Blue Sky Dream (20 page)

There came an evening late in August, a hot evening with a sky still light and grasshoppers chirping madly, when my mother was off at some church function and my father was doing the dinner dishes. I cajoled him into coming outside for a game of Ping-Pong, a game that turned out to be the first I’d ever won against him. It started out with laughs from my father, his cheers for me when my put-aways skittered off the corners of the table or bounced against his chest. By the end, when I beat him with a back-handed slam, my father had withdrawn into one of his sulks. He dropped the paddle on the table and went back into the kitchen where he muttered as he loaded the dishwasher.

I felt badly for my father, responsible for his sulk, and so when my brother took his place at the other end of the Ping-Pong table, I loudly said to him, “You know, if Dad got to practice as much as we do, I never would have won against him.”

My father’s shout came from the kitchen, through the sliding screen door. “The last thing I need, Dave, is for you to
patronize
me!”

He was onto me. He would not, after all, be fooled by my methods of emotional management. He was turning my words against me as evidence of something even worse, proof of bad faith. That panicked me some, angered me, too. “You may
think
I was patronizing you, Dad,” I shouted back, “but I wasn’t!”

I saw him then striding quickly from the kitchen, his face red and hard, one of his arms (the arm of a six-foot, two-inch man who was not skinny) throwing open the sliding screen door as I backed away. I saw his clenched fist before my eyes and then blackness and sparks on the backs of my eyelids as another fist and then another crashed into my cheeks and eyes. I tumbled back and found myself sitting, ridiculously it seemed, on the soft plastic cushion of a chaise lounge. Through hands I’d thrown over my face too late, I watched the back of my father as he
disappeared without a word through the screen door, into the house. I heard my brother whimpering from the hiding spot he’d found beneath the picnic table. I felt my face not hurting so much as pulsating. Except for the whimpering of my brother and the running of my father’s dishwater and the singing of the grasshoppers, all in our backyard was quiet and warm and removed from the world as usual.

I walked then, barefoot and wearing cut-off jeans and a T-shirt, out of our backyard, our cul-de-sac, past Queen of Apostles Church and school, past the softball field by the freeway, through the subdivision of homes that looked just like ours except with second stories, under the overpass where Interstate 280 meets Lawrence Expressway, across the AstroTurf lawn of a corner gas station, down a strip of burger stands and car dealerships to the Futurama bowling lanes. Within miles of our house, the Futurama was the only public space I could think of where a teenager could be with people, yet anonymous and alone late into the night. I sat and watched people bowl for an hour or two and then I went into the bathroom to examine my now-throbbing face. In the mirror were blackened eyes and bloody-rimmed nostrils. I knew my face would only look worse the next day, when the blue sky summer was expected to resume as normal.

When the Futurama closed down at midnight, there was nothing to do but return home, to open the front door my father had left unlocked, to move through the dark house to my bedroom, to ease myself under the sheets. I lay there a few minutes and my father came into my room without turning on the light. He sat on the edge of my bed and whispered an apology. There was “no excuse” for what he had done, he said. I was silent. He whispered a theory about the rivalry that occurs between two males in confined space, a theory I knew he’d drawn from one of his books. I was in no mood to accept his apology, much less to theorize with him. I remained silent as he said again, “But for all that, there’s no excuse for my actions,” and left the room.

The next morning my mother cried, “Oh, no! What did he
do?” when she saw my face. When next they were alone together, she no doubt demanded an explanation of him. I would guess that he told her what he had told me, and that she forgave him having reached an understanding that he would never do it again. My father never did hit me again.

At swim practice I was grateful for the chance to put my head underwater, to be left alone with newly bitter words as I stared at the blurry black line. At the next swim meet, however, the dive off the blocks and the somersault turns forced cold, chlorinated water up my nose, searing the nasal passages my father had crushed with his fists. The sprint to the finish was all fury and when I looked up to get my time, one of the adults holding a stopwatch was my father, reading the numbers off matter-of-factly.

“What happened to you?” my teammates kept asking. I’d tell them I had been playing Ping-Pong, had lunged for a put-away but had run my face into the pole that held up the bamboo roof over our deck. My father once heard me telling this story and he took me aside. He told me never to lie on his behalf. “What I did was wrong. You go ahead and tell anyone you like exactly what I did. Just tell the truth and let me suffer the consequences.” I listened silently, staring away without forgiveness as my father said this in a voice that was tired, even gentle.

SEVEN
 ANOTHER LOCKHEED SON
 

O
n a bright morning in the autumn of 1994, I sat at the big oak table in the dining room my parents had added onto their ranch home some years back. The hour was early and the house was quiet. The day before, the children of my sister, Marybeth, had filled the sunny rooms of the house with their shouts and laughter and the electronic beeps of their toys. Now there was only the sound of the coffeemaker gurgling, my father in his pajamas clearing his throat across the table from me, the pages of the Saturday newspaper rustling as we read and waited for the coffee to be ready.

I was in town to conduct interviews, having long ago made words my livelihood. During my years as a journalist I had freelanced for many publications (once, even,
Vogue
) and I had held a few editing jobs, most recently at
Mother Jones
magazine, a consistent basher of the “military-industrial complex” that employed my father. I had found words with political implications the most interesting ones to write, words that strove for the ring of reason
and fact but which, in the end, always appealed to the murkier aspects of human nature, moral sensibility and fear and faith.

None of my articles had ever required of me the technical precision, the obedience to immutable natural laws, that engineering had demanded of my father. Journalism had asked merely that I know how to arrange certain pliable arguments and evidence in interesting contraposition to others, and that I maintain a sharp interest in some aspect of the world for a matter of weeks or, at the most, months. Journalism had allowed me to live wherever my wife, Deirdre, and I happened to want to live; at the moment, Vancouver, British Columbia. Though there was little financial security in my sort of work, I continued to like it well enough and it often brought me back to the Bay Area where I could visit with my parents for a few days in the house where I had grown up and where there was always a room with a soft bed and a chest of empty drawers awaiting my arrival. The house and the room were still there for me because, all those years, my father had stayed put at Lockheed, had stuck with aerospace engineering, had with my mother paid off the mortgage. He had followed his original life plan, believing it on the whole a sound one.

Anyone who knew no more than these things about the two of us might well have concluded that all my father and I had in common were our balding heads as we bent them over the pages of the newspaper that morning in silence, each of us trying to make a bit more sense of how the world had changed and whether the future was turning out as well as we had been given to expect.

H
ad Lockheed prototyped its ideal engineer, the specs would not have fit my father. He was by his own admission a “crank turner” and not someone given to flashes of design brilliance. He was not a fervent hawk ready to argue that every defense dollar was well spent against Soviet treachery. He was not someone
eager to do whatever Lockheed Missiles and Space Company asked, even when the deadline tied him to his desk on Christmas day, even when the work strained his arteries to the point of bursting.

That perfect Lockheed engineer was someone my father came to know in the mid-1970s, a stocky man with not much neck and a wide face, a genial if reserved fellow named Jerry. He and my father met on a black budget project in the Satellite Systems Division and they got along fine as far as their conversations went. They talked technicalese and they talked about the good bridge hands they’d played of late and that was about it. After months working side by side, my father was not even aware that Jerry had an oldest son, five years older than me, who was named Steve.

My father inferred merely that Jerry led an unremarkable Lockheed life. For the most part, he had. Like my father, Jerry had considered himself fortunate, when done with the Navy, to land a space-age job amidst orchard blossoms. Like my family, Jerry and his wife and three kids lived in a four-bedroom house on a street lined by similar houses. Like me, Jerry’s son, Steve, belonged to a swim team and he grew up playing with other tanned and healthy children of aerospace.

But Steve was a boy unlike me. Nine years old, Steve tore through every Tom Swift book, reading them late into the night by the light of the street lamp spilling through his bedroom window. They were stories about a child engineer who builds robots and submarines and spaceships with his father. Already Steve had built a crystal radio with the kit his father had given him. Already Steve’s father had given him other kits with buzzers and switches and relays and lightbulbs that could be hooked up thousands of ways.

In the fourth grade, Steve’s father helped him create a science project showing which liquids conduct electricity. The next year, when Steve asked his father to explain the makeup of atoms, out came Jerry’s old college textbook with the periodic table showing all the elements known to exist. Son and father decided
to create a blinking shrine to these basic units of everything; they fashioned a display of ninety-two lights that switched on and off in combinations representing the electron orbits for each element. By the sixth grade, Steve had built a Heathkit ham radio and had earned an operator’s license, as had his father. By then, Jerry was teaching Steve Boolean algebra, the zero-one mathematical language of electronics design, and Steve was diagramming logic circuits, having won a science fair competition with an addition and subtraction machine of his own invention. By then, Steve had transformed the street where he lived into a big connected circuit, stringing intercom wires along backyard fences and from light pole to light pole, wires that ended in his friends’ bedrooms attached to microphones and lights and buzzers. Steve was nothing like me, the Lockheed son who was dreamy and not handy. Steve was Mr. Swift’s son.

When dwindling contracts forced Lockheed to lay off legions of engineers as Vietnam wound down, the company looked for a way to keep one of its best. Jerry was given a rare grant to simply follow his instincts. He used computers to design and test integrated circuits so complex that Fairchild Semiconductor, an industry leader, showed interest in a joint venture. Lockheed balked, moving Jerry to a less experimental project, but the grant-funded work was unclassified, and so father told son about all the wonderful engineering he had been able to accomplish with the company’s mainframe. That was the beauty of working for an institution so rich and established as Lockheed, mandated by the United States government to do top electrical engineering. Lockheed employees, if they were good enough, got to work with computers.

In those days, when Steve was a teenager, the son was fond of telling the father that he fully intended to possess a computer of his own, to have one in the next room wherever he might live. The father was fond of laughing and telling the son that a computer would cost him more than a house, so there would be nowhere to put it.

The son turned out to be correct, of course, because the son
was that Steve who, at the age of twenty-four in 1976, invented the Apple computer.

When Jerry Wozniak’s son did that, he did something more. He subverted the belief system of his father’s tribe, a top-down, lock-step vision of how history-changing technology must come into being. Now there would be two technological peoples living side by side in the Valley, each vying to capture America’s imagination with its particular idea of the future. There would be the blue sky tribe of aerospace, and there would be the tribe of Woz, a Lockheed son turned renegade.

T
he mythology of Woz and his miraculous machine has been burnished golden by countless tellings. We know how Woz met the other brilliant Steve in a garage when both were grade schoolers. And how the promotional chutzpa of Steve Jobs was drawn to the engineering genius of Woz. And how a drifting Woz was reinvigorated by kindred spirits at a gathering of computer hobbyists called the Homebrew Club. And how the Homebrew Club, founded by a peace activist who’d done time in jail, was chaired by a radical who put free access computer terminals in storefronts. And how the Homebrew firebrands yearned for a computer that might finally be used not against “the people” but by and for “the people.” And how Woz answered the call with his Apples I and II, the latter creating a brand-new consumer market while catapulting Apple Computer into the Fortune 500 in five years, faster than any company in history.