She first took interest when she noted the gray hair at my temples, and when she learned that I drive a ten-year-old Ford, she was mine…for the night, at least.

She stepped on my thigh and swung her ass up onto the bar. Leaning her sharp elbows into my shoulders and then my back, she drove my face down into her crotch, which smelled like Walmart-brand fabric softener. When the bartender told her that state law required her to put out her cigarette, she yelled back, “I’m in love with the America that used to be!” and flicked the smoldering butt in the bouncer’s face as she pulled me out the door.

As we drove to a motel, she asked whether I had any Nancy Sinatra. I looked on my phone and admitted that I only had the Sinatra family Christmas album, and she said that was fine. As we drove to the outskirts of town, she put her head out the window and let her long hair fly in the wind while I blasted “These Boots Are Made for Santa.”

At the motel, we turned the TV to an infomercial for Time-Life’s Romancing the ’70s. As we slow-danced, she laid her head on my chest and wrapped her left arm around my neck and told me to never, ever leave her. I told her I could never leave her, at least not as long as her right hand was clamped onto my balls so tightly that tears were running down my cheeks. She kissed the tears away and pushed me backwards onto the bed.

“My body is like an eternal flame,” she whispered hotly into my ear, “burning with painful memories of what once was.” When I fumbled with the button of her jorts and offered to help her forget, she stopped me. “No, really,” she said. “I have a UTI.”

So we dry-humped—or rather, she dry-swayed on top of me, her head tilted back and her eyes closed. When I reached my climax she silently raised one hand, the long red-painted nails of her pointer and pinkie fingers forming a rock on gesture. I grabbed her thumb and was trying to turn the gesture into sign language for I love you, but just then an engine roared outside the window and she leaped off of me, opening the window and being yanked away by someone out there in the blackness.

I made it to the window just in time to see a Harley speeding off, Lana’s arms wrapped around the belly of a biker with white hair flapping out from under his American flag bandana. I went back to bed with a sigh and fell asleep to the strains of Dionne Warwick’s “I’ll Never Love This Way Again.” As I drifted off, I had the uncanny sensation that, just for a split-second, I was part of a flashback montage.

– Jay Gabler