argument  noun  1 obsolete : an outward sign : INDICATION  2 a : a reason given in proof or rebuttal  b : discourse intended to persuade  3 a : the act or process of arguing : ARGUMENTATION  b : a coherent series of statements leading from a premise to a conclusion  c : QUARREL, DISAGREEMENT  4 : an abstract or summary especially of a literary work {a later editor added an argument to the poem}  5 : the subject matter especially of a literary work

—WWWebster Dictionary

From here on the moon, Earth makes for an impressive sight—a turquoise brooch on a field of black velvet, so huge and perfectly clear that you think you could reach out and touch it.

But that's just an illusion. Of course you can't touch Earth—it's a quarter of a million miles away. And when you look more closely, you begin to see that the clarity itself is an illusion. It's all surface. You can see the clouds on the outside perfectly well, but only occasional glimpses of what's underneath, and not much in the way of detail at all.

Memory is in many ways similar. It may seem as though you can take in its sum total—the current state of your own life—at a glance, but the harder we peer, the more depth and complexity are revealed, and the more the fine details elude your searching eyes.

Every so often, however, those details swim into sharp focus—but they never stay that way for long. You get a sense that if you don't capture them quickly in a photo or a sketch, they'll be gone again soon, maybe gone for good.

Thus Memos from the Moon—an attempt to capture my world of memory in words, one square mile at a time. That planet keeps on turning, so you'll never know which bit I may be gazing at on any given day—a mountain peak, an ocean trench, an orderly city, a roiling storm—but I'll do my best to accurately report whatever swims into focus.

Percival Lowell looked at the bleak deserts of Mars and saw inconceivably long canals irrigating massive agriculture zones. I can sympathize with his misjudgment, but when I see a desert, I'll try to call it a desert. After all, this is a map of my home planet I'm making. If I should someday go back, being able to get around would be nice.

Do you ever have one of those moments where you consider some behavior or predilection of yours—one so deeply innate to your personality that you never thought to question it before—in an entirely new light, and in a sudden flash of insight you understand how it originated and why it persists?

It doesn't happen to me often, but it did happen to me a week or two ago—not uncoincidentally, just as I was coming to the realization that there are at least three distinct (if not yet fully separate) personalities living there in the moist sponge behind my eyes. (But that's another memo for another day.)

Actually, I figured out the reason for two different predilections—quirks which had always seemed unrelated (or would have seemed unrelated had I bothered to give them any thought) but which are in reality very closely linked.

You see, my father liked to go bowling, and when I was small he took me along with him with some regularity. He didn't bowl in a league or with friends, at least not that I knew of—usually on these outings it was just he and I. And the amazing thing was, even when I was three, he didn't just drag me along to watch. He tried to teach me how to bowl so I could play too.

Now, after our outings at the lanes, we would often stop at McDonald's for a burger and fries on the way home. (And how those signs puzzled me when I was small! How could they possibly have served 12 billion when there were only 4 billion on the planet?) My father would get a Big Mac (two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun—and I could say it all backward, just like the people in the commercials), while I would have to be content with one of those flat little cardboardish regular hamburgers with one slice of pickle and a grudging squirt of ketchup.

But then one day when I was still just three or four, a miracle happened. My father and I were bowling at our favorite lanes in Eagle Rock. I stepped up to the line with an eight-pound ball cradled awkwardly in my arms, bent forward, rolled it with all my might, watched it chug down the lane with inexorable momentum . . . and then stood stunned at ball crept almost apologetically into the pocket and the pins toppled one by one. It was a strike! It was the very first strike of my life!

That was great enough, but the day was destined to get better. My father was so proud of me that when we arrived at McDonald's after our game he ordered me not an ordinary hamburger, but that Holy Grail of the fast-food universe—a Big Mac.

And I finished it all. Every bite.

When we got home, I burbled happily to my mother about all of it, and darn if she wasn't impressed with what a big boy I was now. I must have kept talking about it for days and days. Hell, I still tell people that I bowled my first strike when I was three.

So it shouldn't really come as any surprise that as an adult I can't keep away from bowling alleys and Big Macs. But of course, every time I go near them, I'm really seeking to recapture the feeling I had that day when I felt like a man in my father's eyes for the first (and maybe only?) time, and knew that he was proud of me.

Now if only something equally potent could get me hooked on racquetball and health food.

Phys. Ed. was such a traumatic and humiliating experience for me in junior high and high school that there was no way I was going to take any similar courses in college. For me, perhaps the most significant aspect of my high school graduation was fact that it signaled the last time I would be forced to change clothes in a locker room and wear gym shorts.

So I was genuinely distressed when I started attending the University of Utah and realized that there was a P.E. requirement.

My distress was shortlived, however, because it soon became apparent that I still wouldn't have to put on gym shorts if I didn't want to. I could take courses like golf, archery, rock-climbing, or ballroom dancing without ever going near a communal shower.

But it was—what else?—bowling that turned out to be the ticket. You could repeat the class for credit—I ended up taking it during three different quarters in all. But it was the first time I did that I'll never forget.

It was then that I bowled my all-time high game of 201—a line that included a run of five consecutive strikes—but that's not what stands out the most for me. What I remember best is my partner in the class tournament.

You see, in Bowling 101, the first six weeks of class are spent mastering the basic concepts and techniques of bowling, and the last four are spent in a double-elimination partners tournament. That's right—partners.

I was one of the kids who always got picked last when it came time to choose up sides for sports, and I didn't make friends in many of my classes, so I never imagined that someone was going to pick me for his tournament partner. Her tournament partner, really. Because when the time came for the class to divide up into two-person teams, I was approached by a very lovely young blonde woman. Stellar, right?

Well, sure, up to a point. She also happened to be married and pregnant.

Very pregnant, in fact—about eight and a half months' worth. I asked her what in the world she was doing in a bowling class in her condition. "I've been pregnant long enough, and I'm sick of it," she said. "I'm trying to induce labor."

As it happened, we became pretty good friends over the next month, as we bowled our way together into a middle-of-the-pack finish in the tournament. I became quite taken with her, thus lengthening my string of "friend" relationships with attractive women who are involved with other men (a recurring motif in my life story, and one you can be sure we'll revisit it in weeks to come) and inducing in myself adolescent fantasies being there to deliver her baby when her water broke on the boards.

In point of fact, the only thing I ever did that might have affected her pregnancy at all was accidentally letting the bowling ball slip from my sweaty grasp on the backswing of my approach. The ball landed right next to her with a crash, startling her stiff, but if it had gone a foot the other way . . . I don't even want to think about what the result could have been.

But in the end her grand scheme failed. The exertion of bowling didn't do one whit to bring her gravidity to its natural conclusion. The only day of class she missed that quarter, in fact, was the last, but we had been knocked out of the tournament a week before and hadn't bowled since then. So much for the bowling-alley method.

My friend Lynne once attended an Oingo Boingo concert with me when she was eight months pregnant. She says that's why her son Christopher likes rock music so much now. I never saw my bowling partner again after that quarter, but maybe her little boy—because that's how the ultrasound called it—will grow up with an unusual fondness for the sounds and rhythms of bowling alleys.

And if he does, I wonder if he'll ever figure out why.

Sometimes you have a day that's just entirely too symbolic.

Mine came one morning late this past winter, not long after I'd started my new job in the financial district of Manhattan. I don't need to show up at work until ten, so I usually catch the D train from Brooklyn at around nine-thirty, then transfer to the N at DeKalb Avenue.

The trains are still somewhat crowded at that time of the morning, but nothing like the crush you'd see if you rode an hour earlier. This particular morning, however, as I crossed the platform at DeKalb and boarded the N, I was pleased to spy a large empty zone in the train car. Ah, plenty of room to sit down and stretch my legs without worrying about shoehorning myself into the narrow space between two wide-bodied fellow commuters.

It didn't occur to me to question the big empty space—only to enjoy it.

Blissfully I took my seat, extending my legs into the center aisle as far as they would go and withdrawing a paperback book from my shoulder bag, all the while savoring the blessed lack of human encroachment on my personal space.

It was only then, over the top edge of my book, that I noticed what was sitting directly across the train from me—a big steaming pile of human feces, deposited as neatly and unashamedly in the shallow concavity of the plastic orange seat as if the comfortable transportation of raw filth were the sole purpose for which the public transit system of New York City had been designed.

We stared at each other for a timeless moment, the pile of shit and I.

It won. As unobtrusively as I could, but acutely conscious of the averted eyes of my fellow travelers (some of whom, no doubt, had originally taken the very seat I was in the process of vacating), I moved a few yards farther down the car and pretended to be absorbed in my book.

But I couldn't help it. My eyes kept returning to the brazen fecal display, fascinated and repulsed.

It was with great relief that I exited the train at the Whitehall stop in Manhattan and emerged into the relatively fresh air at street level. A cold sea wind blew in from the water, so I tucked my chin down into the collar of my jacket and hurried off down Beaver toward Broad Street and my office. An armored truck was parked by the Burger King Express at the corner of Beaver and New, right where I usually cross, and without thinking I stepped out into the street to get around it.

I looked up just in time to see a neatly stacked pile of at least two hundred silver ingots bearing down on me.

Well, I hustled my fanny straight over to the opposite curb, and the forklift carrying the pallet of silver ingots from the armored truck trundled on by without incident.

Somewhat shaken, I watched that king's ransom in silver recede up the narrow concrete-and-brick canyon of New Street, and I muttered to myself, "Only in New York."

Then I went to work and forgot about it all. Symbolism like that doesn't bear too much thought.

I really have no idea how I got out to the raft in the first place. I must have swum there—I mean, I know I swam, I was there, I did it—but since I really can't swim, you may begin to understand some of my puzzlement.

I don't remember if we were still living with my uncle's family at the time—that would have been the summer of 1973—or if it was later than that, when we were only visiting. I couldn't have been any younger than six, although I might have been as old as ten or eleven. It's hard to remember.

My uncle and aunt and cousins lived in the small town of Liberty, Utah, in the mountains east of Ogden. They didn't have much money, but boy-oh-boy did they have a wealth of fun things for small kids to do. There were woods and streams to explore, horses to ride, fish to catch, and trees to climb. Oh, yes, and there were lots of places to swim, too. We can't forget that.

On this particular summer day, I accompanied my cousins Steve and Denny, along with a handful of their friends, on a trek across hills and fields to a big square-edged pond in the midst of a cleared field. The pond must have been about two hundred feet on a side, and the other kids swore that it was at least a hundred and fifty feet deep, and that no one had ever managed to find the bottom.

Floating in the middle of this pond was a raft—a big platform made of thick planks lashed and nailed together. We all hopped in the water and swam out to the raft, where we spent the afternoon jumping off and climbing back on and generally having a high old time.

Now, I remember being pretty pleased with myself for actually managing to swim out to the raft. You see, I can't swim, at least not very well, and I'm deathly afraid of "big water"—a status for which this swimming hole was definitely big enough to qualify. I had flunked the basic YMCA swimming class twice, and I would rarely venture out of the shallow end of any pool, so I'm actually quite surprised that I was able to get out to the raft to begin with.

Of course, getting out there was not the same thing as getting back.

As the afternoon shadows began to lengthen, the guys decided it was time to head back home. One by one, they dived off the raft and started stroking for shore—something like a hundred feet of water. I was the last one off, and whatever magic feather it was that had helped me get to the raft in the first place slipped from my fingers as I saw the other boys pulling way ahead, and felt myself growing achingly tired, and began to remember everything I'd been told about just how deep that swimming hole was. I knew I wasn't going to make it back to shore.

Have you ever felt the certainty that you were about to die? The knowledge that if someone from somewhere outside yourself doesn't do something for you, and fast, you're going to sink like a stone into that bottomless black sea of nothingness and the candle of your life will be snuffed out without so much as a by-your-leave from the universe? I have. I felt it that day with my arms and legs turning to lead in the water.

So I hollered for my cousin Steve. Steve is just about four months older than me, and if it requires any sort of physical skill he's always been better at it than I. In later years I would watch him swim a mile at Boy Scout camp in pursuit of his Lifesaving merit badge. He would go on to become a scuba instructor in Southern California. But for right then, all I knew was that Steve could save my life, and that he was the only thing that could save my life.

I really don't know whether or not I could have made it back to shore on my own. I do know that I was right about Steve being able to save my life. He was nearly to shore, but he turned right around, swam back to me, and towed me in to shore. It was a little embarrassing with all the other boys around, but I didn't care. The embarrassment trait always seems to go dormant somehow when it's a matter of life and death.

I don't know if I've ever thanked Steve for what he did for me that day. I should. Hell, I should call him up just for the sake of talking to him at all. He saved my life, and I haven't even talked to him for a year. He's now living on an Army base in Georgia, three thousand miles away from his family, depressed and as lonely as death, and I haven't even gone to the effort of picking up the phone and dialing his number for a year.

Now I'm the one on shore, and Steve's the one out there with his limbs turning to lead in the water. It may not be as big an act as what he did for me, but I think it's time for me to pay back a little of the debt I incurred that day.

I hope I'm strong enough.

Saving my life at the swimming hole isn't all that my cousin Steve did for me. He also taught me how to French kiss. Okay, so he didn't actually demonstrate—he only explained the proper technique. But how many friends do you have that will do even that much?

We were both around eighteen at the time. Steve's family had moved to California years before, but he and I remained very close. Steve had come back to Utah to stay with us for a week or so, as he contemplated attending Weber State College. When Steve was in town, we would do everything together—including the most important activity of all, chasing girls—and we'd have a grand old time at it.

Now, at this time there was a girl I'd been interested in for about two years, by the name of Naomi Osbourne. She and I were pretty good friends. We had met in a community theater group, and we hung out with a larger group of friends that seemed to want to do everything together. She was sixteen, she attended Bountiful High, and she was as sweet as ice cream in July. Cuter than hell, too. And I suspect she knew it.

Anyway, there was a dance at Bountiful High during the week that Steve was in town, so I dragged him off to it. (Actually, I didn't have to do any dragging. Steve has always been ten times smoother with women than I, and he was always on the lookout for ways to meet them.) Naomi was there, along with a nice-looking friend of hers named Tabitha whom I had never met. The four of us ended up spending the bulk of the dance together, talking and laughing and switching partners and so forth. We had such a great time that Steve and I asked Naomi and Tabitha if they would like to go out with us early the next week, on a double date. The girls readily agreed.

As we drove back to Kaysville after the dance, Steve and I began to wonder aloud which of us was actually going to be paired with which girl on the date. Steve knew I had carried a torch for Naomi for a long time, but we were both attracted to her, and we were both attracted to Tabitha, too. Well, we didn't end up worrying about it too much—we just decided to see how things naturally fell out.

When Steve and I went on double dates, we would always split up the driving duties. One of us would drive the car to wherever we were going, and the other one would drive it back. That was so we both got a chance to be in the back seat with our dates. On the night of our date with Naomi and Tabitha, I ended up driving first. And since Naomi lived closer than Tabitha, we ended up picking up Naomi first. And Steve and Naomi just sort of naturally got into the back seat together.

And that was fine with me, really. Tabitha and I ended up having a very nice time that night. In fact, on the way back from whatever it was we did that night—dinner and a movie, I think—I remember snuggling with Tabitha in the back seat while she sucked on my fingers. This was the first time I'd ever had anyone suck on my fingers. I had no idea what it symbolized, but I sure knew I liked it. When we dropped her off at her house, Steve timed my goodnight kiss with her at forty-five seconds. Tabitha and I ended up going steady for the next few months.

But I was still interested in Naomi, too. So when Steve walked her to her front door, and when I saw them up there making out in the shadows on the porch, I felt a little pang of envy. Steve came back to the car, got in the driver's seat, and didn't say anything for a minute. Then he said, "I'm sorry, Bill."

I asked him what he had to be sorry for, and he said, "I know you really like Naomi, and here I am making out with her in front of you."

I told him it wasn't a big deal, that he didn't have to feel bad, because it wasn't like I was hurting for female attention myself.

He was quiet for another minute or so, and then he looked up with a mixture of slyness and guilt on his face. "Do you know how to French kiss?" he asked.

I was a little taken aback. "Um, no, actually."

"Well," he said, "I'd better teach you how, because someday you might end up kissing Naomi, and then you'll have to know how to do it right, because she doesn't."

And then I burst out laughing.

So Steve proceeded to explain all the intricacies of French kissing to me, there in the car in front of Naomi's house, including how you need to do something delicate and sensual with your tongue in the other person's mouth, like running it lightly around their own tongue, instead of just sticking it in and letting it sit there like a big hunk of wet meat—which is what he said Naomi had basically done to him.

I have a great cousin, you'll have to agree. But the rest of the story, including what eventually happened between Naomi and me, and between Tabitha and me, and how and where I finally ended up using what Steve had taught me, will have to wait for other memos on other days. I think I've gone about far enough for now.

Okay, so yesterday's memo, while interesting, was really just a digression so I didn't have to write about what I'm going to write about today: my happy little dunk in Yellowstone's Firehole River.

It was stupid—I'll admit that right up front. Remember, I can't swim, as I learned the day I lost my magic feather in the middle of the swimming hole and my cousin Steve had to tow me in to shore. But for a few critical minutes I forgot that, and I just about didn't live to regret it.

This was one summer when I was twenty-two, although I don't remember whether it was 1989 or 1990. (I was born in August.) Our stake's Young Adults (the Mormon Church's social organization for unmarried folks between the ages of 18 and 30) had taken a trip to Island Park, a pleasant spot in Idaho where relatives of Shauna Toronto—an exceptionally attractive young woman who served as one of my ward's Young Adults representatives, and about whom we will hear more in a later memo—kept a large cabin. One of our many activities that weekend was to take a daytrip into Yellowstone National Park, the Western entrance of which was not a terribly long drive from Island Park.

We saw a lot of cool things that day—Old Faithful, the Paint Pots, and so forth—though nothing I hadn't seen before. But for most of our motley crew of rambunctious yet painfully straight college kids, the highlight of the day came when we stopped off at the Firehole River to do a little swimming and tubing. I say "we" in the loosest possible sense, of course. Swimming was never my intention.

The Firehole is not much a river, really. It's more of a glorified creek winding through a narrow rocky defile with sides no more than ten or fifteen feet high. What gives it both its name and its popularity, however, is the spot where the defile suddenly widens out into a broad natural pool about fifty feet in diameter and thirty-five to seventy feet deep. The water in the pool is perfectly warm, perfectly clear, and perfectly calm. It a great place to swim, if you're the sort of person who happens to like that kind of thing.

The insidious thing about the Firehole, though, is the fact that the section of creek leading up to the pool is swift and rocky and deep enough to make it fun for floating down on an inner tube. Before my mission, I had floated down Utah's Weber River in an inner tube with a church group and had a grand old time. Even earlier, when I was 13 or 14, I had rafted down the Green River and had the time of my life. I knew how much fun it could be.

But the Weber River was shallow and tame. And on the Green River I had a life jacket. Neither condition held true there at the Firehole. So I determined to watch from the lip of the defile while everyone else tubed and swam, but I refused to participate myself.

Until Shauna Toronto started telling me how easy and safe the tubing was.

I won't detail all the mental and emotional gymnastics I went through trying to keep my resolve. But it looked like such fun, and Shauna thought it was safe, and maybe she and I could ride the river in the same tube . . .

So I agreed to give it a try. Through a quirk of fate, I ended up putting into the river upstream not with Shauna, but rather sharing a large inner tube with my friend Craig Topham, and diminutive fellow with an enthusiasm about twice as big as his body. We were both pretty much fully clothed, shoes and all. The plan was to run the river (a short trip of one or two hundred or so feet), then float lazily across the pool and get out on the far shore.

That was the plan, anyway.

The first half of the river run was great. Then we snagged on a rock, the tube tipped up, and we were both dumped into the torrent. We tumbled ass-over-teakettle down the river, trying to hold onto the tube or each other or the rocks all around, but the current was too swift. It swept us along like leaves. And then the defile widened out, and we were dumped into the pool.

We had lost the tube somewhere along the way. All there was to hold onto now, as the river bottom suddenly disappeared and there was only seventy feet of water beneath my feet, was Craig. Craig, fortunately or unfortunately, kept his head a lot better than I did, and he disentangled himself from me as quickly as he could, then stroked for one of the sides. We were maybe a third of the way across the pool by then, and suddenly I was all alone. There were still sounds, but it was like hearing a television from a different room. It wasn't real. The only thing that was real was the water, my sodden clothing dragging me under, the utter fear that filled my stomach.

I misspoke earlier. The pool doesn't really have a shore to speak of. There are rocky ledges and outcroppings on a couple of the sides, but other than that it's pretty sheer from the surface of the water up the sides to ground level maybe twenty feet higher. I'd have to cross the pool to get to any of those outcroppings. I seemed pretty much fucked.

Of course, the outcroppings were densely populated with the other members of my party. There were a dozen or more of my friends and acquaintances watching as Craig and I tumbled out the mouth of the creek and into the drink. With so many people around, so close but so far away, it seemed natural to fall back on old, old patterns. And what alternative was there, really? So, just like that day at the swimming hole in Liberty when I didn't think I could make it back to shore, I hollered for help. And what do you think happened.

I'll tell you. Not a damn thing.

Oh, everyone watched—a few even stood up and got closer to the edge of the outcropping—but there wasn't a one of them who dived into the water to help. Some of them were asking if I was all right. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick.

So it was up to me. I couldn't seem to make myself swim in any sort of proper fashion—I was far too panicked for that—but I thrashed and kicked and bucked and fought the water for the remainder of those nearly infinite fifty feet to where a wide fist of rock jutted up from the water at the lower end of the pool, shouting for help every time my mouth was out of the water, and several times when it wasn't. As I neared the rock, what seemed like hours later, a different Craig (whose last name I can't remember) reached down and hauled me up onto the warm stone like a fish. I was gasping for air, snot was running down my face, and one of my sneakers was missing. But I was alive, by God. And all I wanted to do was cling to that warm rock and never move again.

But somehow—I don't remember how—I was led from the rock to the larger outcropping and then up to solid ground. A lot of people tried to apologize to me, saying they didn't know whether or not I was really in trouble, or they thought I was kidding around, but I wasn't in much of a talking mood. (Kitty Genovese, had she survived her public stabbing, probably wouldn't have been, either.) In fact, I kept pretty much to myself the rest of the day.

I had saved my own life this time, but that didn't exactly comfort me, because I knew what a close thing it had been. But even so, from that day on, I think I stopped believing that anyone else was ever going to help me when I was in a jam—up to and including God, because I can honestly report that I never felt as if The Big Guy gave me a hand out the water, and I was certainly never tempted to relate my experience with streaming eyes in a testimony meeting. I've since learned somewhat differently about relying on certain people, but the basic tendency not to ask anyone for help is still there, pretty deeply ingrained.

So, I made it out of the water that day . . . but the water didn't make it out of me. It would be two or three years before I realized this and finally started to cough it up. More tomorrow.

St. George, Utah—a desert resort town a stone's throw from Arizona—is the last place I ever expected to find myself drowning. Likewise, I'm sure the last thing the patrons of the Valley Discount Book Center expected to see in their midst was a drowning man.

It happened, all the same.

It was 1993—Valentine's Day or thereabouts—and I was weekending in St. George with Roxie, the nineteen-year-old girl I'd been seeing awfully seriously for a year and a half. (That's not her real name, by the way, though it very possibly could have been. Insert your favorite disclaimer here and get used to the idea, because I'll be concealing more identities than just this one in the weeks and months ahead.) Valentine's Day falls exactly six months from my birthday—I'm the yang to love's yin, I guess—so I would have been precisely twenty-five and a half.

Roxie and I were in the middle of a long slow crawl through the local factory outlet mall. Somehow our conversation had turned to the subject of water and swimming, and I'd been explaining why it is that I go out of my way to avoid them both. As we turned into the Valley Discount Book Center (also a made-up name, but in this case it's only because I can't remember the real one), I was relating the story that you read yesterday, of how I took a little dip in the Firehole River and almost didn't come out again.

Now, I'd talked about the incident before this, but never in very much detail—never in detail at all, in fact. In retrospect, it's pretty clear that my conscious mind was avoiding the subject the way a hemophiliac avoids sharp objects. How do I know this? Because of what happened in that quiet little bookstore.

As we strolled down the aisles of books, Roxie and I, and as I told her how the water had closed over my head—well, there's no good way to put it except to say that the water closed over my head. I began to drown all over again, right there in the middle of the store.

It was a panic attack like none I had ever experienced. A dark fear gripped me, I turned cold, and I couldn't breathe. The closest thing to it I had ever felt was in gymnastics class one day at the age of ten when I slipped off the uneven parallel bars, landed flat on my back, and got the wind knocked out of me. On that occasion, it took about ten minutes for me to start breathing normally again—ten minutes of fearing that I might never be able to breathe again. This time, I didn't get my normal rhythm back for over two hours.

My flailing hands, reddening face, and gasping breaths clued Roxie in that something was wrong. She gently tried to calm me down and get me to breathe, but to no avail. She led me out of the store as the other patrons looked on in confusion and embarrassment—and did nothing, of course.

She helped me get settled in her black Trans Am (not her real car), then followed my mostly gestural directions as I guided her to my grandparents' house in the nearby town of Santa Clara. I hadn't told my grandparents that I was in the area (hey, my grandpa is a patriarch in the Mormon Church, and there I was shacked up in a little bed-and-breakfast around the corner from the Temple with a nubile young sexpot), but I couldn't breathe and I thought maybe having familiar people around me—and perhaps a blessing from my grandpa—would help.

Of course, they weren't home.

Next stop was a hospital emergency room near Dixie College. My health-insurance card got us seats in the waiting room, where I wheezed and gasped for an hour and half before I finally calmed down enough to breathe normally again. Ironically enough, that was about when a nurse was finally available to see me, and after a cursory checkup she dismissed me without even filling out a report. There was obviously nothing wrong with me any longer, so the hospital wouldn't even bother issuing me a bill.

Isn't the mind a marvelous and mysterious thing? On the one hand, it can wait years before fully confronting the knowledge that its brief candle was nearly snuffed out by a spring-fed river. On the other hand, it knows right when to stop acting up in order to avoid a hospital bill.

So which do you think scares me more—drowning, or my insurance company?

It must be going on two years ago now that came home to my Brooklyn apartment to find a message waiting on the answering machine. Much to my delight, the message wasn't for me, and I found it entertaining in the extreme. I made a careful transcription of the message before I erased the tape, and since I've just run across that transcription, I thought I'd share it with you.

Imagine the voice of a cultured New York socialite, probably in her early to mid thirties, who is blissfully oblivious to the face that she's dialed the area code for Brooklyn instead of Manhattan—and, indeed, to the fact that the voice on the answering machine belongs to no one she knows:

Hi, Astrid, it's Maria F_____  calling, and, um, this is a thank-you call from me and, uh, Michael, and it is to you and your husband Jim. We had a fabulous, fabulous time at your dinner party, and, um, everything was wonderful. Um, we thoroughly enjoyed your company, and, um, the company of your friends, and, uh, dinner was just delicious, and the conversation was, as you know, hilarious and occasionally, um, um, terrifically satisfying, if you know what I mean, in terms of the content and absolute RANGE, um, of topics, and, um, I don't know, I just, we were blissed upon leaving, and, um, I just, uh, I'm . . . just want to say thank you for your kindness. Um, bye.

I wonder if Maria ever realized that Astrid never received her stilted but effusive flood of thanks. I wonder if their friendship decayed and dried up as a result of this miscommunication. I wonder if Astrid will ever see this page and realize what a stupid fluke it was that drove their two households apart and brought so much pain and misery to the Upper East Side. I wonder . . .

God. I wonder if I'm going to get sued.

The big secret in Roxie's family, which no outsiders were supposed to know about, was her oldest sister's boob job. Seems Sis was feeling a little unhappy with the state of her sagging, aged teats, so Mr. Sis ponied up for a bit of silicone reinflation. Roxie was telling me about the time not long after at a family gathering when Mr. Sis gazed longingly at his wife's fresh rack of 38DDs, shook his head with a smile, and said, "Best three thousand dollars I ever spent."

Kind of sad, isn't it?

I just want to put in a good word today for old-fashioned, real-live, flesh-and-blood breasts, sagging or no. Regardless of how well they resist gravity, silicone breasts just don't measure up when it comes to the touch test.

Oh, yes, there's a difference—you know there is. Remember that hilarious scene in L.A. Story when TV weatherman Steve Martin finally gets New Age ditz Sarah Jessica Parker into the sack and he cops a feel? A confused look crosses his face, and he says, "Why do your breasts feel strange?"

And she says, "Because they're real." (Ba-dum!)

So when was it I felt a pair of Fifth Avenue falsies for myself and arrived at my opinion? I'd like to say that I got my hands on Sis's casabas in a back room at one of those frequent family gatherings, but that, more's the pity, would be a lie. No, what happened was I slipped a woman a couple of bills at a peepshow near Times Square sometime last year, and that's when my innocence was lost.

I'd never felt fake breasts before, but it was obvious from the first moment I touched them that that was what they were. Even before that, I knew something was up, because this woman had to be pushing forty, and her 40-DD's were defying gravity as perkily as helium balloons at a carnival. But when I laid hands on them, all doubt fled my mind.

Those suckers (or suck-ees, if you prefer) were as hard as bowling balls.

When I say they were hard, I mean they were hard. No give whatsoever, not one iota. Now, I don't know about you, but I prefer a little softness and give in my breasts—well, not my breasts, but you know what I mean. If I wanted to caress a couple of chunks of marble, then they'd be peeling me off the statues up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a regular basis.

"You know, most men come instantaneously when they get their hands on my breasts," the nice woman said to me (possibly in reaction to the fact that this obviously was not what I was doing).

Uh-huh. And a lot of men would give their left nut to trade places with Tommy Lee for a night with his wife, Plastic Pam, but that's not me. (Hey, even if Pamela didn't come with a tag that reads MADE IN BEVERLY HILLS, I've met Tommy Lee, and while he was a relatively nice guy, he was so dumb that I'd steer clear of any woman who was actually willing to bring two of his get into the world.)

So bring on those all-natural breasts. I don't care if they sag, or if they're small, or if they come in two different sizes. If I like you, then I'm liable to like your breasts, so long as they're 100% organic.

I guess I'm just a ditzy New Age kind of guy.

This is the story of why I'm cautious when I cross the street—though still perhaps not as cautious as I should be. I got off easy, after all.

I was—what?—eight or nine years old? The family was living in Bountiful, Utah. I was in Cub Scouts at the time, and my den had just finished up a rehearsal for a pack meeting that was coming later in the week. My den was going to perform the flag ceremony, and we had to practice to make sure we would get it right.

My den mother was a woman named Joyce Benard, who would become my piano teacher a little later in life. A handful of us were piled into her big station wagon, and she was driving us home from the church where we had been rehearsing.

I was the first stop. Sister Benard pulled the car over to the curb across the street from my house, and I got out on the passenger side. I went around to the front of the car to cross the street. I looked both ways—but apparently I didn't poke my head far enough around the big station wagon, because as soon as I stepped out past it there came a big loud roar and a squeal of brakes, and the world went totally crazy.

I flew through the air, bounced, rolled, and slammed into the pavement. Sister Benard, ashed-faced, exited her car and ran to me, as did the woman who had been driving the car that hit me. My mother, having heard the squealing brakes, came running out of the house across the street.

When it became apparent that I was only stunned and not dead or seriously injured, the women helped me across the street to the lawn in front of my house. Sister Benard went inside to call an ambulance (just in case).

It turned out that the car which had hit me—a brand-new Lincoln Continental—was damaged worse than I was. I had been flung up onto the hood, where I rolled up the slope of the windshield, rolled back down, and hit the pavement. The hood of the car was dented pretty good, the antenna was bent ninety degrees right at the base, and the windshield was starred with cracks.

I, on the other hand, was sore, and I had big bruises on both knees. There was also a mysterious tire print on one of my sneakers, which no one could ever figure out. And that was about it.

Now let's flash over to the nearby fire station, which was only about three blocks away. The firemen and paramedics were all fussing over their brand-new shiny ambulance, which had yet to be taken out on a call. In fact, my father and his boss were there, too. It was summer, and during the summer my father would supplement his teacher's salary with whatever work he could get. This year it was working at a small local sheet-metal company. The head honcho at the sheet-metal company was a member of the bishopric, and he was also a volunteer fireman. Combine this with the fact that the sheet-metal company lived just around the corner from the fire station, and it's not hard to see why my dad and his boss were there, admiring the new ambulance.

But then the call from the dispatcher came in—"Boy hit by car, Second North, Code Three"—and the paramedics scrambled into the ambulance. My father, recognizing the street as the one where he lived, said dryly, "Oh, that's probably my dumb kid."

The ambulance drivers had a great time on their three-block journey. They used every different siren they had. I'm sure they were disappointed that the trip was so short.

When they arrived, they checked me over and pronounced me fine. I didn't even get a trip in the shiny new ambulance, which kind of bummed me out. But hey, there was a story in the local paper the next week about the new ambulance, and since I was the first call the ambulance responded to, I got a mention! My dad showed it to me, proudly.

Unfortunately, I was referred to only as "small boy hit by a car." What a downer! Even at that age, I was bitterly disappointed when my name didn't make it into print. Jeez, if I come that close to being killed, the least I can get out of the deal is a little notoriety, right?