It takes a while to settle into a new place when you move. The way you think furniture is going to work within a space isn’t usually how it ends up, so we spent a lot of time rearranging. We finally decided we were happy (for now) on where everything was and we would just live with it (for now).

I was meeting people at work, but it was on a professional basis and Susan was writing again, which means she spent a great deal of time by herself. We would cook dinner, have some wine and talk about what we did that day. Susan told me of the progress on her book and how she hoped to wrap it up by the end of the year. I told her stories about my boss and colleagues at the investment firm. We are settling in, we would say, finding our place here.

Warmer weather and longer days had come as we approached Memorial Day. Every morning when I got up, I would look out the kitchen window at the flower boxes. By now, the plants had grown and I could see buds appearing. The promise of summertime flowers.

One day, Susan called me into the kitchen as soon as I got home. “Hey, look at this,” she said. Across the driveway, a woman was weeding and watering the flowers in the flower boxes. She had on a light colored, flowing dress and her long hair would spill over as she tended to her plants. Behind her, I could see two place settings on the table with candles and a small bouquet of flowers. A date?

As we were cooking our dinner, a car we hadn’t seen before, a grey BMW, slowly pulled down the driveway and parked awkwardly on one side of the parking area.
As Susan finished sautéing the salmon, a man with a bottle of wine in his hand carefully made his way toward the balcony, unsure of where to go. Our neighbor appeared, greeted him and asked him in.

We ate our dinner and after the last sips of wine, decided to take a walk through town. It was still warm out with almost no breeze. A perfect evening. As we made our way back up to our place, we heard talking and laughing. We went into our kitchen and took a peek out the window. The date was going well. The candles were flickering, the wine was flowing. But before we went to bed, the BMW started, and the man was gone.

For the next few Saturday nights, this pattern continued. Spring had given way to summer and the flowers in the boxes were now in full bloom. The colors were spectacular and our neighbor made sure her plants were well cared for. Then I woke up early one Sunday morning in July. I thought I heard a noise outside and took a look out of the kitchen. A dog was digging around in the bamboo. After giving up chasing whatever he was chasing, the dog lifted his leg on the tire of the not-so-awkwardly parked grey BMW.

Later that morning, I told Susan that BMW guy had spent the night. “Good for her”, Susan said. “Good for him”, I said. We decided that we would get to know our neighbor a little. I am constantly amazed at how much information Susan can come back with after what always seems to me to be the most idle of chats. Later that week came the report: her name is Pamela, she is about our age, she works at the jewelry store in town, she likes classical music, she moved here 12 years ago and is, or maybe was, single.

August was hot. Early, before the heat of the day would melt everything and everyone, I would go for a run on the beach. On my way out, I would admire the flowers in the boxes, standing bright and colorful, hopeful before another day of baking in the sun.

Cool evenings became the norm as fall pushed summer into the past. The days got shorter. Susan’s book was almost on schedule and the editors at the publishing company were pleased with the progress. For me, it was business as usual. Markets go up and markets go down. There is opportunity in both.

Pamela and BMW guy were together every weekend. While Susan and I cooked and ate in our apartment, they would sit out on the patio, even when it got chilly, late into the night, talking and sipping wine. Good for them.

Then, for several weekends, there were no late evening conversations, no sipping of wine on the patio. Maybe BMW guy was away on business. Then, he was back for a weekend.

We were expected to get a cold snap in the last week of October. Pamela had, in the past covered her plants with a plastic cover to protect them from the cold. I was surprised at how well it worked. The flowers were still beautiful. Then, one weekend, we had a storm. The temperature dropped to freezing and the wind blew 40 miles per hour. The plastic got blown off of the flower boxes. The next day, the sun came out, but the temperature struggled to get into the 30’s.

After a couple of days, it was obvious that the flowers had died from exposure to the wind and cold. We never saw the grey BMW again.

Mindy? she asked, half turning her face from the TV set. I could hear Ed Norton calling out, Hellooooo, ball.

Yeah? I answered from the doorway.
You know about sex, right?
Yeah, Ann told me about it.
You don’t have any questions, do you?
I guess not.
Good.

For the record, Ann was my friend who was a year older and more worldly, and always smelled like a combination of Rive Gauche and Big Red gum. Her lesson on the birds and the bees had gone like this: The man sticks his pisher into the woman’s pisher, and something comes out of his pisher that makes the woman pregnant.

When we informed my brother Harry about this state of affairs, he ran straight to our father to ask him if he really stuck his pisher into our mother.

Who told you that? my father demanded.
Mindy and Ann.
They’re lying.

Mindy Greenstein is a clinical psychologist and writer. She is the author of The House on Crash Corner and Other Unavoidable Calamities (Greenpoint Press, 2011).

“Feed me some vocab,” I whispered.

He started, turned to look at me. Blue eyes.

“Vocabulary,” I said.

“There’s no more port wine left,” he whispered back.

I looked at him.

“Port, left,” he said, looking down at his left hand, palm up. “Starboard, right.” His right hand held an invisible plate next to the first.

“I’m really good at physical stuff,” I said. “Work. I mean, farms. And sports.” I gestured over his palms, indicating winds and oceans and the muscle memory it took to move safely through both. “I learn fast.”

I left orientation early to make an apartment interview in Brooklyn. My brother was moving to the city in a week. The apartment had bars on the windows, but the sublettee had cat-eye glasses and a tiny ponytail.

“Jessie,” she said with one downward handshake. She apologized that her roommates weren’t home but assured me they were the greatest, bestest friends from art school in the south. I am from Kentucky. Her voice rang with sensible but persistent joy, and really, my only responsibility was to ensure the place wasn’t a crack den.

“Above and beyond,” I said, reaching for the deposit.

A week later my family arrived to shuttle their second child from landlocked horse farm to concrete island. My mom and I stood outside my Park Slope apartment, the base camp, loading the Subaru with boxes. She was taking pictures because she believes her children will find home here. A memorialized beginning supplies faith in what follows; you insist it is, in fact, a beginning. I was posing on the sidewalk when the guy, the sailor, Mr. Vocabulary, exited the building directly across the street. He mounted a red vintage motorcycle, kicked it into gear, and drove past us, uphill, into the morning.

“Oh my God,” I said.

Right after orientation, I had emailed my new boss to apologize for the tardy arrival. He had replied, saying all fine, but how much sailing experience do you actually have? We struck a deal involving the company’s adult sail camp and blitzkrieg training. I bought a book and a length of practice rope. I read the book and started calling the rope ‘line.’ Class started the Saturday after the Subaru’s departure. My sailor was my instructor.

“You’ll never guess,” I said. “Red motorcycle, 8 AM, Tuesday, Twelfth Street?”

“My girlfriend lives there,” he said toward the boathouse. He followed his voice inside and deep into a tide book

To his triangle back, I said softly, “I live there.”

On the water, somewhere around the cross-town canyon of 42nd Street, he taught me the choreography of the bowline with a rhyme about rabbits. Lessons and landmarks disappeared. We swapped the basic details, then stories. We echoed each other. We both had studied photography; he had taken it much further and was completing an MFA. Both our mothers were forgiving Catholics who had shopped for our school clothes at Goodwill. For a glossy magazine, he had photographed the southern horse show circuit.

“Oh, my brother just moved in with some southern artist types,” I said. “Shitty block, very happy people.”

“Where?” he said.

“Off the G,” I said. “Gates.”

He looked at me like he had during vocabulary lessons.

“Where exactly?”

“Oh, a good walk, Gates-and-something,” I said. The sun filled everything. The wind moved us toward the Statue of Liberty.

“Did he take Jessie’s room?”
“What?” I said. “Jessie Sears?” She had such a tiny ponytail.

He laughed the way you do when a miracle shakes your shoulders. “Chris,” he said. “Your brother, Chris. He lives in my house. Your brother is Chris.” I wanted to hold his grin in my hands. I or that girlfriend, one of us was sunk.

On charters for the forty-two foot Beneteau, there is a captain and a mate. When you work a sail, you captain or you mate that sail. My boss paired my sailor and I together for a few real jobs, trial runs. After that, when Mr. Vocab agreed to captain, he called to see if I wanted to mate. Yes, sure, absolutely. We captained and mated all summer.

Late June is proposal season, so every sunset job is a guy with a diamond and a woman with ready hands. The breathless couples invited us to weddings, included us in their engagements photos, confided the Statue of Liberty was their self-imposed deadline, asked us if everyone did this, left us in the cockpit while they made out on the bow, left us with the last of their champagne so we could toast the night after we docked. They all wanted to believe we were together. An older couple even assured us we would have kind, beautiful children. Blue eyes! I wanted to shout.

Aside from sharing his motorcycle downtown for tacos, we still hadn’t touched each other when we stole the dinghy for a midnight tour of the Jersey coast. And still not when we drove two hours upstate to buy orchard apples in the rain. I had memorialized our beginning, though, and maybe this was the wrong time, but this was definitely the start of something, meant for some time.

When I returned to Kentucky for Christmas, he was driving cross-country. He stopped for a night. Finally, finally. One night would turn to three. As we settled beneath the blankets, I imagined my mother in the morning, with a grin of conspiracy, whisking pancakes, something she did not do for other boyfriends.

Some six hours later, sooner than I imagined, she shouted, “Kate?” Then, immediately panicking, “Kate?”

“Oh boy,” I said into his chest.

“Chris?” she called. “Kate? Chris?” She was near the top of her register.

“Okay, okay,” I said, pulling on yesterday’s clothes.

I arrived to the kitchen as my brother streaked through, literally, with a soup pot full of water. The water sloshed onto his boxers. The back yard billowed black smoke.

Mom rushed after him, extending two saucepans awkwardly in front of her. “The compost was frozen shut. I dumped the fireplace ashes in the trashcan.” She shouldered open the storm door. “Leaves inside. It was leaning against the shed.”

The shed was, indeed, in flames. My bedmate appeared.

“What’s going on up here?” he said.

“Mom lit the shed on fire. Apparently the hose is frozen.” I revved, reached for the decorative tin pail above the fridge. As I filled the pail in the tub upstairs, I heard him opening and closing cabinets below. When I exited the backdoor with my full bucket, I was following him across the yard. Thinking he had nothing to offer, I scooted in front and pitched my water onto the almost-under-control flames. He sprayed something from a red cylinder until the something and the flames died completely. A fire extinguisher.

“Melinda,” he said, handing the extinguisher to my mom. “You’ll want to get that recharged.”

“Where did you get that?” I said. My heart awoke all over again.

“Always under the sink.”

My brother rolled his eyes. My mom beamed exactly like I had imagined. We were half-clothed around a melted trashcan, breaking the grass’s frost in borrowed shoes. I wanted to high-five the clouds.

Back in New York, in our winter lives, things were not the same. Things were horrible. We spent months in an indecisive dance. He was moving in the summer, at the completion of his MFA, and we had a hard time talking when there wasn’t a physical task to talk around and through. We had communicated in lessons and word games and stories of miraculous similarity. In the sloppy cold, walking to an unremarkable movie, how were we to believe where—or whether— we were going? We were at the stage that takes work, and we were overbundled in unflattering coats.

When the cold broke, our friendship—much less any sort of relationship—was a mess, but he asked me to sail with him, the first sail of the season. The charter was two middle-aged French women who didn’t speak a lick of English or boats. The winds were fifty miles an hour. The Beneteau would never tip completely, but the French women wanted to float lazy-river style, so we scrabbled to keep the boat from heeling deep into the Hudson.

“You’re wrapping the wrong way,” he said over the jib’s luffing.

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” I snapped the sheet to wrap clockwise.

The poor women could only understand the tone of our voices, which said something was capsizing. Not you, us, I wanted to tell them.

“It’s really fine,” he said to the two women, who had moved near the life vests. “Just wind,” he waved his hand in the air. “Wind.”

“Remember stealing the dinghy?” I said.

“I steal that dinghy like it’s my job,” he countered.

I persevered. “Do you remember how we met? Do you remember exactly?”

“You took a sailing lesson.” He lunged into trimming the main.

We finished the tack. The French women hugged each other. Instead of hanging behind him on a shroud, like usual, I joined him at the wheel. We bounced over wake. Steadying myself, I reminded him of the typed orientation packets and my frazzled rush down the dock. The sound of the fenders against the wall, my bad haircut, the springtime smell of wet polyurethane. I reminded him there’s no more port wine left. My litany of details was a plea, next time, to risk. At the very least, pay attention. Two people only get one beginning.

Kate grew up in Kentucky and now lives in Brooklyn. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Press and The Accidental Extremist.

I stood on 125th street, listening the rumble above me as the train rolled into the ground. McDonalds smelled behind me. Cabs, like giant ants formed an army up Broadway. Crossing the street, the sun staring between train tracks, I hear a voice laced with the Grant Projects and affection.

“Yo, Ms. D!”

I knew her as my own immediately.

Gisele Henriquez-woman. She had the same sexy Harlem gait that I remember being alarmed about when she was my student (a girl her age with a body like that shouldn’t walk like that). Her face was unchanged: she was still beautiful; black opal eyes against the backdrop of alabaster skin, the slight curly patch that joined her eyebrows in the middle of her forehead, her long thick black hair alluding Taino heritage was in a ponytail, exposing her small ears which hung “banji girl” gold doorknocker earrings.

She ambled toward me, glowing and very pregnant and kissed me hard on the cheek.

She had house keys and Chico Stix in her hand, and as her face re-emerged from the nape of my neck I watched her seductive lips exclaim some statement of happiness adorned with expletives. This is how Harlem girls address each other, in affection, in nostalgia. In profanity. The train gargled uptown on top of us and I grabbed the Chico Stix from out her hand. I couldn’t stop smiling. When the 1 ran past she repeated herself.

“Mira, Oh my God, how you doin? Oh fuck!!! Ms. D”!!!!

I grabbed her hand and crossed Old Broadway, the small inlet that gave itself over to Grant projects and grand tenements, that housed so many of my students. We walked towards the sunshine, away from our train, next to the bodega that sells loosie cigarettes to all the hard faced man-children that plant themselves on the corners under the train when they should be in social studies class. I stopped and opened up the Chico Stix, bit down, and took my beloved student in, fully.

She started talking slowly, holding my arm, she complained about her feet being swollen, I told her how beautiful her hair looked-it really did. We walked towards the diner before the firehouse, where cars park at an angle when the cops are busy stuffing themselves with Dunkin Donuts.

-The diner, where all the waiters speak Spanish, the corner where the Citerella just didn’t quite take.

I walked with her and listened to her tell me about her life, and him.

I know this beauty. I know this woman from her 15th year as an angry and sarcastic and beautiful hold over- an overage school kid- a hot mouthed, neck swinging thing with a chip on her shoulder and signature Dr. Jay jeans that were way too tight. I liked her immediately.

And she liked me too, Thank God. I never got cursed at or fought like so many other of my District 5 colleagues, and plus, she loved my music class. She had a beautiful voice- clean, chimy, but nasal, like a true Latina. She joined chorus, and my Saturday morning community service outreach, and got into a pretty good high school, thanks to two recommendations from the principal and guidance counselor that I almost had to sell my soul to get.

She was on her way, I thought. She was fixed. She was going to break the cycle of degradation and miseducation that has plagued far too many young women of color in Harlem or any ghetto in the USA for so long. She was the story I told to skeptics and naysayers who wanted to scrap NYC’s public education system completely.

Gisele went to A Philip Randolph High School, next to City College. She also won a scholarship to Harlem School of the Arts (HSA). She was a vocal major, excelling in her studies. She enjoyed high school, remarked how much easier it was that middle school, both socially and academically.

“There were girls there my age. None of these little bitches who gave me shit looks cuz they was jealous.”

She loved voice class very much, and was even crazy about music theory and appreciation class. She was asked to tutor students in the learning annex because of her prior community service experience. The end of freshman year found her on the Dean’s List. There was talk about putting her in accelerated college prep classes.

We sat down in the diner, she remarked about “Precious” being filmed there- I laughed when I remembered the bucket of chicken scene.

“Word,” I smiled bigger, and ordered some coffee to compliment her san cocho.
I asked her if her mother is still at 26 Old Broadway, where she was living in junior high school. She nods, and smiles.

“Yo, you remember when you showed us “Fame” the last week of school in 8th grade? I loved that movie, yo. “

“I remember, Ms. Thing.” I sipped my coffee slowly, watching her square-cut French manicured nails wrap themselves around the soup spoon.

“We was in vocal class last year tryna harmonize Body Electric n’ I thought of you. I sounded mad good too,” she smiled, and finished her compliment with a lip smack that would make all of West Harlem proud.

Then, She told me about Peter. She describes the first time he kissed her like she’s reading script from a novella, her street-Spanglish cascading out over tumescent lips.

“I fell in love with him the night he gave me this,” she points to necklace she wears, with a medallion, of Saint Peter, patron Saint of what, she isn’t sure. It was enough that he entrusted this necklace to her. From that moment, she entrusted her heart to him.

I asked her when she realized she was pregnant.

“I know from that day he would be the father of my children. We NEVER used anything, Ms. D, we just knew it was right.”

Peter subsequently dropped out of school, and has a job now at the new Costco that opened up in East Harlem. Gisele still lives with her mom and younger siblings in that house on Old Broadway and plans to attend Missions School, for pregnant teens. She says she still sings, and wants to name her baby, India, after her favorite Salsa singer.

“Its gonna be ok, Ms. D, you’ll see.”

I smiled again and looked away, not wanting her to notice the worry in my face. I stared out the window and I watched the baby banji girls on the corner headed towards the Old Navy and the braid spot, licking innocently on the deliciouso the Mexican woman pushes on the corner (“$1 mix coco/cherry”!). I eye them closely, like I did Gisele, and wonder if they really know what they’re doing, licking the ice like that, pretty sugar stained lips adorned beautiful ethnic faces full of attitude.

She reached across the table and touched my hand.

“He loves me.” She said it, I realized that after all these streets had thrown at her, after all the clawing over broken glass and racing under booming train tracks and fighting for a meager public school education has done to this girl, that was all she really wanted.

I told her I was happy for her.

Her phone rang, her face lit up, and she told me she had to go. She waddled up, saying her goodbyes way too loud for the small corner diner. She kissed me goodbye and left me with my coffee.

I sat for a minute, stared out the window, and watched this beautiful woman-child venture down a coolly-lit Harlem side street that seemed to me as precarious as her future.

Breeanne Elizabeth Daniels is a native New Yorker. She is taught middle school in New York City for 11 years and community college for 3. She is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the City College of New York.

“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.

“I’m just returning the key to the supply closet,” I said, heading over to the corkboard to hang it back up. I did not want to get drawn into whatever they were talking about. Sunlight was streaming in through the windows, and I felt like fainting. Karen squinted at me over the top of her glasses and smiled: “Ah, I wondered who’d been rooting around in there.”

“Bobby’s been in the closet for a long time,” Marco said, in a low, mischievous growl. He rubbed his short grey beard. The tattoos on his upper arms leered out from underneath his skintight T-shirt.

I laughed but didn’t take the bait. Marco and I were friends on Facebook and his status updates showed a remarkable propensity for gay innuendo. And in person, if you let him get started, he was even more relentless .

But Karen wasn’t feeling so discreet either. “Yes, Bobby would be a bear, right?” She looked over at Marco with a conspiratorial smirk.

With my thick, luscious brown beard and hairy chest, I would be a bear, I thought proudly—if I were gay, of course.

“Oh no,” Marco said with exaggerated surprise. He was looking at me very sternly, suppressing a smile. “Bobby is no bear. He’s more of an … otter.”

I was a bit offended. I’d always kind of thought of myself as a bear. A few years ago, during the dark time after college but before the even darker time after after-college, I’d worked at an independent video store in the West Village. The neighborhood was teeming with homosexuals (or so it seemed to me), and gay pornography was one of our specialties. Titles like Bear Patrol and Free Fur All lined the walls of the seedy little porno room in the back of the store, so I knew what bears looked like: hairy, muscular, dressed in leather, and carrying a nightstick. I’d also seen plenty of pictures of bears on Marco’s own Facebook page. Hardly a week went by without him posting a dozen or so pictures of a weekend “Bear Picnic” or “Bear Hiking Trip” (not surprisingly, bears enjoy the outdoors) or “Bear-E-Okee,” all full of hairy thirtysomethings that, frankly, looked a lot like me. Perhaps I wasn’t old enough? Or burly enough? Gay subcultures seemed so nuanced, I was surprised they could even keep track.

I’d been finding myself embroiled in a lot of these awkward little gay scenarios lately. I’m a bit of a loner, so my day-to-day routine didn’t involve going to that many different places, and it seemed like more and more of these daily stops were becoming tricky due to the presence of gay, or potentially gay, men that I was convinced had crushes on me. But perhaps I was just being paranoid. I mean flattering myself. When I tried out this theory on a friend of mine (that gay men were constantly ogling me and that my awareness of this was adding unnecessary stress to my otherwise banal errands), she said that I have “difficulty” in most scenarios that involve casual interaction with strangers and was likely blowing it way out of proportion.

Nevertheless, I’d started avoiding the bodega near my apartment in Park Slope because of a gay clerk’s overzealous greetings and small talk. And the way he stared at me! It started out innocently enough, with him paying extra-special attention to my bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich orders on Sunday mornings. I was usually hungover, worn out from a long night of drinking alone, or a shorter but somehow more abusive night of drinking with others and feeling alone, so perhaps my defenses were lowered, but I liked the way he smiled at me and said, “Helloooo … bacon, egg, and cheese, right?” before I even had a chance to speak. I’d stand off in the wings pretending to read the newspaper, as he lovingly laid a slice of cheese over the egg and called out, “Salt and pepper?” I’d wait a moment, so as to dampen any impression that I might be at his beck and call, then I’d rush forward saying, “Yes, yes, thank you.”

It wasn’t long before he started complimenting me on my beard, which was lovely, I realized, and apparently impossible for gay men to resist, so I took it gracefully. I’m very susceptible to flattery. And in fact, I was sort of fascinated by his appearance as well. His perfectly round bald head glistened, and his huge blue eyes were always popping with curiosity, the way I imagined mine might, if I didn’t always feel so fatigued. I was simultaneously impressed and appalled by how friendly he always seemed, and he was almost charming, in an exceedingly goofy way.

But being friendly is exhausting for me (this is one of the few drawbacks of being such a stalwart introvert), and sometimes I want to order a bacon, egg, and cheese without being flirted with. I began to dread going in there, and I realized I could only humor this kind of thing for so long. I’d wake up on a Sunday morning with a pounding headache and sit on the couch miserably thinking to myself, “All I want right now is coffee and a bacon, egg, and cheese, but if I go down there, I’ll have to talk to him.” Some days, the dread was so severe I wouldn’t even leave the house, subsisting instead on a box of Rice-a-Roni or Lipton Noodles and dark, milkless coffee brewed in my own coffeemaker. The fact that I’d also have had to go to the bodega if I wanted milk was a bitter pill to swallow that always sent me into a small rage.

Finally, one day when I was feeling brave enough to venture out to the store, he looked up at me expecting the friendly greeting we’d established over the last few months, I snubbed him. I ignored him completely and walked past as if we’d never exchanged hellos before. He was stocking the orange juice refrigerator, kneeling on the dirty floor, and I was overwhelmed by the smallness and sadness of our lives. I was able to collect my meager purchases (toilet paper, soup, milk, cheese) without interacting with him directly. It was obvious to both of us that I had ignored him on purpose, and now the spell was broken. Our little romance was over. I thought that would make it easier to go back in there in the future, but in fact it only made it harder.

Simultaneously, there was also a similar situation going on at Cosi in Midtown, near the magazine publisher where I worked. Once a week, I had a powerful need to consume a turkey and cheddar melt, so I left the hermetically sealed little room where they kept the copy editors and headed out into the midtown Manhattan lunch-hour feeding frenzy.

At Cosi, the prudent first move was always to steel myself with a warm little scrap of bread from the communal bowl they had stationed at the beginning of the line. With my grizzly-man beard, unwashed jeans, and sweater, I always felt out of place in the sea of pant-suited and humorless career women, jocular post-frat boys in light-blue button-downs, and cranky European tourists. “I might look at one of these women and smile,” I’d think, “if this were another life,” but actually I couldn’t bring myself to look at any of them. I was too blinded by their chatter and perceived hostility.

Here, my gay interlocutor was not the person taking the lunch orders, or even one of the half-dozen folks in the sandwich-and-salad assembly line, but the slight, feminine boy at the cash register. His mop of dark hair was mostly hidden under a flaccid Cosi cap, and the faint shadow of a mustache on his upper lip did nothing to diminish the girlish aspect of his face. If Marco were with me, he’d probably dismissively call the fellow a “twink.” (They had plenty of that genre at the video store as well, perhaps even some involving twinks and bears, though based on my cursory scans of the boxes, it seemed like kind was usually paired with kind.)

Cosi was packed during lunch hours, so my attitude was always get in and get out as quickly as possible. This meant, of course, that my interactions with the boy were more hurried and subtle than those with my bald friend at the deli, but again I got the strong and very definite impression that he liked me. His eyes seemed to be looking at me, rather than through me, past me, past everyone, onto the street and into oblivion, like the other wretches with his job. I imagined his whole world snapped into focus a bit more when he saw me approaching, a lovely bearded stranger here to rescue him from the doldrums of another day spent ringing up sandwiches. In any case, he certainly became more attentive, smiling at me slightly, with almost imperceptible amusement—or so it seemed to me, for in the world of midtown Manhattan lunch lines there can be no overt displays of affection.

A few times our hands touched as he was handing me my change, and he didn’t draw away quickly in alarm; perhaps he even let his hand linger on mine for a split second longer than necessary. When I worked at the video store, I tried that trick on a few of the pretty female customers, but I seemed to remember them recoiling in disgust. However, perhaps my slightly warped and impoverished sense of self was overruling reality. In my mind, I am like a bearded god in the eyes of homosexual men, but like some pathetic hairy troll in the eyes of beautiful women. So whenever his hand grazed mine, I smiled and tried to act naturally. I didn’t want to appear rude, but I also didn’t want to lead him on.

Once again, I felt the situation was becoming too familiar. One of the things I like most about living in New York is the absolute anonymity. As soon as I feel obligated to exchange familiar greetings with a person—the chatty doorman at a friend’s apartment building, the brisk Mexican woman who sells me coffee in the morning, the obese and obviously lonely neighbor in the laundromat on a Saturday afternoon—I begin to dread seeing them. And if those interactions are laced with unspoken gay romantic undertones, then they really become too much to bear. So I quickly found myself withdrawing my affection and natural friendliness, which, again, was becoming strained. And in fact, he seemed to be withdrawing as well, perhaps slightly ashamed to have been subtly flirting with a bearded stranger to begin with. I sensed that he was not nearly as self-assured as his goofy bald counterpart at the bodega in Brooklyn.

Incredibly, a similar but even more disruptive situation like this had also developed at my local gym. This one caused me the most consternation, as avoidance was not really an option. At that time in my life, I felt like I had to continue to sculpt and maintain my body, plus the gym seemed vital to my mental health.

I’m not exactly sure how it started, but one particularly muscle-bound jock and I somehow became trapped in a pattern of exchanging the most intense and awkward man-on-man eye contact I have ever experienced in my life. As most gym-goers know, making eye contact is something that is generally not done. In fact, most people at the gym tend to act a bit scared of each other (the women especially seemed skittish toward me); there is a lot of forced politeness, and whatever exchanges do occur are brief and tense. No one wants to “invade each other’s space,” so to speak. Plus, the fact that nearly everyone is wearing headphones further prevents conversation. Before I’d joined the gym, I had imagined (and hoped) that the atmosphere would be more sexually charged somehow, but it wasn’t. Except, unfortunately, between me and this … dude.

It never failed: I’d go dashing up the stairs after doing some bench presses, ready to grab a towel and mount the stair-climbing machine, and I’d look to my left and there he’d be, staring at me. I’d round the corner, heading toward the free weights, glance up, and there he’d be, barreling toward me, staring at me. I’d head into the locker room, drenched in sweat, eager to strip off my headphones and T-shirt, and there he’d be, suddenly, clad in nothing but a tiny white towel, staring at me.

His body was phenomenal. I could admit that. It was no wonder it seemed like he was always at the gym (I tried going at different times of day and night in an effort to avoid him, to no avail). In order to build and maintain a body of such absurdly statuesque proportions, you’d have to be there all the time. He was several inches taller than me, his chest and arms were chiseled, and his stomach was flat and defined, but it was his legs that were really impressive. His buttocks, thighs, and calves were all ripping with muscle that was perfectly in proportion to his heaving upper body. In contrast, my own legs were a source of constant shame. They looked and felt (both physically and psychologically) too skinny, but I found leg exercises to be too tedious to really correct this problem. I’d look down at my legs, at my sneakers really, as I hurried past this Adonis in a skimpy white towel. My face felt hot and, absurdly, my heart was racing, the way it did in middle school whenever I saw a girl I liked.

He had an interesting face. I suppose that was the original problem; he caught me looking at him. He had a strong chin, which was angular and smooth and always immaculately shaved, dark eyes and dark, spiky hair, which he wore very closely cropped on the sides. This combination of features made him look a bit like a Japanese anime character, although if I had to guess, I bet he was from New Jersey.

Actually, now I do remember how this all started. The gym was about two blocks downhill from my apartment; and Prospect Park, where I went running during the warmer months, was about four or so blocks uphill from my apartment. Sometimes on my way downhill to the gym, or on my way uphill to the park, I would pass this spiky-haired gym bunny as he was also either coming from or going to the gym. (I don’t think either of us lived very busy lives.) The first one or two times this happened, I may not have even recognized him. Most likely, I just noticed that he looked familiar, if I noticed him at all. But then, perhaps the third time this happened, I had a simultaneous flash of recognition and fit of friendliness, and I did something unthinkable: I nodded in recognition at him, breaking the invisible plane that usually exists between strangers and establishing actual, furtive human contact. (How I wished I could take that back later!) He nodded back. And so our new nodding-in-recognition rapport was established. Then, for a while, it actually seemed like I didn’t see him at the gym anymore, just in the outside world, in the vicinity of the gym, and so we would nod hello, each thinking, in a very masculine, non-gay way, I presumed, “Oh, there’s that dude from the gym.”

Strangely, while I was OK with this dynamic of nodding hello to a guy in the real world that I recognized from the context of the gym, when I started seeing him again at the gym and he wanted to continue (or even, I feared, escalate) this nodding relationship in that context, I wanted no part of it. It was absurd to have to nod hello at this guy every time I saw him at the gym, which started to feel like every time I went in there. And even more unsettling, he seemed to want more than that. It was almost as if he wanted to talk to me. For what reason though, I couldn’t fathom—at first. Perhaps he was just a lonely straight guy. Maybe he just wanted to have a beer or something, make a new friend. But, no, I thought … that is madness.

Back in the office one afternoon, as I was scrutinizing some proofs, Marco came in and said, “Hey Bobby, you claim to be straight, you should know this: How many players on a hockey team?”

I didn’t really look up. I could imagine the smirk on Marco’s face well enough. “I don’t watch hockey,” I said. “And what do you mean ‘claim’ to be straight? Is there some debate about this?”

Marco laughed. He was standing by the window looking down at the city, perhaps evaluating its relative hetero or homosexuality as well.

Then, as if to cast further doubt on the matter, I said, “So I looked up ‘otter’ and you were right, an otter is just a skinnier bear.”

“Mmmhmm,” Marco said, glancing back at me and drawing the sound out—as if he found otters delicious.

It would be kind of nice to be an otter, I thought to myself, or a bear, to have a cozy little niche clearly designated like that; to be eagerly accepted by a group based on the way I look. I’ve never had that. In fact, I’ve never really been a part of any group, not even any of the ones that are based on the feeling of not fitting in.

I looked up to say something to Marco, something witty about otters and bears perhaps, or maybe even something serious and sincere about people, but he had already wandered out of the room.

Rob Williams is a mercenary copywriter and copy editor who currently lives above a meat market in the East Village. You can find more of his stories at www.itmustbebobby.com.

Photo by Mike Baird 

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.

She asked if she could talk to me, was pretty, had eyes that were open and interested. Our faces nearly touched. Hers filled my vision completely, as though in an effort to block out all thought of the thriving city around us. She spoke fast. Her lips frothed with stats that I could barely hear, stats that meant nothing at all but SADNESS, though of course my head was nodding and—I discovered, hearing myself—I was making mm-hm sounds and even, on occasion, whenever the music of our exchange required it, saying the word "wow." I volleyed with her that way for an amount of time that felt significantly longer than any exchange in recent memory.

The clipboard that suddenly appeared in her hands was covered in stickers for her organization and cause. She was circling dollar amounts. I took it that these were my options.

When she stopped speaking her pen was resting on the smallest amount, the amount she said I could just give—as opposed to the higher amounts, which, if chosen, constituted an unqualified and fuller kind of giving. I then realized with not a little dread that she had mistook the sounds I had been making and the motion of my head as indicators of real interest, of sympathy or willingness, or—her eyes widening further—that I was a person on whom her words had had impact, a good person.

Now came the feeling that I had often felt before, one that I built my life, largely, to avoid—that I had committed myself falsely, that I had made promises I could not keep. It was a feeling, the fear of which had kept me from ever having once responded, either in the positive or negative, to a single e-vite. I did not know what I was going to do and liked very much to keep it that way.

How wretched and embarrassing it was for both of us that she had read me so closely and not taken heed of a person’s natural inclination to nod thoughtlessly to the tune of another’s speech. My head began to move the other way now, laterally, the side-to-side direction of no progress at all, a movement of the head that could have worked well in a modern art museum as a performance piece called Status Quo Keeping.

Still our faces were near touching—the distance at which people stand at the end of a date, when the walk home has come to its inevitable end. I told her this was not the way I wanted to do this, that it had no value, now, except as the submission of one person to the persuasiveness of another, that it could constitute nothing but my own weakness, that this wasn’t at all about children who are hungry—it was about her and I and the erasure of one another’s personal space. I told her that she was a woman and that I was a man. I suggested, unattractively, that these things were not coincidental but essential reasons for what was happening, for the closeness of her eyes to mine. Her pen waited there, still, on the brink, possibly, of her daily quota.

She said she was good at what she did and that because of this goodness she would try not to be offended by what I was suggesting and I had the feeling that this was something for which I was meant to be grateful. She said that she was an actress and that she could have done something more lucrative to support herself while pursuing her craft but this was what called out to her as needing more than anything else to be done.

I told her that if I gave her my credit card number—which I seemed already to be in the process of doing, my hand entering my pocket—it would not be for any child in any country anywhere, but for her. And if that was the case, I asked, did she still want it? Her eyes blinked. She stepped back.

After a moment, she said, well, I think you’ll be happy once you’ve done it, that you’ve made a difference.

I said, no, I won’t, I will feel like a person who has caved in to carefully applied pressure—that, in fact, by taking my money then, she was depriving me of the good feeling that might have come from going home and making an online donation on my own initiative. But then I realized she was busily copying my credit card number onto her form—not really listening anymore, just nodding.

A couple weeks later another young woman stops me—this one with beautiful tattooed trees climbing up her arm. I tell her that I have already been got and she says, “you’re awesome! High five!” Walking on toward the train, I do not feel awesome, but I do feel satisfied at having solved the problem of how to deal with these people: give them what they want. If you do, some kid somewhere might even get to eat, and a struggling actress too. I wonder how she’s doing.

Mac Barrett's fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in Salt Hill Review, Hanging Loose, The Brooklyn Rail, on Anderbo.com, Salon.com, and on the radio for WBAI. He works at CUNY TV as a producer of book-related programming.

The year was 1981. Her name was Julie. Neither of her eyes looked in the same direction. I had a thing for wall-eyed girls. We met at the filming of DOWNTOWN 81. The set was Danceteria on West 45th Street. Jean-Michel Basquiat was the star of the movie. I was an extra, so was Julie. She could have passed as a double of Francoise Hardy, the 70s French pop singer. I still had a thing for the Yeh-Yeh Girl.

Julie said that she was a painter. She was studying arts at FIT with Manny’s daughter. Her old man had a diamond store on Canal Street. I was good friends with her brother, Richie Boy. It was a small world and the four of us ran into each others at a nightclub. Richie Boy swooped on Julie like a vulture hitting a baby lamb. Julie wasn’t impressed with his Crassanova tactics and sought refuge with me. Jean-Michel came over to say hello. He had once painted my refrigerator. I didn’t tell Julie that I made my hillbilly girlfriend wipe it off. She laughed at my joke. That was always a good sign with a woman and even better she agreed to see Werner Herzog’s AGUIRRE WRATH OF GOD with me.

“It’s a German movie about a conquistador seeking the cities of gold in the Amazon.”

“I’ve heard about it.”

“There’s a Five o’clock show at Lincoln Center.”

“I’ll meet you at 4:45 after my class.” She scribbled a phone number on a napkin and left with Richie Boy’s sister. They lived together underneath

5 O’clock Show.

Tomorrow.

I arrived at the theater 30 minutes early and bought two tickets. 15 minutes passed without any sign of Julie. 4:50. A no-show. 5 on the nose. I searched the faces on the sidewalk. She had stood me up and I sold my tickets to a couple holding hands. They were very grateful, since the show was a sellout.

My friend was tending bar farther up Broadway. I had two drinks and told him about my non-date.

“Typical of women in this city. Always saying yes to a back-up plan.”

Julie could have had 13 plan Bs. She was that beautiful and my soul was wandering through a vast abyss of emptiness. Something was sucking my energy without any chance of my repleting the loss. I paid for my drinks and wandered back downtown, thinking I might watch a XXX film at ShowWorld on the Minnesota Strip. The girls on screen weren’t real, but they were always punctual.

As I neared the theater, I lifted my head and spotted Julie running to the ticket booth. She was over two hours late. Her breathing was off pace and her out-of-synch eyes wavered in their gaze between mine, as if she were hypnotizing a cobra.

“Am I late?” Her question swirl as a life-sucking fog around my body. If I answered ‘yes’, those lost two hours would be banked in her longevity account. The first seconds of 5o’Clock were fleeing my soul and I fought for my life by saying, “No, I just got here too.”

“Really?” Her mesmeric stare was transformed by doubt. Men waited hours for beauty like hers. Disappointment broke her mirror of confidence and the stolen time of the past two hours snapped back into my eternity.

“Sorry, I’m late. You still want to see the movie?”

“Sure.” I bought two tickets and we entered the theater. She kissed me during the credits. I thought that it was an apology, but later in my life I realized that it was a kiss of surrender. It was the start of a short affair. She left for France to be a model that summer. I drove her to the airport.

We saw each other in Paris. Only as friends. She could only love someone who would give her his time and I wanted to live forever. I guess that she thought me selfish.

As far as I know Julie is alive in Paris. I hope that she lives long. Most women do and it ain’t no secret why.

Least not to me.

Peter Nolan Smith left New England in 1976 for the East Village. The nightlife became his vehicle for traveling the world; Paris, Hamburg, Nice, and London. His career ended at the Milk Bar in Beverly Hills in 1995 and devoted his years to traveling in the Orient, supporting by his new profession as diamantaire. Most of his 21st Century has been spent in Thailand, although economics forced his return to the USA in 2008. Peter NolanSmith currently lives in Brooklyn and Sriracha, Thailand. He is the editor and writer of www.mangozeen.com.

Gabriella was an adorable Hungarian immigrant with a low voice like Natasha on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Her hair was cut short and bobbed to show off her huge dark almond-shaped eyes and rich lips. Drove the boys loopy, the girls hated her guts.

Gabriella tried to conform and win over the girls. She never responded to the boys trying to charm her socks off. She wore the school uniform, conservative and trim: blue jumper, white blouse buttoned to the top with a neat blue bow tie, high white socks with saddle shoes. This meant nothing to the other girls. Gabriella could have been Richie Rich’s twin sister, and they wouldn’t have cared and still hated her guts because the guys were looking at her instead of them. Gabriella was lonely in sixth grade.

Seventh grade, Gabriella returned to the classroom with bobbed hair and delicious lipstick and dark eyeliner that made her look like Cleopatra. No more shy flower. She began to loosen her bow tie right after lunch. By two o’clock, the second blouse button snuck open. Guys asked to go to the bathroom in record numbers to walk pass her desk.

The high white socks were gone, replaced with stockings. This was the first time I realized, that girls' legs could give girls' boobs equal time in my Daydreaming Hall of Fame. She was a delicious genetic milkshake. Every part of her body measured by an angel for rightness, before she was handed over to the stork for delivery. Her legs were smooth, curvy, perfect.

After a boy battle in the classroom, the Nun moved our seating arrangements around and miraculously I ended up behind Gabriella. Occasionally, Gabriella stretched her leg back towards my desk giving me a close up. This never lasted long enough for my satisfaction. I wanted it to stay there all day. She and I got along. I made her laugh and she appreciated my help with math. I saw light.

Sister Aloysius announced a surprise spelling bee. I faked panic and leaned forward.

“Pssst, Gabriella, Gabriella, I need your help.”

“What?”

“I didn’t study the words.”

“Well, I’m not sure I know them either.”

“No, no, no. I’m going to write them down on a gyp note. Put them inside your stocking, and stick them half way down the back. During the test, stick your leg back and I’ll read the words, you can see them when you bring your leg forward. OK?”

“OK.”

We got caught. I accepted full blame, got a zero and watched it get dark outside.

Doing the crime, well worth the time.