After the Northridge earthquake which pretty much destroyed the office, Activision moved next door to the World Savings monolith on the corner of Wilshire and San Vicente. Parking extended several floors underground. The gigantic beams that held up the skyscraper defined two-car-deep niches in the concrete walls -- if you parked in front of someone else, you left your keys with the attendant so they could move your car to let the other person out. If you stayed late, you'd go collect your keys in the evening. If you parked back against the wall, you kept them. I'd usually go a floor or two deeper than necessary so I could just hang on to my keys, because I always stayed late and didn't want to fiddle with retrieving them.
You had to sign in and out after hours. There was 24-hour security you had to pass before you got to the elevators that would take you down to parking. One fine Tuesday night / Wednesday morning about 1:30 AM, I left work to go home. My car was on the 6th level underground. I signed out and took the elevator down.
I can't rationally explain what I did next beyond saying it was for fun. I like navigating in the dark. You could hit a switch that would give you five minutes of light (or something) but I knew where my car was -- second niche over, all the way at the back -- and for some idiot reason I didn't turn on the lights, but ambled off into the darkness, keeping one hand on the wall.
It was dark. Dark as a cave. Dark as the black basalt columns of Hell. Far too dark to see your hand in front of your face. Dark dark dark dark dark. I realized this was probably a really dumb idea.
And then, in the Stygian blackness of the sixth underground parking level of this deserted building at one thirty Wednesday morning on Tuesday night
somebody laughed
and somebody else
shusshed them
and then there was some snickering
and I used the button on my keychain to trip my car alarm -- the car's lights and siren went off so I knew exactly where it was, and I jumped in and hauled ass out of there, hair on my neck standing up the whole way out. Didn't see another car, person, or anything else in that deserted garage.
In retrospect? Probably a couple of security guards down there getting high or something and laughing at the idiot bumbling around in the dark. At the time, a very, very, creepy experience. I always turned the dang lights on, after that.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Trench Warfare in the Interactive Multimedia Revolution, Part One
THE STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SAGA OF MECHWARRIOR 2
PART ONE: A NEW HOPE
PART ONE: A NEW HOPE
I posted a version of this on PoE-N, back in the day, but all threads pre-1/1/2007 were purged, including this tale. I may go back and do a "Part Zero" to provide a little more exposition, but this is basically how it began. It gets weird beyond belief before it's all done.
In 1991, post-Gulf War 1, the aerospace industry crashed and 40,000 engineers were out of work in Los Angeles alone. The flight simulator company where I'd worked for seven years laid off the engineering staff in January 1992 (right after the holidays THANK YOU sorry credit card companies) and I was left unemployed with a brutal mortgage. Months passed. Girlfriend left me for some asshole, behind on the house payments, unable to find work, broke as hell, general gloom. Forward to late July.
I got a gig playing saxophone on a cruise ship and went to LAX to pick up my ticket to Miami. Cruise ship gigs can be wildly profitable if you don't blow it all in port; you can come home with forty grand pretty easily. It was something a lot of my musician friends had done, and the general consensus was that everyone should try it -- once. This was a Thursday; I was supposed to fly to Miami the next Monday. I bought a copy of the LA Times to kill time before the ticket counter opened and was perusing the classifieds when an ad caught my eye.
Activision had somehow materialized in Los Angeles and was looking for programmers. I hit the pay phone, interviewed the next day, got the job, cancelled the cruise ship gig, and started work the next Monday. I believe it was the day after my thirty-first birthday.
I was the only full-time programmer on staff. The Bay Area version of the company had folded, and the rights to the name were bought by Bobby Kotick. (When I name names here, it's only when they're a matter of public record anyway.) Six employees out of the original staff of hundreds (most of whom had been laid off long before) were brought down from NoCal to form the new company. Bobby had an operation called "The Disc Company" (TDC) which was basically a duplication, packaging, and shipping operation for software. TDC and Activision people worked in the same room. There were about 35 employees total when I joined, five of them named "Eric" if you can believe that, so when someone called out "Eric!" a bunch of heads would pop up out of cubicles.
One thing that helped me get the job was a fractal landscape generator I'd written, called (ta-da) Planet E. (I named a blog after it, once.) I'd brewed up the fractal generator starting in about 1989 or 1990, but I had nothing better to do while out of work in the spring of '92 and wrote a 3D (actually 2.5D) grayscale renderer for it. It could animate in a limited fashion, and I could record the animations as .FLI files, a format native to Autodesk Animator (at which I was an expert) similar to todays animated .GIF. I also owned one-third of a licensed copy of 3D Studio Version 1 that some friends and I had gone in on as part of a side project we did outside work. I could drive it pretty well, and that turned out to be a good thing down the road.
It had been my ambition for a long time to write a computer game. I'd been doing flight simulators so I knew 3D, and for a while on the side I ran a big pirate software BBS (anyone remember The Central Scrutinizer?). One of the games that got uploaded was MechWarrior, which I played and loved. It was done by Dynamix (Red Baron, the Aces series, Tribes), later bought by Sierra and since run into the ground. I remember looking at MW and thinking "is there anything at all going on here that I don't know how to do?" After a little reflection, I decided the answer was "yes;" I'd never programmed sound other than MIDI, never programmed a joystick, and I'd only used hardware accelerators for 3D since my days in the early '80s working on military sims. I didn't have a clear idea of how to fill a triangle quickly.
It was an amazing feeling to have wanted nothing more than to be a game programmer for so long, then come to work at Activision doing just that. This was 1992; colleges had no game programming curriculums, there were no game development schools. There were not a lot of people doing it. During the interview, I was asked more than once if I'd ever wanted to do games -- I guess they expected applicants would be just looking for any kind of programming job. When I answered "Yes!" the reaction was always something like a mildly surprised "hmmm -- make sure you tell that to (the next person you talk to)."
My cubicle was right across from the "office supply" cubicle. Among other things, they had samples of software to send out to reviewers or whatever. I liberated what was probably the last new copy of MechWarrior in existence. I still have the disks and the poster.
My job was doing the Windows versions of a couple of children's games. Activision had a thing they called MADE (Mediagenic Adventure Development Environment) which was pretty interesting. It was a game engine written in C, which ran a LISP interpreter with multimedia extensions. Both games I worked on had exactly the same executable, just different data and scripts. Of course, in those days, Windows graphics sucked big hairy donkey balls and the MSDOS version ran basically ten times as fast -- if I ever meet the guy who invented the Win 3 palette manager he's going enjoy buckshot castration -- but it was a fast education and I worked like ten bastards. One day I realized I'd been there a month and hadn't written a single floating-point instruction. The flight sims were tens of thousands of lines of nothing but float.
Activision was really looking for someone to write the LISP scripts, but aside from one class years before in college, I hadn't dealt with it much and was by no means an expert. They hired me anyway for general programming duties, and brought a LISP programmer on board a week or two later. His name was Joseph Chow, and he was a really nice guy. I ran into him at E3 in maybe '95, but that's the last I've seen him. If anyone knows his whereabouts, please clue me in.
My projects were produced by Eddie Dombrower (Earl Weaver Baseball) and led by Bill Volk (Mac Challenger, among others). Eddie was producing Return To Zork at the time -- a lot of people remember some of the sound bites ("Want some rye? 'Course ya do!") but to have been in the office all day long while things like that played over and over as people worked on the game was like fingernails on the proverbial chalkboard. Eddie recently (3/09) released a version of Earl Weaver for the iPhone / iPod Touch called EWB Baseball. I have a huge amount of respect for these two gentleman, and consider the time I worked for them one of the high points of my career, and certainly one of the fastest learning experiences of my life. Bill kept me just thiiiis far above my head the whole time, and it was a choice between sinking, or swimming like a bastard. I swam, and it was worth it many times over.
I routinely worked fourteen or sixteen hour days. Part of it was that I couldn't stand to go home, because my mortgage was in serious trouble and it broke my heart a little every time I went there. Part of it was that I was terribly lonely after breaking up with my girlfriend and I had nothing to go home to. Part of it was that if I finished the projects on time, I'd get a fat bonus that would go a long way towards paying off the arrears -- and part of it was I loved the work and was having a hell of a lot of fun. I settled into a "ten in the morning until two in the morning" routine, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. Once I just slept through my alarm, and woke up as the sun was going down about six o' clock in the evening with that two-second rush of utter panic you get at times like those. I frantically called Bill, and he just laughed, saying he figured that's what had happened.
Unlike nearly everyone else in the games industry at the time, I had years of realtime 3D experience. The projects I worked on didn't use it, of course, and nothing else was going on that was 3D, either, but I made sure to drop enough casual hints that everybody knew I was "the 3D guy." I figured when something in 3D came down the pipe, I could slide right in. I knew that 3D was going to be the dominant force in games in the years to come, but sometimes I thought I was the only one that felt that way. Activision's theme song at the time was "Full Motion Video! Full Motion Video!" I never saw the point of FMV beyond cutscenes or the occasional accent in a game, but the company (and most of the few other game companies) were convinced that people mainly wanted to watch television on their computer, with the occasional button press.
The first day I was there, I made friends with the head tester (one of the few that had come down from NoCal) and the soundman. Talking with the sound guy at lunch, I asked what games were in the pipe for development. He mentioned "oh, MechWarrior 2".
I decided right then that that thing was mine.
Friday, January 9, 2009
The Steering Wheel of Karma
Like pretty much everyone, I've encountered the occasional spot of road-rage in my years driving a car. This one takes the cake. It's notable because:
A late-model brown Corvette squealed around a corner and got behind me. Right behind me. As in, he was so close I couldn't see the hood of his car in my mirror; he couldn't have been more than six inches from my bumper. The Santa Monica cops are somewhat intolerant of speeding, which I was already doing (it was a 25 zone) and I wasn't about to go 40 to please this nut. I waved for him to pass me and pulled to the right a little. He just sat there, practically on top of me.
Suddenly, he veered to the left and pulled alongside. He sat there, without passing, for a few seconds. I realized I had some kind of dangerous lunatic on my hands, so I was ready for him when he slammed on the brakes and wrenched his wheel to the right, trying to ram me. I hit the skids and fries went everywhere. He locked his tires, and at low speeds a Miata stops faster than a 'vette anyway, so he missed me, just barely. We were sitting still in the middle of the road, with him diagonally in front of me while I frantically looked for a weapon (I had nothing suitable in the cockpit, unfortunately). Then there was a huge SCREEEECH as he floored the 'vette into a long skittering arc that ended with a BANG when he wrapped it around the nearest light pole. The car was totaled.
I wanted to jump out, run back to the trunk, get the lug wrench and demonstrate my deepest sympathies but I came to my senses and realized the cops would be there soon and my burgers were getting cold. So I drove away slowly. The dude was staring at me out of his window with a dazed, dumb look on his face and blood streaming down his forehead. I tooted the horn twice -- beep beep! -- and gave him a cheery wave as I passed on my way back home.
He surpassed mere drunkenness; he had to be blasted on coke or PCP or something. At any rate, the wheel of karma came up with his name on top. No doubt.
- I did absolutely nothing to provoke it. Nothing. The guy showed up on my bumper and thirty seconds later tried to wreck me.
- Justice was served.
A late-model brown Corvette squealed around a corner and got behind me. Right behind me. As in, he was so close I couldn't see the hood of his car in my mirror; he couldn't have been more than six inches from my bumper. The Santa Monica cops are somewhat intolerant of speeding, which I was already doing (it was a 25 zone) and I wasn't about to go 40 to please this nut. I waved for him to pass me and pulled to the right a little. He just sat there, practically on top of me.
Suddenly, he veered to the left and pulled alongside. He sat there, without passing, for a few seconds. I realized I had some kind of dangerous lunatic on my hands, so I was ready for him when he slammed on the brakes and wrenched his wheel to the right, trying to ram me. I hit the skids and fries went everywhere. He locked his tires, and at low speeds a Miata stops faster than a 'vette anyway, so he missed me, just barely. We were sitting still in the middle of the road, with him diagonally in front of me while I frantically looked for a weapon (I had nothing suitable in the cockpit, unfortunately). Then there was a huge SCREEEECH as he floored the 'vette into a long skittering arc that ended with a BANG when he wrapped it around the nearest light pole. The car was totaled.
I wanted to jump out, run back to the trunk, get the lug wrench and demonstrate my deepest sympathies but I came to my senses and realized the cops would be there soon and my burgers were getting cold. So I drove away slowly. The dude was staring at me out of his window with a dazed, dumb look on his face and blood streaming down his forehead. I tooted the horn twice -- beep beep! -- and gave him a cheery wave as I passed on my way back home.
He surpassed mere drunkenness; he had to be blasted on coke or PCP or something. At any rate, the wheel of karma came up with his name on top. No doubt.
Friday, December 19, 2008
The Rubber Lizard Incident
Some years before 9/11, when life was simple and you could board a plane with your shoes on, I had my worst run-in with airport security. I've read a lot of post-2001 horror stories, but few of them approach the magnitude of what happened to me on a rainy night in 1995 Los Angeles. I wasn't even trying to get on a plane.
Rewind about 16 years: in 1979, I was a freshman in college; the basketball team went to Anaheim, California, for the PCAA tournament, and the band went along. We of course went to Disneyland for a day. While I was there, I bought this absolutely gorgeous rubber lizard, which I still have. It's maybe 18 inches long, has glass eyes, and a charming yet realistic paint job. It looks enough like the real thing to have provoked screams a few times when covertly left on someone's chair. I went back the next year intending to buy several of them, but the quality had sadly declined. Clyde, my lizard, was the last of a breed. He now bears a long strip of velcro on his underside, and has spent some years adhering to the walls of my cubicle at various jobs.
In the spring of '95, I was working at The Film Company That Knows All About Interactive Entertainment (Just Ask Us) and violating Rule #4 of The Code Of The North, which is "you don't shit where you eat." Which is to say, I was dating a young lady who also worked there. This was kept a dark, dark secret from all colleagues except my roommate, who worked there too. I'll call her Ivy (not her real name).
Before coming to L.A., Ivy had lived in Chicago, and on that particular weekend one of her girlfriends was coming to visit. Ivy had something else going on that evening, and couldn't meet the plane. She was talking on the phone with her friend, trying to figure out some way to hook up, when I had an idea about how to score some points and told her I'd meet her friend.
The trick was neither I nor her friend had any idea what the other looked like. The inevitable question came up: "How will she know it's you?" I thought about it for a moment, then my eye lit on Clyde, stuck to the wall of my cube. "Tell her," I said, "that I'll be the one holding the lizard."
Her plane came in at six, as I remember. It was a Friday night in Los Angeles, which means traffic sucked. To top it off, it was raining lightly, which means traffic really sucked. It was only six miles or so down Lincoln from Santa Monica to LAX, which isn't bad except on rainy Friday nights, and I allowed some extra time to get there. Still, it was about time for the plane to land when I finally slammed the two-seater into short-term parking, threw the lizard into my bag, and headed for the concourse.
You of course had to go through security whether you were getting on a plane or not. I breezed through the metal detector and threw my bag onto the x-ray conveyor belt. Headed up to the other end, and waited. The monitors showed the flight as "arrived."
And waited.
And was just starting to wonder why I was waiting so long, when I noticed a crowd of Professional Security Personnel gathered around the x-ray monitor. Oh, my.
One of them, a heavyset sister, called out: "Hey -- you got a pet in deah?" Oh, my.
"No. No, it's a toy! It's rubber! A rubber toy!"
"Ah saw it move!" Situation rapidly deteriorating.
A security type started asking me about what flight I was getting on, and I tried to explain I was just meeting a plane (WHICH WAS ALREADY IN THANK YOU) and not getting on a flight, and he acted like he'd never heard of such a thing. Two huge dudes materialized and stood on either side of my bag, which was now sitting on the conveyor. I was like "Look! Lemme show you! It's just a rubber toy!"
"Sir, just wait here until someone arrives from downstairs."
I'd had enough and lunged between them, unzipped my bag, pulled out the lizard and started waving it at them, wiggling it in a most realistic manner. One of them started to laugh. The other one didn't.
"Sir, you'll have to take that downstairs and check it."
BUT I'M NOT GETTING ON A SILLY AIRPLANE -- I didn't mention that it wasn't radioactive, under pressure, had a blade more than three inches long, flammable, or any of the other things their sign said you couldn't take on a plane because it seemed counterproductive at that point and the ding-dong flight had landed a LONG TIME AGO so I practically threw Clyde at the guy in the kiosk and said "hang on to this!" He looked at me like I was from Mars or something and started to tell me why he wasn't going to, but I told him "just HANG ON TO IT, I'll be right back!" and headed for the gate.
To meet someone I didn't know and had no idea what they looked like, who was looking for someone they didn't know either, holding a rubber lizard, which I wasn't. At least I was moving.
Luckily the gate wasn't far. There was an immense crowd of people streaming off the 747; I looked frantically around the crowd, not knowing what for, but looking frantically seemed like the best option at the time. Then someone said "Repo!" (or rather, she said my real name, but "Repo" will do for purposes of this narrative) -- I had thoughtfully worn my shirt with the logo from The Film Company That Knows All About Interactive Entertainment (Just Ask Us) on the breast, and she'd seen it.
"I thought you were going to be carrying a lizard." Don't ask.
We headed towards the exits, but instead of taking the escalator down to bag claim, I steered her back towards security. She wondered what was going on, but you know, don't ask. We got to the guy at the kiosk and I reclaimed my lizard. When he handed it back to me, I told him, "you know, there's a real problem with these things -- kids play with them, and the cops don't know they're not real, and they shoot the kids." He totally did not get it, but I totally did not care. Down to bag claim and out into the rainy Los Angeles night.
Rewind about 16 years: in 1979, I was a freshman in college; the basketball team went to Anaheim, California, for the PCAA tournament, and the band went along. We of course went to Disneyland for a day. While I was there, I bought this absolutely gorgeous rubber lizard, which I still have. It's maybe 18 inches long, has glass eyes, and a charming yet realistic paint job. It looks enough like the real thing to have provoked screams a few times when covertly left on someone's chair. I went back the next year intending to buy several of them, but the quality had sadly declined. Clyde, my lizard, was the last of a breed. He now bears a long strip of velcro on his underside, and has spent some years adhering to the walls of my cubicle at various jobs.
In the spring of '95, I was working at The Film Company That Knows All About Interactive Entertainment (Just Ask Us) and violating Rule #4 of The Code Of The North, which is "you don't shit where you eat." Which is to say, I was dating a young lady who also worked there. This was kept a dark, dark secret from all colleagues except my roommate, who worked there too. I'll call her Ivy (not her real name).
Before coming to L.A., Ivy had lived in Chicago, and on that particular weekend one of her girlfriends was coming to visit. Ivy had something else going on that evening, and couldn't meet the plane. She was talking on the phone with her friend, trying to figure out some way to hook up, when I had an idea about how to score some points and told her I'd meet her friend.
The trick was neither I nor her friend had any idea what the other looked like. The inevitable question came up: "How will she know it's you?" I thought about it for a moment, then my eye lit on Clyde, stuck to the wall of my cube. "Tell her," I said, "that I'll be the one holding the lizard."
Her plane came in at six, as I remember. It was a Friday night in Los Angeles, which means traffic sucked. To top it off, it was raining lightly, which means traffic really sucked. It was only six miles or so down Lincoln from Santa Monica to LAX, which isn't bad except on rainy Friday nights, and I allowed some extra time to get there. Still, it was about time for the plane to land when I finally slammed the two-seater into short-term parking, threw the lizard into my bag, and headed for the concourse.
You of course had to go through security whether you were getting on a plane or not. I breezed through the metal detector and threw my bag onto the x-ray conveyor belt. Headed up to the other end, and waited. The monitors showed the flight as "arrived."
And waited.
And was just starting to wonder why I was waiting so long, when I noticed a crowd of Professional Security Personnel gathered around the x-ray monitor. Oh, my.
One of them, a heavyset sister, called out: "Hey -- you got a pet in deah?" Oh, my.
"No. No, it's a toy! It's rubber! A rubber toy!"
"Ah saw it move!" Situation rapidly deteriorating.
A security type started asking me about what flight I was getting on, and I tried to explain I was just meeting a plane (WHICH WAS ALREADY IN THANK YOU) and not getting on a flight, and he acted like he'd never heard of such a thing. Two huge dudes materialized and stood on either side of my bag, which was now sitting on the conveyor. I was like "Look! Lemme show you! It's just a rubber toy!"
"Sir, just wait here until someone arrives from downstairs."
I'd had enough and lunged between them, unzipped my bag, pulled out the lizard and started waving it at them, wiggling it in a most realistic manner. One of them started to laugh. The other one didn't.
"Sir, you'll have to take that downstairs and check it."
BUT I'M NOT GETTING ON A SILLY AIRPLANE -- I didn't mention that it wasn't radioactive, under pressure, had a blade more than three inches long, flammable, or any of the other things their sign said you couldn't take on a plane because it seemed counterproductive at that point and the ding-dong flight had landed a LONG TIME AGO so I practically threw Clyde at the guy in the kiosk and said "hang on to this!" He looked at me like I was from Mars or something and started to tell me why he wasn't going to, but I told him "just HANG ON TO IT, I'll be right back!" and headed for the gate.
To meet someone I didn't know and had no idea what they looked like, who was looking for someone they didn't know either, holding a rubber lizard, which I wasn't. At least I was moving.
Luckily the gate wasn't far. There was an immense crowd of people streaming off the 747; I looked frantically around the crowd, not knowing what for, but looking frantically seemed like the best option at the time. Then someone said "Repo!" (or rather, she said my real name, but "Repo" will do for purposes of this narrative) -- I had thoughtfully worn my shirt with the logo from The Film Company That Knows All About Interactive Entertainment (Just Ask Us) on the breast, and she'd seen it.
"I thought you were going to be carrying a lizard." Don't ask.
We headed towards the exits, but instead of taking the escalator down to bag claim, I steered her back towards security. She wondered what was going on, but you know, don't ask. We got to the guy at the kiosk and I reclaimed my lizard. When he handed it back to me, I told him, "you know, there's a real problem with these things -- kids play with them, and the cops don't know they're not real, and they shoot the kids." He totally did not get it, but I totally did not care. Down to bag claim and out into the rainy Los Angeles night.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
1987 - The Worst Thanksgiving
In '87, I'd been married a little over four years. It was pretty rocky. I used to blame myself entirely until time gave me a little perspective on it and I realized just how tweaked Ann was, and how I'd lived with things that no sane person would even believe, let alone put up with. It kind of drove me into myself in a lot of wrong ways -- I still heartily know and acknowledge how badly I screwed things up, but I had plenty of help. One difference between me and her, and I can state this with some confidence, is that she will never admit her own failings to anyone, including herself. But that's not part of the story. All that's important is that we were having a somewhat difficult time.
Ann was real close to her mom, and hated her father. I don't blame her; the dude was a 24-carat asshole. He was an engineer, and made decent money, but there wasn't an appliance or stick of furniture in the place newer than 25 years old; same goes for the carpets, drapes, and everything else. A dishwasher was out of the question. Cars were bought from junkyards and induced to run with a bit of work; the guy was good mechanically, but he'd spend four days trying to get a starter core from one car he'd found wrecked by the side of the road (so the starter was free) to fit inside a housing from another model instead of paying fifteen bucks for a refurbished part (true story). That sort of thing. The basement went unheated in the winter.
Ann and I had a nice little house in Redondo Beach, and we were going to spend Thanksgiving in California rather than make our way back to Utah. I had a bit of a commute home from Santa Monica -- the house's location being chosen because it was close to her job, naturally -- so she got home from work before I did. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving I arrived at home in the evening, and Ann was sitting on the couch, holding the phone and crying a little. She said she wanted to go back to Utah for the holiday if that was OK with me. I told her, sure.
From Rendondo Beach to her folks' place in Bountiful is around 750 miles. In those days of the 55-mph limit (not that anyone paid all that much attention to it through Nevada, but speeds were not what they are now) it was around a 12-hour drive, even in our lovely '85 RX-7. I left work around noon the next day, and we were on the road by two; rolled into her parent's place about 2 AM. Shirley, her mom, was still up for some unaccountable reason. We said hello, unloaded our stuff into Ann's old bedroom in the (unheated) basement, and crashed. Before I dropped off, I could hear her mom pacing the floor above.
We had two Thanksgivings; one in the afternoon at my parent's new house (it was the first time I saw it -- it's pretty cool, I'll post about it sometime) in Brigham City, about forty miles north, then again in the evening with her family. Ann's little brother, a college student, was there with his girlfriend, and one of her older sisters, a surgical nurse at a hospital in Salt Lake, came too with her boyfriend. It was a pretty good day. Ann had one more sister, the oldest, who was married and taught college (she was a nutritionist) in Grand Forks, ND, but she of course wasn't there.
There was a brief power outage a couple of hours after dinner, probably around ten o' clock. I opened the curtains in the kitchen to get a little light in the place so we could find a candle; Ann's dad barked at me because he didn't want the heat escaping through the open curtain. He calmed down when I explained why I'd done it. We got the candle lit and a few minutes later the power came back on. It was pretty typical of him. He never allowed an open curtain in that house because the heat would leak in, in summertime, or leak out, in the winter.
Ann's mom paced the floors again late into the night. (She and her husband had slept in separate bedrooms for years, so he never knew and probably wouldn't have cared if he had.)
We bounced around town Friday. I think we went to a movie. I remember talking to Ann in our car at her sister's condo when we were leaving to go back to her folks' place that night. We were both worried about her mom. Her brother's girlfriend had brought it up with us, too. Her mom was obviously depressed and something had to be done, but nobody had any idea what.
Our plans were to stay in Utah Saturday, maybe drive down to my parents' place for a while, then make the long drive back to Los Angeles on Sunday. I heard her mom pacing the floors again that night before I fell asleep.
We were awakened just after six AM by her dad screaming at us to come upstairs. I pulled on some shorts and a shirt and was right behind Ann on the way up. Her mom had taken a knife and stabbed herself several times, and was unconscious and didn't seem to be breathing. There was a huge pool of blood all over the bed and the floor. I went back to the kitchen, grabbed the phone, and called 911 for the first time in my life. They had me stay on the line until the ambulance got there, which was about thirty seconds later. Ann's dad was trying to do CPR but backed off and let the ambulance crew have at her; the house started to fill up with cops. A neighbor lady who was out walking saw all the excitement and started freaking out when she saw Shirley on the stretcher being taken out to the ambulance.
One of the cops asked me, "did she drink at all?" I told him no, not so far as I knew. About ten seconds later, another cop came out of the bedroom holding an empty vodka bottle. Shows how much I know, I guess.
I called Ann's sister and brother. They both got there while the police were still taking pictures and talking to everybody. Shirley (Ann's mother) had taken nearly all the kitchen knives into her bedroom and hidden them around. All the knives were cheap and old, of course. There was everything from little flimsy serrated paring knives to steak knives to table knives. They were under the bed, under the mattress, in the drawers, under the pillows. There must have been twenty or more. It was a big chef's knife she finally used. She'd slashed her wrists of course, which didn't amount to anything, and made a bunch of other fairly superficial wounds all over before finally opening up a leg artery.
Everyone got together and left for the hospital. There were still a few cops around so I hung out to deal with them. After a while, all of them but one had left, so he and I were the only people in the house. He very tactfully said we should sit down and talk for a second.
He was a really nice guy and knew what everybody was going through. As gently as could be done, he suggested to me that everyone would be coming back from the hospital in an hour or two, things were tough enough as they were -- and nobody should really have to see the mess in the next room. I saw his point, though I hadn't thought about it before then. He left, and I went to the nearby grocery store.
It was a beautiful day in northern Utah. Unseasonably warm, with a gorgeous blue sky. The remaining leaves had turned, and the mountains were a beautiful orange and red. People were buying beer, ice, soda pop, charcoal, barbequeables, all sort of good Saturday things. I picked up a load of paper towels, garbage bags, sponges, cleanser, disinfectant, bleach, and stuff like that. I got to the checkout and the cashier said something like "cleaning up a little today, I see?" Why, yes. Yes, I am.
The amount of blood was insane. She'd lost about three quarts (over half her blood supply -- is quarts right, or am I thinking pints?) but it seemed more like three gallons. It had thoroughly soaked the bedding, the mattress, the carpet, the pad beneath, and into the flooring. It was on the walls. It was everywhere. I just turned off my mind and scrubbed. Stuffed all the sheets, blankets, and pillows into garbage bags and hauled them outside. Hauled the mattress into the backyard and sprayed it off with the hose. Went back in and scrubbed some more.
I found a couple more knives buried under everything. I called the cop (he'd given me his card) and asked if he thought there was any point in me holding them for him. He thought about it and said, yeah, I'll be right over, don't clean up any more until I get there. He showed up right away, took a picture of where they were, and left with them. Back to sponging.
About halfway through, Ann's little brother's girlfriend Penny showed up. She said she knew something was up from the way he'd left her place; she was a nurse, too, and wasn't shocked by the bloody scene. She jumped right in and started sponging up blood with me, bless her heart.
Eventually, some semblance of order was restored. As much as could be.
I called Ann's oldest sister, the one in North Dakota, told her what had happened, and told her to get thyself to Bountiful. She was understandably freaked out. She and her husband were unable to get pregnant, were saving up money to adopt and couldn't afford to fly out. So they drove.
Penny and I went to the hospital and rejoined the family. I took one look at Shirley and had to leave the ICU and sit down on the floor of the hall. A machine was breathing for her, and she was a mass of tubes and bandages. She had a heartbeat -- barely -- and blood pressure -- barely -- but they couldn't get a brainwave. The doctor was optimistic, saying it was probably due to the narcotics they had her on.
When we got back, her dad naturally couldn't stand the thought of all that perfectly good bedding going to waste (not to mention the mattress!) so he brought it all in, washed it carefully, made the bed with the same sheets, and put everything away. I was so angry I had to leave before I said something I'd regret, or just cold-cocked the son of a bitch. Your wife tried to commit suicide on those very sheets, asshole, go wild and buy some new ones.
Obviously, we weren't going to make it back to L.A. the next day.
Shirley hung on for a while; on Sunday, her doctor told us he thought she was probably braindead but they wanted to keep her alive a while longer to be sure.
Ann's sister and her husband made it in from North Dakota on Sunday night about one minute after the hospital called to tell us Shirley had died.
The rest is pretty much standard; what happens after someone dies, happened. I told my parents what happened in person when I went back to their house with Ann's brother-in-law the next night, or maybe the night after. I told my boss over the phone that her mom had had a heart attack -- I still don't know why I did that, I told him the truth when I got back to work the next week.
Ann's dad continued to be an asshole, funeral arrangements were made, Shirley was cremated in accordance with her wishes, and she was buried near where she came from, in the small town of Ephraim, Utah the following Wednesday.
Ann got stranger than she already was in some ways over the next year, although I'm sure she doesn't realize or admit it; we split up 13 months after it happened.
Two years later was what I still look back on as the Best Thanksgiving Ever, so things were still things and life went on. I have no reason to ever be in that part of the world again, but if I ever find myself in Sanpete County, Utah, I fully intend to visit Shirley's grave.
This of course hardly begins to tell the story of what went on in those times. Maybe I'll add to it, but I probably won't.
Ann was real close to her mom, and hated her father. I don't blame her; the dude was a 24-carat asshole. He was an engineer, and made decent money, but there wasn't an appliance or stick of furniture in the place newer than 25 years old; same goes for the carpets, drapes, and everything else. A dishwasher was out of the question. Cars were bought from junkyards and induced to run with a bit of work; the guy was good mechanically, but he'd spend four days trying to get a starter core from one car he'd found wrecked by the side of the road (so the starter was free) to fit inside a housing from another model instead of paying fifteen bucks for a refurbished part (true story). That sort of thing. The basement went unheated in the winter.
Ann and I had a nice little house in Redondo Beach, and we were going to spend Thanksgiving in California rather than make our way back to Utah. I had a bit of a commute home from Santa Monica -- the house's location being chosen because it was close to her job, naturally -- so she got home from work before I did. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving I arrived at home in the evening, and Ann was sitting on the couch, holding the phone and crying a little. She said she wanted to go back to Utah for the holiday if that was OK with me. I told her, sure.
From Rendondo Beach to her folks' place in Bountiful is around 750 miles. In those days of the 55-mph limit (not that anyone paid all that much attention to it through Nevada, but speeds were not what they are now) it was around a 12-hour drive, even in our lovely '85 RX-7. I left work around noon the next day, and we were on the road by two; rolled into her parent's place about 2 AM. Shirley, her mom, was still up for some unaccountable reason. We said hello, unloaded our stuff into Ann's old bedroom in the (unheated) basement, and crashed. Before I dropped off, I could hear her mom pacing the floor above.
We had two Thanksgivings; one in the afternoon at my parent's new house (it was the first time I saw it -- it's pretty cool, I'll post about it sometime) in Brigham City, about forty miles north, then again in the evening with her family. Ann's little brother, a college student, was there with his girlfriend, and one of her older sisters, a surgical nurse at a hospital in Salt Lake, came too with her boyfriend. It was a pretty good day. Ann had one more sister, the oldest, who was married and taught college (she was a nutritionist) in Grand Forks, ND, but she of course wasn't there.
There was a brief power outage a couple of hours after dinner, probably around ten o' clock. I opened the curtains in the kitchen to get a little light in the place so we could find a candle; Ann's dad barked at me because he didn't want the heat escaping through the open curtain. He calmed down when I explained why I'd done it. We got the candle lit and a few minutes later the power came back on. It was pretty typical of him. He never allowed an open curtain in that house because the heat would leak in, in summertime, or leak out, in the winter.
Ann's mom paced the floors again late into the night. (She and her husband had slept in separate bedrooms for years, so he never knew and probably wouldn't have cared if he had.)
We bounced around town Friday. I think we went to a movie. I remember talking to Ann in our car at her sister's condo when we were leaving to go back to her folks' place that night. We were both worried about her mom. Her brother's girlfriend had brought it up with us, too. Her mom was obviously depressed and something had to be done, but nobody had any idea what.
Our plans were to stay in Utah Saturday, maybe drive down to my parents' place for a while, then make the long drive back to Los Angeles on Sunday. I heard her mom pacing the floors again that night before I fell asleep.
We were awakened just after six AM by her dad screaming at us to come upstairs. I pulled on some shorts and a shirt and was right behind Ann on the way up. Her mom had taken a knife and stabbed herself several times, and was unconscious and didn't seem to be breathing. There was a huge pool of blood all over the bed and the floor. I went back to the kitchen, grabbed the phone, and called 911 for the first time in my life. They had me stay on the line until the ambulance got there, which was about thirty seconds later. Ann's dad was trying to do CPR but backed off and let the ambulance crew have at her; the house started to fill up with cops. A neighbor lady who was out walking saw all the excitement and started freaking out when she saw Shirley on the stretcher being taken out to the ambulance.
One of the cops asked me, "did she drink at all?" I told him no, not so far as I knew. About ten seconds later, another cop came out of the bedroom holding an empty vodka bottle. Shows how much I know, I guess.
I called Ann's sister and brother. They both got there while the police were still taking pictures and talking to everybody. Shirley (Ann's mother) had taken nearly all the kitchen knives into her bedroom and hidden them around. All the knives were cheap and old, of course. There was everything from little flimsy serrated paring knives to steak knives to table knives. They were under the bed, under the mattress, in the drawers, under the pillows. There must have been twenty or more. It was a big chef's knife she finally used. She'd slashed her wrists of course, which didn't amount to anything, and made a bunch of other fairly superficial wounds all over before finally opening up a leg artery.
Everyone got together and left for the hospital. There were still a few cops around so I hung out to deal with them. After a while, all of them but one had left, so he and I were the only people in the house. He very tactfully said we should sit down and talk for a second.
He was a really nice guy and knew what everybody was going through. As gently as could be done, he suggested to me that everyone would be coming back from the hospital in an hour or two, things were tough enough as they were -- and nobody should really have to see the mess in the next room. I saw his point, though I hadn't thought about it before then. He left, and I went to the nearby grocery store.
It was a beautiful day in northern Utah. Unseasonably warm, with a gorgeous blue sky. The remaining leaves had turned, and the mountains were a beautiful orange and red. People were buying beer, ice, soda pop, charcoal, barbequeables, all sort of good Saturday things. I picked up a load of paper towels, garbage bags, sponges, cleanser, disinfectant, bleach, and stuff like that. I got to the checkout and the cashier said something like "cleaning up a little today, I see?" Why, yes. Yes, I am.
The amount of blood was insane. She'd lost about three quarts (over half her blood supply -- is quarts right, or am I thinking pints?) but it seemed more like three gallons. It had thoroughly soaked the bedding, the mattress, the carpet, the pad beneath, and into the flooring. It was on the walls. It was everywhere. I just turned off my mind and scrubbed. Stuffed all the sheets, blankets, and pillows into garbage bags and hauled them outside. Hauled the mattress into the backyard and sprayed it off with the hose. Went back in and scrubbed some more.
I found a couple more knives buried under everything. I called the cop (he'd given me his card) and asked if he thought there was any point in me holding them for him. He thought about it and said, yeah, I'll be right over, don't clean up any more until I get there. He showed up right away, took a picture of where they were, and left with them. Back to sponging.
About halfway through, Ann's little brother's girlfriend Penny showed up. She said she knew something was up from the way he'd left her place; she was a nurse, too, and wasn't shocked by the bloody scene. She jumped right in and started sponging up blood with me, bless her heart.
Eventually, some semblance of order was restored. As much as could be.
I called Ann's oldest sister, the one in North Dakota, told her what had happened, and told her to get thyself to Bountiful. She was understandably freaked out. She and her husband were unable to get pregnant, were saving up money to adopt and couldn't afford to fly out. So they drove.
Penny and I went to the hospital and rejoined the family. I took one look at Shirley and had to leave the ICU and sit down on the floor of the hall. A machine was breathing for her, and she was a mass of tubes and bandages. She had a heartbeat -- barely -- and blood pressure -- barely -- but they couldn't get a brainwave. The doctor was optimistic, saying it was probably due to the narcotics they had her on.
When we got back, her dad naturally couldn't stand the thought of all that perfectly good bedding going to waste (not to mention the mattress!) so he brought it all in, washed it carefully, made the bed with the same sheets, and put everything away. I was so angry I had to leave before I said something I'd regret, or just cold-cocked the son of a bitch. Your wife tried to commit suicide on those very sheets, asshole, go wild and buy some new ones.
Obviously, we weren't going to make it back to L.A. the next day.
Shirley hung on for a while; on Sunday, her doctor told us he thought she was probably braindead but they wanted to keep her alive a while longer to be sure.
Ann's sister and her husband made it in from North Dakota on Sunday night about one minute after the hospital called to tell us Shirley had died.
The rest is pretty much standard; what happens after someone dies, happened. I told my parents what happened in person when I went back to their house with Ann's brother-in-law the next night, or maybe the night after. I told my boss over the phone that her mom had had a heart attack -- I still don't know why I did that, I told him the truth when I got back to work the next week.
Ann's dad continued to be an asshole, funeral arrangements were made, Shirley was cremated in accordance with her wishes, and she was buried near where she came from, in the small town of Ephraim, Utah the following Wednesday.
Ann got stranger than she already was in some ways over the next year, although I'm sure she doesn't realize or admit it; we split up 13 months after it happened.
Two years later was what I still look back on as the Best Thanksgiving Ever, so things were still things and life went on. I have no reason to ever be in that part of the world again, but if I ever find myself in Sanpete County, Utah, I fully intend to visit Shirley's grave.
This of course hardly begins to tell the story of what went on in those times. Maybe I'll add to it, but I probably won't.
Three Thanksgivings
More specifically, three immediately-after-Thanksgiving stories will follow Real Soon Now™. The first, 1987, is about The Worst Thanksgiving and will be by far the longest. The second, 1989, is The Best Thanksgiving and is going to be pretty short because there's just not much to it, but it was the most fun. The last, 2005, is The Weirdest Thanksgiving and in a lot of ways it's not over yet. It'll take me a few days to finish, but it's not like anyone is reading any of this anyway.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Captain Picard
A former roomdog of mine went to Cal Arts. One of his friends was Patrick Stewart's son. One of his other friends (and mine too) was a gentleman named Ken, who had an absolutely enormous loft in the warehouse district of downtown Los Angeles. Real bad neighbohood, but I could pull my car straight into the freight elevator and park it in the loft. He had a gigantic slot-car track and a pool table.
Ken had a job answering Patrick Stewart's mail, which mainly consisted of stuffing envelopes with autographed pictures.
At the time, I was violating Rule #4 of The Code Of The North, which is "you don't shit where you eat". That is to say, I had become involved with a young lady where I worked, whom I'll call Ivy. This was kept a deep secret from all colleagues. Except for maybe once; she lived in Venice a few blocks from my producer. He saw me leaving her apartment early one morning, and raised a quizzical eyebrow, but never said anything.
(Aside, and Pro Tip: do not strike up a relationship with someone ten years younger than you. It don't work.)
Ivy had one of those lifesize cardboard standup things of Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard. She used to decorate it with Post-It notes of moustaches, lipstick, necklaces, earrings, and things like that.
Roomdog and I got the brilliant idea of abducting him, getting him signed by Mr. Stewart, and returning him the next day. Ken and his roomdog Skippy came by one night and did the deed.
Unfortunately, the cast of ST:TNG went to London for something or another the next day, so the cutout stayed absent for a long time.
She asked me point-blank if I had taken him, to which I was able to truthfully answer "no", because I hadn't. Ken and Skip did. At the time of his kidnapping, he was adorned with a Post-It Hitler-esque moustache.
After about three weeks, Ivy got really fed up. She asked me if I knew anything about Captain Picard, to which I was forced to answer "yes", and she was furious. She claimed I lied to her the first time, so I pointed out that she'd asked if I'd taken him, which I hadn't, not if I knew anything about it, which I did. She wasn't buying any of it, and told me he'd better be back in one hour or I'd be nooky-starved for the rest of my life.
Forty-five minutes later, in the nick of time, enter Ken and Skip, carrying Captain Picard, signed and dedicated to her by Patrick Stewart with a gold pen. She burst into tears.
I snickered all the way back to her place.
Mr. Stewart called the next day to say hello to roomdog, and I talked to him briefly. Imagine the Jean-Luc Picard voice saying "That bloody moustache made me look like Hitler!"
Ken had a job answering Patrick Stewart's mail, which mainly consisted of stuffing envelopes with autographed pictures.
At the time, I was violating Rule #4 of The Code Of The North, which is "you don't shit where you eat". That is to say, I had become involved with a young lady where I worked, whom I'll call Ivy. This was kept a deep secret from all colleagues. Except for maybe once; she lived in Venice a few blocks from my producer. He saw me leaving her apartment early one morning, and raised a quizzical eyebrow, but never said anything.
(Aside, and Pro Tip: do not strike up a relationship with someone ten years younger than you. It don't work.)
Ivy had one of those lifesize cardboard standup things of Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard. She used to decorate it with Post-It notes of moustaches, lipstick, necklaces, earrings, and things like that.
Roomdog and I got the brilliant idea of abducting him, getting him signed by Mr. Stewart, and returning him the next day. Ken and his roomdog Skippy came by one night and did the deed.
Unfortunately, the cast of ST:TNG went to London for something or another the next day, so the cutout stayed absent for a long time.
She asked me point-blank if I had taken him, to which I was able to truthfully answer "no", because I hadn't. Ken and Skip did. At the time of his kidnapping, he was adorned with a Post-It Hitler-esque moustache.
After about three weeks, Ivy got really fed up. She asked me if I knew anything about Captain Picard, to which I was forced to answer "yes", and she was furious. She claimed I lied to her the first time, so I pointed out that she'd asked if I'd taken him, which I hadn't, not if I knew anything about it, which I did. She wasn't buying any of it, and told me he'd better be back in one hour or I'd be nooky-starved for the rest of my life.
Forty-five minutes later, in the nick of time, enter Ken and Skip, carrying Captain Picard, signed and dedicated to her by Patrick Stewart with a gold pen. She burst into tears.
I snickered all the way back to her place.
Mr. Stewart called the next day to say hello to roomdog, and I talked to him briefly. Imagine the Jean-Luc Picard voice saying "That bloody moustache made me look like Hitler!"
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