Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

For a while it had been all the rage. The term “Fox-Trotter” had been coined to refer to the Fox pretenders. Fox himself encouraged the fad. Several nights a week, he would fashion a comic bit around some of the more outrageous postings attributed to him. As he sifted through handfuls of e-mail messages, his eyebrows would rise in mock amazement, the mischievous grin stretching across his face.

“So, apparently, I was in touch last night with an Ingrid and an Olga. Seems they were determined to tell me everything I wanted to know but was afraid to ask about Swedish meatballs.” He milked the laugh and brandished another of the messages. “Look. Here’s one from some fellow named Sven.” Then, in a falsetto voice and a butchered Swedish accent, “De-yer Mr. Fox. Whatever yew dew? Stey awey from Innnngrid and Oooolga?”

NIKKI ROSSMAN LOVED the Internet. She had once heard it referred to as the portal to instant depravity, and she agreed completely. The Internet had opened up for Nikki an entirely new section of the day. Not really day but morning, though for Nikki, it was just an extension of the night before. Nikki lived in Tribeca, lower Manhattan, an area with no shortage of clubs and bars, and she loved to dance. She especially loved to get stoned and dance. She was an excellent dancer; her bones disappeared and she was all fluid movements, either fast and furious in all directions at once or slow, dreamy, undulating. She loved the glow of perspiration. She loved noise, the more deafening the music, the better. In a jam-packed club with the music pounding, a person can let loose with the sort of full-throttle screams and shrieks that at any other place in the city would give someone cause to snatch up the phone and punch 911. Nikki loved to shriek on the dance floor. It was a self-prescribed turn-on. She’d read something somewhere once about chakras; it hadn’t made sense to her except the part that said loosening one could clear the way for loosening the others. Nikki took to the dance floor with a hopped-up vengeance, whooping and shrieking at the top of her tiny lungs, and in time she could feel the release taking place deep below. It made her hungry for sex-not ever much of a problem in most of the clubs. There were places. Dark corners. Bathrooms. If the night was nearly played out anyway and the guy was cute, there was her place, his place, someplace to go for it. The only risk was that the sex might not hit the spot she wanted it to hit; after the music and the dancing and the chakra-shaking shrieking, the guy had better close the fucking deal, that’s all she could say. She even had a name for the kind of sex she wanted it to be. Cataclysmic. It could be hit-or-miss, she knew that. But baby, when it hit-when it was cataclysmic…

A man she once met at the Cat Club had referred to her as “a tight little package.” Nikki loved that description. She thought of it every night as she readied herself to go out, worming her way into her panties, zipping up her baby-doll skirt. Tight little package. Open me first. She’d touch her wrists, the sides of her neck and her cleavage with any of the dozens of scents she lifted regularly from her job at Bloomie’s, imagining that the heat generated on the dance floor would activate the scent and send it out in all directions. Warm blood for the wolves.

Great fun.

Then along came the Internet. It was nothing cataclysmic; it couldn’t be. Hit the mute button and it was quiet as death. No pounding rhythms. No strobing lights. No pulsing sweat machines moving together around a cramped dance floor. It was a whole different thing. Tamer, no question about it. And a lot of the time, pathetically puerile.

Still, it was there, and it was constant. A portal to instant depravity. Four A.M. Ears buzzing. Chakras only partially satisfied. Turning the key and coming into her apartment alone. Nikki found it uncanny, all these freaks sitting out there God knows where, ready at the click of a mouse to climb into her virtual pants. What a riot! Thousands of them. Unseen by the human eye, cyberspace literally crawling with spunk-that was the only way she could put it. What a freak show. She loved it. Yes, you had to wade your way through the lamebrains-or, as her friend Tina called them, “numb nuts”-but like with anything else, a little practice, a little savvy, you could find what worked for you. They were there, the dudes with the moves. Or maybe some of them were chicks in disguise, but what did she really care? You weren’t going to get any safer sex than this. It was a lark, a harmless way to spend some tawdry minutes before climbing into bed alone and kissing the world good night. And some of these guys were good. Nikki liked to think that she was good, too, that she could give as good as she got. Like in the so-called real world. Lord only knows if 90 percent of the people she chatted up would have registered as big fat zeros on her radar if she’d run across them in person. But in her apartment, lit only by the white glow of her computer screen, what difference did it make? None. Nikki’s prompt was always the same: I’m typing with one finger. Tell me what to do with the other nine .

Very silly. Very immature. But get a clever respondent on the line, someone who had the touch, so to speak, and it wasn’t a bad way to top off the evening before brushing the teeth and giving a quick run of the cold cream.

And sometimes, of course, she took it offline.

NIKKI HAD CHECKED OUT some of the so-called Marshall Fox sites. She never for a minute felt that she was actually in touch with the real Marshall Fox, but still, it was fun. Some of the pretenders were exceedingly creative and funny, and not a few showed an impressive flair for the erotic, which Nikki enjoyed.

One morning she had been online with two of the fakers. One of the fakers was far superior to the other. He had the stuff. He wasn’t quite as clever as the real Marshall Fox, but come on, that guy had a whole bank of writers feeding him lines. But this guy was doing all right. He was pretty funny.

The other one? She wished he’d go away. She wondered if he might not be a twelve-year-old kid just getting his rocks off. Her friend Tina actually enjoyed fooling around with young boys online, but Nikki thought it was creepy. She wasn’t into that kind of thing. This guy had just sent her a typo-ridden posting including a long-winded joke that Nikki had already read online the week before. It was about a talking dog and a beauty pageant contestant and…it was stupid. She wished the other fake Marshall Fox would send something. It had been ten minutes since he had sent her anything. He’d probably gotten offline. That’s where I should be, Nikki told herself. Her elbow hit the mouse as she twisted in her chair to see if dawn’s early light was beginning to show. Not yet. Thank God.

Nikki scanned the talking-dog joke. Her orange fingernails clattered on her keyboard.

Dogs know when I have just had sex.

What the hell. She hit send. A minute later, a message appeared on her screen. It wasn’t from the kid, or whatever he was. It was from the other fake Marshall Fox. The good one. Nikki realized what she must have done. When her elbow hit the mouse, she must have clicked back to the other guy’s last message.

Lucky dogs.

She typed, I’m glad you think so .

The screen was still for nearly a minute. Nikki thought maybe she had lost him. Then:

I want to be a lucky dog.

Nikki giggled out loud as she typed back: The lucky dog who knows I have just had sex or the lucky dog who just had it with me ? Oh God. I’ve got to stop this and get some sleep. She hit send.

The answer came back immediately.

Both.

THE CYBER-FLIRTATION HAD gone on for close to two months. He adopted a new identity, just for her. Lucky Dog. For him, Nikki dropped Love Bar and countered with Bitch. He wrote back that she was clever.