After we left the zoo, Barry wanted to drive across the the border to Tijuana, but I’d already made plans for dinner with my colleagues and it was getting late. Maybe another day he reckoned. Back at the hotel, I thanked him for treating me to the zoo (even though I’d paid for both my admission–about $5?–and my hot dog lunch) and started off to my room. He wanted to come with me. I protested, mildly at first, but more insistently after he started to follow me. No matter what, I couldn’t seem to dissuade him. Lucky for me, someone from ISA, perhaps Tom or Mr. G, came to my rescue by grabbing his arm and talking to him while I hightailed it to my room. Naturally I locked and double bolted myself inside.

I assure you I’m neither bragging nor implying my “beauty” inspired all this attention. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that, (1)  I was female, (2) I was single and thus fair game in the minds of many men in those days, and (3) I was alone. Long story short, the three or four days I was there I was made to fight off the advances of not only Barry, who insisted to me that he and his wife had “an understanding” about such things, but those of an even bigger executive whose name I don’t even remember, who had treated me graciously, even acting as a grandfatherly figure to me prior to that incident–until he had a few too many drinks at dinner that evening. Even Tom made a pass at me early on, but in such a subtle and non-aggressive way that I was pretty sure it was a joke and treated it as such. I can add that the rest of our stay, he not only acted like the perfect gentleman, he looked out for me as well.

One evening we went together into San Diego’s seedier district where lots of sailors were hanging out, and I experienced my first (and subsequently last) topless bar, and tasted my first White Russian (vodka, Kahlua, lite on the cream) while we watched a none-too-beautiful woman with small but pendulous breasts dance on the bartop above us, dressed only in panties and fishnet stockings with a small snag near the back seam, looking bored out of her skull.

We talked, too, I remember, about the set of Noritake china he’d brought back from his tour of duty in Japan as a sailor to his then-girlfriend. Every now and then I would glance at the girls working the bartops and feel very sorry for them, wondering how they felt about what they were doing. I guess in the back of mind I wondered too, why them? Why were they up there, and I–sitting there fully clothed–with a job and an expense account that paid for the drink I was having while they were up there bumping and grinding.

There are married men, I decided after that trip, who ought to be ashamed of themselves for treating women as objects, and conveniently forgetting their wives and children at home. Then there were other men, Tom being one of them who, in spite of all those stories I’d heard about sailors–or in his case a former sailor–who could sit in a topless bar in San Diego with a single, still somewhat naive, woman talking about china patterns and not expecting anything in return at all. The trick was in learning which was which.