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"FacebookPinterest\n\nLove is like oxygen.\n\nMr. John Susor\u2014husband to nine wives and lover of all ladies\u2014was sitting beneath a bevy of brassieres strung like prayer flags from the ceiling of his dark Florida bar. It was cold, even for February, and he poked the fire in front of him, sending a shiver of glowing embers aloft. He fingered the gold-lump talisman that hung around his neck on a gold chain\u2014all the wedding rings from all the marriages that he&amp;#39;d had melted down into the shape of, well...a lump. We sat on a wood bench against pillows, each silk-screened with the shadowed outline of two figures in a different sexual position. Sitting in his bar\u2014called Mahuffer&amp;#39;s\u2014was like sitting in the den of someone&amp;#39;s overactive id. About to turn 88 years of age, John Susor (pronounced Seuss-er) felt compelled to make an important distinction for me. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m a titty man,&amp;quot; he said, narrowing his eyes behind gold spectacles, &amp;quot;but I never married for titties.&amp;quot;\n\nI pondered this gravely.\n\n&amp;quot;#9 had these little saggers, but I married her because I respected her and her intelligence. But she was the worst deal I ever had.&amp;quot;\n\nDidn&amp;#39;t physical attraction have at least something to do with it?\n\n&amp;quot;Of course!&amp;quot; he roared. &amp;quot;#3 was a beauty. A body like Ava Gardner. But that&amp;#39;s the problem with your generation. It&amp;#39;s all show. It&amp;#39;s this deal of showing your midriff and tattoos. It&amp;#39;s &amp;#39;motherfucker&amp;#39; this and &amp;#39;motherfucker&amp;#39; that. No wonder women are loving women. Look at the loser guys they have to date.&amp;quot;\n\nWhat went unsaid was that John Susor was a real man. He&amp;#39;d loved and he&amp;#39;d lost...and loved and lost...and loved and lost...and so on and so on, with the passion of a male marsupial mouse, a creature which has been known to die from copulation. He claimed to have had more than a hundred sexual partners\u2014Casanova numbers\u2014but it was only those lucky nine with whom he&amp;#39;d been willing to walk the aisle. &amp;quot;The wives all wanted the same thing\u2014respect, safety, love\u2014but they all had a different way of getting to the bottom line,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;That&amp;#39;s what kept me interested.&amp;quot;\n\nBut it was something more, too. &amp;quot;Love was the way they made you feel,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;All the little goofy things. Love was when they were on your mind all the time. Love was a bowl of cherries.&amp;quot; Susor possessed what few others did: eternal hope, a delusional optimism, a bedrock belief that this conjoining of two people, right here, was repeatedly forever. He wasn&amp;#39;t a poet about love. He couldn&amp;#39;t really go deep discussing it, except by calling up specific wives: #4 was &amp;quot;a dingy&amp;quot; who just made him giggle nonstop. #1 had been the only woman he&amp;#39;d truly loved. (&amp;quot;I&amp;#39;d come home every night with a boner up to my neck.&amp;quot;) #2 had been &amp;quot;a mistake&amp;quot; but was &amp;quot;probably the most honest of them all.&amp;quot; #8 was &amp;quot;a business deal, with no more love between us than between you and me.&amp;quot; #7 had come from Toronto, #9 from Germany. #5 he&amp;#39;d met when his plane\u2014yes, he could fly\u2014was grounded in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1962, and he took a room at the hotel there, and lo and behold came this vision, this waitress, offering a menu. #6 he married at her house, with his new father-in-law, an appellate judge, presiding. (&amp;quot;He got so goddamn drunk that the mayor had to hold him up while he did our vows.&amp;quot;) Three marriages were in a church; six weren&amp;#39;t. One was at &amp;quot;a shingle&amp;quot; somewhere in North Carolina, another at a penthouse overlooking the beach, the last on a friend&amp;#39;s boat. At one, he had a black justice of the peace and a Jewish witness, neither of whom he knew. He met his wives on street corners and at the Elks Club\u2014here, there, and everywhere.\n\nWhen I asked for their names, he began counting on his fingers. &amp;quot;#2 was Virginia,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;No, Marie. #1 was Jean. #3 was Ginger...Virginia, actually. #4 was Sybil...or was she #5? Jesus, now you got me all confused.&amp;quot;\n\nHe stared into the fire. Mr. John Susor had a steel-trap mind, but it was a lot for any one man to remember. &amp;quot;Okay,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;#5 was Renee. #6 was Kate. I can remember #7 because we called her &amp;#39;Old Number Seven&amp;#39; after the mule on Grizzly Adams. That was Mildred. I&amp;#39;m sure about that one. But #8 and #9\u2014those I&amp;#39;m still trying to forget.&amp;quot;\n\nThe art of seduction.\n\nThere were so many lessons to glean from a man who&amp;#39;d been around nine times, especially if you yourself had only done the singlet or doublet. Mr. John Susor was a man who&amp;#39;d lived big, and living big meant taking risks, putting all your chips on red, believing that each woman might be the last woman, that maybe, truly and for real, your restless heart had found its place. Home.\n\nIn his life, he had worked as a bookie. He&amp;#39;d had a vending-machine business that serviced roughly fifty whorehouses. He&amp;#39;d done a military tour in the South Pacific during World War II. He&amp;#39;d conducted a geological survey of the state of Washington from a Piper Cub. He&amp;#39;d shot a man and had had his nose broken seventeen times. He&amp;#39;d run a big hotel where the astronauts came for parties. When Harry Truman came into his club while campaigning for president, he said, &amp;quot;You don&amp;#39;t look at all like the son of a bitch they say you are.&amp;quot; When he met Jimmy Hoffa, he looked him up and down through the peephole of the private club where he worked, and said, &amp;quot;For a man who&amp;#39;s wearing about $1,000 in clothes, why are you wearing thirty-nine-cent socks?&amp;quot;\n\nHe was direct, had a fearless energy and a million stories. And his secret with the broads? &amp;quot;They like the way I talk to them,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Your generation of men think you have to bullshit to get a piece of ass. I never bullshit. You say, &amp;#39;I&amp;#39;ve never seen anything so beautiful.&amp;#39; I say, &amp;#39;Let&amp;#39;s go and take your clothes off and go to bed.&amp;#39; Why do you want to bullshit?\n\n&amp;quot;For instance, the other day, this lady comes into the bar, and I say, &amp;#39;Man, I bet those were a great pair of titties.&amp;#39; And she sits back and says, &amp;#39;Well, what do you mean?&amp;#39; And I say, &amp;#39;I&amp;#39;m an 88-year-old man, so don&amp;#39;t tell me I haven&amp;#39;t seen fifty-year-old titties before. They&amp;#39;ve got about two inches of sag now.&amp;#39; Before she left, do you know what she said? She said, &amp;#39;You&amp;#39;re the first real man I&amp;#39;ve ever spoken to.&amp;#39;\n\n&amp;quot;What else is there to say?&amp;quot;\n\nFeels like the first time.\n\nBeing a ladies&amp;#39; man extraordinaire had its complications: Over time the ladies blurred, as did the various sweet and sour memories attached to each. To help sort things out, Mr. John Susor put them into categories: &amp;quot;wicked,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;smiley,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Good Samaritans,&amp;quot; though when I asked him to place each of his wives, none qualified as a Good Samaritan. Some were &amp;quot;smiley-wicked,&amp;quot; some just one or the other, and some, the special few, were &amp;quot;evil-wicked&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;wicked-mean&amp;quot; or simply &amp;quot;a son of a bitch.&amp;quot;\n\nAnd then there was Jean, the only one who would ever represent purity.\n\n&amp;quot;I was 21 before I even thought about sex,&amp;quot; he said at dinner one night at a local seafood joint, stabbing his baked squid, happy to have my rapt attention as he ran the course of his life. &amp;quot;I had too many things I wanted to do. I wanted to learn how to fly and fish. I made race cars. When I was 17, I hitchhiked to Florida&amp;quot;\u2014during which he spent two nights in jail (not having committed any crime) and another night at Ty Cobb&amp;#39;s house (&amp;quot;He couldn&amp;#39;t have been nicer&amp;quot;). &amp;quot;I had wet dreams and never knew what they were, but then I got a book out and learned.&amp;quot;\n\nWhat accelerated the stirrings of Mr. John Susor was a chance encounter in his hometown of Oregon, Ohio. &amp;quot;It was pouring rain, and I came around the corner of Starr Avenue onto East Broadway,&amp;quot; he said, describing a scene from 1940, still a year before Pearl Harbor. &amp;quot;There was a bus stop, and she was standing there\u2014had just come from church, and she was going home. I said, My God, I can&amp;#39;t let her stand there getting wet. At first I didn&amp;#39;t recognize her, it was raining so hard.\n\n&amp;quot;She got in the car and said, &amp;#39;Don&amp;#39;t I know you?&amp;#39; And I said, &amp;#39;Yes. I know you from school. Your name is Jean.&amp;#39; And she said, &amp;#39;Yeah, your name is John.&amp;#39; It was about nine o&amp;#39;clock in the morning, and I took her home. We parked outside her house and talked until five o&amp;#39;clock. Finally, her stepfather came out\u2014and he was very nice, and he&amp;#39;d always treated me like I was his kid, because I lost my own dad at an early age.\n\n&amp;quot;Well, I was supposed to pick up my uncle that morning, and here it was five! And when I got home, my mother said, &amp;#39;Where in the goddamn hell have you been?&amp;#39; And I said, &amp;#39;Well, I picked up a girl.&amp;#39; And she said, &amp;#39;Jesus Christ, he&amp;#39;s in love.&amp;#39; She was an expert at that.&amp;quot;\n\nWithin a year, they were married. She was 18; he was 21. It lasted four months.\n\n&amp;quot;I blame the goddamn mother-in-law,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;d come home from work, run up the stairs, open the door, and there she&amp;#39;d be. She wanted someone for her daughter who wore a necktie. She thought I was too strong, that my language was too strong. I owned five bootlegs with jukebos in them, and I had a dream that we&amp;#39;d have six kids and Jean would stay home with them, but every night my mother-in-law was at the apartment. Finally, I told her, &amp;#39;You know what? You&amp;#39;re going to win.&amp;#39; And she said, &amp;#39;What do you mean?&amp;#39; And I said, &amp;#39;You know exactly what I mean.&amp;#39; After that, she told my wife I tried to make her, but I&amp;#39;d never make an old broad. Jean said, &amp;#39;I have to believe my mother.&amp;#39; And that was it. We sold the furniture, and she moved back home. That was my first love and only love. It still hurts today.&amp;quot;\n\nThe coda: She remarried a good-looking man\u2014a &amp;quot;Jewish pimp,&amp;quot; as Susor put it, not that she ever worked as a call girl nor he as a pimp. Still, when the second husband had gone out of town, she called John, and he took her to breakfast, and she sat and cried the whole time. She could barely speak.\n\nAnd that was the last he ever saw of her.\n\nJesus Christ\u2014fatherhood!\n\n2, Marie, was clear as a whistle. She didn&amp;#39;t want no &amp;quot;goddamn kids.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;She&amp;#39;d liked the oral sex, so she wouldn&amp;#39;t have a kid,&amp;quot; said Mr. John Susor, still working his dinner. He had a gray beard, and there were those who had written of him as a Hemingway look-alike, which was true in certain rare moments. To my mind, he was much more the hoary John Huston, cutting to the quick, consequences be damned. If you had a few minutes, he was willing to take you to some pretty dark places\u2014but they weren&amp;#39;t without their bright epiphanies.\n\nMarriage with Marie, as he remembered it, had had all the comforts and longing of distance, but because of his military service in the South Pacific, they spent little actual time together. It lasted six years, a record: 1942\u20131948.\n\n&amp;quot;She was cute as a bug&amp;#39;s ear,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;and a hell of a dancer. And of course, back in them days, if she had two heads and buck teeth but could dance, that was it!&amp;quot;\n\nOn his leave, they spent two days in an Indianapolis hotel room, never came out, and that&amp;#39;s how Marie got pregnant. Eighteen months after giving birth, she was through. &amp;quot;I come into the kitchen one morning,&amp;quot; he remembered, &amp;quot;and there was a note on the sugar bowl: &amp;#39;I left. I&amp;#39;m gone. Don&amp;#39;t try to follow me.&amp;#39; Well, Jesus, I wasn&amp;#39;t going to follow her, but that was a big wake-up call. It sparked something I guess I didn&amp;#39;t know I had. My mother and sister came from Michigan to take my daughter with them. Just assumed I was in over my head. I ordered them right out of the house.\n\n&amp;quot;I said, &amp;#39;Ma, how could you do this to me? You raised me and said you were proud of me, and I never got into trouble, and now you think I can&amp;#39;t raise a daughter? That doesn&amp;#39;t say much for you.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nHe got rid of the vending-machine business and bootlegging joints. He hired babysitters, took a job running a private club, and went to beauty school in order to understand what he needed to do\u2014how to clean his girl and comb her hair. He walked her to school, and most of all, he tried to be there for her. &amp;quot;To make a good girl, you have to give her a lot of room,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;And listen to her. If she wanted to know something in the middle of the night, like what her dream meant, and came and woke me, I wouldn&amp;#39;t tell her to go back to bed. I&amp;#39;d sit on the couch and explain it to her.\n\n&amp;quot;I had nothing but time for her.&amp;quot;\n\nHe was there for all his daughter&amp;#39;s early firsts, too. Her first period, her first bra. As awkward as it was for a 1950s dad to have to initiate his daughter, he always tried to keep it light, always went for the laugh, even as he studied the books to learn exactly what was happening to his little girl.\n\nWhen her breasts started to grow, he visited a woman psychologist. &amp;quot; &amp;#39;I got a problem,&amp;#39; I told her. &amp;#39;Well, what is it?&amp;#39; she said. I told her, &amp;#39;My kid&amp;#39;s getting breasts,&amp;#39; and she said, &amp;#39;Well, what the hell&amp;#39;s the matter with that? You don&amp;#39;t want her to get balls!&amp;#39; That broke the ice.&amp;quot;\n\nFeeling emboldened, he took his daughter to Gillespie&amp;#39;s in Toledo, world-renowned for undergarments. When he arrived with her, he was asked to wait while his daughter was fitted by one of the clerks. Mr. John Susor said, &amp;quot; &amp;#39;No, I&amp;#39;ve got to be there.&amp;#39; She thought I was crazy and said, &amp;#39;No, it&amp;#39;s forbidden for a man to be behind the partition,&amp;#39; and I came right out and told her, &amp;#39;Look, I&amp;#39;m raising this little girl alone, and I&amp;#39;ve got to be there\u2014for her.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nMr. John Susor was talking loudly, describing these events, and on occasion diners would turn from their meals and steal a glance at the man talking about his daughter&amp;#39;s first bra fitting. He remembered running that private club, and judges and FBI men coming in for lunch\u2014steak sandwiches and a glass of beer\u2014and razzing him about being a single father: &amp;quot;How do you do it? Living the life you&amp;#39;ve led, how the fuck do you do it?&amp;quot; they asked.\n\nHis reply was always the same: &amp;quot;Because I have to.&amp;quot; But what he didn&amp;#39;t say then\u2014maybe what he didn&amp;#39;t yet know himself\u2014he shared now, decades later, as we sat finishing dinner. &amp;quot;Those were the best times,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;My daughter and I. More so than any of the wives, it was always the two of us together. Those are my happiest memories.&amp;quot;\n\nLove stinks.\n\nAs gruff and uncensored as Mr. John Susor could be\u2014and as ably as he played the role of court-jester provocateur\u2014he still had a heart underneath. He called himself a social democrat. (&amp;quot;Give the people what they need,&amp;quot; he said.) He raised money at his bar for various local causes. If you asked him for help\u2014if you really needed help\u2014he&amp;#39;d give it. He was a bit of a folk hero where he lived in Indian Shores, just on the beach outside of St. Petersburg. For standing up to the cops, the mayor, whomever. For speaking his mind. People came in for autographs\u2014and to see his world-famous bar full of crazy knickknacks: the snowmobile and the sawed-off bow of a boat, the casket, the ashes of his good friend hanging in a pill bottle from a rafter, the walls festooned with dirty jokes and various figures engaged in the full rotation of sexual positions.\n\nAnd yet, despite his willingness to push, prod, and shock, he&amp;#39;d never had much of a stomach for breakups. He always had a soft spot for his ladies, harbored hope that even as the marriage was crumbling, it might last out its rough moment.\n\nTypically, it was the wives who ended it. Pulled stakes and left.\n\nTake #7, Millie, for instance. She proposed to him by telephone from Canada, then sent the plane ticket for him to come and pick her up and bring her down for the winter. &amp;quot;We got married in an office building in Toronto by a justice of the peace, then jumped on the 401 for Windsor,&amp;quot; said Mr. John Susor. &amp;quot;I was driving, and she was all full of love and all that crap. She said, &amp;#39;I have a plan,&amp;#39; and I thought, Uh-oh.&amp;quot;\n\nHe had kicked off his shoes while driving and instinctively tried to find them again. Somewhere deep in his brain, the impulse to flee was working its way to consciousness.\n\n&amp;quot;She had money and some property in Florida, and she started talking about building a house with three bedrooms, and I said, &amp;#39;Heck, make it four. And we&amp;#39;ll need a rec room.&amp;#39; She said she&amp;#39;d buy me a boat and a new car and we could really start living. The kicker was that she wanted me to sell my bar, settle my debts, and give the rest to my daughter.&amp;quot;\n\nMr. John Susor scowled at the thought. The bar was so completely a reflection of him, with its thousands of intimate Polaroids on the wall, the story of a life and the women who came and went from it. &amp;quot;I pulled over right there and said, &amp;#39;Whoa, I think we&amp;#39;re off on the wrong foot. My bar is what makes me feel alive. It&amp;#39;s who I am.&amp;#39; And she said, &amp;#39;I think I understand.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nBut according to Susor, once they&amp;#39;d settled in Florida, she had another plan. She wanted to work behind the bar, her husband&amp;#39;s domain, and he could do odd jobs. &amp;quot;Come to find out she was crazy jealous. She said, &amp;#39;You want to meet all the girls,&amp;#39; and I said, &amp;#39;That&amp;#39;s not why I married you, but I can see it now: It&amp;#39;s not going to work.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nDespondent, she returned to Toronto, then came back to try one last time. &amp;quot;She said, &amp;#39;I made a terrible mistake,&amp;#39; and I said, &amp;#39;I know you did.&amp;#39; What the hell, this was a new one on me. She lasted five days, then left again. I said, &amp;#39;I don&amp;#39;t understand: This bar is my pride and joy.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\n6, Kay, whom he married after his daughter had left home, was worse. &amp;quot;She tried to see how many times she could get me to have a hard-on, and then she&amp;#39;d just leave me with it, walk away, go to the toilet. She was the most wicked. She was a no-good son of a bitch. Did she fool me? Absolutely, positively, completely. If I screwed Kay as many times as she tried to catch me having a hard-on, she would have died.\n\n&amp;quot;But I gotta give it to her for the way it ended. I came home one night at five fifteen, fifteen minutes late, and there were three place settings. She had two kids, and I thought one of them must be out, so I said, &amp;#39;Who ain&amp;#39;t eating?&amp;#39; and she said, &amp;#39;You, you son of a bitch! Your bags are packed.&amp;#39; And sure enough: They were.\n\n&amp;quot;That was great. I didn&amp;#39;t see that coming. But I was glad to be done with her.&amp;quot;\n\nHe could have spent the day telling breakup stories. #3, Ginny, and #4, Sybil, the dingy, had left honorably, because like him they&amp;#39;d put their kids first. #9, Jutta, had been one of the worst. According to Mr. John Susor, she poured whiskey on the computer, ruined the Web site for the bar, showered soda all over the color copier. &amp;quot;My biggest problem with them,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;was the goddamn bickering.\n\n&amp;quot;Before you get married, maybe you liked to go to a certain restaurant. Or go to the beach to watch a sunset. And then suddenly, after getting married, they didn&amp;#39;t want to do those things anymore. They&amp;#39;d start quack-quack-quacking: &amp;#39;Why can&amp;#39;t we go here? Why can&amp;#39;t we go there?&amp;#39;\n\n&amp;quot;I never understood that,&amp;quot; he said.\n\nSure enough, the quack-quack-quacking\u2014alternatively referred to as the &amp;quot;bite-bite-biting&amp;quot; or the &amp;quot;bing-bing-binging&amp;quot;\u2014was always the death knell, he said. Once it started, no matter how good the &amp;quot;fiddle-faddle&amp;quot; between husband and wife, he knew the marriage was over.\n\nRegrets, I have a few.\n\nFor having lived nine decades\u2014and for having lived them so loudly\u2014Mr. John Susor had a pretty clean conscience. From his perch behind the bar, he claimed he&amp;#39;d seen the best and worst of human nature. Had watched peoples&amp;#39; lives be destroyed by drugs and greed. Seen heartbreak and the passing of most of his friends to the other side. But when pressed, he could come up with only three regrets:\n\n&amp;quot;Maybe I made a mistake by thinking sex wasn&amp;#39;t everything, instead of saying that&amp;#39;s the best piece I ever had\u2014and staying with it.&amp;quot;&amp;quot;I think they should bring back whorehouses. They were everywhere before the war, in almost every town. And it wasn&amp;#39;t always about sex\u2014at some you could get a blow job, a quart of cold beer, and a side of ribs for less than $2. Everything you could want. And it did provide a service for those with overactive drives. In those days, you never heard of rapes, and if you did, you found the guy and beat him up and tied a rope around his dick.&amp;quot;&amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ve been thinking about my first wife a lot recently. I wonder if she&amp;#39;s alive. Sometimes I think, What if we&amp;#39;d stayed together? What if I overreacted to her mother? It was almost sixty years ago, but she was what I wanted\u2014and she was the best I ever had. The sex was good, but we were young. We would have tried more things over the years, but it wouldn&amp;#39;t have mattered how it turned out, because we were in love. And I guess that&amp;#39;s what love really is.&amp;quot;\n\nHow Mahuffer got his mojo back.\n\nThe name Mahuffer had come from Mr. John Susor&amp;#39;s youth, when he and a close friend had taken their first jobs with a bookie. The bookie had a beautiful car\u2014a seven-passenger Caddy\u2014that he let them use to run errands. And when they passed anyone in town, they heard the same shouted question: &amp;quot;Hey, whose car is that?&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;Mahuffer&amp;#39;s,&amp;quot; they would shout back. It was a purely fictional word they&amp;#39;d made up.\n\n&amp;quot;Mahuffer&amp;#39;s?&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;Yeah\u2014Mahuffer&amp;#39;s!&amp;quot; Then they&amp;#39;d accelerate, laughing until they pissed their pants.\n\nOver time, Mr. John Susor and Mahuffer became one and the same, a character in his own life, the adventuring spirit, the quintessential self-invented American hero.\n\nThe marriages were about self-invention, too. In any relationship, there was the &amp;quot;fiddle-faddle&amp;quot;\u2014sex\u2014but there was also something else. &amp;quot;I liked what they taught me,&amp;quot; said the legend of his wives. &amp;quot;But even as I made a vow to each of them, I made a vow to myself, about just how much of them I could live with. Maybe someone else would have been shattered with each divorce, but I drew strength from them.&amp;quot;\n\nSo was that why he married again and again\u2014said &amp;quot;I do&amp;quot; and then, three months later, had his lawyer on the phone\u2014because it made him stronger?\n\n&amp;quot;Oh yeah!&amp;quot; he boomed. &amp;quot;There were times when I got shot out of the saddle, when I couldn&amp;#39;t do anything right. But I knew what I didn&amp;#39;t want. And once I was rid of them, I felt free. And that&amp;#39;s how I found what I did want.&amp;quot;\n\nLove, love, nothing but love, still love, still more...\n\nEven after nine wives and eighty-eight years, even with arthritic joints that sometimes made it hard to cross a room, love was a mysterious primal force that Mr. John Susor was still trying to understand. &amp;quot;I realized at some point,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;that I could do exactly what the women did. If they wanted sex, they could have it any night of the week, with any man. Just show up at the bar and men are usually willing. Now I&amp;#39;ve got women down the road, I can call them up today and go there and set in a chair, and she&amp;#39;ll get down on her hands and knees and blow me.&amp;quot;\n\nI should have seen it coming, but really? Was this another act of delusional optimism, machismo unfettered, the id in action? He assured me it was true, but it spoke to a larger point he was trying to make about the cosmic power of love. This was as close as he could come to it:\n\n&amp;quot;Look, that&amp;#39;s just a sex act. There&amp;#39;s no love, nothing there. If the love is there, you start thinking about them. They&amp;#39;re on your mind all the time. Of course, you think about sex with them, but it&amp;#39;s a little different. Like #5, the little freckle-faced one from Chillicothe; she was weird, boy. When it came to lovin&amp;#39;, she&amp;#39;d go crazy. She&amp;#39;d howl and groan and moan. She&amp;#39;d bite on both sides of your thighs...bite! Black and blue. You know why she did that? So I wouldn&amp;#39;t mess with no other girl. That was her trademark. That was love, her way. To show she was mine and I was hers. That we were thinking about each other all the time.\n\n&amp;quot;Still, I never did understand that. Hurt like hell. Do you follow me?&amp;quot;\n\nSecond endings.\n\nSadly, it still always came down to good-bye. And as sure as there would be an ending, there was often a second one. The crying breakfast with #1, Jean. Several skirmishes with #9, Jutta. A blow job from #2 after signing the divorce papers. Some disappeared, but others were like #7, Mildred.\n\nAbout five years after splitting, after the usual involvement of lawyers and acrimonious divorce proceedings, Mr. John Susor had a call at his bar.\n\n&amp;quot;Do you know who this is?&amp;quot; came a small voice.\n\n&amp;quot;No, I do not,&amp;quot; he said. Sounded like a very old broad.\n\n&amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s Millie,&amp;quot; she said.\n\n&amp;quot;Jesus, Millie, how are you?&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;Thinking about old times,&amp;quot; said Millie, &amp;quot;and was wondering if I could come and spend a few days with you.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;Why, sure,&amp;quot; said Mr. John Susor, genuinely glad, but then never heard word again. She probably had doubts, he thought at the time. So be it.\n\nThree years later, a friend of Millie&amp;#39;s came to the bar and told the story. They found the door to Millie&amp;#39;s big lake house open\u2014and the car trunk unlatched. Inside the trunk was a suitcase\u2014and Millie. She&amp;#39;d died loading the car. When they found her body, it had decomposed.\n\nExcept for maybe one or two of his wives, he believed they were all dead now.\n\nHe was seated by the fire again, reclining against a pornographic pillow, fingering the gold lump around his neck. &amp;quot;Suddenly, you&amp;#39;re the only one left,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;There&amp;#39;s no one to talk to, no one who remembers how it was. You know in your head all the stories. They become part of you. But then what happens?&amp;quot;\n\nHe said that over the recent nights, he&amp;#39;d kept thinking and dreaming about Jean. Just couldn&amp;#39;t get her out of his head. Haunted by her.\n\nShe&amp;#39;d been #1, and she&amp;#39;d always listened to him, to his hopes and dreams. He&amp;#39;d taken her to the big parties of his extended family\u2014his father&amp;#39;s side\u2014the ones where they square-danced and sang and laughed until all hours with all of his aunts and uncles and cousins. They were a family that seemed so happy, and Jean would leave with a stomachache from so much laughing.\n\nMr. John Susor got up and shuffled beneath the brassieres, retrieved a log, and added it to the fire. He wasn&amp;#39;t down yet. And so long as he wasn&amp;#39;t, he couldn&amp;#39;t stop thinking of Jean. When he did, he was no longer Mahuffer, folk-legend bar owner. He was just John again, full of those same old hopes and dreams. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;d like to find her,&amp;quot; he said.\n\n&amp;quot;And what if you did?&amp;quot; said I. What would you say after six decades, after all the other lives you both have led?\n\n&amp;quot;I&amp;#39;d have only one question for her,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Are you married?&amp;quot;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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