LaserWriter II Read online

  Acoustiguide wasn’t Current Designs’ only client. Current Designs designed and manufactured pillboxes with alarms, radios that played advertisements on demand, and listening stations that could withstand the grubby hands of New Yorkers. But Acoustiguide was the steady client. The other work ebbed and flowed. Current Designs now had thirty employees, though it still felt like a clubhouse with its own ten-cent Coke machine.

  A contract was signed by Acoustiguide with a factory in China to manufacture their tape players at half the price.

  The steady work ebbed.

  Current Designs started to shrink till it was back in Dick’s loft. The Coke machine was put in his kitchen.

  Steve Jobs was proud of how quiet the Macintosh was. Other PCs whirred and whined, but not the Macintosh. This was because it had no fan.

  David’s Macintosh failed first. The repair shop he called knew what the problem was without even looking at it. As Macs aged, they would all overheat. With no fan to cool the machine, the power supply would burn out. Only two shops in New York could do the repair. Both said it would cost $350.

  Dick, David, and Mike repaired and built audio equipment for a living, why couldn’t they fix a computer? They could. They did. Soon they were replacing power supplies for friends at $135 per.

  Word got out about the $135 power repair, and they began doing the fix for friends of friends. With Acoustiguide out, Lyuben switched from soldering tape players all day to soldering Macintosh power supplies. People would drop their dead computers in Dick’s living room, and pick them up a week later with a one-year warranty.

  Apple gave only a ninety-day warranty, and it took them two or three weeks. Mac Emporium on Madison Avenue hired Current Designs to fix Macintoshes wholesale.

  Current Designs had steady work again, and it started to grow. A musician was hired full-time for his Macintosh enthusiasm, not his audio background.

  Dick and David loved fixing Macs. Mike not so much. It was unanimous—Mike would run Current Designs on his own, taking all the audio repair and design work. Dick and David would keep the Macintosh work and start a new company called Tekserve.

  Claire is hired on the spot.

  The job has perks:

  Macs at cost.

  Free lunch on Wednesdays. Free breakfast Thursdays.

  Full health care that starts right away. “None of this trial crap,” as David put it.

  Claire will be working intake. Intake = triage, but the patients are computers, not humans. Patty, the employee with purple hair, is excited to train Claire in the Tao of intake.

  Away from David, Patty confides to Claire that this is her first time training someone, but she will do her best not to mess up Claire’s future self.

  Patty is 23, with a similar past to Claire except her favorite floppy disk constructed buildings, not pinball machines. The game was Hard Hat Mack. As a little girl, Patty loved to lay I-beams and collect lunch boxes while avoiding 8-bit OSHA safety inspectors.

  They pass a terrarium. Patty points out a lizard to Claire. It is hidden beneath what looks like a bunch of fresh dill on steroids. “That’s Newton. If you have a hard intake—and you will—my advice is to come here and just watch him for a little.”

  “What do you mean by hard?” Claire asks.

  But Patty is gone, lost in the terrarium, watching Newton’s little feet shift over neon decorative gravel toward a tilted circuit board that he shimmies up and mounts. Newton sits still as stone, matched only by Patty’s steady gaze.

  Claire coughs on purpose. Patty looks at her. “What do you mean by hard?” Claire asks.

  “It can be brutal. A customer will react to a bad diagnosis like they were told their mother has cancer. Watching someone crumble like that is hard. And then on the other side of the coin, some customers are just total jerkwads.”

  Patty leads Claire past an invisible line. No chain, wall, or sign blocks the back of Tekserve, but it is clear they have crossed a border. Patty points out the staff kitchen with a big table and an office that belongs to “Thor & Monica.”

  Then Patty introduces Monica, who is all smiles with wide eyes and a ponytail.

  Monica was born in Germany, but grew up in New Jersey. She built a computer with her dad when she was 8, which was the only way you could have a home computer at the time. She learned to program in Pascal and Basic for fun. In her sophomore year of college, Monica interned at the independent record label Beggars Banquet. She was paid in CDs that she would sell to Kim’s records on St. Marks Place for cash—very little cash.

  A bum always sat outside Kim’s with a fishing pole. He was a teenage runaway, though he was no longer teenage.

  The bum’s name was Picasso. He had a shaved head and wore a leather jacket that was like a preschooler’s toy with buckles, snaps, and chains. It would jingle as he climbed on top of a telephone booth or any perch he could find, his cup set on the street below. All day he would sit and fish, a dollar baited on the hook, though it was mostly coins he caught in his cup.

  Picasso lived in a squat on Avenue B called Big Squat. Claire knew this squat well. On Sundays when she was younger, she would volunteer for a chapter of Food Not Bombs that operated out of Big Squat’s kitchen. Food Not Bombs collected food waste from restaurants and groceries. That food was then boiled in a mammoth pot with lentils and way too much cumin for far too long. The pot would be loaded into a shopping cart and wheeled to Tompkins Square Park, where it was emptied by anyone who needed to eat.

  Food Not Bombs and Big Squat were collectively run, nonhierarchical, antiauthoritarian, grassroots, and all that.

  Both collectives seemed to function well. Big Squat’s crazy quilt of a kitchen was clean—at least taking into consideration the communal aspect of it. Food Not Bombs had self-created and self-regulated chapters all over the world that fed thousands of people.

  Claire was drawn to the ideals of these collectives, a.k.a. anarchism. Not the anarchism in Sex Pistols songs that talked about Antichrist and wanting to destroy, not knowing what they want but knowing how to get it—that kind of bullshit. Claire was drawn to the type of anarchy that believed in small communities and held the promise of a just society. Everyone had said, “life is not fair,” but maybe it could be.

  Big Squat was also used for concerts. They had a makeshift stage in the basement. The music was hardcore, punk, sometimes ska or crust, but mostly a band named Hookworm68. This was because all the members of Hookworm68 lived in Big Squat.

  The band had begun as “Hookworm,” but they found out there was already a band named that in Dayton, Ohio. After a two-second meeting the New York Hookworm added “68” to their name, the way one does to a password to make it stronger.

  The “68” was to suggest the French Situationists, not the sex act minus 1.

  Hookworm68’s lead singer was named Herpes. Herpes was obsessed with Guy Debord and the student uprising of May ’68. Half of Hookworm68’s songs were based on French graffiti slogans, and the other half were not very good.

  Everyone had a crush on Herpes—girls, boys, men, women, and in-between. This was despite the fact that he was named Herpes and, to put it in the kindest words, self-destructive.

  Claire had the mildest infatuation possible with Herpes. It manifested itself in two ways. 1: She went to every concert Hookworm68 played. This meant one concert a week and a lot of time in Big Squat’s basement, with its low crumbling ceiling that made everyone crouch like a giant. 2: She stared at Herpes’ tattoos so intensely that when she would doodle mindlessly, the tattoos were what would come out.

  It was at a Hookworm68 concert where Claire met Picasso. He was drinking an orange Tropical Fantasy, the cheapest soda ever to exist, known more commonly as “Sperm Killer.” Picasso offered some to Claire and she asked if he knew the soda’s nickname. After that they would say “Hi,” which was a lot for Claire.

  At one subpar Hookworm68 show, Picasso was drinking something stronger than Sperm Killer.

  He was drunk.
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  Claire was not, Claire was never.

  She was barely 14, and along with anarchism and Hookworm68, Claire was a fan of rebellion through restraint. She didn’t drink or smoke, she said please and excuse me.

  Hookworm68 had just closed their set with Claire’s favorite song: “You Will End Up Dying of Comfort.” Picasso sat down next to her and talked about the little dot on the underside of the tomato that no one ever ate. He was smiley and goofy and sweet and a little dull. It didn’t seem possible that he could be 24 years old. He pulled a permanent marker from his jingle jacket and asked Claire to write on his head. Claire took the marker.

  “Both sides or just one?” Claire asked.

  “Both,” Picasso answered, like that was obvious and implicit in the request.

  Claire thought for a moment and then uncapped the marker with her teeth, which she regretted later.

  “What did you write?” asked Picasso.

  “I wrote ‘Left’ on one side and ‘Right’ on the other,” Claire said—not sure if she had written it on her left or his.

  “I’m glad you didn’t write ‘Empty,’” Picasso said, and then he asked Claire if she wanted to “go out.”

  “You mean to the bodega for chips?” Claire answered. “No, like in a valentine way,” Picasso said.

  It was the first time Claire had ever been asked out on a date. She blushed: face, neck, and scalp. “Um no, no thanks,” she said, and never wrote on Picasso’s head again.

  At Beggars, Monica used a database software called FileMaker Pro. It ran on Macs that were covered in band stickers. When one of Beggars’ Macs broke, Monica was asked to take it to Tekserve.

  She was smitten from the first foot in the door. The intaker noticed and said Tekserve was hiring.

  Monica interviewed with both Dick and David at the same time. When they asked her what she wanted to do at Tekserve, she looked at their desks, covered in papers, and said it looked like they could use some help with that.

  She was given a spot in their office. When David would turn around, her and Dick would snap rubber bands at each other in a joyous never-ending battle.

  “If you want to get paid, listen to Monica,” Patty tells Claire.

  “Just listen to Monica,” Monica simplifies.

  The back of Tekserve is filled with workbenches. Patty leads Claire to the desktop repair area and introduces her to Derek, who has long dreadlocks and round cheeks.

  Patty tells Claire he is her “go-to desktop tech,” and that “he will let intake bug him nonstop.” Derek pretends not to hear this. He is older than Patty and Claire. Before Tekserve, he was a music engineer. In the studio, he used Macs for MIDI sequencing.

  Derek carved himself a spot recording R&B and hip hop artists he loved like Rakim and Mary J. Blige. But the work went late (all night) and was sporadic (at best). When his son turned 3 there was a reckoning.

  He was hired as a full-fledged Tek after a short interview with Dick and then David. Derek’s first day on the job, his very first repair was a Mac Plus with a broken floppy drive. He laid a towel out so he wouldn’t scratch the screen, faced the Mac down and took off the case, exposing the floppy drive. He unscrewed the drive and started to slide it out.

  Then he heard a hissing sound.

  Shit, he thought, that’s not good. Just at this moment Dick walked by. Derek asked Dick to listen.

  “Is that bad?” Derek asked.

  But in Derek’s mind he knew it was bad.

  He fucked up.

  The Mac is super compact. He nicked a circuit board while sliding the floppy out. That circuit board was attached to the picture tube of the Mac’s built-in monitor and he has cracked the tube. The hissing sound is proof. It is the sound of the tube’s vacuum seal being broken. And he has ruined this Mac, and he was for sure supposed to know to pop that circuit board off before he slid the floppy drive out, and there is no way he is not going to be FIRED. He just hopes he doesn’t need to pay for the picture tube.

  “That is pretty bad,” Dick said, “but don’t worry about it. We always have old ones that we’ve bought from customers to use as parts. Just grab one off the shelf and try not to do it again.”

  Derek looked past Dick’s lanky frame and saw a glowing shelf full of rescued parts. He never broke a picture tube again, but he used the glowing shelf all the time. If he thought a computer’s problem was a bad processor, he’d go grab a good one from the shelf, and if the problem went away he would order a new processor for the machine and boom, move on to the next. If the problem didn’t go away, he’d grab a logic board, and so on. This let him figure out the source of a machine’s problem fast, which left him time to field questions from the steady stream of intakers like Patty.

  “Deb is the best,” Patty says as soon as they are out of Derek’s earshot. Deb hears this and gives a small smile as she reassembles a gray laptop on her bench. She has hair even shorter than Claire’s.

  The Michigan hospital Deb was born in burned to the ground the day after she was delivered. She took this as a sign she was not meant for the Midwest.

  In New York, Deb studied drama. After graduation, she worked a lighting board in a tiny magical theater at night and a day job so she could eat. The day job was at a private high school that had just bought brand new Macs for every classroom. Deb had only ever owned an electric typewriter, but she took to the Macs and became responsible for their well-being, which brought her to Tekserve.

  This was around 1994. Tekserve was at its second location, the first location being Dick’s loft. All versions of Tekserve were located on the north side of 23rd Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues, so that Dick could walk to work without even crossing a street.

  This second Tekserve location was on the second floor of 163 23rd Street. Deb started to bring in the private school’s Macs to be fixed or upgraded. At this time, Dick and David were both working the bench repairing computers. There was no intake station yet. You sat down with a technician and told them the problem. One day, Deb sat down with David to get some RAM installed in a PowerBook 500. In 1994, computers were slow. It could take fifteen minutes just for a computer to start. So they had time to talk.

  After the repair, Deb got a call from David. “I know this is weird and maybe unorthodox, but would you like to work for us?” Deb said yes and became the first female technician at Tekserve. She also became the first Tek to specialize. She was tasked with fixing portable computers, since she had small, nimble hands.

  As Deb worked at 163, more specialized technicians were added and intake was created. The Mac Plus was programmed to be a “now serving” machine and mounted above like a convenience store mirror. A billiard ball was hung on a string next to it, and was pulled to advance the serving numbers.

  Customers came to the second floor depressed, clutching their ailing computers, to find a space that was as if Santa’s workshop had made love to a Rube Goldberg machine, complete with mutated elves. Hearts would melt, Coca-Cola would flow from glass bottles, and customers would wait patiently for their number to be called.

  Soon Tekserve outgrew 163 and moved a few doors down to the fourth floor of 155 23rd Street. Everything and everyone came along for the move, and it was the same, only more.

  Deb places six tiny screws into the laptop’s case, turns it over, and starts up the machine. She listens for the start-up bong. It sounds, and she reaches her small hand out to shake Claire’s equally small hand. “Welcome to Tekserve,” Deb says. “If you have portable questions, I will try to help … at least for your first intakes.”

  “Let’s do it. Time is now,” Patty says, and heads to the front of the loft. Claire trails behind her.

  The intake area is made of plastic public school desks that wrap around the waiting area. There are fifteen intake stations, each with a laptop, half of them are being used. “64,” Patty shouts, and waves her hand past a motion detector. The number on the Mac Plus above changes from 63 to 64. A couple holds up a ticket, and Patty calls th
em over.

  Patty and Claire sit side by side at a laptop station. Ticket 64 sits across from them prison-visit style. The couple is young, max fifteen. Their eyes are dark, they hold hands, and only one speaks. And she can hardly speak. Her voice is soft, and her English is bad—very, very bad.

  “They are sooo cute,” Patty whispers in a spasm.

  Patty shows Claire how to create an SRO in the Tekserve laptop. SRO stands for service repair order, and every intake needs one.

  Ticket 64 hands Patty a PowerBook 1400, and signals that it won’t start. Patty types notes in the SRO, signing them with her initials, PB. Patty communicates to the couple that she is going to take the laptop to do a few tests.

  “It’s probably that they need a new battery. Hardware issues are way easier than software issues,” Patty says as she and Claire walk to a nearby bench. The bench is set up for intakers to test machines: SCSI adapters, a keyboard, a monitor, all types of power cords and batteries lie at the ready.

  Patty flips the laptop over and points out a small plastic latch that will release the battery. She pushes the latch and starts to pull the battery from the machine.

  A baby cockroach crawls out. Then another. Patty can see fifty more coming, so she shoves the battery back in fast. Claire automatically kills both baby roaches with her bare index finger.

  “Oh no. What do I do? What do I do?” Patty says to Claire.

  Claire says nothing. Derek walks by and Patty grabs him.

  “Oh no. What do I do? What do I do?” Patty says again and again.

  “You should ask David,” Derek answers.

  Claire holds her index finger up. It looks like she has an idea, but then she says, “I have to wash my finger.”

  They split up. Claire goes to the bathroom and Patty goes to David’s office.

  The problem is not hard at all for David. “You go back and tell them there are roaches inside the machine, and we can’t fix it,” David says.