You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Dating and Sex.”
I had made a plan to meet some friends at a place that had opened just one week ago. The prior weekend, we ended up there at three in the morning, and the scene was good: under-populated, smooth, steel drum-like lounge music, a few good-looking peoples. I was impressed by the Mondrian-inspired decor, and the two women's restrooms that overpowered [...]
It was my last few hours in New York City, enough time to swig several drinks with a friend before catching a shuttle to La Guardia. I was booked on a red-eye flight back to San Francisco, so with soliciting a few gin and tonics foremost in mind, I headed straight to the bar. Denial was a darkened, narrow den [...]
The young musician met the older musician after a concert. It was in a building just south of Wall Street, a part of the city that morphs into a ghost town on late weekend nights. The concert space was run by an organization dedicated solely to the arts and therefore was unheated despite the brutal January cold snap. Audience members [...]
I was sitting in the front seat of Frank's Cadillac Seville when he pulled out of a parking space and whipped into a u-turn without looking. We both saw the approaching headlights too late...and yeah, we got hit. In those pre-seat belt law days, my left hand reached out to the glove compartment to brace myself and I hurt my [...]
While studying piano in college in Mississippi in the mid-seventies, I discovered I could make money with my ability at the keyboard. I played the pipe organ at a church in Hazlehurst, where my parents still live, every Sunday morning. During the week I played the piano for singing lessons and ballet classes in Jackson where I went to a [...]
When I was about fifteen, I was really full of myself and thought I could dive. So, I invited this girl to go to the St. George Pool in Brooklyn, which then was the Mecca for all the Olympic divers and swimmers. I was going to impress the hell out her when she saw what I could do. I had [...]
It was a big mistake inviting her, a big mistake. She wasn't worth all the fuss I'd made. I hadn't seen her in a year and time is rarely kind; she was only twenty- eight but it seemed she'd already been launched into her prime and was now backsliding into the uncomfortable stages of bad skin and poor posture (all [...]
I found a man in Central park. I’d been running around the reservoir on a weekend and needed to get home and shower. I wiped my T-shirt on my face, and bent down to tie a lace, and I heard a man telling a joke. I heard him telling the back-story about how this certain celebrity and his boring wife [...]
I've been dating a Mid-western man for the past two months. Well, it's actually been one month that I've been dating him, and one month that he's been away in Florida "visiting his mother." This man happens to be the oldest I have ever dated--41--ten years my senior. Perfect, I thought. Older, more mature, has his act together, money in [...]
It had been a shitty summer. I left a miserable job for another, better one that paid me a lot less. To save money I moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a studio across the hall. The dead bolt on my new door was tricky, and so it slammed on my hand one day, leaving me with a broken middle [...]
He is a pop artist of modest fame. I know he once designed a Barneys window display, and I think he paints murals for Unicef. Beyond that, I know very little about him. Aside from what he looks like naked. It began innocently enough: I was stumbling home in an uncomfortable pair of shoes when he approached me from behind, [...]
When I first met Lance I was in an altered state. I was sixteen, back in 1963, when you could still buy a Benadryl inhaler, break it open and find a cotton wedge soaked with amphetamine. I'm not sure who first noticed this, but it might have been Jack Kerouac. I hope not, but it probably was. It was late [...]
When my husband Ted and I bought the parlor floor apartment in a 4-family co-op in Brooklyn, we developed an amicable relationship with Sharon, who lived with her cat in the basement apartment below us. We watched as she transformed herself from a 300 lb., caftan-wearing woman, to half that size in a matter of months. She was shrinking before [...]
First of all, and please note that this preventive axiom applies to many long and painful life detours, never take a job that you hate, particularly when it happens to be with a large company where people refer to working in their offices until 11:00 p.m. as “staying late” and recount it—“I could just relax. Everything flowed. I could have [...]
I step onto the 1 downtown train at 116th street every day and usually stand all the way down to Houston Street, where I get off for work. Sometimes I am able to balance and read a book as I hold on to a greasy pole. Other times, I am not so lucky; at five foot one, the long horizontal [...]
The doorman doesn't ask , but he knows where we are going. The guy at the front desk seems wise to what floor two female twentysomethings are headed for. The buildings Super, who shares our elevator, is all too aware of why we pushed button #12 and me and my gal pal snicker in the awkward silence. The Super gets [...]
Through four years of college Louise Holmes was always in my dreams and always out of my reach. So you might imagine the huge surge of adrenaline when one Friday afternoon, two years after graduation, I obeyed the DON'T WALK sign at 53nd and Broadway, looked to my left and discovered she was standing next to me, little changed. "Hi," [...]
It’s a friday night in July. Two women are sitting across from each other on a train bound for the Hamptons. About 30 minutes out of Penn Station, the women who has been doing most of the talking says to her less attractive friend; “I was talking about Sharon’s boyfriend and he said, ‘can I tell her you said that?’” [...]
One February night in1969 a man knocked on my door and introduced himself; he had heard about me from somebody, he said. He didn't say what he heard. He had just moved into #2 with his wife Jamie and his little girl Hannah, they had just arrived from Alfred University; there was something about the SDS and an ROTC armory [...]
I’m standing on the corner of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street staring up at an enormous billboard advertisement, which in behemoth white letters is instructing me to "ProCreate." Gaslight, the venue for this evenings HurryDate party, is on the bottom floor of the building directly below that billboard. HurryDate takes fifty eligible singles and pairs them up for three-minute long [...]
I get on the downtown F train at W. 4th street, it’s a Saturday at 1:30 a.m. The car is pretty crowded, there’s nowhere to sit but that’s fine since I’ve been sitting for the past 4 hours listening to Elvis Costello speak about his career for a TV show. He sang a little too, wish he would’ve chatted less [...]
Proposals of marriage are becoming the most public moment of people's private lives. By Meghan Daum Every Sunday the local newspaper in the midwestern town where I live prints engagement and wedding announcements that look like the pages of a high school yearbook. The faces are fair skinned and robust, some still marked with acne. Their pictures are taken at [...]
1. So my doctor said it is true: You can get AIDS just from snorting cocaine. I decided to visit my doctor’s after I was unable to donate my vital juices at the Port Authority Blood Drive in the fall of 2000. I left without getting the needle after reading a form given to all potential donors that said anyone [...]
In the beginning, there was a brownstone with a crackled façade and a ground floor apartment for rent. I took the tour. Hardwood floors, a tiled fireplace, and a country kitchen. But the rooms didn’t get much light. I wanted sunlight, the kind that slid from four windows into the diamond-bright bathroom, the kind that did not reach the window-free [...]
"If I should die tonight, oh baby, though it be far before my time. I won't die, no. Sugar, yeah, cause I've known you. How many eyes have seen their dream? Oh, how many arms have felt their dream? How many hearts, baby, have felt their world stand still? Millions never, they never, never…and millions never will, they never will." [...]
First dates are about inventing a new language, minute by minute. Smoking is the first level of communication. The realm of intergender semaphore is entirely bottlenecked through nicotine. If there's no smoking then the glances, brushed hair, knuckle touching can reach comedy. Push the date even further and meet in a restaraunt in Nolita, the effective dmz for the new [...]
She arrived in the city ahead of me to work as an assistant to the producer of a movie, a pretty girl's job, a blonde's job, and soon, very soon, while I was still talking to her by phone from Seattle, making arrangements for my move to NYC, she began sleeping with the director. In the business these blondes are [...]
I'm at my folks house in Beverly Hills. It is a fresh, clean, much needed change of place from my usual East 6th Street digs. It's a lazy Thursday afternoon, the 21st of December, I am lounging about in a Champion sweatsuit, and hanging a few ornaments on our Jewish Christmas tree, which stands 11 feet tall in our vaulted-ceiling-and-skylights [...]
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