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The World’s Greatest Lover

By Neil McKinnon

 

hearts(Ed. Note: The following is an excerpt from Neil McKinnon’s latest book, The World’s Greatest Lover.)

To begin, women must understand that there are only three types of men: deadbeats, philanderers and lowlifes. Today, I will describe the philanderer.

This gentleman may be identified by his unique odor, an enticing mixture of after-shave and grease, tainted by a faint whiff of the psychological glue that he uses to stick himself to unsuspecting women, much like summer bluebottles attach themselves to flypaper. He has been in and out of more relationships than Lothario, Casanova and Don Juan combined.

In the beginning, the philanderer is considerate and accommodating. He basks in the lady’s beauty. He revels in her conversation. But all the time his eyes are peering back at the husband of the one he’s just left and forward to the future as he sniffs out his next dalliance.

The reason he’s enthralled with her is that he’s enthralled with everybody. He’s a loving lunatic—his stamina is amazing. He can’t stay away. He’s here. He’s there. No, he’s back here. He’s everywhere. He’s ready to go again ... and again. His horizons have expanded, from high school where he nursed an intense desire to nuzzle every girl in his class, to university where his aspirations grew to encompass the entire female half of his faculty.

Eventually, his ambition knew so few bounds that he secretly craved to populate a complete state or province. He is an expert at bedroom multitasking and is restricted by few technical limitations.

For an example of the havoc wreaked by the philanderer we need look no further than the tragic story of Sarah B., a deeply religious girl who thought her chance meeting and subsequent affair with Desmond, a some-time ski instructor and sweet-talking alley cat, was her ticket away from her stuffy liberal parents who did not subscribe to her right-wing religious philosophy and who constantly encouraged her to lighten up.

Sarah met Desmond at a fundamentalist revival meeting where she had gone to seek solace after her parents had presented her with a membership in a radical animal rights group as a gift for her twenty-first birthday. Desmond attended the revival because long-ago he had discovered that at this venue, dressed in a beard, sandals and flowing robe, seducing young women became as easy as ushering lambs to slaughter.

Using equal amounts of sweet-talk, charm, flattery and sympathy, as well as dashes of piety, sprinklings of biblical quotations and small chunks of prayer, Desmond penetrated Sarah’s awareness, entered her consciousness, broke through her perimeter, infiltrated her defenses, inserted himself into her heart and finally, in what was his best time yet, he squirreled his way into her pants.

At first Sarah felt guilty because she had broken a promise she had made to herself years before—to preserve all alterable pieces of her anatomy in a pristine state until her wedding night or until Judgment Day, whichever came first. But glib, sweet-talking Desmond soon convinced her that what they were doing—by then almost on an hourly basis—was, in reality, responding to a higher power.

Once he had explained this, Sarah recognized their indiscretions as simple peccadilloes and soon she was able to immerse herself in trying to satisfy the quirky shifts in Desmond’s bedroom behavior, shifts she soon came to enjoy. After all, he looked exactly like a picture of Jesus and she knew that the whole sordid affair would drive her atheist parents crazy.

All this might have worked out if Desmond had not been a philanderer. However monogamy is as foreign to philanderers as pork is to rabbis so, of course, he could not stay. The philanderer is trapped by his libertine nature. He must change partners as often as Prometheus changed livers ... and so it was that Sarah awoke one morning to find a note on the pillow where Desmond’s head should have been. The note explained that he had finally identified a place in the world, near barren of population but with just enough females of child-bearing age and indiscriminate nature, that he felt there was a chance he could fulfill his secret ambition. To that end, he was leaving immediately for Saskatchewan.

Sarah was devastated but eventually recovered. Nowadays, she quickly exits from the company of any man who gets a wistful look whenever someone mentions Regina.