Introduction To Ring Central

     Now, most of you know of Zoom by now, due to its indoctrination into society due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. Some might even know that it was around years before that ever even happened. And even less know that there was "An Underground World of Meth", hidden in Ring Central... another Zoom more or less. 

    I was first introduced to this world via a random Grindr PnP hookup. I remember this a lot better than I remember most of the big things I write about here because "The Zoomerverse", aka that underground world of meth on Zoom, became one of the most consuming thing that happened while in active addiction. More on that detail throughout the rest of this entire story. 

    So there I am with this guy, While we are just chilling and smoking,  not long after I arrived at his place at all, he asks me if I have ever partied on Zoom or Ring Central. I had NO IDEA what he meant. He told me all about this community on Zoom (temporality on Ring Central due to the rooms getting shut down too often on Zoom) where a lot people, specifically gay guys, meet and smoke to meth with other guys smoking... and most participants are doing sexual things. Mostly solo guys jerking off. But sometimes there was a cam set up at a group PnP hook up party, many of them were also participating in the sexual aspect too. Legit, Underground World of Meth... and Sex. My mind didn't completely wrap around what he was describing, so he showed it to me.   

    SHIT. He wasn't lying. He logged into his account, and he logged into a room... and there it was. All out in the open it seemed. 

    I find out that the room that he signed into has a name. This room was based out of Orlando (which is the city I lived and partied in) and the area code for Orlando is 407. So the room creator named the room "Four Hoe Seven". EPIC... little did I know that this would not be the only epic pun. within this world, you get to create a new persona. You can be anonymous and not show your face (as long as the camera was ON and ON PART OF YOU). Needless to say, with a gay world based on drugs and sex, there was a lot of headless torsos, smoking and/or jerking off... Its XXX Grindr in LIVE CAM format. What a WIN I thought.

    Remember when I said this world is "the most consuming thing that happened while in active addiction"? I mean that in the most pathetic ways. It consumed all of me. All my time became that eventually. But that happens later in the story. If this guy would have told me, this would consume me more than just the meth already has done by its self... I would have gotten sober a couple years sooner than I did, I really believe this. 

    After he introduced me to Ring Central... I would find myself logging into the rooms. I created my very only meth pun username. Tweak Twack Zack. I loved that name. It was so unique... clearly I didn't care too much about my anonymity in the rooms. I often got asked of Zack was my real name. Most people thought it was just completely made up to slant rhyme with Tweak Twack or something. 

    So what was really unique about these rooms was everyone was muted automatically. So the chat feature was frequently used to communicate with other people in the room. And also, if you join the audio, there was a DJ who would be playing music. Usually and always, Electronic Dance Music. 

    I remember my first rooms I went and enjoyed the company and chilling and smoking . 4Hoe7. 212 (a NYC based room), and Twack City. 212 has always been the Alpha room for the Zoomerverse. It was the first room. It was a popular room that often hit the maximum of participants at that time of the evolution of camming, which was 100. It was the clique room at the time. Twack City was the room I liked the most. The music was so good. It was a mixture of EDM and Hip Hop. The host was awesome. Always the same person. Always smoking. And he is the one that showed me that it wasn't a requirment to be doing sexual things. He didn't. 

    You see... I was not getting high and having the sexual adventure that many gay guys in the meth scene, was into the PnP stuff. I didn't like that part as much as the average person seemed to. Maybe it's because I was self-conscience or maybe it's because it was too extreme for me. More likely it was both. But none the less... I found a community (Twack City) that I could be myself. Chat up the group chat and talk to other Tweakers like me, and smoke with them on cam too. 

    There was never a red flag shined for me that this place was bad. I viewed it as a form of Harm Reduction. When in all actually it was doing one thing... enabling me and others to do drugs and be leud acts. I didn't get on all the time for the first few years... Made appearances every like dozen days or so. 

    Eventually the Ring Central fab went away and logging into Zoom again became the place to go. So it transitioned back from RC to Zoom pretty quickly. I didn't barely notice. By now I had already made some good friends across the world on Zoom. 

    Then... I became homeless.