Bumbling my way through a life of sin.

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IT'S SOMETHING I've pointed out before, mainly because it's been proven to me so many countless times over the years. If you write and publish something you don't want some specific individual to see, they're going to see it. If they're illiterate, they're going to see it. If they live in a cave outside Kabul, they're going to see it. Even in those pre-internet days, before everything was immediately accessible anywhere in the world, and even if you published it in a xeroxed fanzine with a circulation of 25, they would see it.

The first time this was illustrated to me should've been a lesson. And I suppose it was-just not one that stuck.

To say that the woman I was living with in Philly could be a little uptight about sexual issues would be generous. Not sex itself, but rather representations or discussions of sexual matters. It took the form of a kind of radical feminism gone haywire, and sometimes went far beyond even that.

This often made things uncomfortable in the apartment, given that my library was full of Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and countless other "misogynists," and my record collection contained dozens of albums by the Mentors, G.G. Allin, Big Black and other nasties.

If she was around, I was not at liberty to watch any movies containing sex, sexual innuendo, boobs or women in revealing clothing-at least if I didn't want the evening to devolve into another big fight. (Fortunately the animal porn tape was unmarked, and she believed me when I told her "Honeysuckle Divine" was a country punk band.)

One night we went to see a show by a local band we both liked a great deal. They were called Zen for Primates and played odd, eerie, sort-of lounge covers of rock standards like "Whole Lotta Love" and "My Sharona." They were playing at our favorite little bar, and we went with a couple friends. When the show opened, I saw that the band had decorated the stage with vintage sideshow banners.

Suddenly I felt her tense up. She stopped talking to anybody and turned to face the wall for the remainder of the show. Our friends weren't sure what to make of this. Then I noticed that one of the banners-it was for a fire-eater, I believe-contained the image of a woman in a bathing suit. I found out later that this was indeed what had so upset her. That was a tricky one to explain to our friends.

On another evening, she wept throughout the premiere screening of David Lynch's Wild at Heart, laying her head in my lap so she wouldn't have to look at the screen, where it was entirely possible that more boobs would be flashed at any minute.

Again, this had nothing to do with sex itself-there was no problem there. It only concerned images and words about sex.

This could all be very frustrating at times, especially when many of our close friends were artists, writers and musicians whose work focused on less-than-correct takes on sexual violence. Soon, everyone we knew learned how important it was to watch what they said around her.

On the bright side, it didn't affect my own stories at all. Not that I dealt with sexual matters much, but she really, really hated it when I did. So much so that she simply refused to read those stories. That left me free to write whatever the hell I wanted.

One night when she was out of town, my friend David and I, just on a sleazy lark, went to a strip club not too far from my apartment. It was a fancy joint, as such places go, with a large stage, carpeting and a free buffet.

My eyes weren't in such great shape even back then, and so, lit as dimly as this place was, I couldn't see a thing. Not only couldn't I see what was happening onstage, I couldn't even see the strippers when they were inches away from me, working their way around the inside of the bar.

One poor girl was apparently performing all sorts of gymnastics right in front of my nose, as I stared blindly into space and knocked off my third weak scotch. When she was finished, she turned to me expectantly, smiling, waiting for a tip. I crunched my ice, but said nothing, unaware that she was there.

She turned to David and said, "He's a very serious man."

(David, by the way, tipped her well.)

For the rest of the evening, David tried to describe the action as best he could: "Well, uh, now she's lying on her back, and she's spreading her legs real far apart?" In the end, it was a ridiculous, and hardly arousing, evening.

The next day I wrote up a column about the strip club and turned it in. I was pretty happy about it, if I do say so. I wasn't worried about her reading it, nor was I worried about anyone even mentioning the column. The people we knew had not only learned that they couldn't bring up sex in any form, they'd also learned that they should never mention my stories in any way either, as that upset her, too.

When the column ran in the following week's paper, it was received well. Nobody said a word, and I soon forgot about it.

A month later, we were at an opening at the Philadelphia Art Museum. We went to a lot of genteel things like that in those days. She always wanted the finer things in life, and even if I couldn't provide any of them, we still pretended every once in a while. The fact that I wrote these stories she hated so much at least gave us entry into places like this.

We were mingling about with Philly's upper crust, cheap wine in hand, when I saw the editor-in-chief of the paper across the room. We never dealt with each other much, which was fine. This time, though, he smiled and waved and worked his way across the room.

"Hey Jim," he said, "I just wanted to tell you how much I really liked that story about the strippers."

My stomach went cold and began to sink to the floor. Oh no.

"What!?"

The editor turned to her. "You know-that story a few weeks back about him and his friend going to a strip club? It was hilarious!"

She was silent. I was doomed. It was if some force, some demonic practical joker, had set me up. I could almost hear an echoed, wicked cackling just beneath the buzz in the room.

I couldn't tell her that he'd made a mistake, that he must have thought I was someone else-he was the damned editor-in-chief. I also couldn't tell her to just go read the story and see that it was all about my own bumbling incompetence and David's adventures with the free buffet. True though it may have been, it wouldn't have mattered. I had snuck off to a prurient den of sin where women were degraded. I'd supported this system and I, therefore, was the Enemy.

The days following the art opening were pretty ugly. But not quite ugly enough for me to learn my lesson.