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...

It was May of 1978. A beautiful warm day was being predicted for the upcoming Friday. Someone (my guess was Todd) announced that that Friday would be Senior Skip Day. Word spread quickly. Kelly and I were seniors in high school. We were above-average students and had generally played “by the rules” while in school. But something about senioritis and a warm spring day can make you do what you wouldn’t otherwise. Kelly and...

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...

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...

So when I saw The Corporation’s ad looking for volunteers I was happy to sign up.  They didn’t call it “time travel,” but that’s what it was.  A handful of people were going to be sent to another era.  They wouldn’t be able to come back.  Only a few people would be selected because they wanted to examine the impact over time. There were so many appealing years to choose from, but they were only selecting one person for ea...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...