Randi's topic is falling in love. So, here's a simple story right from the heart. The plot's age-old. I just put it in a contemporary context. I hope you enjoy it - and as always, thanks, my friend... DT
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The joint had a hardpacked dirt floor. No shit, real dirt!! And its inhabitants were eyeing me like a herd of nervous wildebeest - albeit slightly less intelligently. Still, the deer was the piece-de-resistance.
Deer heads aren't rare in Wisconsin. I mean seriously!! Besides the MMA, deer hunting's probably our state sport. Even so, this place was like the East Village of rustic avant-garde. Other bars put up the antlers. This one had mounted the hindquarters. There was even an unlit cigarette stuck in the butthole. It was a truly awesome example of redneck visual art.
I was sitting in that epitome of hillbilly savoir-faire with a pitcher of Miller Lite and Skipper McPhee. Skipper was my girlfriend. Well actually... that wasn't precisely true. Skipper was a friend of sorts. But she'd put girlhood in her rearview mirror at least twenty years previously.
Skipper lived in the trailer park across the road, and she was divorced like I was. Except her divorce had been recent, which was no doubt why she'd been trying to fuck me into submission. Of course, you can never tell what motivates women.
I'd known Skipper when she was married, and I could never understand what her husband saw in her. My post-divorce experience answered THAT question. She had big soft tits and fantastic long legs on a slim, hard body. She was passionate, physical, and up for anything. Plus, she would serve it up piping hot in twenty minutes or less. It was like dialing Domino's pizza.
Skipper's face was the only part of her that wasn't sheer perfection. The diplomatic term is "plain." But in truth, the poor girl was kind of a double-bagger. She was also sort of dumb, which didn't get in her way carnally. But it limited the discussion afterward to the weighty matters that she'd seen on TMZ.
Any divorced guy over the age of forty knows my life. You've got deep-seated habits and a job. So, you're solitary but never achingly, crushingly despairingly lonely. You have places to go and people to hang with. You just don't have the intimacy of a good marriage -- not that I knew what THAT felt like.
Still, if you're reasonably presentable and don't have too many blatantly gay traits, post-divorce dating is a garden of earthly delight. The age-appropriate women are ALL starting to feel the bloom coming off the rose and the ones who haven't written men off permanently are desperate to couple up.
Their problem is that males my age suffer from delusions of grandeur about twenty-something hotties, and it was their short-sighted youth obsession that gave me my pick of eager low-mileage, one-owner beauties, all with well-honed erotic skills. In fact, I was getting more first-class pussy at age forty-five than I had at any time prior to - and definitely during - my marriage.
The ironic part was that I was no great catch. I'm fairly presentable, and when you're single you always have too much time on your hands. So, you stay in shape. But my job was my Achilles heel.
High achievers hit the ground running. They kick ass. They take names. People like me stay in school... forever. I like to think that it was because of my love of learning. But that would be a lie. It was because I'd decided early on that the best way to take my life off with pay was to get into college teaching.
I mean seriously... your employers expect you to show up for class. But that's seven and a half hours a week, thirty weeks a year. My old man put in more time than that volunteering AFTER he retired.
You DO have to write and publish. But that was no challenge for someone as full of bullshit as me. And after you make tenure, the only way you can lose your job is if you're caught doing unspeakable things to farm animals. But there's always a catch to a deal that sweet.
Unless you're at one of the big universities or teach in one of the professional schools you make the same base salary as a pipefitter - but unlike those guys, there's no such thing as overtime.
I was in grad school when I met Lucy and I'm pretty sure she was thinking "tech billionaire," not a middle-class drone. She was never the same after the reality of my mediocre earning potential sank in.
Arrogant and oblivious are a bad combination. But that was me. I'd been vaguely aware that my wife wasn't happy. Yet, I was still naive enough to think that MY behavior didn't have anything to do with it. Small children are like that. They're always in the moment. They don't think about what their actions or the actions of others imply in the great scheme of things.
Well, I started thinking about it A LOT after she presented me with the papers. Ironically that was on our tenth wedding anniversary. I believe diamonds are the appropriate gift, not paper. And here I was five years later, sitting in a bar in the wilds of Wisconsin with Skipper McPhee and a pitcher of beer.
*****
I should have been clued in by the fact that Lucy was on a date when I met her. She had the popular hippie-chick look back then, long silky blond hair, tall and flat-chested with a fantastic ass and legs. Better yet, she clearly fancied me. So, we ignored her date and talked most of the night.
The very next day, I pounded on her door and proposed a picnic. She came out in a pair of white shorts that showcased her perfect buns and her long, well-muscled legs. I sprang something inappropriate, and we were a couple from that day forward.
We lived in a little apartment off the Madison campus, and from the beginning, it was more like roomies with benefits. I was pretty selfish back then, and she dutifully went with the program. But it was obviously a chore for her. I don't think she even knew what an orgasm felt like. In fact, I sometimes wondered whether she batted for the other team.
That was our life for the next ten years. I didn't have a problem with humdrum sex because like a lot of immature nerds, I didn't know the difference between what I was getting and the real deal. The mere fact that I was getting anything AT ALL was good enough for me. But there were warning signs from the start.
Both of us were young enough that the party scene of our teen years simply carried over into our day-to-day lives. Thus, it wasn't odd that we were drinking at different places on a Friday.
Lucy was a secretary for one of the departments in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Which, of course, had plenty of students our age. But these were prospective MDs, not nerds.
She had told me that she was with a bunch of the med students at the Kollege Klub, which was right next to the library. So, I finished up and zipped down Langdon Street to Lake.
