Sughrue panicked.

“Vera!” he said, terrified. “Go back to your room. Immediately!”

“I can’t, John. I can’t.” Vera Bundle began to sob loudly.

Several nearby hotel room doors opened. Various heads peeked out to see what the fuss was about. The guests were dumbfounded when they saw an elderly woman down the hall dressed in nothing but a T-shirt. She was crying and moaning to the man standing in the room’s doorway.

“Vera, I’m going to call hotel security if you don’t leave.”

“Please don’t do that, John. Please, please let me sleep with you tonight. Please, John.”

“Vera,” he hissed, “get the hell out of here.”

John J. Sughrue slammed his room door in Vera Bundle’s face.

The john Retta Mae Wagons fell in love with—Rasheed Jamal—was the owner and director of a Muslim mosque in Miami Beach, Florida. He also had a syndicated network of television programs that originated from his mosque’s pulpit and was a leader of the Shi’i community in South Florida. The two would never have met if the good imam hadn’t decided to go to Manhattan for a weekend of fun and relaxation.

Jamal called his friend and onetime inmate at Attica, pimp Dannyboy Marley, a week before he came to the city. Jamal wanted Marley to pick out his best hooker. The imam knew he could trust Marley. The ex-con from Jamaica would keep it all hush-hush.

The pimp procured Retta Mae Wagons for the imam.

Dannyboy explained to Retta Mae, “When it comes to Rasheed, you can forget most a de rules like makin’ him show his dick. Shit like dat. He’ll still have a whatchacallit…a password. Just forget about most a de rest. Unnerstan’?”

Retta Mae nodded yes.

“I’ll describe the imam to you. He’s a big mudafucker. I mean real big. Lots of muscles. The dude’s got nappy gray hair, a split between his two front teeth you could run a truck through, an’ he dresses smart. If the john fits dat description, do whatever he says.”

“How do you know what he looks like?” asked Retta Mae.

“I seen him before.”

“Saw him before, you dumb shit.”

Retta Mae laughed.

So did Dannyboy.

They liked each other.

Later that evening, someone knocked dump-ditty-dump-dump, dump-dump on Retta Mae’s apartment door. When Retta Mae opened it and saw the powerhouse brute with the gapped front teeth standing in front of her, she fell in love. As far as she could remember, it was her first crush. “Just one look,” she was fond of singing over that first weekend, “that’s all it took.”

Same with the imam. “I went down for the count,” he’d say to his friends. “Despite our thirty-year age difference, it was love at first sight.”

At the end of the weekend, when Rasheed Jamal asked Retta Mae Wagons to come back to Miami Beach with him, she didn’t think twice. Of course Dannyboy Marley had a shit fit and rightly so. He was losing the biggest moneymaker in his stable.