Now let’s turn to
the history of when I first started stalking Bill Gates. My story is almost as
familiar a trajectory into despair as that of the Betas. One moment, I could
see my future clearly; I was on a direct path to life on social security, the
next moment, I was a sociopath. I was stalking Harvard and my hair was dropping
out. Little did I know that stalking the future founder of Microsoft would
eventually leave me friendless; but I was, and am today, totally mesmerized by
his sheer brilliance and his gargantuan ambition that I distinctively knew in
my guts that I had to make him my best and only friend. With the help of a
marker pen and an empty wall in my parents’ unused cellar I began to plan a
broad outline of how I would gradually move closer to the object of my
adoration; and dig a hole for myself a little deeper everyday.
Gates’ father was a
rich lawyer in Seattle and his mother the daughter of a well-to-do banker. I
started sending Bill’s ( From a young age I was already on first name terms
even though I had precious chance of meeting him stuck in Hampshire in a morbid
strop watching the flies buzzing around the cabin that was my parents motor-way
café.)-So, I started sending Bill’s parents death threats if they didn’t
introduce me to their son; They took him out of public school, at the beginning
of seventh grade and sent him to a private school surrounded by a piranha lake and an elite SAS squad trained to guard
presidential off-spring. Half way through Gate’s second year, I sold my parents
café while they were on holiday, went to the US , swam the piranha lake and
attempted to join the computer club.
“One of the club
members recognized him from a ransom photo on the bulletin board, established
by The Rich Mothers’ Club and along with a few other boys, after interrogating
him thoroughly, we hauled him off, against his will to claim the money that was
our reward” Said Gates remembering this halcyon entrepreneurial moment with pride,“
We split the reward money and some used it to pay their way out of going to
summer camp by sending others; using their names in their place and some used
it to pay inner city girls to come into the campus for sex. Of course some of
the reward money went to the teachers. I didn’t know nor cared what happened to
the undesirable nuisance but part of the bounty, at least three thousand
dollars of it, a mere fifth, went into a computer terminal they put in this
funny little room with padded wall-paper down the end of gated disused
corridor. We had no control of when they would let us out; the lengths they
went to protect us from the likes of Mal-combed Badwill was amazing really”.
It was ‘amazing’ no really, because in 1968 most colleges
hadn’t yet installed turnstiles, metal detectors and X-ray conveyor belts, but my
venture across the lake that day seem to initiate and instigate all these
changes, almost immediately. As a result of being locked in the computer room
for weeks and months on end to keep others out, (who only wanted to champion the very air he
breathes), those sequestered students learning programming had nothing else to
do but laboriously develop ever more complicated ways of programming.
Notwithstanding, without my unstinting adoration, braving the lake perimeter
and everything, the ASR-33 Teletype, a time-sharing terminal with a direct link
to Seattle Police Department would never have been installed. “The whole notion
of enthusiasts of computer enthusiasts doing time was only implement in 1965”,
recalled a grateful Gates. ”Someone, thankfully, had the right idea”.
Extraordinarily, Floy got me some time on a stalking charge in 1971, so my name
was already on the system. That is how Bill Gates got to be Bill Gates,
programming, while I was doing real time as an eight grader in 1968.
From then on I
intensified my campaign of fanatical adoration; Gates now lived in the computer
room. He and a number of the others learned the art of self-defence and
acquired a strange new device called Tear Gas- after a while, due to the high
cost of round the clock protection, it wasn’t long before the mothers once
again clubbed together and came to the unanimous decision they were bankrupt.
They did a sponsored Cup Cake Bakerthon, but the students ate the cup cakes
before it could actually be verified they had been made. A group of programmers in Washington, who
liked locking themselves in perfectly
symmetrically square white rooms, called No Life Outside of the Centre or
(Life=Eminently Square), asked Gates to join them. As fate would have it one of
the parents of a boy in the same college and programming team. Manic Rona, sole
patron of Life=Eminently Square, put up the money to develop software that
could spy on her allegedly cheating husband, asked Gates if he would like a
safe haven from his ever-growing army of psychophants for free programming
time. Much of, if not all of Gates’ after school time was spent inside a
white-washed windowless cube.
Life=Eminently
Square went bankrupt when Manic Rona discovered the calming effects of Camomile
Tea. Gates and his friends, forced to think outside of the cube, started
hanging about listlessly outside of the computer centre. Before long one of
their number staged a fit until an outfit called ISI, Incremental Scams Incorporated
allowed them access to free use of a computer in exchange for them working on a
piece of software which would incrementally reduce their companys’ payroll. In
one seven month period, Gates and his band of plaid-clad pirates stole 1,575
cents which averages out at eight cents a day from the main employees of
Incremental Scams Incorporated. They did this eight hours a day, seven days a
week!
“It was an
obsession” said Gates regarding my unstinting adoration of the God-like man. “I
flicked through an atlas for potential places to hide. It wasn’t only in the
day time but at night too. That’s when I started programming at the weekends;
it would be a rare week that I did not glimpse Mr Badwill lurking a mere twenty
or thirty yards away. There was the time he even stole a load of passwords and
broke in and crashed the systems so he could lure me into the open. I couldn’t use the security of a computer
room for a whole semester, and I was only fifteen and sixteen, how could I hope
to gain the requisite ten thousand hours!? Then Mr Badwill informed me he had
access to a free computer in the Psychiatric and medical wing of the sanatorium
at which he is now an out-patient. So, I got myself sectioned, and during this
big black period, between electric shock therapy, paper cutting, origami, and
Mr Badwills’ obsequious presence, I was able to program between three and six
in the morning.” Gates let outs a hideous laugh. “I would sneak out of my bed
at night, amid the nightmarish groans of the dreaming inmates, I could even see
the lights of my family home and university through the bars on the windows.
That is why, today, I am so generous to the sanatorium because, sanitary
conditions notwithstanding, they allowed me an invaluable, if brief, daily
respite from insanity”. (Gates mother confided, ‘Years later he still gets up
at three and wanders around aimlessly until six in the morning).
One of the founding
members of the FBI, Bud Dude, got an encrypted, encoded and technologically complicated message to decipher
from the CIA, which meant to convey the
whereabouts of the set- up of a computer system in Washington
state but, misinterpreted, found Mr Gates dispatched to a disused power station
in the Nevada
desert. Those running the power station were more than grateful for the blunder
because, as it just so happened, they needed a computer programmer to
run….well, a power station. In these fledgling days before complete revulsion,
programmers were a hard species to find and one with experience even harder. By
the time Dude had located Gates in the Nevada
desert he had shared top secret FBI data with his former chums at Harvard.
Indeed Gates was to spend his senior years sending the nations’ top secrets to
former chums and ex-girlfriends disguised as an independent college assignment.
He began talking in code, watched over by a young Chuck Norris, who Gates later
says taught him nothing about acting whatsoever.
I pursued Bill
Gates, from the eighth grade to the end of high school and the Nevada desert. I was
Bill Gate’s 10,000 Hamburgers, and by my measured and determined campaign, and,
some would say, ‘quixotic’, elevation of the man to Dulcineaic-like status and
his unbelievable attempts at escape offered him extraordinary geographical and
mental opportunities for confinement only hitherto enjoyed by Floy.
The first part I
played in his genius was death threats to his family which got him sent to a
school surrounded by a piranha lake.. The second part was because I swam the
piranha lake to be closer to ‘The Great Man/Boy’ The Rich Mothers' Club raised
money to have him sequestered with a computer as companion. Due to a neurotic
state of marital paranoia Gates was recruited by Manic Rona to develope Life=
Eminently Square. (I can’t take credit
for that one, though Manic Rona still sends me batches of Camamile tea). Number
four was that he was taken on board by ISI Incremental Scams Incorporated who
incorporated a system to reduce payroll, well, incrementally. The fifth part of
my hand in Bill Gates meteoric destiny was him having himself sectioned to a
place from which he could see his home and university through the barred
windows and in whose impossibly chaotic diurnal and nightmarish nocturnal
timetable offered a slim respite between three and six in the morning. Number
seven was Bud Dudes’ blundered
communiqué between the FBI and the CIA. Number eight was that at the
Nevada Power Station Gate’s had access to State secrets he rendered into code.
And number nine was that, because of a generations of adoring fans like myself,
the lake has been restocked with sharks.
What is the common
thread that runs between all these opportunities? Me, of course. I gave Bill
Gates time to practice. By the time Gates could no longer rely on state
protection for his safety he started his own software company; because of me he
had been forced to program nonstop for seven years running. He had lapped
everybody else including himself at least ten times on life’s race track. He
was one million hours ahead! How many human beings young or old do you know who
have had to be forced into such an experience through another’s determination.
Maybe there are fifty throughout History. J F K, Greta Garbo, The Marquis De
Sade, Michael Jackson and siblings, Agnetha of ABBA, Shirley Temple to name but a few. I had the best exposure to this young computer
software genius than anyone, anywhere in the world ever, and all because I am
lucky to call him my one and only friend.
No comments:
Post a Comment