Sometime in 1994, maybe early 1995, I got hooked up on AOL and entered the 1990s. The online environment was a wonderland, an amusement park, Las Vegas. Before long I discovered the chat rooms--the public ones, I mean. And, of course, before long again I discovered the private, member-created chat rooms. I remember one night--the night--when I sat at my desk downstairs in the house where we were living and came across a room that changed my life--"wrestling m4m." I sat and looked at it for a long time, thinking about it and wondering what went on in there. Finally a shaky finger clicked the mouse button that would take me into the room. Like often happened in those days, a message popped up to tell me that the room was full. Despite my initial hesitation, I wanted in badly now. Eventually I got lucky, and I was in, the conversation and the comings and goings in the room scrolling up the screen.

I won't go into all that happened, all that was to be discovered, in that room. Suffice to say that I sat there as in a dream and discovered over and over again what I'd discovered in that library not long before: I wasn't the only wrestling-obsessed man in the world. In fact, lots of us were out there in cyberspace. Many were gay; many claimed to be bi or straight. And like the man--young or old--who cut the head scissors pictures out of the book in the library, lots of us were into that hold. Or other basic good ones like the bear hug and the headlock.

I spent a lot of time on AOL, one month running up a bill of over $225 when we couldn't afford such a thing. But it paid off, and I developed friendships. I remember the first was a fellow of Memphis. We talked a lot, and as we did I could feel a thrill running up the insides of my thighs, and excited weakness that seemed trying to pull my thighs together around the Memphis man's head. Sometime after that I ran across "Luke," and we were lots and lots alike. We chatted long and often and eventually did lots of cyberwrestling. I wrote some stories based on these matches--"Jacobs vs. Weaver." These went out on the Internet and were popular for a while. Anyway, Luke would be the bridge between online wrestling and real wrestling. Although he wasn't the first I wrestled, we got together as soon as we could and ultimately wrestled twice. And we might again one of these days.

All this online exploration led up to my first man-to-man contact with another wrestler at New Year's, 1996. . . .