0.2 The funeral of bobo  (Page 2/12)

Like me, butler worked out of her home and took in as little paying work as possible. Whenever I brought work over to her, she and Downing and I would spend hours sitting around talking about books—Butler and Downing were avid readers—and sharing Seattle Mariners baseball stories, the M’s being arguably the most hapless team in the majors, if not in major-league history, and knowledgeable Seattle fans being both hard to find and gifted with a perverse ingenuity about the game. To be a Mariners fan was not only to have a taste for macabre humor; it was to be more a connoisseur of losing than of baseball itself.

Seattle in those days seemed to me almost entirely populated by people like Herman, Butler and and Downing: intelligent, talented, perceptive, literate and far too wise to give in to the temptations of acquisitiveness and ambition. We were dropouts, and relatively righteous about it: I always felt that what we defined as “workaholic” the rest of the country defined as “normal,” “acceptable,” “admirable,” or “American.”

Those anomalous Seattleites interested in upward mobility and upscale appearance, however, had only to make a short drive across Lake Washington on Watson’s reviled Highway 520 floating bridge to find standard American middle-class determination to look like you were living large. Here were the bigger homes set further back from the street behind bigger hedges and bigger lawns of the sort you associated with California. Here were the cul de sacs—exotic little circular dead ends of a kind found nowhere in Seattle proper. On the east side of the lake, everyone seemed to be striving to do materially better. The suburbs there had actually grown in population during the Boeing Bust, and by the 1980s they had emerged in the Seattle mind as tacky, menacing proof that “Californication,” as Seattleites started calling the population growth and cultural changes they were beginning to see everywhere in their beloved city, was as real as Emmett Watson had so long insisted it was.

Small wonder, then, that I had never heard of Microsoft—it was located on the side of the lake I resolutely ignored. All I knew about the company was what the inquiring editor had told me: that it wrote software for personal computers—new machines that I had heard a little bit about, since they were just starting to make national news. Curious, I drove over a few days after her visit and made my way to the address she had given me.

The company was housed in a long, four-story, brown building that stretched out behind an old Burgermaster drive-in. The building was typically nondescript—a bland concrete-and-glass suburban office structure of the sort you could see all along the highway on the east side of the lake. I made my way past the Burgermaster, pulled into the parking lot—it was less than half full—and walked through the double glass doors at the entrance.

The lobby was dark, crowded, chaotic, and as remarkable as the outside was unremarkable. Electronic equipment was piled everywhere, both in and out of boxes. There was no receptionist and no security—I could easily have walked out with all the computers I wanted. Kids looking like the “Frodo lives” freaks I remembered from college were running in all directions. Eventually, I found some signs with numbers and arrows on them and made my way down the appropriate hall to my editor’s office.