Hard, Soft and Wet

>I’ll have to ask my mom.

And then a few hours later:

>Mom says it’s OK. We live in Long Beach.

‘How far is Long Beach from Marin?’ I ask Nancy, when the worst of the clatter is done.

‘Oh, a ways, about ten hours’ drive,’ she says, disappearing into her room and re-emerging with a brochure.

‘I just remembered. I picked this up at the trade show. The Fifth Annual Digital Hollywood Exhibition. “The Media Market- Place where Deals are Done™.” Thought it might interest you.’

So I flip through the first couple of pages and read:

‘Somewhere between the zirconia-obsessed and the hackers on the Net with electronic credit to burn, there is a mega world of virtual shopping and marketing in the ethernet. Some day there may be more retail dollars to be spent in the virtual marketplace than in the domain of the current retailing mall culture …’

‘It doesn’t even make sense,’ I protest, hurling the thing onto the coffee table, from where Nancy rescues it, saying in a firmer voice than ever she intends:

‘That’s why I thought you’d be interested in going, sweetie. Say, tomorrow?’

SUNDAY

The foyer of the ten-screen multiplex in Culver City, Los Angeles, is already full of teenagers just out of school, waiting for the late afternoon showing of Streetfighter – the Ultimate Battle.

I wander back into the mall, pick up a root beer and an apple pie in McDonald’s and sit myself next to an off-duty security guard with a face full of freckles and hands all knotted up like vine stems. We make awkward small talk for a while. He mentions that Culver City was recently voted the second most desirable neighbourhood inside Los Angeles city limits.

‘It just looks like a hatch of freeways joined by shopping malls to me.’

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ returns the guard, offended. ‘You should see this place for example, first thing in the morning. The folks from the Culver City senior citizens’ mall-walking club come in around ten. Perfect behaviour. It’s clean and quiet till lunchtime and then these mall rats –’ He gestures towards a group of teenagers lounging round McDonald’s drinking Coke. Two tough-eyed girls glower back – ‘begin drifting in and the whole atmosphere of the place …’ He holds his hands up to the heavens, then begins to twist a waxed burger paper into a candle, forcing it inside an empty carton of french fries. ‘I just wish they’d find someplace else to go.’

‘Like where?’ I say, trying to catch his eye. He looks up from his carton crunching and there’s meanness written on his face.

‘I don’t know, Tallahassee for all I care.’

I was seventeen when I first saw Los Angeles. Staying in a borrowed apartment in Venice, I spent my days boogie-boarding and watching TV and playing beach volleyball with Nancy. I thought everyone in California lived that way then. I was naive and I wanted to believe it.

A pay phone outside Footlocker.

‘Is Isaac there?’

‘Uh uh.’

I check my watch and see there is nearly an hour and a half before we’re due to meet. An almost inaudible sigh trickles down the phone line.

‘Are you his father by any chance?’

‘Stepfather, why?’ I explain that I’ve arranged to see Isaac later on.

‘That can’t be. Isaac had his mother drive him up to San Francisco last night on a business matter.’

I hang up. What the hell kind of fourteen-year-old makes last-minute twelve hundred mile round-trips on business?

WEDNESDAY

Isaac mails to say he’s very sorry not to have kept our appointment, but if I’m ever down in the Los Angeles area again …

SATURDAY

Brain machine

Nancy’s COMDEX friend Dave brings his brain machine and an ounce of crystal caffeine around. He says that crystal caff is the drug du jour among programming types, and I suppose he should know, since he is one, all the way from the Dead Kennedys T-shirt to the lightly sprinkled dandruff. After spending Sunday in his company, Nancy told him as sweetly as she could that in spite of the fact that his qualities were manifestly overwhelming, she wasn’t ready for a relationship just now (which is actually a bald-faced lie, albeit a tactful one), but she’d like to be ‘just friends’. I suspect the truth is she doesn’t think Dave is glamorous enough for her. Nancy is always chasing the unattainable at the expense of the possible, whether it be some greaseball zillionaire in a sta-prest suit, the state of permanent perfect happiness, or the latest must-have body-shape.

We set up the brain machine and toss a coin to see who goes first. The machine reprograms your moods by flashing a series of lights into your retina and changing the pathways of your neural impulses. I win the toss. Having selected my chosen mood – exhilaration – from the mood menu, I settle down on the sofa, cover my eyes with the special glasses and flip the on button.

At first nothing happens. Then, a few seconds later, some strange pulsing music starts up, followed by flashes of light which gather into a pattern of green helixes inside my eyelids. For a moment the whole thing feels like a bad trip, but the next I know, Nancy is tugging on my shoulder.

‘Sweetie, it’s time to get up.’

I remove the glasses from my eyes.

‘Did I fall asleep?’

Nancy nods. ‘Twenty-five minutes ago.’

‘That’s pretty amazing for an insomniac.’

‘Except you were supposed to be exhilarated.’

And then Nancy takes her turn, chooses ‘speed learning’, picks up a software manual and is asleep within seconds.

Later, we pipe a little caffeine while Dave tells us the story of his six-toed cat, Arnie, who is a direct descendant of an identical six-toed cat found stowed away on the Mayflower. After that we sit around in benign but awkward silence; then Dave, smiling, makes his excuses and gets up to go. He’s picked up the thought waves passing between me and Nance and feels excluded. Besides, there really is no follow-up to Arnie, the six-toed feline Pilgrim Father, is there?

SUNDAY

Unwelcome thoughts of home crowd round the breakfast table.

Sorting through Nancy’s clippings box I find the following:

1980s see 19,346 US teen murders, 18,365 suicides.

150,000 young Americans on missing persons register

20% teenage unemployment rises to 40% for African Americans

One in four young African American males in prison, on probation, parole

At lunch, an uneasiness sets in, somehow connected to Dave’s visit.

‘Don’t all those gloomy statistics about kids get you down?’

‘Uh huh.’ My friend pushes aside a half-eaten pop tart, takes some ice cream out of the freezer. It occurs to me that Nancy’s clippings are as much a part of Nancy as her fragile insouciance, whereas for me they’re just statistics strings.

‘So why d’you keep them?’

A bottle of olives appears on the table, followed by some Oreo cookies. She tries a spoonful of ice cream, an olive, a bite of pop tart. Looks unsteady.

‘Pandora’s Box.’ A muffled sound as the other half of the pop tart follows an olive. She scrapes some Oreo filling onto her teeth.

‘It’s my only weapon against the bio-clock. Just to concentrate on what a shitty world it is out there for kids.’ I watch her removing an olive stone and inserting a spoonful of ice-cream.

‘Nancy. You’re not …?’

‘Are you insane?’ she looks at me with her eyes in that crepey position. ‘I don’t even know a friendly sperm bank.’

I remind her of Dave.

‘Oh yeah, like the world really needs another programmer geek in diapers.’

‘That’s harsh.’

Nancy pauses to think for a moment.

‘You’re right. And anyway, it’s untrue. The world needs all the programmer geeks in diapers it can get right now.’

Muir Woods has become a weekend routine. At Nancy’s request a Japanese tourist takes a photo of us marking off the start of the digital age on the slice of redwood trunk, at the very edge where the bark begins to flake away. Climbing up onto the plateau, a weight of sadness falls. I look out over the ocean towards Japan, trying to think myself back to the blue of that wide water. Almost before I’m aware of it, salt tears have begun to scratch at my contact lenses.

It dawns on me that I’m not a part of the grand technological experiment that is Northern California right now, nor a part either of those older dreams it has come to symbolize. I don’t belong to the redwoods, to the frozen yoghurt stands or the piney air. I’ve found myself a project here precisely because I am not from here. There is so much about this new digital world that is alien to me, but utterly familiar to Nancy. I am deflated and left behind, made spare by the sheer pace and scale of the change. I feel like a dazzled rabbit caught in headlights, a mere witness to the ballooning din and flux that is digital America, a self-indulgent stand-in. And as I watch Nancy striding across the plateau towards the woods again, I see she’s given me a vivid fragment of her life to take away and make flourish somewhere else. And I’m overcome by the stillness of understanding. What Nancy has known for a while and has patiently waited for me to discover is that the time has come for me to return to England, though that is where I least belong.

II: Home & Away

LONDON, ENGLAND, SATURDAY

Lost in the blizzard of youth culture

Saturday night has begun early in the Trocadero at Piccadilly Circus. Samantha, fourteen, breath as short as a running dog, scrapes back the rope of her hair and turns to say something. Behind her, in the belly of the arcade, a swell of pubescent boys fuels the games machines and fills the room with the jangle of defeat and Samantha’s words are obliterated in the greater noise.

Today I’ll come clean. I’ll confess. I feel lost in the blizzard of youth culture.

Samantha, Samantha, oh please tell me do.

How shall I be young again, as young and hip as you?

We break a path across the floor, unnoticed. Me under cover of her.

‘Chopping through the enemy,’ says Samantha. She is through to round four of the Streetfighter II South of England Turbo Tournament. The only girl. This is what it takes to rise through the ranks, according to Samantha: ‘Guts and loads of practice.’

We remove to a bank of Streetfighter consoles pitched up against the back wall of the arcade. Samantha leans into the central deck, opens her callused baby hands, flips the supple wrists, stretches the finger clumps and lets them fall onto the joystick like a final act of homecoming. She closes her eyes for a moment, entertaining some thought, then smiles.

‘Double-jointed, ambidextrous Streetfighting champion,’ she says of herself, not having won the championship yet, but having ambitions.

And so there I am, loading tokens into a Streetfighter deck, about to lose to some peppery girl almost half my age while she waits nerves akimbo for the call-up.

‘I’ve actually never played Streetfighter,’ I say, suddenly aware of how it feels to be one of those antique judges for whom the Rolling Stones is a description of a chain gang.

‘Yeah, I can tell,’ Samantha replies. ‘But that’s all right.’ She winks at me and pushes her hair back again. ‘I ain’t gonna hammer you straight off. Wouldn’t be sporting, would it?’

Apparently Sam and I inhabit the same real-life world, but you wouldn’t know it.

Outside in the foyer a line of Streetfighter decks has been set up for the competition, alongside a sound system, a string of mikes and an outside broadcast unit. A computerized scoreboard hangs suspended from the escalator. About fifty kids, boys, are lined up along the row of decks, hands on joysticks, arms beating out the moves of the final leg of the third round. Behind a cordon another six hundred teens await their call-up for the fourth round. And behind them, so distant you can’t see their faces, another eight or nine hundred folk watching, tip-toeing to catch glimpses of their sons, brothers, nephews, grandsons, stepsons, whatever.

A boy with pudding-bowl hair detonates from the shadow of the arcade, looks Samantha almost in the eye, mumbles:

‘I got fucking mashed, man, and now I ain’t got no more money.’

‘You see my pockets bulging, man?’ asks Samantha in return, hard, with her hands on her thighs, calluses pressed in.

‘This is my brother. Jez.’ Her eyes fill with mock impatience.

‘Sisterly love,’ grins the brother, hair part-concealing a face crazy with electric messages.

Sam and her brother came specially for the tournament, but Jez got knocked out in the second round by a Chinese boy from an arcade in Oxford Street. She hadn’t seen him since. She says he’s not a good loser, but it’s his own fault. He gets too cocky and doesn’t practise enough.

‘Why don’t you play and I’ll pay.’

‘Oh no, man, you don’t have to do that.’ Samantha’s voice sings high with guilty insincerity.

‘I can’t play anyway,’ I insist. ‘I’d rather watch. It’ll be like training.’

‘Wicked,’ says Jez, moving up to the console. ‘You going down.’ This from Jez, his right palm levitating over the start button, tongue coiled against lower lip in anticipation. ‘Which character?’

‘Ken,’ says Sam.

‘Man, you’re always Ken.’

‘I got the expertise.’ So Sam plays as Ken, the karate beach punk, and Jez plays as Blanka, the mutant Brazilian. Jez toggles the setting to a beach in America. Adrenaline drifts around them like heatwaves off sand. Jez raises his palm, holds the position as if startled into it, brings the force of his hand stamping down on start.

‘You dead man, dead,’ Jez’s voice twisted with the moment.

‘No, you dead, right?’ replies his sister.

A second’s stillness, like a snarl-up in a projection room, and brother and sister bear down on their joysticks with a series of spastic jerks and swings, closing in on the screen, elbows pumping like pistons. Jez flaps his tongue against his chin, then moves back from the console, eyes momentarily drifting across the room, but sightlessly, with a kind of narcoleptic thrill written on his face. Sam stays close in, rocks slightly. Two ghosts competing for the machine.

A boy wanders up from behind, comes to a standstill and fixes his stare on the deck. Jez, sensing his presence, chooses not to acknowledge the boy, maybe doesn’t know him. All over the arcade, pairs of stiffened kids are hanging over a console with an array of onlookers beside, by turns bored and in the thrall of it.

‘Spike it, give it some wellie.’

‘Combo Combo. Block, block, block.’ The boy uses his fists to scrub canals into the seams of his baggies.

‘C’mon, twist it, man,’ says Jez, keyed up and trying to control Blanka with a series of hops and piston movements.

Sam moves Ken in, charges Blanka with a close-range round-house kick. Blanka is in trouble.

‘Head butt him, Blanka,’ squeals the boy, thumping his thigh.

Too late. Sam and Jez slip from the console like drowned hands leaving driftwood.

‘I mashed you, man, first round over.’ Samantha leans back, unlocks her shoulders, breathes deep and smacks her lips in a sly way. Jez has had an idea.

‘Replay,’ he spits, wheeling round, glaring at the boy. ‘That boy fucking put me off. Unfair disadvantage.’

‘You just a bad loser,’ replies his sister.

‘C’mon, man.’ Jez holds his arms close to his chest, eyes grinning at me.

I shrug and smile off the appeal.

‘Replay, no way,’ says Samantha.

Round four opens with the star player, a boy from one of the Chinatown arcades with control-pad buttons for eyes, who has won all fifty of his games. A block of twitchy adrenaline he is, buoyed up with Coke. A couple of dozen nervous kids, Samantha included, scout the electronic running order, in search of their numbers, hoping they’re not pitched against Button-Eyes.

The constant flow of kids from the tournament consoles to the practice machines in the arcade leaves a matt stain from their sneakers across the linoleum. Sam’s number, 437, appears on the electronic call sheet.

‘You been to America?’ Jez has followed me out into the foyer.

I narrow my eyes to slits and nod.

‘Yeah, but I never met Michael Jordan, or Michelle Pfeiffer or Pam Anderson or Mickey Mouse or anybody anyone’s ever heard of.’ The words burn up in the acrid atmosphere of my remembrance. Whenever America is mentioned I feel sour and fondly protective, like a child forced to lend out a treasured possession.

‘Did you get a go on the Sony Playstation?’ Jez has not noticed my sullen mood. ‘They got them all over America.’

‘They’ve got everything in America.’ Jez ignores me, lost in some internal reverie.

‘I’m getting the import version’, he says. ‘The official English version’s bound to be slow speeds.’ Then, in a righteous gush of consumer patriotism, ‘It’s sick how they rip the English off with slow speeds.’

A queue gathers around one of the Streetfighter decks, and the boy in the baggies is there, egging on a teen combatant. It’s pretty quiet now. A party of Arabs sits in a row at the camel-racing booth. Next to them their bodyguards. Shift changes at the token counter. Brazilian hands over to Brazilian, smiles at the bouncer, heads for the black matt door in the black matt wall marked ‘Staff Only’ in black gloss paint. There is no sign of Samantha.

Jez is moving around in the small knot of people standing by the entrance to the arcade. Looking about for his sister, maybe. Seeing me instead, he flashes a wide, young smile and makes his way over.

‘You seen Sam?’

‘Nah, she’ll be all right,’ replies the brother.

Seven p.m. The smell of baking rises from the food court downstairs. Six hours after it began, Button-Eyes is declared Supreme Champion of the South of England Streetfighter Turbo Tournament, first prize a full arcade version of Streetfighter II Turbo. A DJ in Kiss FM uniform jogs onto the makeshift prize-giving podium, raises his mike, waits for the on-air cue from the sidelines. Tips the words out:

‘A totally wicked contest, man, completely MEN-TAL …’

‘Congratulations.’ The DJ pulls Button-Eyes towards the mike, peers down at a piece of paper. ‘Whasyername.’ He smiles and gives the boy a comedy punch.

It is seven thirty and the Streetfighter tournament consoles are open for the free use of whoever remains. Six and a half hours after the first closed their palms round their joysticks, a row of arms begins to beat in front of the screens, like fleshy pistons.

‘C’mon, I’ll buy you a McDonald’s,’ I say.

‘OK,’ says Jez. He wouldn’t mind that at all. Hasn’t eaten since breakfast.

We elbow our way out of the arcade, past a floor of scaffolding with a sign announcing the opening of a new Battletech Centre, head down into Coventry Street. Jez opens the door into McD’s, immediately peels off to one side.

‘I’ll have a happy meal, £2.98.’ He wanders off to find a table in the family section. Not on the top floor where the youth go. Not with me in tow.

We sit and eat in silence for a while.

‘Did you know,’ I say at last, ‘that this part of London is known as the Meat-Rack?’

‘Nah,’ replies Jez, nodding at the mess of waxed paper and mayonnaise on the table in front of me, his face flushed with that smile. ‘Mind if I finish your fries?’

ONE THURSDAY

A lover’s eyes

England hasn’t changed much. The Common might be a little greener than I left it. The butcher’s shop has closed down, Blockbuster Video gone up in its place. There are a few nominal additions to the graffiti on the walls outside my flat. As from Tuesday next the tube train drivers will be on strike. A bomb has exploded in Earls Court, no one hurt. Otherwise England is as England always was, an isolated little piece of island washed up on its own dank shore.

I have changed, though. At least, America has changed me. I’ve bought an Apple Mac with the remainder of my savings, and it’s beautiful. A mysterious grey sarcophagus with magic innards. I’ve also got a modem and a subscription to the WELL. England and England’s concerns matter less. I can now be in the same place as my fantasies. America. A few clicks of the keyboard, a tumble of lights, an instant’s wait, and the new frontier comes rushing in toward me.

No one here appears interested in my impending conquest of the digital frontier. After some dark muttering about anoraks and computers the subject is waved away. Meanwhile, my life is becoming very altered. Friends are beginning not to bother to call, knowing that I’ll either be online, or be wanting to talk about being online. They think I’m vacant, pretty vac-ant. But I don’t care.

Also, I’ve met someone. Not face to face, but as good as. It began a few days ago in an idle moment. This is how it happened. I posted a short provocation on the WELL – a small uncommitted riff about the media being our chief source of shared values, and he, this someone I’m talking about, replied with a long treatise, the gist of which was that the situation wasn’t so bad because it at least implied that there was a shared set of values. And so it went on. We e-mailed back and forth exchanging our armchair philosophies and cod theories. A strange textual flirtation started up but the stranger thing is, I don’t know anything about him, except that his handle is Macadamia. He’s my souvenir of San Francisco, my memento. And yet, it’s as though I’ve taken the first step in a series of irrevocable steps towards another life, as you do the moment you first meet a lover’s eyes.

Last night, I e-mailed Nancy.

>I’m very taken with a nut, I said.

And she e-mailed back

>It’s a newbie phase, sweetie. Bob was just the same.

I found a small part of myself hating her for that, but I woke up this morning with the usual pangs, missing America and wishing we were walking through Muir Woods together.

Observation: Why is it that technology designed to be used by women is white, while technology designed to be used by men is black? The washing machine vs the VCR. The tumble dryer vs the remote control. Computers, on the other hand, are grey, which must be one of the reasons they’re so intriguing.

SATURDAY

I appear to have given up on the real world. At least, I am spending less and less time in it and as a result I find that it has transformed into a drab waystation for the satisfaction of what Mac calls ‘meat needs’. Food, a bed, a shower.

The most valued part of my day begins around six in the evening, which is morning in California, of course. And also, conveniently enough, when telephone charges fall. It ends at dawn. In between Mac and I compose our e-mail, argue through the finer points of this and that, draw our secret conclusions. We don’t talk about our lives, what we eat for breakfast. We don’t have lives as such to talk about right now, we only have survival tactics: sleep, drink, eat, shit. We don’t go in for revelation. We’re already far too intimate. We chew over the things that matter. The issues.

For example, is the real world binary or analogue? According to Mac, the binary world of 1s and 0s that the computer understands isn’t necessarily a description of real reality because real reality deals more in degrees of grey than in black and white. But then light grey is not-dark grey just as much as black is not-white. Which makes it binary. We considered this conundrum at our respective screens six thousand miles apart and came to the conclusion that we’d got ourselves into a loop. So I called it a day, which it was actually becoming, and fell asleep with sunlight beginning to warm my eyelids.