A Barney's window display of Lady Gaga's work has legendary multi-media performance artist Colette's notorious creations written all over it.

Colette, whose seminal performance art and multi-media installations originated out of New York City's vibrant art scene in the 1970's has traveled to museums and galleries all over the world; including the Guggenheim; MOMA; and The Whitney.

Upon seeing Barney's Lady Gaga window display in midtown, Colette takes to the streets in protest to send a clear message to the Gaga camp that Colette is standing outside the door and must be invited in and given proper respect.

While the maitre d’ was escorting us to our table, Barbara gave my arm an annoying pinch while gasping wide-eyed that Jolie Gabor, mother to Magda, the infamous Zsa Zsa, and Eva was sitting at a table in the center. I had noticed the large jovial group and some of the women bejeweled.

 During the course of our dinner, Barbara began to complain how it was like pulling teeth to get any one of her males to volunteer to help wallpaper her kitchen. I think I saw tears well up in her mink-lashed cocker spaniel eyes when she switched her tone from being pissed off to heartbreakingly lonely. The topic of women’s lib and its pros and cons arose and suddenly, perhaps under the influence of her third glass of white wine, Amy, who believed and rightfully so that we were still too young to concern ourselves with men or kitchens, began to ululate like Tarzan.

I noticed a man seated across the room at the Jolie Gabor table cock an ear. Then without the slightest hesitation, he got up to make his way over to us.

“It’s Tarzan!”Amy shrieked.

It was Tarzan. But in my eyes he was Johnny Weissmuller, five time Olympic gold medalist swimmer and one time bronze.

“That’s not the way to do it,” he said annoyed, all 6 ft. 3 of him.

A waiter appeared like a miracle from out of nowhere to swiftly and graciously slide a chair under Mr. Weissmuller’s rear, I think preventing him from putting it into reverse and careening through the swinging kitchen door.

He was still handsome decked out in his well-tailored tuxedo. The cuffs of his starched white ruffled shirt revealed embroidered initials that repeated themselves as ornate gold and diamond links, and around his neck hung his medals.

The others sort of sat there with ridiculous grins on their faces but I, a swimmer for all my life, looked upon him in awe.

“I’m a swimmer,” I said, rather like an idiot.

After a few minutes of cordial chat, this absolute sweetheart of a man rose from our table, almost taking all of it with him. Later I read somewhere that he'd recently had hip surgery and a broken leg.

Denise Falcone is a writer who lives in New York City. Her New York stories have appeared in J Journal, Antique Children, Kerouac's Dog, and others.

A Free Evening of Non-Fiction In The Lower East Side.

Reading on September 23 will be:

Rob Williams - Bear Patrol 

Lily Shen - It Is Easy To Speak Chinese

Kenneth P. Nolan - Farrell’s

Nathaniel Page - Spanked 

The host is Connor Gaudet - Hung Out

About The Readers...

“Let them see that big yellow head of yours,” Tiffany would say. We broke tradition only once, separating at a corner during a light summer rain in Greenwich Village. The ugly truth left me stunned and incensed. The cab, a canary yellow mini-van with sliding doors, slowed to a crawl. Tiffany reached for its handle just before the driver gunned his engine, bolting past her for a white couple thirty feet away.

We started taking cabs back to Brooklyn from Manhattan because, as Tiffany explained, I stared too much on the subway. If a father trained his son to do cartwheels for change on the Q train, I stared. If a man spoke to his wife in Russian while casually shaving his neck in the reflection of her compact, I was mesmerized.

I grew up in a suburb where everyone drove. Tiffany said my gaze wandered too much. I didn’t have my ‘train eyes’ yet. The two of us always enjoyed a healthy rivalry when it came to our respective upbringings yet it was the interracial aspect of our relationship, the burden and beauty it supplied, that needed to soak into our pores over a stretch of time. Regardless of how well my train eyes developed, I would never truly know what it meant to be black in America, but I was now part of a team that did.

We both taught English at a large high school in New York City under Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral control. When the Department of Education declared the building unsafe and its students failing, we vehemently disagreed with city politics and got to know each other better. Every year the building lost another wing to a trendy boutique academy and every year Tiffany and I grew closer. By the time there was nothing left of the place and our classroom belongings had all been packed, my ring was on her finger.

Initially, I just wanted to know the beautiful teacher who shared my classroom a little better. Yet when things progressed and it was time for Tiffany to inform her parents of the new boyfriend, she made a conscious decision to do it in stages. First there was a new man in her life, and his name was James. It wasn’t exactly a lie. James was indeed my first name. I just rarely used it, opting for my middle name instead. So now I was James on my birth certificate, James on my taxes, and apparently James to a loving couple in Brooklyn with strong Southern roots whom I never actually met. It was simply an easier crossover name than Bryan, which served Tiffany well until her parents demanded to know who this James character was exactly.

“You’ve been dating this guy for months now,” her mother finally said. “How come we’ve never met him?”

“Well, James lives very far. Way out on the Island.”

“Tiffany?”

“Yes?”

“Is James white, by any chance? Because you know that’s perfectly fine.”

Back in our respective classrooms, diversity was never handled quite so delicately. The students simply had no use for political correctness of any kind, producing an atmosphere of equal parts honesty and madness. Moments of tolerance could turn ugly and raw in a New York minute, occasionally taking precedence over a lesson.

“Okay, who can tell me why Macbeth wants Duncan dead..?”

“Hey, Mister, what are those white ladies doing?”
I peered down at my book. “What ladies, the witches from the opening scene?”

“No, those three witches outside!”

Heads turned. Desks and chairs groaned across the floor. Deep inside our texts, Macbeth waited patiently inside Duncan’s chambers, dagger in hand, for the twenty-first century to get back to him.

“Those aren’t witches, Tyrell. Those are secretaries and you know it.”

“But what are they doing out there?”

“Getting some sun on their lunch break.”

“Why?”

“Because they think it looks good.”

My answer was greeted with snickers and smirks. Someone said something about white ladies and wrinkles. Someone reminded the rest of us that ‘black don’t crack,’ then thankfully we were allowed to return to the much easier topic of Macbeth’s ambitious mayhem.

For the most part, my relationship with Tiffany or ‘Miss Young’ was greeted as a fun novelty item by the students. Although the union was never confirmed or denied, each year graduating seniors gleefully awaited their wedding invitations in the mail or demanded we start producing as many ‘Obama kids’ and pretty ‘Derek Jeter babies’ as possible. Light heartedness aside, Tiffany and I did plan on having children one day yet I still had much to learn about race relations. After seven years of teaching in New York City, I could not produce a suitable response whenever a student informed me that I was a ‘good white man.’

The death of a New York City high school turned out to be a long drawn out process. Once a building was declared ill there was nowhere to go for a second opinion. As the years wore on, the school’s troubles only increased. The population took its final plummet once the faculty was required to pass out flyers to students stating that we were a dangerous, failing institution and it would be best if they transferred immediately. For Tiffany and me, it was akin to studying for years to be gourmet chefs, landing dream jobs in a wonderfully diverse restaurant, then being forced to hand out leaflets saying PLEASE DON’T EAT HERE. Our student body changed dramatically. It was simply no longer the same place and it broke our hearts.

We received our letters of excess at the same time. The school where we found each other would close its doors for good in three years, operating with a small skeleton staff until that time. It was now a matter of finishing up the school year with dignity, to not let feelings of confusion and resentment filter into the classroom. Frankly, it was exhausting.

To offset the final months of our teaching time together, we began to see a lot of theater on the weekends. Here again was another lesson to be learned. Even the plays I selected for us needed to be done with an awareness I had never considered before. Tiffany had no problem sighting performances, even audiences themselves for a lack of true diversity.

She did have a valid argument. Just this past June we saw a performance of Larry Kramer’s 1985 drama, The Normal Heart, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, less than twenty-four hours after New York lawmakers voted to legalize same-sex marriage. The audience that evening was so eclectic and charged with victory that when a wedding ceremony took place in the final act the house broke down and sobbed as one entity.

It would be foolish to deny ourselves similar experiences on a stage or even in our teaching lives. We’ve since made a point to seek out theater that will enrich our relationship, as well as our careers. It was at a recent performance of an August Wilson play, an author both of us have taught for years, where the audience mix was as interesting as the performance.

“Oh, Mom,” Tiffany said, making a quick phone call in the lobby. “You should see this. We’re out in full force tonight!”

So it was on that wet little corner of Greenwich Village where I suffered a momentary setback. As I watched the driver pull away, stopping quickly to retrieve his desired passengers, my immediate response was frustrated rage. It was our last weekend together as teaching colleagues. Rather than celebrating a job well done and looking forward to our future, I instead discovered the true nun-chuck capabilities of a closed umbrella. It bounced off the cab’s back window, skidding harmlessly into traffic. I haven’t thrown anything that hard since the little league all-star game.

My reaction was immature and slightly insane, and in the end only made me feel worse. I wasn’t the one the driver elected to pass by. Mine was anger by association, something I would simply have to process better in the future, especially once children were involved. I should have realized that Tiffany and I had long since formed a unit by then. We needn’t be concerned with foolish cabbie stereotypes or Department of Education numbers games for that matter. We didn’t have to teach together in order to stay together. And as I went through all the machinations of the angry male, the huffing and puffing, the bleating heart and racing adrenaline, a tiny hand rubbed the nape of my neck until I was normal again.

“What exactly did you think you were doing?” she said, smiling up at me. “That guy has nothing to do with us. You know that… Come on. We’ll take the train home tonight. Try not to stare, okay?”

J. Bryan McGeever’s essays have appeared in Thomas Beller’s Lost and Found: Stories from New York. He lives in Brooklyn.

The first time I recall getting spanked, I was four. I had stolen a box of matches and lit a fire behind my house. My father spanked me down the hall.

The last time I recall getting spanked, I was 25. I was in Paddles, New York City’s main sadomasochist dungeon. Megan, my spanker, a fat chick with a tattoo of a pyramid on her chest, was steadily increasing the strength of her swats. “It’s getting rosy red now,” she said.

WHAP!

“You have a really nice ass,” she continued, running her hands over my glutes sensuously. “I love the ass.”

I had long wanted to become a libertine. I had been sexually frustrated since I was six, when I took up the habit of humping my stuffed walrus. All through my adolescence, the spectre of intimacy terrified me. I feared I would become the Forty Year Old Virgin. To transcend my fear, I solicited a fat chick on the internet. She sucked my dick behind a sand dune.

WHAP!

I spent several years of my young adulthood involuntarily celibate. “No one wants to fuck me,” I thought bitterly over many bottles of liquor. I fell in love twice, was rejected twice. When I asked the object of my second infatuation to go out with me, she looked at me, turned around, and walked away. “In Buddhism, one of the best things that can happen to you is disappointment,” she told me later. She ended up having a kid with some other guy. I still meditate regularly.

WHAP!

My problem, I deduced later, was that I had been too stiff and inhibited. Had I swept her off her feet like a Spanish knight, she would have loved me. I would lose all fear and shame, I decided. I would become totally virile. Furthermore, I would go to New York and establish myself as a recognized writer. I would follow the footsteps of Gay Talese through the sexual underground, attending orgies and patronizing massage parlors. I would write my magnum opus and prove wrong all the women who had once rejected me.

WHAP!

About a year previous to this paddling, at a friend’s place back home in California, I watched Shortbus. The film opened with one of the main characters trying to suck his own dick while a neighbor spies on him through the window. The character then attended a series of orgies held at an underground club in New York. Overseeing the club was a transvestite named Justin Bond. I wanted to be part of that scene, I thought. I wanted to recapture the erotic spirit of the ancients.

WHAP!

First, I braved a sex party in my tiny home town. I was mortified that I’d see a friend’s father there. To fit in, I wore nothing but a fez and boots, and carried a horse whip. One of the two attractive women present told me a rape joke, then spent the rest of the evening fucking her boyfriend. I remained a voyeur.

WHAP!

Shortly thereafter I moved to New York, where I figured I’d find the real scene. During my first months in the city, I dabbled in cross-dressing. Justin Bond once complimented my get-up at a party. I attended a queer film festival, where I saw a man's pectorals get skewered by a pair of sharp hooks and watched a film that combined war footage with gay porn. I attended a sex party advertised as “Brooklyn's nastiest.” It was held in a squalid basement that stank of sweat. A man asked me through an intermediary to suck his dick. I left after about twenty minutes.

Another time, I attended The Pleasure Salon, a kinkster gathering hosted by a couple of Tantric sex coaches at a club called The Happy Ending. When I walked in, the first thing I heard was a guy telling another guy "I was physically abused as a child, so I'm not really much of a masochist."

There were about 50 people there, mostly in their 40s, none of them lookers. There was one tranny-- an old, wrinkled, obvious one. A good number of men loitered near the walls. A computer programmer approached me haltingly and tried to start a conversation, but it petered out after a few exchanges.

I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged fat woman. She told me her name was Hectuba. She gave me her card. Just "Hectuba"; no last name. It listed her occupations as 2nd Degree Wiccan Priestess and Crystal Healer, and Level 1 Reiki Practitioner. She said that she was also a sadomasochist. She and her husband, Garry, maintained a dungeon in their Staten Island home.

Hectuba told me she became interested in the occult at age 13, when she found a thin booklet about it in the library. She got Tarot cards and a Ouija board. During this time she had several close scrapes with black magic. One time she was playing with her Ouija board and part of the room began to smell strongly of onions and liver, neither of which she was cooking.

Her ex-husband got her into S&M. They met when she was 22. He was 44, a virgin, and a conservative Jew. He convinced her to become Hasidic, and she followed the tradition strictly for ten years. She suspected that he had been sexually abused as a child, and that he was also schizophrenic, because he told her that he talked to angels. Whenever she would put her hands “down there,” she said, he pushed them away. They lived apart for eleven years, then moved in together but slept in separate rooms. She had sex with him only once in fifteen years of marriage.

He enjoyed being beaten, especially while wearing a certain type of sandal. But he had no fortitude as a submissive. He would “safe word out” at the slightest provocation. That is, he would prematurely use the word they’d agreed on to cut off her abuse.

So Hectuba began venturing out by herself to find new partners. She met Garry on an S&M chat room in 2002. They began playing together. Hectuba's husband didn't like it, and asked her to stop. Hectuba dumped him and married Garry.

Garry was a quiet, gentle type. Like Hectuba, he was a “switch”; he could play either dominant or submissive, though he leaned submissive, while Hectuba leaned dominant. On FetLife, the big kinkster social media site that Hectuba suggested I join, he listed himself as “heteroflexible” with a “big messy fetish.” His profile photos showed him in a bathtub, covered in chocolate sauce and whip cream. He was also interested in drowning, slave auctions, cock ridicule, mind control, abasiophilia, and capsaicin (the spicy chemical in chili peppers).

The couple considered themselves “on the verge of polyamory.” Hectuba had sex with other men with Garry’s knowledge. Garry also submitted to other women. A mutual friend of theirs, the druid who originally got Hectuba into Wiccanism, had recently dominated Garry during a trip to Disney World. “She forced him to ride a roller coaster,” Hectuba said. Garry had a mortal terror of roller coasters. He cursed her the whole way up. “He couldn’t handle it,” Hectuba said. She called such over-aggressive domination “breaking your toys.”

“You can’t play with your toys if you break them,” she said.

Garry said he wasn't jealous that Hectuba had other lovers, but he was jealous of her ability to pick up men. He was not so gifted in picking up women. I found Hectuba's success surprising, given her stout stature, greasy, unkempt hair, double chin and stubble.

But I was intrigued. I still hadn’t explored the sadomasochism scene. A couple months later I attended a seminar held by the Eulenspiegel Society, the city’s oldest S&M club. It was called “Knife Play with Master Z.”

Twenty-six people came. One ancient guy in the audience was swaying back and forth; he later mentioned that he had so many neurological problems he didn’t trust himself to wield a knife over a woman’s jugular, but the fact that he might cut her got him off.

There was a guy wearing a thick soul patch who called himself Evil Sausage. “I’m dominant, sadistic and controlling,” Evil Sausage said, and he called his ex-girlfriends “former slaves.”

Master Z stood before a scaffold next to table covered in murderous shanks. His wife “lizbeth” wore a leather collar, eye shadow and fishnet stockings, but the only sartorial clue about Master Z’s proclivities were his studded black boots.

He first discussed safety. Keep knives very sharp or a very dull, he said, so that you’d know exactly the limit of pressure that you could apply before you moved into “blood play.”

“We’re not going to be doing any blood play today,” Master Z said. “Unless I change my mind midway through.”

Master Z got out an eight-inch hunting knife with a serrated spine. Some of the audience members also got out knives. One guy in chaps kept his knife out the whole evening. He kept jabbing it towards Master Z.

A short, dark-skinned woman named Aden came up to the scaffolding. She had thick scars on her arms and tattoos on her hands and neck.

“It’s important to negotiate limits beforehand,” Master Z said. “Especially when you’re a hair’s breath from killing someone. So Aden and I have discussed her limits, and fortunately she has none.”

Master Z strapped restraints to Aden’s wrists and ankles and, while continuing to explain the importance of immobilizing your slave, he chained her to the scaffold so that she was standing, spread eagle, with her arms above her head.

“The best part about having a knife is that you don’t have to worry about getting her clothes off,” he said, and he cut her shirt and bra apart, breathing heavily. “This works great for a rape scene,” he said.

Aden’s wide dark areolas hung out and Master Z poked her armpits, ran the blade along the bottom of her tit, and then over the top. She squirmed and tried to move away from him. Then he dug the knife blade into her nipple, saying “Ah, you like that, huh? Do you like that?”

“Big knives and helpless naked women,” he said. “It’s the perfect combination.”

These proceedings pleased me. I could really mix up a routine bout of sex with something like a katana sword, I reasoned. Maybe I had found my scene.

I went to Paddles for the first time one evening soon after that seminar. The club’s entrance was set in a windowless wall perpendicular to the street, facing a parking lot. It looked like the door to a walk-in freezer. I passed a circle of smokers in black leather thongs and vests, descended a black stairwell, and emerged in a basement filled with the sounds of whips cracking and slaves shrieking.

At first I loitered uneasily at the Whips and Licks Cafe, which formed the center of the club. I could have used a dose of alcohol, but drinking and flogging is frowned upon in the community, so the cafe served only soda, cake, and ice cream. “You can cool down after a scene with a banana split,” a kinkster once quipped.

A television above me played a video of a woman's nipples being hung with weights while she was whipped. A huge mural opposite the cafe depicted a dominatrix forcing a man to drink nuclear waste in an apocalyptic landscape of broken cinder blocks and skulls. A dead woman was tied to a huge penis with horns. In the background, Paddles was still open for business.

After a while a dominatrix approached me and introduced herself as Miss Muse. She asked if I was new to the scene. I said I was. She offered to give me a tour of the club.

We walked first to the main play room, which evoked an Inquisition-era torture chamber. The grey stucco walls were made to look like stone. Thick, split wooden beams supported the ceiling. Gas lamps illuminated the space with a reddish light. Devices in this room included a four-poster bed with a leather mattress and cuff restraints hanging from pulleys on its tester. Each cuff could be pulled taught by wooden cranks on the frame of the bed. “Theoretically, you could be quartered,” Miss Muse said.

In the corridor leading to the back of the club, Miss Muse and I passed a naked man locked in a bird cage. We entered a stuffy room. A woman was hanging from by her hair from a hook in the ceiling, and a man was beating her. A chainsaw also hung from the ceiling. A kinkster named Ramon was blowing fire on his slave with a set of torches and an aerosol can. “Punieta!” his slave screamed. “No quiero mas!”

I can never go back to vanilla sex now, I thought to myself. Now, if I was really going to get off, I’d have to blast my partner’s vagina with burning alcohol.

Back home, I set up a profile on FetLife and trolled the events section. I found Hectuba’s profile. She suggested I attend a “munch” at Moonstruck, a mediocre diner in Chelsea popular amongst members of the sexual underground. A munch is a "vanilla” gathering at which kinksters eat and talk. I invited Evil Sausage to join me. Also present were Hectuba and Garry, a small, mousy man named Fred, his portly partner, and a guy with mutton-chop sideburns who called himself The Baron Von Brunk.

The Baron wore an American-flag tie. On his business card, which he also gave me, he was depicted wearing said tie. He was the chief executive officer of "Reel Splatter Productions," a film company, whose logo was a man in a gas mask chopping open someone's head with a machete. He said that he could reverse the the color scheme of this logo to transform the film company from one based on horror films to one based on zombie films.

Evil Sausage came in sweating, as he often did when he walked, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. He was rolling a suitcase behind him filled with floggers. He introduced himself to the others, using his real name, as always, and amending it with his FetLife name, as kinksters tended to do upon meeting. He had met Hectuba somewhere before.

Evil Sausage told me his awareness of his sadism had grown over many years. As a child, he went through his mother’s clothing catalogs and drew ropes around the wrists and ankles of the models, “especially the women.”

He had been estranged from his mother ever since he was a teenager, when she told his father that he was beating her. “You’re thinking that my conflict with my mother has lead me to want to dominate women,” he told me when he related this story. I told him I hadn’t been thinking that. “Well, you would have thought of that eventually, and you would be right.”

He got into the scene when he was in his thirties. He met his first S&M partner, Rebecca, on a website. “I beat Rebecca,” he said, his tone deadpan, and he nodded once and paused for two beats, as he did every time he said he beat a woman. “Then I brought her home.” She asked him to role play raping her, and he did so. After that, for the whole month that their relationship lasted, the couple’s foreplay involved Evil Sausage crawling through Rebecca’s window and assaulting her.

Evil Sausage had been polyamorous since his slave left him a few years previous, a betrayal that “left a scar.” He was 39, and his girlfriend was 19. She had moved into his apartment in Flushing. He put a collar on her-- Evil Sausage considered “collaring” equal in significance to putting on a wedding ring-- and she became his slave, a “24-7″ arrangement. That is, she submitted to him at all times, not just during sex. The only thing he had to do himself during their time together was to use the electric knife to carve roasts, since she was scared of it, and to shop for groceries, since she made irresponsible decisions at the store.

However, she flew into rages for the slightest reasons, such as when he tried to show her how to cook a roast without drying out the stuffing. One day, after he accidentally broke her laptop, she left him for a man her own age.

He was presently seeing three women, ages 23, 32, and 39, and seeking a new slave. He had not yet beaten his oldest girlfriend, because her Master had indicated that he wanted to watch Evil Sausage play before he let him beat her. “So one day, he and I and her will all see one another at a party, and I will beat her,” he said, and he nodded.

We spent much of the meal talking about tattoos. The Baron Von Brunk had tattoo of a Lego man on his arm. He had long been a Lego aficionado, and still built models, elaborate ones depicting such scenes as General Sherman's burning of Atlanta. On the middle of his chest Evil Sausage had a tarantula. To the left of the tarantula he said he would get a tattoo of Wolverine riding My Little Pony, surrounded by Care Bears wielding swords. He would get a second tattoo opposite the tarantula, that of a Smurf in a bloody smock, wielding a chainsaw.

Several of us went to Paddles. We sat awkwardly together for a long time. There were only about five other people there when we arrived, and there would only be about thirty through the whole evening. Hectuba blamed Passover and Easter. Evil Sausage blamed better parties elsewhere.

Hectuba donned a pair of high heels and Garry got into a leather thong and a vest. Frank and his partner came up to Hectuba and Frank stood there silently while his partner explained that he was into foot worship. She said that when Frank rubbed his stubble on her soles, she had a peak experience. So Hectuba sat in a leather throne and Frank worshiped her feet for ten minutes while she looked bored. “It's just not really what I'm into,” she explained later.

Eventually a young woman new to the scene came in and two fat dominatrixes strapped her to the quartering device. While a man put ice in her panties, Evil Sausage, delighted, poked her with the end of a rod he told me he'd once given to a friend, hoping to entice him to beat his girlfriend, who had confided in Evil Sausage that she liked such things. The friend had then suffered a psychotic break, though, compelling Evil Sausage to steal the device back.

In another room a beautiful young black woman in a leather suit and heel boots, which made her about 6'4”, was laying into a man's ass with a wide belt strap, throwing her whole shoulder into each flog and making the belt crack loudly. Every time he was flogged the man said “Thank you Miss Reign.”

The voyeurs sat silently. A fat young man in schlocky clothes who lived upstate chewed his fingernails. He asked Miss Reign's sidekick, a worse-looking, fatter woman, also in leather, how he should approach the dominatrix. “She would have you crawl up to her and kiss her feet,” the sidekick said. The man sat and kept looking at Miss Reign, his face sagging and expressionless, and when she came towards him to talk to her sidekick he scrambled away.

Later, I saw Miss Reign beating another fat man viciously. He was tied to a wall, writhing and moaning. “What's his safe word?” Miss Reign's sidekick asked her.

“He doesn't have a safe word!” Miss Reign said, laughing, and she flogged him again.

By this time, there were only about eight people and two scenes left in the club. I wandered between the two, feeling bored and alienated.

I hadn’t yet tried sadism myself, but I thought I should. One time, before a play party in Brooklyn, I bought a cheap whip at the Pussy Cat Boutique. I spent forty minutes on the train to get to the party. I walked twelve blocks from the station to the warehouse venue.

Before I entered, I looked inside. The room was black lit. A fat woman dressed like a Medieval wench drank from a goblet. A woman in a white leather corset had her boobs hanging out over a flogging bench. A woman in a leather thong was locked in a cage. Several men stood around by themselves, looking like they weren’t sure where to put their hands.

It was $35 to go in. I stood with my whip, pondering. I knew it would be a long, awkward evening, that I wouldn’t enjoy myself, that the guests would be sexually unattractive. I turned around and went home.

The night I was spanked, though, I wasn’t yet disillusioned with the scene. That night I had still found sadomasochism novel enough to pay Paddles’ $40 cover charge for single men. (To discourage creeps, a single man is charged $15 more than a single women or a member of a couple.)

When I met Megan, I told her I was a writer, and she told me that she wanted to spank me.

I looked around, nervous. A saw a man bent over with his pants down and a dominatrix paddling him.

WHAP!

“What are you so scared of?” Megan said.

“Ah, um, I don’t know,” I stammered.

I wandered away, but she followed me. Everywhere I went, people were providing social proof that a spanking was the thing to get. I realized that I was running up against my old, limiting fear, the fear that kept me isolated and conventional.

“Can we start with my pants up?” I asked Megan.

We went into a corner. She bent me over a rack. She began to spank me with her hand, but I was wearing thick jeans and couldn’t feel it.

“Can I take your pants down?” she asked after a few minutes.

“Yeah, okay, do it,” I said.

She pulled my pants down but kept my boxers up, and continued to spank me, and this time there was a bit more of a sting to it. I looked down through my legs at the corridor behind us. A small audience of feet had gathered, encouraging Megan.

Megan kept running her hands up and down my thighs, around my scrotum, and up and down my torso. Her hands were soft and pudgy. It was all about “getting in touch with sensation,” she explained. Once her hand strayed into my cock, and I said “Whoa!”

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I just meant to go up and down your thigh, but my hand slipped. Can I take your boxers down now?” she asked.

“Yeah, alright, sure,” I said. “Now I can say I really did it.”

“No more faking,” she said, slipping my boxers down.

Megan eventually switched to her paddle. After about ten minutes, my ass was sore. I stuck it out another five minutes-- WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!

The spanking satisfied me. It was sensual, like a massage. I felt high, like I had been working out. Most importantly, though, I was a new man, one capable of being spanked before all the patrons of Paddles and feeling no shame.

Nathaniel Page is a California writer who lives in Brooklyn.

The Roots drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson cuts through the crowd, trailing a small posse of +1s and scampering paparazzo with their flashing bulbs, and somebody carrying a walkie-talkie whispers, “I think there are models here,” to another carrying the same. Then, the music cuts out at the DJ platform––which is next to the open-bar and above the hopscotch and four-square grids––and the Hollywood humanitarian hyphenate Rosie Perez mounts the stage.

She wears a pair of wide-legged black trousers, a slim-fitting white blouse and teeters on high, leather pumps. Her skin is bright and whiskey-colored, and the expression Rosie broadcasts to the crowd posturing before her belies a concomitant reticence and rehearsedness.

“There are people out there who actually believe that the education system in America is working,” she begins. “But I ask, for whom?”

Rosie is a co-founder of the Urban Arts Partnership, a New York based initiative working to close the intellectual, social and artistic achievement gaps of underserved public school students through arts-integrated education programs. She is here to celebrate the opening of RE:FORM SCHOOL, the weekend-long pop-up contemporary art gallery-come-education reform festival––proceeds payable to the UAP––taking place at 233 Mott Street, in what was, until shuttering at the end of the ’09/’10 school year, New York City’s oldest operating parochial day-school.

Huddled figures loom from the propped-open windows that face the yard, their backlit silhouettes still and silent, pausing to hear Rosie deliver her rhetoric: “There is a disgusting and shameful prejudice, here in America, that if you are born into poverty, you must be stupid, you must have a lower capacity to learn,” she says. “I was one of those kids that they discounted. Just because I was poor and I was on welfare, no one took the time to realize that I was extremely intelligent––thank you very much.”

Rosie says this with a precocious sass in her punchy Latin accent; it’s meant to offer a bit of comic relief, but the crowd hesitates out of a practiced “post-racial” politesse.

“And what changed my mind––because I was a pissed-off young person––was that, one day, there was a special trip to see a performance of The Wiz. And when I saw this young, black girl up there, singing ‘When I think of home, I think of a place / Where there’s love overflowing’; me, the tough kid; me, the kid that used to beat up little boys––who was really, inside, a nerd, a smart nerd, who just wanted people to like me––cried like a bitch. Like a bitch.”

The crowd perks up to the profanity, taking this as its queue to cut loose a little. Of course, anyone with a pulse would see the irony here: Rosie, at her most sentimental, wasn’t looking for a laugh.

“Seeing art, live, up there, on the stage, changed me as a person. That’s why I’m part of Urban Arts Partnership. There’s a new way to teach kids, and the arts is a big part of that. I hope that tonight you reach into your hearts, but more important, I hope that you reach into your pockets and buy some of the art that’s here. Because every drop in the bucket counts, because someone’s drop in the bucket changed me for the better. Thank you.”

Beside me, a slim young man in a well-tailored pantsuit says to a leggy blonde fingering her iPhone, “So, I guess there’s art inside?” They share a mutual shrug.

* * *

The school’s interior, once populated by the bags and books and buoyancy of the student-body whose thinning number necessitated its closing, has metamorphosed into a three-story, goodwill gallery displaying work from over 150 of the country’s more prominent––publicity hungry?––contemporary artists.

The men and women milling about the halls and classrooms are a very different breed from those outside, who are mainly interested in playing catch-up and parsing party turnout. These are the collectors and gallerists and, conceivably, some are the artists.

In a cramped, coat closet-sized ex-classroom, a small audience has gathered to watch a somber man with chin-length hair play improvised cello suites––the pitch and tone of which send droplets of water leaping into the air from the two, shallow, rectangular troughs positioned on either side of the behemoth instrument. This is one of several “pieces” contributed by Michael Murphy, an artist and teacher based in Milledgeville, GA, who flew in a group of his students to help set up his super-sized installation art. The cellist was sourced and hired via Craigslist, several days prior.

Murphy’s “USA Pencil Install” is a divisive three-dimensional info-graphic comprised entirely of #2 pencils––which are wood with a black-paint coating, and capped with eraser-heads of either neon pink, green, orange or yellow rubber––and negative space. Into the clean white plaster of a high-ceilinged wall, a dot-dash system of holes has been drilled to form an outline of the United States, with like holes plotted within every square inch of the interior surface area of the nation. The pattern in which the pencils have been plugged into these holes is such that each of the fifty states is identifiable by not only its designated neon hue, but also its percentile average of high school graduates.

Beside this America, a key––written in pencil and coded with eraser-cap clusters––elucidates the value represented by each of the four colors. For the states with the fewest issued diplomas––California, Florida, and Texas, among others––the holes are left empty, bald and gaping, within the neon-orange rubber outlines of their intranational borders.

Murphy’s art is technically precise and of exceptional design; but, being location-bound––or, in the case of the cellist, human––none of it is for sale. Art über alles.

Upstairs, in a long, window-lit room with a particleboard partition situated at its center to create an ad hoc perambulate path of floorspace, framed mix-media pieces occupy just about every spare scrap of blackboard and wall. (The art here in particular, and throughout the entirety of the campus in theory, takes its inspiration from the sanctioned themes of the event––namely, Knowledge, Community, Creativity & Inspiration, and Teachers Who Inspire.)

Two art-rich seeming men in sunglasses and suit-jackets glide over to a set of framed woodcuts by the artist Scott Albrecht. One piece displays the message DON’T GIVE UP in primary colors, the other reads EVERY DAY IS A NEW DAY. They are, for a brief moment, quiet and contemplative, then one man says to the other, “I like these,” and a volunteer swoops in to inform the man that “they are $300 a piece.” “I want ‘em,” he says. The woman asks which, and Mr. Impulsive says he’ll take the pair. Purple dots are then placed beside each; they have been sold in under four seconds.

* * *

More art sells––most, in fact. Or at least that which is mobile and amenable to transit. There is live music on the blacktop, and, to the displeasure of the many parched patrons, little booze left in the ice buckets. One woman, whose skirt skims her knickers, with a neckline south of her navel, expresses audible resentment when someone luckier than she plucks a solitary cup of cabernet from within the sea of drained bottles and dropped dollar-bills.

The temporary step-and-repeat––which has been erected in the concrete alleyway between the playground and the curb––is plugged by a swell of artist-parents with babies Bjorn-swaddled to their chests; their older children zip around the playground’s perimeter on collapsable steel scooters. The party is not yet over, but it might as well be, and these children seem an odd late-addition to the after-school affair.

Curbside, at the school’s Prince Street exit, a broken-down school-bus rests upon cinderblock supports where its wheels ought to be. Layers of aerosol paint have been spritzed on its cheddar-colored body, cartoonish clouds of magenta, grape, baby-blue and silver; and for each smashed-in window, there is an open socket and a web of tempered glass that sags like twinkling lace. Above the windshield and the rear exit, and along the length of each side of its middle, a supplemental ‘T’ has been tacked onto the chains of decal-lettering; the text reads PUBLIC SCHOOL BUST in a bold, black font.

A troupe of four girls in their mid-teens swirls from around the corner at Mott and heads up Prince, toward the bus. They are shrill and sing-songy, and it looks like they are dancing even though they are not. They pause at the bus, unsure of what is before them, then move in concentric circles around its wide berth. “Fifty-four percent of dropouts ages sixteen to twenty-four are jobless?” one reads aloud, disbelieving, from the decal beside the door. Then: “High school drop outs have a life expectancy 9.2 years shorter than high school graduates?” She and her friends agree that it’s Gotta be a joke and Nuh-uh, not for real. And just as quick as they’d come, the girls again bob down the street, away from St. Patrick’s, cheeks fat from laughter, divorced from the four near-empty backpacks that flap and kick at their shoulders.

Molly Oswaks is a freelance writer and editor living in Manhattan's West Village. This is her first story to appear on the site.

My secret hope was that I would live in one of those secret apartments one day. I wasn’t the kind of writer who hoped for a garret. I wanted a warren, a private place inside a big structure that would be utterly silent at night. The moment I found the apartment in the basement of The Museum of the America Indian, it became my apotheosis of a writer’s warren.

I had unfettered access to the basement because I’d gotten a part-time job at the gift shop in the Museum. This is back when the Museum was up on 155th Street, sharing one of the grand Beaux Arts buildings of Audubon Terrace with the American Geographical Society, the American Numismatic Society, the Hispanic Society and the American Academy of Arts & Letters. The compound was an elegant testament to the retro-classic architecture of the early 20th Century. The people who ran the Museum of American Indian chafed to get out...the dated sensibility of Victorian anthropology clashed with the enlightened post-Modern interpretation of the native American cultures.

I was happy because the job was on the Number 1 Line and midway between my apartment way uptown on Wadsworth Avenue and the Columbia campus, where I was finishing up my junior year.

My primary qualification for working at the gift shop was that I had wrapped packages for a letter press shop was I was thirteen. The hours were flexible and the setting fed my need for eccentric and out-of-the-way New York experiences.

As dated and stodgy as the Museum was, the gift shop was vital and energetic. The manager was one of the most sophisticated buyers of Indian jewelry, Navajo rugs, modern native American painting, pottery and Hopi Kachina dolls in the New York area. The shop also had an extensive collection of literature and research about native Americans.

I was intrigued by the expertise of the people who came in to the shop and began to read all of the books about Native American art that I could sneak out with me at the end of the day. Soon I was allowed to work the counter, and in time I became one of the most confident people on staff talking about the pottery and rugs that we carried.

Nancy, the shop manager, encouraged me to learn as much as I could about the things in the shop. My enthusiasm began to attract her attention. Dane, another guy who worked in the shop with me, didn’t seem happy when Nancy invited me down to the stockroom to see the new shipments that had come in from her last buying trip to the Southwest. Jane, the girl who worked the admissions counter and handled the phones, told me that Dane and Nancy had a thing going, and that I’d better watch out for myself. I wasn’t sure whether I was all that interested in Nancy: she was in her thirties, had stringy blonde hair that she kept in a business-like cut, and her hips did an odd, mis-aligned seesaw switch when she walked.

I was sure that I was interested in Jane. She was a couple of years out of Michigan and lived in a ground-floor apartment on 79th Street, just off on West End, by the entrance to the West Side Highway. She always had an apologetic smile on her face, but her eyes twinkled mischievously, and she wore her bangs over her brows, so that when she didn’t want to look at someone all she had to do was tilt her face down. She favored nice wool skirts and silky blouses to work the admissions desk, and she always had a book to read when things were quiet.

The best thing about Jane was that she wasn’t Janet. I’d been trying to wind things down with Janet in that rocky, unclear way that incomplete relationships fall into.  We’d been boyfriend and girlfriend, and then we weren’t, and then we kind of were again. By the time I started working at the Museum, we were in a suspended state of weren't.

One day I told Jane about my fascination with the custodian’s apartment in the basement. I wondered if she had any idea who I could talk to about using it.

“Why would you want to live here when everyone was gone?” she asked.

“I could play my saxophone as late as I wanted,” I said.

“I could come and play my cello then too,” she laughed.

The die was cast. I didn’t know she played the cello. I was fascinated. I wanted to know more.

One day I asked Jane if she wanted to go over to Trinity Cemetery and picnic at lunch. I figured that this could be a kind of trial date. I could use the time to figure out whether she liked me that way or not, and what her deal was with her boyfriend.

Trinity Cemetery ran up alongside the Museum, and was across the street from The Church of the Intercession. The cemetery was heavily wooded and ran down the hill to the river, surrounded by a high stone wall. We went in through a side gate and ate our sandwiches sitting on fallen grave stones so we wouldn’t get our pants wet. I finished my sandwich quickly and sipped on a seltzer. Jane put her sandwich down. We kissed. I had my answer.

Back then, one of my favorite things to do was to go to the West End’s jazz club and listen to Benny Waters play the alto saxophone. A few times I’d brought my horn and he’d invited me to sit in. He’d been brought back to the states by Phil Schaap, who hosted (and still does) a seminal show on Charlie Parker every morning on WKCR, the Columbia radio station.

I invited Jane to listen to Benny Waters that Friday evening. We hung out on the Walk at Columbia, sitting by one of the fountains, watching people walk by, enjoying each other and stealing kisses that became progressively more urgent, that dulled our eyes, lowered our lids, left our faces flush.

We walked over to the West End hand in hand and got a table at the back of the club. The 9:00 set was crowded with jazz buffs. Waters was swinging hard, blowing out the side of his mouth and egging on the rhythm section with quick glissandos and sharp honks. I was elevating: the girl, the music, the night, what might happen.

Jane squeezed my arm and leaned in.

“Do you know that girl over there?” she asked, turning her head.

I looked over to the door.

Janet was standing in the door. She had square shoulders, and her hair was pulled back from her head, so her forehead shined in the stage lights. She was staring hard at me. I hadn’t noticed. She started to make her way over.

“Who is she?” Jane asked.

“My girlfriend.  Ex-girlfriend,” I said.

Now she stared at me hard.

“What’s she doing here?”

“I don’t know. She’s not really my girlfriend anymore. We broke up. But I don’t know why she’s here.”

“Did you tell her we’d be here?”

I tried to remember. I didn’t know. I’d talked to Janet earlier that day. But I knew what the smart answer was.

“No. I don’t know why she’s here.”

Jane narrowed her eyes.

“I’m going,” she said.

“No, no,” I said, while I stood up. “Don’t go. It’s going to be all right.”

Janet stood next to us.

I introduced the two women. They stood there. I searched for that elevated feeling, looking for the escape that would come with floating away in the air, or a blinding moment of invisibility.

The women were silent. Then Benny picked his horn up from the stand. The piano player hit a chord -- E7 -- and then another -- A -- then vamped a little, picking up the shirring of the drum brushes, and Waters lifted his horn to his mouth, licked his lips, and kicked off a little run that took him in the center of the E chord, and the melody broke. A Jerome Kern standard, The Nearness of You. It would have been ironic if I’d known the words. I just knew the melody and the changes.

I sat back down. Jane slipped next to me, held my arm, leaned in. Janet sat on the other side. Waters played, the set ran on. I sat between the two women -- the woman I wanted to sleep with, whose breast I’d tentatively caressed just an hour earlier, who had wrapped her tongue around mine, and the woman I had slept with, who I wanted to be away from, who I didn’t trust -- and looked straight ahead, unmoving. I could have used that custodian’s apartment just then.

After the set we walked out onto the sidewalk. No one was willing to make the first move. Janet looked at me with wounded eyes. Jane looked a little away, like she was bored or had forgotten something.

“Stay here for a sec,” I said to Janet.

Jane and I walked a couple of steps away.

“I’ve got to talk with her. I’m sorry.”

“I get it,” she said. She whispered. “Come down to my apartment after.”

I walked Janet back to her apartment on 106th Street. It was a big building on the corner, a luxury rental once upon a time and well out of my price range still. She lived there with a roommate. Her dad paid the rent. She had wanted to go to art school, but was going to business school instead. I told her that it was really over. She cried a little. Then we got to the building and stood outside the door. She wanted to hug. I held her. The night was warm and sparkling. A cab pulled up to the corner.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. I skipped over to the cab. “I’ll talk to you later.”

I didn’t know why I said that. I told the cabby to go down to 79th Street. I hoped that Jane was still waiting.

J.W. Rogers grew up in Massachusetts and came to New York in 1977. He's been in and around NYC, collecting stories and writing them down, ever since. You can read some of his work at www.drmstream.com.

Then who were those teenage goons sent to frighten us wee children back in grade school with tales of life-ending catastrophe and humbling community service hours spent plucking trash–orange vested–from interstate on-ramps as a result of being tempted by that white-powdered dragon? Were they genuine drug casualties or had they merely gotten caught? Rumors circulated through junior high that with one snort you were addicted for life. One snort and your heart could explode.

As a twelve year old my world revolved around action figures, comic books and video games and the thought of my heart exploding was, to say the least, unattractive. The thought of snorting white, crystalline powder into my nasal cavity was repulsive bordering on absurd. I had no problem telling my mother, grandmother and grandfather–all eager to secure my assurance–that I would never, under any circumstances, try cocaine, no matter how intense the peer pressure to do it. But like all oaths sworn by young children to their over-anxious parents mine was non-binding, a contract signed by a minor under severe emotional duress.

Many years later, I moved to New York to go to Bard College–alma mater to such seminal cocaine enthusiasts as Chevy Chase, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker–and, soon after, I tried cocaine for the first time with a small, shifty Literature major named Ted who had massive black circles beneath each eye. Ted and I met when, one day after Proust class, we followed our professor, a noted Proustian, into the stairwell of the humanities building and both surprised and wowed him with our unscripted, simultaneous enthusiasm for and knowledge of the somewhat obscure yet highly regarded Polish writer, Bruno Schulz.

Our mutual literary interest sparked a friendship and one night Ted invited me over. We sat in his dilapidated, poorly lit basement dorm room listening to some abrasive jazz albums he had on vinyl. I was still at that point in my life when I thought jazz held some deep and unseen meaning and if I only listened to it long enough–accompanied by the correct dosage of substance–I was bound to uncover its soul-piercing riddle.

“Do you want some coke?” he asked in a voice so nonchalant he may as well have been asking if I wanted ginger ale.

I was surprised but acted like I wasn’t. Ted didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d snort cocaine–he seemed more like a Hudson Valley antiquarian bookseller, a young man who’d already begun to take on the rickety shades of his future, elderly self. Besides, jazz never struck me as good coke-snorting music anyway. Nothing about the moment seemed right.

I said, “Sure,” anyway, more interested then in racking up Life Experience than in staying healthy and Doing The Right Thing–though at the time it seemed like, racking up Life Experience was Doing The Right Thing.

As I leaned down over that first chopped up line of white crystal I thought of my younger self, my mom and my grandparents and how appalled and disappointed they would have been knowing what the older Shawn was about to do and how this was just like one of those after-school specials aimed specifically at kids my age in the 1980’s depicting a good, prospect-rich young man turning lecherously to the Dark Side, his first step on a path leading irreversibly to a fate much worse than death. I placed a rolled up one dollar bill in my nose, said goodbye to my former self, and quickly snorted the line. I paused to observe my potentially exploding heart. Nothing happened. I sat back and tried to gauge if I was instantly addicted. I was not. I barely felt anything though a few seconds later I had an overwhelmingly metallic taste in my mouth – what I would call “Hospital Flavor” — and I could feel a point in the center of my skull I hadn’t yet known existed.

“That’s it?” I thought.

Like most transgressive behavior–smoking, drinking, sex, drugs–which is culturally frowned upon one moment and wildly glorified the next in a pendulum swing that makes manic depression seem mild by comparison my first experience with each was distorted, pre-empted and in a way nullified by the hype and advertisement accompanying them. Cocaine was no different. It was nothing like what I expected. I actually didn’t know what I expected but the dull, numbing feeling I had in my head was nothing like what I associated images of cocaine use with in movies such as “Scarface” or “Wall Street” or in TV shows like “Miami Vice” or in the massive news coverage devoted to the Central and South American drug cartels targeted in America’s War on Drugs throughout the 1980’s. This was what all the fuss was about? This was what America was up in arms about? It made no sense.

Later that evening Ted and I walked to a nearby dorm to visit a friend of his, a small eastern European girl who showed us her collection of wooden hand puppets and who herself looked somewhat like a small wooden hand puppet, her face a smooth, pale, creaseless orb. We sat in her tiny dark wooded room in a beautiful centuries old manor for half an hour engaged in polite, barren conversation. I was dying to get out of there and, after waiting far too long to make my exit, I finally excused myself and headed back to my room. Hardly, a sexy evening. I got a sinus infection the next day to boot, a souvenir of my virginal experience.

I didn’t do cocaine again for several years. I wasn’t tempted. Sex and food were my vices of choice if you can even call sex and food vices (that’s almost like saying a bowel movement is a vice…). Several years later, post-college, while I was living with several band members in a two-story apartment building in Williamsburg situated over a real, honest-to-god biker bar it seemed that cocaine was everywhere. There was even a nearby bar named (obviously) Cokies just off Metropolitan Ave. where, late at night, you could enter a small curtained space no larger than a department store changing room at the rear of the bar and there, huddled next to three or four sweaty partygoers, you could purchase and snort tiny bags of very poor quality cocaine.

I did just that several times the summer of 2000 and, once I got past the self-revulsion I felt (or felt like I needed to feel) for spending time at such a blatantly seedy establishment I actually grew to like the place. It’s still the only bar I’ve ever been to in New York that had such a culturally, economically and age-diversified clientele. Fifty year-old black men danced with young Latina girls while white businessmen cavorted over the bar with the occasional post-college hipster and random middle-aged woman sprinkled in for good effect. Like any ubiquitous, massively successful product cocaine’s demographic is as wide as the ocean–young, old, rich, poor, black, Asian, Arab, Jew. Come one, come all. If you’ve got a nose you are qualified. Cokie’s was a great bar because its demographic reflected this–it was in a way the iPod of bars, its clientele set to shuffle. I didn’t realize at the time, however, how crappy their cocaine was. I didn’t know any better. I’d never had good stuff.

That changed a few months later when I met three friends at a huge late-night party in Soho in a loft that was said to be a very recently converted whorehouse. Each bedroom was decorated in the theme of a different prostitute–frillies and lace in one room, whips and chains in the next. There were hundreds of people lining the hallways, bouncing on the dance floor, hanging out of windows. It seemed like a fashion / art / young Hollywood scene. There were a lot of impossibly beautiful girls of unknown Eastern European / Russian descent, skinny boys with asymmetric haircuts and loads of designer clothes. It was summertime and my friends and I had been going to a lot of parties and none of us felt like we needed to stay particularly long at this one. Our ringleader, G, and the reason we were at the party in the first place, bought some cocaine and invited us back to her godmother’s Soho loft.

Her godmother, a famous contemporary artist, lived in a massive, luxurious space, larger than twenty average Manhattan apartments put together. I’d been there before and spent the night a couple of times and always enjoyed myself. It was like staying at a spa privately owned and operated by one of the world’s most famous living artists.

None of us were particularly rambunctious that night and when we got back to G’s godmother’s loft we sat around on the couch watching cable TV, content with rock videos and sitcom reruns. None of us touched the considerable little white mountain on the coffee table and it seemed as if we were all seconds from calling it quits and having a good night’s sleep.

Instead, for some reason, I said, “Come on,” my inner-cheerleader making a rare appearance, “Let’s do this.”

I grabbed the bag and divided it up into four more-or-less equal piles, giving myself a slightly larger pile. I was starting to feel somewhat experienced doing cocaine from my various visits to Cokie’s and I felt my user status had been upgraded from Novice to Intermediate–an asinine conclusion, in hindsight. After a quick glance around the coffee table in which we all exchanged trepidatious-yet-excited glances–glances that said both hello and goodbye–I leaned over and immediately vacuumed the considerable white slug from the plastic CD case before me.

This was immediately different than all my previous experiences. I was instantly high and I sat back deep into the couch not so much out of choice but because I had to. I was no longer sitting in a room with three of my friends but I was, rather, thirty thousand feet up in the cloud-dappled blue heavens as if having just stepped from the hull of an aircraft. I thought of the Tom Petty song “Into the Great Wide Open.” My entire body chimed with a hypersensitive wavelike tingle. Then, without warning, I began to fall hard and fast. I moved from couch to floor feeling as if I weighed a thousand tons, falling rapidly, faster and faster, towards the earth. I closed my eyes and told myself that it was just the drug working its effect on my brain and that it would soon be over. After some time my frighteningly meteoric descent began to slow and the full-body tingle that lapped in waves over my body began to cease. I took a series of deep-breaths, grateful that the high was coming to an end.

Joseph Stalin, after seeing the Swiss Alps in person for the first time, is claimed to have said: “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I never want to see it again.” I feel similarly about cocaine. That high was the highest high I’d ever had and I have no desire to feel it again. Maybe that’s the difference between someone who has an addictive personality and someone who doesn’t. If the dictionary definition of the word snort means “to express contempt, indignation etc.” it’s easy for me to imagine snorting cocaine as one’s expression of contempt and having indignation for one’s normal state of being as if some other, better, heightened sensory awareness were achievable and through it a way of being in the world preferable to the one we’ve already got. At this point, I’d rather stick to the awareness I’ve got.

Checking my voicemail one day, I discovered a passionate message from Dean saying “Asterisk” was the “best original play I’ve ever auditioned for,” and he was sorry to hear that the production was canceled. Dean had acted in my last play, “Great Kills,” and, coincidentally, auditioned for the second ill-fated production at ATA. I returned his call to say thanks, and see how he was doing, but everything changed when he asked, “What do we have to do to get this play up for three weeks?” Dean was suddenly a first-time producer, and my play was finally on its way to being produced.

“Asterisk” was listed on Offoffonline.com, and NYTheater.com, and several other theater/entertainment websites. We hadn’t sold any tickets, but we weren’t discouraged yet. The Sunday before the play opened, The Post ran a blurb about it in their “The Rumble” section, a weekly Sports page about sports celebrities, above a story on Yogi Berra. This was a major coup for an Off-off Broadway show with a marketing budget that didn’t allow for stamps to mail the postcards we’d printed. Envisioning a sold out run, I asked Dean if he’d checked ticket sales. Not one ticket had been purchased. We’ll do a walk-up business, we told ourselves.

The first week, we played to houses of twenty to twenty-five mostly invited guests and industry. The publicity continued, however, with a feature article on MLB.com, a blurb in the Staten Island Advance’s “Five Spot,” followed by a feature article, and listings in several periodicals. We also received a favorable review in Backstage. The second week, Tuesday’s show had six people in the audience. One fewer than performers on stage. The Mendoza Line for theater. We cancelled Wednesday’s show because no one showed up. Dean pleaded with the cast to man the phones. Attendance picked up, with audiences of twelve, fifteen, and seventeen respectively, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Sunday’s matinee had three people in the audience. A father and his adult son in the front row, and an older man, sitting fifth row-aisle.

On Monday, our dark day, Dean and I brainstormed. We’d given up on recouping our investment, but we did want to perform in front of people. “Let’s hand out fliers,” I said, facetiously. Dean responded with, “We’ll offer a discount! Half off!” Attracting ten additional audience members to each performance was not only feasible, but would be a success, we reasoned. Whipping each other into a frenzy, we discussed getting the whole cast involved. “They do it for Broadway,” I said. “I mean, they don’t hand out fliers, but they do appearances.” We agreed to meet the next day at four, in front of TKTS.

The official TKTS in Times Square is closed for construction, and an interim one is open at Duffy Square, in the lobby of the Marriott Marquis on West 46th Street. Overflowing onto the sidewalk, the crowd is amorphous. And frustrated. Hotel guests pull bags back and forth. An attendant validates parking. Cars beep when they can’t get through to the garage. Several barkers are lined up at the curb, promoting shows. They don’t say anything. Just hand out postcards. They’re veterans. Hardened. Paid by the hour.

Dean jumps right in, pursuing a couple with his pitch. I watch the parade, trying to think of something to say. As the Venti Iced Americano I picked up at Starbucks on the way kicks in, I step toward a touristy looking couple and call out, “Wanna see a new play about baseball?” They look. I grin. Another touristy couple passes. “Wanna see a new play about baseball? – Ten bucks!” They smile. I smile. A group of tourists approaches. “Wanna see a new play about baseball? Ten bucks! Running through the end of the week.” They laugh. I smile broadly. A businessman walks by. “Wanna see a new play about baseball?” No response. An eccentric-looking New Yorker–toupee unkempt and kind of crooked, reminiscent of the tuft atop Michael Myers’s masked head in “Halloween”–hurries by, and I don’t say anything. I start targeting tourists. My pitch gets more and more elaborate, giving them the “Wanna see a new play about baseball?” line, and ad libbing things like, “Third smash week!” and “Off-off Broadway: The heart of theater!” and “You can say you saw it first!”

Some people ignore you. Some smile. Some respond with, “No,” or “No thanks,” or “I’ve already got plans.” One girl exclaims, “I hate baseball!” Most of the tourists courteously decline, like you’ve invited them to a party that they regretfully can not attend. A few people ask directions. A European man in a soccer jersey listens to my spiel, and then, in very tentative English, says, “This is a play?” “Yes!” I reply, enthusiastically. “There are any baseball matches tonight?” he asks. “The Mets are in town,” I say, and write directions to Shea Stadium on the back of a flier. An elderly couple approaches, and I give them my line, but they explain that they already have tickets to “The Lion King” and “The Color Purple.” They don’t seem in any particular hurry, so I ask them where they’re from. “Minnesota,” they tell me. “First time in New York?” I ask. “We were here forty-seven years ago,” they say. “Try to avoid the trap of going to the same places you went last time,” I quip, and we share a laugh. An affable, middle-aged Australian couple attempts to give me money for tickets on the spot, but I tell them to pay at the box office. Matthew Perry ducks past, and I say, “Wanna see a new play about baseball? – Ten bucks!” I don’t realize it’s Matthew Perry until after I ask – he’s in movie star disguise of baseball cap pulled down low and sunglasses. He just shakes his head.

I get into a conversation with a guy hawking for a show called “Sessions.” He’s wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt with “Sessions” on it. He asks how my show’s going, and I lament how difficult it is to fill the seats, with the qualification that those who do come seem to really enjoy it. I inquire about his show, and he tells me that the critics panned it, but they’re getting a standing ovation every night. Leaning toward me, in a hushed tone, he says: “The playwright’s a multimillionaire.” All I can do is nod. “His father invented the paper that covers straws.” A group of older ladies dressed for the theater passes, several of them taking his glossy, over-sized postcard, while ignoring my flier.

Dean follows a Midwestern couple toward me, and stops them in their tracks with his hard sell. I listen as he tells them about the play, and details the press we’ve received. “I’m the producer. And star!” he says. I cringe. “That’s the playwright,” I hear, and turn to see the three of them staring at me. It’s at this moment that I have an out of body experience, where I’m soaring over midtown, and swooping down on Duffy Square and the Midwestern couple and Dean and myself. “How long did it take you to write?” the man asks, bringing me back to earth. “About three years.” They look impressed. “And two hundred drafts.” Their faces go blank. “The two hundred and first draft is in here,” I say, and pat the bag slung over my shoulder. They politely decline a flier. Dean says he’s hungry, and we head for pizza.

There are about twenty people in the audience that night. The only faces I recognize from TKTS are the Aussie couple. I’m in my customary seat in the last row, and they’re three rows in front of me. I keep an eye on them throughout the performance to try and read their body language. I’m really hoping they have a good time. I feel personally responsible. After the show, I intercept them in the lobby. They say that they liked it, wish me luck. The woman informs me that her husband played baseball. “I didn’t know they played baseball in Australia,” I say. “Oh, yeah,” he says, proudly. I thank them for coming, and the man smiles at me with, “No worries!”

When I was, I lived in the same neighborhood but it was different, so even though my first address in this city was only a few blocks from my current sublet situation, things feel foreign. I find comfort in still being able to hear Ukrainian spoken at newsstands, in the exchanges of landlords who greet the day by stepping out to sweep their portion of sidewalk clean, and on church steps that are crowded each Sunday, despite the growing population of atheists who sleep into the late afternoon and then emerge to observe their ritual of brunch.

The prevailing street style is Ramones meets vintage, just as it was when Joey could be seen skulking around, though there was no street named for him and if there had been, I would not have explored it because even though this neighborhood is now full of bars and boutiques and salons manned by young Japanese hairstylists, I first knew it as a place safe only for drug dealers. Like so many others, I’d come from a different culture, in my case, via Long Island Railroad. I was a recent college graduate, numb over the death of my father. Though he often told me that I had common sense, I had no idea how to care for myself. I loved my father but I often wished that I had been born into a family of artists like that of my neighbor.

In the time that she has resided at her present address, I’ve had seven— excluding an all expenses-paid summer-long residency at a five-star Italian hotel courtesy of a client whom I despised, nine months in a corporate flat in London that caught fire twice, and the six months I spent sleeping on a friend’s living room couch while I gave Los Angeles a go.

In order to create an inventory significant enough to get a mention in the conversation that becomes art history, artists must cultivate lives free from distraction. I learned this through a series of short-term cohabitations with a sculptor, a painter and a performance/installation/videographer. I wonder if, under the confusing guise of love, I participated in these failed experiments so that through proximity, I might find my own focus.

Someone productive enough to be museum-worthy must be impervious to the seduction of puttering, a potentially full-time activity in which we delude ourselves that we are engaging in something worthwhile. She must be willing to forgo the pursuit of leisure, which is the luxury of having time to squander. Time passes regardless of what we do— but if an artist doesn’t come up with anything substantial to show for how she spends her days, she’ll be known only as unemployed.

I read about a famous person who is so possessed by the urgency to work that he takes time out only for spoonfuls of powdered protein. I have been nourished by thick brushwork, thin washes, simple palettes and compositions that looked crazed and I am grateful to all the artists—but I am also jealous because it is in the process of making this work that they live while the rest of us must either follow the advice of those who came before, or try things out one after another and risk lives of regret and disappointment. I know from stories like Van Gogh’s that making art is no guarantee for happiness but its demands do seem to both exalt and simplify things. I am glad to have two ears but I waste time each day trying to decide which earrings to wear.

My neighbor does not take time to shop for the fashions of the season. Her wardrobe is elegantly functional, she wears sturdy shoes and has a beauty that requires no cosmetic enhancement —I know because last week I watched her ride off on her beat-up old bicycle. She smiled at Vera, to whom I am never a distraction but always the main event.

One morning a homeless man sat on my neighbor’s stoop and rolled himself a cigarette. He told me that the woman who lived behind the red door was currently the subject of a show at a major museum.

“She’s famous.”

I pretended that I hadn’t known. In the months since my return, I have walked past location shoots for several television series; perhaps through a kind of pedestrian osmosis, I have learned how to act. I like to think that my deceit was a gesture of generosity that allowed him to maintain his stance as an authority on neighbors in the news. But maybe I preferred that he think of me as an ill-informed dog-walking passer-by because in the hierarchy of the streets, homeless person trumps stalker.

I am propelled by curiosity. What is it like over there— in the yard where the tree blooms two weeks early, in the living room across town where the murders took place, on the road with the band? These kinds of questions were enough to get Gauguin all the way to Tahiti where he created his masterpieces. I’ve had to conclude that conversely, if I had been able to stay put, it’s still unlikely that I would have become a famous artist.

When I measure my achievements, I have little to show beyond the list of addresses and situations I tried on for size before moving elsewhere. Perhaps this impulse to remain a body in motion is the outcome of my ability to imagine other lives and landscapes, or maybe I am merely allergic to the familiar. It is possible that my nomadic disposition is genetic. While my family can be traced back only as far as three generations—to a tribe who roamed between the provinces of Eastern Europe and Russia— the woman who had a lifetime’s worth of work on view shares the family name of a colonial settler. Perhaps her DNA is encoded with the tenacity to put down roots.

When my grandfather left what we think was Lithuania, he carried with him a genetic mutation potent enough to fell our women but precision-timed not to decimate before they’d given birth— until I put my foot down. Despite the hard-wired imperatives of human biology, I believe in free will; I invoked it when I thwarted the manifest destiny of my gene pool by not passing it on. Maybe that’s what my father meant by common sense. I evolved into a moving target, one that leaves behind no trace of a genetic footprint. Or perhaps he had a premonition that he wouldn’t be around to see me make my way in the world and he found solace in thinking that, despite the lack of hybrid vigor in our family tree, I would survive.

Recently, while I was not making museum-worthy work, I learned that a toy poodle died from overheating in the dog-run, that the milliner’s mutt yaps each morning between nine and eleven because her mistress is out at the gym, and that the wisteria that clings to a fire escape two blocks over blooms in the first week of May—the same time that our parks seem to green while we watch. That’s when Vera and I stumbled upon a small private garden and I discovered that my noteworthy neighbor had made a generous gift to those of us with time to spend on aimless strolls.

There, on display behind bars, captured nude, cloaked in a cover of wolf and cast in bronze for our gaze, she stood forever still.

Now the terms of my sublet are coming to a close and I am considering moving dozens of blocks uptown, where my other grandfather was born—the one who had the gene for longevity.