My folks were not so keen on my moving out to the West Coast, but they had been proto-hippies themselves and had to let me be free. Myself, I was damn excited. This was yet another chance for me to ditch my various past identities and move on. No one would ever need to know about Sara Abrams, the aloof woman in her blond pageboy and little outfits. Not even me.
When we got there, Elysian Fields turned out to be anything but, except that it was in a field. In Sascha’s overweening enthusiasm, he had neglected to mention a crucial fact: the place was a dump. The field---a few acres, at least---was in the side of a hill. All around us were reminders of the Oakland Fire of 1991. The grass was sharp and yellow. There was a sense of sudden desertion, which was all the more spooky. We could have been wandering into the slag heap of a minor apocalypse.
The houses---little graffiti-splotched bungalows around a cracked courtyard---were in pretty sad shape, too. But it was too late. We were here, dropped off and blinded by sun and drought like David Bowie in the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Positive thinking, I told myself, closing my eyes and breathing deeply inwards to catch the vibes. I am grounded. I am safe. I am among friends. This isn’t Casa Deus, but it is home. I opened my eyes again, palms turned upward. Sascha’s and my house was still made out of avocado-colored cement. OK, so my affirmations weren’t so successful, but it was my first foray into the Zen garden of West-Coast thinking.
Sascha and Jonathan immediately made themselves at home by drilling holes in the walls for the fiber lines. "I’m responsible for bringing all of you across the desert like this," Sascha explained. "I’ll be damned if you have to suffer with dialups, too."
Here’s who came out with us: Jonathan, Wendy and children; Catfood and his new boyfriend Ted Fujima, who he had met on a job interview in Berkeley (at last, his sexual orientation exposed!); Drexler and Shanna; Ariadne (Sascha’s charity case, but he was hoping she’d mellow out here---after all, didn’t everyone come to the Bay Area to start new lives?); Elia, who somehow had rigged a job in the Oakland Public Schools as a Web designer and teacher of Web design; Faith and her hacker husband Warhol; Richard ("Dick") Quick, an early Unix developer and proponent of free software, and his wife, both of whom had come out for the weather and a chance to hobnob with other aging Unix gurus; and MJ Rao, a young MIT dropout with family in the area, the most spectacular Internet-hacking skills Sascha or anyone had seen in a while, and two rice cookers filled with live and constantly reproducing cremini and shiitake spores buried amongst the grains of Basmati.
People who I thought had no skills except for those having to do with computers really came through during those early difficult weeks. We planted African Savannah grass seed, plastered Depression-era walls, haggled with crabby hippie contractors over the best price on skylights. Sascha got an electrician’s license, and, by rewiring the houses according to code, finally started using his second MIT degree for something constructive. We had a "barn raising" for the common building. Interested neighbors (these included people who came in their cars) helped out or brought potluck, and we promised to invite them to the first Event at Elysian Fields. A couple of them---but only a couple---had heard of Deus Ex Machina Software.
I was delighted at how much more spiritually refined I felt than I had a year earlier. My hands now had the power to heal. Sascha and I were, at least, good friends and on equal footing with one another. I would never be like him, and we would probably never understand each other in a lot of ways. But we were participating in the same concrete, physical world---digging and planting and repairing---and it helped a lot. I was surrounded by women. Some of these women, despite their own technical propensities, admired me for being an individualist, someone who didn’t want to become subsumed by the culture she had married into.
This last was, sadly, a total misconception, but I let them believe I was still a liberal artist to the core. Maybe to them I was.
Little Faith, especially, thought I was the greatest thing, and followed me around everywhere, as if I were a shaman that would keep her safe. I couldn’t believe that she was only a couple of years younger than me. Maybe being in the computer industry ages you rapidly or something.
Most of all, I loved the Bay Area. I was free of all the school snobbery, the WASPy expectations, the burden of living in a historical monument. And it was warm, and the swimming pools were nice and cool, although I was trying to cut down on the number of hours I spent in them these days. My long hair was so damaged from excessive chlorinated hours at the Cambridge Y that a lot of it had to be chopped off when we left Massachusetts. I missed it---the hair, that is.
Another cool thing was that I could pass for a real California Girl if I dressed right. And what was even cooler was that I basically didn’t dress right any more---and I didn’t care, because I had more important things to think about.
*
Elia, self-appointed High Priestess of Elysian Fields Cohousing, was getting a little antsy about wanting to lead a group housewarming ritual. "Aren’t we ready yet?" she’d gripe. "Can’t we sanctify yet?" But I agreed with Sascha; we were still living in pretty shabby quarters, and it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to purify a place that still had gunk of indeterminate origin in all the corners. After all, it wasn’t pure. So Elia would stomp off to her inner-city Webheads-in-training, where she’d probably bitch about us and then send them home to the projects with little flasks of essential oils that hopefully would not be mistaken for alcohol.
I had become much more tolerant of Elia since she and I had started swimming together at the Oakland Y. I could tell by her technique and speed that she, as she had told me, had once been a varsity swimmer. It was fun to sit with her in the steam room afterwards and listen to her staccato babbling about her sculpture (a lot of it she had sold or given away, but she, her cats, and her dozens of remaining Crystals made for quite a jam-packed little house), and her fulfillment at her new job. We were friends, I guess. She was also teaching me, as she had taught Sascha more than a decade earlier, how to be a decent cook. Her primary text, though, was The Witch’s Cookbook, which included recipes like "Sacramental Salads for Superb Sabbats."
I even got a little enthusiastic about Elia’s ritual preparations. She took Faith and me down to Magick Moments, on Telegraph near the fondue place, and we bought sea salt (for grounding), a bunch of tiny colored chiming bells (to call the Quarters), and a few I-ching coins for good luck. I felt a tingling anticipatory excitement at this that made me act silly. Faith and I ended skipping down Telegraph singing one of Madonna’s corny old songs about how "There’s a golden gate where the fairies all wait," and generally not behaving our age.
Almost all the expatriates had started going to their new jobs, except for Sascha. He was having a crisis of faith about computers. He refused to use ExCom. He said he would refuse to use it forever. In his view, we all lived so close together now that we didn’t need real-time electronic contacts. And if we did, something was wrong with our communication skills. Computers sucked. He wanted to do something else. He hadn’t even started on SWorld 2.0.
He wandered down to the U.C. Berkeley campus as if for guidance, maybe to hook up with a Ph.D. program, maybe to teach a class or something... An old acquaintance from MIT---an old nemesis, actually, but now we were in California so grooviness was in and East-Coast vendettas were out---had seen the Rolling Stone article. He suggested that Sascha be a guest lecturer for the following semester in a class called "The Business of New Media." So what if he was going to be sold as a tragic figure? He would milk his tragedy for every bit of technopathos his newly humbled self could bear.
So Sascha was settled for a bit. And I, even sans certification, was starting to bring in a couple of steady clients with what someone told me was my "warm and centered personality" (ha!). At last, we thought we could get the house-blessing rolling and Elia off our backs.
The next full moon we all gathered in the new common house. The ceilings were high and bright with skylights; the paint was white; the whole place smelled of warm new wood. Our computer cluster was T1’ed and online, the hot tub was bubbling, and the vegetarian kitchen was stocked with scrubbed organic produce from Berkeley Bowl. Everyone’s comfy couch from their old places slouched in the center room, and speakers hung on all the walls. And it was still temperate here, in that strange seasonless Bay Area way; in Cambridge, it was probably snowing.
We all crowded expectantly on the furniture in the darkened room while Elia passed around us in a circle, anointing us with ritual oil on our hands and foreheads, and giving us each a candle to hold. She was wearing the extravagant white robe I hadn’t seen since our wedding, and she extended her jeweled fingers proudly in the wavering light.
When Elia was done, Wendy got up, lit some incense and sage, and drew a picture of a circle with a house inside it. This represented a safe and happy home, free from negativity. Wendy and Elia handed out little cups filled with salt water. We took them and walked around the inside of the common house, the common grounds outside, and the insides of our own houses, flicking the water around to purify and protect.
Jonathan, Ariadne, and Dick and Paula Quick took four bells and faced the cardinal points. Each one rang the bells and said: "With the powers of fire, air, earth and water I charge this space for the purpose of house and home. All that enter will come in peace and love." They placed their candles in the windows.
At this point we all drank little cups of tea and ate a handful of nuts which were supposed to represent hospitality in food and drink.
Elia passed a goblet of something around, and we drank. She stood in the center of the circle, a formidable, luminous figure. "We drink to the Lord and the Lady, and to the four elements, and we consecrate this house to love and peace, study and play, fertility and productivity. So mote it be!"
I and my husband and my friends put down our candles and danced in a circle in the dark, holding hands.
The party started. We put on wild music, and whirled around alone or in pairs or in threesomes, laughing and getting dizzy like kids on a playground. We ate: soup, bread, fruit, wine. We collapsed on the floor or on the couches, satiated, spun down.
Sascha and I giggled together on the couch. I sat in his lap, with my fingers interwoven in his whitely glittering curls. I smiled happily at my family. For this was in fact my family, and I had chosen them---through a strange roundabout path, for sure, but they were mine now. They and all their extended family everywhere---Seattle and Sydney, Palo Alto and Pittsburgh and Prague---intimately connected by technology of their own making, sharing their knowledge and culture and the future of the world. I felt it with all my heart, and I wasn’t even taking any drugs.
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