Pair Publish Magazine About Life on the Road : Publications: Michael Lane and Jim Crotty stay on the move as they put out a periodical that is billed as America’s first totally mobile magazine.

NEW YORK — James Crotty and Michael Lane don’t wait to return home to spin tales of their latest travels. In fact, they don’t return home at all.

Crotty, Lane and their two cats have been on the road for four years and 85,000 miles publishing a totally mobile magazine: Monk.

They eat, sleep, travel and work in a 26-foot 1986 Fleetwood motor home. A solar-powered Macintosh computer is mounted on the dashboard. Ads are sold by Lane, 39, and Crotty, 30, from phone booths. A mailing address described as a “suite” is actually a 5-inch by 10-inch postage box in Santa Fe, N.M.

What started as a newsletter has turned into a magazine with a circulation of about 30,000 and a cover price of $2.95 ($3.75 abroad).

“Monk is about life on the road. In each issue we describe the latest segment of our travels and encounters with the lucky victims of our latest pit stop. Everyone from dogs to dancers, vision queens to country singers and occasionally, even real live monks,” the two Monks wrote in their seventh issue, July 28. “We are a gentle tickle in the side of the earnest seeker, the frazzled housewife and the corporate climber, though we can also be quite useful. In fact, thousands of readers use our quarterly rag to teach dogs how to fetch.”

Lyrical, philosophical, kind of zany--that’s the kind of thing readers expect from Monk and its founder-editors, New Age hippies who held down a series of jobs in San Francisco before they answered the call of the open road.

“We represent a new style of spiritual nomad who is not bound by religious norms,” they say, a kind of “traveling soap opera, flophouse and nunnery all rolled into one.”

Initially, they were fed up with rising rents. But Crotty said the Monks’ odyssey was also a quest for simplicity in their lives and resulted from a “burning desire to create a life style that was completely mobile.”

“That’s obviously a dream of a lot of people or mobile homes wouldn’t be so popular. We were just a little more passionate about that than most.”

The magazine describes their adventures in a stream-of-consciousness, chatty, gonzo style. Occasionally, people they encounter contribute articles.

“It’s like Charles Kuralt with Jack Kerouac and they pick up Laurel and Hardy hitchhiking and then go on an adventure,” Crotty said.

Follow the Monks to New Mexico, where “it’s high, it’s clear, it’s desert and it’s peyote land.” Follow them to the “scene of the crime”--White Sands Missile Range, where one of the first nuclear test blasts occurred on July 6, 1945.

Listen as the Monks expound on turbans, China Cola, the benefits of geese in weeding farms, how Arkansas got its name and “What You Won’t Learn Through The Arkansas Department of Tourism.”

The magazine’s advertisements offer all-natural sunscreens, herbal toothpaste, the secret to instant memory, massage tables, Indian-style ceremonial drums and “The X-rated Bible.”

With advertiser and reader support, the Monks break even. Eventually, Lane hopes to distribute Monk in Europe and to travel overseas. For now, they explore the United States, changing directions on a whim.

Last winter, they were in Minnesota and chose to go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. But the motor home slid off an icy road, and about 30 residents of the tiny village of Calico Rock, Ark. emerged with shovels. “We almost lost the van and ourselves,” Lane said. “These people all came out and rescued us and helped us get started. It was touching.

“Being on the road you have to open up to all people. There’re a lot of people traveling like us in vans but they would never have these chance encounters because they will just stick to certain tourist centers, or what’s expected.”

As a result, stereotypes crumble along the way.

“In the South we thought they were going to be a bunch of bigoted racist rednecks, and though that exists, everyone you run into is really open-minded. Most people everywhere are incredibly friendly,” Lane said.

“This is a simple journey that many people have carried out. We just got very complex about it,” Crotty said. “We go to places that are unheralded or to places that you dare not go with a motor home, and Manhattan fits into the latter category. Absolutely no motor home magazine will recommend that you go to Manhattan.”

There is a reason, of course. While in Manhattan, the motor home was parked in a garage. But that didn’t prevent thieves from stealing a bicycle from the Monks, who were last reported more safely ensconced in North Bergen, N.J.