The annoying neighbor drops a flyer in the hallway. She’s been glimpsed before; a tiny, pretty girl who stomps up and down her apartment at two in the morning. When I see her at her show, the noise reports are explained—she wears huge platforms. This puts me on notice. Short women who want to be taller do interesting work. (We mid-sized types are lazier.)

Her show is The Farm; a twenty-minute documentary short that will grow into a feature with the funds from parties like this one. In the early seventies, a convoy of 50 hippie buses left San Francisco for Tennessee, where they bought a few thousand acres and established a commune called The Farm. Rena, it turns out, grew up on The Farm with her sister. Her parents were founders, along with Steven Gaskin, self-styled spiritual leader of the community. Rena has exclusive access to the founders and to the Farm kids, born and brought up there, and it’s a dream subject.

The savvy hippies made their myth from the start. There’s washed-out footage from the bus journey, interviews from the first days, filmed talks by Gaskin. Boys play earnest music. Soft hippie chicks dance, and the ones with glasses all manage to look like Hillary Clinton at Yale Law School. I give thanks for LASIK.

We see them cutting their first crop, sorghum. I snorted my drink through my nose at their efforts. I remember the grace of my grandparents, born small-f farmers, quietly turning turf or baling hay. They moved no more than was needed. These frenetic hippies flailed and sweated in the Tennessee sun. Most looked like they wished they were still cracking college books.

The interviews with Farm kids, grown up now, are affecting. Several were in the audience for the showing. They looked proud; they whooped at familiar faces onscreen. Before the movie, I bought Spritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin from the bookstand by the door. In The American Way of Birth, Jessica Mitford credits Gaskin with reviving American midwifery; I didn’t know she’d learned her craft delivering all the Farm kids. The girl who sold me the book pointed out the pictures of baby Rena and her sister. I found out later that she herself was the daughter of the demented, loveable Italian featured heavily in the film. He still lives there.

Not all the kids in the movie managed so well. One young woman, wearing the difficult short bangs and dark red lipstick of a downtown artiste, choked as she described the ‘four-marriage’ Steven Gaskin had forced on her mother. She and her husband were ‘married’ to another couple, of whom the man became her biological father.
    ‘The four-marriage was the Farm ideal, you know? Because it was to help you get beyond ego. Because you had to be egoless if you had to share your partner. But it was always weird for the kids from a four-marriage.’

I want to know more about the commune movement, especially now that I’m reading veteran stories from Vietnam. My parents wore the threads of the hippies and were, if anything, more beautiful than these California kids. But they followed the European path, where self-discovery came through service, and went to teach in a bush village in Zambia around the same time. That Irish generation had nothing like the American self-consciousness about changing the world, and they lacked the Boomers prodigious entitlement. We are on a thirty-year lag; mine is the baby boom generation in Ireland, and we have many of our US forebears’ traits. We lack a sense of demographics; we think the country booms and opens up because we are so much smarter and worthier than our parents.

For me, American boomers are embodied by Clinton. Enormously gifted, born into huge generational privileges of peace and prosperity. Fussing endlessly now about their legacy, wanting us to agree that the Sixties changed the world more than World War One or the French Revolution. I like them, but I wish they had more teach us. Maybe when Rena finishes her movie, I’ll find out they do.

On my husband’s thirtieth birthday, we had dinner at Gennaro’s on the Upper West Side. He didn’t want a party or a meal with friends. He didn’t want the milestone mentioned. He was too old to be a prodigy, and that cut him deeply. I tried not to laugh; his misery was real.

His old company, which branded itself on hiring ‘superstars’, gave him a great gift. They didn’t pick him out as one of their chosen ones. He was smart, well-respected, competent, but they didn’t spot him as a star in their warped firmament of quantitative analysts and trading hotshots. After four years there, he wasn’t happy, and as was my way then I nagged him about this on his birthday.
“Of course you’re not happy. You’re in a rut, just like when you were doing your thesis. You need to start doing your résumé and looking for something that suits you better.”
Some birthday. Poor bastard.

Three weeks later, Jason started to talk openly about starting a business. He and his coworker David tossed around ideas on their Central Park runs. Jason was fixed on the possibilities of mobile devices, especially Palm Pilots. David had some other ideas, but after ten days or so emailed Jason to say that he’d seen the light. Palm Pilots were the way to go.

They began to come to our tiny apartment after work. Ceremoniously, I dragged out the unused artist’s easel I’d given Jason for another birthday. We balanced a whiteboard on it, and started to throw around ideas for Palm Pilot software. We talked earnestly about scheduling whole families for soccer moms, about handhelds you could roll up like a scroll, about controlling your fridge from your Palm. I loved this stage. Bob Geldof said that most Irish ideas get talked to death in pubs, and I was happy with pie in the sky. Jason and David wanted real pie, though. They emailed in a frenzy. They spent weekends pacing together and refining their ideas. They decided to build a search engine for the real world, starting with the only world that counted: Manhattan.

Jason wanted to quit his job immediately. I panicked, though I didn’t say. What was the rush? What about those trading bonuses? What about security, our visas, all that stuff? He was set on it. He had a real sense of urgency, of a door that was closing. This was 1999 and he was right, though I didn’t know it then.

Jason quit three years ago in April. The first task was to name this baby company, something that the books told us should take no more than a couple of days. Everyone sent suggestions. David lobbied for Streetmonkey. I pushed Afria, my middle name, wanting a label credit like every band girlfriend. We had Zambuck. JakPak. Blue-somethingorother. Jason came up with Vindigo, which I hated, and we fought about it.
“Ugh. Like vindictive, or Vindaloo. That’s really stupid!”

It’s hard to squabble with Jason. He wanted a name that was unique, easy to pronounce, that didn’t have to be spelled out over the phone. He narrowed down a list of five. David’s sister-in-law volunteered to stand on a street corner with a clipboard and get votes from 100 passers-by. I accused Jason, somewhat hysterically, of seeding the rest of the list with deliberately crappy names. But the people spoke, and Vindigo won. I like it now.

They had quiet discussions over who would be CEO and who would be president. Co-founders, David said. CEO, Jason said. They debated how to break down the work and decided that David would do all the coding while Jason would do the business research. In the middle of May, David quit his job too. I took a picture of them that night, standing proudly in front of the makeshift whiteboard that displayed a faked equation and the date. They have their arms around each other’s shoulders, and they look incredibly young and hopeful.

That whole summer, they worked every single day in our apartment. It was on the second floor of a building in the canyons of midtown and got no natural light. David sat at a little girl’s white dressing table that he had found somewhere. He couldn’t get his legs under it and wrote the entire first version of Vindigo sitting sideways on. Coming home from work, I’d find them exactly where I left them, blinking hard from looking at their monitors all day. While I cooked dinner for them, they would tell me about their progress, and then head back into the living room to work on into the night. We had no air conditioner, and no screens on the windows. I bought fly-swatters when I discovered that they had become obsessed with killing flies with our table napkins.
“So, how was your day?”
“Great! I got nine flies, and Dave got 11.”
In July we broke down and got an air conditioner, too.

David ate Snackwell cookies and rice cakes, and cranked through code. Jason paced, gestured, and fretted that he wasn’t progressing through the business plan as fast as David was getting through the hard slog of making an application that worked. In those heady days, all the so-called smart money said to just throw together a back-of-the-napkin business plan and some Flash mockups, and the money would follow immediately. Jason and David disagreed. They knew that Vindigo was the kind of product that would get polite nods if described, but once it was in someone’s hands, they wouldn’t be able to imagine it not existing.

There was a lot of 1999 nonsense that they ignored. They took no salary for months and sat in a cramped apartment rather than fancy venture-funded digs. Their first employee’s first job was to find a payroll system for himself, then to find office space.

In August, Vindigo’s little band moved to a grotty loft in Chelsea on the same block as the late, lamented Billy’s Topless, which by then had gone through a Giuliani-forced rebranding as Billy Stopless. I cried by myself the day they moved out of the apartment. It was the end of the beginning and I knew I would lose touch as they became a real company.

My officemate Tricia listened to my excited gabblings every day. I showed her every shaky version-in-progress, and painted wild pictures of success that Jason would never have let me get away with if he’d heard. I couldn’t join Vindigo myself—I needed to hold the work permit for both of us and I had to pay the rent until he drew salary—but Tricia got excited. She started to work for them in their new loft, in the evenings after her real job. They were lucky to get her.

I moved to another startup. I didn’t hear the daily stories any more, or the daily fly body-count. They had moved to bigger and better vermin and their trash bags squirmed with mice. The little office, originally designed as a one-bedroom apartment with a French travel agency at the back, slowly filled up. The engineers they hired were modest, literate, and brilliant, especially by New York standards. When the French travel agents lay on their couches smoking dope and giggling, the Vindigo engineers put headphones on. Tricia joined full-time, and complained about being the only one who bought toilet paper. There were ten men and Tricia, plus the French travel agents, and only one toilet with a saloon door that didn’t reach the ceiling.
“I never wanted to drink anything in case I’d have to pee,” she said, “I got really dehydrated that winter.”

We spent the night before new year 1999 fixing bugs and proofreading the web site. We ordered ice-cream from Kozmo, which they delivered with free t-shirts, cookies, fridge magnets, and gift vouchers, but without spoons. The ice-cream-fueled alpha version of Vindigo launched New Year’s Eve 1999 to one hundred handpicked users. I cried again.

The next few months were extraordinary. Vindigo’s underground cachet grew in a city obsessed with going out. Jason did deals with the New York Times, and then with Zagat. Thirteen former colleagues invested in the first financing round. These were the can’t-fail boom years, but it still makes me proud that people who had worked with them believed with their checkbooks. An Irish college friend who had started a business in London looked on with envy as the requests to invest poured in. People sent unsolicited ten thousand dollar checks to the new office. The press coverage for the product launch was fawning. The Times Metro section ran a bemused piece on watching Jason get mobbed at a venture conference, where investors begged him to take their cards even though he’d already raised all the funding he needed:
“Mr Devitt thanked them politely and turned to the next supplicant.”

When Glenn, the company dealmaker, went to conferences, he didn’t even put his own name on the Hello my name is… labels.
“They don’t care who I am,” he shrugged, “but when they see Vindigo on there, they go nuts. I feel like a fucking rockstar.” Once, at an industry event, Glenn turned to a woman who had ignored me for twenty minutes and introduced me as Jason’s wife.
“Oh my god, oh my god, I’m sorry! He’s a fucking genius! Are you guys hiring?” she said.

Back at the office, no one acted like a rockstar. The Globe’s spokesmodel cofounders were photographed dancing on nightclub tables, but Jason and David didn’t use their own product much. I threw tantrums when I realized Jason hadn’t taken a single weekend day off that whole first year, to little avail. When Vindigo threw rare parties, they were paid for by drinks company sponsors who wanted to be closer to these Palm-toting Manhattanites.

It was hard watching the company fill up slowly with staff who saw me as the CEO’s wife.
“I got the visas! I paid the rent!” I wanted to yell at the cool eyebrow-raises. “I worked in software before he did. I’m not some ditzy corporate wife bitch!”
The more successful Vindigo became, the more out of place I felt. I wasn’t part of this. I was both hugely proud and resentful. Though I worked just five blocks away, I stayed away more and more as Jason and Dave became completely absorbed. Jason didn’t need me to provide a work permit or pay the rent any more. I wanted them to ask me to join. They didn’t.

I finally joined that September. Vindigo had just moved to a new office in the very unglamorous Penn Station area. The previous occupants were 150 Puerto Rican jewelry cleaners crowded into a too-small space—I wonder what happened to them. The weather was still hot, and the street smell was a thick cloud of male piss. The office space was low-cost in a city still high on its own fumes, and the architects were glad to work cheaply for Vindigo. Everyone worked cheaply for Vindigo. The combination of glamour and sturdiness appealed to people who longed to deliver quality, and we felt lucky to be part of this adventure.

We hired a marketing staff, and grew to 50 people. Our billboards wrapped around our own seedy New York block, and Howard Stern gave us cut-price placement on his show. I remembered, three years earlier, getting excited by the first dot-com bus ad, but by now they were getting to be a grim joke.

2001 was a very different year. Jason and David, as usual, cottoned on sooner than most. In February, we quietly worked on a list of staff to lay off, well before the money ran out. It was clear that the next round of funding wouldn’t be made up of checks mailed to the office by desperate investors on spec, and also that there would be no more need for big print ad campaigns. On the morning of the layoffs I led the remaining staff to Chelsea Piers for glum beers while managers talked to those laid off. Everyone stayed together, downcast though we were. We went back to the office at three o’clock, and stared at the empty desks.

Companies started to close all around us, but Vindigo survived because of those early layoffs. We were cheerful about not becoming rich. Suddenly, in New York, it seemed enough to have a job. Jason struggled to raise more money, and managed it through sheer persistence. We laid off more staff to cut costs right down; this time, everyone who was left walked to Chelsea Piers together automatically. We sat outside in the sunshine with our pitchers of bad American beer and talked about our ex-colleagues. It would be tough to find a job. Everyone seemed a little lost.

David left shortly after we raised more money. Jason was gutted, but he understood. We held our breath and waited for his engineering team to quit, but nobody did. They were loyal to the new CTO, they liked the team and they got to work on stuff that their friends actually used. And there was nothing else out there. With 22 people left, we turned out more products than before. Dutifully, we rolled out a new software version every three weeks all through the summer and the winter that followed.

By now, Vindigo has gone from being Mac-cool to beige-box-workmanlike, and the user interface lacks the spare elegance it had before. We’ve bloated what we had rather than rolling out new products. Our Extreme Programming methods sometimes make me feel like a hamster on a very small treadmill. But none of that matters. Users like the product enough to buy it in droves. Nobody left. At Vindigo, smart people are gentle with each other, and I don’t even know how that’s possible in New York. Vindigo is going to survive.

And now that Jason and I have separated I am trawling through hundreds of résumés looking for my replacement and I feel more sad about that than I can say.

I’m dreaming of the Mekong delta and reading Catfish and Mandala, by Andrew Pham. Categorization hurts some books. This one got slotted into Travel, but it’s so much more. Pham came to this country when he was eight, just after the fall of Saigon. This is the story of his escape from his broken, raging family by riding his bike from California to Hanoi.

I was happy to have a dentist’s appointment today because I’d get to read it in the waiting room. On my way, I saw Charlie for the first time in years. At the tony Park Avenue church soup kitchen, I’d had the same conversation with Charlie every week as I doled out his breakfast—beef stew, or meatballs, at 6.30 in the morning.

    ‘C’mon, gimme some more fuckin’ meatballs.’
    ‘Jesus, Charlie, what do you want from me? It’s already getting on the floor,’ I would say as I ladled a third helping into his brimming bowl.
    ‘Hey, I served my fuckin’ country, darlin’. Don’t fuckin’ shortchange me now. You got a boyfriend?’

We knew he’d been in Vietnam. He told anyone who asked and yelled it at anyone who didn’t. He was still handsome as Stallone in his trenchcoat and slouchy fedora, and today I recognized him immediately. He was on 35th and 10th, a seedy part of town far-removed from the Episcopalians who told him not to swear over his breakfast stew. He walks macho, as if his balls are so huge he can only drag their weight by leading with his shoulders and swivelling each stiff leg out from his hips.

   ‘How are you, Charlie?’ I yelled from my bike over the noise of the trucks.
   ‘Hey darlin’. Lookin’ for a boyfriend? I served my fuckin’ country!’ he said automatically. He had no idea who I was. I thought of the broken soldier Andrew Pham met in Mexico at the start of

http://books.guardian.co.uk/firstchapters/story/0,6761,404657,00.html”> Catfish and Mandala:

    ‘What nationality would you like to be if we weren’t American?’ I asked Jason a couple of years after we moved to New York. He pointed out that we weren’t, in fact, American.
Oh, yeah.

You can’t be Irish unless you were bred there. My home town of Limerick has both a Clareman’s Association and a Tipperaryman’s Association for the lonely exiles from bordering counties 20 minutes drive from the city. My parents moved to Limerick 25 years ago, but they carry a whiff of the outsider still.

Being American is different. It’s like being Buddhist or extroverted. It doesn’t preclude other loyalties, though it flavors them like garlic. She may not know it yet, but a girl selling bun bo hue on the streets of Hanoi can be as American as Jackie Robinson. You’re a New Yorker the moment you decide and declare it. The city just shrugs.

I lived in London for two years before moving here. I loved London, but only because I hadn’t met New York. I thought I would live there for years, shopping in Jigsaw and the Conran Shop, Eurostarring to Paris for ‘minibreaks’, grumbling at the rain during Sunday afternoons in the pub. The day I’d realized I’d never belong there, I was sitting in the Lamb & Flag at Covent Garden with my two favorite English friends, talking about their ideal marriage partners.
    ‘Well, first off, obviously, they’d have to hold a British passport.’

The other nodded in that English oh-yes-absolutely way as I grew sulky. They couldn’t understand why I was tetchy about this sudden proof that we Irish were still just imported personalities in their country. We used to build their roads and literature, now we built their tv programmes. But we weren’t pukka yet.

Then I got the sliver of a chance to spend a year in New York. My last eight weeks in London were a flurry of work projects, wedding plans, movers, and forms. My last day was spent sobbing through Diana’s funeral. Weeping for ditzy Di, no doubt, but also for the end of my time in Blair’s hopeful Britain and the start of an unknown life. I left the soggy country that looks so much like my own and haven’t been back to London since or even thought about it much until these past few weeks.

Now here I am again with a sudden scheme to take off on a six-month adventure. I’m buried in travel tales rather than my beloved novels. Speed-reading Lonely Planets, wincing at vaccination requirements—rabies, yikes—fretting, as ever, over what to wear there. Calling travel agents, lunging through work projects, making lists of bills to look after and storage lockers to rent and friends to call and visas to apply for and letters to write and luggage to buy. Locks! Money belt! Passport photocopies! Mailing lists! Travelers checks! Tylenol! Picture-postcards! Mosquito nets!

And then some nights I lie in bed listening to the rain and think about floating down the Mekong, and I wonder how I can be so sure that I’ll come back. That I’ll still want to, that they’ll let me in. I make neurotic lists of my friends and ties here, losing count and starting again over and over. I wonder if these caffeinated days are my last as a New Yorker. I’ll always be an American, right? Who else would have me?

My mother doesn’t deal well with answering machines.

Hel-looo?
Hello?
Are you there?
Maybe you’re in the shower.
Are you in the shower?

pause

Or are you in…the bar?
You might be out.

pause

I suppose you’re not going to answer me
Okay.
Well.
Bye now.
Okay?
Bye.

click

Real writers are naturally suspicious of weblogs. Max writes:

Jason points out that I didn’t credit him with sending me the Harold Lloyd link below.
 ‘That’s the kind of thing that can cause your sources to dry up fast.’

Let it be known, therefore, that the founder and CEO of Vindigo spends his workday trawling for tidbits on silent movie stars.

My sister Claire is assimilating in Frankfurt:

She was ritually murdered in an Irish bog during the Iron Age. They found her preserved body two thousand years later.

My friend Alex doesn’t quite fit in a town that wants to know if you’re ‘in’ media, law, or finance. He’s the Colombian kid from Queens who moved to an Irish-Italian suburb. He’s the Green Beret lieutenant who fetched up in the least-disciplined corners of Silicon Alley. He’s the action man who meditates. He’s the corporate CTO who goes to film school and makes movies about toy monkeys. I like him very much.

Alex served in the Gulf War, in Haiti, in Panama. He threatens to show me the shrapnel in his ass from Sinai. He talks about ‘his guys’ with the love other men keep for sons. When he left the Green Berets, he wanted to put war behind him to live in what he calls the fantasy world—peaceful America.
 ‘Before September 11th, when I told people I’d been in Special Forces, they didn’t even know what that meant.’

He walked home from work when the World Trade Center reports started coming in. People were running and crying, but he was fine. At 76th St., though, he saw the fighter jets over New York and broke down in tears.