When I told my dad I was going to San Jose, his reaction was to say several times, ‘Do you know, I have never been to San Jose,’ as though this in itself was an interesting fact about the place. Given that he had travelled throughout the world, the idea of finding somewhere he hadn’t written about and left his mark on was, in fact, one of its main attractions.
It was an internship – I would be working for next to nothing for three months in California at a weekly newspaper. One dark winter afternoon I had visited the august reading room of the Boston public library and found a book called the Directory of Internships and applied for work placement schemes at a far-flung selection of US newspapers and magazines – one in Colorado, another in New Orleans. A few weeks later, a call came from Metro, a weekly in San Jose, California, saying they’d like to take me on.
I had thought San Jose might be on the sea, confusing it with San Diego. In fact, San Jose is landlocked, a farm town that, as they say of cancer cells, forgot to stop growing. It lies a hundred miles south of San Francisco and numbered, in those days, around a million souls. It has no claim to fame other than featuring in a Burt Bacharach song about someone unable to find it, and its connection to Silicon Valley, in which it notionally sits, though in fact most of the big tech companies are in smaller towns outside the San Jose city limits, like Santa Clara and Cupertino. It is a city in which the natural relation between centre and periphery is reversed. The life of its community takes place in vast malls, secondary towns, suburbs, freeways, and office parks, far away from its largely empty downtown. All these peculiarities – its soullessness, the indistinguishable strip malls, the gun stores and fast-food places, franchise outlets and the weird scattered non-belonging of people, many of them from elsewhere – had a perverse charm for me. After a lifetime of cloisters and Victorian suburbs, I saw exoticism and romance in San Jose’s anomie and unplanned sprawl. It seemed utterly different to anything I’d experienced, and its strangeness and lack of judgement combined to make me feel, for the first time, invisible and liberated.
Metro was a free newspaper, given away in metal bins around the city. The editorial team was a ragtag band of ageing punks and ex-hippies – what might today be called hipsters. The deal on offer from management involved allowing those on staff the liberty of coming in late, wearing what they liked, and playing Tetris late into the night on office computers, on the condition that they did their work and didn’t expect to be well paid. Several of the writers were graduates of the nearby University of California, Santa Cruz, a cradle of radical activity and progressive politics, and I don’t think it’s too grandiose to say that faintly in the background were the stirrings of new ideas and subcultures that would prove influential through the rest of the decade – whispers of the Internet, ‘modern primitives’, techno-shamanism, and Burning Man. Sadly, there was only a limited outlet for many of these ideas in a newspaper dedicated to the prosaic concerns of a very average American city, in which it was widely acknowledged the only feature anyone read was the horoscope.
My news editor, Jon Vankin, was a polymath of US politics, with a righteously angry punk edge, a devotee of the British music acts The Pop Group and Gang of Four, liable to quote lyrics about the death of the campaigner Blair Peach during an anti-Nazi rally in London in the seventies and rant about oligarchic corruption in the US body politic. He and another Metro writer later compiled several books of American conspiracy theories propagating the idea that we are all brainwashed drones existing in a sinister confected reality in which nothing is really what it seems – the Kennedy assassination, Iran–Contra, the cancellation of the TV series The X-Files.
Embattled amid the surrounding blandness of San Jose, Metro felt like the citadel of a small counterculture. We were lonely hold-outs flying the flag of strangeness in a vast indifferent sea. God knows what they made of me – the pale and awkward recent Oxford graduate, turning up six thousand miles from home in one of America’s most boring cities. A city that didn’t even have the inverse allure of high crime or deprivation.
A news intern, my duties involved fact-checking articles, undertaking bits of research for other writers, transcribing tapes, and pottering around looking confused. A few weeks in, they let me have a small column, the ‘Polis Report’, where I wrote quirky articles about the city. An interview with a Jamaican psychic who was predicting an earthquake in the Bay Area. A business story – largely fictional – about a rise in vibrator sales in sex shops. In the middle of the year, in the wake of the Rodney King verdict unrest – San Jose experienced this in the tiny rippling form of a small downtown protest – I phoned an anarchist thinker and writer, John Zerzan, and wrote up a short account of his view that the disorder was overall ‘a positive act’ that should be celebrated, under the headline ‘Paperback Rioter’.
After three months of interning, I got hired as a staff writer on a smaller newspaper owned by the Metro media group, the San Jose City Times, that shared offices with Metro and was known among staff as Shitty Times. Supporting myself with words was still new enough to feel exciting. I wrote about City Council meetings, budgets and zoning, fires, charity fundraisers, shake-ups at City Hall, some political gossip, and the occasional human interest story about local characters. I turned in an early story about a fire that had gutted a Chinese restaurant. It began with a description of clouds scudding across the sky as the smoke rose.
‘Do you know about the inverted pyramid?’ my Shitty Times editor, Lorraine, asked. ‘Most important facts at the top. Was anyone hurt? How much damage? The clouds scudding can come further down.’
Once in a while I got to range more leftfield. I wrote a satirical account of my past-life regression experience at the ‘Berkeley Psychic Institute’ and another about making a donation to a sperm bank in Palo Alto, for which I had to masturbate into a little cup. (My donation was turned down – they said it didn’t freeze, though that’s hard to believe. Presumably it froze but the sperm were all dead when they thawed it out. Either that or I am missing my true calling as a manufacturer of organic automotive products.)
I look back now at those times from a distance of twenty-five years and I see myself totally dedicated to doing my work, to making a mark, and finding a small measure of success with my articles . . . but I also see emptiness. In that entire year I had no romances. My social life revolved around work and though I enjoyed being removed from my usual milieu, stranded on a kind of frontier of middle America, I was in a deeper way cut off from real life, as though it was taking place behind glass or being conducted secretly in rooms away from me. In the end, the idea of getting close seemed complicated and entangling, fraught with all sorts of potential for embarrassment, more trouble than it was worth. I would play the encounter out in my head and get ahead of myself. How will this end? How will I get out of it?
My Metro press card.
Towards the end of the year, feeling I might have gone as far as I could in San Jose, I made plans for another move. I wondered about joining my brother, who was now living in New York. ‘We’ll have larks, Lou!’ he said. ‘We’ll get an apartment in Hoboken! It’ll be wicks!’ I applied for an internship on a magazine there called Spy. But I was also missing Sarah, who was still in China, but coming to the end of her teaching assignment. We’d been writing to each other and discussing the possibility of me joining her and us living somewhere in South East Asia. By coincidence, my uncle Gene, an international lawyer, told me he had a connection on a paper in Mongolia called the Mongol Messenger. Gene mentioned he could hook me up there. The randomness of the connection, the fact that I knew almost nothing about the place, tickled me. I liked the idea of making big life decisions based on very little information. At the same time, I didn’t take Gene’s offer too seriously – he had form as an over-promiser – but on this occasion, to my surprise, he came through: an offer of a position on Ulan Bator’s leading English-language newspaper arrived by post.
Spy. Mongol Messenger. Mongol Messenger. Spy.
At this distance I can’t recall what decided me one way or another. I just know that in December of 1992 I drove in my Honda Civic, not west to Mongolia, which would have been tricky with the Pacific in the way, but east to New York and Spy.
