VEGAS HARLOTS (MAYBE) by Joe Marcuse

The pool at Circus Circus hotel and casino in Las Vegas has a mirror opposite. It’s only a few dozen yards away, on the other side of the refreshment cabana, and both are crowded during pool hours which end at 7pm. I jumped into only one of the pools during my seven-day visit to Vegas, the one day during which I visited that rather cramped and crowded pool area. I think it was around mid-trip and by that time I started doing this thing where I imagined the majority of women walking around as call girls and it happened that one day at the pool too. I still don’t know if I was right about this, how accurate a perception or how off a misperception this was, but since I was there in the hot climate and since I think about sex a lot anyway and since after walking through a few casinos in the very upscale hotels and noticing that, indisputably, there were hundreds of call girls hanging around in them, I just sort of got predisposed to seeing the women there as, quite possibly, working girls.

I had never been to Las Vegas before and there are a lot of things going on there that are really quite interesting, but my call-girl alert initiation happened the first night I arrived. I was hungry after all the traveling and decided to walk across the strip from the hotel to this 24-hour diner. It was called the Peppermill Diner. The décor was very 1950’s, a look that always kind of appeals to me. Formica tables, a lot of turquoise, little fake palm trees, plastic booths that had a slight glitter thing going on inside the plastic, I mean what do you expect in a town like Las Vegas .

The table I was seated at was a round booth, and I noticed a majority of the tables were like this, and strangely you wound up feeling this sense of privacy in your little round booth even though technically there were other booths rather close to you. The one to my right was close enough for me to see two young girls, each twenty-something, one white and one black, sitting with a black man. Their pimp, had to be. The first thing I heard that got my attention was one of the girls saying “Oh they had me all foamed up”. I think the white girl said that. The black girl said they wanted all kinds of sick shit, you wouldn’t believe it. Her hair was in ringlets and had very badly applied, obvious red-streak highlights, though perhaps this was a look that attracted men. She was repeating something she apparently had to yell to this client or clients; she said This is my face. Then she said to the pimp Are they crazy, there’s nothing more important to me than my face. She had a southern accent. One of the girls said something about boundaries being all busted up and one of them also said something about wanting to go back home. The remark about boundaries was interesting to me, indisputably an understatement in this case. Again the black girl said How come they couldn’t understand that this is my face? The pimp said absolutely nothing the whole time I was eating my dinner, a salad with some scallops in it I think it was, who cares. I imagined that the pimp was treating them both to dinner to make them feel better after having had an apparently very rough night, one during which they could have just as likely ended up dead or beaten up from the sound of things.

At another table was a business-looking guy talking to another guy and the business-looking guy said Of course I would never want you to do anything you’d be uncomfortable with. He was oozing that sort of fake positive energy that doesn’t fool anybody.

Leaving the Peppermill for now, a diner I never returned to during my trip, I will relate just a bit more on this call girl business, and excuse me for sounding a bit one note here but this tits and ass stuff is just so in-yer-face in Las Vegas that to leave it unreported is an exercise in total denial. Anyway I never asked anyone to confirm my suspicions on this but it seems there are virtual armies of young call girls marching through the lobbies of the really swank hotels. Will someone correct me if I’m wrong here? The heavy make-up, those little white strapped purses that hang to just above elbow level. The high heel shoes, the very short dresses, the cleavages down to the naval. These are whores, right? Hello? Anyway, The Encore and the Wynn, this pair of hotels which are connected by a vast lobby lined with dozens of expensive boutique stores, is where I was first witness to this phenomenon. They outnumber the casino patrons, these chicks. Besides all the accessorization I just mentioned, they look rather milk-fed and wholesome. I’m thinking about the relationship with the casinos, how this town is built on doing anything at all to get people in there to gamble. So yes, the lightbulb goes off. Of course they are welcomed here. It is part of the Great Big Plan, the Arrangement, the Great Big Cycle of Money. The juxtaposition of this adorable, almost cult-like community of Midwestern, girl-next-door looking girls with my little overheard episode from the first night, what a cornucopia the world is, it’s downright Dickensian.

Waiting on line at the Bellagio hotel for their reportedly to-die-for lunch buffet. It is a long line, it will be a long, hour and a half wait, and the line extends out into the casino of course. I have my paperback with me, Ayn Rand’s “The Romantic Manifesto”. I look up from the paperback and there is a gal sitting in front of slot machine looking at me. She has on those high heels, her midriff is bare. She’s really very pretty, again in the girl-next-door way. She has one of those little purses. She sort of smiles at me but I look back down at my paperback. When I look up a few seconds later I see her gesture down to the floor with her finger. I try to read her lips. I think she is saying “you’re staying here?” The fact is I am not staying at the Bellagio but I’m not going to pay this chick a few hundred bucks to be anywhere with me so what’s the point of mouthing the word No back, I just bury my nose in my book again. A few minutes later I notice her get up and walk up to the guy who is standing in the line in front of me. I can easily hear from their rapport that they are husband and wife, and she hadn’t been looking my way at all, she was looking at her husband. Dressed like a whore. I am not judging how she was dressed at all, I admit that it was sexy, but isn’t that all whore stuff? Is there some thing I don’t know about where to have fun and fit in in Vegas the women tourists decide to dress like whores, and is it possible this legion of whores I thought I was seeing were really just young housewives, having fun doing hotel lobby shopping?

This is just the call girl / whore report, the trip was about a lot of other things but I don’t want to cram. This was the Las Vegas Memorial Day week first-time-to-Vegas whore report, is all, no big deal just some sociology-lite.

MESSY by Polly Howells

Neatness was important. I was six years old when Mummy came into my bedroom and saw my unmade bed. “Oh Polly, you used to be such a good girl,” she said. Apparently I had already been making my bed for years. Messy was bad. Neat was good. Very simple.

My sons never made their beds, growing up. I never taught them how. Do they now? I don’t know. They both have wives, perhaps they make them.

But Mother was very lax in other areas. She never taught me to wash my hands after I peed, for instance. My younger son scolded me, as a young adult, that no one had taught him that.

Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It doesn’t seem to have affected my health. When I’m in a public ladies room and others are washing their hands, I usually do.

From a very young age I criticized Mom. She was different from other mothers. She didn’t wear push-up bras, she didn’t care that her breasts hung low and spread out flat against her chest. Sometimes in the heat she didn’t wear a bra. I was appalled. Six years old and I was appalled. It was 1950. In truth, she was ahead of her time.

I thought Father was cool. In fact, he was. His feelings rarely got ruffled. “Damnation!” he cried if he hit his finger with a hammer. That’s the closest he ever came to swearing.

I wanted to be like him when I grew up. I saw the letters of the alphabet in color. Only the consonants; the vowels were clear, or white. But not incidentally, the letters that started Father’s names -- Jack, or John, and Howells -- were the same colors as the letters that began my name: Polly Hayes Howells. Blues and blue-reds and purples. The letters that began Mother’s and Toni’s names -- Toni, Brown, Katharine, Kay, Franchot, DuBois -- were in greens, oranges and browns. Toni and Mother belonged together, Father and I did too. Father and I were painted in sky hues, Toni and Mother in earth tones. Sky is clean, earth is dirty. We were clean they were messy. Mother and Toni expressed their feelings, shed their tears. Father and I tried not to. This was how I saw it.

The problem was I would become a woman one day. I would bleed. I would be messy. I was terrified of that fact. The insides of bodies freaked me out. Father worked at the Boston Museum of Science, and we went there to see The Transparent Woman. We sat in a darkened hall with a huge Plexiglas model of a woman, all her organs lighting up one after another in vibrant colors. I got dizzy, almost fainted, had to walk out. That’s what happened to my feelings; they went inside and came out to knock me over the head, to knock me out.

Better I should have been messy like Mom and Toni.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED? by F. M. Edison

In my 58^th year – and, in my apparent never-ending quest for that elusive “LOVE” to rock my world – I recently joined yet another online dating site. This one is called Plenty of Fish – and yes, there truly are.

In the first few days after uploading my photo and 200 words encapsulating my best character and personality traits, likes, dislikes, life story line, ideal man of my dreams, perfect first date, favorite movies, foods and reality shows – I received quite a few emails from other fish floating around in these stale and murky waters. Two or three of them seemed almost promising – at least, enough so for me to consider giving one my phone # (he lives in Rochester, so a phone chat or two would be required to inspire -- or not -- a desire to move forward), and making a loose-ended agreement with another to work out details to try to meet soon (he lives in Hudson NY). A third fish – a musician from the Rhinebeck area, was also on my growing ‘maybe’ list.

And, then…I got an email from Rick. His profile didn’t say a whole lot about him, just something about his proudest moment being the time he did some kind of small environmental clean-up project in Vermont. Well, that’s kinda’ cool. But, it was his photo that really appealed to me. I’m not proud to say this– but, I never move on to reading the profile if the photo doesn’t first capture my attention. Plus, he lives right here in Woodstock. We exchanged a couple more brief emails, and agreed to meet on Thursday at the Muddy Cup in Saugerties.

“You’re pretty” were his first words.

“Well, you’re really cute. You kinda’ look like Marlon Brando in his thin period. But, ya’ know, you’re dangerous for me…I have a weakness for good-looking guys,” I told him, flashing back on that near-decade of my life -- in my forties -- a period I’m still struggling to understand ten years later -- of my out-of-control psycho-sexual obsessional attachment to the dashing, elusive, some-might-say emotionally sadistic Englishman, David.

“Oh, really, do I make you weak?” he grinned.

“Yes, you do.”

We sat down with our coffees on 2 brown leather chairs and he gave me the 5-minute version of his life story and I did the same. I divulged my real age to him -- as opposed to my online age. Acknowledging our 10-year age difference, he says, “You’re a little older than me, but I like you.”

“I like you too…will you be my boy toy?”

He’s from this area originally, but has been living for several years in a small, rustic cabin in Vermont that he built with some friends, ever since IBM transferred him there, and staying after the company offered him some kind of early retirement deal. His step-father recently died, and he’s back here for awhile to be close to his mother. He also spends a few months each year in the Florida Keys, where he has a boat he’d like to convert to a live-aboard. He says he’s kind of a nature boy who likes to live close to the earth. “Will you ride on the back of my motorcycle with me and hold my hand?” (“You bet!” I thought.)

“Hold your hand while you’re driving!?” I said.

“I’m a very safe driver.”

He told me that he had scheduled another appointment to help out a friend in New Paltz, so he couldn’t stay long at the coffee shop with me, but he’d like to see me again and will call tomorrow. I gave him my card and he gave me his: it was a 4x6” flyer-of-sorts, with his name, cell phone and Vermont land line numbers, that indicated he was a responsible, motivated individual seeking a house-sitting or caretaker situation in the Woodstock area.

The next day was Friday, and Rick called as he said he would. He told me he was thinking of taking a Tai Chi class with some friends from Phoenicia that evening; I told him I was going to a political meeting in Kingston, so I wouldn’t be able to join him.

On Saturday, Rick called in the early afternoon. He asked what I was doing. “Not much….just got home from my writing class.”

“Can I come over…see your place and meet your dogs?”

“Well, I guess so.”

“What should I bring?...need milk or something?”

“Nah.”

He parked near my red barn and peaked inside. For a few minutes, he took in the steep rock outcroppings bordering one side of my property and then the deeply recessed gully bordering the other side. I gave him the requisite tour of the small 1800s house I had restored a few years ago. He loves old houses, too. He admired the old wooden ceiling beams running throughout the first floor. He liked my kitchen table made of 3 long pine planks, and told me he’s made several similar tables, even sold one or two. Hmmm…I’ve also liked a man with carpentry skills.

We sat on my couch. I asked if I could read him one my essays from writing class. He said he’d like to hear it. I read. He was an attentive audience. Later, he was still on the couch. “Come over here. Give me a kiss.”

“No, not today. Don’t be a bad boy. Don’t tempt me to be a bad girl. Behave yourself.” But, of course, he didn’t. And, alas, neither did I. Kissing him was delicious. But, he’s making me delirious. Feelings reminiscent of those I had with the Englishman. We escalated from kissing…but, stopped way short of…well, you know. Yeah, this guy can rock my world.

We returned to the dining room/kitchen area. I show him the mock-up of the book I’m planning to write, focused largely around the Englishman. It’s tentatively called, “A Recipe for Obsession.” He noticed I had a carton of Cocoa Crispies on my fridge – you know the one with Fred Flintstone on the box. He said he loved those; I prepared a bowl for him that he devoured with the gusto of a trucker enjoying his Lumberjack breakfast special at Ihop after a 16-hour haul. Then he engaged my dogs in the best play date they’ve had since – well, probably ever. Rufus, the sweet Golden Retriever whose only demand in life is that you pet his head and never stop – was almost satiated with head pets. And Rick gave Otis, the funny little pugnacious pug, the lengthiest deep tissue all-body doggie massage he’s ever had, and surely ever will. Yes, Rick transported these guys directly to canine heaven.

Before he left my home late Saturday afternoon, Rick announced that he’d like to move into my barn. “ My barn?!? I know you like to live close to nature — on your boat, in your rustic Vermont cabin, but -- nobody can live in that barn. Except maybe the porcupine and the ground hog that make regular appearances out behind it.” Yeah, I thought -- there’s electricity in the barn, and my ex-boyfriend Bob used it as a seasonal office in the warmer months – but he wants to live in it?!

As I -- along with my dogs -- was by now completely smitten with this near-stranger who wanted to move onto my property, into my energy field, into my lonely life -- the part of me that was not incredulous was, well -- simply, elated.

On Sunday, Rick called and told me he’s going to build me a wood shed, using the wood planks I had stored in the barn. I had told him I had intended to have a shed built last year, but aborted the project. As he talked about pine boards, my hormones were raging like a teenage boy’s. I was now in a state of perpetual excitement, flying high.

It’s Monday. He calls. “Hi cutie” …the dogs really miss you. Me, too…shit, dammmmn,” I say.

“Ha,Ha” says he… “Isn’t that a good thing?”

“I dunno,” I say. “I’m in danger,” I think. He tells me he’s going to Vermont to meet with his accountant to settle his taxes. He’ll call again when he gets back into town.

“Hi, cutie pie,” he says, when he calls on Tuesday. It’s just after a power surge has corrupted my Vonage router and my internet service, which means that that I’ll be spending the better part of the day speaking with a tech support person from my cell phone. Ya’ know…the modern-day version of hell on earth.

He tells me that his trip to see the accountant in Vermont had been postponed. Can he come over and check out the barn -- ? I tell him of my descent into computer hell, and that I’m too frazzled today to deal with it (and him, I think) and that we should speak about the barn thing tomorrow.

He calls Wednesday early evening to tell me that he made the trip today to Vermont, saw the accountant. While in Vermont, he’s grabbing some photos of a wood shed he had built that’s similar to the one he’s planning to build for me. “Yeah, bring the photos. But, you know, we still have to talk about this. Like, the rent – you know it’s going to be $1200 a month, PLUS utilities,” I joke. (“Are you my boyfriend? Are we dating? Will you love me?,” I think.) “Let’s go out to dinner soon to talk about this.”

“Okay,” he agrees, and adds, “Tomorrow night.”

“Garden Café,” I suggest…“6:30.”

“Okay, get dolled up…me, too,” he says.

We don’t speak on the phone anytime Thursday. Neither of us calls to confirm. I wonder if he’s going to show up. He does.

We order dinner and wait for its arrival. He’s had a headache all day and has been feeling ‘frazzled.’ I give him an aspirin from my purse. He opens the manila envelope he had placed on the table and shows me its contents – photos of the wood shed in Vermont, of the slab wood tables he has built, one photo of him on his boat in the Florida Keys, another of a beautiful sunset from that locale.

And then -- I ask him the question – “Will…we…be...lovers -- ?”

His demeanor changes… dramatically. “Don’t make me feel boxed in. I don’t want to feel possessed.” And, then, he says...“I want to go.”

We ask the waitress to wrap up the dinners to go. She does. We leave. In the street, he’s silent, begins to drift away…”That’s it?! You don’t want to talk about this?” He stops, we talk. “You know, pretty boy, you don’t go onto a dating site to do a real estate transaction.”

“I’d be paying you some rent, and building the shed…and you couldn’t handle making love with me, anyway.” I know that last part is true, of course.

I knew I wouldn’t, couldn’t, really let this happen — open the floodgates and allow those feelings to spurt and clench me tight in their tentacles again… couldn’t allow that bottomless need and overpowering hunger to surface again, overtake my life – render me unfocused, incompetent, incapable of controlling my thoughts and my emotions –because all of these thoughts and emotions would be fixated on him...compulsively, frenetically. I have too much at stake -- my work that sustains me financially and mentally would be on the line; in dire jeopardy. I’m not a teenager now who can cast her fate to the wind.

I knew it was irrational, unhealthy, made no sense; I was being played by the male equivalent of Blanche DuBois, who went through life “always depending upon the kindness of strangers.” I guess I was being used by an emotional con man not lacking in charm – they never are. But, that’s his issue.

Me – I’ll be attending my first Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting with the other powerless love junkies any day now.

ENDINGS by Billy Herman

Endings matter but I don’t know how much. Is a fake happy ending worth more than a humiliating one? And how long do you hold on to the memory of how a big nothing ended? Or was it more than that? How long do you live in an ending?

It’s like oh man that hurt. I think I’m just going to think about that for a while. Then I see decades going by and I’m still thinking about how that thing ended. And it’s not really a happy thought.

Maybe I can change the focus to what happened. I was offered a shot at love and I blew it. I rejected her or she rejected me. But in between wasn’t there some kind of tenderness? Wasn’t there some kind of yearning for a dream to come true?

She had a husband and four children. She took five hits of LSD years ago because she thought she would see God. But so what? I loved her. I steered us away from an affair until it became too late. Now it is too late and thinking about the sweet feelings between us only makes me sad. Something happened with her marriage and with her sanity. She called me a long time ago declaring she wasn’t going to play any flirting games with me anymore. She didn’t know that in between I had completely broken down and would need years of mending.

There was one ending at a bus depot but it was so long ago I don’t care about it anymore. She wasn’t that great. For years she blazed as the big great one, but who says?

Wasn’t there some kind of tenderness? Wasn’t there some kind of yearning for a dream to come true?

I have lost you in space and time. You who I liked, maybe loved I have lost. It seems so devastating. Liked, maybe loved? I was crazy about you. Or maybe I just thought you were hot. I’m not an idiot. I don’t have to act confused.

Alyssa as a beautiful woman inspired all kinds of fantasy, but she did not like me. And that would be all there is to it if I didn’t keep hanging on. I became addicted to the dream. Yeah, we had some kind of delightful parting. A parting in which I was informed that I was not enough of a man for her. But you know how women are when they are telling you that. She’s giving you some kind of fantastic punishment. She’s lying about you. You have to escape from her lies.

Wasn’t there some kind of tenderness? Wasn’t there some kind of yearning for a dream to come true? I have lost you in time and space. With my arms around her or at some old bus depot isn’t it all the same kind of thing? It’s some kind of lie about me. It’s some kind of disgrace and worthlessness. What man can live that way?

It’s a January snowstorm. I have lost some women in time and space and I feel like I can’t get over it, but I know I can.

I HAD NO CHOICE by Jay Wenk

Occupation duty began with a bang when, in different days of the week, we would sally forth before dawn from the Kaserne in Amberg, with loaded weapons, riding in 6 by’s. It was always chilly. We drove to small villages in the countryside which we surrounded. Some of us were on guard on the perimeter, some searching every house and barn and shed, looking for hidden weapons and soldiers, primarily SS. The job of searching was preferred because that was an opportunity to look for loot; Leica’s and Luger’s and anything else we considered valuable. Occasionally picture books of the Nazi regime, its leaders and its works would surface. I remember one that had blank spaces beside the text where the German civilians could glue in photos they purchased to aid the war effort. Never anything about concentration camps. Never anything about the disaster in the east.

The people in the homes we invaded were mainly resigned, stoic. A few were frightened but never crying. Not a word was ever said by any of them. Always, wherever we searched, in small farmhouses or larger blocks of homes, every place had lots of stuff that German troops sent back from all over Europe: things like ashtrays from Norway, fur-lined gloves from Russia, tableware from France. What goes around comes around.

On one occasion we came to a tiny hamlet, not even as large as a shtetle, seven or eight little cottages. The place was deserted. Every one of those cottages was crammed with unopened packages of food from America to GI prisoners of war in German camps. We had no idea how all those gifts to GI’s came to be there, but we called our trucks to come up from headquarters to take the boxes away. We were outraged and vengeful. We had seen Dachau and Flossenburg , but this was in our face, this was very personal. We burned very house to the ground. That’s something we never did deliberately during the war; you don’t destroy potential cover.

The rotation of guarding and searching was handled fairly evenly. I had my share of doing both. On this morning, I was guarding on the outskirts of town. There was a small sawmill close by and some piles of lumber next to it. The red glow of the rising sun made the world look pretty but not yet warmer. I saw a man slip out of a nearby house, furtively making his way from one pile of lumber to another, moving away from the town. He didn’t see me, he was facing the other way. He had a large green rucksack on his back. His clothes were typical of the time: ill-fitting army pants and jacket and the grey forage cap that all the men of every age wore.

As I wondered what he was up to, a feeling of lassitude invaded me. I knew he could be a war criminal trying to escape. My M1 was heavy in my hands. I wondered why I didn’t stop him; that was my duty. It was as though I was watching a movie, not having a part in it. I wondered if doing nothing was a protest against all the insanity and degradation that was involving me.

Finally, when he was about 80 yards away, still well within my rifle’s range, I moved into a position that gave me an unobstructed field of fire whichever way he might move. In the chilly stillness I yelled, “Halt, Hande hoch!” He stopped, put his hands up and turned towards me. Almost immediately, some of my brother GI’s came running, weapons ready. Harold Thane, who we called “Heavy” had the BAR but with very little ammo, and all were relieved that there was not going to be a fire fight. The German, who was about my age, was Landswehr, not SS, trying to make his way home from the front. He had no papers, of course, hardly anyone did then. The war had ended only two weeks before and there was no system set up yet to deal with returning German soldiers and all the DP’s.

He was frightened and sullen. I’m sure he was afraid that we, the victorious army in his native land, would throw him in jail. He started to relax when he realized that we were not going to beat him. His rucksack contained some bread and cheese, ragged clothing, an extra pair of worn boots, and a lot of letters and mementoes from his dead comrades that he wanted to bring to their families. This was something we could relate to, this was something we would want a buddy to do for us. We gave him a few packs of cigarettes that came with our C rations – I think there were three butts in each pack – and some matches. He had no weapons, not even a breadknife or a spoon, and no watch. Watches were commonly traded then for food and clothing.

He was placed in the Captain’s jeep with the Sergeant to guard him. I never saw him again, though I knew he would be taken back to rear echelon to be interrogated and eventually released, perhaps given a job assisting HQ in some way. There were hordes of Displaced Persons all over Europe then, all of them needing food, shelter, clothing, doctors, translators. Many Germans and other Europeans were employed in this work, and almost everyone was involved in the Black Market as well; it was a necessary fact of life then, for survival.

I still have no understanding of what came over me before I stopped that man. Something tried to keep me from doing that, though stopping him was the right thing to do. I never told anyone that I almost let him go. I knew that I would have been shunned forever. Why did I hesitate?

ESCAPE by Bennett Neiman

When I was in high school, the major conversation that went on between me and my friends was about getting pussy. Of course, it was all talk. In the summer of 1964, in Cincinnati, Ohio, there really was no place that any of us knew, where pussy was hanging out ready to be gotten. And, even if there were such a place, neither me nor most of my chums would have much of a clue about what to do with it once we had it—except perhaps Carl, who was the cool one of the bunch.

Nonetheless, talking about such a place, did occupy quite a bit of our time. I’m not sure how it got started, but one of us must have seen the old movie, “Shangri La,” about an exotic, hidden paradise island—because we started referring to that amazing place where pussy fell like rain from the skies—as Shangri La.

So imagine our joy when one of us—Kenny Baker be exact—announced that he had accidentally stumbled into Shangri La the past Saturday night. We were all so excited, or so it seemed. I, myself, was. “What if they find out I’m a virgin,” I thought, “or what if they discover that I had never even seen a pussy, much less know what to do with one?” But, there was no backing down. I had to go on this exotic adventure with my brethren, whether I liked it or not.

So, it was decided that the next Saturday night, that the four of us: Kenny, Carl, Marc and I, would get into Kenny’s car—he was the only one who had a car—and take the majestic journey to the place we had been fantasizing about for at least the past year.

Kenny told us that Shangri La was down by the Ohio River on the Eastern side of Cincinnati, a place where none of us had been because it was know for being a very rough red-necked part of town.

We had all been on Columbia Parkway before, the highway that overlooked the river basin area in which Shangri La was nestled into—but none of us had actually been down there. The only reason Kenny had found it, was that he made a wrong turn off the Parkway, and found himself down by the riverside.

Kenny described the place to the other three of us as a small town filled with bands of gorgeous high school girls who looked very cheap and tawdry, who just roamed around like sexual predators, looking for who they could give the next blow job to. Kenny, who we knew was prone to exaggeration and hyperbole, told us that he was certain that these packs of divine, nasty goddesses were certain to throw us all to the ground and have their way with us, just as soon as they spotted us. Even though we all knew Kenny was spinning a tall tale—we made him repeat his prognostication again and again—on our way to high school boy paradise.

When we got on Columbia Parkway, I felt my heart jumping. I was so scared that I almost started crying. I thought, “What if I jumped out of the car at the first chance—maybe I could make up a story later about why I had to leave.

At first, it appeared that I was going to get a reprieve. It turned out that Kenny did not really remember exactly where he had made the wrong turn before and, consequently, didn’t know how to get down to Shangri La. But Carl, who was a very street-smart, clever fellow, figured out how to get off the Parkway and down to the river. Fuck you, Carl. Once down there, Kenny had no trouble finding the place he had been to before. Fuck you, Kenny.

Since we didn’t know exactly what to expect, it was decided that we would park the car up on the hill road that ran parallel to the river—and then walk the several blocks down to Main St. of Shangri La. I was very nervous as we descended into the village.

Well, it turned out that Kenny had been half right. This was clearly an edgy red-necked place, populated by former and current inhabitants of trailer parks. And, on this particular summer Saturday night, much like the one of Kenny’s first visit—there was, indeed, a roaming gang of high school age girls—mostly gorgeous—and all very cheap and tawdry. And, it was pretty clear to us that probably every one of them gave very good blow jobs.

What Kenny did not tell us—which he swore later that he never noticed—was that accompanying the pack of felacio-addicted female rapists, was a pack of dangerous looking, greasy hoods with cigarettes rolled-up in their t-shirt sleeves—looking very capable of brutal mayhem.

By the time we realized what we were walking into, it was too late. The pack of cock-suckers and future wife-beaters had spotted us and moved their way toward us. I looked around to assess our troops. Let’s see….we had Marc, the intellectual, who I doubted had ever been near a fight.…Kenny, a big lug of a guy, who looked like a small sumo wrestler, but was unfortunately more like a Jewish teddy bear….Carl, the ladies man, who might have been very familiar with pussy, but not much good to us now, unless the girls decided to fuck us to death. Then, there was me—certainly the weakest link of the bunch. My mind went into red alert. I looked up and saw a little old lady starting to cross the street. I quickly ran over to her and said in a very loud voice, “Excuse me, ma’am, let me help you cross the street. I figured no one could beat up a guy who was trying to help a little old lady cross the street.

My friends quickly caught on and came over to assist me. There we were, four frightened high school boys from the suburbs, helping a little old red-neck lady cross a small street with absolutely no cars in sight—to avoid being attacked and brutally injured.

When we got half way across the street, one of the young Shangri La maidens yelled out, “Hey, they’ve got granny and they’re taking her away…what are they going to do to my granny?”

With that, things broke into chaos. The mob broke ranks into a full attack, and the four of us turned and ran like we had never run before. Kenny yelled to us, “Meet me up on Columbia Parkway!” Carl took off in one direction, Marc in another. I went with Marc, I think because he was my best friend, so when I started crying and pissing and shitting in my pants, I wouldn’t have been as embarrassed as I would have been with either Carl or Kenny.

None of us were caught that night. I never looked back, so I don’t know what happened. I could imagine no one trying to get Kenny, because of his size—in that his Jewish teady-bearness was not distinguishable in the dark night. Why the rest of us got away, I’ll never know. I was never known for my speed. In fact, I believe granny could have caught me if she wanted too.

Anyway, we did escape, with everything but our egos in tact. Eventually, we all made it up to Columbia Parkway. Marc and I first met up with Carl, and it wasn’t too long before Kenny drove up and we all got into his car and made our getaway.

None of us mentioned Shangri La again. Not the place down by the river, nor the imaginary one. It wasn’t too long after, that I lost my virginity—but it wasn’t to a gang of horny girls. I escaped puberty and made it past adolescence into young adulthood. Now, I’m 60 years old. But, the truth be known, for a long while, I stayed open to the possibility and fantasy that someday I would stumble into the real Shangri La, that is, until I fully grew up and embraced the beauty of true love as the true paradise and the other as only fools gold…….that was about a year and a half ago...….some fantasies last a long time.

CONVERSATIONS WITH MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY by Suzanne Bachner

Scene Two. I sit across from MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY. HIS vast green-tinted glass desk sits between us.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: The inclusion of a letter is recommended. It makes it more personal.

ME: A letter?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Or a note. Nothing too overwrought.

ME: Do you want to dictate it to me? So, I'll say the right thing?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: There's no right or wrong thing. It should come from me.

ME: I thought you said I should write it.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Did I say, come from me?

ME: Yes.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: I meant come from you. It should come from you.

ME: What should I write it on? Should I type it out?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: You do realize that I get billed by the hour? I’m handing some of the work, as much work as possible, to my associates to keep your costs down.

ME: That’s very kind of you.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: I look everything over, of course!

ME: I bet you do.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: But she bills at about half the cost of me.

ME: That’s still pretty damn expensive.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY shrugs.

ME: So about this letter…

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: A note, really. A note. Did I say a letter?

ME: No, I asked you if it should be a letter.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Right. No, no, nothing too much.

ME: I don’t know what to do here. I don’t want to do the wrong thing. I don’t want to upset him.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: My guess is that he’ll be pretty upset when gets served the papers. That’s why we do it this way. For your own protection.

ME: But you want me to write this letter.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: A note. That’s just my professional recommendation. You don’t have to. Sometimes it’s just…softer. And it lands.

ME: Lands?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Yeah, you know, he gets it. Because he knows it’s coming from you and not some disembodied court or attorney.

ME: I didn’t expect you to be this short.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Excuse me?

ME: When we spoke on the phone.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: What?

ME: You said “disembodied court or attorney”. So it made me think of you without a body. But you do have a body.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Yes.

ME: And he’s just going to get the papers. Or maybe talk to you on the phone.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Perhaps.

ME: I thought when I talked to you on the phone and I first came into your office that you were taller until you stood up. It may have been the big desk. You have a really big desk.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: I know.

ME: He could get a really slimy lawyer, right? You said before.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Yes. That’s why we’re being offensive.

ME: I don’t want to offend him.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: O-ffensive. As in de-fensive. Offensive.

ME: Proactive. That’s what you called it the last time. So, I guess we’re past the point of speaking euphemistically.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Billable hours.

ME: Right. I don’t know what to say. In the letter.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: It should be handwritten.

ME: More personal.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Yes.

ME: Nice touch.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: I’m going to have to read it.

ME: To make sure I don’t say anything wrong?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Right.

ME: But you said I couldn’t say anything wrong.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Within reason. I need to check. To make sure.

ME: What should I say?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: I can’t tell you that.

ME: I could write it on a Van Gogh card, maybe. He always loved Van Gogh. I can run down to the Hallmark Store. There’s a Hallmark Store on the lower level of your building, did you know that?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: I don’t do greeting cards.

ME: I found it the first day. I was early for the appointment so I wandered around downstairs in the shopping area.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: I get my shoes shined down there.

ME: You don’t have a personal valet?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Never mind my shoes.

ME: You brought them up.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Let’s focus here. We need to take care of this today.

ME: I didn’t know I'd have to write a note.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: You don’t have to, but I recommend it.

ME: Then I have to. Do you think that would be thoughtful?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: What?

ME: The Van Gogh card?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: You mean Van Gachh?

ME: Are you correcting me?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: No, just clarifying.

ME: I hate when people pronounce it like that. It’s pretentious.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: It’s correct.

ME: Maybe a plain card. But the Van Gogh cards never have any sappy messages in them. They’re always blank. I got him a poster once. Of the blue café with the trees.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Starry Night?

ME: No, the café.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: I’ll tell you what, why don’t you draft the card, then I’ll approve it and you can pick out the card while we finish the paper work. I have to find a server anyway.

ME: Or maybe someone in the mailroom could do that. So, it’ll be more cost effective for me. What’s the hourly rate for someone in the mailroom?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: You’re upset.

ME: Of course I’m upset. And now he’s going to be upset. No one else is upset.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Do you want some Kleenex?

ME: No. Thank you. I’m not a runny nose cryer. It’s all in the eyes. Hands work well enough for the eyes. See? And eyelashes. Luckily I’m not wearing mascara.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY hands me a white legal pad and a pen. I take them.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Here. Why don’t you pull yourself together. Take a breath. Write the note. Don’t over think it.

ME: This could be the last time I communicate with him.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: It won’t be.

ME: Directly.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Don’t worry about that.

ME: He was my husband.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: He still will be if we don’t move forward with this. It’s your choice.

ME: I’m not having any doubts. If that’s what you think.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: I’m just asking.

ME: You’re not asking. You’re insinuating. That’s annoying.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Write the letter.

ME: I did all my homework on legal pads because my dad used to bring them home from work with him. In his big brown leather briefcase. But they were yellow.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: We don’t use the yellow ones anymore. Too hard on the eyes.

ME: Yeah. This is much easier. A long pause.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: What? ME: It’s just not fair. I mean, that I have to be the one who does this. When he’s giving me no choice. What is it called—the person who brings the action?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: The Petitioner.

ME: Yes. I shouldn’t be the Petitioner when I’m really the what?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Respondent?

ME: Yeah. The Respondent. I shouldn’t have to take responsibility for both of us when I’m just responding to his actions, his withdrawal, his lack of intimacy, his disappearance, his violence and utter inability to actually work through the underlying compulsion that drives his alcoholism, that makes his being a sober nondrinker, a dry drunk, worse than when he was a raging in-denial binge drinker. He won’t leave me but tells me with every single action to leave him. Gives up. Pushing me away when I want to help him. Help us. Not fight in front of the dog because his ears go down and he thinks he’s done something wrong just because he exists. Like a child. I’m the Respondent. He’s not the Respondent.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Life’s not fair, sweetie.

ME: I bet you don’t call your associate, miss less-billable hours, sweetie. Just your female clients.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: You’re right. It’s a technique.

ME: You’re kidding.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: None of my techniques work on you.

ME: The Kleenex routine?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Usually works.

ME: Sorry. Look. I can’t afford this. I’ll do it.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: Good girl. I pick up the pad and pen and write the letter quickly. No cross-outs. I show it to him. He reads it, then looks up at me.

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: You can’t say this.

ME: Why? What?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: The bit at the end.

ME: Which bit?

MY DIVORCE ATTORNEY: You can’t say I love you.