I'm going to lay this one out in installments. It's about me getting sent to Virginia to look for moonshine in the 90s, not finding any, but telling myself that I found so much more.
The story's too long and involved to rely on my memory, which can be pretty spotty thanks to stories like this. To retell it, I had to retrieve a shitty, 1998 attempt at nonfiction novelization, which I'd imprisoned like the villains of Superman II in a flat, 3.5" floppy disc labelled "The Longest Virginia". Apparently it took me a few drafts to turn something that should have topped out at 30 pages into a 250-page carnival of self-indulgence for which the term "masturbatory" doesn't really do justice. Provided you're not too drunk, masturbation only takes a few minutes.
Freeing General Zod took some doing. For starters, floppy drives are rarer than 8-track players these days, because there's no strain of nostalgia that causes people to say "I just like the way this Word Document reads on floppy disc". I certainly don't have one. I sold the Dell on which I'd originally pounded out this monstrosity over a decade ago, to a Dallas guy named Otto. Otto was a fat ex-skater who was always talking about how, when Armageddon came, survivalists like himself would thrive while the rest of us helpless slaves would starve like abandoned babies. He could have said "I totally get why not everyone is as preoccupied as I am with the fall of civilization; we're friends, so if my paranoia proves useful, I'll make sure you're taken care of." He didn't. This dickishness is why most survivalists are murdered long before the End Times arrive.
Otto promised me $100 for the Dell. He also said that to protect me from cyber-criminals he'd wipe the computer clean. I have no idea if he wiped me. I do know that he never paid me; the last time I saw him he was slinking around a dark corner near the Cotton Bowl, once again successfully avoiding a confrontation. Just one of his many survival techniques.
I bought another Dell after that one, the Experion something or other. It hosted a single port, into which you could either slide a detachable floppy or CD-Rom drive. I still have that computer, but it only operates eight minutes at a time before overheating and shutting itself off. Dell claimed this was not their fault; some vandal must have jammed a pen into the fan system when I wasn't looking, and vandals aren't covered under warranty, and that will be $800 please, and go fuck yourself, I'm buying a Mac. Regardless I have no idea where the detachable floppy component disappeared to, so really the point of this paragraph was to let you know I have trouble throwing away things that hold no value.
I called my parents to see if they could find a printed version of the story in their Montana attic, in the boxes where I store cassette tapes like Judas Priest's British Steel and Cinderella's Night Songs and maybe also a Rodney Dangerfield comedy album with a rap song on it. No such luck, though they did find a copy of the fiction novel I'd written around the same time. I told them to burn it, so they wouldn't remember how close I'd come to having to live in that attic.
Then I rang up my buddy Cole, who, with grudging good humor, has stored a few boxes of my junk since I moved to New York 10 years ago. This likely did more harm than good: he found no tragically unpublished works of nonfiction, but was reminded that, after 10 years, maybe I could store my own fucking boxes.
Finally I asked our company's tech officer, Mark, if he had access to a floppy drive. He laughed and asked if I needed a 3.5" or a 5 1/4". When two things become equally useless, the degree of their archaism becomes irrelevant. And hilarious! To tech people.
Funny thing is, Mark does have a floppy drive, hooked up to this massive screen whose displays look like they belong back in 1986, when interfaces looked less ludicrous than they did in WarGames, but still, pretty ludicrous. Comically, my floppy disc was so old, the floppy drive couldn't read it without inputting long-forgotten special codes (like tech Sanskrit). Mark walked over to a table used mainly by junior employees and interns and pulled a thick manual out from under the desktop monitor its main job had been to support. Apparently the book was ancient (possibly as old as eight years, gasp), and Mark caught a lot of shit for even bothering to keep it around.
Old as it was, it still did not contain the required information. Mark told me to leave the floppies with him, and he'd see if Mike could pull it off. I'm almost certain Mike is 12 years old -- too young to remember codes whose utility expired when he was, like, zero. Maybe he eagerly soaked up outmoded programming commands the same way young British dudes soaked up old American blues in the 50s and 60s, but why would anybody do that?
Mike did that. I don't know why, but at some point he had absorbed the right information, and so was able to retrieve this terrible, terrible manuscript. But dig underneath the terrible treatment, and the story itself was good. Hopefully now I can retrieve it.
