John Butleron burning ambitions at the start of the dotcom boom
As far as everyone else was concerned Charlie Wagner was a just dogsbody and so was I, and that was fine with us. We were working in a technology television company based in San Francisco at the beginning of the dotcom boom. We badly wanted to work in television, and here we were, finally, on the ground floor. When the weekly show was being recorded we worked as grips, ran for coffee and copied scripts, and it was great; and when the show wasn't being taped we moved furniture for the expanding technology side of the company, and it was fine.
A new hierarchy was beginning to take shape around town. Technology companies could not find enough people to build websites, and those who could write a little code inherited the earth. When they started at our company they were given a natty shoulder bag with their e-mail address sewn across it, and Charlie and I would set up their office for them. They would log on to the earliest incarnation of the web through Netscape and begin to build our future while we built their filing cabinet.
Like a lot of people, I had grown up dreaming less about the future and wishing more that I had been around for the glories of the past - the books, music and films of then, not now.
Observing all this in retrospect seems to suggest that I haven't changed a whole lot, but we took a contrarian pride in our love of old music, Charlie and I, running errands around Silicon Valley in his Chevy Malibu, playing Steely Dan loud, on cassette. Charlie was 42 and I was 20, but we shared this fondness for looking back, though it turned out we looked back for different reasons.
Within two years staff numbers at our company would swell to 500 and we would expand into the old health club next door - a working environment that resembled the aftermath of a natural disaster. People were crowded into converted basketball courts, building websites with computers perched on desks made from old doors. Another day, another new hire - and another job to drag us away from the television-studio floor, and every time another Stanford graduate handed Charlie a cocktail napkin with his desired office layout sketched on it, I was reminded of tyrannical youth-led regimes from history.
Charlie seemed to have no hang-ups about where a man of his age should be, and I aspired to this calm acceptance much more than the lives of the paper millionaires you could sometimes glimpse crying at their desks at 5am when you came in to tape the morning show. Charlie had quit driving cabs in the first place because he knew what he wanted. He wanted to be the cameraman at the football game who zoomed in on the hot girls in the crowd. He had met one such cameraman in a bar, and spoken to him, and he had made up his mind there and then. No more cabs.
Sometimes, if there was a three-man job to be done, Charlie would call on his friend Mikey to lend us a hand. Mikey was older, pot-bellied, with a comb-over. He was a product of the pre-internet world, out of step with San Francisco, its skateboarders and their baggy pants. He wore tight, faded Levi's he elected to belt below the waist, kept a plastic comb in his back pocket and spent all his days out at the racetrack in Oakland. When Charlie called, Mikey always needed the money.
I hated any labour that didn't involve being around television. I would come in on Saturday to label tapes because it was TV production, in a way. Even making coffee on set allowed me to think I was making progress, going somewhere. The first time I felt that Charlie also needed this validation, the three of us were tarring a leaking roof.
We were getting ahead when Mikey stopped me. "Stretch it out," he implored. "We're on the roof. No one can see us. We're getting paid by the hour." I ignored him and kept working, and Mikey got angry at me for ruining an easy number. "Stretch it out, man. Tell him, Charlie. Stretch it out."
"Mikey likes the roof," Charlie explained with a laugh. Mikey looked at Charlie accusingly. "What. You don't like the roof now?" Charlie didn't look up when he said: "My daughter doesn't like me on the roof."
I finally made it back to San Francisco 10 years later, after everything had changed again. The dotcom bubble had burst, the office we had worked in was boarded shut and those hundreds of desks we built were stacked against the outside walls, their Dilbert cartoons flapping in the wind. Charlie was working in sports now, as a cameraman, and he was finally starting to look his age, with glasses and grey-flecked hair. We met for coffee, and he seemed more guarded than before, as if a greater age difference had materialised between us.
The previous year his daughter had become pregnant by an army guy and dropped out of college, leaving San Francisco for her mother's place back in the Midwest. Though I never remembered him as much of a drinker, Charlie had taken the news badly and ended up in rehab. He talked about how happy he was back when we were dogsbodies at the technology television company, and I thought back to the day that he, Mikey and I were tarring the roof.
I wanted to ask him if he was happy then, but I didn't. We didn't know each other any more. Instead I suggested that there was no harm in looking forward. There would be plenty of time to reminisce, somewhere way off in the future.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com