Gotcha all beat.
June of 1967. I still had quite a ways to go to get to twenty. I was staying for a month in my uncle and aunt's basement in upstate New York. Every day I'd ride the Erie Lackwana train down to Grand Central Station with my uncle and all the commuters with their New York Times carefully three-folded . I had a wispy beard and super long hair for those days (over the ears meant weird) and I got a lot of strange looks from the briefcase heads. My uncle was a lawyer and he'd let me loose on the city the whole day with some bills in my pocket to see museums and art galleries he recommended. The money was for cabs and meals but then I found Times Square.
I had read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn and Kerouac's On the Road and had snuck in to see Belmondo in Breathless. I thought I knew what my mission was -- experience life to the fullest as a bohemian artistic libertine ... philosopher/musician/writer/actor/story-teller/bon-vivant/ wild ass combo of Herman Hesse/Jimi Hendrix/James Dean/Dean Moriarity. Yeah right. I probably had a journal somewhere that I never wrote in but at least I had the fucking thing with me.
Times Square was unbelievable compared to Vancouver. I would sometimes get turfed out of peep show places (that had real porn!) because I was too young looking or they just hated the hair and beads I was wearing for effect.
After a couple of weeks of spending five minutes in museums and walking to save cab fare and eating hot dogs, I had a poon stash of something like $70 or $80 (my uncle would get looped on the way home in the martini car and stuff some extra in my pocket). I tried a couple of massage parlours around the Square and got the boot each time. I remember one place where there were black girls all lined up on chairs in a row of what looked like a hallway outside the changing rooms in stores. There were about four of them in mini skirts and bras and the boinking rooms were merely feet away from them and there were just curtains on them. I started talking to an almost pretty one and was just about to get led into a curtained area when the black manager came over and spun me around by my tie-dyed shirt and threw me out.
One sweltering day, I got off the Square a bit and found a walk-up massage place. When I got to the top of the stairs, there was quite a large high-ceilinged space (looked like an old warehouse) with what appeared to be about a dozen plywood cubicles with flimsy doors with hook and eye enclosures. A tall, dangerously wiry and oily bored guy came out to a little desk and said in a smokey voice like Robbie Roberston talking in "Catch the Blue Train", "So what do you want, little man?" (I didn't get my full height until I was almost nineteen, so I was probably only about 5'5" back then). I gulped and said something like, "Well, you know." "Oh, up for a lttle fun, huh, little man?" he said.
He seemed really reluctant to let me past his desk but then he called out for one of the girls who came from the back. An equally bored blowsy young blonde of probably 18 came out from somewhere in the back and the guy said something like, "Well, honey will you do our 'little man' here?" She asked me how old I was and, of course, I lied and said 20. Yeah, sure, she says. The guy took $50 or $60 and there was no discussion of what I was getting for that. I was taken to one of the cubicles, told to lie down and she immediately unzipped me, jerked my jeans down a little and gave me this uninspired blow job. At first I remember looking up at the ceiling and thinking, wait, this isn't like Henry in Paris. It was muggy in this place, the mattress was dirty and the girl didn't even say anything just sucked away. I can still remember being able to hear the guy at the desk coughing away and the echo of high heels somewhere else in the place. I'm sure I was the only customer because it was 10 o'clock in the morning. I reached out for her tits and she flopped one out for me without even looking at me or stopping the blow job. The whole thing took about 5 minutes. Jacking off was way better than this. I left with my ears burning to the guy at the desk saying, "Have a good time, little man?" and smirking at me.
I convinced myself afterwards that this was not an intellectually honest thing to do because the girl was being forced by the awful guy somehow and that's why I hadn't enjoyed it. I never wanted to see another SP until I was in Amsterdam about five years later and my inner horndog went off like a rocket when I saw the women in the windows. I dropped my intellectual bullshit pretensions and found out about five times what I had learned about sex with various girlfriends in several sessions with women who clearly loved what they were doing.
Haven't had a pinch of shame since.