What's making Jean-Louis Gassee's nipples hard isn't Apple, it's his ultimate boy toy, the BeBox.

Most people don't start getting interesting until you've spent eight hours with them in a car. With Jean-Louis Gassée, it happens 92 minutes into our trip to check out the natural mud baths in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. It's somewhere near Sacramento, just before dawn, when Gassée, the former president of Apple Computer Inc.'s products division, begins reminiscing about what he refers to as his "psychosocial moratorium." That's the time between his mathematics studies and when he "reentered society."

He's doing 85 mph in his wife's white Mercedes SEL and he drifts back to the early 1960s: His father's financial misfortunes had forced him to drop out of graduate school at Paris's Faculté d'Orsay, so Gassée took a series of temporary jobs. He was a maître d' at a Montparnasse strip joint, now a pizza place. "One day a beautiful black woman was doing a sadomasochistic strip act to nice music, 'I Put a Spell on You,' by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. We all had white coats with napkins on our arms. I hear a commotion. I turn around. Right behind me a drunk is leaning over on the bar. He whipped his thing out and was peeing on the head maître d'."

Another, more relevant job involved selling royal jelly door-to-door. For the uninitiated, royal jelly is the hormone-rich secretion that worker bees feed to larvae to make them into queens. "I would sell it to spouses, telling them it would reinvigorate their husbands," he says, lifting his hand from the steering wheel long enough to adjust his glasses and laugh in advance of the punch line. "And I would sell it to the husbands and say, 'It will reinvigorate you.'"

I use the word relevant because these days Gassée is peddling what some might view as the technical equivalent of royal jelly - a new computer and operating system designed, in the Frenchman's own words, "for people who like to lift up the hood." The BeBox, which made its début in October, is a high-performance machine designed, according to the bright phrasing of a Be Inc. press release, "to meet the demands of sophisticated computer users and developers who are frustrated by the limitations of current architectures." At a stripped-down price of US$1,600 (no monitor, no mouse, no keyboard), it is "the first true real-time, object-oriented system that features multiple Power PC processors, true preemptive multitasking, an integrated database, fast I/O," and a host of other features that promise to reinvigorate wimps on Windows.

It sounds promising, like a new beginning. There had been reports of a standing ovation when Gassée first demo'd the computer last fall at the Agenda industry conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, and polite endorsements began trickling in from the likes of Marc Andreessen, who was quoted as saying that both the Windows 95 and Mac operating systems were showing signs of age. Stewart Alsop wrote that the BeBox was "a machine that represents what [Apple] should be selling today" and that it "will probably end up being the ultimate World Wide Web client." Gassée's first round of backers includes folks and companies that any ambitious Silicon Valley upstart would die to have on speed-dial: Seymour Cray, execs at Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Groupe Bull.

To celebrate this new beginning, I proposed to travel with Gassée to a place that somehow held for me the promise of spiritual renewal: Death Valley at dawn. He wanted something a bit closer to his Palo Alto home. A friend suggested the Black Rock Desert, where 3,000 attendees of The Burning Man Festival had weeks earlier frolicked nude in the natural hot springs and mud baths. It's near the site in the northwestern Nevada salt flats where the land speed record had been set in 1983. J.-L. emailed back that Black Rock, a 12-hour round-trip, sounded "intriguing" - provided we returned by 6 p.m., time enough for him to make an art show benefit for his kids' school that featured paintings by his wife, Brigitte.

When he pulls his wife's car into the agreed-upon San Mateo parking garage at precisely 4:30 a.m. on a crisp Friday morning, Gassée, who typically rises at 5:30, is full of cheer and enthusiasm, calling us "Silicon Valley's Merry Pranksters." I am coming off two hours of sleep and feel like shit. I throw a couple of towels and spare underwear into the trunk and settle into the passenger seat. (We don't take his car, a convertible Mercedes 500SL, because it won't accommodate the photographer accompanying us.)

Within moments, we are zipping out of San Francisco through the Bay Bridge maze and Gassée is telling me that he sees himself as "a mathematician and a peddler" and that "after being a corporate asshole for so many years, I thought it would be a good idea to see the other side of the world" - the sort of banter I would find charming at a reasonable hour and with a sufficient blood-caffeine level. Fifty-two-year-old Gassée wears jeans and a black T-shirt with the word Be in Times Roman type, which is eerily reminiscent of ITC Garamond, made famous by Apple. He gets a tad defensive at the veiled suggestion that perhaps he is imitating his former employer.

The Man Behind the BeBox had been described to me with words like "flamboyant" and "outspoken," and I have been forewarned that one of his favorite - if not most quotable - sayings is "That makes my nipples hard!" But in the predawn darkness, as he leaps into a description of the nuts and bolts of his five-year-old company, the monolog seems painfully scripted. Gassée talks about how BeBox is designed to accommodate the growing requirements for digitized audio and video, how the company uses the Web to attract developers who will write applications for the operating system, how his dual Power PC processors are more effective at a lower price than Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations. And how he is counting on another round of financing of $7 million to $8 million on top of the $9 million initial round. (He invested $1 million of his own; after the second round, he expects to have 20 to 22 percent interest.) Why reduce your stake? I ask. "Even if I have 51 percent of the Titanic, it's still a sinking ship," he says, using a Frenchman's gestures. And he talks about how, when a venture capital backer asked what he'll do after he saturates the "geek" market, which Gassée estimates at 4.5 million units, the Frenchman told him, "We'll sell them a second computer."

"If you ask people in the mainstream what they want, they'll say faster and smaller and cheaper," he says, as a gentle snore drifts from the lips of the photographer in the leather backseat. "But with that you don't get innovation. If you align yourself with the ball-breaker, high-testosterone crowd, that leads to innovation."

Gassée sees his company as part of a tradition of putting out a device and then letting the market emerge. "Jobs and Raskin brought out Apple II without any vision of VisiCalc, the application that would take their product out of the hobbyist ghetto and into the business market. The IBM PC: Don Esteridge developed it in Boca Raton and had no idea that transcendental meditation teacher and disc jockey Mitch Kapor would create Lotus and make IBM big time in the business market. Jobs and Raskin, when they started Mac, had no idea that Canon, Adobe, and Aldus would create the desktop publishing revolution, which brought Mac into the big time. The guys who developed Amigas had no idea the Video Toaster would bring them into video editing, multimedia, and the music market.

"Many things we've done in our company we are doing by studying Amiga," he adds. "That company sold 4 1/2 million units and at one point had $800 million in annual revenues." Gassée goes so far as to say his product is a "spiritual descendant" of Amiga. Waiting for the killer app? I ask. He prefers another metaphor - the tractor app, which is not only more peaceful but more applicable, in that it "pulls your application into the big time."

Then the man who is credited with bringing the Macintosh to Europe spots the fuzz parked along the shoulder up ahead, near the sign indicating Interstate 80. "Monsieur, je pensais que quatre-vingt c'était la limite de vitesse!" he jokes as we plot a strategy in case we get stopped for speeding. Our little conspiracy: Gassée will play the part of the French speaking tourist who thinks the Interstate 80 sign means the speed limit is, in fact, quatre-vingt. I will be a not-too-bright, hearing-impaired passenger.

It is something about his lapsing into French that seems to jump-start Gassée out of PR-speak and into saying outrageous things. Like: "The Japanese, they are a lot more trustworthy than people say. People say they are inscrutable - that is bullshit! The Japanese have a sense of style and aesthetics that I envy." Or: "When I want to do something mindless to relax, I reinstall Windows 95." Or, regarding Neo-Luddite Clifford (Silicon Snake Oil) Stoll: "It's good. By saying computers are bad he gets people talking about computers, which sells computers." Then, when he discovers a new way of describing his company - as "the Pete's Wicked Ale of computer companies" - he shares his delight: "My nipples harden!"

The guy's a salesman. He's less a creative technical genius than the requisite personality-behind-the-project. The son of an accountant, he got his start in the 16th arrondissement. He attended a Roman Catholic boarding school in Brittany, where he hated soccer but loved building clandestine radios and hiding the antennae in baseboards. He saw his first OC71 transistor in 1955; this was the kind of adolescent you could imagine getting caught reading Électronique Populaire hidden inside Playboy, although he makes it clear that he wasn't your typical undersexed nerd. "I don't understand the demonization of sex in this country!" he exclaims. "I don't understand how we can show on TV people blowing each other's brains out but we can't show them blowing each other'sŠ." (Only two things from our trip are off the record: the end of the preceding sentence and the speed at which he drove the car on a Nevada back road.)

Gassée wanted to be a mathematician and was studying for his advanced degree when finances forced him to become a bartender and a maître d'. Then he advanced up the selling hierarchy from insurance to royal jelly to calculators to pharmaceuticals to computers. "I was a young adult and didn't know what I was about," he recalls. But having tended bar in Deauville and having sold royal jelly door-to-door, it was hard to imagine life as a mathematics researcher. Gassée never did return to his studies. In 1968, Hewlett-Packard hired the 24-year-old to peddle the company's first desktop model, the 9100A, thus putting an official end to Gassée's psychosocial moratorium.

"To me, it was my business school," says Gassée of his six years at Hewlett-Packard. The young man was given increasing responsibilities. He wrote press releases, he held press conferences. "I got lucky, because how many companies would give a 24-year-old without experience that opportunity." Eventually, he was promoted to sales manager for the company's European head quarters, and he still has warm feelings for H-P and its founders. "Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard are models of virtue who have aged well and continue to do well."

From H-P, Gassée moved to Data General, where he started out as president of the French affiliate and was responsible for Europe and the Middle East when he left five years later. "Data General was rough," he says. "At H-P, everyone was nice and trustworthy. At Data General, it was dog eat dog, but a nice balance after H-P." Next he went to Exxon Office Systems ("or Orifice Systems"), where he was president of the French division. "I got taken in by business writers who were writing about Exxon's diversity, the vision, the infinite money. It was horrible. It was fucked up. I got burned." Eighteen months later, his friend, analyst Aharon Orlansky of Warburg Paribas Becker Inc. - for whom he would critique press releases - turned Gassée on to the fact that Apple was looking for someone to start its division in France. In those days, Apple was selling the Apple II and III, the Lisa, and, eventually, the Mac; under Gassée's direction, France became the company's most successful market outside the United States. Gassée was rewarded for that success in 1985, when John Sculley imported him to Cupertino, less than a month before the messy ouster of Steve Jobs. Gassée was being touted in the press as Sculley's heir apparent, and for a while there, he was a god - in some circles.

Gassée recalls that there was a major cultural conflict with which to contend. "I came from France - I spoke my mind. It's a more abrasive culture. I saw the Apple IIGS and said, 'This is fucked!' and it did not amuse some people. In France that's an opening statement. In retrospect, I blush when I think of all the stupid things I said."

Companies will accommodate cultural diversity as long as the profits roll in, but then Apple - and the Macintosh Portable, Gassée's baby - started foundering. By the time he left in 1990, his responsibilities had been cut in half. They had even taken to calling him Jean-Louis Passé. Gassée recounts, "I had the 'seminal' dinner conversation at Maddalena's when John Sculley asked me what I thought of him, and I answered honestly. After the dinner, the vice president of human resources at Apple, Kevin Sullivan, put his arm around my shoulder and told me he was proud of me. Right there and then, I understood I'd done something irreparable - luckily so." Shortly before resigning, Gassée says he told Sculley to cancel the going-nowhere joint project with IBM, Taligent (the "Pink" operating system), and blame it on him. "He didn't cancel it - he probably thought I had some ulterior motive," says Gassée. Sculley? "I owe him a lot."

It is sunrise in the Sierras and the morning fog creates a magnificent cotton-candy effect over Donner Lake. The photographer wakes up as we pull into Truckee for breakfast. Gassée talks cameras and movies and how the BeBox won't need "positioning," which is phony, and how the Marlboro Man is a pure example of product positioning. "It is a metonymical link between subject and object. The Marlboro Man connects our desires for the outdoors to the cigarette, because cigarettes themselves are undifferentiated. "

"The important thing is that they started with a clean slate," says developer John Worthington, whom I phoned after the Black Rock trip to get an outsider's inside opinion on the BeBox. Worthington is the co founder of San Jose, California-based MojoSoft Ltd., which is developing digital video and audio applications that will run on the BeBox - in addition to Mac and Windows versions. The result of BeBox's clean slate is an operating system that, Worthington says, "is much easier to program" than Mac or Windows.

Worthington feels there is a "silliness" to those older operating systems. "On the Mac, you are limited as far as file size. You can't have a file greater than two gigabytes, which is ridiculous because today you can buy a nine-gigabyte drive for $4,000. And with Windows, you still have a lot of DOS stuff beneath it. Even though they tried to spruce things up for Windows 95, they had to have compatibility with the old applications." He is parroting Gassée, who seems to be able to pull the metaphors out of his cul.

"I worked 22 years in the industry, and I noticed that operating systems get cancer with age," says Gassée. "With the incremental approach, they grow old and complicated and Byzantine with age. In 1980, Microsoft bought QDOS, which became DOS and is now Windows, Windows 95, Windows NT. When you have six levels of silt in the architecture, it's hard to move the foundation."

Gassée, who gave up "truly programming" in the early 1970s, boasts that "we wrote the operating system from the ground up," pointing out that when you have no baggage, you also have no legacy and "no applications to speak of."

The green of California gives way to the brown of Nevada. Reno passes us by - a city that knows all about product positioning, having staked its fate on a new reputation as the bowling capital of America.

The inevitable comparison is made to NeXT and to Steve Jobs's computer of-the-future that wound up being loved - much loved, in fact - only for its object-oriented software. "NeXT wanted to grow fast. They took a kernel from Carnegie Mellon and bolted it together with display PostScript. It was a slow machine, there was no floppy, and it was targeted at an insolvent market, the education market, which doesn't have any money," explains Gassée. "What remains from NeXT is wonderful programming tools. They are considered by many as having the best environment in the industry for corporations doing their own custom development for mission-critical applications." There is a pause during which he looks out at a stunning display of Fremont cottonwoods nestled in a dusty valley reflecting at least 17 shades of brown. "We make our own brand of mistakes."

One way to distinguish him from Jobs, Gassée says, is that "I don't know the fuck if I'm going to hit or when." It is a jab at Jobs's bloated proclamations. Gassée, who tends to put a more comic spin on his pronouncements, is asked if he is friendly with Jobs. "It all depends on what you mean by 'friendly,'" he responds. Then, a moment later: "If we're on the record, he's a friend."

The coffee from Truckee must have started kicking in, because this is when Gassée's tense/cynical/delightful mind (described by John Dvorak as "the mind of a Frenchman which is unfortunately trapped inside the body of a Frenchman," a quote Gassée appends to his email) kicks into high gear. His strongest talent, it seems, is coming up with exquisite little barbs about other personalities-behind-the-project in Silicon Valley, a place that, despite a bull-run in technology stocks and a general mania over the Internet and multimedia, has become jaded and humorless - a point which Gassée disputes. "On occasion, Steve Jobs can be funny. Andy Grove has a great Central European humorŠ."

As we stop to refuel at a sun-bleached truck stop and transfer to a secondary road, Gassée's talent goes on parade. Scott McNealy: "He's got balls. He's got brains. They work nicely together." Larry Ellison: "I'd say the same of Larry Ellison, although they have different lifestyles. Scott is more private than Larry." Steve Wozniak: "He's teaching now. If he's making other people happy, that's fine."

Talk turns to cars, and Gassée reports that he recently ran into Wozniak in Los Gatos. The two drive the same model of Mercedes, although Woz's is beige and Gassée's is anthracite gray. Gassée mentions something about how he - unlike Ellison - never harbored a long-range desire to own a Testarossa. The picture he paints is one in which these guys cruise around Palo Alto and Los Gatos, where they all know the make, model, and color of each other's cars, and possibly the license plates, and they are aware of each other's every move and go around dissing one another - sort of like jealous Hollywood types. There was the time Steve Jobs drove the three or so blocks over from his house one Sunday morning at 9:30, unannounced, rang the Gassée doorbell, and invited J.-L. to a product announcement. He was lucky Gassée had his pants on.

The white Mercedes rolls down 67 miles of back road leading to the rusted near ghost town of Gerlach, home of two or three weathered saloon casinos. Gassée keeps looking at his watch as we follow my friend's vague instructions: on the other side of town, after the road becomes unpaved, keep going for about a mile and a half. Half an hour later, we haven't found the mud baths, although we can see the vapor rising from occasional hot springs dotting the open desert landscape. Oh, there is a weird art project of some sort, a faux cemetery with headposts bearing political sentiments that are presumably somebody's idea of a statement: "Attention all preachers: Have your fireproof suits ready at all times Š David Koresh wake-up call." We make our way back to town and an almost-sober old-timer in one of the saloons indicates that the mud baths we're looking for were made inaccessible. He says we can sneak into the hot springs just outside of town, which are on private property, until somebody comes along and asks us to leave.

We drive through a gate, step out of the car, and come face-to-face with a garbage can overflowing with empty Bud bottles. The hot springs consist of a nasty-looking watering hole that has steam drifting skyward and a few beer bottles floating like rubber ducks in a bathtub. There is a shed adjacent to the springs. On the outside are the spray-painted words "Please help us keep this area CLEAN," the last word underlined three times. Inside, the shed is full of trash. Nearby, a rusted diesel tank lies on its side.

Gassée hasn't made a move to take a dip, so I lean down, touch the water, and tell him that it isn't too hot for swimming. "That is not the issue," he replies. "I don't trust the water." I don't press the point. The place is disappointingly gross, and if J.-L. isn't going skinny-dipping, I really can't blame him. Instead, he opens the trunk of the Mercedes, removes his Nikon N90s, and photographs the overflowing garbage can, the rusted diesel tank, the inside of the shed, and an empty bag of Chips Ahoy! cookies floating on the water.

We hang out for maybe half an hour, get back in the car, and then Gassée discusses the future of computing. He predicts that one day we will have computerized eyeglasses in which information will be superimposed onto the lenses themselves. "A lot of information can be in the field of view without disturbing too much. It just came to me," he says. Also, computers will be able to start "reading our nerve impulses. They'll read the flow of electricity in the nervous system and do something about it." He discusses how Internet security is going to be messy because "people in the government are so illiterate. The FBI wants more authority and technology to spy on us." He explains how mathematics has reached a point where anyone can make a message that is unbreakable. And he says that it is possible to hide messages in pixels in Photoshop or to hide digital documents as noise in audio transmissions. He also thinks that at some point this year, we'll all be able to "efficiently buy things safely" on the Web, which will have "more refined content and presentation."

At this point, I'm in the backseat while the photographer sits up front, asking all sorts of questions about Libération, the French publication to which Gassée still contributes a weekly column, and about Paris, where Gassée still maintains a house that he visits twice a year with his family and friends, spending a lot of the time seated around a big table eating large meals. As we drive into a desert crossroads, somebody points out a sign that reads "Congested area - discharging of firearms prohibited."

Gassée is in a hurry to get back. While we ingest take-out sandwiches in Truckee, he refuels and makes a few calls on his cell phone. What does he think of Bill Gates? "Bill is very successful. Bill is Bill. The company is well managed. They are also wonderful intellectual terrorists."

By five in the afternoon, we have reached the 13-hour point and are all pretty wiped when a major freeway backup makes it obvious that no matter how fast he pushes those eight cylinders, Gassée will never make it back in time for his exhibit opening. Oh, he gets a little tense at first; the photographer is shooting photos through the rearview mirror and playing with the electronic headrest adjuster. But after a while, there is nothing left to do but make the most of the situation and stare out at the sun as it sinks slowly into the Pacific, creating a palette of soft, hypnotic colors that haven't yet been discovered, at least not by Photoshop. It's the kind of scene that would bring out the romantic in the most technocentric capitalist. It somehow brings me back to words Gassée had uttered in a less tranquil moment: "The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."

Such frank talk doesn't go over well in a region that runs as much on optimism and delusion as it does on tiny chips, and part of this Frenchman's appeal is his cultural inclination to be playfully honest - even if it makes him as iconoclastic as his new machine. I suppose that makes Jean-Louis Gassée the metonymical link between the latest box and the geeks who like to distinguish themselves as hood-lifters. It is something I think about as we pull into the garage in which we met 14 hours earlier, transferring towels and unused spare underwear from one car trunk to another. No, it doesn't make my nipples hard, but it gives me something to ponder on the way home.