My name is Walter Franklin II. My father was Walter; I will not tell my middle name, but it's almost as bad as Johnny Cash's song about "A Boy Named Sue" where the troubadour talked about growing up tough. As teachers called my full name at the beginning of the year, there was always some new kid who did not know that using that name could get him hurt. I was fair; I always explained that I did not like that name and if it was used again, I would do my best to hurt the person who used it.

My parents called me son, but my sister called me Two. My mother's oldest brother called me Deuce; the uncle we called Big Bub was a very large man and that was always a running joke between us. My grandfather was a tiny man - five foot two inches would have been a stretch and to weigh 140 pounds, he would have needed rocks in his pockets.

I used to tease Big Bub he was granny's love child by a circus strong man, etc. If Big Bub had lived long enough to see Smokey and the Bandit and hear Jackie Gleason's, "I can't believe you came from my loins" and then "When I get home, I'm going to slap your mamma," etc, it would have been hilarious. At any rate, I was following the same body plan as Big Bub. My paternal grandfather was also large, but built like a fireplug, close the ground and solid. Big Bub was the first adult I called my friend.

When I was married in June of 1961, she was 19 and I was 23. Our first child arrived 101⁄2 months later, a beautiful bubbly blonde girl. Her dark complected brunette sister came 221⁄2 months after that. We moved from Dallas to a Midwest city and ended up in the St. Louis area.

Soon, about 10 years after our beautiful little blonde, we had a son, also blonde. We found out that a woman can get pregnant while nursing and our second son, another brunette, was born 181⁄2 months after his brother.

After discussions with her doctor, rather than her have surgery to tie her tubes, I went to a urologist and had a vasectomy. My medical insurance covered that, but not the tubal ligation.

I had been traveling since 1965 and suddenly my wife began to avoid me. At a time I was doing very well financially, but she took weekend job. She actually worked on the weekends so I knew she was not cheating then. Why should she, if she was at all?

I was going through a concerted effort by a competitor to take over all my business. They put additional men in the field to cover the territory. It seemed that no matter what I did, I was on the road constantly. My absences from home were from Monday morning to Friday night.

The weekend job she had taken at a local hospital necessitated her being there at 6:30 A.M. on Saturday and Sunday. She did not get off until 3:30 P.M. On Friday night, we no longer went out for dinner and discussed our week, because she needed to get to bed very early. For the same reason, and her fatigue on Saturday night, I spent a lot of time in my shop, or reading and watching TV.

I always wanted sex with her, except that I thought of it as making love. During the next few months she called it, "having sex!" My favorite time was early morning; it started my day off right. The second weekend of her job, I was informed that it was a problem to go to work with my "stuff" running down her leg, so Saturday and Sunday mornings had become no sex zones.

The evenings were for going to bed early and our Sunday afternoon "naps" were out, since she was at work. Finally Sunday night she was tired and had to get her rest to get up and get the boys off to school, which also served to outlaw my Monday morning sex.

I should have said, "Let's talk." But I didn't. I was hurting and lonely, and very horny. At that time, I had never thought that she might be cheating and to this day, have no concrete evidence, but I am not as naive now as I was then.

You know what happened next. I had been a straight arrow for years on the road.

I did not and still don't consider myself to be a handsome man and I didn't have to carry a stick to beat women off, but the nature of my business required that I do a lot of entertaining with influential people in the smaller towns in Eastern Missouri. That meant bars and in some cases, country/western dance halls.

I met and danced with a lot of women and did not try to get them into my bed. I was a happily married man, right? Still there were a few who tempted me, but I was strong. Looking back, that should have spelled STUPID!

And then, I met her. I was sitting at the bar in a Holiday Inn, when from behind me, I heard this little silver bell tinkle. I turned to discover a delightful little redhead, laughing at her friend. The local man I was with knew the redhead's friend and asked her why she was being laughed at and Beth explained that she had heard of some people who could tie a knot in a cherry stem with their tongue and she was not having any luck trying it.

I was introduced to Beth. We had seen each other around. She introduced us to Elaine, her friend from Kansas. I told her that if I had a cherry, I could tie the knot, just so she would know it could be done. Elaine was drinking a Whiskey sour, I think. I drink beer or Chivas Regal scotch. The only mixed drink I ever order in a bar is a Rusty Nail.

So, at any rate, Elaine said, "I have a cherry," and everybody chuckled at the double entendre.

I asked, "Can I have it?"

Playing the game, she asked in a shocked voice, "You want my cherry?"

I used a gruff voice and said, "Yes, I intend to take your cherry."

She smiled and said, "Well, you are much larger than me, so I'll have to give you something. I'll give you the stem, okay?"

I said, "Sure."

She pulled the cherry from her drink and put it in her mouth with the stem sticking out. I leaned over and put my mouth on hers. I had been drinking awhile and as she held the cherry behind her teeth, I pulled the stem and had a semi-kiss at the same time. I tied the stem into a knot and looked at her. No one knew that I had learned that trick as a soda jerk in the eighth grade.

Finally she said, "You can't do it?"

I leaned over to her and she put her lips to mine and I passed her the stem. She stuck her tongue out for everyone to see. Fifteen minutes later, she and Beth went to the ladies room.

Five minutes after that, she took my hand and said, "Let's go."

And I did. It took us seven or eight minutes to get in my car and go across the road to my motel. Five minutes after getting into my room, I was showing her other tricks I could do with my tongue. Then she tried to get my entire cock, in her mouth, but it was no contest - too much too soon.

Before she worked it long enough to get past her gag reflex, she had to swallow. I was not able to hold back. Finally I laid her back in the missionary position and fucked her until I was exhausted and rolled off, having lost count of her orgasms.

She gave me three minutes, then sat up and inhaled my cock. I was revitalized. I rolled her over onto her stomach and entered her pussy from her back, pointing my cock down, so that it was entering her pussy at an angle and striking her directly on the 'G' spot.

Very quickly she had another climax and I blew a load into her warm and accepting body. And so I was no longer a faithful husband. I had become a cheater; I was guilty of adultery.

Being new at the cheating game, and allowing for the fact that she lived almost 300 miles west and north of the town we met in and I lived 150 miles north of there. I spent a lot of time on the telephone.

Naturally my wife caught me through a bizarre set of circumstances. We separated for seven to eight months and she asked me to move back in. Eventually I understood it was for the children, but we seemed to be getting along.

But then it started again. I snored and she couldn't stand my reading light, so she moved out of my bed and into a different room. I knew I snored - I had for years - and as for the reading light, I had read myself to sleep for years. Those things had never bothered her before.

She slept like the proverbial log. I had seen her sleep undisturbed with a ringing telephone eight feet from her head.

So in the fall of 1996, on a crisp October morning, I walked up behind her and cupped her breasts. She said, "Don't you think we're a little too old for that?"

I was 58 years old and she was 54 years old. In the calendar year of 1996, we had sex three times, once each of the first three quarters, I knew it was over.

We split the personal property, with no arguments. I told people that I had always tried to give her everything she wanted. The last three things she wanted from me were her car, the house and a divorce. I gave her all three.

From the day we married until the day our divorce was final was 36 years, six months and six days, but who's counting, right?

When the divorce was settled, I was living in a rented town house. I bought a new computer and went on line. Yeah, you're right, porn first. Back then, professional type porn sites cost $25.00 and up per month. However there were amateur sites that showed a lot of very good-looking naked flesh — well, mostly naked. The prized pussy was not shown, at least not on the free sites.

There was one site that for a one-time nominal fee of four or five dollars, you had permanent access. There was page after page with photos of attractive women. If you clicked on a picture, you went to her pages. The progression was of her stripping, slowly until the only thing left was her panties. The text on each page told you that her husband did not know she was doing this, or her mother and dad, but she needed to for some reason or other.

As you expected the next picture to show her completely naked and spread, you saw a message that you needed to pay for her private pages. I only did that once; an absolutely stunning little blonde only cost me $4.95 each month. I quit after the second month.

The main site had several sections: Asians and blacks, I remember. Periodically they would have a row of four or five pictures from an alternate site at the bottom of the first page. One day, I saw a black girl who grabbed my attention. I don't even remember what it was that attracted me to her, so I clicked on the black section as I had done once or twice before.

Now, please understand that while I have come a long way toward political correctness, I grew up in a small town in Northeast Texas. When people in general talk about the south, they mainly think about Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, etc. I remember a conversation in an office in Baltimore, when a man I did business told me I didn't understand - he was from Virginia, the South. I asked if he had an atlas and he pulled one from a drawer.

I opened it to the front pages showing the United States spread out, pointed to Virginia and said, "From here, right?"

He proudly said, "Yes."

I said, "And this is South, right?" indicating the space below Virginia.

He said, "Yes."

I put my finger on a spot about one inch east of Dallas and a little north and said, "I grew up here. Look closely. I think you will find that I grew up a lot further south than you did."

I don't remember why I was so angry with him, but the incident stuck in my mind. I grew up with prejudice when most of us had never heard the word and had no idea what it meant. Blacks in my hometown lived in the nigger holler, a section of town beyond the railroad tracks. There were a few black people who worked downtown regularly but most if them were not out front. There were no blacks in our schools; they had their own schools, I guess.

I used the word nigger without thinking about it. The closest thing to thinking about sex with a black woman was laughing at someone who had been gullible about something and imitating a high pitched voice, saying, "Change your luck for a quarter, sir?"

That was not really thinking about or considering sex with a black woman, but a putdown indicating that he was dumb enough to buy sex from a cheap black whore. There was a story about a group of black girls who would wait for a car to stop, have the guy stay in the driver's seat and take 25 to 50 cents up front. They would have him stand and drop his pants and sit back down.

As she was giving him a blowjob, she was using both hands to empty his pockets into her large purse lying on the ground by his feet, after 1 or 2 customers, they moved to the other side of town, or the next small town. Sometimes they left everything except the money lying on the ground when they left. I did not have a high opinion of blacks, especially black women.

Now, as I looked through the black section of this site, there were some pretty bodies, but the color and the typical Negroid features turned me off. But as I went to the next page, there she was: a goddess. Where most of these girls were... let's say, coffee colored, Michelle was a glass of milk with a teaspoon of coffee stirred in. She was gorgeous, her lips might be a little thick, or that might be the lipstick.

I clicked on her picture and went to her pages. I downloaded most of the pictures on her free pages. The text said that she was looking for a new man. Her lover for the last few years had not, as promised, divorced his wife and Michelle was leaving him. She was, I believe, in her early twenties. And had never been with another man, although there was a hint that she might have sex with a guy in her private pages. She fueled my dreams for days on end.

She was a beauty. She reeked of sex — not the smell, although there was the faint fragrance of heated female, but the aura of sex.

Her name was Michelle. She was probably just average height, about five foot six inches. She had long black hair that hung straight down to the middle of her back and framed her face with bangs that came just below her black eyebrows.