Mark and I stayed up for the eleven o’clock news. We needed to hear the marchers’ names. We didn’t know any of them, but it seemed as if we should. They were people just like Mark and me and those in our isolated, diminishing circle. One marcher was a black nurse; two were white doctors (one of whom had quit his medical practice to organize textile workers instead). One was a Cuban immigrant who’d graduated magna cum laude from Duke University, another a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. Professionals and radicalized do-gooders, their silly slogans had been punished by death. (Over the course of the next several years, their murderers would be twice acquitted by all-white juries.)
So there was a certain inevitability to events closer to home in 1979, when the Syrian immigrants who populated the garment mills and auto body repair shops of Allentown were attacked by gangs of young white guys. And when fifty-three Americans were taken hostage by Iranian students, it was open season on foreigners and the malcontents who sided with them. Patriotic fervor reached such a peak in the wake of the U.S. hockey team’s 1980 Olympics victory over the Soviet Union that people took to chanting “USA” not just in international sporting events, but driving down the street waving the Red, White, and Blue outside their car windows. The “true” Americans—those who had felt marginalized or left behind during the 1960s—were taking their country back.
On a rare night out in February, 1980, Mark and I drove to Philadelphia to see The Clash. London Calling had been released a few months earlier, and replaced Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness at the Edge of Town as the default on our record player.
Married young, already parents, Mark and I were too old for slam dancing or mosh pits. But in the emerging party culture of pop music, in a landscape studded by the puerile stuttering of My Sharona or the glitzy camp of YMCA, punk—especially The Clash--kept streaking through my peripheral vision. Against Mick Jones’ slashing guitar, Joe Strummer’s savage glee at the imminent demise of London and civilization as we knew it was disturbingly resonant.
Springsteen’s poetry moved me, but punk’s nihilism, while alien, broke through all that sorrow now and then, fueled by some bright red blood coursing through it. So we were excited as we slogged through Philly’s slushy streets, past the small neighborhood movie theatre whose marquee boasted the unusual double bill:
Jesus Christ, Superstar
Creature from the Black Lagoon
“See, I told you that religion’s monstrous,” Mark roared.
I poked his shoulder. “Shh…” I said, gesturing to the surrounding working class Italian neighborhood. “Pay attention to where you are.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he muttered. “Can’t a man even be heretical in peace?”
“In peace, just not in public.” I couldn’t believe how cowed I’d become.
When we got to the theatre, we joined a crowd of leather-clad eighteen-year-olds. The lights went down and out came an opening act—the old, stooped Lee Dorsey, accompanied by a pianist and a bass player whose combined age didn’t equal his. He’d had a couple of hits in the mid-1960s—the New Orleans-influenced “Ya Ya” and the far-funkier “Working in a Coal Mine.” This song about an honest-to-God worker is probably why The Clash had invited the singer to open for them. But gray-tinged and brittle as a twig, Dorsey was an antique on display in a very obscure museum.
When he shambled off stage, nobody called for an encore. And when instead of The Clash, a young black guy in dreadlocks and a knit Rastafarian hair-do cap came out carrying a huge boom box, the crowd booed. Seemingly undaunted, the guy pressed play, propped the boom box up on his shoulder, and started to rhyme against its sputtering beats. His voice was nasal, the reverb on the mic turned up all the way, and we could barely make out his name—Mikey Dread—let alone his lyrics. In England, he was already a chart-topping Dub performer and sound engineer, but in this crowd of white punks, Mikey Dread was just mystifying. We were witnessing the birth of Hip-Hop, but to me, curmudgeonly at twenty-seven, this wasn’t music. Why would he willfully subjugate his voice to the hollow thumping of a machine, replace live musicians with muddy looped recordings?
When they finally arrived on stage, The Clash hewed tightly to script. Each song sounded like the record, note for note, without any of the looseness I’d expected. And though it was invigorating to be one with a singing crowd, the macho, violent lyrics to “Guns of Brixton” left me feeling both queasy and foolish.
I was in a crowd that I didn’t quite belong to, listening to a boom box and a live performance so relentlessly routinized that it could have been recorded. Unmoved, isolated from the newest wave of cultural rebellion, I felt a new kind of alienation.
In April, 1981, after six years in Allentown, we decided to move back to Boston. My father had just been released from the hospital following an episode of ventricular fibrillation that had caused his heart rate to climb dangerously high. (“Sell if it reaches 180,” he claimed to have told the EMT sitting in the back of the ambulance with him. Given my father’s powers of denial, I almost believed him.) I was worried about being so far away from him. I wanted Katie to know my parents and to give them the pleasure of being grandparents. But mostly, I wanted to go home, not just to my family, not just to my old college friends who had migrated in droves to the Ann Arbor of the East, but to myself and to all those artistic and intellectual aspirations that had not a damn thing to do with the class struggle. We were tired of being lonely and marooned, and if we were going to be broke, we at least wanted to be broke in a city with decent public transportation and free concerts.
On our first night back, we went to the Wordsworth bookstore in Harvard Square, which stayed open until midnight. On our first weekend back, we took the subway to the Aquarium and sat outside it with Katie, watching the seals frolic in their outdoor pool. And in December of that year, we went to see the newly opened Reds.
Part documentary, mostly romance, Warren Beatty’s epic film ostensibly documented the lives of revolutionary journalists Louise Bryant and John Reed. Beatty and his co-star, Diane Keaton, were impossibly gorgeous; Keaton’s clothes were stylish even when meant to be ragged. Still, how affirming it was to see a story about intellectuals joining a real class struggle. How much cooler to point to handsome Warren Beatty and beautiful Diane Keaton, both utterly charming, and say to our friends, “That’s what we were doing in Allentown.”
At intermission—probably the last major American movie to have an intermission—Mark and I walked up the aisle toward the lobby. As we approached the back row of seats, somebody called our names. There sat a row of our old political friends, people whose first sojourn in Boston ended when ours did, when we had fanned out across the country to more industrial locales.
“Fancy meeting you here,” said Nate, as his wife Nancy rose to give us both hugs. Lou reached out to offer a handshake only slightly less elaborate than the kind he’d routinely dispensed six years earlier, then introduced us to his new wife, Sandi. Bruce, a big guy stuffed into a small seat, struggled to stand, then settled for a friendly wave.
“When did you come back to Boston?” Mark asked.
Everyone chuckled and exchanged glances. “The last party split kind of did us all in,” Nancy answered. “And honestly, without political work, why stay in Schenectady?”
“Why indeed?” I felt giddy to be back in time, back with people who needed no explanation.
“We all kind of staggered back within the past two years or so,” Nancy continued, bringing us up to date. Bruce was working in a hospital and had recently been elected shop steward in his union. Sandi was a guidance counselor at a university. Lou and Nate and Nancy were all back in the kind of quasi-professional social service jobs they’d had before their pilgrimage to the factories.
“Now we organize each other to go out on Saturday nights,” Nate quipped, gesturing to the half-empty theatre. “We unite with the masses at the movies.”
Wha
t soon made us so passive? The demands of working and raising two small children? Perhaps it was just fatigue in the face of the culture of the decade. One of the top-grossing movies of 1982 was Rocky III, in which a once-dominant, now-complacent boxer loses a big bout and must regain his mojo. That was exactly Ronald Reagan’s message in those early years of his presidency. Enough self-doubt or complacency—America needed to once again show the world who was boss. Two years later, running under the slogan of Morning in America, Reagan would be re-elected in a landslide. But when I think of his tenure, I think only of wintry dusk.
One August we went hiking and camping in Alaska, at a time when our kids were entering their own adolescence, when the sky turned violet but never black, and the sun skimmed along the horizon after midnight but never set.
“Alaskan Brown Bears—better known as Grizzlies—mate in late spring,” a placid ranger in Katmai National Park told us. “The cub embryo grows for a month or so, then stops—or at least grows at such a decelerated pace that it seems to stop. From May through October, the bears gorge themselves, consuming as much salmon and berries and carp and tender shoots as they can forage and catch.”
We believed him. We’d seen dozens of honey-colored bears—massive and silent—dive deep into the frigid lake and surface with fish wriggling in their jaws, swat salmon out of the air as they leapt or catch them in their open mouths like party performers. We’d watched the bears plant themselves on their haunches and systematically suck every blueberry off the dense, prolific bushes.
Alaska in August was crowded with life—swarming insects, bounding herds of caribou, rivers so clogged with fish that you couldn’t take a step without being butted in the shin by one. Even what looked like lacy moss below our feet was actually an inch-high forest growing on the tundra.
“If by November the mother bear has amassed enough body fat, the cub embryo will resume growing throughout the winter,” the ranger explained, “gestating throughout the mother’s next cycle of hibernation. If not—if the mother bear hasn’t been able to nourish herself enough, then she’ll spontaneously abort.”
In the 1980s, nourishment was scarce. When I struggle to remember who I was then, I think of the accounts I’ve read about freezing to death. People describe the hush of it, the sleepy enchantment.
In that decade, I surrendered to the notion that my ideals had been as acute and short-lived as a child’s first teeth. Two decades later, in the wake of the 2008 recession, I looked around and saw cooperation manifesting itself in new ways. Zip cars and bike sharing, localism and community-supported agriculture, a do-it-yourself, artisanal movement borne of economic necessity but sustained by conviction—these second-world solutions to first-world problems were being created by my children’s generation. Looking at the lives of my daughters and their friends, I saw their backyard chicken coops and guerilla knitting circles, at how volunteering their time to food banks and inner-city arts troupes was as routine as going to the gym, at how they shared what they couldn’t and didn’t want to buy.
They were taking on the ills of the world in subtly powerful ways. Maybe we had transmitted more than we’d realized. In the dismal decade of their birth, below our feet, in the thin layer of soil above the permafrost, tiny trees were sinking delicate stems.
But now, a year into the Trump presidency, I’m realizing that reaction is as tenacious as revolt. The Reagan years—what I’d thought of as the last gasp of those who can only feel tall by grinding down others—were just a preview. Some of the American Nazis who pathetically paraded in Skokie, Illinois in 1977 were undoubtedly alive to cheer forty years later when another of their Klan in Charlottesville, Virginia, mowed down an unarmed protestor with his big fat car. In 1976, some Americans referred to Mexicans as “spics”; forty years later Donald Trump sneered and blustered his way to the presidency by calling them “murderers and rapists.” In 1991, Reagan’s vice-president and newly elected president, George Bush, nominated a man to the Supreme Court who had sexually harassed Anita Hill; twenty-five years later a self-professed pussy grabber was voted into office by those willing to overlook this and dozens of other peccadillos.
I could go on, but if you’re still reading this, you know all these details. You know that those who feared that their privilege, already limited, was draining away and some of those who rightfully resented the cronyism of the ruling class, astoundingly found their enraged voice in the inane braggadocio of a narcissistic, vicious, arrogant prick. Those who found it intolerable to have been led for two terms by a black president, who would have felt still more emasculated with a white woman at the helm, instead elected a self-serving mockery of a human being. And voila, we’re back in the bad-old-days of robber barons and America First, of giveaways to the rich and decimation of the safety net for the poor, of inviting church into the state and curtailing women’s right to choose.
I can’t remember any point in my lifetime, any point in American history, where the ruling elite has been so ready to sacrifice the planet and lives of younger generations to satisfy their own limitless greed and consuming zeal. I’ve never encountered leaders so bloated with hypocrisy and so contemptuous of the future.
Yes, their ideology and actions are being countered by #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, digital movements that are transforming into physical ones. The Women’s March and counter-Inaugural, the self-forming army of young people taking action within and outside the electoral process—these are sources of solace, reasons to hope. But the work that they and we must do will be harder, often more joyless, and take many more generations to develop roots that are sufficiently deep and durable.
On days like this one I wonder if I still have it in me.
The Cost of Goods Sold (1999-2003)
Prologue
When I got to work on September 26, 2002, I was surprised to see my boss, Cheryl’s, Z3 convertible parked out front.
I stuck my head in her office. “I thought you were going to see Jennifer in Atlanta today.”
Cheryl looked up, her bright-red nails matching her lipstick, and complimenting her dark-blue wow-the-clients suit. “A terrible thing has happened. Jennifer’s brother was killed in a surfing accident yesterday. She flew out to California last night.”
I fought to suppress the grin I felt breaking out and retreated to my cube. Within five minutes my colleague Sandy came to my desk.
“The timing is really uncanny,” she whispered.
I confessed that I was about to start searching for surfing accident stories in the California newspapers and obituaries.
“I already did,” Sandy said triumphantly. “Nothing. Nada. Zip.”
Scott, our chief financial officer, ambled over to the entrance of my cube, where he stood, gray and bland as always, intently peeling his banana. He took a big bite.
“So,” he said and then chewed deliberately. “Do you think Jennifer even has a brother?”
April 1, 1999 (1 Brattle Square, Cambridge, 2500 sq. ft.)
In which my eyes are opened and grow wide
Eight colleagues and I sat in the office, rereading the termination letters we’d just received from the parent company that had acquired us, then dumped us.
“Surely we can put our heads together and invent something new,” urged Don, founder and president of our newly deceased company. Don, a self-described “serial entrepreneur,” was my Pied Piper into the business world, a worldly, curious man with the twin gifts of ego and ideas. He was the classic entrepreneur, a supreme schmoozer, trend-watcher, and visionary—the guy who could excite the troops not with bravado but with a sense of fun. And for me, on that day, the moon was in “Why Not.” Before going to work at Don’s firm, I’d made a living as a freelance writer for several years. If this spring skit—Hey, Let’s Start a Company!—didn’t work out, I felt confident enough that I could go back to contracting.
On the spot we decided to pool our efforts and our e
ight weeks of severance pay and start a new company. Coopernation was born that day and nurtured in our living rooms over the next couple of months. It was to be in the business of hosting and running online communities, private places on the web where companies could collaborate both internally and with their customers.
At the beginning, our company was a piece of improvisational theater. We drew pictures, built ideas out of color-coded Post-its, and did research into the ethnography of workplace learning and online communities. We put together PowerPoint presentations, software prototypes, and market matrices, and within a matter of weeks, our enthusiasm and leadership’s track record with past businesses were enough to get us our first $900,000 in angel capital. Unlike venture capitalists—squinting, lean people who took big risks in the expectations of big rewards—angel capitalists were soft and nurturing. Sure, they expected a substantial return on their money someday, they told us, but they were really just benevolent guardians who were there because they believed in us.
Until this point, I had no idea of how businesses actually got started. But in our first few months of operation, I learned. The “Friends of Don” were, like Don himself, smart, often liberal Ivy League Business School graduates who defied my more adolescent stereotypes of all business men resembling Richard Nixon, physically and morally. Raising our initial round of angel capital seemed to be primarily a process of sitting in meeting rooms talking about the possibilities, which were infinite in those heady end-of-the-century days. We’d serve coffee and make the pitch to one of Don’s buddies from B-School or from Ground Floor Angels, a group of angel capitalists that met once a month to evaluate new supplicants.
And after looking at the PowerPoints, clicking on a few links, and listening to our vision, a millionaire named Nick or Hal or Alex would stretch out his lanky legs in front of him, roll up his Egyptian cotton shirt sleeves, place his hands prayer-like on the table in front of him, and ask, “So how much are you looking to raise?”
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