prev girls night out next
2001-08-04 | 10:03 a.m.

It's Thursday, early evening, and I'm on the freeway driving to meet Internet friends. It occurs to me that it's been years since I've done this. I think about the night I drove to the Reno airport to meet Duff in person for the first time. We hadn't even exchanged pictures. It never came up, which I took to be a good sign. I wore a bizarre outfit of lucky clothes, the same outfit I'd worn applying for my job in the sportsbook: two-tone cowboy boots, black jeans, and my favorite jacket with tiny pink-and-white checks. Plus my scary black Dad glasses, 10 years after Elvis. I still had my car, my trusty '67 Mustang. 289. Super Sport. Only car I've ever owned.

But this time I am meeting other women. Fellow diarists, whose intimate lives I know better than most of my other women friends. So why, I wonder, do I have that little nervous feeling in my stomach, just like the night I drove to Reno? I decide that the nervousness comes from not knowing how things will go.

But things go well. I arrive at the restaurant first, a big box of neurosis, and sit down in the foyer on a chair so high my feet swing awkwardly in the air. It makes me feel like a four-year-old. Then along comes Alice and we sit down together and order fruity party drinks. Alice reminds me so much of my friend Maxine that I find it a little hard to remember where Maxine ends and Alice begins. Then Alice spots Kath and leaps to her feet. "There she is!" she says excitedly, and rushes to the door. I am struck by her palpable delight.

If Alice's feelings shimmer near the surface, it's still waters run deep with Kath, whom I found perfectly inscrutable for the first 15 minutes or so of our encounter. She puts me in mind of Frances McDormand in Fargo (only without the parka, ear flaps, and Minnesota accent).

I am struck once again by how enjoyably strange it is to meet people you've come to know from their writing, and to find that they both are and are not the people you thought you knew. I'm not just talking about Internet diarists now, I'm talking about writers generally. Writing is a kind of distillation of personality. When you meet them in person, they bring along the rest of them and it's always a bit of a surprise. Hopefully not a shock.

I once met a fellow online who was living in an isolated area. He couldn't drive because of an injury so I invited him to go to the movies with me. I would drive. Now online, you couldn't shut the man up, and he was an incorrigible flirt. I made two things explicit beforehand: 1) I'm nothing to look at, and 2) this is not a date. So I drive out to his place, pick him up, drive all the way back to town, we go to the movies, we drive around a bit, then I drive him all the way home---and I tell you, I don't think the man said 20 words all night. I had to employ my advanced debutante conversational training just to coax yeses and nos out of his mouth. He barely made eye contact with me. I chalked it up to great expectations---maybe he was disappointed in me despite my warnings. Next day on the computer, there he was, life of the party, the mouth that roared, and now the flirting was twice as bold. He wanted to know if I knew anyone who could give a good massage (the classic geek come-on). I told him to check the phone book.

Have you seen those hard little sponges kids throw in the bath? When the water touches them, they blossom into fully formed creatures.

Anyway, I had a great time with Alice and Kath. I hope we get together again. I was thinking about this later---I don't go to church, I don't belong to clubs. But I have the Internet, and it's all right, you know?

prev archive next
0 comments