With little to lose in the way of seniority, though I could have been canned for pilfering, I did occasionally score such items as ill-fitting Italian sandals, bottles of sake and some used clothes from huge bales wrapped in scratchy burlap, shipped by Catholic agencies to overseas charities.
     This was one of the few times we could use the traditional cargo hooks of the movies, usually seen wielded in fights, generally intended for use on rough wood crates in the old days when they were sorted on the docks and netted in or moved on pallets.  Today they would puncture paper or cloth bags of grain or powdered milk products, or hides, or even cardboard cartons, the most common commodities not transported in shipping containers.  So they lay rusting in the warehouse, but it was satisfying and powerful to whip them around when we remembered they could be useful.
     Since there were few longshoremen in Milwaukee, while the Port, south of Downtown, didn't get noticed much at all, a lot of people were surprised to learn what I did.  It seemed fascinating to some, and I didn't mind the romanticized appeal we had, especially when I was talking to women, and went so far as to hang one of the hooks from my rear view mirror.  But Marlene on our first date quickly told me its sinister shape dangling on our side of the windshield made her nervous and I tossed it in the back.
     So much for my borrowed machismo, and we continued on our way to the Oriental Theatre and the showing of Jimi Hendrix's Rainbow Bridge, a film with a dreary opening but some decent music.
     But we were getting along fine, and after we moved in together I could be domestic the way I really wanted -- maybe both of us deciding to go out at the last minute, but otherwise I could read while watching TV.  After the bleak horror of waking up and drinking to get back to sleep and dragging through a work morning I had developed the resolve never to drink the night before work again, even if it meant no sleep.
     My rule was that if I dozed off at all -- judged by whether I became aware that the images and fantasies, momentarily so logical, that captivated my brain, were in fact dreams -- I would get up when the clock radio played.  Otherwise, with no trace of sleep I would stay in bed -- reasonably, I thought, since I could be facing a demanding 12-hour stint.
     Sometimes that meant that the first couple days of a work week I would only get an hour or so, but at least I wasn't hung over, and then as a longshoreman I could sometimes take off after problematic mornings with few repercussions.
     Once in the hold and finding myself on a bag gang or something else grueling I could hope to get a replacement and go home at noon if someone was in the hall looking to get on.  Soup and a sandwich at Marino's was next, in either case.  Beers starting at noon, but only if I didn't plan on getting hired the next day.
     Occasionally I would get chided for abusing the checkout system, maybe in a letter from Meehan Seaway, but I was following the union contract.  Work came there in spurts, so after a few days I could make up for my abstinence by relaxing with some quarts of beer -- outside on the grass in front of the apartment building, if it was a warm night -- muscles sore from hours of repetitive exertion, and swollen, stiffening finger joints.
     Sometimes I would have to enlist Mar to unbutton my shirt cuffs.
     Marlene herself enjoyed her glasses of chilled jug rosé, decanted when possible, but it didn't interfere with her journalism courses and women's studies -- financed by her work as a clerical temp and some grants and loans.  At the same time I did my best to keep up with my running and yoga, and using longer stretches of time while she basically supported us to write for the Bugle.
     At least that got me out of the house sometimes, though apart from the in-and-out appearances of the small staff, contributors -- like myself -- generally worked from home and it was rare to run into someone there like Mike Zetteler, who covered some of the same ground with articles on censorship, sex and the alternative scene since leaving Kaleidoscope -- even his adventures as a cab driver fending off inquiries into his indulgence in oral sex while remaining tipworthy.
     Myself, I was adventurous enough once to poke canned peach slices into her pussy and suck them out -- she said pieces were coming out even the next day -- but I was generally more conventional while it wasn't unusual for her to see I was absorbed in reading and come over to the easy chair and unzip my jeans.
     "Got to let 'em breathe once in a while," she would say, lifting out the cock and balls while I watched with bemusement.  It wasn't as comfortable after a while as one might have thought, and after continuing for a while with my magazine I would have to cover up -- but it could lead to sex.
     As the night manager I had gotten us into the best apartment in the building, on the ground floor in the front opposite the office.  The bedroom was spacious, and we could find ourselves there in the middle of the day or at night with the lights on -- across from the windows looking out of the L-shaped projection -- belatedly wondering if our sexual positionings had been on display for anyone over there.

 But over time, as with the others, the intensity of my first fondness for Marlene dwindled.  The main problem was with me, I thought when I mulled it over, as I often did.  Somewhere within me I had an idealized picture of the perfect woman for me -- actually, it was amorphous and varied when I saw an actual candidate.  Whether a film actress or singer or TV character -- Mouseketeer Annette Funicello was one of the first, and the tigerish Eartha Kitt -- she was dark, generally lush and often oriental, or at least exotic:  Deenah, an Indian girl up north, one of the many Dekorahs, had me at age 16 to her 17 filled with shy, inchoate longing.
     Independent enough to drive without a license, like many country girls, she first picked me up as I walked the road to my grandfather's home in Adams, Wis.  She was too experienced for my schoolboy ways, though I thought I personified big city cool, and I could only admire her as her crowd let me run with them.  I eventually wrote a poem about that vacation, remembering her in the part about . . .

                . . .  the first summer that
               I didn't get poison ivy there
               I was hardly able, after drinking
               muscatel with two Oneida girls
               and a sailor with a broken arm
               home on leave, in a Ford by the
               Petenwell dam, to walk
               the road to the cottage that was
               to be attached by the county
               for medical bills when he died.

     Even one of the colored girls at school would be great for me -- and a daring choice -- if we could connect despite my caution, though Italian was a good compromise, but it was a round, sensual face -- baby-faced, actually -- that was the main attraction.

     As with Marlene, whom I first noticed at the bar for a mass of long, luxuriant auburn hair and ample body, though by the time we got friendly she had dropped some weight.  A short depression and a lot of pizza because of a recent breakup had been to blame, but she was one to take charge and move on.
     She was smart, even interested in journalism, with striking good looks, set off by white, even teeth.  She was quick with a quip or pointed observation, and sometimes liked to act in the spirit of the times and introduce herself at parties as an urban guerilla -- though in truth her activities were along the lines of canvassing for Ralph Nader's public interest groups or staying home to bake banana bread after classes, its aroma suffusing the air.  But she was au courant enough to recognize the name of an Iranian politician at a party when someone mentioned Ghotbzadeh to interject:
      "Goats b' day -- and men by night!"
     At any rate, I could cook adequately enough, but usually relegated myself to washing the dishes when she was home to take over.  And I always volunteered to make the instant coffee afterwards, though when it came to actual housework beyond my natural tidiness I knew I could always outwait her.
     Luckily, her body, despite her weight loss, was satisfying to grab by her butt when I got behind it, and she mostly kept toned with yoga on a towel on the floor.  Once when she noticed me observing her in an ungainly position she struck a pose elevating her abundant tits under the thin top with her palms, announcing with mock pride:
     "My body's a symphony."
     "Hmmm, maybe a Looney Tune."
     But I appreciated her curves, ever since the first days when I had licked the wine from her glass off her stiffened nipples.  Even when she moved out in one of her fits of independence -- to teach me a lesson for my coolness, I assumed -- we would end up in her bed after her shift as a cocktail waitress.  In one early evening session when she called me to come over with my Polaroid camera I took nude pictures of her -- sporting a floppy, wide-brimmed hat and striped stockings -- and eventually I propped the camera on a cushion so I could photograph her sucking my cock.

     But of course, she got pregnant, and though she arranged a legal abortion we somehow drifted back to the old arrangement.  This happened several times when she would scout out a flat for us almost without my input and then we would be living together again.

     But I recovered quickly enough from her confession, as she sipped wine, since I had already been fucking Christy when I could, and had some phone numbers from an East Side party we had gone to.  One belonged to a music teacher named Betsy Mierow, who Marlene immediately dubbed The Whale after she saw us dancing a fast dance to Mark Shurilla and the Electric Assholes band.  They had been hired for the occasion and were overpowering in the storefront, with Buddy Holly covers and originals like Blitzkrieg Over Kenosha, while the rather large and zaftig Betsy and I looked warmly in each other's direction and occasionally accepted a passing joint.
     I had stayed with her most of the night a few times even before Marlene left me, early enough in the affair to think I could make it permanent, noting she read the New York Times and had traveled a lot.  But right before one of her spring trips, just after an encounter when she tentatively went down on me for the first time and I was pondering whether I should reciprocate -- I didn't know her well enough to easily bring it up, and I had the lingering reservation that some women didn't think it was manly -- she told me about her newly diagnosed condition and the possible Ping-Pong effect.
     She gave me my supply of pills to treat the trichomoniasis she could have infected me with.  I hadn't been seeing anybody else -- though apparently she was -- but I was expected to abstain from sex and alcohol for 10 days, the course of the treatment.
     Not drinking for 10 days was hard -- it meant isolation -- but everything really went bad when she came back and told me over the phone that she had no desire to see me again.  No special reason, it seemed, just no real spark.  And I had thought a well-read teacher who knew who Keith Jarrett was -- she played the piano herself -- was just what I wanted.
     For me the sex had been good enough, yet another fresh revealing of vistas of smooth flesh and soft mounds with their nubs and a sparsely covered slit.  I had found that Marlene could be eager and open for anything, though I doubted she ever had a real orgasm, reticent as she was to talk about coming or go beyond hints that she would like receiving oral sex.  But I could be indifferent, since I knew she loved it any time I still found her desirable.
     So I didn't care much either that Betsy didn't seem to be able to get off easily, and often was happier to stay out with her friends at Rieder's than go back to her apartment and fuck.  One night at an otherwise empty table there, surfeited with the ubiquitous popcorn, I suggested we make the move to her place and she rather petulantly demurred.  Not in the mood.  By then the clay steins of Hacker-Pschorr Braü -- owner Frank Rieder insisted the glassware couldn't be called by a word that meant stone -- under the overlooking panels of stained glass set in dark wood had me becalmed and ready for new sensations.
     I couldn't imagine Jenny or Marlene not being primed for sex almost any time, but to demonstrate my understanding nature I suggested eating at Conejito's.  A supply of Dos Equis and some enchiladas would comfort me, I figured, though it turned out that we didn't have a lot of time.  We realized they closed early on Sundays when they started emptying the remaining jackets from the little coatroom.  Betsy, seeming happy enough to be with me, noticed first and asked, "What's going on?"
     I pondered for a second as they laid the clothing on tables and told her, "Maybe they're going to do the Mexican coat dance."
     So we hurried to finish and she drove herself home from Rieder's without having sex.  Leaving me baffled about her true desires.
     Still, I reasoned that like Marlene she cared enough about me to plan a future while I was willing to take a long time, months, to perfect the nuances.  Even the basics, like getting her off -- I knew it was a problem when she guided my hand from where I had been dutifully fingering her to her clit.  Even at my age I was about as learned as an average schoolboy in really knowing what to do.  But I had to mount her after what I thought was a reasonable time, even turning her over when I decided I wasn't as vigorous as I could have been, a tactic that usually worked when I had the recurring effects of earlier, humiliating failures.
     I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised after my coming with her ass in the air and glad to relax, the tension spent, that she announced in her singsong schoolteacher voice -- she was used to dealing with grade-schoolers, after all:  "Now I ah . . . require to be masturbated."
     Reflexively, I dismissed this.  "I don't have the energy."
     Thinking languidly that of course I would be willing to do anything reasonable, even eat her pussy, but before I came myself.  Afterwards, I would only want to relax, a typical male I suppose, and it would be something we could deal with in the hazily pleasant future.  After all, like finding out that yet another naked photo of a woman could be as compelling as the first view as an adolescent, after a lifetime of sightings desire always came flooding back.
     The other side of the coin was that though deprivation encouraged thoughts of creative eroticism like eating pussy or anal sex, I found the power of reality more rewarding, with its own  urge to get off fast.  Even fantasies, as ephemeral as mine were, seemed to be products of a general desire to get laid, vanishing with the resurgence of the real thing.  So I never confronted whether I seriously itched for a threesome or to see my wife get fucked.
     Especially since I could always make things right with Marlene -- and our trysts often resumed when we both found ourselves adrift and horny, though Betsy's sudden cruelty stunned me with its permanence.
      From that break-up on I showed her my best stone face when I encountered her around the East Side, and I was on my own.  

          1. We admitted we were powerless
 over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

     I was far from powerless.  I just devoted an extraordinary amount of time and effort to exert that power, and had succeeded with my many rules and habits to maintain an equilibrium for at least a half of a lifetime so far.  No drinking except weekends, or never before workdays, or only on special occasions if I felt in need of slowing down.  Of course it interfered with my job, as the warning signs would have it, but that was why I had the jobs I did -- I might miss work, but the job was still there.  The biggest delusion I avoided was to think I could have a little and then coast, the way the Big Book depicted countless alcoholics who thought they could have just one or two and then feel better.  Coasting.  Call it binge drinking, but I knew from the moment I took the first drink I wouldn't stop until I was asleep -- passed out, perhaps, but it was generally night and time for bed anyway.
     Resting peacefully as soon as my head hits the floor, I sometimes joked.
     So my life was manageable, though requiring determination.  And it was a point of pride that I never lied about when or how much I was putting away.  And in the long run I felt it wasn't that much, since as a longshoreman who had to show up ready for anything or be scorned by the rest of the gang as a stick, someone an overburdened partner would soon find a way to retaliate against, I had a routine that included regular sessions with weights in the gym and jogging and a yoga workout I alternated to keep in shape as days off allowed.  So it was a balance.
     But as a bartender I soon realized visions of eager women tossing their keys at me over the bar -- or however they would flirt -- were unrealistic, at least at the neighborhood pizza joint where I ended up, though I made sure to work where I could get a free meal and leave not too long after the kitchen closed.
     Approaching 20 years on the docks, I had settled into my routine of joining the regulars at Jammer's after my shifts of pouring drinks and washing glasses, sharing my tales of longshoring and pseudo-hospitality with acquaintances and friends who would listen.  A few of them went back to the old days at various East Side hangouts, even including Barney's.
     I had moved around for a while after becoming single again, ending up in a city high-rise project on the Milwaukee River.  It had age and income requirements but amounted to the best deal around for those who qualified, and I was happy to get the word to my old friend Terry and help him move in as well.
     We had realized a long time ago that our backgrounds included many of the same women -- over many years and affairs -- and we could think back on some good times as we drank at the bar.  In truth, there weren't many salacious details that it occurred to us to share, though we did have some appropriate anecdotes about Music Teacher and her need for masturbation -- it turned out he too found her requests overly demanding -- and the elusive Christy in Waukesha with her perfect pink nipples, and even my long-time roommate Valerie.  A long time back she'd had a crush on him, as recounted to me by her girlfriend Carol Ann at Barney's one night, finding her way into his bed in a surprise late-evening move with her dancer's body and knees flexed to her ears, only to be rejected in time by Terry as too needy.  He confirmed that and a few other participants it turned out we had in common, though unfortunately those days of post-sexual liberation and the Pill, before AIDS, seemed to have vanished.  Along with our youth, not so coincidentally.
     Still, it was a source of surprise to me, at first, if not actually resentment, that the same women found us both attractive -- he was shorter, and more grizzled and lined from a life in the sun sailing boats in Door County and flying his home-made kites -- and a head of hair that started straight and full but ended as a big bald patch when his attempts at curling it to fill in the thinness ultimately failed.
     But I had to admit that in the longer view we were much alike -- unconventional lifestyles and erratic jobs -- he a potter and I a sometimes-writer after our factory stints -- with bearded visages and casual, bohemian appearances.  He was shorter than I, and I suppose women found him cute, but I had to exclaim one time when he came into the Astor coffee shop with pants legs tucked into high, patterned socks:
     "Dances with elves!"
     Of course, adults and philosophers and leaders had always exhorted others to follow their own dreams and live lives of independence, free from others' dictates.  Chart your own course.
     The unspoken text was that this would somehow bring success and achievement as it had to the accomplished exemplars themselves.  That it could mean a life of poverty and little recognition and ultimate alienation from the circles of support we start out with wasn't usually a part of the calculation.  For every long stretch of time when I successfully avoided work or abandoned one agreeable companion for a fresh, complaisant replacement I was stuck in a menial factory job at minimum wage for endless periods, and drinking alone at a bar while eyeing unavailable lovelies.
     But we had decades of history to talk about over beers, and my continuing work as a longshoreman provided some anecdotes, while he could talk of his recent experiences blowing up and selling balloons in the park and at city events.
     I sensed things were winding down for me at the docks when the employers mounted a push to get everyone to sign over their vested pension rights or accumulated credits for a one-time payout that would let them sell their own interests unencumbered to a buyer willing to take over their holdings.
     One night I told about one of the first takers, a long-time hold boss who had gotten his experience in the Korean War as a cargo officer, one of the few white leadmen.  With the buyout available, he was soon to walk off one afternoon, his gloves and a shackle for weight stuffed into his white hardhat, heaved off from the pier where his ship was tied into the slip to sink with a small splash into the choppy water as we cheered.
     Having lived in poverty for so long and with back rent accumulated over the years, and always needing car repairs, I couldn't resist the lure of a few thousand in cash myself, as opposed to a distant pension in which I still didn't have vested rights, and might never.  At 52, bartending would have to do.
     Unlike Mac Leverett's hat, my own simply ended up in my closet as a talisman, alongside my rakishly modified cab driver's cap from my college years.  I did note somewhat ruefully that 21 years of wearing it in the hold and on deck and on the shore that it had left its mark in more than one way.  Not just metaphorically, shaping my life as the emblem of a unique vocation, but physically:  I was accustomed from early on to wearing a bandanna underneath at work, keeping sweat-damp hair from matting further as I just let it dry on breaks rather than trying to comb it out, and of course sopping up the rivulets that tended to roll down my forehead to burn my eyes.
     As it happened, the hardhat had a leatherette band inside that dipped to a point to cover the plastic suspension, and it overlay precisely the triangular fold at the front of my red bandanna to form together a distinct X that over the course of many years left the same permanent indentation on my forehead from the pressure.  Never going away, in the right crosslight a perfect X could always be seen to mark me.  Long after I retired I could muse about the symbolism, of course, of the effects of a way of life chosen early on staying with me forever, but there it was.  Oddly enough, I never pointed out the branding to anybody, and it was never noticed except by me.  But it was visible in any mirror.
     What would Mike Grumley say if he could see me?
     Of course, Terry and I were marked also by the various sexual and romantic escapades of our past, including our more recent tentative and dwindling possibilities, to the point where it amounted to mostly speculation, while the modern age of computers, especially as my new hobby, entered the picture -- with the charms of online pornography becoming ubiquitous.  Now I could have a screen that helped visualize if I wanted a wife that I could watch getting fucked -- even by a dog.
     I admitted to finding it all fascinating, and useful, the most convenient way outside of actual sex to keep desire alive and active.  As I mentioned to Terry, "For one thing, that's how I find out if I'm horny and want to do something about it . . ."
   "I don't do that," he said quickly.  A reflex, it seemed as he then noticed I wasn't disparaging masturbation at all and that my raised eyebrows were actually a comment on his lack of sex drive, if not his honesty.
     "Well, sometimes I do," he continued rather lamely.  But I took him to mean that indeed he had given up on any sex, just as he had actually mentioned that he didn't care if he ever got laid again.  As a grandfather who at least in his own mind had a history of prowess, his ennui was plausible -- and at any rate was his business and not my place to judge.  By most accounts he did have impressive numbers to reflect on, though as I pointed out I was never trying to set records:  I  just wanted to settle down with someone cute, and write.  And if my count of affairs made while I was trying to entice sleep had reached 29 or 39 -- when awake I could never recall, exactly -- he had balled away with a lot more.
     Now I was casually gliding through porn sites at the end of an evening and finding every couple of sessions jiggles and folds of flesh and hard core thrusting and sucking growing more fascinating until it was time to get out the K-Y Warming Liquid and newly sent-for Fleshlight.
     So eroticism wasn't over for me, even with the rise of computing and my own ventures into web publishing.  I now had a website with old mainstream and alternative reportage and fiction and poetry and had started a novel about longshoring's disreputable history called Shenango after an old term for itinerant dockworkers.
     A name that took hold back when the ships were wood and the men were iron, as the saying went.
     My Web presence led to females surfacing electronically, at least -- via the Internet and e-mail -- from my college days and East Side hangouts and underground publishing collectives to raise hopes of an eventual renewed liaison.
     Nothing much panned out, though even Bibiana Garson in Washington State -- long divorced from Gregory -- got my e-mail address after being turned on to my online reminiscences by a daughter that heard of it from childhood peers that remained in the city, and wrote to me.
     Like many respondents to my website, including Gregory Garson and others who were looking to touch upon the past or perhaps had idly checked for references to longshoremen or the underground press, she was one who was initially complimentary about what history I had preserved but at the same time admitted to being overwhelmed by the scope and detail.  Generally they promised to read at more length when they got the chance and comment in detail -- but they seldom followed through.
     It happened a lot in bars that after a conversation about my website with a drinker that seemed earnest enough and interested in my histories that I would give them my business card with URLs so they could check things out -- expecting to get e-mail comments -- but I never did.  Even though readers from around the world -- mostly strangers -- would comment about those same pages.
     Bibi herself eventually likened my efforts to Henry Miller, though "without the sex," as she typed in her e-mail, which I thought was fair enough if she meant only the histories.  Apparently she couldn't give much consideration to the fiction, maybe because I wrote old-fashioned realism.  Then she was silent for a long time until she wrote me about a therapeutic writing class she was taking where she was called upon to write a journal, a sort of recollection of "all the men I have kissed."  She said she seemed to remember that we had flirted but that I had been wary of Gregory -- my English teacher, after all -- finding out.
     "Did we kiss?" she asked.
     With her age and experience the group  project seemed a daunting task, and I marveled in a message that it wasn't at least limited to actual lovers, not just kisses -- of which even I had too many to begin to count.  But I thought to gently remind her of our past -- apparently fading from her mind -- by confirming that we had indeed kissed, though I was concerned about Gregory and my guilty feelings, and directed her to my short stories -- links she might have passed over -- about a Milwaukee youth eventually attending UWM and some tentative oral sex with a seductive teacher there.
     "Anti-climactic," as I pointed out to her, hoping that maybe she would find that long-ago failure to completely charm me -- because of course for a real passion I would have risked the chance of Gregory flunking me, or worse -- had at least been turned into art.  She was a poet, after all.
     It was silence on her end for a long time, until I finally wrote and asked if somehow she had been offended.
     "Didn't you write about my vagina?  I remember that I was horrified."
     I could only remind her that where the Garsons appeared in my writing -- complimentary by anybody's standards -- I had written like a sexless Henry Miller; the rest was fiction and not to be taken as depicting actual participants.
     She grudgingly admitted that was true, but I took the ensuing lack of communication to be a result of her new alienation.  Since I respected her and Gregory above anybody else that I could consider mentors, I was sad but resigned that given their advancing years our cameraderie could never be regained.
     All the more so since they had both suffered for their principles, losing their jobs for a Vietnam War protest at school; if not to the martyr's death once speculated on by Bibi they went far beyond most of their academic peers.
     My own age was becoming more of a factor as time went on, with fewer good conversations with contemporaries or even suitably interesting -- and interested -- bar-going types, male or female.
     Even so, with music supplied by an advanced sound system that had replaced the jukebox, Jammer's could draw me in for long sessions -- though it became more rare as I spent more time at the computer and eventually elected often to stay home even on a weekend night.  I found myself thinking that the taverns could be desolate but that I was ensuring I would have something of importance to offer to someone someday if I finished my various projects while learning some HTML and web design -- drawing on my experience in magazine and newspaper layout.
     So without struggle I was drinking less and less -- it seemed pointless to bother at home -- and wondered why I had ever sought that warm, enveloping muzziness.  My eventual theory was that when I was in relationships or even found regular camaraderie in bars, the occasions when I was forced to forego companionship could be compensated for with an alcohol-induced glow.  Replicating a recent sense of pleasure.
     But faced with a grim loneliness, I had to confront that I had nothing to look forward to, and drinking only enhanced the hollowness around me.  Better to feel healthy and on point and accomplish something in the moment -- especially with the growing challenge of building and mastering computers.
     But then I also remembered Marlene's father who was said by her mother to have been nursed by her through the DTs as an alcoholic working for Bugs Moran in Chicago and going on -- unlikely though it seemed -- to drink again normally and own the family tavern on Milwaukee's North Side.
     And picking up on writing my stories and articles where I left off was so much easier with a keyboard and illuminated screen and instant editing functions.
     Oddly enough, I could feel guilty about not drinking, as if I were admitting my encroaching elderliness by giving up on bars and swinging dick night.  So I found myself drawn back on rare occasions, maybe after a street festival for a nightcap, aiming for several times a year.  Sometimes after a Mexican dinner and some jazz.
     When I did, I could always watch the TV, of course, though the owners favored sports, which usually left me cold, and it took close attention to subtitles to make the occasional desirable movie worth viewing.  Once a commercial for a sleeping aid played, and the announcer advised taking it only if you had seven hours to devote to sleeping.
    "You wish you had seven hours to sleep?" I asked a momentarily still Jamie, pausing in his incessant rounds, sweating even in the cool autumn night, door open, in a loose Hawaiian shirt.
     He nodded ruefully, and I felt prompted to observe:  "Hell, even my naps are longer than that."
     But wait long enough and even a relatively quiet corner bar -- and it was actually on the corner -- like Jammer's could be more than the usual sedate scene.  So it was that my friend Ralph Praefke, who salvaged and sold antiques to earn enough to carry a substantial coke habit, somehow prevailed upon a young blonde he knew to cartwheel topless the length of the bar and back several times.  Unfortunately keeping her shorts on.
     I never asked how it came about, though I suspected the powder he had in abundance played a role.  Just as I was occasionally the recipient of a free thumbnail of the stuff in the men's room.  The same dynamic, with previous owner Jimmy Schreiner himself supplying the fuel, may have led the tall local TV newscaster to dance atop the bar, barely keeping her head from hitting the overhanging ceiling with its recessed lights dimly illuminating the spectacle.
     She kept her top on, so Jimmy didn't feel the need to lock the door, as he sometimes did when things got racy or lines were being done off the bar, but it was an entertaining diversion anyway.
     More rewarding to a guy like myself just sitting and quietly drinking was the occasional flasher, one of several young ladies who had no interest in me but a strong enough need for a refill to lift her sweater at the far end of the bar, around the bend, to get the bartender's attention.
     Once, two of them, as if they had rehearsed it, lifted their tops in unison -- bare tits underneath, of course.  To get a drink or just for fun, I didn't know, but then I was only observing out of the corner of my eye because of their position on bar stools around the curve of the bar.  Fortunately, I had a good reflected view in the front window, obscured darkly by fir trees on the outside but easily returning the sight of the interior.
     Finally, one night that display was topped by a young lady who bantered most of the night with a busy Jamie, calling for another vodka and sweet, who pulled up on her sweater -- but unlike most of them who gave a quick up and down tug and glimpse, this fabric was tight enough and her breasts full enough to make substantial obstacles, until a harder tug set them free to swing, nipples like pink candy bits making small twin bull's-eyes visible even in the low light.  A seemingly long pause before she was covered again, as I watched with apparent equanimity, and it was over.  The last tease for that night, at least until I swallowed the flat remains of my final beer and left.
     My tower for the disabled and elderly -- I was considered near-elderly myself, a category recently added by the city to dilute the presence of alcoholic and drug-addicted residents who qualified for government benefits -- loomed in the dark, past the streetlamps and shadowed, silent playground of Pulaski Field abutting the famous Wolski's Tavern premises.
     I had lived there long enough to be on good terms with the manager, a stout black woman whom I helped, in the early days of the Internet, with her installation of Windows 95 on her office computer and eventually bookmark a website I found for her:  She said her mother confided that her father had been one of the Inkspots, and I linked her to a fan site, to explore the connection, though I never turned up any evidence myself that any of the various performers were candidates for that role.
     The block-long walk north after a last glance through the plate glass at the female form visible at the end of the bar was slow with exaggerated carefulness as I maneuvered to stay upright, the scene in the tavern staying with me as I thought back to the night at Grumley's where Jenny had gyrated to the music semi-naked in her girdle in the doorway, pink nipples and delightfully wobbly tits, and I had to recognize that the way things were going I would never see again such a show by any girlfriend of mine and that Jenny, all the Jennys, could only be conjured up in my bittersweet remembrance of them.
     I wasn't usually one to torture myself with induced longing or regrets, but if I felt morose at times some music of a bygone period seemed called for, and I had plenty of it on my computer if I didn't have the original record, to be played through the connected hi-def flat screen TV and resonant soundbar as the cathartic, diffuse grief I probably had been seeking came welling up.
     Tuning in a TV program -- probably some affectless overnight newscast with a slickly attractive duo -- seemed too flat for my surfacing sense of loss, but I kept everything at bay with a rare visit to some childhood enthusiasms, from afternoons at my Grandma's when we gathered around the floor-model RCA for The Shadow and Gabriel Heatter's news and the Inner Sanctum mystery.
     It was the heyday of Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters, of course, but I was captivated by Tex Ritter and Rye Whiskey whenever I heard it.
     My usual fare was all-day broadcast jazz in the background -- with some classical music to relax to reading the Sunday paper -- going back at least to local host Ron Cuzner and his encyclopedic knowledge.
     But having gone so far as to play Tex, I indulged my nostalgia by putting on a keepsake from the days my mother would load a stack of 78s while ironing.  She grooved in her private way, reminiscing about who knows what, to Pearl Bailey, and Benny Goodman and Bing, but my favorite was Patricia Norman, who caused a scandal when she  recorded Ol' Man Mose.  As my mom delicately pointed out, she supposedly sang something other than "buck-buck-bucket," though I was only vaguely aware of the nature of the transgression.  Still, I could later appreciate that my mother was straightforward enough about it.
     So it was onto a path of reveling in memories and hurt intertwined, and I allowed myself to indulge.
     I started with the Jefferson Airplane Surrealistic Pillow album, one that I had often listened to with Jenny when we were first married.  I followed it with the Fugs -- a wedding present from the Garsons -- especially as I associated her with Slum Goddess; switching to The Mamas and The Papas for a cut that reminded me of her and one that I had pointed out I liked for the poetic craftsmanship in the placement of a simple comma: "trip, stumble and fall."
     With Don Crawford's Princess of the Nile and Fear Fountain I was into my time with Marlene.  I had met him when he played at UWM and stayed at the Garsons', fresh from the Tonight Show and touring the country in his big Buick -- mostly obscure venues for the course of his career, unfortunately.
     But If I Gave You My Love always resonated with us for some reason, and I could only follow it with our all-time preferred medieval tapestry, Carmina Burana.  By then I was swimming in pleasurable pain, and even deeper into drink, releasing tears from caverns within, and I was making selections for their emotional depth.  The Beatles and Stones had been so ubiquitous that their impact at any time was diluted, but I had always been drawn to She's A Rainbow, even more so since I always associated it with the long-gone Cheryl who had once appeared on my doorstep.

          Have you seen her dressed in blue?
          See the sky in front of you
          And her face is like a sail
          Speck of white so fair and pale
          Have you seen the lady fairer?

     After many years I realized I had mis-heard the lady fairer, and it wasn't about the Lady Cheryl at all, or even Carol, but by then the link was ingrained forever.
     Even though in flitting in and out of my life she had seemed to be the one female who was content to just use me for sex and to be on my arm at events, unlike the voracious Jenny who nevertheless was seeking a deep connection with a companion.  So Cheryl could disappear and leave me wondering what I had meant to her, though I felt obligated to take it all on her terms, the terms typical of many a man.
     About all I learned of her was when she came back to Milwaukee for a visit and called me but would only meet me at Barney's with her husband -- a school-based child-psychologist from Nashville -- whom I mentally tagged as an insecure wimp when he hovered in the vicinity even as we briefly danced in the crowded back room.
     But though the past is linear, even with its seeming mechanistic convolutions, memory is free-ranging, hopping between random visions.  So up popped warm thoughts of Karen and her presence in the balmy courtyard autumn night of the Chicago tavern where we ate and  drank, to the sound of Willie Nelson, as romantic to our ears as the touch of the soft wind.  Always on My Mind came up now as the aural talisman of that interlude, as well as for my now alcohol-dampened lust for that chubby but uninhibited body and pussy, so recently virginal.
     Still, I also reminded myself sometimes that though I liked to recount that I had initiated two virgins, for the long run I couldn't see the attraction of marrying one.  I would always be wary that she would wonder what another man would be like -- and without comparison she wouldn't really be able to appreciate whatever I could do well.
     By then I was well into a session made poignant yet sodden as any in those distant college days of musical indulgence, choices surfacing in my mind with the old keening drama.  With saturation my drinking had slowed markedly, though I noted sardonically that my tumbler of bourbon and ice and seltzer -- rimmed and monogrammed in gold -- was a wedding gift, a relic that Jenny, generous Jenny, hadn't taken with her.
     Then it was back to a previous era again, early college days, the time of Jackie Wilson and Jack Scott and the almost Gregorian sound of the Shirelles.  Evoking those hand-jobs from Lorri in the car while Motown and soul mixed indiscriminately on Milwaukee radio with bland teen pop and occasional doo-wop -- the one I still played, along with the Moonglows' See Saw, until the cops broke it searching my car -- being considered the first to actually have doo-wop in the lyrics: the Turbans with When You Dance.
     So with tears forcing their way and then drying and then welling again I could berate myself and in the next minute reflect that no matter whom I had displeased or turned away from, it was only the last alienation that counted -- with anyone going before it had always worked out, and who would I have relegated to the list of mere possibilities?
     Just as Dylan Thomas could stifle his mourning because, "After the first death, there is no other," I could assure myself that until the last death there was no other.
     The intensity of an Evelyn alone, even with grown children and a husband -- my last real consuming passion despite her off-putting, matronly diaphragm -- made the other disruptions worthwhile.  And how could I have known at every step what I would lose and when I would be adrift?
     No, I had made my choices, unconventional as I may have been, with nothing to be done now but seek a kind of solace.  For hurt and yearning I turned to their echoes in the haunting harmonies of Master Jack and its reminder of the late '60s.
     Unfathomably strange world indeed, as the tune said.  With Valerie already dead at 50, how could I argue with that?  I could envision still the moment when she tried the Cosmo pencil test, to determine if her cute little titties were too small to hold a pencil underneath, and thus not in need of a bra.  She was glad to find the pencil stayed trapped, barely -- but she still went without a bra.  Common in those late '60s, the time we started acquiring albums together.
     I was drawn to one we first heard on the new free-form FM radio, hosted by Kaleidoscope co-founder Bob Reitman.  Pulling it from its milk-crate holder, I mulled over the notion of why some songs were generally to be kept away from if you didn't want to to feel the avoidable pain, even as I went to the one I perversely treasured as the saddest ever recorded: Maffitt & Davies with Landscape Grown Cold.
     Sometimes that last drink becomes an imperative even if you fall asleep with it in your hand to slip out of your limp grasp, gold trim and all, and fall to the floor, those pale faces specks of white floating away into the waiting darkness calling you down . . .

                                         THE END