The List

One night, in the dark, frigid Iowa winter of 1998, I took a pad and pencil and wrote down the names of all the women with whom I could remember having sex. I think I got them all written down, but you never know. I took a lot of drugs in the 1970s, and most of the Carter administration is just a blur to me now, so a few names might have escaped The List.

In an instance of kismet, there were exactly 50 names on The List, no more, no fewer. I thought for sure that was too neat and tidy to be true, but as hard as I thought I could come up with no more names. I couldn't think what to do with The List once it was finished, so I just went in the basement and put it in the bottom of a box of old newspapers and magazines in the far corner of a small unlit storage room. Then I went back up to the bedroom, laid down waaaaaaay over on "my" side of the king size bed, whispered "So there!" at my wife's back and went to sleep.

In 2002 my now ex-wife surprised me by presenting a Xeroxed copy of The List to the court as evidence in our divorce. I guess there is no corner of a storage room so dim and remote that it cannot be penetrated by a woman with a flashlight and a heart of brimstone. Even though Iowa is officially a "no fault" state when it comes to divorce, such a List, kept in chronological order with four names coming after my wife's, and most especially a list where some of the names are no more detailed than "Number 179, Happy Joy Massage, Surat Thani, 1988," apparently has de facto, if not de jure, relevance. A lot of de facto relevance, in fact, in a town where three-quarters of the family court judges are listed as elders in the Zion Lutheran church. We were fighting over custody of the kids, and she won. The judge gave her my kids and one third of my gross pay through 2014. The judge was unusually generous to my ex-wife, and my lawyer said it was because of The List.

I would have done better in the courts of Southern Thailand, where such a List would not raise an eyebrow. In those courts the fact that my wife left me to move herself and our kids into a lesbian home with a female Army sergeant would have been more germane. In Iowa bringing up my wife's newfound sexual orientation would have been seen as "homophobic," and my lawyer counseled against mentioning it. On the other hand, South Thailand evenly divides its family court officers the way its families are divided, half Buddhist and half Muslim. If we had gone through a divorce in front of one of those Muslim judges I'd be making my kids supper right now and Mem would be trading cigarettes for tattoos in a Thai jail. But I'm not bitter. I take consolation in the fact that the female Army sergeant who took my wife and kids out of my house got posted to Iraq shortly thereafter, and after two years on the front lines Sergeant Butch came back to Iowa with a deep hatred for all people with skin darker than her own, including my dark-skinned Southern Thai ex-wife. Som nom nah, as they say in Ranong.

I imagine that a lot of men have their own Lists, though I don't know how many write them down, or how many live to see them become part of the court record, available after seven years to anybody who cares to request a copy from the courts. But The List is what I thought of recently when a friend said this: "To keep a girlfriend or wife is more costly than sleeping with prostitutes."

What interested me most about his statement was its implied premise that there are only two relationships available to men and women, marriage or prostitution, and the corollary proposition that all that separates the two is price.

It seems like a lot of men in my demographic share the opinion that sex is always a commodity and never has anything to do with love, or even with affection or friendship. The denial of love is not an opinion shared by many men who write poetry, or novels, or screenplays, or even heavy metal power ballads, or by the millions of men all over the world who live with the women they love. But it certainly is the opinion, apparently, of the majority of men who choose to take their vacations in Bangkok rather than Yellowstone.

I try to avoid Bangkok, and any other concentrations of ugly architecture, cultural doldrums and environmental pollution, but I have from time to time spent my leisure hours among women who make their living simulating passion. Sometimes we had sex together, me and those women, and sometimes we had dinner and watched a movie, smoked some weed and went to sleep. Sometimes we played cards or dominos and sometimes they paid me to write letters for them. If I made a list of bar girls with whom I never slept but instead considered friends, there would be about twice as many names on it as there are on The List.

But as The List confines itself to women who've received my penis in some portion of their own anatomy, there are 37 names on The List of the "Number 179" variety, 37 relationships that spanned between ten minutes and nine months of my life, 37 women who happily or unhappily traded their bodies to me for anywhere from one-hundred baht to nine months' tuition in a hairdressing college. Some of those women take up no more space in my memory than the number they wore pinned to their dress, or some comment they made, such as, "Oh, you're name is John? My father's name was John."

Some of those women still take my breath away when I think of them. Remembering some of them makes me very, very sad.

Three other women on The List I loved, and they loved me. I can say this without bragging, and without begging for sympathy: Three women have I loved and they loved me. Three names of women with whom I shared the love the poets write about, three names that conjure up faces that still occasionally turn up in my dreams, in one case 26 years since I last saw her. Three women for whom I would gladly have given up my life. If I could spend an hour with any one of those three women today, and for that hour be for them the man I was then, I would give up anything I have, except my children. Of course I cannot, because love affairs die so that we can have the Opera. But I will always know that those three women gave me their bodies and took my body because they loved me and I loved them, and for no other reason.

So the list had 50 names on it in 2002 when Mem showed it to her lawyer, everybody who worked in her lawyer's office, my lawyer, everybody who worked in my lawyer's office and everybody who works at the court house, and damn but Iowa City is a small town; the next time I walked into my lawyer's office a secretary I'd never spoken to said, "Oh, hey Steve. You went to high school with Amy B., didn't you? Did you know she's married to Mike S. now?"

The List had 50 names on it then, and it would have 55 names on it now. Thirty-five women who slept with me for the money, three who loved me, and Mem, who apparently slept with me, and married me, and had two children with me, only to prove to her family and coworkers that she was straight. (She did not do it to destroy my life, that was just an unexpected bonus.) That leaves, let's see, 35 + 3 +1 = 39, and 55 - 39 =, um, I think that leaves 16 names. Sixteen women who over the past 35 years have shared their bodies with me for reasons other than money, love, or needing a beard (look it up).

Why then? I'm not handsome, I've always been a little overweight, and until very recently I smoked Marlboro reds compulsively and kissing me was like licking an ashtray. I am opinionated and fussy and as an only child I'm very territorial. I don't like people to touch my stuff. I've been told that I'm not at all easy to live with, and as the person who has the most experience living with me, I'd be the first to agree with that. As you would expect from somebody whose diploma was printed by the Department of Speech and Dramatic Arts, I've never had much money. So for what reason on God's green earth have these 16 women chosen to share their most intimate space with Steve Rosse?

The only reason I can think of is this: I never accepted Spanky and Alfalfa's invitation to join the He-Man-Women-Haters-Club. I like women. I like them a lot and I let them know it. I like to talk to women, I like to eat with women, I like to hang out with women. Even women I have no intention of sleeping with. Women are just a lot more complex, and thus more interesting, than men. Face it, we men are pretty simple machines. We eat, we shit, we sleep, we f***, we're happy. The only reason we build bridges or conquer the wilderness or go to the moon is to compete with each other, and the only reason we compete with each other is to impress women and get laid.

The old expression "If women didn't have c***s men would throw rocks at them" is not as true as "If women didn't have c***s men would all still be living in trees eating the lice living in their pubic hair." Ask a man a question and his thoughts will go, slowly, from A to B to C and to his answer in a nice straight line. Ask a woman the same question and her thoughts will go, fast as lightening, from A to C to the square root of Q to a funny joke her hairdresser told her to some nebulous, nameless anxiety to risqué flirtation and finally, maybe, to her answer. Ask a woman what she wants to have for dinner and in 30 seconds she'll leave you dizzy.

I think that I am fascinating to women because I let women know they're fascinating to me. I listen to them when they talk, whether it makes sense or not, whether I agree with it or not, whether it's in a language I speak or not.

I don't lie to women, about anything. This put me at a tremendous disadvantage in my divorce, but it's served me well in sex. I tell women that I'm poor as a pauper and they say, "Can I buy you dinner?" Before I ever touch a woman I make sure she knows that no matter how close we get, my two kids will always come first. Once I say that they can't keep their hands off me. There is nothing sexier to a woman, to any woman on this planet, than a man demonstrating good parenting. Take a child to the mall, wipe his nose for him, and every woman who sees it will instinctively move her knees a couple inches farther apart.

I can't go to one of my kids' band concerts, or a Boy Scout meeting, or Parents' Night at the school, without some woman I've never met engaging me in conversation and eventually handing me her phone number. Women at my daughter's dance recitals place their hands on my biceps and pull me into a corner to say, "Mandy and Mackenzie are such good friends, we should organize a play date. When are you free to come over? Do you like Hawaiian coffee?" They catch me at the auditorium door and walk out to the parking lot with me and by the time we reach my car they're digging in their purse for a pen. I should save a step and just hand them The List and ask them to add their name.

I'm losing my hair, I've got a pot belly, I've got a job that's pure drudgery and pays crap. I don't own anything in this world except for a 21-year-old Volvo station wagon and a pretty fair collection of 1970s rock on vinyl, which I can't listen to because I no longer own a turntable. I'm in debt up to my eyeballs and I have no retirement savings. I'll be 61 years old when my daughter finishes college and I can begin to save for my retirement. Even the computer on which I'm writing this essay is provided by my employer. But I get more attention from women today than I did when I was 20.

These are divorced women in their 30s and 40s, not the kittenish ingenues who shout "Hallo saxy man whe' you kum fum!" but instead women who can buy their own drinks, and mine too. They're not able to hang suspended upside down with their ankles wrapped around a chrome pole, but they've been dieting and going to the gym five times a week since they were cheering for the junior varsity. They sit behind their desk at the bank or behind their microscope in the lab and they do Kegel exercises all day long to keep nice and tight down there. They're self conscious about their appearance and oh my God there is nobody in the world kinkier than a woman with self-esteem issues. They don't want a commitment, they don't want money, hell they've all got better jobs than I do. They just want me to come over after the kids are asleep and do to them whatever their husband would never do. In return they'll do whatever I ask them to do, just as long as I get out of the house before the kids wake up in the morning.

Friends with benefits, our kids call it, and that expression is frightening as hell when it comes out of the mouth of your pre-teen daughter, but sexy as hell when it comes out of the mouth of her Girl Scout den leader.

So I'm confused by the attitude of my friends who say that all sex is commercial sex. Even if a man doesn't believe in love, there are still all kinds of relationships that involve sex without requiring a quid-pro-quo. I do believe in love, as the Cowardly Lion says "I do, I do, I do, I DO!" AND I believe in friendship with benefits, and I believe in pity sex, and comfort sex, and danger sex, and experimental sex, and all the wonderful, bizarre, hilarious ways human beings copulate and all the silly noises that go along with it.

I still believe in commercial sex; I once saw a man with no arms or legs sitting on a bar stool on Phuket's Kata Beach. He had only flippers where his arms and legs should have been, I suppose he was a "thalidomide baby," but the prettiest little teenage prostitute you ever saw was holding him gently but firmly, with love you might say, around the waist with one hand to keep him upright on his stool and with her other hand she was holding a straw to his lips so he could drink his beer. They were laughing and joking around together and nobody in the bar, except me, was paying them the least bit of attention. I suppose hookers are a godsend to men like that. Sometimes I've felt like a deformed cripple and in those instances God knows they've been a godsend to me. But if you're born with all your limbs and faculties intact, you should not have to pay for sex all the time.

Money or gifts or favors can change hands sometimes but they're certainly not necessary. Women are unbelievably generous people. However, they're also remarkably perceptive. They can spot a member of the He-Man-Woman-Haters-Club a mile off. If you hold every woman you meet responsible for something some other woman did to you years ago, or for the way your boss treated you today or the way your parents treated you fifty years ago, without a doubt you'll have to pay for sex. Hell, I'd charge you money just to talk to you.

But the man who CHOOSES to limit himself to only the sex he can pay for, because he's been hurt in love or is painfully shy or afraid of women for one reason or another, or because he believes that hookers have some technical expertise non-professional women lack, well he is cutting himself off from some of the best sex there is. He's wasting a lot of money. And he's needlessly shortening his List.

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

The author can be contacted at: shavethemonkeys@gmail.com

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