Rick and I were childhood buddies. We go back so far that I don't remember meeting him for the first time, he was just "there" from the get-go.
As we grew up together there were plenty of times we saw each other naked, like when we were going swimming or staying over at each other's houses. Like all guys, we had a sex drive from birth, we just didn't know what to do with it back then, but we had ideasβ¦
Back then there was a TV cop show called "Naked City." It sounded sooo sinful, but was just another series about a cop in New York City, based on a book by a crime photographer. We didn't care, it just gave us a code word name we could use to signal that we wanted to play with each other.
Don't get me wrong, we both were waiting for the day when we would be old enough to date girls, it's just that when you're a kid that sort of thing is out of the question, or at least it was back in the early Sixties. We just made do with what we had. I later discovered I still like it both ways, but Rick was a mystery, since we went our separate ways after he went off to college.
I hadn't seen my old buddy in almost 25 years when I was passing through his town on business. It took a while to find him in the phone book, but it was his voice that answered the phone. Some things don't change.
His children were grown and gone to college themselves, and his wife was off visiting her mother. He came to my hotel where we had dinner and talked over old times and times gone by in between. He had been married before, I had been divorced and was still looking. His kids were such and such, I didn't have any. Did I remember playing "Naked City?" "Yeah. Did you like it?"
"Yeah."