True Things

On being catfished

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As a junior in college, I let myself be catfished by a man named Tradd. He lived on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. We met on Scruff. He was toned, bronzed, wore slutty stringer tanks, and was in his late twenties. As a 21-year-old college student, this was “daddy” material. He moonlighted, he told me, as a photographer for GQ. He told me he had Rihanna’s number. They texted intermittently. I was impressed by the concept of a swamp daddy who knew Rihanna, and I admired the narrative restraint in casting her not as a close friend, but as a casual professional acquaintance.

I gave him my number.

I was bored. I had a raging libido and wasn’t attracted to anyone within 100 miles of Norman, Oklahoma. I was surviving off horny conversations with Brazilians using Scruff’s “Venture” feature. I learned a not insignificant amount of Portuguese. I was available, in other words, to be seduced. Tradd and I talked, both over text and on the phone, for months. He was definitely southern. His voice was all the honeyed clichés. Viscous. Sweet.

Why am I thinking of him? I must be bored again. I can’t speak to Brazilians over Scruff anymore. Last week, Scruff permanently banned me for impersonation. I haven’t bothered to correct them because they want a selfie and my neurosis won’t allow it. I haven’t shared a photo of myself in well over a year. So it’s a Mexican standoff. No one uses Scruff these days anyway. Plus, they’re right. I’m not real.

Back in the Tradd days, I knew one other person who lived on Hilton Head Island. Casey Wagoner AKA @WagCasey was as aspirational a figure as any on 2012 gay Twitter: A hot, southern liberal who wore backwards hats and basketball shorts with a folksy, no-nonsense approach to his progressivism. He hunted, he fished, but you best believe he voted for Obama. Did I mention hot? Working-class muscles, boy-band pretty in the face. I mean, come on.

His every thirst trap initiated a feeding frenzy. These pics were calibrated for maximum libidinal impact on the male homosexual mind. Basketball shorts, backwards cap, silver chain (one imagines the words “white boi”), lying back on a couch, hands behind his head, biceps slightly flexed, the “yeah, I’d let you play with it, bro” pose. Raw, bleeding bait for fagtwt. I don’t know why he followed me. He didn’t follow many people. I had no platform. I’m sure it was for some reason that would have disappointed me, like “I think you’re smart.” I was excited to see he’d followed me because I was sexually attracted to him.

We bantered a bit online. Our politics were mostly in step, though unlike him I was nowhere near cynical yet. Like most college-aged progressives, I was an apocalypticist who believed I’d never die. The world was ending with my generation. We would light the fuse. We would usher in the next and the new. I burned hot. I argued. I spit. I fought. I was a bullet. Casey, on the other hand, was jaded. “Oh, you young folks kill me.”

I don’t know how or why we started texting. I remember I was in Austin at the time, spending the summer interning for a film festival and canvassing for Lloyd Doggett for extra cash. I’d gone on a date with some guy who’d roped me into the canvassing gig. I looked up Doggett’s politics after I agreed to it. The guy at HQ reprimanded me for wearing a tank top. “Put a shirt on.” I was supposed to knock on people’s doors, but I was shy. I often left the pamphlet balanced on the doorknob. It’s unclear what kind of revolution I was hoping to have. Hopefully one that offered remote positions. I was relieved when Doggett won anyway, in spite of my unintentional sabotage.

I very clearly recall one pleasant, sweaty afternoon in Austin. The AC in the house I was staying in sometimes failed. I’d wear a tank top and underwear and unlike the stiff at Doggett HQ, my roommate, Kelsey, a devastatingly chic grad student, never minded. I was preparing a salmon filet for dinner when I checked my phone and found a text from Casey waiting for me. I don’t remember what it said. I only remember seeing his name on the screen, and how I felt.

It’s easy to judge people who get catfished. I don’t even like the term. Catfish aren’t deceptive creatures. They like to be hidden. They abscond into dark crevices. They feed at the bottom of murky water. It’s us who insist on dredging them up and eating them. I was hungry. I sort of knew what I was doing. I knew, and I ignored the knowing. I remember checking Twitter after getting his text and seeing that he’d posted another thirst trap that was garnering the typical replies from horny strangers snapping at the air for a piece of him. I felt chosen.

My heart broke in Austin. It happens. I fell hard, hard, hard for this cowboy guy from Houston. He came to me through OKCupid. He had one blurry profile photo and showed up to my place looking like the cover of a horny romance novel set in the Wild West. That’s the other thing about the internet. Sometimes a sexy cowboy steps out of it. No wonder we keep tapping, swiping, playing.

I was the first man he’d ever been with, he told me. One of the happiest mornings of my life: the morning we woke up together, still on our first date. He sleepily kissed me, wrapped his arms around me, muttered love-drunk in my ear, “What are you doing to me?” It didn’t work out.

When I got back to Oklahoma, feeling as though I’d never feel that way for another man again (which, so far, true), I leaned on Casey. I cried over the phone to him. I told him with the certainty of the very young that it was over. That was my guy, Casey, and he’s gone, and it’s over for me. “Oh, you hush,” I can still hear Casey say. “You’ve got your whole damn life ahead of you.”

You might think it sadistic, what Casey did next, knowing that I’d confided in him, cried to him, trusted him. I suppose the possibility of his sadism only appears to me now. I don’t feel angry or sad. I mostly feel he should have picked a different location to drop Tradd in. Really, Casey? Hilton Head Island twice? Sloppy, sloppy. And what’s with the name “Tradd?” I would have gone with Wade, Nash, or Hunter. I would have been from the outskirts of Charleston, dropped the GQ angle, and focused on the humid bucolia of it all. But maybe that’s the sort of creativity that drew Casey to me.

When Tradd messaged me on Scruff, I did wonder if this was Casey. I texted him anyway. Why? Was my boredom that severe? What was I thinking? When we talked on the phone, I heard a voice that, while there were some obvious differences, very easily could have been Casey. Eventually, I asked Casey if he knew a Tradd. I sent him pictures. I said, “isn’t this odd?”

“Dude, super weird,” he said. “I’m gonna figure this shit out for you.”

He told me he would start asking around. Told me that if Tradd dropped any more hints as to his real identity or his location to please send them directly to him. He’d be my private detective. He even sussed out a specific building in one of Tradd’s pics and said “I know exactly where that is.”

Casey’s Twitter account was suspended shortly after that. I vaguely recall nudging that along. I got bored.

When @WagCasey was suspended, it unleashed a glut of “stories.” People said they felt taken advantage of, used, lied to. I’m sure I participated somehow. I, who was never one to miss out on a Twitter spectacle. I don’t know what I said. I’m only certain it didn’t reflect the truth of what I actually felt. How could it? The internet struggles with true things.

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I don’t meet people off Scruff. I’ve historically used it just to chat. There’s no real body on the other end of my Scruff conversations, no possibility of flesh. In the mind of whoever I’m talking to, I’m a vague collection of data points and images hornily constellated into the shape of a man. “Preñame, papi,” read the last message I received. “Impregnate me.” Quite impossible. A fitting sign-off.

My photos, though Scruff disagrees, are of me. Lightly edited, of course. My best angles. My mental body drama has inflamed, such that I don’t know how to take new photos. I know myself better now, and maybe I’m worse for it. I can see why, in my youth, I was so drawn to the internet. I get to be a ghost.

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I remember one other night, talking on the phone with Casey. This was after I’d decided not to kill myself after all, after losing the cowboy, though there was never a real chance of me doing so. This was before Tradd, and before @WagCasey got suspended. The halcyon era of our relationship. Casey made the rare move of being vulnerable with me. “My birthday is tomorrow,” he said. “I can’t help but feel like it’s all over for me. It’s too late.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, though indeed he was old to me. I echoed his advice from when I called him crying over the cowboy. “You’re still so young.”

“Heh.” He paused. He took a while before speaking again. I remember the words he said next. I’ve kept them, because they’re true. I remember the breaths he took. Deep, shuddering breaths. “I’ll be thirty soon,” he said. “Then I’ll be forty. Then, before I know it, I’ll be old.”

I’ve come to recognize this sort of statement. It’s the kind older people sometimes deploy out of spite for younger people who don’t know better yet. These statements are indulgent, self-pitying, slightly sadistic, and often true. It was obvious to me then that this was an older man speaking from his experience. I turn 35 next week. It scares me. Sometimes, I wake up thinking about my age, thinking about how it’s too late. Too late to fall in love again. Too late to turn it all around.

It’s mopey. It’s pathetic. But it feels true. I don’t think I’m old. What I think is that I’m old enough to know something about how time works, something I didn’t know, couldn’t know, back then. I know now that one moment you’re having a breathy conversation with a stranger from the internet, lying in bed in your campus apartment, reckless and unkillable, throwing yourself into anything and everything, and the next, in the span of a sigh, you’re here.

I don’t really wonder who Tradd and Casey really were. I don’t care. The fact is, he could have really been that toned stud reclining on a couch. We wouldn’t have met anyway. I’m glad he was caught, and that his account was suspended. Is it strange to say, though, that today I feel a bizarre kinship with him? Two voices, afraid of time?

“Before I know it, I’ll be old.”

Believe me or don’t. It’s one of the truest things I’ve ever been told by a stranger on the internet.