Best Sex? I have to admit maybe Straight—as in with a Woman...

It was that magical age—25. We were both 25.  Carol was just a month older than me--In that magical city, San Francisco. We worked in the same office, doing different clerical jobs, about a rod apart, with a row of desks between us.  My desk faced west towards the wall, her desk, north of me, faced south with her back to the window; so that I was always pretty much in her line of sight, and I always pretty much ignored her.

But she, she said, couldn't help noticing me; how I was always grinning at my typewriter like I was stoned (likelihood of my having been stoned, or that being stoned was the reason I grinned at my typewriter: about half), and the way I hunted and pecked with my middle fingers, even though I really already knew how to type—she thought it meant I was really thinking, at least subconsciously, about fucking. I learned later that she found me, physically, heart-stoppingly beautiful.

So, truth to tell, I didn't so much think about the fact that she was voluptuously beautiful (rather like, say Gina Lolabrigida)—which she absolutely was—as just that she came up to specs (the thought at the back of my mind, as nearly as I might have come to articulating it, was that I wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen with her), and that I admired her discreet but flashy style, and that I could tell that she was smart, and I wanted to be friends, maybe.

And what experience had I actually had of that precious, putative, theoretical beau Monde whose opinion mattered so much in my selection of a Female Counterpart, Consort or Mate Apparent? None, of course; but, then as now, I might have answered that I sometimes dream of it, or am dreamt of by it, and that, when I re-read the Rape of the Lock, as I often do, I revisit it.

At any rate (I think at this point we should say something about the poor young woman)--Carol said later that it was the weirdest come-on she'd ever dealt with: As we were leaving work, in the late afternoon of the 21st of February, 1968, I said to Carol,

      'You gonna be home tomorrow afternoon?  How about I come by after work?'

      "I didn't know how to say no."