Agents of the Internet Apocalypse (8 page)

“Would it
kill
you to lose that fedora?” Tobey asked.

“I'm sorry, Tobes,” I said. “I know your Black Flag T-shirt is the epitome of fashion, but I'm keeping the hat.”

“
And
the white sports jacket?”

“Yes. Both. I'm in L.A.”

“Why does a
Miami Vice
jacket mean
L.A.
to you?”

I stopped for a moment. “Hmm, that
is
curious. Anyway, I'm willing to take my chances.”

Tobey drove us to a bar on some street I barely noticed because being aware of my surroundings was starting to make me uneasy. The bar looked standard and fratty, but there was a blue banner hanging outside that read, “OKCupid.”

“Why are we going to an OKCupid bar?” I asked Tobey.

“Instead of?…”

“I dunno, Match.com? eHarmony?”

Tobey looked at me with vague disgust. “Gladstone, are you looking for someone to see a Coen Brothers movie with you or get your dick sucked?”

Inside, there were lots of seats, just like at the Hash Tag, and that was nice. Not sure why it took the Apocalypse to get some decent bar seating. Or maybe it was an L.A. thing. We paid our forty dollar entrance fee which came with two free-drink tickets, and a form of about twenty questions, replete with a tear-off number for identification.

“What did you put for the sexual-preference description?” Tobey asked.

“‘Somewhat adventurous.' How about you?”

“Sex criminal.”

“That's not a choice,” I said.

“I wrote it in,” Tobey replied. “You think they grade these by Scantron?”

“Fair enough.” I crossed out my answer and scribbled in “pervert.”

When we were done, we handed our finished forms to one of the four perky young coordinators, two girls and two guys with lots of smiles. After about thirty minutes, some local comic emcee got up on a makeshift stage, not unlike the one at The Hash Tag.

“Jesus,” I said. “When the Net went down, I should have invested everything into plywood.”

“Yeah,” Tobey agreed. “And desperation.”

Apparently, they were trying to split the crowd up into four distinct personality types and make pairings. Having seen our coordinators, I was pretty sure the process was less than scientific. And when they called the numbers, I was even more sure, because Tobey and I were in the same group.

We took the stage, standing in a line with fifteen other guys, while the emcee started introducing us by reading our three-line bios. I seemed to be the oldest. (Indeed, that's why Tobey didn't even bother taking us to a Tinder bar). I could tell instantly that this was a highly flawed re-creation of a dating site, even if I'd never been on one. Nothing could be less like the Internet than consensually being put up on stage for harsh viewing.

“You're missing the point,” Tobey said. “None of that matters.”

“Doesn't it?” I asked. “Isn't that what the Net's about? Putting your best foot forward. Slimming pics. Lying about your height?”

“Yeah, a bit, but not dating sites so much. On a dating site the main point is you're on a dating site.”

I didn't understand.

“Look,” he continued. “You hit on a woman in a bar, a bookstore, a coffee shop, whatever, she can be annoyed with you. Maybe she's just trying to drink her skinny latte without being bothered. And even if she'd like to be hit on by a dude who's not you, she can still pretend she's not on the market. But on a dating site you're saying, yes, hi, I'm generally interested.”

“That sounds kinda rapey, Tobes.”

“I don't mean it like that. Of course, people get nixed on dating sites all the time, but just being there pulls back one more layer. Destroys the cool front. Everyone is admitting that, yeah, they'd like to meet someone. It levels the playing field a bit. It's more honest.”

I was thinking about how the Net could catalyze honesty and deceit in equal measure when the emcee pulled a bit of a dick move on the first guy, who was wearing a short-sleeve button-down shirt and giving off a distinct IT vibe.

“According to your stats, here,” he said, “you're five-foot-ten?”

The dude was my height at best, and I was glad I never lied about being five-foot-seven. He put his head down before saying weakly, “What? No. That's a mistake.”

“Aww, it's okay,” the emcee continued. “I'm just fucking with you.” He flipped through the pages quickly. “Everyone lies about their height at these things.”

“I didn't,” I said.

“What was that?” the emcee asked.

“I didn't lie,” I repeated.

He looked me up and down. “Are you sure? You look like someone who'd make himself bigger.”

“Actually,” I said, “I was hoping someone else would take care of that tonight.”

The emcee paused for a second.

“He means his dick,” Tobey clarified, and the audience lost it. A few women catcalled like they were at a bachelorette party.

I was in for it. As a comic it was his duty to be the funny one, so now he had to destroy me, even if it was his job to actually facilitate hookups.

“Good job making enemies, G-Stone,” Tobey whispered. “How long did that take? Five seconds?”

“I don't like taking shit, Tobes.”

“Nooo,” he corrected. “You love
not
taking shit. It's not exactly the same.”

The emcee flipped the sheets looking for mine. “Ah, is this you?” he asked. “‘Gladstone?' Just one name like Madonna or Cher?”

I didn't remember omitting my first name, but I wasn't sure it was a bad sign. Dr. Kreigsman had said using just “Gladstone,” as I'd done online for years, was a way of being less than a complete person, but part of me also felt OKCupid didn't deserve all of me.

“Yes, that's me,” I said, and I felt a strange energy pass through the crowd. I didn't know what it was, but my name had started something.

“Okay, Gladstone,” he said. “Let's start with you. What brought you here tonight?”

“My friend Tobey.”

That got a chuckle, but it rightly angered the comic as a petulant half-joke. He geared up to say something particularly pointed.

“Okay, okay,” he said, “but what—”

“I came for the sex,” I interrupted, hoping to diffuse his pending attack.

“Hey, that's a smooth line, buddy. Me Gladstone. Me come for bang bang.”

“Well, I was hoping to have sex with a woman, not a primate, but yes. My name is Gladstone and I came here looking for a nice, attractive woman who would think I was worth having sex with.”

I waited for a bucket of pig blood to fall on me all
Carrie-
esque, but it didn't. And that's when I realized this actually was like the Internet because honesty came easily. My time here was fleeting, and these people didn't know me. This was not my home. I had nothing to lose from the truth. And even though honesty wasn't hard, and there were countless other people in the room who could have been just as forthright, there was still something rare and startling about hearing the truth. And that was like the Net, too. Now I was bulletproof. Nothing could be done to me except by the worst of trolls. Trolls like the emcee. But I knew exactly where he was going.

“Well, let me ask you this, Mr. Honesty,” he said. “How big—”

“Seven inches, cut.”

He was done. He looked at the audience to make sure of what he already knew: they liked me and wouldn't like him if he were cruel. He was the kind of garbage who checked the consensus of a comment thread before leaving his opinion.

“I have a question,” a woman in the audience said. She looked mid-twenties, wore a tight black T-shirt and jeans, and had one very fake streak of red through her otherwise brown and conservative hair. “Are you
the
Gladstone?”

“We're not up to the question section, ma'am,” the emcee said, but she ignored him.

“Y'know, the Gladstone from that Internet Apocalypse book?”

I didn't understand what I was hearing. I looked at Tobey, and although he wasn't the picture of clarity, he seemed less thrown than I.

She called out to the bar. “Jimmy, can you grab my book, back there by the ice? The pages?”

The bartender looked beneath the counter and held up a stack of photocopied pages held together by a binder clip. “This?”

“Yep,” she said, and then repeated her question to me in the form of a raised eyebrow.

“It's your book, dude!” Tobey said.

“Fuck, Tobey. How many copies did you make?”

“It's not all me. People started coming in to make copies for themselves the last couple of days.”

“Um, this book,” I said to the woman. “It's about a dude looking for the Net, and Oz and Romaya, and…”

“And Tobey,” Tobey added.

“Yeah, because if it's you,” she said, “I'm thinking I'd like to buy you a drink.”

Something about this moment was even more surreal than being dubbed the Internet Messiah, but I knew it was real. This room had a smell. I was seeing it from behind my own eyes, and I had to embrace it.

“Well, then,” I said, as painfully cool as I could muster, “why don't we get out of here?” I took a step off the stage.

“Can't. I'm a waitress,” she said holding up her tray. “I don't get off for another two hours.”

“Smooth, G-Stone,” Tobey said as I stepped back on the stage.

“So you wrote a book?” the emcee asked, trying to regain control.

“Sort of. It's hard to explain.”

“It's more like a journal,” another dude said, and held up his copy, curled and contained by a rubber band.

“I have it too,” another woman said, standing beside him and pulling out her copy.

“Tobey?” I asked. “What's going on?”

He was beaming. “Your book, dude,” he said. “It's gone paper viral!”

*   *   *

The waitress' name was Wendy, and it was a good thing she wanted to take me home because Tobey took his Matrix and went off with some woman wearing a hemp necklace and Snorg T-shirt.

“My roommates are out,” she said, “so we'll be able to talk better in my apartment than in some noisy bar.”

So this was a sure thing, it seemed, and I didn't know what to make of it. I'd been pedaling uphill for as long as I could remember. Now the road had leveled. Maybe there was even a decline that would let me coast all the way to a somewhat cluttered, even dirty, apartment on Kilkea Drive.

“Check it out,” she said, revealing a bottle of Jameson as she returned from her kitchen.

“This is so weird,” I said, from the couch. “You don't know me, but you know what I drink.”

“Why is that weird?” she asked, taking a swig right from the bottle. Some dripped down her chin. “I read your book.”

She caught the drop on her finger and straddled my lap. “What better way to get to know someone,” she said, and ran the drop of Jameson over my lips and into my mouth. I tried to remember if she'd washed her hands after coming home from work, but hoped the alcohol would provide enough of a disinfectant.

“Besides,” she said, taking her finger from my mouth. “It's not like I bring home the author of every book I read. I'm not a starfucker.”

“I'm hardly a star,” I said. “Just some broken mess with a journal full of crazy.”

“Oh, I know,” she laughed. “So why be so suspicious?”

She took off her shirt with a confidence I never saw in college. No bra and both nipples pierced. That was new. Of course, the right thing to do now was to have sex, but I delayed. Maybe it was because I hadn't been with a woman in over two years. (Delusions don't count.) Or maybe it was because, having found someone who liked me, I really wanted to understand why.

I pulled back from the approaching kiss and said, “Yeah, but that's the thing. That guy in that book. He's just a bruise. Why would you like that?”

“Sometimes being broken is hot,” she said, throwing my fedora to the side and pushing off my sports jacket.

“You wanna fix me?”

“I'm not sure I'd say fix.” She ran her hands up my T-shirt. “But I'd like to make you feel better for a little while.”

I decided not to press it any further and turned to my side, transitioning her flat to the couch without too much effort.

“Should we stop talking about the book?” I asked, and stroked the strands of red-dyed hair back from her face.

“Yeah, except I think it would be kinda hot to role-play it a bit,” she said.

I pressed down on the couch, rising up high enough to look her straight in the eyes. “I don't know. I think pretending you were Romaya would really mess me up right now.”

“Romaya?” she laughed. “No. I meant Oz.”

“Oh, I guess that makes more sense.”

“Yeah. Fuck me, Daddy,” she said, quoting Oz from the journal, but she was trying too hard. It was wrong. Just not wrong enough for me to leave.

*   *   *

It turns out Wendy wasn't much of a snuggler, or so she said, but she was nice about getting me the number for a cab.

“Do you have a phone?” I asked, looking around her living room.

“Yeah,” she said, “but they shut it off. It's hard to get used to mailing checks.” She pointed to a stamped, unsent bill sitting on the table beside me.

“Okay, then,” I said, pocketing the business card.

“There's a pay phone they got working on the corner at Melrose,” she said, and sat up, tucking a blanket over her breasts and under her arms.

“Okay,” I said, not knowing one-night-stand etiquette.

“Come here.” She smiled and patted the couch beside her. “You forgot your hat.”

I sat beside her and she placed the white fedora on my head before scratching at my scruff. That's when I realized something that made me laugh.