Upon awakening in Palo Alto, or Gecca, Van Stein and I haul our sorry selves around the corner to Starbucks on University Avenue.
The magnetism of The Garage had been so strong for the artist, he tells me, that he’d returned to paint it at four that morning.
“Hey, what’s that on your lip?” he asks.
“What-where?” I seek my reflection in the glass of my iPhone and see a nasty blood blister on my lower right lip.
“Jeez, how’d that get there? Maybe my immune system is down from this stupid cold?”
Van Stein snickers. “I’ve never seen a blister like that from a cold.”
“The devil used to do this kind of thing to Padre Pio,” I say. “He’d be up half the night battling Satan and come out in the morning scratched and bruised.”
Pumped with caffeine, we climb into the Jeep, consult The Tablet, and set off to Google headquarters at 1600 Amphitheater Parkway in nearby Mountain View.
This is our in-person, off-line version of a Google Search.
There is no main entrance, no security gate, and certainly no sign to herald Google’s presence. Only an amorphous sprawl of unidentified and anonymous buildings.
In fact, the only reason we know we’re in the right place is because a Google car is patrolling the area with a camera mounted on its roof aimed in our direction.
They know we’re here.
We pull into the parking area and wander freely around what seems like part industrial park, part university campus—a half-dozen unlabeled buildings with the occasional locked door and this sign: Google Employees Only.
The concrete-paved communal area in between buildings is desolate.
“Where is everybody?” asks Van Stein, throwing his arms in wonderment, articulating a 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone.
We come upon a shop that appears open, but the door is locked.
A sign says, Google Employees Only.
The windows are decorated with lava lamps, which appear to be for sale.
I recall—from reading a book about Google prior to departure—that the lava lamp is Google’s unofficial mascot. And seemingly more popular among Google nerds than baseball caps and T-shirts embroidered with their rainbow-colored motif.
“Lava,” I say. “Spewed from volcanoes…”
“…And an opening to hell,” Van Stein finishes my thought.
The few persons who crisscross the openair court between buildings don’t look old enough to have graduated college.
We stop a young male with a Google badge and obligatory dispatch bag hanging from a shoulder.
“Where is the main building?” I ask.
He chuckles and points. “Over there.”
He strides off.
I try to follow his point.
“Over where?” I say to Van Stein.
We walk in the general direction of the point.
More unidentified buildings, whose doors are locked to all but Google Employees Only.
“This is weird,” says Van Stein. “I think we’re in their play area.”
“Makes sense, because they’re definitely playing with us. This is better security than guards with guns. They just ignore you.”
We return to the Jeep, drive off, and quickly discover that the amorphous sprawl of Google extends in several directions across Amphitheater Parkway, including a smaller building identified by a small sign on the street: Visitors Entrance.
“That’s us!”
We rejoice, park, alight, and stroll through unassuming glass doors.
The lobby is small and drab, not well lit, certainly not befitting a multi-billion dollar company, as if—like the devil—it attempts to disguise itself as benign.
Behind a simple counter sits a lone female receptionist, who you can’t even see until you’re upon it.
She looks up cheerfully at two adventurers in travel hats.
“I’d like to see someone from Google,” I announce.
She regards me vacantly, barely a hint of amusement in her eyes.
“I’ve tried to phone,” I continue. “It’s impossible to connect to a human being. I tried to email. But no one answers. So I’ve traveled a long way to see somebody in person.”
“We don’t do that,” she says bluntly. “There’s no one who can see you.”
“But it’s important,” I say. “Maybe you can find a trainee junior assistant who has two minutes to talk to me?”
She shakes her head. “Not even. There’s no one here who can do that. You have to send an email to a support group.”
“I did that. No one responds.” I pause. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Can I talk to you?”
“No. I’m not authorized to talk to anyone.”
“But you’re taking to me right now.”
She shrugs, no longer talking.
“Your boss?”
She shakes her head.
“Your mother?”
Behind me, Van Stein erupts: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
And I realize, we are just like Dorothy, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion on a pilgrimage to a new-fangled version of Emerald City, if more forbidding.
The Great Google is a giant lava lamp. And it hath spoken: Don’t come to us, we come to you, through your computer screen. So… PISS OFF!
Weeping now, I accept a handwritten notation from this woman about who I must email.
Not actual named people, mind you, unless that person’s name is Support—which, in any case, would be a sick lie.
Van Stein and I aren’t ones to give up easily.
I realize what we need, what we’re missing.
“We would like to buy a lava lamp,” I say to the counter woman.
She shakes her head. “Not here. The shop is for employees only.”
“We noticed. Where in town can we find lava lamps?”
“Wal-Mart, on Showers Drive.”
Odd how she knows such details.
I look solemnly at Van Stein as if I’m Indiana Jones and just discovered where the treasure is buried. “Let’s go.”
As we pull out, we’ve got two Google cars with roof cameras on our tail.
We weave around until we intuitively uncover Google’s hub: a clump of austere buildings.
Again, no signs, just an amorphous, anonymous sprawl of steel and glass… until a Tyrannosaurus Rex confronts us as it feasts on a pink flamingo.
“They’re trying to scare us off,” I whisper.
Not far from this exhibition of barbarity, a ten-foot tall stainless steel sculpture blocks our path. It depicts the giant dorsal fin of a great white shark.
Don’t cross this line or we’ll eat you!
Does Google embrace monstrous beasts?
Or maybe Google is the monstrous beast?
Because—for certain—many years before Google became the name of a search engine and data storage facility, it was an ugly beast depicted in a foretelling illustrated children’s book by V.V. Vickers, published by Oxford University Press...
The Google Book is about a much-feared Google monster that resides in Google Land.
The monster does not appear until the last page, and when it does, it is with these words:
Ultimately, Google is un-penetrable.
Unexpected visitors like us are worn down by total indifference and confusion, which to my thinking is purposely induced.
On the way out, Google deploys a clump of colorful sculptures of a giant ice cream sundae, chocolate éclair, gingerbread man, and ice cream sandwich—all waving goodbye…
…happy, happy…
…accompanied by a transparent glass robot filled with jelly beans or oversize pills from Alice in Wonderland.
Don’t forget to take your meds!
Perhaps they are there to remind us we are inside a world of virtual reality coupled with contemporary society’s proclivity for prescribing psych drugs.
But now we know what we must find as a memento of our valiant effort to penetrate Google-land: A lava lamp from Walmart, where everything therein—and there’s a lotta stuff—comes from China.
And Google will probably know when we arrive there, because it recently extended its operations to collecting offline data (in addition to global mapping) about everyone’s shopping habits in malls.
That’s because Google uses in-house collection resources, though I would not be surprised if they also buy data from merchants who keep a record of everyone’s purchases based on “club” memberships, which consumers are suckered into with the inducement of discounts.
Suitably Lava’d, we consult The Tablet and navigate to Facebook headquarters, situated at Hacker Way in Menlo Park…