[Continued from Part 22. To read previous entries, type "Wuz" into the search box at left.]

One day during that summer of 1999, I returned home to my Hoboken, N.J., apartment after a day of work to find an odd message from a man from my past. It went something like this, in a voice that sounded like James Cagney after gargling with gravel:

"Hello, Dawn, this is Mike McPadden ..." He sighed. "...Selwyn Harris."

I knew the name all right. A blast from the past. I even knew how he'd gotten the moniker; he'd named himself after the last two old-fashioned seedy movie houses left in Times Square back in the early Nineties, when he started his sex-industry fanzine. The publication was named Happy Land, in a sick reference to the 1990 fire at an illegal Bronx social club.

"I'm in [a 12-step program] right now," Mike continued, "and I have to call people I've hurt and ask for forgiveness.* You're one of the main people. Please call me ..."

A wave of excitement rushed through me, followed immediately by fear that Mike was pranking me. Nobody who had wronged me had ever asked me for forgiveness years after the damage was done. The idea that Mike, of all people, would do so was unbelievable. The last messages I'd received from him, four years earlier, were sound bites of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in their personae as the ultra-scatological duo Derek and Clive, saying to one another in their thick Dagenham accents, "You [vulgar word for female anatomy]. You f---ing [ditto]."

Despite my skepticism, I knew that if there was the slightest chance that Mike was serious, I had to let him apologize to me in whatever way the 12-step folks wanted him to do so.

When I phoned him back, Mike sounded just as sincere as he had on my answering machine — wanting to meet me in person so he could apologize properly.

Thinking back to the actions for which he wanted forgiveness, I knew that although Mike did treat me badly, I was no saint to him. Yes, he wrote some poison-pen items about me in Happy Land (along the lines of Henry II's lament, "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"), causing me to fear that an unhinged reader might try to harm me. But that was only after I caused his girlfriend to dump him.

I really did it. Here's how it happened, in 150 words or less: I hadn't heard from Mike — then calling himself Selwyn — after having a few seemingly promising dates. A mutual acquaintance informed me that there was a simple reason for the silence: The man I'd considered a potential beau had neglected to tell me that he had a girlfriend all along. I then went to an East Village bar called Downtown Beirut where I'd heard Mike and his girlfriend hung out. Sure enough, they were there. I greeted Mike warmly; he swiveled right off his barstool and into the men's room. His girlfriend (beautiful, blonde, very young) swiveled around to me. "So, how do you know Selwyn?" she asked cheerily. I replied with equal lightness that I had answered his Village Voice personal ad seeking a "gutter goddess."

But by the time Mike got back in touch with me, all that — including the Derek and Clive phone messages — was several years' past. I hadn't thought about Mike in quite a while. So, I didn't know quite what to expect when I headed out of the kimsvideo.com headquarters one afternoon to meet him for lunch. Part of me still feared it was some kind of setup, in which case I would be defenseless.

To be continued ...
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*Mike has already spoken in a published interview about being in a 12-step program. In the interview, he said that, as part of the program, he had asked forgiveness from those he had wronged.

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