turned the page over and ran a thumb over the classifieds. “Like these. All these beautiful, sensitive, lonely young men, desperately seeking a soulmate. Preferably a soulmate with many credit cards.”
“Not on the level,” I said.
“About as much as the sex ads in the straight papers. Hustlers, mostly, or old fatties pretending to be twenty-four and buffed up. Sad stuff. Where’d you get this?”
“It was Max’s. It’s what brought me here.”
Jack’s eyes widened briefly. “Max? Max had this?”
“Not what you’d expect?”
“Not bloody hardly. Max found his kids on the street, where he could see they were desperation cases. Plenty of kids on the pavement these days. One side of the economy the
Times
rarely sees fit to cover.”
“So why would he have the paper?”
He refolded it along the sharp creases, looking at me. “God knows. He had his hands full as it was, between his lost kids, Christy, and the service.”
I was getting confused. “Which service?”
“The computer service. Something Fine Online. I thought that’s why you were here.”
“I’m just blundering around,” I said, “chasing lines in the
Nite Line
.”
Jack jerked his head over his shoulder. “Come on. So your day shouldn’t be a complete loss. I’ll show you a new side of Max.”
We went through the living room, where angel’s flight seemed to have struck: All the phones were silent, and the young men sat staring into the middle distance, gathering their energies for the next erotically charged encounter. One of them was doing a crossword puzzle. Jack led me down a hallway hung with a few small and unconvincing Dali lithographs, mostly watches that seemed to have collided with pizzas, and into a bedroom where a tower-model desktop computer hummed away on a huge desk made from two tables placed end to end. The setup covered an entire wall. Multiple-tiered in and out baskets screwed to the wall held stacks of modems, their red lights blinking like the eyes of animals in a Disney forest. Four screens were filled with flying text, scrolling almost too rapidly to be read.
“About thirty online at the moment,” Jack said, eyeing the modems. “What do you know about how this works?”
I’d come up against a bulletin board before, a particularly vile heterosexual meat market where children were the merchandise. “People call in on their computers and talk to each other in real time, using their keyboards, or leave messages for each other.” It didn’t sound very expert. “I guess all boards are different, though.”
“All boards are exactly the same, at least as far as the hardware and software go,” Jack said. “It’s the wetware that makes them different.”
“Wetware.”
“The people.” He gestured at the screen, at the ribbon of words. “Boards are neutral, just like a TV set or a telephone line, until you add in the human factor. This is a gay board. Most everybody on it is gay, they live in the local calling area, and they give it its distinguishing characteristics, which is to say they make it a West Hollywood gay board, lots of jokes, lots of industry talk, lots of jokey, horny e-mail. And, naturally, a psychic flavor, since this is probably the only city in America where psychics outnumber real people.”
“And that’s where Max—”
“Not entirely. Close, though.” He seated himself at the computer and did something fast and practiced. “Look here,” he said.
TALK TO THE THERAPIST glowed in the middle of the largest screen.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Max?”
“Therapist and psychic,” Jack said. “All-around emotional handyman. Some of the strangest questions you ever read. That was one of the things I loved about him: Nothing struck him as weird. If someone said to him that he needed his aura fluffed, Max would have figured out a way to fluff the man’s aura. He dealt with some pretty disgusting stuff here, too, but Max never got disgusted.”
“Nothing human
“Not on the level,” I said.
“About as much as the sex ads in the straight papers. Hustlers, mostly, or old fatties pretending to be twenty-four and buffed up. Sad stuff. Where’d you get this?”
“It was Max’s. It’s what brought me here.”
Jack’s eyes widened briefly. “Max? Max had this?”
“Not what you’d expect?”
“Not bloody hardly. Max found his kids on the street, where he could see they were desperation cases. Plenty of kids on the pavement these days. One side of the economy the
Times
rarely sees fit to cover.”
“So why would he have the paper?”
He refolded it along the sharp creases, looking at me. “God knows. He had his hands full as it was, between his lost kids, Christy, and the service.”
I was getting confused. “Which service?”
“The computer service. Something Fine Online. I thought that’s why you were here.”
“I’m just blundering around,” I said, “chasing lines in the
Nite Line
.”
Jack jerked his head over his shoulder. “Come on. So your day shouldn’t be a complete loss. I’ll show you a new side of Max.”
We went through the living room, where angel’s flight seemed to have struck: All the phones were silent, and the young men sat staring into the middle distance, gathering their energies for the next erotically charged encounter. One of them was doing a crossword puzzle. Jack led me down a hallway hung with a few small and unconvincing Dali lithographs, mostly watches that seemed to have collided with pizzas, and into a bedroom where a tower-model desktop computer hummed away on a huge desk made from two tables placed end to end. The setup covered an entire wall. Multiple-tiered in and out baskets screwed to the wall held stacks of modems, their red lights blinking like the eyes of animals in a Disney forest. Four screens were filled with flying text, scrolling almost too rapidly to be read.
“About thirty online at the moment,” Jack said, eyeing the modems. “What do you know about how this works?”
I’d come up against a bulletin board before, a particularly vile heterosexual meat market where children were the merchandise. “People call in on their computers and talk to each other in real time, using their keyboards, or leave messages for each other.” It didn’t sound very expert. “I guess all boards are different, though.”
“All boards are exactly the same, at least as far as the hardware and software go,” Jack said. “It’s the wetware that makes them different.”
“Wetware.”
“The people.” He gestured at the screen, at the ribbon of words. “Boards are neutral, just like a TV set or a telephone line, until you add in the human factor. This is a gay board. Most everybody on it is gay, they live in the local calling area, and they give it its distinguishing characteristics, which is to say they make it a West Hollywood gay board, lots of jokes, lots of industry talk, lots of jokey, horny e-mail. And, naturally, a psychic flavor, since this is probably the only city in America where psychics outnumber real people.”
“And that’s where Max—”
“Not entirely. Close, though.” He seated himself at the computer and did something fast and practiced. “Look here,” he said.
TALK TO THE THERAPIST glowed in the middle of the largest screen.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Max?”
“Therapist and psychic,” Jack said. “All-around emotional handyman. Some of the strangest questions you ever read. That was one of the things I loved about him: Nothing struck him as weird. If someone said to him that he needed his aura fluffed, Max would have figured out a way to fluff the man’s aura. He dealt with some pretty disgusting stuff here, too, but Max never got disgusted.”
“Nothing human
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