Some Seattle Homeless Go Joy Riding on the Information Superhighway : Computers: The downtown library allows the public free hookup on Internet, and those who have nothing but time spend hours tinkering on the worldwide network.

By night, 25-year-old Rodney Lindsey retires to his room in a homeless shelter at the old Pacific Hotel.

By day, he explores the outer reaches of Russia, China, Germany, Switzerland--wherever the power of Internet takes him.

As 9 a.m. approaches each day, Lindsey and a cadre of other homeless people can be found outside the downtown Seattle Public Library, waiting for first crack at one of about 35 terminals that will allow them free hookup to the global matrix of worldwide computer networks known as Internet.

For many, short on money, long on time, down on luck, the Internet has become a safety net. It beats the streets.

“It’s my high,” Lindsey said, peeling himself away from the computer terminal one recent morning to talk with a reporter. “I don’t do any drugs. I don’t drink. I’ve got to have some high.”

Ever since Seattle became the first major public library to provide public access to the Internet in July, 1993, some of the most avid users have been a group of homeless people who have come to be known simply as The Internetters.

They don’t have physical addresses but can be reached in cyberspace.

Their numbers range from a dozen to two. Some spend an hour or two on the terminal, others the whole day.

Lindsey, a self-professed Internet junkie, boasts of once having spent 72 hours straight on the net: When the downtown library closed at 9 p.m., he resumed his internetting at the University of Washington’s computer science lab a few miles away.

“Well, I did use the bathroom, but that was it,” Lindsey said. “But I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat. I just internetted.”

The Seattle Public Library offers direct Internet hookups to only about 10 “gateways,” such as the Library of Congress and White House News. But the Netters have figured out ways to hop out of the library’s menu system and “telnet,” or connect onto just about any other public terminal on the worldwide Internet.

From there, they’ve discovered bulletin boards, databases, games, chat lines, MUDs (multi-user dimensions, a kind of computer-simulated environment), and e-mail.

They can play “Star Wars” with someone in Brazil, then drop a line to President Clinton.

Some have gotten so adept that other Internet users often come to them for help.

“If you have all day to explore you can become pretty expert, and that’s why some of them are able to teach our staff or other patrons,” said Jim Taylor, the library’s coordinator for automated services.

Lindsey found himself on the streets after being booted out of the Navy in January, 1993, for reasons he wouldn’t disclose. He uses Internet to explore.

“I see it as a bank vault, with no guards, trying to get in,” he said.

“I am able to go anywhere and everywhere and mess with anybody. I can get into Russia, Japan, China, Switzerland, Germany, England, anywhere in the United States, Canada, Mexico. I’m unlimited.”

Jon Cooper, 41, uses the Internet to research witchcraft and to correspond with a Maryland woman he “met” through a bulletin board. The electronic conversations, he said, have been encouraging and uplifting.

“She gives me more of a positive attitude,” Cooper said. “A lot of that rubs off on me through the computer.”

Cooper graduated from college in North Dakota with a degree in business administration. He worked for the Forest Service for 13 years and was a welder’s assistant at a nuclear power plant in California. When he lost both job and wife, he found himself homeless in Seattle in February.

He’s waiting for a hire call from Boeing Co. Meantime, he sleeps most nights on a cot in the basement of a church.

About the Internet system, he said, “I don’t know about anybody else, but I need a little space that I can draw into. Otherwise, I’m going to go crazy. It’s to keep my sanity more or less, to have someplace where I can feel comfortable and just learn.”

Frank, an eloquent 25-year-old who left home at age 14, hooks up to interactive games on the net to kill time while looking for work.

“What are you going to do? Are you going to sit on the curb and get a ticket?” he asked.

“It’s good to have a release, being able to escape and to get rid of that time that you really don’t know what to do with, and then to come back and maybe use the knowledge that you’ve learned.”

And on the net, Frank said, “nobody can see I’m black.”

That sense of safety and anonymity may be what’s attracting some homeless people to the net, says Nancy Amidei, a lecturer at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work and coordinator of a homeless youth program.

“If you’re living on the streets or if you don’t have a stable living situation, it’s sometimes hard to connect with people in usual ways,” Amidei says. “Anybody who’s gotten themselves on e-mail or on the Internet knows once you get hooked in you find yourself with more friends than you can possibly imagine.

“Nor can your correspondent see how you’re dressed or where you are. It’s classless. It’s genderless. It’s raceless.”

And it’s free.

One of the public library’s missions is to provide everyone equal access to information, be it printed or electronic, said Craig Butold, deputy city librarian. Homeless people, he said, “are clearly a group that would not have access otherwise.”

Less than 3% of the more than 9,000 public libraries in the United States offer public access to the Internet, according to a June report from the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science.

Libraries from across the world have contacted Seattle for advice on setting up Internet access. Butold tells them to expect the unexpected.

Some patrons complain that some of the homeless people are hogging the terminals and making too much noise.

The library staff and the Internetters met to discuss the problems, and both sides amiably agreed to some time-use guidelines. The library also set aside some terminals for patrons who just wanted to search the library’s catalogue.

Since then, things have been running smoothly.

Lindsey has spent so much time on the net that he says he should be hired to teach others how to do it.

“I’m learning too much,” he said. “Someone’s bound to say, ‘Hey, you know too much. I want you.’ ”