As I look back and picture myself laying in the half-filled bathtub, cold and naked, my erection long gone, I admit to you that I have given up on my first column idea, which I will explain later, in this: my first column.

In the tradition of other great columns, such as the ones that supported the buildings of Rome: my column for Ink19 will be as straight and strong and dependable as the erection I no longer had by the end of my last "one-night-stand". You, readers, will enjoy what I write, consistently. I promise you that, with complete confidence.

But, like Roman civilization itself: there's no telling how long this magnificence will last. 'For how long can I burn so brightly?' I ask, even now as I remember the cold bathtub, the way the chill gripped me, the way my pruned fingers had expected so much more from the evening?

"In my column, I want to write about the parts of myself that people might find distasteful." I tried to explain to her earlier that evening, while sitting across the hot tub, sipping my Long Island Ice Tea and knowing I was gonna score. I looked up into the star-flecked night sky, pushed the dark blue drink-umbrella aside and gulped straight from the rim of the glass.

Refreshing.

I looked back to her, catching her gaze and holding it firmly. "I want to write…(pregnant pause)…questionably." I told her. "People will misunderstand, possibly even dislike me."

"But you seem so nice…" she said while carving patterns with her fingers, in the warm foam of the water's surface.

"And why would you want to put yourself in that position if you're not even getting paid?" She asked.

I had been trying to vaguely explain the idea behind my column for almost a half an hour; which was hard considering I had to leave out the part about how I planned to document a series of one-night-stands, starting with her.

She didn't understand me. She knew my name from stuff she'd read in other publications and had been impressed with my writing. But she didn't understand me. She didn't understand my artistic intent. But she did have an amazing mouth, so I let it go: I was not here in search of her love and understanding. I was here, in the Jacuzzi at her apartment complex at 1:30 a.m. in the morning, in search of a story. I laughed out loud at the thought; like a bad-guy wrestler who, though forced to cheat, had won the belt regardless of karma.

"What's so funny?," She asked. I didn't answer, but rather, held my glass into the night air made muggier by the hot tub; "A toast!" I called out. She held her glass up to mine, "To Ink19!…To my column!" We clinked our glasses together, me and this girl I didn't really know, and drank heartily.

I had initially pitched several concepts to the Ink19 editors when asked for my words: "every week I'll get into a different physical altercation; a bar fight or something…every month I'll try a different illegal drug and review it…every three weeks I'll get in an argument with someone and try and make them cry…once a week I'll pursue a one-night-stand."

Secretly, they all sounded like bad ideas to me. I wasn't confident that I could follow through on any of my concepts: I would end up with a horrible drug addiction, slumped in an alley somewhere, crying my two black eyes out. But I wanted my column to be alive and memorable; safety and reality be damned.

The one-night-stand idea sounded the most feasible, though I couldn't picture pulling it off my age. Though I'd had a run of one-night-stands years back: up until I was 24, I hadn't had but two dates that didn't end in sex of some sort. And I dated a lot.

But, at that time, I was just out of high school and my zits had finally gone away. When they finally disappeared, my confidence hit me like a pint of mushroom tea and I committed myself to exercising every option from there on out. My brazen confidence during that time precipitated a one-night-stand streak only impeded when I became monogamously tied to my first real girlfriend: my experiences with her were my real lesson in how to, and how not to go about loving and fucking.

By the time I was sitting in the hot tub, drinking Long Island Iced Teas with umbrellas in them, and pondering my Ink19 column, I had stared the reality of love and sex so hard in the eyes that even the memory of its intensity wilted my sexual spirit. Since that first promiscuous streak long ago, I had been sent to school and failed, and the idea of one-night-stands now seemed as far away as my high-school zits.

At 26-years-old, with nothing to prove sexually, I had nowhere near the momentum I had during my freshly zit-free years. One-night-stands, it turned out, were a lot harder than I remembered them to be. But the sound of your laughter filled my head and the thought of entertaining you, dear reader, was the only impetus I had, to again try my hand at the art of the one-night-stand.

Her and I had long ago landed in a class together at USF. We played eye games from across the room the entire semester. But we never directly spoke to each other.

I hadn't seen her in two years and she had long since been logged into my private mental files under: "women-I-could-have-hooked-up-with-but-never-did-
so-now-I-will-masturbate-with-their-image-in-my-head-for-the-rest-of-my-life." When I saw her by herself in Ybor City, I was drunk enough and had previously had so many sexual fantasies about her, that accosting her and treating her as if we were going to have sex (again) seemed second nature.

I stopped her amid the throngs of drunks on the street. She was alone and equally as drunk as I was, which were both good signs. She had short, curly-blonde hair to her ears, hard, dark eyes and a confident jawbone. She was very sexy and her face looked like a boy's from certain angles; in a mysterious, fashion magazine way. She was small chested but her ass was athletic like a ballet dancer's or a gymnast's ass. We were almost exactly the same size and I wondered if perhaps, after we had our one-night-stand, I might be able to provoke her into trying to kick my ass, so I could write about that too. It'd be a good contest: me and her.

Our most substantial conversation revolved around the eye games we'd shared in class a few years back.

We had talked for a bit out on well-lit 7th Avenue, the main strip, until we'd had enough of being unapologetically bumped into by the herds of drunks stumbling around the closed-off street, yelling at each other about sex: like every other Tampa weekend. Her and I held hands and walked into a small quiet café.

We were both drunk, but not too bad. Not drunk enough to have even a seemingly great conversation. I was thinking a lot, too much perhaps, about my column, and how to get her in bed. I thought a lot about how to turn our lack of electricity into a respectable piece of literature. I repeatedly zoned out and woke up to find myself answering questions I hadn't paid attention to. It seemed like a waste of time.

I grabbed her hand under the table and counted and studied each of her knuckles with the tips of my fingers, trying to motivate the situation and turn myself on.

I thought about what it would be like to take her back to her apartment and find out that she was brilliant. I explored her hands and thought about her thin fingers perhaps playing the cello; something surprising and beautiful. I imagined walking into her bedroom and finding her with her eyes closed, legs open, straddling a the cello with her eyes closed. I pictured her lost in the music like she would later (unbeknownst to me at the time to the cello fantasy) lose herself to Pearl Jam. Picturing her lip quiver as she ended her cello solo I was suddenly very aroused and put her hand on my crotch.

"Oh my," she exclaimed softly smiling and blushing, her boyishness very apparent. I kissed her cheek gently. I felt like I was going to throw up: bravado was exhilarating some years back, but now it just felt fucking ridiculous. But it seemed necessary for art's sake.

"Woooooooo!," someone yelled in the door of the café, startling us both. We looked up to two drunk frat guys giving us the thumbs up as they walked past the open door of the café. I hadn't realized that passersby had a full view under the table, to my lap and her hand on the zipper of my jeans. My bulge dissipated in a wake of humility and self-consciousness and I softly pulled her fingers away before she could notice I was no longer all-powerful. "It's hot," I murmured in her ear. "Let's go to my apartment complex and go swimming." She answered.

I realized how lucky I was to come upon such a logical subject for my first one-night-stand-column. I was very grateful, but still, I looked her in the eyes while talking to her and wrongly assumed it was going to be easy.

Only the thought of you, dear reader, kept me from army-rolling out of the moving car as she sang along to Pearl Jam's, '10' album on the drive to her apartment.

If I was to write about my one-night-stand with this girl, I would have to keep you in mind the entire time: I couldn't dwell on how, as soon as we'd gotten into her car in Ybor City, she'd rewound '10' to the beginning. I would have to ignore the way she started the car dramatically with the first notes of Stone Gossard's guitar. I had to tune her out and think only of you as we sat in the dark parking lot of her apartment complex for a couple extra minutes so she could finish the last refrains of 'Evenflo'. If this was to become a one-night-stand, I would have to ignore all those things in favor of you, dear reader.

Getting really beat up every week began sounding more feasible.

In the car, with Eddie Vedder's every earnest plea and admission re-routed out the amazing-looking mouth of this 23-year-old women; she became less and less mysterious and sexy.

If someone sings along, ver batem, to a whole album in your presence: that person is trying to tell you something. I didn't want to think about what this woman was trying to tell me by singing with so much heart-felt honesty that she no longer acknowledged my existence; as if she was so lost in Pearl Jam that I disappeared. Her singing made the forced seduction that much harder, but that trend reversed after she made the drinks.

We sat on the floor with our very strong Long Island Ice Teas and talked about nothing some more. I was busy thinking about work: the column, how to describe the bare room her and I were sitting in, on the same uniform-beige carpeting found in all the student-ghetto apartments near the University. She had yet to buy furniture so, like an aerial shot of a dried up wheat field; the carpet ran uninterrupted to all the edges and corners of the room. It was just us, two drinks and a lamp.

She stood up, "Let's go swimming." She said, walking into the overly-lit kitchen and setting her drink on the white plastic bar top. She walked around the corner, down the hallway and out of view.

I sat in the vast, boring livingroom, aqlready in my swim trunks with my legs crossed staring at the popcorn ceiling. "Did I tell you that I have been offered the opportunity to write my own column in a cool huge newspaper with a large circulation." I yelled into the next room.

"Really!" She exclaimed, her voice preceeding the sound of her footsteps coming back down the hall toward the living room. "That's great," she said, as she came around the corner in only a red bikini swimsuit bottom. She was naked from the waist up as she reached out for the drink she'd left on the counter. I studied the perfect white line from her fingertip to her breast. The imprint of her ribs underlined her bare breasts several times over.

"How much are you getting paid?" She stopped, taking the umbrella out of her drink and licking off the toothpick. Her and her beautiful breasts smiled at me for a moment before taking off back down the hall with her glass.

"Uh, they're not paying me," I said vacantly, staring at where she had just stood and trying to discern what her nudity meant in regards to my column. I got up, walked to the mouth of the hallway, peeked around the corner and shouted. "But it's a great opportunity. I'll have total artistic control."

"You better…if they're not paying you." She yelled back from behind her bedroom door.

Why had she just walked in here naked? I hadn't doubted that we would sleep together by the end of the evening, but her bare breasts seemed very out of place considering the low sexual energy level of our evening's discourse. Discounting completely my actions in the bar earlier.