New York Nostalgia

Thanks to a cab driver who enjoyed breaking the (traditional) speed limits, and the fact that I left for the airport at 5:30 AM on a Tuesday, off-off peak by traffic standards I found myself at LAX in a record 20 minutes instead of my average 45. My driver got a nice tip and soon I was on a plane heading East to celebrate my 50th birthday. Big Apple, look out.

31 years before, I was a college student on a Spring Break Broadway Theater tour: my first time to Manhattan. It was a coming of age and time of transition. HIV was called GRID and for we kids from Texas,, was nothing more than a pesky STD.  I had cocktails at Uncle Charlie's Downtown, danced at the Ice Palace and waWe watched Colleen Dewhurst and other great actors make impassioned pleas to stop the demolition of the Morosco and Helen Hayes Theaters for the Marriott Marquis. This was happening right outside our 46th Street hotel, the Century-Paramount. At least five times a day coming and going to the CP, I'd walk by a long staircase . This led up to the 'Gaiety Theater' which was atop the Howard Johnson's Restaurant where we ate almost every meal. The Gaiety advertised a 'Gay Male Burlesque' but I never ventured up those stairs. I was too chicken (and being 18 probably too 'chicken') to visit the Mineshaft, a multilevel club with each floor more decadent than the last, or so I'd heard

I did venture into Central Park, and without planning it, found myself in the Rambles, although I didn't know the legendary gay cruise section existed then.  A rite of passgeIt was incredibly hot to be either blown or jacked off by a  Mysterious Older Man: how much 'older' he was I don't know-at 18 everyone is older.

Later in the week I was buying postcards in a little shop in the Village/SoHo neighborhoods called 'Welcome To NYC'. The owner, whose name I am ashamed to admit I can't recall, tried in earnest for a few weeks afterwards to get me to move to Hoboken and settle down.

I traveled to New York regularly from 1989 through 2000. Times Square was just beginning its transformation to what it is today but with regularity, I would visit the old theaters on Eighth Avenue, the Adonis, the Eros ,the Eros 2, Capri and a few others, and not for the films. It was the unusual  and complicated lengths people had to go through to hook up there. The action in the Adonis was in the balcony. In the Eros or the Capri, I think you went downstairs to a sort of delivery hallway. Another theater on 46th I recall having to walk behind the screen and take stairs up to a small room where men played around.

One of the adult shops, maybe it was Peep World by Madison Square Garden, but I think was on 42nd had these booths where you put in money and a floor to ceiling panel would rise up and you could see the guy in the next booth...if he wanted you to, that is. We were separated by a thick sheet of glass which was kinda hot.

I remember how incredibly hot to be having sex again in Central Park-this time in a bamboo thicket near the Plaza Hotel. Did I mention it was snowing? I was in this thicket going at it fast and furious because my flight to Los Angeles was later that morning. My anonymous playpal in the park was an Englishman who had the best hairy chest.and who was also in a rush as he was going back to London that day also. 

True to the my-life-is-a-movie formula, we would meet again: my departure gate at United was next to his British Airways one. Upon seeing each other, we burst out loud laughing and hugged.

These days I'm more about getting to know someone in additional to the sexual gymnastics. And with the announcement to fasten our seat belts as we were about to land, I was about to add some new experiences.