Diddling In The Streets

It was a Sunday afternoon in July. The air was thick and sticky like syrup. We bought ice cream cones from a Mr. Softee truck on 116th Street and walked down Broadway. The ice cream melted faster than we could eat it, and by the time we reached the 1/9 station on 110th Street, our fingers dripped with chocolate and vanilla.

We stood on the platform for a long time, waiting for the subway and fanning ourselves with napkins. Heat, I had noticed, had a way of slowing down the entire city. It was like a headwind, but more viscous-something that you had to push through. I didn't like the way the air pricked against my skin, like a wool sweater. It made me feel claustrophobic and miss the cool, green quiet of my hometown in Maine. More than once in the past few days I had been overwhelmed with the urge to ask everything-the traffic, the buildings, the pedestrians-to just take a giant step back and let me breathe.

Finally, the subway careened into view, pushing air from the tunnel that felt like heat rolling out of an oven. The car we got on was full but not crowded-several fashionable young mothers with fat babies hoisted on their skinny hips, a teenaged couple, each with one ear plugged into the same iPod and four or five people reading The Da Vinci Code.

We collapsed into a pair of seats, chatting idly. I was enjoying the feeling of the sweat evaporating off the back of my neck when I saw him, slouched on the bench across from us. The first thing I noticed was his feet. He was wearing homeless person shoes-laceless white sneakers, the leather tearing away from the soles. On the floor next to him was a plastic shopping bag packed to the brim like a suitcase. Then I noticed that he was rubbing something against his leg. That man has an animal in his pants, I thought. A hamster, or maybe a gerbil. Definitely some kind of small rodent. I looked up and realized that he was staring straight at me, the look on his face a mixture of fury and glee.

Suddenly, it clicked.

Within seconds, I was yanking Erin out of her seat and stumbling towards the opposite end of the car. We got off at the next stop and hurried up the steps to the street, unable to get away fast enough. The subway, which had previously been grimy yet bearable, had abruptly become intolerably seedy.

For the rest of the afternoon, I trailed through department stores behind Erin in a daze. I felt stunned, weak-kneed and dirty. The stickiness from the ice cream on my fingers was reminding me of another, less innocent kind of stickiness, and I wanted to take a shower.

Erin, on the other hand, was barely fazed at all. The man hadn't really done anything to us, she argued, and we had never been in genuine danger-there were plenty of other people around. And besides, masturbation was a healthy expression of human sexuality. Part of me knew she was right. I should follow her example, brush off the experience and move on. But I couldn't stop thinking about the way the man's eyes had bored into me, like fingers touching. Living in Maine, I had never witnessed anything so lewd-for one thing, its way too cold up there to expose yourself like that-and I was traumatized by what I had seen.

Later, as we walked home along Central Park South, the stench of manure from the horse-drawn carriages juxtaposed against the opulent facades of the buildings, I thought about how New York was simultaneously full of things that were terrible and things that were wonderful. It was so confusing.

Three years later, Erin has fled New York for Woodstock, Vt., but I'm still here. And somehow-bit by bit-I've toughened up and grown to love this city. It happened so gradually I barely noticed, but every once in a while I get a little reminder of how far I've come. About a month ago I went for a run early in the morning, before work. I headed west from my apartment in Chelsea towards the Hudson River. When I reached the intersection of 20th Street and 11th Avenue I paused at a red light and jogged in place. It was very quiet, and at first I thought I was alone. Then I saw a man leaning against the side of a storage building 20 feet away. His wool cap was pulled down low, almost completely covering his eyes, and his down coat was torn at the bottom and leaking feathers. In his right hand was his naked penis. He was rubbing it vigorously up and down, and looking back and forth from me to it, as if to indicate what he was doing lest I fail to notice.

I jumped back. My eyes popped open in surprise. At first, I thought-that's disgusting! And then I thought?that's sad. And then, the light changed, and I kept on running. ¦