Page 3 of Nearly Roadkill
From:D.I. Drew
Subject:Journals and privacy
Now onto your first excerpt from Winc’s journal, which I got from… never mind where, I have my sources. I was relieved to learn that anything in Scratch and Winc’s journals were for their eyes only, no Toobe allowed!
This next log by Winc seems to be from about when ze first started to record hir online encounters, conversations, etc. No one dated anything, dammit, so no embedded dates, but I’m guessing this was maybe late 1994?
Cheers,
Drew
WINC JOURNAL ENTRY
The bottom line here seems to be sex, yay! So that’s where I started.
Last night in a chat room I used a couple of different names, right? (Thanks to Toobe for teaching me *that* one.) I went into one room calledthe Flirt’s Nook, and this guy said, Wanna go private? and I said, Sure (no idea what it meant), so he gives me the name of this room.
So I go there, and he starts *taking off his clothes*! I mean, online he does. He used that double-colon thing, ::I’m stripping off my shirt:: etc. It’s amazing! So ::blush:: we have sex right there! He asks me what I look like, what I’m wearing, and it’s kind of like the phone sex work I do only better, because there’s even *more* to the imagination!
So he has his way with me ::grin:: and then he just *signs off*! Poof, he’s gone. ::wryly:: Guess he came, huh? That’s what guys do on the phone line, too, they come, then they hang up.
At that point, I figured in for a penny, in for a pound. So I signed off, then signed back on as, get this, a major macho dude! HAHAHAHAHAHA! And I had *more* sex—with some women this time! *Then* I signed off and signed back on as a DRAG QUEEN!
And I had all this sex with straight boyz and gay boyz AND straight girlz.
All of this is like when I’m working my phone line, being someone else for some guy. Only, online it’s really *me*, a different aspect of me. *For* me. Not for some guy who’s payin’ me to be his fantasy.
I want to learn to do *that* in the real world. My dream come true!
END WINC ENTRY
To:Editor, They/Them magazine
From:D.I. Drew
Subject:New character
Hi Asa,
Have I got a treat for you today!
Enter a character called Jabbathehut, apparently a friend of Toobe. Toobe calls Jabba “she,” so I will too. Jabba writes the technical and legal accounts of the story in a kind of narrative. Reminds me of a smoky film noir scene. Enjoy.
Let me know if you have questions about this next batch of materials—
Cheers,
Drew
NARRATIVE ENTRY, JABBATHEHUT
Green walls. Darker green trim. Wherever one might glance from the vantage point of Wally Budge’s well-worn government issue swivel chair, there’s some shade of green. The brightest green is the monitor into which Wally Budge is now peering: it’s positively glowing green. The lone window in his office is a pale brown-yellow: layers of nicotine obscure nature’s one shot at adding some real green to Wally Budge’s life at the Federal Bureau of Census and Statistics. Wally Budge couldn’t describe the color of his office walls if you paid him. He’s 46 years old, and the best he can come up with is: “The same color I went to school with.”
Cigarette wedged between his fingers, he reads the daily reports offered by the FBCS’s twin Cray supercomputers; he’s sucking at a hole in his teeth, an annoying habit, but Budge has no one left in his life to annoy. Three failed marriages and two lost custody battles, so no one to care about his three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, no one to wince at the soft sucking sounds his tongue makes as it pokes the well-traveled cracks and crevasses of his teeth. His nicotine-stained fingers are, ironically, well-manicured; they now dance clumsily across the worn and battered keyboard of one of the Bureau’s oldest desktop computers as he adds information to his spreadsheet. He peers up at the screen from time to time in search of a clue, a pattern. And for someone outside a pattern.
Wally Budge knows that once you have a pattern down, criminals show up outside it; criminals will inevitably break the patterns laid down by the law. He begins humming a mangled version of “London Bridge is Falling Down.” Good sign for him, bad sign for some poor sap trying to escape the length of this particular lawman’s long arm.
His monitor beeps, and on his screen flashes:
