The Man Who Loved Women...

"I don't think when I make love..." - Brigitte Bardot

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - What they say about romance is that it is, even at its worst, the best reason for living. Everything else is peripheral collateral, the job hunt, the social climb, the buying, the debt, the pain, the angst, and the stress. A friend of mine found himself caught in that soul-sucking web, and what he said there near the end was that he was leaving, that he'd heard about a place in the Pacific where everyone was on downers. There is something to be said for solitude, although I've never found it to be the answer for anything.

Women are the answer - for everything.

I am frickin' convinced of that. A woman is a certain refuge from the storm, in church, out on the town, in the bedroom. You travel with a fine woman and you should count yourself among the lucky. And, yet, even when I've been with a bad woman (it's all relative, I know), well, I've still felt the special attraction, the closeness to God, the power of salvation, the warmth of the ultimate shelter. Can there be anything to replace woman? No. Never has been, never will be, and you can look it up. History is strewn all across the ragged geography with tales of women and the role they played in the advance of civilization. We are a soiled planet from top to bottom, only imagine what it would be without women. I like to say I chase the weekend, buit it's really women I am talking about. I may get burned by shitty service at the post office, but if I run into a good-looking chick on my way out, well, that erases all the bad.

Once, I left a nightclub here with a woman I'd known when she'd been married. We headed for her place and strolled into the bedroom, where the undressing brought me a scene out of some horror flick: she had this weird, purple bruise halfway up one thigh. It sort of looped me, but this woman, as all of them down the line, from hopeful Eve, to partying Cleopatra, to betrayed Elizabeth Edwards, had the ready answer. She turned off the lights...

Passing moments never have been as emotional as the ones that followed, moving from anticipation, to pleasure, to the soundtrack of a woman sobbing softly, perhaps in answer to the pain, the divorce, the long-awaited arrival of what was at hand...

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