CHAPTER 24

Billy Ray Barnwell here, let me just state for the record that even though I did live in South Florida, specifically in the city of Boca Raton, from September of 1968 until June of 1975, I personally have no knowledge whatsoever about “the coca down in Boca,” it was just an intriguing internal rhyme that popped into or out of my head, I don’t know which, one afternoon when I was writing a poem, and by internal rhyme I mean internal in the poem line, not internal in my head, and I also have no way of knowing whether Boca’s coca is high, medium, or low grade, but the local Knight-Ridder newspaper did report with some degree of regularity about drug busts on the beach amongst the high school crowd, no pun intended, and also rumors were rampant all over town that people from Colombia had moved their families into the Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club and were paying for their mansions with grocery bags full of cash that they carried around in their luxury cars, I don’t know whether it was true but it sure made a good rumor, gosh I sure hope they didn’t bother Delwyn and Frances Brockett over there what with Delwyn having been the CEO of Gulf Oil and all, he deserved a little peace and quiet in his golden years, but all of that is water under the bridge or over the dam, all I’m trying to do right now is clear up any misconception you might have about my use of the phrase “the coca down in Boca,” and even though you may be trying to think of a male counterpart to Mr. William Shakespeare’s “methinks the lady doth protest too much” or maybe it was Mr. Christopher Marlowe, I will move on to another subject, let’s see, sex is always an interesting topic, a while back it was reported that the average American male thinks about sex 238 times a day, well this startled me because besides wondering how they could possibly have obtained that statistic it seemed just a teensy-weensy bit high to me, but then I started thinking about it, how they came up with that statistic I mean, not sex, and if you round 238 up to 240 just to make the math easier and you realize there are 24 hours in a day then that comes to 10 times an hour, or once every six minutes, which leaves no time at all for sleeping, so if you take eight hours away from 24 to allow for sleeping you have 16 hours left which times 60 minutes in an hour comes to 960 minutes and if you then divide 240 times a day into 960 minutes you come up with once every four minutes, and you know what? upon reflection that doesn’t seem so far-fetched, in fact it’s prolly about right, I mean let’s face it ladies, given the fact that A men are wired differently from women and B persons of distinctly feminine persuasion parade around scantily clad on beaches and cable television and in certain movies and magazines day in and day out, to say nothing of on the streets of every American city and town, well even if your man is a devout Christian or Jew or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or whatever he isn’t blind unless his name happens to be Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles or Ronnie Millsap, I’m not saying it’s women’s fault and I’m not condoning the pornography industry in any way whatsoever, but when Nature takes its course and your man has thoughts about sex every four minutes because Nature wants the species to continue, just be thankful that he doesn’t act on those thoughts until he comes back home to you, or maybe that’s what gets you so upset in the first place, because of how often he wants to act on his thoughts when he comes back home to you, I know you prolly don’t want to hear about it, you’d rather go shopping at the mall or buy some more Mary Kay products from the lady down the street or watch the latest episode of Desperate Housewives, why even no less a personage than former First Lady Barbara Bush said on the TV that a woman doesn’t want to hear what a man thinks, she wants to hear what she thinks in a lower octave, now there is one smart lady, at least she isn’t laboring under any delusions, and it just occurred to me that even Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles and Ronnie Millsap prolly think about sex too so the problem, if that’s what you want to call it, is not in a man’s eyes, it’s somewhere between his brain and his crotch, which mathematically speaking may be a new definition of the shortest distance between two points, but it further occurs to me that philosophically and anatomically speaking the place that’s somewhere between a man’s brain and his crotch is his heart, let’s not get off on a side discussion about his stomach and intestines, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.