He had been at a dance at the officer’s club when he saw a tall slender English woman dancing with another officer. Back in those days it was often customary for one man to cut in on another. I can’t remember every lurid detail of the story, whether the man had one or two dances with the English woman.  I Just remember his key point which he was hoping would strike home with me. Within a half hour of cutting in on the other office he took the English woman back to his tent for a night cap.  I can hear his words still: "I just layed her out on my cot, spread her legs and lifted up her skirt. There was no beating around the bush or time for idle talk.  Every moment you delay, the more chance you have of losing the woman.  Be a man and show her you mean business."

His business was fucking. During his lifetime he kept a running score card of how many women he had in the sack which amounted to three hundred and fifty, give or take a few. The exact number had been extremely important to him and far less important to me.

The old man continued on with the story. "The English woman was a lady having come from a wealthy family. She had a horse, a thoroughbred named Venus, and when you rode that horse you knew you had been on something. Fast and spirited, Venus was practically uncontrollable. It was really something to feel the power of that animal beneath you." Then he continued on about the woman. "From then on the other officers wondered how I had gotten her to be my girl friend. How I had become the lucky one. She was a haughty one and most of the officers considered her to be above them. The kind of woman you admired from a distance but wouldn’t dream of actually sleeping with."

"Me—I knew what she wanted. Which was sex. And I got right down to it without wasting a moment’s time. That’s what they all want and don’t let them tell you differently"—then he looked at me and continued about a girl I had once dated and made the mistake of introducing him to—"That is unless you run into a woman who’s not really all woman. Take that girl you used to go out with from the Springfield Ski Club. What’s her name? The tall skinny one. I could tell she didn’t really like sex. It was written all over her."

He never stopped. The beer I was drinking out on the porch was already getting a funny taste to it and the more he continued the worse it got. "Now you take most women. They want sex and they don’t like a man who’s bashful about getting it. And don’t let them ever call you a nice guy.  It’s the worse insult they can ever hand you.  Because it means you are not getting right down to giving them what they really want which means you are not a contender.  Just remember, Jack, it’s the bad guys they really want.  It’s the bad guys who are doing all the fucking and the good guys are getting left out and being run over.

*****

The trouble with picking up girls in bars is that once in awhile you might actually get lucky and bring someone home with you. Which usually turns out to be the worse luck of all. Either you wake up with her the next morning and she turns out to be a lot uglier than you remembered her as you were pounding your meat into her or she’s a lying sack of shit—a little fact that’s going to catch up with you if you end up ever taking her out.  Even worse, she now knows where you live.  But even if you don’t strike pay dirt think of all that time and money you are wasting trying to pick up women.

And face it, you are putting yourself on the line.  There are one helluva lot more men in singles bars than women and they are all vying for the attention of just several half way presentable girls. And if you think they are such prizes, then just ask yourself, if they were so terrific just what in the hell are they doing in such places anyway? You end up losing any which way you play the game.  If you strike out you’re a loser since your made up lines didn’t turn out to be as full of shit as the next guy’s and if you score you’ve got a real whore on your hands since she fell for your crap in the first place and even worse, she’s not even getting paid for having to put up with it.

Let’s face the facts, most men can be distilled into two basic types. The first is the kind of guy who will do practically anything or tell anything just to get laid and the second is the lonely hearts kind of guy who’s going to languish into oblivion if he doesn’t meet his soul mate------next week. Myself....I liked the direct approach. That is to be perfectly honest with yourself and admit it...that one is paying a heavy price for sex no matter how he slices it.  It’s a pretty pricey waste of time going out and trying to pick up women in bars, and chances are, if you do succeed, you are going to end up with somebody far less attractive than you think you deserve in the first place. Even worse....suppose you actually find someone you think you are like and will go on liking for the rest of your lifetime? Well...it just isn’t going to happen and if you don’t believe me just start counting on your fingers the number of married people you know who are actually happy. So you can measure the cost of having sex with someone you actually like in a heavy emotional cost you will be paying down the road when this relationship "made in heaven" ultimately turns sour.

Me? I’m on top of my game or at least I believed I was just a few short years back.  Divorce proceedings are moving inexorably through the court system and it’s eventually going to cost me $140000 for that eight years of marriage.  I’m single, and I’m dating Nipples and Jan and a few others I’ve been meeting in the clubs.  Nipples is in her early twenties whereas Jan has just turned twenty-one.

But here’s the great thing about it.  I can get laid any night I want to.  very night I go out I’m going to have sex unless I decide not to and even on some of those nights I’ve decided against it, there’s often a good looking blonde or brunette who talks me into having sex with her.

They come in all sizes. Some are blondes and others are brunettes. There are black gals. Tall girls. Fat girls. Young ones and old dancers in their mid thirties. I’m close to fifty and it seems to make little difference to the women. For them a dollar is a dollar and forty bucks will buy a fair amount of crack.  Not that everyone of them is a drug addict.  But most are.

Here at the Platinum Paradise Show Club one of the brunettes often chides me  that I am afraid of brunettes (like her) who are too mysterious and unpredictable for my tastes. It seems she is right since almost all the girls I’ve been with in this club are blondes.  Later on I hear that her drug of choice is acid so there’s no telling what’s going to be coming out of her mouth.

There’s the hot tub and for a couple short months or so there’s the limo but the limo is not always available whereas the hot tub is on permanent display—an open invitation to me to have sex with anyone of fifty percent of the girls in the club.  And it might even be more than that.

Now just consider this in a rationale state of mind. You are going to have to pay for sex one way or the other. And chances are your partner is not going to look so hot to start with. And if you are getting along now, that’s not going to last very far down the road, especially if you’re the same kind of guy as me...one who likes to have fun. You’re in your forties or fifties and possibly might have even made it into your sixties. It’s so easy. By example you let all the girls know who work for the place that you are really into screwing and that you are willing to pay for it. Word’s going to get out fast about you and you will have lots of invitations from the girls to have hot tub bliss with them.  And it’s no longer a question about if you are going to do it or not, but who you are going to do it with and whether it’s going to be more than one girl or not.

You are on top of the world.  No longer a question of will I or won’t I or will I impress some worthless tart or not with my bullshit lines but what hour I’m putting it in someone in the hot tub and how much am I going to drink afterwards.  You can have someone fairly mature or a nineteen year old with a suppliant body, make it extra firm, and great waiter in the sky, please make her a blonde this time between five foot six and five eight.

Take for instance that last night the blonde nurse worked at Platinum Paradise. She had warned me two months ahead of time that her last night as a dancer would be on Saturday night, October 20^th. She didn’t tell her customers, not even Norm, who was in love with her, that this would be her last night. Meanwhile the little nineteen year old blonde was working the same shift and I soon found myself with both women at my table, the nurse who was in her early thirties and the little nineteen year old.

There had always been a special chemistry between the nurse and me.  She loved having me come to her stage just to keep her company.  If it wasn’t busy she’d quietly talk with me, then when I’d offer her a tip, just blow me off by saying: "I don’t need your money and don’t want it.  I just like having your company." No question about her intelligence------the nurse simply had her own demons to satisfy as if she had something to prove  by being a dancer.  It was almost as if she had taken out a line of dynamite fuse and carefully measured out one and a half feet of it as she cut it off precisely at that point with a utility knife.  She had decided with finality----"I will live this wild streak for only this length of time, then I’m quitting.  I will never do it again as I go back to going to PTA meetings, tending to my patients in the hospital, and trying my best at being a good mom.

The nineteen year old was essentially mindless, actually believing that I’d fall for her stories about having mafia connections. Once, while I was at the nurse’s stage a man and a woman had come in and sat next to me. The man watched his wife or girl friend tip the nurse  sliding into her lap. I watched the woman out of the corner of my eye as she started to feel the nurse up.  Watched an ugly crocodile gleam lust enter her eyes.  She was paying for her stage dances same as any guy yet expected a great deal more than most.  Her whole being overtaken with lust, now having paid for what she felt she deserved she grabbed the nurse by her hips as the nurse ground into her pelvis.  I caught the look in the nurse’s face as she looked away, detached and annoyed or was it just a hope that she was disturbed over having to do this with a woman?

"We are doing a hot tub together," The nineteen year old exclaimed. "Who?" I asked. "The nurse and me. There are a few guys who want to pay so that they can watch us together."

‘The nurse has been lying to me," I said to myself. "She’s a rug muncher just like most of them. Just didn’t want to admit it to me." I had already had a few beers. It was okay for the nineteen year old blonde to be a liar who believed her own lies but it was unacceptable for the nurse to deceive me about her sexual preferences. I had much higher expectations of her. For that matter I felt she did for me also.

But it never panned out. The two gals never got into the hot tub together. The nineteen year old would claim, "There weren’t enough guys wanting to pay us to give them a show." The nurse would tell me, "I never agreed to do one with her in the first place." But a few beers back the nurse had reminded me: "This is my last night here and my last night working as a stripper anywhere.  You and I should do something special. A limo. A hot tub. Something."

Pure and simple. She wanted to fuck. Because she liked me all that much? Because she wanted a lasting memory or two of her few months working in a strip club that she would remember for a lifetime?  This would be her last night. Afterwards it was back to being a nurse in a small city in Missouri  trying to be a decent mother and good citizen.  Didn’t matter.  She only had a few hours left in the nether world she had temporarily chosen for herself.

I had tried to get her to go out once or twice when she got into town.  She had given me her phone number in Missouri but the bottom line is she had never come across.  The nineteen year old found me feeling the effects of all the beer and tequila I had been drinking.  The nurse was in the dressing room, restroom-- wherever.  What counted is the nineteen year old got to me first. "Want to do a hot tub with me?" she asked.

"Sure." Then I made sure she knew what the rules were. No non fucking allowed.

She was cute. And she was thin. Nice figure but that’s all I remember from this hot tub. Later on I’d end up taking her to a near by motel but that was another night and another memory. This night there were none, other than my getting drunk, my screwing the young blonde in the hot tub, and the nurse leaving early.

She had to have seen us doing it in the hot tub. I never talked to her again–not face to face, only on the phone when I’d call the hospital one night I was passing through her town. I don’t think she stayed more than an hour after the young blonde and I did it in the hot tub. Cute...the little blonde would turn out to be like most. Fluff. The older woman...the nurse, no doubt feeling completely let down, would have been a memory worth remembering.

Or would she? For me, another drunken debauch. Another girl.  What the hell–a fuck’s a fuck and this was the way it went down this time.  Next time, there will be another and still another the time after that.  Each night a new adventure, my two goals being to get my dick wet in as many inviting places as possible and to get drunk.