Christmas Releases

by Donald G. Evans

I logged on: the room was a total snorefest. It was only nine o’clock, meaning half the regulars were still asleep or else doing the whole Santa Claus thing. That was true, I knew, for Tigger22, who had a much younger sister.

Boys immediately tried getting in my box. “Are you wet, JAP?” “What are you wearing?” “I’m SO horny.” Like I sat around all day in a puddle of my own juices, wearing six-inch stilettos, a red teddy and fishnet stockings. I shooed away several pervs, ignored the rest, and typed a message in the big room, “Hi ALL.”

“Merry Christmas!!!” some asshole named HungBuck18 responded.

“Which part of Jewish don’t you get?” I typed.

“Christmas is for everybody!!!” some other asshole, SoccerStud, joined in.

“It is NOT,” I returned. “It’s only for Christians.”

“The spirit of it is for everybody,” a third asshole, HappyShorts85, typed.

I typed, “JAP15 sticks a Menorah up HappyShorts’ ass.”

That drew a few LMAOs and LOLs. New guests logged in all the while: PocketRocket, EarlyMorningRiser, 10INCowboy, KittyLicker, BushWhacker. Boys felt this compulsion to advertise 1. their erections, 2. the size of their penises, 3. their keenness for sex, mistakingly thinking women, like themselves, merely required a warm, willing, anatomically impressive body. There were a lot of high schoolers, like me, but also a bunch of old married pervs and some old desperate sluts (also, usually, married) (also, usually, lesbians) and then a handful of little kids, some just ten or eleven years old.

Still no Tigger22. His real name was Paul something Italian, and we had plans to meet today—to fuck, I guess. At least, we’d been seriously cybering for, like, a year, and we’d told each other everything we wanted to do and have done to each other, and he was sneaking out on Christmas dinner to do this.

HarryPotter22, Paris, Hottie and more regulars popped in. Random guests kept volleying private messages asking me for phone sex or to meet—I mean, they didn’t even know what I looked like or how old I was, or anything, and I think if I said YES they’d actually grab some condoms, start the car, and drive like hell to get here. Why did everybody think being in a chat room was an invitation to be totally unedited, even though it was, in a way?

“Has anybody seen Tigger?” I wrote. Bunch of nopes. Tigger lived like three subdivisions over, and we were probably going to meet at the movie theatre, where I was going to go anyway on Christmas day. After that…we weren’t positive, but we had talked about a bunch of places we could go to be alone. Paul was a total Italian Catholic—my mom and dad would have instantly disowned me. But he was sweet and funny and kind of smart. He didn’t like sports or reality TV. He hated Bush.

I was a virgin, but nobody believed that because I was, like, a super sexual person, I mean, amazingly sexual; it was only that I hadn’t actually had sex yet, if that made sense. Most of my friends had—nearly all, in fact. Even the Future Librarians of America crowd. I was too picky, I think, or too Jewish, or not Jewish enough, I’m not sure, but I’d had plenty of chances and passed. I mean, it was nothing but chances. If you were even vaguely hot, which I was, just about any guy would fuck you, didn’t matter if they were young or old, married or single, whatever, as long as they figured they wouldn’t get caught by whoever wasn’t supposed to find out. Knowing that made it a little harder, not that I was against fucking for fucking’s sake, but, you know, I wondered sometimes if there was a point to it all. There didn’t have to be, but if there was I wanted to know it going in, not later.

I emailed Tigger: “Where are you? I’m going to breakfast, BRB.”

I went downstairs. My dad was eating bagels and lox and reading the Wall Street Journal. He was the most Jewish dad I knew.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” he crooned.

I kissed him on the cheek and made a beeline for the Apple Jacks. I joined Mom outside. She was reading a self-help book in the rock garden. We had the typical Arizonabackyard: cactuses, bird feeders, a pool, rocks everywhere, a clay-colored wall blocking any view that was left after they built 46 Wal-Marts and a thousand identical houses. “Hey,” I said, and plopped down on the wicker chair.

“We have reservations at Big Wa’s for one-thirty,” Mom said.

“Oh, fun,” I said. I was so sick of our Chinese dinner tradition. “Can’t we try anything new for once?”

“You like Big Wa’s. Plus they have a special Christmas menu.”

We had Jewish friends and non-Jewish friends—Dad called them Gentiles—and we always went to Big Wa’s with some of our Jewish friends, either the Kauffman’s or Goldblatt’s or both. Afterward the adults played cards and the kids went to a movie. I was sort of between childhood and adulthood, but if 50 First Dates meant one thing and Pinochle another, then I was definitely still a kid.

“Oh, Dana,” Mom sighed. Big Wa’s was okay, but it was crazy with Jews on Christmas—it got loud and smoky.

When I got back upstairs, there was Tigger. “Good morning,” he typed.

I LOVED Tigger. It was the little things, like not saying Merry Christmas to a Jew. Another thing: he punctuated. Almost everybody else was just so lazy; pretty much nobody bothered to spell right or capitalize or end sentences with a period. Tigger’s neatness showed a conscientious side; it showed respect for his correspondent.

“Merry X-Mas,” I typed. “Was Santa good to you?”

“I got like 100 pair of socks,” he wrote. “We’re going to my Uncle Frank’s at two. He lives in Mesa. I’ll say I’m sick. They won’t be back until late tonight; you could maybe even come here.”

Neither of us drove, which meant we were slaves to geography. But we were both close enough to the movie theatre to meet there. That was how we first started chatting: the freaky fact that we were both from Casa Grande. I me