I didn’t have an easy transition from high school to City College. The sexual attitudes and politics of the new place disturbed me. It was like every guy who couldn’t get laid in high school assumed that college girls were “easy” and they couldn’t wait for some sexual action. It seemed that the place was swarming with horny virgins and near-virgins, and all of them noticed me. When I was on campus, I was constantly gettin...

Two young women sat in a diner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Both of them were about to start their senior years of college. Nora Meara attended the City College of New York, a public institution that was part of the city university (CUNY). It was located uptown in Manhattanville/West Harlem or whatever one chose to call that particular area. The other one, Gilda Wasserman, attended New York University (NYU), a pri...

In mid-September, after I had accepted the dominatrix position offered by Gilda Wasserman, she met me in front of the building I would be using for the “sessions,” as she called them. I was surprised when she had told me these would happen in the basement of a loft building on West 27th Street. My first client, a guy named Kevin, had already been lined up with me. When talking to Gilda on the phone, I mentioned that I had...

Within a week of starting my hooking gigs, a lot of guys at CCNY had my home phone number and I’d arrange many of my transactions through that medium. Sometimes I’d still do it the old-fashioned street prostitute way. I’d lounge around inside the Finley Student Center or just stand outside that building or maybe Wagner Wall, and invariably some dude would approach me. My first ever customer, that Greg with the big Ford, p...

People have asked me: what is it like to turn a trick? They want to know the mechanics of it for sure, but they are also curious about the emotional state of the lady who does the work and gets paid for it. I do remember a certain incident that happened in April 1974 near the end of my first stint as a hooker. Nothing unusual happened in that particular pay-to-play event, but the details of what I did and what the john di...

When Nora and I started our final year at City College, we were both still on the student newspaper The Salient. In the two years since our break-up, we talked to each other at times, but we didn’t have a lot of interactions elsewhere. Mostly we saw each other in the office on the third floor, and that was about it. One day in early October she came up to me and said, “Paul, I’d like to talk to you about something. Let’s...