November, 1991

In the early '90s my social life mostly took place in the spare bedroom of a seedy apartment in Van Nuys — The Porn Capital of the World — belonging to a guy named Greg. Greg was not a pornographer, but a computer programmer who, with nothing more than a Telnet server and a dream started a dial-up bulletin board called The Spot. It was for all intents and purposes the eHarmony of its day, where for ten bucks a month single people in the L.A. area (married people, too, actually; it was also the Ashley Madison of its day) could meet virtually online and then, perhaps, in person as well. The Spot was so popular that, according to a contemporaneous news article, during peak hours there would be as many as sixty people logged in to The Spot at the same time!

For me, the benefits of The Spot were abundantly obvious. Text-only communication played to my strengths. I was witty and engaging and I knew how to spell — 8th grade county spelling bee champion, yo! — and in the digital confines of Greg's server, I was extremely popular. Face-to-face, less so. The charming, confident raconteur they had been chatting with online would fail to materialize in meatspace and they would get me instead.

In fairness, the disappointment was almost always mutual. There was a questionnaire everyone filled out when they signed up which, among other personal details — age, gender, favorite sexual positions (to which I responded, "There's more than one?") — asked you to rate your own physical attractiveness on a scale of one to ten (in the Dial-Up Era it took too much bandwidth to post actual pictures). I gave myself a five, but after I saw what some of the other fives looked like, upgraded myself to a six.

And then, after I met a few of my fellow sixes, I upgraded myself to a seven.

One of the women I met was Paula. Paula was, of all things, a chemical engineer. And by chemical engineer standards she was pretty cute, although nowhere near the ten rating she had hubristically assigned herself. We were at the Woodland Hills P.F. Chang's, a chain restaurant which ostensibly served Asian cuisine but could not have been less authentic if it added chimichangas and bratwurst to their menu. Unfortunately, the only thing Paula and I seemed to have in common was the belief that "My Own Private Idaho" — the movie I took her to before dinner — was the best film about a narcoleptic gay prostitute Keanu Reeves had ever starred in, with the possible exception of "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure." (It's subtextual, but it's there.) Other than that, though, we did not seem to be hitting it off. Which is why I was surprised when she invited me into her house and then into her bedroom.

Claiming to be tense from an exhausting work week she asked if I would give her a back rub, and without waiting for an answer removed her blouse and lay face-down on the bed. Even a clueless idiot like me understood that a back rub was usually a pretext for sex; plus she had put on Enigma's "MCMXC a.D." — with its hypnotic melding of Gregorian chants and sensual dance beats — which was the go-to fucking album of the early '90s.

I admit, her behavior did strike me as a little presumptuous, but then again Paula was a ten according to Paula so I figured I'd see where this went. I gave her a back rub and I could tell it was really relaxing her; first by the contented sighs she breathed into her pillow, and then by the extremely loud snoring. Paula was dead asleep.

Huh, I thought. Now what?

I was ninety percent sure I knew where she wanted this go, but — and in this way I guess I'm old-fashioned — I kind of want the woman to be conscious before I start having sex with her. (During, too, ideally.) Not knowing what else to do, I jostled the bed a few times. I attempted to find the bed-shaking sweet spot — hard enough to wake her, but not so hard that I scared the shit out of her — but she kept right on sleeping. So I gave up. I tip-toed out of her bedroom and left, but not before writing a note on a Post-It and sticking it to her refrigerator.

Nice meeting you! (Smiley-face.)

And it was nice meeting her. Not only did she give me another dating disaster story — Tom's take: "You should have robbed her house, just to teacher her a lesson... and also because we could use a bigger TV" — she also sent me down the path that would lead to the woman I would eventually marry. Because at dinner, upon learning I was an aspiring writer, Paula had told me about a local theater director who was looking for writers to participate in a collaborative play.

By this time, Tom and I had managed to get an actual agent. To accomplish this we made use of the list of literary agents that the Writers Guild published every year. And if you're wondering how someone becomes a literary agent it is, as near as I can tell, by saying, I am a literary agent! Ideally but not necessarily in a heroic voice with arms akimbo. The result was that while the WGA's list included reputable three-letter agencies like ICM, WMA and CAA, it also included a creepy guy with a gold tooth who lived in his dead mother's house, Norman Bates style, a fat woman and her buck-toothed assistant who worked out of a garage which they were forced to vacate every day around six p.m. when her husband came home from work (a temporary situation they assured us) and a crazy bird lady who had to shout over her squawking parrots.

We signed with Crazy Bird Lady because she, at least, had a real office. An office dripping with bird poop, sure, but an office nonetheless. I know it doesn't sound like it, but this was a significant step forward. Because for boring-ass legal reasons no one of consequence would read your script if it didn't come through an agent. Now, everyone in Hollywood could read our work.

Could!

But didn't!

Apparently, the downside of being writers with a crazy bird lady as your agent was that you're writers with a crazy bird lady as your agent. And that is why, when offered the opportunity to work for free on some dopey vanity project, we didn't just accept, we fucking leapt at it. Because at least it was something.

The play was a series of interwoven vignettes all revolving around the topic of loneliness and the less said about it the better. Let's just stipulate that it wasn't very good, it never got off the ground and the director was a talentless twat who gave the scripts we wrote to her goddamn dog groomer for notes, and leave it at that.

The more important part was that I met Samantha. She was a performer and a comedy writer. My first memory of her was watching her perform a scene that she had written involving a reclusive woman whose insecurities paralyzed her with indecision. She had a date, but could not decide between a high-heeled shoe and a low-heeled shoe, and in the end she chose to wear one of each, lurching off spastically to meet a guy who would most assuredly run in the other direction.

I thought the scene was wonderful. I thought she was wonderful. I did not believe in love at first sight — and I still don't — but I will say that Samantha glowed with an inner light that made her appear physically brighter than everybody else, a sparkling luminous entity set against the smeary gray background that is the rest of humanity.

Samantha, on the other hand, thought that I hated her.

The reason was that while I was mesmerized by Samantha's incandescence and enthralled by her talent, I also had some constructive criticisms about her writing and acting. Not a lot of men have the integrity to fall head over heels for someone and dispassionately dissect their work at the exact same time. But I'm not a lot of men. I'm barely one man.

Samantha very much did not appreciate my feedback. She didn't like the message and she really didn't like the messenger. Luckily, I am an acquired taste and over the next six months we spent on this moronic production, Samantha acquired the shit out of me, with the assist going to her perceptive writing partner who alerted Samantha — who was almost, but not quite, as bad at reading signals as I was — to my infatuation with her. "Have you noticed," she nudged, "that Aaron only talks to you?"

And in case you missed it: Samantha had a comedy writing partner! This was Tricia, an adorably neurotic, transplanted New York Jew. Samantha and Tricia were best friends, too.

We became a foursome, doing pretty much everything together — A Bugs Bunny Film Festival, Six Flags Magic Mountain, Etta James at the Palace, Joe Jackson at the Universal Amphitheater — until one night I walked Samantha up to her apartment and kissed her in the doorway, taking her by surprise.

The good kind of surprise. Not the rape whistle kind. Just to be clear.

Soon, both Samantha and I could sense this was it. The last relationship we'd ever have. And it gave it some poignancy to everything we did, knowing that this was the beginning of the end of our firsts. Our last first kiss. Our last first love-making. Our last first flossing our teeth in front of each other. We savored the moments, knowing they would never come again.

Then something even more incredible happened. Tricia and Tom started dating, too, disappearing into Tricia's apartment for entire weekends.

So let's take a moment to appreciate the holy-fucking-shitness of this turn of events. Tom and I had met Samantha and Tricia, two comedy-writing women, at the same time. Like us, Samantha and Tricia were best friends. And now, Tom and I were each dating one. This was exactly what I had envisioned as we drove to Los Angeles. What had once been idle musings on a stretch of New Mexico highway now had the gravity of prophesy.

Two men ride west in comic masks on a Swedish horse

Besotted by two ripe maidens of great humor in the Valley of Smoke...

As incredible as it sounds, my bizarrely specific hopes for the future had actually come true!

For approximately six weeks.

Sadly, while Samantha and I fell deeply in love, Tom and Tricia's relationship — which turned out to have been more about convenience than compatibility — imploded. When I asked Tom what had happened, he was characteristically elusive, muttering vaguely about how things just didn't work out. I chose not to press him. It was fine by me if he didn't want to talk about it; I didn't want to talk about it, either (male friendships!) and besides, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" was about to come on and we loved to sing along with the theme song.

But while Tom and I were giggling at that dopey cartoon, Tricia was busy scorching the earth. She shared every embarrassing detail she could think of with Samantha (female friendships!) about Tom's immaturity, insecurity, insensitivity and sexual inadequacy. Having previously been accused, with tremendous justification, of all of those things myself, I didn't find it particularly scandalous. If anything I thought it was pretty shitty of Tricia to violate the implicit Nondisclosure Agreement that exists — or at least should exist — between people who have exchanged bodily fluids.

And there was something else, too. Something which Tricia kept alluding to, something she kept almost saying, some secret about Tom that even at the apex of her spitefulness Tricia couldn't quite bring herself to divulge, even though she so clearly wanted to.

It was, I am sure, a secret, but not the secret; rather, it was some step along the way — a fetish, maybe, or a fantasy — that would have been mortifying if revealed. Tricia understood this, which is why she tried to shift the responsibility to Samantha, baiting her with tantalizing hints in the hopes that Samantha would become curious enough to ask. But she wouldn't bite.

Finally, Tricia abandoned all pretext and said, "Do you want to know what it is?"

And Samantha said, "No, thank you."

The whole thing didn't seem like a big deal at the time. A bitter breakup, a wounded ex lashing out. What we didn't know then was that the day would come when Tom — Tamara — would be outed, when she would have the power over her own narrative stripped away because someone figured out that Tom was transgender and decided it would be fun to make it public. I'll be honest: I could live a thousand lifetimes and never forgive that. This is not a game, people. This is someone's life.

Tricia was surprised that Samantha didn't want to hear Tom's secret. When she asked why, Samantha simply said, "Because it's Tom's secret."

Is it any wonder I fell for this woman?