Boy, did I underestimate Les. Not only was his penis larger than average, he had the stamina of the Iraqi ground forces. He had the exact same physique as Serena Williams. Things were happening that even I couldn't keep up with. Before I knew it, not only were my clothes off, but somehow I was on the top bunk. Les launched into a vault across the room to the porthole, where he grabbed a condom and then triple saichowed back up to me. This guy belonged in the Olympics-and not the ones I would have qualified for. All of a sudden, he was on top of me. Just before we started having sex, he flipped me around and I was on all fours. I had never been manhandled like this before and was really enjoying myself. This cruise was turning out to be an episode of The Love Boat, after all; I would have to check tomorrow about availability for next year.

That's when Les hit me. Not a slap or a caress, just an open-handed full throttle strike against my right ass cheek. It was with such force that not only did I cough, I almost flew off the bed. In the couple of seconds it took me to remember his name, he hit me three more times, alternating ass cheeks.

"Hey! You! Stop that!" I managed to yell out.

"What's the matter?" he stopped to ask.

"Did you just hit me?" I turned to look at him so he wasn't staring at the back of my head.

"You don't like that?" he asked me in a soft voice. Now he was back to his original self.

"Well, I don't know, I guess… wasn't I doing good?" was the nonsense that left my mouth in the form of a question. Spanking was usually something you discuss beforehand. I felt a little violated and thought that after we were done I was going to be forced to make him a sandwich or something.

"You seem like you like it," he said breathing heavily. The truth was that I did kind of like it, but at the same time, it seemed so violent that I felt as if I should object. I was in a tailspin of confusion I hadn't experienced since the first time I heard George W. Bush speak. It wasn't that I didn't like confrontation. I did, but I had never had a disagreement during the act of sex before and I hadn't known Les long enough to have our first fight. I thought about hitting him back, but that seemed too manufactured. It was usually me calling the shots in bed, and I didn't know how to react to someone else taking the wheel. Especially when we were technically the same size.

"It's okay, I guess," I told him. And so it continued, for the next fifteen minutes until he climaxed which, coincidentally, also bordered on bearlike behavior.

"How old are you?" I asked him after we were done. I was lying on the top bunk and he had moved to the bottom. I was lonely and felt like making small talk. I had never been left so quickly after sex before, though I had done it many times to others. Now that the shoe was on the other foot, I began to realize what abandonment was all about.

"I'll be nineteen on January first," he told me.

"I really need to get back to my friend," I told him as I lunged off the top bunk, naked with one hand covering my vagina and the other covering my right boob. My left boob was out for the taking, but in an effort to avoid it getting hit, I turned and quickly put on my clothes.

In my drunken stupor I was still trying to figure out how I could have ended up in bed with an almost minor. This wasn't good at all. I had never slept with someone even a year younger than me and immediately felt like R. Kelly. How did a boy that young learn how to spank women? I feared that maybe he was lying about his age and wasn't even legal; images of the water police taking me off the ship in handcuffs and ankle weights swam through my mind.

The next night was New Year's Eve, and we decided to see a show called Swing, Swing, Swing since my gambling streak was over and I was now down two hundred dollars. As we were being seated, I saw Rico a couple of rows behind us. "Hey, Rico," I yelled, "corno te llamas?" He looked at me and my roommate and then made a gesture that was similar to the middle finger, but the Spanish version that tells someone you're not interested in speaking with them.

"You really pissed that guy off, now he won't even talk to us," I told Dumb Dumb. "Thanks for taking care of me!" I screamed out, and this time he made a gesture I hadn't seen before. I didn't understand why he was pissed at me. I never threw a shoe at him.

As the mangy curtains separated to start the show, the first person out on stage was a bare-chested male wearing green tights with a long run down one leg and a fake wreath on his head. He sprang onto the floor with a combination of two back handsprings followed by a half pike into a somersault. I would have recognized those moves at sea or on land. It was official: I had now hit my all-time low at the tender age of twenty-six. Not only did I sleep with an eighteen-year-old who hit me, but he was the lead in an abysmal cruise dance show called, Swing, Swing, Swing.

Maybe a real boyfriend wasn't the worst thing that could happen to a girl.

I WAS ON the Discovery Channel's Web site trying to get my hands on a monkey when my cell phone rang. Nathan called to ask me if I would be his beard at his high school reunion.

Somehow, Nathan still considers himself a closet homosexual even though anyone who has ever spent a late night at his apartment knows otherwise. You didn't have to clear a thousand on your SATs to figure out that when you were abruptly getting kicked out of his apartment at one A.M., and a tall beefy Latino passed you on his way in, that Nathan had ordered takeout from We Deliver Cock.

All Nathan's classmates from high school and college, along with his parents, were still in the dark about his homosexuality. His parents had no idea that when they sent him to a child psychiatrist at the age of fifteen, he began a romantic relationship with his shrink that lasted for well over ten years. "Romance" isn't the word I would use to describe your psychiatrist giving you head, but Nathan insisted that the relationship was a two-way street and they had strong romantic feelings for each other. This was obviously the Jews' retaliation for not having access to the Catholic church and their pedophiles. Being as resourceful as we are, we developed our own system of child molestation and then added another layer by paying our attacker.

After receiving this information from Nathan, I was thoroughly disappointed that none of my therapists had ever tried to go down on me. Nathan admitted this relationship to me only after we had been friends for many years, and when he did, it was primarily to convince me to accompany him on his family vacation and pose as his girlfriend.

"Will the psychiatrist be there?" I asked.

"No."

"Then why would I want to go?"

"Because my parents want to meet you. I talk about you all the time, and this way they'll think I'm closer to getting married."

"But you're not getting married. Certainly not to me," I told him. In fact, we'd discussed marriage on several occasions just because we seemed to get along so well, but after thinking long and hard, I realized it was not in my best interest to waste my first marriage on a gay man.

But Nathan convinced me to come along and I ended up going on many more family vacations with him after that. There was the trip to Telluride, ten days in Fiji, and a couple of weekends at his family's house in Big Bear. It was turning out to be a swell deception and I was getting a lot of frequent flyer miles in return. His family was fun, and I liked his overbearing Jewish mother who wanted to know everything about me, from my favorite sexual position to my rising sign. She would sit and play with my hair and stare at me like I was Goldilocks, saying over and over again how she couldn't believe I was Jewish. My mother is the antithesis of a typical Jewish mother; she is very soft-spoken and takes more naps than a cat. As a result, I've always longed for someone to really annoy the shit out of me.