A couple days later, I'd read the book and could get back to the code. So after we got a few things plugged in upstairs my onboarding co-developer buddy decides the next task is to show me around town. Our eyes need a break from the smashed pixels, and I sure can't look at or listen to any more broken audio code for the time being.
In the lobby of the Embarcadero, SGI had a CAVE set up for demo's.
We spent a couple of minutes lustfully sniffing at it .. expensive hardware we games programmers were convinced we'd have in our own cubicles, some day. "No .. some day, everyone will have a graphics engine like an SGI .. in their pockets", we chortle, not really serious. The demo was cute, a blocky seagull flying through gullies and over gourad-shaded hills and things. Fantastic. Then, as now, I couldn't last more than a few minutes with the headset on until the horizon parallax disorder takes its toll. I look as I type this now, over at my museum shelf full of SGI gear .. an Indy, an O2, an Octane2 .. and I'm typing all this as my already-outdated GPU's scream in the background so I don't have to write a line of code ever again. I miss SGI.
We head down to the wharf to watch late night tourists and see about some food. I'm not really digging the clam chowder, Mr. Onboard finds some fish and chips he'd rather feed to the sea lions.
I note that the little "record your own pop song" booth business that I'd seen teenage girls belting out their hits, some 5 years previously when I'd visited San Fran as a teenager myself at a shinier age .. is now a run-down shanty. Bums everywhere - that was normal for San Francisco of course - but the gloss and shine of the 80's that I'd remembered from my previous visit had all gone, the wind didn't smell like toasty sugar much any more, as it once had. Piss and vinegar, maybe. Maybe the bums were friendlier, then. Cleaner, somehow. The bay wind was still cold as fuck.
We bounce around downtown SF a bit, deciding to walk until we work out something else to do. "Maybe catch a show at a theatre I know", he chuckles to himself. I have no idea what he could mean, it's too late for that now surely, and besides we are miles from any kind of entertainment. Cable cars and tourists and stressed out businessmen. Punks spitting at old people. Seagulls, incongruous, chasing at paper. A cold wind sometimes interrupted by a blast from skyscraper doors, opening and closing like some breathing coral cell, replenishing the neighborhood with warm CO2, heavy in the tubes.
We make it to the theatre Mr. Onboard had been babbling about, and I find out who the Mitchell brothers were and what, finally, was behind the green door. Suddenly that contractor rate didn't seem so great.
Afterwards, we stumble towards his place in a hip spot of town, where I'll crash out on his couch, just across the road from a ghetto slum or two. We'd be safe, he says, if we don't cross the road.
The steep hills hurt my ankles, and I'm getting tired of not knowing where the horizon is. Los Angeles doesn't have that problem, I note. He doesn't care, there's nothing cool happening in LA, all the action is in San Fran. He's kinda right, but I knew some things, even then.
He deals with the ritual of getting into the place - 5 locks, 5 different keys - and we settle in for .. 5 hours of sleep .. before we need to be back at Embarcadero, first thing, for the company standup. I note his apartment, a 3-bedroom place for which he's paying a nearly 5-figure rent, is very clearly occupied by zoo animals.
Pizza and keyboards, half-finished PC's with their guts strewn over the coffee table, trendy programming books and socks everywhere, an SH101 synthesizer leaning on the grubby window, 3 different varieties of Ivy League hoodies, Princeton and two others, and so much other interesting detritus and paraphernalia not relevant to the situation, which is that we are two wired-up coders, desperate for sleep.
I make a big mistake, and half-assedly press the power button on the disembowled PC, just for grins. I only wanted to see if it booted, not expecting it to. He laughs, "okay then.." disappears into his room and I see the sudden grey glow, hear the chime I'd been optimizing buffers and I/O handlers for all day, and off we go, some more pixels to smash, "one more quick round" endlessly until the sun starts to come up through that grubby window. I'll never forget the SH101 silhouette, broken by sunrise, burned into my retina, immutable.
We take a taxi back to the office, sleepless, and my new onboarder friend/colleague loads up a tub of coffee, heads back to his cubicle. "See you at lunch", he says, but when I go to get him at lunch-time, he's fast asleep under his desk, and I don't have the energy to wake him, so I trudge out to find the one subway shop in the Embarcadero, whose jalapeño subs I can also still taste in my mind.
Good times. Halcyon days. We had a tally of 12 submarines and 8 whales, that week.