Sun threw a dinner that night in Chinatown so we went. We stopped at home so I could change to my little black dress, then we walked to the Powell Street trolly and rode it to Clay.
It feels smug to ride something people consider a tourist attraction. The Powell Street cable car goes past many hotels — the Francis Drake, the St. Francis-Westin (where I stayed in 1973). We found our seats in the middle of a trio of funny, loud tourists from Little Rock Arkansas. They were right out of Designing Woman, two pretty young things with carefully hot-ironed hair and a plump, blonde good old girl. They all giggled a lot, and exclaimed over the cable cars. The conductor assumed a long-suffering air when he learned that their tickets had expired and just stood there intoning, “you need to pay me, ladies” while the good old girl ruffled through her singles in an obvious attempt to pay him.
The dinner was at the Celadon on the corner of Stockton and Clay. Pretty ritzy. There were about ten of us, Jennifer, with bouffanted hair, Lisa, the office manager with dark hair, two French guests, an Italian man, a hard-of-hearing man and his wife, (they wore hearing aids and had barely perceptible accents, a slight slurring of consonants) and a husband and wife with their little girl. We all sat at a huge wheel of a table and the courses were placed on a lazy Susan in the middle. White wine, Szechuan beef, sweet and sour chicken, crispy duck. I had no idea I could eat so much.
The topic of the conversation tonight was the fact that Tim has — at last! — frozen the code on Tops Terminal. I know only that this means at least one stage of the product is finished. It was hard not to feel proud of him, listening to everyone discuss the product, and know he is relieved to have so much behind him.
The party broke up at about nine and we rode another cable car back. This time there weren’t any obvious tourists. The car was almost empty, and the conductor scolded every passenger as they got on except for Tim and me. He said he liked the way we signaled.
Tops Terminal, where Tim worked at that time, was a division of Sun. It was, I think, through Tim’s acquaintance with John Gilmore (whose employee number at Sun was five) that we’d moved to the Bay Area.
Silicon Valley culture was still new, and I was simply an onlooker by way of my relationship with Tim. I wish I could remember more about what the conversation was like at the Celadon. A weird evangelism permeated hi-tech at that time. “But there’s an opening at (fill in start-up here)“ was the most frequent response when one of Tim’s cronies discovered I worked at LOCUS, followed by a troubled silence when I revealed my undergraduate degree was in English and I had no interest in learning to write code.
I recall nothing like that at the Celadon, only that I felt very adult in my little black dress and heels and proud of the fuss they were making over Tim. I looked across the table at the little girl with her parents and wondered what she would remember about it.
Pam Troy 