There was a girl in Denver
Before the summer storm
Oh, her eyes were tender
Oh, her arms were warm
And she could smile away the thunder
Kiss away the rain…
— Rod McKuen, Love’s Been Good To Me
Chapter 40: Foot-rub in Denver
It was a stormy cold Pacific Northwest February. The wind shrilled. Sleet rattled my window like shotgun pellets. In my sixties halfway to seventy, I was reading texts on my screen transferred to a “thumb drive” from old-fashioned floppy disks. A forgotten internet chat log about foot-rubs caught my eye.
My memory double-clutched to produce a sunny Denver afternoon in 1996 when a voluptuous redhead gave me the best foot-rub of my life. I didn’t search the thumb drive because I never wrote about it.
The back story to that omission is complicated. In my fifties, my writings had become subject to surveillance hostile as a warden monitoring prisoners’ mail. Unemployed, taking what free-lance work I could get, required me to access the internet via a modem linking my computer to the world. “Chat rooms” in what I came to call the Cyberian wilderness astonished me. This technical miracle of communications, invented by a defense think-tank, had been seized by Venusians as an electronic condom. It took no time at all for a woman to take my cyber-virginity.
Early in my online experience I incautiously printed out an early “cybersex” exchange to add to my notebooks because I thought it might make a good story someday, and naively believed there would be no recurrence.
My snooping wife found it. Essentially house-bound, with no extra-marital lovers in over a decade, my lost habit of discretion caused pain that hardened into anger. I learned to conceal text-logs behind computer passwords on floppy disks with the notion they would be good material if, unlikely as it seemed, I ever was a real writer again.
I was wrong about no recurrence. An amazing number of women behind the computer screen wanted to flirt and “cyber.” Diagnosed with and medicated for clinical depression that worsened attendant erectile dysfunction, I found ED no bar to writing persuasive sex. I became popular for my wordplay, and got an emotional lift from those anonymous faceless women. The redhead for instance. We connected in an online UFO chat room. I was interested in people’s sighting and encounter stories. Not her — she was there to flirt. One thing led to another. And eventually to Denver.
Now, this stormy Northwest winter, I was a solitary old man with no one to monitor my writing. And a publisher who had proposed a book of erotic short stories, inspiring me first to reconstruct the trysts of my forties. I had moved on to my fifties, where resumption of infidelity with the triple-doc resulted in debacle, when the Denver foot-rub flashed alive in memory
In the chronology of my life, the Denver foot rub followed the triple-doc. So I consulted organic disk space between my ears for the putative erotic collection. I had no other thought than that, certainly not of an entire Iliad. My old man’s diabetic feet, not yet numb as they would become, tingled as if freckled hands of a redheaded ghost were at work beneath my computer desk.
We were on the balcony of a very nice room I booked just off Denver’s Sixteenth Avenue Mall, part of an Amtrak package deal on a cross-country train trip, returning from New York City book discussions with my agent and editor. The redhead, from Missouri, scheduled coinciding vacation time and flew to meet me in Chicago. We were in bed within the hour, and traveled together to Denver.
Denver has hilly streets. To celebrate my pending book deal I bought a pair of Olathe kangaroo-hide cowboy boots at the Kipling Road boot outlet and wore them the rest of my stay. Riding heels are not made for hill-climbing. The boots were soft as glove leather but my feet complained until I limped.
When we collapsed to rest I said my feet hurt. She knelt, pulled off my new boots, took my feet in her lap and started in.
God! It was wonderful. Waves of relief rolled all the way up my calves. I lolled like a lazy cat and told her she was really good at that. She said one of her men was a hard-working construction guy, on his feet all day. That’s how she learned: preparing him for another day on the job. It was one of those perfect little moments of happiness the matriarch said were all I could ever expect in life.
Mere days before, I had been so devastated by the New Jersey triple-doc I wondered if I would ever recover. The answer was yes: the Missouri redhead erased the pain. More, in Chicago she reawakened John Thomas to rigid glory.
We discovered pretzel bread in a lakefront restaurant, toured a wonderful street fair and people-watched delegates for a national political convention. I did not introduce her to my old Army buddy I.Z. when he hosted me to an expensive Sunday brunch and walking tour of famous Chicago neighborhoods. He was a big shot now in a loss-prevention corporation, who sent secretaries home in limos when they worked late.
Unable to find a newspaper job when he returned from Vietnam, he had been hired by a Korean War vet running a collection agency. That diverted him into this career path: BMW as a company car and ski trips to Switzerland, married and evidently settled. I still had his hilarious Henry Miller-like letters about Bangkok sex on R&R, but worried he might disapprove my behaving like the twenty-something horny GIs we were during the Vietnam unpleasantness.
She had arthritic difficulty with a hip, so she could not spread her legs to sit astride me. In the heat of a Chicago moment I maneuvered us deeply connected to the bed’s edge so she could put the troublesome leg straight down to the floor and ride that way. I penetrated fully with an erection defying dysfunction, including the pathetic showing with the triple-doc. I watched her face change as we shared a powerful orgasm. Her body folded down around me, soft freckled pillow breasts heaving against my chest. When she could talk she said she never before had a deep vaginal orgasm.
We made love across America in my private train compartment. Not as erotic as it reads. John Thomas was reborn, ready to rumble, but she developed mild motion sickness. I dined with strangers when she was too woozy to leave the room.
On Colorado terra firma she recovered like a landlubber back from the sea. John Thomas approved. We hit Rockies tourist sites — my turn to feel woozy from altitude sickness I don’t recall from a childhood Denver visit — and won a bucket of quarters at a ghost-town casino.
Writing about her in my sixties, I recalled the poet’s lines: I have…watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows…
As a youth I had wondered what moments of happiness they remembered. Closing in on seventy years old, a solitary old man, I recalled the buxom redhead who in my fifties midwifed my phallic rebirth in Chicago, on the train, in Denver.
