Mallory's Camera

It's been very interesting hanging out with Max. I mean, even apart from the OmiGawdd-I-breastfed-him-and-now-look at-him aspects of it.

Smartphones make such a huge difference in the actual pattern of his generation's lives. The casualness of the assignations. That sense of No worries if the plan does not come off as negotiated: You just text someone else and make another plan. There's far less urgency about encounters. And also the GPS functions are such that you never get lost in transit.

Liza left Thursday. I wouldn't say he's having more fun without her – they are quite the doting, intensely mutually involved young couple. But it's a different kind of fun, a somewhat more intense experiential fun. The girlfriend of a Deep Springer issues a crowdsource invite to a Tribeca hiphop party, come one, come all, come Max – that type of fun.

"Well, when I'm with Liza, a huge chunk of my attention goes toward making sure she's okay," he explains. "When she's not around, I can pay attention to other things."

Right. The tracking function. That's what I miss the most myself about not being in a relationship. I like being tracked.

"So, why do you think you ended up choosing Liza?" I asked. "Is it her particular personality? Was it timing? Did you hear the MGM studio orchestra playing Some Enchanted Evening behind a bush the moment you set eyes on her?"

He laughed. "All of the above? But probably timing was a major factor. When I was in school, I had absolutely no idea of what was going to come next. Molly knew what was coming next, so we were way out of synch that way."

We spent a couple of hours playing the What happened to… game.

One of the many ways in which Facebook has reconfigured the social universe in only a few short years is that it is now virtually impossible to lose touch with anyone you once knew, however tangentially. In that way, I suppose, interpersonal tracking has replaced personal tracking. Max is rather adamantly not on FB and tells me he is trying to use the Internet as little as possible other than for quick information checks. (Sort of a useless exercise if he's trying to stay out of the vast intra-penumbral database: They've got his cell phone records.) Nonetheless, he's still in touch with people he went to grade school with. I don't know anyone I went to grade school with. I have one friend – hi, Terri! – I'm still in kinda, sorta touch with that I went to high school with.

"So what happened to Joe _______? You know, of all your friends, he was always my favorite. Just like Kodiak was my favorite of Robin's friends."

"I saw him when I was doing all that campaign work in Monterey around the beginning of the year."

"Tell me he wasn't working for Greg –"

"Of course he was working for Greg! But he was about to apply to the local police academy –"

"Oh, my God! Joe as a cop! He'll make a great cop."

Max laughed. "Joe always did his own thing, that's for sure."

"Molly, I keep up with on FB. What about Maya? I always loved Maya. Or maybe it was that I loved Maya's family."

"I loved Maya's family too. That's the worst thing about breaking up with someone. For years after Maya and I broke up, I kept trying to have some kind of ongoing friendship with Purea. But it wasn't going to happen.

"Maya's good. She's in San Francisco now. I don't really know what she's doing other than that she's living with this French guy who was like Employee # 1 in this hot start-up –"

"Oh, right! I forgot. She's got that French national thing through Purea –"

"Well, I don't know how much that actually helps her deal with this guy's family and such. She was having issues last time I spoke to her –"

"Is she still beautiful? She was one of the most beautiful creatures I ever laid eyes on back then –"

"She is and she isn't. She's lost a lot of weight, gotten kind of gaunt looking. She always had that gorgeous space alien thing going on –"

I laughed. "True, true."

"— and she looked better when her face was a little fuller. She looks sort of nervous and strained these days.

"You know, it's funny. I saw her right after I got back from Deep Springs. And all the while I was at Deep Springs, I'd been nursing a broken heart –"

"But you broke up with her!"

"I know, but then I changed my mind. And she didn't. Anyway, I saw her and there was this sense in the air like we were going to hook up. But she had changed so much – not physically. Some other way. And I realized: I really wasn't attracted to her anymore. Physically, emotionally, any way at all. She'd just gotten hard and… brittle somehow."

"Robin still keeps in touch with her."

"Robin!"

"Yeah. He adores her. Remember that time when he wanted some money for a video game and I wouldn't give him any so Maya took him down to Cannery Row and they did break dancing together for a couple of hours till they made enough to buy the game?"

Max laughed. "Selective memories! No, no, that's a memory I don't have at all."

It was a ridiculously hot day. We sweated buckets as we wandered down to the Korean grocery store – which I think is going to replace the El Salvadorian grocery store in my affections – and bought dinner supplies and then came back and cooked. These days Max is a vegetarian. A protest against cruelty to animals as part of the commodification of food processing. He'd eat animals, he tells me, if he was part of the supply chain – or trusted the supply chain. Maybe.

"But the longer you go without eating meat, the less you miss it," he says.

"Do you still eat white sugar?"

"Oh, sure."

"Drink alcohol?"

"Definitely."
Then he went off to the hiphop dance somewhere in the nebulously glimmering geo-dimension of Tribeca.

I curled up in bed, read Malcolm Gladwell's exegesis of the Steve Jobs myth. Felt old.

Today we're going to Coney Island. Another Ground Zero of sorts for moi although I'll spare him the doddering Old Person story that goes with it.