Kozmo-politan

by A.J. Daulerio

Welcome to The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past. 

When I first moved to Manhattan in December 1999, I was making $23,500 as a reporter for a legal news wire service. I was also dating someone who had rich-person tastes in wine and restaurants, was unafraid to accumulate credit card debt, and was more sophisticated than anyone I’d ever dated—she had an apartment in the East Village with black-and-white photographs and posters that had French words on them. 

She also exposed me to high-speed internet (she had a primo DSL line), which transformed me from a casual internet user burdened by the snail’s pace of a lugubrious dial-up connection into a terminally online one.

I spent the majority of my time online between a janky roulette room where you could win (or lose, mostly lose) actual money and the Zoetrope All-Story message board, the literary wing of Francis Ford Coppola’s production company, where I posted sloppy short fiction in the hopes of grabbing the attention of someone important enough to rescue me from obscurity and the legal news doldrums. (“Francis, you should check out this story about a lonely old man who weightlifts in the nude that was posted last night—the kid’s got talent!”)

One of my first realizations that Manhattan was not like any other place on Earth I’d lived before (meaning, up until that moment, my parent’s home in the suburbs of Philadelphia) was the exotic food delivery options, many of which were available long into the night, sometimes 24 hours a day. Also readily available for delivery—drugs!