I was blessed there for a while, back when I was 35. A lot of really good things seemed to happen to me sort of all at once. I had started taking Prozac in January of 1990 and that might have had something to do with it. Before there was a World Wide Web, before anybody but academics and scientists used the Internet, there were other online options available for mere mortals. I used a service called Compuserve as part of my work, to get technical support for programming questions and issues.
The interface to the service was really primitive. You'd type "GO MACINTOSH" or "GO IBM" or "GO PROGRAMMING" and it'd take you to different areas called forums where you could post your questions on a bulletin board and then come back later and see if there were any answers.
And one day I was online and idly twiddling my thumbs, figuring out what I wanted to do next when, as a sort of joke, I typed in "GO ROCK." And boing! Suddenly I was in a forum devoted to... rock and roll! I couldn't believe it. I thought Compuserve users were all propeller-heads, real dandruff-on-the-glasses geeks. And we were! But some of the geeks were really into rock and roll, too.
And I had this epiphany, this realization that I lived in a really big world, a world large enough to contain a lot of people a lot like me: hipster nerds, or something.
The ROCK forum (actually "ROCKNET") was, like rock and roll but unlike the rest of Compuserve, total chaos. There were some long-term regulars who hung out there year after year, and the whole thing was pretty savagely clique-y. Newcomers would get pounced upon like fresh meat, until they proved themselves (or didn't).
It was May or June when I started hanging out in ROCKNET regularly, and I was still living with my wife, Molly. In June or July, I started meeting some of the guys from online to go, like, record shopping, and to talk about music in person. (And that was always a mind-bending experience, since you had NO idea what the person was going to look like; this pretty much pre-dated digitized photos)
It was around then that Molly started going to her "support group," and, emboldened by my eye-opening experience meeting people a lot like me, I said, "To hell with this," and I announced that I was going to get my own apartment and move out.
She was flabbergasted, but I was not to be dissuaded, and sometime in August I took a week off from work and went and found an apartment, bought a bed, took a couple of chairs and my computers, and I was gone. It felt so great.
And I was convinced it was the right thing for both of us, if we ever wanted to grow and stop living dysfunctionally.
After I'd moved into my new place, I started noticing posts in the ROCKNET forum from a new person named "J Richards." The posts were pretty wry, and pretty knowledgeable, and he seemed like a nice guy, living in Mississippi.
Anytime there was a new person in the forum, private messages would fly back and forth: like, "Who's J Richards???" And we were all, like, "I dunno!" We always thought it was somebody who'd been hounded out of the forum, returning under a different name, but it never was.
At some point it dawned on me that the name "J Richards" was just like the names that women used to list themselves in phone books. No first name, just the initial. But everybody was referring to him as "he" and s/he never corrected them.
I got a private message from him/her one day, and when I replied back, I said something like, "You're a woman, right?" and she replied back, "How did you know?" She'd used the androgynous handle because she didn't want her opinions dismissed due to gender; it was sort of an experiment. Her name was actually Jane.
Things happened very quickly then. We started messaging back and forth a LOT and at some point she intimated that there was a deep, dark secret about her, one she wanted to TALK to me about. So she called me, or I called her, and it turned out that her secret was that she was married, not very happily.
Fresh from my own experience dealing with a dead-end marriage, I almost hooted in laughter. "You're stuck in a bad marriage? That's the easiest thing in the world to rectify!" But she didn't want to strike out on her own all by herself. She wanted to know how I felt about her, whether she should pack up her feelings for me and go away, or whether there might be some sort of future with us.
And I didn't know -- feelings for me? Future? I told her I really liked her. I liked the fact that she was a few years younger; I liked the fact that she was a designer and worked with Mac computers, and wasn't intimidated by them. Everything I knew about her I liked, I told her, and we should just take it from there. Keep writing; keep calling when she could; exchange photos via U.S. Mail.
And it deepened very quickly; really, really quickly. You can get to know some aspects of a person in e-mail way more readily than you can in person. At the time I thought you could practically peer inside somebody's soul via e-mail. I'm a lot less sure about that now, but there's such an intimacy to e-mail. It's almost like pillow talk, or a slumber party. Still, I've come to realize that there's a lot of idealization that goes on, and projection. And there's no way to tell if what seems like chemistry is really there until you meet, face to face.
But after a ton of e-mail, and long phone conversations, and taking a gander at pictures we sent each other via U.S. Mail, we both just made this huge leap of faith and decided/realized we were in love, that we wanted and needed each other desperately. A little voice wondered if we were both slightly nuts ("Folie à deux," baby), but it simply felt too right, and I ignored the voice.
It turned out she had a brother who lived in NYC, going to school at NYU, which was pretty near where I'd moved (fashionably solo in fashionable SoHo). So she fabricated a cover story to tell her husband (and her parents!) about going to visit her brother for a week. But really she'd be coming to visit me. Once we'd finally met, if it turned out that we'd been colossally wrong about one another, well, she did still have her brother there, and she could in fact just visit him.
So I made plans to take yet another week off from work, and one Saturday I set out to Newark Airport to meet her. I was unbelievably nervous, and gobbling Xanax, and when she got off the plane she was clearly incredibly nervous, too.
But we were right. We were in love. And we just held each other like we'd never let go. It was more like a reunion than a meeting, more like "I have missed you so much, I have needed you so much."
Back when I was a teen I used to fantasize about what it would be like to have a twin, somebody who'd completely understand me, and complete me; somebody to whom I could say anything. I had felt so different from everybody all my life, and so alone.
We rode a taxi into the city, saying things like, "You said you had a hairy stomach!" and "You said you were flat-chested!" and the driver was eye-balling us in the rear-view mirror constantly.
We got to my apartment and after a bit I whispered, "We need to fuck," and we did, and afterward she whispered, "Thank you for fucking me." And of course that's what we did pretty much non-stop during her nine-day visit (though we also managed to eat Indian food with her brother, and to go out and buy iced coffees and orders of bacon and egg on a roll, and browse a zillion record stores). We'd both been married, so we'd had a lot of practice having sex [duh], and it was just absolutely wonderful, as perfect as perfect can be.
About that whispering. We came to call ourselves "the whispering family" because of our tendency to confer with each other very quietly about absolutely everything. We were total partners, and we ran everything by one another. That was one of the many things that we were convinced drove most people absolutely crazy when they were confronted with us. She and I were completely intertwined, and most people, we were convinced, had never been in love the way we were. We certainly hadn't.
Because we were both still married, we went and bought wedding rings for our other hands and married each other in a coffee shop. Really.
As the amount of time we had left grew shorter, we began to scheme about her coming back and moving in. I can't remember what she told her husband, but it was definitely not, "I met this guy from New York City on Compuserve and he and I need to spend the rest of our lives together." It was more like "I think I'd like to live in New York City for an extended period and strike out on my own, and my brother's got this friend who needs a roommate." He was weirdly receptive to the idea of a divorce, thank god. I was a tad hurt that she couldn't mention me as her new partner, but she didn't see the need to, and thought it might hurt him, and I suppose it would have. Q: Did I want to hurt him? A: I'm not sure.
She felt she had to give her job three weeks' notice in order to get a good reference, so there ensued a VERY difficult waiting period. We'd talk every day and every night and write each other endless notes. It was torture, the waiting, but somehow the time passed and she returned.
We fell into life together so easily, and so completely. We were inseparable. We said things to each other like, "We are the same person."
Around Thanksgiving we rented a truck and drove down to Mississippi to gather her belongings. Her now ex-husband had thoughtfully left town to visit his family so there was no danger of an encounter with him.
And I'll tell you: going into her house was the only time I felt anything like guilt (or satisfaction?) about my role in the dissolution of her marriage. Everywhere I looked there was evidence of their eight years together. They had a lot of nice stuff, but as she kept reassuring me, that didn't mean that they had a nice life, or really, much of a life together at all, and it certainly hadn't made her happy.
From there we drove to her parents' house, and to their credit they welcomed me into their home completely. True, they kept their daughter's wedding picture on the wall of their bedroom, but the whole thing had happened so quickly; it was going to take them a longer time to adjust than it would Jane.
And so they sat me down for Thanksgiving dinner as a last-minute replacement. And it was so nice to be with a family where nobody left the table in tears.
Orson Welles once said that "Every story essentially has an unhappy ending. If you want a happy ending it all depends on where you stop telling it." If we wanted to give my story a happy ending, we might stop at Christmas of that year. My therapist had essentially sent me packing, saying he'd never seen me (or practically anyone) so happy. Which says something about his therapeutic skill right there. To start with, there's a term for that: mania. And even if we weren't officially maniacs, we were completely dependent on each other. And need leads to resentment, which leads to all sorts of stuff.
I always think it was hubris that did us in. Or rather, that it was my hubris which did me in. Which would have done us both in since we were, after all, the same person. The thing we knew was that the relationship was as strong as a relationship could be. We knew that we'd never leave each other, and we knew that no love could be more powerful or more right than ours.
Fast forward three years. We were cruising, and summer was upon us. We still hung out in that ROCKNET forum and we collected face-to-face meetings with the people from there the way others might collect butterflies. Mid-July there was scheduled a free outdoor poetry reading by fabled punk priestess Patti Smith. And in attendance were ten or fifteen people from that forum, including a newcomer named Lucy who, for better or worse, caught my eye. She was different; she looked like she'd just stepped out of that Slacker movie. Shorts, olive skin, Doc Maartens. She had a long stride and I watched her from the subway car as she walked toward the stairs.
I turned to Jane and said, "Interesting, eh?"
"Very," she said. "Did you notice that wart by the side of her mouth?"
"Wart? No, not really."
"She has a wart."
And that was that. Except it wasn't. Lucy was a music geek like the rest of us, and had a particularly keen knowledge of what's now called "garage" but wasn't really called much of anything back then. I made a post about a song called "Sugar and Spice" by "The Cryin' Shames," which had come out when Lucy was precisely zero years old. And she responded:
That's "Cryan'" Puh-leez!
And I thought that was the most clever thing I'd ever read. So I started flirting with her in private e-mail. What a dunce. And I knew it. I knew I could never have anything as good as what I had, that I'd never love anybody else like that, and yet...
Jane and I had a transition to make, I've decided in hindsight. The exhilaration of any new relationship, even ours, slowly flattens, inevitably, into the routine. We were in a wonderful groove but I wanted to ride a roller-coaster again.
The giant paternalistic corporation I worked for had a policy of "summer hours." Work ended every Friday at 12:00. So every Friday afternoon I was at loose ends.
I convinced Lucy to meet me for coffee, which was a departure from the norm -- as much as possible, Jane and I did EVERYTHING together. This time I was solo. Lucy was so nervous. I reached across the table and held her hands. "It's okay," I said.
The following Friday Lucy and I went bowling. Afterward we sat on a bench out in the park. We held hands. I kissed her lightly on the cheek.
That evening I met Jane for coffee on her way home from the job at which she had to work until 5. I was chattering a little too much about Lucy.
"You're going to fall in love with Lucy," she said. Like an idiot I said nothing for a few very long seconds. Jane said, "You're ALREADY in love with Lucy!" She was flabbergasted, and enraged. And she got up from the table and left. I quickly followed her into the street, saying "Wait!"
She stopped and turned and then slapped me across my face. I followed her, babbling all the wrong things all the way home. "It's not like us. It could never be like us." And then: "Maybe people only really fall in love for three or four years." Suddenly I was a Seeker of Truth, and a complete idiot.
The exact sequence and nature of the events of the next week or two elude me. I remember trying to leave Jane, if only for a few hours, and having her follow me every step I took. We walked all the way to the Empire State building and then walked all the way back home. It was lunacy. I had this delusion that I was going to go stay with Lucy for a few days and find out if something was really there. Never mind that Lucy, being a basically sane and sensible young woman, was having no part of it. The two of them spoke on the phone for about an hour and worked it all out between themselves. "He can be very persuasive," I heard Jane say, and inside I beamed.
There was one thing Jane did that made me feel it was okay to do just about anything: she dialed into my work computer and read my private e-mail. Her Mac enthusiasm and fearlessness about computers had served her well. Never mind all my stupid stunts and betrayals of trust; this, I thought, was dirty pool.
We lurched forward, and tried to repair things. But I'd done major damage to the very core of our relationship, and things started to fester from the inside.
We got hooked on a very early multi-player online game that was vaguely dungeons-and-dragons-y. We'd come home at 6 and log on and play the entire night, sometimes until 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning. Our two computers sat side-by-side, and so did we. After a month or two, Jane made friends with a player named "Demannu" ("Unnamed" spelled backwards, natch). Demannu's claim to fame was that he'd written a cheating program that gave him sort of unlimited power, and unlimited money, and allowed him to teleport to and from any area he wanted. He knew the game inside out, and Jane thought he was pretty neat, and a good person. He spent a lot of his game time helping others with his cheating program and being hailed as a hero.
He was a Mormon (honest to God) who lived in Utah with his wife and twin two-year-old daughters.
It began to seem to me that Jane lived for those nights with this guy and that this was the only thing that was important to her. When I told her this, she said that their friendship was not about destroying relationships, but rather about making them stronger. That sounded like horseshit to me, and a rationalization. I didn't feel like our relationship was any stronger; it felt like it was pretty screwed up. Her infatuation with this guy hurt like hell. I'd go to bed and hear her typing, and I'd wait and wait and wait for her to finish up.
One very wise thing that Demannu's wife did was to try to befriend Jane. His wife sent her a little care package, complete with a professional portrait of her, her husband, and their two daughters, demonstrating what a FAMILY they were. Wow! Nobody would mess with a marriage where there were kids involved, right?
It occurred to me that this game-playing compulsion was very similar behavior to what had gone on between her and her husband when I became involved with her. She was always messaging me, for hours and hours and hours, while her husband was off in another room.
I told her that. I told her that I thought she was in love with Demannu. It certainly had the all-consuming thing going. I said she should go out to Utah and find out. Her countenance changed, as if to say, "I just might do that." "Really?" she asked. "Really. Things will never get better like this." It was like a dare, like a double dare.
Her weekend trip to Utah was postponed not once, but twice because of bad weather. And I was sick to my soul.
The third time was the charm, though. I was so worried, and I hurt so badly. It was unbelievably sickening waiting out the weekend. Sunday night I did a reprise of that very first meeting at Newark airport, picking her up there.
"Am I still the guy?" I asked in the taxi on the way home, cradling her in my arms. "Am I still the one?"
"I don't know," she answered, and I began crying uncontrollably.
I was advised by my oldest friends to play it cool, to let it run its course, but that wasn't in me, that wasn't something I was capable of doing. Instead I became a total asshole, punching walls and doors. Hitting myself in the face with a shoe. Non-stop temper tantrums.
Within a couple of weeks she had moved out. We would still see one another almost daily, mostly outside, mostly me crying.
At some point I think she realized she might have made a mistake. Or maybe that's the only version of reality I could (and can) live with.
But she was married to him by then, and pregnant with his baby. And I knew I couldn't raise his baby, and she knew she couldn't get an abortion, so we were at an impasse.
I'm realizing now that I have no memory whatsoever of the last time I saw her. Kind of odd, that. In my memory it's a Summer night, and we're outside, and my head is in her lap, and she's stroking my hair, and I'm blubbering. I'm certainly blubbering now. Like the song says, "Some things you never get used to, even though you're feeling like another man."
We still e-mail each other on our birthdays, but that's about it. She's got five kids now[!], is still with Demannu, and if we stop now, I think we can give them a happy ending. So let's do that.