‘Howard explained our girl problems to Jose: we were lonely, socially inept and virginal. Jose furrowed his brow and listened with concern. Then he said he was taking us to a whore house’ Jonathan Goldstein,
Where metaphor meets whore house
The teenagers are on winter break this week and in the neighbourhood streets and cafés, I watch them as they snap chat and pose for selfies. When I was an 18- year- old on winter break, all I had was a notebook. A sensitive, morose lad I used it to jot down my pensées, most of which revolved around my desire to find a girlfriend.
My best friend Hersh and I decided that year to spend the week in New York. And as we rode the train there, I scribbled away. As we passed a burned-out school bus in a field, I wrote, “that is my heart. My heart is a burned out school bus with no windows sitting in the middle of nowhere.” But then, after about 15 minutes, the train passed a little grey wooden control booth, the door flung open and I wrote that that was my heart. The train continued along through February fields and I looked for more things to call my heart: A rusty bridge, a chopped down evergreen, a discarded can of Mountain Dew. It turned out my heart was everywhere that winter month.
We stayed with Hersh’s aunt in Queens, and every night we’d go to the local bar and take photographs of ourselves working away in our notebooks, Hersh sketching, me writing, our faces illuminated by the neon jukebox.
It was at the bar that we met a 25-year-old Venezuelan furniture salesman named Jose. Howard and I thought Jose was the coolest. While we drank our rum and Coca- Colas, Jose drank Bloody Marys, something we considered very sophisticated — sort of like drinking a salad.
Howard explained our girl problems to Jose: We were lonely, socially inept and virginal. Jose furrowed his brow and listened with concern. Then he said he was taking us to a whore house.
Initially, I cottoned to the idea, telling myself that it was very old-school, very Neil Simon, or Burt Reynolds. It was probably how my father and his father before him did it. I imagined my grandfather had lost his virginity to a kind-hearted madame who after the deed had cooked him a brisket.
Jose took us to an apartment above a fruit store in Spanish Harlem where we were invited in by a small, older Latino man wearing a shoulder holster. Jose told us not to worry, that this is how things were done. There were three women dressed in nighties who walked by carrying balled-up, faded linen and punchbowl sized metal basins with soapy sponges.
It was upon seeing the linen that I realized I’d never be able to pull it off. There was something too medicinal and matter- of- fact about the whole thing. I felt like a bottle about to be uncapped on an assembly line. Not only that, but I was terrified. Sex was one thing, but if I was going to be getting naked on a strange bed with sheets that were circumspect, I at least wanted it to be with someone who mildly liked me. And that, of course, is impossible to gauge when the exchange of Canadian traveller’s cheques is involved. And so I decided to wait. If I was a teenager in this day and age, I might not have used my loneliness as fuel for becoming a writer. But having sad-faced emojis back then would have been nice. I’d have filled entire notebooks with them.