I met my first girlfriend just two blocks from where I lived in Williamsbridge, The Bronx. It was September 1972 and I had started my senior year at high school. I was seventeen years old and my romantic experiences at school had been, frankly, non-existent. Maybe high school was overrated as a dating location, but I hadn’t found a single prospect during my three years there. By that point, I was starting to think ahead t...

One day in late September, I made one of my usual trips out to Maspeth to visit Nora at her house. I was surprised by her appearance when she opened the door. She was wearing a business outfit: a dark-gray suit with a tight skirt, dark nylon stockings, and high heels. I had seen those clothes before during her first visit to the college newspaper, The Salient. Her dark-blonde hair was pinned up on her head. Her most notic...

About a week after she had joined The Salient in September, Nora and I were together in the office. She was near me, sitting at a desk, banging away at an old Smith-Corona manual typewriter. Not only did she have her Burger King memoirs to write, but she also had been assigned a news story by senior editor Lilith. As the latter had said, “She needs to pay her dues here, like everyone else.” That actually wasn’t true. I ha...

On Saturday, as promised, Margery did call me around one o’clock. As on the day before, she asked me to meet her in the park in front of her building. I figured that since it was a weekend, we’d probably do something together for those two days. Then, when the school week started again, perhaps we should both concentrate on our homework. At that time, I had no idea about how to deal with a girlfriend. I had initiated the...

One day in early September, the time came for Nora to join The Salient newspaper at City College. She was going to attend the first staff meeting of the new semester with me. I had joined nearly a year earlier in the fall of my freshman year. In October they ran a tongue-in-cheek help-wanted ad. Jeff Kimmel and I – we had met each other in high school – discussed joining. One line in the ad caught my attention: “If you li...

In August Nora asked me to meet her in a park near her Maspeth house, something we had never done before. I was sitting on a bench when she came up and stood in front of me. Her outfit was surprising; she had a white blouse, a dark blue skirt that went below her knees, white ankle socks, and brown shoes. She said nothing, so I just looked her over. Her hands were folded in front of her. Finally, I said, “What are you supp...

The girls were only on their third time with their new “bad girl” underwear when the nuns caught them. There was a rumor going around the school that the nuns had some kind of extrasensory perception that gave their teachers something beyond random guesswork to discover which girls were being naughty on a certain day. Probably it was something more prosaic than that. After years of experience looking for that kind of thin...

The northbound D train often got stuck in that right-hand curve into 205th Street station. That was not unusual, because 205th was the terminal and trains had to clear the platform before another train could enter. Except on that night, it was the ungodly hour of nearly 3:00 AM when I was sitting there. This being May of 1977, public employees were completely demoralized and didn’t give a damn about doing their jobs. Thus...

On Thursday, Vivian Hannity eagerly awaited the arrival of her friend Cathy Morrow. Vivian knew they were going to participate in an unofficial tradition: the wearing of “naughty girl” panties under their Catholic school uniforms. Cathy had gone and purchased new underwear for both of them. No one could remember when this practice had started, but it seemed to be a way for many of the girls a way to express their represse...

At the start of her junior year in the late summer of 1971, sixteen-year-old Vivian Hannity had been attending Catholic schools for her entire life. Yet she found that her belief in her own religion was waning. It wasn’t exactly that she was becoming an atheist. It was more like the rigid dogmas of the Church simply made no sense to her anymore. She could not resolve the contradictions between what the Church was trying t...

The following day was when the papers were due. I was already sitting there when Nora came bopping in. Later that year, I would see Young Frankenstein, and how she had moved reminded me of Madeline Kahn’s entrance into a bedroom. That was the scene late in the film where Peter Boyle is trying to read The Wall Street Journal. I thought, Nora, try to be a little more subtle. She plopped into the seat right next to me – she...

Catherine Morrow was bored, lonely, horny, and still living in her parent’s apartment on Briggs Avenue in the North Bronx. She was at loose ends, not a good place for an eighteen-year-old woman to wind up. Even her part-time job downtown had ended, or rather she had simply quit it. Starting at the age of sixteen, she had a girlfriend named Vivian who attended a Catholic High School with her, the nearby Mount St. Ursula Ac...

I didn’t have an easy transition from high school to City College. The sexual attitudes and politics of the new place disturbed me. It was like every guy who couldn’t get laid in high school assumed that college girls were “easy” and they couldn’t wait for some sexual action. It seemed that the place was swarming with horny virgins and near-virgins, and all of them noticed me. When I was on campus, I was constantly gettin...

Two young women sat in a diner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Both of them were about to start their senior years of college. Nora Meara attended the City College of New York, a public institution that was part of the city university (CUNY). It was located uptown in Manhattanville/West Harlem or whatever one chose to call that particular area. The other one, Gilda Wasserman, attended New York University (NYU), a pri...

It was May of 1978. A beautiful warm day was being predicted for the upcoming Friday. Someone (my guess was Todd) announced that that Friday would be Senior Skip Day. Word spread quickly. Kelly and I were seniors in high school. We were above-average students and had generally played “by the rules” while in school. But something about senioritis and a warm spring day can make you do what you wouldn’t otherwise. Kelly and...