At the Blue Fox Inn

“I’ve not told anyone this, not anyone. Berg and I had gone down to San Diego to pick up some surfboard blanks from Gordie Clark. Berg wanted to go to a whorehouse and wanted me to go with him. I didn’t want to do it, but I was curious so we drove on down into Tijuana. I had no idea where we were going. Berg said he did. We ended up at a place called the Blue Fox Inn. I’d just found out that Barb and Ricky had been having an affair so I thought maybe it might be all right for me to do this. I was pretty upset about that. That little shit with Babs. I got a young, beautiful, very dark skinned, seventeen-year-old girl, one who told me she already had a baby. She was very small, beautifully built, and very sweet. And sweet to me. I’d never done anything like this before. Berg cheated on his wife all the time. Now I was going to be just as bad as Berg. I went upstairs with her and into this little room with a single bed and I was so conflicted I couldn’t undress so she undressed me and then washed me and undressed herself and I couldn’t get a hard on. It was humiliating. I always could get a hard on. She told me to lay down on the bed and I did and she put her robe back on and laid down with me and didn’t do anything, then put an arm around me and raised herself up, looking down at me, and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ Her voice was really soft, and looking in her eyes, which were sweet and pure, I broke out into tears and told her the whole damn thing, how I’d never cheated on my wife, and as far as I knew in twelve years of marriage she had never cheated on me, that I’d just learned that she was screwing one of the kids that worked for me in my surf shop, a really hot shot, good looking kid, and I was sick about it, and didn’t know what to do. She just listened and let me cry it out and laid back down and told me the only thing that mattered was just what I did right now, what the two of us did right now, we couldn’t solve any problem like that, those kind of problems always solve themselves, and told me to lie still and let myself go to sleep if I could. Well, I did, and when I woke up, she was still there, and then the rest of it was easy and we slept together, then I paid her the fifty dollars, then another fifty, which she wouldn’t take until I told her it was for the baby. While she watched me dress, she told me not to be too hard on my wife. She actually said this sentence, ‘Don’t be too hard on your wife, please.’ It was the way she said please like it had all the sorrow of the world in it. She was just beautiful, this little sweetheart, and then she said, ‘Please don’t be so hard on yourself either; you are a good man. Things will work out for you.’ Berg was down in the bar wondering what had taken me so long. I only told him I had a good time and let it go at that. I was really glad I went. On the way home, Berg looked over at me and said, ‘Hey, I finally see you look relaxed. See, cheating on your wife isn’t that bad a thing.’ Of course, after Barb and I broke up, I went back to Tijuana and the Blue Fox and asked for the girl, thinking maybe I could get serious about her, but they didn’t know who she was, girls came and went all the time, ‘N’ no, they didn’t remember her.”