I had new blooms of friendship when I was 30, 42, and 53.

     I didn’t realize this until I was 67 and got an email out of nowhere from my ex-wife, Rhonda. We’d eloped from Detroit to California in 1969 and married at age 22 at Figueroa Mountain, and we had a wild and crazy life together for six years. Last I’d heard of her, she’d ditched her Detroit Lions football player and married that guy’s best friend, an aeronautical engineer, and moved to Seattle. That was 1978. I never saw her again.

     When Google came into existence I searched for her name every couple years but there was no sign of her.     

     In 2013 I got a brief email from her (“Looking for me?”). She’d searched the internet for her own name and found my picture of her on my website, the only picture I had of her. We became email pen-pals and exchanged 727 emails over the next five years until she died of the cumulative effects of lithium treatment for bipolar disorder.

     I confess to being guilty of schadenfreude as I found out her life had been a series of divorces and car wrecks and hospitalizations. The reason I couldn’t find her online was that she’d legally changed her name to her mother’s maiden name. Take that, patriarchy. 

     She didn’t want to talk about our years together, so I told her about what I’d been doing for the last 35 years since the last time I saw her. My entire writing career happened after we split up. I told her about the friends I’d accumulated over the years, and I realized that I’d had three major bursts of new friends in my adult life.

     Everybody makes friends in school and then in their first job, but not me. After I left high school I never saw any of my classmates again. I made no friends at Eastern Michigan University. The only serious friend I made at my first job at the Sears advertising department was Rhonda, my fellow copywriter.

     I told Rhonda about the massive change in my life when I landed at Santa Barbara Magazine in 1975. Mark, Henry, Jurgen, Janet Planet were all high-functioning creators. My brother Scott left the magazine in January 1977 and Mark bought my brother’s equipment and took over his business. It took a while for me and Mark to find new clients after my brother left but then things accelerated. Mark and I created a campaign for Gordon & Grant Hot Tubs that drew national attention. The magazine hired a managing editor, Jerry, a Stanford grad who’d spurned the family law business to hitchhike around the world. He was freakishly tall, nearly seven feet, and earned his way across India by appearing in several Bollywood movies as the looming villain.  

     I’m still friends with the writers, photographers, artists, sculptors, designers, typesetters, freelancers and sole proprietors I knew in those days.  My work with them resulted in a portfolio of brochures and ads that won me a job with BBDO, the world’s fourth-largest ad agency, writing radio, TV, and print ads in Detroit for Dodge cars and trucks.

     I didn’t make any long-term friends there. I was an outsider because the other copywriters weren’t really writers. They were sloganeers and patter-masters. The projects were set up so that you didn’t have to write much. Most of the radio spots, for instance, were “donut” ads, opening with 8 seconds of a pre-made jingle and closing with a 10-second reprise of the jingle, so all we had to write was the 12-second “donut hole” in the middle. After I’d been there a year, they routinely handed me any projects that required long copy.

     I continued to write for SB Mag while I was at BBDO, and wrote sci-fi stories. Last year, Mark surprised me with a fat envelope of letters I wrote from Detroit to the magazine people–279 pages of analysis of the issues published while I was away and my shrieks about the awfulness of the BBDO job.

     BBDO turned out to be an interruption in my brilliant copywriting career. A well-paid interregnum, but I didn’t create anything noteworthy. When BBDO was fired by Chrysler, I rejected job offers in Detroit and fled back to California.

     A team of highly competent creators united against crass senior management. This seems to have been a similar factor in my friendship events. SB Mag was our baby that had to be smuggled past the publisher’s fixation on the local real estate market. The real estate magazine was the money-maker; SB Mag was a vanity project. We wanted to make it a good magazine, not just another Chamber of Commerce shillzine.  

     My pals and I created the first marketing campaign for Seymour Duncan that changed him from a mom&pop shop to the #1 guitar pickup manufacturer. We flew to St. Louis to gather information to create a catalog for Alvarez Guitars. COMMUNICATION ARTS magazine ran an article about a direct mail campaign I wrote. I designed and wrote a fundraising brochure for the Santa Barbara Zoo that became their new Master Plan after bringing in millions in donations. I wrote a stereo catalog for Warehouse Sound that won the Gold Mailbox Award from the Direct Mail Association.

     Then I bought a Macintosh computer and a modem and discovered the electronic bulletin-board systems (BBS) in Santa Barbara, and the second friendburst of my adult life began.

     All you needed to run a BBS was a computer and a regular phone line. To log onto a BBS you needed a certain level of computer savvy and a certain level of literacy to engage in discussions. I encountered a fascinating group of intellects.

     I soon became a leading member of the BBS community. I was over 40 and they were almost all under 20 but we got along fine. We were united by our exploration into computers and the micro-internet of the phone-line system that predated the Web. Most of them were schoolkids. 

     It was all local–BBSes in other cities required expensive long-distance connections. There was a famous BBS in San Francisco, The Well, and I went there once or twice to look around but all I could think about was “a dollar a minute.”

     My 17-year-old niece Lori flew into town from Oklahoma to spend the summer at my brother’s house and I introduced her to the BBS network and she leaped in, adopting the handle “The Bitch.” She quickly gained attention because hardly any girls were BBSing. After a few weeks she said she wanted to meet some of these people. She said, let’s all meet at Don Q Billiards and play pool.

     I went with her–who knows what kind of people the BBSers were? Nobody used their real name, it was a maze of extravagant “handles.” I was expecting to sit on the sidelines while the kids frolicked, but instead the kids turned out to be seriously intelligent young masters of the emerging technology.  

     The BBS was our private reserve, outside the access of almost everybody, unfettered. I was a lot older than these kids but we shared this fascination with the technology of the internet. I still talk to some of those people every day online–Jello Viagra, Salamander, Gwar, Norbus, Math Blaster, Mr Pube.

     Some of the kids were excellent writers and we began an online fiction ‘zine, called COSMIC CHARLIE at first–each contributor was asked to write a story with that title–the title eventually settled down to SWAGAZINE and the issues are still online at https://www.swagazine.com.     And those kids are still my friends 35 years later. 

     It was through these BBS kids that I began attending hackers’ conventions in the 90s. I was never a hacker myself but a lot of the BBS kids were hackers. One hacker’s BBS was MOODY LONERS WITH HANDGUNS. A few of the local hackers became members of The Cult Of The Dead Cow, a world-famous group of white-hat hackers. One member, Mudge, eventually became an advisor to President Obama. Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s membership in the Cult was a controversial factor in 2020.

     I attended several DefCons in Las Vegas and took pictures in the Cult’s “Suite of the Elite” at the convention hotel, and I appeared on stage with them and threw glow-in-the-dark cow fuck detectors into the audience as the Cult introduced their revolutionary tool that made it super-simple to hack Windows: “Back Orifice 2000.”

     One value of the BBS friendships was that we could move without moving away from our friends.

     I looked up from my desk in the Granada Building one day and noticed that business was real slow and all my clients had vanished. The Mac destroyed the existing ad/graphics biz understructure. Typesetters went out of business. One typesetter suicided. By then I’d been attending hacker conventions for a few years. My pals in the Cult of the Dead Cow had moved to San Francisco. I moved there too and fit in well with their new group of ‘zine publishers.

     I shared a house with a couple guys from the Cult of the Dead Cow and the house was full of computers. I brought my laser printer, which was a high-priced rare beast in those days, and the guys were grateful for access to the printer. One of them used it to produce his quarterly magazine, COOL BEANS, about the San Francisco live music scene. He’s still publishing it.

     More and more of my work came through online connections, and most of my work was as a Macintosh graphics creator. I worked for a week or two at a time at dozens of companies creating brochures and ads and packaging and PowerPoint presentations (although PowerPoint hadn’t been introduced yet, I used an app called Persuasion) and courtroom presentations and displays for tradeshow booths. 

     But after a few years of this I wanted to get back to writing. I told Aquent to find me some writing work, and they sent me to the Internet Shopping Network (ISN)’s office in a building near Moffett Field. Billionaire Barry Diller’s ISN filled four floors of the building.

     To get hired, I had to supply four product descriptions to prove my competence. Pick any old product and write about it, they said. I was leery that they’d take a real product description and use it, so I made up some fake products.

Swiss Navy Knife

            Just the thing when you’re out at sea! Seven separate blades fold out of this compact, rugged handle. Rope hawser blade, oyster shucker blade, barnacle blade, fishhook blade, bailing blade, porthole access blade, and gangway blade all fold in and out easily. This unique lightweight knife even floats if you drop it overboard! It’s corrosion resistant, too: built to last a lifetime even in harsh saltwater environments. Each blade is made of high-strength 1040 C stainless steel, stress-forged and sprung-mounted into the engraved narwhale horn handle. Attractive leather carrying case included.

     They hired me and I was put into a bullpen of a dozen other writers. We started going to lunch together. We could all fit in my ancient Oldsmobile with bench seats.

      Mark had published an article in HARPER’S magazine. I forget what Rosie’s writing background was, she was a native San Franciscan. Richard had published celebrity squibs for the National Enquirer. Tanya’s master’s thesis was about the novels of Thomas Hardy. Kevin was the only black kid in his class at the Bronx High School of Science and he was a hip-hop DJ at the Stanford radio station. Dan’s athletic career came to an end after he competed in the 1996 Olympics but did not win a medal.

     We started bar-hopping on Fridays and weekends. Rosie was our guide–she knew all the oddball bars in The City. Her boyfriend was the manager at Tosca Café in North Beach. One night Kevin was featured on the billboard as an upcoming DJ at the dance joint next door to Tosca. Kevvy Kev was his handle.

     How Tanya financed her college education: every few months she would fly down to Texas and buy a used car and drive it back to Minnesota and sell it for twice what she paid for it. Salt on the roads in winter kills cars. One of her side jobs in San Francisco was repairing Nazi battle tanks at a military museum. (She knew German and could read the repair manuals.) The owner of the museum, a billionaire, joined us in our barhoppings occasionally and Richard pestered him into setting up a visit for our group to the tank museum, and we each drove a tank. I almost hit a tree but the billionaire reached across and grabbed the control stick and swerved the tank.

     I don’t know if other people have similar ebbs and flows in their friendship history. Maybe it is common among the peripatetic. I lived at 27 different addresses from the time I was 18 until I was 33. Wandering from place to place, it’s hard to make long-lasting friends.  

     Part of my emails to Rhonda were to show her that I’d accomplished things that she’d denigrated as impossible for me. She never revealed much of anything in our email penpal years. She didn’t want to discuss any of the events of our life together. When she talked about her past it was tales of how rotten her exes were and lists of diseases and car wrecks.  

     She had no friend stories of her own to share. She told me about her Mensa membership and how she jeered at her husbands who didn’t attempt to take the test to become a member. She had nothing good to say about her ex-husbands or her former co-workers–she retired from her government job at 55 with a medical disability. 

     She was living in a metal quonset hut on several acres at a remote rural address in eastern Washington state.  It had only 2 windows on the ground floor, each 4×6 each with bars.  All the exterior doors were steel. All of them had deadbolts to keep out the 280 citizens of Spangle, Washington. She had zero friends there.