Chapter 41 My Brush with Date Rape

I moved back from Houston and decided to live in Tulsa.  I got a place at One Eton Square.

It was the first and only apartment that I ever lived in where the billing of “singles” living actually lived up to the hype.  There was a fun but odd group of people in my building.  I had gotten a ground floor one bedroom off the second pool back from the main pool.  There were a couple of guys across the breezeway, a divorcee, a few younger women in assorted jobs like sales and marketing.  We kind of hung out together for a short time before people moved or drifted away.

 I met a nice guy there that I still stay in touch with, he moved up to Minnesota and works for Johnson Controls.  I didn't meet him till I was dating my Future Ex #2 pretty steady.

The apartment managers were real friendly and we had parties one a month at the main pool.  I would use my dive equipment to check out things in the pool for them every once in a while and in exchange they left me alone.

I remember one gal who worked for the Green Sheet in advertisement sales who I knew casually, called me up and asked me to come over to...uh, service her.  It was pretty cut and dried.  Actually it was pretty nice.  No games everything right up front.

At a party I met a surgeon.  She was a short haired looking athletic sort.  She was working down in Marfa doing a stint of government service to pay off med school.  She had been a flight surgeon and had to work off some of the med school costs the feds had picked up.  Her specialty was male urology.  She installed implants for erectile dysfunction.    I had no idea there were so many types.  Of course, Viagra may have put a dent in her future business. 

But this was in the days before the blue pill.  She described the pump, a kind of the Michael Jordan Air pump, only the little pump pad isn't in the tongue of the shoe but in the guys scrotum.  I wonder how many pumps it would take to get the thing erect.    It would inflate a bladder inserted surgically in the penis.  She said the pumping could be worked into foreplay.

The second and most ridiculous was the tent pole extension.  Two telescoping metal or plastic tubes were inserted surgically.  They nested into one another.  To use the thing the guy, or girl if he had a helpful partner would pull the ends of the two tubes and then twist them to lock them in place, just like two tent poles, or walking sticks. 

One had a cam that would bind up to hold the two tubes in place when they were twisted.  Neat, but oh so not cool.  According to her this type was prone to rupture through the side of the penis.  Imagine having the equivalent to the tube that holds a role of toilet paper in your penis and hitting something not too yielding inside your partner and having that thing ram against your pelvis or worse something too yielding.  You could ram the thing out the back of your scrotum, which I guess happened once or twice.

In the event we went sailing together after I met her at a pool party.  Turns out she was divorced.  Her ex had been a body building narcissist and she had come home to find him in bed with, dare I say, one of his body building buddies.  Not of the feminine persuasion either. 

 I guess in the twisted world of self love; he loved looking at himself so much that he fell in love with someone that looked like him.  Nah!  He had just married her to have a beard.  He was gay and just could not face up to it.  Now you know how AIDS crossed the heterosexual boundary.  Sharing needles?  Some, but by far it was infecting of unsuspecting females by gay men or bisexual men.  To this day the gay community still won't own up to it.  They want to continue the fallacy of casting themselves as victims.

Anyway, that kind of startled me and we talked and she point blank said the first thing she did was go out and get tested, then filed for divorce.  But it was a big ego hit for her.  How do you compete with someone from the opposite sex?  I found myself on the end of that dilemma about 10 years later with Future Ex #3 the bi-polar, sexually confused wunderkind.

There was one very bizarre thing that came out of my acquaintances at One Eton.  One of the guys liked to regale us with stories of his encounters and one in particular piqued my interest.  He spoke of a young woman who liked to be tied up, you know into BDSM or a bondage queen.  At the time, this predated the Internet, I was pretty ignorant of the underground community to which these people gravitated.  Well being the resourceful guy I am, I found out her name and where she worked and called her up for a date.

Talk about cold calling. 

Anyway, I proposed she bring a friend for safety, I described myself and said what I would be wearing.  Since I didn't have a clue what she looked like other than a cursory description, hair, eyes etc, and that she was attractive.  I wouldn't be in a position to recognize her.  She could come to the designated restaurant of her choice, check me out and if she wasn't interested just leave and I'd never be the wiser.  If she wanted to meet me she could introduce her self.  Well it worked out great.  We met and decided to date.   I went an picked her up at her apartment late one evening in pretty foul weather if I recall correctly.  We went to Incahoot's or whatever it was being called then. 

I knew I might have a head case on my hands when she wanted champagne. I obliged her and she immediately got wasted.  So much so she couldn't find her way back to the table after visiting the women's room.

In hind sight I would have to say she might have been Bipolar.  She drank like she was on a mission from god to get wasted.

The BDSM thing is now a give-away.  In my personal experience, people into that in a big way, have psychological problems.  Wife #3 wanted to delve into it in a big way, and I gather now, that there are several elements at work.  One is self-loathing.  They engage in it to punish themselves.  Second is a touch of infantilism, by that I mean they emotionally never grew up, and they put themselves in the role of the child, the Dom is the parent.  They want to be taken care of, and in exchange, they allow themselves to be punished.  Third is objectification.  They see themselves as an object for sex, they cannot differentiate between sex and love.  They are one in the same to them.  Anyone who used them for sex, loves them, so to be loved they let themselves be used.

It sounds fucked up and it is.

 There could be a touch of masochism and desire to be degraded too, that plays into the self-loathing.  Even sex can become an act of contrition, or punishment.

It’s kind of like they carry this load of emotional baggage with them and they are constantly wanting to make amends for something they were not responsible for.   Ever hear of autism, where the sufferer is kind of cut off from the world and resorts to head banging to feel something?   There could be an element of sexual dysfunction that laps into that too.  My ex needed intense pain not being whipped but still intense stimulation I would call pain in order to climax.

I am not a psychologist although I had Psych 101 and 102  in college and had 7 years of on the job training.  My interaction with real shrinks makes me thing my diagnoses here have just as much validity as their half- baked arm waving does.

Okay, now that I established that there seems to be, in my opinion, a link between mental illness and BDSM, it tosses the whole premise of 50 Shades of Gray on its head.  Believe me, BDSM in not romantic.

Pause.  Stop. 

I need to write a whole entry on this.

Now that I have touched on it, let me continue.

The gal gets tanked, just like I later saw my wife #3 do all the time.  No reason, just a mission to get blotto.

I end the date early since she is nearly incoherent.   I think she might have popped something along with the Champagne.

I take her home.  I say by good byes but no, she wasn’t having it.  She barred the door, wanting me to stay.  I really did not want another Marilyn on my hands.

She then pulls off her top to show me her newly enhanced breasts, wanting my opinion.

Okay, so that did stop me from leaving.  I tell myself I put her in bed because I was afraid she would have followed me out and down the stairwell half naked.   She probably would have.

So I tuck her in bed.  She pulls me down on her and we start kissing and one thing led to the next and we had sex.

Okay, so I gave in.  I stayed until she was asleep and then I let myself out.

Again, I don’t call the next day.  How do you tell an attractive gal that you had a good time, but you really don’t want to go out with a hot mess drunk?  To this day, after wife #3 I cannot stand to even talk to a drunk when I am sober.  Drunks just make me want to throw up.

Well I finally get a call from her, and I guess as a face saving measure, insinuates I took advantage of her, when I am here to tell you, I did not.

I have been in the company of many drunk or passed out women and I never, not once did anything that was not by mutual consent by action if not word.

This was in the days when you did not have to get a signed consent form from the Dean of Student affairs or the District Attorney before two adults exchanged bodily fluid by sexual penetration.

Today it’s different.

At the time we exchanged words, I told her I think she was miffed because I hadn’t called her.  That pretty much tore it.

That is until I moved apartments.

I found this nice place called Green Briar on 61^st  near Lewis.  Quite, nice, a second floor apartment overlooking the pool.

As I am unloading my trailer with a buddy, and my future wife #2 imagine who I run into on the landing, of the same floor.

You guessed it.  All of a sudden the place is starting to look way familiar.  I had been there only at night.  I suddenly recall the little half moon turn out for the car around a tree at the base of the stairs.

As you can expect, the gal got her nose in a joint, thinking I was moving in because of her.  Our apartments back up against each other.  I was on the south side, she was on the north side, we shared a common wall.

As it turned out, I didn’t see her at all and she moved out not long after that. 

Small world.

Bill Cosby has now admitted to purchasing Quaaludes with the intent of using them on women to have sex with them.  If that is true, I guess they have to prove he did in fact use them.  If a woman takes drugs on her own, then drinks rendering herself incapacitated, I would not have sex with her.  It not only opens the guy to allegations after the fact, but what fun is it?  Pretty much like fucking a corpse only its warm.  In this case, the girl was quite active, but it was my bad for not taking my leave when I should have.  It was decidedly not date rape, far from it.  If I had recorded the session, it would have been quite clear she was an active participant, even if she could not recall it the next day, or chose not to.

In Cosby's defense some of the alleged instances took place at the Playboy Mansion, where I dare say that all the girls were there for the use of the many VIP guests that happened through.  If you care to read, "A Bunny's Tale" by Gloria Steinem (available on the web for free) written when she did an expose of the NYC Playboy club working as a Bunny for two weeks,.  You will learn that it was common for all the female employees to put out for VIPs both at the clubs and it follows, at the Mansions too.  Although it was "against the rules" to date customers, the girls were in fact pressured to do so by the managers.

2018 Update.  Considering the events of the last year and the formation of the Me Too! movement by militant feminists, I really do feel fortunate that my run in with "morning after regret" happened when it did. Men today have a mine field to walk when asking a woman out on a date. I truly feel sorry for them.

Chapter 40 A Midnight Horse Race at Place One

I lived for a short time at Place One in Tulsa, off Riverside Drive.  It was a nice two story apartment.  I had just gotten a Labrador puppy and knew it was a matter of time before I had to move because of the dog size restriction.

Well, I sailed catamarans and I had to park mine at the end of the covered parking by the end of my building.  I had a big blue tarp over it by the end of my building.  One evening we went up to the pool side pub and had a few drinks.  We were walking home, the distance was about 40 yards if that.   At my insistence we got adventurous. 

I pulled soon to be wife #2 under the tarp where it hung over the mast.  You could stand under it since the mast was in a cradle above the boat making a sort of tent.    The opening was held closed by a cord so we were in our own little enclosed space.   She braced herself against one of the trampoline cross members between the two hulls and I flipped her skirt up and we headed off to the races. 

Just after I left the gate and was at a full gallop sprinting down the track, some older gentleman out for his late evening walk just happened to be wander by.  Well the boat was a rocking and he should’t have come a knocking.

The boat and trailer were pretty light and our combined weight was making it move around a lot.    I had both the trailer and the boat rocking and the tarp flapping for good measure.  Lol.

Well the old guy must have thought there was someone out to mug him, or was trying to jack with him.  He got in quite a tizzy.  He started yelling wanting to know if someone was out there.  He wanted to know what we were doing.  Really getting himself worked up.  I slowed down to trot, and needless to say, we were both fighting to keep from laughing all the while trying to finish our business.  I guess the guy got himself unruffled enough because he kept on walking.

I gave it the spurs and increased my speed to a full gallop, but damn if my date didn’t get to the wire before me.  I guess it’s as it should be.  The mounts nose always gets to the finish line before the jockey does.

I still laugh my ass off when I remember the worried tone of the old guys his voice.  He was really panicked, little did he know that we were quite pre-occupied and if not for fear of having our privacy invaded, would not have given him a second thought.   The  whole thing was pretty hilarious.

Chapter 38 Nursing Stories

My girlfriend from college that came out to Bartlesville from back east was a nurse.  The trouble is that she didn't much like it from her experience with clinical in nursing school.  So on arriving in Bartlesville she went back to bar tending which put her through school.

We rented a house on Greystone just east of the Quarters at the top of the hill.  She went to work for Larry Lively and things were pretty hectic what with working for the guy and having to help his girl friend after he beat her up regularly.  But she stuck it out with him.  He stopped on the side of 75 on night coming back from Tulsa and pulled her from their car and beat her with a belt.  On another occasion he nailed her in a closet of their home where she was hiding from him.  Not her physically, just the door.

As the world turns.

Well my girlfriend and wife #1 did take her nursing boards at my urging and landed a job at Jane Phillips.

Now, I want to say here, that she deserved a lot better than she got from me.  She was a wonderful woman, smart, outgoing, headstrong, pretty, a real keeper.  I just met her too soon in my life it seems.

Well she took Jane Phillips by storm. The hospital had such a shortage of registered nurses that if you had a BS-RN you were immediately given a lot of responsibility.  In her case she was made charge nurse of a unit.  After a few weeks of wearing a dress, hat and the proper shoes, she started wearing white pants and tunic and ditched the hat.

The hospital administrators were not keen on that and it escalated to the board and she allied herself with some doctors who agreed with her that her choice of dress did not impact her nursing care if anything it made it better because she was not afraid of giving the staff a moon every time she had to get up on the bed to help roll one of their "large" patients.

She won.  I was proud of her, but would have not expected anything less.

She used to come home from work and regale me with stories.  She did some time in the ER and those storied were the best.

On weekends there was never a shortage of excitement.  The casualties and such poured in from Pawhuska.  Those Osage Indians really knew how to party.  I recall one episode she recounted to me.  Seems late one Saturday evening a middle aged lady came in with a problem.  Seems she had something lodged in her vagina.  As my Future Ex # 1 recounted it, the woman was drunk off her ass, and just kept laughing hysterically.  She laughed the whole time the doctor worked on her.  It appears she had a tampon lodged crossways in her vagina. To make matters worse, it was still in the dispenser tube. It appears that in her inebriated state she had failed to insert it correctly and remove the tube.  She had just shoved it in and forgot to remove the tube.  She then proceeded to engage in sex with several gentlemen and in their zeal they were not about to let something like a tampon get in their way.  So onward and upward they went, figuratively and literally.  They pounded the thing in pretty good and it lodged crossways high up in her vagina.  I guess she thought it was pretty funny since she was still laughing when she left.  I have to say I am very impressed with the rigidity of the tools of the men involved.  I think I would have given up if I had started pounding the end of my pecker into something as unyielding as a cardboard tampon tube.  But hey, maybe the quim of  a heifer cow or ewe feels that way.  You never know, right?

The next funny story was about someone being brought in with a heart attack and the doctors failed to revive him even after prolonged CPR and defilibration.  That was before her shift.  They pulled the screen around his bed and when my Ex came in told her that she had a patient.  She walked over and stepped behind the curtain to see the obviously dead patient.  Good fun, right?   She said he was in pretty poor shape, ribs broken from the CPR and what not. 

 

We were sitting on our front porch of a rental we lived in off Greystone behind the Quarters.  We were both laughing and having a glass of wine when our neighbors drove up and looked pretty devastated.  Being good neighbors we struck up a conversation and asked how their day was going.  "Not too good," they replied.  It seems the wife's father had died that very day from....yeah you guessed it: a fatal heart attack.  My Future Ex #1 just about choked on her wine.  It was pretty funny at the time.

This wasn't so much a funny story but a commentary to the abiding stupidity of man.  The hospital had a Garp ward, named aptly for the book, The World According to Garp.

It was peopled by head trauma injuries brought about by failure to wear motorcycle helmets.  They would jokingly refer to going up to feed and water the plants.  Referencing the fact that the unfortunate patients resembled members of the vegetable family and only needed to be turned and watered. (turned to prevent bed sores and have IV fluids changed.)

My current secretary just lost her Ex-husband and father to her two kids to the same oversight.  I can only imagine that it has to be a fundamental lack of gray matter or basic IQ to think that your head is harder than a concrete road bed when impacting it  in excess of 50 miles per hour.

If you think it is safe to ride a motorcycle without a helmet.  Get an egg and drop it from about 3 feet.  The terminal velocity (velocity at which falling rate equals drag) won't be large but what do you think will happen to the egg.  Now throw another egg at the ground at about 50 mile per hour.  You think you'll be walking away if it were your head?

 

If you want to feel the air going through your hair, get a convertible.

I think it is Darwin's Natural Selection at work.

Chapter 37 Conflict of Interest

I worked in the R&D division under John Mihm and had been there for five years.  Wanting to further my career, I personally requested a transfer to an operating group and got one to the Gulf Coast Exploration group in Houston.  A bunch of us were transferred to Houston in 1986.  I arrived in Houston New Years night 1987.

Earlier that year before I was officially notified I was getting a transfer by the company, I was walking through the Frank Phillips Building Tunnel connecting to the Phillips National, I mean First National Bank.  The greeter sitting at the desk, was some one with whom I had a passing acquaintance.  You can imagine my surprise when she, as I walked by said " Hi, I understand, you're going to be leaving us?"  I assured her that I wasn't going anywhere as far as I knew.   When she say I was mystified she suddenly got sheepishly quiet.

 

You see First National Bank held the mortgage on my house. 

As it turned out apparently the people at the bank knew before I did that I was getting a transfer.  It was either a reflection of the close working relationship the bank had with the company, or someone with inside information was leaking information on pending transfers of employees.  

 

I never found out if there was any kind of sweetheart deal going with realtors or something shady, but if the info was leaked to this realtor or that, it would give them a leg up on the competition.   

To me it stunk to high heaven.  I seem to recall there was some noise about Mr. Mihm giving his wife inside into, and that there was some fallout over it.   

You can imagine what would have happened to your average Joe employee if he’d done something so egregious.  Public flogging, drawing and quartering followed by hanging of the remains would not have been adequate enough I bet. 

But remember the Golden Rule: "They who have the gold, make the rules."

 

As it was the housing market was so flooded at the time, the company bought my house and held it off the market for about six months to keep the prices higher before it was finally sold.  A guy who was dating a gal I was also dating at the time (my future wife #2 as it turned out) and was showing off all the work I had done in the house, the kitchen remodel and floors.  It was funny because I had taken her over to the house on one lunch hour before it was put back on the market and gave her a grand tour.  I knew how to get into the house even though I did not have a key any longer.  I went by the house a few years ago, and the privacy fence I put up back in 1982 is still standing.  They did at some time replace the arched oak front door with a modern piece of shit.  The old siding was replaced and a new roof and A/C was put on it before the guy bought it, so he got a bargain.  It was a nice old house.  It is the red brick one with the brick front porch, with a very steep pitched roof, almost gingerbread looking, just two houses up from the Cherokee Street split north of the high school.  A few blocks south of the Frank Phillips Mansion.

Chapter 36 Phillips 66 Credit Union

Around Christmas time used to bake assorted German Christmas cookies pack them in the little tin cookie cans from Pier One Imports and take them to the tellers at the Phillips 66 credit union. 

 

There was a tall attractive gal who worked there.  She eventually made it to head teller if I recall.  I can't remember exactly how we met outside of the Credit Union, probably at Happy Hour at Patrick's or the DI or maybe a party. I cannot remember, but I bet she could.  Women remember that kind of thing. 

 

She lived in Ramona with her parents I believe.  She was a single mom.  I don't remember much about how we started off, but I think she came home from the DI with me one weekend night.  It turned into a thing that happened every now and then.   Not always at my place but always on her terms.  She's leave early so as to be home when her child woke up.  She'd leave notes in the mailbox at my house asking if I was going to be free and if I was, then we’d meet up.  I guess we defined the term FB..fuck buddies before there was a term for it.

I remember one weekend she was house-sitting, so I met her where she was staying.  We watched TV had some wine and had sex.  Nice simple, no strings attached.

I guess she was lonely and just wanted company and sex.   Those terms are usually agreeable to a guy, they were with me.   I don't ever recall the subject of a relationship ever coming up, we just had the occasional night together enjoying each other and that was it.  I guess she had enough in her life raising a child on her own.   I recall she finally did get married again and moved out of the area.  Before I left for Houston she had been promoted to Head Teller.  She was an all-around nice young woman.

There was one fringe benefit, she would call me if an incoming check of mine was not going to clear and hold it for me till I could transfer some money to cover it.

 

I never once met the kid, so she was on the ball there.   Why?    Years later when I was dating I recall going on a date with a blond gal, another single mom and she dragged me back to her house after a date to meet her son.  If she was trying to fill the void left by the absence of the kid’s father, she was doing it all wrong.  I tried talking to the kid, and he said, “Don’t waste your time trying to be nice to me.  I know you won’t be around in a week.”  The kid was older than his years and had been irrevocably scarred by his mom’s frequent dalliances and inability to stay in a lasting relationship.  That was enough to kill any desire I might have had for GI Jane (she had just finished a stint in the army).  As much as I wanted to, I could not have bonked her there knowing her son would probably be listening to the headboard pound the wall.  I had kids of my own at that time and I didn’t want to think about them being in the same position.

This brings me to Miss Brown.  Miss Brown was a sweetie that I met at the YMCA gym.  I used to watch her pump out set after set of squats.  She had a bum on her that you could have bounced a baseball off of and thighs that would have made Mr. T cringe.  She had short blond hair and a cute face. 

 

This was just another demonstration of how small Bartlesville was and is.

 

Turns out her mother was a loan officer at the credit union.  I had gone in to open a signature loan line of credit and her mother is the loan officer I spoke with.  I don't think her mother ever knew about me.  As it turned out Ms Brown and my friendship was short lived.

 

We ran around for a short while but it was doomed because she had made up her mind to move to Tulsa.  At the time I couldn't blame her.  I wanted to leave too but was saddled with a house.  There was little opportunity for her in Bartlesville.  I went to visit a time or two in Tulsa, after she moved into her new apartment.  I seem to recall even going furniture shopping with her to the big what’s it’s name warehouse furniture place.  We went out for lunch and spent a bit of time together.  I would have liked to get to know her better, but it was not to be.  I am kind of surprised I didn’t’ run into her when I bounced at Incahoot’s but she struck me as more the country and western cowgirl, so she probably frequented Wild West or some other place on the east side.  Regardless she was a sweetheart.

Chapter 35 Crime, Canoe Trip Rules and Dale C.

We had one gal on our volley ball team report she was raped.  I never read about it in the papers.  Crime was something the powers-that-be in Bartlesville back then didn't like to publicize.  They'd rather have people victimized than let them be forewarned.  Heaven forbid that people should think crime existed in B'ville.  Two friends had their homes cleaned out by a gang of thieves.  They lived in the country just outside of town.  One off of South 75 one up in the Osage hills just over Nike Hill.  The gang would approach from the prairie side of the house and just load up trucks or whatever was handy and take everything they could.  They usually had all day to do it.

A friend and ring leader of our group of horny young people was a guy named Dale C.  His family was from over in Arkansas or at least that is where his mother was living.  He worked in the Catalyst Lab and organized canoe trips over on the Buffalo River.  We would drive over and camp on his mother's living room floor in Harrison the first night and hit the river the next day.  Imagine 20 people sleeping on your living room floor!  His mother would even get up the next morning and make ups breakfast.

Some of us would pair off with a partner on the trip, either female or male.  I had my own canoe so took a date along.  In my experience, if a gal got an invitation to go on a canoe trip and camp it was pretty well understood that there would be sex.  It is like inviting someone to go on a trip knowing ahead of time you were sharing the same room and the same king size bed.

I took a co-worker by the name of Kathy R. a very bright and sexy lab technician in the Geology Branch.  She was pixyish, short hair an impish smile and game for anything.  A months later after the canoe trip, we did a stint of field work in Paris, Texas.  We went to a restaurant in Paris, and I got some bad imitation crab, or maybe it was real crab they had driven up very slowly from the coast.  In the event I had severe Hershey squirts and was dehydrated to beat hell.  I was afraid to drink water for fear of leaving a trail of diarrhea across N. Texas.  We had to walk about 7 miles in the heat climbing fences and carrying shovels and samples.  I became weak as a kitten, but she soldiered on and carried all the equipment for me.  She was a real trooper.  I made it up to her later.

One of the other team members, who was pretty clueless, must have heard noises in the wee hours of the night and inquired at breakfast about what had been going on.   He must have been Mormon. No, even they know about that stuff, they have huge families.  I mean really, what did he expect me to say? "Oh, that was just Kathy and I boxing the compass last night on my bed..."   Cathy and I had a FB (that does not stand for face book), relationship for some time and personally I don't think it was his or anyone else's business.  Kathy left R&D to go back to school I think.  She was pretty lonely in B'ville, living in some apartments near down town; it was this square apartment complex, with a center courtyard, more like a motel.  Anyway, I don't know what happened to her we fell out of touch.

On the canoe trip we had some excitement, turned over at least once, camped at the first 12 mile takeout below Lost River and it started to rain.  We had a fun cozy night together.  I really liked that.  Didn't get too wet, not from the rain anyway.

The next day the river had risen to flood proportions and the rest of the group bugged out.  Left their rental canoes and booked.  I on the other hand had to get down stream to my truck, which I had already had shuttled to the takeout point.  It was the most exciting canoe trip of my life. 

 

I sent Cathy on in a car to the takeout point and another guy volunteered to be my second in the canoe.  We covered the 6 miles in a couple of hours.  You could not see the shore, the water was up in the trees so you had to stay in mid channel to avoid reall trouble..  We dumped once just upstream of a strainer, a flooded stand of trees.  I was able to get to shore with the canoe before we wrapped it.  Not having wet suits we were border line hypothermic.  The hot coffee we had helped.  We finally started following a guy in a solo canoe who knew what he was doing and had no further problems.  There were standing waves a good 4 feet high in some places and water would come over the bow and drench the bowman and fill the bottom of the canoe.  We were glad to make it to the take out point but were very exhilarated as well.

 

I went on more than a few canoe trips and took dates along, a single mom here, a single gal there, and we always had fun.  I tended to do the luxury canoe trip.  Cooler with food, beer, wine, it was rigged properly with no fear of loosing anything from the canoe in an upset.  Dinner might be cajun blackened fish or shrimp etouffe.  Dessert might be strawberries and cream.  Drinks, beer, wine and even champagne.

I even found a blind date; no she could actually see, for a friend from Houston.  He came up and we paired him up with her.  She was an acquaintance of my future Ex # 2 and the "Canoe Trip" rules applied and she was ready and eager to go.  Another friend and his girlfriend came along.  On the way over from OK to the river we were having a few drinks and on one stop, both Future Ex #2 and the date got out and had to throw up form the alcohol.  My buddy, he was the one who married the Indonesian gal, looked at me with a serious face, the cracked a smile and gave me two thumbs up.  He was like that.  He knew he was in like Flynn.

 

We three couples shared a cabin the first night at Lost Valley on the Buffalo.  My god she was a screamer.  My girlfriend and I lay awake half the night listening to them by the fire place.  The other couple had taken the loft and we settled in on a pull out bed by the bathroom. The couple in the loft, well the female half was so disturbed by it all; she spent the night, according to her boyfriend, with her pillow over her head. 

It was pretty humorous at breakfast the next night.  This same later on the river saw fit to pitch his tent next to mine, when I took great pains to camp away from him and the carnal soprano companion.  The next morning I got up to fix coffee and almost walked into a used condom hung from a tree branch in front of my tent door.  Those kooky crazy guys.  He was the same one who detested a pink tie I owned.  So on an occasion of me staying at his apartment, with said tie and my camera being present he waited till I was gone on an errand.  He enlisted the help of a friend, dropped trouser, tied my tie to his penis and documented it on film in my camera.

I got quite a laugh when I got the pictures back.  He though I would be appalled.  Not so, I still have the tie and the picture.  To be honest I don't' think I ever got it cleaned.  It is silk and you know how delicate silk is..

Dale hooked up with a troublesome gal from Dallas who played the jealousy card on him a lot.  She would drink want the attention of other guys, then have to deal with the consequences.  It jerked him around a lot.  He finally married her, which was not the solution, obviously.  She didn't stop or change and I lost contact with them before they flamed out.  Too bad.  She was a very attractive gal which was probably why he tried to hang on to her.  I think she had some problems though.  From a guy who married a bi-polar woman (Future Ex #3) I now know the symptoms by heart and run the other direction. 

I am sure the alcohol and drugs going around that part of the group probably didn't make things any better.

Update.  With Facebook allowing people to connect, I reconnected with Dale just in time to experience his death.  It was just a few years back.  Dale was always a trend setter.  It seems he had cancer, and just about knew the time of his expiration.  So he got on Facebook and posted a good bye to all his friends and then cashed in his chips.  It was kind of eerie, but nice in a way.  Everyone got to hear what he had to say about his life and the end of it and then if you were lucky, you had time to respond.

 

I lost another good friend and classmate to his excessive drinking and tobacco.  Sadly he did not heed nature’s and his bodies warning signs until it was too late and had a massive cardiac event that left him brain dead.  Facebook seems to have turned out to quasi memorials to people, which is fine.  We all posted pictures and memories of the guy and new and old friends got to see him in different periods of his life that they might not have known about.

Chapter 33 Unbalanced and Suicidal: a Tale of Stalking

There was a gal, Her name was Vicky G.  Her mother lived over on Adam's Blvd where it ran by Pennington Hills.  She was a fixture at the DI and most parties, but she was a bit strange.  She was a local girl, not hard to look at but a bit clingy.  I guess she was one of those unfortunates that nobody liked in school, but everyone knew.  The kind of girl that has "Use Me" written on her forehead, and a lot of guys did just that.  She was the proverbial outsider, who was desperate to fit in.

My friend, the one who dated the Brown Bomber became someone on which she became fixated.   He never admitted to asking her out or even having relations with her.  She apparently worked in the same group at Phillips that he did.  She probably delivered mail or worked in the copy center.  As best I can figure,  he may have spoken to her or flirted.  He had boyish good looks and all the girls like him.  But if ever there was a a walking talking Dorian Grey, it was him.  We ran around for years together, In Bartlesville, Houston, Dallas, Florida and even Bangkok Thailand.  He finally moved to Jakarta, and eventually got married.   He has lived over there for damn near twenty years now.  I believe he has two or three sons.  He and I had a falling out and have not spoken since sometime after 9/11 because I was a little out spoken about the Muslims.  that might have hurt his feelings since his wife and father are members of the Nation of Islam.  She also was a beneficiary of a clitorectomy, more the foreskin removal than the whole little bugger, but I cannot be certain, she wasn’t specific when we talked about it in Tampa Bay on a golf trip. 

Just an aside, she hit the gold mine gravy train.  You white girls just do not know how to do it apparently.  He and his girlfriend and now wife, used to fight like cats and dogs.  She ran off on the trip to Tampa Bay and he didn’t give a shit till I reminded him she was here on his sponsorship and if anything happened to her, like she ended up dead in a ditch somewhere, the cops would come looking for him.  Well long story short, they are married with kids.  They live in Singapore, he sends her to Europe periodically with her friends, most likely so he can get rid of her and pursue his lifelong passion for Asian prostitutes.

The other Asian gal I mentioned in an earlier chapter, also hit the gold mine.  The beneficiary of the right draw on the blind date, ended up marrying the guy, traveling from Pakistan to Egypt and finally back to Houston.  First thing old Debbie did was buy a new Jaguar and a new home in an upscale neighborhood in Cinco Ranch west of Houston.  I live not too far from there.

Back to the original plot line…

I was friends with my friend’s Indonesian wife on Facebook for a while and saw her travels but heard not a word from him.  So I am not sure what bug he got up his ass.  Life’s too short to care.  He is and probably will always be an expatriate.  I just wonder if his boys are going to visit the Karma on him that he did on his parents.

Okay back to Vicky G.  I knew her and she knew me by name, but I never hit on her, thankfully.  She never seemed to be around at closing time if I felt like a roll in the hay.  Could be that someone else already had snapped her up.  Whatever the case she never fixated on me, but she did on him for whatever reason.  I have to say that I did look for her on more than one occasion but never found her on those nights.  I dodged a bullet.

She started to stalk my engineer friend,  sending him weird notes at work, calling him at home and the office.  If he was out of town, she called his boss to find out where he was. Even his boss was starting to get pissed.

My buddy finally filed a harassment complaint.  She stopped for a while but ultimately lost her job at Phillips over it.  The final chapter was her confronting the CEO of Phillips Bill Douche or maybe it was the one after him, in the parking lot over by the Phillips Building.  She didn't attack him or anything just confronted him in an attempt to get her job back.  That must have been the last straw for the poor Vicky because she gassed herself that Christmas in her mother's garage by leaving the car running.

 

For years afterwards we would send my buddy a Christmas card signed Vicky, as if she was still watching over him.  Kind of a sad last tribute to a sweet but troubled girl.

A side story to this involved a former hunting buddy of mine.  He still works for Phillips unless he retired.  He was last working in the Environmental Division.  He is the one who married the China Doll that worked in Production Research.  Anyway, he was just beginning to date the China Doll.  She, being a good southern Baptist was not giving away the milk for free until the cow was bought and paid for.  He came to me one day lamenting how horny he was and that he just could not convince her to let loose the old Abe penny she kept between her knees.  He knew about Miss Stalker and our mutual friend.  He asked me if there were any women I could fix him up with so he could get laid.  I had done this for a few guys, single unattached women not being a scarce commodity in Bartlesville at the time.

His intent was not for me to fix him up with her, I assure you.  But I saw a great opportunity for a practical joke.  Our whole relationship was based on joking one another.  Tit for tat.  I was a friend when he came to Bartlesville and he was going through a divorce where the gal pretty much cleaned him out.  He played doormat, letting her have every damn thing she wanted in an effort to please her.  Thing was is she was the one who was fucking around on him in the Philippines while he was off shore.  I know where his head was…at least now, because I’ve been there.  Not at the time though, but he didn’t even get an attorney and had to pay alimony and sell just about everything he had.  I bought some of his furniture and still have some nice rattan night stands.  We duck hunted together for years, drank, partied and were pretty tight.  Then came China Doll.

Well seeing the opportunity for a great joke at his expense, I had one of the young women in our section call him up and say she was Miss Vicky G. the Stalker and that I had told her he was interested in meeting her.  It was all real innocent like, no sexual references, just the lingering threat that he would now become the stalking target of Vicky.

He went ballistic.  Not with anger, but with fear!  He called his mommy, I mean his girlfriend.  He was terrified, either that Vicky would start to stalk him, or that it would get back to China Doll.  Unbeknownst to me, his girl friend China Doll knew Miss Stalker, either from church or school or Stalkers Anonymous or something. 

Well, fuck me!  She calls her up and confronts her.  Well, now haven’t I stepped into a nice tub of  shit!

Well, China Doll calls her friend Vicky and finds out that  the call wasn’t from her after all.   I can see the light bulb come on over his head to this day.  He connects the dots and they lead back to me. 

So he comes down and laughs and swears to get even, right?.  No, not on your life.  Most men would, if they still had a pair swinging between their legs they would.  But if yours are kept in a jar next to your girlfriend’s make-up, you have her call your friend and read him the riot act on your behalf. 

 

To be fair she did it without his approval, and the chagrin on his face and humiliation he felt was painful to see.  I hung up on her after telling her that she should let him take care of his own business, after all we traded practical jokes all the time.  Up till then anyway.

That was pretty much the end of our relationship, because she forbade him to go out drinking, which meant no time with me, and he had to take his future brother-in-law hunting with him, which meant I wouldn't be going because the kid could not find his ass with both hands.  I am surprised Scott could stand to hunt with him either.  My friend was pretty serious about his ducks and was mightly embarrasses when his future brother in law showed up wearing disco clothes to hunt ducks in.  Scott was a hunting purist and taught me pretty much all I know about hunting waterfowl.  Well not all of it, I just said that because I just used his name…whoops.  But I guess once he was family, he had to make allowances.  His parents, his mom and step dad had died, and he was alone.  So wanting to belong to a family and getting regular poon overrode any loyalty with his male friends.  Believe me I understand that.  I have been around long enough that some people can't live without family.  Besides, I was not going to bend over and spread’em for him no matter how close we had been or how many early mornings we spent in the woods together.

I feel I helped him through the divorce and then the shit done to him by the gal who ran one of the diet meal rip-off plans.  She ran around on him too.  I believe she drove a red Ford Bronco at the time, or maybe that was his.

I have very fond memories of our duck hunting and fishing on Copan together.  I only hope that eventually he got possession of his equipment back, but I doubt it.  They wouldn't go well with the tutu he probably has to wear around the house what with the short hem and all.