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KINGPIN

system. But that was probably the only thing geeky about the town, where the high school rodeo team got all the girls.

Max's parents had married young, and they'd moved to Idaho from Phoenix when he was an infant. In some ways, Max combined their best qualities: Robert Butler was a Vietnam veteran and enthusiastic technology buff who ran a computer store in Boise. Natalie Skorupsky was the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants—a humanist and a peacenik, she liked to relax in front of the Weather Channel and nature documentaries. Max inherited his mother's clean-living values, eschewing red meat, cigarettes, and alcohol and drugs, except for an ill-fated experiment with chewing tobacco. From his father, Max acquired a deep passion for computers. He grew up surrounded by exotic machines, from giant business computers that could double as an office desk to the first suitcase-sized "portable" IBM compatibles. Max was allowed to play with them freely. He started programming in BASIC at the age of eight.

But Max's equilibrium disappeared when his parents divorced in his fourteenth year. His father wound up in Boise, while Max lived in Meridian with his mother and his younger sister, Lisa. The divorce devastated the teenager and seemed to reduce him to two modes of operation: relaxed, and full-bore insane. When his manic side flared, the world was too slow to keep up; his brain moved at light speed and focused like a laser on whatever task was before him. After he got his driver's license, he drove his silver Nissan like the accelerator was a toggle switch, speeding from stop sign to stop sign, wearing lab goggles like a mad scientist conducting an experiment in Newtonian physics.

As Max protected his friends, they tried to protect Max from himself. His best buddy, a genial kid named Tim Spencer, found Max's world exciting but was constantly reining in his friend's impetuosity. One day he emerged from his home to find Max standing over an elaborate geometric pattern burning in the lawn. Max had found a canister of gasoline nearby. "Max, this is our house!" Tim shouted. Max sputtered apologies as the pair stamped out the blaze.