Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 12 Vladik

An ex-lover still calls him Vladimir, but in all the years since I first met him on the Lucky Strike, I’ve never heard anyone else call him anything but Vladik, unless Arianna’s unique pronunciation “Vladique” qualifies as an altogether different name. Well, occasionally Vladi. And Vova, too.

He and Jay go way back, back to when their age was but a single digit, when they met at a chess tournament about halfway between their respective residences: Jay’s in New Hampshire and Vladik’s in New Jersey. Despite the differences that are so obvious now, that is, financial means, political leanings, temperament, gregariousness, physical assets, love of the outdoors, and attitudes about spicy foods, differences that might prohibit them in today’s polarized America from even knowing each other, back when they were nine years old, the binding agent that held them was their mutual aversion to the chess tournaments their fathers required them to attend. It didn’t matter to them at all what they did when they played hooky together, as long as it got them out beyond the walls of those dreary halls.

Their first adventure, launched within hours of having met, began by escaping the gaze of their chaperones. Then they hitchhiked from Pittsfield to Portsmouth. The driver of the VW minibus who picked them up was heading south on Route 7, and then by felicitous circumstance was headed east on I-90 for a while, but only as far as Blandford. The boys were holding a cardboard sign. On one side were the tournament’s offset-printed event details, and on the other were the words “Portsmouth or Bust!” hand-printed as neatly as boys of their age were able to manage with a fat black felt-tipped marker. While on the Interstate shoulder, having reasoned that there was more traffic on the roadway where it was illegal to stand than on the on-ramps where it was legal, young Vladik hoisted the handwritten sign while Jay entreated the state’s Volvo-driving brie eaters—Jay’s words—with waving arms. The first car to stop was licensed to the Massachusetts State Police. The boys’ heads reached somewhere between belt and armpit of the Rabelaisian trooper who left the vehicle to talk to them. Wide, easy smile and cowboy good looks aside, his calf-height black leather boots and black leather belt holstering radio, billy club, Chemical Mace, and semi-automatic handgun, and the martial gray-blue stripe down the side of his trousers, all left Vladik frozen with fear. He had been conditioned by five years, admittedly a period during much of which he hadn’t any memory, of living under the surveillance state—more on which later—but Jay was conditioned to live free or die. This legend of theirs, which was unfolded to me that first weekend we all spent together, exemplified one of their key differences, albeit one that didn’t get in the way of friendship; Jay was like the beautiful blonde who never played the part of victim because she knew she wouldn’t get the speeding ticket. Jay, leaning in, so charmed those beefy officers—whose individual tonnage was nearly twice that of the two protagonists combined—with his natural generosity and a confidence that could never be emulated that before long, both boys and men were headed for the New Hampshire state line, but not without first stopping at Friendly’s in Amesbury for a dinner of outsize proportions, finished off with a banana split, for each, of equally outsize proportions, and a sharing of family photos that had been warmed, moistened, and made raggedy in back-pocket wallets. In an age before minute-by-minute tracking of an officer’s whereabouts was a matter of course, or even possible given the primitive radios they were carrying, the troopers called patrolling friends on the New Hampshire side of the line and received permission to drive the boys all the way to Jay’s parents’ estate in the d’Anconia Gnotch suburb of Portsmouth. Jay offered to host the policemen and their own children on a weekend of good clean American gun worship, and then the two agents of the State of Massachusetts drove off. Thus began Jay’s and Vladik’s life together.

The Orrix family was always expansive and inclusive. After saying to Jay’s mother, “K, with a k, just a k,” by way of explaining his last name, Vladik immediately received from her—Jenk the patriarch was away and couldn’t object to the fact that Jay had so brazenly violated his edict to participate in the chess tournament—an open invitation to visit and stay, and this was hours before the ritual hazing—as if the day’s events were not evidence enough of high spirits—in Jenk’s neuron-stimulating electrified lounge chair.

Before Vladik was sent by Greyhound bus back to New Jersey, Jay introduced him to Zelda. Zelda’s Lago di Garda was and remains a brick furnace cum pizzeria of unique construction that drew a crowd every day of the year. The fifty-eight-inch tall, bottle-blonde proprietress had hand-fed Jay his first bite of Neapolitan crust before he was three, as she had thousands of other children in a ritual not unlike communion in the atheistic little town about which she would say with a mixture of ka-ching!-stoked glee, sarcasm, and disgust, “Where the women trade gold, the men make their own steel, and the children lack compassion.”

The wood-fired furnace was an inverted paraboloid of revolution rising four stories from the subterrane before climbing skyward in a cooling tower that would have stirred the imagination of Thomas Edison. At each of nineteen access ports, architects of pizza—master chefs she had imported from the Italian lake country, Naples, Staten Island, and other havens of the doughman’s artistry—prepared pizza for Zelda’s customers in a most personal and intimate manner, and shoved them into the heat on thirty-inch-wide wooden paddles of New Hampshire timber. Locally sourced, organically produced, and individually prepared, the leptocrustean creations towered over mere pizza, and the demand for them fully occupied the abutting railway siding. Zelda was a maker of pizza.

She took one look at the nine-year-old Vladik and said, “You’re not one of them, are you?”

“I’m a guest, a friend, if that’s what you mean.”

“Fina boychik,” she said, and rubbed him on the back.