This isn't a book review but it's kind of about a book...
Since the shut-down, my boyfriend has been watching a lot of Law and Order in the background while he's been working from home. When school ended I started joining him and we laugh together about some of the weird dialogue. They couldn't just say two people were having an affair; they were "sweating up the sheets." We have fun spotting character actors and I Google where we might know them from. It helps that WE TV is showing nothing but Law and Order, all day every day. We joke that I have to leave the house on the hour to go for a hike or to go to the store because if not I'll get sucked into another ripped-from-the-headlines plot.
Yesterday, Matt texted me and said, "Remind me to tell you about the most ridiculous Law and Order plot yet when I get home." Look, as someone who likes to write and still has aspirations to publish a novel, I know it's not nice to pick on other people's writing. I've also just taken two levels of a sitcom pilot writing class, and this stuff is way harder than it looks. So if the plots of Law and Order episodes are little far-fetched it's fine. I still couldn't wait to hear about it.
Matt had just watched an episode called Faith about a publisher who was murdered because he caught onto the fact that the teenage author with ALS whose memoir he was publishing might not have been real. I said, "Oh my God, Matt. This isn't crazy. I knew this person! This is a real story!"
So I'm going to take you all back to 1995. We were early adopters of the Internet in our house, at least among people I knew. We were faithful AOL users. I liked to hang out in the teen rooms and I remember specifically spending time in chat rooms and message boards for teenagers who liked to write. I started chatting with a guy whose screen name was TONE123 (at the time I was SybilVane, named after a character in The Picture of Dorian Gray.) TONE123 told me that his name was Tony and that he was my age (about 16) and he was a published author. For real, a kid my age had published a book. I was fascinated. He'd written an entire book, found himself an agent, and had the thing published. It was a book I could go to Waldenbooks and buy. It was called A Rock and a Hard Place, and I did indeed go to Waldenbooks and buy it. It was a harrowing memoir of the child abuse he suffered at the hands of his biological parents. The story was that his parents used to physically and sexually abuse him and allow their friends to do it too; in fact, that's why he was also suffering from AIDS. It was horrifying. It was the saddest thing I'd ever read. And it was all a true story. I knew this guy. His full name was Anthony Godby Johnson, and we were IM friends.
We used to email each other stories back and forth and give each other feedback. I chatted on the phone with him once. He supposedly lived in New York City and I was in northern NJ. Once, some TV developer he knew was putting together a focus group of teenagers and my dad drove me and my sister into NY to learn more about the variety show they were brainstorming. Tony was friends with Oprah, Mr. Rogers, Keith Olbermann, and Armistead Maupin. And me, apparently. And I'm sure lots of others. This was before the days of Skype and Facetime. There was no video chatting. There was email and there was the phone, and catfishing was easy.
Somewhere around when went to college, we lost touch. My dorm wasn't outfitted with the ability to connect to AOL. I could use email from campus but not IMs or anything. We did email once in a while but his responses were far apart and finally we just... I guess lost touch.
I hadn't thought about Tony in a long time, but several years later my dad asked my sisters and me at Christmas to go through some boxes of things from our house in NJ and take whatever we wanted; the rest was getting tossed or donated. In my pile of books was A Rock and a Hard Place, all highlighted and underlined. By then, Google was a thing and I was wondering what was going on with Tony. Was he even still alive? Had he written anything else? Google turned up a bunch of links instead about the fact that there never was an Anthony Godby Johnson. I found this article by Tad Friend in The New Yorker. I also learned about Armistead Maupin's novel The Night Listener, which was made into a movie by the same name.
There's something about finding out that something you just took to be true having been a total fabrication. It kind of shifts the ground under your feet for a second. Tony was a completely made-up person, fabricated by a woman named Vicki Fraginals, who claimed to be his adoptive mother. Nobody had ever met him face-to-face. He wasn't allowed to meet anyone because he was soooo sick, but Vicki had fooled a literary agent and a publisher enough to get his memoir published and distributed. That added legitimacy to it, so none of the celebrities (at least at first) questioned anything. Internet and publishing hoaxes now are much more common, from James Frey's A Million Little Pieces to Catfish.
I went down a little rabbit hole last night, watching a youtube video of Keith Olbermann talking to Armistead Maupin about the fact that they'd both been tricked by Vicki. Keith is angry. Armistead seems to have dealt with it.
I think it's time I read and watch The Night Listener. I was only a small blip on Vicki's radar, I'm sure. I wasn't rich or famous. I had nothing to offer her as far as fame or publicity. It's kind of creepy that she hung out pretending to be him in AOL chat rooms. She was clearly a pretty disturbed person. There is going to be a short film released soon called Tony Fraginals made about Tony Johnson by another teenage friend of his. I couldn't resist sending him an email about Tony. I haven't heard back yet but I can't wait to watch the film.
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