouble came we never considered the possibility that we would just walk away. That was never an option. Instead we would look at the trouble as though it were a foreign invader that had manifested itself in the action and reaction between our two psyches. We had created a home for it and it had grown up in this home, but we had to drive this demon out of our garden. Doing so required making common cause against it. We couldn’t say, “You’re doing this and you’re doing that…” Instead, it was always, “We’re doing this. This is what we do here. And at the point where I do this, if you could stop yourself from doing that…” We were our own therapy.

  We traveled together a lot and went overseas when I had speaking gigs in Spain, but we spent most of our time in New York. I was living there because I still had not delivered my book to Viking. In order to get me to finish it, they put me in an office next to my editor, but that still didn’t work. I would go there regularly, but I learned that I could not relieve myself of the tale without someone there to hear it.

  Cynthia and I began living together in my apartment at 24 Fifth Avenue, where she also had her office. But then we had to leave. My place was a sublet from a good friend who had spent the summer at his farm in Vermont but now was coming back to reclaim the apartment. It was a terrible moment for us because real estate and romance are very tightly connected in New York. They are deeply bound to each other. You kind of are where you live, and we were panic-stricken because we couldn’t seem to find anything.

  Then we went to a movie at the Quad Cinema on West Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village, and there was a note pinned to a tree right outside the theater that described this way-too-good-to-be-true apartment. Cynthia actually laughed at me for calling the guy. “This is a trap of some sort,” she said. “I’m amazed you’re so gullible.”

  The apartment was on Twenty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue, and it turned out to be a wonderful place, too good but also true. It had a rose garden and a bedroom that was a conservatory made of glass. As a container for the two of us, it could scarcely have been any nicer. Especially given the fact that we were both exhibitionists. We could lie in bed and see the moon and also absolutely be seen by all our neighbors.

  Before I had taken Cynthia to see the Grateful Dead for the first time, the only thing that had ever really mattered to her about music was that her best friend from the time she was about six years old was Diana Krall. This was before Diana had much of a reputation, but we would go to every one of her shows and find ourselves in the cocktail lounge at the Ritz-Carlton. Cynthia was Diana’s most devoted fan and best friend and was practically her manager at the time. After Diana married Elvis Costello, she bought a really beautiful piece of property right next door to Cynthia’s parents on Vancouver Island and that is where they live now.

  Because of my relationship with John Kennedy, Jr., and Cynthia’s affection for him and Daryl Hannah—his girlfriend at the time—the four of us became like a team searching for adventures in New York.

  After graduating from Brown, John had spent a couple of years working for the city in their Office of Business Development before becoming the head of a nonprofit dedicated to helping the working poor. He’d earned a law degree from NYU, finally managed to pass the bar exam on his third attempt, and begun working as a prosecutor in the white-collar crime unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He had also done some acting but had not yet begun his next career as the publisher of George magazine.

  John had known Daryl Hannah ever since their families had vacationed together on St. Martin in the early 1980s, but they had started dating only after he ran into her at his aunt Lee Radziwill’s wedding to director Herb Ross in 1988. Daryl was then just coming out of what I gather had been a fairly calamitous relationship with Jackson Browne, and for a while John was seeing other women as well, but once he and Daryl became a couple, it was definitely what I guess you might call headline news; they were featured on the cover of People magazine.

  Although Daryl is mildly autistic, she had a great way of deemphasizing it. But it was there all the same and made her seem like she was permanently twelve years old. Right down to the minor details, Daryl was the one who had come up with the plot and treatment for the movie Big. Although she wasn’t in it because the whole thing got taken away from her, Big described what it was like to be her.

  John himself was not particularly a dope smoker, but he did like psychedelics and the four of us tripped together on acid. Cynthia and I also took MDMA with John and Daryl, and that was interesting. Three really good-looking people on ecstasy and me. I was like, “What is wrong with this picture? Like, how did I get into this group? I get the other three but what about this ugly fuck over here in the corner?”

  What I didn’t know back then but learned much later was that John was also in love with Cynthia. Was I in love with Daryl Hannah? I know my limits, and she was far beyond them. Although I spent a hell of a lot of time around her, Daryl had so many trust issues. I am not an untrustworthy person at all, but for some reason people often feel that I might be, especially if they are not terribly sophisticated. And so I think she had a hard time really trusting me.

  It was not out of the question that Cynthia would have responded to John’s interest in her. I mean, this was John Kennedy, Jr. Nobody ever spent any time around the guy without falling in love with him. Cynthia was very, very fond of John, but we never discussed this. The way things turned out, it didn’t matter one way or the other.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  LOSING HER

  By this point, Cynthia and I had realized we had become mutually indispensable. Neither one of us could imagine life without the other. However, Cynthia was filled with forebodings and premonitions and had constant nightmares about my impending doom.

  These were not entirely ill founded, because Wired magazine had asked me to go to Sarajevo during the Serbo-Croatian war at the height of the shelling. They wanted me to write about the relationship between information and war an
d the way in which the mass media had created a hallucination that was destroying the ability of each side to see the other’s humanity. Of course I’d accepted the assignment and had already been issued my flak jacket and helmet by the United Nations.

  Cynthia was absolutely convinced I was going to get killed over there. I didn’t believe it. I felt that despite there being a lot of bullets addressed to whom it might concern, none of them had my name on them. I offered her repeated assurances, but they were not particularly comforting to her.

  In April 1994, shortly before I was to leave on the assignment, I went out to Los Angeles to give a speech and was staying with Daryl. Tim Leary had gotten tickets and backstage passes for John, Daryl, Cynthia, and me to go with him to a Pink Floyd concert at the Rose Bowl, but John called and said he couldn’t come because his mother, who was suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, had suddenly taken a turn for the worse.

  Cynthia was supposed to fly out with John but instead came by herself. Daryl was so angry that John didn’t come that she decided to spend the day with her horses in Santa Barbara. Both Cynthia and I had been suffering from one of those persistent flu viruses that can hang on for weeks at a time. Whenever we thought we were getting better, it would grab us again.

  That afternoon, Cynthia and I went over to Tim Leary’s house, and death was on everything. It was the weirdest thing because Tim wasn’t even sick yet but looked like he was dying. I never saw him look that sick again until he actually died.