Chapter One

I never said I hated men, but I hated Harlon, and I hated him with a grandeur and a passion that grew stronger with each passing day.

In the past, when I dumped a guy, or he dumped me, I’d only go through a few weeks or-at the most- months of exquisite revulsion.

There was Kim, who wanted to dominate me- neckties, feathers, beads, ice, hot wax-and succeeded only in appearing demented.

There was an experienced man, Zack, with all the appalling skill of a disco dancer (nine quick darts of tongue, roll over, fingertip strokes, plunge).

There was an older man, Jerome, who allowed that ‘foreplay’ was a relatively new word in his vocabulary, let alone his repertoire.

There was Trey, a family man, divorced, with a built-in premature ejaculation and spoiled sulky week-end kids.

By the time I slept with Harlon, it seemed I’d had the time, as most women who stay single eventually do, to try out all the apparitions of an eligible man. Instead of settling for a suitable husband, I found lame actors, missing cues, blowing their lines. Like the guy who plays Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice.

I thought Harlon was the lamest of them all.

After we broke up, I often went into these fugues when I was driving my car, pushing a cart of groceries, staring at the green screen of my computer…my gaze wavered, my adrenaline speeded up and Harlon’s droopy profile displayed before my eyes, a coke-bottle spectacle shielding a wide blue eye, prim, pursed lips, prominent Adam’s apple, narrow hairless chest, a roll of excess flesh about his waist, flat sloping buttocks and long thin legs with ankles like a Palamino pony.

If I kept it up, I was going to die of disgust.

Where to begin? There was so much to hating Harlon, I made it into a science, I made it into an art. I catalogued and committed his many sins to memory, and devoted whole folds of gray matter to mental records made up of files, sequenced by dates.

While Harlon mooned about his dusty house, shuffled through hundreds of photographs, cried until his eyes were glassy and red veined, I indulged in fantasies that frightened and exhilarated me. I imagined the tires on his six-year-old Toyota developing a slow leak, going completely flat on Kendall Drive, I-95, the on-ramp of 826 West, a car completely out of control and nowhere to pull over, hitting the guard rails. I got one good glimpse of Harlon’s white distraught face before he was rear ended and hurled over the precipice to the asphalt hell below.

Ok, then.

Or I imagined him coming home from work and being surprised by two burly guys, felons with tattoos and Uzis, rifling through the hundred-dollar bills and Cracked magazines he kept stashed under his mattress. Harlon groveled and drooled into his beard until the madmen were so disgusted, they shot him in the balls, ok, in the testicles, Harlon, which was no great loss as they quickly realized, so they got his bobbing Adam’s Apple in their sights and BOOM.

Whatever.

But I daydreamed most about Harlon in his bathroom, standing before his spit-stained mirror, shaving his sparse beard, patting on aftershave, knotting an acetate tie and smoothing his sparse hair, shrugging on a jacket, and leaving to go on a date.

With a strand of toilet paper stuck to his shoe.

Chapter Two

Just the facts: Harlon and I first crossed paths through a personal ad in the Miami Herald. He was a ‘palatable dentist’ looking for a relationship with ‘roots.’ I wrote to him, he wrote me. After a month, he came to my town, Orlando, for a seminar.

I picked him up at his hotel, the Crown Plaza, an Art Deco affair that clearly appealed to a bunch of Miami dentists. He was standing by a potted plant when I first saw him: a tall, fair, and fidgety thirty-something peering at me through aviator glasses. He had an upturned nose and eyes the color of vegetable soup. Harlon wore a navy blazer he later told me he’d had since he was eighteen, which was approximately twenty long moth-eaten years ago. I drove him to dinner in my MGB convertible with the top up. We ate at a seafood restaurant on the outskirts of downtown Orlando. We chatted desultorily, and I found out Harlon lived ten minutes away from his mother, and that he was nervous, fussy with his food, and terminally boring. Not bad at all by blind date standards.

I’d answered a few personal ads in the Miami Herald since they began publishing some of my free-lance personal essays. I figured Miami was far enough away to be safe from crazies, but close enough for a long-distance relationship. So far, I’d met an alcoholic who inhaled eight drinks before dessert, and a widower who was so needy I had to change my phone number. On the way back to his hotel, Harlon urged me to write a story about our date. Apparently, he’d read some of my work in the Sunday supplements. He had that naïve assumption, which many white men hold that any event, featuring them, has strong literary potential.

The next day, my friend Karen asked me about the date. I said, “We were nervous and neither one of us has the gift of putting other people at ease.”

Karen said, “A dweeb, right?”

“Well.”

“On a scale from a Madonna concert to the Challenger disaster, where would you rate this date?”

“I’m not answering that.”

“So, are you going to see him again?”

“He needs a few more reincarnations.”

Karen laughed. “Not so fast. Your date calendar isn’t exactly full, y’know.”

Karen is a tremendous girl, literally and figuratively. When we were teenagers, we moved from our side-by-side houses in Long Island to the same city in Florida. Before, and since then, we have shared many things including blow by blow details (no pun intended) of our experiences with men. She copped out of the game a year or so ago after many boring traumas and tantrums initiated by Payne, a balding divorced psychopath. By acquiring a dense layer of baby fat and shunning aerobics, she managed to stay relatively free of happy-hour yahoos and similar stoic apparitions of selfishness.

I did see Harlon again about three months later. He was attending another seminar and, again, I squired him around town. I even put the dinner on my Master Card so he would know I was an Independent Woman and not a Dependent Grasping Spinster eager for a MAY-NE, and a doctor at that.

I clearly remember the end of that evening as I pulled into the shadows of the hotel awning, a Radisson, this time. Putting the gear shift into neutral, I lowered the radio.

“I had a good time,” I said. The evening had been almost unbearably tedious, which still qualified in the ‘good’ range. Bad would be someone rude to the Maître’d. ’Bad was someone with a tattoo, a hairpiece, or a wife and kids at home. When women outnumber men five to one worldwide, when said women get on up in their thirties where the studies indicate they have a better chance of waking up Queens of Romania than receiving a proposal of marriage, when all these factors are in operation -yes- ‘a good time’ is an extremely subjective notion.

Harlon said, “Me too.” He leaned forward and kissed me on the lips, quickly, with no urgency, and no pressure. He undid his seat belt and opened the passenger door. “Stay in touch,” he said.

My gaze flickered to the odometer. I had driven over seventy miles that night. I needed gas. It was late. I had a babysitter to pay, and my Master Card was now over the credit limit.

The car door slammed.

“So, are you going to see him again or what?” Karen asked me in the wee hours of the morning, breathing Ring-Ding breath into the tiny holes on the speaking end of the telephone receiver.

“Crap no,” I said.

I heard the sympathetic crackle of a cellophane wrapper. “What? His schlong is too small? Make sure it’s not worth it.”

By ‘no,’ I meant if he didn’t call me. Which he failed to do. Which he may never have done, leaving this book unwritten, if I hadn’t moved to South Florida nine months later. On business.

~ * ~

After Harlon broke up with me, I couldn’t get up in the morning, so I would huddle under the covers, and think of him hopping up and down, naked, on a field of red-hot glowing coals. I imagined his narrow aristocratic feet blistering and swelling as he blubbered cried out and wrung his soft white hands. What can I say, it got me to work.

~ * ~

Let me explain why I called him.

On second thought, I won’t explain. It should be obvious why I called. Plus, I may have grown to know, and to hate him, but two and a half years ago I didn’t know beans. I thought he was a nice boring guy, professional, gainfully employed, all that. My impression of a certain paleness, of a rabbity tilt to his eyes and the fastidious tuck of his mouth was just that: a first impression.

Perhaps I’m psychic.

~ * ~

I called Miami long-distance from West Palm, where I’d recently moved to open a field office for a software company. He was pleased to hear from me; we talked for over an hour. He didn’t offer to call me back mid-conversation and save on the phone charges. We talked about- -I don’t know. How dental problems were linked to emotional problems. My daughter, Marie, was thirteen at the time, and already had fillings in most of her teeth, so I listened. I listened to everything. I remember it was close to Labor Day.

“What are you doing over the holiday? Harlon asked.

I had a date, a date that has long since faded from memory. “Oh, my body will just think it’s Friday and veg out for the weekend. Call me in a couple of weeks, okay?”

“Okay.”

I thought of that long-distance call as an investment. But it was six months before I heard from him again.