In our frequent telephone conversations between here and there, she spoke of New Orleans as if it had everything Seattle had promised and withdrawn from her. It was a culture of words and food—she had moved there to be the paper’s lead restaurant critic—steeped in a pre-technological tradition that New Orleans was committed to preserving rather than destroying. The computers in the newsroom were just writing machines—they weren’t hooked up to the Internet. To get email, you had to go to a machine in a separate room and log on. Men showed up for work in a shirt and tie, books mattered more than bucks, people were allowed to walk the streets with drinks in hand—“You’d love it here, Fred! You’d love it here!”—and “no one here ever talks about Microsoft…no one seems to have even heard of Microsoft. Down here, it’s like none of that exists!”
I felt a tremendous and telling surge of envy—not because she was in New Orleans instead of Seattle, but because she seemed to be in a city more like “Seattle” than Seattle was now.
When I talked with her about Squish, or about Squish and Joey, she would turn furious, ranting scornfully at me about how their dreams of Empire and even of simple impending wealth were “pipe dreams,” how they were “just dreamers who would never amount to anything,” and how F5’s impending IPO was a “fantasy.” “They’re just talk!” she said again and again, whenever I tried to bring her up to date on their efforts and hopes.
Whether because of Sumi or because of what Squish would call “the usual madness,” Squish and Joey’s pretensions seemed less and less plausible to me as the date for the IPO—now scheduled for late spring or early summer 1999, the date constantly moving back—drew closer. Joey learned that Hussey had just finalized a divorce, and had kept secret from his estranged wife the coming F5 IPO and his attendant massive wealth. He drove across Lake Washington one day and mailed an anonymous postcard to Hussey’s ex-wife, telling her that an upcoming “liquidity event” was going to make her Wee Little Ex-Husband a multimillionaire. Hussey’s divorce was subsequently re-opened and in the ensuing discovery proceedings, Joey fed various company documents to the erstwhile Ms. Hussey’s attorney. At one point, intending to return the documents to Joey, the attorney mailed them to Hussey instead. Bizarre as this sounds, in the context of Squish-and-Joey stories it did not seem a particularly odd or surprising development. No sooner did Hussey learn that Joey was the source of his trouble than he and F5 sued Joey for breach of company confidentiality. Squish, possibly trying to evade getting swept up in the lawsuit, took off in pursuit of Sumi, Sumi kept calling me trying to get me to dissuade Squish from visiting, and Joey came down with Bell’s Palsy—a paralysis of one side of his face that was caused, his physician assured him, by massive stress.
Not exactly a series of developments presaging riches and fame.
Things percolated along in this fashion for some months. I stopped thinking about the IPO, having decided that it would never come off. Even Squish and Joey stopped talking about it, Squish’s talk being mostly about Sumi’s disappearing act and his heartbreak, and Joey’s talk being mostly about his and Squish’s declining health. On those infrequent occasions when they brought up the IPO, I tended to tune them out the way you do to people who can’t let go of a fantasy that’s over, over, over.