The Unknowns (13 page)

I was living in the same suburban bungalow where I’d grown up, working for a wire-transfer company in downtown Denver, when Bill Fleig convinced me to move to San Francisco and spend three years with him in a mildewy apartment in the Tenderloin, making what turned out to be $18.4 million but could have been nothing. His argument had two planks, one practical and one ethical: that his idea for a web-based microprofiling service could make me rich, and that lubricating the flow of information about individual consumer preferences would constitute a meaningful contribution to human happiness. He never sold me on the second one.

We worked on the program until we could navigate it more easily than the street outside our apartment. We worried about bugs in the code, about the strain on the servers, about whether the database queries would scale. We worried about competitors, about users, about funders. Worrying every second of every day was insufficient to exhaust the list of things that could destroy us, so we worried about not worrying enough. I retreated into a social universe bounded by Bill Fleig. I sometimes thought about girls, in an abstract way, as a problem to be solved, but I was saturated with problems already. The small sum Bill’s father had invested was dwindling, and air was leaking out of the NASDAQ, and failure was stalking us, a hungry gleam in its eye.

And then, after two offers had fallen through and the IPO
market had collapsed and our rivals were dying around us like trees in a Dutch elm epidemic, Atrium Inc. offered us $18.4 million for the work of just less than three years. To my horror, Bill had rejected an earlier bid that valued us at $3 million. He vacillated about this one. He still thought of our service as an economy-changer, a vector for billions of consumer dollars, rather than what Atrium wanted to buy, which was an ad-targeting feature for a midsized media conglomerate. I threatened him with everything I had—walking out, selling my share—and his parents applied what little pressure they could, and finally, in a sunny conference room off the 101, in front of four men in shirtsleeves and ties, we each signed our name seven times. There was a round of handshakes and a strange physical sensation, a sad release. And then the code wasn’t ours anymore and we missed it, although the previous day we couldn’t bear to think about it for one more second.

Male friendship, like a wave, requires a medium to travel in, a project or a context, material on which to display solidarity or insight or wit. Ours was the mass of Perl and C++ and HTML known as Demographic of One, and now, less than a year later, we struggle to recapture the frantic, loyal mood of our collaboration.

We can’t drink together because Bill doesn’t drink, so today we’re meeting at an Italian café in North Beach with round tables big enough to accommodate about one and a half people each. This is the only place Bill ever wants to meet: it’s fifteen yards from his doorstep, and no one acknowledges him even though he comes in twice a week. Today he doesn’t even order an espresso because he’s planning to catch up on sleep. He hasn’t had any Diet Coke since eleven this morning, and a crash is imminent. He stayed up last night fixing bugs on his new project; all he’ll tell me is that it’s something to do with multithreading. Instead we talk about the mess that Atrium has made of Demo1’s interface in a misguided attempt to bring it in line with recent trends in e-commerce. Bill is unsurprised.

“That’s what they paid for,” he says. “They’d fuck up the back end too, if they could understand how it works.” During the courtship phase, Atrium sent over a couple of technical managers to kick the tires, and Bill answered their questions with such naked contempt that I was sure they’d go back to their bosses and claim that our code was trivial and fragile, out of spite.

We pick at the bones of our one topic some more, while Bill nurses his mandarin-blossom tea and speaks more slowly than usual, leaving long pauses during which he seems to collapse on himself. Emerging from one of these pauses with a jerk, he says, “So I got a phone call from your father.”

My shock flares up and dies. “He wanted to hire you, didn’t he?” I say. Could my father possibly remember Bill from when I was in high school? No, he found Bill’s name in the articles about Demo1.

Bill grins. “He said,
You know, Eric is exploring other opportunities right now, so we’ve got this big, this big opportunity open
.” The imitation of my dad’s business manner is surprisingly accurate, and I bristle: I’m the only person who’s allowed to do impressions of my parents. “He also said that you spoke highly of me, so thanks for that.” Bill’s sarcastic mode is so deadpan that many people don’t recognize it.

Someone leaves the café, and as the door shuts it bellows a gust of cold air toward us. “You know I would never give my dad your phone number, right?”

“I didn’t mind,” he says. My dad is not the pit of guilt and confusion for Bill that he is for me. “I told him to call my agent.”

“Your what?”

“I said,
All the top programmers are being handled by agents now
. I told him I was represented by the Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles.”

I can see how this has played out: my dad has called the Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles and said he’d like to speak to the
agent representing Bill Fleig, and the receptionist, a young actress with a phone-sex voice, told him they don’t have a client by that name, and he said,
Sure you do, he’s a computer programmer
, and she laughed her condescending Los Angeles laugh. I feel a little sorry for my dad.

Bill relates the rest of the conversation: Dad wouldn’t reveal his plan over the phone, but Bill asked where Dad was getting funding, and Dad said,
We’ve got enough private money to get us to the point where the revenues kick in
. This sets a little bug of anxiety nibbling at my stomach lining. Bill asks me about the business plan, and I tell him I’ve signed an NDA. I wouldn’t care—it’s not like my dad is going to sue me—but Bill has made enough fun of my dad today, and I don’t need his opinion of the online stereo market.

My espresso has cooled enough to drink. I drain the tiny cup and head to the counter for another, mostly to precipitate a break in the conversation. Café Florio is a one-man show, and the line backs up and snakes around the tables. I stand behind a family of tourists from England and two young women in office attire, one white, one Asian. The shiny devices behind the counter burble and hiss. What is my dad talking about when he says
private money
? I shouldn’t care about my dad’s money now that I have my own, but when I was growing up, my father’s bank balance was central to my parents’ abiding conflict—and, I was led to believe, to my survival—and I feel instinctively protective of it. The two office girls push past me with their drinks, and Florio takes my order.

When I finally rejoin Bill, he’s on the brink of collapse: his arms are splayed out across the tabletop, and his head is cocked at an angle that exaggerates his long neck and makes him look like a stork. Recognizing that further attempts at conversation will be futile, I turn and watch the two girls leave with their lattes. The Asian one is chubby and kind of pretty, and I realize that I may never have to hit on anyone again.

If not for Cynthia and her misplaced faith in me I would have ignored Bill’s email, in which case I’d probably still be living with my mom and working for MoneyWire. They hired me to work on something they called Project Tyrannosaurus, presumably because it sounded cooler than Project Rewrite the Transactions Code from Scratch. It was a death march. The original system had been written almost twenty years earlier, and since then hundreds of new features had been added by dozens of successive programmers, like a medieval cathedral built by five generations of stonemasons. The resulting contraption worked, just about, thanks to patches and voodoo. (Every night we rebuilt the database, an operation that tied up the servers for twenty-five minutes. No one could explain why except to say that terrible things happened when we didn’t.) There were layers written in obsolete dialects, subroutines that existed only to avoid problems with discontinued hardware, Y2K fixes that bottlenecked every operation. Everything we added broke something else, usually something in a completely different part of the code, and just identifying the point of collapse often took days. It seemed likely that we would work on Project Tyrannosaurus until we died, and our replacements would discover our contributions, our hacks and workarounds and abandoned attempts at efficiency, and curse our names as we cursed those who had come before us.

My third week at MoneyWire, while I was getting up to speed on the codebase, I found a bug that lowballed the company’s commission on transactions into Hungarian forints by about 2 percent. I fixed it in ten minutes (the hard part with some bugs is finding them) and showed it to Kevin, the project manager. I had just saved the company approximately the cost of my salary and benefits in perpetuity.

“Holy shit,” Kevin said, standing over my shoulder and squinting at the screen. “Don’t mention this to anyone or they’ll have a fucking cow.”

“Kevin, I just fixed it,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “but they’ll think it was our fault in the first place.”

Kevin’s management style involved the imposition of hopelessly ambitious, allegedly unbreakable deadlines for each stage of the project. The fact that we were always on a deadline, and had blown all the previous deadlines, enabled him to keep us on a permanent emergency footing. The night I received Bill Fleig’s email, for instance, I didn’t make it home until 10:38. On my way to my room I saw through Mom’s open doorway that she’d fallen asleep sitting up in bed, her head lolling, the paperback in her hand flopped open. I crept in and set the book on the end table, then turned off the bedside lamp. “Mmm,” she said, without changing position. In the morning she would complain about having slept in her contacts again.

In my room I checked my email, expecting nothing but nightly digests from mailing lists devoted to open-source projects. I almost didn’t notice the message from [email protected] among them.

Bill’s message was brief. It didn’t say how he’d gotten my email address, or ask how I’d been, or describe the idea that was motivating him to drop out of MIT to move to California and found a company, or explain why he was proposing to do so with someone who had rejected his friendship. Despite these lacunae, the email reopened certain possibilities, such as happiness and California, that I had given up on. I had worked hard to inure myself to their appeal, and for an email to dangle them in front of my face felt like a cruel and personal form of spam. Why did Bill Fleig always show up when you didn’t need him? I selected the email and clicked the Delete button.

Bill’s proposal would have vanished from my mind if Cynthia hadn’t come home for spring break the following weekend. At her parents’ kitchen table we talked about life at Wesleyan, her latest romance, the brutal organic-chemistry class that would keep her
from applying to medical school. I hoped she wouldn’t ask me anything about myself.

“So are you applying to CU?” she said.

That had been the plan. The brochures and forms had arrived in the mail but I couldn’t bring myself to fill them out. I’d investigated scholarships at Stanford and elsewhere, but the development offices told me I wasn’t eligible thanks to my father’s financial state: a decent salary, not bankrupt, just a lot of debt. They wouldn’t take into account the fact that he wasn’t going to give me any money. They couldn’t, or everybody’s father would try it.

“I’m not really thinking about college right now,” I said.

Against all the evidence Cynthia interpreted this optimistically, as proof that I had some brilliant and unconventional alternative in mind. “So what are you going to do?” she said.

“I might start an Internet company,” I said. It was just something to say, splitting the difference between a joke and a sense of possibility. I didn’t want to disappoint her.

“That’s so great!” she said. “What’s it going to do?”

So I had to continue. “You remember that kid Bill Fleig from MLK?” I said. “He wants me to work on something with him.”

“You’re going to start a dot-com!” she said. “I want to get in on the ground floor! You’re going to make us all rich!”

“I don’t know if I’m going to do it. I mean, it’s so geeky, and most of these things flop.”

“So what’s the alternative?” she said, in all seriousness, and I realized I couldn’t answer her.

Three and a half years and eighteen million dollars later, on the cold first sunny day of the year, Cynthia and I sit on the hillside at Dolores Park, looking out at the pastel houses and the towers and cantilevers of the Bay Bridge. Cynthia wore essentially the same thing every day since high school—blue jeans, T-shirts, hooded sweatshirts, sneakers—until she came out, at which point she
switched to black jeans. She’s having some trouble acclimating to her new sexual identity.

“I just feel dumb that it’s taken me so long,” she says. “What is this, the 1950s? Was I in the
closet
? That’s so passé.”

I, on the other hand, have acclimated quite successfully. Cynthia’s not masculine—her gentle manner suggests some kind of woodland creature, a fawn or a hobbit. But there’s something flirtless about her that makes our friendship possible. We have covered the basics: has she told her parents, is she maybe bisexual, is she ready to encounter a familiar set of genitals in a new context. “OK, I need to ask your advice,” she says. Everybody likes being asked for their advice. “Should I be a butch or a femme?”

“Don’t ask me,” I tell her, swallowing the sweet flat last sip of my beer. “I’m not in your target demographic.”

She tugs on my arm. “Help me with this,” she says. “It’s taken me too long to get here, and now I have all this catching up to do. I’m in the car with Sam the other day, and I’m driving, and she’s telling me about her day, and I’m thinking,
This is what it feels like to be the guy
. But then other times I want her to be the guy.”

“Do you have to lock yourself into one or the other?”