FEETS...Around the World: A True Story of Love and Adventure

By Mark Brown and Karen Spencer

The story of two young people who set out with no money to see the world and to show that one can truly live their dreams if only they would give themselves permission to.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543916294

Mark Brown

Mark is an Australian Physiotherapy Association titled Sport Physiotherapist, a Fellow of the Australian Sports Medicine Federation, and also a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management. He is currently the Executive Officer of the Sports Medicine Australia Queensland Branch, and also holds adjunct academic positions as Associate Professor in the Griffith Health Institute at Griffith University and Assistant Professor of Physiotherapy in the School of Health Sciences and Medicine at Bond University. His previous positions include the Executive Director of the Australian Physiotherapy Association New South Wales Branch and the Director of Physiotherapy for the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Mark’s international sports event experience as a Sports Physiotherapist also includes the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games and the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games, as well as numerous other national and international events.

Book preview

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission.

Copyright 2017 by Mark Brown

[e-mail]

ISBN: 978-1-54-391629-4

In love, you and I, we can conquer the world.

Stevie Wonder

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

PREFACE

HUMBOLDT COUNTY

ON THE ROAD

FLORIDA

BAHAMAS

CARIBE

QUEEN ELIZABETH, THE SECOND

BRITISH ISLES

EUROPE

GOING HOME

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

My heart jumped when the phone rang. For a brief moment, I was afraid it might be her, but then I told myself no, it couldn’t be. I had only gotten here about 10 minutes ago, hardly enough time for anything to have happened. I was just being jumpy from not having gotten any sleep last night, I thought, and tried to relax.

I’d come to Steve’s apartment that morning to sell him my darkroom equipment, in preparation for my big trip, and we were right in the middle of negotiations. The phone rang again as he was reaching to answer it. He said hello, paused a moment, then shot me a quick glance. At that moment, I knew that my fears had just been realized; something had indeed gone wrong and now she was in trouble. It was, after all, the reason I had given her his phone number in the first place. Call me if you need any help, I’d said to her as I dropped her off at her house that morning, but I didn’t think it would ever actually come to that. At least I’d hoped not. Now, though, I was afraid it had.

With a puzzled look on his face, Steve looked up and held the phone out to me. It’s for you, he said, as though I hadn’t already guessed. I felt awkward as I took it from his hand and I turned my back toward him as if to keep him from hearing the conversation. Is everything alright? I half-whispered, fearing her reply. I was self-conscious talking to her in front of Steve like that, for he worked with Karen, too, and I knew how odd he must be thinking it that she should be calling me, particularly here at his place since neither of us knew Steve very well nor had ever been to his apartment before.

Yes, was all she answered. Her simple reply took me by surprise. Why the hell, then, was she calling me? Surely she wasn’t so impetuous as to take a risk like this just to tell me everything was okay. It would be much too difficult now to deny all the rumors at work and she had to know that, too. There had to be something else, I thought as I stood there, and I soon found out that indeed there was. It was what she said next that was the reason for her call: a short little sentence that tumbled out of her mouth so matter-of-factly but one that was to change both our lives so quickly and so drastically on that sunny August morning.

I listened for a moment, not really believing what I was hearing. I’ll be right there, was all I could manage to say. My heart started to race at the thought of what was unfolding and I quickly hung up the phone. Flushed with a sudden sense of urgency, I turned to Steve, who was eyeing me even more curiously now. I knew he wanted to ask but I didn’t give him the opportunity.

Something’s come up, Steve; I gotta go. You can have the whole thing for a hundred bucks, I said, referring to the equipment laid out before us. It was a bargain, I knew, but I couldn’t afford to have him refuse it at this point. I scribbled down my mother’s address in Los Angeles and handed it to him as I made for the door. Mail the money to me as soon as you can, I said to him. I knew that I’d soon need every penny I could muster up. Is there something wrong? he managed to squeeze in before I made it out the door. No, I replied, pausing for a moment as a smile slowly crept across my heart, everything’s fine. I can’t explain it to you just now but you’ll find out soon. With that I dashed out of the apartment, hopped into Otto (my 1974 Toyota Corolla) and sped away to Karen’s house as fast as I dared, still not fully believing the way things were turning out so suddenly.

As I neared her house, I saw her standing there, outside by the side of street, just like she said she would be. That was a good sign; it meant I’d made it in time. She looked like a forlorn little orphan standing out there all alone, albeit a very nervous little orphan. At her feet was a large cardboard box which contained all the things she thought she would need or want for the next three years. All the things she would need or want to go around the world with her. Indeed, all the things she could pack in the five minutes it took me to get there.

When she saw me coming down the street, she quickly grabbed her luggage and, as I pulled up, threw it in the back seat and then jumped in. She looked over at me and smiled. It was a nervous, uncertain smile, yet a happy one, for it was finally over now. She had done it. She had just committed herself to something that would change her life forever, something the likes of which she never thought she’d do.

I, of course, understood all this, but I could only sit there and smile back at her, as I’m afraid I was just as nervous and unsure as she was, for at that precise moment Karen had just left not only her husband of two years, but also her mother (with whom they both lived), her brothers, sister, cats and dogs. She left the house in which she had been born and raised, the friends she had known all her life. She left virtually the only life she had ever known and was trading it in for one with me. One that was soon to be full of strange people and strange places, one whose direction was unknown and outcome uncertain. A life that could no longer be predicted. The slamming of the door behind her as she got into my car was to be the starting gunshot of a race that would take us far into an unknown world. And together, armed with little more than our love for each other, we put our noses to the wind and we ran.

PREFACE

It’s been ten years, almost to the day, that I sit here in my little house telling this story and as I think back on it I’m sometimes not sure that it all really happened. Karen and I split up long ago and there is little left of our trip to remind me that it actually did happen except for a few photographs and a million or so memories that become ever more vague as time skips by. So now, before it totally slips from me, I will put this story down for the sake of posterity and for my own peace of mind, knowing that I can finally let the memories fade without the fear of losing perhaps the most important chronicle of my life. Certainly the happiest.

If it sounds, by this telling, overly sweet and simple it’s because that’s exactly what it was and if it seems that we were both somehow blessed, well, that too is exactly what we believed as well.

HUMBOLDT COUNTY

Way up on the Northern California coast, sitting alongside the muddy banks of Humboldt Bay, lies the humble little city of Eureka. Since its nearest neighbor of any size is San Francisco, about 270 miles to the south, it serves, in effect, as the capitol and regional center for the entire north coast area, much as it has for the past 150 years.

In those days, the area that is now called Olde Town was pretty much the only town. It was a bustling seaport then and in its prime, as in most seaport towns, Eureka’s Victorian waterfront section had been alive with saloons, brothels, shipyards and merchant shops of all sorts servicing mostly the needs of not only the transient sailors but also the thousands of redwood loggers and gold miners that lived and worked throughout this remote corner of the state.

But that was over a century ago and, despite a recent attempt to turn Olde Town into a charming tourist center, the quiet, dead-end streets that ran through this part of town and the dilapidated remains of many of the original warehouses and shops that still loomed darkly around its fringes were now home mostly only to the odd assortment of fishing boats and the scores of hobos and transients that had found their way in here over time but had somehow never managed to find their way back out again.

Here, too, along the old, rotting docks of the waterfront, was Lazio’s Seafood Restaurant. Despite the fact that it was set up in a corner of the crumbling, decrepit, and otherwise deserted fish packing plant that it once had been, it was nonetheless a very well-known and extremely busy restaurant. It was here, in the winter of 1978, that I first met Karen and where this story begins.

She was working nights there as a salad maker when I returned to Lazio’s from a brief absence to resume my work as a dishwasher that January and I was quick to notice the new girl they’d hired while I’d been gone. She was no raving beauty, in the classic sense anyway, and would probably sound fairly average if I were to try to describe her looks here, she was in actuality a very attractive woman, by almost all accounts.

Though she was indeed pretty, it wasn’t on her looks alone that the strength of her appeal rested. Rather, she simply had a way about her that seemed to attract not only one’s attention but one’s affection as well. It was more of an essence of childlikeness really and carried through with such an honest sincerity that you couldn’t help but become endeared to her, indeed much as you would be to a child. She also had a certain sparkle in her eyes (particularly when she smiled, which was always) that seemed to emanate from the very depths of her heart and it didn’t take much more than a single look into them to become ensnared. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to feel this way for I soon found out that just about every guy in the place had a similar crush on her.

As is so often the case with such women, though, she had been scooped up at an early age by the first guy to realize what a prize she was and it was to him that she was in fact married.

I was disappointed, to be sure, to learn of this since I had always considered marriage a fairly sacred institution and I didn’t feel that this was a good time to violate my otherwise dubious ethics by making a play for her. I was just coming out of a very long dry spell, so to speak, in regard to relationships, and a married woman was not what I needed to help bring me out of it. I needed a real girlfriend, someone I could call my own - certainly not another man’s wife.

The funny thing about emotions, though, is that they don’t seem to follow anybody else’s rules but their own and these rules always seem to be contrary to the ones we’re supposed to live by. In spite of my good and honorable intentions I couldn’t help but be drawn to her more and more as time went by. Her positive, happy-go-lucky approach to life somehow seemed to just ooze all on its own into the hearts of those around her, making it almost impossible to keep a distance, and I’m afraid my heart was not immune.

A few weeks after my return to work, my position changed to that of night clean-up man, which meant coming in to work at about 11:00 every night. As the rest of the staff rarely got finished and out of my way before midnight, I usually just strolled around the kitchen during this hour of overlap and chatted with everyone while I had the chance to. Soon, they would all be going home, leaving me alone with only the wharf rats out back for company.

It was during these nightly intervals that my friendship with Karen eventually took root and I soon found myself holding up the wall over in her corner of the kitchen more times than not, talking on and on with her about anything and everything that happened to cross our minds.

From these talks, we soon discovered how much we really had in common with each other. Not in terms of background or lifestyle, for those were very different, but in our general view of the world. We had the same values, the same sense of spirit, the same taste in music and, perhaps most importantly, the same sense of humor. Indeed, we seemed to approach life from an identical point of view.

Neither of us took the daily machinations of life very seriously and our nightly talks were usually nothing more than highly animated, nonsensical banterings about absolutely meaningless things. There were no points to make or any arguments to propound; they were strictly recreational talks and would often go on for great lengths of time. A sort of verbal abstract art, if you will. Some would call it flirting.

Many times, other people would see us having such an obviously good time together that they’d come over and attempt to join into our conversation. After only a few minutes of our inane gibberish, however, they’d usually just walk away shaking their heads in bewilderment, never to try again. As a result, it wasn’t long before we became known around the restaurant as a couple of loonies.

This, of course, only served to draw us together all the more, as like-minded people so often tend to collect together in the face of such mass incomprehension. Birds of a feather, I suppose.

This was compounded even more by the fact that we were the only two vegetarians in the entire place and this at a time when not eating meat was still associated with shaving your head and chanting on street corners. Almost anti-social, in other words, and not very well understood.

And so it was that Karen and I became best of buds, while at work anyway, and we continued to stand off in our corner of the kitchen every night with our backs to the world, discussing such fundamentally relevant topics as the probable sex life of French fries and other such profundities. Soon however our friendship began to quietly slip the confines of the restaurant.

As it was, we both also happened to be taking classes at the local College of the Redwoods (CR) during the day and in our nighttime chats we often spoke of the virtues of our respective classes. It shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise, really, when on the first day of the very next semester we both just happened to show up in the exact same two classes together, but it was nevertheless.

Our two classes conveniently met back to back on the same days so now, not only were we working together every night of the week but we were also going to school together three days a week. And of course, the more we were together, the closer we got.

Our first class was recreational soccer and was immediately followed by recreational swimming. The soccer class, being unsupervised, gave us the opportunity to run around and play together like the kids we felt we really were, though I was in fact twenty-two at the time and she nineteen. The swimming class, also unsupervised, gave us the opportunity to flirt with each other at closer range, without the fear of being seen by anyone we knew. Of course, we also played in the pool a lot, too, chasing each other around, getting in water fights and the like. It was something we did well together, playing, and it was always the inevitable result whenever we were together.

And yet, as testimony to the mind’s ability for selective thinking, we still somehow managed to bypass any conscious acknowledgment of affection or attraction to each other. It was, however, becoming increasingly harder to do so as time went by, to convince ourselves that we were really only platonic friends. Deep down I’m sure we both knew that the time would soon come when we would have to face up to the fact that, in spite of our otherwise childlike and innocent approach to this relationship, we were indeed adults with very adult feelings, regardless of how much we tried to ignore or even suppress them, subconsciously or otherwise.

But if we were suppressing the truth to ourselves about our feelings, it was only because to admit to them would be agreeing to hurt people that neither of us wanted to hurt. Specifically, her husband, Tom. Though I barely knew him, I didn’t at all like the thought of being off with his wife like this. And if I felt that way about it, I can only imagine Karen’s dilemma for she was the one who was married to the man. Though their marriage wasn’t perfect, by any means, they did love each other very much and the thought of deceiving him certainly couldn’t be something she enjoyed. And so we simply continued to deny it all.

As springtime blossomed, however, taking hold of the countryside and young hearts, I reached the point where I couldn’t fool myself any longer. I finally allowed myself to consciously acknowledge that our relationship had indeed progressed far beyond the point where something needed to be done.

The thought of confronting Karen with this troubled me and I struggled with it for several days as I considered what to do. I had been painfully lonely prior to meeting Karen and now I was faced with becoming painfully frustrated in loving someone that I might never be able to have.

An even worse thought for me, though, was what I would feel like if I said or did nothing at all, if I just let it fade away without ever knowing what would have come of it. I had never felt with anyone else the way I now did with Karen. We seemed somehow made for each other, in my mind anyway, and I felt it would be a personal crime against myself and my happiness if she was indeed the person I had long hoped for and I let her go without at least making a try.

I knew that she would never bring up the subject of having an affair herself and that if we were to get past this turning point it would have to be at my suggestion, which I was very loathe to do. Though I knew in my heart that I wanted nothing more than to have her with me, I did not at all like the thought of suggesting to her that she betray her husband. All I knew was that whenever Karen and I were together, nothing felt so right with the world as did we.

***

It was an absolutely gorgeous spring day. The sun was up, the flowers were out and the grass was tall and glowing a vibrant green. Turkey vultures were high up in the deep blue sky with the cotton ball clouds, doing their slow, lazy circles above the redwood trees and sheep pastures that surrounded the beat-up old house I was presently living in. I had the day off from both work and school and my two roommates, Kathleen and Susan, had both gone on to their classes, leaving me home alone. I was supposed to be getting ready to do some gardening work that morning at our landlord’s house but I decided instead to just sit out in the sunshine on our front porch and dream up a good excuse why I wasn’t.

We were living outside a very small town on a very small, dead-end lane just off an insignificant little highway that wasn’t on the way to anywhere else in particular. We didn’t get much traffic there, in other words, and so I was surprised, as I sat there basking in the sunbeams on our tiny little porch, when a big, old Pontiac Le Mans pulled around the corner not far away and came up the road toward the house. What was even more surprising was that it was this car in particular, for though I knew it and its driver well, it was the last car I expected to see driving up my street that day.

Some days ago, while sitting in my car after driving her home from swim class, I had finally drummed up my courage and broached the long-taboo subject. She was just getting her things up to leave and I knew that I had no more time to stall. So, I blurted out anxiously, when are we going to have an affair? I had finally done it. For better or worse, there it was, out in the open, and with my heart on the line, I eagerly waited for her response. To my utter despair, however, she’d simply made a joke about it, got out and walked away laughing, leaving me sitting there alone and feeling like an idiot.

Not to be so easily daunted, I mentioned it again the following day but this time she’d deftly evaded answering me altogether and went on as though I hadn’t even asked, leaving me to stew in my frustration. I had taken all this as a definite not in this lifetime and had resigned myself to the notion that it was a dead deal. I no longer expected her reply, nor would I ever mention it again.

As I sat there and watched, though, the big yellow battleship of a car pulled up and dropped anchor right across the lane from the house. The huge door creaked open and sure enough, pee-wee little Karen came falling out of it, wearing a smile as big as the car itself and as bright as the day.

She said she wasn’t really sure why she’d come. She had just pulled into the parking lot at the college for class that morning when something in her head suddenly told her to come out and visit me instead. So that’s just what she did. She started her car back up, turned around and drove the twenty some miles farther to come see me. She didn’t really need to explain anything, though. I knew why she had come.

Although the house we lived in was a ramshackle little two-bedroom dump, it made up for any shortcomings by being situated on top of a high bluff overlooking a beautiful, big, green valley and surrounded by meadows, sheep pastures, forests and wild rivers.

Out back of the house, past the redwood trees and the garden, was a large open field of grass. It belonged with our property but wasn’t being used for anything right then and so had just been left to grow wild. Off in the far corner of this field stood a lone, old cherry tree whose only company was the even older redwood stump that jutted up from the grass near the field’s center.

Behind these, running along the back edge of the property, was a small brook that was lined on both sides by a narrow margin of woods. A ribbon of green grass, speckled with countless small, white English Daisies, carpeted the near side of the shaded banks and down its center ran a small foot trail. It followed along upriver for a short way before eventually veering away up a hill and continuing off into the trees.

Following the trail farther into these woods, it soon opened up into a small, grassy glade filled with the huge, black and gray remains of an ancient redwood forest that had been cut down ages ago. The dark stumps were twisted and weathered and in the misty fog or the darkness of evening they gave the place the feeling of a cemetery, grave markers of the giants that had lived there through the centuries before.

Sometimes, when I felt the pains of life too sharply, I would follow this trail and sit by the creek or farther up into the glade, amongst the giants, and bemoan my fate. It became a special place for me and it was out here that, only the night before, I had come and beseeched the gods to help me with this sordid thing called love. I’d pleaded that warm, cloudless night with the rising full moon to intervene in my sorrowful life.

It seemed only natural, then, that it was here I brought Karen that sunny morning and here alongside the creek, amongst the daisies, that she and I lay together for the first time. On a small grassy knoll, in the warm sunshine, with only the woods as our witness, we finally consummated our long-avoided affair.

As corny as I know this sounds, it was like being in a fairy tale. She truly was my long-lost princess and I felt like I was the misbegotten fool in the enchanted forest who had just discovered he was a prince unawares. We lay there for a while afterwards, soaking it all in, before finally getting dressed and meandering our way back to the house.

Karen must have felt the same way, for she came out several more times after that day. When she did, we usually headed straight out back, where we’d lie together in the tall, dry grass of the sunny field or in the cool, green grass of the shaded woods. Every time seemed like yet another fairy tale.

Almost every time, anyway. Once, while we were lost in our passion, the cows that lived out in these woods had quietly gathered around, unbeknownst to us. A short time later, we looked up and were momentarily startled to find ourselves almost completely ringed by a herd of Holsteins and Jerseys staring down at us from only a few feet away, thoroughly fascinated with what we were doing. We were a bit unnerved at first but it quickly became apparent that their curiosity had completely transfixed them where they stood and so we didn’t let them deter us. We didn’t really mind the company.

On one of Karen’s visits we decided, instead of going out back again, to go down the highway a few miles to one of the nearby redwood parks that lined the banks of the Van Duzen river. There was a place I knew there that had a good-sized swimming hole at a bend in the river, with a nice patch of warm sand on one side and a high rock wall on the other to help keep the wind out. No one else was there that day so we promptly took off our clothes and jumped in the river. We spent the afternoon swimming and playing together in the clear, cool water, taking breaks occasionally to climb out and spread ourselves out on the sandy beach to warm up while we dried.

Across the river from this beach and a few feet up from the base of the rock wall, a little shelf had been cut into the cliff from previous floods. Inside this shelf was a small pocket of gray, slimy clay just big enough for two people to sit in. After we had lain out for a while in the sun, we swam over and climbed up in it. We couldn’t resist the temptation in our illicit freedom and began smearing handfuls of the wet clay all over each other’s naked body, head and face. We had a wonderful time heaving these gobs of muck on one another and then finger painting them onto any spot not yet covered, until only our white eyes remained visible through the viscous ooze. Any sensual arousal we may have felt from rubbing the slippery clay over each other’s touchy parts was immediately offset by the total hilarity of our appearance when we were through. We looked like a couple of misplaced aborigines out of the jungles of New Guinea. The only things missing were bones in our noses.

We sat up there on the sunny ledge afterwards and played until all the mud on our bodies had become dry and flaky. We looked even funnier now and had a good laugh before finally diving off the ledge into the clear water below to wash off. Karen went first and left a long, gray plume behind her as she slid through the water looking, I thought, much like a torpedo shooting across the pool.

Later that day I climbed up on a large rock at the river’s edge and watched Karen taking her last swim of the day. It was very much like watching an otter or a seal swim, I thought, as she slipped in and out of the water looking for pretty stones on the river’s bed. The reflection of the late afternoon sun on the ripples in the water turned the swimming hole into a brilliant, glittering golden pool and against its blinding sparkles I watched her dark silhouette silently disappear under the water and then, almost as silently, reappear on the other side of the pool from where she had just been, with only the slightest sound of her breath giving her away. I made a game of watching her slide under the water and then, scanning the limits of the pool, trying to guess where she would next appear but I never seemed to get it right. I think that’s probably why I enjoyed it so much.

Truth is, I don’t think there has ever been a day in my life, before or since, that I have enjoyed as much as I did this day, nor a time when I loved this woman more. Lying there on the beach after our romps in the river, watching the hawks high up in the sky doing their figure-eights above the steep, forested hills that surrounded us and Karen lying beside me, it seemed like yet another make-believe story come true. It was something I had previously thought only existed in dime store romance novels and I had a hard time believing that this was all real, let alone happening to me.

As our affair continued to grow, it became ever more difficult for us to wait until we could both be available to meet at my house. Fortunately, the college, being at the foot of a forested and otherwise deserted hillside, gave us a lot more opportunity and we didn’t miss a chance to take advantage of its convenience. Several times, after our classes were finished, we’d sneak away to a grassy spot high up on the hill and commit our sordid crimes.

One day, while running downfield in our soccer class, our sense of romance (or maybe just our hormones) got the better of us and we decided to just keep going. When everyone else turned and headed back toward the other goal, we just kept on running - past the goal, out the gate and straight on up the hill - with our fellow teammates none the wiser. We sat up there overlooking the campus below and gloated in our cleverness as we watched the soccer game continue without us. Toward the end of class, we simply ran back down the mountainside, through the gate again, and rejoined them as though we’d never left.

Sometimes, for a change of pace, we’d drive to an old, abandoned pioneer farmhouse that we knew of about a half a mile down the two-lane road from the campus. It sat high up on a hillside overlooking the southern lobe of Humboldt Bay. To get up to it we had to jump a fence down by the roadway and walk another quarter mile along a winding, tree-lined dirt lane that served as its driveway.

Just before reaching the top we always stopped to raid the long-neglected apple and plum orchard before continuing on. Though the plums were hardly worth the effort, the apples were wonderful and worth the trip up for their own sake. Afterwards, we’d continue on up and lay out on the grassy hillside in front of the deserted, one-room pioneer shack that once had been the farmhouse and talk, make love or just sit and watch the afternoon sun as it slowly crept its way down to the sea before us. We fondly referred to this place as our Summer Cottage and came here several times. It was a truly magical time for us.

***

As spring grew into summer and our relationship continued to grow ever stronger, it became harder and harder to hide our secret from our coworkers. We were seeing each other for several hours every day now and people were beginning to notice that unspoken familiarity between us, no matter how hard we tried to seem otherwise. Rumors were beginning to circulate. I had since become night manager of sorts there at the restaurant and Karen was now working as a bus person, also at night, which put us in close working contact virtually every night and there were times I caught myself on the verge of forgetting where I was and doing something stupid.

Sneaking away when we could, we’d sometimes creep out back into the dark and abandoned, rat-infested depths of the old fish plant, past the gaping hole in the floor where a slab of concrete had fallen into the sloshing bay below and into one of the old fish filleting rooms. The moment we were inside we immediately launched into a hot and heavy make-out session, staying back there for as long as we thought we could get away with before sneaking back into the restaurant.

One night, early that summer, Karen came to tell me that the kitchen was out of iced tea so I went back with her into the old, onetime hallway that now served as the restaurant’s storage pantry to try and find some.

As soon as we got inside, of course, the pantry’s semi-seclusion overwhelmed us and within seconds we were hopelessly lip-locked. It was a very dangerous thing for us to do here since there was no way to know if anyone was coming until they rounded the corner at the entrance to the room and by that time it would be too late.

As exciting as this made the moment, I still felt uncomfortable at the thought of getting caught in such a compromising situation. At the same time, I was not at all ready to end our impassioned tryst quite so soon. Seeing the closed door at the far end of this pantry suddenly gave me a wonderful idea.

Though this door was kept locked all the time, it just so happened that, as the Night Man, I had the only set of keys for the whole building, including the one to the wine room, which lay right on the other side of this now very opportune door. I quickly let us in and locked the door behind us. With the thrill of discovery having just added itself to the heat of our stolen moment and the knowledge that we were now only a few scant feet from the busiest part of the entire restaurant, we steamed up those wine bottles in there pretty good before we regrettably had cool down and return to work.

I let Karen out through the back door we’d come in and then waited several minutes before then letting myself out through the front door, which opened directly into the dining room