I pull up the screenshot I took of Perkins’s contact information. I know I should delete it. I have paid for two services for the price of one—to get my name back and to get him out of my life. But I find the second benefit unsatisfying. It feels as if, on top of everything else, he took the last word.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I write to him. I explain that I would like to meet him and promise that I am not a nut, come to demand her money back. I just want to ask him a few questions about his business. As he’s perfectly aware, I am a writer. And as I am perfectly aware, he is a walking series of transactions with human skin stretched over them. I reason that I just paid him $4,200 to sit down with me. He writes back a few hours later, his name appearing in my newly recovered in-box. He addresses me by my first name, which makes sense. For a hot minute, he was me. He is amenable to chatting but, before we go any further, I should know it’s “just business” and I shouldn’t “take it personal.” He closes with “kind regards.” No name beneath. The regards are just floating there, a sentiment sent from no one.
* * *
I have two weeks before I fly to London, where Perkins has agreed to meet me. In this time, we speak once. He is monosyllabic at first, emitting the occasional Cockney “yeah,” but once he gets going, he speaks with great enthusiasm about his work. He can’t seem to decide if he should brag about his achievements or treat me as suspect for asking. He wants me to know how lucky I am to be speaking with him. He feels at a disadvantage that I know what he looks like but he doesn’t know what I look like, so he finds images of me online and chastises me for looking different in some photos than I do in others. I have no explanation for this. A few minutes later, he has a revelation that it’s the glasses. Sometimes I’m wearing them and sometimes I’m not.
After the call, he e-mails regularly, wanting to know how many of me are coming, if I’ll be “chaperoned.” Chances are I’ll be coming by private plane on account of me being a writer. He vacillates between helpful and unresponsive. Most missives are peppered with “lol”s. He becomes fixated on the idea that I follow him on Twitter and insinuates that he won’t meet me unless I do. At one point, he casually refers to himself as the “wolf of the dot-com.” He’s not serious … but he’s a little serious.
It’s becoming clear I have no idea who I’m dealing with—but I know who does.
A. D. Justice’s real name is Angel Burrage. Turns out her mama didn’t name her “Justice,” period. She lives in a small town in northwest Georgia and has a voice meant to be threaded into a pillow. And she’s happy to chat with a stranger about what happened to her. Unlike me, she did read GoDaddy’s renewal e-mails. But she was in the midst of switching over from an old Wordpress site and associated the warnings with property she wanted to lose anyway. So she sat back and did nothing.
“When I realized what happened, I e-mailed him, thinking any normal human being would say, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize,’ and sell it back to me for whatever he paid for it. But that’s not what he asked for.”
When Angel didn’t immediately respond to Perkins’s offer, he initiated another conversation, bluntly laying out her choices: not buy the domain, hire a lawyer, or just buy it back from him now. She reasoned she would rather “pay someone to take it away from him than give him a cent.” But before she could state her position, she received another message: “Too late. This is no longer for sale.”
“He was a real jerk about it,” she says. “In one of his e-mails, he wrote, ‘It’s not like you’re a bestseller or anything.’”
“Oh no, he didn’t.”
“He did. He was fishing for me to object so he could ask for more money. The whole thing was devastating. I was angry at myself for not understanding the process and with him for fully understanding it. I really wanted to track him down, you know?”
I do know. And it’s nice to hear my impulses echoed back to me, as everyone in my life has reacted like I’m running toward a burning building.
“It’s just hurtful,” she says. “All of a sudden I could see everything I had worked to build being flushed away. I felt so violated.”
The word sits heavy in my ears. Violated. I had not yet identified the feeling myself, but while negotiating with Perkins I was anxious and sleepless and absolutely convinced I was going to get hit by a car. At one point, my neighbor came up behind me as I was putting my key in our door and I spun around, ready to push him off the stoop.
For some people, specifically creative professionals, an eponymous website is not just another avatar—it’s the real-time representation of their life’s work. Come, feast your eyes on the output that I hath scraped together between the walls of my dwelling! Or, as Angel puts it: “I didn’t so much feel stolen from. I felt as if someone had stolen me.” Unfortunately, these same people are not known for their logistical prowess. A website is often
