Skipping Towards Gomorrah (40 page)

Halfway through my weekend in New York City, I'd managed to commit five of the seven deadly sins. Anger, as I said, was easy; it was the reason I came to New York. Greed was taken care of by Emily's outrageously high fees. (Although I will admit that Emily was better looking than my lawyer, as advertised.) Gluttony was the outrageously expensive meal with Emily; envy in the form of the reaction of Jim, the man in the bar who wanted to get into a fistfight and run off with my very expensive date. Pride was my feeble attempt to explain to Emily why I didn't punch Jim in the bar, and lust, well, that would be taken care of by Brad, who would be coming to my hotel room late Saturday night.

I had just one sin left to tackle before Brad came by and took care of lust: sloth. I took a nap after Brad called, and that might have counted towards sloth, but napping did nothing to pump money into New York City's battered economy. I would have to be more proactively slothful. So I got up, got dressed, and headed down to the East Village to kill some time and score myself some of that leafy, green sloth the kids like so much.

I have a friend who lives on East Twelfth and Avenue A, and I often stay at his place when I come to New York. Walking around his neighborhood, men mutter “weed, weed,” under their breath at passersby.

It was dark when I got to the East Village, and as I walked by Tompkins Square Park, a black guy in a satin Yankees jacket and an FDNY baseball hat walked past me muttering, “weed, weed, weed.” I'd never said anything but “no, thanks,” to weed mutterers before, so I wasn't sure how to initiate or close the sale. In fact, as I walked around the park, I found myself dwelling on the fact that I had never once purchased pot in my life. To satisfy my rather minimal need for pot, I had always relied on the kindness of a few potheaded friends, all of whom seemed more than happy to give me marijuana for free. I think my potheaded friends are amused by how little it takes to get me high; again, I didn't start smoking pot until I was in my thirties, and I've never smoked enough to develop much tolerance for the stuff. I wondered for a moment if I might get arrested buying pot on the streets of New York. Then I figured that New York City's police department had better things to do right now than come between New York City's potheads and their pursuit of happiness.

“I'd like some weed,” I said to the man in the baseball jacket. He looked at me, long and hard.

I began to panic. Did I say the right thing? What if he was a cop? What if I said the wrong thing and he decided to gun me down, drug-deal-gone-bad style?

“How much you want?” the man finally said.

I had planned to spend three hundred dollars on pot—I intended to get New York City's underground economy roaring!—but being a novice pot buyer, I didn't anticipate the reaction my request would get.

“Three hundred dollars' worth,” I said.

“What you need so much for?” the mutterer said, looking pissed. “You a cop?”

“No,” I said, “not a cop. You a cop?”

“No, I'm not a cop. What you need so much for? You settin' me up?”

Ah, I got it. If I was a cop, and I could get him to sell me a
lot
of pot, he might get sent away for a long stretch of time.

“I . . . uh . . . just need a lot of pot. I'm buying it for my friends. And me. They smoke a lot of pot, you see, so I need to get . . . a . . . lot.”

“You a cop,” the mutterer said, “you a damn cop.”

The mutterer walked around the corner, off Avenue A, and onto East Fourteenth Street. I thought the deal was off and was about to split when the mutterer looked over at me and said, “You buying pot or not?” I walked around the corner. He asked me to show him the money. I pulled three hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket.

“You not a cop?” he asked again.

“Not a cop.”

“How much you want?” he asked. I was confused by the question; hadn't I already indicated to the gentleman that I required three hundred dollars of his finest marijuana? In my confusion, I said the wrong thing:

“How much pot can I get for three hundred dollars?”

In retrospect, my mistake was so frigging obvious it makes my head hurt. I basically told the pot dealer that I had no idea how much pot three hundred dollars buys. Now he knew that I didn't know what I was doing. Since the sale of marijuana isn't regulated by the New York City Department of Consumer Fraud, Weights and Measures Division, I would have no one to complain to if he fleeced me.

“Okay,” he said, “three hundred dollar' worth.” He made a show of taking three bags of pot out of his pocket. He held out his left hand. I handed him three hundred dollars; he handed me the three bags of pot.

At my friend's apartment ten minutes later, I pulled out my three “hundred-dollar” bags of pot. I'd been had, Sean laughed. His friendly neighborhood pot dealer charged me three hundred dollars for three twenty-five-dollar bags of pot. I didn't feel like getting high (I didn't want to be fucked up when I met Brad at my hotel), and I told Sean that I would leave it all for him on one condition: He had to smoke a little of my very expensive pot, just to test it out. I wanted to know if I'd been completely had; I was overcharged, and I could live with that. But was it pot at least?

Sean smoked some in a little pipe, then sat back in his chair at his kitchen table and waited a minute or two. Then he smiled.

“Good news. This is
excellent
pot,” Sean said. “You may have been overcharged, but you weren't ripped off.”

Apparently some dealers by the park keep pot in one pocket to sell to locals and bags of chopped-up bay leaves in another to sell to tourists.

“They figure half the tourists don't know what pot looks like, and he's never going to see them again anyway,” Sean said. “He probably sold you the real stuff because he thought he might see you again. So look at it this way: You got ripped off, but at least the guy who ripped you off didn't think you were a tourist. He thought he might see you again. He thought you were a New Yorker. Isn't that worth the extra two hundred twenty-five dollars?”

 

“L
ook at these muscles, faggot,” Brad said, one hand on the back of my head. “Faggot, look at these muscles. You could never have muscles like this. No faggot could. Yeah, you're a fucking faggot. I'm a man. A real man. You? You're a faggot. Faggot. Faggot.”

Brad was slowly dragging my face across his massive chest as he called me a faggot, moving my face into one armpit, then onto his biceps, down his side, across his abs, and back to his other armpit. Then he ran my face through the whole upper-body circuit again. Brad was everything Emily told me he was—huge, gorgeous, a little rough—and while his demeaning you're-a-fucking-faggot rap probably qualified as a hate crime in New York City, the tone of his voice was oddly tender. He murmured the insults as if they were sweet nothings, which to some of his clients they no doubt were.

Brad didn't want to meet in the lobby; he preferred to come right to my room. I tried to watch some television while I waited for Brad to come to my room, but I couldn't concentrate on
Saturday Night Live
. (Tina Fey rules.) My heart jumped out of my chest when Brad knocked on the door. He told me to leave the money on the table by the bed, which I did, and he smiled and said hello as he came into the room. I expected him to pick up the money right away, but he didn't seem to notice it sitting on the nightstand. He was wearing black sweats, a black T-shirt, and a pair of running shoes, and his black hair was a little longer than it looked in his pictures. He walked to the middle of the room, looked out the window, then turned around and pulled his shirt over his head, tossing it on the end of the bed. He stood there for a second, letting me take him in, all rippling shoulder muscles, abs, and pecs. He slapped his abs with his hands and then held his hands out, palms up, as if to say, “Solid, huh?” I was transfixed—but not by lust, unfortunately. Brad was about as far from my type as men get; I like slightly sissy guys. Brad, towering over me, was none of those things. He was massive, a human SUV.

Brad reminded me that he was straight, and that he only did muscle worship. Then he asked me what I wanted to do—and he called me
dude
.

Oops. I didn't have a game plan. All I really wanted to do was meet Emily's great big boyfriend, pump a little money into New York City's underground economy, and piss off a few fundamentalists. I was satisfied just to see him with his shirt off. But he was mine for an hour, and I had to fill the time, so I explained that all my boyfriends had been shorter than I was and skinnier than I was, which was true. Then I lied and told Brad that I was curious what a big, muscular body felt like. I didn't want to get naked, I said, I just wanted to run my hands over him.

“Mostly,” I said, “I just want to feel you up, I guess. I've never really worshiped muscles, so I'm not sure how that's done. Is it okay if I just feel them?”

“It's your hour, dude,” said Brad. “I just came from the gym. I can take a quick shower if you like, and you can watch. Some guys like that; we can even shower together. Or if you like, we can do this with me all sweaty. Your call, dude.”

I hesitated.

“It's good, clean sweat, dude. I don't smoke or drink, so my sweat is clean. Dudes tell me all the time that they dig it.”

I opted to watch him take a shower, hoping it would kill fifteen or twenty minutes. He looked amazing naked, and I was amazed that this sort of beauty could be ordered up to my hotel room like a bucket of ice. He was one of those body builders with hugely broad shoulders but a very narrow waist. Like Emily, Brad was breathtaking. Richard deserves all the dirty laundry he can handle for bringing these two young people together.

Unfortunately, Brad was in and out of the shower in about five minutes. He invited me to dry him off. I demurred. I plopped down on the end of the bed, and when Brad came out of the bathroom he was wearing a clean pair of underwear. He walked to the edge of the bed, stood right in front of me, and began to flex and pose.

“Come on,” he said. “Feel my body, dude. You know you want to.”

Actually, I didn't want to—but I didn't want Brad to know that I didn't want to, so I began running my hands over him. He was male, and he was beautiful, but he was so far from my type that running my hands over his chest and shoulders and arms wasn't having much of an effect on me. Brad felt like an enormous armoire that someone had stretched turkey skin over, popped in the oven and roasted to a golden brown. I wasn't turned off, but I wasn't turned on. I was thinking to myself, Shit, do I really have to stand here like an idiot running my hands over this guy for the next fifty minutes?

 

I
broke the law pumping money into New York City's underground economy. What I did with Emily probably wasn't illegal, but what I did with Brad—or what Brad was about to do to me, I should say—definitely was. There were 2,598 arrests made for prostitution in New York City in 1998, according to the New York State Uniform Crime Report. The average big-city police department spends 213 workhours a day enforcing laws against prostitution. In Los Angeles in 1993, one city official estimated that the ineffective enforcement of his city's prostitution laws was costing the city $100 million a year. In the city where I live, the police department seems much more interested in setting up prostitution stings than catching violent criminals. And why not? “You get up in a penthouse at Caesar's Palace,” Las Vegas vice cop told the
Vancouver Sun,
“with six naked women frolicking in the room and then say ‘Hey, baby, you're busted!' ” Compared to regular police work, “busting prostitutes is fun.”

The urge to alter consciousness is as old as humanity itself, as Salim Muwakkil points out, and so, too, is buying and selling sex. Prostitution has been and always will be with us, so the only rational argument about prostitution is not, “Shall we allow it or ban it?” but “How shall we make this thing that we can't stop less harmful and less dangerous for all involved?” Every problem moralists and virtuecrats cite as an argument for keeping prostitution illegal—violence, disease, child prostitution—is a problem that is either created or made worse by keeping prostitution illegal.

In Australia, where brothels are legal, a street hooker is eighty times more likely to have an STD than a woman who works in a brothel. In the Netherlands, where prostitution is legal, the rate of STDs among prostitutes is no higher than the rate of STDs in the general population. Edinburgh, Scotland, decriminalized prostitution, which is now permitted in public baths, which are licensed and regulated as places of “public entertainment.” Streetwalking is permitted on particular streets in Edinburgh where hookers have plied their trade for centuries. After decriminalization, prostitution did not expand into other areas, as some predicted, and the health, social, and crime problems associated with prostitution actually decreased.

The owners of licensed bathhouses in Edinburgh are required to keep drugs out to hold on to their licenses, and they can't abuse or exploit the women who work in them very easily since those women can now take their complaints to the police without fear of being arrested themselves. In the areas where streetwalking is allowed, there's a policewoman on duty who works with the girls; as a result, prostitutes are subjected to much less violence in Edinburgh than they are in Glasgow, where it remains illegal.

Following Edinburgh's example, England is moving towards legalization, as is Germany. Even the Jesuit magazine
La Civiltà Cattolica
has come out in favor of decriminalizing and regulating brothels, which were closed in Italy in 1958.