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.
I don’t think the attraction disappeared for him as instantaneously as it did for me, so I had to navigate the dance of trying to reframe our relationship as friends and not phone flirt mates before my other courtier, Tyler, got finished being yelled at upstairs by a very angry New Jersey woman. (By the way, her accent was NOT exotic.)
“How’s your cat doing?”
“Good! I can’t believe I’m seeing you in person. You’re so prett . . .”
“Look over there! A washer-dryer combo! Cool!”