I was a computer tester at RCA/EDP in Palm Beach Gardens.
The Barking Dog Company. The training ground for the industry.
We reverse-engineered IBM computers and tried to make ours
compatible, so people could switch over. It was intellectual property
theft, I suppose. Cheating. Appearances and dissimulation. The usual.
Business majors. This was before open software. This was before the IBM PC.
This was before Microsoft, or Windows. It was hexadecimal notation.
An octal numbering system. Base 8. I think. I don't remember.
I lived in an efficiency apartment out on Singer Island.
El Pelicano Arms. It was managed by a man
in a yellow jumpsuit. I read Claude Lévi-Strauss
and Marshall McLuhan. I read the New York
Herald-Tribune. Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and
Dick Schaap were inventing The New Journalism.
I was going to be a writer when I grew up.
Meanwhile, I was reading The Mechanical Bride
and Tristes Tropiques. I saw Mondo Cane at the drive-in.
I was studying the Melanesian gambit. I was later to become
Anthropologist-in-Residence (AIR) at the L. A. (Lower Alabama)
Folk Life Center in Point and Shoot, Florida.