Gabriel Roth - The Unknowns

He’s chosen an absurd fusion restaurant that I suspect he learned about from a magazine. I find him sitting at the bar in a golf shirt, drinking the closest thing they have to a Budweiser, gazing around uncomfortably. When he sees me approaching he looks relieved, and his handshake is gentle and sincere.

“How are ya?” he says. “Good to see ya!” His hair is markedly grayer than it was, and so is his skin, and rather than allow his expansive belly to flop over his belt he’s hiked his pants up to his navel.

“Yeah, you too,” I say.

He looks toward the door and fails to catch the eye of the hostess. “I’ll just let her know we’re all here,” he says, the all making me wonder if he’s brought someone else. On my seventeenth birthday he took me to a steakhouse where, to my surprise, we were joined by a nervous middle-aged woman, an archivist at the college, who he was apparently dating.

But the hostess leads us through the crowded dining room to a small table for two, one of a long row against the restaurant’s rear wall. All the other tables are occupied. Along the banquette sits a line of women facing their male counterparts. The walls are brushed metal, and the trebly din of reflected conversation is massive and complex.

The hostess pushes our table to one side to open a path to the banquette, but the diners are tightly packed and the guy next to us has to stand and move his chair to allow my dad to squeeze through. When he lowers himself onto the cushioned seat his hips practically touch the women on either side.

“So,” he says when he’s settled. “Mr. Dot-Com Startup! The boy genius himself!” I sit there and take it. “Maybe you should be teaching me, huh?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“So what was it like?” he says. “Must have been pretty exciting, huh?”

Writing and fixing code for sixteen hours a day was, in fact, exciting, but the excitement was of a kind that’s hard to see from the outside. “It was a lot of work,” I say. “But we got to make our own hours and wear jeans and drink as much soda as we wanted.”

This seems to satisfy his expectations. “So how come you didn’t do an IPO?” he says.

“We looked at it,” I say. “But we got a good offer, and it seemed like the product had more value to a bigger company than it had on its own.”

He bats this assessment away with the back of his hand. “They’re going to ruin the culture that made your startup so dynamic!” he says.

I don’t think he even knows what our software does. “No, you’re probably right,” I say.

The waiter approaches our table, introduces himself as Roy, and crouches to tell us about the specials in a rich baritone on which he rightly prides himself. My dad has to lean in to hear him above the ridiculous noise. We order, and Roy goes away, and there’s a little pause while Dad smiles nervously.

“Well, so I’ve got a proposition for you,” he says, with the off-kilter enthusiasm of a salesman who has steeled himself to make the call.

“What’s that, Dad?” I say, moving the bowmen and the cauldrons of oil into position on the battlements of my heart.

“I can’t tell you about it just yet,” he says. He reaches down for his briefcase, leaning into the woman on his right, a brunette with a weathered face. “We need to get you under NDA first.” He looks around to see if anyone has heard him, then pulls out two pages, laser-printed and stapled, a generic nondisclosure agreement he got off the Internet. He reaches into his pocket and proffers a fat fountain pen. How is it that of all the men in the world my father is this one, grinning and waving his pen at me in a restaurant? I don’t want to sign this piece of paper; I want to be excluded from my dad’s confidence. I search it for an excuse to decline, maybe a clause giving him the rights to everything I’ve ever made in perpetuity. But it’s just an NDA. I take his fountain pen, struggle to get the ink flowing, and scrawl my name across the bottom. When I hand it back I feel like I’ve just signed something more significant than a pledge of confidentiality.

“So what’s the big secret, Dad?” I ask him.

“Well so I’m starting a dot-com company!” he says, smiling as if the happiness of this news is self-evident and universal. I become very aware of the proximity of the people at the neighboring tables.

“That’s great,” I say, trying my best. “What’s it going to do?”

“We’re going to sell stereo equipment over the web!” he says. “How about that? Stereo equipment! I know all about that stuff!” I just nod. “Because, see, no one owns that space yet,” Dad says. “When you think of buying books online you think of Amazon. When you think of buying toys, you think of Toys.com. But when you think of stereo equipment, who do you think of? No one. Well, that’s going to be us!”

“Cool,” I say. “Congratulations, Dad. That’s great.”

“It is great,” he says. “It’s gonna be great. So that’s why I’m here.” He takes a dramatic pause, enjoying himself, and extends his hand, palm up. “I want you on board!”

I can’t think of a word to say to this. Dad remains frozen, hand out, for several seconds, until I become aware of Roy standing behind me with our appetizers. “All right, here we are,” he says as he lowers my dad’s pan-fried noodles. Dad, his moment interrupted, looks blankly at his plate while Roy sets down my Thai beef salad.

“It sounds like a really interesting idea,” I say, stalling. “So how far along are you?”

“We’re just in the initial stages right now,” he says, uncharacteristically ignoring his food. “Right now we’re putting a team together, a really great team. Then we’re going to go looking for financing, and then we start development. And I’m seeing you as a key player on the team.” He leans in over his noodles and says, in an intimate voice, “How does chief technical officer sound?”

I concentrate on spearing a bite of beef, onions, and lettuce with my fork. “I’m not really looking for a job, Dad,” I say.

“Well, I’m headhunting you!” he says happily. “Hey, I’m not just some twenty-five-year-old MBA. I teach those guys what they know, and I know it better than them. I’m building a real company here, a serious company.” Finally he grabs a thick clump of noodles in his chopsticks and ferries them to his mouth. “But I need you to make the website, otherwise this won’t get off the ground. Now, I could hire some consultant to do it, if you have any idea what these guys cost, but I want to keep the whole thing in the family, you see? I want—”

Something occurs to me. “Dad,” I say, “do you even have a domain name?”

“A what?”

“A domain name,” I say slowly. “A web address. Like, uh, stereo dot com or audiophile gear dot net .”

“No, we’re not at that stage yet,” he says, still eating. “See, I wouldn’t even know how to do that! This is why we need you on the team! I think stereo dot com would be good. It’s easier to remember.”

The woman next to Dad stifles a smile. When I glance at her she looks away.

“Dad,” I say. “Who is we ?”

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“It’s always We’re going to start a company, we’re going to make a million dollars selling this and that .” I’m doing my best to control my voice. “So who’s the we ? Who’s in this with you?”

Dad looks at me as though he’s never seen me before and he’s not happy about what he sees. “I was hoping you would be,” he says.

There’s a silence, and I realize that Roy will be back soon to clear the appetizers and bring my sea bass, and I can’t bring myself to sit here for one more second.