Well, she's real.

The legendary woman who gives head to guys who are driv­ing, only the guy loses control of his car and hits the brakes so hard the woman bites him in half, I know them.

Those men and women, they're all here.

These people are the reason every emergency room has a dia­mond-tipped drill. For tapping a hole through the thick bottoms of champagne and soda bottles. To relieve the suction.

These are the people who come waddling in from the night, saying they tripped and fell on the zucchini, the lightbulb, the Barbie doll, the billiard balls, the struggling gerbil.

See also: The pool cue.

See also: The teddy bear hamster.

They slipped in the shower and fell, bull's-eye, on a greased shampoo bottle. They're always being attacked by a person or persons unknown and assaulted with candles, with baseballs, with hard-boiled eggs, flashlights, and screwdrivers that now need removing. Here are the guys who get stuck in the water inlet port of their whirlpool hot tub.

Halfway down the hallway to Room 234, Nico pulls me against the wall. She waits until some people have walked past us and says, "I know a place we can go."

Everybody else is going into the pastel Sunday school room, and Nico smiles after them. She twirls one finger next to her ear, the international sign language for crazy, and she says, "Losers." She pulls me the other way, toward a sign that says Women.

Among the folks in Room 234 is the bogus county health of­ficial who calls to quiz fourteen-year-old girls about the appear­ance of their vagina.

Here's the cheerleader who gets her stomach pumped and they find a pound of sperm. Her name is Lou Ann.

The guy in the movie theater with his dick stuck through the bottom of a box of popcorn, you can call him Steve, and tonight his sorry ass is sitting around a paint-stained table, squeezed into a child's plastic Sunday school chair.

All these people you think are a big joke. Go ahead and frig­ging laugh your frigging head off.

These are sexual compulsives.

All these people you thought were urban legends, well, they're human. Complete with names and faces. Jobs and families. Col­lege degrees and arrest records.

In the women's room, Nico pulls me down onto the cold tile and squats over my hips, digging me out of my pants. With her other hand, Nico cups the back of my neck and pulls my face, my open mouth, into hers. Her tongue wrestling against my tongue, she's wetting the head of my dog with the pad of her thumb. She's pushing my jeans down off my hips. She lifts the hem of her dress in a curtsey with her eyes closed and her head tilted a little back. She settles her pubes hard against my pubes and says something against the side of my neck.

I say, "God, you're so beautiful," because for the next few minutes I can.

And Nico pulls back to look at me and says, "What's that supposed to mean?"

And I say, "I don't know." I say, "Nothing, I guess." I say, "Never mind."

The tile smells disinfected and feels gritty under my butt. The walls go up to an acoustical tile ceiling and air vents furry with dust and crud. There's that blood smell from the rusty metal box for used napkins.

"Your release form," I say. I snap my fingers. "Did you bring it?"

Nico lifts her hips a little and then drops, lifts and settles her­self. Her head still back, her eyes still closed, she fishes inside the neckline of her dress and brings out a folded square of blue paper and drops it on my chest.

I say, "Good girl," and take the pen clipped on my shirt pocket.

A little higher each time, Nico lifts her hips and sits down hard. Grinding a little front to back. With a hand planted on the top of each thigh, she pushes herself up, then drops.

"Round the world," I say. "Round the world, Nico."

She opens her eyes maybe halfway and looks down at me, and I make a stirring motion with the pen, the way you'd stir a cup of coffee. Even through my clothes, I'm getting the grid of the tile engraved in my back.

"Round the world, now," I say. "Do it for me, baby."

And Nico closes her eyes and gathers her skirt around her waist with both hands. She settles all her weight on my hips and swings one foot over my belly. She swings the other foot around so she's still on me, but facing my feet.

"Good," I say and unfold the blue paper. I spread it flat against her round humped back and sign my name at the bot­tom, on the blank that says sponsor. Through her dress, you can feel the thick back of her bra, elastic with five or six little wire hooks. You can feel her rib bones under a thick layer of muscle.

Right now, down the hall in Room 234 is the girlfriend of your best friend's cousin, the girl who almost died banging herself on the stick shift of a Ford Pinto after she ate Spanish fly. Her name is Mandy.

There's the guy who snuck into a clinic in a white coat and gave pelvic exams.

There's the guy who always lies in his motel room, naked on top of the covers with his morning boner, pretending to sleep un­til the maid walks in.

All those rumored friends of friends of friends of friends . . . they're all here.

The man crippled by the automatic milking machine, his name is Howard.

The girl hanging naked from the shower curtain rod, half dead from autoerotic asphyxiation, she's Paula and she's a sexaholic.

Hello, Paula.

Give me your subway feelers. Your trench coat flashers.

The men mounting cameras inside the lip of some women's room toilet bowl.

The guy rubbing his semen on the flaps of deposit envelopes at automatic tellers.

All the peeping toms. The nymphos. The dirty old men. The restroom lurkers. The handballers.

All these sexual bogeymen and -women your mom warned you about. All those scary cautionary tales.

"We're all here. Alive and unwell.

This is the twelve-step world of sexual addiction. Compulsive sexual behavior. Every night of the week, they meet in the back room of some church. In some community center conference room. Every night, in every city. You even have virtual meetings on the Internet.

My best friend, Denny, I met him at a sexaholics meeting. Denny had got up to the point where he needed to masturbate fifteen times a day just to break even. Anymore, he could barely make a fist, and he was worried about what all that petroleum jelly might do to him, long term.

He'd considered changing to some lotion, but anything made to soften skin seemed to be counterproductive.

Denny and all these men and women you think are so horrible or funny or pathetic, here's where they all let their hair down. This is where we all go to open up.

Here are prostitutes and sex criminals out on a three-hour re­lease from their minimum-security jail, elbow to elbow with women who love gang bangs and men who give head in adult bookstores. The hooker reunites with the John here. The molester faces the molested.

Nico brings her big white ass almost to the top of my dog and bangs herself down. Up and then down. Riding her guts tight around the length of me. Pistoning up and then slamming down. Pushing off against my thighs, the muscles in her arms get bigger and bigger. My thighs under each of her hands go numb and white.