Every man’s dream

February 19, 1977

“I can’t stop, and never get enough,” my friend, Edward tells me at the Red Baron slow night when I came early to set up the band equipment.

I’ve known him since high school, when he ached for it, just another dweeb from the audio-visual department with thick black glasses and a tendency to wear pocket protectors.

These days, he can’t chase women away, and he complains about it in those rare moments when women aren’t crowding around him at the bar.

“I know you think I’m crazy,” he said. “I have a real problem here and I don’t know how to work it out.”

I try not to look incredulous when he says this because I remember all too well how girls hated him in school and used to mock him from his face full of pimples, he claimed then came from not getting anything at all.

I wasn’t much better then, spouting poetry that won all the less popular girls when l wanted the girls, he wanted but wanted no part of either of us.

Now, in his early 30s like I am, he gets any woman he wants while I still spout poetry, and still know I’m not in the upper crust even in a dive bar like this.

I remember a time when Eddy couldn’t say hello to a girl without sputtering and spitting like a rotted garden hose; while he still stutters, women find it quaint – and I’m aching to find out what changed. Did he come up with a fairy godmother that waved a wand over his head?

“God if I know,” he says when I ask. “It’s as big a mystery to me as to anybody else. But when it happened, I over indulged at little. Wouldn’t you? I was for so long starved for affection that when someone smiled at me, I melted. It was very, very addictive. All I wanted was to get my share before all these pretty women woke up and saw me for who and what I was and went back to the jocks and rich jerks they had before. The problem is – it never stopped. The more I got; the more women came to me, and worse, the more I wanted. I was drowning in women and most people thought I loved every bit of it.”

Then, he looks at me and laughs, and tells me I have the look he’s seen on the faces of other men since, a look almost as addictive as the sex.

“When other guys saw the quality of women I was getting, they started looking at me like that, too,” he says. “It’s the way we used to look at the jocks at school. These guys wondered like you wonder what I have that makes women fall for me the way they do.”

Men started hanging around him hoping whatever he had would rub off on them.

I ask if he came into a lot of cocaine; he shakes his head.

“I only wish it was that simple,” he says.

Then at some point, he didn’t like it any more.

“When I tried to tell people, no one would believe me,” he says. “The fact is, it stopped being fun and started becoming a burden. As my reputation grew, women started telling other women, and I found women pulling me aside everywhere. I had no private moment.

Worse, men stopped admiring me and started wondering if maybe I was messing with their women: husbands, fathers, brothers, sons all gave me that same look warning me without words that they’d beat the crap out of me if they found out I was messing with the women they loved. Worse, it was true.”

It got to the point where he could no longer look some men in the eye, knowing he had been with their wives, their sisters, their daughters, mothers – and even in some cases, their grandmothers.

“Some men found out. Most didn’t,” he says. “I no longer had any man I could call a friend. Not that it mattered much since most of my time was taken up with women, who sought me out, day and night, a work or at home, or even while I was on the street.”

“What did you do?” I ask.

“I got married,” he says. “I figured this would discourage them.”

“And did that work?”

“Not in your life,” he says. “In fact, my vows seemed to increase my value to some women, who thought I had become even more fascinating since now our copulating involved some measure of intrigue. Every woman wanted to prove something – the old ones seeing me as a way of making them feel young; the young girls using me to feel mature. All of them seemed to suck the life out of me, leaving me a hollow shell no amount of alcohol or drugs could fill.”

“Perhaps you need to see someone,” I say. “I mean professional help.”

“I tried,” he says. “That lasted right up to the point in which the male doctors found me involved with their wives or I got involved with the female doctors. I went right through the whole profession without getting an ounce of cure.”

“So, what do you do?”

“I walk around like a ghost,” he said. “Most men that know me hate me. Those who don’t know me admire me. But everybody, male or female thinks I’m living high – when all I really want is for all this to stop.”