Ten minutes and $245 later, she’s on her way back downtown to meet the guy who runs a hardware company called Goat Rodeo. The corporate name isn’t just a random whimsy in an industry full of companies called Yahoo! and Oracle, it’s particularly cocky and ironical—goat rodeo is slang for corporate dysfunction and stupidity. Goat Rodeo sells a five-hundred-dollar liquid-crystal video display called PerfectView, tiny monitors that game players strap onto their face like a pair of glasses. Goat Rodeo’s next-generation device, its holy grail, is iZ, pronounced “eyes.” iZ is a tube the size and shape of a stubby pencil meant to replace computer monitors the way mice have replaced computer keyboards, particularly for people playing games like Warps. It scans video images continuously and directly onto players’ retinas.
She finds the Goat Rodeo address just off Pioneer Square. This neighborhood has its quintessential Seattle aspects—a wonderful overstocked map store, a wonderful overstocked toy store, a wonderful overstocked bookstore. (She doesn’t mind, as George said when he was here, that “half the store is devoted to Garrison Keillor and Blue Highways and Louise Erdrich novels.”) Pioneer Square also has its obligatory man-made water feature, Waterfall Park. But the neighborhood is flat, the buildings are dark and old and close together, and there is a leavening of winos. It’s her favorite part of the city. Walking down Occidental Avenue, she sees a white couple in their late teens or twenties, both lavishly pierced—a gold ball on each of her nostrils and a tin girder through the bridge of her nose; on him at least six rings per ear, three in an eyebrow, and one rough yellow crystal on the upper lip—no doubt intended, at least obliquely, to simulate snot. The woman’s T-shirt says CALL ME A CUNT AND I’LL CUT OFF YOUR BALLS. As Lizzie passes them, stepping into the street to cross, she turns and stares for a second, not for the reason the boy and girl happily imagine, but because the Doc Martens nihilists are standing on the curb, waiting for the red DON’T WALK sign to change to a green WALK before they’ll cross. They’d rather be smashing imperialism, too.
From the reception area, the Goat Rodeo offices look and feel like Fine Technologies’, except even more boyish (along one wall a five-foot-high DAWGS is spelled out in fist and hammer gashes through the Sheetrock) and much roomier—not bigger, but probably twice as many square feet per unhealthy-looking-young-man-with-goatee. She scrawls her name in one second and hands it back to the receptionist.
“Before I laminate I’m supposed to ask you to read the language above where you signed,” says the receptionist, and hands the visitor’s name tag back to Lizzie. “It’s necessary”—she makes air quotes—“ ‘legally.’ ” Lizzie takes the card back and tries to focus on the tick-size lines of type. Watched by this girl wearing overalls, however, she is careful to avoid even a hint of the middle-aged racking move, the incremental positioning of small print—a little closer, a little farther, a little closer—to find the optimal depth of field. She sees that what she has signed is the world’s tiniest contract, a five-millimeter-by-thirty-millimeter nondisclosure agreement in which she has not only promised to keep confidential everything she sees or hears at Goat Rodeo, but has agreed preemptively to forfeit any new intellectual property rights that may arise out of any conversation she has with any Goat Rodeo employee. In other words, they own anything she says here.
Lizzie hands the tag back. “Do they want my firstborn too?”
“That’s okay,” the girl says blankly as she encases the tag in plastic and hands it back, still hot, to Lizzie. “Tommy’s office is all the way down the end of that hallway, then all the way to the left.”
The offices have doors, but all the doors are open, and every cubicle is standard issue—the hazy whiteboards, the fat EXPO colored markers and plastic spray bottles of colored-marker cleaner, the multiple computers and soda cans, the candy wrappers, the harsh fluorescence, the charmless dormitory mess. And as she click-clacks past the offices in her expensive black shoes and black Armani suit, feeling like the visiting adult, she sees and hears that in two of the offices—no, three—arguments are loudly under way, about “T3 pipes,” about how many trillion bytes of data are on the web, and about astigmatism. During her years at the foundation, she never heard voices raised, not one time, since even the people who despised each other agreed about everything and didn’t care very much about facts. She’s used to discussions among computer guys—almost every discussion boiling into a debate—although at her shop, the language barriers put a fetter on the tendency. But whenever she’s been out here, every technical and business disagreement is heated and zero-sum, a friendly fight to the death. Someone is smarter, and the smarter person must win. It is a dialect rarely spoken in New York, and so different from Los Angelese as to be essentially untranslatable. Seattle does remind her of college, like George says, but an all-male college where everyone is majoring in the same subject. She doesn’t hate it. It is her major too.
As she turns left, she sees Tommy Thayer in profile at the end of the hall, bouncing a basketball once and passing it, hard, to someone she can’t see, inside an office. She recognizes him from the TED conference in Monterey a year ago, where he gave a speech to seven hundred businesspeople and scientists and designers about “what totally sucks in this business.” She thought he was an asshole, not because he used the word sucks sixty-seven times in twenty minutes, or even because he used the phrase kick some corporate booty, but because he oozed pride in being the kind of jaunty, crew-cut, chinos-and-Converse alterna-CEO who would give such a speech.
“The princess of Silicon Alley!” he says, his mouth full of something. “Welcome to the Emerald City.”
Fuck you. “Hi,” she says, reaching out to shake Thayer’s hand. “It’s good to finally meet.”
As they sit down in his office, the Goat Rodeo chief technology officer, a man named Robbie, who’s closer to Sarah’s age than Lizzie’s, sits on a couch dribbling the basketball on the wood floor between his feet. His wandering left eye, which always seems to be looking at his boss, makes Lizzie feel sorry for him. She sees why Thayer’s mouth was full: it’s always full because he is a chain-eater of giant, two-inch-diameter SweeTarts, which he keeps in a black wire basket on his desk. In the first five minutes, they get their real business out of the way, which mainly entails Thayer nodding, claiming they are now way ahead of Microvision, the more established VRD (virtual retinal display) startup, and using the word deliverable as a noun over and over and over again.
“My guy said you’re willing to indemnify Fine Technologies on product liability for iZ?” she says.
Donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk … Robbie the technology boy is still dribbling.
“Limited indemnity as he defined it, sure, that’s definitely a deliverable,” Tommy says.
Donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-thwap, swoosh, thwap. Robbie passes to Tommy. Tommy proceeds to twirl the ball on an index finger, but he doesn’t dribble.
“And in your beta testing you haven’t come across any medical issues?” Lizzie asks. “Ophthalmological, neurological, whatever?”
Tommy passes the ball back to Robbie. Donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk … Lizzie no longer considers his strabismus extenuating.
“Zero,” Tommy says. “Zero on the retina, zero on the iris.”
Donk-donk-thwap. “I’ve personally logged about nine hundred gaming hours with the product since the fall,” Robbie says, speaking a full sentence for the first time, “and look at me. I’m cool.”
Lizzie nods slowly, wondering if his bad eye prevents him from knowing when she’s staring at it with both of her good ones, and using the pause to calculate Robbie’s exposure (nine hundred hours, six months—five hours every day). Lizzie has been in this business six years, her bar is high, but the easy slur (Get a fucking life, kid) remains apt.
Donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk …
“We had a year of animal experiments, offshore, tweaking it before we ever tried it on civilians. A few Irish bunny rabbits got zapped early on, but�
��” Thayer catches himself, and turns suddenly solemn. “That’s between us. You signed the NDA,” he says, nodding at the tag dangling from her collar over her left breast.
Donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk …
“Of course, sure,” she says, “no problem.”
Donk-donk-donk-donk-donk … Lizzie gives a game smile to Robbie and puts her hands up, a foot apart, palms in. Donk-thwap. As she catches his pass, she leans down and tucks the ball under the chair, between her feet and her Kate Spade bag.
She turns back to Thayer. “Antivivisection isn’t my issue. I’d rather have a few of your rabbits go blind than my customers.”
“Exactly,” Thayer says, popping a yellow SweeTart in his mouth. Lizzie is reminded of the detergent disks her parents’ housekeeper used to let her throw into the washing machine. “But a guy over here at U-Dub has been getting just creamed for using animals in his work. They’re basically riding him out of town on a rail. The town of Kirkland actually passed a law saying they didn’t want him to live there.”
Lizzie knows he’s talking about Buster Grinspoon. Deciding to commit a fib of omission, to let a sleeping lie lie, she changes the subject to smaller talk. She points to their name tags. Each has a blinking green digital display in the center—some pointless boys’ club high-tech trick, she figures. “Why do you LED your ID numbers like that? And why is your number seven digits and Robbie’s only five?”
Robbie, sulking since his basketball was taken away, now looks like he’s about to cry. He stands suddenly, says, “Later,” and rushes out of Thayer’s office.
Thayer ignores him, so Lizzie does too.
“They look kind of cool,” she says.
“Ms. New Yorker! They’re not supposed to look cool. It’s not an ID number, it’s how many shares and exercisable options we own.” He flips his tag up and looks down at it, then points at a little line of type. “The ID number is printed down here.” He glances up. “You just zapped Robbie in his sore spot. He’s only got, what, ninety thousand shares, and I’ve got a million-one. But I’ve worked for the company three years,” he says. Robbie feels like he’s gotten to the start-up party too late. You know? Like all these kids out here now. They’re jealous of how much easy money they think people our age piled up in the nineties.”
Yet another generation gap! This time not between the greedy old and idealistic young, but between supergreed rewarded and supergreed denied. Lizzie felt something similar when she arrived in Manhattan and discovered that in the early eighties people hardly older than she had bought houses in the Village for $255,000 and giant Fifth Avenue duplexes for $324,000. And once again she thinks of the Microsoft numbers ($31.5 million for half the company, $7 million for her general partner’s share), flashy and titillating, like advertising blimps hovering always just overhead.
“Are you guys making money here?” she asks. She knows you’re not supposed to ask this of computer entrepreneurs, that it’s the equivalent of asking religious people for proof of God’s existence. And like a fundamentalist Christian convinced that the rapture is going to occur the week after next, Thayer smiles at Lizzie’s childish, benighted, old-paradigm question.
Robbie returns, licking and biting an ice cream bar as big as his foot.
“Are we ‘making money’?” Thayer says, slightly mocking, repeating the phrase as if she has asked where she could go poop. “Well, if you subtract our sales and marketing costs, we’re profitable today. Even if we don’t ‘make money’ until ’02, in the sense of bottom-line earnings, the market cap will keep moving money into the business. Nongame video applications are what will take us over the top. But unfortunately, there’s still an East Coast. People back there still aren’t even doing rich e-mail.”
By “rich” e-mail he means e-mail messages that contain photos, recorded voices, video clips. “My husband’s company in New York has v-mail,” Lizzie says.
“Did they do a VCR?” asks Robbie, the corners of his mouth smeary with chocolate.
As Lizzie hesitates, Thayer explains, “Video CIMBLE Retrofit.”
“Beats me,” she says. “What’s a video symbol?”
“C-I-M-B-L-E,” Robbie says, practically giggling with pleasure at her ignorance. “CIMBLE stands for CADETT Interactive Multi-User Business Learning Environment.”
They all wait, exchanging glances, Thayer and Robbie smiling.
“Okay, you stumped the girl. Cadet?”
“Consortium,” Robbie says, pausing to catch a melting vanilla stream with his tongue, “for ADvanced Education and Training Technologies. I have a question for you. On your game, with the polygon attribute editor in the Softimage Sega GDE, is the control of the Sega-specific rendering attributes on a per-polygon basis really up to snuff?”
“I’m not that deeply involved in the architecture of the technology.” This is a line she delivers often.
Robbie smiles and nods. She knows he thinks she’s mortified. She isn’t. But in Seattle and down in Silicon Valley all the nonengineers are a little intimidated by the Robbies among them, because only the engineers understand, deeply understand, how the products work.
“I run the company,” Lizzie adds. “I don’t spend a lot of time debugging lines of code.”
“Got you,” Thayer says as if charmingly. “It’s the you’re-from-Venus-we’re-from-Mars deal. We program and slay the beasts, and you,” he says, pausing, chuckling, “market, or whatever.”
Defending the Northeast against the Northwest, now driven to defend her gender; this really does feel like Harvard 1983. “You know, of course,” Lizzie says, forcing a smile, standing to go, “that the first computer was programmed entirely by women. To do the calculations of ballistic trajectories. To blow up Nazis.”
“You mean ENIAC?” Robbie says, sucking on his spatula-size Popsicle stick.
“Uh-huh.” She prays for a pop quiz—she knows it stands for electronic numerical integrator and computer.
“ENIAC wasn’t the first computer,” Robbie says. “The first computer was developed at Iowa State by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. ENIAC was based on Atanasoff-Berry.”
“He shoots, he scores against the lady from New York,” says Thayer, giggling.
Lizzie smiles and, shaking their hands, promising to be in touch, wishing them well, looking at both men’s skulls, thinks for a purgative couple of seconds about her brand-new, two-pound, two-foot-long Charlet Moser ice ax sitting in an REI shopping bag in the trunk of her rental car.
“Cut!” says Gordon. “Perfect. It’s a wrap.”
“Wrapping!” the first AD announces.
Featherstone is back talking to Lucas Winton, who didn’t appear in the last scene. If employing Timothy Featherstone and building a soundstage in the basement on Fifty-seventh Street are the irrational prices Harold Mose pays to keep his own show business fantasies burning bright, driving his Hummer an hour through a tunnel and over a bridge to a grubby street in Staten Island is Featherstone’s.
“God, I do love being on location,” he says as George joins him.
“The smell of greasepaint,” says George.
Featherstone sniffs. “Hmmm. I don’t smell anything. Hey, George, can you give me a lift into the city?”
“You didn’t drive your Humvee?” George asks.
“Sergeant Winton of the SAG wants to take command of the Hummer for a test-drive into occupied Manhattan.” MBC pays for Featherstone to lease two identical bright blue three-and-a-half-ton turbo-diesel Hummer wagons, this one and another in L.A., even though they cost twice as much as a stretch limo and three times as much as a Town Car. The budgetary rationalization is that he drives himself. (“Lean, mean, and chauffeur-free!” Featherstone says.) George has wondered how he manages parking. But as they drop Lucas off at the Hummer on the way to the Land Cruiser, George sees that Featherstone’s car has both NYP license plates, the New York laissez-passer for working journalists to park where regular civilians can’t, and, in his front win
dow, a location-scouting permit from the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting. George feels both envious and superior, since he has never used either perk.
“Extremely cool device,” Featherstone says about the driving prosthesis as George clamps it onto the steering wheel and heads for the Verrazano. “I’ve never seen you with that on. Is it Italian? Is that magnesium or titanium?”
“Just stainless steel, I think,” George says.
“Man, I’m jealous of you. I want one.” George smiles, but he knows Featherstone well enough to understand that his covetousness is sincere. If only to eat up dead airtime, George calls the office. Iris does not answer, and the machine picks up.
“You don’t have your girl do the recording?” Featherstone says as they listen to George’s voice on the car speaker. George dials the voice-mail number to retrieve messages—Milken’s office again, a science teacher from St. Andrew’s (if one of the kids had been killed, wouldn’t he have called the set?), and Francesca from MTV, who’s in town and desperately wants to hook up. As Featherstone listens, his eyebrows rise and his smile grows more salacious.
Turn of the Century Page 36