Chapter 10

I left Thailand in 1998 after working there for five years. I was under no compulsion to leave. I liked my job at the refugee camp. I was still spending weekends at Steve's house and the two of us got along fine, relating to one another almost like husband and wife. Almost.

Thailand had been good to me. I had arrived there newly divorced, nearly broke, and with only a one year contract on my job. Five years later, age 48, I had 100,000 dollars saved, thanks to my frugality, Steve's good financial advice, and a booming stock market. But my relationship with Steve was going nowhere. Sex with him was a rarity, except that he liked to watch me fuck other men and sometimes joined in to make a threesome. He was still screwing several Thai bar girls every week.

Moreover, in my years of working abroad I had fallen way, way behind in my former profession as a computer systems consultant. I barely knew anything about the internet and the World Wide Web. In the refugee camp where I worked our technology was pencil and paper 1.0. I still had my license as a Certified Public Accountant but I wasn't up to speed in that field either.

I could look in the mirror and see that age was creeping up on me. It was time to leave behind my counter-culture life, return to the U.S., re-establish a career, and perhaps settle down. "To become an adult," I joked to Steve when I told him I was leaving. I had a vague hope that Steve would ask me to marry him. But he didn't and so we kissed and said goodbye and I cried inconsolably on the way to the airport, my worldly goods contained in two large suitcases.

Well, enough of my sorrows and back to tales of my sex life. As an accountant I'm always counting and in Bangkok I continued with my journal about my life and sexual experiences. Going through the pages of the journal, I counted my sex partners during five years in Thailand: 54 men and three women. That brought me up to a lifetime total of 87 men and four women.

Being an accountant, I also had to define what "sex" means. The scandal with President Bill Clinton, and the debate about whether he had sex with "that woman" or not, caused me to reflect on a precise definition. Vaginal sex, to my mind, wasn't inclusive enough. Oral sex and anal sex certainly qualified as sex in my mind. How about blow jobs? Is it sex if a man sticks his dick in one of your orifices but doesn't cum? As had happened during my group sex encounters. I decided on a broad definition of sex as "genital contact for the purpose of achieving orgasm." Thus, I didn't count as sex partners a couple of men that I brought to orgasm with lap dances while we were fully clothed. But I counted as a sex partner a man I jacked off while we were slow dancing in a dark Thai night club. I also counted a couple of men who only titty fucked me.

They say that men overestimate their number of sexual partners by counting women they wish that had bedded -- and that women underestimate their partners by not counting men they wish they had not bedded. Most women, especially single women, lie about the number of sex partners they have had. My friend Sue, who doesn't count, but whose lifetime total probably exceeds mine, blithely tells men that she has "been in bed with ten or so men." I tell men the same thing – except those I really trust and with whom I share experiences. But I don't lie to myself. This ex-preacher's wife is a bit proud of her sexuality – and her honesty.

Another reason I left Thailand was that I was drinking too much. For years I had controlled my alcoholism by only drinking on weekends and vacations, but, in the last year of my job in the refugee camp, I had begun to enjoy a beer, which often became two or three, with my co-workers at the end of the day. I was in a mild alcoholic haze nearly every night and, on weekends at Steve's, I was often stumbling drunk. It was time to confront the problem. A change of scene would help.

Before I dealt with excessive drinking, however, I wanted to have a final binge. From Bangkok, I flew to Greece and took a ferry boat out to the islands where I had enjoyed myself so many years ago. (See Chapter 4) I planned to spend a couple of weeks wandering from island to island and then continue on to the United States where I would begin the rest of my life.

My vacation didn't go well. I spent my first two nights on an island alone in my hotel room with a bottle of gin. Among all the topless and naked twenty-something women, I seemed ancient. I suffered the common fate of middle-aged women: I was invisible. Nobody paid any attention to me. Even when I went topless on the beach.

My third day, I met an American couple about my age named Sidney and Rachel. They were Wall Street types, nouveau riche New Yorkers, ostentatiously ordering the most expensive item on the menu beneath the arbor of grapevines at the little sidewalk café where we ate lunch together. They were pleasant people and I was lonely and I needed friends. They liked me because I was like a rare species of bug, a counter-culture, world-traveling, long-haired hippie.

"Why don't you come to a party at our house tonight," Rachel asked. "It'll be a small group. Three couples and a single man – and you if you come."

It was the best offer I had had that day. Actually, it was the only offer, so I said okay. The single man, they told me, was a very successful stockbroker who was "nice." I took that to mean that his only asset was money.

"What shall I wear?" I asked.

"Very casual," she said. "Bring your swim suit. Our villa has a pool." I was impressed and appalled at the same time. Swimming pools on the water-scarce Greek islands are rare. If they have a pool, I thought, they must own, or rent, the biggest and most luxurious house on the island. It seemed obscene to have a swimming pool when the azure-blue Mediterranean was only a few steps away.

I gave some thought to my outfit for the evening. At lunch, Rachel had been wearing a sundress designed to display prominently her artificially rounded orbs. My own orbs were less prominent and rounded. I picked a flowery, flouncy knee-length skirt and a white peasant top of meshy, clinging cotton and silk. Sans bra, the shape and color of my large nipples showed through discreetly. To maintain my hippie image I wore no makeup except a little face powder and combed my hair, streaked with gray, into a pony tail. I was too old to be wearing a pony tail, but it kept my hair in order with a minimum of fuss.

Ready and anxious for my night out, I sallied forth on foot from my hotel, following the directions Rachel had given me. A walk of a few minutes down narrow cobbled streets brought me to the walled compound that contained their house. It was indeed the largest house on the island.

Rachel led me into the huge living room. Along with the adjoining dining room, it looked out upon the swimming pool and a garden of potted geraniums and hibiscus. I shook hands with my dinner partner. His name was Tony and, as I had suspected, he was not going to win any beauty contests. He was fifty-ish, short and plump, with thin, black hair, and displayed overly large, overly-white teeth. He wore a heavy gold chain around his neck. But he was amusing – and I quickly ascertained from the deference he was accorded that he was the richest person in the room.

"We're drinking Kir Royals," said Rachel. "Do you want one?"

"Of course," I answered. I would have preferred something stronger. Kir Royal, a mixture of champagne and crème de cassis, was, I knew from visits to Paris, a vulgar drink for people with more money than taste. (Yes, I am being catty and, no, I don't apologize for it.)

After a couple of Kirs and a few minutes of chatter, we all sat down at the table and dined on lobster and pasta. It was delicious. I had two large glasses of white wine and by the time dinner was over I was feeling comfortable and chummy with Tony and the three couples at the table. They were people who had attended the best schools and made a lot of money and displayed it ostentiously. Tony, I had already decided, would be an adequate partner for the night.

After dinner Sidney brought out an elegant flask full of white powder: cocaine. We grouped around a glass-topped coffee table and he poured out a generous quantity of the powder and arranged it into lines with a razor blade. He pulled out his billfold and produced several one hundred dollar bills and laid them down on the table. "It's the best stuff," he pronounced proudly. Everybody picked up a bill, rolled it into a tube, and sniffed a line.

"How about trying it, Rachel?" Sidney asked.

"I'd love too," I said. I've never been a drug user. I figured one addiction – to alcohol – was enough, but, to be sociable, I have sampled small amounts of marijuana, hashish oil, and cocaine. With everybody watching, I had no choice but to snort a full line of cocaine. I almost immediately felt a jolt to my heart. It was indeed "good" stuff. All the others did a second line, but when it came around to me again I begged off. "Later. Oh, wow. I'm feeling it real good. But gotta pee now." With the euphoria and fast talk increasing around the coffee table, I slipped away for to the bathroom to avoid having to take a second hit. I didn't want to be excited. I wanted to be mellow. I stopped at the bar on my way back and poured myself a large glass of gin and took a long drink. To calm down my racing heart.