Pronoun Problems: A Novel About Friendship, Transgender and (eventually) Ninjas

15 - Tantalizing Hints

November, 1991

In the early '90s my social life mostly took place in the spare bedroom of a seedy apartment in Van Nuys — The Porn Capital of the World — belonging to a guy named Greg. Greg was not a pornographer, but a computer programmer who, with nothing more than a Telnet server and a dream started a dial-up bulletin board called The Spot. It was for all intents and purposes the eHarmony of its day, where for ten bucks a month single people in the L.A. area (married people, too, actually; it was also the Ashley Madison of its day) could meet virtually online and then, perhaps, in person as well. The Spot was so popular that, according to a contemporaneous news article, during peak hours there would be as many as sixty people logged in to The Spot at the same time!

For me, the benefits of The Spot were abundantly obvious. Text-only communication played to my strengths. I was witty and engaging and I knew how to spell — 8th grade county spelling bee champion, yo! — and in the digital confines of Greg's server, I was extremely popular. Face-to-face, less so. The charming, confident raconteur they had been chatting with online would fail to materialize in meatspace and they would get me instead.

In fairness, the disappointment was almost always mutual. There was a questionnaire everyone filled out when they signed up which, among other personal details — age, gender, favorite sexual positions (to which I responded, "There's more than one?") — asked you to rate your own physical attractiveness on a scale of one to ten (in the Dial-Up Era it took too much bandwidth to post actual pictures). I gave myself a five, but after I saw what some of the other fives looked like, upgraded myself to a six.

And then, after I met a few of my fellow sixes, I upgraded myself to a seven.

One of the women I met was Paula. Paula was, of all things, a chemical engineer. And by chemical engineer standards she was pretty cute, although nowhere near the ten rating she had hubristically assigned herself. We were at the Woodland Hills P.F. Chang's, a chain restaurant which ostensibly served Asian cuisine but could not have been less authentic if it added chimichangas and bratwurst to their menu. Unfortunately, the only thing Paula and I seemed to have in common was the belief that "My Own Private Idaho" — the movie I took her to before dinner — was the best film about a narcoleptic gay prostitute Keanu Reeves had ever starred in, with the possible exception of "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure." (It's subtextual, but it's there.) Other than that, though, we did not seem to be hitting it off. Which is why I was surprised when she invited me into her house and then into her bedroom.

Claiming to be tense from an exhausting work week she asked if I would give her a back rub, and without waiting for an answer removed her blouse and lay face-down on the bed. Even a clueless idiot like me understood that a back rub was usually a pretext for sex; plus she had put on Enigma's "MCMXC a.D." — with its hypnotic melding of Gregorian chants and sensual dance beats — which was the go-to fucking album of the early '90s.

I admit, her behavior did strike me as a little presumptuous, but then again Paula was a ten according to Paula so I figured I'd see where this went. I gave her a back rub and I could tell it was really relaxing her; first by the contented sighs she breathed into her pillow, and then by the extremely loud snoring. Paula was dead asleep.

Huh, I thought. Now what?

I was ninety percent sure I knew where she wanted this go, but — and in this way I guess I'm old-fashioned — I kind of want the woman to be conscious before I start having sex with her. (During, too, ideally.) Not knowing what else to do, I jostled the bed a few times. I attempted to find the bed-shaking sweet spot — hard enough to wake her, but not so hard that I scared the shit out of her — but she kept right on sleeping. So I gave up. I tip-toed out of her bedroom and left, but not before writing a note on a Post-It and sticking it to her refrigerator.