DEAD TWINS TALKING

A written record of the Lilly twins
Mitchell (left) and Marshall (right)

Death is the Ultimate Writer's Block image
Marshall, left, and Mitchell, right, South Mission Beach, San Diego, CA, circa 1981

     Dead Twins Talking is a website blog written by the Lilly twins, Marshall Earl and Mitchell Evan. Our site features an ongoing journal, Dead Twins Walking, a mishmash of personal stories and anecdotes chronicling our extraordinary yet unremarkable life and times as identical twins. The blog also contains a collection of poems, short stories, essays, and correspondences.
     Although our creative writing and poetry may never see the light of day, we’re gung-ho about putting down as many words as possible before becoming the dead twins we were always meant to be.
From the Womb to the Tomb image

Mitchell, left, and Marshall, right, eating mud pies on Ensenada Court in South Mission Beach, San Diego, CA circa 1962

     
      My identical twin brother Marshall and I joined the world on June 19, 1959, in La Jolla, California. I came out first, with Marshall, whose nickname is Mars, sliding out from our mother's womb two minutes later. If you're reading this, we're either old men or dead and gone.
     We grew up in a family of six. Our father, Thomas Earl, who hailed from West Virginia, made his way to sunny California as a diver with the Navy. After leaving the military, and while earning an engineering degree at San Diego State University, he worked as a lifeguard in Mission Beach and eventually found his way to the house where our mom, Marsha Ann, lived on Ensenada Court in South Mission Beach. The rest is history.
     We have one older brother, Byron Joseph, and one younger sister, Anne Grace. Byron and his wife Nancy have two children, Benjamin, and Jordana. Anne never married and has no children. My siblings and I spent much of our childhood in San Diego, but our dad liked to move around so we also spent time growing up in Anchorage, Alaska, Frankfurt, Germany, and Keflavik, Iceland.
     Mars and I are turning sixty-five this month (June 2024). That's a lot of years to live and we've had our share of ups and downs and good and bad experiences to go with them. In our early sixties we wound up living 360 miles away from each other. I live in Da Nang, Vietnam, and he lives in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
     In the summer of 2023 Mars and his Cambodian wife, Eang, flew to Da Nang and stayed for 10 days. It had been seven long years since we'd seen each other. They met my Vietnamese wife and stepdaughter Lana and Hai My. We ate delicious meals at home and at local restaurants, visited Marble Mountain and Hoi An, and spent time swimming and drinking morning coffee at the local beach. Our reunion and brief time together left me feeling both exhilarated and melancholy.
     My feelings for Mars are deeper and stronger than those for my other siblings. Twins are naturally closer, sharing a kinship that goes beyond the common ties of brother and sisterhood. It's like we still feed off the amniotic sac from our first nine months together, uncannily bound by an inseparable and unbreakable twin connection. It's a bond of love that lasts a lifetime!
A Twin Talk A Day image
Marshall, left, and Mitchell, right, Oceanside Pier, San Diego County, 2010

     I talk with my twin brother almost everyday. Seeing and chatting with him is like a a life-sustaining drug that keeps me from going insane. I cannot imagine my life without him in it. We've had some big fights and major estrangements, at times not talking to each other for years. But we've let it all go and now enjoy a twinship of kindness and comradery. We finally understand each other! Or at least we understand how silly and stupid it is to be mad at each other.
     
The Last Visit? image
Marshall, left, and Mitchell, right, Marble Mountain, Da Nang, Vietnam, 2023

     We had such a nice time with Mars and Eang when they visited us in August 2023. We took this photo at Marble Mountain, which is in between Da Nang and Hoi An. Another year has flown by and it's almost June, when Mars and I will be turning 65! I wish I could visit Mars in Siem Reap but it's just not in the cards right now. Not enough cash flow. But I'm hoping we get to meet again before we go from being alive twins talking to dead ones.
The Last Photo? image
From left to right: Lana and Mitchell, Marshall and Eang, Woody House, My An beach, Da Nang, Vietnam, 2023

     We had a fabulous time, as our mother used to say, when Mars and Eang visited us in August 2023. We took this photo at the guesthouse Mars and Eang stayed at for 10 days. Now when I bike down to the beach for my morning swims the place feels like a heartrending ghost town, the figment of my imagination sensing my twin brother's presence as I envision him walking, almost hobbling, along the boardwalk and cobbled beach town streets. He is hauntingly yet welcomely with me in spirit all the time.
Johnny Manifesto image
Marshall, left, and Mitchell, right, Lake Tahoe, 2010

     It's a long story. I'm sixty-five years old. So, I'll keep it short and sweet. All that matters is now. The past's billions of years of old stories. We can learn a lot from yore tales, but aside from that they don't mean anything. They're meaningless. My past is riddled with mistakes, but I've let them go. My mistakes are forgiven.
     Now Mitch and I are okay. At 65, our battle is health. The downhill of longevity is painful, and sudden, fatal falls are imminent. Now, our Southeast Asian ladies, Eang and Lana, are everything.
     They'll get us through. And as always, all we have to do is show up!
Marshall Earl Lilly, August 2024

Mars in the Moment

In the moment
My brother Mars
Getting loaded
High in the stars

In the moment
Just twin to twin
Feeling lucky
To see him grin

In the moment
My old best friend
Staying happy
Until the end
Marshall, left, and Mitchell, right, James Madison High School Graduation, San Diego, 1977

We got a promising and extraordinary life
Handed on a double silver platter
We lost ourselves along the way
And that's the way mops flop sometimes
When thin glass is prone to shatter

We chased and chafed like bumper cars
Wired to jumpy house hopes and dreams
Our will-o’-the-wisps soon dashed
And that’s the way balls bounce sometimes
When islands long for crystal streams

We failed and fell then failed and fell again
Each second chance overrun by rust
Our fruits of labor often spoiled
And that’s the way boughs break sometimes
When flowers make tomorrow’s dust

We now have heartening and overflowing lives
Granted with a clean slate of intertwining
We found ourselves along the way
And that's the way winds blow sometimes
When clouds seek a silver lining
The Lilly Bros
This is a link to our song about twinship called "The Lilly Bros". The lyrics are ours, the rest is all Mars. Watching this is one of my favorite things to do.

We are the Lilly Bros
One follows where the other one goes
What one thinks the other one knows
We're the Lilly Bros
We are the Lilly pads
What one's got the other one has
Even though it's all by chance
We're the Lilly Bros
Oh, yeah, we're identical
Oh, yeah, we're inseparable
We are the Lilly Bros
One egg one sperm two embryos
Made the same from head to toes
We're the Lilly Bros
Oh, yeah, we're adorable
Oh, yeah, we're incorrigible
We are the Lilly Bros
Which one's which nobody knows
Side by side through life we go
Oh, yeah, we're identical
Oh, yeah, we're inseparable
We are the Lilly Bros
One follows where the other one goes
We're the Lilly Bros

There's a thorn in my side

That never stops chafing

A hole dark and daunting

As stark madness raving


Pursuing perfection

Never quite knowing where

Incomplete and halfway

Never quite getting there


There's a thorn in my side

That just keeps on aching

A sore deep and wounding

As bleeding hearts breaking

I'm a temporary man with a temporary thought

wearing temporary suits temporarily I had saw,

I'm live camouflage in temporary human being,

oh, I'm a temporary thing, according to the law!

I'm 'pon the US Wait-n-Sea!

improvise my ship doth not 

hear a life shall wait for me

time redeeming all but lost!

It's a temporary life

with a temporary time

It's a temporary poem

with a temporary rhyme


It's a temporary ride

with a temporary spin

It's a temporary walk

with a temporary grin


It's a temporary road

with a temporary bend

It's a temporary run

with a temporary friend

I got caught in the attachments of the world

poor relative judgment became my moniker,

now I've let it all go and made new mantras

ordinary balance end analogous awareness

No one is more equal

Nor less faultlessly built

We're but all broken bits

Of the same mortal quilt


No one is less worthy

Nor more perfectly made

We're but all damaged goods

Of defective low-grade 


No one is less human

No more flawlessly blest

We're but all on the blink

Of a life soon at rest

Yes, and what we've done with our twin lives,

'tis a movie in the can exploring rise and falls


Whilst what we're doing here in our late lives

'tis proof gentle man, we're now standing tall!

There's only you, which is me

And then there's me, which is you

So alike it's plain to see

Sunkissed atoms through and through


Love's the universal pact

Signed by you, and also me

Such a simpleminded act

Wide-eyed truth on bended knee

I'm posting, publishing, soon peeking

I've been doing this all day in and out

At moment I believe I'm also peaking

hoping some day's kind to my shouts

I'm mending on a heartstring

healed in bath salts of reason

I feel like sobriety had led me

off an old lane in self-treason


Sometime went to her tolling

processing fate must survive,

I love to see ordinary balance

equally psychologically alive

Well then, what do I stand for?

'tis personally and only for me

which's one's the most upright

just Buddha say now I can see!

Reach reach reach down inside

Deep in the comfy numb

The place of toxic flaws

Where virulence comes from


Pull pull pull the heartstrings

Dead to the broken soul

The place of self-reproach

Where sorrows take their toll


Reach reach reach for the sky

Dark as the bitter moon

The place of run and gun

Where pipers play their tune

Mitchell (left), mom Marsha (center), and Marshall (right), Mariners Basin, Mission Bay, San Diego, circa 1960.

     As of July 2024 this section is still very much incomplete. Dead Twins Walking is and probably always will be an unfinished hodgepodge of recollections from various periods in our lives. The writing here, at least up to this point, is mostly mine (I'm the older twin). I wish it were better writing, more impressive or groundbreaking to the point of being earthshakingly poignant, but it's the best I can do. One cannot squeeze singular art from the less artful.

     The funny part is, we both ended up in Southeast Asia, married to Southeast Asian women. We both ended up retiring on Social Security benefits, penniless save for an 80K inheritance our parents left each of us in 2016. Mars used the last of his birthright to build a small house on some land owned by his wife in the countryside 90 minutes outside of Siem Riep, while I invested my heirloom in two small plots of land in Bien Hoa, my wife's hometown in Vietnam.

     I hope to sell one of the parcels in the next few years and use some of the money to visit Mars and Eang in Cambodia. I hope to live long enough to fly there and see them again. I hope my twin's house is everything he and his wife want it to be. I hope he finds peace and contentment in his last stand and final resting place. I hope.

     In the early winter of 1982 Mars and I moved from San Diego to Humboldt County. We left our hometown to attend Humboldt State University, now Cal Poly Humboldt, located on a hillside in the redwoods high above the college town of Arcata. We were 23 years old. Broke and out of work, we traveled the first leg of our journey with one of my roommates at the time, Gary, who'd recently graduated from San Diego State University and was heading back to his hometown of Piedmont in the Bay Area to start a new job in commercial real estate. Little did we know that the journey north would change our lives forever.

     Before leaving, Mars and I dropped by the Salvation Army in Pacific Beach to pick up some much needed rain gear and cold weather clothing. We rummaged the store and as luck would have it found matching yellow fisherman's raincoats and matching pairs of brown rubber galoshes, which we thought we'd need to stay dry in the torrential Humboldt Country rain. We also picked up two light polyester jackets, two pairs of wool hats and cloth gloves, and a few thick sweaters, all in good secondhand condition.

     A few days later, while packing our clothes and belongings into Gary's Subaru Outback, I stole a down-filled vest jacket from one of my other roommates, a coke dealer named Ron, who'd left the navy blue garment in the closet of his unlocked bedroom door. I'm not sure what possessed me to do so. Years later, the theft would come back to haunt me when I ran into Ron one night at Diego's disco in PB.

     Drunk and feeling jovial, and completely forgetting about swiping Ron's stylish The North Face  jacket with me, I got all excited about seeing him again.

     "Hey! Ronny, is that you?" I guffawed loudly.

     Ron eyed me suspiciously, giving me a hard, standoffish look. He frowned, throwing up his hands and shaking his head at the same time, six words flying out of his mouth. "You took my jacket, you dick."

     "Huh?" I protested in self-defense. "What are you talking about, bro?"

     "Gary told me, asshole," Ron grimaced, his voice loud and accusatory.

     I froze, thinking he might punch me out, and quickly told him how sorry I was. Luckily, Ron's face softened, and with a crooked smirk on his coked out face he told me to forget about it. It was the last time I'd ever see him.

     Mars and I had learned a thing or two from Eddie Haskell. Eddie, a two-faced teenage scoundrel on the TV sitcom Leave It to Beaver, would have no qualms about stealing down jackets from his roommates. The 1988 American comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels also comes to mind. Truth be told, the Lilly twins somehow got hardwired with the reprobate genes of incorrigibility and deplorableness. Throw in our inherited anger and commitment issues, not to mention our puzzling propensities for cheating and quitting, and our rocky road to the future was already paved in stone. Sadly, these self-seeking and backsliding behavior patterns would bedevil us into old age.

     But on with the story. Gary drove all the way from PB to Piedmont with only three stops in between, one at a fast-food restaurant to eat and two at roadside rest stops to pee and stretch his legs. We arrived at Gary's parents' house late in the evening. His mom and dad welcomed us warmly and extended plenty of cheerful hospitality during our two night stay. You could see how proud they were of him, particularly his father, and how happy they were to have their handsome son back home again.

     Gary's mom offered us some food so we ate and then crashed in one of the guest bedrooms. We woke up late the next morning to an empty house, as Gary's parents had already gone to their day jobs. Gary made us scrambled eggs with white onions, tomatoes, and Monterey Jack cheese, and we wolfed it down with toasted bagels and orange juice. After eating Gary rinsed the dishes and glasses and stacked them neatly into a dishwasher. Then we stepped out onto a side porch to pack a corncob pipe with some of Mexican weed, known as mota, we'd brought along for the ride.

     "So, what do you wanna do today, guys," Gary asked, squinting in the bright morning sunshine. It was a clear and lovely Bay Area day, with the sound of birds chirping in the surrounding trees filling the crisp December air.

     Mars finished packing the pipe and got it started with a yellow BIC lighter. "I guess we're up for just about anything," I said, watching Mars fill his lungs with his first hit of the day. There would be many more to come.

     Mars passed the pipe to Gary, who would be joining us in Cannabisland. "I think we should head into the city, see the sights," Gary offered, taking a long, slow drag of the low-grade ganja. Gary passed the pipe to me and we were all off to the races.

     "I can take you guys across the Bay Bridge and then over to the Golden Gate," Gary continued. "We'll go up to Battery Spencer for the view and then swing back to Fisherman's Wharf for lunch."

     Mars and I nodded in agreement. "Sounds like a plan," we echoed in unison. Gary passed the pipe to me and I puffed on it like there was no tomorrow.

     Gary sped across the Bay Bridge in light midmorning traffic, San Francisco's magnificent skyline, iconic Alcatraz Island, and stupendous Golden Gate Bridge all looming surreally in the distance. I rolled down the passenger side window and took in the matchless view, a euphoria of complete freedom and the unlimited possibility of youth hitting me like a ton of wacky tobacky bricks. In that moment, high on that bridge on that perfect day, I felt on top of the world.

     We motored through the streets of San Francisco, taking in all the sights and sounds and the places and people in the famous city that day. Gary drove us down famed Lombard Street and then through the mazy Golden Gate Park. I keenly took it all in, my head swiveling left to right, as eye-catching and historic sites, structures, and architecture whizzed past us in all directions.

     Five years into the future and I'd be back in San Fran working as a mobile DJ on Treasure Island and also as a male stripper in and around the city for a stripagram company. Those part-time gigs along with temporary day jobs as a word processor would be enough to pay my living expenses while taking television news classes at San Jose State University.

     I'd also catch up with Gary again, who at that time would be married to Stacey, a funny, smart, and pretty blond I'd knocked boots with once while we were students together at Mesa College in San Diego and who later met and fell in love with Gary, her favorite booty call while a student at San Diego State. It was a small world. Stacey loved the man she called her Gare Bear, and headed north to find and eventually marry him soon after tossing her SDSU cap and gown.

     Back in the city, we motored across the legendary Golden Gate gawking in all directions at the breathtaking view. It made me think of some photos our family had taken along the structure's epic railed walkway back in the mid 60s, black and white images of our mother and father, Tom and Marsha, along with our older brother and younger sister, Byron and Annie, all looking so young and jubilant and full of life, their beaming faces and exuberant poses momentarily etched in photochemical time.

     Gary knew how to get up to Battery Spencer and that's where we finally ended up. He parked the car somewhere near the main viewing area and Mars packed the pipe. "Let's get irie before we check it out," said Mars, lighting up the dry greenish brown ganja.

     Stoned to the point of blissful giddiness, I gazed down from the scenic viewpoint at the massive steel and concrete structure hulking between the massive bay and immense Pacific Ocean. Boats of all kinds dotted the water in all directions. Beyond, beneath a nearly cloudless blue sky, towered the spectacular skyline of the famous City by the Bay. The incredible vista view on that day remains one of the most breathtaking and awe-inspiring sights I've ever seen.

     Within the next few years the original rebar-enforced concrete deck of the massive suspension bridge would be replaced by a steel orthotropic deck panel, to go along with its galvanized carbon steel wire cables and 746-foot tall steel towers. The retrofit would turn the Golden Gate into one of the world's first modern marvels of earthquake-proof construction.

     We left the Battery Spencer, going down the steep hill to the highway and then back across the Golden Gate to the city. By this time we all had the munchies. As promised, Gary drove to Fisherman's Wharf and we stopped at the first Mexican restaurant we could find. Gary knew we were on a tight budget and offered to pay for lunch. During the meal, as we washed down plates of tasty chicken enchiladas with ice cold bottles of Pacifico beer, Gary also invited us, on his dime, to hit a few bars with him later that evening in the city.

     "Sounds cool, Gary, thanks man," I offered between bites of my perfectly spiced and cheesy Mexican rice and beans. "We'll keep the ganja flowin' for ya."

     "Good, and we're also gonna need a little pick-me-up, if you know what I mean." Gary countered. "I still have half a gram I got from Ron before we left, just enough to get us fired us up before we head into the city."

     "Sounds like a plan, Stan!" Mars hollered, chomping on another corn chip dipped in fresh cantina salsa. His sudden outburst made a few of the other patrons in the place turn their heads to look, which made Mars guffaw. Then, all at once, with an expression of mock surprise plastered on his face, he dramatically pursed his lips, covered his mouth with his hands and shrugged.

     "Oopsy-doopsy!" he cackled, feigning remorse. Mars was a rebel without a cause, a bull in a china shop full of piss and vinegar who thought very little of social norms.

     After our nosh-up with three beers apiece Gary drove us back to the home he grew up in. Satiated and daydreamy, I thought about the next day, when Mars and I would take a Greyhound bus from Oakland to Arcata. The final leg of our journey. I felt keyed up and on edge, an intoxicating blend of anything goes and last-ditch uprootedness keeping me on kicky tenterhooks. My twin and I had reached a crossroads of clean slates and bugouts leading to nowhere and somewhere at the same time. We were kissing our hometown goodbye, heading to a college town we'd never stepped foot in, with only the towering redwoods to greet us when we arrived.

     Later that evening, after an afternoon nap, we showered, dressed, and joined Gary and his parents for dinner in their dining room. I don't remember what we ate. Gary's mom and dad asked us about our day in the city and more about our move to Humboldt. They were easygoing and talkative folks and we had a relaxed and lively conversation together.

     Towards the end of dinner Gary's mom looked directly at me and Mars and asked, "So, you guys are going out tonight?"

     "I already told you, mom," Gary grumbled.

     "I know, I'm just asking, honey," she replied, her voice full of patient sweetness. There was no awkwardness in the moment. She was just making polite conversation, showing sincere interest in the guests her one and only son had brought home with him. She again looked in our direction but Gary answered for us.

     "I'm gonna take the twins to Polk Street." He said amicably. "I haven't been there in a long time."

     Gary's mom patted the top of her son's left hand. "Well, have fun guys. And don't forget to take a cab back here if you need to. We'll be happy to pay for it."

     "Okay, mom." Gary promised.

     "We won't wait up for you," said Gary's dad, chuckling.

     Back in our guest bedroom, Gary used a credit card to chop up and arranged six fat lines on a small glass-framed picture he took down from the wall. He rolled up a twenty-dollar bill and we took turns packing our noses with what turned out to be decent blow. Coked up and warmly dressed we stepped out into the nippy evening air for another trip to downtown Frisco.

     I only remember bits and pieces from our night out with Gary. Truth be told, most of my memories from this time period are now the blurry and washed-out remnants of a treasure map torn to tattered pieces by natural aging. He took us to an upscale watering hole, an elegant place with nice fixtures and furnishings. We drank draft beers at a long, well-appointed bar. Then, at some point late in the evening, we ran into another pair of twins, twin girls, who naturally gravitated towards our twinly energetic charisma to the point of striking distance.

     "Hey, are you guys twins?" asked Lacy, swiping at the long, bleached-blond bangs covering her forehead. Her twin sister, Lisa, stood next to her with one hand on her beefy hip and the other hand holding a glass of white wine.

     Mars and I swiveled on our bar stools to face them. The pair of short and voluptuous young women with big boobs and darling faces looked amazingly identical. We looked at each other and then back at the girls.

     "Are you guys twins?" we chortled in unison. All four of us burst out laughing, instantly becoming the best of friends.

     We hung out with Lacy and Lisa for at the bar for roughly 30 minutes, talking about their lives as twins and our lives as twins. We offered them our seats but they declined, standing side by side at the bar in front of us, chatting up a storm. When we told them we were leaving for Humboldt State University the next day their big brown eyes lit up like Roman candles.

     "Oh my gosh, one of our best friends from high school goes to HSU," Lacy exclaimed. "He's actually one of Lisa's exes, but he's like a brother to us now."

     "Yeah, but sometimes he's my incestuous brother!" Lisa cackled. Then, almost to herself, she added, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe I just said that!"

     "Anyway, like I was saying," Lacy continued. "He rents a 3-bedroom house in Arcata. Maybe you guys could stay with him for a few nights while you look for a place to live. He has a roommate but I don't think either one of them would mind."

     "Oh, man, that would be so cool," I said.

     In credit cardless and play-it-by-ear fashion, the bro and I had failed to arrange for a place stay once we landed in Arcata late on Sunday night. Our asinine plan was to walk around the town looking for a cheap hotel. But the twins saved us from that certain misadventure.

     Lisa pulled an address book and a pen from her black Lea Frances purse and wrote down her ex-boyfriend's home telephone number on a fresh cocktail napkin. Along with the number she wrote the names Bob and Wade.

     "Here," she instructed, thrusting the napkin in my direction. "Call their house as soon as you get there and they can give you directions from the bus station. It's not far, you can walk to Bob's place in 10 minutes."

     "Bob's the ex?" I asked, taking the napkin and looking at it for a second before putting it in my right front jean pocket.

     "Yeah, and Wade's his roommate. We'll call them in the morning to let them know you're coming." Lacy chimed in exuberantly. "And what's your number?"

     "Yeah, give us your number so we can let you know they know you're coming." Lisa interjected. Classic twin talk, one constantly butting in on the other.

     Gary sat on one of the barstools next to me with an amused yet nonchalant look on his handsome mustached face. The coke had long worn off but his gorgeous green eyes still sparkled with robust masculinity. Gary knew how to get girls. And the twins, who knew a hot guy when they saw one, kept glancing in his direction.

     After initially introducing himself to Lacy and Lisa he'd been keeping his mouth mostly shut, delightedly and good-naturedly observing the perky, big-boobed twins while paying close attention to the conversation.

     Finally, Gary spoke up. "The twins are staying at my house," he explained, "so you'll need to get that number from me." Then, smiling like the hottest porn star on the planet, he added, "Why don't you come over here, Lacy, and I'll give it to you."

     "I've been waiting for you to give it to me all night!" Lacy cried, howling with laughter. Gary asked Lisa if he could borrow her pen and when she handed it to him he wrote his home phone number on another cocktail napkin and handed it to Lacy, who had just sat down in the empty bar stool next to him. Gary and Lacy started up a conversation while Mars and I continued talking to Lisa, who was still standing in front of us.

     "Would you like to sit down?" Mars offered, gesturing to the empty bar stool next to him. Lisa glanced in her sister's direction and then at the empty wine glass in her right hand.

     "Looks like I'm all out!" she cried.

     "Sit down," Mars cooed, "and we'll get you another one."

     Lisa sat down and ordered another glass of Chardonnay. Wedged between Gary and Lacy to my left and Mars and Lisa to my right, I spun around to face the bar and ordered another beer, sucking on it thirstily while jonesing for more nose candy. Vampire mode. It was early in the a.m. and the place had thinned out to a dozen or so patrons waiting for the last call. Buzzed and unfazed to the point of numbness, I quickly got lost in my own jumbled thoughts, pondering the events of the last two years in San Diego.

     I thought about my job as a busboy at Vacation Village, at a fancy tableside service restaurant right on the bay. The place had originally opened as Jack's Steakhouse in 1962, in honor of the property's original owner Jack Harold Skirball, but was later remodeled and appropriately renamed the Bayside Restaurant.

     Mars and I were living in a furnished one bedroom apartment on San Fernando Place in South Mission Beach. By coincidence, our digs in the double fourplex with small interior courtyard stood next door to the house our grandparents, Marshall and Molly Herman, had moved from Hillcrest to South Mission in the 1950s.

     During the planning and construction phase of their double lot on Ensenada Court, Molly had placed the relocated family home and foundation on top of two newly built ground floor apartments, one of which she'd eventually rent to our father. She turned the other half of the property into a long lawn with an adjacent patio area on the other side of a double garage in the back alley.

     That summer we turned 22, with friends and family all around us. Mars got involved with an athletic and bodacious 18-year-old girl named Lisanne. The dark-eyed, dark-haired seductress of Greek descent could be seen almost daily playing beach volleyball on the local courts and roller skating along Bayside Walk in her hot striped Dolfin shorts and colorful tank tops. When it came to dishy dream girls Lisanne easily fit the bill.

     Lianne's best friend was a heavily-pimpled 16-year-old girl named Caron, a nubile temptress with less attractive facial features but whose large shapely breasts and perfect body made her dangerously boneable. The four of us would play volleyball on the bayside at Mariners Basin and then swim across to Mariners Point singing the chorus to a 1977 Pablo Cruise song A Place in the Sun: It's time to find our place in the sun, find your place, find your place in the sun.

     I badly wanted to hook up with Caron but a voice in my head told me not to. The thought of her father, a science teacher at Kearny High School, putting me behind bars for taking his jailbait of a daughter's virginity stopped me in my tracks. Luckily, in my senior year of high school, I had learned how to have a coregasm, which is the ability to have an orgasm by doing abdominal exercises that contract the pelvic floor muscles to the point of ejaculation. After our swims the four of us would do sit ups in the soft wet sand of the shoreline and I climaxed many times gazing lustfully at her tight bikini-clad tits and body.

     It was perhaps the finest summer of our lives. And then it wasn't. Mars got a job as a dishwasher at Saska's, a popular and palmy family-owned eatery that opened in 1951 and went on to became one of San Diego's longest running steakhouses before closing for good in 2020.

     One morning I took Mars on my Yamaha SR 250 to pick up his paycheck at the Saska residence on one of the courts on the ocean side in Mission Beach. I dropped him off on Mission Boulevard and watched him saunter up the sidewalk and stop at one of the courtside gates, which he carefully opened and closed behind him before disappearing. After several minutes he suddenly reappeared, hurriedly pushing the gate open but not closing it behind him, and instead of walking back towards me he turned and bolted in the opposite direction towards Ocean Front Walk.

     I couldn't believe my eyes. I shouted at him but he never turned around. Where the fuck are you going, bro? I wondered perplexingly. He was getting out of Dodge! One of the Saska sons had left him alone for a few moments to go get his paycheck and that's when Mars had wasted no time in swiping a stack of money from their dining room table and splitting the scene.

     That night I came home from my busboy shift at Vacation Village to find two police cars parked outside our apartment, red and blue lightbars flashing, and the plate glass in our bedroom smashed in and broken. Inside, two cops were talking to Mars, and as soon as I saw his face I knew he'd done something wrong. It turned out that the Saska son who went to get his paycheck had thrown one of the wooden lawn chairs in the courtyard through the window. Mars told the cops he never saw the cash but after they left he admitted taking it. The next day, our father came to the rescue by calling Mr. Saska and arranging for Mars to return the money and for both families to drop any charges.

     Due to the incident my twin and I were politely asked to move out. But when one door closes another door opens, and Mars and I moved into a nice two bedroom house on Avalon Court owned by our childhood friend, Brad, whom we'd gone to school with from kindergarten to the second grade at Mission Beach Elementary.

     Brad lived upstairs in what was once the master bedroom but had since been remodeled into a self-contained one bedroom apartment. The mini spiral staircase leading up to the main bedroom on the second floor had been sealed off, and Brad now came and went to his place via the back alley and concrete backyard, a fenced-in enclosure with an old inward-opening gate and single car garage. The remodeling of the second floor included the construction of wooden stairs with a big balcony at the top just outside the front door to Brad's rear bachelor pad.

     And that's the house where the Lilly brothers briefly became cocaine dealers.

     I quit my busboy job at the Bayview Restaurant for a better gig as a banquet waiter at Atlantis SeaWorld, where I once saw Dean Martin walking alone outside in the parking lot and another time served lunch to Tom Chambers and the rest of the players on the San Diego Clippers that season. Mars had no job at the time so when our older brother Byron came down from Berkely to stay with us at Brad's house for awhile and told us he had a coke-dealing friend from his UC Berkely days ready to front him a kilogram of cocaine to sell, Mars pushed hard for the plan.

     Byron's friend drove down with the brick a few days later and we powwowed about ways to cut it and which fillers to use and how much to sell the carefully measured quarters, halves, and grams for. The next day I came home from a writing class at the University of San Diego to find Byron cutting and measuring out small cocaine bindles from a massive pile of pretty much pure powder on a portable card table he'd set up in my bedroom. He looked as pleasingly and pleasantly high as a swirling sunlit diamond kite.

     "Ready for a taste?" he asked, his legs bouncing like pistons but his voice sounding calm and collected.

     "Lay it on me, bro." I replied. I spent the next thirty minutes in the bathroom having one of the best bowel movements of my life.

     A few hours later Mars came home with Lisanne and the lovebirds found us drinking margaritas and smoking hashish in the dining nook adjacent the long, narrow kitchen.

     "Hey guys!" Lisanne purred, a big, pretty smile on her suntanned face. "Mind if we join you?"

     I quickly scooted over on my bench seat towards the big pane glass window. "Sit your sweet little butt down right here," I said, patting the brown, foam-filled cushion on the spot where my butt had just been. "I've been keeping it warm for you, Dizzy Ms. Lizzy."

     I'd given Lisanne the nickname Dizzy Ms. Lizzy, for the way she talked and acted like somewhat of a bimbette. Her being blazed much of the time probably had a lot to do with it.

     "I told you not to call me that," Lisanne shot back, giving me her don't fuck with me look.

     "Oh, sorry, I forgot." I said as sincerely as I could. Blow turns most people of all ages into assholes. "So what should I call you then?"

     "Lizzy is okay, just not the dizzy part."

     I raised my right hand holding the index and middle fingers together. "Scouts honor," I lied.

     The four of us partied all night. At some point we decided to hide the bindles Byron had so painstakingly filled inside a slightly deflated beach volleyball on the wall shelf in Mar's bedroom. It seemed like the perfect hiding place. But it wasn't.

     Each of us got an 8 ball out of the deal, roughly 3.5 grams, which we could either sell for profit or snort for fun. Mars, who'd been out of a job for awhile and entirely disinterested in finding a new one, was supposed to sell his share for profit. He did the opposite. I'd planned to snort half and sell half, but that didn't happen either.

     What did happen is after whiffing up each our own 8 balls within the first week and selling most the remaining packets within the next two weeks, Mars and Lizzy got hammered one night and took the volleyball containing the remaining 5.5 grams to a house party on Bayfront Walk. The particular group of friends at the party that night, kids who grew up together in South Mission and called themselves the South Mission Beach Crew, snorted up an eight-ball-and-a-half's worth of free watch-the-sun-come-up house party fun. And Byron and I had missed it!

     So we ended up losing money on the deal. Byron had to pay his friend back the difference out of his own pocket, and soon headed back to Berkely to reunite with his UCB girlfriend, Nancy, whom he he eventually married. And the Lilly bros were coke dealers no more.

     I thought about my job as a waiter at the Playboy Club in Mission Valley, where I worked for only a few months before blowing out the engine of the yellow 1971 Sunbeam convertible my sister, Anne, had sold to me when our parents along with Anne and her boyfriend Mark drove down from Anchorage, Alaska to stayed with us at Brad's place a few nights. My father warned me about the engine oil, instructing me check it every couple of days, but I forgot to check it and a few weeks later the engine seized up at the crosswalk in front of Mission Market. The halting thud of the broken rod cutting through the engine and bringing my cute little sun-colored sportscar to a screeching halt kills me to this day.

     I barely noticed Gary pulling on my left shoulder. "Hey...hey...Mitch...earth to Mitch. It's gettin' late buddy." He looked at me squarely and affectionately, his face filled with an oddly serious expression. "Time to scoot." He commanded.

     "Are you okay to drive?" I asked, thinking just one more for the road.

     "Yeah, I stopped drinking an hour ago." Gary answered. Then, glancing at his wristwatch, he gave me the reason for his dead seriousness. "I promised my mom we'd be home at a decent hour."

     And that was it. We said goodnight to the twins, who promised to call us in the morning. We couldn't thank them enough. They said they'd be back in Arcata one of these days and would love to meet up with us again. We couldn't agree with them more. The next morning they did call, and we were on our way to Humboldt with a better plan and a good place to land.

     The thing about hangovers is that they sure are a lot easier to deal with when you're young. And the thing about wisdom is that it sure is a lot easier to know how important being a fully conscious human being is when you're old. At least that's the way it is for me and Mars.

     When we were young Mars wanted to rip the heads off people and shit down their necks. I'm not sure if I felt the same way, but at that time in our young lives my twin brother and I lacked the wisdom to understand where our single-minded feelings of alienation and suck it hostility came from. While I felt less hostile and disconnected from the world in a slightly different way. Unsure of my place in life, I lacked both self-esteem and moral integrity, a one-two personality punch that made me a very selfish young man unsure of his place in life.

     But both Mars and I did see life through the same distorted lens of the typical All-American male jock, a down and dirty world of the good, the bad, and the ugly, where using your physical attributes and attractiveness to get what you wanted was all that really mattered.

     

     This summer the Lilly twins are turning 64. The Beatles wrote a song about it. As we begin our final years of will you still need me, will you still feed me, each of us is hoping to live into our 70s, and maybe even a little longer.

     Sadly, the odds of us living to ripe old ages are low. I'm now in stage two of congestive heart failure, and Mars is suffering from symptoms of chronic kidney failure. But we still have right now, and that's all any 64-year-old identical twin can really ask for.

     It's funny how we wound up living in neighboring Asian countries, Mars in Cambodia and me in Vietnam, as our Beatles old man anthem fast approaches.

     I've been in Da Nang for nine years. For eight of those years, I've been married to Lana, 42, who I met in her hometown of Bien Hoa, an industrial city 45 minutes from Saigon by car. Mars recently got married to Eang, 44, in her hometown of Siem Reap. As the crow flies, my twin bro and I are just 613.7 kilometers away from each other now.

     There was a time when we both believed in the impossible. Back in high school, we were 6-foot, slow-footed, white basketball players with the vertical jumps of sea slugs. But we loved the game, believed in hard work, and eventually became two of the top prep players in San Diego County.

     At one point, long before boys began turning themselves into trans athletes so they could compete against and beat the pants off girls, we'd considered becoming subjects in a University of California study on the effects of growth hormones in identical twins.

     That's probably not a precise description of the study, but the gist of it was that if we signed up to be lab rats in the research, there was chance we might grow a few inches taller. Due to some possible life-shortening side effects, however, including weakened or enlarged major organs, our parents refused to let us do it.

     Despite our physical shortcomings, and thanks largely to our mother, we were born with above-average athletic skills such as quick reflexes and exceptional eye-to-hand coordination. We had the same focused drive and endless dedication as of any of the world's top athletes. Hardwired to become the best players we could, by the eighth grade our hoop dream had taken on a life of its own.

     The place was Keflavik, Iceland, in 1972, where our father had taken a job as civil engineer at Naval Air Station Keflavik (NASKEF). The military base was home to an enormous gymnasium, which became our home away from home for much of the year that we lived there.

     Our family moved into 4-bedroom house a few miles off base, a second-story walk-up with a balcony and windows on all sides overlooking some of the other asymmetrical, pastel-colored homes in the neighborhood. Most of the Icelandic-style dwellings around us had the greenest, most immaculate lawns I'd ever seen. It was a peaceful, picture-book place to live.

     The gym stood kitty-corner between the base's combined school and movie theater. Just down the road was a snack bar with a jukebox, which gave us a cozy place to eat and hang out between classes, films, and most importantly, getting our basketball jones on in the gym.

     For us, the gym was everything. It offered plenty of open play hours and top-brand leather balls from the equipment room to boot. We shot around and played halfcourt pickup games to our hearts' content for hours on end. And as we'd soon find out, the massive, airy facility also hosted basketball league games and boxing smokers.

     The gym had one main court in the middle, with two half courts along one side fronting a high, long column of retractable wooden bleachers. They kept the first few rows of the bleachers pulled at all times as bench seating, where players and other visitors could sit, watch, or rest between pickup games.

     On the other side, they'd installed a fully enclosed racquetball court in the middle, and two partially equipped matted areas on either side, one for gymnastics and the other for boxing and martial arts.

     For us, it was a dream come true. But our hoop dream, in fact, had actually started two years earlier, in the sixth grade at Mission Beach Elementary school, where we fell in love with the game out on the school's playground, a multipurpose blacktop with a single steel pole, netted hoop, and half-circle backboard near the lunch tables. The court also included a painted key area and free-throw circle.

     We spent countless hours during the school's afterschool program on that court, honing the skills that would one day make us two of the most well-known high school stars of the day.

     In retrospect, our athletic ability and work ethic might've been better served on a tennis court, or in the Pacific Ocean just a couple hundred yards away, where many young boys our age were strutting their stuff on surfboards. But thanks to Jerry West, we believed in our chances of achieving greatness in the sport.

     How little did we know. The truth was, in terms of our innate athletic skill, tennis and surfing legends like John McEnroe and Skip Frye had very little on us. Similarly built and equally coordinated, light-footed, and sure handed, our chances of reaching the professional pinnacles of the tennis and surfing worlds were much better. But as fate would have it, we chose Naismith's game instead.

     Not long after we arrived in Iceland, about the time our family was settling into our new, green and serene Icelandic community, Mars and I decided we wanted to return to San Diego on our own. We wanted to go back to Pacific Beach Junior High, and the local recreation center, where life and the friends we'd left behind seemed safe and familiar.

     Our parents, Tom and Marsha, arranged for us to stay on a monthly stipend with the Flores family, our neighbors for several years while living in the queerly designed yet fantastically situated single-story beach house we'd rented at 3930 Bayside Walk in Mission Beach, the one with a private beach as a front yard right on the edge of Sail Bay. Mr. and Mrs. Flores were all set to take us in, but at some point, we changed our minds. It was one of the best decisions we ever made.

     The first friend we made on the base was Glenn Craig, a handsome, strapping teen of 14 who also liked to play basketball. He was tall and lean, at least three inches taller than us, with the glossy and flowing shoulder length jet-black hair of a model. He was a dreamboat, really, with the foxiest girlfriend in the ninth grade to prove it.

     Our bromance began in the summer of '72. Glenn's girlfriend, Julie, was on summer holiday with her family when we ran into him at the gym, so for several weeks we had the rugged teenage Adonis all to ourselves. It wasn't a gay thing, at least not consciously.

     As twins, it had always been easy for Mars and me to make new friends. We traveled through our halcyon youth guard's way down and hearts wide open, seeing almost everyone we met in the best possible light, without judgements or preconceived notions. We immediately liked every single person we met, and most of the people we met like us right away too.

     That summer spend most of our time either in the gym or a quarter mile down the road at the snack bar, which had a bus stop out front where off-base busses ran until late in the evening. With Elton John's Crocodile Rock, Daniel, and Rocket Man playing on the jukebox, we spent many a late afternoon sharing orders of salty fries washed down with fizzy, throat-burning fountain cokes on ice while waiting for whatever bus we wanted to take home that day.

     Our second most favorite place was the movie theater. Tickets were dirt cheap, around 75 cents from what I remember, and they showed many of the top Hollywood films of the day. After playing pickup games all morning, we'd walk right across the road on the other side of the gym to catch the daily matinee. Tubs of buttered popcorn and sugary soft drinks also kept us entertained and satiated until we got to those fries later on. It was an idyllic life, and we loved it.

     But when Glenn's girlfriend came back, the special feeling of comradery we shared with him suddenly changed. It was weird and hard, dealing with that sort of jealousy at that particular age. We met her one day on our way out of the gym, and while crossing the road to the movie house, she looked at us with beautiful but suspicious eyes. For reasons beyond our limited comprehension at the time, his foxy bitch wasn't the slightest bit impressed by or interested in her boyfriend's new twin bosom buddies.

     After that day, she barely looked at or spoke to us again. It was as though she were entirely immune to our twin powers of friendly sociability, and that we were completely off limits in her mind to any thoughts of approval or acceptance. Our closeness to Glenn petered out after that, and later, in the spring of 1973, I'd lose my cool in a touch football game, and in the process lose whatever remaining friendship I had with Glenn forever.

     Life's funny that way, the way some people like us while others don't. When we meet people who decide not to like us it can be hard to change their minds. Sometimes we can do things to get them to like us after the fact. Other times, when we meet people who initially like us, we can do things that make them dislike us, or even hate us, in the end. That's what happened with Glenn and a few other friends we met on the base.

     Life's a funny thing for sure. Time flies and youth fades away like the court lines on a light varnished hardwood floor. The composite leather of a basketball eventually wears away, leaving blurry dreamscapes of uproarious jocularity and tortuous pathos. The memories of our hoop days, which took off in Iceland like the first iPhone, can only be recalled in fuzzy, chopping-block pieces of recollection. It has simply been too long.

     Be that as it may, I shall rethink and reconstruct the events and remembrances of our shared past as accurately as I can, taking artistic liberties as needed to piece together our life story to the very best of my ability. No matter who reads it, sharing these chapters in our lives will be my last labor of love.

     The truth is, Marshall needed glasses. 

     Yes, I needed glasses, but I didn't get them until 1979, aged 19. By then I'd missed too much and lost more than enough to ruin any boy's coming of age, Southern California story. 

     My medium astigmatism caused enough fuzzy, out-of-scale blurriness to terribly hamper my educational and emotional development. Sure, I could barge forward with youthful power and vigor to accomplish almost any physical challenge, but my inability to make clear eye contact with people beyond even a couple feet away left me a poor, disconnected, uninformed boy.

     Our cousin Rick, six years older, who had a gift for music and a quick, sharp wit, took to calling me dummy. I didn't understand his critique of me at the time, and stubbornly denied his observations. Although Rick had no knowledge of my short-sightedness, he absolutely recognized my lack of focus, my inability to communicate in meaningful and intelligent ways using proper eye contact and body language.

     I missed so much, especially the times I remember people looking straight into my eyes while flashing some positive facial expression, attempting to make meaningful connections that were totally lost on me because of my bad sight.

     I could only return blank, confused, moronic stares. And although only my cousin Rick came right out and said it, I'm sure a lot of other people also thought of me as dumb. The really sad part is I had the intellect to respond back to people in amazing and positive ways. I believe my poor vision barred me from having deep, important experiences, and my intellect stood by rusting and unused.

     At 19, when I finally got those glasses, I couldn't handle it. The laser-sharp strangeness of reality felt so bizarre that I threw the specs away after only a week. I got another pair at 22, and since then I've come to realize just how devastating not getting corrective lenses as a child and having them throughout my teens has been for me.

     Losing my chance to be mentally crisp and fully connected whilst in my youth hurt me both emotionally and developmentally for a long time after I finally got that second pair of preppy lenses at 22.

     Ah, but it's all under the bridge now. And all my memories and past times are still very important and beautiful to me. I've learned to live with what happened, and I'm mentally focused and fully connected now, which is all that really matters. I've met my intellect, and I like what I see.

     As far as the past goes, I only like to think about how and what I could've done differently. However, and much more importantly, I'm choosing to do things differently right here, right now, and literary creation seems to be my best and favorite way to shake any coulda, shoulda, wouldas from my past.

     Blurry vision notwithstanding, soon after touching down at Naval Air Station Keflavik it became crystal clear that my identical twin brother's talents in the sport of basketball towered head and shoulders above my own.

     Like the windowmaker heart attack that eventually ended Cousin Rick's life at the age of 64, Mars slowly and then suddenly made his dominance known. His superior skills seemed to come out of nowhere, which both hurt and surprised me to no end.

     By the time we started the eighth grade, Mars was on his way to becoming skilled and cagey enough to be a starter on the school's junior varsity squad. I felt pleased by his success, but also sick with envy.

     During the tryouts I desperately tried to keep up with him, but to no avail. His ascendance as the better twin simply couldn't be stopped. He understood the game better than me, and had more finesse and court sense, which allowed him to use his God-given attributes to their fullest potential.

     I was better than him at only one thing: choking shots. As a choker, when taking shots during real games, I tended to psyche myself out at the last moment, and in the split second before releasing the ball, worry too much about missing the shot. This caused me to miss a lot more shots than he did.

     That year in Iceland, Mars never once talked about his poor vision or said anything to me about his bad eyesight being an issue for him. At that point he probably wasn't cognizant of the problem anyway. Based on the way he outplayed and outperformed me from the eighth grade on I'm not sure how much his slight astigmatism hampered him as a player.

     On the subject of Cousin Rick, I'm also unsure how much his what's up, dummy? shtick was about us being stupid or him being a mean-spirited person. To my mind, Rick calling me a dummy seemed more like a callous term of endearment than a psychoanalysis of my shortcomings as a teenager. In any case, it's clear that our father's decision not to get Mars glasses when he needed them had a severe psychological impact on his life. 

     And one thing is also crystal clear: on a basketball court, my twin was a whiz. Although we both got cut after the tryouts, it wasn't long before Mars got brought up from the freshmen league to be one of the starting guards on the JV.

     In that freshmen league, Mars also got the luck of the draw. When the rosters came out, his team had been stacked with several of the better players in the eighth and ninth grades that year, including Glenn.

     But undeniably, Mars was the main reason his team won the league title that season. He was unstoppable, which made me feel madly jealous and dejected, especially during games when he soundly kicked my butt all over the court.

     But I also felt delighted by his success. I went to every JV game he was in, beaming with pride in the bleachers and jubilantly cheering him on. I was, in fact, his biggest fan.

     Being an identical twin often made it easy to freak or fake people out, especially upon first meeting us when it was harder for them to tell us apart. People often stopped in their tracks to peer and point, tilting their heads quizzically at us with bemused looks on their faces. Once in a while, we pulled pranks intentionally, like the time we signed up for the gym's semiannual boxing smoker.

          Naturally, they put us in the same division, and we ended up boxing each other in the first round. We had no idea what we were doing. For three minutes we bounced around the ring swiping and slugging away at each other with equal abandon.

     At one point in the single-round bout, as I pushed and punched Mars towards the ropes, he lost his footing and fell down backwards onto the canvas, landing nimbly on one knee. This made the near-capacity crowd watching from the bleachers roar with excitement.

     It must've impressed the judges too, as right after the fight they declared me the winner. Standing face-to-face in the middle of the ring, they announced my name, and the referee raised my gloved right hand up into the air. I'd beaten my twin in the sport of boxing!

     Marshall had always been better than me at sport. A few years earlier, at the tender age of eight, our parents had taken us up to the Arctic Valley Ski Area in Anchorage, Alaska for our first lessons. Two years later, Mars got the chance to compete in one of the youth league's giant slalom races.

     In the shadow of his stouthearted fearlessness, I chickened out and passed on the opportunity to compete alongside him. The steepness of the slope and the size of the moguls scared me; but mostly, I was afraid to lose against him.

     Mars raced only one time. And as I watched him from the finish line at the bottom of the hill my soul soared with awestruck delight at the very sight of him coming down the mountain. He was fearless, deftly crisscrossing the moguls and flying past the poles with reckless yet masterful exuberance.

     His time, however, reflected a less triumphant result: a fourth-place finish that failed to qualify him for the next round. And as fate would have it, Mars was forced to retire his junior ski helmet after just a single race. That summer our family moved back to San Diego, and just like that whatever shot Mars and I had at developing from a young age into world class alpine racers flew right out the ski lodge window.

     Fast forward to the NAS gym, and just like that day on the slalom slopes high up in Arctic Valley, I chickened out about going back into the ring to face my next and final opponent. As it turned out, Tony, a 12th-grade bully with a mean streak, was the only other boxer in our division that day.

     At some point before stepping into the ring against Tony, I asked Mars to follow me into the men's locker room. When there was no one else around, I pleaded with Mars to take my place in the fight.

     "I don't want to fight him," I sighed plaintively. "Will you go in the ring for me?"

     "Sure," Mars said without hesitation. We quickly switched the clothes we had on that day—gym shorts and American football jerseys—and returned to the noisy, jam-packed bleachers.

     No one had a clue. Mars stepped up into that ring wearing my favorite No. 77 football jersey to face a kid with a big chip on his shoulder and a barrage of boxing skills to go along with it.

     Mars got licked up pretty good. Tony was bigger, stronger, and had learned how to throw a punch without pulling it. The crowd went wild for the one-sided scuffle, with Tony manhandling Mars like a punching bag all around the ring for about two minutes before they stopped the fight.

     Mars climbed out of the ring and walked over to me with a big frown on his face. "That guy's too tough," he said. "I never had a chance."

     "Nice fight, twin!" one of the spectators sitting behind us exclaimed. "Don't worry, you'll get him next time." We looked at each other thinking the same thing: there won't be a next time.

     Mars sat down next to me, in the front row of the bleachers just below the ring, and together we watched, mesmerized, the remaining bouts, including a main event between two heavyweights that sent the rambunctious crowd into a dizzying, uproarious frenzy.

     I glanced at my twin brother's face many times during the fights, marveling at his gutsiness, his willingness to take my place against an opponent I was too scared to face.

     I doubt it ever occurred to him to question or complain about my cowardice. I felt relieved and grateful for the fact that he never got mad at me for asking him to face Tony in the ring that day.

     That was Mars. My best friend, and the toughest 13-year-old I ever met.

     During that short but sedulous year in Iceland, Mars and I lost our virginity together. We lost it to the same girl on the same night, not in a threesome but separately, me first and Mars second, in what would be our first in a limited number of twinly tag teams.

     The girl's name was Patty, a pretty and precocious 14-year-old ski bunny we met between runs on our second day in the breathtaking Alpine mountains of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria, in southern Germany.

     Our family had gone to the quaint ski town on Christmas vacation in the winter of '72, staying in a nondescript armed forces hotel with a game room for kids and three nickel slot machines in a small foyer next to the main dining room. Mom and Dad let us pull down those classic Liberty Bell handles a few times and we marveled with boyhood awe at the machine's three rows of spinning reels that magically whirred out an assortment of fruits and bar symbols before stopping haphazardly in a series of beeps, clicks, and chimes. Once we knew how the machine paid out we were hooked.

     Mars and I had our own twin room on the first floor. It was a plain, no-frills room with an old-fashioned radiator heater under a large, single-pane window overlooking the parking lot and the looming Bavarian Alps beyond.

     I remember that radiator well. One morning after a shower, after walking over to the windows and dropping my towel to the floor, I leaned over the heater to grab a bag of Gummi Bears from the windowsill. That's when the head of my penis touched the heater's scorching surface. My pelvis instantly recoiled, and I yowled in jolting agony. It would be the last time I ever let my dick get near such a hot burning surface again.

     Like us, Patty was American. She was 14 years old, a year older than us, and one year younger than our brother Byron, who was 15. It's hard to remember exactly what she looked like. Her hair was long, straight and brown. She was thin and flat chested but had a foxy face and a bubbly and playful personality, allowing her to flirt and giggle with a self-assured sexuality beyond her years.

     After meeting Patty at the ski resort, we found out she was staying in the same military-run hotel as us and arranged to meet her later that evening in the hotel's game room, where the night before we'd played foosball, or table soccer, with a group of other kids who were staying there.

     We were having the time of our lives. Traipsing about the property on our own, with little or no adult supervision, made us feel as though the world and our place in it was as an enchanting crustacean teeming with endless potentialities.

     At first, Patty was just like one of the guys, a strictly platonic affair, hanging out and playing doubles foosball, with each player controlling two of the sticks. We were having a ball. The room also had several old-school arcade games from the 1970s. Foosball, though, was the main attraction, with kids lining up to play the winners of each match.

     After several hours of clamoring around the pint-size football table furiously spinning the metal handles and striking the small wooden balls into the goals with the unabashed whoops and groans of pure teenage delight, we said our goodnights, promising to meet up at the ski lodge the next morning.

     The Garmisch ski resort was a heavenly, picture-perfect site to behold. Flying down its exhilarating slopes was literally like being on top of the world. But my recollections of the place are now obscured by time, as though caught in the blurring flurries of ice and snow ripping through the topmost bowls of Zugspitze, the highest peak at the top of the Garmisch-Parten ski area and the tallest mountain in Germany.

     Perhaps my twin can add some much-needed clarity to my indistinct memories of the experience. All I can really remember is that after skiing from mid-morning to late afternoon on day three, we met up with Patty again post dinner in the game room. But this time, after we'd had our fill of foosball for one evening and returned to our room, Patty came along with us.

     Eventually, Patty ended up sitting with us on one of the twin beds, where at some point the conversation turned sexual in nature, with Patty asking us about our virginity. Talk turned to touching. As novices in the art of flirting and foreplay, she had to almost dare us to make love to her. Not in a threesome, but one twin at a time.

     I went first. Mars left the room, and we got naked on top of the bedspread. I kissed Patty on the mouth, first light pecking and then deep Frenching. I cupped her small breasts, kissing and twirling my tongue around her tiny brown nipples.

     I could be making this up as I go along. But what I do vaguely remember is having the strangest feeling of being turned on and frightened all at once, an esoteric weirdness of titillating desire and enigmatic uneasiness pulsating through me at the same time. I got on top of her and nudged my penis all the way inside. It felt warm and inviting, like a hot meal on a cold day.

     At one point during our brief intercourse, she began writhing and wincing. "Ow, ow, ow, you're on my wall," she groaned.

     She pushed up on my hips and twisted her body, making my erect manhood slide out of her. She promptly reached inside herself and made some sort of gingerly adjustment. "Okay, try again," she cooed.

     I came like a two-minute warning. It was nothing to write home about. No music and wonderful roses, no sweet fragrant meadows. I quickly pulled out, rolled off the bed and put my clothes back on.

     Without so much as giving her a kiss on the cheek or a pat on the ass, I bolted for the door and opened it. That's when Mars, who'd been standing outside in the hall for the entire five minutes, barged past me like a horndog zeroing in on a bitch in heat.

     Mitch and I were thirteen and a half when we got laid for the first time in Germany together, and by then we'd already been beating off for about two years. Sure, we were horndogs all right, to the max. But no circle jerks; we handled our personal business separately and privately.

     Tits and ass shots from Playboy magazine usually floated our jism boat parades and were guaranteed to make us poke a fresh six-inch stiffy straight through the pee-pee slits of our tighty-whity underwear.

     In those early days of magazine pornography, it was illegal for magazines to publish full-frontal nudity. Although pics of fresh young trim, aka pussy shots, were taboo in Hefner's famous mag, a flotilla of sultry pinups and centerfolds in a variety of glossy poses still created plenty of horniness in us, so that at any moment we might yank out our wee spuds and begin jerking off to the orgasmic content just about any place we could find a little privacy.

     Mitch and I believed wholeheartedly in the adage, early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. We almost always hit the sack by 9 PM and almost never stayed out late. But one night Glenn came over for a sleepover and the three of us went out looking for girls in town after dark.

     We didn't need to go far from our residential neighborhood to find a short block of local businesses. Once there we stopped at an outdoor hotdog stand for a late-evening snack. To our surprise and delight, they were horsemeat dogs, which was a normal thing in Iceland. The tasty nibblers came slathered in your choice of fried onions, ketchup, spicy mustard, and mayonnaise.

     It's hard to remember many of the details of our sexual escapades in Keflavik and beyond. As Mars would say, it's now all as hazy and murky as a misted snorkeling mask. But our stories, while embellished, are mostly true. I mean, we're not making anything up. Nonetheless, we may need to fill in and flesh out some of the dimmed and mawkish moments of our lives with a few excogitating pen strokes.

          The story and evening in question initiated by Mars in the previous chapter is actually our second pussy time score. The phase pussy time comes from one of our rare jaunts to downtown San Diego three years later, when we somehow ended up at one of the all-nude strip clubs in the red-light district with a group of our teammates on the Mission Bay High basketball team.

     The main throughfare-turned-boulevard in the downtown district, Broadway, was once lined with a smorgasbord of sleazy peep shows and nudie bars. Doormen stood just outside the entrances, where telltale clusters of blinking lightbulbs and flashing muted neon signs helped them to coax horny sailors and marines passing by to venture beyond the dark curtains just inside the doorway.

     Long gone now, ID checks at these strip joints was lax to say the least. On a warm, sunny, perfect day in the summer of '76, when we were barely 16 years old, Mars, me, and a small group of our fellow Buccaneer jocks waltzed right past the lone bouncer at one of these joints. Climbing a steep flight of stairs, we dropped anchor at two booths in front of an empty stage in the darkly lit cabaret room.

     That's when the magic happened. After ordering a round of cokes, a disc jockey's voice from out of nowhere welcomed us with a barrage of strip show banter before introducing the first dancer. The only words I distinctly remember him saying were, "It's pussy time!" He thundered the phrase like a game show announcer each time a lingerie-clad dancer was about to take the stage.

     We had a rip-roaring time. I'm not sure how many strippers we watched, or how attractive or unattractive they were. I just remember feeling wildly and naturally intoxicated, as high as a kite on the happy hormones of youth, exuberantly making sail on an adventurous sea of life with an endless horizon of enthralling possibilities.

     "It's pussy time!" the DJ boomed, inviting the next stripper in the lineup to the empty stage. All of us burst into uproarious laughter every time. Thirty minutes in the waitress started pushing for a second round. We exited, stage left, making a beeline for Broadway. Outside, the air seemed a lot fresher, and the midday sunlight seemed all that much brighter.

     Parading and chortling gleefully along the wide, almost empty downtown sidewalks, we bellowed the DJ's signature phrase over and over again, hee-hawing our way to the nearest Jack-in-the-Box.

     

     Our second twin tag team happened in what I believe to be the spring of '73. Our extremely liberal parents, perhaps to the point of fault, allowed us many freedoms, including letting us bring girls over to the house after they'd gone to sleep. Or maybe they just never heard us.

     Either way, on the night in question, we left the house later in the evening than we normally did. Glenn, who was spending the night, came along with us, but he only wanted to get something to eat. Me and the twin wanted to eat and look for girls at the same time. But it's not like we were in the habit of cruising for girls, not at that age anyway. I actually only remember doing it once.

     After devouring two horsemeat dogs apiece, we kept on walking while keeping an eye out for girls. And by some stroke of remarkable luck, we soon ran across two tall and attractive Icelandic teenage girls, maybe 16 or 17 years old, walking along the side of the road.

     Bundled up against the chilly night air in parkas with fur-lined hoods, the girls stopped and looked at us when we called out to them. It was still early in the evening, 11 PM at the latest. 

     We approached them with the line, "Hey, do you wanna come to a party?" Neither of them could speak English beyond the beginner level. We asked them what their names were, which they answered. We asked them where they were going. "Home," they answered in unison.

     "No, come to our house," we pleaded, gesturing in the direction of our neighborhood about a 10-minute walk away. I don't remember what else we said, or how we talked them into coming home with us. Maybe it was having beefcake Glenn with us that made them want to follow. Miraculously, that's exactly what they did.

         The next thing I knew we were in the living room of our house, offering the girls some wine from a half-finished bottle of cabernet sauvignon our parents had recorked after dinner. They accepted, and we sat on the sofa trying to communicate with each other. 

     It's all so hazy now. The girls must've been enamored with Glenn, but he was in love with Julie and had no intentions of bedding one of the young women. At some point I made my move and invited the tallest one with long stringy blonde hair to join me to my bedroom down the hall.

     It was a short, narrow hallway. We slid past Marshall's room and down to my own, the second one on the right. Byron and sister Anne's room was just beyond mine, also to the right. The door to Mom and Dad's room stood at the end of the hall, right next to Byron and Annie's and only a few feet away from my mine. It was close quarters to say the least.

     I pulled the girl inside my room and closed the door. We got on the bed and started taking our clothes off. Once naked, we crawled under the covers together.

     Unbeknownst to me, Mars had snuck his way down the hall behind us, dragging one of our dining room chairs along with him. He'd ditched Glenn and the other girl in the living room to come and spy on me.

     About the same moment I was about to get lucky Mars was setting the chair down in front of my room, stepping up onto it, and peeking down at us through a long rectangular window at the top of the wall.

     Although my room was dark, my peeping twin stood on that chair the whole time I was trying to make love to the girl. That is, if you call sticking a penis into a vagina missionary style and then laying on top motionless for a few minutes before climaxing any kind of lovemaking.

     Don't get me wrong. It was an intoxicating feel-good experience from start to finish even without the customary and highly pleasurable sensations of pelvic thrusting. It may even have been a form of tantric sex, with a slow tantalizing build to throbbing orgasm.

     For my second mad dash away from freshly milked poontang, I whispered wait here into the girl's ear and scurried out into the hall, where Mars was standing awkwardly next to the chair. My first thought was, with a half-suppressed chuckle, what the heck are you doing out here?

     I darted straight past him and into the home's lone bathroom across the hall. I had to take a pee. Mars opened the door, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him. "Let me go back in as you," he proposed.

     The last thing I wanted to do was return to my room with that girl lying naked beneath the covers of my bed.

     "Okay, go back in there for me," I agreed. Mars vanished into thin air.

     The thought of him going back in as me made me feel like a stud. The girl had stayed freely and willingly in my bed and would probably wonder admiringly how I'd gotten it up so fast again. She might also know exactly we were doing, which was pulling the old switcheroo. But one way or the other I doubt she even cared.

     This old gringo was living far south on Mexico's Pacific side, in a surfing town world famous for its gargantuan, beach-breaking rollers. Puerto Escondido hosted absolutely zero giant resorts, so my favorite beach, a roughly two-mile stretch of wide, white sand, still remained mostly uncrowded.

     Often times throughout the day I found myself alone on the shore and preferred it that way. I liked it even more with no one else around at all, because it gave me a feeling of being by myself on a deserted island.

     Then my only companions were endless vistas and pelagic birds, giant, jutting volcanic rock outcroppings, and the stupendous sound of waves rolling in to violently die upon the shallow ends of a sloping sea.

     I loved the local inhabitants, but not the other gringos or Mexican tourists. The probability of a foreigner greeting me with a friendly first smile soared as high and distant as the puffy, white cumulus clouds daily cluttering the far-reaching edges of Puerto Escondido's oceanic horizon. Like the borders of a postcard the view left nothing in-between but tropical blue skies.

     The other gringos usually brought only their narcissistic, self-serving egos to the bread-breaking tables of my unknown existence. Mexican tourists, meanwhile, barely bode better as first-time acquaintances, offering mostly paltry side dishes of uncaring strangers' doubt.

     Hungry for human connection, I especially adored the children I encountered on my daily shoreline walks. They grinned from ear to ear whenever I got up close and glanced in their direction. Some hid their happiness shyly behind their guardians' legs or torsos; while others, bursting forward, raised and waved a cute poco hand, then shouted out a joyful word or two in Spanish.

     "Ooh, tu hijo es muy hermoso!" I lavishly told the parents. And each time the parents beamed with pride, and their niños and niñas cried out with exuberant joy or exhibited other forms of giddy glee.

     On darker days, when I felt utter mental starvation and exhaustion, my positive mind would sink to the breaking point, and I'd see everyone as misguided humans, and miserably start hating them all.

     "Fucking losers," I said out loud to himself. "Fucking goddamned, delusional morons. Where the fuck do you think you're going? Who in the hell do you think you are? QuiĂ©n carajo eres tĂș?!

     And each time, my suffering thoughts would drag my alcoholic mind back into an ice-cold Oxxo beer cooler, to the same sleazy barroom fantasy of getting sloshed with pie-eyed women as equally desperate and lonely as I was.

     Thankfully, such knee-jerk impulses to kill my tormented soul with bottles of beer or wine never ripened to fruition. I always returned soberly to what I believed to be the truth: that the only wise men and women of this world are humble, scientifically minded people who know that the Homo-sapient emotions of love, tolerance, acceptance, and forgiveness are the most important words in the human language.

     During these bouts of depression I'd rest, drink some water, have some food, and soon feel brighter, filled again with much hope and kindness for all people and the evolving earth upon which I lived.

     I suffer from mild hallucinations, brief panic attacks of demoralizing regret. My phantasmagoric world contains many misplaced memories of my younger years, lost dialogues of a thousand conversations I may or may not have ever had.

     When gripped by these bittersweet, melancholic thoughts—the constipated remembering's of all I've lost and everyone and everything I've left behind—I often, dig myself out of this pitiful, self-loathing state by playing chess. 

     Modern day computer chess has served me well. No longer does a computerized game mean challenging an electronic opponent only. Modern day computer chess now means going head-to-head against a real earthly inhabitant, someone else sitting at a table or desk, or just about anyplace else, with a laptop pinned between their knees.

     Being lost in it is what this old gringo likes most about chess, when my worrisome thoughts about what chores need doing or what problems require solving are for a short while totally rubbed out.

     Surfers talk a lot about disappearing on a wave, the instant all else in and of the world fade away, leaving only a shockingly fast, oncoming stream of exhilarating moments, one's complete melding into the perfectly thrilling now. In this way both surfing and chess are meditative, and this old gringo, who began playing chess in his mid-forties, is grateful for it.

     I also live near the sea. I reside in Da Nang, Vietnam, where in the summers I swim daily between beckoning rows of washed-out buoy lines stretching as far the eye can see along the city's extensive white sand beach. I love ocean swimming and always have. At this point in my life taking early morning swims during the peak swim season from June to September are the best part of my day and would be very hard to live without.

     Danang's long and wide world-class beach lies between the Tien Sa Peninsula and Cape Da Nang on the South China Sea. The waters in the swimming areas are still relatively clean and clear, with very little trash and other debris floating in the sea or scattered upon the shore and an average annual water temperature of 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

     The beach's foreshore slopes quickly to the nearshore so at high morning tide bathers and swimmers can reach waist-deep water within a few paces. The offshore sandbar is only a few more kicks or bounces beyond. This creates a classic fishbowl effect, with calm seas and moderate to high visibility on most mornings during the peak summer season.

     Ocean swimming in these ideal conditions is about as spiritually intoxicating and invigorating as it gets. I prefer alternating from the crawl to the breaststroke, moving back and forth between the buoy lines in shallow water no deeper than 10 or 15 feet.

     Any farther out to sea and an irrational fear of becoming the victim of a shark attack sends me into panic overdrive, when the sheer terror of turning suddenly into shark bait turns my meditative kicks and strokes into frenetic and turbulent spasms of splashing and thrashing towards the safety of the shore.

     During my countless morning swims, I've observed any number of small tropical fish darting to and from beneath the concrete hulls of the bigger flag buoys. Schools of larger nearshore fish can also be seen darting and jumping below and above the shimmering ocean surface, while here and there bite-sized sand crabs with fake black eyes on their backs dig for cover beneath the sandy ocean floor.

     Every so often, I find waterlogged money, mostly bills of small denominations, drifting along the seabed. Once spotted, I dive down to scoop up the notes and like a dutiful husband bring them straight home to my wife.

     As an older beach bum with congestive heart failure, I now know that my time on this planet will one day end in Da Nang. So many turnpikes have led up to this moment in my life, where the end of the road looms so much closer than the beginning. At this stage, the promise of life seems more like the weeds in my late mother's pea-graveled front lawn than the flowers in her backyard garden.

     Like my twin brother, the old gringo, who was down in Baja but now lives only a few hundred miles across the border in Cambodia, I too love the blissful happiness the ocean brings out in people, especially the pure joy seen in children, whose jubilant squeals and cachinnations reverberate along the seashore like the paradisial siren songs of a maritime glee club.

     Many of the children, their wide, bright smiles beaming from wet, dripping faces, stare approvingly at this old foreigner (người nước ngoĂ i) with admiration in their eyes. Other stares, mostly from adults, reflect a more benign indifference. But rarely do I ever get stink eye from the locals.

     I had once more lost all the weight, in late middle age, which isn't an easy thing to do.  

     But a forty-year-old Cambodian girl broke my heart, and in a depressed state of emotional pain and weakness I high tailed it from the land of Khmer back to the island of Oahu, where a fourteen-day Covid-19 quarantine awaited my newly awesome, thin healthiness.

     But self-pity and I felt like blowing it again, so we in our tiny studio gorged for two weeks on double meals and triple snacks, every chubby bite delivered to our door via Safeway, Inc.  

     When I'd finished the lock-down, and a week later found myself a permanent room, I began getting pain in the backs of my shoulders. Simply deteriorating muscles, I thought. The shoulder pain of heart attack fame comes in the front of the shoulders, not the rear.

      I've had those aches on and off for a year.  

     A few weeks ago, my identical twin brother had a balloon and stents inserted into his sixty-two-year-old heart to fix major blockages in two arteries. Today, I better remembered the heart attack warning signs: pain in the shoulders or back, especially the backs of my shoulders!

     My cousin Rick experienced a widowmaker heart attack in 2016. His older brother John just a few years earlier had undergone triple bypass surgery to repair what a simple CT scan revealed. Getting the test is costly when paying by cash though, but insurance wise it's cheap as a co-pay.

     Cousin Rick had cash plus insurance, yet he neglected to test himself for those narrowing arteries. Voila. I have Medicare, 50k in the bank, and get 1k a month from social security; yet I too am refusing to get the checkup. Voila again? I thought Rick died in a stupid, avoidable way. Well, welcome to the club dummy!

     I'm much happier now though, as my little, electronic, human brain isn't sensing anything anymore. It's very pleasant here in this dark, silent place of scattered atoms. We're all waiting extremely patiently for new assignments, and we'll see you soon.

     Old expatriate might be the best way to describe my final years as an identical twin. I've been teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) for 21 years now.

     These days, I work as an IELTS speaking trainer for an English as a Second Language center in Da Nang. I teach part-time, around 12 hours a week. I don't mind the work too much. It's a pretty good job for me at this stage in my career. After 20-plus years as an ESL teacher in four Asian countries it's the last job I'll ever have.

     But for the demons, my life as an old expat, as my late father would say, ain't too shabby. At least that's the way I see it most of the time. Other times, I see it as a total shit show.

     Perhaps my main downfall as a transient being, and the foremost reason I failed to reach my full potential as an earthborn mortal, is my largely lifelong addiction to masturbation. This is a touchy subject to say the least, no pun intended.

     My dependence on and eventual habituation to the erotic stimulation my own genitals began innocently enough with Playboy magazines in the seventh grade. But I experienced my first penis-in-vagina-sex, along with my first inkling of an orgasm, when I was only nine years old. It happened in Anchorage, Alaska.

     Her name was Katie, a 9-year-old from our neighborhood who also happened to be the go-to girl for any 9–12-year-old boys in our neck of the woods looking to explore their preadolescent sexuality.

     I believe our first encounter took place in her bedroom one sunny summer afternoon while playing albums on her record player. At some point an innocent game of you show me yours and I'll show you mine led to a titillating flurry of rubbing, petting, and pecking.

     Weeks or months later, a group of boys from the neighborhood got Katie to come over to the house of two of the boys, brothers who lived in a big two-story place right off a trailhead leading through some woods to a sledding and tobogganing hill about a quarter mile away. My brothers and I had many adventures in that wooded area.

      I remember watching Scooby-Doo cartoons while waiting for my turn with Katie, who was already being violated by our hosts in the walk-in closet of one of their bedrooms. A second pair of brothers from another family were also waiting for their seven minutes in heaven with Katie in the closet.

     I went in after the first two brothers. The lightbulb in the closet had been clicked on, and Katie was lying on the carpeted floor wearing nothing but underwear. While fumbling and fingering around with her hairless pussy, I got my first peak inside a vaginal opening. It may have been her hymen, but whatever it was, it looked bloodred and menacing, like the maw of some wormlike alien.

     After poking my penis around her labia for a while we changed positions, with me lying on my back and Katie climbing on top. We wriggled around for few minutes and then something magical happened: my four inches of boyhood inadvertently entered her introitus and slid up into vaginal canal.

     Just at that moment the older brother of the two boys still waiting in the wings opened the closet door and looked down at my face. "Hey, it's our turn," he whispered.

      All at once a mind-numbing and spine-tingling surge of paralyzing orgasmic pleasure sluiced through my body like fervent blasts from a fixed-thrust hypergolic decent engine on a soft lunar landing. I couldn't move. I lay motionless under Katie, staring upwards with unblinking, narcotized eyes, the trancelike rush of rapturous ecstasy shooting through me like liquid-fueled rocket propellant.

     The boy seemed to find my momentary state of mind-blowing paralysis funny. Chuckling, he briskly waved his hand above my head to try and snap me out of it. "Hey, hey, time to get up," he enjoined.

     The afterglow of pleasurable euphoria stayed with me for a while longer, lingering in my gut and groin like the jouncing, undulating parachute of a decelerating space capsule coming back down to earth.

     I can't remember for the life of me what made us so mad at each other. But anger indiscriminately takes no prisoners, and on this particular flashback the first fuming had mostly to do with finding an apartment.

     It was 1979, give or take a year. We were barely 20 years old, at the most 21. We were good-looking, healthy, and full of so much promise.

     By healthy, I mean physically. Mentally we were both struggling, trying to find our footing, feeling lost and unsure of ourselves while dealing with perhaps the greatest setback of our lives: giving up the dream of playing college basketball.

     We were living in our hometown of San Diego, a city where for years young people from all over the country had made it their dream to live, but we were a long way from living our dream. I'm not sure why we felt like such castaways back then, at such a young age and with our whole lives ahead of us.

     But that's manic depression for you. By the time we turned 20, the claws of bipolar disorder were already deep in our respective buttocks. Oblivious to our knee-jerk compulsions, we soldiered on for many years as best we could, taking on the regrets and ramifications of our mistakes one by one.

     Somewhere between us living rent free together in the home of a gay model and his wife and infant child up in Irvine and moving into a one-bedroom apartment together on Ensenada Place in South Mission Beach, we'd gone looking for places to live in Ocean Beach.

     The details of this particular row are a bit hazy now. After looking at several rentals we suddenly got into a heated argument about which place to take. As I sit here trying to remember what happened my mind is going blank. I'm not sure exactly what set us off. All I can vaguely remember is us storming along the sidewalk on Niagra Avenue in downtown Ocean Beach absolutely livid with each other.

     I think we'd eaten at one of the breakfast places on Niagra in those days. The argument may have started over pancakes and eggs, but again, I'm not sure anymore. We screamed at each other with hurtful and hateful words springing from the deepest, darkest places of our disappointment and displacement in and from the world. It came from the anguish of not knowing our true calling in life.

     Of course, during these times we forgot about living our best lives in the moment and being grateful for every minute of our youth that we got to spend with each other.

     Needless to say, we ended up not getting a place together. At least not on that particular occasion. But there were other times we lived for short periods together in relative peace and harmony as roommates. They are now priceless moments in our brief life spans.

     Another time we got into a major imbroglio was at a breakfast place that our mom and dad used to take us to back in the early 70s called Mr. D's. Their special was two eggs, hash browns, choice of ham or sausage, and a buttermilk biscuit. All for 99 cents. And the biscuits were to die for.

     We went there many times with our family, and a few other times either with friends or each other. Again, in this instance, I don't remember what we were fighting about. Things got so heated Mars started spitting food out of his mouth.

     As I remember it, Mars usually got a lot more worked up than I did during our battles royal. Nine times out of ten I tended to get his goat a lot more than he got mine. But that's not something I'm proud of. On the contrary, it makes me wince, as Mars says, about how unable we both were to fully enjoy the warm fuzzies of being alive at such a young age together while here on planet Earth.

     One more mad at me story comes to mind. It was the time we decided to go live in Hawaii together, in the Fall of 1999. After leaving a job as a TV videographer in Texas, a gig that had lasted only a few months, I decided my next best move was moving to the Big Island to become a divemaster.

     My plan was to pay for the training needed to become a divemaster at a dive shop in Kailua-Kona and then work as a guide and crew member on one of the diving boats there. This dream of mine all came true, albeit in a warped and perhaps even pathetic way.

     After booking a flight from LAX to Hilo International, Mars and I stayed in a hotel above the Oceanside Harbor for one night before driving up the coastal route in a rental car. I started to write about this in a short story here, In No Particular Order, but have yet to finish the first chapter.

     We left a day before our scheduled flight and when we got to Laguana Beach we decided to hang out for an hour or two. It was the beginning of the end.

     We climbed over a long, forlorn sea wall and sat down on our beach towels in the deep white sand. It was roughly 11 am on a weekday morning and the wide, desolate beach was nearly deserted.

     I vaguely remember a sinking feeling of dispirited loneliness overcoming me as I took in the surrounding scene: an inviting yet unoccupied volleyball court, its taut net perfectly still in the warm, breezeless September air, and a trio of sexy young girls trapsing through the sand looking for a place to lay their beach towels and sunbathe.

     It felt like being caught in a crevasse of high anxiety and deep disillusionment, not to mention sexual longing and frustration, from which there was no place to crawl out. I was 40, maybe 41 years old, without a place to call home, falling into the abyss of my first midlife crisis.

     Sadly, we were each in our own separate, inconsolable worlds. We could no longer find solace in each other, in just being together, at an age when so much of our lives still lay ahead. And right there, while lounging free and unencumbered on that magnificent Southern California seashore, we began sliding into one of the worst falling outs of our lives.

     Of course, there would be a few more spats for us to navigate before we gave up quarreling for good.

     We left the beach and while driving the rest of way to LAX the subject of Mars wanting to smuggle half a pound of cheap Mexican weed onto the flight came up. I told him not to do it, but he was adamant. We got into it and by the time I parked the car in the Holiday Inn parking lot it was game over.

     When we got out of the rental, Mars was out of his mind, screaming at the top of his lungs and pounding his chest with his hands. Facing me from a few feet away, fists raised, he suddenly took a fighting stance against me.

     His violent outburst scared and horrified me at the same time. This was my identical twin brother, so mad at me he was ready to turn our verbal disagreement into a physical brawl.

     I backed off and retaliated with the silent treatment, which had been my tour de force against him over the years. I got my duffle bag out of the backseat and headed to the lobby to check in alone. It was one of the worst moments of my life. In shock and deeply wounded, my own anger, not to mention fear and loathing, took its ungodly toll upon my soul.

     I checked into a single room, while Mars called his wife at the time, Eva (mentioned in the Twinship Lasts a Lifetime section), who drove up to the hotel and took him back to San Diego.

     I flew to Hilo all by my lonesome. Gut wrenched, I made my next move like a wounded and desperate animal gone berserk, fighting and flighting at the same time, Hunter S. Thompson playbook in hand.

     The jungles of Hilo are amazing.

     By the time I got there I was already on my way to another big fail, which may or may not have been a good thing. It's just the way it happened. What's good and what's bad, isn't this what life eventually comes down? Choosing and losing, winning and spinning. What's the difference?

     My room at the back of the lodge had a window, maybe even a balcony, which overlooked an amazing jungle filled with all sorts of tropical trees and birds. I think I had some weed with me and got high that day, but I don't really recall. Hazy memories, all of them!

     I was still smarting from the breakup with Mars. I missed my bro terribly, which put me on the melancholy side. But I was also mad at him, after he had gotten mad at me, and I tried my best to forget about him and not be too bothered or worried about my screwed-up twin.

     At least that's how I kidded myself. I knew full well that Mars was and always would be the biggest part of me, whatever that means. I wanted to enjoy my trip, but sadly, without him it probably wasn't even possible.

     I still had some stamina left. My first morning in Hilo I walked to the nearest beach, which wasn't really a beach but rather a rocky cove. And what an amazing cove it was. The stuff of postcards. But I was feeling disappointed, as I almost always did, having been dreaming of soft white sand and string bikinis rather than the jagged, razor-sharp reef rocks of Hilo Bay.

     I guess you could say I was flighty, perhaps even unstable, and you'd probably be right. In my defense, I was really only half a person. The other half was Mars.

     I'd spent the first 18 years of my life with him, and during that time we'd done just about everything together. We'd taken on the world side by side in a mostly happy-to-lucky game of doubles rather than singles. Twinship is a special kind of love only twins can know, a bond as old and deep as the beginning of time.

      Looking back, I somehow managed to make it through my solo escapade on the Big Island without getting into too much trouble. At the time, I'd I tricked myself into believing that the consequences of my twin-or-no-twin highwire act were minor speed bumps that could not and would not slow or stop me on my merry way.

     It only took a couple of hours to get to Kailua-Kona. Along the way, on route 200, I took in the hilly countryside, fretting over the hard fact that I was very much alone and out of control.

     I had a plan, but it was flawed. My father, Thomas, had brought this up a few days before Mars and I packed up and left.

     We were out at the pool of a condo in Oceanside my mother and sister owned together. I'd gone out for a few laps and Dad had followed me out there. He paced up and down the length of the pool until I finally stopped to see what he wanted.

     "How are you financing your trip to Hawaii, Mitch?" Dad asked, his tanned and wrinkled face covered in a somber scowl.

     "I've still got some money on my credit cards," I blurted out.

     Dad looked daggers at me, shaking his nearly bald head.

     To assure and appease him, I added, "Once I get a job as a divemaster I'll be able to pay it down slowly. Don't worry, Dad. It's an adventure!"

     "Yeah, an adventure in misery," Dad deadpanned. "Why don't you get a job around here, son?"

     "There aren't any jobs around here that I want, dad. I wanna work on a dive boat in Kailua-Kona. It's paradise there, Pop.

     "Mitch, you don't have the money to fly off to Hawaii, and putting your trip on your credit cards is a very foolish thing to do." Dad was trying his best to talk me out of it, but I'd already made up my mind.

     I looked up at his weary face, into his steely blue, disappointed eyes.

     "We're going, dad. It's a done deal. It's a solid plan and I'm ready to go for it. It won't be easy to pull off, but I know it's the right move for me at this point in my life. Why not give it a try, huh? What've I got to lose?"

     "How about your financial freedom?" Dad countered. "Maxing out your credit cards isn't your best move, son. You should get a job here and save up some money for a trip like this."

     "I'm not gonna wait, Dad. Come hell or high water, Mars and I are headed for Hawaii."

     Dad sighed and lipped his final words. "You're gonna be in hell and up to your neck in hot water, brother. You're gonna regret this, Mitch. You need more debt like you need a hole in the head."

     I dove back under the water for another lap. When I came back up to continue my breast strokes, Dad was on his way out of the pool area. Then in his early 70s and fit as a fiddle, he ambled to the gate of the pool and clicked it shut behind him like an able-bodied farmer closing the door on yet another ruined and unsavable crop.

     From Hilo, the 200, aka the Senator Daniel K. Inouye Highway, cuts and curves through the middle of the Big Island past the Mauna Kea Ice Age Reserve and Mount Mauna Kea. It eventually connects with route 190, or the Mamalahoa Highway, and from there it's a straight shot down Hawaii Belt Road to Kailua-Kona, the Gold or Kohala Coast on the northwestern side of the island.

     I don't remember getting there, but I do recall staying in a somewhat cushy hotel room for the first few days. It was only three or four stars, but well-appointed and very close to the sea, somewhere along Alii Drive near the Coconut Grove Marketplace.

     Depressed to the point of isolation, I spent too much time in that comfy room, ordering delivery from restaurants in the area and overeating. I was feeling way too sad and out of sorts for a guy who'd landed smack-dab in the middle of paradise.

     Deep down, I knew I was living beyond my means. I was also jonesing for cocaine and methamphetamine, my drugs of choice when it came to my sexual addiction to pornography. I was one jolly-seeking son of a gun!

     I took my first swim in Kailua Bay down by the pier. The water was lovelier than I could've ever imagined. I also located the dive shop I'd be training with, Eco Adventures, in a small retail center next to the swimming pool of the King Kamehameha Kona Beach Hotel.

     I quickly found a relatively cheap place to live outside of town about 12 miles up Alii Drive near the town of Kealakekua. I rented a studio on a small coffee plantation owned by a single woman in her late 50s. The apartment was ground level but underneath the woman's house, along the side and at the back of her slanting property.

     The panoramic view was spectacular. From the sweeping lawn outside my room, it was nothing but 180 degrees of shimmering Pacific Ocean far below and beyond my very own Kona coffee and Koa tree wonderland.

     It was the perfect place for cane spiders. Scientifically speaking, cane spiders are termed Heteropoda venatoria, a species of spider in the Sparassidae family, called huntsman spiders.

     The main house was surrounded by either apple or Cuban red banana trees, and there were plenty of cane spiders that came with them. At first, the sheer size of this arachnid scared the bejesus out of me. In fact, cane spiders are the largest species in Hawaii and can grow up to 4-6 inches, legs included.

     The year was 1999 and Google had only been around for a year, so I didn't know how to Google the spider to find out how dangerous it might be. I also had no idea that cane spiders, also nicknamed large brown spiders, giant crab spiders, and even banana spiders, are commonly found inside homes and that some countries even consider them welcome houseguests.

     Rather than spinning webs to catch their prey, cane spiders hunt for food directly, eating mostly moths and butterflies but also indoor pests including ants, roaches, and silverfish. They inject their prey with venom containing the toxin HpTX2, a potassium channel blocker. Although not deadly to humans, their bites are said to be plenty painful.

     Based on the cane spider's behavior, I soon learned they prefer to run away rather than put up a fight and defend themselves. Unfortunately, my first reaction was to squash the terrifying creatures on sight, so I killed several of them before eventually just shooing the creepy crawlers out of my room with a soft bristled broom.

     Luckily, I never got bit by one. My landlady, a stout woman with short silver hair whose name I can't remember, told me to leave the spiders alone and they wouldn't bother me. She was right, but it still creeped me out every time I saw one crawling along the low pile carpet or across the walls and windowsills.

     The landowner was a nice lady who pretty much left me alone the whole time I lived there. I was only inside her house a couple of times, once to sign the month-to-month rental agreement and the second time to get my deposit back and say goodbye. I stayed in her studio for only two months before moving into an ocean view house on Alii Drive with another diver from the shop.

     While living up on the plantation I binged twice on my stimulants of choice. The first was a solo coke and porn party with two grams of decent blow, a fifth of Southern Comfort, and several porn videos I'd rented from an adult bookstore in town. The second was a meth and beer all-nighter with several other druggies I'd met in town.

     The back of my apartment was separated from another studio on the other side by a very thin wall with one crack in the corner closet big enough to see through. At first, I kept the volume on my Panasonic 9" TV/VCR combo on the low side, but eventually I was too fucked up to care and cranked up the sound a lot higher. I'm sure my neighbors heard the moans and groans of those sex scenes all night.

     The night I did coke, the studio on the other side of the plywood partition was occupied by a couple in their early 20s. The entrance to their studio was on the other side of the main house. I never actually spoke to either one of them, but I did see them coming and going from time to time. Occasionally I heard them talking in their apartment. Although they spoke in hushed, keep-your-voice-low-he-can-hear-us tones, it was almost like they were in the same room.

     The girl was a Polynesian hottie. Just the thought of her behind that drywall made me horny. I tried to peek through the crack in the closet a few times, but I never saw or heard any action between them.

     In the wee still hours of that morning, my young neighbors must've heard me snorting lines and jacking off, but I got lucky, and the cops were never called. By the time the sun came up I had only two terrible things to contend with: a guilty conscience for blowing the money and a horribly morbid coke hangover making me wonder in forlorn fashion what the fucking point of being alive even was.

     Hypersexuality is real, and in my case the only cure is death.

     Recovery clubs and fellowship clans will tell you differently, but most of these anonymous addiction cliques are so full of crap they wouldn't know striped skunk poop if they fell into a pile of it face first. I witnessed some of their non compos mentis bullshit firsthand and it was the exactly the same kind of classic human nature hogwash George Carlin liked to joke about.

     Almost decade earlier, I'd gotten married for the second time to a woman I'd met in the seventh grade at Pacific Beach Middle School, which at the time was called PB Junior High. We used to call it Peanut Butter and Jelly High. The marriage was annulled after one year. It was my fault of course. I was one fucked up bat in the belfry, and compulsive sexual behavior was my main echolocator.

     My bag was, and still is, masturbating to pornography. My pornomania began innocently enough, first with Playboy and Penthouse magazines, and later with adult videos. Eventually, my repeated behaviors and intense urges for solo sexual arousal led me to the promised land of Internet porn.

     Plenty of good men have gone down this smutty road. It's a raunchy, rip-roaring ride, but it's also an out-of-control rabbit hole of damaged self-esteem and relationships.

     My favorite mag was Playboy's Book of Lingerie, the last hook in an erotically fixated Megalodon that would become my calling card in life. My father once wrote that having an organism is equivalent to meeting our maker, meaning the red-hot orgasmic moment of feeling the earth move is the closest we can ever get to God or any other Supreme Being.

     As an agnostic, I believe lovemaking to the point of climax, either by copulating or jacking off, is just nature's scientific way of making us want to procreate our species. It makes no difference if sperm swim up pussies to predestined eggs or perish in wads of tissue papers and wet wipes.

     But if there were a kingdom come, I wouldn't be surprised to find the Creator and every other spirit in the place floating rapturously around in a continuous state of intoxicating euphoria.

     Back to my story. My second wife, Rachelle, eventually got me to attend my first Sexaholics Anonymous meeting. At first, I thought I'd found the holy grail, but boy was I wrong. The SA pundits will try to trick you into believing that the only path to recovery is through fellowships with other sex addicts and thorough self-inventories based on what are called the twelve steps.

     Twelve-step programs might work for some people, at least in theory. But most folks going all in on fellowship groups with whatever skin they have left in the game are just kidding themselves. The reason is simple: fraternities are ruled by the laws of human nature, which means they're flawed and eventually take on a delusional and deceptive life of their own.

     Just ask the real Shirley Jackson or the fictional Doctor Moreau.

     Like most well-intentioned addicts, I eventually found a men's group I liked and started attending meetings on a regular basis. Rachelle made sure of this. That's when I met Gary (I don't remember his real name), a short, stocky, jet-black haired and bearded fellow in his mid-30s who claimed to be a motivational coach and speaker by trade and certainly proved it by stealing the show every time he shared at meetings.

     When Gary the dynamic and seemingly sincere orator spoke, people listened. He assured us he was hanging on to his sobriety. He told us it wasn't easy and that he had to work hard for it. He said that if we worked the steps and put getting and staying sober at the top of our priority lists, each and every one of us could be free from sexual addiction.

     By the time I started going to Gary's group, he was already the most popular and respected addict there. His charismatic and captivating talks mesmerized and motivated everyone who listened. And I too fell for his bloviation hook, line, and stinker.

     A few months into my recovery I went off the deep end and made my way to one of the high-end strip clubs in the city, Deja Vu Showgirls. I was never a regular at all-nude strip joints or topless titty bars but like any other proper sex addict I was never against going to one.

     The nightclub was hopping. Dolled up and scantily clad girls could be seen standing, walking, strutting, talking, smiling, laughing, dancing, and grinding in every direction. The dimly lit pleasure dome was abuzz with blaring music and gleaming party lights, pounding and pulsating in a smokey, boozy, swirling neon haze of horndog high energy.

     I made my way to the main stage and took the only seat left, keeping my eyes on the hot, busty blonde working the pole. No one seemed to notice my arrival. Left and right, other men were staring up too, drinking and clapping and throwing bills, mostly ones and fives, onto the bronze-railed stage.

     That's when I saw Gary. He was on the other side of the T-shaped, poshly lacquered platform, looking up like a wolf in a butcher shop at the current chunk of flesh caught in the stripper lights. It was Blackbeard himself—steady, sober, smooth sailing Gary—right there in the thick of it, licking his concupiscent chops like the rest of us!

     That's when I knew it was all bull pucky. Gary had been talking out of both sides of his mouth, high as a masterful, line-broken kite on his own brand of deceptive toploftiness. The motherfucker was just as fake and fraudulent, duplicitous and double-dealing, and lost and lonely as the next suffering sex fiend.

     I'm not sure if Gary ever saw or even recognized me that night. He never once looked directly at me. Like every other swinging dick in the joint, my man Gary was fully engaged and preoccupied by the ever so erogenous and eye-popping entertainment going on around us.

     But I kept looking over at him. I wanted the prick to know I was there and that I knew his big secret. And while trying to catch the corners of his eyes there was one instant when the goofy, goatish, I'm-so-into-you look on his face changed to a caught-in-the-cookie-jar countenance.

     I believe he knew I was watching him but didn't care or dare to look in my direction. At least not squarely. One mainstage dancer later Gary and his hard-on were gone, vanishing into thin striptease air.

     Scuba diving from a boat on the Kona Coast is out of this world.

     The owners of the dive shop, Dave and Elsa (like the lioness from the film Born Free) welcomed me with open pocketbooks. Dave was an American, tall and husky and fit as a fiftyish gym rat who could stand a little more cardio in his workouts. Elsa was Swedish, or maybe German, a petite, short-haired brunette in her mid-forties who spoke with a European accent.

     Dave and Elsa were good people and made a nice couple. They were living the dream, running their palmy scuba diving business in Kona Town from the Kailua Pier with all the gusto and panache of two wheeler-dealers in a money-making shark tank.

     My experience as a divemaster-in-training and then briefly as a boat-based dive leader was a guggle of mixed gas. I was well-trained and during my training Dave and Elsa gave me a part-time job at their main office and warehouse, where I cleaned and organized the place, ran errands, and filled up tanks for the morning dives. Later, they even gave me a chance to be part of their dive team. But my dream of working as a pro diver would get ripped to pieces by a cold-blooded shark of my own making.

     At first, while living up in my Kealakekua studio, things went fairly smoothly. Despite my constant mood swings and drug cravings I stayed relatively sane and sober, taking my scuba diving training in stride and for the most part enjoying the ride.

     Like most overthinking addicts I had good and bad days. But even on the good days I trudged along my road of hapless destiny with a gnawing sense of unsettling uncertainty nibbling at the back of my brain like pesky Tribbles on a twin trek to nowhere. There was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide; yet I kept fooling myself into thinking there was.

   On the bad days I'd stare woefully out the side kitchen windows of my ground-floor studio, beyond the lush, sloping green lawn at the back of the house to the distant rows and clusters of Koa trees towering high above the sea like mighty giants on perpetual watch of the dazzling body of water below.

     I missed my brother terribly. Sadly, my up-and-down solo days as a sad-sack worrywart made me a poster man-child for middle-aged loneliness and despair.

     On the good days I marched onward and upward, as high as the magnificent Koas, counting my lucky stars at every turn of my Professional Association of Diving Instructors adventure. Figuratively speaking, I had it made in the Koa shade. Despite the black holes in my psyche, my dream of becoming a professional divemaster seemed very much on track. I was having the time of my life. I just didn't know it yet.

     I soon found out that becoming a certified PADI divemaster is tremendous fun. I went on lots of amazing trips and dives, exploring underwater caves, jumping into the open sea with sleeping humpbacks and pods of massive, eye-peering pilot whales swimming pokily towards and then past me in the crystal blue-green water. I dove at night with the mantas and saw reef sharks, oceanic white tips, hammerheads, and even a few tigers. It was thrilling.

     I also learned about the science of diving, called dive theory, which involves the physics and physiology of recreational dive planning. The most important thing is knowing how not to get the bends. It took some time and effort, but I enjoyed studying for and passing this part of the training too.

     But the best part of scuba is the going out on the dive boat. I took countless trips out to sea, standing on the top deck of the vessel with other crew members and mingling with the customers as we cruised along the island's rocky volcanic shoreline to the best dive sites and coral reefs the Gold Coast had to offer.

     Once at the first dive site, everyone got into their wetsuits, geared up, and then plunged into the warm, welcoming ocean, giving perfunctory okay hand signs before sinking down to explore the fantastical, awe-inspiring oceanic world in the depths below. It was a blast. But picture-book Jacques Cousteau recreation doesn't come cheap.

     By the time I moved down to Alii drive I was feeling the pinch of my limited credit cards. I moved in with a fellow diver named Casey, who looked like he'd been cut by the same cloth as Jesus. He had long, stringy, shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes. His face was thin, his body wiry, and his smile big and heartwarming.

     During my first week on the island Casey had delivered a few pizzas to my hotel room. In addition to his part-time job as a delivery driver he also put in regular shifts at the dive shop's retail store in the Kona Square and worked whenever he could as a dive guide.

     I'd soon find out that only a few divers, including a retired cop named Gary, were given regular shifts on the morning dives. Casey did mostly night dives and maybe one or two morning dives a week. I'm not sure if he was a divemaster or not but most of the guides were.

     When Casey invited me to be his roommate on Alii Drive I jumped for joy. It didn't matter that my room was a doorless 5'x6' kitchen pantry that had been revamped into a bedroom refitted with a wall-to-wall scaffold used as a bedstead to hold a mattress for sleeping. I don't remember how much rent he asked me to pay, but it was dirt cheap for a sea view place right in Kona Town.

     This is about the same time I met another guy living his dream on the Big Island who worked in one of the small retail dive and snorkel shops right off Alii Drive somewhere in the vicinity of the Kona Marketplace.

     His name was Steve, who looked like a young Bert Reynolds, with short, coifed jet-black hair and dark brown eyes. He had an easy way about him, a down-to-earth composure, yet he also came across as a man's man with equal parts low-key cockiness and measured self-assurance. Steve was a natty charmer and as such a natural salesman. I liked him from the start.

     Eventually, we started hanging out together, which set me on course to yet another coke all-nighter, this time on New Year's Eve 2000, an off-the-wall night of debauchery that turned out to be one of the final dive knives in my foamed neoprene body bag.

     The first day I met Steve I was checking out some of the tourist shops on Alli Drive in the downtown area. I had just purchased some jewelry, a sterling silver chain and shark pendant that I wore for many years before finally losing. I miss that shark. It was a crescent shaped great white, jaws open and body twisted, as though surging back to devour its mortally wounded prey.

     I'm not sure what made me walk into Steve's shop. Maybe I wanted to see if they sold any diver's watches, which was always fun to do. After a few minutes on my own, and with no diving watches in sight, I was about to bolt when Steve came up to me with a sly grin on his handsomely proportioned face.

     "Hey," is all he said, giving me a nod of recognition.

     I nodded back without speaking.

     "Are you a diver?" Steve asked, eyeing me with genuine bemusement.

     "Diver in training," I said. 

     "Oh, one of those, huh?" Steve replied, smiling at his choice of words. "We get a lot of those in here. Looking for anything in particular?"

     "Not really. Just killing time. But I might be in the market for some gear later down the road."

     "Which dive shop?" Steve asked friendlily. He was good at keeping the conversation going.

     "Eco adventures."

     "Oh, yeah. We get a lot of divers from there. Dave and Elsa, right? I run into them once in a while at Kona Coffee. Nice people."

     Steve was looking right at me, giving me good eye contact. He appeared completely at ease and engaged at the same time, as though the customer interaction part of his job came easy to him. He was just being himself and having fun at work. People fun.

     Steve was a people person, and people were naturally attracted to him. He once told me about the time he ran into the American actor Woody Harrelson in a Kona Town watering hole, where they hung out together for a few hours drinking shots and kibitzing. Steve said Woody pounded a lot of beers and shots, but that he was a happy drunk.

     Another famous American actor, Christina Ricci, also spent some tavern time with Steve one night, telling him among other things that she liked having sex on coke. Steve said they drank together for several hours and that he kept hitting on her until she politely excused herself, saying she had to wake up early the next day.

     I didn't see Steve for a while after we first met. I was busy with my training, which was going surprisingly well. Dave had invited me to join him and Gary for some early morning workouts at a local gym, starting at 4:45 A.M., and I was getting in some much-needed stationary cycling before the sun came up.

     I had game, at least for a little while. In between the madness, I stayed as on track as I could, rarely going out, eating cheap, healthy food, and going to bed, tuckered out, pretty early. At some point, as my training drew to a close, I started to see my divemaster dream as something that might actually come true, just as long as I wanted it to. 

     The truth is, perhaps I never wanted any of my goals and aspirations in life to pan out. Maybe I wanted to fail. My father once came up with the idea of having a personalized license plate spelling the word FAILURE. How funny is that? For most people failure is a dirty word, exposing a deficient lack of success. While we can learn from our defeats, most people prefer to lay their eggs privately rather than publicly.

     Being seen as a failure in the public eye is probably one of our worst fears, and being unabashedly fearless of our fizzles to the point of being openly unafraid to admit our nonsuccess makes a mockery of the word by taking away its power over us.

     For me, crashing and burning was easier and also more gut-wrenching, which made me feel more in touch with the acute poignancy of life. As a born loser, my goals and aspirations were always part of an unreachable dream in which doing what was expected of me or considered the right move for me constantly felt like the wrong thing to do.

     Thus, my choices in life continued to spiral out of control, creating make-it-up-as-you-go-along scenarios and spur-of-the-moment energies which perdured my addictive going-against-the-grain adrenalin rushes. As my father used to say, I was up shit creek without a paddle. I was a bends test diver, and my life was a crash course in decompression sickness.

     Truth be told, I've lived most of my life in a kind of stupor, a trancelike row, row, row your boat feeling in the pit of my gut or back of my brain which makes me think or feel that the people and things around me are never quite what they're supposed to be.

     This is a form of madness, of course. Madness from the past, madness in the moment, madness for the future. I was hook, line, and sinker for the habit-forming loop the loop of stinking-thinking thoughts inside my head. Confused and misled, I've lived with the curse of overthinking my entire adult life.

     But at least I'm still here, putting something down about me in print. My words will live on after I'm gone. Maybe no one will ever read them, but at that point it won't matter. At least not to me. I'll be dead.

     You might read these words one day and wonder what kind of a man I really was. I was a good man with a bad moral compass. I was a thinking man with the heart of a lion and the mind of a weasel. It was always hard for me to tell the difference between doing good or bad and being smart or stupid. Although I had some good qualities, such as compassion for others, there were more jokers in my deck of cards than aces.

     As my mother used to say, I was often a day late and a dollar short in the decision department. Since early adulthood, the life I inhabited had always been slightly off kilter, as though lacking or missing key pieces or elements of an unsolvable puzzle or unanswerable riddle that would one day teach me how to take life by the horns and measure up to my capabilities. To suddenly become the best version of myself.

     What if everything that happens to us in life was going to happen anyway? That no matter how much we wanted or how hard we tried we were powerless to control the fateful trajectories of our lives? And despite any of the choices we make and actions we take the twists and turns of our predestined lifetimes always lead us to the same outcome? So that every curve in the road of life takes us strangely and continually forward to the exact place we're supposed to be?

     Ultimately, no matter how much we trick ourselves into believing we can control what happens to us in our lives, we cannot stop or alter the predetermined paths our lifetimes take because all roads lead ineluctably to the same futuristic result. In the hapless here-and-now moments of our lives any and all decisions we make and moves we take bring us constantly closer to the precise places we were always going to be. And in the end, we wind up exactly where we were always meant to be.

     Gary, the retired police officer from Los Angeles, fit the type-A American hard ass mold to a tee. Pushing 60, the physically fit and strikingly handsome ex-cop looked strong and youthful for his age, bullying his way through his early-retirement years as a rough and tumble Hairy Ape of a man, hard-eyed and calculating. But the gruff gorilla also knew how to turn on the charm, particularly when it came to getting what he wanted. As such, Gary appeared to me like a Bates Motel security guard: friendly on the outside, demented on the inside.

     Gary's stern and intimidating temperament both scared and puzzled me. I didn't understand his bossy and flinty disposition, the harshness in his I-couldn't-give-two-shits-about-you mentality, and it didn't take long before I saw Gary as my Big Island bĂȘte noire, a thorn in my side not to be trusted. Yet underneath it all, I also knew the disputatious dickhead was just another macho and adventure-seeking senior citizen trying to press the very best out of life's freshly squeezed citrus fruits.

     While working as a gopher for the dive shop, I rode shotgun in the company truck with Gary a few times to pick up the Hawaiian rolls, cold cuts, and vegetable trays needed for the midmorning snack provided on the boat between dives. On our first food run to the local Safeway store, Gary pulled the truck into the nearly empty parking lot, parked near the entrance, and told me to wait.

     "Stay in the truck, I'll be right back," said Gary, stone-faced as a perfect stranger. He licked his brassy-haired chevron mustache and shut the door behind him. While waiting, a gentle drizzle began tapping the windshield of the old V-8 Chevy, and I noticed the light in the sky growing, unfolding somewhere between predawn and daybreak.

     We'd left the gym at 5:15 A.M., and it was now 5:27 A.M., so we now had 33 minutes to get the food, drive back down to the office/training room and storage facility, help load up the scuba tanks and gear into the rusty bed of the truck, and then get down to the dock by 6 A.M.

     Sunrise came a little past 6 A.M., and by that time all the tanks, gear, food, and water needed to be safely stowed on the double-decker vessel, and we were then free to begin greeting the day's customers.

     I have one or two funny stories about the schmoozing aspect of the job, which was tolerable enough, even fun at times in a meeting-new-people kind of way. It all depended on the sort of customers we got.

     Most of the divers were fun, happy-go-lucky folks hardwired to be social. They arrived at the dock jubilant and coolheaded, untroubled by whatever else was happening in their lives. They came as kindred spirits, gung-ho and ready to share their next scuba gest on the high seas with captain and crew.

     Some people on the dive list were the quieter types, divers who either needed or wanted to spend most of the trip lost in their own thoughts. And what better place to meditate and ponder life then with the warm sun on their shoulders, salty sea spray in their faces, and dolphins chasing the wake on a dive boat chugging along the Gold Coast of Hawaii's Big Island between some of the most spectacular coral reef dive sites on the planet?

     A few of the divers who climbed aboard were on the stodgy side, too smug and aloof for their own good, as though the entire emprise was all about them and their needs. They were rich snobs who saw the crew as worker bees providing a service which they had paid good money for. The two best ways to deal with these unpleasant fat cats were first to grin and bear them and then to kill them with kindness. Nothing too unbearable.

     On the intolerable side, I knew all the chin-wagging chitchat was just a make-believe part of the sale. Like most jobs in the travel and tourism industry, it was a soft-skill gabfest of insincerity, right down to the last you guys were amazing and let's definitely keep in touch.

     Beyond the sham artificiality, the expedition did have a deeper meaning. It was a passageway to the shared human experience of perfect strangers with a common interest spending a few gutsy hours together in the one of the most indelible and awe-inspiring of places under the most exhilarating and extraordinary of circumstances. It was, beyond a doubt, the perfect place for all diving souls on board to bucketize their bucket lists.

     There was a time when I thought being a scuba diving guide in Hawaii might be the right job for me. Gary seemed perfectly content with his position, and even made the job look easy. Wake up at dawn, go to the gym, get the food, load up the gear, head to the dock, go diving, have some snacks, go diving again, rinse off the masks, snorkels, and wetsuits, go back to the dock, return the gear to the storage unit, done by noon. What could be cooler than that?

      However, as I soon found out, Gary was on the inside track. He was Dave's supervisory right-hand man, a savvy diver, attractively machismo, and to the clients at least, charismatically palsy-walsy. This meant macho man Gary did less of the grunt work, had the best schedule, and got to dive more than anyone else. Like Dave, he did morning dives only, Monday to Friday, while the rest of the employees took their schedules and dives in pecking-order fashion.

     During my time with Eco Adventures, I was never employed as a divemaster or dive boat guide. I was a paying customer, going on the dives as part of my training. This included one night dive with the manta rays, one cave dive, and dozens of open water dives.

     While working as gofer at the main office, I once witnessed how brutally competitive the scuba diving job market in Hawaii could be. A young man, in his early twenties, came to the office one morning to talk to Dave about his schedule. I eavesdropped on their conversion from the upstairs storage room just above the roll up doors at the back of the building.

     "Why'd you take me off the schedule?" the young man queried.

     "We just don't have any spots for you right now," Dave, said matter-of-factly.

     "But why?" the young man pleaded. "I thought you were happy with my work."

     "You did okay, but we need people better at socializing with the customers, and we also think you're a little too young and inexperienced to be on the boat right now." Dave explained. "I'm sorry, but we gotta let you go."

     "Without any notice?" asked the young man, his voice strained and choked with frustration.

     Dave folded his beefy arms around his massive chest. He was a large man, at least 6'3" and 240 pounds. The kid didn't stand a chance.

     "This is your notice," said Dave. "I'm sorry, but it's just the way things go sometimes."

     "What about my pay?" the young man asked.

     "You can pick up your paycheck on Friday here at the office." Dave answered. Then, after a few beats he added, "Is there anything else?"

     The young man slowly turned around, head down, and solemnly walked away. He looked as dejected as a high school hoopster right after he finds out he hasn't made the final cut. The kid did look young for his age, but that's not the real reason Dave sacked him.

     Truth be told, two new female divers had rolled into town, friends of friends who were promised jobs before they arrived. They were a few years older than the young man, a bit more experienced, and as I soon found out, extremely cute and bubbly young women. Young and spirited, not to mention attractive, their breeze shooting would come in handy with the male divers.

     That was the Project Runway nature of the scuba diving business: one day you were in and the next day you were out. I would know because it also happened to me, except Dave had a much better reason to send me packing.

     On one particular picture-perfect morning in paradise, a woman in her mid-30s came aboard wearing a belly chain. She was moderately pretty and sexy in a funny valentine and slutty D-list porn actress kind of way, with a nice figure showing only a few extra pounds of flab on her tummy.

     On a scale of 1-to-10 scale she was at least a six, but the sleaziness she exuded made her a seven, and she caught the eye of every male on the boat that day. The vivacious lady was obviously looking for some deep diving.

     As a 40-year-old chronic masturbator my days as a player were all but over, but Miss Belly Chain made me want to give it the old college try. On the dive trip that morning only me and another fellow were in the running; his name was Mike, an American scuba instructor in his early 40s who'd been diving for a decade.

     Mike and I became fast friends. We were nearly the same age and our personalities clicked right away, which gave me the feeling I'd known him a lot longer than I actually had. We started hanging out together, eating loco moco at a restaurant near the warehouse and killing time in the seaside shopping villages and paradisial promenades of Kona Town.

     Later that day, after the morning dive, we ended up in a tourist shop that sold funny hats with faux hair sticking out of them. Mike tried on a hat with fake shoulder-length hair matching his jet-black locks and Grecian facial tone to a tee. The wiglet looked totally real, making him seem more like a chain-smoking, beer-guzzling trucker than and a scuba diving instructor. We laughed like two best friends in a fun house.

     "I should get this," said Mike.

     "No, let me buy it for you at Christmas," I promised.

     "Really?" Mike answered. "Are you sure?"

     "Yeah, I'll have it wrapped and bring it to you when we have dinner at Dave and Elsa's on Christmas Eve," I said.

     "Okay, cool bro, thanks." Mike replied, his eyes shining with comradely gratitude.

     On the boat that morning, Mike looked like he'd been hit by a rogue wave of pheromones. He set his laser sights on Miss Belly Chain from the get-go, for no sooner had the horny little mermaid scrabbled up the bite-size ship's ladder to the top deck Mike was there to greet her, giving her his best big pukka grin and escorting her accessorized midsection to an open spot along the rectangular bench seating ringing the outer edge of the sundeck on all sides.

     I have to admit I felt jealous of Mike's sexual prowess. The dude was smooth, which meant he was just being himself and interacting without fear, something most women can smell from a mile away. I was trying to be smooth, which of course meant I was being just the opposite. I was a bumbling, fumbling salty dog up horndog creek without a paddle. Luckily, or so I thought, Miss Belly Chain saved a little demure kittenishness for me.

     Mike and I were still in the gift shop, looking at the hats.

     "You ready for loco moco?" Mike asked, with a smirk on his face that told me he already knew the answer.

     "You read my mind, buddy." I mused.

     Loco moco is a Hawaiian dish of white rice topped with ground beef, a fried egg, and brown gravy. It's the simplest of cuisines done to the purest of perfection. Savoring one delightfully yolky mushy beefy bite at a time, I asked Mike about Miss Belly Chain.

     "She's staying at the King's," said Mike, which was short for the King Kamehameha's Kona Beach Resort.

     "Are you gonna see her tonight?" I asked, wiping my yolk-covered chin with a cloth napkin.

     "Not sure yet," Mike said. He scooped a man-size bite of loco moco into his mouth and chewed it ferociously. "But the door's definitely open," he added.

     After lunch we went our separate ways. As it happened, a month later we'd be roommates living in a sublime 4-bedroom ocean view estate high up in the plush hillsides above Kona Town. Casey would give up his place on Palani Road to move in with us, and one more diver named Doug would take the last bedroom. At certain points in my life, land-on-your-feet luck had put me on top of the world.

     The next morning, Miss Belly Chain returned for her second and final day of diving. She had on a different bikini but was wearing the same belly chain from the day before. Maybe it was the only one she owned.

     As soon I got the chance, I asked Mike if he'd knocked on that open door he'd been talking about.

     "Two drinks at Sam's (Sam's Hideaway, a popular local watering hole) and it was straight back to her room at the King's." said Mike.

     "And...?"

     "Banged her twice, bud. First in the ass and then in the puss."

     "Was she wearing that belly chain?" I asked, glancing around to make sure we weren't being watched.

     "Yup," Mike replied.

     "How was it?" I asked.

     "Not bad," said Mike. "I didn't kick her out of bed, but it's a one and done. She's all yours if you want her."

     "Really? You sure?"

     "Yup. Like I said, one and done."

     "I think you mean two and through."

     We both laughed and started putting on our wetsuits. The rest of the crew and paying customers quickly joined us in the predive ritual of suiting and gearing up for the first descent of the morning.

     It was another perfect day in paradise, warm and sunny with a coolish ocean breeze and the water temperature around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The sun was still low on the eastern horizon, creeping brilliantly skyward as a majestic fireball of melioristic hope gloriously trumpeting the next hot and muggy early fall day in the Hawiian Islands.

     Miss Belly Chain flirted uncomfortably with Mike for most of the trip. He gave her the cold shoulder, which seemed to make her draw back and seek comradery with other divers on the tour. She eventually gave up on Mike and became more interested in what I might have to offer. At some point I invited her out to dinner. She accepted, which made my dick a little hard. I was hornier than a jailbird fresh out of the slammer.

     After the first dive, I unzipped the top half of my full wetsuit and pulled the foam neoprene down inside out around my waist. This was customary for most male crew members and patrons because it was considered the coolest way to hangout between dives.

     I glanced at my belly. It had a few extra pounds on it but still looked attractively surferish enough for a middle-aged exjock. The training was getting me into even better from when I arrived, and although I was still overeating on a semiregular basis, I was staying fairly fit and maintaining a healthy body mass index.

     As a food addict, the complimentary Hawiian buns and snack plates of fresh veggies and thinly sliced roast beef, turkey, and pastrami, along with mouthwatering mounds of Swiss, Jack, and cheddar cheeses, were always the first thing on my mind when coming out of the water.

     While rinsing and sorting the masks, weight belts, and any other out-of-place gear, I tried to look as unhurried and nonchalant as possible, but all I could think about was the savory deliciousness of the perfectly seasoned deli meat and moist creaminess of the well-aged deli cheese slices stuffed inside the sweet and fluffy doughiness of those Hawiian rolls.

     The boat usually had plenty of food to go around. Crew members waited until the last of the paying customers had grazed the food trays before divvying up the leftovers. On any given day the trays offered either a bounty or slim pickings. On this particular day, I stepped in line as politely as possible alongside Miss Belly Chain and a husband-and-wife couple from Norway whom she'd made friends with.

      To avoid any chance of being rude by interrupting their conversation, I kept my mouth shut and simply smiled and nodded at the chatting trio while stepping in line behind them.

     After loading up my 6-inch paper dessert plate with two turkey, Swiss cheese and mayo sandwiches, along with an ample assortment of raw broccoli and cauliflower florets, sliced carrot and celery sticks, and orange and yellow cherry tomatoes, I gingerly followed Miss Belly Chain and the Norwegian couple up to their place on the top deck and asked if I could join them.

     We chugged luxuriantly to the next dive spot, blue water surging and sparkling all around us, the deep-sea swells gently rocking the flush decked dive boat up and down as the rollers lumbered shoreward. The great mass of seawater tossing and turning beneath us, the epipelagic zone, held the whale-sized pleasure craft in her saltwater grips, magically transporting all souls on board to a perfectly unparalleled storm of stalwart adventure.

     After popping several of the sweet and slightly acidic tomatoes into my mouth, I saw an opening in the conversation and asked all three of them at once, "So how was the first dive?"

     Their eyes lit up like Alaskan fireflies. Miss Belly Chain's name turned out to be Laurel, and she had lots to say about her first dive. She seemed to be warming up to the idea that her naughty tryst with Mike had been a one-night stand. All three divers, including Norwegians Bjorn and Astrid, kept our conversation going for nearly 20 minutes.

     When the dive boat anchored, Bjorn and Astrid excused themselves and made their way down to the main deck. That's when I made my move.

     "Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?" I asked as nonchalantly as I could. "There's a great Mexican restaurant we could go to."

     Laurel looked at me with pretty green eyes and said, "Sure, I'd love to."

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