THE WEB'S "ANONYMOUS"

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

One can understand why the author of Walter Miller's Home Page wishes to remain anonymous. Take the embarrassing case of the terminally ill fan in the Midwest who laughed himself to death last month. The man's last gasp, supposedly, was, "Here's the part that kills me... " (The E-mail I got looks believable.) Then there's the preservation of privacy. Already, waltermiller@prodigy.com gets dozens of E-mail messages a day, many of them mash notes mixed in with offers of help from social-service workers--all directed, I should point out, at a fictional character. Finally, a lot of his business associates in the real world would doubtless be appalled.

That's because the author of Walter Miller's Home Page claims he's relatively well known in the computer industry. "I'm not saying I'm the ace of spades, but I'm not the two of clubs either," he said last week, after agreeing to an unprecedented face-to-face meeting at a Manhattan barbecue joint. (For identification purposes, this was worthless: I didn't recognize him.)

Walter Miller is the Anonymous of the Internet, Walter Miller's Home Page its Primary Colors. Lots of people want to know who could be writing such a bizarre, raunchy and, um, drop-dead-funny Website. His home page is among the hottest places on the Net--a top attraction on Prodigy, despite the page's lack of advertising, graphics, sound, color or flashing pyrotechnics. Or maybe as a result: Walter Miller's Home Page is just writing, hilarious writing, in the long tradition of lowbrow American satire. Think of Huck Finn, Forrest Gump and Beavis and Butt-head all channeled through the persona of a 20-year-old, acne-speckled, "boy-gennius programmer in the booming computer industry." Walter Miller's Home Page is little more than misspelled accounts of his exploits, posted to the Web each month. "I guess I'm the product of the pubblic schools," Walter writes, noting that he could post without the misspellings, but "a few profesional writers told me to keep it as my spelling and syntax are dialectal like Mark Twain and Willaim Foulkner."

Our hero lives in a trailer in a junkyard in Austin, Texas. He's involved in an "abbusive" relationship with his 62-year-old, wheelchair-using "granfather," who may be the meanest man in the world as well as being an extraterrestrial. Walter is charged with caring for the "gristtly old basterd." They share their encampment with 14 junkyard dogs, to which they feed only vegetables: "Granfather thinks it makes them lean & mean ... What it does do is make them skinny with patchy bald spots and crap a lot. Tomatos are a real problem."

The success of Walter's page says a lot about how the underground current sweeps material to the top of the Web. The author quietly pitched his home page last September like a tent among the other Prodigy members' sites. Within weeks it was reviewed at some of the Web's most influential sites. Mirsky's Worst of the Web observed, "Sometimes it takes a pitiful life to make a great Web page." The Geek Site of the Day picked it up too, followed by those arbiters of cool, Suck. Soon, thousands of people a week started to swing by. While it's great to get the hits, the man who would be Walter doesn't make a dime. So he's writing an expose of the Web that might be profitable--if only he had a publisher.

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