Pixel Lust by Lol Stein

Marco and I began meeting in the evenings, sometimes at a sex club, sometimes in a Japanese garden or at the beach, where Marco would say (or rather type), Show me your boobs, Dang This has been a cataclysmic year for me. I broke up with my husband of nine years (together twelve), the love of my life very real life. I say broke up because I am still not ready to broach the divorce topic yet, nor have I taken off my pretty diamond ring, though I am indubitably headed in that direction.

He was a party boy and I was a party girl, and together we had one long languorous lovely party, until the party and all the hangers-on, the last pungent stragglers, ceased being fun. That was more than three years ago when I got clean and sober. The husband still foolhardily carries on, waiting for it to be fun again, grasping at the wilted wine-stained confetti, throwing it in the air, wearing his party hat, blowing on his party noisemaker. But even the stragglers have left.

That's it, you are no longer part of this team! I said several months ago. Remember, In sickness and in health? You don't want to join me in health, do you? Nope, he replied.

Earthquakes, volcano eruptions, hailstones, tempests of hot, plump salty tears.

I suppose I needed to forget. But I didn't want to go to a bar. I hadn't had a drink in years and wasn't about to have one. I needed a new life; I needed one fast.

I had glimpsed something in a magazine about Second Life, the user-created 3-D cyber-environment. It was only in passing that the article mentioned a soccer mom who had an alternate life in which she owned houses and cars and motorcycles and was a famous and wealthy stripper. (In her second life she didn't have any kids, and what a relief that must have been for her, to lock the door, to dim the lights!) Somehow, this little tidbit snagged on my brain.

I wasn't interested in becoming a stripper or a hooker for that matter but was intrigued by the idea of a virtual reality in which I could fully immerse myself. One of my all-time fave films is Cronenberg's eXistenZ. Jennifer Jason Leigh makes the game look so damned sexy and intoxicating. And presto, it existed. The founder, Philip Rosedale, of Linden Lab, the inventors of Second Life, made it appear all the more enticing. So one day, shortly after my separation, while weepingly trolling online, I found myself signing up.

Then I stumbled in-world, as they say.

You are born to Second Life, a free download, with a basic avatar chosen from a selection of beginner avs. You choose a first name, then select a surname from a list. Warning: This name will perpetually be tagged above your av's head, so pick it wisely. Don't go for Largopenis, for instance, even if it sounds sophisticatedly Latin. My SL name is Dange Veeper (visit me at my beach pad; IM me and I'll TP you that is, transport you to me if I deem you worthy).

The in-world veteran avs, who also have real humans behind them (don't forget), will immediately take you for a rube while you are still in your infant skin. Although many of them are friendly and helpful (right click or apple click an av, then click IM to begin chatting or just chat with whomever is around by typing in the local chat bar). The first order of business, however, is metamorphosing into something a bit more hip.

This is paradise. You can be whatever you want. You can do whatever you want. Within reason. You can own whatever you want, namely, if you are willing to pay in linden, the SL currency. Nothing is exorbitantly priced (and lots of free stuff: premade body shapes, skins, clothes, furniture, cars, etc.). You can have as many boyfriends or girlfriends as you want (consequences exist just as they do in real life, and, keep in mind, avs lie, as you will find yourself doing, say, about your age). You can marry if that's your cuppa (not mine any longer). You don't have to eat (liberating). You will forget to eat in RL (liberating), as you sit laptop atop your thighs. In fact, your real body will cease to exist, save for the occasional dash to the bathroom, but not before you IM a fellow frolicking av, BRB (be right back). Mostly, you will sit in the glow of your computer screen for days on end, RL vanishing into the surrounding darkness. Whew!

Interestingly enough, several men have asked me the same question: Can I be a large penis? The answer is, yes, you can, but it requires advanced skills and sticking to a Mature rather than PG sim. Some mature areas prohibit male avs from walking in public areas sporting an exposed cock. I have seen more than one newbie blundering about with a humongo Greek old comedy-sttyle phallus getting rapped on the knuckles. Of course, you can do whatever you want in your home or at a sex club or at some nude beaches. Looking like a Lolita is out of the question. Pedophiles in hideaways up in the sky or rarely frequented sims do exist. Anyone with a right mind who comes across such dreary places does his or her best to nip them in their prepubescent bud.

So it isn't exactly paradise, but I am getting ahead of myself.

You arrive. You look around. You see all the beautiful avs around you: fay fairies, strapping studs, nubile nekos, vain vampires, brassy busty babes. Ugly avs are a rarity.

And suddenly, it is like playing doll all over again. I had once enjoyed playing dolls, and now I needed a little fun in my vast wasteland of RL misery. I took all my av's clothes off, as you do as a child when you receive a new Barbie. Her undies sadly appeared to be glued on. I began attempting to tweak her. I managed to put one shoe on and sundry items, but then I couldn't take them off. I hobbled clumsily around in one shoe and my glued-on nether-garments as the other avs avoided me. What did I care? I had forgotten all about my husband.

Overwhelmed, I found a plethora of tutorials on youtube and the SL site. Over the course of a month, I had gleaned mad SkiLlz. After a full day's RL work, I plunged into SL for six to eight hours at a clip, going to sleep as the light spilled through my bedroom window. My eyes hurt, but I couldn't stop. At work, I boned up on SL I couldn't exactly go in-world with my boss peering over my shoulder. I was jonesing. During downtime, I avidly read SL bloggers and whatever magazine and newspaper articles I could click on. Check out this headline: Second Life Romance Costs First Life Marriage.

Larva, pupa, imago: Dange had turned into a green-eyed, milk-chocolate, leggy babe. She was smokin.

But what is there to do in SL besides play doll in a dollhouse by the beach while your RL body atrophies? you ask.

I did what any savvy Euro-New Yorker lady would do. I went to art galleries. So bedazzled was I by user content, I wanted to see what SL artists might have up their virtual sleeves. Then, in a youtube video I watched at work, a man, who had become an RL millionaire with his SL male stripper, said something like this in a TV interview: The first thing people gravitate to when they come into SL is the X-rated stuff. They look for sex.

Sex? Did someone say sex? I hadn't thought about that. But wasn't I the child who, playing dolls, couldn't wait to disrobe all of them, so I could feign one big orgiastic romp? My dolls had all been wanton slatternly sluts Teddy included. Teddy didn't care who he fucked, be it Barbie or Raggedy Anne. He was a horn dog. What a naive and tame adult I had become. Sex? Where was it? How did you do it?

I went in-world and typed sex into the search menu. A gazillion hits popped up: FREE SEX, ORGY ROOM, WECOME NEWBIES, SEX CLUB, SEX, SEX, SEX!!!

My first SL BF was Marco, an Italian who lived in Canada in RL, also new to SL. I met him at a sex club. He was sitting on a big comfy cushion, jacking off his giant schlong. I hopped on. Other avs walked aimlessly about in various states of undress. Some were already engaging in sexual congress, squeezed in a shower or bathroom stall, plastered behind a glory hole, or lying among strewn pillows. Some came to observe Marco and Dange, as we fervently switched positions, moving from poseball to poseball (a little orb, often feminine pink or masculine blue, you click on to animate your avatar).

Marco and I began meeting in the evenings, sometimes at a sex club, sometimes in a Japanese garden or at the beach, where Marco would say (or rather type), Show me your boobs, Dange It was pixel lust. We couldn't get enough of each other. Marco didn't ask Dange too many questions about who the person behind her was or what she did in RL. I didn't want to talk about any of it. I didn't want to think about my failed marriage, the husband I still loved who was killing himself in slow increments. I didn't want to reveal my real age. Marco didn't want to talk about who he was, either. Fine by me. I was content being thirty-something Dange not Lol, lugging around her waterlogged luggage. I am not even Lol. That's a nom de plume, filched from a Marguerite Duras novel.

Marco was a slow typist. Then the guy pulling Marco's strings broke his arm in a skiing accident, which made him desirable, since I have a thing for fellow skiers. But this made Marco type even slower. You type too fast, Dange, he wrote, which took forever. So I phased Marco out, because I had met a fast-typing American with some wit at another sex club. His name was Bam (well, sort of, I am changing names). To give you an inkling of our first encounter, it began like this:

Bam: come let me lick you
Dange: me?
Bam: yes
Dange: let me take my clothes off
Bam: ok
Bam: and if you would like to go to my apartment, we can do that also
Dange: is it fun there?
Bam: ah, sex bed and couch . . . we can start here
Dange: stuck on my bra
Bam: how do I look?
Dange: usually this isn't a problem [trying to remove bra]. hot. you have a tail
Bam: so do you [referring to my naked ass]. yes, i'm a neko
Dange: wass that? voila [Dange is fully naked]
Bam: it's an anime type of character
Dange: i have a panda head. want me to wear it?
Bam: heeheehee, sure if I can fuck you with it on

And so on and so forth. Thus began Dange's cybersexual awakening and Lol's oblivion, or that of the mysterious person with the catastrophic marriage behind both.

Dange had banged about a dozen avatars, give or take. She had had some weird SL experiences. She had lost money in a few cons. She fell from the sky when TPing to her first skybox apartment, which had vanished, because her landlord had been up to shady business. She had gotten fucked and dumped in a broken-into house by the avatar of a soldier on leave. I am so wound up, I need to either fuck or kill something, he had said to her at the raunchy club she had begun frequenting. And a man even fell in love with the person behind Dange me after he'd begged for a real-life photo. I sent him an older, younger, prettier version of myself, thinking of the opening paragraph of Duras's The Lover. A man says to the narrator,Everyone says you were beautiful when you were younger, but I want to tell you I think you are more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged. (Those lines have haunted me since my twenties.)

Then one day I, Lol Stein, or whoever I am, was standing in line at the supermarket with my soy milk, avocadoes, and organic field greens. I saw a creepy-looking man standing in another line with his Cheetos, Coca-Colas, and Hostess Ding Dongs. He oozed creepy. It was then that I had an epiphany: He could be one of the guys behind one of the avatars Dange has been fucking.

My whole SL world tumbled upside down.

Since then I spend most of my rare time in SL alone, just as I do in RL. Sometimes Dange gets sexed up and dressed up, then goes dancing at a lesbian-only club she's partial to a place called Lesbian Paradise. She dances and dances and dances. Other avs join her and dance in synch. They call her Miss Dange. She is a dignified citizen of SL.

Dange, Lol, and the person behind the pen name, the real-life me, we are all moving on.