MEMOIRIST IDOL

A Breakup, Dancing Girls, and a Sexy Seatbelt

After my first marriage broke up, love opportunities arose

My ex thought he was HIV positive when he last slept with me

I learned this after he died and I read his journals.

He was carousing around and sleeping with a lot of women. I had endured three years of a dry spell (pun intended). He noted in his journals he was keeping me safe from HIV by not sleeping with me. Lovely.

He wasn’t HIV positive, but we both knew people who were — from sleeping with prostitutes.

I was an attractive young woman, but the white dudes that go to Cambodia are there because they’re intrigued with the women (or men). They aren’t there to do altruistic human rights work. Believe me.

My ex, in his mid forties, was fucking around with the taxi girls when I flew home to visit my parents. They were begging me to get out of Cambodia, and I listened — finally.

I couldn’t stay in denial any longer.

The ex was smitten with the sex oozing out of the bars in Cambodia and Thailand. The beautiful, sexy brown skin, the twenty-year-olds in red mini skirts and the Mamasans overseeing her flock. The girls yelling out, “You buy me drink, mister?”

In Bangkok, ten girls in a row danced poles on an elevated stage

The fair-skinned petite girls from Vietnam with beautiful faces and rehearsed dances. The darker round-faced country girls from Northern Thailand, sold by their parents. My ex loved the Asian party scene, and my last week living in SE Asia, we sat at an outside Bangkok bar. He pointed out the Thai women stopping at the Buddha statue, laying flower ringlets down. Moistening their hair in the water, and smoothing it down both sides of their head.

“They’re praying they don’t get SIDA,” he said. The French word for AIDS.

He’d gotten so wise about the bar scene. Ugh.

Women working the Cambodia bar scenes in the early 2000s wore jeans shorts so abbreviated in the back their entire ass cheeks were exposed. The old white guys remarked on it, clucked their tongues, shook their heads, and loved it. Loved every bit.

At 40, I had light brown hair and green eyes, and dressed up to do business around town during the day and early evening. Black pencil skirt and white blouse, with make up and heels. I’d been there for over seven years.

I sold ads for the magazines we published and I made a lot of money for our publishing company. I knew everyone. I was a businesswoman and lots of money went through my hands. I was a walking cashflow, and trusted by business owners around town. I spoke Khmer fairly well, and I had taught English to many people in the country over the years.

I knew secrets, and kept them. I knew how people had really died. I knew who was pregnant, and who had a disease they were hiding from a spouse or employer. People told me things. I listened, and information was working knowledge. I never betrayed a secret.

Later everyone came to me to confide stories about my husband

I’d been in the USA recovering a miscarriage, and my ex had fun in my absence. He was “indiscreet,” he admitted. He apologized. I didn’t want him to be discreet. I didn’t want these damn secrets destroying my marriage.

I heard about two girls riding with him on his motorcycle. I saw photos of his girlfriend on the southern coast, the one with a young child. Granny in Na Trang, Vietnam took the little boy so girlfriend could screw around with my husband and better forge a relationship.

He took motorcycle rides around the city at 3 in the morning, visiting the apartment he was financing for his girl. I cried myself to sleep, holding a wooden carved bird and watching the goldfish in the tank.

I was coming apart at the seams, an old velveteen rabbit no longer loved.

I rescued myself

In time, I got myself on a plane. It took a long time to recover.

It’s been more than two decades, and the ghosts haunt me sometimes.

Today I was on the riding lawnmower riding around in circles when it occurred to me people hate their exes because they can’t live with the tremendous sadness.

You marry someone and see a future that ends fifty years down the road. You envision hope and happiness and laughter and babies.

Your person betrays you, and time is stolen. Precious time. It’s horribly sad, and memories are painful.

Hate is easier.

I’m just not a hater. Never have been.

When I got back to Oregon, I stayed with my dad and stepmom until I put myself back together.

Then I began looking around for some male attention

I needed it to recover.

I hadn’t slept with my husband for over a year at that point, and at 41 that’s pretty hard to deal with.

Especially for women, who often find their sexual zenith around 40

As a young woman, I was oozing desire, like a sinsemilla plant. I was honey-golden, sticky, and oozing pheromones. You know the feeling!

I was looking around and sizing up potential partners. It’s not desperation if you’re a woman. It’s a matter of choice. Most men are agreeable.

So, like a little queen, I was sizing up the worker bees. Who was I going to allow into the hive? Who was going to be my honey?

Not Mac, most certainly not

Mac was a neighbor down the street, in his mid 60s. An Arkansas transplant, he was an old guy who went to church twice a week. He was friends with Dad, and at the farm quite a lot. Mac had his own little farm down the road.

Mac took one look at me and decided he wanted me. I’m sure my pheromones were calling out, but not to him. He wasn’t a remote consideration.

First of all, he was about my size. I noticed he had small feet in slip-on loafers. Loafers. Ugh! Penny loafers, nice and polished.

Mac went to my dad and asked if he could court me

Court me? What did that even mean?

Froggy went a-courtin’ and he did ride, uh huh! Flowers? Chocolates? Sit in the parlor and admire my embroidery?

I was floored! I had no intention of riding around in Mac’s little truck and being courted, and exploded at Dad.

“Dad, that’s insane! Mac? Are you kidding? There’s no way I’m having anything to do with him!”

I was 41 and had no interest in dating a man my dad’s age

I had already settled on a tall, slender man with a big smile and a killer sense of humor. It was nearly sex o’clock, and my attitude was improving by the minute.

Dad told me Mac was very upset I’d chosen to go out with someone else. He was better equipped to take care of “my needs,” or so he’d told my dad. I was appalled and a little disgusted.

My needs! As a 41-year-old, I was not going to entertain any of this.

A few days later, Dad sent me down to Mac’s farm, to pick up some boxes of vegetables. I didn’t want to go, but Dad asked me to.

I pulled in and Mac came to the driver’s side window.

He looked at my face, then his eyes slid down my body. They stopped about three inches south of my shoulders and remained glued there.

That’s when he uttered the words that make me roll my eyes

I’m a man. You need to take that seatbelt off. The way it’s cutting between your breasts is driving me wild…I’m a man…

His eyebrows said what his words didn’t.

Not kidding!

So, what did I do? First, I unbuckled the seatbelt.

Then I looked at him with my are-you-f’ing-kidding-me face and plenty of side eye, got out of the car, loaded the boxes of tomatoes and carrots, and drove home.

• I didn’t fasten the seatbelt again with a come-hither look on my wanton face.
• I wasn’t a safety-harness harlot, a restraint-device Jezebel.
• Nor would I be a diagonal-dividing Delilah!

Dad always felt bad that I didn’t want to have family dinners with Mac, or sit on the patio and watch sunsets in Mac’s company. I explained to Dad that sexual advances don’t always sit well with women.

He had a hard time understanding why I wouldn’t let it go. Some things you can’t explain to a father. My dad didn’t always get it.

Even now, when I put on a seatbelt, I look down to see if I look particularly fetching

I’ve decided that a seatbelt turns me into Aphrodite, a bombshell with divided breasts. The white gown with gold, braided cords separating my large milky-white, firm lobes of lasciviousness.

May the power be with me!

Thanks for reading my story! Thanks to Memoirist Idol competition and to KiKi Walter and all of the Suite 1984 team for their work.

I’d love to recommend Sally Prag’s story recently submitted to Memoirist Idol. Her story of nearly being abducted gave me chills. Here’s her story. I know you’ll feel shocked when you read it.

And below is my first entry to Memoirist Idol. Enjoy some young romance!