Your sister. Tell me about her.
Man. She was incredible. She would have grown up to become a beautiful and talented woman. Claudine. I miss her every day. She loved music. Always twisting my arm to sing songs with her. She considered all the heavy thinking in our household sort of comical. She could defuse a deep conversation with a perfectly timed joke. If my family was the Beatles, she would have been Ringo.
And you would have been—
Paul.
Let’s talk about high school.
Sure. I was your typical debate nerd, specializing in Lincoln–Douglas, also did a pretty decent job as a fullback on the football team, elected to student council, founder and president of the Photography Club, never at a loss for a girlfriend. Again, I floated by on charm and all the things I learned through osmosis from my parents. Kept a 4.0 GPA, volunteered at a retirement home teaching senior citizens how to use computers. My high school career was an unmitigated success from start to finish. I was miserable. [Laughs].
And Nick?
He started smoking. Hanging out with the poorer kids, making out in public with these skanky chicks. Spent a lot of time in the vocational-tech departments. Those teachers, the wood-shop, metal-shop guys, sports coaches mostly, they loved him. He did really well in math and science, lousy in Spanish and English. Hated art.
And you guys remained friends?
Strangely enough, yeah. We had a real Goofus and Gallant thing going on. We orbited each other, admired each other as opposites. Nick started smoking pot as a freshman and one night convinced me to try it. We stayed up watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall and talking about philosophy. He told me he looked up to me for how I could get anyone to do anything I wanted them to. I told him I admired him for his genius. But there were whole weeks that went by when we didn’t talk to each other. Just pass in the hallway with not so much as a nod. I still defended him when friends of mine talked shit about him but we started to have a lot less contact than we used to. Then the science fair happened.
The science fair at Bainbridge High was kind of a big deal. Sometime in the late eighties scouts from tech companies started coming over to check out the budding talent. The idea was to identify the innovators really young and give them scholarships. Of course this poisoned the spirit of the thing and after a while everyone was writing unoriginal programs in DOS. It turned into more of a computer fair than a science fair. So junior year, the first year Nick qualified, he shows up with these boxes of crap. Gears and wires and hammered-out panels and screws and stuff. Little pieces of wood and coils of string. It looked like the contents of a junk drawer. I sat there with my display on Puget Sound pollution watching Nick set up his project. He refused to say anything about it. The pieces appeared to fit together in random configurations but Nick worked on it with such a sense of purpose that I had to believe the machine he was building actually did something. Kids and parents wandered around, smirking about the bizarre contraption Nick was building. If Nick heard them he didn’t show it. He was absorbed. After about an hour, his project was built. It was a battered metal cube, about a foot and a half square. He put up a sign that said, “The Machine” and sat behind his table, stone-faced, his black hair hanging in front of his eyes. I was convinced he was putting everyone on. Then the judges stopped by with their clipboards and frowns and asked Nick what the machine did.
Nick took a key from his pocket, like the kind used to wind up an antique toy. He inserted it into a hole in the top of the box and twisted it a few times. We waited. At first nothing happened. By now a crowd had gathered, curious to see what the hell this thing did. Then a panel popped off and landed on the floor. Inside were gears and screws, little pistons, whirling things. The machine shuddered and then appeared to dismantle itself. Screws and rivets shot out in all these directions. People stepped back. Somebody made a crack that it was a bomb. No one could take their eyes off the thing. Within a minute the entire machine was dismantled, lying in pieces all over the table and floor. There was a moment of quiet. Then, one by one, everyone realized this was the end of the show, and started to laugh. Nick didn’t move. Just sat in the same position he’d been sitting in, quiet, while everyone roared. Once the crowd was tired of this they moved on to look at someone’s model of a double helix.
One man lingered. He wore slacks and a black sport coat over a white shirt. Young guy, maybe twenty-five years old. Handsome, short haircut. He slowly bent down and picked up a gear from the floor and turned it over in his hand. He cleared his throat and told Nick he liked his invention. At this, Nick looked up, sort of wary and angry, prepared for a punch line. But there was no punch line. The man handed Nick a business card. The card just had a name and phone number on it. Dirk Bickle. He said he was a scout for an organization that was always on the lookout for innovative young minds, then nodded and said good-bye.
I helped Nick pick up the pieces of his machine. As I was putting the pieces back in their boxes I realized that Nick’s machine hadn’t just fallen apart. It had dismantled itself so thoroughly that every moving part had been detached from every other part. Not a single screw or gear was connected to anything else. When I pointed this out to Nick, he smiled for the first time that afternoon and said, “You figured it out.”
What about this Dirk Bickle character?
Nick stashed the card. They didn’t speak until a year or so later.
You guys weren’t curious about why Dirk expressed interest in the machine?
Sure, I guess we were for a day or so, but other stuff came up, or we got distracted by the day-to-day bullshit of being kids. Nick got busted for smoking pot behind the art building. The principal pulled me aside and basically told me to stop hanging out with him. Said I would sully my reputation by associating with a kid like Nick. I told him that Nick was brilliant and if he couldn’t see that it meant he wasn’t doing that great a job as an education administrator. [Laughs]. That didn’t fly so well.
You mentioned girls. I’m wondering if you could talk about your and Nick’s girlfriends at this time.
So we’re on to sex, okay. I went through quite a few girlfriends. I can’t remember a lot of their names. I know that’s bad. It was typical high school stuff. Leaving notes in lockers, slow dancing, finding remote places to make out. It’s the make-out sessions I remember most. Spending literally an hour with your face pressed up against a girl’s, that warm delta in her jeans. Her hair. They wore it long in those days, my God, I’d live in those ringlets and strands. The girls I was most attracted to weren’t the designated popular girls but the smart ones who should have known better. They wore thick woolly sweaters you could just slide your hand under. Whenever I rode in the car with my dad, he’d try to start conversations by asking what I was thinking, and invariably I was thinking about sex. The way you think about sex before you’ve even had it, the unanswered hormonal question of it.