To talk about Alexander Henry Strathmore’s early life is to give him a bit more biographical credit than he deserves. You might think he were actually one of those great men everyone wants to analyze and second-guess before he finishes his third decade.
Yet for a man who so loudly claims to have "no secrets" and who so successfully foists his private life into the public domain, Sascha Strathmore remains a cipher. Is he a robot? A dilettante? Is he crushed under the weight of his own cogitations? Unobservant of his inner realm? Is it grief or smugness that crease the hard lines across his pink baby face? Only I and a few others---and I am not his biographer---know that he is bleakly, inescapably alone and lonely. From the electrified chasm where he sits, everything is chaos and everyone is blind.
Sascha’s business success has been based on a number of happy circumstances: being raised by money, learning how to channel his obsessive, addictive impulses, and having the right skills in the right industry at the right time. His endless capacity for self-reinvention never hurt, either.
Nor did it hurt his father, George Shapiro, son of a Cleveland steelworker. Shapiro changed his last name to Strathmore and, after a number hard-fought business deals and lucky coincidences, became magnate of Strathmore Steel Inc., a giant foundry on Lake Erie. He then whisked his arriviste wife, Helen, and his two children, Daphne and Sascha, to an extravagant house in the exclusive, Wonder-Bready Cleveland suburb of Pepper Pike.
It seems that George Strathmore thought he could do whatever he wanted. He certainly taught his children to believe the same, which they quickly internalized in their own fashion. That’s why, when Daphne Strathmore was graduating from the Maple Glen Country Day School in 1973, she was its first Vietnam War protest organizer, the first female Westinghouse scholarship winner in Ohio, and Pepper Pike’s first out-of-the-closet lesbian. Meanwhile, her brother Sascha, ten years younger, was terrorizing Maple Glen’s Lower School with his homemade pipe bombs, near-successful attempts to dismantle the school’s electrical power supply, and theoretical arguments with teachers---all the more curious for being carried out in his still-lispy baby voice---about everything from quantum mechanics to the school’s cafeteria policy. Added to these iniquities was his disconcerting propensity for picking schoolyard fights, decking his classmates, then helping them to their feet, hugging and kissing them---even the boys!---and inviting them to the fabled Strathmore pad after school. They never came. Neither Strathmore child, it seems, was very popular.
Sascha and Daphne often met in detention in the headmaster’s office. There they greeted one another with cool formality and sat side by side like two ticking bombs, with their radiant blond curls and their father’s acute, pitiless blue eyes, waiting out their measure of punishment. And they were Jews, too! No one at Maple Glen knew what to do with either one of them.
Adults thought that Sascha was a temporarily misguided prodigy who had to be steered toward a "safe" and conventional use of his talents. His classmates all knew that he bit people and picked his nose. As he entered adolescence, his lack of a conventional social life only fueled his voracious interest in futuristic gadgetry, which by now had come to include computers.
At that time, anyone who wanted a home computer had to build it from parts or a kit. What we now think of as integral parts of a "computer"---the microprocessor, its memory, connectors to the screen and keyboard, even the hard drive itself---had to be purchased on separate "cards." For his thirteenth birthday, Sascha picked out all the computer parts at Cleveland’s first computer store, imperiously waving a spec sheet in one hand and a big check in the other. He barely reached the store manager’s breast pocket.
Sascha was banging around on his first machine at about the time young entrepreneurs with names like Bill Gates were concocting the PC revolution. He knew who these guys were, and he wanted to be equally famous and technically proficient when he got to be their age---if not before. And richer, to boot.
After Daphne graduated Wellesley and went off to Washington, DC, shaving her head and doing other morose and radical things, Sascha’s parents basically left him alone for days at a time. His father was working day and night, because the steel industry wasn’t doing quite as well at the cusp of the ‘80s as it had been 20 years earlier. His mother was at the Club or just somewhere else in the house, dimmed over with a martini and earplugs. She had basically given up on motherhood after trying to raise two intractable children. So Sascha tried to stave off his increasing manic-depression and profound sense of abandonment by creating his biggest oeuvre ever: a computer program that would impress girls enough to get them over to his big empty house.
Sadly, none of the pert blond girls at Maple Glen held any interest in computers, and the Cleveland Computer Club was devoid of women altogether. So Sascha had to settle for the next-best thing: making a financial killing.
Sascha’s ticket to the Big Time, he believed, was a database address book for (pre-IBM) PCs that he self-indulgently called SBase-1. Sascha sold about 50 copies of SBase-1, then licensed it to Yellow River Software, which sold about 500 copies more at $150 apiece. Then Yellow River decided to rid itself of the demands of SBase-1’s snooty 16-year-old author, and bought out all rights to the program for $50,000. Sascha still wasn’t getting any girls, but he did buy himself a glossy black pickup truck and a ticket to a computer science major at MIT.
Getting to the Institute is a profound experience for anyone, whether you’re the only girl in your high school who cared about metallurgy, a first-in-your-class nerd who knew hundreds of science fiction books by heart, or a preternaturally intelligent juvenile delinquent with an after-school business designing discontinued parts for antique cars. Most matriculated MIT Freshmen were their high school valedictorians; still, someone has to wind up at the bottom half of the MIT grade pool after the pass/fail first year. Some of these bottom-halfers find themselves in the infirmary as botched suicide attempts, or else drop out altogether, going to other schools in search of better cost-benefit ratios.
Sascha knew that neither of these ignominious fates would befall him. He loved MIT with such a deep and fierce passion that, even after he graduated, he was sure he would never leave the security of its soaring and intimidating architecture, and the intellectual feeding frenzy of the classes and student activities. He wasn’t an out-and-out nerd like some of the other guys---he had been too well-brought up for that and considered his manners comparatively quite debonair. But his success in picking up girls (they were called "women" now, and they never let you forget it) was no greater. He joined all the computer-related activities he could, took modern dance classes (which he was actually quite good at) to appear artistique and politically correct, and double-majored in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. He did end up getting a girlfriend, a student from Wellesley, MIT’s sister-school, named Rachel Cohen, but while he was sick in love with her he loved his work at MIT just a little bit more. After a year or so of being jerked around she dumped him in a hole so deep he wound up---much to his great humiliation---as one of those botched suicides in the Infirmary.
Sascha couldn’t have told his parents about this episode, even if he had wanted to. Strathmore Steel Co. was being sold to a Japanese firm at a tremendous discount, and George and Helen had to sell the white elephant in Pepper Pike and otherwise tone down their lifestyle. They had no time or energy for Sascha’s puppy-love dilemmas. Daphne was not keen on commiserating with him either; there had been a falling-out over a certain 17-year-old female runaway they both claimed ownership over, but who, naturally, had some ideas of her own.
In desperation, Sascha turned to the computer jockeys at MIT for something resembling consolation. With their long hair, immoderate lifestyles, and deep culture and mythology, the hackers were pretty suspicious of young Mr. Strathmore, whose frenetic and brilliant programming---and attendant ego---were nonetheless couched in preppy Midwestern clothes and an unwillingness to relax or to share his ideas. The young computer gods grudgingly let Sascha sit in with them during their late-night hacking sessions. But they smirked when he displayed a trembling, intense curiosity about their allusions to another, more jaded hacker world taking place just beyond the MIT campus.
Sascha Strathmore was doing more than just listening to them. In his soul was a proselyte to The Counterculture, hacker-style. Without knowing it, he had already been converted.
Over his senior year in college, Sascha gradually unfroze and let himself and his work be a little more exposed to his compatriots, who sported unlikely nicknames like Warhol, Drexler, and Catfood. He began to see that there was another Way than that which he had obediently been following. At the experimental computer clusters, at the Institute’s futuristic labs, and ever so gradually, at the group houses of recent MIT-alum computer gurus, Sascha realized that there was a parallel world to the one he had been living in.
In this world, everyone worked as hard as he did, and their products were just as good, or even a little bit better. But theirs was also a world of peculiar, seemingly outdated freedom, especially for the Reagan ‘80’s: free love, free drugs, free food and drink and free crash space whenever anyone wanted. Many grew their hair long. They wore wild, eye-catching clothes. Conventional concepts of beauty were subsumed by greatness in the lab---the most desirable women were the smartest, not the thinnest or the perkiest. Technology was God, but computers and robots and science fiction fandom lived peaceably side-by-side with Gaia, the Goddess, who was also worshipped enthusiastically. Offbeat Libertarianism and New Communitarianism held hands in once-grand Victorian houses in marginal neighborhoods to produce the technopagan credo: Do As Thou Wilt.
Sascha was nearly as taken by his own awed interpretation of this subculture as he had been by MIT itself. He began secretly lighting incense and candles in his dorm room. He bought weird outfits at Dollar-a-Pound, the used clothing store behind the campus, but couldn’t bring himself to wear his braggadocio military surplus or foppish 1960s-style ruffled shirts in public---not just yet anyway. He let his hair grow, just a little, long enough to take some of the curly ends and make a little rat-tail in back. Then he grew the rat-tail just a bit longer, and attached a couple of beads to the end. The first time he smoked marijuana, he thought, "I’m doomed! What would my father think!" But George Strathmore was so busy unsuccessfully beating off bankruptcy that Sascha could have lit up right in front of him, and the elder Strathmore would never have noticed.
Sascha’s last semester, someone introduced him to Elia Kopf, a Wellesley graduate and a hotshot young programmer at one of the huge computer companies in Boston’s western suburbs. Elia also moonlighted as the Pagan Priestess of the group; she was warm, intelligent, and joyfully free with her ample body. Sascha and Elia became lovers.
One of the first gifts Elia gave to Sascha was to teach him how to cook. She marched him into her kitchen with the promise of sensual scientific inquiry and elitist pride: Yes, she said, most nerds are happy with crappy pizza and 35-cent packages of ramen. But why sink to their level? A god like Sascha should not have to set his culinary sights so low. Sascha took her seriously, as he took all things, and weeks later he was devoting himself to the service of Calphalon and sharp cleavers, chocolate ganache, soft-shell crab, and chardonnay.
Elia Kopf had another attraction for her hackers: her house was a major distribution site for hallucinogenic drugs. When Sascha started spending nights over at her apartment, she told him that in the same drawers with her Tarot cards and oil-preserved flower essences were other ways of achieving the sublime. Sascha was about to graduate, overloaded with work, and starved for anything new. Elia showed him Tantra; then she showed him how to cleanse the Doors of Perception. She wouldn’t tell anyone if he didn’t want, she said.
Sascha’s dam burst. There were Drugs: LSD, Ecstasy, magic mushrooms, MDA, hashish, 2CB, mescaline. There were Events: house parties, Pagan rituals, camping, bike trips, lab all-nighters, building hacking, science-fiction conventions, hacker conventions, Renaissance Faires. There was Sex: a girl, two girls, a girl and a boy, orgies, tantra, circle jerks. And there was Work: collaborative projects, bug fixes, beta testing, experimental software, object-oriented programming, emerging technologies.
He was suddenly wildly popular. And, so close to graduation, he was being inundated: job offers, consulting work, interviews, more job offers, more drugs, more consulting, more parties, more hacking of various kinds and all getting increasingly dangerous (for instance, breaking into the Marriott Hotel and hotwiring the building’s huge neon letters to flash "MIT"), more, more, more. If Sascha had ever understood the meaning of "enough," it had been lost to him now. Maybe in a couple of years, when he got a little more mature and settled, it would come back. But for right now, he was not quite 22 years old and flush with the Power.
When his folks came up for his college graduation, his mother gasped at the sight of him. In his silks and beads and wild hair, his freaky friends trailing behind him, Sascha had immense compassion for his poor old square Midwestern industrialist parents. To Helen, he said: "Mom, I love you. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’ve blamed you for being a weak person, but now I’ve changed my mind. I understand you. I want you to know that." To George: "Dad, I’ve been working on this new program called Communicate. Your son is going to be very successful. Write this down: by the time I reach 30, I am going to run the world."
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