The Gas-Station Caper and other Tales of the Night

Marty is a slightly overweight, bearded man of 45 who is an executive in the publishing industry. Marty's luck is almost always good: Women seem to gravitate toward him like birds to a feeder. "I think they see me as a father figure at first," he says, "sort of a harmless older man who will protect them and listen to them and not jump their bones. That's OK with me. I'm happy to play Santa Claus for a while. Things usually get better after that."

Marty is not his real name. The names here have been changed to protect the roguish. But Marty is your typical male, and he has war stories about his life and loves that will keep you laughing through lunch. His favorite? Something you might call Sex and Paralysis.

"I developed this lower-back problem." Marty says. "It got so bad I could hardly move. I went to my doctor, who is also one of my best friends. He examined me and them did his routine: a list of exercises for my back, a prescription for muscle relaxants, a cane to walk with and the advice not to put my back under any undue stress. 'You can't move too sharply or suddenly,' he told me. 'Basically, you have to avoid all vigorous exercise.'

"I thought about that for a minute. 'Doc,' I said, 'you're not talking about sex, right? Tell me I can have sex.'

"'Marty,' he said, 'you definitely have to limit your sex life for at least the next few weeks. Stay away from it as much as you can. If you have to do it, only one position allowed, your back on the floor, your partner above you, no violent movements, she does all the work. You've got a dangerously deteriorating disk conditions. If you throw your back out, it can cause you serious problems for the rest of your life.'

"I'm just regular guy," Marty says, laughing as her reminisces, "which means that if I get a stiffie, I'll do anything to get laid. So there I am, hobbling down the street from my doctor's office, walking like a goddamn bull on ice, using the cane and hating it, feeling like shit, pain in my back and pain down my legs. There on the street, I run into a former girlfriend, a woman I haven't seen for five or six years. She likes the way I'm limping. She likes the cane. She thinks it's all very sexy. She has missed me terribly.

"We stop in a bar fro some drinks, we remember old times and before you know it, we're checking into a hotel. At first, I'm careful. I tell her I have to do it the way my doctor told me to do it. She cooperates. We put the bedding on the floor, she climbs aboard, I let her do the heavy work; she's good at it. But one thing leads to another and I want to change positions. I'm not a passive guy. I want to show off. I remember that she likes doing it doggy style best; it's the only way she can come; there's something about the position that does it for her every time."

Marty taps his temple. "Some things you never forget, you know? And here I am, in the heat of passion, wanting to be impressive. So I get up on my knees and she gets on her knees and we go at it like two mutts in the street, bam-bam-bam. She's moaning, I'm moning, and it's terrific sex. I feel invincible.

"Suddenly, my back goes out. No warning at all. Just snap, like that! I feel this horrble pain, paralyzing, the worst pain I've ever felt in my life. I don't know if you've ever had a bad back, but let me tell you, just trying to lean over to put on a sock or tie your shoelaces is death.

"There I am on my knees behind her, and I'm screaming, 'Ow! Ow! Ow! No! No! No!'

"She hears me. She thinks it's true love. She thinks I'm coming. This excites her. She goes crazy at the noises I'm making. My screams set her off. 'Me, too; me, too,' she's yelling. I'm coming, don't stop, I,m coming!' She's pushing back on me, bounicing all over the place, and she won't let me go. She's reaching back and holding me by my ass. I can't escape. Every movement is like a knife in the spine. It's killing me. I'm screaming in pain, she's yelling in pleasure, it sounds like a zoo in there and I'm dying.

"Finally, I break away. I fall down on the floor on my back. 'Oh, Marty, I'm so sorry; I forgot about you poor back.' She's sobbing, I'm in tears, too. I'm having these back spasms and I can't talk. Pain is colored white; did you know that? White is all you can see, bright-white pain, like you're on the desert and staring at the sun.

"She calls an ambulance. The paramedics carry me out of there on a backboard and I end up in the hospital. 'I thought I told you to take it easy,' my doctor says when he walks in to see me, 'and you're back in here before I can get home for dinner. What the hell were you doing?'

"'You wouldn't believe me if I told you,' I say.

"'Was it worth it? he asks.

"'I'm not sure,' I say. I'll tell you tomorrow.'

"I had to have a back operation and lots of physical therapy. Through it all, I kept asking myself one question : If I had a chance to do it all over again, knowing everything I know now, would I do it? Would I run the risk of total paralysis for a piece of ass?" Marty pauses. "I decided that, all things considered, I probably would. I guess that makes me a little crazy, but I admit it: I'd go for it, no matter what."

For most men, anyway, Marty does not sound crazy; he is simply one of us. Throughout history, men have gambled life, limb, reputation and physical well-being to woo and win, convince and seduce. High-risk loving is a male tradition, from Adam to Casanova, from Gary Hart to many of the men reading this. And in spite of repeated attempts by moralists and scolds to unsex the male and neuter his gender, nothing has changed. We're still the same horny fools we've always been, and we love to laugh at ourselves and our antics.

Take Brian, the commodities broker.

Brian is married. He is in his early 30s, affluent, with a home in the Chicago suburbs, a man well on his way to having his piece of the American pie. Short, manic, driven, quick of mind and geture, Brian is a human dynamo who has a wandering eye and a happy heart.

"There was this Belgian woman, probably ten years younger than I am, a currency trader for an international banking firm, a beautiful woman, more like a girl than a woman, you know, the kind of gal who has stuffed animals on a trunk in her bedroom and posters of Tom Seleck on her wall. I met her at a party and I couldn't take my eyes off her. She seemed innocent and corrupt at the same time, and she had a great body. So I took her out to dinner one evening and we hit it off.

"I will say this for European women: They are magnificent lover. It wan once of the best evenings of my life. But sooner or later, I had to get home. 'First,' she said to me, 'before you go, in my country, the woman always gives the man a massage after lovemaking.' Well, that sounded OK to me, so I lay back and let her massage me with this special oil she had. I loved it, but I noticed something a little strange. The oil had a smell. A nice smell, sort of a combination of pine needles and roses, but a very strong smell. Not the kind of thing you want to wear as you walk in your own back door at three in the morning, if you know what I mean.

"So I showered with Belgian soap and dried myself with a Belgian towel, but I still smelled that oil. I showered again. Same smell. I had no more time to shower. I had to get home, so I kissed my Belgian girlfriend goodbye and hopped into my car and took off.

"Immediate problem: I am stinking up the car. I open the windows and hope the breeze will blow the odor away. Guess what? That doesn't work. The smell hangs around me like a dirty yellow fog I'm panicked. What should i do? My wife will five me hell if I arrive home smelling like a Belgian forest. My mind is racing I'm heading toward the last big interesection before my suburb. Bingo! I get an idea.

"I stop at the only gas station that's open, pull into the self-serve lane. The attendant is watching me very intently from his booth. I don't blame him. I look a little strange, because I've thought of a solution to my problem and I'm happy. It's the middle of the night and I'm bouncing around like it's noon. I don't need much gas. Hardly any at all. But that doesn't mean I turn the pump off right away. No, I have a plan. I'm humming to myself, splashing fuel on my shoes, slopping it around, sprinkling it on my trousers, washing my hands in it, flipping a little into my hair. I'm taking a gasoline shower! The attendant stares at me while I do this. He is convinced I'm crazy. He is waiting for me to torch myself. I pay him. He puts his handkerchief over his nose while he gives me my change.

"I drive home. I talk to myself all the way. 'Do not make a mistake, do not light a match, do not smoke your cigar, do not smoke a cigarette, be very careful, do not fuck up.' I park the garage, go in the kitchen door, climb the stairs. 'God, you smell like a gas station,' my wife says as I walk into the bedroom. 'I know,' I say. 'Sorry about that. The gas hose broke and the guy spilled it on me.' She goes is the shower--after I burn my clothes in the burn barrel.

"It was a once-in-a-lifetime ploy, of course. I can't do it again. It's too risky. I could have gone up in flames like a napalm bomb. But it worked for me that night."

There is an underlying characteristic of these men's stories: clarity. Every male with whom I talked had one specific moment clearly in mind as the riskiest, craziest, funniest episode of his love life. Male memories of love and risk are on the tip of the brain, fond recollections of times we choose not to forget.

My friend Glenn, for example, remembers the reckless moment in his life. Looking at Glenn, you would think he was an advertisement for what we used to call Yuppiedom. He is 28 years old, an impeccably dressed business consultant, possessor of a Harvard B.A. and M.B.A., near the top of his class in business school, high-salaried now. But Glenn has secret.

"What people don't know about me is that I was raised on a small farm in the (continued on page 138)Gas-Station Caper(continued from page 82) South. My family had no money at all. Everbody assumes that because I went to Harvard, I come from an Ivy League family, but that's not the way it was. My dad died when I was tewlve. I worked an outside job all the way through high school, got some financial aid for college, scrimped and save. The first day I arrived in Boston was my first day in any big city.

"Frankly, the way I learned to survive at Harvard was by being a chameleon. I tried to melt into the wallpaper and copy what other people did. I was a chameleon with women, too. I'd be whoever they wanted me to be. I loved almost all of them deep in my groin and I just wanted to please them. Were they politically liberal? Hey, I could be liberal. Were they right-wing conservatives? No problem for me. Did they like to go to art museums? Me, too. Concerts? Sure. Baseball games? Why not?

"Some of my attitude was based on finances. If I did what they wanted to do, it was easier to go Dutch, and I was in no shape to pay for a lot entertainment. But I also realized that women like men who agree with them. Today, those my be the only men they like. So I became a really agreeable guy, and liked me and sometimes loved me.

"I used to hang around a coffeehouse near campus. My father never saw a coffeehouse in his life, and here was his son, Glenn Junior, ordering cappuccino and looking at contemporary art on the walls. But I had a good reason for doing that: Waiters don't usually hassle you in a coffeehouse. You can order one cup of coffee and then sit there for hours.

"I get ambushed in the coffeehouse one winter's morning in my sophomore year. This beautiful woman walks in, blonde hair in braids, Bo Derek features, parka and ski boots and glowing skin, I am immediately in love. I have to talk to her. I will die if I do not talk to her. So chameleon Glenn starts up a conversation. I ask her where she got her ski boots, she tells me, we talk.

"She seems to like me. I'm trying to scope her out, get her profile, just fit in, you know? She loves Switzerland; I love Switzerland. She paints in oils; I paint in acrylics. She loves skiing at Vail; Vail is like my own back yard, I've skied there since I was six years old, I knew it before it got fashionable, Robin Leach has nothing on me. I'm very noisy about my history at Vail and my tryouts for the Olympic ski team and the way I'd like to wait tables and party and sauna and ski for the rest of my life. 'Really?' she asks. Really, I nod. I try to look honest and sincere, but it's hard to do that with my own bullshit piled up to my kneecaps. 'So let's go.' Julie grabs my hands. 'Let's get out or here this afternoon, let's go boogie in the snow.' It is amazing offer that I cannot refuse.

"'W-w-well,' I stutter.

"'Come on,' she says, 'My father has a condo at Vail. We can stay there. How about it?'

"I've got the first credit card of my life in my wallet, I've just been challenged by a beautiful woman, I've told her how great I am, I'm in love, what do you think I'm going to do? I go with her, of course.

"Her father's condo is great. When we get there, I suggest we take a whirlpool and get some rest. She's too smart for that. She knows that I don't really mean rest. She says no, she wants to hit the slopes. So True Grit here goes out and rents some skis, asks the clerk at the shop some really basic questions and meets Julie at the lift. Off we go, me amost breaking my butt just getting into the lift chair, up to the top of the toughest hill.

"Julie's talking all the way, but I hardly hear her, because I'm convinced I'm going to die. I assume I'll probably fall off the lift; it that doesn't get me, the downhill trip will. I've seen movies about skiing, but I am your basic country boy who has never been on skis in his life. I am clearly crazy. My hormones are leading me to my death.

"I remember standing there on the crest of that mountain, feeling like my chest was about to cave in, terrified, still playing macho man but ready to quiet, ready to sit down in the show and cry and ask for a snowmobile ride back to town.

"You know what did it? You know what got me down that hill? My nose. The smells. I don't mean the trees and the pine needles and all that shit. I mean the smell of Julie's suntan lotion, her lip balm and hand cream, her shampoo, her wonderful skin. She took off, dropped out of sight, and my nose had to follow her. She was like a magnet.

"Did you see the movie Who Framed Rogar Rabbit? Remember the first ten minutes of it, the baby in the kitchen crawling all over the place and almost getting killed but not getting killed? That was movie of my trip down the mountain that day. I bounced, I fell, I rolled from pillar to post. I slammed into trees, I ate tree bark and snow, I fell every twenty meters, I shimmied on my butt and crawled on my knees. Julie said I looked like a wounded grizzly bear when I got to the bottom. But I made it.

"Only man in love could have survived that run. And you know something? I can smell that woman to this day. I can put myself back on the top of that mountain in my mind any time I want. Us guys, we're fools for love. Absolute fools."

Those are just three of the scores of sagas I've heard from the men I've interviewed for this article. Unfortunately, over the past quarter century, men have become more reticent about telling adventures like these. This reticence is born of fear, the fear of being labeled sexist by a culture that has become squeamish about male behavior. Men have learned to bury their sexual histories deep, and it is a new experience for them to openly discuss their shenanigans. But one thing held true in my research: I never met a man who didn't have at least one moment in his life when risks were accepted and love was then fanatically pursued.

There is the computer programer who drove his motorcycle 500 miles through snow and freezing temperatures to reach a beautiful American Indian woman who had hinted in a phone call that she might permit him a delliance. In his precoital haste, he blew a tire at 85 miles per hour, broke a clutch cable and shifted thereafter with a vise grip. He almost crashed when he fell asleep on the highway, pulled into a truck stop and was shaking so badly from cold and fatigue that he spilled four cups of coffee before he could get a cup to his mouth. He arrived at his destination only to see his intended lover waving to him from a raft in the middle of a very cold lake, swam out to her and said, essentially, "Here I am!" He met resistance because she didn't want to make love where someone might be able to see them, got pushed off the raft and back into the icy water, lost momentary capability for an erection when a fish bit his toe and entertained the frightening vision that he might be swimming in a lake stocked with piranhas. He retired in defeat from the hoped-for seduction with a pledge to himself that from that moment on, he would, as he put it, "ride in greater comfort toward more assured ends."

And then there is the journalist, now middle-aged, who remembers a wild night on Okinawa in the early Sixties. At the time, this man wan an active-duty Marine, a member of a secret task force that had been hastily assembeld on Okinawa and was preparing for a possible invasion of Laos, an invasion that America's new President, John Kennedy, was seriously considering. Convinced that deadly combat lay ahead, this Marine wanted to see his own true love for a final reunion before he went off possibly to die for his country.

At the time, his own true love happened to be a bar girl naed Michiko, a slim and graceful young woman who worked as a hostess at a bar in Naha, the island's largest city. But out Marine ran into an unforeseen problem on the night he went to see his bar girl for the last time. Michiko suddenly had been spirited out of Naha and hidden away by her jealous proprietor--the owner of the bar and one of Okinawa's small-time mobsters. She ws being held in captivity in a rural section of Okinawa into which no Americans, particularly military personnel, were welcome.

Okinawa, the last island of the Ryukyu Island chain south of Japan, site of one of the great battles of World War Two, was in th early Sixties a place of smoldering resentment between the Okinawans and the overwhelming American military presence there. The last American military man who had tried to go into the village where our Marine planned to go in pursuit of Michiko had been caught, beaten, his ankles tied to the rear bumper of a taxi, his battered head the consistency of tomato pulp after being dragged for miles over rough roads.

None of this stopped our Marine in rut. He talked Michiko's sister into telling him her exact location and prepared for a long-range patrol. He taped his dog tags together so they wouldn't tarrly, put on camouflage clothing and camouflage paint and a black knit hat and drove his jiip as close as he dared to the village in question. With his K-Bar between his teeth--he swears it's true--he crawled several hundred merters across rice-paddy dikes, past open sewage ditches, through mud and slime, past chickens and dogs, so that he could infiltrate, reconnoiter, lie in wait in the bushes until the palce seemed asleep, them silently invade Michiko's room through the window of the shack in which she was being held prisoner.

Once in her bedroom, he luxuriated for ap couple of hours in love and still-remembered lust. He tried to get her to escape with him, met refusal, said several sentimental goodbyes, finally crawled out the same way he had crawled in and made it back to the jeep and safety just before dawn. "It was crazy, but I did it," he says today. "I just kept telling myself that I was doing what the Marines had trained me to do. As I saw it, I ws on a mission from God, I loved It."

These adventures may sound apocryphal. They are not. They are representative and true strories, testimonies to the male spirit, to male energy and ingeniuty. Risk is often good, franctically pursued love is frequently warm and wonderful, release int hemidst of danger can be exquisite. Men know this in their genes. Almost all of them have participated in some risky sexual business. It comes with the male territory.

Love and risk are not incompatible for men. Not by a long shot. They represent a potent and memeorable mix, a combination of self-expression and reaffirmations, a way of living and loving that will never die and cannot be wished or legislated away.

What do men risk for love? Sometimes everthing. And they never forget it. Shortly beofre his death, Tolstoy glanced at his bare feet and suddently remembered Aksing Bazykina, a young peasant woman who had been the mother of his olders son some 50 years previously.

Tolstoy, the old rogue, was smack in the middle of an honorable male condition that is usually composed of revery and lust, seduction and remembrance.

And most of us know exactly how he felt