You have to understand, a twenty-year marriage, with the last fifteen of those years spent in a quiet, respectable, and completely sexless desert… it does something to a man. It rusts the machinery. It makes you forget you were ever a goddamn animal in the first place. My first time out of the cage, with that thirty-year-old redhead? Christ. It was an awkward, clumsy, and completely pathetic affair. A goddamn shock to the system. You’re a king who’s forgotten how to hold his own goddamn scepter. You have zero confidence, and the beautiful, complex, and completely terrifying machine of a new woman is just a puzzle you’ve forgotten how to solve.
And then came Tiffany.
She was a friend. A beautiful, blonde, Marilyn Monroe-looking disaster with a great smile, a drinker’s laugh, and a set of tits so big they were practically a goddamn floatation device. She was top-heavy, top-sighting, and just plain fun. She was the perfect partner in crime for a man who was just relearning how to be a criminal.
I was living in this condo on the 18th hole at Eagle Crest. It was freezing, maybe 20 degrees out, with snow on the goddamn ground. And we’re drinking. Heavily. That beautiful, ugly, and completely honest “I don’t give a shit” attitude was starting to bloom.
“You know what we should do?” one of us slurred, probably me.
Next thing I know, we’re sneaking across the frozen patio of my goddamn neighbor, firing up their hot tub like we own the place. We’re sitting in the bubbling, beautiful heat, smoking cigars, drinking whiskey, the steam rising up into the frozen night air.
And then the real madness, the real, beautiful, and completely necessary apocalypse, began.
We jumped out. Buck naked. From a 104-degree hot tub into 20-degree, snow-covered reality. It was a shock so profound, so beautiful, so goddamn alive, that you didn’t even feel the cold. You just felt the scream. We’re doing naked snow angels on the goddamn 18th green, right next to the flag, our asses freezing to the beautifully manicured grass. We’re spinning around, shaking, laughing like hyenas.
And in that beautiful, hypothermic, and completely honest moment of pure, unadulterated insanity, one thing led to another.
Right there. On the 18th hole. In the goddamn snow. Two naked, beautiful, and completely stupid animals, fornicating under the quiet, indifferent stars. We did it in different spots, different positions, a whole goddamn sexual rodeo on the frozen tundra, with the quiet, respectable houses of the sleeping bourgeoisie all around us. I’m sure we had an audience. I’m sure some poor, insomniac bastard was watching the whole beautiful, ugly, and completely degenerate show from his bedroom window. But nobody shined a light on us. Nobody called the cops. It was a perfect, beautiful, and completely honest crime.
It was amazing. My second time with a woman after my marriage. And it was this. A drunken, stupid, and completely beautiful act of defiance against a life of quiet, passionless, and completely respectable bullshit.
Fast forward six months.
I’m dating this young college girl. We’re five, six dates in, doing the whole polite dance, sleeping together, “getting to know each other,” all that beautiful, fraudulent nonsense. She comes over to my place, and she has this look on her face, a mix of awe and suspicion.
“Can I ask you something?” she says. “I was talking to my friends in class about you.”
“Oh yeah?” I say.
“And all the girls,” she says, leaning in, “they all wanted to know… are you him? Are you ‘the 18th hole guy’?”
I just stood there. I was shocked. The story, that beautiful, ugly, and completely drunken night of depravity, it had spread. It was a rumor. A legend. A beautiful, dirty, and completely hilarious piece of small-town folklore. And I was the goddamn star.
I was tagged. A disgusting pig. A man-whore. A deviant. A beautiful, ugly, and completely unapologetic bastard. But you know what? It was a goddamn achievement.
How many men, after fifteen years in a sexual desert, can say their second fuck was so goddamn legendary it became a pickup line for them? I spent the next five years in that town, and at least twenty different times, a woman would come up to me at a party, a complete stranger, grab my drink right out of my hand, take a sip, and hand it back, saying, “I hear you’re the 18th hole guy I keep hearing about.”
And it was never, ever a negative. Christ, no. They loved it. Their eyes would light up. They wanted to know if the monster was real. Women aren’t attracted to the quiet, respectable, and completely castrated man who’s afraid of his own shadow. They’re attracted to the bad boys. The ones who are a little bit dangerous. The ones who aren’t afraid to be a little bit alive.
That one, beautiful, stupid, drunken, and completely necessary act of defiance on a frozen golf course… it was my second triumph. It established my legend. It turned me from “James, the sad, divorced guy” into a goddamn folk hero.
It was the sound of the master key, that beautiful, rusty, and completely forgotten tool, not just opening one lock, but proving to the whole goddamn town that it could open any goddamn door it wanted.
And that, my friends, is a hell of a way to start your new life.
