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Posted on August 1, 2002 in Neighborhood Silicon Valley

Took a walk out by Concourse Park to see how they’re doing on getting the thing shaped. The sidewalks are in. They’ve laid out the foundations of the restrooms. No grass or trees or flowers beds yet, just cream-colored dirt and sterile white concrete.

I’m dying for this park. I need to get out every day so that Lynn doesn’t come home to an ogre and I need a variety of views so that my writing doesn’t start running in a rutted road. From my favorite chair at Tully’s, I can see the bar and the entrance to the bathrooms. When I sit in the comfy chairs of the corners I look out at the flower-rimmed parking lot, Lake Forest Avenue, a buckwheat-infested lot, the Foothill Toll Road, and the crenellated line of white townhouses that is Portola Hills, beneath Mounts Modjeska and Santiago.

Switching chairs helps a little. I don’t like sitting in the comfy chairs next to the window because they remind me too much of four years I spent imprisoned in an antique swivel chair at a Menlo Park plastic injection molding company, my last “real job”. That company has thankfully passed into extinction due to the recession that followed what should now be called the First Gulf War. The place was filled with megalithic presses whose size was measured in the hundreds of tons. Part of the machine melted the plastic pellets. A gigantic arm shoved the halves of steel cubes that had insides carved out in the mirror images of parts for chain saws, automobile seats, and coffee brewers. The halves clanged together, dully as Spanish-speaking workers reputed to have green cards pulled the handle, waited a second for the polymer ooze to congeal inside, reopened the mold, pulled the parts, and then trimmed the parts of that thin plastic leakage off the sides that those of us who have been in the trade call “splay”. Parts came out in colors like royal blue, coffee brown, red, blue, yellow beige, and dark antelope. Sometimes operators had to set small nuts or other parts in the mold itself. Or they added them after they were pulled. One crew did nothing but assemble pieces that we shipped to Livermore where they were added to automotive seats. The folks who worked in Building Three had it the worst. They spent their days in temperatures that exceeded the low hundreds and in atmospheres that reeked of musty polypropylene, ABS, and other polymers. On hot days, the odor drifted over to Building Two where I worked. It gave me a stinging headache right behind the eyebrows, an evil complement to the aches in my neck, shoulder, and temple that developed from the stress of working for and among managerial barbarians.

To while away the tedious hours and to keep some creative impulse alive, I composed a little ditty that I would sing to myself to the tune of “Home on the Range”:

Oh put me to work for some short-sighted jerk

Where the beige and the antelope splay

Where seldom is heard

An encouraging word

And the boss keeps on shouting all day.

I had an office job. I managed the computer network such that it was, compiled spreadsheets that never seemed to be right, and hid in the bathroom when I couldn’t think of anything better to do. In those last years of legitimately elected Republican rule, I felt helpless. The only way I could think of to fight the bastards was to write a novel about them, against them, out of that awful place. I’d come home tired, however, and to an answering machine full of messages about the Peace Committee of the local chapter of the American Friends Service Committee, which was always riddled by finger pointing and long arguments over the definition of the word “racism”. I had no mind for writing after working at that place and after coming home to that. I’d log into my PeaceNet account, get on the Net, find a vulnerable news group, and flame some bastards who probably hated their jobs as much I did mine. These hours made me feel something like life, though I have to confess that to many I was something of a horror, one of those fiends who made meaningful the nickname I coined for newsgroups: “abUSENet”.

I had a better computer at home, an XT I’d assembled from component parts for less than $500, than they had there. Management bought early CPM — Morrows, Osbourne portables, and some custom job that served as a network — and never upgraded to DOS. Hidden behind the president’s office was the shame of the company, an IBM System III that took punch cards. I never had to work off that, thankfully. They thought the CPM machines were treasures. I thought they were junk and danced elatedly every time one burned out because I held out hope that at last they would see sense and overhaul the accounting and production tracking systems. They never did. The boss knew how to find technicians who’d fix any machine he brought to them. A dead Morrow would go out for a few days and come back renewed, a zombie that drained the life force through my fingers.

I struggled with management every day. They were too cheap to fire me without cause (they’d have to pay my unemployment) and I was too stubborn to quit. I stayed there for what might have been the worst four years of my life, when I worked for barbarians in an annex to hell. My desk stood next to a door that management insisted be kept locked because they were afraid of someone “from the neighborhood” coming in to steal our precious CPM computers and to snatch an unguarded purse. My Morrow was set with its back to a window. I remember the view. A narrow bed of junipers shaded my spot for most of the day. I could peek through the door and across a parking lot which was rutted and cluttered with debris. I did not see its like until I visited near the front lines at Osijek, Croatia. The parking lot drew pebbles, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, sea gull feathers, dead leaves, and a grime that seemed to have no place of origin unless it was in the relentless grinding of the macadam beneath the wheels of cars and the tread of feet going from Building Two, where I worked, to Building One. And back again.

A line of elms feebly hid our cars from peering eyes that rode in trucks and autos down the street and from the off-duty drivers who hung out in front of the local taxi cab company which was across the street. Next to the cab company was a trade school called the “Opportunity Industrialization Center, West” or OIC as we called it because it almost sounded like “oink”. There wasn’t a single attractive building on that street. Everything was built of concrete painted in the same dirtied, flaking bone colored paint. The elms saved me. I’d look at their bark towards the end of the day because they were the one thing that was natural. I trusted them to make the air outside breathable for long enough to get into my car and drive away. If you went outside, you choked. The neighborhood had its own local inversion layer. The elms checked the carbon monoxide levels and helped me stay awake as I sat in on yet another meeting called by a manager who was a proud Jew who often spoke of how he hated any kind of moral teaching and that of the rabbis most of all. I depended on that window to keep me from losing my mind in that place. Sometimes I amused myself by attaching my eyes to passing cars, hitching a ride to unimaginable places that didn’t stink; offices where the people were kind and the assigned tasks made sense; somewhere out there in a dream, over the monochromatic rainbow called the Dumbarton Bridge.

To shut that view out of my brain I now think of our new park and the adjacent chaparral. I want to be a cipher sitting on a bench overlooking the Whiting Ranch badlands. The passing wind doesn’t need to take me anywhere.