arno30 wrote:(that's a cheap C&F dukasaur !

)
You're right, it was. May was just a brutal month for me, and I just didn't have it in me to create something better. I didn't want to delay the tournament, so I did something quick. Still, although it might have been a quickie, I think it was an appropriate way to wrap up.
Now that things in R/L have slowed down for me a bit, I am prepared to do some penance. I will therefore complete the task that Greg set for us:
GregDavidson wrote:tell us about your best and worst experiences in NYC
I've been to NYC a few times when I was little, but I've only been there once as an adult. All my best and worst experiences are therefore encapsulated in a single trip.
We went down to NY in March or April of 1983; there were seven of us jammed into a single Ford LTD. Most of us didn't know each other; it was a semi-random assortment of friends of friends of friends who somehow all got assembled for this trip. We all dropped in to a friend's apartment in an old building at 163rd and Broadway, which was to be our base of operations for the first two days. That night, we increased our ragtag band with some more friends of friends, and went for a wander downtown. We were going to go up the Empire State Building, and then afterwards go to see Lou Reed.
We got off the subway at some Midtown stop, a fair distance from the ES Building so that we could see some other interesting sights along the way. Well, we saw quite a few neat buildings, but what we saw most was Liquor Stores. Coming from Canada where Liquor Stores are a government monopoly and there is about one for every 50,000 people, it was a whole new world to see what the free market does with Liquor Stores. In NYC it seemed there was one on every corner. So we just had to sample something at each one. We didn't have any glasses or mix, obviously, so we bought sweet liqueurs that could be drunk without mix, stuff like Bailey's and Creme de Menthe and Triple Sec and Amaretto. We bought one small bottle at each store; passed around between ten or twelve people there would only be enough for everyone to have one or two good swigs. By the time we got to the next corner the bottle would be empty, so we'd drop into the next Liquor Store and buy another!
The thing about sweet liqeurs is that they're deceptive; you don't realize how much you've had until it's too late. Our march across Midtown was only an hour or so, and yet by the time we got to the Empire State Building we were thoroughly trashed, and starting to get disoriented.
I found myself on the elevator with a girl named Katrina that I had only met that day. I had been one of the Elite Three who had a drivers' license and earned a spot in the front seat of the LTD, and she was one of the Subhuman Four non-drivers condemned to the back seat, so we hadn't even spoken to each other until the March Across Midtown, but the more alcohol we got into our systems the more we seemed in love.
On the elevator we started sucking face, and then just like a movie cliche, she started moving downward, kissing my chest, then my belly, and finally arriving at the Demilitarized Zone. Oh my God! I'm about to get fellatio in one of the greatest landmarks on earth, a thousand feet above street level, in the elevator going to the top of the Empire State Building!
We had gotten separated from our friends before entering the elevator, and we were surrounded by old people. (Well, we were twenty at the time. You know how it is. When you're twenty everybody over thirty seems really old.) Some of them looked amused, but a few looked horrified. Katrina's hand was firmly wrapped around my penis, but she hadn't yet found the opening in my underwear, so there was still a layer of cloth between her skin and mine. My animal brain desperately, desperately wanted her to continue, but my rational brain was telling me that we were going to get arrested, and being arrested in a foreign country, even for a minor offense, can be a total nightmare.
I don't know where I found the strength, but I won the battle of wills with myself and I pushed her away. To this day I wonder if maybe I'm too rational for my own good. Maybe I should have let things proceed. Either way, it was an elevator ride I'll never forget.
The rest of that night was a spectacular ride in its own right. Falling-down drunk, seperated from our friends, knowing only the address but not the name or phone number of the person we were staying with, we got on subway train after subway train, always somehow getting to the wrong destination in a comedy of errors. (For instance, in one of the few examples that I remember clearly, I confused 163rd and Broadway with 163rd and Grand Concourse, a navigational error that brought us to Yankee Stadium. At another point my navigation was bad enough that we ended up on Coney Island.) It was almost dawn when we finally made it back to base, having had a semi-conscious tour of most of New York.
Anyway, that was my best time in New York, ever! My worst time? The next morning, having sobered up, Katrina showed no interest whatsoever in my penis, and it took three months of persuasion to get her to finish what she had started. That happened in Gravenhurst, Ontario, but it's a whole other story.
