By the time I’d had my second beer, I’d thought about going home and hauling the shotgun out and killing every cat on the place. The last time I had counted them, there were lots of them. Rats and mice were no longer a problem. I was sure those rodents came up on the edge of the yard, took one look at all those cats, and said: No way, José.

Often people in bars don’t speak to one another, and often this is what happens to me. I am extremely friendly. I just don’t know what to say to people. I didn’t know what to say to Mildred the first time I met her. I met her in Destin, Florida, and saw that wonderful ass she had. She did all the talking. I was down there recuperating from my divorce that was almost pending. I was separated from my first wife, but divorce was not pending. It was just almost pending, and I was trying to recuperate from that and was going home to try and patch things up in a few days. When I saw Mildred, everything went out the window, good intentions, everything, the divorce became pending. Mildred represented herself as a virtuous woman with naturally hot tendencies and told me sincerely that she was technically a virgin, but on our wedding night I quickly formed the erroneous opinion that this was simply not the case. As a matter of fact, I thought on our wedding night that Mildred’s puss had simply been worn out from numerous encounters over a period of many years with some enormous number of men, which caused me and Mildred to almost divorce the next day, until she broke down crying at the Continental breakfast and confessed that I was only the first and one-half person to ever penetrate her. I took that as a compliment to mean the other person had only made it in halfway.