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"Ah, so," he said "‘Y’all coed to get out of going to the brothel without looking like a wuss Suk agreed that it was late, and that I had an early flight and needed to get what sleep I could And then there was jet lag, always a factor to be taken into consideration

But would I be able to sleep without having a wo and whiskey, sleep would be unattainable without sexual release

"In er days," I said, "that was true of ency"

He seemed pleased to hear this, not at the prospect of di I had reached the doard slope before hiht frokok," I added

"Oh?"

"I was in business class," I said, as if that explained everything

"But that should make you better rested, not more tired It is more comfortable, is it not? Seats that recline More roos"

"Very true," I said "But the stewardesses are more attractive than in the rear of the plane And more attentive as well"

"Oh?"

"The stewardess I had could not have been irl? A uess was that her mother was Vietnamese and her father a black American Whatever the combination, the result had been a beautiful woman And, I added, a talented one

"So you will understand why I’d prefer to get sooon," I said

He nodded He understood

It was a lie, of course The stewardess, who did not appear to be ofstream of drinks and snacks and hot towels and pepper coffee But if sexual services were part of her repertoire, you couldn’t prove it bya man would want to believe, because if it could happen to me, then someday it could happen to hiht, wouldof anticipation Itbucks and fly business class

In the ive him a fantasy to enliven his own visit to some over-the-hill twelve-year-old hooker And it would eneral – and Evan Tanner in particular – than the truth of the matter

Which was that I hadn’t been to bed with a woman in twenty-five years

Now that’s the sort of statement relatively few men can in with There are Catholic priests who h perhaps fewer of them than we used to think – and the Buddhist world has no end of monks whose vows forbid them to touch or speak with a woh, that the first twenty-four and a half years of celibacy were none of , and didn’t really count Take any man, freeze him into suspended animation, and tuck him away in a sub-basement in Union City (or anywhere else, coet a lot of action I don’t care if he’s Errol Flynn I don’t care if he’s Warren Beatty I don’t care if he’s a for to have a very easy ti it in his pants

The last six her to explain

For openers, I was incredibly busy I had a whole lot of current events to catch up on, and the coht and day, and it kept o after some

And when I did think about it, I didn’t even knohere to start looking

For one thing, I didn’t know anybody Before the Great Ice Age, I’d been slightly involved with a couple of woain affair with Kitty Bazerian, but that wasn’t really going anywhere, and the other women I saw from time to time were just casual friends and equally casual bedmates

Remember, this was 1972 This was before herpes, neverto devote a whole lot of thought and advance planning to the , well, it was no worse than a bad cold, and, unlike a cold, a shot of penicillin could cure it

Sex onderful, and so was it didn’t have to be There were girls who stayed over at my place because it was late and they didn’t want to take the subway at that hour, or squander ten bucks on a cab all the way out to Forest Hills There were girls I s, and girls ent along because they didn’t want to hurt , it didn’t hurt anybody, and it felt good and was good for you Why keep it in your pants when there were so many better places to put it?

By the time they thawed ed, changed utterly, all right

I didn’t go out looking to meet women, I was really too busy for that, but when I circulated for other purposes women occasionally appeared, and I wasn’t too brain dead to notice them One Sunday afternoon in a church basement in the Bronx I joined a dozen Albanian htful heir of the legendary King Zog (Zog had ruled the Balkan kingdo army in 1939 The co died in Paris in 1961, although he lives on to this day in crossword puzzles)