A Truck Full of Money (11 page)

When Paul was a baby, his parents bought a ramshackle cottage—for $5,200—on Helen Street in the seaside town of Hull, a half hour's drive from Boston. Every June the family packed up and moved there. His mother brought the toaster from Perham Street—no sense in wasting money on two toasters. And his father brought his tools and worked on fixing up their cottage in his usual that's-good-enough spirit. Hull was a town in a pretty setting, but it wasn't fancy like some other towns in the area—like Cohasset, where kids rode around in their daddies' Porsches, Paul and his friends would tell each other. Hull had a yacht club. “But,” Paul would say, “they only drink Budweiser there.” The town had some public housing apartment buildings as well as seaside cottages, and it contained Nantasket Beach, huge and public and thronged with kids and, by the end of summer days, covered with litter. “Trashbasket Beach,” he and his summer friends called it.

Paul and Danny reveled in that town, often in the company of three other boys: “the Hull Five.” Paul and Danny got a pirate flag and painted the gang's name on it, then they broke into the high school and raised the flag on its roof. They found a styrofoam mannequin's head and torso and adorned it with a blouse borrowed from one of their sisters, and a wig and glow-in-the-dark eyes and lipstick. They mounted the figure on a broomstick and carried it around their neighborhood at night, tapping it against second-story windowpanes so that the people who looked out would see a woman floating in the dark.

Driver's licenses opened up a whole new theater of operations. Paul installed a good stereo in one of his cars. In the very early morning hours, he and his buddies would drive the car to Trashbasket Beach, leave it in the best parking spot, then go home to bed. They'd return on their bikes once the crowds began to gather, and Paul would get his speakers out of the trunk, connect them to his car's stereo, set them up on the sidewalk, turn on the music, and wait—it rarely failed—for girls to arrive in their bikinis.

Together, he and Danny created a remote-control system so they could shoot bottle rockets from under the rear end of Danny's Camaro, sometimes at tailgating cars. Meanwhile, Paul began accumulating speeding tickets, often while driving his own secondhand and lovingly restored Camaro on the circuitous route from West Roxbury to Hull. He totaled two cars while in high school, one of them when he ran into a school bus on the Jamaicaway.

Paul, it seems, was capable in his youth of two very different kinds of behavior. In the abstract, this is not strange; teenagers are often contradictory beings. But it is hard to reconcile the images Paul drew of himself, of a boy often lost in ferocious anger, and the boy in a photograph from junior year in high school—thin and tall and gentle-looking, indeed almost feminine.

Serious fighting began for him in fifth grade. This was also around the time when the federal court began its attempt to integrate Boston's public schools—by busing African American children into white working-class sections of the city. West Roxbury could not have been less integrated. In the census, the entire town was listed as 100 percent “white.” Paul found himself in homeroom with a tall and burly black-skinned boy, a new kind of person. The kid's mere presence frightened Paul, and this meant he had to pick a fight with him. Paul fought him to a bloody draw in a school hallway, and they ended up in detention together, where Paul discovered that the guy was funny. They became friends, and through him Paul met one of his cousins, who was herself a cousin of Donna Summer's. Paul didn't get to meet her, but it was exciting to come that close to a famous singer.

By high school his fights had assumed a pattern. A friend and sometimes even a stranger who was small or weak or in some way vulnerable would be getting picked on by a tough kid, and at once Paul would feel hand-shaking fury, as if he were the one being bullied. He would rush to intervene. There was the kid, later jailed for attempted murder, who went after a friend of Paul's on Dent Street, a block over from Perham. He and Paul faced off, pushing each other in the chest, and then Paul put his foot behind the tough kid's foot and shoved him backward, tripping him. Then he jumped on him and started punching. There was the time at the gym when another tough kid, a very big kid, was trying to take a ball away from a friend of his, and Paul got in between them and said, “Hey, fuck off,” and the kid squared himself up, and Paul, thinking
I have one shot,
punched him in the jaw as hard as he could. The kid fell and started crying. “My big brother's gonna beat you up,” he wailed.

“Dude,
you
could beat me up,” said Paul, standing over him. “Why do you need your big brother?”

Paul thought of this as bullying bullies. He was playing the vigilante. But he couldn't account for his most terrible fight. A smartass kid at the bus stop. Paul banged the boy's head on the sidewalk. When sanity returned, Paul got up and backed away. To his relief, the kid got up and ran. For days afterward, the scene kept returning, and Paul would think
I
could have killed him. God, I could have
killed
him.

Two of his brothers knew about some of his fights, but even best friends from high school were astonished when, years later, Paul recounted his days of brawling. One former girlfriend said the news distressed her: “That was not the person I knew. I thought he was the smartest boy in the whole world. I thought he was the
sweetest
boy in the whole world.” She remembered him as confident, even a bit competitive, traits she found attractive. He wasn't content, as she was, to be just a cashier at the local drugstore, he had to be the head cashier. And yet he was kind to everyone under him, especially to her, always making sure at the end of their shift that her drawer contained just the right amount of cash. She was both “shocked” and “dismayed,” she said, when she ran into him years later and he told her that he often went to nightclubs nowadays. When he was her boyfriend, he was shy and serious. His idea of a fun date was to sit in the '68 Camaro that he'd rebuilt and customized, and wait for people to come by and say, “Hey, nice ride.” She said, “He really liked that. I thought it was neat.” But she also liked to dance and sing, and he never wanted to go out on the town, which was one reason they broke up. “I cried in my room all weekend,” she said.

A high school girlfriend who used to go to Mass with Paul remembered his taking her on dates to the Boston Public Library, where he would help her with her homework. He carved their initials in trees and in the snow, and one time he artfully printed them, via his computer, on a huge piece of paper, the first letters of their names drawn with tiny versions of the same letters.

She thought he was the perfect boyfriend, and her mother thought so, too. Unlike Paul's parents, hers came to see him play in the jazz band at the Hatch Shell. One time she told him she wanted a phone in her room, and he said, “I can do that,” and then came to her house and hooked up an extension. She smiled at the memory. “Then we could talk for hours.” She remembered being very impressed when he showed her his video game, and she swore she would always remember his telling her, “I like the way you think.” She called this “the best compliment I ever got in my life.” Decades later, she read Paul's own account of fighting and drug dealing as a teenager—in an interview published in a magazine called
Entrepreneur.
She preferred her version of him. “He was sweet and gentle. I never knew him to fight, smoke pot, or even swear! And over thirty years later, that is how I will always remember him (no matter what he says!).”

Paul was a boy who, feeling shy, made himself gregarious, who always had plenty of friends and was never long without a girlfriend, who loved being on a team and especially in a band, who worried when he sensed anger in the house and wished that he could cure it, who was often in ardent pursuit of “fun” and was devoted to breaking rules and yet was rarely without a job, and was so conscientious that one time, feeling too ill to drive after a night on the town with some buddies, he took a taxi to his post as head Medi-Mart cashier. The taxi cost him more than his entire day's pay, and his father scolded him for the extravagance.

In later years, Paul and all his siblings compared their memories of family life in the presence of a psychologist. Afterward, Paul concluded, “There are seven different versions of our childhood, all of them true.” Some versions were sunny. The one most nearly like Paul's came from his older brother Tim, who remembered weddings that their whole family had attended, all of the English boys and girls sitting silently at a table while members of other families danced and socialized. Tim imagined people whispering, “Look at those English kids.” At seven, Tim had become convinced that theirs was the weirdest family on the block. “You didn't talk about family business outside, or for that matter
within
the family.”

But these were the feelings of one who had fled—Tim set out on his bicycle for California and never returned for good. Paul was still in high school then, and the departures of older siblings were mournful events. He felt the age-old sadness, the feeling that he was being left behind and that the family was crumbling. Paul had just started high school when Ed left for the chess-programming job in Florida.
Why is he doing this?
Paul had thought. Then Tim left, and then his oldest sister, Eileen. Paul had never felt especially close to those three, they were so much older. He began writing to Eileen, however. He sent her detailed instructions about writing to another sister who was going to a local college. He told Eileen to compliment a sister who had joined Weight Watchers: “When you write to us next (
YOU BETTER WRITE
SOON
AND A
LONG
LETTER
) say, ‘Oh my gosh, you look skinny!' ” He closed the letters, “Love always, your little brother Paul.”

In one letter, he described an evening he was spending with their father in the house on Perham Street. “It's 11:45 pm and me & Dad are having a stubborn contest to see who will go upstairs first. He's being absorbed by the stupid box as usual. Its his own new color one he got from BGC for his 40 yrs. We've been sitting here for an hour. As soon as I go upstairs though he will go up and knock on the bathroom door.” A page later Paul added, “Dad keeps half snoring & then yawning. That last snore did it. I quit! You win Dad! I can't take it! I'm going to bed! Arrrrggghhhh!” Not the most flattering portrait of his dad, but this was a Friday night when Paul always had fun things to do, and he had chosen to spend it with his father.

In tenth grade at Boston Latin, Paul had received career counseling and had been told he should become a priest, a therapist, or an actuary. “What's an actuary?” he had wondered. College counseling was offered in eleventh grade, but he had skipped it. He didn't care about college. He was going to become a professional musician.

Twenty-six of his fellow students got into Harvard. Paul graduated near the bottom of his class and didn't apply to Harvard or anywhere else. By the time his mother learned that his SAT scores entitled him to free tuition at the state's schools, all the deadlines had passed except the one at the Boston branch of the University of Massachusetts. She insisted that Paul visit. He enrolled, but only because he learned that the school had a student jazz band. The campus was situated on the seashore, on Columbia Point, facing Dorchester Bay. Its monolithic buildings, only eight years old, didn't live up to the setting. Fellow students called the campus “the prison” and “the fortress.” It was a commuter school, in prestige not far above a community college.

In his first days there, Paul often found himself sitting at the back of classrooms, imagining old classmates surrounded by the grand-looking buildings of Harvard Yard.
And I'm at UMass Boston,
he would think. He thought of his old friend Mike from Hull, now at Boston College, another first-rate school. He'd had the same chances as Mike and the others, and he'd blown them. He was just a screw-up, at a school that looked like it was built for screw-ups.

One day early in the first semester, Paul was sitting gloomily in a social sciences class when the instructor invited the students to debate the morality of the Vietnam War. Within moments, the room came alive for Paul. The man to his right, it turned out, was sitting in a wheelchair because of wounds from Vietnam. The older man in the chair to Paul's left had lost a son to the war. Listening to them felt like a lesson not just about history but also about social class—about his own people, the class of Americans who had done most of the fighting in Vietnam.
My friend Mike is not having this experience,
he thought.
He's with kids in polo shirts over at BC.

A door had opened for Paul. A humble place like UMass Boston had its own virtues, once you really let yourself in. There were many night classes, which meant Paul could work his way through college, as many other students had to do. There was also the jazz band and the chance to learn about other cultures, and not just from books but in person.

One evening, Paul was walking down a windowless, fluorescent-lit hallway in one of the buildings of the fortress when he heard an odd concatenation of sounds—quick, sharp slaps of wood on wood and loud exclamations in an Asian language. He stopped at once, then followed the sounds into the student lounge, where two young men were playing what looked for a moment like chess. But the pieces weren't the standard figurines of chess. They were identical wooden disks differentiated only by Chinese characters painted on their flat round tops. The young men played fast, slapping their pieces down on each other's pieces, then slapping those captured pieces onto the table beside the board with exclamations that seemed to put those noises into words. The whole thing seemed more tactile than chess, athletic as well as cerebral. Paul thought,
I have to learn how to play that.

Paul made friends with the students. Both were Vietnamese, and the game, they told Paul, was called xiangqi—pronounced approximately
shung-chee.
Its origins are obscure. It might be several hundred years old or a thousand, and had long been the most widely played board game in China, which meant it was almost certainly the most widely played game in the world. It was also popular in Vietnam, where one of the young men had earned a sort of living as a xiangqi hustler. The other student was named Trung Dung. One time Paul took him out to lunch in his Camaro, and he had to show Trung how to put on a seatbelt. For his part, Trung taught Paul how to play xiangqi and beat him at it relentlessly over the next several years. Paul stuck with it regardless. He read books about the game. He searched for opponents, carrying his own xiangqi set to places like the Asian student lounge at MIT. He spent much of his scant free time in Chinatown, watching the old men play.

UMass proved to be the place where Paul found his vocation. He had arrived there still believing he would become a musician. He had no other plan. He had been working part-time for his brother Ed's new company, coding music and sound effects into video games. But he thought of programming as a hobby, not as the sort of thing one studied in college, let alone as part of a science. When he saw a listing for a class called “Introduction to Computer Science Using Pascal,” he thought he might as well check it out. It was a lecture course, with about a hundred students in a big windowless room. After a few preliminary classes, the professor started assigning homework, and by then Paul felt in the mood for doing some. In one of the first assignments, Paul had to write a procedure, an algorithm, that would make a computer sort a list of numbers in reverse order. Sorting was a classic problem with myriad applications. It had been solved in many elegant ways over the brief history of computing, but all the members of the class, including the instructor, were supposed to invent their own solutions. At the next session, the instructor unveiled his code, writing it out boldly on the board. Peering from his seat far back in the room, Paul saw that his own algorithm was shorter than the professor's. It would do the job faster, he thought. He was surprised, and he was pleased.
I'm way smarter than this guy,
he thought. And then he thought,
I could do pretty well at this stuff.

One by one Paul's older brothers and sisters moved away from home, but Paul stayed on in the converted garage for all the seven years he studied at the university. He had enough money to rent his own place, and he certainly wasn't lazy. He had spent part of the summer before college as a meter reader for Boston Gas. He loved the job, perhaps too much. On one of his first days, he read eight hundred meters. In union parlance, he did “two books,” and the union boss took him aside and said, “From now on, you'll do one book.” After a while, he was put on “special reads,” which meant he had to find his way inside places where the meters hadn't been read in six months. Sometimes he had to break in. The job had excitements. It was always possible that he would find someone inside with a gun. It was fascinating, too, like a tour of the innards of the city, all sides of it, from townhouses on Beacon Hill furnished in mahogany to restaurant basements in Chinatown and Southie haunted by enormous rats.

He left that job reluctantly. He went on coding part-time for his brother during most of freshman year while also playing in the jazz band. He loved the teamwork, the call and response of playing in a band, and especially the complex task of arranging music, which felt akin to the programming he was doing in his classes, indeed much more like computer programming than math had ever seemed.

He took most of his classes at night, and as many in computer science as he was allowed. During the days, he worked full-time, at a string of programming jobs seven years long. Soon enough he realized that, in spite of first impressions, the computer science faculty at lowly UMass Boston deserved his respect. Some were still in the midst of distinguished careers, and most had practical experience at companies. Unlike many computer science programs, theirs focused not on theory but on the actual engineering of software. Paul's jobs added up to a supplemental course, like clinical rotations in medical school.

It was the 1980s, and computer technologies were still a source of wonder and anxiety to the American public, but they no longer belonged exclusively to specialists in white coats ministering to huge mainframe machines in sealed-off rooms. The invention of the microchip—the innards of a computer etched onto tiny slices of silicon—had made possible a great variety of machines and uses for them. Other devices had all but replaced centralized computer systems like the one Paul had broken into at Boston Latin. There were supercomputers, minicomputers, workstations, and personal computers, and all that machinery required the services of software engineers. During the 1980s, their numbers grew annually by more than 25 percent. Computers were spreading even into the humble corners of American life, into car repair shops and living rooms and grade schools, as well as into labs and government buildings and corporate skyscrapers. The computer had—all of a sudden, it seemed—become America's essential tool, favorite new toy, and universal scapegoat. Everywhere in the land, one now heard the phrase “Sorry, the computer's down.”

To many parents of kids in junior high and elders in business and education, it seemed as if the new technologies had arrived with a human user interface included, with a generation genetically coded to understand how computers worked. In his first programming job, Paul was hired as a temp doing menial chores, but ended up rewriting the company's administrative software. He had wanted to learn what office work was like. After about six months, he quit and signed on at a medical device company, where he wrote a program to control a centrifuge. He also spent a year and a half with a defense contractor, writing software to control a high-speed camera in an air force spy plane and a user manual to go with it; and another year and a half at the minicomputer company Data General, where he performed coding jobs for a team of computer scientists with PhDs.

In 1987, Paul finished that practicum, and he also got his bachelor's degree. He was twenty-four and ready, he felt, for bigger things. His favorite professor at UMass was a computer scientist with a doctorate named Bob Morris. He worked part-time for a large and growing company called Interleaf. It made software for the computerized creation of documents, and it had within its ranks, Paul gathered, a small group of extraordinary programmers. Paul asked Morris if he could join them. Morris said Paul wasn't ready yet. “All right, whatever,” said Paul, and he went to work for one of Interleaf's small competitors. Like the great majority of the fourteen thousand software companies founded in the 1980s, this one was doomed to roughly the same life span as a salmon's, but it lasted long enough for Paul to learn some of the new art behind electronic publishing. Meanwhile, he went on studying at UMass. The PhDs he had met at Data General inspired him. He wanted an advanced degree, too.

By the time he started graduate classes, Paul knew his way around the society of programmers. He felt he was one of them, and yet he sometimes felt like an anthropologist in their midst. He knew coders so unworldly that they needed a mnemonic to guide them at a restaurant table. They'd murmur “BMW” to remind themselves that it was their Bread that lay on the small plate to the left of their Meal, their Water in the glass to the right. He could navigate the wider world better than many programmers, and he felt comfortable among them. He felt that all of them were a bit peculiar: “We're all introverts, we're all nerds, we're all slightly awkward.” And he could more than hold his own technically, which was what really mattered in the society of coders.

At UMass Boston, Computer Science consisted mainly of two rooms, aboveground but subterranean in feeling, a little windowless world of concrete floors and concrete-block walls painted industrial white. There was a lab stuffed with equipment and next door a fairly large room filled with tables and chairs. This was where grad students hung out with computers and each other.

Paul's main friend there was a thin young man with long blond hair named Karl Berry. Paul could usually find him sitting in front of one of the new Sun-3 workstation computers. The machines were named “red,” “blu,” and “grn.” In this society, abbreviation was a useful habit, and naming machines was one of the things that some coders thought of as “a fun event.” Karl struck Paul at first as one of those programmers who had trouble looking other people in the eye, a difficulty that Paul had tried to overcome in himself. Karl had a deep, strong voice, though, and strong opinions. He could be curt and impatient when discussing technical matters, but he struck Paul as very smart and principled and, once you got to know him, downright friendly. Karl was also a very good programmer, one of the two or three best who hung out in that room. Maybe in another setting Paul would have decided to make him a rival, but probably not. Paul never had the feeling that Karl wanted to compete with him. Karl felt more like a colleague, like a fellow member of a band that played the rarefied music of computer code. Karl was the first member of Paul's band, as it turned out, a charter member of his twenty-pluses.