I met my first wife, Beth, on that trip into San Diego. She was a prostitute, and she was incredibly beautiful. She would divorce me six months later while I was sweating it out in the steaming heat of a desert tank. Our marriage had put a strain on her career.

“I know a place,” said Jake, leering at me and Harold through his half-empty beer glass. We had been in the bar for more hours than I could count on the blurry wall clock.

“We got a place,” I drawled. “Look around, good as any.” Our waitress came over, a pleasant college student who had been pushed too far that night by three soldiers with alcohol running wild laps through their addled brains.

She asked, “Anything else?” and amid some sloppy compliments and mishandled passes, we managed to order up yet another round of beers for ourselves. The waitress trotted away from us as quickly as she could, and we resumed our present business of moving from stone drunk to dead drunk.

After a few minutes, Harold remembered where the conversation had left off. “Jake said he knows a place,” he mumbled.

“You said that already. You’re repeating yourself.”

“No,” he insisted, building his voice into a whine, “a place. You know, a place.”

Jake winked as best he could. “That’s right. A place.”

“Oh, a place.”

“Yeah, a place.”

I shook my head. The room spun. I resolved to speak to the manager about that. “We don’t need a place. We got willing girls right here.”

Right on cue, the waitress appeared with our drinks, plopping the mugs onto our table with practiced ease. Before she could read off our tab, I grabbed at her hand and somehow connected. Holding her delicate fingers between my meaty paws, I turned my bloodshot eyes up into her baby blues and asked, “Darling, sugar, honey—would you sleep with me?”

“Only if you were the last guy on earth,” she said.

“But then you would?”

“Of course,” she said. “A girl’s got to have sex, too.”

Given the right situation, I think I could have loved that woman.

I have only loved six women in my life, including my mother, and I married five of them, excluding my mother. But I could have loved many more. The cashier at the Downtown Deli, that co-ed who walks her Saint Bernard past the building every morning at 9 A.M., that sexy anchor-woman on channel 18 with the bob hairdo and pouty lips. I have a great capacity for love. I know this because that’s what my therapist told me the two times I agreed to attend marriage counseling with my fourth wife, Carol.

“We got your tests back from the lab,” said the man with a degree on his wall and the cojones to charge me three hundred dollars an hour for butting in on me and my wife as we fought and bickered, “and I would say that you have a great capacity for love.”

I beamed. “So that’s the end of it? Are we done here?” I had work to do, organs to remove.

“No, we’re not done here,” said Carol, agitated.

“Then what’s the problem? You heard the man—I have a great capacity for love.”

“The problem,” Carol answered, “is that you’re not living up to your potential.”

By the time we found the “place” in downtown San Diego, we were sober, a real bummer. Dawn was fast approaching, and sex with strangers for money didn’t seem so exciting without the rush of alcohol to smooth over the moral potholes. We searched in vain for a liquor store, but the squares had all closed up hours earlier; we were unfortunately under our own control for the rest of the morning.

Harold went first. I was nervous, I guess, for my first time with a professional. I mean, I’d done it all over the state of New York—even some in Pennsylvania and Jersey—even some while in a moving vehicle—but never with anyone older than me and never with someone as…knowledgeable as a prostitute was sure to be. What if my technique was wrong? What if I’d been doing it backwards all these years?

So I waited outside and read a Vanity Fair someone had left in the lobby. The operation was set up as a massage parlor, an old trick that I thought had lived out its usefulness long ago. Seemed odd to me that they’d still have a front like this inside the city limits, as San Diego had just instituted their Red Light District less than a year before—all bets off, sexually speaking—but I guess old habits die hard. The décor was strictly economy-class: fluorescent lighting, pressed wood, quarter-inch-depth industrial carpet.

The johns were streaming in and out of the place like horny worker ants coming to visit their queen. Doors opened and closed every few minutes, muffled moans echoing down the halls and about the small waiting room. This was a place for soldiers, from what I gathered, mostly Navy boys, but not exclusively—the clientele obviously ranged all over the armed services. I even caught a glimpse of a few familiar holographic insignias, but didn’t say anything for fear that the Marine Corps soldiers would make me do push-ups or lick their boots right there in the lobby. A whorehouse is not the ideal location for emasculation.

Harold wobbled out through a sliding door twenty-five minutes after he went in, and I congratulated him on his stamina. “Didn’t happen,” he said, a little frown creasing his lips.

“She didn’t go for you?” I asked.

“I didn’t go for me.”

Harold had encountered his first experience with the world of “sexual non-performance” long before I ever would, and I couldn’t help thinking him less of a man for it. I know now that was foolish, but to the hormone-ravaged brain of a boy in his late teens, it seemed there was nothing in the world that could deter a real man from a toss in the sack once it was offered to him.

“You can try again,” I offered. “Take my turn.”

He told me to forget it, that he was done, and slumped into a nearby chair. “I’ve got fifty bucks,” I said.

“It’s not the money. Just…go on. Have a good time for me.”

What could I do? I went inside.

Years after Beth divorced me—it was during my marriage to Carol, I believe—I received a particularly acerbic letter from her which read, in part, that I was a no-goodnik, a welsher on my debts and obligations, and that I should look into evolution classes in the hopes that it would help me to rejoin the dominant species. But tucked away inside the squiggles of vitriol was one sentiment which I’m sure it pained her to admit:

Understand that from Beth, this miserable sentence was the equivalent of the most lovelorn Shakespearean sonnet. An admission, practically, that she might have cared for me at some point in her life.

So I wrote her back:

Nyah nyah nyah.

The sliding door led to a small foyer abutting the main “massage room,” which lay just beyond a cheap bedsheet hung up to act as a curtain. A small Mister Coffee dripped a steady stream into its glass pot, and I helped myself to a cup. A little caffeine never hurt. I had another cup. And another. Minutes ticked by. I found to my surprise that I was still grasping the Vanity Fair magazine—I wasn’t able to let it go. My fingers had clenched tightly around the spine.

A sugary voice called to me from behind the curtain—“You there, lover?”

No control—my hands trembled. I spilled the coffee. It stained my slacks. I suppressed a scream, dabbed at the stain with a nearby napkin, and held the Vanity Fair in front of my groin as I pressed myself through the opening in the gauzy curtains.

The prostitute—Beth—was naked. Just like that, splayed out atop the mattress. Blonde hair spread out across the pillows, breasts heading toward the ceiling, nipples pointing the way. She barely turned her head as I walked in.

“You’re naked,” I said. My mouth moved by itself.

Beth sat upright, her breasts drooping only slightly, dropping to either side. Natural, full, but still firm. “You new at this?”

“No, no,” I answered hastily, fumbling with my own zipper. “I just—I didn’t expect—I thought maybe you’d be wearing a nightie, and…”

“And you could take it off me,” she finished. I nodded. Beth rose to her knees, yawned, tucked a seductive finger into her seductive mouth. She bounced playfully on the bed. “Weekends are tough for me, what with all the military bases nearby. And Labor Day—forget about it. I’m swamped. Dressing and undressing tends to clog up the line.”

I told her that I understood, and we spent a few minutes chatting about the weather, the weekend, as I nervously removed my own clothing. The months of basic training had hardened my muscles, firmed up the contours of my body—perhaps not as much as Harold Hennenson, but I still felt myself to be an impressive specimen of manhood. This was not the first time that Beth had seen a young man flush with pride in his own body, but at the time I was bull-moose confident in my physique.

“Very impressive,” she said, and I thanked her. To this day I don’t know if she was humoring me.

“You want to lie down over here?” she asked, pulling the bedsheet to one side. There was a recent stain just below the pillows, and I tried to look away.

Her hands were all over me the second I sat on the bed, and I began to harden instantly. I wanted this to last. I needed this to last—my money was running low, and I couldn’t afford another shot. “Shouldn’t we talk first?”

“Oh Christ,” she sighed. “You’re one of those psych students, aren’t you?”

I didn’t understand. “The psych group from UCSD,” she explained. “They come down, pay their money, and all they do is ask questions. How does it feel to do this, to do that, what do I think about the Red Light, that sort of thing. Am I demoralized? Am I victimized? Jesus…Tell you the truth, I’d rather screw than talk.”

So we did. Screw, I mean. And then some. And as a member of the U.S. Marine Corps, I felt an obligation to prove myself more of a man than any psych student could ever be, so I made sure to keep damn silent during the act.

Peter—my son—went in for a few psych classes in school. I paid for that tuition—thought it would be a good way to screw his head on tight without having to fork over a wad of dough to the local shrink. But all it ever got me was six hundred dinner-table questions, a disapproving eye, and one full-scale intervention.

“Do you understand how your career is hurting this family?” the designated counselor asked me, hands folded, tone calm. Asshole was sitting on my couch.

“My career puts food in their mouths,” I explained. “Puts this roof over their heads. That couch under your rear end.”

“But do you know how much it hurts them?”

I didn’t know if he was looking for something quantifiable or not, but Bio-Repo men don’t deal with the abstract. It’s here and it’s physical or it’s not our concern. “No,” I said finally. “No, I don’t. You wanna give me a number?”

That shut him up nice and quick. Man mighta had a doctorate in head shrinking, but he’s shit outta luck when it comes to higher math.

After Beth and I came to a satisfactory end of our business transaction, we talked. I couldn’t help it. “Was that good?” I asked, searching more for a grade than anything else.

“Mmmm…it was wonderful. You didn’t have to—”

“I wanted to.”

Beth smiled, held me closer. “Johns don’t usually go for that sort of thing. Most of the time they just want in and out and then they’re gone.”

“’Cause my name’s not John,” I said, and she was kind enough to giggle. “You spend time with most of your clients afterwards?”

“Only the cute ones,” she replied, and my chest puffed a little farther. The fact that she was being paid for her time had left my mind, and I took everything she said as the unvarnished words of a casual lover.

“I’m in the Marines,” I said. I thought she should know.

Beth shrugged. “I probably coulda guessed,” she admitted, “but I was a little wrapped up.” Suddenly, she grabbed my hand—held it—squeezed it tightly—

“Aftershock,” she whimpered, and rolled into my arms, grinding her groin into my leg as she moaned softly. It was easily one of the most entrancing things I’d seen in my young life. I could have watched it go on for days.

An hour later we had made love two more times, and the waiting room was quickly filling with paying customers. Beth gave me these last two sessions as a gift, and I couldn’t believe my good luck—I’d been planning to lay some heavy bets in the weekly crap game back at the base in order to cover the expense of my weekend rendezvous, but now I’d be able to save my cash for another time.

“Maybe next weekend…” I began, and Beth, who had begun to prepare the bed for her next client, shook her head.

“Next weekend’s no good—there’s a convention in town, and I’ll be working the hotels.”

“Oh,” I said dejectedly, surprised to find myself put out at the idea of Beth sleeping with other men. Sometime during our sexual congress, it seemed that a jealousy virus had infected me and planted its tendrils in my brain. Forget about your AIDS and Molié—already I could feel this new deadly disease throbbing away. This should have been a tip-off to drop any notion of a future relationship then and there, that my concerns, however prudish they might be, would ruin any chance we had at anything meaningful. But my intuition only whispers at me—it never shouts when it should.

“The weekend after next is open,” said Beth, and planted a peck on my cheek that was more gratifying than any of the tantric positions we had occupied in the last hour.

And that was how our first date came to a close: I went to my home, she stayed in hers, and it ended with a peck on the cheek. Proper.

Basic training continued, an endless series of repetitive actions that our drill sergeant assured us would come in handy saving our skinny hides. I couldn’t see how swinging over a pit of water could help any when we were going to be fighting the enemy in the desert, but after the first three stints of KP duty, I made a habit of keeping my mouth shut.

Got down San Diego way about twice a month, which was as often as I could wrangle a forty-eight-hour pass. I took on so many extra duty shifts—patrol, orderly, clerk—in order to clear my weekends, I soon found myself subsisting on less than three hours of sleep a night. But Beth and I had a swell time, mostly holed up in the back room of the massage parlor, testing out the tensile strength of her mattress and bed frame, though we managed to get to a few nightclubs now and again. Beth had been thoughtful enough of my feelings to clear out her weekends, business-wise, and only once did we have to rush out of a bar because she’d forgotten about a client’s appointment she’d been unable to cancel. I waited in the lobby. I could hear the mattress springs creak. It lasted one hour and six minutes.

During the last few weeks of basic training, our instructors began to shift the focus away from basic military preparedness toward the practical and tactical. We engaged in mock military maneuvers, operations, whatever you want to call them. Our marching fields were transformed into great plains of faux warfare, littered with fake tanks and fake buildings and fake sniper nests sporting real soldiers writhing in real pain. Low-velocity rubber bullets were used. They stung like a bitch. One guy in E Squadron lost an eye when he took off his goggles to wipe off the fog.

On the last day—it was their mistake in the first place for telling us that these would be our last twenty-four hours of basic training—we cut loose. Red Team, ho!

We raided the Blue Fort, me and Harold Hennenson, and brought down three snipers in the process. Three-hour mission. Two-hours and twenty-five minutes of waiting, waiting, waiting, and thirty-five minutes of adrenal overload. Details: We shot up a flimsy plaster facade with a clip-full of red paint, smeared it across our foreheads, and wrote our names in the dripping excess while whooping up the sorriest of battle cries. We took prisoners, hostages, and bound them with ropes we pretended were thick sheets of eucalyptus. We interrogated them. We asked them for their names, their serial numbers, the women they’d slept with and their precise addresses. We were the RAF, the doughboys, and the yellow-ribbon brigade, taking our cues from every old war film we’d ever seen. We were Mongols making good, and we won the day.

Our instructors were furious. Each of us was given two hours of lecture, threats, push-ups, bunk and meal restriction, and one hundred hours’ KP and trash-hauling duty. We would never see a minute of that time. They shipped us out the very next day.

The prior week, just before the Corps shipped our squadron off to fun and sun and gun in the desert, Beth and I did the deed and got ourselves married. A half-drunk preacher culled from a local bar near Beth’s apartment, Jake Freivald standing by my side as best man, and Harold Hennenson, who was often found scrubbing toilets with his toothbrush—not because he was forced to, but out of a fanatic zeal for order—signing all the witness papers in triplicate.

Unlike Harold Hennenson, Jake Freivald would live through the war. Like me, he would return to America feeling lost, without purpose, and without the necessary training to compete in what was already a staggeringly technological job market, where computer programmers were cast onto the street with the morning’s refuse when they couldn’t learn the latest version of C-Triple-Plus quicker than their counterparts. And, like me, he would turn to the one thing that had always sustained him through difficult times, the one piece of hide-saving equipment with which the military way of life had vested us:

We could kill people and not care all that much.

But during the wedding we knew none of this. Harold was alive, and Jake and I were just a couple of knob kids trying to get our business done before jumping onto a transport plane heading into the heart of darkness.

“Somebody here to swear?” gurgled the preacher. During the short ceremony, he kept turning his back to us, ostensibly to cough, but it was pretty clear from his breath that he was belting down a new slug of rotgut with every spin. “Swearing, anybody?”

Harold glanced at me, shrugging his shoulders, wondering what to do. I shrugged back, so Jake took the reins and stepped up. “I stand up for this man,” he improvised. “I swear for him.”

“And…who gives…who gives the lady?”

We hadn’t discussed this. I turned to Beth, afraid that our lack of foresight was about to put a kibosh on the whole deal, when she whispered in my ear, “Harold can do it.”

“You sure?” I whispered back. “We can wait, I guess…Find someone else.”

“Harold will do fine.”

And he did. Stepped up, gave me my lovely bride—hair up; no veil; gown long, rented, slightly frayed at the hem—and backed away just as quickly. The preacher mumbled through a few benedictions, pronounced us husband and wife, and split to go find himself an after-hours club that didn’t bounce men of the slightly stained cloth.

We made love in a motel room I rented for two hours, sweating fantastically in the San Diego summer heat. When it was over, when our time was up, I put on my military fatigues, bundled up my belongings, kissed my wife goodbye, promised to write her every day, and headed up to base and out to the battlefield with a new, purposeful stride in my step.

She took off work for the rest of the night. At least, that’s what she told me.

In a letter she sent me while I was ensconced in one metal monstrosity or another during the war, Beth explained why Harold was the best choice to give her away. “He was the only man who had the chance to screw me and didn’t,” she scribbled, “and that makes him chaste enough in my book.”

Stupidly—thoughtlessly—naively—I wrote back, “We could have waited and called your father.”

I knew it was coming even before I got the reply letter, this one three days later than her usual response, the hurt and pain after all those years of good, healthy psychological burial resurfacing in every angry scrawl. “You’re such a sweet kid,” she wrote in part, “but sometimes you can be a complete asshole.”

No argument.

Enough reminiscing. I’m going outside today. Here’s hoping I make it back.