Prologue One day, not long after the ferry terminal episode, Holly, Tiffany, and I were hanging out in a bar having sherry. I didn’t particularly like sherry, but I decided to follow their lead. At one point Tiffany said, “We know another lady who would l...
I drove a yellow taxi in New York long before Uber, Lyft, Juno, and so forth made the whole thing so app based. You had to hustle out there and know where to find passengers on your own. Also, there was no GPS to help you navigate. I had a map unfolded on...
One afternoon Holly and I were hanging out at a coffee shop in Manhattan. Along the way we got to talking about role-play games. We had already done some of those, but she proposed a new one. Holly started describing it. “We’re going to be playing a pick-...
In June of 1975, I made a misguided attempt at a bar pickup in New York. Actually, technically, I did pick her up. I was twenty and she was about twenty-six.Somehow, I convinced Charlotte to take me back to her nearby walk-up apartment. She cock-teased me...
My favorite uncle was my father’s younger brother, Henry D’Amato, or Uncle Hank as we called him. When I reached college age in the 1970s, he had a successful fruit wholesaling business in the Bronx Terminal Market. By then he had surpassed his own father...
I was sitting one day in a bar with my older, classy-lady girlfriend, Holly Sykes. I had met her while I was driving part-time for a car/limo service called Lioness Limousine. She was one of my passengers and we got involved in “activities” inside the car...
One Saturday afternoon I got a call at the apartment where I was living with my family. My dad happened to answer it and said it was for me.I said, “Hello, this is Paul.”I heard a woman's voice, “Paul D’Amato? This is Janice Dubin, you know, from Trylon T...
While driving for an outfit in New York called Lioness Limousine, I had a customer who was both delightful and exasperating at the same time. Holly Sykes was a thirty-seven-year-old divorcée who started asking for my services every Sunday in the late spri...
On a cold Saturday in February, 1975, Michelle Hanley and Judith Weinberg went to see Bonnie and Clyde at a revival house, the Cinema Village on 12th Street. The two were sophomores at the City College of New York. When they came out, they decided to walk...
Driving for a car service requires a deft touch for customer service, as I found out when driving part-time for a New York outfit called Lioness Limousine. I had one particular passenger with unusual demands, but I was more than happy to oblige her reques...
In the spring of 1976 I made some extra money for college by driving for a car service called Lioness Limousine. I was a sophomore at the City College of New York in upper Manhattan, and I commuted by subway to my job in Long Island City. I wound up havin...
"Tell you a story?""Of a bygone love. I like learning more about your former paramours, Honey.""Love?" In my bed--which had recently become our bed--I rolled over into Jacob's arms. I was barely awake, as it was early Saturday morning. "How about a former...
Judy Weinberg was pondering her life one afternoon. She was sitting in a lounge at Finley Hall, the student center building for the City College of New York. It was near the end of a cold and bright day in December 1974, just before the winter break. She...
During the 1974-75 academic year, there was a fellow sophomore at the City College of New York named Judith Weinberg. She was a modern European history major like I was, and she lived with her parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.I met her because...
I’m not sure why I tried my first bar pick-up, but it had something to do with my college girlfriend Michelle. At the end of our sophomore year in June 1975, she was starting to get flaky after going with me for nearly nine months. She suddenly found excu...
