Java.Dec.2017-pages

Back in the early ’90s when the interweb was
new, my mom was a bit of a chat room junkie.
You would hear the high pitch of the dialup
and the blaring AOL “You’ve Got Mail!”
announcement at all hours.
new, my mom was a bit of a chat room junkie. You would hear the high pitch of
the dial-up and the blaring AOL “You’ve Got Mail!” announcement at all hours.
Unlike the underground sewer that chat rooms likely are today, back then chat
rooms were brand-new babies where nice people could explore this new internet
thing. This is where my mom met “Tony.” I don’t recall the name of the room she
met him in, but I do remember hearing sad and awful stories about poor Tony
over dinner. Apparently Tony’s parents were monsters and prostituted him as a
child in exchange for drugs. They beat him and berated him for years, until his
father, a former police officer, was arrested and then killed in jail. Not sure what
happened to the mom, but Tony landed in the hands of a social worker named
Vicki, who adopted him.
Listen, don’t take your tissues out just yet. So, Vicki had her hands full caring for
Tony, with his AIDS and all, but he apparently had enough time to spend hours
and hours in chat rooms meeting new friends like my mom. “That Vicki? She’s
sent from heaven. She’s just a miracle worker. Tony is on death’s door and she
just …” My mom could barely finish her sentence, she was so moved by Vicki.
Little Tony even wrote a book with the help of Vicki, which she mailed to my mom
with a personal note written by Tony. It was called A Rock and a Hard Place. The
abuse described was so terrible, I couldn’t get through the first chapters. Poor
Tony. What a trooper this kid is, I thought.
I went to college and the internet changed and I didn’t hear much about ol’ Tony.
When I asked my mom what ever happened to him, she said they just kind of
lost touch over the years, adding, “I hope he’s okay though.” Being okay seemed
unlikely, considering Tony had AIDS, not HIV, for years before modern drugs
were available. But much about Tony seemed unlikely, which, turns out, it was.
I eventually Googled the name of his book and came across a litany of articles
that basically prove Tony is not real. It’s crazy and twisted and my mom could not
believe it. I forwarded her dozens of articles about it, and she still seems to be in
a bit of denial. The fact that NO ONE has ever met Tony is just the beginning of
these shenanigans ol’ Vicki was pulling.
The whole Tony charade hits a sensitive spot for my mom, but my sister and
I think it’s hilarious. It’s pretty funny that she got duped by one of the original
internet hoaxes. For a while after my discovery, I continued to send my mom
links to articles that heaped on more evidence to disprove the existence of Tony.
Until my recent book-present search, I had forgotten about the whole thing. How
I missed the fact that Armistead Maupin wrote a book about the Tony tales, I’ll
never know. I can only think of it as a gift.