Memoirs, Ink

 

Chat

by Shannon Fandler

For a couple of months, when I was twelve, my best friends were in their forties, and, even better, believed every word I said. “How interesting,” they responded when I told them I was a breeder of Scottish Terriers in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. “What a challenging yet rewarding job.” Except, I could never exactly picture what my dog-breeding business looked like—a row of outdoor kennels behind my house? An air-conditioned building with clean tiled floors like the vet’s office, full of tiny cages? I didn’t even have one dog.

This was far from the only discrepancy between what was true—my actual life—and what was not true—my online life. I was an agnostic at best, but because most of the chat room regulars were intensely religious, I would drop comments like, “Wow, my church group also did a service immersion trip to Ecuador last year!” or, “Does anybody have tips for a Bible passage that might be comforting if read aloud to terminally ill children?”  When my bedtime came and I needed an excuse to leave the room, I would say I was going to evening mass. Or that I had to sew patches onto my daughter’s Brownie vest for a scout rally the next morning. Or that I heard a disturbance outside and needed to check the kennels. Raccoons, you know. “Later, ScottieLover159,” they would type. “Same time tomorrow!” I would type back. They never knew I was logging out to brush my teeth for about five ineffective seconds before changing into my Pikachu pajamas. I would lie on top of my blankets in the dark staring at the silhouettes of my furniture and thinking up what I’d say the next day.

 

The chat room was actually an outlet for conversation about a weeknight show called the Ponderosa, which was supposed to be a prequel to the long-running western, Bonanza. It was really a watery anachronism of period costumes, hundreds of horses, and a style of progressive parenting exclusive to the 21^st century. Episodes ended with neatly packaged morals as easy to swallow as an apple fritter from the kitchen of Hop Sing, the Cartwrights’ perpetually laughing Chinese cook, and the antagonist always learned his lesson with a smile. I had gotten into the show because my parents, like everyone in the chat room, were old enough to remember the actual Bonanza. “No one tops the original Ben Cartwright,” I’d type, quoting my mother. “Hear, hear!” BlueIce would say. “Ditto to that!” Donna12 would punctuate.

They were characters to me, just as my imaginary husband Bill and my daughter Stephanie were figments of that delicious kind of fiction that becomes so personal, it almost isn’t a lie. Donna was the manic depressive who threatened to kill herself every couple of days yet, tiresomely, never actually did. She’d enter the chat room every evening at 7:00 like clockwork, and we’d all express our concern: “Feeling okay tonite, D?”

“A little down and out,” she would admit. “Sigh…Thanx for asking.”

BlueIce was the teetotaler whose screen name, incidentally, was also a vodka brand. I had a whole argument with her once on the morality of red wine. “I like to have a glass once in a while if I’m eating a plate of spaghetti,” I typed, again quoting my mother. “The Good Lord changed water into wine, so it must be okay.”

“All the same,” BlueIce responded coldly, “Juice or water for me, thanks.”

“Brb,” I replied. “I think I’ll go grab that bottle of Merlot right now.” I spelled it Merlow. But no one noticed.

 

My best online friend was Meatheaddiddy. I knew and respected the references: All in the Family and the rapper P. Diddy. I never knew how old he was, as he changed his story on a nightly basis, but I was flattered by his interest in me. “Hey Dog Lady,” he would type (all in lowercase letters). “How are the puppies?”

“Oh, a few of them have kennel-cough,” I’d reply. “I may have to have the vet come out later this week. It’s just, I’m so busy sewing costumes for Stephanie’s school play. She’s going to be Alice in Wonderland. Those little pinafores are hell to embroider.”

“You do it all, Dog Lady,” Meatheadiddy would say. “But sometime, when you get a break, hop in the car and come on over to Ohio. We can share a juicy cantaloupe and get to know each other better.”

Meat had this thing for cantaloupes. Maybe now I’d call it a fetish. The icon next to his screen name was a digital image of a cantaloupe cut in two with the seeds spilling out in a moist pile. He was always talking about how to choose one in its peak state of ripeness, how best to clean it, how to select a good melon baller at the kitchen appliance store.

“Meat, I’d love to, but Ohio’s awfully far away from Chadds Ford, PA,” I typed back, feeling reasonably safe.

“I know something about cantaloupes that you don’t know,” replied Meat. “When two people are eating one, all distances are obliterated.” It was, to give him credit, a unique pick-up line.

I was told that he asked about me on the evenings when it was impossible for me to secretly enter the chat room with the excuse of “doing research” or “finishing my homework.” These were weekend nights or the nights when someone called my bluff—“I thought you already turned in your Christopher Columbus report” or “Wait, there’s a field trip tomorrow. You have a whole extra night to find some suitable sea turtle clip art for your science fair poster.” These were also the occasions on which someone suggested a “Family Game Night” and I was forced to act out charades or manage Monopoly properties with one eye on the sleeping computer monitor, yearning after the conversations I was missing.

Such as my chats with HorsewithnoName, and the one-upmanship that prevailed. “I have five full-blooded Arabian horses with excellent pedigrees,” she once informed me, all in caps.

“Well, I have seven full-blooded Arabians,” I typed, fingers flying. “I take them to shows on the weekends, and we sweep all the ribbons. Of course, it’s hard being 4-H leader and raising show dogs at the same time, so I don’t get to ride the horses as often as I’d like.”

Or I would mention, “I’ve just finished building my new 25-stall barn, and it looks gorgeous!!! There’s a vault ceiling and a cupola, and wood paneling throughout.” This, I got from a real estate ad in the back of an equestrian magazine.

“I finished my new barn six months ago,” HorseWithNoName retorted. “It’s got a swimming pool out back for equine aqua-therapy, and an adjacent Olympic-sized riding arena with an air-conditioned observation lounge.” She never knew she was competing with someone whose real estate property consisted of the two square feet of garden in which my goldfish had been buried. A goldfish cemetery, so to speak, which it was my job to weed periodically.

And this was the sad thing, that they never knew. We’d run through our stats at the beginning of each chat for the benefit of any newcomers, and mine, for the first month, was 36/female/PA. Then I made a lot of wry jokes about having a birthday and, sigh, finally getting old, and my stats changed to 37/female/PA. I was clever.

Others, not so much. When an actual live adolescent entered the chat room, not bothering to conceal her youth at all but instead openly admitting to 12/female/OR, we all abandoned her to enter a private room where, as BlueIce put it, we were free to be adults, thank God.

What did we talk about? How the fifty-year-old male lead on The Ponderosa was disgustingly, deliciously, almost biblically hot. “I love his gray hair and his pectoral muscles,” I gushed. The older women loved other parts of him. And plus, he was a Mormon. “They don’t still practice polygamy, do they?” I asked once, in more or less words, and BlueIce typed back, “Oh, I wish.” There followed a rousing chorus of LOLs from the other women, and I felt left out. I was the only one not literally laughing out loud over man equipment and multiple wives. I think I changed the subject to property taxes. Sky high,” I said. “They’re breaking me this year.”

We talked about our children. Our jobs. Recipes. One night, I sat at the computer with my mother’s Betty Crocker Book in my lap, typing up ingredients for “a prize-winning cinnamon bun recipe of my own invention.” Donna would ask my advice: “Any tips for a quick pick-me-up?”

“Hot tea with 5 mg. Vicodin crushed in it, and you won’t feel anything but euphoria,” I typed, after a quick consultation with that sage old butler, Jeeves. “I don’t know if I ever told you that my husband is a doctor.”

I was good at advice. I got most of it from the internet or whatever self-help books we had lying around the house. Any medical questions, I forwarded to my husband Bill, the doctor. When BlueIce’s baby swallowed fifty cents, I told her not to panic. “Bill isn’t too worried,” I said. “The fifty cents will just take its natural course, and the baby will be fine tomorrow morning.” When HorseWithNoName had a case of adult chicken pox, I remembered my own chicken pox from only a few years prior, and suggested soaking in a bathtub with a whole lot of oatmeal in it. “Bill says not to use the kind with added sugar,” I reminded her. “Thanks, ScottieLover159,” they would tell me later. “And thank Bill, too.”

It felt nice to be valued as a person who had lived long enough to be sensible and to have worthy opinions. In school and at home, I felt like a cartoon animal in a real-people movie—a little funny, a little lost, a little stupid. My every emotion was a cliché. If I was in love, it was puppy love. If I was anxious or depressed or smelly, it was the hormonal fluctuations of puberty. I didn’t really have a lot in common with my peers, whom I viewed as silly and petty and mean. Only online, under the guise of 37/female/PA and a whole lot of other lies, was I truly free to be myself. (Even if that self was a couple decades older and nothing like me, really.)

But even online, I saw the perils of being young. Once, a fifteen year-old girl wandered onto the site, asking if “anybody knew the trick to giving good head?” She was going on a second date and feeling anxious.

“Jesus,” typed Meat.

Everyone just kept chatting around the girl, her unanswered query floating in an island of cotton-candy comic sans among our hastily pecked out black text. Finally, as her pink words nearly disappeared into the scroll of rapidly-moving cyberspace, I shot her a quick private message: “Ask your mother.” Just a guess. I was twelve, and I still giggled when Adam Cartwright kissed his Mexican girlfriend in Episode # 13, The Picnic.

 

I would, from time to time, enter different chat rooms geared to preteens and try to fall in with kids my own age, just to see if I could. I couldn’t. The misspellings and abbreviations were excruciating. The flirting and banter was ridiculous and unrefined. I tried to picture the people I was chatting with—sugarNspice and princesshottie and xoxGurl, but all I saw were the same blonde baby bitches who inhabited my neighborhood and school. I then joined a forum for online video game geeks who toyed with the lives of Sims, people that lived in virtual dollhouses on your computer. You got the Sims up in the mornings, sent them to school or work, and either saved up enough cyber-cash to purchase kitchen appliances so they could cook for themselves, or let them go without food until they collapsed, emaciated, on the floors of their carefully designed living rooms. Even with the computer program’s remarkable realism, the grim reaper still came to clear the bodies away, and so you never had to deal with the viewing, the cremation, or the thank-you notes for flowers and donations. It seemed so fake and impersonal that I couldn’t really get into it, and I never made friends on the forum.

In the end, I always went back to the Ponderosa chat. These people were assholes and screw-ups and maybe a little pathetic, but they were accepting. They were so accepting that they eventually became boring; I don’t remember the point at which I became tired of the TV show and the people, but it was sometime after Donna12 had threatened self-mutilation for the thousandth time, and it was sometime after the millionth rerun of the Ponderosa pilot episode on PAX family channel. Mostly, I was tired of the deception, which got to be a drag. Being 37 was a drag. Never being able to type the word “school” was a drag. Remembering the names of my Scottish Terrier stud dog and my twelve Scottish Terrier bitches and my seven Arabian Horses was a drag. Being married to Bill, who was a controlling prick with an MD and a PhD was an extreme drag. Returning to my previous Pokemon-card-collecting Full-House-watching less-than-hygienic self was like unbuttoning a tight pair of pants.

Still, the drug was in my system. Sometimes I would post messages on the Ponderosa web forum saying, “Hi guys, how are you? Been busy lately.” Meathead was always the first to reply, with an invitation to share in some succulent fruit the next time I was in the suburbs of Cincinnati. BlueIce would make cracks about Ben Cartwright’s taut gluteus maximus, and Donna would beg for an illicit prescription. They were all stuck in the same tracks. They all used exclamation points too liberally and ended their posts with corny little quotes about Jesus. I had moved on, just like The Ponderosa, which went off the air after the first season. Me and that girl who asked the wrong question to the wrong people, and then hung around for an eternity waiting for an answer, we had moved on. I wonder if our conversations are still hanging somewhere, in invisible ink, transcribed across the networks of the Bible Belt as a testament to the temporary loneliness of growing up.

 

Shannon Fandler is 19 years old and a second-year English major at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pennsylvania. She doesn't really have a plan, but hopes that her future will include writing for publication.