Times Square's eDump

At the Times Square easyEverything, the only U.S. outlet (so far) of a European chain that boasts of offering "the world's largest Internet cafes":

There's a woman two chairs away from me, young and well-dressed but with deep dark circles under her eyes. She giggles and mumbles to herself in what sounds like a foreign language, and frantically copies information from her computer screen onto a yellow legal pad.

A beer-bellied and mustached man razzes a friend, seated at another screen: "Eat! Eat! You haven't eaten in two days!" Slow jams play in an endless loop over the sound system. To my left, a girl coughs, sneezes and keeps typing instead of wiping her nose. The young blond guy sitting behind me instant-messages someone in Polish. Women speak Spanish and Arabic in the bathroom.

Truly, the size of the place is impressive: 800 computers on two levels, rows and rows of them in a vast universe of unvarnished pine, bright orange banners and even brighter fluorescent lights. Plus security monitors on which you can see yourself while standing in line to buy your "credits." More security cameras watch you as you work, or play, or whatever you do here. (Look at porn? And if you just sit at the back end of a row and stay alert, it should be easy.) Open 24 hours. Webcam. Phone capability. Coffee-holder at every workstation.

You'd think the place would be full of tourists, but in fact the defining customers seem to be young people who look like they might be on the less fortunate side of the digital divide. Avirex and Enyce are the popular brands here, and though vacant screens run ads for wine.com and Sony Style, tastes here lean more toward AOL. The good thing?the only good thing?about easyEverything is that it's cheap, dirt cheap?a dollar for 45 minutes?even if the connections are a little slow.

If only easyEverything didn't have to call itself a cafe, with all that word connotes: leisure, civilization, actual person-to-person interaction. There aren't too many pick-ups going on here?at least not unmediated ones. This might be a place for hooking up, but only via the Internet. Hence the webcams, and the liability waiver (for direct "or indirect" harm) you're forced to click through before you get to surf.

Maybe there's hope for the place yet, though, as more human, old-school Times Square elements trickle in. Leaving the factory floor, I spotted an odd couple: older, wizened black man in watch cap and heavy glasses, with a young white creature of at first glance indeterminate gender, his/her eyes slathered with black eyeliner, sporting a silk paisley headscarf. They sashayed out from the rows of computers, past the folks lined up for credits and printouts and coffee, and paused on the sidewalk?easyEverything has street-level windows to entice passersby. While the younger man turned aside to light a cigarette, the older one simply stared and stared, captivated, through his huge glasses at the rows of people. He knew the real freak show was inside.