Chapter 1

I was sixty-two when I retired. I moved to the Philippines because of the lower cost of living. I discovered there are benefits and frustrations involved with living in any culture. The very best thing about the Philippines has to be the attitude of good women. You are always going to run into Gold Diggers and bitches. If you are careful and don’t go looking for Bar Girls or Strippers, you have a chance to find an authentic girl who will make your life better.

I literally ran into Mae (Pronounced “My”) in a shopping mall when I wasn’t watching where I was going. After picking her up off the floor and saying I was sorry for what seemed like the hundredth time, Mae said, “One of my aunts married an American Navy guy. I always thought he was handsome. He was very nice to my aunt and they were always sweet to each other. If I ever get married, I hope it will be to a man like that.”

We turned the chance meeting into a date. Mae was twenty-five, so she knew what she wanted in life and was not shy. Technically, we didn’t have sex on the first date but Mae did come home with me and we did sleep in the same bed. In the morning, we did have sex. A week later we got out of bed for longer than just bathing and eating.

After three months, I asked Mae to marry me. She was surprised because all her ex-boyfriends told her she was difficult to understand. Mae was a little heavy and thought no one would want her. Besides being great in bed, Mae liked having sex with me. She told me I was the first guy to always make her cum and to never hurt her. Being older, I had the patience to do a lot of foreplay and get Mae frantic to have me inside her before I attempted penetration. That level of arousal also made it possible for Mae to cum from penis in vagina intercourse. She came hard and she was noisy during all of her orgasms. We had sex two or three times a day for the first two years we were married.

Even if I realized Mae wasn’t really in the mood, if I was horny, I could always get my wife interested if I just started in with kissing and slowly moved to light petting. Mae would realize she WAS in the mood after all. Things would quickly escalate to heavy petting. After I gave my wife five or six G-Spot orgasms with my fingers, I’d go down on her and make her cum five or ten more times. By then Mae was ready to go and eager for whatever kind of sex I wanted.

Mae started a couple of businesses and made enough money so we were comfortable, had a nice place to live, a car, and could travel. Mae never complained at me or tried to boss me around. She was fine with my being retired.

Now Mae’s ex-boyfriends weren’t wrong. Mae was difficult to understand. For me the positives were much more important than the negatives. Once I understood what her hot buttons were, I took the time to find out why. Mae had been ignored a lot by her mom, who ran a tiny store called a Sari-Sari store. The store sold day to day necessities in small packages, often sachets. This is the kind of neighborhood store that serves mostly very poor people. People come up to the security mesh covered window and ask for what they want to buy. Typical items are candy, cooking spices, packaged noodle dinners, ramen, canned fish, Spam, powdered milk, laundry supplies, cleaning needs, bath soap, shampoo, conditioner, and deodorant. The shop owner puts the purchases in a bag and the customer hands the money through the window. When the money is counted, the shop keeper hands the bag out of the window. The store owner tries to sell as many additional things as possible, for example drinking water, propane, and Pre-Paid phone loads. Mae spent most of her early childhood in a playpen while her mother tended the family store.

Once I understood the effects of her childhood on her personality it was pretty easy to make her happy by lots of positive attention and sweet talking. Whispering romantic things to her when she was worn out from multiple orgasms kept her in a good mood.

The one thing I never could cure was that her family made her deathly afraid to spend money, even for necessary things, like going to the doctor. Rather than go to the doctor, buy authentic medicine, and get better, she would buy black-market crap and never get her problem solved.

I grew up in Iowa, where the old farmers were about like Mae. They would wait until the last minute, then go to University of Iowa Hospital in Iowa City, or The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and expect miracles. I had read about so many cases where the doctor told the patient, “If you’d come in a month ago, we could have helped you. Today your cancer is stage four, incurable, untreatable, inoperable.

I had two personal fights with cancer. I went to the doctor when I first had unusual symptoms. Each time, the cancer was only stage two and I was cured both times. I preached early detection to Mae, but her family had messed her up so badly, she couldn’t hear me.

Then the symptoms couldn’t be ignored. The doctor gave Mae a sad look and said, “If only you’d come in last month, we could have cured you. Now, it’s too late.”

They kept Mae comfortable. Thankfully the cancer was very aggressive, and it killed my wife before she suffered for very long.

I had thought we were a good match and met each other’s needs really well, but I never thought Mae and I had a romance novel worthy love affair. Maybe I underestimated. I was torn up. I was nearly worthless.

I sold Mae’s businesses and moved to a condo in Baguio City. The city is built on a mountain. The temperature is lower than anyplace else in the Philippines because of the altitude and the prevailing winds off the Philippine Sea.

I took long walks among the tall pine trees at Camp John Hay. I went to the gym, and I did strength training as well as working to lose weight.

Dan, one of my late wife’s former employees had been sort of like a little brother to her. He came by my condo and made appropriate noises. He clucked at me for not keeping the condo neat and clean.

The next day, he brought his younger sister, Jemma to see me. I remembered feeling guilty for lusting after the child when I first met her. Then she was fourteen. Now that she was sixteen, she looked like a woman to me, in spite of all the people who want to say a girl needs to be eighteen to make decisions for herself. I instantly fell in lust with the girl in earnest. She was beautiful in the way a girl who competes in pageants is beautiful, but she was not haughty or distant the way many contestants are. She had a youthful enthusiasm that made me want to spend time with her. She still looked like a schoolgirl, but she had the intelligence and life experience for me to believe she was an adult. Still, she had the kind of softness that made her whole body alluring to me and ache to have her wrap herself around me. Her smile seemed to light up her face. She had none of the demanding, cynical, grasping hardness about her that seemed to be a built-in part of most beautiful women. She paid attention to me when we chatted in a way that I couldn’t ignore.

Jemma stared at me. “Mom used to do things for your wife, like be the substitute cashier. Sometimes I came along with mom. I remember I liked the way you were always sweet to your wife. You talked to me like an adult, not an idiot child and helped me learn not to run myself down. Do you remember me, Sir George?” She asked.

“Of course, I remember you. So, few pretty girls are smart enough to overcome all the misogynistic rules and double-standards society forces on young women. It was so refreshing to talk with you and recognize an intellectual equal and kindred spirit,” I said.

Jemma blushed from her forehead all the way down to the small triangle of skin showing where her school uniform blouse had the top two buttons unbuttoned. She tossed her head and the heavy waves of midnight black hair moved, showing her ears were incandescent crimson.

“Sir George, Dan thinks you could use a little help. Would you mind if I came by for a while every day to make sure you have everything you need?” Jemma asked.

I gave the girl a sad smile and said, “I do need help now and then. I’m sure it wouldn’t take too long out of your day, and it would really help me. You could just stop by on your way home from school.”

“You know the De La Cruz family is always there to help out family friends, so I’ll just stop by tomorrow and make sure you have something for dinner,” Jemma said.

I felt something I hadn’t felt for a long time. My body was actually trying to get an erection. Now Mae and I had a loving and successful marriage until the day Mae died, and I never cheated on my wife. However, we stopped having sex after we had been married for seven years. Mae was worried about having a moustache and she gave herself three shots in three days of what was supposed to be estrogen. She bought it from one of her male to female trans friends who bought the drug on the black market. The drug was actually Depo-Provera. One shot was the standard dose for one month of birth control, so Mae had taken a triple overdose. The drug stopped her periods for almost two years and destroyed her sexual desire. Mae had no interest in sex and even extended foreplay didn’t bring back her interest in sex. While Mae always wanted to make me happy, she wasn’t a masochist or a submissive, so when Mae Mae died, we hadn’t had sex for three years. At first, I missed sex a lot, but I loved my wife and didn’t do anything that would hurt her. Because I was over seventy, when I didn’t use it, I lost it. By the time Mae got her cancer diagnosis, I couldn’t even get hard enough to masturbate.

It was a little embarrassing getting a chubby over a teenage girl, young enough to be my granddaughter, but it was also exciting to feel like a real man again. I was sane enough to realize Jemma was just doing her duty as a daughter and not specifically wanting to spend time with me, so I promised myself not to make a fool of myself.

My walks in the pine woods were starting to improve my mood, my stamina, and I shed some of the excess weight I’d been lugging around for years. Knowing Jemma was going to come by every day motivated me to take a shower and put on clean clothes every day. I started getting a haircut and having my beard trimmed every week. I bought some new clothes, so it didn’t look like I was wearing someone else’s shirt.

Now Jemma is the daughter of a Christian minister, and she gets all bent out of shape about the whole, “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” thing and she reposts every so-called Christian news outlet article about some allegedly transgender person raping a girl in the women’s restroom. I get irritated with her for not checking things out before she reposts. Jemma says, “But it’s from the ‘Christian xxx’ so it must be true.”

I said, “You want to be a doctor. Are you going to take a patient’s word for something and not examine them because they say they are a Christian?”

Jemma said, “Heavens no! Patients lie. Sometimes they are addicted to pain medicine and just want to get drugs.”

“I like to be sure anything I post is really true. Over the years I’ve found out that there are old laws still on the books that would cost someone a lot of money if that old law was changed. Have you ever wondered why insurance companies care who gets elected and are willing to spend a lot of money supporting one candidate and fund attack ads against the opponent?” I asked.

“There must be money involved somehow,” Jemma said.

I grinned and replied, “There are laws that let life insurance companies pay a widower less than the face value of his late wife’s policy. The insurance companies want Insurance Commissioners and State Legislators who won’t change discriminatory laws. That was also why insurance companies funded attack ads against the ‘Equal Rights Amendment.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with a ‘Christian news outlet’ though.” Jemma said.

“True. I just wanted to give you an easy to understand example of why a business supports a candidate or cause. Back when the ERA was first approved by Congress and sent to the various States for ratification, a lot of Christian groups started spreading the rumor that if the ERA was passed, coed dorms, locker rooms, and restrooms would be required. This wasn’t true, but enough people believed the lie that the ERA was not ratified. Now why would Christian groups lie to stop an amendment from being ratified?” I asked.

“Follow the money?” Jemma asked.

“That’s right! Follow the money.” I replied.

“People lobbying for ratification of the ERA discovered some interesting things. Fliers with the lies about things the ERA was supposed to require were all on copy paper with a unique mark that was identical to copies distributed within a well-known cosmetics company. This company had been built by a woman and depended on women to sell door to door by doing product demonstrations and makeovers in customers’ homes. The CEO of this company had been criticized for the very small share of the profit from each sale that went to her sales women and the high price she charged for the ‘starter kit’ which included the required uniform, a pastel pink linen suit and pink pill box hat.

“This CEO was very much against the ERA because she did not want to be required to allow men to sell her product. Now ‘Cindy Lou’ said her opposition to hiring men was all about the safety of her female customers. Ms. Embers claimed she didn’t want women opening their doors to a man selling the Cindy Lou brand and being in danger of being raped in her own home.

“A leaked internal memo found in a trash can on the 39^th floor (executive suite) of the Cindy Lou tower said the ‘real’ reason for opposing the ERA was indeed to prevent men from becoming Cindy Lou representatives, not for the safety of the female customers but because Ms. Embers feared males would successfully unionize and win higher pay for all representatives. The memo went on to say that the women who sold Cindy Lou products were usually less attractive and less intelligent women who had not been successful in attracting a man who was an ‘Alpha Male.’ Their second-rate husbands could not earn a salary or wage large enough to properly support their family. These ‘genetically inferior people’ were placed on this Earth as prey to sustain the fitter (richer) members of the species. The memo pointed to the female representatives happily accepting the company car they could earn after selling a million dollars of Cindy Lou products as a true indication of their inferiority. What was that company car? A pastel pink Nash Rambler. The memo went on to say that a male who would apply for a position selling Cindy Lou cosmetics would undoubtedly be an inferior person and not a ‘real man.’ The final sentence said Ms. Embers abhorred the idea of a bunch of pansy ass faggots prancing around in pink linen suits and driving Cindy Lou pink Nash Ramblers.