James Del, LTD

lilpodracer/AdmrlLundy: An Afternoon Overshare

It’s been years since I’ve written a personal blog like this. Part of me wonders if I can still even do it well after so long, but I guess the only way to find out is to just jump in.

We were the first people on my block to have internet.

It was about 1994 when we first got America Online, back when there was no “unlimited useage” plan for $20 per month, you had to literally unplug the phone to browse, and downloading a 15 second .wav would take close to 20 minutes.

My first screen name was actually my dad’s, JMD1226, and, because of that, parental controls on that account were mighty lax. It wasn’t long before I was in chatrooms, and at 9 years old started playing a Star Trek themed RPG called Spacefleet Command. This was essentially the nerdiest thing ever. A group of dudes (aged, apparently, from 9 to 40) would get together and pretend they were on a space ship. Via chatroom. There were “missions” and attacks and allies and all kinds of crazy shit. It was fun, though I remind you that I was NINE. How that’s entertaining for an adult is beyond me.

I took to one of the leaders of the group, AdmLundy (Adm was short for Admiral). Not realizing that EVERYONE ON THE INTERNET IS A DUDE IN 1996, Lundy implies she is a she and I believe it. Nothing sexual at all; I liked talking to this girl (she said she was 18) online though and eventually a friendship formed.

Fast forward a few years, this time to middle school (1998ish?). Lundy comes clean and tells me that she’s actually a he, and the AdmLundy character was just something he used in Spacefleet to get respect. I vaguely remember being confused, but at the same time not giving it much thought. Like I said, there was nothing overtly sexual about the friendship, so it didn’t seem that odd, though now that I think about it it’s pretty fucked. Still, I found out his real name: Steven. The rest of his story was pretty much the same though: 20 year old, living in Florida, going to trade school. The friendship continued with him assuming some kind of “big brother” role with me, and he’d frequently talk about his real little brother, a kid named Joey. He’d send the same picture of a sandy blond kid (around my age) in some kind of garage or basement. That was Joey.

I hadn’t RPG’d in awhile, and in an effort to be “cooler” got my own screen name: Seaford5 (my hometown and the grade I was in…smart James). This of course becomes a topic of discussion with Steve, who tells me he wants to drive to NY to see the ball drop in Times Square. CLASSIC. I still can’t figure out how he got my full address, but sure enough come December 30th of 1999, there was a red Mustang parked in front of my house. The same red Mustang Steve had sent me pictures of a few weeks earlier. He never attempted to make physical contact and at this point, we still had a mainly platonic friendship. There were times that he’d ask vaguely deviant questions—you ever finger a girl before, you know what a blowjob is, etc—but that seemed like normal fare for a pubescent teenager to talk about.

Still, it didn’t click just how scary and dangerous this guy was until he parked in front of my house. I received a bunch of messages from his new account: LILpodracer, asking if I had seen his car. Now that parents were catching on to the online predator thing, our teachers had started warning us about talking to strangers online and protecting our identities. Realizing how fucked it was that this guy literally knew where I lived, I completely and totally panicked. A furious panic that I don’t even think I could experience anymore…I didn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus…I was overrun. I blocked Steve immediately and changed my screenname. And believe it or not that was pretty much it.

The last time Steve got in touch was a few years later, towards the end of HS, when Myspace began to take prominence. He friended me and asked where I disappeared to, and I told him how creepy it was for a 23 year old guy to drive to NY to park in front of a 12 year old’s house (I was 17 at the time of this confrontation and considerably less concerned for my safety). He apologized, and told me some excuse about his younger brother being taken away. Whatever. I was 17 and over this fucking creeper.

I stopped responding to his messages, and he disappeared into the ether, existing only in one of the deep pockets of my mind with thousands of other inconsequential interactions that I only think about every few years or so.

Maybe it was the “sexting” doc on MTV this morning that got me thinking about online predators, so I decided to do a very quick Google search. I typed in lilpodracer, since that’s really the only way I knew him (I hadn’t even remembered his name was Steve until I started digging around).

Lilpodracer led me to a mylife account for a Steven Joey Maciejka. Having his full name and a cursory knowledge that he lived in Florida, I googled him. Here’s what I found:

See, it turns out at 31 years old, Steve was still talking to 12 year old boys on the internet. This time though, he used a fake (female) Myspace profile to get the boys to send him naked pictures, and then he’d later extort the boys to perform sexual acts on him if they wanted to keep the pictures secret. You can read all about it here.

I’m a little hazy on what all this means…considering I never sent this guy anything or met him face to face, it feels like I managed to dodge a bullet. But 11 years ago he parked his Florida-plated Mustang in front of my house, and in the back of my mind I keep playing through the worst case scenario. How quickly this story could have ended so much differently. Well then!