Early-summer nightlife was beginning to buzz as evening fell in downtown Star City. Outdoor diners sipped pints at Tavern on the Market. The usual crowd of skateboarders hovered outside Mill Mountain Coffee and Tea.

Amid dinnertime chatter, a man sitting outside Metro looked up from his sushi, chopsticks in midair.

A waiter at Alexander's -- white shirt and black bow tie -- cracked a smile.

Even a hobo stopped to chit-chat before asking for change.

Women on the sidewalk turned to look -- staring at the young man in shorts and a T-shirt carrying an inflatable couch.

The couch was red and see-through, like an oversized piece of hard candy. It was the size of an office desktop, patched too many times to count.

Its name is Lucy.

It has crisscrossed the world -- a mountaintop in Hawaii, the Liberty Bell, the gates of Graceland. And most recently, the Mill Mountain Star, where the star's red, white and blue lights reflected in the plastic.

The couch's owner, Jim Stone, is a couch surfer, a man who travels complete with his own couch.

A few years ago, Stone -- 28, a Texas native, a new graduate with a degree in communications -- was unable to find a job in the post-Sept. 11 market. Two blurry years passed as he worked in sales. Then, Stone freaked out, watching his life go by unscripted. He could see his future -- five, 10, 20 years going by. He didn't like what he envisioned.

In early 2004, he found couchsurfing.com.

Stone is among a growing number of young people taking Internet interaction to a new level. Launched in January 2004, the Web site is a network for travelers, set up similar to MySpace.com or Friendster.com. Members who want to spend time in Central America, for instance, search for members in an area they want to visit. Travelers contact registered hosts to make a reservation on their couch, meet people and see how locals live in the process.

There are more than 76,000 surfers registered on the site. When he started surfing in March 2004, Stone was the 99th member. Now, his business card says "vagabond."

He's stayed with more than 100 people, traveling cross-country and throughout Europe. He's visited Roanoke five times -- more than nearly anyplace else. The city felt familiar when he arrived May 18.

On most Roanoke visits, Stone stays with Audette Fulson. The 38-year-old Unitarian minister and Community High School teacher was unsure what to expect when she registered with couchsurfers.com after seeing an article in her teen daughter's Bust magazine. But Stone had enough members on the site vouching for him that Fulson was pretty sure she wasn't letting a dangerous criminal into her home.

"Jim had a bajillion, bajillion references," she said of the traveler she hugs goodbye when he leaves for the evening. "He's like a big man in the couch-surfing world."

Stone gets the spare room when he stays with the Fulsons, but that's not always the case. There was the banana-shaped couch in Rome. There was no couch at all in Jacksonville, Fla., just scratchy, burlap-like carpet. There was the couch in the garage where he awoke to a cat hacking up a hairball in the middle of the night.

He never knows what he will find at the end of each journey in his silver pickup where the back seat holds most of his belongings -- rolled sleeping bags and rolled yoga mats, backpacks and worn paperbacks such as Don Wright's Guide to Free Campgrounds.

Stone never knows what odd jobs he will do for a living along the way; he made $300 assembling IKEA furniture for Harvard students last Labor Day weekend.

But one constant in his travels is Lucy, his red, blowup couch.

Lucy was sent to him last June, after he couch-surfed with the Web site's founders in Hawaii. Early one morning, awake and not-so-sober, they scaled a mountain reaching 10,000 feet into the sky. Above the clouds and with a view of volcano peaks at sunrise, Stone lounged on an inflatable couch being used for promotional photos.

Two people sent Stone blowup couches after he posted a picture of the scene on his Web site. Now, he carries the couch wherever he travels, taking pictures with it when he sees something interesting.

Public officials have posed on the couch, from Florida's secretary of agriculture (Jeb Bush was gone that day, but his assistant told Stone that the governor would have "been into it") to Roanoke City Manager Darlene Burcham.

Stone photographed the couch with a Paul Bunyan-size dresser in High Point, N.C. -- the nation's furniture capital -- complete with 6-foot-long socks.

During this Roanoke visit, Stone carried the couch downtown, positioning it in the City Market area, in front of a three-story American flag on the side of a building, and with a cutout of Virginia at the O. Winston Link Railwalk.

But true to the couch-surfer life, Stone never stays anywhere for long.

He leaves next week in his truck with Lucy in tow, ready to surf a couch in Montreal, with maybe a few stops in New York and Philadelphia in between.