Back in the '70s I lived for awhile in a low-rent neighborhood of the city. When the weather got warm my nearest fish market, a little hole-in-the-wall storefront, had metal sinks filled with crushed ice they'd put outside under their awning, from which they'd run a street-side raw bar -- oysters, clams, shucked and ready. They were good, and cheap.

I remember standing inside one day, waiting for some salmon to get weighed and wrapped, when this short, stocky hispanic man came jogging along. I'd seen him jog in the neighborhood before; he was mid-forties, I'd guess, but definitely intent on keeping himself in shape. Track shoes, shorts, t-shirt, a towel around his neck, dripping sweat, taking care of business. He slowed down when he got to the ice-filled sink, laid down a fiver, gulped a dozen oysters, then jogged off. There, I thought to myself, goes a man who expects to get laid today.

I used to think all that stuff about aphrodisiacs was all in people's heads. Not that food isn't profoundly sensual, and not that eating it can't be sexy as hell (in my teens the dinner scene in the movie version of Henry Fielding's novel Tom Jones was about the hottest thing anyone had put on screen in mainstream cinema). And not that you can't do sexy things with foodstuffs -- whipped cream and honey alone can keep you occupied for days.

But that any food itself, the actual content thereof, was erotically stimulating -- that didn't match any experience of mine, so I considered it all myth and suggestibility. Whatever works for you, though, so I figured that if this jogger used those oysters to pump himself up psychologically, more power to him.

About five years later, sometime around 1979, I went to Florida (Gainesville) for the first time, on business. Somewhere during the trip we had an afternoon off, so my hosts invited me to a raw bar -- a Florida-style raw bar -- for the afternoon. I love clams and oysters, so I said sure.

We settled in at one, but, my friends indicated, we could have gone to any of a hundred. They'd all look the same. They'd all appear as if they'd been there since at least World War Two; they'd all be be dark and cool; they'd all have the big blond college boy behind the bar with his shucking knife and his rubber mitt cut out of an old inner tube; they'd all have sawdust on the floor, mounds of shells out back. Just like this one.

We ordered drinks -- I took a tequila with a beer back -- and a bucket of oysters to split between the three of us, not very expensive in Florida (in those days, anyhow). A bucket is eight dozen, so we'd elected to eat just shy of three dozen oysters each. Lemon, horseradish, ketchup, those little hexagonal crackers appeared before us. The lad shucked a dozen and slid over the platter. When we'd finished, and nodded to him, he passed us a dozen more.

I'd never eaten so many oysters before, no more than half a dozen at a sitting, so this was hog heaven. Hardly a more pleasant way to spend an afternoon. We rolled out of there tipsy, and full -- too full for dinner until eight or so that evening. I ended up back at the guest house where they'd lodged me, falling into bed around 10:30, ready for a good night's rest.

At midnight I awoke stone sober with a raging hard-on, the kind that tents your sheet. . . . and for the next 72 hours I found myself non-stop randy. Made a believer out of me.