After my divorce, I had what could only be described as an early midlife crisis. I had recently been through a lot. I had two businesses fail, and another business on the verge of failing. I had a friend die suddenly, and a family member die slowly. I was swimming in dept due to a combination of using my personal finances to prop up the businesses and my ex-wife’s ludicrous spending habits. Then I discovered that she was having an affair and I lost it.

At the end I did a lot of horrible things. I was a prick to a lot of people. I even spent a night in jail. After it was all over I was forced to take stock of myself. Was this who I really wanted to be? One night I sat down with my brother, who was also going through a divorce. (Almost everyone I know has been divorced at least once, marriage is a scam to sell expensive cake.)

We split a bottle of whiskey. At one point he said, staring down at his feet, “I used to be so good. Who am I? When did I become a bad guy?” I felt the same way.

Usually when you have a midlife crisis you get a comb over, buy a sports car, and begin dating women that are wildly age-inappropriate for you. However, I am not balding, I have been driving sports cars since college, and I like women my own age. Older women are better in bed and less fussy.

Instead I decided that I needed to become a new person. Even before all the shit I went through I wasn’t the nicest guy in the world. I slowly began forming a picture of the person I wanted to become. Instead of being obsessed with money, I wanted to value experience and travel. Instead of being arrogant and dick-ish, I wanted to be charming and flirtatious. Instead of being cruel and violent, I wanted to be a badass. Slowly I’ve been training myself to be that person.

A midlife crisis gives you quite a bit of wanderlust. I spent the year after the divorce roaming the country. I spent a week on an island weathering a hurricane. I went to the City to have an affair with a woman …and her friend. (I want to be good but not with a capital G.) And when a friend called me and asked me to meet him in Las Vegas, I hopped on the next flight.

His plan was to drive out to the coast and then hit all the major tourist spots, before heading back down and flying out of Vegas. If you ever need to get across the country on the cheap, I highly recommend Vegas. You can get amazing deals on flights to there because the casinos assume you are going to gamble and subsidize your airfare. If you go on their websites, you can get coupons for literally everything. Except gambling, you have to pay for that.

He wanted me as a travel companion, but also as a wing man. His plan was to stay at youth hostels instead of hotels, as they encourage more social interaction and he thought we could pick up a few dates on our trip. As I had been training myself to be charming, I’d been becoming a pretty good wingman.

You might be born good looking, or born rich, but no one is born charming. It’s a skill, developed through practice like any other skill. You have to work at it. That’s one of the reasons I go on so many dates. I’m not trying to get laid, though that is a perk, I’m trying to become more charming.

Unfortunately, my friend was not charming. Successful dating isn’t about being rich, or good looking, or having a nice car. While those things certainly help, I’ve gotten laid more often in a rusty old pickup than in any of the nice cars I used to drive. In order to seduce someone, there really are only three ingredients. You have to make them feel safe, you have to be interesting (make art, play music, write weird stories on the internet, etc.), and you have to make them feel amazing –about themselves– whenever they are around you.

My friend was not good at any of these. As we drove from city to city, we went to lots of bars, including an awesome jazz bar in San Francisco. We didn’t have much luck with the ladies. Partially because I hate pestering women in bars, it feels rude, and it’s why I use dating sites. With dating sites, you know exactly why everyone is there. In a bar she might just be there to hang with her friends and doesn’t want some guy sleazing on her. Also, partially because he kept accidently cock-blocking me. He knows how to put his foot in his mouth like no other guy I know.

We drove all the way up the coast. He wanted to skip Washington, but I wanted to buy a bunch of that sweet, sweet, legal, recreational weed. Afterward we hooked around and headed south through Idaho. We spent the night in Boise.

Surprisingly, Boise in the middle of the night is pretty dead. My friend had been pestering me for a while that he wanted to go to a strip club. He had evidently gone to one in Vegas and gotten a hand job, which given that he was in a bit of a dry spell was very welcome. I don’t like strip clubs, but well, nothing else was going on in Boise.

Boise strip clubs are not like Vegas ones. Who would have thought? The laws are so strict that if the bar serves alcohol, the women can’t even be topless. The first place we went, they were all dancing around in lingerie, and not even revealing lingerie. I immediately protested that I was not paying for this. If we wanted to see this sort of thing we could have just gone to the beach in L.A. In fact, the beach would have been better, as while I’m sure all these girls were Idaho ten’s, they were L.A. six’s.

After some Yelping he found a topless place, which was about as good as we were going to do in the state. They don’t have nude clubs there. They don’t allow alcohol in topless places there, but that wasn’t an issue as I had my sweet, sweet legal, recreational weed vaporizer with me.

We got to the place and it was a dump. It looked like a rec hall. Industrial carpeting, undecorated walls, there was even a concession stand selling popcorn out of a machine that didn’t look like it had been cleaned since the 70s.

The women were very attractive though.

This strip club had a very unusual setup, I think, I don’t go to many strip clubs. Each woman would dance on a table surrounded by men. The men would put down some money on the table, usually about $5 and if they did, each woman would work her way around the table giving each paying customer a lap dance. A short one, but still it was a very cheap way to get a whole bunch of lap dances in an evening. Given there were almost 20 guys at each table, the strippers were probably making about $100 at each table every 20 minutes.

It was kind of a fun setup. It had a fun group vibe to it. I was a city slicker surrounded by Idaho, er… potato farmers, but I felt like I fit right in. Normally I’d feel pretty weird about getting a lap dance, there is just something inherently embarrassing about paying a girl to rub herself on you, but it didn’t seem that bad in this set up. The idea was also that if you liked a girl you could hire a girl for a private dance. “Private dance” being slang for “stupidly expensive hand job”.

One of the girls did something weird. She was an amazing looking, slender brunette with creamy white skin. I don’t really have a type, but if I did, women fitting that description would be it. Of all the Disney princesses my favorite was Belle from Beauty and the Beast. Or maybe Jasmin from Aladdin.

She went around the group giving each guy a standard lap dance. A little rubbing her butt on them, a little boobs-in-face. When she got to me she did something completely different. She bent down and bit my nipple through me shirt, hard. Then she worked her way down my chest biting me hard again and again. It felt like she was trying to draw blood.

Normally I would be into that sort of thing, but I did not expect it and I did not know this person. I cringed with every bite, and almost started to panic when she’d made her way down to my groin. She shoved open my legs and started biting the insides of my thighs, just as hard, working her way to the center. When she reached the center, she pushed her face into my crotch, thankfully without biting, then pulled away, giving me a sultry come-hither look.

She then moved on, going back to standard lap dances. I didn’t quite know what to make of what had just happened. Obviously, she was inviting me to request her for a private dance and implying that it would involve more than just an expensive hand job. I just didn’t understand why she picked me. She could just have sensed that I was from out of town and slinging around NYC sums of money in economically depressed Idaho or she could have just decided I was her sort of weirdo. I was sitting there in all black with rose colored glasses. Sex workers have preferences on who they service.

In the end I turned her down. Actually, I just forgot her name and didn’t know who to ask for. I decided that I wasn’t above dropping a couple C-notes for some alone time with her. Everyone pays for sex, usually in the form of dinners, diamond rings, and divorce settlements. That transaction would have been simpler and cheaper.

To this day I wish I had tracked her down. When I went back to the hotel and got dressed for bed, I found my entire body covered in angry red bite marks and bruises. Given that she had skin like moonlight and hair like a raven’s wing, had I gotten her alone I might have walked away with eternal life.