The Wicked Allure of Nazi Iconography

I can still remember, because I will never forget, my first night as An Older Man. The Artist Formerly Known as The Kiddo and I had repaired to the infamous Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Blvd, where, in those male-chauvinistic times, salesgirls from Orange County masquerading as groupies got chummy with boxboys from the Valley masquerading as rock stars. It was our hope to meet young women with whom to enjoy a bit of promiscuity. Over the course of the conversation we had with the first two maidens we were able to persuade to share our booth, the fact of my being 27 came out, whereupon they gaped at each other in horror, and…mine gasped, “You’re so…old!” They were both 19.

Within months, First Major (adult, live-together) Girlfriend had pulled the plug on our relationship because I was unbearable, and I went out looking for someone new to whom to be ghastly and unfaithful on an ongoing basis. As luck would have it, lucky winner Jakki Gall was herself 19, blonde and cute and of the Valley. Our first date was to see The Night Porter, which intrigued me because I found fantastically sexy the poster depicting Charlotte Rampling in her opera-length leather gloves and Nazi officer’s cap.

I was a smoker then, but Jakki Gall was a smoker’s smoker, and it was a wonder anyone seated in our vicinity was able to see the film, but all was forgotten when she agreed after the closing credits to come over to my apartment overlooking Sunset Blvd. for a look at my etchings, if you get my drift, and you do.

Within around 72 hours, she had me wrapped around her little 19-year-old finger. First Major Girlfriend had been pretty nervous about sex (and I, of course, impatient, censorious, and the consummate tyrannical asshole male), so Jakki’s being fantastic more than made up for the great unlikelihood of her coming to be viewed as one of our great public intellectuals. I couldn’t get enough of her, though she seemed able to get quite enough of me. I searched for consolation on nights she didn't answer her phone in the arms of an older woman, one of my own superannuation. I'd known that I would never be happy with her, though, from the moment she turned up for our first date in a ghastly maxiskirt that four years before wanted back.

Christmas was coming and I rolled out the heavy artillery, making Jakki a top on which I wrote her name in silver glitter. I tried to make a date to present her with it (among other things), but the joyous season had made her even more elusive than usual. Once having given her so vigorous a bawling out for disappointing me that she said maybe we'd better retrieve the personal items we’d left in each other’s homes, I scraped her name off the top, replaced it with FMG’s, and left it for FMG, as a surprise, in her car, to which I’d retained the key.

She was sufficiently touched to suggest that we meet up. At our meet-up, though, in spite of my trying to be my most charming, she seemed to think better of thinking better of our breakup. She’d never looked more gorgeous than just before the elevator doors closed on her as she left me again.