i thought i was talking to michael jackson in aol chat but HEE-HEE wasn't real.
catfished before the term existed.
i loved me some michael jackson.
over 15 years since his death, i often lament the deep regret i feel for not being able to experience michael jackson live in concert. as an elder millennial, i was too young to be amongst the screaming and fainting fans at his peak, and the one tour i likely had a chance at going (the HIStory tour)… we couldn’t really afford. and we all know what happened with “This Is It.” sigh.
i remember obsessively watching “Moonwalker” and “HIStory” with my younger cousins, all of us learning all of the choreography to his music videso—choreo that i still mostly remember to this day. i remember digesting every tidbit i can, from literature (printed and digital alike) to biopics (shout-out to the forever-quotable, The Jacksons: An American Dream).
all of which has been since been dipped in a tainted bucket of complicated mess since the child abuse allegations. it doesn’t erase the years of fandom i had, and my nostalgia still guides me as i belt out his tunes in the shower, but i have to admit it’s not the same. i can’t NOT think of it.
speaking of which…
one core memory i have involves AOL chat/AIM. smells like millennial spirit. sounds like the cringey, mechanical dial-up chimes in hopes of connecting to the magical world of the wide web.
it was a pretty big fucking deal when my mama bought a computer for the crib. we even had a small nook in our 100-year+ home we dubbed the “computer room.” this was where i could huddle away in solitude while i tapped away at the keyboard, surrounded by the pop band wall posters that fueled my teenage lust (heyyy, BSB!).
along with playing cd-rom games (that one is for another post), i loved utilizing AOL chat and AIM. it would suck hours of my day—a prelude to the elevated time-suck known as smartphones, perhaps? i would seek out chatroom topics i loved and yap, yap, yap about everything and nothing. i laughed, flirted, snarked, trolled, and more. i would cry out in rage when the phone rang, disrupting my aol chat party.
so one time, i ended up in a michael jackson fandom chatroom. i started developing a rapport with one of the members of the chat who claimed to work closely with michael. then i received an AIM message… it was this “insider”—claiming to be sitting right next to michael and asked if i wanted to talk to him. i SCREAMED.
“michael” started thanking me for being a fan and getting to know me, what my favorite song is, etc. etc. etc. i felt so… special.
looking back at my naive teen self, it reminds me of this well-known meme (i’m busting out laughing while uploading this pic btw):
like… girl????? really????
this online “relationship” lasted a few days or so. i don’t even remember how it ended—it wasn’t in this grandstanding way. no pomp and circumstance. i just stopped talking to “michael.” did i get bored? did i become suspicious? i really don’t even remember. i just remember one day i was talking to “michael” and a latter day… i wasn’t.
i think about watching the 2010 documentary film Catfish (which eventually became a pop culture phenomenon tv series) a few years after it debuted, enraptured by just how deep the rabbit hole could go in the world of online chatting. i thought of my own chatroom experience and—with a little bit of dread in my gut—wondered, wow, “what if” i went that far with my thrillermaker AIM fun… and at that young of an age?! sure, it could’ve been just another teen fucking with me, but it also could’ve been much darker, much deeper. you know where i’m going with this. i’m just glad it stayed online.
i’m glad it’s a story i can laugh at in hindsight. HEE HEE.
tell me, have you ever gotten catfished before? how far did it go before you stopped it? and to make you feel OLD, what is your experience with AOL/AIM, chatrooms, etc.?