"Sure," Alan said.
"I know a place," he said, and nudged the car through traffic and on to
the Don Valley Parkway.
"Where the hell are we *going*?" Alan said, once they'd left the city
limits and entered the curved, identical cookie-cutter streets of the
industrial suburbs in the north end.
"Place I know," Kurt said. "It's really cheap and really good. All the
Peel Region cops eat there." He snapped his fingers. "Oh, yeah, I was
going to tell you about the cop," he said.
"You were," Alan said.
"So, one night I'd been diving there." Kurt pointed to an anonymous
low-slung, sprawling brown building. "They print hockey cards, baseball
cards, monster cards -- you name it."
He sipped at his donut-store coffee and then rolled down the window and
spat it out. "Shit, that was last night's coffee," he said. "So, one
night I was diving there, and I found, I dunno, fifty, a hundred boxes
of hockey cards. Slightly dented at the corners, in the trash. I mean,
hockey cards are just *paper*, right? The only thing that makes them
valuable is the companies infusing them with marketing juju and glossy
pictures of mullet-head, no-tooth jocks."
"Tell me how you really feel," Alan said.
"Sorry," Kurt said. "The hockey players in junior high were real
jerks. I'm mentally scarred.
"So I'm driving away and the law pulls me over. The local cops, they
know me, mostly, 'cause I phone in B&Es when I spot them, but these guys
had never met me before. So they get me out of the car and I explain
what I was doing, and I quote the part of the Trespass to Property Act
that says that I'm allowed to do what I'm doing, and then I open the
trunk and I show him, and he busts a *nut*: 'You mean you found these in
the *garbage?* My kid spends a fortune on these things! In the
*garbage*?' He keeps saying, 'In the garbage?' and his partner leads him
away and I put it behind me.
"But then a couple nights later, I go back and there's someone in the
dumpster, up to his nipples in hockey cards."
"The cop," Alan said.
"The cop," Kurt said. "Right."
"That's the story about the cop in the dumpster, huh?" Alan said.
"That's the story. The moral is: We're all only a c-hair away from
jumping in the dumpster and getting down in it."
"C-hair? I thought you were trying not to be sexist?"
"*C* stands for *cock*, okay?"
Alan grinned. He and Kurt hadn't had an evening chatting together in
some time. When Kurt suggested that they go for a ride, Alan had been
reluctant: too much on his mind those days, too much *Danny* on his
mind. But this was just what he needed. What they both needed.
"Okay," Alan said. "We going to eat?"
"We're going to eat," Kurt said. "The Vietnamese place is just up
ahead. I once heard a guy there trying to speak Thai to the waiters. It
was amazing -- it was like he was a tourist even at home, an ugly
fucked-up tourist. People suck."
"Do they?" Alan said. "I quite like them. You know, there's pretty good
Vietnamese in Chinatown."
"This is good Vietnamese."
"Better than Chinatown?"
"Better situated," Kurt said. "If you're going dumpster diving
afterward. I'm gonna take your cherry, buddy." He clapped a hand on
Alan's shoulder. Real people didn't touch Alan much. He didn't know if
he liked it.
"God," Alan said. "This is so sudden." But he was happy about it. He'd
tried to picture what Kurt actually *did* any number of times, but he
was never very successful. Now he was going to actually go out and jump
in and out of the garbage. He wondered if he was dressed for it,
picturing bags of stinky kitchen waste, and decided that he was willing
to sacrifice his jeans and the old Gap shirt he'd bought one day after
the shirt he'd worn to the store -- the wind-up toy store? -- got soaked
in a cloudburst.
The Vietnamese food was really good, and the family who ran the
restaurant greeted Kurt like an old friend. The place was crawling with
cops, a new two or three every couple minutes, stopping by to grab a
salad roll or a sandwich or a go-cup of pho. "Cops always know where to
eat fast and cheap and good," Kurt mumbled around a mouthful of pork
chop and fried rice. "That's how I found this place, all the cop cars in
the parking lot."
Alan slurped up the last of his pho and chased down the remaining hunks
of rare beef with his chopsticks and dipped them in chili sauce before
popping them in his mouth. "Where are we going?" he asked.
Kurt jerked his head in the direction of the great outdoors. "Wherever
the fates take us. I just drive until I get an itch and then I pull into
a parking lot and hit the dumpsters. There's enough dumpsters out this
way, I could spend fifty or sixty hours going through them all, so I've
got to be selective. I know how each company's trash has been running --
lots of good stuff or mostly crap -- lately, and I trust my intuition to
take me to the right places. I'd love to go to the Sega or Nintendo
dumpsters, but they're like Stalag Thirteen -- razorwire and
motion-sensors and armed guards. They're the only companies that take
secrecy seriously." Suddenly he changed lanes and pulled up the driveway
of an industrial complex.
"Spidey-sense is tingling," he said, as he killed his lights and crept
forward to the dumpster. "Ready to lose your virginity?" he said,
lighting a cigarette.
"I wish you'd stop using that metaphor," Alan said. "Ick."
But Kurt was already out of the Buick, around the other side of the car,
pulling open Alan's door.
"That dumpster is full of cardboard," he said, gesturing. "It's
recycling. That one is full of plastic bottles. More recycling. This
one," he said, *oof*ing as he levered himself over it, talking around
the maglight he'd clenched between his teeth, "is where they put the
good stuff. Looky here."
Alan tried to climb the dumpster's sticky walls, but couldn't get a
purchase. Kurt, standing on something in the dumpster that crackled,
reached down and grabbed him by the wrist and hoisted him up. He
scrambled over the dumpster's transom and fell into it, expecting a wash
of sour kitchen waste to break over him, and finding himself, instead,
amid hundreds of five-inch cardboard boxes.
"What's this?" he asked.
Kurt was picking up the boxes and shaking them, listening for the
rattle. "This place is an import/export wholesaler. They throw out a lot
of defective product, since it's cheaper than shipping it all back to
Taiwan for service. But my kids will fix it and sell it on eBay. Here,"
he said, opening a box and shaking something out, handing it to him. He
passed his light over to Alan, who took it, unmindful of the drool on
the handle.
It was a rubber duckie. Alan turned it over and saw it had a hard chunk
of metal growing out of its ass.
"More of these, huh?" Kurt said. "I found about a thousand of these last
month. They're USB keychain drives, low-capacity, like 32MB. Plug them
in and they show up on your desktop like a little hard drive. They light
up in all kinds of different colors. The problem is, they've all got a
manufacturing defect that makes them glow in just one color -- whatever
shade the little gel carousel gets stuck on.
"I've got a couple thousand of these back home, but they're selling
briskly. Go get me a couple cardboard boxes from that dumpster there and
we'll snag a couple hundred more."
Alan gawped. The dumpster was seven feet cubed, the duckies a few inches
on a side. There were thousands and thousands of duckies in the
dumpster: more than they could ever fit into the Buick. In a daze, he
went off and pulled some likely flattened boxes out of the trash and
assembled them, packing them with the duckies that Kurt passed down to
him from atop his crunching, cracking mound of doomed duckies that he
was grinding underfoot.
Once they'd finished, Kurt fussed with moving the boxes around so that
everything with a bootprint was shuffled to the bottom. "We don't want
them to know that we've been here or they'll start hitting the duckies
with a hammer before they pitch 'em out."
He climbed into the car and pulled out a bottle of window cleaner and
some paper towels and wiped off the steering wheel and the dash and the
handle of his flashlight, then worked a blob of hand sanitizer into his
palms, passing it to Alan when he was done.
Alan didn't bother to point out that as Kurt had worked, he'd
transferred the flashlight from his mouth to his hands and back again a
dozen times -- he thought he understood that this ritual was about Kurt
assuring himself that he was not sinking down to the level of rummies
and other garbage pickers.
As if reading his mind, Kurt said, "You see those old rum-dums pushing a
shopping cart filled with empty cans down Spadina? Fucking *morons* --
they could be out here pulling LCDs that they could turn around for ten
bucks a pop, but instead they're rooting around like raccoons in the
trash, chasing after nickel deposits."
"But then what would you pick?"
Kurt stared at him. "You kidding me? Didn't you *see*? There's a hundred
times more stuff than I could ever pull. Christ, if even one of them had
a squint of ambition, we could *double* the amount we save from the
trash."
"You're an extraordinary person," Alan said. He wasn't sure he meant it
as a compliment. After all, wasn't *he* an extraordinary person, too?
#
Alan was stunned when they found a dozen hard drives that spun up and
revealed themselves to be of generous capacity and moreover stuffed with
confidential looking information when he plugged them into the laptop
that Kurt kept under the passenger seat.
He was floored when they turned up three slightly elderly Toshiba
laptops, each of which booted into a crufty old flavor of Windows, and
only one of which had any obvious material defects: a starred corner in
its LCD.
He was delighted by the dumpsters full of plush toys, by the lightly
used office furniture, by the technical books and the CDs of last year's
software. The smells were largely inoffensive -- Kurt mentioned that the
picking was better in winter when the outdoors was one big fridge, but
Alan could hardly smell anything except the sour smell of an old
dumpster and occasionally a whiff of coffee grounds.
They took a break at the Vietnamese place for coconut ice and glasses of
sweet iced coffee, and Kurt nodded at the cops in the restaurant. Alan
wondered why Kurt was so pleasant with these cops out in the boonies but
so hostile to the law in Kensington Market.
"How are we going to get connectivity out of the Market?" Kurt said. "I
mean, all this work, and we've hardly gotten four or five square blocks
covered."
"Buck up," Alan said. "We could spend another two years just helping
people in the Market use what we've installed, and it would still be
productive." Kurt's mouth opened, and Alan held his hand up. "Not that
I'm proposing that we do that. I just mean there's plenty of good that's
been done so far. What we need is some publicity for it, some critical
mass, and some way that we can get ordinary people involved. We can't
fit a critical mass into your front room and put them to work."
"So what do we get them to do?"
"It's a good question. There's something I saw online the other day I
wanted to show you. Why don't we go home and get connected?"
"There's still plenty of good diving out there. No need to go home
anyway -- I know a place."
They drove off into a maze of cul-de-sacs and cheaply built, gaudy
monster homes with triple garages and sagging rain gutters. The streets
had no sidewalks and the inevitable basketball nets over every garage
showed no signs of use.
Kurt pulled them up in front of a house that was indistinguishable from
the others and took the laptop from under the Buick's seat, plugging it
into the cigarette lighter and flipping its lid.
"There's an open network here," Kurt said as he plugged in the wireless
card. He pointed at the dormer windows in the top room.
"How the hell did you find that?" Alan said, looking at the darkened
window. There was a chain-link gate at the side of the house, and in the
back an aboveground pool.
Kurt laughed. "These 'security consultants'" -- he made little quotes
with his fingers -- "wardrove Toronto. They went from one end of the
city to the other with a GPS and a wireless card and logged all the open
access points they found, then released a report claiming that all of
those access points represented ignorant consumers who were leaving
themselves vulnerable to attacks and making Internet connections
available to baby-eating terrorists.
"One of the access points they identified was *mine*, for chrissakes,
and mine was open because I'm a crazy fucking anarchist, not because I'm
an ignorant 'consumer' who doesn't know any better, and that got me to
thinking that there were probably lots of people like me around, running
open APs. So one night I was out here diving and I *really* was trying
to remember who'd played the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy, and I knew
that if I only had a net connection I could google it. I had a stumbler,
an app that logged all the open WiFi access points that I came into
range of, and a GPS attachment that I'd dived that could interface with
the software that mapped the APs on a map of Toronto, so I could just
belt the machine in there on the passenger seat and go driving around
until I had a list of all the wireless Internet that I could see from
the street.
"So I got kind of bored and went back to diving, and then I did what I
usually do at the end of the night, I went driving around some
residential streets, just to see evidence of humanity after a night in
the garbage, and also because the people out here sometimes put out nice
sofas and things.
"When I got home, I looked at my map and there were tons of access
points out by the industrial buildings, and some on the commercial
strips, and a few out here in the residential areas, but the one with
the best signal was right here, and when I clicked on it, I saw that the
name of the network was 'ParasiteNet.'"
Alan said, "Huh?" because ParasiteNet was Kurt's name for his wireless
project, though they hadn't used it much since Alan got involved and
they'd gotten halfway legit. But still.
"Yeah," Kurt said. "That's what I said -- huh? So I googled ParasiteNet
to see what I could find, and I found an old message I'd posted to
toronto.talk.wireless when I was getting started out, a kind of
manifesto about what I planned to do, and Google had snarfed it up and
this guy, whoever he is, must have read it and decided to name his
network after it.
"So I figger: This guy *wants* to share packets with me, for sure, and
so I always hunt down this AP when I want to get online."
"You've never met him, huh?"
"Never. I'm always out here at two a.m. or so, and there's never a light
on. Keep meaning to come back around five some afternoon and ring the
bell and say hello. Never got to it."
Alan pursed his lips and watched Kurt prod at the keyboard.
"He's got a shitkicking net connection, though -- tell you what. Feels
like a T1, and the IP address comes off of an ISP in Waterloo. You need
a browser, right?"
Alan shook his head. "You know, I can't even remember what it was I
wanted to show you. There's some kind of idea kicking at me now,
though..."
Kurt shifted his laptop to the back seat, mindful of the cords and the
antenna. "What's up?"
"Let's do some more driving around, let it perk, okay? You got more
dumpsters you want to show me?"
"Brother, I got dumpsters for weeks. Months. Years."
#
It was the wardriving, of course. Alan called out the names of the
networks that they passed as they passed them, watching the flags pop up
on the map of Toronto. They drove the streets all night, watched the sun
go up, and the flags multiplied on the network.
Alan didn't even have to explain it to Kurt, who got it
immediately. They were close now, thinking together in the feverish
drive-time on the night-dark streets.
"Here's the thing," Kurt said as they drank their coffees at the Vesta
Lunch, a grimy 24-hour diner that Alan only seemed to visit during the
smallest hours of the morning. "I started off thinking, well, the cell
companies are screwed up because they think that they need to hose the
whole city from their high towers with their powerful transmitters, and
my little boxes will be lower-power and smarter and more realistic and
grassroots and democratic."
"Right," Alan said. "I was just thinking of that. What could be more
democratic than just encouraging people to use their own access points
and their own Internet connections to bootstrap the city?"
"Yeah," Kurt said.
"Sure, you won't get to realize your dream of getting a free Internet by
bridging down at the big cage at 151 Front Street, but we can still play
around with hardware. And convincing the people who *already* know why
WiFi is cool to join up has got to be easier than convincing shopkeepers
who've never heard of wireless to let us put antennae and boxes on their
walls."
"Right," Kurt said, getting more excited. "Right! I mean, it's just ego,
right? Why do we need to *control* the network?" He spun around on his
cracked stool and the waitress gave him a dirty look. "Gimme some apple
pie, please," he said. "This is the best part: it's going to violate the
hell out of everyone's contracts with their ISPs -- they sell you an
all-you-can-eat Internet connection and then tell you that they'll cut
off your service if you're too hungry. Well, fuck that! It's not just
community networking, it'll be civil disobedience against shitty
service-provider terms of service!"
There were a couple early morning hard-hats in the diner who looked up
from their yolky eggs to glare at him. Kurt spotted them and
waved. "Sorry, boys. Ever get one of those ideas that's so good, you
can't help but do a little dance?"
One of the hard-hats smiled. "Yeah, but his wife always turns me down."
He socked the other hard-hat in the shoulder.
The other hard-hat grunted into his coffee. "Nice. Very nice. You're
gonna be a *lot* of fun today, I can tell."
They left the diner in a sleepdep haze and squinted into the sunrise and
grinned at each other and burped up eggs and sausages and bacon and
coffee and headed toward Kurt's Buick.
"Hang on," Alan said. "Let's have a walk, okay?" The city smelled like
morning, dew and grass and car-exhaust and baking bread and a whiff of
the distant Cadbury's factory oozing chocolate miasma over the hills and
the streetcar tracks. Around them, millions were stirring in their beds,
clattering in their kitchens, passing water, and taking on vitamins. It
invigorated him, made him feel part of something huge and
all-encompassing, like being in his father the mountain.
"Up there," Kurt said, pointing to a little playground atop the hill
that rose sharply up Dupont toward Christie, where a herd of plastic
rocking horses swayed creakily in the breeze.
"Up there," Alan agreed, and they set off, kicking droplets of dew off
the grass beside the sidewalk.
The sunrise was a thousand times more striking from atop the climber,
filtered through the new shoots on the tree branches. Kurt lit a
cigarette and blew plumes into the shafting light and they admired the
effect of the wind whipping it away.
"I think this will work," Alan said. "We'll do something splashy for the
press, get a lot of people to change the names of their networks -- more
people will use the networks, more will create them... It's a good
plan."