c h a p t e r 1 2
The Electric Adventures of
A Novel of Erotic Satire
Chapter 12
c:/notes/congressnotes/congress0004
SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,
CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE PRESIDING
Committee report: Summary of major characters and events in The Electric Adventures of Alvin.
The character of GEM is introduced in the first lines of the first chapter of the book,[5] indicating her centrality to the ensuing story (such as it is). In this initial scene, she is described sitting naked in front of a desktop computer, her legs opened across the arms of the chair in which she is sitting, while she employs the plastic mouse from the computer as a masturbatory tool.[6] While doing this, she is reading messages of a sexual nature that have been transmitted, via the Internet, to her computer screen from the protagonist ALVIN, who, the reader is told, is typing from a different computer in a different location.[7]
GEM’s persona, here and in her many subsequent appearances in the plotline, is primarily one of extreme sexual obsession, aggression and promiscuity. She physically engages with eleven (11) different sexual partners during the course of the story, and has ``Internet sex’’ with another nineteen (19) partners.
When asked at one point how many sexual partners she has had in the course of her life, she responds: ``I’ve got
Given the exaggerated nature of this character’s persona and behavior, is it unlikely she is based in any substantive way on an actual person. She appears instead to be a metaphorical creation (or perhaps an amalgam of various women) intended to highlight what the author views as the more extreme aspects of female sexuality . . .
c:/program/miscfiction/gemstuff
I made contact with Guinever a few months after discovering her moniker in Beth’s email. Now and then one of her incoming messages would beep on the computer while I was using it, and I would call it up and look at it, feeling guilty about snooping in Beth’s mail but feeling more strongly the need to protect myself from any errant comment Gwen might make about the past.
And, let’s be honest, there were other reasons I read them, reasons beyond security. In the time she’d been in my sphere and the couple of years since she’d vanished from it, Gwen had remained to me the very definition of female sexual obsession. The mere stringing together of a few casual words from Gwen to her old roommate was enough to keep me in Inner Life stories for days at a time.
That’s not to say I was entirely happy about this new access to her. Alcohol doesn’t interest me, but I imagine that, were I an alcoholic, the feeling of both elation and dread that I might harbor at discovering a newly opened liquor store just below my apartment would be roughly equivalent to the feeling I had at realizing Guinevere was again within my reach.
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One night while Beth was at class and I was online, browsing a chat room called jewish & looking (yes, that’s one of the ones I used in the book), Beth’s email beeped, and I saw the address (Gem4u) and the subject line (``urgent! i hafta talk 2u!’’), and I felt a sudden weight in my stomach. I suddenly was sure that Gwen was deep in the throes of some crisis of conscience – utterly unprecedented for her, and all the more intense because of it – and was about to unload everything to her old friend. In that first dizzy moment I had her letter wholly, devastatingly constructed in my head: ``i’m sorry to tell u this beth, i cant live with it anymor, it was just the 1 time, pleez forgive me.’’ Etcetera. I fairly lunged at the ``open’’ icon on the email, literally holding my breath as the letter popped up on the screen.
What the letter said instead was: ``got a digital camera 2day. SO cool!! this is me these days. look!’’ And there was a little virtual paperclip at the top of the email, indicating an attached digital photo.
So relieved was I that I signed out without even looking at the photo. A moment later, my stomach returning to its normal weight, I signed back in, now overwhelmed with deep-red curiosity: Gwen today, unseen by me for several years, except in memory and fantasy. How could I not look?
I braced for disappointment, though, as I waited for the photo to glacially download across our second-hand modem. The news that Gwen had become an L.A. aerobics instructor had led me for some time to subconsciously complete the cliché in my head; I’d imagined that she probably had immersed herself in the whole California fitness-culture thing, a thing I’d come to associate mainly with bony, phony women. This was potentially devastating to my Inner Life. Gwen, when I’d known her in college, had always hovered a few pounds above the usual male-brained standards of ideal feminine weight, and the effect had been to accentuate her bosom and her hips and her legs and her rear end with just enough fleshly heft and roundness to give her a look and feel that was (to use the recurring phrase that I employed to describe Gwen’s now-famous curvature in my original manuscript of the book) ``invitingly ensconcing.’’ That’s how I liked to think about her in those first years after college – ``invitingly ensconcing’’ – but I feared her later reality might undermine that memory with one that was less ensconcing, less inviting.
Still, how could I not look?
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``Invitingly fuckable’’ was the recurring phrase that ended up describing Gem’s fleshy curvature in the final version of the book (Carol, my agent, had decreed that my original wording wasn’t ``hot’’ enough).
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Gwen’s photo finally assembled itself on the computer screen, and my fears of disappointment dissipated, and I found myself adjusting my jeans.
The photo, apparently a self-portrait taken by holding the digital camera out in front of herself and smiling into it, showed her from about mid-waist up. The years had been kind, even coddling. Her hair was different than it had been, longer and pulled back and up in perhaps a nod to the fitness craze in which she now worked, but her face was the same plain-pretty face that had looked out at me from behind tumblers of pale pink wine and from under sweatshirts as she’d pulled them onto or off her head as she’d rushed in or out of her apartment getting changed – the same face that looked up at me from the mattress that morning gasping and imploring and demanding ( . . . ``fuck me hard, oh Adam, ram me!’’ . . . ).
Her face was grinning widely into the camera, almost a mocking grin, tinged, I thought, with the mischief that was her trademark. She wore a clingy purple strapped top made of some spandex-like material, possibly workout clothes, which clung to her shape and followed it downward along her torso. She hadn’t withered; if anything, she’d put on a pound or two – mostly in her bosom, it seemed. Her breasts, behind the top she wore, looked less buoyantly firm but softer, heavier, fuller, in that transformative way that breasts have of changing, of becoming less girlish, more womanly. A long shear of cleavage, deeper than I’d remembered, sprouted up from the spandex. I looked for, and found, shadowy hints of her hardwood nipples within the dark purple field of her top.
I stared dumbly at the photo for a full minute, remembering when those breasts, that throat, that face, had brought me such pleasure and panic, alternately, day to day, in college. I remembered how her breasts had felt in my hands and in my mouth that morning. I remembered how many times afterward she had bluntly, so brazenly, offered up those breasts and the rest of her warm curvy self for my pleasure, offering it so aggressively that there had been times I’d had to all but lurch out of her presence, only to hungrily accept the offers later, in my fantasies.
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I could have left it at that. But of course I didn’t.
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What I did was to send the photo from Beth’s email account to my own, and then sign onto my email and call it up again and look at it some more, pasting it into a file where I could look at it as often as I wanted, which I already knew would be often.
c:/program/miscwriting9994
And I could have left it at that. But I didn’t. An hour after finding the photo, and after peaking twice to it right there seated at the kitchen table, I succumbed to what I now realized had been a gnawing urge to whisper to her across the miles and the years.
``Hey,’’ I wrote, employing the catchall vernacular that had supplanted ``madam’’ and ``sir’’ and every other traditional salutation in this new realm of letter-writing:
From: Alvn
To: Gem4u
Subject: blast from the past
Hey. It’s me. Adam. How r u? Saw your email on Beth’s account, just wanted to drop you my address & say hi. Hi. (ar ar) I’m fine. Beth’s still working on her phD. I’ve got a job handling incoming documents at an advertising firm. Living in an apartment the size of a bed, but having fun. Hope you’re well out there in dream-land. Your pal, Adam (ps – saw the pic you sent to B – the one of you in the purple spandex. Stunning as usual. Serously – you look great, Gwen)’’
Then I sent the letter to the address that I’d gotten from Beth’s mail, and I went back to the bedroom to stretch out in the dark and peak a third time, this time to the thought of curvy, impatient, lascivious Guinevere reading my letter while wearing her tight purple nipple-hinting top.
I finished up and returned to the computer and signed into my email. I hadn’t expected an answer so quickly, but there it was: a return email from her. Same wording in the subject-line. There was another paperclip icon attached to it, indicating another photo.
The note was a typical Gwen spray of curt, impatient misspellings that read the way she’d sounded during all those furtive, aggressive offers of sex during college. Dizzy with the possibilities, I clicked on the photo. It began its slow assembly on the screen, building downward, like a stripper’s gown slowly shimmying toward the floor. Gwen’s hair. Gwen’s eyes. Gwen’s mouth, smiling. Gwen’s throat. I remember that I stopped breathing, and had to make an effort to start again. Gwen’s naked shoulders. Gwen’s upper arms, held forward, balancing the camera.
Gwen’s breasts. Utterly bare. Both of them.
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It may be a testament to how immersed I’d become in the nuts-and-bolts inner workings of this new world of computers that my first brief thoughts were technical ones: How had she produced and sent this image so quickly after receiving my email? It was almost the same photo as the one she’d sent Beth, minus the purple top; she almost certainly had taken it at the same time, stripping off the top to snap the second picture. She must have had it right there, at the ready.
c:/program/docs/adam/mis764
It took only a moment for the technical questions to dissolve in the deep shadows of Guinevere’s breasts. As the previous photo had hinted, they were incrementally fuller and heavier than what I’d remembered, but without any hint of surgery (which was a relief to me – I could easily have pictured Gwen embarking on an artificial enhancement, and then getting freakishly carried away with it). They looked notably softer than they’d been, hanging lower than they once did, their pleasing new weight fatly and smoothly defining the lower twin arcs of her matured form. Her nipples were exactly as I’d remembered and had spent years recalling in frenzied fantasy: perpetually stiff, insistently textured, virtually demanding to be touched.
I was staring, mouth open, when I heard the thump from downstairs that indicated Beth had entered the front lobby was about to ascend the narrow stairway toward our apartment. I glanced ruefully at the door, then back at Gwen’s beckoning breasts on the screen. My erection was pressing hard against the inside seam of my jeans, pressing almost to the point of pain. I zeroed in on her wicked smile and reached down and freed the tip of myself with one downward zip.
I knew I had maybe thirty seconds before her key rattled in the lock.
It turned out to be more time than I needed.
c:/mydocs/notes/gmm745
From: Gem4u
To: Alvn
Subject: re: blast from the past
[see attachment]
well hi there young adam. been wondering when you wuld jump in. its about fukking time!! congrats on the job, the apartmnt, bla bla bla. Enuf talk. Do u want to see them or dont u? well here they are. G (p.s. – whats this *
c:/documents/adamwriting/miscwriting/notes222
In the weeks that followed our reconnection, Gwen picked up where she’d left off with me in college. After years apart, with no way for her to torment me that whole time, it was as if a dam had broken – though now the tormenting was being done over hundreds of miles via digital words and satellite signals and pixel images.
Every night when Beth left for class, I would sign on, often before I’d even heard her exit the front lobby downstairs. It was a technologically enhanced replay of those college days: Beth exiting, and Guinevere almost instantly appearing before me, generally in some state of undress.
Gwen quickly made up for a lot of lost torment in those first weeks. Every night, it seemed, there was a new image waiting for me in my email account: Gwen’s wet mouth, kissing the lens. Gwen’s low heavy breasts, from every angle she could achieve while holding the camera in front of herself. Gwen’s expertly trimmed bush, seen from her eye-level looking down, a soft dark mound of hair that brought back a rush of carnal moments in memory. Gwen in the mirror, standing fully nude – breasts hanging free, dark triangle beckoning from between her legs, her smiling face partly obscured by the camera held to her eye.
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In one of the breast photos, she is gently squeezing her nipple between her thumb and forefinger, snapping the photo with the other hand, the lens so close that every little dimple and goosebump on her areola stands out sharply.
c:/notes/congressnotes/congress0078
SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,
CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE PRESIDING
Committee report: Summary of major characters and events in The Electric Adventures of Alvin.
. . . The lasciviousness of the character of GEM stands in sharp contrast to another central character in the book, MINNIE, who is presented as a foil to GEM. Both women are online lovers to the protagonist ALVIN, but that is where their similarities end. MINNIE is presented as a wife and mother[49] and a professional paralegal in a respected law firm.[50] Sexually, she is relatively reserved and inexperienced,[51] but also is eventually revealed as having an intense hidden sex drive[52] which creates frustration in her marriage to DARRIN[53], an attorney whose own sex drive is muted.[54]
As opposed to the sexual extremism of GEM’s character,[55, 56 & 57] the character of MINNIE appears to function as a representation of a gentler, if more tormented, form of female sexuality. Some readers have concluded that, because of her reserved and motherly persona, MINNIE’s sexuality, as presented in the book, can at times be more disturbing than the more extroverted sexual escapades of GEM. In any case, the contrast between these two personas is clearly intended to examine different and conflicting ideals of feminine sexuality.[see Dr. Draper’s attached analysis regarding Madonna-Whore Syndrome.]
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Gwen’s letters were mostly short, blunt descriptions of her current sex life, masturbatory and otherwise. Her habit in college of picking up and seducing and discarding men hadn’t diminished. If anything (judging from her letters), her addiction had increased.
She told me how she tried to avoid bringing them to her apartment because she didn’t want them to know where she lived (since they inevitably wanted to remain in her life after the few weeks or days – or hours – that she wanted them there). She assessed their performances for me, often brutally.
She told me how she had, a few times, out of a mixture of frustration and curiosity, initiated trysts with women, but had found herself ambivalent about the experience.
And she related, without a hint of remorse, how she specifically sought out married men, looking at their ring fingers at the gym and at the grocery store and at the bars. (``i dont have to worry theyll show up at my door w/a suitcase,’’ she explained.)
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Several of the photos she emailed me featured the purple vibrator – the same one from college, she confirmed, which made me marvel at the durability of the thing – but the imagery was limited by the fact that she was taking the photos herself. She forwarded several photos that featured half the vibrator sticking out of the dark mound of hair between her legs, but she lamented in the accompanying letters about the limited angle of the image. The nightly flood of photos eventually diminished to a trickle, as she ran out of new ways to show herself to me.
She soon solved the problem by getting her temporary men involved, directing them to shoot the photos of her, for me. A second flood of images now filled my email account over weeks, images that were less logistically limited than before because they were taken by various men she’d gone home with: Gwen leaning forward and holding up both breasts for the camera and smiling sweetly; Gwen spread-legged on the bed, holding open her vaginal lips with one hand, the other guiding the purple vibrator deep into her dark pink folds, her face twisted in a frozen carnal gasp; a closeup, blurry, motion-filled image of an erection buried almost to the hilt inside her, the photo snapped by the faceless man from above.
The more she sent me, the more I needed. Even as I immersed myself in this vast newly opened cavern of my Inner Life, I began to wonder where it was leading, where it could possibly end. I was fully, cautiously aware that the Benny’s Principle was in play: That first photo, of Gwen fully clothed, had caused me to peak three times in a matter of minutes; now, barely a month later, with so much more of her having been so freely offered, my fantasizational requirements were again rising beyond any semblance of reason.
She admirably kept pace with my growing appetite – and with her own, I knew. The exhibitionist in her had been let loose in this new place. Its needs, like the needs of its one-man audience, were growing exponentially with every batch of electronic pixels.
c:/program/docs/gem/email20
From: Gem4u
To: Alvn
Subject: that big-titted lezbo who ate me
. . . Her mouth felt good on my clit but i probably wont do it again. At the end i just wanted a good hard fuck and i couldnt get one, and i ended up having to use the purpl vibrater . . .
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Still, she managed to surprise me again and again. One night, she told me she was going to go to a nearby bar and pick up two guys at once for the express purpose of having them take pictures of each other having sex with her so that I’d have an even better view of her adventures.
She followed through beautifully on the promise. The next night, my email account was bursting with a series of images, dozens of them, of the two men (both nondescript graceless white males ) taking turns holding the camera and holding Gwen: One on top of her in the missionary position, her legs wrapped around him like a fist; then the other lying on his back as she straddled him, her breasts hanging deliberately in his face; then the other one again, slamming into her from behind, his hands tightly holding her waist, his torso a blur of motion as she’s poised on elbows and knees before him, hips and hindquarters held high, reaching forward to steady herself by gripping the headboard.
At some point – the crescendo of the encounter, perhaps – she had taken them both on at once. The moment was recorded with several random, seemingly accidental photos that one or another of them had managed to aim toward a nearby dresser mirror, which yielded what were mostly a confused, reflected blur of flesh and light flashes – but one reflected image that very clearly showed Gwen straddling one of the young men on the edge of the bed while the other stood behind her, both their hips pressed tightly to her body, both their faces contorted in pleasure.
c:/notes/congressnotes/congress0005
SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,
CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE PRESIDING
Committee report: Summary of major characters and events in The Electric Adventures of Alvin.
. . . GEM’s character appears designed specifically to offend, socially and politically as well as sexually. This is especially evident her frequent and enthusiastic usage of self-referential words like ``cunt’’[12 & 25] and ``slut’’[27-39] and ``fuck-buddy’’.[61]
Similarly disturbing is GEM’s derogatory and discriminatory attitudes toward homosexuality. Her character harbors a certainty that any man who doesn’t yearn to engage in sexual intercourse with her is a homosexual, and she tends to be brutal in her assessments of such men once she has reached this conclusion. [see attached Amicus Curiae brief from Lambda Legal Defense Fund regarding this issue]
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I peaked probably ten times a day for two weeks to that batch of images, often pausing first to re-read the short written note with which she had accompanied them, warning that I should brace myself because this particular batch of photos was ``me at my sluttyest.’’
And then the effect again started wearing off. I know she felt it, too; the pace of the photo sessions was again diminishing to a trickle, as she ran out of new doors to kick open.
Every time I called up on my screen the image in the mirror of Gwen satisfying two men at once, Gwen, at her most carnal, her most adventurous – her most electric – I would ponder: Where could she go from here? Short of coming home with the entire defensive line of the Oakland Raiders in tow, where in the hell could she go from here?
c:/notes/congressnotes/congress0006
SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,
CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE PRESIDING
. . . Although GEM does, at several points in the storyline, engage in sexual activity with other women, this doesn’t prevent her from continuing to employ derogatory and discriminatory language regarding lesbianism. At one point in the storyline, in anticipation of a date with a woman that evening, she informs
c:/adamstuff/notes/miscnotes46
One night, I signed on to find an email from Gwen with no photo attachment and no note, just a website link. I clicked on it, and found myself in a chat room called married but looking.
I’d earlier gone through a chat-room phase, signing on to watch the typed conversations scroll up the screen, looking for signs of life and Inner Life within the jumble of random writing and porn links and advertisements. I hadn’t usually found anything there to hold my interest, in large part because I’d suspected, from the tone and content of the conversation, that even the participants with female names were actually, by and large, graceless males.
That night, I took my hands off the keyboard and sat back and watched the words scrolling through married but looking, wondering why she’d brought me here. After a moment, I understood: There was Gwen – Gem4u – in the center of the conversation, recounting, in lavish if poorly typed detail, her experience with the two men, her thoughts and feelings as she had undressed for them, as she had masturbated for them, as she took them inside her one by one and then both, reliving the experience through the frantic dance of her fingers on the keyboard, the others in the chat room dropping their own side-conversations to gather around the story.
``they took turns snapping pics,’’ she told them. A predictable flood of begging ensued, with all the men in the room (and a few who claimed to be, and may or may not have been, women) imploring her in capital letters and exclamation points to email them copies of the described photos.
``dont know if i can do tht,’’ said Gem4u. I could almost hear the teasing lilt of her voice behind the scrolling words.
``pleez pleez pleez!!!’’ responded someone called JonsHand.
``cmon just 1 fuckpic pleese!’’ added Oxn69.
``i’ll trade u! pics of my tits for a fukkpik!’’ implored an alleged woman named DorthyGal.
``hmmm. dunno,’’ teased Gem4u. ``they were made for
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And all at once I was back there, in her bedroom in college, on that one dangerous morning, watching her lying on the bed, legs poised above herself, ready to open, but holding out for more words. Always for more words.
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Gem4U: hmmm. dunno. they were made for
Gem4U: what about it,
Oxn69: cmon alv, help us out!
DrthyGal: pleez
DrthyGal: i’ll send u any kind of pic you want!
JonsHnd: dont be selfish, alv. U got to see, now our turn
Gem4U:
Alvn: Yeah.
Gem4U: well? should i?
Gem4U: should i?
c:/program/docs/gem452
``. . . You sure you wanna see it all, Adam? . . . Want me to spread for you? . . . You want me to spread like a slut? . . . Your own personal slut? . . . ’’
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In the months that followed, Gwen and I prowled the chat rooms together like a couple of digital vampires from an Anne Rice novel, she stalking and luring and seducing the other chatters with talk and the occasional emailed photo; me assisting, conspiring, watching.
Sometimes we’d sign in separately and pretend not to know each other, and begin flirting in front of the rest of the chatters, describing undressing each other, describing bodies and positions in all manner of practiced and increasingly explicit prose, watching as the others reacted to what they thought were two strangers having Internet sex in front of them.
More often, we’d announce our presence together, and offer the room some approximation of the truth about ourselves: two old friends from college, who’d bedded each other back then in the real world and who now were in this virtual world, enjoying something like a reunion.
Like so much of our connection back then, there was a mutually beneficial (parasitic?) aspect to the nightly virtual outings: She got an audience in her quest to cause countless men to grovel and gasp for a peek at her explicit self-imagery; and I got help identifying the genuine women in the rooms, who were far fewer than the men pretending to be women, and difficult for me to separate, but easy for Gwen – not for any sisterly connection to the world of nuanced womanhood on her part, but rather because her lemming-like effect on the male of species was in full force, even behind the cloak of typed words. It was amazing to me how easy it always seemed to be for her to spot the many frauds and isolate the real ones. It was often as easy as, ``hey who wants to see some TIT??’’, and then watching who comes panting, dog-like, out of the depths of cyberspace, and who instead wants to talk about it first.
c:/notes/congressnotes/congress0005
SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,
CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE PRESIDING
Committee report: Summary of major characters and events in The Electric Adventures of Alvin.
In terms of cultural impact, is it relevant to note how aggressively the persona of GEM has inserted itself into the language in the past two years, particularly those parts of the language referencing sexual activity. Staff research indicates that in adult films, and in casual conversation of a sexual nature between young adults, the very word GEM is often used as a substitute for the word ``vagina,’’ and to reference sex or sexuality in general.[91, 92] Staff found examples of the word used as a singular noun in place of the phrase ``a sexual intercourse session’’ (``I’m hoping to get a GEM tonight’’); as a plural noun used in less targeted phraseology, referring to either generalized sexual intercourse or, specifically, to vaginal access (``I want some GEM tonight’’). Staff also found instances of the word being used as a verb (``Oh, man, can she GEM!’’).
c:/documents/adamsstuff/writing/notes4523
One of the chatters who claimed to be a woman caught my attention one late night in a chat room called Intimate Indy, geared toward
As Gwen languidly positioned herself at the center of the cyber-orgy now occupying the chat room, Minnie and I talked – chatted – off in our virtual corner.
She was new at this, she said, but had already become addicted to the scrolling words. She’d not told her husband, Darrin, who tended to go to bed earlier while she stayed awake downstairs, reading – and, now, writing, in this strange new definition of the word. Immersed in the casual intimacy of the place we were in, I asked whether she masturbated to the conversations she found here, and she reacted pretty much the way a normal woman out in the real world would react to such a question from a stranger. I apologized profusely and barely convinced her not to leave, and explained that I’d let my manners slip in all the time I’d been spending here, and I asked her to forgive me, telling her I found her lively and interesting and someone I could talk to – all of it true – and could she give me another chance?
``will u behave?’’ she wanted to know. I told her I would.
c:/program/chattxt/miscchat458
Alvn: i work with incoming documents at an ad firm
MinniMous: wow. so yor, like, making ads?
Alvn: not really.
Alvn: i’m kind of laying the groundwork for the ones who make the ads.
MinniMous: ok. sounds cool.
Alvn: yeh not bad
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We talked – chatted – for well over four hours that night, MinnieMouse and I. Gwen kept barging in, trying to pull me into her carnal conversations going on elsewhere, finally giving up and focusing on a little klatch of men and two alleged women, one of whom was pushing hard for a real-world meeting. As usual, I was content with the world of words, especially now that I’d connected with this thirty-something mother from Ohio who was just reserved enough to intrigue me.
MinnieMouse told me about growing up in
I told Minnie about growing up in Indy as well, about my dad and Uncle Martin and St. Ignoramus and Father Lovett and Mrs. McCormick (though I didn’t tell her everything about Mrs. McCormick). I told her about my unusual chemical composition and the lifelong torment of my hypersensitive sense of smell, and she laughed (lol!), apparently assuming I was kidding. She said she knew of St. Ignatius, it actually wasn’t far from where she’d grown up, though she was a public school kid. I was, too, I explained, St. Ignoramus being just a brief holy diversion in my otherwise heathen childhood.
c:/notes/chattext/min9
MinniMous: who’s that gem person who keeps talking to u?
Alvn: old friend. long story.
MinniMous: she just sent me a pic of her boobs.
MinniMous: wanna see them?
Alvn: i’ve seen them.
c:/docs/miscchatnotes
Halfway through our third hour of chatting – and still adhering to the ubiquitous chat room rule of not using real names – we discovered we’d gone to the same high school at the same time. And suddenly, awkwardness descended. How quickly this safely anonymous, casually intimate conversation became tense and halting, now that our mutual anonymity was threatening to slip off like a towel wrapped not quite tightly enough after a shower.
In those first tense moments of digital silence, I searched my memories of high school, trying to retrieve any stray thread about my various female friends that might connect with the woman who now sat silently behind the other side of a glass screen in
Mindy. It didn’t even occur to me, until the woman at the other end of the conversation – after lying silent for so long that I thought she’d signed off – suddenly reappeared, having clearly done some memory-searching of her own, and offered four words that made me gasp so loud that for a moment I feared it might have awakened Beth in the other room: ``adamski? is that u?’’
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