by Dan Peres
Acquiring new pornography was one of the great challenges of my adolescence, right up there with braces, acne, and parallel parking. Pikesville was hardly a hedonists’ playground. Looking for a new menorah? A lean corned beef on rye with a side of slaw? Pikesville was the spot.
There was only one place in Baltimore that I knew of where I was sure to find what I was searching for—the Block. The Block was actually a stretch of several blocks downtown on East Baltimore Street. This area was as close to a red-light district as we were going to get: strip clubs, X-rated movie theaters, peep shows, seedy bars, and sex shops. As a kid, when we would drive past Baltimore Street on the way to a restaurant somewhere near the harbor, I would crane my neck to look down the Block with the hope of seeing naked women. I never did, though I did see a man urinating in the street once.
One day, not long after I got my license, I decided to drive downtown to the best of one of Baltimore’s two magic shops, Yogi Magic Mart. The shop had been around since the late 1930s, and going there was one of the few things that could excite me—even more than new porn. Yogi’s was packed with illusions, props, books, and posters. I could have easily spent all day there; in fact I had on many occasions. This particular afternoon I was hoping to find a copy of a short manuscript by Paul Harris called The Immaculate Connection. It was a part of a series entitled New Stars of Magic and taught a trick where the magician linked together three playing cards with their centers torn out, like cardboard doughnuts. David Copperfield had performed it on his CBS special earlier in the year and I was desperate to learn the secret.
As I was walking back to my car with the Harris manuscript in a yellow plastic bag, it dawned on me that I wasn’t far from the Block. There were always news reports about fights and shootings and drug activity on Baltimore Street, but how bad could it be in the middle of the day?
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I definitely didn’t count on seeing businessmen in suits and ties coming and going from nudie joints. These guys could have been my neighbors or my friends’ dads or the guy from temple who handed out candy to the kids after services. It appeared that the search for new material was a lifelong pursuit.
I ducked into the first sex shop I came to. It smelled like sweat and bleach. It smelled the way I imagined a crime scene might smell. I tried to be discreet, but subtlety can be tough to pull off when you’re waiting in line to pay for a copy of Great Sexpectations and it’s in a box the size of a phone book.
In time, the more sex my friends had, the more my virginity stood out. I was the one guy in a group of five friends who couldn’t manage to close the deal. I was the guy the girls came to for advice. I was the guy they complained to and cried to. I was the guy they hugged before going off with the other guy. I was the sweet and lovable sidekick. I was Duckie from Pretty in Pink. I was Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I was every character ever played by Anthony Michael Hall.
My chance for leading man status finally came in the fall of 1989, a few months into my freshman year at New York University. I had just turned eighteen.
I met Rachel Gordon the second week of school in the cafeteria at Rubin Hall on the corner of 10th Street and Fifth Avenue. We’d made eye contact a few times around the dorm but hadn’t spoken. There was something exotic about Rachel. She had olive-colored skin, long black wavy hair, and the icy blue eyes of a Siberian husky. There was a calm about her that was completely foreign to me. She lacked the unbridled anxiety that the Jewish girls I’d grown up around seemed to ooze. Rachel was a hippie, albeit one from Beverly Hills.
“I’m Dan, by the way,” I said, when I finally worked up the courage to say hello. I had been Danny my entire life, but switched to Dan on my first day at NYU. It seemed more grown up. Less virginal.
Like most relationships, this one started off with a lie. We were having dinner at Dojo on West 4th Street after dating for a couple of weeks when she asked me how I lost my virginity. She lost hers at sixteen on a ranch in Ojai to her high school boyfriend, the son of a famous television producer. She told me that he kept a macrobiotic diet, introduced her to yoga, and looked like a young Jackson Browne. Needless to say, my history of chronic masturbation and coin tricks couldn’t compete with that.
I spun some tale about sleeping with my neighbor’s older sister the previous summer when she was home from college. It was the plotline of a porno I’d seen once.
Rachel was the oldest of three sisters, who were referred to by nearly everyone who knew them as the Gordon Girls. They all attended a small, elite private school near Beverly Hills—which Rachel called the Academy—where they had to wear a uniform of pale blue pleated skirts and white polo shirts with the school logo embroidered on the chest. Like me, Rachel had been the editor of her high school newspaper. She was one of the smartest people I’d ever met, often speaking passionately in opposition of the impending Gulf War. Her parents were big Democratic fundraisers in California, and Rachel knew more about politics than most adults I’d known. I would sit across from her on the floor of my dorm room and listen as she railed against the president. She was the first non-family member I ever said “I love you” to.
As dorm rooms go, mine on the fourth floor of Rubin Hall was fairly typical. My roommate, Sean, was studying photography at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He’d grown up in Manhattan and spent most nights and weekends with his parents in his childhood home on Central Park West. I never understood why he even bothered to pay for housing, but I wasn’t complaining. Our room was originally meant for three people, but it was just Sean and me—mainly me.
There were bunk beds and a single bed separated by Sean’s desk along the left-hand wall. I slept on the bottom bunk, which was closest to the window overlooking 10th Street, and Sean had the single, which was closer to the bathroom. The top bunk sat empty except for a navy blue fitted sheet and a bunch of decorative pillows courtesy of Sean’s mom. I’d tucked a spare blanket under the mattress of the top bunk, which, when pulled down, turned my bed into the type of fort my brother and I used to make when we were kids with sofa cushions and my mother’s expensive white throws. Along the opposite wall were our dressers, a mini-fridge stocked with ginger ale and black film canisters, and my desk.
The night I lost my virginity, Rachel and I had been studying in my room. Had I known I was going to finally be having sex that night, I probably would have dimmed the lights and put on some music. I definitely would have put on a new pair of boxers instead of the old Hanes tighty-whities I was wearing.
But it all happened so quickly. After fooling around on my bed for a few minutes, Rachel asked me if I had a condom. I did. I’d nervously purchased them the week before along with some Twizzlers at a deli on University Place. I’d hidden the box in the back of my sock drawer. I was in such a hurry to get one that when I jumped out of bed I knocked my head on the frame of the upper bunk.
“Are you okay?” Rachel asked.
I was standing there rubbing my head with a pair of tighty-whities around my ankles.
“Yup,” I said. “All good.”
My dresser was flush against the room’s heater, which had kicked on a few days earlier as it had finally started to feel like fall in the city. The side of the dresser was hot. When I pulled the condom out of the drawer, it was warm. Adam and the other guys I grew up with were always talking about how they preferred lubricated condoms, so that’s what I bought. The only problem was that it wasn’t clear to me which way the condom went on. Was the lubrication for me or for her?
I stood there looking at Rachel’s naked body a few feet away. It felt like I had been waiting my whole life for this moment. I’d fantasized about sex for years. I’d seen it done in videos at least a hundred times—by professionals, no less. My training was complete. I was, quite arguably, the most well-prepared virgin in history.
So I took a deep breath and put on the condom, still warm from the room’s heater. Confused, I put it on inside out. The instant that warm lubrication hit m
y skin I got light-headed. It felt incredible—better than anything I’d ever felt. It felt so good, in fact, that I came right there standing in front of my dresser, an empty Trojan wrapper by my feet.
Unsure as to whether or not Rachel knew what was going on, I kept my cool. I walked over to her and put myself inside. We had sex for about thirty seconds before I started to go limp. I had no choice but to fake an orgasm. I jerked and shivered and groaned, just like the guys in the pornos. I’d like to think I gave a convincing performance.
“Oops,” I said. “Sorry about that. I just couldn’t control myself.”
“No, that was great,” she said. Sweet, but a lie.
It didn’t really matter, though. While anyone else would have viewed this experience as a disaster, to me it was a victory. It was a rite of passage. I was no longer a virgin. I had finally caught up to my friends. The next day, I ditched the remaining condoms that were in the small box in my sock drawer. I was worried that the heat had somehow damaged them. Plus, I couldn’t afford another lubrication mishap, no matter how good it felt. This time I went to Rite Aid on Sixth Avenue to buy new ones, certain that they’d have a wider selection than the corner deli.
As a rule, buying condoms should be done quickly and with as few witnesses as possible. But I lingered. The selection was overwhelming and I was clueless. It must have showed.
“Can I help you find something?” the store clerk asked as he passed by where I was standing for the second time.
My first order of business was to let this guy know in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t dealing with some dumb virgin.
“Yeah, I usually use these lubricated Trojans,” I said, pointing at the blue box on the shelf, “and I like them a lot, but I’m looking to change it up.”
“Okay, well, there’s a lot here,” he said. “There’s ribbed and there’s these without the lube. And I really like the lambskin. Have you tried those?”
“No,” I said. “Not yet. Heard good things, though.”
This should have been an extremely awkward conversation. This wasn’t like buying new sneakers and having the salesman recommend a pair of Nike’s. This was the dude stocking the shelf behind me with Dr. Scholl’s shoe inserts telling me what he prefers while having sex. It should have been weird, but I was surprisingly into it. We were just two non-virgins talking shop.
“Oh, and Trojan just introduced these,” he said, handing me a black box. It said MAGNUM in big gold letters across the front. Underneath, it read, “Large Size Condoms.”
Now what guy didn’t want to buy these? You didn’t hide this box in the sock drawer, that’s for sure. No way. You kept this right on the nightstand like a trophy. It doesn’t make a difference how many times a man is told “size doesn’t matter,” it sure as hell matters to him. It mattered to me.
But was I a MAGNUM man?
I got the definitive answer to that question months later when I went to visit my brother at Cornell. It was his senior year and Jeff wanted me to experience one of his legendary fraternity parties before graduating. I had met his college friends over the years, but this was the first time that I was actually going to hang out with them.
The party was held on the ground floor of the large white fraternity house on Cornell’s scenic Ithaca campus. It was nothing like NYU parties, which were confined to considerably smaller venues. I stayed close to Jeff all night. We drank tons of beer and danced with his girlfriend and her friends. Afterward we ate pizza from a food truck before passing out in his room in the fraternity house.
The following morning I was standing in the house’s open, locker-room-style shower, hung over and trying not to vomit as hot water was beating down on me. From behind me I heard one of Jeff’s fraternity brothers calling my name.
“Yo, Dan,” he said. “Turn around.”
I didn’t move.
“Hey, little bro,” he continued. “Come on. Let’s have a look. Let’s see if you’re hung like big brother. Does it run in the family?”
I pretended not to hear him. I moved closer to the wall in front of me. He walked up to me and pulled me by my shoulder, turning me around.
“Nope,” he said, laughing, and walked away.
I turned back around and leaned my forehead against the tiled wall in front of me as water pounded down on my back. I wanted to disappear, but the Tarbell Course in Magic hadn’t covered that.
The Cartwheel
I knew this guy in college who got a tattoo of a Grateful Dead dancing bear on his forearm just so he might have a better chance of sleeping with a sexy Deadhead in our English lit class.
“It’s like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, man,” Henry told me when I questioned his sanity. “I said, ‘What the fuck.’”
Maybe he was vaguely familiar with some of the band’s more mainstream stuff, but he was hardly a Grateful Dead fan. He was more of a flannel-wearing Pearl Jam guy, but he had fallen hard for Amanda, who rarely wore a bra and spent summers following Jerry Garcia and the guys around the country. So he went for it. The tattoo ended up looking more like an Ewok than anything else, and when the semester was over I heard that Amanda was sleeping with our lit professor. Henry later took to telling people who asked about the tattoo that he was a die-hard Star Wars fan and that he loved the quiet strength and intense loyalty of the tiny teddy-bear-like creatures from the forest moon of Endor. I’m pretty sure that didn’t help get him laid, either.
I know guys who have done some seriously dumb shit over the years in an attempt to impress women. “What the fuck” decision-making has led to more misguided mohawks, piercings, fedoras, bottle service, and leather pants than anything else, to say nothing of the purchase of countless Ducatis. We’ve spent ages catcalling and serenading and bulking up and trimming down and putting ourselves in the most unnatural situations. Like the time in high school when I tried out for a production of Our Town in order to get the attention of Becky Turner, a stunning blonde who was cast as Emily Webb. I tried out for the role of George Gibbs, the male lead and Emily’s love interest. My voice quivered all the way through the audition. I had a tough time focusing on the memorized passage about my love for Emily as I was delivering it not to Becky Turner, as I had hoped, but to a pimply sophomore named Stefan who was there to help build the sets. Staring longingly into Stefan’s eyes while sharing an imaginary ice cream soda in Grover’s Corners was not what I had in mind when I signed up. I didn’t get the part, or any part for that matter. Instead, I was asked to be the assistant to the show’s faculty director, Mrs. Carr. I accepted. This was the theatrical equivalent of being a water boy. Still, it put me in close proximity to Becky, who went to an all-girls Episcopal school in what my grandfather referred to as the “goyisha part of town” and looked every bit as innocent as the Virgin Mary herself.
I soon learned, however, that she was far from a saint. One day before rehearsal, I walked into the dressing room and saw her making out with Danny Garrison, who played George and also got to kiss her onstage during every performance. Because I was always with Mrs. Carr, taking down notes on stage direction and lighting, I was viewed as the teacher’s pet and something of a narc. Once when I went outside behind the theater to round up the cast for a meeting, everyone—including Becky—quickly stubbed out their cigarettes and scurried.
Sadly, I failed to make an impression on Becky. Mrs. Carr, on the other hand, was definitely a fan. I was presented that year’s drama award at a special schoolwide assembly for my exemplary work as director’s assistant. It’s the only trophy that I ever won—except for those participation awards given to the entire Little League team when I was ten and eleven.
Hands down, though, my single biggest “what the fuck” moment would have to be the cartwheel.
In 1995, not long before the cartwheel, I had just been promoted to what was described to me rather enviably on more than one occasion as “the best job in New York.” I was the editor of the Eye page at Women’s Wear Daily, the fashion-industry trade journal who
se influence reached far beyond the cluttered showrooms of Seventh Avenue. WWD was the ultimate influencer for an audience of cultural influencers. It was a must-read—the definitive word on style, celebrity, and taste. Whether you were a designer, an artist, a chef, an author, or a Park Avenue socialite, coverage in WWD had the ability to anoint stars and make careers. It could also end them just as swiftly. I was in charge of the Eye, which showcased the paper’s sharp-witted party coverage and celebrity profiles. It was my first taste of the power and access that comes with some jobs in journalism, and I liked it. It was a highly coveted position and one that I almost didn’t get.
Like many businesses in New York back then, WWD’s parent company, Fairchild Publications, drug-tested prospective employees. After graduating from NYU, I spent months sending résumés to just about every major media outlet—newspapers, magazines, television stations. Aware of the possibility that I might eventually have to pee in a cup, I completely stopped smoking pot, which had become a daily activity since the beginning of my final semester. After a few months, with nothing in front of me except a stack of rejection letters from places like the New York Times, ABC News, the Wall Street Journal, and even Details magazine, I decided it was time for a much-needed bong hit. No sooner had I exhaled than the phone rang and I was asked to come in the following day to meet about a position at Fairchild’s menswear trade newspaper called the Daily News Record, or DNR.
“Relax. Just start drinking tons of water right now,” Adam told me after I made a panicked call to him in Baltimore. “You haven’t even met them yet. They’re not going to give you a drug test at the interview.”
Everything always seemed to just work out for Adam. Not for me. I stayed up half the night thinking of a way to dodge a drug test that I wasn’t even sure I was going to be asked to take. It was the most time I’d ever put into preparing for a test in my life.