About all I had to eat was an oyster omelet for lunch. Didn’t feel like eating much of anything else that day. Except for some creamed corn. This made me not only queasy, but dizzy and weak later on.
What in God’s name was I thinking?
Category: Diary
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One of Tim’s co-workers is leaving the company to take a new job in Switzerland and there was a send-off at Brennan’s, so after work I drove straight there. We spent a lot of time at the table talking about the alarming exodus of old employees. I heard a lot of complaints about a new manager there who apparently went to a couple of software engineers and told them to make a purposely arcane and confusing presentation for a female engineer who lacks a computer science degree and needed to be “put in her place.” I think I heard that story about six times.
Classic Silicon Valley sexism. So many of those white, male, newly-rich nerds were eager to replicate the mindset of the high school jocks who bullied them when they were teenagers. They saw themselves as part of an exclusive club. I remember how much some software engineers hated Macs because they made computers accessible to people who couldn’t write code.
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Pumpkins have appeared in store windows and the days have gotten so short that on Friday, when I lieft waork an hour late, it was almost dark. The fleet is in town and on the walk home that night I passed on Clay near Polk a gaggle of boys in uniform, dark green, with square caps. They looked very young to me, all downy cheeks and round chins.
The next day, while I was walking down California, I heard a sound over my head as though the sky were being slowly ripped in two, and looked up to see the blue bellyt of a jet, frighteningly close. For the next few hours the Blue Angels dove, pitched and barreled overhead, the sound of their passing more overwhelming than the sight of those tiny, sharp-looking jets flying in formation. It’s like reality is being torn open. I expected to see the sky, the clouds, and the tall buildings all around me collapse like a painted backdrop around a black gash. When I got back to the apartment I could see people standing on their roofs, some of them with binoculars. I was content to stay inside and occasionally peek out throught the blinds.
Michael spent the day watching baseball. “You bastard! You incompetent! You useless F*ck!” he’d yell at the TV before running into the kitchen to call a friend and vent.
Yes, children, in the old days of the last century, the phone was tethered to an outlet and YOU had to go to IT. Phone conversations could only take place in our kitchen.
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A resignation at Locus today. The new hire, she of the curly brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, did not come in. Nor did she call. When Shelly went to Charlie’s mailbox she found his keys and a letter from the new hire saying she was sorry, she was resigning, she had thought she could take the pressure but she couldn’t and she wouldn’t be coming back.
This after Trevin has left us, so we are now down by two. I was annoyed, but Tim pointed out tonight she probably did it that wsy only because she felt she had no alternative.
The sequel to this is that a couple of years later, I was driving in some wooded, quiet area in Oakland and had paused at an intersection when I heard my name being called, looked to my left and saw her at the wheel of a UPS truck, waving at me. She looked round-faced and quite happy. We exchanged a few words, and she said she liked her new job much better. “It gets me outside,” she said.
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Charlie was back today, looking tan and fit but oddly subdued. He and Shelly apparently got in very late, about 2:00 AM.
He got upset about the fact that I had taken a bunch of Heinlein photos down to Sorber’s to be retouched and framed. (Which was exactly what Shelly had told me to do over the phone, presumably because it was exactly what Charlie had told her to tell me to do.) I had to phone Sorber’s and get them to call the photos back so I can pick them up tomorrow.
Then he couldn’t find the Nebula photos. Last I saw, they were on his desk, but they weren’t there this morning. No idea what happened to them.
Shelly says that the goal this month is to get the first section done by the 10th. Charlies is planning two back-to-back parties at the end of the month, one to celebrate his birthday, the other to celebrate Locus’ 20th anniversary.
My guess is that Charlie and Shelly had been at BayCon in San Jose.
“Nebula Photos” referred to photographs of recent Nebula award winners.
As for the Heinlein photos, by 1988 I always repeated Charlie’s instructions back to him after he delivered them verbally. It annoyed the living Hell out of him, but he had a habit of denying he’d said what he said. Getting him to repeat his instructions not only aided my understanding, but provided an atom of insurance against him storming into the back office later and demanding to know why I had done whatever it was he regretted asking me to do. I probably did the same with Shelly if she were giving detailed instructions over the phone involving photos of a major Golden Age science fiction writer.
By this time, I was well past the “Gee, it MIGHT be my fault” stage of dealing with a mercurial and unreasonable employer.
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This is when I start to feel that quickening in the year, the beginning of the festival season — Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas… My birthday comes at the end of October. I’ll be forty-two.
We went out last night for dinner and a movie. Dinner was at Mayes, an old, old place on Polk Street, dating back to the 1860s according to the sign outside. It had the kind of ambience I imagine when I think of the 1940s, a dark, rather church-like interior, red carpet, booths, a player piano in the middle of the dining room playing Cole Porter and old showtunes. The sheet music was from the 60s — Oliver!, Alfie, Stop the World I Want to Get Off. Our waiter ws a blond, bearded man with good posture and a bay window that made him look like a walking capital D, and he wore the dark suuit and apron that waiters have likely worn there for fifty years. I had lobster thermidor becuase the waiter said they served it there in the forties and it occurecd to me that my grandfather, my mother’s father, might have eaten lobster thermidor at Mayes when he visited San Francisco back then. The place was empty except for us and an Australian couple in the booth next to ours.
The fog really rolled in tonight. It’s almost 7:00 pm, I can see rooftops to the end of the block, and then everything becomes gray and indistict, with headlights barely visible on California.
Mayes briefly blinked out some years ago, became a Thai restaurant, though its large, iconic sign remained. That plainly did not work out because it became Mayes again.
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Dustin, the golden retriever who lives next door to Locus, is back after a week’s absence. I saw him on his daily walk at dusk with his family, the mother pulling her toddler in a toy wagon, Dustin following with great dignity, a lemon in his mouth.
Big yellow Dustin frequently greeted me when I arrived in the morning, approching with his slow, tail-wagging walk in the driveway. As retrievers do, he always brought gifts, proudly holding his head up to show me a pine cone or a tennis ball. Any attempts at extracting them were fruitless and he never went so far as dropping them at my feet. I would praise him and pat him on the head, he would look pleased, and walk away still carrying his prize. Sometimes, if I’d parked at the end of the driveway and had a long walk to the door, he’d come back to show me he now had TWO pine-cones or tennis balls.
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I had a dream about Tim a couple of mornings ago. I was walking down the aisle of a train and came upon him sitting in one of the cars. He gave no sign of seeing me, but in my dream I contemplated him, his squarish head, His beard, his narrow, very intelligent eyes that always look keen, even when he’s in repose. There was that usual sense of sadness and inevitablity I feel on those rare occasions that I see him or hear from him.
The Tim from my 1980s diary, the software engineer boyfriend who brought me out here in 1986 during the Silicon Valley Gold Rush, was living in Mill Valley by then. He died quite suddenly and tragically in 2003 from a pulmonary embolism.
I still miss him. The world is less interesting without Tim around to comment on it.
Pam Troy 