Note from Julene: If you haven’t already, I suggest you read PART 1. Here’s part two of three from a favorite anonymous friend…
I’ve kinda been stuck at the “It was a dark and stormy night…” part of this story for a few weeks now, perhaps a month. The main-est main reason for not being able to generate a Part 2 for this story is that it just kept going. So this morning at about 12am I ended the story. I’m smiling, so it was a happy ending.
Yeah, in part 1 I didn’t think I’d be the kind of guy that’d pay for a hooker, but here it’s safe to say I never thought I’d be the kind of guy to pay for a sex on the internet.
First and foremost, never send a junkie to crack shop to research a story about drugs. As it happened, your intrepid writer had just begun potentially the biggest project he’d been offered in a long time. Taking it seriously, wanting to keep my wits about me, and hell, just to have energy for the 10 to 14-hour days ahead of me I’d opted to steer clear of the bar where I work part-time. It had been a ritual in the past to stop in there after work (2am, usually) and have a nightcap, which usually meant staying til close or after.
What ended up happening was a lot of late-night chatting with a close friend, surfing the internet, and generally pairing my insomnia with some porn. Those of us who’ve ever gone on randomly through the free world of online porn have, no doubt, come across pop-up ads for video chat sites, or as they say in Eastern Europe, web model sites. In the past I’d visited one in particular to see what it was all about. With this late-night lack of focus/desire for decompression I started randomly checking it out again when it popped up.
You have access to what they call Free Chat, where you can, as a guest, talk (or attempt to… more on that later) to these girls (or boys, trannies, or couples/groups). Usually this will cut out after about 3 minutes and, as I discovered, you just reload and are given a new guest number.
So I started to obsess a little about the details. Some of these girls were clearly in some sort of “studio,” as they had strangely mashed up decor with generic art or walls covered in strange fabric, as if they spruced up some corner of a room, I’m imagining, full of girls. In the cases where the video quality was poorer it tended to look like someone’s actual home. And from there I started to look for the details. I was trying to build a character in my mind of who these girls were. In talking to my friend, I’d decided we should write a story together that centered around a girl who did this for a living, but to focus on everything BUT the cam activity.
There were women from all over the world, though surprisingly at the time the only ones I found from the US were African American women and Latinas. The girls from Eastern Europe who dominated the site were more expensive, and the price was generally uniform for women from South America (mostly Columbia) and then the bottom of the price scale were women from Asia.
The “performers” ranged from devastatingly beautiful to total shit shows. I watched women falling asleep and heard babies crying past domestic room dividers with a man speaking Spanish in the other room. There were women eating (against the rules!), and most of them smoking, occasionally breaking character and freaking out when they’d ash on their bed or picking up their mobile phones. It’s kind of a nut house with anything and everything going on.
As the week went on with the project I became more and more daring with my activities–still as a guest–but starting to interact with these people. What I’d found before was that these girls’ chat rooms were a sea of broken English mixed with what appeared to be one-handed typing.
So much of the dialog going on is shorthand: bb=baby, mb=maybe, hru=how are you, ty=thank you, yw= your welcome. All of this back and forth bullshitting, one would hope, would lead to pvt, which means Private Chat. In my case it lead to a whole, lot more.
For those of you smart enough to live real lives out in the world, spending only a reasonable amount of time on the internet, let me fill you in on what this looks like. You access their site and are presented with a screen full of girls, with captions saying their name, usually something like 001FuckMeHard69, or SquirtGirlXXX, and their status being Free, Member, or Private Chat. When you click on one that is in free chat you are taken to the girl’s “room” where, with any luck, a video stream of a girl, in a room will appear. Usually she’s on a bed, or at a desk, with bluetooth keyboard and mouse, in some form of undress… not always, though.
In most cases the audio is on and you’ll hear the most distorted, awful generic Euro Techno, a melange of ICQ, Skype, and their chat host’s alert sounds (most of these girls actually carry on conversations, for free, with regular members, friends, boy/girlfriends, whomever, while they’re working — there’s a fuckload of typing going on). I got in the habit of keeping the sound off whenever I would visit as it was instant stress, what I’d imagine it would be like to be in the cockpit of a plane during horrible weather.
So I started being social. Or rather, I tried to be.
Hello.
Hello, beautiful.
Hello bb.
Usually no response, especially if the chat screen was flying by with guest#-whatever’s saying “show pussy bb,” “open legs…” or my personal favorite, “do something you bitch!” Trust me it’s not a pretty scene. Imagine a street walker standing on a corner with a mob of about 250 guys, maybe 20 who actually had money (ie members) yelling at her to strip or play with herself or shove her whole hand up her ass or, god, crying at her because she won’t respond — repeatedly… IN ALL CAPS.
What is kind of cheeky about the whole thing, and this is really what separates the men from the apes here, is that you can actually change your nickname in the guest chat. I was never completely clear on how a girl can tell whether you are a member or not, or whether, as a member you have credit, but the first clue would lie in your choice of nickname. Again, I’m not even sure if some of these girls even bothered to learn about this, but some, I know, understand that you can’t have a username less than like 7 characters.
Of course my initial dives were using name like Birdie, or Spark. Something really generic and having nothing to do with me, my profession, my interests, nothing. A lot of guys are pretty specific: assgapelover, asianfootlover, bigblackcockxxx. Others, quizzically had first and last names and a number. I was able to successfully navigate initial conversations with these girls. Most of them looked like this:
ME: Hi beautiful
HER: hi bb (blows a kiss)
HER: hru?
ME: I’m good, hru?
HER: horny
HER: wanna play?
HER: lets go pvt bb
I mean, I was kinda stuck at that point. Remember, I’m not the kinda guy that would do this. I also didn’t really have the money to start spending between $2 and $3 a minute. Or did I?
Eventually I was talking as a guest with this girl. She was stunning, really sweet, and had just about all of the other features I generally look for in a girl IRL (In Real Life). Additionally, she was in the WORST DECORATED BEDROOM ever. Total Eastern Block apartment shitty wallpaper with unmatched curtains, and two mismatched armchairs smashed next to each other in a corner accompanied by a gargantuan, mirrored wardrobe which provided a nice view of her from behind.
It was weird, this particular day. We were talking and kept on talking, eventually I just never got logged out of the free chat. I was getting turned on, even though I don’t recall the conversation being overtly flirty. It was just nice. It seemed to go on for hours. I was giving my friend the play-by-play, thinking it was weird it kept going. Finally, I really just had to know what lay beyond in the private room. I quickly created a user profile, with a really fucking stupid name — probably the same stupid name I was using before, as I didn’t want to have to reintroduce myself, and with credit card in (my free) hand I entered payment info. Basically you can just click “buy credit” on almost every page and in usually one click you can re-up.
Despite the fact I couldn’t get my cam to work, I entered her Private Room and I masturbated concurrently with this girl. It was pretty startling to behold. It wasn’t like watching a video, the interaction is what ups the situation, brings in this weird emotional connection. Buttons pushed. I was learning something. I mean, ultimately I learned a lot, mostly about myself.
The project finished and perhaps over the course of the week we hooked up a few times. Maybe not. All I know is that I’d thrown caution to the wind and gotten sucked in, by design, to this site.
I had to leave the country for 3 weeks. I “took her along with me.” And while she was away with other guys, I quickly gravitated toward several other girls I was curious about or just enjoyed talking to. I was totally distracted by it. About two weeks into my trip we’d exchanged emails repeatedly, sent pics back and forth, she sent me TONS of pics of her with her family, with her cat, where she lives (Eastern Europe) and we were making plans. We eventually started video chatting on Skype, and eventually I stopped paying for sex with her. Yes, I mean “sex” not sex.
I came back and would spend most of my nights with her, until she went to sleep at around 1am my time. She’d be working, we’d be joking together or flirting in her free chat while making fun of people, carrying on a completely separate dialog on Skype, or just talking about plans to someday meet.
Things started to change very quickly when the aforementioned project’s ante got upped and I had to go to Europe for possibly six weeks. I was that much closer to her, and it seemed logical we’d have to meet up. Though in her mind, her fantasy was to meet on the beach somewhere — as she couldn’t just hop over to the EU without applying for a visa — like Egypt or Turkey. We talked every day and I stayed up all night with her while she worked most nights, we spoke on the phone, though I couldn’t get texts from her, which became a point of frustration.
As the project reached around the half-way point I’d started to lose it. She’d become increasingly harder to pin down as to what she’d wanted to do. She’d worked as a travel agent before and had been to Egypt, I hadn’t, and really wasn’t prepared to foot the bill and coordinate a trip for both of us from two separate places. It just wasn’t within my capacities financially or mentally at that point. Shit was high pressure on my end and, in hindsight, this fantasy relationship accelerated from the two-month mark of just being a fun distraction for both of us, to the six-month mark where we both were leaning on each other cause our shit was getting stressy in real life.
So I left Europe and came home. And that was the beginning of the end. My fee for the project just barely covered my bills and left me barely any money to live on when I got back. My part-time job at the bar had been put on hold and I became a fill-in, and lastly I really couldn’t book any new work while I was over there. I was stressing money HARD and it didn’t help I think the anticlimax of us not meeting up left my return home feeling pretty empty.
My time in Europe was magic. The project was turning out (so I thought, at the time) to be my life’s dream, I had a beautiful girl (albeit, a sex worker, and waaayyyy the fuck from another planet, truth be told) waiting for me. And then I found myself back home, with only a pot to piss in and that was about it. The thing was, I’d fucked up and told her I would wire her some money to buy these shoes she’d seen. Her friend had just had a birthday and had gotten a bunch of gifts, and my girl had had one just prior and got nothing, nothing from me. I mean, I was broke. I’d wanted to send her some nice chocolates from France, but started to read abysmal stories about the mail system where she lives. Basically it said, GOOD LUCK unless you use Fed Ex or DHL. Fact was, I was broke. Ba-roke!
And she couldn’t deal with it. I’d made her a promise and that was it. Fair enough. I mean we were two months in, and that was that. Also, I was kind of being insane running up my credit card, still impulsively “fucking” other girls while she worked, and seemingly trying to throw it in my face that there were other men out there willing to gift her, or WHATEVER. I just lost all faith in the situation, had gone obsessively mental, and very secretly, was loving every minute of it.
The funny thing is the friends, both male and female, I told about this were stoked. For some it was the sheer freak factor of the situation, for most others they know me, and that despite the story you’ve been reading, I’m a pretty romantic dude, if not an idealistic one. They know I’ve dated girls in the sex industry before. It was just hard to parse the enthusiasm I was getting. No one was telling me to simmer down, except the amazing woman who hosts this blog. I got the WTF’s and “watch your (mental) back” from her. So basically I got high fives and accolades from nearly everyone for having this strange, 21st century relationship. I guess I seemed really happy.
I think the shoe-thing really got to her, and I guess that’s not a bad place to draw the line. So with her retreat, I became agitated but only for just wanting to know what was up. We had a miscommunication and she went silent. It became painfully apparent that where she comes from, this kind of work IS your life. She’d been doing accounting for $300/month, full time. That’s about the average take-home where she lives. As a “web model” she was making $2,400 average on a good month.
She had less and less time for me. With me breaking the promise of getting her shoes, I’d symbolically outed myself as “just another guy.” And to an extent, I guess she’s right.
Yet we had a full-on emotional relationship over the coarse of nearly four months.
It was really just that I became suspicious of her ability to differentiate reality with her work. She could turn on a smile for anyone. Telling me about her relationships with her regulars, and how she became increasingly obsessed with maintaining their interest, which meant taking it offline. With that I became paranoid. I wondered who else she had lurking her inbox, or how many Skype profiles she had, or who was buying her shoes. She’d upped her game considerably; getting a new camera, changing her hair, buying new clothes, getting proper bedding and covering the two mismatched chairs with fabric, essentially looking more like a studio. She was determined to do it on her own, be independent and ultimately have her own stable of girls that worked for her. She had goals, was determined and fucking intrepid about it. Her focus was incredible.
I found all of these traits to be incredibly desirable. At the same time I had to constantly wonder how far she was willing to go with it, and with whom.
I’d become aware of one completely obsessive “fan” she told me about, who began stalking me. It started to become precarious as this guy and another member could tell we had something going on and were becoming jealous and hostile with her. For me, I wanted to protect my anonymity. While my ‘relationship’ was deteriorating I became aware that these guys was stalking me. I wanted to protect her, but as I would learn, the last thing this girl needed was protection.
As we ended it my interactions with her became limited to her Free Chat, and were short, terse even. We’d say hi, talk about our days and I’d duck out, knowing full-well that the obsessive trucker was lurking, silently, taking it all in, as he would tell her, like the FBI. I tried to make it very apparent we were done. Last thing I needed was this as two projects I’d been working on were about to become very public in a matter of weeks. In my mind I still wasn’t THAT GUY, even though for a couple months that’s ALL I became. Man, I was the fucking internet.
During the final days of this, before I finally got a text from her saying, “I think we should return to the friends relationsheep [sic],” I’d struck up a friendship with a Caucasian African girl living in Russia who was very much NOT HER. She was a breath of fresh air and most importantly, had just broken up with a guy just like me.
We’d talk every day. We’d email, we’d nurse each other’s wounds, all the while maintaining a safe distance. She was the buffer, the debriefing I needed to get out of this. She wore a wig and worked for a studio and was pretty cynical about the whole thing, but was using financial domination on one member. so she had a good thing going. In real life she was a student, had a shaved head and medium-sized “sick tat” on her back. She had dabbled in drugs, smoked weed, drank occasionally, in other words, was normal. My girl claimed she barely drank, never did drugs, and despite saying she, at a really young age, dated older, powerful businessmen and film directors, seemed more like the girl next door with the dark secret — not what I’d call normal in my world.
So while my relationship had ended I had this new buddy. She could relate and was open to talk about whatever, and generally good company. But that soon would change as she’d met a 40 year old married guy with a kid, who became her interest. Very quickly she’d gone from friend to lover with this guy, or I’m not even sure what, and her attention for me went away. She couldn’t prioritize me anymore, I was kicked to the curb, though this time it wasn’t my fault. And this time I was ready.
I’d been thinking it was time to get off the internet once and for all. Because of work I’d been predisposed to spending a lot of time on the computer, and dealing with people all around the world at all hours, so naturally having a life online wasn’t out of the question. But it increasingly started to interfere with my ability to make my real life a priority. The more it was an option, the more I took hold of it with both hands. Thing is, it wasn’t making me happy, at all.
There’s a sign that keeps popping up around here that says, “The Internet Has Killed Your Social Skills,” and it couldn’t be more true.
I kept on thinking of everything as, “This is a sign, move on!” And truly, the Russian bailing the same week I found myself making out with a married woman at a bar, followed by some really strange and wonderful happenings in real life snapped me out of it.
What before seemed like an awesome subplot for a screenplay, this woman who is a cam girl, turned into this massive (and expensive) sociological experiment, probably one that didn’t need to happen no my dime, but the life experiment and next levelness, fuck, even the 21st century-ness of it seemed worth it. Truly, I can say now I WAS that kind of guy, and maybe inside I still am, but the sun was shining outside a minute ago. I can smell grilled cheese coming through my window, riding on a gentle spring breeze. It’s time for me to go!
Epilogue.
I talked to my virtual ex-girl yesterday before deleting my account. I let her watch me get off and told her she didn’t have to do anything, I just wanted to see her one last time. Strangely, after all her admonitions about money and not wanting me to go broke, she tried to tell me I didn’t have to quit, that 10 min a week was not so bad to have an experience with a hot girl. I think it was her way of saying she didn’t want to lose me in that context. We’d been increasingly more friendly of late, the initial shock of “breaking up” — god this all sounds pathetic — having gone and our friendly joking around resumed. We agreed to be friends and she agreed it was time, that this was not on my life’s path anymore. She said congratulations after I got off, we waved goodbye and blew each other kisses with a smile.
Post Script.
I get the feeling it’s very common for these girls to strike up relationships with their customers. Having a career where you keep odd, if not inhuman hours and get very little time to socialize in real life seems completely counter to being able to have any kind of real relationship. Add to that, not exactly having job that would be dinner time conversation at your boyfriend’s parents’, much less at a nice restaurant with his friends. If you don’t have a (real) life, it stands to reason you’d carry on a string of relationships that aren’t based in reality. While I’m sure, now, that her feelings for me were real, I can’t tell you exactly what they were. I get that I was, as she was to me, a comforting constant, that, too a point, demanded very little of her with regard to the daily demands she got from her fans. It was only when our frustrations with our jobs started to criss-cross and hit a null that the fantasy lost its luster. And looking back that makes total sense. I don’t think she’ll be looking for a new man any time soon, real or virtual. A woman, maybe. Me? I’ve got my feet planted pretty firmly in the here and now (for now). It’s nice to be touched. (More on that in part 3).