She jacked in for the third time this evening, hearing her cable modem screaming as it made the connection. Lori had kept the sound as a reminder of her first days on the 'Net. Ironically, in those days the sound of her modem and "you've got mail" were about the only things her computer spit back at her. Now, well, now everything came back. Especially buzz, buzz, snip, snip.
Sounds, smells and textures were as important as the flat pictures on the wall screen in front of her. In recent years, video had far eclipsed words, sounds and other experiences in the minds of the masses.
But not to Lori. Some of her favorite toys made such stirring sounds. A low, insistent hum of one kind of hair clippers. The high-pitched blender effect of another. She chuckled. Yes, this cruise on the 'Net she'd hear that blender when she met Sandy. But her joy faded as her attention returned to the worries of the last few days and to the message she had to send soon.
What was she going to do about Paul?
In all her years, she had somehow managed to avoid this dilemma. Maybe she had just been lucky. Or maybe she had been good at keeping her cyber friendships at arm's length, ephemeral enough to allow for a convincing charade, but deep enough not to get her busted by the reality police.
In a way, her adventures into cyberspace had been a lucky lark, just perfect. She wasn't a techie, never had been. She had signed on to the now-bankrupt America Online service more than a decade ago, hearing there were some interesting images, thinking perhaps she might find some inspiration for the latest piece of corporate sculpture she'd been commissioned to create. The money was good, but she hadn't yet reconciled with artistic vs. financial realities. So her bank account was filled, her artistic soul empty. She hadn't been able to work up something even in clay.
Searching the image library, staring at fuzzy jpegs on her 12-inch monitor she'd come across a startling series of women. They wore buzz cuts or crew cuts or no hair at all. She couldn't stop going through them, one after the other. Again and again.
She discovered a fascination lurking in the depths of her psyche. Something she'd never considered. Some people found high heels and garters erotic. Some people preferred hairy chests or big breasts, brown eyes or blue eyes, round Rubenesque figures or Twiggy matchsticks. Her sexual tastes were catholic, a little of this, a pinch of that. But online she found a deepening fascination -- passion -- for the idea of haircuts, especially short haircuts. She found herself drawn to the look on others, she found herself reaching out to touch the soft brush of hair cut close on the nape and around the ears. She added a bare or almost-bare nape and ears to the usual list of erotic suspects. Ah, the nape, an area of ticklish, electric pleasure too often ignored in careening world where the soft caress, the slow tease had become a lost art.
She began to wonder about this erotic pull. While the origins of the attraction had probably buried itself in her puberty, she needed to explore it. Why? What was the intellectual appeal? Certainly the sharing, an act of care requiring two. So did the idea of power transfer, the whiff of domination and submission, though she wondered just who was the master in a haircut scenario. Then there was the transformation, the new her that emerged each time. And, of course, the ritualistic aspects, the ceremony that's a given in many fetishes. Ah, that human need for comfort in repetition.
Her hands, her sensitive, creative, hands, wanted to feel the soft, stiff brush of that boyish crop, perhaps a crewcut or even the velcro briskness of a buzz cut. She craved to feel it on her head, on others' heads. She needed to sit and watch while she was shorn. Eventually, she realized she wanted to be the barber as well, to accept responsibility for planning the shearing.
Her arousal wasn't surprising; she'd always loved adventuresome looks on others. She was shocked, though, to discover others shared her fascination. But that was so long ago, when LnghrdLori, as she called herself, was just a cyber infant. Before she realized the World Wide Web was the biggest playground ever invented.
Her play in the early days of America Online had been so simple, so easy. It was both a window into a world she didn't dare explore in real life and and dead end. She just became the woman she thought would be most appealing to others with the fetish online.
All she significantly altered was her physical description. In reality, her honey-brown hair had always been cut in a long bob, shoulder-scraping. Thick, full, soft, but nothing too distinctive. It remained that way to this day, years and years later. Boring, predictable, safe. In the early 21st Century, the haircut had become the Establishment equivalent of Nancy Reagan's red suit in the '80s and the hair bands of First Ladies Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore during the '90s.
Online, though, she became whatever she pleased, anything but Establishment. That was, of course, before the government forbid anonymity on the 'Net. That law almost made her pine for the days of a cyberspace filled with just text and images, not video and audio.
When she signed on in 1994, she strung a few lines of description into something America Online called a "profile." It was simply stunning how many people believed the attributes suggested there and how they filled in the blanks she left with whatever they wished. Or more accurately, Lori recalled, whatever they needed in their lonely little lives. She was straight, gay, short, tall, even black and white, depending on her mood that particular month.
Most often she was Lori with the long, thick blonde hair reaching down the small of her back. Somehow, that stereotypical image seemed to attract both men and women who wanted to be erotic barbers. Otherwise, she stayed relatively true to her self. A woman interested in art, literature, music, someone easy to meet online, but not easy to engage.
Night after night she sat alone in her darkened office and connected with people all over the world. Only recently, she recalled, the shrinks had come to realize the cancerous cultural destruction of what they called "connected isolation."
Over the years she'd had dozens of encounters. All ran along the same model. She met someone, exchanged a furious correspondence, entered into haircut fantasies acted out online or in those letters and then disappeared. Usually in a matter of weeks.
It was perfect. She could indulge in her eroticism in the safety of her home office, but never actually make a commitment. Technology, the god of the modern world, gave her this opportunity. And it became her soulless religion. She signed on every night, looking for entertainment, getting off on the kindness of strangers so willing to believe her every lie. The stories became redundant. So many of them had so little creativity. But she was addicted, she needed that easy fix, that easy entertainment, that connection without responsibility. She often told her cyber lovers their words had driven her to enact their fantasies in real life. Of course, the only thing to touch her hair had been the German shears of her stylist, Marco, and then only for her inch trim every other month or so.
