Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [58]
Going on AOL for the first time without any supervision was incredibly exciting. When the digitized voice greeted me with “Hello! You’ve Got Mail!” I felt tingles.
The quintessential component of socializing on AOL was the personal profile, because that was how a person determined if you were worthy of having a conversation with. Because I was desperate for attention, I crammed every characteristic I could think of into my profile, in the hope of attracting the widest possible range of girls. And I changed the description as ideas occurred to me. There was no accountability involved in editing myself endlessly. I could transform myself at a moment’s notice—add to myself the things I lacked; subtract my liabilities.
AOL was perfect. It offered a means of communicating with the opposite sex that was severed from physical reality. Flirtation and arousal didn’t go past the textual level. Chatting with women was nothing more than a thought-crime—and sexuality at that level couldn’t be zina.
It all started innocently enough. There was Jess, a sixteen-year-old from Pennsylvania. We talked about our favorite tennis players, but soon she was telling me what kind of guys she was into and how many bases she had covered. Then there was Annie from Colorado, who said she was the heiress of a mob fortune but couldn’t stand the sexual restrictions of Sicilian Catholicism; she wanted a boyfriend who would run away and travel the world with her. And there was Claire from Baton Rouge, who was an aspiring erotic novelist. She was bisexual, she said, and liked describing the difference between boys and girls to me. “Boys taste like stale 7-Up and corn; girls taste like strawberries warmed up in a towel left in the sun.”
The easiest time to go online was in the evenings, but the best time to talk to Jess and Annie and Claire was at night, because that’s when the chat rooms heated up. However, going online late at night was all but impossible for me, because if Ammi or Pops heard the modem screeching they came in and pulled the phone line.
I had to devise a way to cover my tracks. Islam came in handy.
I took a pair of prayer rugs and wrapped them all around the PC. Then I took my fattest books—the Quran and a couple of Ammi’s big volumes of hadiths—and stacked them behind the tower to muffle the screeching. For background noise I put on a loud recording of Quranic recitation by Ajmi. Then I clicked “Sign on Now” and went to the living room to mislead my parents about my plans for the nights. “I’m about to prayer the isha prayer,” I would say. “Then before sleeping I’ll read some Quran.”
During this time, when the modem would be reaching its highest pitch, I went to the bathroom and started making wazu, turning up the faucets in order to block any noise seeping from my room into the hallway. Just to give AOL enough time to sign on, I did a wazu that was five minutes long.
Once I was assured that the modem had gotten quiet, I went out into the living room and prayed. After asking Allah to make me a good Muslim, I went and talked to girls in Teen Chat 123.
This scheme took place every few nights. Those fifteen minutes of stress as I set the stage with my parents were followed by nights full of cybersex.
The Quranic recitation had to stay on, of course, so that no one became suspicious.
AOL sex lost its shine within a few weeks. Why bother to speak with someone a million miles away, where arousal was contingent on the integrity of a phone line, when at any time the Internet could, and often did, crash? If fantasies were to be imagined and nothing more, then why include others of lesser creative acumen—especially when my daydreams were far more detailed? Why engage in conversations where you could just as easily have been any of the other millions of screen names out there? AOL dropped out of the picture for good when I realized that when it came to the opposite sex, I didn’t want carnality; I wanted intimacy. That required having physical access to women. It required real