Confessions from a Dark Wood -- Chapter Two by Eric Raymond Lyrics
On approach at San Francisco International, the jets are vectored in such a way that they cross the yellow halogen pearls of the San Mateo bridge and descend gradually towards the Bay. Passengers who have never experienced this approach often murmur with increasing alarm as the 767-200 appears to be deliberately easing into a freezing bath at a ground speed of one hundred and fifty seven miles an hour. At the last possible moment, a marshy gravel appears, and then the safe-home scorched border of runway 28R.
Depending on my mood, I occasionally imagined what it would be like to catch, out of the corner of my eye, the shape of a black boat bobbing where it shouldn’t be, its running lights dark. The flash is like a spark from an outlet, and the shoulder-fired rocket sweeps up to meet us before we touchdown.
My friend Jake Hawkins tells me that this is unlikely. He tells me that a veteran pilot with a cool head and a little luck would be able to put the jet down in one piece despite a rocket hit on approach. He says they’re much more likely to concentrate a dual rocket attack on take-off, when the wings are fat with fuel. But then again, he’s a poet and a baggage screener at SFO. So, grain of salt.
He reminds me there are death fantasies that do not involve acts of terrorism.
Not anymore, I tell him.
Thirty-six thousand feet above the Grand Canyon and pointing west, I read a full-page advertorial in SkyMall Magazine on a NASA-inspired diaper harness for dogs. This canine poop carry-on redistributed the indignity of scooping up hot piles of shit in plastic bags. The filter bags for the harness were lined with 100% compostable, environmentally friendly organic odor neutralizers. Now your dog can become an active participant in the greening of America, and a family contributor to your community garden’s summer tomato patch.
Someone at SkyMall knew exactly where this plane was landing.
Welcome to the Bay Area.
I loved San Francisco when I had a little money in my pocket. But without at least a little, I spent a lot of sour time observing how the Mexican guys stacked flat cardboard boxes nine feet high in the back of their graffiti bright pickup while up the block a guy parallel parked his Maserati. Sure, any city was this way, but in the ramshackle movie set of San Francisco, there wasn’t enough room to keep disparities at dignified distances.
Flying left me punchy and bone tired. Speeding underground between Mission & 16th and Mission & 24th, the BART train deafened passengers with a banshee howl and threatened all of us with imminent disintegration. At Civic Center the MUNI trains were locked in a staring contest with one another. A kid in a hoodie talked incessantly into his cell phone about how he was going to move back to New York. A lot of people were going back to New York, they just had to make sure everyone in San Francisco heard about it first.
I abandoned the trains and busses and walked up Market toward home in the Western Addition. (NOPA is a restaurant, the Western Addition is a neighborhood.) Pious car choices nested like Russian dolls. A Prius, a Mini Cooper, and a Smart Car walk into a bar.
Sprayed across a plywood wall protecting the open pit which would become a new high-rise in Hayes Valley, a graffiti kid had stenciled a skeletal horse vomiting blood. The blood spelled: GOD GAVE NEWSOM THE RAINBOW SIGN! NO MORE WATER! GENTRI-FIRE NEXT TIME!
Our heavy sow of a house stood out as the cannibalized rental on the block, with its peeling paint and black plastic garbage sack permanently duct-taped in the widow’s peak attic window. I split the second floor of the toothless old swine of a Victorian on Hayes with three other people and a Great Dane-Labrador mutt named Sagamore. Home again, I spilled my duffel bag on the bed. It smelled like my mother’s house.
I seldom saw my roommates. Russ tended bar two blocks away and rarely showed up until three in the morning. Occasionally we would go on a bender and drink free with all of the other bartenders on shift who came in while Russ was working, and they were off. The first secret to surviving the city’s high cost of living was settling for a quarter of America’s median living standard. The second secret to surviving the city’s high cost of living? Create a network of friends in the service industry.
My next roommate was a reedy kid named Petey, with full sleeve tattoos and a wild style mural inked earlobe to earlobe. He had escaped New Jersey, spoke of it like three tours in Vietnam, and worked in the Mission at an artisan irony store where they sold Hamm’s Beer, toasted and microwaved Velveeta and bacon sandwiches on Wonderbread, and sold “superfixie” bikes with wheels that did not turn.
I do not mean these bikes lacked a freewheel. I mean the wheels were literally tack welded in place. The thing to do was hang them on the wall or sit on them near Dolores Park when you weren’t carrying them on your shoulder. This was a relatively new subculture war, and since I’ve wondered if it wasn’t the experiment of a hipster mockumentary or Urban Outfitters market research project. Petey’s job, as he described it to me once, smoking on our front steps, was to sound like he was from New Jersey, drink Hamm’s, and strenuously ignore people. Sagamore was Petey’s sandblasted dog, and so named because of a degenerative muscle condition which affected his head, causing the skin under his eyes and around his snout to hang like a stroke victim’s. He had once been named “Champion.”
Proof the last roommate even existed came only from the periodic appearance of a low light under his door and the occasional calypso rhythm and spring moan of his bed frame thrashing the wall. Having paid cash outright for a year’s worth of rent, he received no mail, and was rumored to be called either Marcus or Brent, depending on who I talked with (Russ called him Brent, Petey called him Marcus). He was the best roommate you could hope for, assuming the severed head of a woman didn’t appear in the freezer one weekend. I put him on being a wealthy married guy from Marin who slummed in Western Addition bars for USF girls or boys, though Russ had never seen him out. Our unspoken agreement was not to pry, as his occupation of the largest room in the house kept the rest of our rents under $600 a piece.
Money matters loomed.
At the time of my father’s death, I temped at an internet porn company named Purv which specialized in the niche of industrial machine porn. They were the masters of mechanized fucking, the doctors of advanced dildonics, the mad laboratory of steampunked sex and electrostim labia clipping. Connoisseurs of Purv’s niche preferred zero male participation, and the girls were post-punk, vampire gothy, or wholesome farm girls with a thing for the combine. They enjoyed full health care benefits with no deductible, 100% match 401ks, and access to subsidized housing in Purv’s studio lofts four blocks away, provided they passed semi-regular drug tests and showed up when they said they would. I had heard that early on Purv offered fractional ownership in the videos, which meant that the girls pocketed a small royalty each time the content was resold. Save the camera crew, everyone else was temp or part-time, sans benefits.
The building Purv purchased was south of Market Street in a foreboding ex-armory which still bore the black-and-yellow signs labeled FALLOUT SHELTER. The ground floor housed the reception area and a phalanx of typical tech-company cubicles and offices, connected in the back to a spacious machine shop. The top floors were post-production, web development, affiliate and web traffic management, accounting, technical support, and a dot-commish rec room packed with all of the amenities that flowed down Howard and Bryant at six cents on the dollar when the vaporware companies tanked. A freight elevator connected the machine shop to the studios below street level. Once in a while, you would see a new girl sitting in the reception area for an interview, but the working actresses steered clear of the upper floors, where our bored army spent most of their days processing hardcore images or dealing with the mundane cash flow details surrounding Purv’s enormous profits.
Purv’s founders still took an active interest in the business, being passionistas themselves for the unity of woman and machine. Ray Vance was an old hippie machinist from Fresno and his partner, Collin Baker, was a Stanford MBA and tech startup burnout. They were frequently in the machine shop together, among the partially-assembled pneumatic pumps and small tool engines, fiddling with robotics and silicone molds, while the production assistants ran racks of the “business end” parts from the day’s shoots through commercial dishwashers and autoclaves.
It smelled of acetylene and industrial lubricants and popcorn, as Ray Vance had an insatiable appetite for the buttery stuff, and kept a full-scale movie theatre popcorn machine stocked and running all day long. On last pass, an old-school chalk board displayed a sketch for what looked like a motorized wheelchair fitted with a black horse saddle and gynecologists stirrups. In the open lot behind the machine shop, a circle of wooden picnic tables allowed for lunch outside if you weren’t of a mind to sit in the coffin-plush rec room, which I often did. Short on cash, I was on the one-burrito-a-day diet. Coffee for breakfast, half a burrito for lunch, the other half for dinner. Ray Vance spotted me a bag of popcorn for my walk home.
My specific job consisted of finalizing and uploading the videos to Purv’s websites, writing some of the video descriptions, and editing and partially censoring video stills for the teaser pages. Thankfully, we were all required to wear headphones, or else the top floor would have sounded like a great sapphic polyphonic orgy in a Detroit auto assembly line. After a couple of weeks, complete porn desensitization set in, and I barely registered what was going on in the videos. I was, however, increasingly perplexed by how to wittily describe, for the nine hundredth time, the intersection of Black & Decker, synthetic appendages, and wax-bald vaginas. The cubicle I inherited was peppered with cheat-sheets of nouns, verbs, and adjectives tacked up behind the monitor to make the copywriting easier.
A web page on the Purv intranet helped the temp web monkeys like myself keep the machine names straight. It showed each machine with a brief video clip, so that we would never accidentally disappoint our loyal following by calling a machine by the wrong name. We were reminded constantly to refer to it. In a company-wide email one morning, Collin Baker underscored the importance of accuracy by sharing a “not uncommon” customer service email.
The message customer service received was from 36-month member ($1,078.20) “BigOleBoi,” (Don Lemmon, 39-year-old regional bank manager in Tulsa, Oklahoma) calling attention to the fact that in video #278 (“Go On Down on the Funny Farm”) we had misrepresented “Licksaw’s” top-tongue speed at 3,000 CHM (clit-hits-per minute), when in video #112, (“Lumberjackin’ Time”) Licksaw’s control dial clearly indicated a maximum upper limit of 4,500 CHM. Could we please clear up this discrepancy?
BigOleBoi was not alone in his attention to detail—the Purv forums were jammed with fans who carried the stats of the sex machines in their heads the way others knew the earned run and batting averages of major league ball players. The most active thread on the forum was one in which members regularly discussed what types of future robots could be added to the Purv family. Other members collaborated online over long, meticulous scripts for Ray Vance and Collin Baker to shoot. When Collin Baker once picked up the idea of issuing gasoline-scented limited edition collector’s cards, modeled after Topp’s baseball cards, the entire run of 500 sold out at $89.95 each. Rumor had it plans were underway for a massive live event to take place in an old Air Force hangar in Nevada, a project the members referred to as “Yearning Man.”
So when I returned from Florida, head fogged in and body beat to hell by five hours in a center seat on Southwest, I accidentally made the mistake of labeling the robot in a new scene “Captain Fucktronic” when it was actually “The Dildonator.” The mistake generated nearly three hundred flaming all-caps or all-lowercase emails in the customer service department, two cubes to my right. It did not help matters that Captain Fucktronic and The Dildonator were major rivals in our continuing sci-fi miniseries, Warpdriver.
Word reached the machine shop an hour later, and Collin Baker rounded up the entire support staff in the rec room for an emergency meeting. We filed in to find Ray Vance sitting in his oversized, stuffed purple chair, a prop ripped straight from a Dr. Seuss book. He looked dejected. Bits of popcorn nestled in his long salt and pepper beard. Collin Baker waited until the room was full and then stormed in for maximum dramatic effect, his shirtsleeves cuffed by equal centimeters to the elbows.
Though both Vance and Baker had a genuine enthusiasm for Purv’s content, it’s worth noting that Ray Vance saw the enterprise as a labor of love and Collin Baker’s heart was closer to his wallet. Collin’s assistant dimmed the lights. An LCD projector descended from the ceiling. Collin stood beside Ray Vance, sad porn robot king, and pointed a remote at the laptop connected to the projector. A bright image of Captain Fucktronic and all of his weaponized appendages filled the wall.
“People,” Collin began, “who is this?”
“Captain Fucktronic,” we said in a dim, asynchronous chorus. Ray Vance turned his head and looked at the screen lovingly. The PowerPoint slide advanced. An action shot of The Dildonator appeared.
“Very good. Now who is this?”
“The Dildonator,” we said, a little more with it.
“Wow, hey, that’s right. Gosh. It’s hard to understand how we managed to fuck up so bad today, seeing how you all clearly can tell the difference between the two.” Collin advanced the slide and both robots appeared side by side. “Just in case someone out there is not quite clear, let me point out a few of the more obvious differences.” Collin waved his laser pointer over the two robots in shaky circles. “Here? And here? Here? See?”
We murmured assent.
“Let me express this clearly: If anyone still doesn’t get it, we can arrange for a free first-hand experience with the two. I assure you the differences will be vivid.”
The room was silent. Ray Vance sighed heavily.
“It just bums me out, man,” he said in a low voice. “These are like… my kids.”
Collin nodded vigorously.
“You know who else it bums out?” Collin picked up. “Our paying members! You know, the ones with the credit cards?” The lights brightened and Collin closed his laptop with a snap.
His body language softened, he hung his head like a disappointed father and squeezed Ray’s shoulder reassuringly.
“Folks, never forget this: We are storytellers. This enterprise of ours—it’s about creating and maintaining the unbroken arc of a fantastic, magical ream. When we make mistakes, even smaller ones than this, the inconsistencies destroy the fantasy for our fans, and they are rudely blue balled by our sloppiness.”
Two months hence, I would more or less hear the same speech from Pontius J. LaBar’s mouth in the boardroom of a Fortune 500 company.
“This isn’t 1999. We’re not the only machine erotica shop in the game any more. Members have choices. We may be the first and the best, but we’re only the best because we’re customer service fanatics. Do I need to rent Tony Hsieh for an hour to cheer you fuckers up? Attention to detail, people. When we fail to uphold the high standards, members notice, and we lose market share.”
“I remember the day they were born.” Ray Vance rescued an edible kernel in his beard and consoled himself.
Collin Baker met each of our eyes, hands on hips. “You want to go through the motions, start filling out your apps for Starbucks. Dismissed.”
We began our penguin waddle out. The idea of free coffee and working with fully clothed women in aprons was by this time far more arousing than another eight hours pixelating nipples a-la alligator clips.
Then: “Nick, can we talk with you for a minute?”
It was as if they read my thoughts.
Ray Vance and Collin Baker freed me up to explore my barista options the very same day.
You have not been thoroughly blacklisted from temporary employment until your agency finds out you were shit-canned from a porn company. They’d been notified prior to the meeting and hung up on me when I called to request a new assignment. A guy with biceps like grapefruits escorted me to the receptionist’s front desk. I remembered my half-eaten burrito in the rec-room fridge. Since I didn’t think Ray Vance would come charging out with a fare-thee-well bag of popcorn, I couldn’t leave the burrito behind. I pleaded with the security guy and he reluctantly disappeared back upstairs to fetch it for me.
This was when I met Sadie Parrish.
She was a loose limbed, straight red-haired beauty with a cosmic calm and twee librarian’s glasses above a bridge of light freckles. On her lap a copy of Circuit Cellar lay open. Her lips moved slightly as she read. I was instantly smitten.
I blurted “You don’t want to work here.”
She looked up and took me in. She squinted at me through her glasses. Her attention was like being shot to death with spring sunshine.
“How do you know where I want to work?” She closed her magazine.
“I don’t know where you want to work, but I know where you don’t want to work. And that would be here.”
She closed her magazine. “Sounds like you might have a little problem with female empowerment, huh?”
“Are you kidding? Tell me you’re kidding.”
“Why would I be kidding?”
“Let me see if I can put it another way: When was the last time you were double-penetrated by twin eight-inch dildos driven by a six-speed Chevy transmission?”
When she looked away and laughed, I noticed the Apple logo tattooed on the back of her neck.
“Is that how you ask all the girls out for coffee?”
“Did I ask you to coffee?”
“Maybe I asked me for you.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said yes.”
“That’s pretty unusual.”
She opened her magazine again.
“I’m glad you asked. Your afternoon should be as free as mine.”
“I’m not walking out on this interview. If you have all this new free time, wait for me.”
“You should skip the interview. They won’t hire you with that tattoo on your neck. No logos, trademarks, or rights-managed characters or likenesses on the actresses. If you had one of those trashy tribal wingdings, no problem. But no logos. Post production would go out of their mind tracking and blurring it, and it would ruin it for the members anyway. Thing is, they won’t tell you that until after you’ve auditioned, know what I mean?”
She bit her bottom lip and seemed genuinely deflated.
“Fucked before I was fucked.”
“Way of the world.”
The security guard came back with my burrito and stood by the receptionist’s desk to see me out. Sadie looked as though she understood.
“Alrighty then,” the security guy said. “Time to go.” He held the burrito at arm’s length like a full diaper. I took it.
He held the door for me, a gesture of civility I owed to Sadie’s presence, I was sure. I stepped outside into the afternoon wind. She wasn’t standing yet, but she leaned over to look at me through the open door.
“Soooo… I guess it’s coffee o’clock,” she said.
I felt like I had to shout as the traffic crowded past.
“I can’t afford to buy you a cup of coffee. But I can offer you half of a burrito.” I waggled my foil package in the air. She stood up and rolled her magazine as if to scold a dog. She stepped outside into that cold and descending light. The security guard shut the door, and we were among the homeless and the windblown garbage.
“What if I loan you a cup of coffee?”
“That’s sort of a relief. It was my last half burrito.”
“Please, please shut up. You had me at double penetration.”
Once in your life should you be so lucky to meet someone like this. Meet someone you start with in media res. Meet someone who seems as though they’ve known you for who you are your entire life. Meet someone improbably, and understand every meaningless moment guided you to this high-speed collision.
The 49 Mission-Van Ness bus lumbered up from the curb and left us there with a poorly understood but shared secret. The fog crushed over the hills above South San Francisco. Take it all as a gift if it comes to you like this.
I would offer one caveat, however: Before it comes, as Sadie Parrish appeared to me in Purv’s lobby, file a small prayer that the girl you meet has no ambitions to become the country’s first domestic suicide bomber. Because Sadie did, and who was I to dissuade her from a life’s ambition?
Her older brother, Staff Sergeant Anthony Parrish, had been killed in Afghanistan, and the shockwave from his roadside bomb traveled all the way across the world and sheared her family into pieces. She was twenty-two and done with the yellow ribbons and oak trees. She didn’t tell me this the day I was fired from Purv. When a fresh tattoo of the Starbucks logo appeared on her stomach after one of my two week stints on the road, we had a talk.
But that day of loaned coffee: I tramped home late, buzzing with the day, the reality of my financial situation settled on my shoulders. Little money remained. I could not subdivide my burrito into smaller and smaller sustaining portions. Laundry called. I batted the mound of clothes around, looking for jeans with spare cash tucked away, happy-hour style. I found none, but I did discover the invitation from LaBar Partners Limited crumpled at the bottom of my army green duffel. I sat alone on the edge of my bed and turned the unopened invitation in my hand.
Sometimes the runway appears at the last second.
Depending on my mood, I occasionally imagined what it would be like to catch, out of the corner of my eye, the shape of a black boat bobbing where it shouldn’t be, its running lights dark. The flash is like a spark from an outlet, and the shoulder-fired rocket sweeps up to meet us before we touchdown.
My friend Jake Hawkins tells me that this is unlikely. He tells me that a veteran pilot with a cool head and a little luck would be able to put the jet down in one piece despite a rocket hit on approach. He says they’re much more likely to concentrate a dual rocket attack on take-off, when the wings are fat with fuel. But then again, he’s a poet and a baggage screener at SFO. So, grain of salt.
He reminds me there are death fantasies that do not involve acts of terrorism.
Not anymore, I tell him.
Thirty-six thousand feet above the Grand Canyon and pointing west, I read a full-page advertorial in SkyMall Magazine on a NASA-inspired diaper harness for dogs. This canine poop carry-on redistributed the indignity of scooping up hot piles of shit in plastic bags. The filter bags for the harness were lined with 100% compostable, environmentally friendly organic odor neutralizers. Now your dog can become an active participant in the greening of America, and a family contributor to your community garden’s summer tomato patch.
Someone at SkyMall knew exactly where this plane was landing.
Welcome to the Bay Area.
I loved San Francisco when I had a little money in my pocket. But without at least a little, I spent a lot of sour time observing how the Mexican guys stacked flat cardboard boxes nine feet high in the back of their graffiti bright pickup while up the block a guy parallel parked his Maserati. Sure, any city was this way, but in the ramshackle movie set of San Francisco, there wasn’t enough room to keep disparities at dignified distances.
Flying left me punchy and bone tired. Speeding underground between Mission & 16th and Mission & 24th, the BART train deafened passengers with a banshee howl and threatened all of us with imminent disintegration. At Civic Center the MUNI trains were locked in a staring contest with one another. A kid in a hoodie talked incessantly into his cell phone about how he was going to move back to New York. A lot of people were going back to New York, they just had to make sure everyone in San Francisco heard about it first.
I abandoned the trains and busses and walked up Market toward home in the Western Addition. (NOPA is a restaurant, the Western Addition is a neighborhood.) Pious car choices nested like Russian dolls. A Prius, a Mini Cooper, and a Smart Car walk into a bar.
Sprayed across a plywood wall protecting the open pit which would become a new high-rise in Hayes Valley, a graffiti kid had stenciled a skeletal horse vomiting blood. The blood spelled: GOD GAVE NEWSOM THE RAINBOW SIGN! NO MORE WATER! GENTRI-FIRE NEXT TIME!
Our heavy sow of a house stood out as the cannibalized rental on the block, with its peeling paint and black plastic garbage sack permanently duct-taped in the widow’s peak attic window. I split the second floor of the toothless old swine of a Victorian on Hayes with three other people and a Great Dane-Labrador mutt named Sagamore. Home again, I spilled my duffel bag on the bed. It smelled like my mother’s house.
I seldom saw my roommates. Russ tended bar two blocks away and rarely showed up until three in the morning. Occasionally we would go on a bender and drink free with all of the other bartenders on shift who came in while Russ was working, and they were off. The first secret to surviving the city’s high cost of living was settling for a quarter of America’s median living standard. The second secret to surviving the city’s high cost of living? Create a network of friends in the service industry.
My next roommate was a reedy kid named Petey, with full sleeve tattoos and a wild style mural inked earlobe to earlobe. He had escaped New Jersey, spoke of it like three tours in Vietnam, and worked in the Mission at an artisan irony store where they sold Hamm’s Beer, toasted and microwaved Velveeta and bacon sandwiches on Wonderbread, and sold “superfixie” bikes with wheels that did not turn.
I do not mean these bikes lacked a freewheel. I mean the wheels were literally tack welded in place. The thing to do was hang them on the wall or sit on them near Dolores Park when you weren’t carrying them on your shoulder. This was a relatively new subculture war, and since I’ve wondered if it wasn’t the experiment of a hipster mockumentary or Urban Outfitters market research project. Petey’s job, as he described it to me once, smoking on our front steps, was to sound like he was from New Jersey, drink Hamm’s, and strenuously ignore people. Sagamore was Petey’s sandblasted dog, and so named because of a degenerative muscle condition which affected his head, causing the skin under his eyes and around his snout to hang like a stroke victim’s. He had once been named “Champion.”
Proof the last roommate even existed came only from the periodic appearance of a low light under his door and the occasional calypso rhythm and spring moan of his bed frame thrashing the wall. Having paid cash outright for a year’s worth of rent, he received no mail, and was rumored to be called either Marcus or Brent, depending on who I talked with (Russ called him Brent, Petey called him Marcus). He was the best roommate you could hope for, assuming the severed head of a woman didn’t appear in the freezer one weekend. I put him on being a wealthy married guy from Marin who slummed in Western Addition bars for USF girls or boys, though Russ had never seen him out. Our unspoken agreement was not to pry, as his occupation of the largest room in the house kept the rest of our rents under $600 a piece.
Money matters loomed.
At the time of my father’s death, I temped at an internet porn company named Purv which specialized in the niche of industrial machine porn. They were the masters of mechanized fucking, the doctors of advanced dildonics, the mad laboratory of steampunked sex and electrostim labia clipping. Connoisseurs of Purv’s niche preferred zero male participation, and the girls were post-punk, vampire gothy, or wholesome farm girls with a thing for the combine. They enjoyed full health care benefits with no deductible, 100% match 401ks, and access to subsidized housing in Purv’s studio lofts four blocks away, provided they passed semi-regular drug tests and showed up when they said they would. I had heard that early on Purv offered fractional ownership in the videos, which meant that the girls pocketed a small royalty each time the content was resold. Save the camera crew, everyone else was temp or part-time, sans benefits.
The building Purv purchased was south of Market Street in a foreboding ex-armory which still bore the black-and-yellow signs labeled FALLOUT SHELTER. The ground floor housed the reception area and a phalanx of typical tech-company cubicles and offices, connected in the back to a spacious machine shop. The top floors were post-production, web development, affiliate and web traffic management, accounting, technical support, and a dot-commish rec room packed with all of the amenities that flowed down Howard and Bryant at six cents on the dollar when the vaporware companies tanked. A freight elevator connected the machine shop to the studios below street level. Once in a while, you would see a new girl sitting in the reception area for an interview, but the working actresses steered clear of the upper floors, where our bored army spent most of their days processing hardcore images or dealing with the mundane cash flow details surrounding Purv’s enormous profits.
Purv’s founders still took an active interest in the business, being passionistas themselves for the unity of woman and machine. Ray Vance was an old hippie machinist from Fresno and his partner, Collin Baker, was a Stanford MBA and tech startup burnout. They were frequently in the machine shop together, among the partially-assembled pneumatic pumps and small tool engines, fiddling with robotics and silicone molds, while the production assistants ran racks of the “business end” parts from the day’s shoots through commercial dishwashers and autoclaves.
It smelled of acetylene and industrial lubricants and popcorn, as Ray Vance had an insatiable appetite for the buttery stuff, and kept a full-scale movie theatre popcorn machine stocked and running all day long. On last pass, an old-school chalk board displayed a sketch for what looked like a motorized wheelchair fitted with a black horse saddle and gynecologists stirrups. In the open lot behind the machine shop, a circle of wooden picnic tables allowed for lunch outside if you weren’t of a mind to sit in the coffin-plush rec room, which I often did. Short on cash, I was on the one-burrito-a-day diet. Coffee for breakfast, half a burrito for lunch, the other half for dinner. Ray Vance spotted me a bag of popcorn for my walk home.
My specific job consisted of finalizing and uploading the videos to Purv’s websites, writing some of the video descriptions, and editing and partially censoring video stills for the teaser pages. Thankfully, we were all required to wear headphones, or else the top floor would have sounded like a great sapphic polyphonic orgy in a Detroit auto assembly line. After a couple of weeks, complete porn desensitization set in, and I barely registered what was going on in the videos. I was, however, increasingly perplexed by how to wittily describe, for the nine hundredth time, the intersection of Black & Decker, synthetic appendages, and wax-bald vaginas. The cubicle I inherited was peppered with cheat-sheets of nouns, verbs, and adjectives tacked up behind the monitor to make the copywriting easier.
A web page on the Purv intranet helped the temp web monkeys like myself keep the machine names straight. It showed each machine with a brief video clip, so that we would never accidentally disappoint our loyal following by calling a machine by the wrong name. We were reminded constantly to refer to it. In a company-wide email one morning, Collin Baker underscored the importance of accuracy by sharing a “not uncommon” customer service email.
The message customer service received was from 36-month member ($1,078.20) “BigOleBoi,” (Don Lemmon, 39-year-old regional bank manager in Tulsa, Oklahoma) calling attention to the fact that in video #278 (“Go On Down on the Funny Farm”) we had misrepresented “Licksaw’s” top-tongue speed at 3,000 CHM (clit-hits-per minute), when in video #112, (“Lumberjackin’ Time”) Licksaw’s control dial clearly indicated a maximum upper limit of 4,500 CHM. Could we please clear up this discrepancy?
BigOleBoi was not alone in his attention to detail—the Purv forums were jammed with fans who carried the stats of the sex machines in their heads the way others knew the earned run and batting averages of major league ball players. The most active thread on the forum was one in which members regularly discussed what types of future robots could be added to the Purv family. Other members collaborated online over long, meticulous scripts for Ray Vance and Collin Baker to shoot. When Collin Baker once picked up the idea of issuing gasoline-scented limited edition collector’s cards, modeled after Topp’s baseball cards, the entire run of 500 sold out at $89.95 each. Rumor had it plans were underway for a massive live event to take place in an old Air Force hangar in Nevada, a project the members referred to as “Yearning Man.”
So when I returned from Florida, head fogged in and body beat to hell by five hours in a center seat on Southwest, I accidentally made the mistake of labeling the robot in a new scene “Captain Fucktronic” when it was actually “The Dildonator.” The mistake generated nearly three hundred flaming all-caps or all-lowercase emails in the customer service department, two cubes to my right. It did not help matters that Captain Fucktronic and The Dildonator were major rivals in our continuing sci-fi miniseries, Warpdriver.
Word reached the machine shop an hour later, and Collin Baker rounded up the entire support staff in the rec room for an emergency meeting. We filed in to find Ray Vance sitting in his oversized, stuffed purple chair, a prop ripped straight from a Dr. Seuss book. He looked dejected. Bits of popcorn nestled in his long salt and pepper beard. Collin Baker waited until the room was full and then stormed in for maximum dramatic effect, his shirtsleeves cuffed by equal centimeters to the elbows.
Though both Vance and Baker had a genuine enthusiasm for Purv’s content, it’s worth noting that Ray Vance saw the enterprise as a labor of love and Collin Baker’s heart was closer to his wallet. Collin’s assistant dimmed the lights. An LCD projector descended from the ceiling. Collin stood beside Ray Vance, sad porn robot king, and pointed a remote at the laptop connected to the projector. A bright image of Captain Fucktronic and all of his weaponized appendages filled the wall.
“People,” Collin began, “who is this?”
“Captain Fucktronic,” we said in a dim, asynchronous chorus. Ray Vance turned his head and looked at the screen lovingly. The PowerPoint slide advanced. An action shot of The Dildonator appeared.
“Very good. Now who is this?”
“The Dildonator,” we said, a little more with it.
“Wow, hey, that’s right. Gosh. It’s hard to understand how we managed to fuck up so bad today, seeing how you all clearly can tell the difference between the two.” Collin advanced the slide and both robots appeared side by side. “Just in case someone out there is not quite clear, let me point out a few of the more obvious differences.” Collin waved his laser pointer over the two robots in shaky circles. “Here? And here? Here? See?”
We murmured assent.
“Let me express this clearly: If anyone still doesn’t get it, we can arrange for a free first-hand experience with the two. I assure you the differences will be vivid.”
The room was silent. Ray Vance sighed heavily.
“It just bums me out, man,” he said in a low voice. “These are like… my kids.”
Collin nodded vigorously.
“You know who else it bums out?” Collin picked up. “Our paying members! You know, the ones with the credit cards?” The lights brightened and Collin closed his laptop with a snap.
His body language softened, he hung his head like a disappointed father and squeezed Ray’s shoulder reassuringly.
“Folks, never forget this: We are storytellers. This enterprise of ours—it’s about creating and maintaining the unbroken arc of a fantastic, magical ream. When we make mistakes, even smaller ones than this, the inconsistencies destroy the fantasy for our fans, and they are rudely blue balled by our sloppiness.”
Two months hence, I would more or less hear the same speech from Pontius J. LaBar’s mouth in the boardroom of a Fortune 500 company.
“This isn’t 1999. We’re not the only machine erotica shop in the game any more. Members have choices. We may be the first and the best, but we’re only the best because we’re customer service fanatics. Do I need to rent Tony Hsieh for an hour to cheer you fuckers up? Attention to detail, people. When we fail to uphold the high standards, members notice, and we lose market share.”
“I remember the day they were born.” Ray Vance rescued an edible kernel in his beard and consoled himself.
Collin Baker met each of our eyes, hands on hips. “You want to go through the motions, start filling out your apps for Starbucks. Dismissed.”
We began our penguin waddle out. The idea of free coffee and working with fully clothed women in aprons was by this time far more arousing than another eight hours pixelating nipples a-la alligator clips.
Then: “Nick, can we talk with you for a minute?”
It was as if they read my thoughts.
Ray Vance and Collin Baker freed me up to explore my barista options the very same day.
You have not been thoroughly blacklisted from temporary employment until your agency finds out you were shit-canned from a porn company. They’d been notified prior to the meeting and hung up on me when I called to request a new assignment. A guy with biceps like grapefruits escorted me to the receptionist’s front desk. I remembered my half-eaten burrito in the rec-room fridge. Since I didn’t think Ray Vance would come charging out with a fare-thee-well bag of popcorn, I couldn’t leave the burrito behind. I pleaded with the security guy and he reluctantly disappeared back upstairs to fetch it for me.
This was when I met Sadie Parrish.
She was a loose limbed, straight red-haired beauty with a cosmic calm and twee librarian’s glasses above a bridge of light freckles. On her lap a copy of Circuit Cellar lay open. Her lips moved slightly as she read. I was instantly smitten.
I blurted “You don’t want to work here.”
She looked up and took me in. She squinted at me through her glasses. Her attention was like being shot to death with spring sunshine.
“How do you know where I want to work?” She closed her magazine.
“I don’t know where you want to work, but I know where you don’t want to work. And that would be here.”
She closed her magazine. “Sounds like you might have a little problem with female empowerment, huh?”
“Are you kidding? Tell me you’re kidding.”
“Why would I be kidding?”
“Let me see if I can put it another way: When was the last time you were double-penetrated by twin eight-inch dildos driven by a six-speed Chevy transmission?”
When she looked away and laughed, I noticed the Apple logo tattooed on the back of her neck.
“Is that how you ask all the girls out for coffee?”
“Did I ask you to coffee?”
“Maybe I asked me for you.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said yes.”
“That’s pretty unusual.”
She opened her magazine again.
“I’m glad you asked. Your afternoon should be as free as mine.”
“I’m not walking out on this interview. If you have all this new free time, wait for me.”
“You should skip the interview. They won’t hire you with that tattoo on your neck. No logos, trademarks, or rights-managed characters or likenesses on the actresses. If you had one of those trashy tribal wingdings, no problem. But no logos. Post production would go out of their mind tracking and blurring it, and it would ruin it for the members anyway. Thing is, they won’t tell you that until after you’ve auditioned, know what I mean?”
She bit her bottom lip and seemed genuinely deflated.
“Fucked before I was fucked.”
“Way of the world.”
The security guard came back with my burrito and stood by the receptionist’s desk to see me out. Sadie looked as though she understood.
“Alrighty then,” the security guy said. “Time to go.” He held the burrito at arm’s length like a full diaper. I took it.
He held the door for me, a gesture of civility I owed to Sadie’s presence, I was sure. I stepped outside into the afternoon wind. She wasn’t standing yet, but she leaned over to look at me through the open door.
“Soooo… I guess it’s coffee o’clock,” she said.
I felt like I had to shout as the traffic crowded past.
“I can’t afford to buy you a cup of coffee. But I can offer you half of a burrito.” I waggled my foil package in the air. She stood up and rolled her magazine as if to scold a dog. She stepped outside into that cold and descending light. The security guard shut the door, and we were among the homeless and the windblown garbage.
“What if I loan you a cup of coffee?”
“That’s sort of a relief. It was my last half burrito.”
“Please, please shut up. You had me at double penetration.”
Once in your life should you be so lucky to meet someone like this. Meet someone you start with in media res. Meet someone who seems as though they’ve known you for who you are your entire life. Meet someone improbably, and understand every meaningless moment guided you to this high-speed collision.
The 49 Mission-Van Ness bus lumbered up from the curb and left us there with a poorly understood but shared secret. The fog crushed over the hills above South San Francisco. Take it all as a gift if it comes to you like this.
I would offer one caveat, however: Before it comes, as Sadie Parrish appeared to me in Purv’s lobby, file a small prayer that the girl you meet has no ambitions to become the country’s first domestic suicide bomber. Because Sadie did, and who was I to dissuade her from a life’s ambition?
Her older brother, Staff Sergeant Anthony Parrish, had been killed in Afghanistan, and the shockwave from his roadside bomb traveled all the way across the world and sheared her family into pieces. She was twenty-two and done with the yellow ribbons and oak trees. She didn’t tell me this the day I was fired from Purv. When a fresh tattoo of the Starbucks logo appeared on her stomach after one of my two week stints on the road, we had a talk.
But that day of loaned coffee: I tramped home late, buzzing with the day, the reality of my financial situation settled on my shoulders. Little money remained. I could not subdivide my burrito into smaller and smaller sustaining portions. Laundry called. I batted the mound of clothes around, looking for jeans with spare cash tucked away, happy-hour style. I found none, but I did discover the invitation from LaBar Partners Limited crumpled at the bottom of my army green duffel. I sat alone on the edge of my bed and turned the unopened invitation in my hand.
Sometimes the runway appears at the last second.