Getting in my car the other day on lunch-break, the rain drizzled down white. But the Florida heat, palpable underneath, gave the drizzle a positive context.

The rain sprayed whiter as I came to the High School a few blocks from my house. School was letting out: hundreds of kids poured into the street to walk home in the rain. It seemed mostly girls. Girls who, through the blur of my rainy, foggy truck-windows, looked older than most of the women that have been in my bed.

The girls laughed and screamed in wet white shirts with bras underneath. The whole wet world was white and beautiful like fake snow on a real Christmas tree.

The girls dispersed to the sidewalks on the sides of the road; still waving and screaming to each other over my car and I felt like I was the star of some hellish and beautiful psychosexual parade procession.

I pulled off immediately down a side road away from it. As my guilty heart raced and I looked for an alternate, asexual route home, I remembered my ex-roommate Greg.

A friend hooked me up with Greg when my sister moved out and I needed a roommate. Greg was moving to Tampa from Atlanta and needed a place.

Fragility peeked through his physical features. He was of average build but his pectoral muscles were placed low on his torso which made him sometimes seem to be melting. There was a hint of Boo Radley in his almost white-blonde hair. His lips, what little there were of them, pursed inward, giving Greg the appearance of holding in sounds as they tried to escape his mouth.

Greg was fragile in his over-reverent appreciation for music, which drove him to work hard and eat less so he could afford to buy musical instruments he'd never be forthright enough to put to task. When drunk, he'd talk about his musical desires: not his desire to make it a profession, but his desires to create.

But when sober, he merely spent his money on drums and dreamt. Music intimidated him like a perfect, beautiful woman. His impotence was sweet and sad and pure.

Sometimes Greg would talk: mostly only one-on-one, or in drunken social settings. At other times, especially when sober, Greg drew his thin lips even tighter, not opening them other than to laugh. His laughing helped him seem more benevolent, or at least remind those around him that he was keeping up. But some that didn't know or understand him regarded him as a creepy introvert.

Greg often headed directly for a drunken state after long, useless days working in various restaurants, trying to make enough money to get out from under the financial pressure of his recent useless move to Tampa from Atlanta.

When drunk and loose-lipped, Greg bombarded others with the energy he'd been so overly rational with in sobriety. Sometimes it was funny, sometimes it was uncomfortable. When drunk, Greg opened up into some Dean Moriarty without the smarts or sense of purpose. The joke was: he would just go and go and go and go and 'he's normally soooo quiet.' And everyone laughed. But, living with him, I noticed more than others, the unhealthiness of the contrast.

On afternoon breaks from whichever restaurant he worked at, I would talk to him as he lay quiet on the frameless mattress on the floor of his room, and I saw in his tight sober lips that he struggled with a powerful, almost unpredictable shyness.

His shyness crippled him in regards to women. By the time he was drunk enough to assert himself, he had usually already set himself up to be studied objectively as the joker or, in worse cases, the joke.

In sobriety Greg was silently frustrated, and because of this, he exuded sex. Not in a sexy way, more like he sweated it out to cool himself off. And he seemed self-conscious that those around him would smell it. His self-consciousness didn't help his cause.

When Greg did eventually have a woman in our apartment, I was surprised. I came home at 3 a.m. from drinking and sweating at a cramped club with stale 80's music. The yellow moon shined off the giant pre-historic foliage that framed our parking lot. I smelled the smoke in my clothes and hair as I ascended the stairs.

I put my key in the door and immediately heard thumping, scrambling and stumbling. I pushed the door in and it opened a bit but stopped at the end of the chain lock. The scramblethumping continued and through the crack in the door, in the dark distance of the living room, I saw white feet disappear up the stairs.

I yelled in, "Jim dude, don't put the chain on the door if I'm not in the house."

"I know, shut the door and I'll unlock it!" He yelled strangely from upstairs.

"Seriously," I continued into the dark, "If it's locked and I come home and you're asleep, I have to bang and bang on this door until I wake up everyone in the complex and you're in there…"

…the door pushed me back with a slam. I heard the latch rattle loose, followed by the same scrambling thump up the stairs and opened the door.

I crossed the threshold, turned on the lights and before me on the floor were a pair of white, men's Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear: 'tighty-whiteys'.

The next morning I asked Greg about his underwear. He told me, with his eyes on the floor, that he had met a woman in a bar and taken her home. She had given him an Ecstasy tablet and they had fucked until she left, long after I was asleep.

I couldn't picture him building enough charm or momentum to accomplish such a feat. But I believed him.

Over the course of the next few weeks I gave the story of the tighty-whiteys, and Greg's lay, to some of our friends and everyone agreed that the whole thing seemed out-of-character. When I got around to telling my sister the story, I added, offhandedly, jokingly, that Greg had probably hired a prostitute. I had daydreamed the theory before, but for some reason, hearing myself say it: I knew it was true and I discussed the possibility with every subsequent person to whom I repeated the story.

Yes, I realize that was mean of me…I'd never do such a thing now…that's not the point:

One afternoon, as Greg sat on the couch, eating and marveling at the sounds coming out of his stereo on a break from whatever restaurant job, I asked him, "Dude, a couple months ago, did you get a prostitute?"

"Yes." Greg admitted immediately. He kept chewing his food, seeming unsurprised, as if every embarrassing thing he'd ever done had been found out and this was no exception. He proceeded to let me interview him about it.

"Where did you find her?"

"In the phonebook." He took another bite of his sandwich.

"Oh. So it was an escort? You didn't go pick up a ho on Nebraska Ave?"

"No."

" How much did she cost?"

"A hundred dollars."

"Damn, that's not that expensive for a clean one…it doesn't seem. Was she good? What did she look like?"

"Yeah, she was hot." He said.

I questioned Greg's idea of 'hot' since I'd been with him to strip clubs many times and seen him fall under the spell of some very un-magical women. "She was only 18."

"Damn."

"It actually cost a little more with the tip, plus she sold me the Ecstasy."

"Did she seem miserable?"

"No, she was on Ecstasy too. She acted like she really liked me."

"Maybe she did."

There's really no theme or end or even point to this character study. But I will say that when Greg moved out, he left behind a porno movie. I have that movie today, it is the only one I own and I have watched it so many times that it now skips like scrambled cable porn. And I still watch it. The movie is called is called "Wide Spread #13: Stuff My Pussy".