Winter lives with his parents when he's in Houston and rents a room when he's in any other town, writing code for a software firm for a few months at a stretch. He takes a room, he says, largely because he needs a stable TV source. He is intent on not missing episodes of his favorite shows -- "Alias," "The West Wing," "Smallville," "24" and "Enterprise." But soon, he says, "broadband will be so prevalent that I'll be able to get the shows that I want on my laptop. Then I could just live in my car full time."
Winter does not really favor any one region of the United States, and he couldn't care less about landscape. "I'm not a nature person," he said as I dragged him down to the beach, through legions of seagulls, in Brooklyn. "These waves, they're giving me vertigo. And what are those birds -- ducks?"
Winter sips his java outside the Starbucks at 16th and K streets NW.
(Photograph by D.A. Peterson)
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The place that sang most to Winter during our travels was Times Square. A new Starbucks was slated to open there, and Winter not only wanted to visit it on opening day; he wanted to be the first customer. When I asked why, he was incredulous. "It's Times Square," he said, as though I was a complete numbskull.
Winter staked his spot outside the door at 5 a.m., and when I arrived 30 minutes later, he was alone and crouched on the darkened sidewalk, his laptop open as he typed up his blog. On an earlier reconnaissance mission, he'd spoken to someone who had intimated that the "Today" show would be on hand for this opening. There was a chance, Winter thought, that some reporter might hail him as the first customer and lob him a few softball questions, live and in Technicolor, right there on the sidewalk. But now such a lucky break seemed unlikely. The store was dark and empty save for a jumble of cardboard boxes and, as yet, there was no menu board over the counter. Winter was worried he'd miss the store opening. He had to leave New York in a few hours; there were other Starbucks cafes to visit.
We waited, the stream of morning commuters flowing around us, and I was aware now of how solipsistic Winter's project was, how lonely. In visiting more than 4,000 Starbucks outlets, he said, he has never once made a friend whom he has contacted again. He's scarcely had a meaningful encounter. His two most significant? "In Framingham, Massachusetts," he said, "this barista saw how tired I was and let me crash on his couch. That was a really nice thing to do. In Hilton Head, South Carolina, I was lost, looking for a Starbucks, and a gentleman at a convenience store had me follow his car. He led me right to the cafe."
At about 7 a.m., a familiar face showed up in Times Square -- a plumber Winter had seen laying pipe at the new Starbucks. "I got the key," the man said, "but I'm not allowed to go in because the alarm's on."
"But when's it opening?" Winter said.
The plumber took out his cell phone and called someone and talked for maybe five seconds. "Tomorrow," he told us. Winter nodded stoically and walked back to the car.
BUT THE MIRACULOUS THING is that, when Winter wrote on his blog about his sad luck in Times Square, someone was listening. Someone was reading: a woman.
Jodi Morgan is a 27-year-old social worker at a domestic violence clinic in Springfield, Ill. When she first learned of Winter last January, while surfing the Web, she sent him an idle tip: A new Starbucks would soon open in Springfield. Winter's response was casual. "I may just drop by one of these days," he wrote. An electronic dialogue blossomed. Jodi confessed a fondness for "B-list celebrities" such as Donny Osmond, Subway's Jared Fogle and Winter. She was not a Scrabble player, but for Christmas her cousin had given her a necklace bearing a single Scrabble tile: the letter J.
Winter was smitten. One week into the cyber romance, after Jodi had moaned about having broken her toe, he signed off, "Many kisses for your little toe." He begged for her photograph.
Jodi is 4-foot-11. Last winter, she was, by her own reckoning, significantly overweight. She e-mailed Winter her photo -- and then she waited.
"I'm trying not be insulted," Winter wrote back, "at your suggestion that you wouldn't hear from me after I saw a photo. I'd hope never to be that shallow." A few weeks later, on her birthday, he sent 27 purple tulips. They talked on the phone almost daily, and on his blog he gave her a nickname: Schmoopie.
"Am I in love with her?" Winter mused as we drove south from Times Square. "I don't know. I try never to use that word. It's too vague. I'm infatuated. I'm serious, at least, about meeting her." He threw back a Vivarin caffeine pill (because there were no new Starbucks outlets nearby), and then we drove on -- through Washington, in haste, and to Vienna, in search of store No. 2804. Winter saw a Starbucks sign on the main drag and then, instinctively, he went in. He began checking e-mail, but there was something awry: The carpet was frayed; there were little chips on the chairs. Almost ineffably, the place lacked that new car shininess that pervades a just-opened Starbucks. So Winter got a receipt -- and learned that we were actually in store No. 706, which he had already visited, four years before.
