Internet Love-The Trials And Tribulations Of A Romantic Fool

Internet Love-The Trials And Tribulations Of A Romantic Fool

By Bradley Fox

Judd Jasper had always been, and will always be by his own admission, a fool for love. Do things in the name of love, or better sex that he would not dream of doing in his otherwise rational mind and world. I should know since I have seen him in action since he was kid, since we first met in seventh grade at Riverdale Junior High (now called a middle school and has been for while so that you know that Judd and I are no spring chickens which may be part of Judd’s current malaise which we will get to in a moment). In the old days it was just a matter of saying or doing the wrong thing to the wrong girl face to face and getting the deep freeze and then moving on. In high school it was more about him being crazy over some girl and not consulting me about whether she was “spoken for” or not and getting egg in his face when he got the bad news. See I was the go-to guy for all that kind of grapevine information because from that seventh grade on both boys and girls would confide in me, trust me to let them know what was what.

Of course best friend Judd couldn’t be bothered taking his best friend’s consult the one time he was “hot” for this fox, and she was a fox, Diana Nelson, and decided one cold night around midnight to call her up for a date. And got slammed with the hard fact that she was going steady with a college guy, which is why in his feeble mind he thought she was “free” like a fox couldn’t get some attraction from college guys. Of course I too had a crush on her but got over it when she told me about the college Joe whom she had been going steady with for about a year when Judd made his big bad move. Of course later when he went off to college at State U and I went to work in my father’s insurance company he made every known mistake one can make in the love game but that is to be expected because but then the young women have had enough experience to keep any guy going crazy for any reason. So no apologies necessary there. What apologies do need to be forthcoming concern those two throw-away marriages to Lana and Melinda before he got smart and married Laura on the third go-round. I was there for all of that although I might as well have been an invisible man for all the good it did me to tell him anything.    

I should have known some was up, some woman problem when Judd called me one night and vaguely hinted that he was in some woman trouble, not with Laura, at least not yet but this weird situation where he was being outsmarted by some young woman he met on the Internet. Like I said Judd keeps his own consult except he comes running to me for salvation when some skirt is around, some scent of jasmine as we used to call it when we were in high school. This is the first time though as far as I know that love on the Internet entered the picture. He said he needed to talk to me face to face so we agreed to meet at Blinky’s, a bar we frequented more of late for lots of reasons which was across the street from his law office in downtown Lowell, Massachusetts the next day after he closed the office for the day about six in the evening. Here is the way he told me the story, told it after we had our obligatory couple of scotches to unwind. I let him tell it because I don’t think I could do justice and I will just throw in a smirky or sarcastic comment as we go along: 

“You know I have been kind of a sex maniac all my life, although nothing kinky or crazy and nothing that other guys are not into but I have always been just a little off if I don’t have some sex, or some prospect of sex. Remember we used ot talk about what the hell to do about our desires on weekend nights when we used to hang around Harry’s Variety dateless-girl-less and dough-less equals zero. What you probably don’t know, no, I know you don’t know is that over about the last five years, when I turned about fifty-five I think I have been periodically going on these Internet sex sites that advertise that you will get laid, get a date, get your clock cleaned or whatever come on they used to get you join up. The reason and this is why I know you don’t know this is that around that time and now too Laura has left me in the deep freeze, doesn’t want to “do the do” as we used to called it back at Harry’s after we heard the old bluesman Howlin’ Wolf on the radio singing about getting laid using that expression. So that was that. But as a result I found myself still feeling randy and since I didn’t want to,  don’t want to give up for lots of good reasons besides loving her I started checking out the Internet. Here’s the funny part you expect this all to be hush-hush on the down low but all you have do is Google the word “sex” to get more sex sites that you could shake a stick at. With more explicit sex as come-ons than you could shake a stick, although that part is not bad when you think about how we had to sneak Playboy and other girlie magazines we would purchase out of town and titter over them in the dark night of our roosm.

So I took the plunge that was how I met Sarah, a young very young although legal woman who had just graduated from high school and in order to fit in at Emerson, the big acting and performance school in Boston, was looking for a sugar daddy to replace he long gone real daddy who ran off with some mistress or something I don’t remember all the details and the first order of business was to pay for her to have some lip enhancement operation, you know cosmetic   surgery. In return she would give her “sweet daddy” anything he wanted (except anything too kinky, that part never got resolved since I wasn’t that much to doing B&D or S&M with her although she in theory was willing to try it out if I insisted). [Jesus Judd talk about “robbing the cradle” whatever happened to that thing you talked about one night about twenty-somethings being your meat of push came to shove.]     

Now this sex site thing despite that fling with Sarah, naturally that is all it could be, is a lot harder and frankly treacherous than you might expect. A lot of it has to do with come-on, false come on to get lonely guys like me, or the socially awkward, hell, guys wo have trouble even talking to women signing up on the dotted line complete with credit card in hand before you can even take step one. That is the reality despite all the bells and whistles but it took a while, and ditching a few useless sites to figure that out. A lot of the profiles are fake, house players if you were using a gambling metaphor, a lot are of women who submit their details from when they were twenty years younger and twenty pounds lighter. I’ll admit that I fudged on the age thing saying I was fifty when I was fifty-five so I don’t have much of a bitch about there and frankly so of these women are looking for some fourteen old up in there room masturbating over the latest heartthrob and won’t give you a tumble. So I had plenty of flame-outs before Sarah came on the scene out of the blue.             

In her profile Sarah made no bones about what she was looking for and made it clear as well as long as the guy was still breathing he and had the dough he would have a shot at her. Naturally the photograph of her probably taken on class day was of a dewy good-looking if not beautiful young woman. Moreover I sensed that she meant what she said about what she would offer up in exchange. So almost as a goof I contacted her, she responded, and then sent each other a blizzard of e-mails finally leading up to our arranging a meeting in a public place, a restaurant, my suggestion to show I was on the up and up. She showed up and of course she looked even younger than I suspected from her photograph. [You could have walked away Judd after all it was totally possible that she could have been your granddaughter if I am estimating that possibility right based on what you have told me.] You know me though as a professional yakking and listener I was able to cull some “common” interests that we shared (love of music, books, movies) into enough for us to consider a second date. I had qualms but I keep pushing because then I became a captive of the idea that I could get a second youth if we bounced around the bed a bit. In other words I was the classic “dirty old man” that every self-respecting mother warned their daughters against. But she was playing her come hither look once I told her that there would be no problem with getting her that lip operation although I told her several times her lips looked fine to me. That did it for her so when I suggested the next time we meet we go to a hotel she didn’t balk, only asked if she should wear sexy lingerie and should she bring the condoms or should I take care of that.      

That first night was great because she was so eager (eager not for me but those new lips I know in retrospect but that didn’t matter when my heat was up) to please and I was the one who was a little shy since I only had us do oral sex which we both liked although she said she liked to have a man inside her after that. Moreover she gave one of the best blow-jobs I have every received and that include was from my first wife Joyce who had made that an art form since she was not because of some off-handed medical problems into conventional sex. So Sarah and I had our few months of a couple of time a week going to a hotel mostly and getting it on. Got it on best when we got high on grass, or had a couple of glasses of wine. Eventually though after the lip operation I started, get this I started to have second thoughts about this especially as I was tired of lying to Laura about my whereabouts on those seemingly endless client meetings. So we parted, and maybe she was just as glad although I can still smell her jasmine and feel that tongue lashing she gave my cock every time she went down on me. [Stop, brother, stop I didn’t take my heart medication today.] 

So I was okay for a while but then early this year I got the randy feeling again after a few years of Laura’s no-sex laws and so I started thinking about checking out the sex sites again this time not looking for a teeny-bopper but a twenty-something to I make me feel young which is the way I placed the idea on my profile page. I actually went back to the site where I “met” Sarah thinking that I might hit pay-dirt again. Silly me. Of course unlike Amazon or those kind of sites this sex site stuff moves all around cyberspace so I had to check out others and came up with a well-known one that had caused a stir because some jokers had hacked it or something. I went out as a “free” member of course, they all do that but that gets you exactly nowhere as I found out the last time. But unlike the last time seasoned veteran that I am I fooled around with the site to see if it was worth playing dough for. It was so-so, nothing really came up except the twelve million come-on messages by the house players or the rogues (people, women for me, who try to lure guys to their competing sex sites or for what amounts to on-line prostitution, which if you think about it is a half-good thing since those women are much safer than being on the streets or in some whorehouse), a couple of nibbles but nothing really decent.

One day though I saw a profile (no photo like a lot of them which I have learned to usually passed by as no-go stuff because the few times I did make contact thee was a serious reason why there who no photo) which intrigued me because it directed me to a person off-site g-mail address. I figured what the hell give a go, although usually this g-mail stuff turns out to be bogus. I sent an e-mail and got a reply along with a couple of photos of an extremely attractive young woman with long black hair, very pretty face, great red lips and a nice bosom who asked me what I was looking for and I told her that I was looking for a younger woman, blah, blah, bhah. She didn’t flinch and then told me that she was a cam-modeler working out of Nashua, New Hampshire and was looking for an older guy and so on. Not as a sugar daddy as she explained once when I mentioned that idea but to take care of her needs which strangely enough despite being a sex worker of sorts by profession had not been met over the past few years while she was doing this work. Naturally we got around to ages and those type facts. I will be honest because you know me I told her I was fifty-five not sixty just to make the age difference a little less since she was twenty-five. [Christ, Judd you are worse than some women, women of our generation with that dipping the age stuff what different would it make to her or any women if she was looking for somebody older worry about five.]

So we ran a blizzard of e-mails I told her I was a lawyer and all that and she seemed okay with moving along. To push my side I told her if she wanted I could get her modelling jobs for lingerie or gym wear, you know through Kenny who is always looking for a fresh look, or remember that client I had who did the soft- core porn that I got off that bum rap if she wanted to be a porn queen I could help maybe. She was kind of non-plussed by that. I was surprised until I asked what a cam-model did and she told me about playing with sex toys for the cameras (and guys out in cyberspace). I got my temperature up after that. No question.

Then things started getting a little off-kilter which is why I am talking to you right now. [Yeah, the king of keep his own counsel wags his tail at the women and gets it bitten off and then I have to come and figure out what the heck to do short of placing you in some rest home.] She mentioned that she was in some kind of contest among the women in cam-world to be the feature of the month or something and could I, pretty please, pretty, pretty please go to her private page on this other website and vote for her. No problem. [Smirk.]

What the long and short of it was which I should have known was that she had come from a competing site to lure guys away and go to that site. Like I say this stuff goes on all the time and I was no stranger to it but I was looking for something so I played along for a while. What was happening though was that a bogus scam operation, a crude one that wouldn’t have fooled any but the most gullible when they “requested” a credit card to get on their free site. The idea of the credit card was to check for sexual predators-Jesus think about that, trying to get guys on the site with that come-on. The kicker though was that the name of the site was written one way in the title and another in the body of the printing. Jesus, again. But she was adamant that I attempt to join until I told her straight out that she was being used for a scam (playing along with the idea that she didn’t know what was happening). That I thought was the end of the matter and I moved on.

A few days later though she sent an e-mail wondering what had happened to me, why I hadn’t sent her an e-mail. So we started again and besides being still interested in her I figured I would give her the benefit of the doubt on that scam thing. [Gives a look like Judd shouldn’t have given that benefit of the doubt without even knowing what was coming next.] It didn’t hurt that she sent a few revealing photos showing a very fit body with nice tits and ass. [Done, done for…] So we moved on over the next couple of days kind of making arrangement to meet in Nashua over that next weekend.

Then she started e-mailing about how her mother in the Philippines was in the hospital in critical condition and needed dough for drugs or an operation. It kind of changed a little with each e-mail. [Oh brother I can see what’s coming.] Only 500 bucks. Well I knew this was a semi-hustle when you think about it after that bogus sex site scam thing but I went along for a bit, a good bit pointing out in particular that we had never met, I didn’t know her as anything but an e-mail address and after all since I had no relationship with her why I was I going to put myself over this. We went back and forth. I smelled something funny but would go back and forth on whether to play, or stay. And then she did two things-sent some really revealing photos and told me she would suck my cock until it hurt, go deep throat if I wanted, over the next weekend at a hotel that we would go to when we made arrangements. [Bingo!] So naturally I sent the dough via Western Union to some guy, her cousin, in Manila, yeah, five hundred bucks which was going for the meds.

You know you would be surprised how easy it is to send money via Western Union. I don’t recall if I ever used that service for sending messages to anybody, seemed kind of old-fashioned like snail-mail or land-lines are now, but I know that I never sent or received money that way except maybe one time when Lana and I were done in Mexico and kind of broke she sent up to New York for dough from her parents and that might have been through Western Union. But in those days you had to go to some brick and mortar place to do your business. Now with credit card in hand and the Internet you can do it very quickly for a reasonable service charge-except apparently it is not so easy to send the dough to foreign countries the way the credit card security systems work, and usually rightfully so, for such transactions-at least for mine. Remember I was down in Washington doing this thing after a furious exchange of sexy e-mails highlighted by that deep throat vision early in the morning (me being an early morning person and she being a night owl we mixed around three or four in the morning) I went on-line to see where the nearest Western Union office would be in D.C. and like a lot of things that I don’t automatically think would be on-line still being half in the dark ages about modern communications technology like you very well know with that texting business I noticed that you could sent money via the Internet after filling out the inevitable on-lone security-password-secret question chicken gumbo e-page work. That nada-I tried using a couple of credit cards and a bank check and still nada. As it was explained to me a lot of this scam stuff works through foreign countries so they filter that kind of transaction more carefully. So next morning or really later that morning I trundled to a Western Union agency at a liquor store and did my business after filling out the snail version of the previous online paperwork. Done and I e-mailed her that information.

That issue settled I, we, started making plans for getting together that weekend once I got back from Washington. As it turned out they must work these girls something fierce, although I didn’t say anything at the time figuring I would get the dope on the business when we met (naturally it was turn-on even thinking about the idea that I would be asking a sex worker, because that is really what it is, about the conditions of work, and maybe some hot stories). Her day off was Sunday but she could arrange to meet starting Saturday afternoon and we would go to a hotel for the nighty. I made several suggestions but she said I should decide and I presented the idea of going to York and the beach, etc. like I have done with about twelve thousand women, although not all of them at York (all of them at the ocean though). So ready, set, go. No go. A few hours after sending the dough to Manila I get an e-mail from her that her mother had passed away. Done.  I figured that was the big-kiss-off the final hook to this scam and I should learn to keep my cock in my pocket with this stuff and not in some fantasy deep throat kid’s stuff. Chalk it up to live and learn. La, la, la smart guy had been taken. And when I didn’t hear from her for several hours when I made a bogus “sorry for your sorrows” message figuring I would get no answer I figured that was that. [You’re preaching to the choir, brother, your own choir, but you knew that, knew that.] 

But it turned out that that was not that because after that several hours she sent me an e-mail with a photograph on a plane heading for Manila saying she was going to be giving her mother a final sent-off and essentially act as the dutiful if errant and fallen daughter. (The dough which must have been a fair amount for a quick notice flight was lend, assume by her agency, meaning the greed-heads who were exploiting her labor probably expecting their own deep throat pay-offs too boot.) Moreover she sent me an e-mail once she arrived in Manila. So for the next day or so we did our sorrowful times black-bordered e-mail stuff until she started talking about how the hospital would not release the body of her mother, that they would keep it in the morgue pending payment of 800 dollars in medical bills. So naturally I am ready, more than ready to have the other shoe drop. You know where this is heading-a classic scam, like oh yeah just five hundred dollars to be paid back with the next paycheck (the original arrangement) to help me through this hard time, then the next step a little more, not much but a little, say 800 dollars, then what, well, if she didn’t have the dough for medical expenses then how was she to pay for the funeral and then probably something for her way home (although she told me that she had a round-trip ticket from the agency), figure 1200, 1500 hundred and then who knows what else. Maybe pay for getting her cellphone out of hock in Nashua since she said that she had done that to help pay some mother medical expense. (Who knew, not me, that Iphones/Smartphones had some black/grey market value these days a question that I asked her when she told me that she took that plane photograph with a camera phone that one of her co-workers lent her and which she told me she sold in Manila to pay for some overdue rent.) [Jesus, Judd when did you totally lose it in the old days you would have walked away even from some jasmine-scented dame her all you have is cyber-space vapor.]

So we go round and round on that until one e-mail out of the blue she asks me, although I actually missed it the first time to “pretty-please help her out-again and then sent a quick second e-mail telling me to Western Union her in her name. [Is Western Union capable of being a verb?] So we went round and round so more and I told her I she should check with the charity hospital to see if she could get a waiver for being indigent, check with the American Embassy for help, and about seven other suggestions which she blew off. No, “her man,” her new sucker was the only way to go. I started to tell her about my own not so made up tale of woes about my current financial difficulties trying to get out from under this scam but still with half mind that she might be on the level, a little, because there were holes in her story which I tried to exploit but as usual with these things they have a come-back that is half plausible. So the long and short of it was that I sent her the 800 bucks using my personal account-you know the one I share with Laura. That was the last I heard from her. Figures right. My problem is what do I tell Laura about the double-hole of 500 and 800 unexplained dollars. Needless to say I won’t go into that deep throat stuff.

[Off-hand Judd I would say shoot yourself and put yourself out of your misery. A guy like you has had a long life and nothing will change that shirt-chasing except at seventy-five you will be passing yourself off as sixty-five and the girls will still be twenty-something and you can be a reverse Dorian Gray. Enough said.]