Desolation Row 

by Alex Morton

Kulana Nalu – The place where a surfer paddles to catch a wave; usually the most distant line of breakers.  

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It was a pale California afternoon, with a bouncy landing in a plane that had more grumpy flight attendants than passengers, and food that wouldn’t draw rats. When we landed in San Francisco, it was no better. The airport was nearly deserted and half its shops looked as if they hadn’t seen a customer in weeks. I should have taken it as a sign and turned around and flown out again as quickly as possible. As my father taught me, if you see a train wreck happening, don’t stand on the tracks.

But sometimes, you don’t have a choice. I was back there working for a last gasp company at the tail end of a career in what was no longer even called high tech. The trip would be one of desperate meetings on the trail of whatever money was still left in California. It didn’t look good, but there might still be something for a small Canadian software company that could live on table scraps for months. I’d been to see all the venture capitalists back home in Vancouver, but after the last of their money disappeared in the crash of what was now referred to as the Information Technology industry, about all they had left was their arrogance. Changing the name of the industry hadn’t helped anything.

I’d lived on the California coast for a few years, commuting to Silicon Valley and always figuring that the industry would eventually give me what I needed so that I would have the time to join the surfers I watched from my car as I left for work. I might have had the BMW, but they caught the waves. All I could do was catch a glimpse of them on the coast road and listen to their music on the radio. I wanted to get out there and catch one of those waves, but I was too busy making money to stop. In the tech industry, although we dressed as if we were on vacation, there was never a minute when we were free. Eventually, I moved to Vancouver hoping to make more of a life and maybe do a little Pacific Northwest surfing, but the move turned out to mean even more travelling, and the pace never slowed down.

Along with the rest of my generation, I lost my angst for good in the mid eighties, when making serious money replaced solving the mysteries of the universe, but I was regaining it quickly as I turned off route 101 and drove past rows of buildings with For Lease signs and empty parking lots. It was like driving through a concrete graveyard. The vein was obviously running out, and so were my options for staying in the industry, but I had no idea where to turn next.

Because of a scarcity of low-end cars, the rental company had put me into a new, very fast sports model, but I was too involved in my thoughts to enjoy its power or even remember to put the top down before I left the airport. By the time I thought about it I was on 101, where you couldn’t stop and there was no room to try out the car’s speed.

The first meeting was with Khayam, a huge memory chip company. When I turned into the entryway for their campus, all except one of the buildings were empty and dark, and the big fountain in the middle of the traffic circle was as dry as the withering, rust-colored lawns surrounding it. The flowerbeds were bloomless and native cactus and desert weeds were choking off the surviving hedges in front of the one building that appeared to be inhabited.

I’d held on in the tech industry far longer than I should have, hopping from company to company as they fell, and trying never to miss a beat or a pay check. Instead of running companies, I wrote business plans, formulated marketing strategies, planted PR and harvested leads. It was a nomadic existence, with the companies scattered all along the west coast, and thinning rapidly, as the venture capital dried up. I flew from airport to airport, startup to fedup, working with companies that should have been, would have been, could have been something until the money ran out and they were left gasping on a barren plain.

After a while, the companies rolled into each other, the fancy coffee all tasted the same and the chairs in the boardrooms were cold year-round. There wasn’t much more of it I could take, but I had no idea what else to do.

The main lobby of Khayam’s single, occupied building was empty except for a middle-aged woman in a blue security uniform, seated behind an eighteen-foot stretch of highly polished steel reception desk that had a rust spot on one corner and sat on a marble floor that looked dusty. When I signed the logbook, I noticed that at eleven in the morning I was only the second appointment of the day.

“I’ll let them know you’re here,” the woman in the blue security uniform said, flatly. “You can have a seat while you’re waiting. I can’t offer you coffee, we’re not set up for it down here any more, but I think they have a machine upstairs. And they’ll have water. We still have water down here, too. Would you like a bottle?”

I nodded yes, and sat alone in the huge room, drinking no-name water, while the lobby remained empty.

The wait was a short one, but the meeting that followed dragged on forever. It was held in a huge conference room at the end of a desperately long, empty corridor. Despite the air conditioning, it was dry in the room, so dry that I drank two more bottles of water in the first ten minutes.

I met with three, thin, middle-manager engineers who were just hanging on by their fingernails and weren’t shy about discussing it. Nearly everyone around them had been laid off, and they had no doubt that, short of a miracle, they were next. Without provocation, as if compulsively confessing to a priest, they told me that their company was wrapping dollar bills around every product they shipped, meaning that they were selling below cost, just to keep their market share while they figured out what to do.

Our discussions were pointless. While they admitted that they could use our product, they weren’t about to invest any of their company’s fast-dwindling cash reserves in our shaky startup, and they couldn’t order product unless we could show that we had enough financing to stay in business. I left by the same door that I came in, with nothing in hand and only vague promises for something in the future.

The next meeting was with a nest of venture capitalists further down the valley, on Sand Dollar Road, where there had been nearly seventy of the firms the last time I’d been down that way.  Now, the word was that there were only five. All the others had either gone broke or divvied up their remaining cash and run for the hills.

The woman who looked up at me from the reception desk was a time-sharpened version of someone I’d known ten years earlier. She was then a full-bodied, young Latina, with a drive that could take her through brick walls, glass ceilings or anything else that stood in her way. She roared through one company and on into a job as marketing manager for its main competitor within six months. The last I’d heard; a few companies down the line for both of us, she was VP marketing for a startup in San Jose.

The Annamaria who stood up to greet me  at the venture capitalists’ office was ultra-thin, wearing a translucent blouse that advertised her now-small breasts, looking good and sharp, but at the same time appearing as if someone had stuck a straw in her and sucked out all the fat and most of the energy. Across her once-animated face was a wash of dejection and when she looked up and recognized me her expression was compounded by a flush of embarrassment that gave momentary color back to her face and reminded me of how she once looked.

I had to speak. “Annamaria,” I said, “What a nice surprise to see you again.”

“Surprised to see me here, I bet,” she said, flatly. “Before you ask, I’ll tell you. We never got our funding. Old story. You can see it all over the Valley. They didn’t give us the money, but they gave me a job. And you know, you’ve gotta eat.”

She looked carefully at me, as if just noticing that I was really there. “And you?” she asked. “Still raising money?”

“Trying to.”

“Any luck?”

“Well, I’m here.”

“These characters still have some,” she said, indicating the oversized wooden doors behind her. “They got their money right at the end and held onto it, waiting for the bottom.” Her old look of mischief came fleetingly onto her face. “Think we’re there, yet?”

“I hope so.”

“Here’s the deal,” she whispered, conspiratorially, “they’ll chop you to pieces no matter what. It doesn’t mean a thing. And the techie’s an asshole, but what else is new?”

“Any advice?”

“Yeah,” she replied, leaning forward so that I could see that she was braless. “Hire me if you get any money. You know I can do a whole lot more than this.”

She handed me a card. “Call me before you leave. We can have dinner.”

“I will,” I said, not meaning it. I wanted to get home to my wife, not entangled with a she-wolf.

The meeting was mercifully short. Five young venture capitalists sat around the boardroom table and did a careful slice and dice job on our company, laying bare every positive and negative point with a scalpel that gave no quarter. And then they brought in the techie.

“None of this matters,” was his opening line as he heaved his big belly into the room. His face was partly smeared with an ointment that looked like wet dirt. “You’ve got interesting technology with no market. Am I right?”

Of course, he’d hit it dead on. There was no market for any of this shit. In the technology industry we all got so far beyond what anybody needed or wanted that we had to keep inventing reasons for people to buy it. And to do that we had to believe in it, ourselves. Whatever the hell it was. Just like any religion, without the core belief, it was only ritual.

“What you need,” the enormous techie continued, as he wobbled across the room and let his weight fall into a chair that barely bore the burden, “is a strategic partner.” He chuckled. “One with deep pockets.”

A venture capitalist, across the table, leaned deeply on his elbow, rested his cheek in the palm of his hand, and said, levelly, to the techie, “Leonard, do you have any questions for this gentleman about the technology, itself?”

“He’s not the engineer.”

“But he might know something.”

“Not likely.”

There it was. The obnoxious sonofabitch had it right again. The programmers always knew it was all a lot of bullshit. In what the industry had become, half of us built stuff that was of no use or interest except as the solution of an intellectual puzzle, and the other half of us sold what we didn’t even understand. That’s why the techies had such contempt for us. If we managed to peddle one of their creations, we were just hoodwinking someone and if we failed to sell it, well, “I fucking told you so, man!”

The venture capitalist who was leaning on his elbow suddenly thanked Leonard for his participation in the meeting. The techie ignored the hint and tried to pick up his thread of sarcasm with a comment about the style in which our programmers had written the code, but he was cut off quickly by another of them.

“Leonard, we’re finished with the technical portion of this meeting. We’ll call you back if anything in your area arises.”

With a look of annoyance, the huge techie pushed his weight up out of the chair and suspended it, again, over legs that were unsteady under the strain. He turned, as if to say something, then shook his head in a way that indicated that he thought it would be hopeless to make his point because we were clueless.

After Leonard wobbled out of the room and slammed the big oak doors, the meeting only held on for a few more minutes. As I left, the venture capitalists told me that they might be interested in investing, but only if we could first show a significant sale.

Annamaria walked me to the door, holding my arm with a hand that was nearly bony. “Don’t forget dinner,” she said, pressing her nipples against me, and kissing my cheek. Her lips were so dry and cold it felt like I was being kissed by a ghost.

On the road again, and headed inland toward Modesto, with the California hills burned out at the end of the dry summer, I stopped at a hotel that was called something like the American American Hotel. The entire lobby was decorated with flags and the walls were covered with plaques bearing anti-left homily. I just ignored it all and checked in as quickly as I could. It felt like I was heading into the center of something and I needed rest before I got there. Maybe all the flags would help ward off evil.

In the morning, the coffee at the hotel might have been served in flag-motif mugs, but it was still watery and unsatisfying. A desperately blonde waitress in a very low cut stars and stripes blouse brought granola that tasted of insecticide and a glass of water that smelled as if it had been dipped out of a pool. It was such a cheap act, no matter how you cut it, that I gave up and left two hours earlier than was necessary.

It was very quiet in the powerful sports car with the top still up and the radio forgotten. Only the air conditioner whooshed softly, the soft top flapped lightly against its mounting, and occasionally the tires ticked erratically over a crack in the concrete roadway.

An hour or so into the drive the landscape was dominated by a set of hills that were populated by windmills. There were lines and lines of windmills across the golden dry rolling hills, and none of them were turning. These were skeletons left behind by the wave before high tech, when the government was giving out huge grants for alternative energy, and the money poured out in a gusher until someone in power changed course and it suddenly stopped and not long after, so did the windmills.

A few miles after the hills of dead windmills, I pulled the encapsulated silence of the car over to the side of the road for a break. Beside me, the farmland was littered with the plant debris of a recent harvest. Vultures circled the far corner of the field where something must have been killed. It was early in the day, but I was already worn out. It must have been the fault of the sun which was most of the way up in the sky and beating just about straight down on the convertible roof  that I still hadn’t lowered.

I opened the window to get some fresh air before turning off the ignition, but it was still and noon-hot without a breeze for miles except for the scattered wind from the occasional passing car. In their wake, the road made noises that were no more than scratches against the atmosphere. I sat for an hour, barely moving in the heat and isolation. Eventually, I must have fallen asleep.

We gather round the fire pit. There is nothing left to cook and no reason for a fire because it hasn’t rained for months. The ponds are dry, the crops are dying in the fields and the animals of the forest have nothing to feed on. The grain was coarse last year and the bread was bad. This year it’s worse; there is no grain.

Our faces are painted with mud and our women are nearly bare-breasted. The drums beat out the rhythm of the highway and the power flickers on and off. We wait.

We hear a scuffling of feet in the underbrush, some little animal, something alive, something edible. Everyone grows quiet and serious. There is prey. We scatter to hunt it.

When I woke I felt as if I’d been baked into the leather seat. Before my eyes were open, I turned the key. The car shook powerfully and after a few minutes of driving, the air conditioner blew away the heat. As the road unrolled in the renewed silence, all I let myself think about was the upcoming meeting. Angst would have to be postponed.

This one would be different. It was a slogan that had kept me going over the past couple of years, but I could still hang onto it because if I didn’t I would have nowhere else to turn.

The meeting was to be with a company that was focussed around one man. King Ray was a direct marketer who didn’t care whether he was selling a technology-based product or a flute with a built-in compass. He represented what my company most needed; a genuine customer. If I could snag one of those, it might still be possible to get the company off the ground.

Modesto was laid out flat and straight, dry and summer-worn. From the outside the shops looked dusty and uninteresting. One after another, they had dull signs, with nothing much to say on them.

On one corner at the end of town was a white, old-fashioned restaurant with a wooden sign that read, Le Mangerie. I was sure it would be terrible, but the choice seemed to be either that or redneck pizza, so there wasn’t much to lose.

To my surprise, the coffee was an honest French roast that tasted like it does in Paris, and the eggs were steamed and served in a croissant that was crisp and flaky and spun out of perfect dough. From the kitchen, I could hear a man and a woman arguing in French, while the young waitress looked embarrassed and tried to make small talk with me to cover the sound of the loud voices. She looked over my shoulder at the sports car parked beside the restaurant.

“That yours?”

“It’s a rental. I’m just here on business.”

“Where you from?” The voices back in the kitchen became louder.

“Vancouver, now.”

“And before?” There was the sound of breaking dishes and then only laughter from the kitchen.

“Here. Well … down in the valley.”

“Staying long?”

“Leaving today.”

“I’d like to do that. Leave today.”

“Don’t you like it here?”

“It’s not that. You know how it is. Everybody wants to be somewhere else.”

A couple of miles out of town, I reached a white wooden warehouse that stretched over a few acres of land and announced itself with a huge sign that read: King Ray’s -- Products for the New Century.  I parked the convertible in a visitor’s space, did five minutes of breathing exercises, feeling as if they were the last deep breaths I might take for a while, and finally forced myself out of the car and in through the big, red front doors.

The place was chaotic. Phones were ringing, and people were running back and forth.  Twenty feet from the entrance was a reception area staffed by at least a dozen young, very attractive, very busy girls who looked as if they’d just come in from the farm. They were so healthy and wholesome looking, that it was more like entering the 4H headquarters than a business space, except that their jeans were a lot tighter, skirts shorter, and blouses much lower cut.

I filled in the logbook and had a badge pinned on me by a dark-haired woman in her early twenties who wore the name tag Sally clipped to her exposed bra strap. She came out from behind the desk, put her hand in the small of my back, and propelled me along as she said, “Ray will see you in ten minutes, but I don’t want to leave you in the middle of this madness.” Keeping her hand on my back, Sally moved me into a board room, pulled out a seat ,and sliding her hand up to my shoulder, pushed me down into the chair. I felt like a heifer she was herding. Maybe these really were 4H girls.

When she left to get coffee for me, I took the opportunity to look on the product-filled shelves that lined the walls of the boardroom. There were household gadgets, energy saving light bulbs, peculiar looking back supports and radios that could be re-charged by turning a crank. While I was in the midst of surveying the products, there was a fraction of a second in which the shelves rattled as if a big truck had rumbled past.

The door suddenly burst open and in loped a tall fifty-year-old cowboy who looked like he’d just walked off the range into a pile of money. “Ray,” he drawled, “Just call me Ray. Don’t bother with the King part, that’s just for the sign.”

He threw a leg over a chair and sat at the head of the boardroom table. “Let me tell you something before we start,” he said. “I don’t believe in technology. It’s all nonsense. All I want is a product to sell and I have to buy it for a third of what I figure I can sell it for. That means you have to produce it for a sixth of my retail price for you to stay in business. Am I right?”

“Depends on the retail price.”

“I set that, and if you can do it we have a deal.”

The rest of the discussion centered around our product and the markets that might buy it. I kept waiting for the shelves to rattle, again, but it was as if it had never happened. At what was obviously near the end of the meeting, Ray suddenly stopped in mid-sentence, looked at his watch, and stood up quickly. “You’ll have to excuse me for five minutes,” he drawled. “I have a conference call. But, I’ll be back, partner. I’m interested. Did Sally ever bring you anything? I’ll send her in.” He loped across the office and within a minute of his leaving, the dark-haired girl appeared in the doorway.

“Relax,” she smiled. “He’ll be twenty minutes.” She moved into the room and stood beside my chair. “In the meantime, what can I get for you?” She rested her hand, comfortably, on my shoulder. “Coffee? A cold drink? Something to eat? The muffins are all gone, but the cookies are wonderful.”

“He bake them himself?”

She laughed and squeezed my shoulder. “What would you like?”

“Coffee and some of Ray’s cookies.”

“I’ll be back in a minute.

Right after she left, the world began fluttering, and the floor seemed to shake. I thought I must be coming to some cataclysmic insight until a couple of products fell off the shelves and I realized I was trying to internalize an earthquake. Before I could react, it was over and Sally was walking in with a tray of coffee and cookies. She looked very pale and as she put the tray down, it rattled against the table from the shaking of her hands.

“I don’t like this,” she said, with a tremble in her voice. She sat suddenly into a chair, almost collapsing, but with enough remaining grace to hold down her skirt and cross her legs.

“This is my first one of these,” the girl said. She was somewhere in her early twenties, but I could see a wrinkle across her forehead that would deepen quickly if she went through many more earthquakes.

“You know,” she added, “I’ve kinda been waiting for an earthquake ever since I moved here from Oklahoma,  and now that one’s here, I’m just scared.” The room shuddered again, and a large box fell from its shelf and hit the floor with the sound of breaking glass. The wrinkle across Sally’s forehead grew starker and she grabbed for my hand a bit desperately, tightening her grip as the building gave one last wiggle like a dog shaking off water.

“I could never get used to this,” she stammered, digging her nails into my wrist. The room had stopped its motion, but Sally was still trembling as I put my free hand over hers, both to get her to relax her grip and to comfort her.

“Why did you move here?” I asked, trying to distract her.

“No jobs back home and I liked the idea of California.”

“Still like it?”

“Got a ride to somewhere better?”

“Earthquake bother you that much?”

“How come you don’t seem disturbed by it? You’re not from California.”

“No, but I’m in the tech industry and that’ll shake you up a whole lot more than an earthquake.”

“Yeah but there’s a difference,” she said, with a return of life to her voice.

“What’s that?”
               

“You can get out of high tech.”

I wasn’t so sure.

Sunlight streaked through windows that were dusty from the dry California summer, and the building was as still as if there’d been a suspension of time. She kept her grip on my hand as we left the boardroom, in case things started shaking again. We were the last people left in the building and walked through it quickly, not wanting to be caught inside for the next tremor.

Another shockwave hit as we reached the front entrance. I could hear cracking in the hills as the earth tried to tear itself apart. Again, it was brief and at the end nothing seemed out of place, except that I was standing outside of a building in Modesto, California holding the hand of a strange woman in the middle of an earthquake.

Across the way, the rest of King Ray’s employees were gathered in a field, far from anything that might fall on them. Two of the young women I’d seen behind the reception desk were clinging like little children to King Ray’s hands. The others were gathered closely around him, most in physical contact, shoulders touching, hands held and arms around each other.

“We’re on top of it,” King Ray called over to me. “This is our spot. Underneath it’s all igneous rock, solid and safe in earthquakes. He looked up at the sky. “Nothing can fall on us from above either, except rain, and I don’t think we would mind that.” He laughed at himself and then continued.

“Dave. This might be a strange time to tell you, but I think I can sell your product. Call me when you get back to your office and I’ll get you a purchase order."

The ground gave another twist that almost knocked me off my feet. Only Sally’s hand held me up.

“You both better come on over here,” King Ray called out. “Lot safer.”

Sally tugged my hand, but I held back.

“You go ahead,” I said. “You’ll be okay with them. They know what to do.”

“What about you?”

The ground had stopped shaking, and although there were no birds in the air, I knew they’d soon return. A little dust was settling, casting a weird violet-yellow light on everything, but the sun hadn’t changed its course or intensity and I had a sale. I guessed I was all right.

Giving Sally one of her own heifer-style pushes, I said goodbye and headed for the car. This time I remembered to put the top down. If something were going to fall on me from above, I wanted to see it coming.

There were more cracks in the road than there had been on the drive up, but the powerful car took them easily and kept tugging to go faster. With the top down it was noisier, but not unpleasant. The sun was long past its peak and although the air was still hot, between the blasts from the air conditioner and the constant breeze, it was comfortable. Long before I reached the dead windmills, I lost any sense that I was driving. The car was pointed toward the airport, but my thoughts were somewhere else.

Down in the valley, the few remaining small tech firms would soon be ending their day, counting their pocket change and wondering how much longer they could survive. On the other hand, I had actually done it. Made the sale. Saved the company. I could do anything.

The road suddenly began to move as if the world were shifting in its pants to get more comfortable. After this scattered beginning, the earthquake focused itself and began to roll as a giant wave, moving rapidly down the road away from me, even though I was doing around sixty miles an hour. I gunned it until, at eighty-five, I began to gain ground. By the time I hit ninety, I was just about at the top of the wave, and the low-slung car wobbled as it struggled for balance against the forces of nature. The music pounding out of the radio was absolutely in time with the curl. A little more gas, a little less and then up, up, up and there I was, right on it and holding. Time froze. The wind froze. My brain stopped working. I put the car on cruise control, threw my suit jacket overboard, turned on the radio, and stood up sideways in the convertible, one foot on the steering wheel and the other on the seat. The music on the radio was classic Beachboys, and I was heading for the coast.