Alcock’s Autobiography 3.4
22 July 2011
22 July 2011
During most of the first year, Kumiko was consumed by her love. Fortunately, a good deal of this energy, this desire to please and I daresay possess me, was diverted to the business. With GUIs not yet practical, and PCs just starting to make their debut among experimenters, she mastered the command line interface to our Prime 300 mini-computer and went on to learn enough Fortran to write a few programs herself.
But I was even more impressed by how quickly she learned to draft building plans by hand. Although I had hired a programmer to write a suite of CAD routines specifically aimed at our type of log construction, it would be a decade before computer aided drafting would replace the stool, table, lamp, scale rules, T-squares, triangles, lettering guides, erasers, pencils, pens and big sheets of paper of the old style draftsman. My programmer and I had computerized parts of the process, such as generating the list of materials, and producing cost estimates from a “napkin sketch”, a rough sketch of a potential customer’s dream home or lake cabin or barn that was used to draw up a professional floor plan upon which most sale contracts were based. Once we had a go-ahead and a substantial down-payment, we proceeded to make a full set of working drawings which were then used to produce the cutting list and bill of materials. The cutting list was given to the plant foreman who broke it into sections and distributed these to the relevant work centers in the factory.
Often a change would have to be made in the drawings at some less than optimal time and sometimes a floor plan had to be drawn up when we were away from the office, traveling in Japan for example under the aegis of Forestry and Agriculture of the Mitsui banner. Kumiko had learned to do this. As long as she was with me, we could respond quickly, even overnight, to changing customer demands. We had been using the new Tandy Model 100 to access our mini computer by an acoustic modem (at 300 baud!) via regular voice phone lines which worked okay for lists, and plain text documents, but took a very long time at a high price per minute to transfer files for a large CAD-like drawing. To add to the inconvenience, line noise often corrupted the file and it had to be resent several times. Furthermore, we usually had no practical way to print it once we got it.
Kumiko’s ability to sit down with the portable drafting kit we’d put together, in a hotel room, ryokan, or at a desk in a Forestry and Agriculture branch office and change a drawing or produce a new one probably contributed more to our success in opening up an export trade to Japan than her skills as an interpreter and occasional translator.
In addition, I had someone to talk with, an advisor who was intimately familiar with my company— the availability of raw material, other orders in the pipeline, our current financial situation, etc.— and at the same time was sensitive to the implications, nuances, and indirect suggestions from our partner, Forestry and Agriculture, and their sub-contractors and occasionally customers, in Japanese. And she was available pretty much 24/7.
She was a boon to the company, so much so, and because we so deeply loved to fuck each other then, that I was immune to negative gossip and criticism.
I began to take her seriously when she asked me about my divorce. Maybe I should push it, make more concessions to get it done. Whereas I had previously ignored advice from friends to finalize it, considering their analysis to be the usual two-bit “Dear Abby” counseling type of crap, I now found myself toying with the idea of Kumiko not only as lover but as wife.
The matter was brought to a head when I finally sold the business. Of course I was completely burnt out by then. I needed a major rest. And I wanted to get back to my studies of ancient Chinese. What I probably should have done is take a three week vacation. If I had done so without Kumiko, it might have worked. I could have asked my plant manager to handle things for three weeks together with her. But when the opportunity to sell quite literally walked into my office one day, I was so exhausted, so bone-weary of the business world, so stupefied, I said, “Yeah. Let’s make a deal.”
I sold the company in ‘85. In ‘86, with Kumiko’s mother acting as a guarantor, I rented a 4LDK apartment in Nishiogikubo, Tokyo. We began a new life, one without the business, without a business card. I was no longer a president. I was an ex president but without the money or age to make that count for much. In fact, I had no title. And neither did she. I began to receive a stern lesson in the overriding importance of ‘position’ in the Kanji Culture world of East Asia, in contrast to the value of ‘intrinsic being’ beloved by the West. It would not be my last lesson in this topic. If that era were a novel, it would have been titled, Tokyo Without a Meishi.
At first it was a great relief. But after about three weeks our relationship began to deteriorate. I didn’t see it at the time, but now I realize that my jobless status was the same as having no status. Having no status had the effect of eroding my image in Kumiko’s heart. I don’t think she said to herself, “He’s a nobody now. Not young. Not wealthy. He was stupid to sell his business. What happens when the money runs out? What happens if the new owners fail to pay his royalty on Japan sales or Japan sales themselves dry up? And he is still legally married. I’m losing interest.” But something like that was no doubt at play, if only beneath the surface.
I had inherited my position, took it for granted, saw it mainly as a burden to bear or as an obstacle between me and “what I really wanted to do”, and did not appreciate its true value. I suspect some people gave me good advice during that period, cautioned me, but I can’t remember a word of it, so dense were the clouds of delusion.
In Nishiogikubo the sex began deviating from the previous norm. Either it was lazy, less intense, or we went to extra effort to create tension and excitement. It was no longer rolling entirely on its own volition. But this too was not clear at the time. Instead, the focal point— like a war-mongering government creates and embellishes an enemy that is only lightly based in reality— was my divorce. “If only I were legally divorced, things would be better,” the refrain ran.
But actually certain key conditions, taken for granted and not clearly acknowledged, that supported the existence of our love affair were disappearing. Just as a fire without fuel does not persist, or lacking air goes out, or meeting water is extinguished, so our love affair without the business was flickering, threatening to die. But I did not recognize this. Instead I imagined I was freer than before when in some ways the opposite was true. In Tokyo at age 45, for example, I was distinctly less free.
The problem was that, after the much-needed three weeks’ rest, the I that Kumiko had fallen in love with had left the stage, but for me, the I I loved and wanted to promote had just entered the drama. Without the concrete problems of business to focus on, we looked around and found things that resembled problems and then elaborated on these pseudo problems, my divorce being the prime example. We thereby condemed our love affair to its eventual demise.
I thought she had fallen in love with the me I thought I was. But she had fallen in love with the me she thought I was. And I had become deeply attached to the non-existent she that had fallen in love with the wrong me. If we would have been clear about this at the time, everything would have worked out well, without violence.
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