"My trousers fell to the floor and her eyes widened as she saw my proud tower of flesh. She stared in fascination as I climbed on the bed and positioned my thick, eight-inch piece of man meat at the entrance to her tunnel of love. Suddenly, as if coming out of a trance, she cried out, "No, we can't, we must not. It would kill my husband if he found out."

"Hush girl, you know that you want this."

"Oh god I do, I really do, but this is just so wrong."

"This will make it right" I said as I pushed my hard pole into her quivering quim."

"Can you believe it? Proud tower of flesh? Tunnel of love? I'm telling you that real people do not talk like that. Real people don't write shit like that. The letters in these magazines are all bullshit man. They are made up by people who work at the magazine."

Andy waved the copy of Penthouse Letters that he had been reading and said, "These stories are phony as shit too." He leafed through the magazine and stopped at a page, "Here's one. A housewife whose husband is out of town on business takes her laundry to the Laundromat. According to the story she has never been unfaithful. While she's doing the wash a guy comes in to wash his stuff. He asks her if he should use bleach on something and she tells him no and then a paragraph later she is on her knees sucking his cock and then she goes back to his room with him and they fuck for the three days her husband is gone.

"I'm telling you guys, all this is phony shit. Things like that just don't happen in real life" and as all the other guys sitting there agreed with him I just sat there and thought, "You are wrong Andy, oh so wrong. Things like that do happen in the real world" and I let my memory take me back to the spring of 1954.

I'd taken my discharge at Fort Lewis in November of 1953 after coming home from spending a sixteen-month tour of duty in Korea. I'd come home to a family that had missed me and who had welcomed me home with home coming parties and family get togethers. My sister's current boyfriend gave me a lead on a job where he worked and I applied, got the job and started to get on with my life.

But something was missing. I couldn't quite get into civilian life. Stopping with the guys after work for a beer was boring and tame. Even the few dates I went on seemed uninteresting. I didn't know what was the matter with me, but some one else did — my father. He and I really didn't get along and as far as I was concerned it was all his fault. He had come home from War Two, stayed with my mom and me for about two months and then he split. One day he left for work and never came home. Six months later he was back. He and my mom disappeared into their bedroom and I heard them talking most of the night and in the morning it seemed as if she had forgiven him, but I never did.

I was still living at home and one night I got home from work and found him sitting at the kitchen table waiting for me with a couple of beers. He opened one and pushed it toward me and motioned for me to sit down. We looked at each other in silence for several minutes and then he said, "Figured it out yet?"

"Figured out what?"

"Just what it is that seems out of kilter with your life? Why everything seems just a little bit off and you can't quite put your finger on it?"

That was exactly what I was feeling; how could he know? "No, no I haven't."

"Think about it. What were you doing and what are you doing now?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Okay, since I don't know what your circumstances were and I have to assume that the Army has changed some since my day I'll give it to you from my side.

"When I was drafted in 1942 there was none of this two year bullshit. When they took you it was "For the war plus six months." Then they take you to a training camp and they train you sixteen hours a day to kill people and destroy things. You learn to use rifles, pistols, BARs, machine guns, mortars, hand grenades, bayonets and knives. Then you finish basic and are assigned to a unit and the training goes on. It never lets up; this is how you kill, this is how you blow this up, this is how you tear this down. This is your enemy. Learn to hate him because he is evil personified and then kill him every chance you get.

"Then you find yourself in a landing craft approaching a beach. Bullets are clanging off the hull, artillery bursts are going off all around you. The ramp goes down and you find yourself in a living hell as men are dying all around you. You fight your way off the beach and for the next six months it is hedge row to hedge row, town after town, storming pillboxes, kicking down doors and tossing in grenades, fighting house to house and all the time men are falling all around you wounded and dying.

"They finally pull you out of line and send you back to a rest area and just about the time you stop wetting your pants every time you hear a loud noise they load you on trucks and send you back up to the line and it starts all over again. Suddenly one day it stops. It is like some one threw a switch. One minute you are being shot at and two seconds later it is peace and quiet. You get loaded on a troop ship and twenty-one days later you are back in the USA and two weeks later you are standing at a train station with a government travel voucher in one hand and your discharge papers in the other

"Three days later you are home, but home to what? A nine to five job, nights sitting on the couch listening to Amos and Andy or George Burns and Gracie Allen? The days are dull and boring after what you have just been through. Some men just can't go from months of stark terror to orderly calm over night.

"That's where the Army, Navy and Marines fail us. They wind us up, but whenever what they wound us up for is over, they cut us loose. There is no period of winding down, of getting what they pumped into you out of your system. One day you are clearing a house room to room with grenades and bayonets and then suddenly you are in a house and fixing the storm windows. Some made the adjustment, but a lot of us didn't."

"That's why you left us?"

"I had to get away. I had to, for lack of a better way of saying it, cleanse my system. I had to get rid of the insane urge to settle every argument with a vertical butt stroke. I was seething with violence and I had to get it out of me."

"So what did you do when you were gone?"

"I'm not going into that. A lot of what I did I'm not proud of, but to boil it down I looked for dangerous jobs, jobs that would let me work the bad shit out of my system. It took a while, but one day I woke up and said, "I could get killed doing this shit" and I knew then it was time to try and come home. Luckily for me your mother is one hell of an understanding woman.

"I see a lot of what I felt when I came home in you. The shooting in your war ended in July of '53 so you had a couple of months to adjust, but you still seem to have — I don't know — a need to let off steam."

"So what do you suggest I do?"

"Hell, I don't know. Take up sky diving, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, just do something that will burn whatever is still inside of you out of you."

Not too long after that I saw Marlon Brando in "The Wild Ones" and I don't to this day know exactly why, but at the point in the picture where the town girl says to Brando, "What are you rebelling against Johnny?" and Brando replied, "I don't know, whaddya got?" I knew that I needed to get a motorcycle and go screaming down the highway with my hair on fire. It would be exciting and exhilarating and just maybe dangerous enough to burn out what my father thought he saw in me.

I bought a used 1947 Harley and set out to run up and down the roads as fast as I could. It was not an uneventful time in my life. I pushed that bike to the limit and several times I had the cops chasing me for being so far over the speed limit that my speedometer was pegged out. But I was on my Harley and I was invincible and I ran from them and I never did get caught.

One day I was in a gas station filling up when another rider came in. He said he had seen me riding around the neighborhood and he introduced himself and we started riding together. He belonged to a club and he talked me into joining and soon I was riding all over the state with a group of guys. One night we were sitting in a tavern drinking beer and trying to decide where we were going to go next when a guy and a girl walked in and sat down in a booth. It was dark in the place so I did not get a good look at them, but it was obvious from the loud talking coming from their booth that they were not happy with each other.