Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 19 The Harvard Roommate

At first Max and Jay had been competitive friends, as high-achieving private school boys at colleges like Harvard are wont to be. How could they not have been competitive, two eccentric, brilliant science majors? “It was weird, though, that we’d been assigned as roommates. Don’t you think?” Jay asked us, inviting us to say, “Yes, Jay, that’s so weird,” although it seemed not very weird, and we were uncomfortable as we waited for him to go on. “Was it chance, or had higher powers, you know, like the psychologists who reviewed all the room assignments, been playing a prank?” To Jay, it was as if Federer had drawn Nadal in the first round of the French Open. It seemed not right that one of them was going to lose so early in the tournament. The game was still on when they decided to live together and were assigned to Al Gore’s old suite in Dunster House.

“I know Al Gore,” I said. This was Jay’s spiel and there was no interrupting him. I got as much attention for my remark as one of the crew got when she walked by while trying not to disturb us; that is, none.

“At the Dartmouth game, Max was in the end zone bleachers and was introduced to a particularly choice Emerson College coed, my cousin’s nineteen-year old roommate, Joosey. Her name is Josey, but we called her Joosey.” Jay’s eyes went wide, and he began sucking on his lips as if he was about to cut into something succulent.

“She was an actress, blond, ravishing, and nearly a clone of Max’s mom in that photo he had on his desk. She was there like we all were, to get sloshed and picked up. Like I said, Max was beautiful, and they were drunk. He had on his easy side that day, and she was his for the taking. After the 6-5 victory, the two of them got lost in the stadium’s warrens. After all the fans had left, and while hiding from the stadium cleaners, the two of them found a sufficiently private spot behind a concrete column, and he kissed her. Then he clumsily felt her up, and she reached beneath his belt, and then he not-so-clumsily lifted her skirt…I can’t describe this soft-core in front of you!”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ve heard better.”

“This is not prurience. If you don’t know this, you’ll never understand Max, and if you don’t understand Max, you won’t be able to do what I’m asking you to do for Orrigen.”

“Don’t hold back on my account.”

“But will you still respect me in the morning?”

“If it’s a good story, yes.”

Confident that he had the goods, and freed by me to deliver them, no subtlety of the intimacies Max shared behind that column with the girl who would briefly become Jay’s wife was withheld.

Then he continued. Max invited her to a Dunster mixer the night before the upcoming Princeton game. It wasn’t the first such invitation she had received.”

The week went by. On the cool Friday evening, the air was filled with the smell of dry leaves that Max would never forget, and the prospect of cozying up to Joosey must have been all too appealing. He came back to his rooms to get ready for too much drinking, and there he found Jay in bed with the very girl, his prospective date. The widely circulated details of that interruption, and Jay’s animated telling of them are too lurid and cinematic for me to convey well, but they included something about the appearance of galloping as she braced herself against the wall; lubricating raspberry Jell-O shots tossed back and thrown across the room; Joosey turning to see what had made the front door slam; breasts swinging in a great arc as they fell free of Jay’s hands; and Jay’s curly hair and joyful face peeking around her bare torso to see Max in a fury. The encounter in the stadium had not actually made Joosey Max’s girlfriend, but he thought he’d staked out territory that Jay should have respected. From that moment, the competition between the two young men turned not so friendly.

Jay explained that Max then found another place to live and began a vindictive campaign of behind-the-scenes character assassination aimed at him. It backfired. No one cared about Jay cuckolding him. Everyone had his or her own life to lead and pain to endure. “What was his problem?” or “Get over it” was all the sympathy he elicited. Max earned a reputation for backstabbing that he couldn’t shake.

In the winter, a student reported that Max had been copying results from yet another student’s lab notebook, and while the Code of Conduct Board didn’t sanction him because there was enough ambiguity that they couldn’t be absolutely certain that the results he was copying weren’t actually his in the first place, there was an investigation and it stained him. His circle of friends narrowed further and he transferred out of Harvard at the end of that sophomore year, obtaining his undergraduate degree from the National University of Singapore. nus provided him with about as much geographical separation as he could find, and that’s what he wanted.

“Max is a genius.” Jay said. “I know he’s got some ip right in the middle of what Orrigen will be doing. You might be navigating the gray area around it.”

That’s where Jay left off. He was wrong, though. We didn’t need to know the play-by-play of Max or Jay fucking Joosey to prepare Orrigen’s future. But he was right, too. Without understanding that scene, you can’t understand Max Frood.

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