By: Dennis Vannatta

#9   At age twelve, Russell Parkhurst tears a page from his spiral notebook and writes across the top, LIST OF MY LIFE.  He’d meant to write, LIST OF WHAT I WANT TO DO IN MY LIFE, but doesn’t bother correcting the error.  All he’s doing is trying to pass the time while Mrs. Koppelman, a seventh-grade English teacher, drones on and on about sentence fragments.  Like he could care.  Beneath the title, he writes in parentheses:  (IN ADDITION TO HAVING INTERCOURSE WITH AMY BURROUGHS).  This is for his friends, if one sitting nearby happens to see what he’s written.  It’d be good for a laugh even though Russell is serious.  He badly, badly wants to have intercourse with Amy Burroughs.  It had this year become the favorite topic of discussion among boys his age:  sex.  Intercourse, they call it, used as both noun and verb.  Russell badly wants to intercourse Amy Burroughs.  He dreams of intercoursing her, both in daydreams and sleeping dreams, waking with throat feeling hot like he has a fever.  Now—sitting third row, far right, Mrs. Koppelman at the blackboard chalk in hand, elbow going up and down like a hatchet, with each stroke her skirt twitching across her ample rear end, Amy Burroughs sitting front row, middle, fingers curled in her blond hair—Russell writes #1 under the subtitle and then stares at the blank space following.  Stares.  Then he puts his mechanical pencil down.  He can finish the list later if he wants.  Probably not, though, because there’s really nothing at all he wants to do in his life except intercourse Amy Burroughs.  Or if not Amy, then Mrs. Koppelman.

#1   A vague memory, perhaps his earliest.  He’s two years old, maybe not even that.  He’s sitting on the carpeted floor of a large room, like a ballroom or a banquet hall.  Some social occasion, no doubt, his father being the Baptist preacher and a thirty-third-degree Mason and therefore called upon to attend many social functions.  His mother or father must be nearby because he’s not frightened, just sitting there on the carpeted floor taking in the scene.  Men and women whirl by.  Dancing?  (Surely not Baptists.)  “Look out!” someone (his father?) says, and suddenly Russell finds himself straddled by a pair of legs, silk stocking clad.  He and the legs are tented under the skirts of a woman’s dress.  The material of the dress glistens at the edge of the hem in the light of the ballroom sconces and rustles as the woman twists her torso as if looking left and right but does not move her feet because of the cry, “Look out!  Don’t step on Russell!”  Then he’s rescued by his mother, who comforts him because everyone is laughing and he cries easily when he’s embarrassed or frightened.  But Russell does not cry and is neither embarrassed nor frightened.  In fact, although it’s impossible to be certain decades later, remembering, Russell thinks he might have enjoyed it.

#2   An old man, Russell isn’t certain that he can actually remember the scene or if he’d just heard about it so often from his mother and older sister, Marilynn, that he could conjure it up with convincing vividness:  a playground (in a park?) and his three-year-old self rushes up

 to a chubby little blond-haired girl younger than he (Marilynn:  “You always were a cradle-robber”) and says, “Hi, baby.”  Then he puts his arms around her and kisses her on the ear and the corner of her left eye.  The words are supplied by Marilynn.  Russell can’t hear himself saying them and thinks it unlikely.  Neither Marilynn nor his mother ever said the girl was blond, and Russell wonders if he hasn’t conjured up a little blond girl because he’s always had a weakness for blonds.  At the same time, he holds out the possibility that the girl really was a blond, and his subsequent preference stems from this ur-encounter.  What he is certain of is the two kisses, that and the feeling of the girl in his arms, how first she stiffens in surprise and perhaps fear, but then yields.  In pleasure?  Or as the weaker will yield to the stronger, from necessity?  Or just to get it over with?  It’s a phenomenon that will be repeated countless times over the course of his life: first stiffen, then yield.  He’ll never be sure what it means, and, frankly, so long as she yields, doesn’t care.

#4   In that tiny town where Russell spent his early years, the lone movie theater was frequently his baby sitter.  Admission was a dime, and for another dime he could get a candy bar and Pepsi.  He can remember the glass case of the concession stand, reaching up to put his dime on top, he was that little.  He can remember watching a Tarzan movie, and a tiger springs out of the dense jungle foliage, and he runs screaming up the center (in fact only) aisle.  Is his sister back there somewhere with her friends?  Does he run to the concession stand where the clerk would certainly have known him (everyone in town knows the Parkhursts).  No matter.  Russell remembers it but isn’t scarred by it.  As an adult he still loves movies and likes tigers just fine, too.  He doesn’t like going to movies alone, though.  In fact, his most enduring and endearing memory of that little movie theater stems from his sixth year.  He sits next to Gloria Cunningham, the cutest girl in first grade, puts his arm around her shoulders, and gives her a kiss on the cheek.  They’re sitting near the front at the time.  Something dazzling is on the screen (a fire? a sunset? an explosion?), and he and Gloria are highlighted by the radiance at the moment of the kiss.  In his memory, he hears clapping behind him and thinks it’s for him.  Well, if it wasn’t, it should have been.

#5   Russell is seven years old.  His second-grade teacher is Mrs. Brice.  He does not think of Mrs. Brice as young or old, pretty or not pretty.  He does not recall especially liking her or disliking her.  In fact, the only specific memory he has of the second grade is of trying to make a chain out of red and green construction paper to take home to his mother for a Christmas tree ornament.  Simple.  Using the little brush from the little bottle of mucilage (as Russell is pretty sure they all called it back then), dab a little glue on one end of a strip, press the opposite end onto the glue and voila, one completed link.  Next, take a strip of paper of the opposite color, insert it through the first link, dab glue, press ends, etc.  As noted:  simple.  But Russell can’t do it.  In two minutes his fingers are covered with glue and his hands festooned with red and green strips of paper.  Shaking his hands wildly fails to dislodge them.  Gloria Cunningham—yes, she of the heavy-petting anecdote of the first grade—laughs at him.  Russell weeps bitter tears..  Mrs. Brice comes to his rescue, cleans his hands, helps him make that chain.  “For your mother,” she says when it’s completed—or rather whispers, with a wink, as if it’s some secret between the two of them.  Sometime in that second-grade year, not necessarily right after the paper-chain scene and not necessarily related to it, Russell has a curious dream.  He’s in the classroom.  He walks up to Mrs. Brice’s desk.  She shifts her chair around, raises her leg, and lays her ankle on his shoulder.  Then she cants her foot over and rests it against Russell’s cheek.  A silly, silly dream, he tells himself when he wakes up.  But his last conscious thought before drifting off into sleep is, I hope I have that dream again.  He does not.  Nor does he, as might be expected, develop a foot fetish.  Like the guy says, love is strange.  

#6   One day in the fourth grade (Russell is ten years old) a new student appears in school.  Years later Russell will no longer recall his name but will remember that he moved to town from Alaska, of all places.  At a certain point, the boy broaches the subject of where babies come from.  Does Russell know?  Russell has never given the subject much thought.  In cartoons babies generally arrive via a stork, but Russell suspects that probably has about as much validity as Santa Claus, in whom he no longer believes.  The hospital, he says; babies are delivered by doctors to the hospital.  Naw.  “Your daddy sticks his peeder in your mama’s hole and shoots a seed in.  That’s what grows into a baby—the seed.”  Russell runs around in circles haw haw hawing and then stops long enough to declare this to be the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.  Yeah, well, what about those great big bellies women have and then no longer have when they come home from the hospital with a baby?  Russell haw haw haws in great swooping arcs around the playground again but even as he does so wonders, Where do those big bellies come from?  It couldn’t be that, though, not that daddy’s peeder stuff.  That’s just some craziness from Alaska.

#7   When he’s eleven comes the calamity:  his father loses his job as the Baptist preacher over something that happened with a woman.  Russell doesn’t know much about it at the time, in later years can’t recall how he learned what little he knew.  He does recall saying to his mother (saying, asking), “Dad got fired because he kissed a woman.”  To which his sister replies (replies, screams), “He fucked her!  He didn’t kiss her!  He fucked Mrs. McCandless!”  And then his mother slaps Marilynn’s face, and Marilynn screams, “Slap me?  Slap me?  I didn’t fuck Mrs. McCandless!  Why don’t you slap him!”  And his mother replies (screams), “I did slap him!  I slapped and I slapped and I slapped . . .” and she keeps on screaming that she’d slapped him until Marilynn runs out of the room.  Russell doesn’t recall what he did, but he wishes he remembered what Mrs. McCandless looked like.  Frankly, the fact that he doesn’t is his biggest regret about the whole thing.

#8   They move from the little town of Hickory Grove to what to Russell is the bustling city of Lyonstown where his father has some sort of white-collar job with a trailer manufacturer.  He apparently makes more money than he did as a preacher because they live in a bigger house and have a color TV.  Marilynn is popular with the local boys and gets slapped a lot for coming home late.  (Russell listens to the rows lying in his pajamas on the floor at the top of the stairs.  He loves Marilynn, but the sound of her being slapped thrills him.)  It’s this same year (Russell is still eleven), that he plays his first kissing game at a classmate’s party.  He doesn’t remember exactly how the game was played, but he recalls going into a dark room with Bobbie Meier where they stick their tongues in each other’s mouths.  Bobbie’s tongue tastes metallic.  Russell stops kissing her after a few seconds, but Bobbie says, “Diane and Jimmy kissed for two minutes straight without stopping.”  So he and Bobbie put their tongues in each other’s mouths and leave them there while Russell counts to 121 to himself.  Then he pulls away.  “There,” he says, “we kissed for over two minutes.”  Bobbie seems satisfied.

#10   Later in his twelfth year [see #9, above], Russell is in bed, sick, feverish.  He dreams a fever dream.  He’s on an island in the tropics.  Very hot.  He’s tied to a post.  A girl dressed like Jane from the Tarzan movies stands before him with a whip.  She’s prepared to do terrible things to him.  Russell is frightened but also strangely excited.  Then he has the whip and the girl is frightened but also obviously strangely excited.  Does he use the whip?  Does she use the whip?  Russell awakens with his underwear wet and sticky.  “I was so sick I peed my pants,” he confesses to his best friend, Joe, a few days later.  “It was all sticky.”  “You didn’t pee your pants, you dumb shit.  You had a wet dream,” Joe says.  Joe isn’t very clear about just what a wet dream is, but Russell is gratified that you don’t have to be in a high fever to have one.  He eagerly awaits the next one, and it doesn’t take long.  He continues to look forward to wet dreams, but of course there’s the issue of what to do with the sticky underwear.  It’s just the price you pay, he decides, at the same time having a sudden premonition:  there’s always a price to pay.  In later years, though, looking back, he’ll conclude that, no, there isn’t always a price to pay.  (Or if there is, he doesn’t pay it.)

#11   When Russell is fifteen, Bryan Kennard goes strutting and crowing, claiming to have had sex with Phyllis Masters.  Russell is outraged and heartsick—not because Bryan beat him to the punch, so to speak, but because he’d been wallowing in a sort of adolescent slough of despond under the assumption that sex was something boys his age talked about but did not do.  It would come, if it came at all, at some ill-defined point far, far into the future.  But here that pimply bastard Bryan Kennard had already done it!  Russell dedicates his life to doing it, too, sometime before his sixteenth birthday.  He begins to date cute LouAnn Spears and pursues his goal with a ferret-like singleness of purpose.  Then one night in the back seat of her father’s car (LouAnn turned sixteen and got her driver’s license before Russell), she suddenly pulls out of his arms, says, “Oh all right, if you want it so much.  But this means we’re going steady, OK?” and lies back on the seat, pulls her panties off, and spreads her legs.  Russell is finished so quickly that he’s not even sure if he liked it.  He decides that he did but that he’ll probably like it better next time.  For the rest of his life, he always likes it but figures he’ll like it better next time.

#12   Russell breaks up with LouAnn after having sex with her, terrified she might be pregnant.  In movies, girls always get pregnant after having sex one time.  If LouAnn got pregnant, he’d have to drop out of school, marry her, and get a job, and what kind of job could he get at fifteen?  But she doesn’t get pregnant, and except for that one tearful scene when he announced they weren’t going to go steady after all, she doesn’t bug him in any other way, and for the rest of his life he thinks of her fondly.  The other time he has sex in high school he wears a condom.  “Trust me, it’s not as good with a rubber,” he tells his friends, most of whom remain virgin until well after high school, “but there’s less worry.  It’s a trade-off.”  He likes to act the wise old pro at sex with his friends but privately considers himself a near failure.  For all his trying—and having sex is pretty much all he thinks about and works at—he manages to have sexual intercourse only two times in his high school career.  Much of the blame falls squarely on the shapely shoulders of Nancy Pelphrey, with whom Russell goes steady all of his junior and most of his senior years.  “Handjob Nancy,” he calls her after her specialty, which she is very good at and very liberal in performing.  Russell’s friends are jealous and Russell quite content for a while, or, if not content exactly, hesitant to jeopardize a relatively good thing by exploring alternatives.  A bird in the hand and all that.  Shortly after Christmas break his senior year, though, Russell realizes his high school career is coming to an end and he with so little to show for it:  sexual intercourse only one time.  So he starts seeing Bobbie Meier (yes, she of the 121-second tongue kiss) behind Nancy’s back and achieves his goal with surprising ease.  Surprising unless you consider that Bobbie hates Nancy and is delighted to bang her boyfriend and then go running to her with the news.  Tearful breakup scene.  Why oh why?  “Nancy, a guy gets bored with handjobs after a while.”  “Well, why didn’t you tell me?  I thought you were OK with it.  I would have given you a blowjob if you’d asked.”  Shee-it.  Live and learn, hey?  Thereafter, Russell never dates a girl more than three times without asking for a blowjob.  Results are mixed.  [See #14 below.]

#13   The college years are the happy hunting grounds for guys on the make—and what guy isn’t?  Russell keeps a careful count of how many times he’s had sex and with whom until sometime in his sophomore year, and then lets it slide.  What’s the point?  Besides, it’s not his past conquests that are important to him but the next one.  His very success, though, begins to cause problems with les femmes.  Careful of that guy, he’s only interested in one thing—that’s the word on Russell.  But that’s unfair.  Russell wants to like the girl, too, her personality, wants to enjoy her company:  bowling, movies, stuff.  Of course, he won’t continue to date a girl if she refuses to have sex with him.  Don’t be silly.  But he won’t immediately drop a girl after having sex with her.  That would be wrong.  There are girls he dates weeks, even months.  This is a dangerous game, though.  If college guys are on the hunt, college girls are, too—for husbands.  Russell isn’t opposed to the idea of marriage but only on his terms and in his own time.  He’s careful not to let himself be entrapped.  What he hasn’t taken into account, though, is that in situations like this it takes two to tango, and it takes two to be careful.

#14   Russell is never in a fraternity, but he does quite well with the sorority sisters nonetheless.  His great conquest is Bess Oetting, Delta Delta Delta.  It might have come as a surprise to even Russell’s closest friends, but looks were never very high on his list of priorities when it came to women.  Sex for him was more a matter of friction—two bodies coming together—than aesthetics.  Still, Bess Oetting is a real looker, stunning.  She seems the type to go for the captain of the football team, the BMOC, and Russell is as surprised as anybody when he makes his all-purpose pitch (fat girl, skinny girl, any girl) and it works.  Really, though, never in his life does Russell have much of any idea what goes on inside a woman’s head, doesn’t much care.  Maybe Bess is no more driven by superficialities (looks, money, job prospects, all of which Russell possesses in only the most modest proportions), than Russell is.  It was also possible, Russell suspects when after three months of dating Bess announces she’s pregnant, that she’d been knocked up when they met and was desperate for a husband.  The math doesn’t fit, though.  She would have to be showing by then.  He does the right thing and marries her (even though she miscarries two weeks before the wedding, that’s the kind of stand-up guy he is).  It’d always been his plan to marry at some point anyway, and Bess Oettings didn’t come along every day.  Just look at her!  Moreover, he was near graduation, and perhaps marriage and fatherhood would help him fend off reclassification to the dreaded 1-A.  Even a bad marriage had to be better than slogging through rice paddies in the Mekong Delta.  And it isn’t a bad marriage.  Russell gets a high lottery number, so no draft to worry about; both get decent jobs, so no money worries.  They get along well, enjoy playing golf and traveling together, and are wise enough to give each other sufficient space when space is required.  There’s only one problem:  Bess refuses to perform oral sex.  He’d asked for it on their third date, but she’d said no, and he let it slide because oral sex had never been a sine qua non for him if the sex was good enough otherwise, and sex with Bess is damn good.  When Russell asks for it again on their honeymoon, though, Bess does not courteously and regretfully decline as a new wife should but declares confrontationally, “No!  Ugh.  Gross.  It makes me sick just thinking about it.  I’ll never do that, never, so don’t bother asking again.”  “Is it too late for an annulment?”  He says it like he’s joking.

#15   The years pass, keep on passing.  Their marriage is pretty good despite the oral sex prohibition, but that begins to weigh on him, becomes an obsession almost, and obsessions aren’t good for a man’s health.  On his fortieth birthday he decides to ask her for oral sex again but loses his nerve and settles for female-superior sex, big deal, Bess does that every fourth time anyway (top, bottom, side, rear-entry).  Then, the night following his fortieth birthday, he drives down to County Line Road where all the cheap motels are and pays a streetwalker twenty-five dollars for oral sex in the front seat of his car.  He’s so nervous he has trouble getting an erection, but then he pretends it’s Bess, and then it’s OK.  He tells himself if Bess were ever to find out, he’ll say, “Bess, I swear while she was doing it I thought of you.”  It’d demonstrate a sort of loyalty, wouldn’t it?

#16   He’d thought the trip to County Line Road would be a one-time thing, but he finds himself going back repeatedly, at first once a month and then weekly until it threatens to replace sex with Bess (who’s pre-menopausal by then and doesn’t seem to mind missing out).  He never gets over being nervous—the fear of getting mugged or caught by the cops—but it’s a nervousness he becomes accustomed to.  The price of doing business.  The money-price increases from twenty-five dollars to fifty by the time it comes to an end in Russell’s forty-seventh year when his luck runs out and he and LaToya Johnson are arrested in one of the cops’ periodic sweeps of the motel area.  He thinks he might be able to keep it from Bess because his name never appears in the paper, and they have separate checking accounts, so she won’t know about the fine.  But one of Bess’s co-workers sees Russell in court and can’t wait to run tell the tale.  Not good, especially when he confesses it’s been going on since he turned forty.  Bess explodes:  “Seven years!  Hell, almost eight years!  How could I have not known this was going on behind my back for almost eight years?”  “Well, it helps that you’re dumb as a box of rocks.  But you’re a genius compared to me.  I mean, I was dumb enough to marry the only Tri-Delta in history who doesn’t give blowjobs.” 

#17   How they flew, the years, although in some ways they seemed to fly backward.  Middle-aged and divorced, he feels like a teenager again—that is, in his situation vis a vis sex.  Instead of it being within easy reach on the other side of the queen-sized bed whenever he wants it, once again he has to work for it:  i.e., dating.  Dating.  It was more complicated now.  Where to go?  Back then you’d go to a movie, a ballgame, a dance.  It didn’t make much difference.  The where was just the ante, something to get the game going.  The real contest started in the back seat of the car.  Now, though, you have to think of someplace interesting to go, make sure this movie isn’t sexist, that restaurant has vegan options.  Worse, you have to carry on conversations, and that’s hard work, too.  In high school you talked about school, teachers, friends, parents.  Easy.  Now you have to work to find common ground and interesting common ground, and a little charm, a little wit are expected, too.  The worst thing is that now—and Russell never thought he’d live to hear himself say this—the sex is too easy.  He’d had sexual intercourse twice in his high school years.  Now, with all the widows, divorcées, career women who pretended to be or were as sexually predatory as he, Russell could have sex three times with three different women a week if he wanted to and were able [see #18 below].   In contrast to the endless pathetic stratagems and backseat wrangling of his teenage years, the outcomes in doubt, the rare triumphs cause for hosannas, now it was, while waiting for the check, “Look, we’re adults.  I’m just going to be honest and say I find you very attractive and would like to go to bed with you tonight, if you’re agreeable.”  Simple.  Yes or no, and no hard feelings if it’s no or strong feelings if yes.  In some ways, in fact, it was a little like a visit to County Linde Road but without the worrying about getting busted by the cops.  Pleasant, but damn near no excitement.  Maybe he should just find a new hobby?  But then he thinks back to that twelve-year-old Russell’s LIST OF MY LIFE [see #9] and realizes that his fifty-five-year-old version would be precisely the same:  #1, to have sex with somebody; #2, blank.  Over a tall cool one on the nineteenth hole at the country club, her mentions #9 to a golfing buddy with a half-apologetic, self-deprecatory laugh—“Am I just a case of arrested development?”—and the friend, quite a swordsman himself, tells him not to beat himself up over it.  “You’re not unique, you know.  What you are is a man, that’s all.  Men are progenitors.  We advance with our dicks out looking for someplace to stick them.  It’s the way we’re made and why we’re made.  It’s our biological imperative, to be progenitors.”   Russell isn’t absolutely sure there is such a word as progenitor, but thereafter that’s how he thinks of himself.  Unapologetically, he advances spear-foremost upon the world of women.

#18  At the age of sixty-six Russell retires and at the same time (although he doesn’t think there’s any emotional connection, his career never having been important enough to him to rate a single mention in his Life-List) begins to have problems—ahem—in the bedroom.  He wonders if it isn’t time to make some concession to age and so cuts down on his frequency, but this only seems to make things worse.  Use it or lose it, pal.  Girding his loins for the embarrassing conversation, he talks to his doctor, another golfing buddy, who prescribes the little blue pill.   Bingo!  Back in business.  True, by his mid-seventies things sometimes get a little iffy even with the pill, but Russell takes lemons and makes lemonade:  i.e., he finds that by feigning humiliation at “a bit of bother,” as a charming English gal once described it, his partners often become helpful and inventive.  There isn’t much they aren’t willing to try—although of course they’ve never done that before.  The dears.

#19   On his seventy-eighth birthday, opening the car door for his current lady (ever the gentleman, our Russell), he catches his heel on the curb and goes down.  Broken hip.  Surgery.  A difficult recovery exacerbated by blood clots.  He stays three weeks in the medical center rehabilitation wing, after which his crappo medical insurance says no more of that, Bub.  On to the Bedford Retirement Community where he receives more rehab.  His hip responds, but his knees, ankles, and feet begin to swell.  Diagnosis:  congestive heart failure.  “Not good but not as bad as it sounds,” the doc assures him.  “You can live for years with CHF.”  That’s good news?  Funny how your priorities can change.  Russell goes from wanting to get through rehab quickly so he can return home to hoping to get the CHF under control enough that he’ll be allowed to move from the Bedford East Campus (assisted care for the lame and the dying) to the West Campus (independent living) where there are, as he notices in the common cafeteria, any number of “possibilities” among the women there, some of whom look barely in their sixties.  Yes, Russell’s heart may be congested, but by golly it’s still a man’s heart!

#20   Private rooms in the assisted-care campus are prohibitively expensive, so Russell shares a room first with a fellow who dies, then with one who one day has enough and hobbles out without telling anyone, then finally for the last several months with Garnett Travers, a retired railroad worker with crippling rheumatoid arthritis and a couple of other things.  Garnett shuffles painfully along with the help of a walker, his torso bent at a ninety-degree angle, but he’s a cheerful fellow nonetheless, and he and Russell get along well.  They talk about their jobs, their travels, about sports and politics, but their favorite topic is the women of the West Campus, which ones they are going to nail once they get cleared to make the move.  One night Garnett calls over to him, “You may not be making the earth move, but you sure are making that bed rattle.  Spanking that monkey again, you dirty dog.”  Yes, guilty as charged.  Russell hasn’t had sex with a real live women since he broke his hip, but he’s been masturbating weekly for a good while now under that use it or lose it assumption, and without the aid of those little blue pills, too, because he’s saving them for the real thing.  Masterbating without them is a protracted affair, a real workout.  Russell is a little embarrassed to be caught in the act but not too.  In fact, they laugh about it, and since both are now good and awake, they begin talking about sex.  Garnett wonders if it’s ever going to happen for them again, or is it going to be all talk and handjobs now?  Russell says it by God better happen because that’s what he’s on this earth for:  to be a progenitor.  Garnett asks what in Halifax a progenitor is, and instead of giving him a short definition, Russell begins telling him about his Life-List, starting at #9, because he thinks that’s when his realization of his life’s purpose first came to him, and then backing up to #1 and proceeding right on down the list in narrative fashion, skipping a few bits, true, but in other places adding details that come to him only at that moment.  It takes a while, after eleven when he begins and only a couple of minutes before midnight when he gets to the broken hip and the sexless East Campus, but concluding with, “But I’m still a progenitor, bet your ass on that.”  Gerald laughs.  Russell is a little taken aback.  “What’s so funny?”  “Nothing, nothing.  Well, come on, that ‘progenitor’ business.  If that word means what I think it means, well, you’ve gone your whole life progenitoring every female who crosses your path, but you’ve never actually produced anything.  I mean, you’ve never fathered a child.”  Russell lurches up in bed and gives Garnett a look of consternation.  “What the hell are you talking about, never fathered a child?  I’ve got three kids, Garnett, three.”  Garnett seems thunderstruck.  “Are you kidding me?  You’ve got children?  You just told me the story of your life and you don’t . . . I’ve been in this room with you for months and you never once mention . . . I just don’t know what to make of you, Russell, I really don’t.”  Garnett turns over in bed away from Russell, his face to the wall.  What’s eating him, Russell wonders.  The guy seemed almost angry.  Russell lies there trying to figure it out until the clock begins to strike twelve.  But wait, he thinks, there’s no clock in this room.  But it struck twelve anyway.