When I drove to Tim’s Berkeley office I found it empty except for a few boxes, partitions, moving men, and a handful of employees, one of whom told me she thought Tim might be helping “set up the lab” at Alameda. I got directions from her and drove down.

It’s not difficult to find in that it looks like a spanking new commerce center just off the tubes. Sun now has a building of its own, very modern, and upscale looking. All I could see out front, though were what looked like moving people. Several large women, one with tattoos up and down her arm, conferred with some tough looking men next to a pick-up truck with a little girl in the cab. I wandered into the building and inside I ound a maze of partitions and offices, marked with numbers and names.

Occasionally I’d bump into a workman. Finally, as I was passing, one spoke to me. “Know where I can call out for a pizza?” he asked. He was short, dark and powerfully built, and talked like he was from new York. I told him I was a complete stranger to the place and sked him if any Sun employees were around. “They’re in the back having a fuckin’ feast,” he said.

In the back I found a small semicircle of Sun employees sitting on the floor in a bare room, surrounded by munchies and beer. I only recognized two of them aside from Nat Goldhaber. When I asked about Tim, they said he wasn’t there. “Tim blew off two hours ago,” a dark, bearded man said with stiff disapproval. I went back out to my car, to drive home, smiled at the little girl in the truck, who smiled back. (She was a dark-eyed little thing, bent over a book.)

Tim and I had takeout sushi for dinner – then we went out to buy a couple of CDs. This time we went to a shop on Haight Street. It carried mainly records, but there were few racks of CD cards. The clerks were pretty avant-garde, one skinny with a dry thatch of bleached hair tinted green at the ends and a tight leather outfit jingling with jewelry and chains. The other was plump and British, with black wire glasses and a simple punk cut pulled back into a stiff, short ponytail. We bought the new Talking Heads album and Sinead O’Connor.

Tim at that time worked for TOPS, (Transcendental Operating System) which had recently been sold to Sun. I remember Nat Goldhaber, now listed in Wikipedia as “an American venture capitalist, computer entrepreneur and politician” as a pleasant, pink, oval-shaped man. His new age outlook would have meshed with Tim’s interest in the occult. In 2000, Nat was the vice-presidential nominee for the Natural Law Party.

Those Haight-Ashbury record-store clerks, whose clothes and appearance struck me back then, would not warrant a second glance today. The Talking Heads album was likely NAKED, the Sinead O’Connor her first, THE LION AND THE COBRA. Two of my favorites. I believe I still have them.