Riding the H Train Riding the H Train I ...

I moved to New York City in the summer of 1990. Like many provincial suburbanites before me, I expected New York to blow my mind, to push my limits and gouge my eyes. I was fertile ground for a major mindfuck: I'd spent the previous year living in Boston, where I hadn't scored so much as a handjob, literally or figuratively.

A friend of mine in law school landed a summer internship with a Manhattan firm. He invited me to take a corner of the loft he and a few other law students were renting. I'd only have to pay half price.

I arrived at Hudson and 13th in late May in a rental car with suitcases full of clothes, books and CDs. It was the first loft I'd ever seen in my life?and the only time I've ever been able to afford to live in one. It was owned by one of the law students' cousins, some trust-fund artist who knew which way the gentrification wave was flowing. I was in awe?the huge open space, the concrete floors and fake-incomplete construction, exposed plaster, lighting and girding. It didn't take long for even a middle-class serf like me to figure out that Manhattan lofts are the estates of the post-industrial aristocracy, the Jonathan Franzens and James Freys.

For the first few weeks, I filtered everything through the art that had brought me to New York: Taxi Driver, early Velvet Underground? I'd walk the streets snarling out loud, "Gonna take a walk down to Union Square/You never know who you're gonna find there." I went "there" a few times. All I ever found was a Chinese takeout on the way that offered a huge chicken-and-broccoli lunch special for $3.95.

One block from our loft was a popular pickup point for limo-cloaked johns in search of transvestite hookers. That registered something on the edgy-o-meter, though not much if you come from the Bay Area, as I do. One day, while I was home alone writing, a soft-voiced man called, said he could see me and tried to get me to take off my clothes for him. At first I thought it was a joke; when I realized it wasn't, I hung up. He called back. I told him that I hoped he'd come down with a certain terminal disease common to his type for which there is no cure. That must have ruined his hard-on, because he never bothered me again.

I cased everywhere I could for a mindfuck experience?seedy bars and clubs, rank parks, cafes. The more I explored, the more a sinking realization came to me: Manhattan was just San Francisco on a bigger scale, only a thousand degrees hotter and more expensive. There was a reason why New York hadn't produced any great culture since the mid-1970s, and I was just finding out. The city was packed full of yuppies, not alienated freaks and struggling artists. Instead of Taxi Driver, the movie metaphor that really worked was Michael J. Fox's The Secret of My Success.

More than a month after I moved in, I felt like I'd already figured New York out. I sat in a cafe going over some books I'd just bought when I noticed an attractive blonde in black tights and a halter top smiling at me. It made me nervous so I tried to pay and leave, but she caught me on the way out. She introduced herself, told me she'd followed me from the bookstore.

Her name was Debbie. She was a graphic designer visiting from Anaheim. She smiled as we introduced ourselves, nodding her head affirmatively to everything I'd say, interrupting with "Really?" and "Wow!" and "Great, that's great!" She had big dimples and permed hair like the kind you'd see on Winger groupies.

We exchanged phone numbers and met for drinks that night. She took me to Limelight and found a dark booth for us. She got some tequila shooters and salt. She rubbed the salt on her neck and told me to lick it off and drink the shooter. I was nervous: Manhattan was now devolving from San Francisco to San Jose on the edgy-o-meter. But I did it?I licked the salt on her neck, drank the shooter and we sucked face just as if we were in an Orange County yuppie bar.

I brought her back to the loft. We climbed up to the melted-tar-and-gravel roof. It was hot up there. We pushed two chaise lounge chairs together and started kissing. She pulled her jeans off, grabbed my right hand and told me what to do.

"Okay, do circles?no, this way, counter clockwise, yes?yes, like that? Oh!" She held my fingers and guided them right up to the first convulsion, then let go, I guess to make me feel like I'd actually had a hand in her orgasms. She racked up four seizures in a row.

After observing her in mute awe, I clumsily unfurled a condom and mounted her.

"You can do anything you want to me," she said, stretching out.

I blew into her bag within a minute. Sitcom laugh-track followed.

The next day, she called and said she wanted to meet me. She sat me down, watery-eyed, wanting to tell me something very important. I told her it was okay, go ahead, I was willing to listen.

"But I? Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. Tell me, what is it?"

I thought it was going to be one of those I-was-raped-by-my-uncle tales that most sluts saddle you with. It's the tax you pay for getting your rocks off. She hesitated, dramatically, then confessed to me that she had genital herpes, and that she'd totally forgotten to tell me the night before.

When she was through opening her heart to me, I could tell that a huge weight had been lifted from her. She nearly jumped me, so eager to sleep with me now. Everything was okay! Yippee!

I squirmed away from her and sent her home. What was it that made her case me the day before? Did I look like a victim?

I told her I'd call her back and never did. I spent the next two and a half weeks on the telephone with the National Herpes Hotline, begging, pleading for some kind of definitive diagnosis. I checked my lips and dick in the mirror every day, pulling my skin in all sorts of circus-act directions. I had twenty days to wait it out, the viral incubation period in which the organism searches for its place in the genitalia, its canker-loft, so to speak.

I never contracted anything. Debbie left town but she didn't stop calling.

"You're not avoiding me because of the?"

"What? Oh! No, Debbie, gawd!"

She'd somehow memorized my address and sent me huge manila envelopes stuffed with infopackets on herpes. The brochures tried to convince me that "millions of people have learned to live with the disease" and that "the worst thing about herpes is the social stigma associated with the disease."

I thought, "What about the pain of a bleeding raw canker sore on my cock?"

She wanted to "demystify" the disease. I just wanted her out of my life. A few weeks later, I blew out my knee playing basketball on the court next to our building. I was out of money, bitter, and now I needed surgery. I went home to California after less than two months with only one edgy experience under my belt. Herpes was the gnarliest thing New York City had to offer.