Addled was an understatement. The bullshot had cooked up in the sunshine, sending its fumes directly to my frontal lobe, by the time the door to apartment 8 opened to reveal a man who looked like Grizzly Adams’s more poorly groomed younger brother: maybe forty-five, beard to mid-chest over an Alvin Ailey T-shirt, thinning hair pulled back into a ponytail, tinted aviator-style glasses over odd gold-colored eyes.
“You’re the pay phone?” The gold-brown eyes flicked over my shoulder, making sure I was alone.
“About Max,” I said.
He ran the name through his frontal lobe while he looked at me. It was a speculative look. Finally he nodded. “I’m Jack.” He put out a hand and mauled mine with it. “Come on in, air-conditioning’s expensive. I can give you ten minutes.”
Four men sat on couches and director’s chairs, talking on phones. “Oooh, I’d like that,” one of them said in a seductive voice. “Do you think you could do it twice?”
I closed the door behind me. “You knew Max?”
Jack straightened his glasses, which were already as straight as a plumbline. “Everybody knew Max.” It was beginning to sound like a litany. “The saint of the sidewalks. What’s your connection?”
I told him. He never took the gold-brown eyes from my face. No polite nods, no reflexive sounds of agreement. When I was finished, he said, “Christy,” in a noncommittal tone.
“That seems to be the general opinion.”
Jack turned toward the kitchen, and I followed. “He’s a Jonah. You a sailing man?”
“I know what a Jonah is. Bad luck.”
“More than that.” He reached back and pulled fingers through his ponytail. “Bad luck for other people, too. Some people trail clouds of it, like scent.” The kitchen was white and spotless, with three electric coffee makers on the tile counter. Labels on the pots read cinnamon, decaf, and ecstasy blend. At the far end of the kitchen was one of those little greenhouse windows people are so fond of these days, jammed full of terra-cotta pots sprouting foliage. Jack pulled up a stool at the counter and indicated another for me.
I eyed the coffee. “Who had it in for Max?”
He shrugged. “Nobody. What was there to hate? He was generous, good-hearted, and stupid. The perfect mark.”
“He didn’t strike me as stupid.”
“About himself. He was brilliant about everybody else.”
“You know that personally?”
He looked puzzled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Was he brilliant about you?”
Jack chewed the inside of his lip, looking dubious, and followed my gaze toward the coffeepots. “You’re confusing me. You want some coffee?”
“I’d love some. I’m recovering from a bullshot.”
“Lady Ecstasy for you,” he said, getting up to pour.
“So what about Max?”
“I’m not sure why you’re here.” He held out a heavy white mug.
“I told you.” I took the mug and wandered toward the greenhouse window.
“Max,” he said, weighing his words, “Max just had to help people. There weren’t enough hours in the day, you know?”
“So I gather.” The plants in the little pots were herbs: rosemary, basil, mint, and a couple I couldn’t identify. They gave the air near the sink a pungency that clashed pleasantly with the coffee.
Jack’s stool shifted behind me. “What do you know about us?”
I turned to look at him. “Who’s ‘us’?”
He made a circling motion, index finger down, as though stirring the air in the apartment. “Us.”
“You’re a, what, a hot line.”
“Safe sex,” he said. “Through the ear, like the Holy Ghost’s words to Mary. Did you know that Mary was impregnated through the ear?”
I pressed a leaf between thumb and forefinger and inhaled the dark, sweet green-clove scent of basil. “Sounds uncomfortable.”
“We’re more than a hot line. We’re also a dating service. Not-so-safe sex, but people are people. They’ve got to take their own precautions.”
“You’re First-Class Male, too?” I asked.
He nodded. “And we’re a computer bulletin board. Something Fine Online.” He looked dissatisfied. “Got to work on that name,” he said.
“So tell me about this,” I said. I licked the basil from my fingertips and pulled the folded newspaper from my pocket. Jack peered across the kitchen at it.
“Our ads,” he said, sounding satisfied. He got up and held out a hand, and I passed the page to him. “Designed them myself on the computer. That’s the Nite Line. Comes out once a week, on Monday. It’s a bar rag. Lots of little ads.” He 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.”
