A sweetest heart who cares for the well-being of others.
A most sensuous soul who is full of life and passion.
And a beautiful intellect who brings realist precepts to balance out those disillusions in the world.
... It’s painful to feel you’re just a Peripheral, isn’t it?
“How could I not print part of ‘Song’ in this chapter,” I thought, and wrote Lee Chen for permission. Back came a letter from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary in Canada. People on the Internet love to end messages with “signatures” telling how they see the cosmos, and Lee had picked a quote that looked as gentle and logical as his poem. The speaker was the President of the United States in the movie Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love the Bomb. And the words went, “You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room.”
Sometimes I thought that in the battle of the sexes, certain areas of the Internet could be that war room. No man could claim to be a superhunk or millionaire without risking a female retort in the vein of, “Yeah, sure.” The Net was rich with put-downs worthy of an old Tracy-Hepburn movie. Clearly the men had started this war, however. “When a female shows up,” said the author of an explanatory file on alt.sex.wanted, “clueless folks tend to e-mail ‘wanna fuck’ messages no matter what she has said. This means many of them don’t post, only listen.” Fights had also broken out between the gays and certain heterosexuals, who came up with the witless fag jokes, and who, in turn, had drawn equally stupid remarks about “breeders.” In this sexual war, the biggest losers were SMHGs. That was Netspeak for Straight Male Horny Geeks, who, as noted earlier, suffered from the laws of supply and (lack of) demand.
Lee Chen was an SMHG in a nice way. His style had been to try in alt.personals rather than one of the tackier areas. When Lee had placed a recent ad, he had described himself as “a romantic dreamer,” and he wanted “a single woman between the ages of nineteen and thirty-three who is sincere, intelligent, attractive,” and “passionate” as well. Lee was twenty-six and entitled to feel his age. Moreover, based on his self-description, women would have no more reason to run away from him than they did from Greg Smith in his lonely days.
“I’m five feet eleven inches, 185 pounds, have dark brown eyes and short black hair,” Lee said. “And I’m a healthy, disease-free nonsmoker and considered attractive looking.” He told me he held a master’s in computer science, was continuing his studies, and obviously was destined to earn a comfortable living at the very least. Lee enjoyed “going out to movies and romantic dinners, discussing current events and politics, visiting museums and natural parks, walking along the rivers, listening to various kinds of music, giving and receiving pleasures with a sensuous partner.” So far, however, Lee lacked a woman—he was new in town. Maybe a minor part of his problem, at least among females off campus, was the kind of place that Calgary was. He saw it as “a cowboy city, big in the oil business, very similar to Dallas culturally, except for the cold winter climate.” This particular SMHG might have felt more comfortable in a more intellectually minded city such as Boston or San Francisco. But he was no snob and still held out hope of meeting one of the locals rather than confining the search to university people (“I’m sure there are many wonderful women in this town”). Simultaneously he decided to try the Net.
The first time out with a personal ad, Lee heard from a woman in, yes, Australia—E-Mail Central. Dozens of love letters threatened to melt down any fiber-optics on the Net; in fact, she sent Lee her erotic poetry and encouraged him to reply with the same. Through it all, he was high minded. “I believe in the mutual respect between women and men,” he said, “but am also saddened by the gradual decline of romantic chivalry in our society. I feel they don’t need to be mutually exclusive.” His poet in Australia seemed to feel the same. Within a month she promised to fly to Canada.
“My darkest knight, my love,” she called him. She was “burning with a need to talk with you, to share with you my fears, my joys. I ache to be able to brush a falling raindrop from your cheek and hold your handsome face close to my heart. I miss you already though we have not met.”