A/S/L

My hand was wrapped around the cordless phone. My thumb hovered over the last of seven numbers, for some reason I remember it being a "4". My closed eyes rolled back into my head and down again in unison with probably the biggest breath I have ever taken, my chest heaving outward then back down. A million thoughts racing through my head, running the gamut from sexual, to romantic, to practical outcomes of my actions, and back again. Could I really pull off one of the greatest relationship upsets in junior high school history? I mean, I'll be fair; my looks probably peaked when I was fifteen, but this girl was still way out of my league. The thoughts continued:

"Dude, what's the worst she can say? No? Fuck that."
"She's gonna tell everybody what a lame sack of shit you are."
"Just do it, chicken-shit."
"Hang up."

I pushed the four and immediately hung up afterwards, not even letting the phone ring once. The rest of the night I spent playing Super Metroid. My brother's friend Chris told me that he heard that if you beat the game in under an hour you got to see Samus in her underwear at the end of the game. When you're a fourteen-year-old guy who loves video games, this is SO worth the effort, you don't even know. Shit, a stiff breeze could have gotten me to pop cedar in those days. I later found out that what Chris told me was true, by the way, I accomplished that feat nearly two years ago and needless to say it did not have the same effect on my libido.

What is the point of this you ask? I will tell you, dear reader.

It has come to my attention that fucking kids these days have it way too easy. The internet has effectively killed being as ridiculous as I was during primetime awkwardness. That phone call I was too embarrassed to make has been eliminated and only high-speed internet remains with its sidekick the cell phone. Here is what kids are missing.

The phone call to the house:
I would be hard pressed finding a kid these days who had to make this call. As I recalled in the opening of my ramblings, this was probably the hardest thing in the world to do. Today, all you have to do is get a girls screen name or request her as a friend on Myspace of Facebook and you're golden. You'll know everything about the person without even speaking a word to her. But remember the absolute fear that came with calling a member of the opposite sex. Such a first move took not only huge balls, but actual social skills that many of us did not yet possess, but were trying desperately to see our first real set of boobs. There were also certain dangers that would come from this phone call. First, and the worst possible outcome, would be having to talk to somebody's parents. They would no doubt give you the run-around if the person you were calling was not home. "Who is this?" "Can I take a message?" "Please don't call here again or I'll call the police." These are all things you might encounter and need to be prepared for. I will say that if you were nervous to begin with, hearing the sound of a grown man's voice on the other end of the phone would have me stammering like a retard who was just shown something shiny and pretty. One time I actually said something REALLY inappropriate to a girl's mother thinking it was the girl on the phone. The young lady in question was instructed to tell me never to call their house again. Guess her mom didn't like being called "Cock Breath." Worse yet was an older sibling. More than once I had to deal with this and it was way worse for obvious reasons, especially if I knew the older brother or sister. Furthermore, if I did manage to get the girl on the phone on the first try, I would have nothing to talk about. How uninteresting are adolescent boys? If you weren't talking about farts, video games, sex, or explosives I really didn't have much to add to the conversation. Come to think of it, that is still the case, but fuck you, I added Classical Languages to that list. Also understand that the cell phone at this point was non-existent and my mother refused to get me a beeper because she told me that drug dealers used those to peddle their wares.

Dial-Up Internet:
If the phone call wasn't working for you or you had nobody to call, good ol' dial up internet was there to keep you busy for a short amount of time. I remember being the chat room king; talking to people I didn't know but presumed were my age and wanted to talk shop about what we thought sex was. For the adolescent of the early 90's, this is where we learned everything we needed to know in the shortest amount of time possible. First thing I learned was "A/S/L" which I'm sure all of you know means "Age/Sex/Location." Being a brand new thing to me, I honestly answered this the first time as "14/okay/my room" after it was spelled out for me enough. It wasn't until some time after learning how to find chat rooms that I eventually found out that there were naked pictures of girls on the internet. To date myself, the first girl I ever did a naked search for was Kathy Ireland. Yeah, noodle that for a second. Done? Okay. While by today's standards this would be no big deal, there was something you needed to be careful of. Dial up internet was so slow at this point in the game, that while you were waiting for the image to load on your computer, you were in real danger of being walked in on in the middle of your quest to see tits. My brilliant idea around this was to print these pictures out and hide them in my room until I could have "alone time." However, this left me with two problems. One, my mother found them and didn't say anything, just left them on my bed for when I got home...worst. And also, my father ripped me a new asshole and made me pay for a new ink cartridge for the printer. Jerking off then became a game of cat and mouse around the Davey house, and I was relegated to the shower most times, but my cover was soon blown when I started taking twenty minute showers. I will say that, to this day, I have never been caught masturbating by anybody, but there definitely were some scares. Also, let us not forget that during this stage in the internet's development, people were still paying per minute and your account was subject to close scrutiny from chat room administrators. My brother, god bless him, found both of these things out the hard way when a) the bill came from AOL because he and I changed the dial up number to a long distance one, making our phone bill equal to Peru's GNP and b) when our account got cancelled for him calling some girl a slut in an open forum. We know he called her a slut because AOL was good enough to provide my father with a transcript of the conversation. Also if you had Prodigy, you sucked. AOL was where it was at.

In Person:
If you were lucky enough to escape the chat room and the phone call, the ultimate success was meeting the girl in person. More often than not, I would be too embarrassed to tell my mother where I was going, so I would have to bring a friend along to cover it up and make it look like I wasn't meeting a girl somewhere. My go-to man during those days is no doubt reading this right now. Barry, I never thanked you for all those times I dragged you to see Billy Madison in the theater, but you're the one getting married now, and I live alone writing blogs about the times I almost got caught jerking off in my parents' basement. Who's the big winner today? Barry Warhola. Bravo, old friend. Meeting up with a girl for me one time took a very strange form. It was in the summer, my school year had just ended, and my father was all over me to do some rollerblading before summer hockey started so my legs weren't all wobbly once I got on the ice. This became the perfect cover. I was talking to this girl on the phone who was in 9th grade while I was in 8th grade. The fact that I was older than her really didn't matter because she was a grade older than me, and who can turn down a year's experience. This young lady was brazen enough to ask me if I wanted to go to the movies with her alone. Needless to say I got really excited about this. She asked me what she should wear and I said I didn't care. She then told me that if she wore a skirt it would be easier for me, but didn't want to get her knees dirty. I'm not fucking kidding with you. Can you imagine having this conversation at 14? I thought my head was going to explode. Needless to say I strapped on my rollerblades two days later and traveled to the Nashua Mall where the old theater used to be. A total of about four miles in about 45 minutes. No small task in ninety degree heat, mind you. I'm not going to tell you what happened when I got there, because nothing did. I had no knowledge of periods at that point and I thought the girl was a fucking liar. So I watched "Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls" in absolute disgust thinking I rollerbladed for miles only to sit in a disgusting theater in my socks (they wouldn't let me wear my rollerblades inside) and not even get a tug. Who knew having her period would make a girl back out of a deal like that. Total bullshit…even to this day.

The point of all of this is to vent my frustration at today's youth. It blows my mind and infuriates me that these kids are never going to know the pain and embarrassment that I felt as a young man. Myspace, Facebook, and cell phones have eliminated being a total dickhead loser. I say fuck that shit. I want to see one of these kids try to wait out a picture of Cindy Crawford in a thong with a half stack while the dial up loads the image.

For the record, the girl I was trying to call in the beginning paragraph, I finally did call her and made out with her. To this day it remains one of the single greatest achievements of my life, and I pray to God she reads this. I'm no sentimental asshole; she was that hot and still is.

Peacefrogs,

R Von D