Chapter 1

"There are no second acts in American Life" – F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Sometimes there are second acts in American Life" – anonymous

"Old flames never die, but sometimes memories burn" - anonymous

My wife of fourteen years loved me without fail until the day she died of internal organ failure several years ago. A minor throat surgery turned into a post-op infection that no drugs could manage and she died on me less than a week later, in terrible pain ... but with all of her humor and love of life intact until the very end. The secret to our marital success? She'd never met in real life either Sean Connery, Hugh Jackman or Viggo Mortensen!

Every married couple has an exception list complete with a marital 'get out of jail free' card. Sort of an, 'I love you dearly, but I'd do (insert famous name here) in a heartbeat, if he/she knocked on the door!' Maria had her exception list, complete with four or five Hollywood 'A' list actors on it whom she'd dump me in a heartbeat for. Or at least enjoy permission to drop her dress down on his hotel room floor and pounce upon him like an all you can eat buffet! At least she had the good sense not to have the hots for Brad Pitt!

As for me, my own exception list for an authorized extra marital fling only contained one name, Rebecca Westbrooke, but that was her birth name that I knew her as in high school. Later for the silver screen she became Becky Brighton, and like Sandra Bullock and Julia Roberts, she was tall, funny and stunningly brunette, and very definitely currently 'America's Sweetheart'.

Maria's final instructions to me were to go find and bang Rebecca! I smiled at my dying wife and told her that I would indeed give her a chance, but that she was not to wear herself out too much with Cary Grant up in heaven until I eventually (in another fifty years) decided to rejoin her! She just laughed and mentioned that she wanted a piece of Errol Flynn and Frank Sinatra too! I gave Maria a kiss as she drifted off to sleep and the runaway infection took her away from me a few hours later that evening, leaving me now alone in the world ... except for a promise that I would find and bag my dream girl, Rebecca. The one and only name on my exception list, and my late wife had given me carte blanche to bag and tag her, even to marry her, if I could pull the feat off!

And it wasn't exactly a one in a million chance of my needing to find her by stalking the gates of her Hollywood mansion either! For me she had been the proverbial girl next door. We'd been best friends in junior high school in Tampa Florida and even began to 'date' once we started high school together. The last time I'd kissed her, we were both seventeen and I thought that she would become my own personal leading lady for the rest of life. And then she became instead 'Backseat Becky'.

I guess I need to back up here a little and explain a few things.

Rebecca, hereafter just called for simplicity Becky, had always been a slightly insecure girl and then an even more insecure young woman. She was slightly slow to physically mature in comparison with the other girls at school and especially by her junior year in high school she began to feel increasingly out of synch with everyone and everything in her life. More than anything, she yearned to be popular, one of the in-crowd, to be part of the clique at the very top of the girls' social order ... the group of a dozen or so girls that formed the school's fashion trends, had the best parties and had the hunkiest guys in school at their beck and call, and more importantly to Rebecca, determined who was 'in' or 'out' of their school society, whether a girl was 'popular' or not!

Becky had the love of her parents and no particular problems at home, and she had me! Her friend, the boy next door. But she wanted more! She wanted to become one of the popular girls, and at nearly any cost!

"I just want to take drama for one semester and also do drama club as well after school." She told me, and I understoodd why. All of the clique girls were in drama club and at least half of the so called best and hottest weekend parties were those put on by members of the club. She wanted to join and then mold herself into their image, to laugh at their jokes and dress in their approved fashion styles, to become in other words, anyone but the original Rebecca Westbrooke! And to some moderate extent, she succeeded, at least at first.

Now calling herself Becky, she began to dress with flash, not slutty mind you but more fashionably, with shorter skirts and off-shoulder sundresses and way more makeup. As we lived in Florida, there was a great deal of sun to be worshiped and the clique girls, of whose outer sphere Becky slowly found herself entering, always sported the nicest tans and dressed to show them off.

Still, even by the beginning of her senior year, Becky could not breech that final obstacle and gain admittance in the inner most workings of the clique. For all of her effort she was in fact still barely better than an outsider who just aped the manners of her social betters and even her heavily padded bras (as I discovered first hand one evening) couldn't make her 'fashionable' and one of the really cool girls. Desperate to adapt and to conform, Becky did everything but grovel at the feet of the clique, and they in turn treated her with some amusement, hinting and making vague suggestions for her social improvement and promotion, which of course they never had the slightest intentions of ever granting.

They never actually told her that she stood no chance whatsoever of making the cream of their society, but they could sense her desperation and during that last year they increasingly manipulated her like a puppet, jerking her around solely for their amusement.

I was not amused and kept trying to break Becky out of the drama club group with its collection of hangers-on, but that only caused fights between us. I considered myself her boyfriend but honestly I have no clue about the way that she then saw me. We'd been kissing for some time, and I'd even sort of reached second base with her, kissing her on my bed with her t-shirt off and my hands just down the front of her jeans barely feeling her pubic hair when she stopped me cold.

Two nights later at a little after midnight I saw a car pull into her parents' driveway without any lights and for the next half hour from my darkened corner upstairs bedroom I watched Rebecca, now 'Backseat Becky' hand over to Cliff Logan on a silver platter everything that I had been denied! And then again the next evening, and for weeks after that until I stopped watching from the window out of mental self preservation.

In retrospect, I think I handled it all really rather well, considering the shock I'd received. That is I didn't borrow my dad's gun and shoot the bastard who was banging my longtime girlfriend! I'd always been geeky, one of the library nerds, and not even drama club was ever going to make me socially acceptable at school. I worked on the school newspaper instead and wouldn't have traded that for anything! A few equally oddball friends of mine heard it through the grapevine fourth or fifth hand that the clique had set-up Becky with Cliff on purpose, to allegedly boost her status on the theory that she should never again be seen with me ... as I was apparently a severe social handicap!

Cliff was good looking, a semi-star athlete and came from a well-off family and they did make good boyfriend-girlfriend material, I grudgingly had to admit. On the other hand, he was in tight with the clique and he knew that it was all just a put-on from the start, that the clique ringleaders like Carolyn Baxter were just trying to see how far Becky would indeed go ... and manipulating her every step of the way. He was just there at the front of the line to cap a bit of Becky's willing ass. When he tired of banging her like a cheap drum, he passed her down to one of his friends ... and then another, then and a few more after that.

Pretty soon Rebecca was known as 'Backseat Becky' all over school as she discovered that being the slut for all of the A-list (and B-list) guys at school wasn't improving her own social standing one little bit. The clique found it all hilarious, and with her reputation as the school's bike that nearly half the guys had taken a ride upon, was now being discussed with amusement in every classroom and hallway.

Even Becky by then had realized what she had been made a fool of and she then had something of a nervous breakdown and went begging back to Cliff for him to somehow fix everything for her.

Cliff told her what she wanted to hear and then took the opportunity to fuck Becky again, this time in her own upstairs bedroom one Saturday afternoon while her parents were gone. Cliff also made sure that all of her bedroom windows and curtains were wide open so that I could watch and listen. He first made her strip naked and beg for his cock, and then he made her pose for photos for him. Next he made her give him an obscenely long and noisy blow job, making her stop often to loudly tell Cliff in a overly loud stage voice how 'nice and big his cock was and how much she loved sucking it'. Next he fucked her cunt and then her ass too, but by then I'd watched and heard enough and had gone downstairs to do something else instead, like slash all of Cliff's tires on his car!

No. Obviously throwing herself back into Cliff's arms wouldn't do a thing to salvage Becky's reputation, which was already a joke all over school. A few days later supposedly the candid photos of my former girlfriend spreading and posing for her lover were spread all over school, random pictures placed into every locker at school with the notation, "Backseat Becky – Collect the entire series of 20 prints!".

The clique had worked her over to perfection, toying with her goals and aspirations and slowly twisting her until she was utterly socially destroyed, left worse off than she had been even, right from the very start!

Cliff beat the shit out me about half an hour later, but then again I shouldn't have been sitting on the porch laughing at him either when he came downstairs an hour or so later to leave! That was poor judgment on my part. It also earned me a trip down to the police station where I spent the next two days waiting to appear before a judge. I'd turned eighteen a few days earlier that spring so it was the big house rather than juvenile hall for me! No one much cared that Cliff had beaten the crap out of me, breaking my nose and giving me two black eyes that remained swollen nearly shut for days. His dad was golfing buddies with the local station police captain and as fair as Cliff's version of the events had gone I had been the sole instigator and he had responded solely in self-defense, as I had allegedly threatened him with the same knife I used to slash his tires.

The charges wouldn't hold up, but I was held for the legal maximum of three days just to make the point that any further retribution against Cliff would be highly unwise.

During my long stay in the local lockup I met a rather infamous local minor crime boss Cameron O'Neil and his top two henchmen and earned myself a lasting favor, and a job that would span the next twenty years. I proved my worth right from the start by running a certain small errand for Mr. O'Neil that took me a full week to accomplish (but successfully) after my release, and when I returned home Becky was gone. Her parents wouldn't talk about it, even to me, but I heard later that she'd attempted suicide with an overdose of pills and had been placed into medical care for a while afterwards with acute depression.

They wouldn't let me visit her. For some reason they blamed me for their daughter's state of mental illness, even though I had clear memories of warning them, and Rebecca, for much of the school year that her current 'friends' were anything but, and that disaster was likely to happen. No one likes an 'I told you so!" Logically, there was no way that they could put the blame on me, but anger is very rarely ever logical and I was persona non grata with them from that time on.

Neither Becky nor I had ever returned to school after that fateful Saturday, but we both had enough credits to technically graduate, or else the school just wanted us both gone to stay. Neither of us walked the stage to get our diplomas either. I was now working full time for Mr. O'Neil and after her release from the hospital Rebecca went to go live with an aunt in Burbank, California. She never called me or even left a note. Another neighbor told me that her parents had virtually disowned her, and that they didn't even want her name mentioned in their house anymore.

From what I heard from mostly second and third hand sources, her aunt worked as a makeup technician for a TV production company and she got Becky production support work. Then a director took notice of her backstage and gave her a tiny walk-on role, and then another speaking part in his next project, and then a supporting movie role for that's years hit romantic comedy.

The rest became history.

My own career wasn't doing too badly either. While being stuck in that crowded police holding cell, I'd mentally needed to pace about more on my feet than I wanted to just sit, and I'd given the elderly Mr. O'Neil my own seat. Then, as we had nothing much else to do for a great many hours I told the delighted expatriate Irishman about my minor triumph over the local sports athlete that had cuckolded me! My story of revenge endeared me to the old scoundrel, who was facing a number of local gambling charges and was currently being denied bail while the local DA was trying to patch together a case. It wouldn't stick, but Mr. O'Neil and his immediate associates were unavailable for business temporarily.

Asked if I would do them a small favor and make an urgent but minor delivery for him, I agreed immediately and I made the specified drop-off down in Miami. Then the next week, I was asked to handle another, much more important delivery all the way to Las Vegas, and borrowing my mom's car for the week I completed that assignment as well. The DA and the police were watching all of Mr. O'Neil's men like a hawk, still trying to gather evidence against him, but I was a brand new innocent (and unknown) face.

Arriving in Vegas, there was some suspicion there that since I wasn't the usual courier (of what I was actually delivering I have no idea ... I never looked!) and was rather young for the job, that I must be a plant by some law enforcement agency. But after a day in a fairly comfortable casino hotel room watching cable and eating room service, eventually someone in Mr. O'Neil's organization vouched for me and faxed a photo of their newest and youngest courier.

When I returned home, Mr. O'Neil (Cameron now to him), was out of jail (and to stay) and my Becky had gone to California. I tried to call her there a few times but her aunt would only say she'd given Rebecca my messages ... but she was never home when I'd call, and she never once called me back. I could get the hint.

I wouldn't say that I eventually got over Rebecca and forgot all about her, but I did put her behind me into a sealed folder in my heart labeled 'the past' and moved on without too many regrets. I had a steady job making serious money for Mr. O'Neil, undoubtedly doing criminal things like illegal interstate transportation of gambling money, documents and god knows what else, but I didn't much care. Life was a lot of fun and I was living it up high! I lived and played smart and didn't buy expensive fancy cars or dress up in thousand dollar Italian suits for business. I bought my clothes from Sears or Penney's and never flashed money when out on the town. I changed cars every year, but I always bought a used one, selecting a boring make and model that wouldn't attract police attention. I did buy my parents new cars every four or five years but I didn't splurge for the beachfront mansion or the European vacations. To my loving parents I had a good white-collar job as part of a traveling auditing team for a sales company ... and I did nothing that would convince anyone otherwise. My criminal bosses even provided me access to extremely confidential off-shore banking opportunities so that I was able to secretly bank away the majority of my income, living quietly and modestly on the rest.

Life was indeed pretty good!

When I saw Becky's first 'above the line' movie credit I mailed her a Congratulations card, via her parents address. There was no return reply ... of course.

A few years later I heard that she married an up and coming director in a big Hollywood wedding, but no one sent me an invitation and I didn't bother to even send a card. I was way over her. A few months later I met Maria who was working as a waitress in a Vegas casino hotel. One of the same casinos that I was making regular deliveries to and from. I was now working as much now for the legendary and infamous Mr. Adriano DeLuca in Vegas as I was for Cameron O'Neil back in Florida. DeLuca was one of the major mob bosses at the top of the organized crime pyramid, and Mr. O'Neil was under much obligation to him as a subordinate and the big boss began to take something of a shine to me. Over time, Mr. DeLuca (no one ever called him by his first name) made arrangements to have me handle deliveries and pick-ups nearly exclusively for his parent organization ... with a significant increase in salary and benefits too!

Between the two of them I was traveling across the country nearly non-stop, personally handling shipments and special packages too sensitive for any known mob associate to touch or be seen anywhere near. I seemed to be invisible to the eyes of law enforcement and I was never once stopped or even questioned while doing 'company business'. Security was always paramount with Mr. DeLuca and no loose discussions of my duties were ever discussed on either over a non-secure telephone, or any place that might have recording wire. Less than ten people in his entire organization even knew my name, let alone my real duties ... and everyone worked hard to keep it that way.