Memories are like heirlooms stored in the attic of the brain. Most of the time, you forget about them, but then you see something that reminds you of an heirloom of your own, and you drag it out and savor it all over again. That happened to me the other day.

I read a newspaper article about real estate in France which immediately conjured up the memory of an afternoon many years ago when I went looking for an apartment in Paris. I was in the company of a silverfoxy real estate broker who drove like a maniac along the Seine in the same area where Princess Diana would long after meet her death. He was not an especially hot man, in my estimation, so my focus lay entirely on finding a place to live. My dogs were flying over from Boston the following week, and I was about to start a new job, so my living arrangements had to be accomplished posthaste.

He took me to an apartment I loved the minute we walked through the door. It was perfect and had an enclosed garden for my dogs. Fully furnished, even to two sets of china, one for daily use, another for guests, it also had a linen closet filled with towels and sheets. In short, it had everything. I would have to buy no household items, and the rent was right.

We sat at the kitchen table to write the contract. He suggesed a cup of coffee. The apartment was even stocked with that. As he tried to light the stove, he noticed that the pilot had gone out. Typical of Parisian living at that time, the stove ran on butane supplied from a tank replaced by an outside firm. The gauge read full, but the pilot for the top burners couldn't be lit. He squatted down on his haunches and checked the oven pilot. That was out, too. He opened the valve wider and touched a match to the gas outlet. The accumulated gas burst into flames. The explosive force sent the agent tumbling ass-over-elbows against the far kitchen wall. Even I felt the whoosh of discharged energy at the table in the dinette.

I leapt up. "Are you hurt?"

He had come to rest in a seated position against the wall. His eyebrows were slightly singed, as was his mustache, but he shook his head no. He was too stunned to notice, but I did, that the explosion had catapulted him across the room with enough force to rip his pants apart at the crotch seam. He sat with his knees buckled up, but with his feet on the floor so that everything he had down there spilled out below. He wore no underwear. His ball sac spread out from his crotch on the linoleum, as healthy a set of gonads as I ever saw. His dick had the look of a fat, dark, very long cigar, with a crumpled foreskin that again reminded me of a cigar with an unclipped tip.

I went over to lend a hand to help him up off the floor, but when he reached to take my hand, it was to tug me down beside him. He seemed a little dazed. I began to worry that he might have a slight concussion, but he was coherent. He did not let go of my hand.