aviatorOG 2004

If eZabel had a most-wanted poster, it would feature a grainy photo of a guy who went by Marco, Joey, Dave, Frank, Jessica, Morris, and at least a half-dozen other names before anyone could pin him down as Jeremy — a JetBlue engineer working the night shift at JFK who turned the site into his personal theater of reinvention from late 2003 through 2006. He arrived as guilderbellsuck, a provocateur with a fake name ("Joey Astin"), an opinion about everything, and an immediate talent for making people either love him or want to throw their monitors out the window. When that act wore thin, he vanished for 86 days and resurfaced as aviator, rebranding himself as "Marco Lanzaronni" — a suave, well-traveled airport insider who signed his journals with increasingly absurd surnames like Marco Shakur, Marco Pizztzzt, Marco Van Gorten, and Jamal Viktorniev. But even after aviator ran its course, Jeremy was not done. He came back as molo and then brother — making at least seven confirmed accounts in all, the most elaborate identity shell game in eZabel history. He may also have been behind the account flower — registered as "Jessica Lane" with the email shrimppockets@aol.com, his own band's name — though whether "Jessica" was another mask or a real person remains one of the saga's open questions. fivezero spent months piecing together the breadcrumbs, and jamiephaser publicly called him out ("we all know you are the proprietor of guilderbellsucks. Can I get an amen!!"), but what made Jeremy's game so remarkable was not the deception — it was that he kept building real friendships through every mask he wore.

At his core, Jeremy was a genuine music obsessive and a surprisingly talented writer trapped inside the body of a guy who could not stop picking fights. His knowledge of grunge history was encyclopedic — he could trace the lineage from Green River through Mother Love Bone to Pearl Jam with the fluency of a doctoral thesis, and he championed deep cuts by Chevelle, Silvertide, and Alice in Chains long before anyone asked. He played drums with real passion, geeked out over Pro Mark Hot Rod sticks, and fronted two bands — Overtake and the gloriously named Shrimp Pockets. His journals about working at JFK were genuinely fascinating: watching Air Force One land, driving alongside taxiing 747s at sunrise, gushing about the TWA terminal's futuristic architecture, and leaking JetBlue's expansion plans like a kid who just could not keep a secret. He was writing a novel called Forget Tomorrow about bored teenagers in upstate New York, and his professors had compared his style to Faulkner — though he saw himself more as a Langston Hughes or Mark Twain type. When he was not feuding with someone, his writing had a raw, rambling warmth that made his journals some of the most readable on the site.

The friendships that survived his identity carousel tell you more about Jeremy than the feuds do. hunkpapap was perhaps his truest ally — the one who publicly defended him when the rest of the site was piling on, posting that "aviator is a valuable member of eZabel" and insisting he was not guilderbellsucks. When Jeremy resurfaced under new names, Patrick stayed loyal anyway. socalgal was always in his corner too — she pushed back against fivezero on his behalf, tried to get people to lighten up, and somehow maintained a genuine friendship with him through every reinvention. And tinser engaged with him across multiple eras of the site, keeping up a rapport even as the identity game grew increasingly obvious to everyone watching. The pattern was always the same: Jeremy would burn a persona, vanish, reappear with a new name, and immediately gravitate back to the same people — because underneath the fake names he was still the same guy from Queens who wanted to talk about grunge and baseball and invite people to Jets games.

But Jeremy was not all chaos and smoke screens. He gave away free JetBlue airline tickets through an eZabel contest, awarding them to violetboregaurd. He wrote a moving journal about his friend David's death in a car accident, carrying the funeral card in his work badge as a daily reminder. He opened up about having bipolar disorder and ADHD, about losing his mother to cancer, about surviving abuse as a child — raw disclosures completely at odds with the brash "Marco" persona. He cooked omelets for his roommates Crotch and Jeff, dreamed about building a home bar with exposed brick and a jukebox and Atari arcade games, and mentored younger members with advice that was blunt but genuinely caring. His friendship with jp over fantasy baseball was pure joy — he beat John 12-0 and 11-1 in their leagues and never let him forget it. He got along with togatweeter and superhero, tangled with fivezero endlessly, and somehow kept showing up in the same circles no matter which account he was using. He started threads about Ben Sheets, Gumby, the Anarchist's Cookbook, and why emo music was a crime against humanity. He wanted to move to Seattle. He wanted to be taken seriously. He contained multitudes — most of them arguing with each other under different screen names.

eZabel Personality Type: ENTP — "The Seven Lives of the Debater." The thing about Jeremy is that no amount of fake names could disguise who he actually was. Every account had the same obsessions: grunge deep cuts, fantasy baseball, muscle cars, Ben Sheets, sour cream on pizza, and the deep human need to be known. People recognized him not because he slipped up — though he did, constantly — but because his personality was simply too loud to hide. iwz eventually confirmed it plainly: "our 'friend' Brother/Aviator." Seven confirmed accounts, a thousand-plus comments, and in the end, everyone knew it was Jeremy — the JetBlue guy from New York who typed in all caps when excited, who freestyle-rapped about Baghdad, who kept coming back to a website full of people who had already figured him out, because even a guy with seven masks still needs somewhere to take them off.