Within minutes of the internet being invented, its creators and earliest users realized it could be used to find people to fuck. The issue, of course, was that this tiny subset of people was overwhelmingly male and, we can safely assume, profoundly unfuckable.
Match and eHarmony got going in the mid-nineties, but initially offered little more than an online version of the newspaper personal ad. That began to change around the year 2000 – the year I tentatively dipped my wick into the wild world of online dating at the age of 23.
Nerve had started life as a thinking-person’s magazine about sex in the late nineties. When its perma-horny audience was given the opportunity to meet one another through Nerve Personals, online dating suddenly seemed less like something for lonely hearts and neckbeards and more like a portal into an exciting sexual underground populated by libertines, aesthetes, bohemians.
My first internet date was already in position when I arrived at the intersection of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place. Punctuality was more important then. Most people, myself very much included, didn’t have cell phones yet.
A day or two earlier, we’d inspected each other’s scanned, low-resolution profile pictures, exchanged mildly suggestive messages, and arranged to meet on Sunday in the early evening.
For me, the promise of dating on Nerve was that, as opposed to trying to hook up with someone in a noisy bar, I could flex my wit, charm, and individuality ahead of time. This was done by cleverly answering around a dozen questions that made up a Nerve profile – a much more fleshed-out version of the prompts people answer on latter-day dating apps like Hinge and Bumble.
See, in the wild, I was unlikely to make a strong first impression. I was short, broke, and both chubby and skinny at the same time. Nerve seemed to be allowing me to present a somewhat more compelling version of this uneven package. Now all I had to do was show up.
Within 50 paces of Erika, I knew I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
She had long, shaggy blond hair, oversized sunglasses, and bright red lips loosely holding a cigarette. A cropped white T-shirt under a leather biker jacket exposed a strip of taut midriff above ultra-low-cut jeans. She was maybe 28 or 29 and looked like someone who had already lived several more lives than I had.
I orbited her twice at a safe distance, psyching myself up for what seemed certain to be a flat rejection. Whether I was actually going to approach remained a coin toss until her name tumbled out of my mouth.
“Uh…Erika?”
She took a drag, looked me up and down, dropped the cigarette, and stamped it out.
“You made it,” she said flatly. “I need a drink. Sun’s up. An Irish bar is the only acceptable place to drink when it’s still light out. Turns out there’s one right over…”
She mimed aiming a pistol over my shoulder and pulled the trigger.
“…there.”
In addition to her perfume, I could smell that Erika’s body was off-gassing liquor as we walked through the East Village. Once we sat down with the cheap beers and well shots I could barely afford, she confirmed this was indeed a hair-of-the-dog situation.
She’d gone to see a band called Nashville Pussy the night before. The last thing she could remember was being “eaten out” on the hood of a Trans-Am after the show.
Upon hearing this, I was ready to finish my Schlitz, apologize for wasting her time, and scurry home to the safety of my bed. We made an odd pair. She was – or doing a very good impersonation of – a badass. I was wet behind the ears. Dripping even. Calling it early was almost certainly the right move for everyone involved.
But then she laughed at something I said – a sort of throw-your-head-back laugh.
While I was taking a leak, she bought another round. Then another. Somehow the date began to work. Or at least stopped obviously not working. By the time we left the bar, I was too buzzed to prevent the evening from gathering a surprising amount of momentum.
“Coming back to my place?” she asked. “I gotta watch my show.”
In 2000, television still required you to be in a particular place at a particular time. Sex and the City was then the epitome of appointment television, and its four main characters had become a sort of shorthand for different sexual personae.
“I’m a total Samantha,” Erika announced as she opened her apartment door.
This wasn’t just her opinion, she told me, but the feeling of everyone she worked with at a perfume concession at a high-end department store on Fifth Avenue.
I hadn’t really seen the show, but given the possibility that I wasn’t there solely to watch television, I was eager to discover what being a Samantha actually entailed.
She fixed me another drink and stirred it with a finger. Twenty minutes later, it gave me the courage to kiss her.
We made out. Clothes began coming loose. Somehow I managed to unclip her bra one-handed and fondled her perky tits. Soon I was rubbing her crotch through her jeans while trying to ignore the malevolent glare of her cat. Things were progressing considerably better than I had dared imagine when, at precisely 8:59, Erika suddenly swatted my hand away.
“Okay. It’s on.”
She flicked on a television that was about as deep as it was wide.
For the next 30 minutes Erika roared with laughter, shushed me whenever I tried to ask a question, and zealously guarded the rapidly cooling damp patch of denim between her legs from my impatient hands. The instant the credits rolled, though, she stood up and led me by the hand into her bedroom.
“I don’t think he likes you,” she said.
She pointed to a coiled turd her cat had deposited smack in the center of the bed, then calmly removed the befouled quilt. I stifled a gag as the scent arrived hot in my nostrils.
“Do you?” I asked, realizing at that moment that I might be too romantic, too reflective, too tender to be trysting the night away with a stranger plucked from my computer.
Wait. Am I a Carrie? I thought.
Erika didn’t answer. But her expression loudly said, Not particularly.
Her casual indifference to me didn’t stop us picking up where we’d left off. Within minutes, her jeans were on the floor and the evening had progressed into territory that would have seemed preposterous to me a few hours earlier. She was pushing my eager face into the rough/slick surface of her stubbly/gooey vulva for its second devouring in 24 hours.
Whether she actually came or just pretended to was unclear to me. All I knew for sure was her screams were still bouncing off her apartment walls when she shucked me out of my jeans and commenced giving me the blow job of the century, which, admittedly, was only a few months old at that point.
While Erika’s technique wasn’t at all sensual, it was devastatingly effective.
I assumed intercourse was next, so I was doing everything in my power not to come, preserving myself for the unappetizing prospect of rolling on a condom and the much more exciting idea of cycling through the three sexual positions that constituted my entire repertoire.
With those red lips wrapped around my dick, she observed me white-knuckling the experience and shot me a quizzical look.
“What’s going on up there?” she said, her hand taking over the steady, juicy-sounding rhythm.
“Huh?”
“I’m really good at this.”
“Agreed.”
She stopped.
“Wait. Are you trying to not come?”
“Er…yeah.”
“Um…why?”
“Aren’t we gonna…fuck now?”
“Um, no,” she said matter-of-factly. “And my boyfriend’s going to be here in about ten minutes, so…you gotta go.”
The word boyfriend instantly introduced an entirely new set of considerations.
Whatever plans my body had been making were abandoned as fight-or-flight kicked in. My previously indomitable erection began to soften in her grip. Erika, apparently unwilling to let a little existential panic spoil her boner fides, redoubled her efforts. Within moments the matter was concluded.
Wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist, she let me know our time together had come to an end.
“Okay, dude,’ she said with a smirk. “Get the fuck out.”
I was still grappling with what was happening, wondering which wave of feminism had just crashed over my prone, quivering body. With the prospect of her boyfriend arriving, I was more than happy to comply with taking my leave. But steaming drunk and freshly drained, I was moving far too slowly for my host’s liking.
Erika quickly gathered my discarded clothes, balled them up, strode to the front door, and launched them into the hallway.
I stared at her.
Then at the clothes.
Then back at her.
She opened the door wider.
Naked and still recovering from the preceding events, I ran into the hallway and began frantically pulling on my underwear. At that exact moment, the elevator doors opened, and a mother emerged with her two young children.
I concentrated on getting my pants on.
Behind me, Erika picked up her cat and stroked it like a Bond villain while watching me struggle into my clothes and cackled in the most diabolical manner. She slowly allowed the apartment door to swing shut, and mocking laughter continued from the other side of the peephole she observed me through.
Eventually I got my socks and shoes on and made for the exit, half expecting to encounter the scheduled boyfriend coming the other way. I didn’t, and a few moments later I was back on the street and making my way to the Williamsburg Bridge because walking home to Brooklyn saved me a dollar fifty. My first internet date was bizarre, unsettling, but in the books.
I wish I could say the experience taught me to exercise more caution about meeting strangers from the internet. It did not.
I’d just discovered that somewhere inside the beige desktop computer at my workplace were women like Erika. People I would never have met at work, through friends or by hanging around the same shitty bars night after night. I’d already set my snare. All I had to do was type a few messages, arrange a place and time, show up and let things unfurl in ways I couldn’t hope to predict.
The internet, I realized as I headed home, was fucking incredible.
