Russian Roulette is an Immortal’s Game. Anyone who tells you otherwise either has a death wish or is just flat-out fucking stupid. I’ve been both, I know the type. So, when this bitch with beady eyes and greasy blonde hair came into the warehouse, everyone could smell the mortality on her like the sound of a pulse in a den of vampires. Not that any of us were that kind of immortal. Well, one was but he had his own blood d...

The next week, the last one in September, was a time for Margery and me to have introductions to various friends and family. The one I want to talk about here is when Margery met my two best friends from high school, Mark Zimmerman and Dan Behrens. I had met Mark in the West Bronx back in 1966 when we were eleven years old and starting junior high. If someone was going to play him in a movie, I might have picked Woody All...

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...

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...

“Man, this sucks,” I thought as I worked outside trimming the hedges of the clubhouse in 86 degree weather. ~ For some background, my name's Jimmy and I work as a golf course maintenance worker at a fancy country club outside of NYC. Some would even call it boujee. All of the Wall Street types come play either after work or on the weekends. Shit, sometimes they just trade stocks right from the driving range! What a life....

I was going to wait two days before calling Margery, figuring that I wanted to appear interested but not desperate either. That was about the limit of my knowledge about handling dating situations. However, she was the one who called me the very next day. She had suggested that she might do something like that, but I hadn’t taken her very seriously. It was a Friday, and I had just gotten home from school. “Hey Hank, how a...

I met my first girlfriend just two blocks from where I lived in Williamsbridge, The Bronx. It was September 1972 and I had started my senior year at high school. I was seventeen years old and my romantic experiences at school had been, frankly, non-existent. Maybe high school was overrated as a dating location, but I hadn’t found a single prospect during my three years there. By that point, I was starting to think ahead t...

The girls were only on their third time with their new “bad girl” underwear when the nuns caught them. There was a rumor going around the school that the nuns had some kind of extrasensory perception that gave their teachers something beyond random guesswork to discover which girls were being naughty on a certain day. Probably it was something more prosaic than that. After years of experience looking for that kind of thin...

The northbound D train often got stuck in that right-hand curve into 205th Street station. That was not unusual, because 205th was the terminal and trains had to clear the platform before another train could enter. Except on that night, it was the ungodly hour of nearly 3:00 AM when I was sitting there. This being May of 1977, public employees were completely demoralized and didn’t give a damn about doing their jobs. Thus...

On Thursday, Vivian Hannity eagerly awaited the arrival of her friend Cathy Morrow. Vivian knew they were going to participate in an unofficial tradition: the wearing of “naughty girl” panties under their Catholic school uniforms. Cathy had gone and purchased new underwear for both of them. No one could remember when this practice had started, but it seemed to be a way for many of the girls a way to express their represse...

At the start of her junior year in the late summer of 1971, sixteen-year-old Vivian Hannity had been attending Catholic schools for her entire life. Yet she found that her belief in her own religion was waning. It wasn’t exactly that she was becoming an atheist. It was more like the rigid dogmas of the Church simply made no sense to her anymore. She could not resolve the contradictions between what the Church was trying t...

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...

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...

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...