On Joining the Century Club

— #1 —

I’ll never forget my first.

It was in Casablanca, of all places.  He was a junior officer in the Deutsches Afrikakorps, stationed there as part of the occupation facilitated by the Vichy Government.  I was only sixteen.  I had snuck away from my boarding school in Basel for a little fun, and…well let’s just say one thing led to another, which led to another, which ended with me in Morocco needing to wait tables for a couple weeks to earn enough dirhams for the ferry across the strait of Gibraltar and train rides back to the dormitory.

I fell in love with him the first time I saw him.  He really was the picture of Aryan perfection; blond hair, blue eyes, tall, a broad strong chest…it still gives me quivers thinking of him.  He wasn’t a guest in the restaurant – which really was a casino, everybody knew it was a casino but the proper palms had been greased that everybody pretended it was just a restaurant – he was just there delivering a telegram to one of his superiors, who was halfway through a two thousand deutschemark stake at the roulette wheel. One glimpse of him looking neat as a pin with his uniform and armband, doing the straight-arm salute that had become so familiar since his regiment had arrived – though as it happened he was actually Austrian, not German – and I was hooked. I tracked him down a day later outside the occupation headquarters and presented him with a proposition.

“You’re underage!” he whined. “I’ll get in trouble!”

So I said to him, “Rolf, you’ll get in even worse trouble if you don’t.  You ride me like you ride that bicycle or I strap a pillow to my belly, walk into your kommandant’s office, and proudly introduce myself as your newly minted fiancée Miss Deborah Ruth Finkelstein. Take your pick”

He chose…wisely.

— #25 —

He wasn’t my first choice.  My first choice would have been the tall, dark and handsome one.  He ducked out with one of the client’s wives after twenty minutes, and was back for more after another twenty.  I was tempted, but one of my hard and fast rules is that I don’t do sloppy seconds.  It’s a foolproof way to end up with a social disease.  My second choice would have been the silver fox.  But of course he didn’t glance at me – he only had eyes for that redhead.  I can’t blame him – she was built like a battleship and from the outfit she wore you could tell she wasn’t ashamed of it.  I didn’t see them leave together, but it’s no coincidence that they both disappeared at almost exactly the same time.  Third choice would have been the pirate.

As it happened, I settled for Harry.  It was a disaster.  He cried pretty much the whole way through, talking about how guilty he felt for betraying his wife and all that other nonsense.  I’d had half a mind to leave him there with his pants down and go right back to the party, but I hadn’t…shall we say, had my account serviced…in over two weeks.  I tried playing along with things – “you’re a bad man, Harry,” I told him – but he just went on sobbing pathetically and said “no, I’m an ad man…”

—#36, #37 —

I suppose I had it coming with the way that I coerced more than a few reluctant young men into accepting my charms, but I will never forgive myself for getting outsmarted by that redneck sheriff. And I honestly had nothing against the son of his I was being forced to marry – he was a gawky dork of a kid, but nice enough, and I found him perfectly servicible when I took him for a test drive. But the prospect of living in Tex-fucking-Arkana for the rest of my life? Good God, no. I’m a city girl. I wish I could have given them the slip before embarrassing Junior at the altar like that, but come hell or high water, I was getting out of there. If Bo hadn’t let me climb into that Trans-Am I’d have shot him in the face and just stolen the damned thing. It certainly wasn’t my first time doing it in a car, but it was my first time in a Pontiac (a Pontiac, mind you – I’ll tell you about the incident in Pontiac at the Silverdome some other time). It was quite the ride.