Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (12 page)

Like Merle, we’re all guilty of assuming we know what’s best for other people—especially when whatever that is happens to present a lovely frame for our own moral and intellectual superiority. But unless your cellphoning makes me want to take a shrimp fork to my eardrums or causes me to swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid running you down, it really isn’t up to me to dictate whether you text your days away or spend them reading Good Books Approved by the Reviewing Staff of The New Yorker.

That said, I think we could all be a little more mindful of the dangers cell phones can pose when used less than mindfully. Per the research on how a one-sided conversation commandeers the brain, a phone call by the passenger in a car could cause the driver’s attention to the road to wane. Also, many who talk on the phone while driving weave down the street like drunks, and every few months, you hear a story about someone who thought she’d just send that one little text while speeding down the highway—and who ends up sending a family of four to the funeral home.

To keep from being one of these people, I have a personal rule (in addition to the California law that so many ignore) that I am never allowed to send a text or even look at my phone while driving.
¹⁷
I do sometimes talk with an earbud while behind the wheel, but never in dicey driving situations, and if a phone call gets dropped and the person I’m talking to doesn’t call me back, I don’t call them back until I’m stopped. In general, I drive in terror of hurting anyone and with the belief that everyone on the road is simultaneously talking on their phone, applying mascara, getting oral sex, and trying to swerve into my lane and kill me.

Perhaps because of this, I’ve avoided being physically injured by others, and my own episodes of distracted phoning (outside the car) have merely led to my dying of embarrassment. For example, one afternoon, I was in the middle of a productive writing jag at the coffeehouse, so I dashed off a quick text to my boyfriend:

Honey, we should wait until end of day to book my travel.

Or, rather, I thought I sent it to him.

The woman who edits me texted back:

ok, baby.

Oh, how embarrassing. I resolved to be more careful. And about an hour later, knowing that he was under a lot of pressure to pull research on the Apache Indians, I texted him a little pick-me-up:

Smooches from your squaw. PS honey, I know you’re doing great.

Again, my editor texted back:

just hanging here in my wigwam laughing my ass off

Thankfully, having texted from a public place, I’d been unable to take advantage of the mood-enhancing qualities of eight megapixels of bared cleavage.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
was nine when I got on AOL in late 1993, probably about five years before I began hearing this complaint: “The Internet alienates people.” In 1993, what alienated me was having too little money. I was a struggling writer in New York, the city that never sleeps (because it’s too busy dining out at pricey restaurants). My budget limited me to dinners that came in dented cans, but when a group of my gainfully employed friends was dining out, I’d sometimes drop by the restaurant after they’d finished their entrees. The hard part was that moment when the waitress would come over to ask what I was having. I’d make the face of a person thinking (or perhaps constipated) and say “Just a glass of water—for now” as if I couldn’t make up my mind which caviar or pricey glass of port to order.

Dreading that exchange, I began to bow out of these dinners altogether. Instead, I’d buy a big bottle of Diet Coke, crank up my dial-up modem, and drop in on an AOL chat room. A lot of these were home to some pretty inane chatter—LOL! ROFLMAO!—but if I found the right one, I’d get in on a fast-paced dinner conversation with no need to hand over my current life savings at the end.

One night, some chat room lout got pretty crass in attacking me. I can defend myself and did, but somebody else came to my defense, too—screen name “The Counte”—in a way that was both chivalrous and hilarious. The Counte was far more interesting than anyone else in the chat room. I instant messaged The Counte to thank him, and we kept talking, writing long e-mails every day and sometimes spending hours in the evening IM’ing each other, sharing ideas about science, human nature, politics and life, and tossing around raunchy humor.

Over about six months of this, we became close friends, telling each other stuff we told no one else. Yet, I had no idea who this person was and felt no need to find out. In fact, it seemed kind of amazing to have this deep friendship without our having each other’s dull, job application-y particulars. And no, this wasn’t one of those panting Internet affairs. Ours was an intellectual romance. Besides, with it being winter and my being intermittently penniless and renting a “bedroom” that was essentially a heavily trafficked hallway in a drafty loft, if he’d asked “What are you wearing?” my answer would have been “An old snowsuit I got at the Army-Navy surplus.”

One day, I informed The Counte that for a few weeks, I might not be on AOL so much because I had to go to Los Angeles for a freelance job. He said he lived in LA, and he wanted to meet me. He told me to call him and gave me his number. I dialed it, and God answered—or at least that’s how it sounded when he said his slow, deep, raspy “Hello?” We talked for a long time, and before we hung up, we decided to tell each other our names. It was only then I learned that my friend was Marlon Brando.

Before I flew back to New York, he invited me up to his place on Mulholland, and we hung out for an afternoon. After I moved to Los Angeles, we hung out a lot. He was the first person to believe in me as a writer and thinker and would send me these long, poetic, supportive e-mails when I felt disappointed and lost. He ended up becoming pretty much a second dad to me, as well as a human mountain range to my three-pound Yorkie, Lucy, who liked to prance back and forth across his shoulders and then sit licking the back of his neck when he and I were seated on his living-room couch.

The Marlon I hung out with was the Marlon few people got to know: the inventor who loved literature, poetry, science, logic, and sleight-of-hand magic tricks. He’d call me at 3 a.m. to tell me something fascinating he’d just read about, say, Madame Ching, the Chinese pirate. And most fun of all, there was Marlon my co-prankster. We were like two adult eight-year-olds. I’d come over, and he’d make prank calls in various voices and identities, including that of a British lady’s maid, and I’d try to laugh out of my eyes instead of out loud so I wouldn’t blow his cover.

Of course, we never would have become friends in “real life.” Famous people and regular people generally can’t become friends, because the famous are like human wild game to many or most regular people. Even regular people who don’t have userish motives can end up acting all weird around famous people, deferring to their fame. And, as I came to learn, even some movie stars treat other movie stars—bigger movie stars—like fame objects. In Marlon’s case, it seemed that some other stars thought that if only they could get close to him, some of whatever he had might rub off on them. This made them act creepy around him, which made Marlon itchy and late to some dinner parties (later than he would have been just by being Marlon) so he didn’t have to spend so many hours being treated like a thing.

Once, Marlon took me to one of these soirees as a sort of psychic bodyguard, knowing that at least two of those in attendance (all six of whom were movie stars) would be on him like vultures on a downed wildebeest. We were already late to dinner when he got to my dumpy Venice Beach apartment in the back of a hot-pink duplex shack. He wanted to be even later, so he parked his white Lexus in my spot, and we sat on my couch for a half-hour coming up with elaborate excuses for our delay. Storywise, he decided to go for plausibility over flash, settling on the rather dull tale of his supposedly coming to the aid of a stranded motorist on Pacific Coast Highway. When I complained that this story was boring, he said he’d jazz it up by weaving in the big gauze bandage on his shin from some minor injury he’d gotten at home.

I found this funny because it made no sense in the context. How would he have gotten this injury, by borrowing the person’s tire iron and cracking himself in the shin? And at what medical facility would he have gotten this bandaged between wherever we supposedly stopped on Pacific Coast Highway and the dinner-hosting star’s Malibu home?

I declined to let him introduce me as Dolores del Schwartz, his Jewishizing of Dolores del Rio, a Mexican Hollywood star from the 1920s and 30s he’d probably had the hots for. I instead went as myself, and as I predicted, the only thing the snotty, fawning famous people were less interested in than the commoner taking whole molecules of Marlon’s attention away from them was that commoner’s name.

Seeing how Marlon was treated, even by people who, famewise, were close to being his peers, made me understand the truth in the cliché “It’s lonely at the top.” So many “regular” people long to become famous, because out there in ordinary citizen-land, they see only the upsides. But when you’re really, really famous—one of the most famous movie stars of the twentieth century—it seems that one of life’s joys is finding that you’re just “some guy” some girl can’t stop writing to on the Internet.

THE MISSING MANUAL

For most of us, the Internet was like a shiny thing that dropped out of the sky. The phone was like that at first, too. But, in 1878, ten months after the first telephone exchange came into existence in New Haven, Connecticut, the phone company put out the first phone book, which included directions on how to use the thingamajig. Ammon Shea writes in his history of the telephone directory,
The Phone Book
, that “there were admonitions to restrict calls to three minutes at a time and to not use the telephone more than twice in an hour without first getting permission from the central office.” The book also advised starting a call with a “firm and cheery” hello (written “Hulloa”)—ignoring Alexander Graham Bell’s insistence that callers open with “Ahoy!”

It might seem a little late now for Internet guidelines. We’ve all managed to find our way to Google, and most of us have figured out that Dr. Mubutunde in Nigeria really isn’t going to give us a million dollars if we’ll just send him our bank account login and password. But because the Internet puts so much power right at our fingertips and it’s so much fun to use, we underestimate the tendency for even otherwise responsible adults with serious jobs to devolve into mouth-breathing chimps who’ve just been handed the button for an info-nuke. As Twitter-lovin’ disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner discovered, disseminating boner shots far and wide is as easy as spreading your legs and clicking your cameraphone.

As in Weiner’s case, people who fall back on what’s
technically
possible as the standard for their behavior typically give the most thought to how to act online
after
they get in trouble—after they lose their job or a friend or just go medieval on somebody on Facebook in a way they’re later ashamed of. To avoid disaster, you need to come up with personal policies
in advance
for how you’ll fly online, covering three essential areas:

• Your online identity.

• Privacy: yours and everybody else’s.

• How to treat other people online and what to do when they treat you badly.

CRAFTING YOUR ONLINE IDENTITY

You’re only anonymous on the Internet because nobody’s tried very hard to figure out who you are.

Exactly how public do you want to be? Answering that question takes deciding how closely your online identity should follow your actual identity. I’m one of those open-book types. I’ll keep your secrets, but I have a harder time keeping my own. Also, I find that people are more interested in reading what I write about my life if I reveal the idiotic, humiliating, and hypocritical things I’ve done rather than all the ways I’m smart and together. So it literally pays for me to let it all hang out, or at least a whole lot of it.

Figure out parameters for how much of yourself you want to reveal online in comments, photos, and videos—from your name and occupation to your true politics to your naked parts. Be proactive about articulating these parameters to others in your life so, for example, friends will know that they’ll need to ask your permission before tagging you in Facebook photos or perhaps even posting photos that include you. Remember, every picture tells a story, and your name in a caption on somebody’s Facebook photo makes that photo appear on your Facebook page
¹⁸
and become visible to your Facebook friends. When it does, it’s best that the story it tells (
personal best for slamming tequila shots!
) doesn’t lay waste to the story you told your boss about tending to your sick auntie instead of staying late to tend to his spreadsheets.

Having a clear sense of your boundaries for exposure will also give you a better chance of keeping hold of them should you find yourself in something of a stupor. Sure, when you’ve had a few and somebody videotapes you naked and frisky, you can probably sue or maybe even have them prosecuted, but that won’t close the barn door after the sex tape of you and Mr. Ed has gone viral on YouPorn.

When considering how much of the real you to share online, err on the side of assuming that whatever you or other people post or e-mail will be speedily copied, pasted, and forwarded to anyone with an Internet connection, because that sometimes happens even when you’re sure you’ve taken stringent precautions. For example, Facebook “privacy” settings are wildly complicated and ever-changing and no guarantee that your private life will be kept private. In 2012, Geoffrey A. Fowler wrote in
The Wall Street Journal
about Bobbi Duncan, a twenty-two-year-old woman from a fundamentalist family “who desperately wanted her father not to know she is a lesbian.” Duncan, a student at the University of Texas, had adjusted her Facebook privacy settings to hide any hint of her sexuality from her father after she helped him sign up for Facebook. But one of Duncan’s extracurricular activities was singing in a college choir. When its president added Duncan to the choir’s Facebook group, it triggered Facebook to notify Duncan’s nearly 200 Facebook friends, including her dad, that she was part of the unambiguously named “Queer Chorus.” “That night,” wrote Fowler, “Ms. Duncan’s father left vitriolic messages on her phone, demanding she renounce same-sex relationships … and threatening to sever family ties.”