Long Time Gone

Eighteen years ago today I packed the last of my belongings into the back of a Rider truck, tucked the cat into a cubby hole next to the driver's seat, and struck out for California. It was raining that day, the first day in months that it had rained in New York, one of those harbingers that seems hard to understand at the time.

The picture shows the truck as it was when I pulled into the parking lot of my company, the New AmNews, a disk-based magazine of which I was the Editor. The car being towed by the truck belonged to the magazines new Marketing Something-or-other; I picked it up in Cleveland, en route to an Amiga show in Chicago. Funny story about that. Actually, several funny stories, some of which are featured in my never-written book "The Guerneville Express." I suppose I should actually write that book one of those days.

I'll skip over one or two of the funny stories to get to the funny story about the hotel. One of the funny stories, actually. As I mentioned earlier, I was traveling with my cat, a cat I had surreptitiously brought up to my hotel room. As it happened, that weekend featured not only AmiExpo -- a gathering of geeks enamored of the Amiga personal computer -- but also the fifty governors of the various states of these United States. And the President of these United States, one George H. W. Bush, was scheduled to make an appearance.

Naturally, this necessitated the attendance of the Secret Service, as well as every cop in Chicago, and perhaps the FBI and CIA, as well. And bomb-sniffing dogs. Many bomb-sniffing dogs, not a one of which had anything resembling a soft spot for cats. The kind of animal I had, in my room. Surreptitiously.

I don't actually know that any of the dogs hesitated outside my room or pawed at the door. I don't even know if there was any barking involved. I just like to imagine that there was, and tell the story anyway. No, the more interesting part of this story involves our Marketing Person -- I'll call her "Cassandra" -- and her relationship (or lack thereof, as of the date of her hire) with the boss. The same boss who, once having done it with her, wished to do it again. He may, in fact, have been the inspiration for the song "Every Morning" by the group Sugar Ray.

Funny story about my boss. We'll call him "Mr. Asshat" for now. He had a fairly large stomach, one that -- in the words of the person who was forced to turn the magazine over to him -- was just begging to be punched. Cassandra was herself just a tad overweight, but pleasantly so. I had a recurring vision of the two of them attempting to have relations, bodies glistening with sweat, she on top and he on the bottom, but every time I pictured the two of them, she kept sliding off his round belly, landing on the floor with a pronounced thud.

The magazine, by the way, was deeply in debt when I was hired, and soon declared bankruptcy and closed its doors. I found myself stuck in Guerneville (which is primarily a resort town) with no prospects for employment, a car that literally bled brake fluid, and an unhappy cat. I no longer have the cat or the car, but -- eighteen years later -- we still have a president named George Bush. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.