“Wow, we really lucked out with this place,” said Vivian Hannity. She was talking about the apartment they had just rented on Sedgwick Avenue. Her new roommate, Miranda Grossman – or just Mandy – replied, “I’ll say, I especially like this view looking out at the reservoir. How about we celebrate by smoking a doobie?” “It’s a bit early in the day for that, isn’t it?” “Naw, you’re just fooled because of the time of the year...
I suppose I was something of a cad back in college, but I didn’t see it that way then. I thought I was just making up for the lost time of high school and then my freshman year. At the very end of that first semester in 1974, circumstances started to break in my favor. I wasn’t involved in casual sex or one-night stands, but I had several overlapping girlfriends for a while. Two of them even offered several threesome ses...
During the second term of my freshman year at City College in New York – this was the spring of 1974 – I had an unusual professor for one of my English courses. His name was Gordon Raskin, he was a specialist in Medieval Literature, and he was thirty-six-years-old at the time. One of his courses was “The Vampire: Certain Ideas of Evil in Western Thought and Art.” Dracula, of course, was on the reading list, but so were w...
“Jake, I’ve heard from Josephine,” Livia said. “Apparently, you did quite well yesterday.” That was when JoJo was in her dominatrix mode. He was surprised, “I did?” “Yes, you certainly did. She was impressed with your, call in stoicism, during her discipline of you. Give her a few days, and then call her and ask her out.” “Are you sure of that?” “Absolutely. She said she’s looking forward to it.” Livia had sent up her bo...
It’s happened to me several times since, but Lenore was the first girl to dump me for another guy. It went about the same way as the later incidents. The first thing I noticed was that she had stopped contacting me, and she wouldn’t return my attempts to contact her. The telephone was our usual method of communication. Sometimes I would run into her in the lobby or the elevator, but when it came to arranging dates the ph...
On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, Lenore and I went out by bus to Pelham Bay Park and Orchard Beach. We weren’t going to swim that day, just walk around. We had gotten off the bus as it entered the park so we could do just that. It was a ghastly hot day, and the entire scene out there was chaotic. Cars kept pouring into the area and, with the parking lots filled, people parked all over the grassy lawns. One group of guy...
Most of us of a certain age remember the 1989 teen romantic comedy, Say Anything. It’s actually an adult fantasy about how they wished teen life had been for them. Yet it struck a nerve with me when I saw it because of the early scenes with high school senior Lloyd Dobbler. At the opening of the film, he is utterly infatuated with his classmate Diane Court. Of course, it’s completely improbable how he keeps his interest i...
I thought I lost my virginity to a girl I met at Finley Hall, but afterwards I was never truly sure. I suppose it was a matter of definitions. It wasn’t really about the event itself, but rather the woman I was with. Finley Hall was the Student Center at the City College of New York by the 1970s. It was a huge, sprawling structure and I don’t remember now exactly what was contained in the whole place. It wasn’t being used...
One day in September, I got a phone call from Lenore’s Aunt Julia. That seemed odd because I hadn’t said much to her in the weeks I had known Lenore. I had been invited to dinner with them at the apartment only once. Sometimes I ran into Julia on the elevator. I was the one to answer the phone that day. We greeted each other and had a bit of chit-chat about the weather or something. Then she said, “Lenore’s at Lehman a lo...
I was a recently divorced man at the age of forty-five when I first tried Internet dating.Back then, in early 2001, on-line dating wasn’t quite a novelty any longer but it also wasn’t something everybody had grown up with. In that period before Tinder, Instagram, and smartphones, people were still trying to get the hang of meeting partners through their desktop computers.At first, it was quite exciting for me, not being t...
“Jake, I have heard from Josephine. It’s a mixture of good news and somewhat ambiguous news,” Livia said.“Then give me the good news first,” he replied.Jake was Livia’s boss at the offices of a small restaurant chain. At twenty-six, he had already become the head bookkeeper. Livia, at the age of twenty, was his assistant. He had recently caught her embezzling a small amount of funds. Rather than report her or press charge...
If the object of the New York authorities were to increase prostitution and depravity, they could not better accomplish it than by their present policy towards the unfortunate class that everybody endeavors to ignore, but who suffer and cause more guilt, crime and misery than even bad rum can justly be held accountable for.-Walt Whitman,Brooklyn Daily Times, June 20, 1859********In mid-January 1975, I had been separated f...
Prologue One day, not long after the ferry terminal episode, Holly, Tiffany, and I were hanging out in a bar having sherry. I didn’t particularly like sherry, but I decided to follow their lead. At one point Tiffany said, “We know another lady who would like to meet a nice young man like you.” I blurted out, “Another one?” “Let me tell you about Catherine, or Cathy. She’s forty-two; she’s also divorced and she has two son...
Livia Behrends got greedy, and then she got sloppy and as well as greedy. She was the assistant bookkeeper in the offices of a small restaurant chain. With the cash coming in, she figured she could pilfer a bit of it without it being noticed. Then she moved into straight embezzlement. She was good with computer programs, and the total wasn’t that much, about twenty-five hundred dollars. Her assumption was that it could be...
I drove a yellow taxi in New York long before Uber, Lyft, Juno, and so forth made the whole thing so app based. You had to hustle out there and know where to find passengers on your own. Also, there was no GPS to help you navigate. I had a map unfolded on the front seat and other maps in my bag.Our fleet was mostly Checkers, but we had one Chevrolet Impala as an experiment. It supposedly had capacity for only four passeng...
