Eric stared around himself at the endless cerulean surface of what he assumed was the Pacific Ocean and sighed. The shattered and incomplete set of planks he sat on, which looked like the remnants of some huge packing crate, bobbed up and down on the sedate waves. He glanced up at the unforgiving sun and wondered how long it would be until he died.

"How the hell did you get yourself in this pickle, old boy?" he asked himself. But that was a waste of breath, as he knew most of the how he'd gotten himself here, wherever here was. He patted the empty pockets of his tattered jeans -- great, even his wallet was gone -- and decided aloud, "This is as good a time to re-examine things as any ..."

Five months before, when Tabitha smiled and watched him through her thick eyelashes, he'd never expected things to have gone so wrong. But as Danny sang "As Time Goes By" at that dive karaoke bar in Lomita, she'd stepped easily into Eric's arms and they'd danced across the sawdust like it was the sprinklings of stars. She later told him that when his hand fell ever so perfectly into the crook of her back, she'd been ready to go home with him then, but resisted. Even now, with the sun beating down on him like a rain of police batons, Eric could smell feel her thick red hair in between his fingers, smell the frenzied fragrance of her, like baby powder mixed with gelignite. Her curves and sense of style were reminiscent of a fifties screen bombshell. How could he not fall in love with her?

Danny had dragged Eric all the way down to Los Angeles' south bay area from Eric's normal Hollywood haunts. "You've gotta see this girl," Danny kept telling him. "I swear it'll be a home run!" Danny, a part time comedian and part time car salesman, knew how to lay it on thick. He met Eric at a short lived Hollywood Boulevard karaoke show, where they found similar tastes in computers (Macintosh), humor (Monty Python) and science fiction (the new Battlestar Galactica). Danny had been picking up some extra money as a karaoke host in Torrance and Hawthorne, where people were very serious about their singing, where he met Tabitha, and apparently wanted Eric to get her because, "you know I don't date no white women! My daddy'd whup my ass!"

She was everything Danny had promised -- swirls of passion and gales of laughter, a hurricane of bawdy sexuality and lethal mood swings. "Am I the girl?" Eric asked after Tabitha had taken him driving in her new Camry, high in the Palos Verdes hills, and on a romantic moonlit walk overlooking the sea. When he finally partook of her fleshy pleasures, it was like stepping off a cliff and into a weightless expanse of sheer splendor. The power and grandeur of their lovemaking surely kept many of his neighbors glaring angrily at his walls. Her resonating mind kept him amazed, as they'd discuss the depths of Frank Herbert's Dune for hours on end, as she'd encourage customers at her restaurant to support his fledgling in-home tech support business, as she'd instantly sense a bad day coming from him and respond with a backrub and oral sex.

With the heights of their joy so ascendant, it should have been no surprise that the depths would be so abysmal. The time she almost made him wreck his Explorer Sport when he joked that "Bush was not Hitler," slapping him repeatedly with that huge purse with a scene from Casablanca emblazoned on its side. The melodramatic exit after he'd suggested that it might be all right for some guys to wear cell phones on their belts with their shirts tucked in. When Eric told Danny that he was completely gone for Tabitha, the older man placed a hand on Eric's shoulder and quoted a rap song: "Just because she's got some junk in her can/ doesn't mean you're supposed to go and fall in love with her, man!"

But still he stayed, holding her as she cried when her surrogate father, her mother's sister, died in a car accident. He stayed, making the one-way thirty mile trip to her Torrance apartment three and four times a week, because she was afraid of the glitter and corruption of Tinseltown. He stayed, soldiering on as the best boyfriend he knew how to be. The ups and downs kept him going this way and that ... until Raoul entered the picture. Tabitha had dated the equally mercurial Colombian four years before, when Raoul had just started to get involved with drug trafficking, and caught a conviction and a stay at Folsom. But dealing some dirt on a Vietnamese rival had gotten Raoul early parole, and been the start of Eric's real problems.

That last night was less clear -- Eric and Tabitha shouting in the parking lot at one of Danny's shows, that sudden thunder of footsteps, the agonizing pain as blows landed on Danny's skull like chickens coming home to roost, Raoul laughing with crossed arms as consciousness left Eric quicker than an Elizabeth Taylor marriage ... after Tabitha admitted to being weak, and kissing the sturdily built Latino the night before. But when Eric woke up, feeling the sway of waves underneath the hard wood under his back, he knew what he was.

"Alone," he said quietly, to no one at all.

More alone than he had ever been. Even standing up, there was no sign of land in any direction, all the way to the horizon. There was no way to tell which way safety might be, no means with which to call for help, no supplies to lengthen his rapidly shortening existence.

"Hh," Eric uttered, nodding to himself. He was no more alone than he was as a pampered and forgotten child of a mildly famous thoracic surgeon and a school board president. He was no more alone than he'd been, driving to Los Angeles from Houston, with dreams of working in advertising. He was surely no more alone than he'd been those many nights with Tabitha's back turned to him as she slept, an emotional Maginot Line forming a great divide between them, right down the middle of his queen sized bed.

Eric started to laugh, and laughed long and hard, like the laughter of a man who found out his children hadn't been kidnapped, they just forgot to call. Still laughing, he stood up, glanced around and shrugged before hurling himself into the sea.

Swimming just as hard as he could.

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