By Ian Avi

Zarathustra himself couldn't tell you how it happens, but it does. Picture this, last June I found myself having sex with a 20-year-old prostitute on a pool table in the small town of Alexandria, Louisiana. I think her name was Bonnie.

I was in a strange land with strange people and was trying to get back to some familiar surroundings. So I went into the seediest bar I could find. It was two in the afternoon and the place had its windows boarded up. It could have been condemned for all intents and purposes, but one push on the door and it opened right up. It was completely dark inside but we pressed on, undaunted. When my eyes adjusted I saw the bar, tables and chairs. In the background was a small stage with a pole.

It couldn't have been 30 seconds after we walked in before the two girls came up to us. I had gone there with a couple of my professional associates. They both thought they were wild boys — Chris was newly divorced, Ryan was newly married.

Bonnie was a decent-looking trailer-trash blonde in a leather bra and black miniskirt and Sharika was a beautiful mulatto girl in a blue silk bra with matching hot pants. Immediately Bonnie picked me out and asked if I needed a cigarette. I think she was working on instinct. Of course, I told her that I did need a cigarette, and she was gone.

Sharika suggested that we play some doubles at pool. Soon Bonnie was back and she placed a lit cig in my mouth. The two girls had fun flashing various body parts in order to make us miss.

I wanted to fuck right there and then, but my less-adventurous compatriots were thinking their best scenario was a little harmless voyeurism.

I can't really explain the series of events that unfolded from that point to when Bonnie and I were hitting it missionary style on the green felt. All I know was my debit card was charged $40. I'm not one to pay for the squish, at least not in a fiduciary way, but she was very much into it. I would like to think that it had something to do with me, but don't all of us males think that same way?

I always try to have a point or a moral to my stories. Here I would have to say that it's good things do happen to the unsuspecting. The layman would ask what was the good thing in this story. Well, I drank at least $40 worth of alcohol before and after Bonnie and I did our thing and I was never charged for it. I don't know if it was an oversight or if I was comped one screw, but even that was unimportant.

What was important was that I made a connection with others like me. Kim owned the place. She was a Korean women brought to the states by an American G.I. They lived here for a couple years, then they were divorced. Sharika's father was another G.I., stationed in Germany. Her mother was a German woman he knocked up. Her parents came to the states before they were divorced.

Bonnie wasn't an immigrant. She was a girl that had been badly used by somebody. She had the word ̉vengeanceÓ tattooed in Japanese on her thigh. She had been scarred. That was the point.

Kim, Sharika, Bonnie, me and even Chris and Ryan were a bunch of misfits that were all thrown into one place by some weird turn of fate, in some dive bar in some strange corner of the globe. We were entirely different sorts of miscreants, but for a couple of short hours — after the sex on the pool table — we were kin. That's the miracle. There are people like us out there.

After a while, we knew it was time to go. We all drank a lot. I even got 50-year-old Kim out on the dance floor. No one else came in during the whole episode. The town had gone to shit since the nearest army base closed down, so we had the entire afternoon to ourselves.

I don't want to throw the word miracle word around too much, but I really believe that encounter met the definition. The thing is, you have to be on the look out for them, or else they may happen and you won't see it. Or even worse, you won't act on it.

Don't get bogged down by social or religious propriety. It's the summertime, and every year that goes by is a year that you won't get back. Go out and have a great time, experience the miracle, do something that your friends might not do, because as we all know, it's better to regret something you did than something you didn't do.