He looks 30 but he’s really 49. He has dirty thoughts all the time; they keep him young.

He is 6’2″ and in good shape. He still has hair, and its dark blonde shade hides the gray rather well. His skin is tan and relatively unlined. His face is big and well-featured, and he doesn’t sag.

His name is Sandy.

He was the oldest child of the three his parents bore, and he was always bored with his parents. His mother was petulant and pretty; his father was pompous. Sandy left home for college and didn’t return for any but the most obligatory occasions. Aversion motivates him to earn enough so that he never has to sleep in his parents’ house again.

He works as an actuary for the Internal Revenue Service, and he lives with his wife Phyllis and one-plus children in Daly City, California. Phyllis is 36. They have a two-year old son named James, and Phyllis is seven months pregnant with their second child. Because she is over 35 and they have good health insurance she has had amniocentesis, but Sandy and Phyllis declined to learn the gender of their unborn babe.

Sandy wants a second son. He’s unfamiliar with girl-children, he claims. He says he wants an all-boy nuclear family like the one he left. He had a conversation with his friend Shelly about it.

“I don’t know anything about raising a girl, Shel,” he said.

“Don’t be silly,” she countered. “Girls are born adorable. They’ve been selectively bred for it; the ones who couldn’t charm their daddies tended to get left for the wolves. You’re guaranteed to love your daughter.”

“But you don’t understand. I was a teenage boy once. I won’t be able to handle it when my daughter…”

”Don’t give me that shit,” Shelly derided. “Yeah. You were a teenage boy once. Good with computers and everything, too. Now just think back to being that teenage boy.” Her face softened. “You’re in a car with a girl you like. You’ve just parked somewhere secluded and dark. Tell me: who’s in control of the situation?”

“Well, the girl of course.” Sandy said it automatically, and then Shelly just gazed at him, chin down, lower lip jutting out a little. Sandy grinned and figured he probably looked a way he’d read about but rarely seen: sheepish.

“So what’s that about?” Shelly asked. “Why do so many guys give this line about wanting to protect their daughters from the teenage boys that neither they nor their peers ever were??”

“I guess maybe we old guys are having thoughts about young women? Attributing those thoughts, dirty thoughts, to the teenage boys, who had the thoughts, oh yes indeed, but never in a million years would have acted on them?”

“I guess.”

“I doubt it’s that simple.” Sandy’s head was feeling a bit twisted.

“I’m sure it’s not simple. But I think there’s something to this. After all, we don’t use the expression: dirty young man.”

Shelly’s words resonate in Sandy’s brain now, riding BART from what used to be the end of the San Francisco line. Sandy vowed for his 48th birthday that he wouldn’t lie to himself any more, and he knows Shelly nailed him. He won’t deny it: he is a dirty old man. He looks around the crowded train car and counts five young women standing in his vicinity, no raving beauties but none with a deformity or even too much fat. Five firm midriffs, five high asses. Imagining peach breasts his hands curve and he stiffens beneath the Chronicle on his lap. Sandy almost feels young again. No way does his body act like this around Phyllis.

His vow about self-honesty came about as a way of settling a hassle with Shelly. She had then fallen into some EST-like program called Portals, and she was pestering everyone in the office about it. Her attempts to recruit Sandy were particularly obvious and very tiresome to him. He’d been too often on the other end of it.

Sandy has an addictive personality but he was clean when he joined Synanon. He discovered the organization when he was in ninth grade; a social studies term paper led him to it. He was fascinated by the people and the program. From the junkies he learned a certain loose way of sitting at a table, leg crossed on his knee, drinking milky sugared coffee and smoking Marlboros. From the drunks he adopted the cadence: “That’s STUpid.” There was something about the rigor and alienation of the program that distracted him from the depressive boredom of his suburban family life. Woke him up. Made him try to recruit his younger brothers. Made him ignore them when his proselytizing failed.

He stayed with Synanon for about five years, then graduated to some cult-like groups of Gurdjieffiens and splinters that vectored off that curve, until six years ago, when he fell out of the last group and not into another. But Sandy knows the drill. He’s been a participant in engineered group catharses; he understands the attraction. He refused to go with Shelly to the Portals program, even for a weekend, but he had to negotiate a peace by asserting his revelations and intentions about self-honesty.