Nerd love

Sit back, kids. Grandma O’Kistic is going to tell you a tale about a time when AOL was serious business, people hated cats and predators were what Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Glover tried to catch.

It was 1994.

Your dad tried his best to hide the floppy disk he’d bought of Dana Plato giving a double blowjob, but if 2 girls were eating a substance from 1 cup, it was almost certainly not feces.

Modems zipped along at 9600 bps. You paid by the hour to dial into your online service, and you liked it – until someone picked up the phone and interrupted your 3-day odyssey of downloading Doom.

There was no 3G, no Angry Birds, no Google, not even Friendster, and all you had to entertain yourself in the bathroom was a dog-eared copy of “Reader’s Digest.”

Few of your friends had PCs. The ones who did primarily used it as a replacement for their parents’ ancient typewriter. Meeting people online was not normal, and the people you met online were not normal. You had to be dedicated to embrace the then-burgeoning online world.

My parents went through several online services – Compuserve , Delphi and GEnie – before settling on Prodigy. Or * P * as the cool kids referred to it.

As more people discovered the Internet and online services grew in popularity, Prodigy instituted a policy of charging for emails. Can you imagine paying US0.25 PER EMAIL after exceeding your allotted free emails? These were dark times.

My online friends and I didn’t care for that, so we used our genius 2600-reading brains to deduce Guns N Roses fans were fond of using “garden” as a password and added ourselves to their accounts.

“Hackers” still hadn’t been released, and the general public was mostly oblivious to the threat posed by dangerously smart, spiky-haired 1337 kids who could fuck your technology up while riding skateboards.

So, my parents weren’t concerned that they never paid for my Prodigy usage nor did they understand why there never seemed to be any long-distance charges for calling the boy I’d met from New York City on the teen discussion message board.

We were 15.

Our parents didn’t mind us chatting online or talking on the phone, which we did for hours at a time thanks to a phone-phreaking acquaintance, and they didn’t object to us meeting in person. They just didn’t want to put much effort into making it happen.

I realized if I was ever going to hang out with the boy of my angsty dreams, I’d have to do it on my own.

After yet another explosive fight with my parents, I told them I was going to the deli down the street to grab a sub, but instead, I called a taxi from a payphone. Before I left, I told my uncle where I was going and swore him to secrecy.

The taxi took me to the Trenton train station, which began my long trek to the wilderness of Staten Island—a place so backwards that it wasn’t totally wired for cable TV until the early 1990s.

From Trenton to Hoboken to the World Trade Center to the Whitehall ferry terminal to the Staten Island ferry terminal, where the boy was waiting for me in the arrivals hall decked out in his finest clothes of a Skinny Puppy T-shirt and Docs.

We took a bus to the movie theater to see John Waters’ “Serial Mom.” The theater was almost empty because, well, it was Staten Island, the borough where culture and dreams go to die.

After the movie, we sat and talked at the bus stop, each secretly hoping the other would make a move. But we were introverted and awkward and just being in the presence of another human being was overwhelming enough.

A half-hour later, the bus arrived and our date came to an end.

At the ferry terminal, it dawned on me that I now had to make the reverse trip during the early-morning hours in a NYC that still hadn’t been Giulianified and Disneyfied, and the only other people around me at that hour were already home.

So when I saw the boy walk into the waiting area 10 minutes later, I was relieved. And then I saw his dad behind him. His angry garbageman father who needed to be up at 4 a.m.

Hoping he hadn’t gotten a good look at me yet, I took out my nose ring and hurriedly shoved it into my pack of cigarettes. Because it would have been the facial piercing and not the multi-colored hair and Crass T-shirt that would have freaked him out.

His dad glared at me. “Come with us.” The fear of having been busted was not as great as the fear of being a 15-year-old Jersey girl alone in NYC at midnight.

I climbed into the Isuzu Trooper for an awkward 20-minute ride back to their house. I took my nose ring out of the cigarette pack and played with it. No one said anything.

At their house, I met the rest of the family. His mom looked horrified, and his sister stood by silently, mostly due to her archaic orthodontic headgear making it difficult for her to speak.

Not long after, the doorbell rang. Two men who looked straight out of central casting for “Homicide: Life on the Streets” walked into the kitchen. They introduced themselves as NYPD detectives.

During my absence, my panicked parents had worn down my uncle and discovered where I had gone. My father, being a cop himself, figured the NYPD would be on his side and send out every squad car to look for me.

He asked my future mother-in-law to call her local precinct and explain the situation to them. The sergeant on duty told her: “Lady, they’re on a date. If they’re not back by tomorrow, call us then.”

My father learned the harsh lesson that fraternity is often limited by state lines, but he managed to persuade the NYPD to give a tiny shit about his missing daughter and to arrange for an escort home.

The detectives directed me to their unmarked car, and I slipped into the backseat, a metal grate separating us. As we drove toward New Jersey, Munch and Bayliss tried to engage me in conversation.

Intrigued by this growing technology that gave kids new tools to get themselves killed, they asked: “What the fuck were you thinking? He could have been an axe murderer!”

But he wasn’t, I responded.

”But he could have been,” they argued.

We went a few more rounds.

They drove me as far as the New Jersey side of the Goethals Bridge, where state troopers picked me up. They brought me to their station and gave me a turkey sandwich and coffee. I didn’t like coffee at the time, but that little Styrofoam cup had the delicious flavor of freedom and fuck-you-Mom-and-Dad.

At home, my mom chain-smoked her Salems but said nothing as my dad raged and threatened to have me sent to juvenile detention. I laughed. They hid the modem and sent me to my room to think about what I’d done.

And what I’d done was awesome. Not many first dates start with a John Waters movie and end with a police escort but they’re the kind of the first dates that lead to a 17-year relationship that takes you all the way to Hong Kong.