You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (7 page)

There was only one commercial online company at the time, CompuServe, and it was not sophisticated, guys. It was the cave painting equivalent to Tumblr. I mean, you had to pay $10 an hour to use it. That’s right, in ye olden internet days, kids, people had internet cafés in their own living rooms! But, for the times, CompuServe had it all. It offered news, messaging, and bulletin boards covering every subject you’d want to chat about in a glorious “only text” interface. Oh, and tons of racy ASCII porn.

For that, and many reasons, it was a long time before my brother and I were allowed to log online by ourselves. We could only pop on and off to get quick hints about
video game puzzles we were too lazy/stupid to figure out on our own. (Conservative usage of CompuServe was more affordable than using the 1-888 hint line, which we previously used to run up $400 phone bills. We got very good at hiding the mail from my father.) But eventually, when I was about fourteen, my family graduated online technologies to a newer online service called Prodigy. Which was revolutionary amazing because it charged $12.95 for unlimited use. In addition, it had REAL GRAPHICS. Like, eight whole colors.

In 1994, this interface looked like virtual reality.

Prodigy had online GAMES and interactive bulletin boards, and did I mention it was a flat rate, so my brother and I could use it as long as we wanted and not get in trouble? This was like Prometheus rolling into town, “Here, humans, check out this fire thing.” It changed everything!

As soon as I got access, I immediately went to the message boards to search the video game discussions and found a group called the Ultima Dragons. Browsing through the posts, I couldn’t believe it.
I had finally found a place where people totally knew what I was talking about when I wrote, “OMG ULTIMA IS THE BEST GAME OF ALL TIME SORRY FOR THE CAPS!” My dreams about finding a place to create true, meaningful friendships around my fake video game world had come true.

And my mom didn’t have to drive me anywhere!

I joined the club and named myself Codex Dragon because everyone had a Name + Dragon theme going on, and a Codex was an object in the video game that represented the “book of infinite wisdom.” Are some of you feeling like it’s getting too geeky in here? You probably should have read the book blurb better, because I’m just getting STARTED.

As a member of the Ultima Dragons, we didn’t just post about the games, although a majority of the stuff was, “How do you defeat the stupid gargoyles at the Shrine of Humility because I keep dying!” We talked about movies we loved and books we read. The people who shared my love of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time fantasy book series immediately became my closest friends. They were the first people I’d ever met who’d read them, too. (Although I was the only one who had all the hardbacks in first edition and did a yearly reread. Impressed? Well, THEY were.)

It might sound dorky, but the Ultima Dragons gave me my first environment where I could express my enthusiasms freely to my peers. Hell, for once I HAD peers. And I mined it for all it was worth. Socially, artistically. In all ways. Even . . . with poetry.

Yes, I wrote poems dedicated to a video game—shut up with the judgment (although it’s warranted). The following is a really special example. It’s an ode to one of the fictional characters in Ultima video game. A jester. His name was Chuckles.

Hand me the Pulitzer. Dozens more where that came from!

There was also a separate message board called the “Drunken Stupor” where we’d post what I now understand to be “fanfic” set in a tavern (called the Drunken Stupor)
about
our Ultima Dragons characters. Meaning, ourselves. Example:

Codex Dragon enters the tavern with a tough look on her face. Busting open the door with her high-heeled boot, then she strides over to the bar and then slams down her silver sword of Grandia. She looks at Tempest Dragon with torrid eyes, “You! I don’t know whether to kill or kiss you.” Tempest looks up. Like he wants her to do both.

Looking back, there’s an uncomfortable dose of S&M in the stories I wrote at fourteen. I attacked other Dragon members with swords and whips a lot, and Codex always wore sexy leather outfits with stiletto heels. The guys LOVED how creative I was! Their feedback on
the stories made me discover that flirting was fun. So I proceeded to do it with a lot of people.

Um, pretty much everyone.

You gotta understand I had NO OTHER GUYS in my life! Sure, there were some boys in my dance classes and community theatre productions I acted in, but the other chorus members of
Brigadoon
didn’t generally put their Ps in Vs. The guys online were into girls, and I had access to them. Do the teen math:
I wanted all of them
.

We started sending pictures to each other (physically in the mail, yes), which either fueled or quashed the fire of awkward teen romance. I got a ton of positive feedback on my submission:

This picture was originally taken for a JCPenney modeling competition. I was not a winner in the eyes of the department store, but the Dragons all thought I was a treasure.

Yes, those are velvet high-tops.

I got pictures back in exchange, and it was weird to put a face to an online personae. They never matched up the way I imagined. The asshole goth punk of the group turned out to be a Midwestern blond guy in a football outfit, straight out of
Friday Night Lights
. The friendliest of the group turned out to be a little person, which was a shock, but then cool, and no one brought it up again. Several of the other guys had really long stringy hacker hair, or were old, so I stopped flirting with them (kinda), and two standouts got my thumbs-up endorsement for continued romantic flirty times.

On the one hand, Wolf Dragon’s picture was a Sears portrait special, with the bokeh-blurred edges, and a splattering of pubescent facial hair, erratically spread, like a limp hair-gun had shot follicles at his face. But I liked his personality online, and he had kind eyes that overcame the velvet waterfall behind him. I was into him for his brain, mostly. And his cat named Poe.

Camouflage Dragon, on the other hand, was, by Dragon standards, the hottie. He did have a significant unibrow, but he had eyes the color of a tiger’s eye gem, ochre and deep, and he was into math, which I liked because my grandpa would approve. I gave myself permission to get a crush on him, too.

I wasn’t ready to commit to one boy or the other fully, I wanted to keep both in the romantic-type running, so we became an online trio, sending messages back and forth to one another in private email boxes. We also sent handwritten letters snail-mail style filled with song lyrics. Mostly Bangles and Aerosmith.

“Camouflage, I like the idea we could all go to the same college. That would be so cool, but I don’t wanna hope too hard. Like Steven Tyler says,

You’re callin’ my name, but I gotta make clear

I can’t say, baby, where I’ll be in a year.”

We would three-way call every other night. The guys each lived in different parts of New Jersey, and I remember thinking,
Wow, their accents are so exotic
. We mostly talked about the Ultima games, but we got into other things, too. Like . . . other video games. Our conversations were always fraught with veiled sexual innuendo. “What kind of armor do you hope your character wears in Ultima VIII, Codex? What kind of corsets?”

My mom was cool with all of this, by the way. She had recently gotten more defensive about our socialization; maybe the state started checking in on us? Who knows? But she was extra aggressive in supporting my relationships with all my online Dragon friends, especially the romantic ones. After all, SHE first had sex at sixteen and other details I tried to black out after she shared them.

The summer of my fifteenth birthday, my family had to move to Louisville. And because we were going in the general compass direction of New Jersey-ish-ness, Mom decided that it would be okay to take a trip and see as many of my Ultima Dragon friends as I wanted. Yes! MEET-UP TIME!

I was so excited; I’d never been above the Mason-Dixon Line (yes, Southern people still had that as a THING) and I was going to meet face to face with my only friends in the world and perhaps a potential husband. My mom and brother would be along for the ride to cramp my style . . . but whatever. For my romantic teenaged heart, this was do-or-die time. I was gonna figure out which one of these guys I liked better if it KILLED ME!

New Jersey is much farther north than you’d think if you’re driving
from Alabama in a two-door Acura hatchback with broken air conditioning. We arrived at Camouflage’s house after a few days (for a real name, let’s call him Tyler. Which was hard to remember in person anyway, to NOT call him Camouflage). And when we got there it was obvious he hadn’t explained everything about the meet-up to his mom. Or . . . anything.

We were shoved in the basement with the four other Dragons who showed up while Tyler got chewed out by his parents upstairs.

*muffled yelling* “Weirdos!”

“Mom!” *muffled yelling* “NOT weirdos!”

That went on for a while. Meanwhile, we made the best of it downstairs and awkwardly tried to pin faces to Dragon usernames.

There was Aeire, our club leader, with waist-length blond hair and a slacker vibe, who never took his sunglasses off, and his girlfriend, Mist Dragon, who looked like she should be into reading romance novels, not killing gargoyles. I don’t think I ever got either of their real names, but they were nice and came from Ohio, which was also an exotic state to me. “You eat spaghetti with your chili? How interesting!”

There were a few older dudes who I can’t remember much of at all because my mom was kind of a cock block to us interacting. And thankfully, Wolf (fake real name Henry) had shown up from exotic EAST New Jersey for my inspection.

He approached me, wearing that Sears portrait smile. “Hey!”

“Hey! Wow, weird to meet you in person!”

Insert awkward attempt at hug. Abandon.

Insert awkward pause.

And another.

I sat down next to him on a slightly broken futon, and within twenty seconds I could feel the possibility of romance disappearing.
Instant turn-off. A never-gonna-happen-let’s-be-friends-forever switch flipped in my head. And it wasn’t because of his looks (although his picture didn’t translate BETTER in person), but there was just no chemistry there. He was someone I got along with and wanted to talk hours to on the phone. But have my virgin intercourse with? Nope.