One afternoon Holly and I were hanging out at a coffee shop in Manhattan. Along the way we got to talking about role-play games. We had already done some of those, but she proposed a new one. Holly started describing it. “We’re going to be playing a pick-up game. Have you heard of those?” “No; I’m not up on them.” “What they are is this: two people pretend they don’t know each other. Then one picks up, or tries to pick up...

Three young people were working as summer interns at Jamison’s Magazine in New York; it was in an old, rambling building on lower Fifth Avenue. They were all nineteen-year-old students who had finished their freshman year at City College: Darina Kuznetsov, Paul D’Amato, and Judy Weinberg.Darina was an art intern, while the other two were on the editorial side. One of their tasks was to find other works that could be repro...

In June of 1975, I made a misguided attempt at a bar pickup in New York. Actually, technically, I did pick her up. I was twenty and she was about twenty-six.Somehow, I convinced Charlotte to take me back to her nearby walk-up apartment. She cock-teased me by doing a striptease, and then she had me masturbate on a couch as she watched. Then, in a very abrupt and unsubtle way, she threw me out.At that time, I had a girlfrie...

My favorite uncle was my father’s younger brother, Henry D’Amato, or Uncle Hank as we called him. When I reached college age in the 1970s, he had a successful fruit wholesaling business in the Bronx Terminal Market. By then he had surpassed his own father, who had his store just down the block. Hank had two trucks and two “stores” or units, while my Grandpa Carmine only had one of each.During my school years he sometimes...

I was sitting one day in a bar with my older, classy-lady girlfriend, Holly Sykes. I had met her while I was driving part-time for a car/limo service called Lioness Limousine. She was one of my passengers and we got involved in “activities” inside the car when she rented a vehicle for the day. She definitely was the one who initiated the affair.After a few weeks we got into a more conventional relationship that involved r...

One Saturday afternoon I got a call at the apartment where I was living with my family. My dad happened to answer it and said it was for me.I said, “Hello, this is Paul.”I heard a woman's voice, “Paul D’Amato? This is Janice Dubin, you know, from Trylon Typesetting. We met this week.”This was in the late spring of 1976. I had applied for a job as a part-time paste-up artist and proofreader at a Manhattan typesetting compa...

While driving for an outfit in New York called Lioness Limousine, I had a customer who was both delightful and exasperating at the same time. Holly Sykes was a thirty-seven-year-old divorcée who started asking for my services every Sunday in the late spring of 1976. For the first two sessions she decided to mix kinky BDSM activities with various sexual acts - in the car. On the first outing, she took me to the back seat w...

On a cold Saturday in February, 1975, Michelle Hanley and Judith Weinberg went to see Bonnie and Clyde at a revival house, the Cinema Village on 12th Street. The two were sophomores at the City College of New York. When they came out, they decided to walk a few blocks to a bar.Judy said, “How about the Cedar Tavern? It’s just a couple of blocks from here.”“No, let’s go to Googie’s today. It’s a little more cozy, I think.”...

The first time I found out that some women liked being spanked on their buttocks was when I had to discipline my own secretary.It wasn’t official company policy of course, but for years female employees got corporal punishment at my mid-sized law firm of Cromwell, Bartleby, Stevens and Yates. They could get it for making serious mistakes or for bad behavior on the company premises.It didn’t happen that often; maybe a few...

Freedom of the PressWhen I was twenty years old I decided to use a newspaper to improve my romantic life. To be more precise, I wanted to create a romantic life where none had existed before. I had gone to the City College of New York expecting to meet girls - or even just one girl, perhaps - as well as get a degree to improve my chances for some as yet unspecified career.By the summer of 1975 between my sophomore and jun...

“Remember that heavy petting we had last May at Loew’s Paradise?” My girlfriend Michelle Hanley asked me that as we sat in one of the lounges at the City College of New York.“Petting? I'd call what we did mutual masturbation. We both came, obviously.”She laughed at that, “Yeah, I was using a 1950's euphemism.”“It actually, I think, covered a whole range of behaviors, from fondling through the clothes to literally, as I sa...

Driving for a car service requires a deft touch for customer service, as I found out when driving part-time for a New York outfit called Lioness Limousine. I had one particular passenger with unusual demands, but I was more than happy to oblige her requests. She was a thirty-eight-year-old divorcée named Holly Sykes, and she lived in the Gramercy Park section of Manhattan. What Holly asked for and got from me one Sunday a...

In the spring of 1976 I made some extra money for college by driving for a car service called Lioness Limousine. I was a sophomore at the City College of New York in upper Manhattan, and I commuted by subway to my job in Long Island City. I wound up having a regular customer, a lady named Mrs. Holly Sykes. She was a divorcée who lived in an apartment building near Gramercy Park in Manhattan. I was told that she had specif...

Judy Weinberg was pondering her life one afternoon. She was sitting in a lounge at Finley Hall, the student center building for the City College of New York. It was near the end of a cold and bright day in December 1974, just before the winter break. She had one more exam in two days, and then she faced about two weeks of unstructured time for herself.I should get a job, she thought; even when classes were in session ther...

During the 1974-75 academic year, there was a fellow sophomore at the City College of New York named Judith Weinberg. She was a modern European history major like I was, and she lived with her parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.I met her because she was a friend of Michelle Hanley, one of my girlfriends at the time. Judy made some moves on me and I, being a callow youth - or maybe just a cad - responded to her. J...