The bride and I went to a hotel by the beach for traditional romance. We checked in at 2:30 P.M. and didn’t leave until dinnertime. We had a boom box playing the sweetest Mississippi blues while we were flying all over the room like evil astronauts trying to repair that oh so out of reach godhead meltdown button, blasting on and off the bed, tearing each other apart like wolverines and then, a knock on the door. Porn freeze frame. So I say, Yeah, what is it, and a dead male voice comes back with two words, Turn down. I say, What? The cryptic utterance repeats, Turn down. But the music is low and it’s, what, eight o’clock. I say, Turn down the music? and the voice says, Turn down the bed, would you like your bed turned down, sir? No, thank you. We continued fleshslap in vaporlock until the engines of love layed us down to rest, whereupon we staggered around the corner and ate fish at a place we later learned was a Ku Klux Klan restaurant. It was called Whitey’s Sandy Catch. The workers, all in their early 20s, wore flowered uniforms. Lanterns, udders, sails, and oars dominated the walls. The men’s bathroom was wallpapered with life-sized photographs of bikini models posed beside hooded Klansmen holding barbeque tongs and spotty aprons. The combination of sailing, seafood, and lynching was difficult to comprehend but we were starving and we didn’t really put it all together until after we were gone. Anyway, following our waiter Hermann’s suggestion, we started off with a shrimp cocktail. I had a stein of beer and my bride knocked back a shot of tequila—she’s a roughneck, she didn’t want to eat, just booze, and get back to the bronco pit for more lewd thrills. I got one suggestion for all you bachelors out there: Marry a nympho, you’ll be set for life. We both had halibut, cauliflower, and mashed potatoes, with rice pudding for dessert. After a short stroll along the water, we returned to our room for more carnal activity. At some point we fell asleep. I dreamt about Cindy Crawford. My friends were irritated by her presence. Cindy was equally unhappy even though she told me she loved me. Suddenly the smoke alarm went off, not the one in my brain but a real one in the room, but there was no smoke anywhere. My bride leapt to her feet and turned on a light. High above our heads we noticed something crawling in and out of the smoke alarm. It looked like a colony of spiders, but it turned out to be one long and very nimble centipede. I rolled up a newspaper—I’m brave when striking something one-millionth my size—and as it traveled out of one hole and into another, I whacked it, whereupon both the outer shell of the alarm and the centipede flew across the bed and landed on the carpet. My bride called me her hero but she was also disturbed. We searched everywhere and could not find the corpse. The centipede was still alive. I was tired. Poison me, kill me, I don’t care, I needed to know how Cindy really felt about me. So I fell back asleep. In the morning my bride told me to shake my clothes out carefully before putting them on. I did and sure enough the four-inch monster clung to an inside pant leg. I shook him out and scooped him into a coffee cup. I repeated the story to the Klanswomen at the desk who both wore matching flower-print dresses. One younger, sexy one wanted to go up and see the centipede, while the older fatter one pleaded with me to stop the story. I told her I couldn’t stop the telling because I was Jewish, and as wanderers of the world we confront vermin daily and insist on making the most out of it.