This sort of entry may very well be the kind that makes me not want to let my mother and sister know that I have a blog. My sister could certainly handle the raciest content available in the Pizza Diaries, but I don't think that I'd want to trust her not to accidentally blurt out "Oh, you haven't seen David's blog?" And then I'd have to not only go through the business of explaining to my mother and all other gathered family members what a blog was, ("Oh, like Howard Dean?") but I'd risk them seeing photographs of me in the compromising positions that follow. Compromising positions? Yes my friend, and compromising situations even. That's right, because this week it's...

When I was leaving the party on Saturday night I was disappointed to find that I couldn't locate my scarf. It had been given to me more than a year ago by my then-girlfriend and to a degree, I treasured it. I treasured it because she'd brought it back with her from Scotland when she was home for a visit and it had been made there and patterned with the Cameron of Lochiel tartan, my family's tartan. I also valued it because it was one of the only remaining ties that I had to our relationship. Our break up wasn't a traumatic one for me, but it was one of those "I really like you but I don't love you and unfortunately since we've already been involved we can never be friends" sorts of things. Perhaps you, my cherished reader, have had a similar experience in your past. But I was rooting around in the bedroom of an apartment way downtown, south of City Hall, looking to see where it might have fallen. A scarf isn't the sort of thing most people would steal from the coat room at a party. And it was just a normal-looking scarf and it wasn't all that cold out anyway. I looked behind the exercise machine propped up in the corner on which I'd hung my coat earlier but it wasn't there. It wasn't on the bed. In fact, I think that I was among the last leaving the party, and there were probably only one or two coats left on the bed. My scarf wasn't there either, and not on the floor alongside the bed or under the bed. Someone must have taken it by accident. I gave up and figured that it might turn up at some point, someone might call the host and say "I took home someone's scarf by accident." Or not. It was gone and it was late and I just resigned myself to letting it go.

I'd begun the evening out in Williamsburg, somewhere out there with my friend M from work and a number of her friends. Frankly it was a bit of a drag hanging out with them all. They were all seated around a big table in some bar and were just talking amongst themselves. Not very friendly. I do like M's company though and so it was nice to see her. She was wearing this great ring on her hand and I wanted to take a picture of her with her hand held up alongside her face so I could make a drawing from it later. M has some thing about how she hates her hands though and wouldn't let me take a photograph with her hands in it. Then she wouldn't let me take a photo of her at all. I think that she was feeling self-conscious about having her picture taken in front of all her friends.

I don't know how long I was hanging out at the bar but I'd gotten a late start on the night to begin with. I think I had a couple of pints and decided to split. I was in a part of Williamsburg that I don't know so very well, but it was a straight shot from the L train to the bar and so then from the bar back to the L. I was passing a pizzeria on the way back to the subway and surprisingly decided to stop in. Okay, not so surprisingly. It was late, I hadn't eaten much of anything up to that point and I had been, and was planning to continue, drinking. The pizza at Tony's Pizza (355 Graham Ave.) was good but too hot as I recall. I don't think that I really found this out until I was in the subway station though, which I'll come to. It was late at Tony's, and as you may be able to make out in the photo the chairs were already stacked up and they'd rolled up the floor mats. I don't really remember this at all. I'm just going by what's in the photo myself.

After I got the slice I went across the street where I could fit the whole of the front of the pizzeria into my camera frame and snapped a couple of shots of the pizzeria. I'd seen three girls walking towards me as I was crossing. Two Latina chics and an african-american girl. They looked like Brooklyn girls but nothing I was really worried about. As I was walking away I heard someone scurrying up behind me and looked over my shoulder to see who it was. It was one of the Latin girls, and it looked like she was going to try to play some kind of joke on me for her friends. I just kept going and then one of them said in a lower-register tough-guy voice "Hey, you got any money?" And I said "Yeah, I got some money, but not really enough worth rolling me for" with a grin and a kind of sly tone. But then a car pulled over or stopped for some reason and one of the girls ran over and asked whoever was driving if they were going to Manhattan and could they drive them there. Then the other two started arguing with the girl talking to the driver and they were like "What the fuck are you doing? Don't be fucking stupid, we're going to the subway." But they'd completely stopped harassing me, so I said "Hey, what's up with that? I thought you were going to try to roll me? That's just fucked up." I turned on my heel and walked down into the subway.

I saw another guy down there on the platform that I'd seen at the pizzeria minutes before. He was in the same predicament that I was now finding myself in: the pizza was too hot, and the cheese was too melty and coming off of the slice. So how do you eat the slice? Do you slurp up all the cheese so it doesn't fall to the floor and resultingly burn your tongue and the roof of your mouth? Or do you try to poise the rest of the slice underneath the now-separated cheese and hope to catch whatever you can't get into your mouth back on the dough and sauce portion of the pizza? I was working on a technique somewhere in between, eating some of the cheese and letting some of it fall back onto the dough, and then biting off more of the cheese but also biting off some more of the dough and sauce. It's hard to explain, and still harder to execute without burning the roof of your mouth. Somewhere in there there has to be some sort of action on the part of the pizza consumer to cool the aforementioned hot melty cheese.

Earlier when I was riding the subway into Williamsburg, there was this young dyke on the L with her bike, a fixed wheel it looked like. She was wiry and kind of butch, but in that boyish manner that some women will affect. She had her messenger bag (uh, it was Saturday) and her chain, etc. There was something about her, the whole frame of her as she was dressed, probably no taller than about 5 foot 2 leaning on her bike against one of the poles near the doorway that made for quite a picture. I wanted to ask if I could take her picture but held back for some reason. I didn't want to do anything with the picture in particular, although had I snapped that particular frame you too, dear reader, might now have the opportunity to look upon that figure and see what I saw. Now you'll just have to take my word for it. So as I stood there near the entrance onto the subway platform and heard the loud voices of those three women who'd only moments before given up trying to rob me in order to try to get a ride into the city with a stranger and/or convince their friend to stop trying to get them a ride into the city with a stranger I thought that I'd surely see if I could take their photos. Now reader, please be aware that I'm not trying to make any comparison between these three and the dyke with the bike as far as appearance or aesthetics, rather I just wanted to have a record of them, now more than ever since I'd just finished eating a slice of pizza.

Okay, maybe I hadn't decided right off the bat like that when I heard them coming down the stairs. But I was glad to see them just because it increased the chance that there would be some kind of shenanigans going on. And so long as they didn't get belligerent or violent things would more than likely remain on the side of those things that are humorous, even if somewhat pathetic. After one of the women started singing some song (perhaps entirely of her own composition) "Ohh I just want to love you/and suck your dick/ and give you the best head you've ever haaad" I thought for sure I wanted to take a picture of them. New York subway platforms are odd in this way, as are NY subways themselves sometimes: a person can be sitting on the same bench with you, and as they start singing or wailing about how they just want to suck someone's dick (I assume the intended audience wasn't present because she wasn't singing to any one person in particular) and give them the best head he's ever had, and you will just go on reading your newspaper or staring at the rats running around below the platform on the other side of the tracks as though nothing at all was happening. And that's what was happening. Most people weren't looking at her, and the people sitting next to her, aside from the two women she came with, weren't flinching. Not one bit. How should we think of this.

The L train arrived without much more delay and the three women and I all ended up on the same car. Actually, they were sitting pretty much across the aisle from me. So I asked them if I could take their picture. The two Latin women were clearly interested but the black woman was clearly not, and moved across from where they were sitting almost immediately saying that she didn't want her picture taken. "Can we see what it looks like right now?" one of them asked, and I told them they could. "Will you e-mail the pictures to us?" I told them I would if they liked. Now I'm sorry my patient reader, as you may already know this whole evening took place some time ago and not everything is crystal clear to me anymore. I can't remember when it was that they asked me why I wanted to take their pictures but I explained frankly when they did that it was because I kept an on-line diary about my day every time I eat pizza, and that these photos would go with the diary. So then I took about three pictures.

Throughout much of this the three women were speaking back and forth in a foreign language. At first I thought that it was Spanish and I tried to listen in, but it became clearer after a bit that it wasn't Spanish at all. Was it French? Some parts of it sounded like French and my French is even better than my Spanish so I tried to follow even more closely. No dice though, it wasn't any dialect of French that I'm familiar with. There were a few words that I could make out, and I could also tell just from the tone and context of the conversation that the black woman was warning the two others that I was some kind of pervert. I heard "blah blah blah (all with a foreign accent, mind you) FETISHES (blah blah blah). I looked over at the black woman and gave her a look to let her know that I understood what it was that she was saying and assured the three of them that I wasn't going to do anything unusual with the pictures, like paste their heads onto other photos of naked women. The two Latinas didn't seem in the least bit concerned. The black woman looked dubious. One of the other women was sitting next to me when the black woman said something to her in the language that I couldn't make out. Then the three of them started laughing. The woman sitting next to me said that her friend had told her that I would pay her $300 for her to fuck me. She asked it kind of like a question. Not like an offer, but sort of like "How are you going to respond to this?" I wasn't going to get all bashful and play the fool. Think you can bait me? I thought it over for a second. "I don't know," I said "that would have to be some kind of incredible fuck for me to pay you three hundred dollars." The black woman denied having ever said this. I told her I didn't care, that it didn't bother me if she did or she didn't.

Before we all got off the train at Union Square, I asked one of them where they were from, what language was it they were speaking? "We're from Sweden," she told me. Sweden? "But you all seem like straight-up city girls." "No, we're from Sweden." Thinking back on all this I don't really know quite what to believe. The truth of the matter is that when I look at the photos I can't imagine that they were from anywhere but New York. Of course, I've never been to Sweden, so I don't know how women there behave. Perhaps they're all singing pornographic hymns to nobody on the subway. Maybe in Sweden they've got perverts who ride the subways asking if they can take digital photos of women that they'll then go home and perform acts so unholy they're even unmentionable in pornographic hymns sung deep in the forest in the middle of the night when there's not another soul around for miles. And then there's that weird language to consider. What was it? Was it Swedish, or just another dialect of Spanish or French with which I'm just not familiar? Sweedorican home girls. Just remember, you read it here first folks.

It had to be one of the local lines that took me downtown from Union Square. Almost certainly it was the N or the R, and I got off at City Hall. I had a map in my back pocket that I'd printed out from Yahoo! or some such, and I knew that I was going to have to be somewhat south of City Hall Park. There wasn't much open down there at the time, and I didn't want to show up to the party empty-handed, so I went into what appeared to be the only 24-Hour Deli open for miles. The guy in there charged me through the nose. It was something like $11 for a six pack of Coronas. I guess that's his prerogative though, staying open as he does until all hours. Maybe if you live that close to Wall Street you can afford the markup, or maybe you wise up and get your groceries elsewhere.

In retrospect I don't think it really would have mattered if I'd walked in the door empy-handed. I'm also not so certain that it would have mattered any more or less if i walked in the door with dynamite duct-taped to my chest. I took the elevator up and there was only one apartment on each floor it seemed. Loft apartments. In the small hallway outside the apartment there were naked ladies painted full scale on the walls, about four of them. To say that they were naked isn't really accurate, because they were wearing paper flowers over their "privates." I later learned that other residents of the building had complained about them when they were completely nude in spite of the fact that no one else ever had to get off at the floor. It was that they might have to see them when the elevator doors opened on that floor. People can be such assholes. The paintings weren't obscene or lewd in any way, they were just nude. Neked. In the buff. Wearing Johnny Carson's pajamas. When I walked in my friend B was sitting by the door nonchalantly on a stool. Nearby I noticed a couple grinding on an otherwise empty dance floor. They weren't nude either but they weren't obeying any six inches between the bodies rule either. They were pretty much all over each other. Well, good for them, I thought. I talked with B for a while watched people walking around a bit. R came over and said hi. At some point I glanced over and noticed that the couple had moved over to the wall, seemingly to get a little more leverage on one another. It was working.

B & Our Be-Hatted Host, B

There weren't a great number of people there, I'd say about thirty-five or so, and the loft was fairly large. Nonetheless the space never seemed empty at all, perhaps due largely to the large and colorful personalities present. I think that the loft is owned by the man who'd painted the nudes in the hallway and his wife. B (not to be confused with B) is a large fellow who I've only ever seen wearing a large felt top hat. His wife M (not to be confused with the earlier M) is a performance artist, or perhaps a performance personality known downtown as Carmen Mofungo, "The little Latin lady with lunch on her head." I'd come largely because B had told me that it was her friend W's birthday, and although I don't think that I'd ever met W, I had seen her at B's birthday party some months prior. As I recalled it she had been wearing boots, a mini skirt and a bustier all in black leather. I've tried to describe the inadequacy of the bustier by telling people that she had been "bustin' out of it," which she certainly had been. I don't mean that things were flying out all over the place, I simply mean that had the top of the bustier been a couple sizes (perhaps cups) larger it still would have fit just fine. Of course then the desired affect might not have been achieved. When I finished off my description of W for my friend T, who felt the fool for not having come with me, by including that she had large blond Bay Ridge-style hair he said to me "Oh, that's so bad it's good." I thought that was a pretty good summation.

As I've said it was W's birthday. She was dressed for the evening much as she had been the first time I'd seen her, only this time the bustier was made of satin or silk and the boots had spike heels and came to about mid-thigh. The skirt? Well the skirt seems to have disappeared, replaced just barely by something akin to a skirt but which wasn't really doing all that much to cover her ass. Her ass itself wasn't that covered either for that matter, wearing as she was something akin to a thong but with a bit of lace around the top edges. There were other people whose mode of dress was somewhat risqué?, but none that quite matched the birthday girl's. Some of the other women were wearing bustiers or teddies tucked into their jeans, but to be quite honest not one of them was pulling it off half as well or with a fraction of the style that the birthday girl had gotten together.

After I'd been at the party for about an hour or so (I'd arrived at about 12:30) W dragged a hard-backed chair out into the middle of the loft, kneeling on the seat and bending over so her forearms were resting on the back of the chair and her ass was stuck out behind her. She announced at this point that since it was her birthday she wanted to be spanked by all present 37 times plus once more for good luck (38 times in total, not 38 by each guest). The reaction was somewhat mixed, and clearly there were those who knew W better than others because they were far quicker to step up than the rest of us. Lord knows I wanted to spank the dear girl as round and pleasant as her ass was, and as permissive as the party seemed on the whole. W is married though, and her husband was standing nearby and that made me feel a bit odd, which I doubt is really all that hard to understand. Friends of mine who knew W and her husband better assured me that it was alright, that this was part of what their relationship is like, which jived with me. He wasn't scowling or pouting but looking on along with everyone else. So I allowed myself to be cajoled by my friends (yeah, twist my arm) and went over to where she was kneeling. I put my hand squarely on her round ass, pulled back and gave her a good spanking. Only once, but I felt as though I'd done it properly. I'm not interested in inflicting violence on people who don't want violence inflicted upon themselves, and even then I have my own limits with what I feel comfortable. So I didn't just give her a little pat on the ass, but I didn't send her flying forward off the chair either (far from it actually). I don't remember where I was in the count but the number wasn't exactly rocketing skywards. A woman that I didn't know was trying to get me to go up and spank W again but I told her that I'd already gone. "Spank her again, spank her again," she implored me. She wanted to get a picture of me spanking W. I suggested that she go and spank W, whose ass was already pretty red from the spankings, but she insisted that I go again and that I should let her take a picture of me spanking her. "But you don't have a camera," I noted. "I'll use yours," came the reply. I still wasn't entirely comfortable spanking this married woman but I was again reassured by the friend and he still didn't look uncomfortable with the goings-on. So I went over to her chair again and spanked her much in the same way that I had before.

Now I'm glad that there was that woman there to capture my spanking W for time immemorial, but I'd like to take a moment to comment on this. I realize that there are people in this world who are turned on more by watching than by doing, and that their voyeuristic habits may lead them to stand on the fringes of an activity or conceal themselves from it so that they might enjoy it unseen. But that's not what the woman who wanted to borrow my camera was. To the contrary what she was is just chickenshit. People who will stand on the inner edge of a circle like that one and egg other people on to do what they themselves are unwilling to do bore me. To do so in an environment where just such a thing as spanking the birthday girl is gladly accepted by all present seems almost hypocritical. If you are unwilling to get your rocks off by taking part in something which might under other circumstances be socially unacceptable and yet you still encourage other people to go ahead with it so you can get your rocks off by proxy then shut the fuck up or go the fuck home and watch some bullshit reality TV show.

I don't know, maybe I'm a little out of line here, not willing to jump at every bizarre or outré opportunity myself but still liking to know that there are people out there who will. Maybe this fine glass of Malbec (Altos Las Hormigas, 2002) that I'm almost finished with is going to my head.

The rest of the evening was still debauched to an extent, and probably more people were spanked at one point or other, but it was likely in a more personal, private fashion. There was still a good deal more grinding on the dance floor, long rows of men and women pressed up against one another and pushing forward with their hips or backward with their asses. Some of it was dancing, some of it was dry-humping, some of it was good ol' dance floor makin' out, and some of it was a delightful melange of the three. And there were other activities that were less conspicuously sexual, dragging a drunken B (at her request) on her back around the loft, holding on to one of her boots, holding her husband T upside down by his ankles to see if he could drink his beer with no hands upside down (I don't remember if he did or not), whipping people with a red feather boa and drinking shots of Vodka and Tequila out of R's navel and out of the navel of the girl who'd been pressed up against the wall shortly after I walked in. Have you ever tried this, gentle reader? I wouldn't recommend it if you have tender sinuses. Regardless you're drinking out of the navel of a woman (or man) who has a deep navel or more flesh in the immediate vicinity you're not going to be able to drink in any normal sense of the word, provided the woman is lying on her back as R and make-out-against-the-wall girl were. Rather you're going to have to suck the liquor up into your mouth, which means that some of it may vaporize somewhat in the process and end up in your sinuses, since you are, after all, inhaling. And in my experience, which is I'll grant limited to this one night, both tequila and vodka will provide you with a slight burning sensation when they go up your nose.

For some reason I'm hesitating before writing about the part of the evening when I ended up fooling around with R. I'm not entirely sure why it should bother me to mention it, except that I may come off looking like something of a ho-bag. Of course the problem with this being my concern is that if you're reading this and you know me already even slightly you're probably aware of this. That's right, Mom, Dad, Grandma, little Davy has grown up to be a ho-bag. An ass-slapping, navel slurping, bumping and grinding ho-bag. And it's too late to send me away to military school.

My ho-bagginess being understood it should come as no real surprise that when the last handful of us were getting ready to leave and R came into the bedroom where the coat was and said to me "You look like you wanna fool around," I fooled around with her. Not for more than about five minutes and not anything more than some impassioned kissing, but fooling around nonetheless. Then probably someone came into the bedroom and told us that they were waiting for us or that our hosts were waiting for us all to leave. I did try to convince her briefly that she should come home with me, but she said that she was already going back to B's with the couple that had been grinding against the wall shortly after I walked in. I wasn't heartbroken by this. How was I going to compete? I don't doubt R's perception though that I looked as though I wanted to fool around. I mean, I wasn't doing anything odd or unusual like stomping one foot on the ground and snorting steam out of my nose, but moments before I came into the bedroom to get my coat I had been sitting on the couch and talking with the 4' 10" dominatrix with her long hair pulled back into a single I-Dream-Of-Genie-style ponytail, and maybe that had sent some thoughts running through my well-lubricated head at that late hour.

Apparently the couple that had been grinding against the wall shortly after I walked in has some arrangement whereby R is the only other woman that the girl who'd been pressed up against the wall shortly after I walked in is allowed to kiss. She calls R "La-la," which is the name of one of the Teletubbies if I'm not mistaken. According to R this arrangement was the source of some consternation on the part of the boyfriend (who didn't seem consternated at all) because the girl who'd been pressed up against the wall shortly after I walked in had been fooling around on the dance floor with this Latin woman wearing jeans and a teddy. The girl and the Latina had only met that night but were dancing entwined with one another at some point in the evening. "She says they're in love," R. told me.

I realize this entry in the Pizza Diaries might be better were it filled with further tales of debauchery and hot oils, but it isn't going to be. We all piled into R's car, seven of us, and head back to Brooklyn to find some place to eat. For some unknown reason we ended up at a godforsaken diner on Atlantic Avenue across from the YWCA the name of which is escaping me at present. It used to be called the Brooklyn Diner but it isn't called that anymore.

Six of us went into the diner. One of B's friends had passed out already and it was decided that it would be best if we were to leave her in the car, directly across from the diner. We locked all the doors and I went back periodically to check on her and turn on the engine and run the heat for a while. Almost all the booths in the place were packed with heavy set home girls presumably still out after a night of ripping it. I was at the back of the group when we walked in and the management had decided to seat us all in the back. When we got to the booth the other five slid into the seats, but somehow there was no more room for poor me. So jokingly I decided to just sit on the table, but when I put my ass down on the formica the whole table top just came crashing down onto the laps of the five that were already seated?it had been glued to the wall, nothing more. There was a flurry of activity and comment from all the tables and booths around but when the manager or owner or I don't know who but he seemed to be in charge came by he said that it wasn't a problem at all, that it had just been glued onto the wall and that they'd just re-glue it in the morning. I offered to pay for the damage (I really did) but he insisted it was nothing. This was greeted by all the tables around with a lot of muttering and teeth-sucking and under-the-breath comments about what if a black person had done this and that because I was just a white boy?

After that friends there really isn't much to tell. They seated us at another booth and the manager and I carried over a large chair so I wouldn't break any more tables and I sat on it at the head. I had coffee and maybe a grilled cheese with tomato which seemed fairly safe, but there were other more adventurous diners ordering things like the much anticipated and inevitably disappointing french fries with cheese and gravy. After we'd finished and settled the bill R was kind enough to drive me home even though everyone else in the car was going over to B & T's.

I can't really say what time I got home although I'm pretty sure it was close to seven a.m. as the sun was starting to come up. In spite of the number of hours that I'd been up I was still conscious enough to take my time with taking out my contact lenses and brushing my teeth. Before heading off to bed entirely, I picked up my coat off the couch where I'd thrown it when I first came in. When I opened up the closet door and reached for a hanger I saw out of the corner of my eye a familiar plaid tartan. It was the scarf I thought I'd lost, still sitting there on the shelf undisturbed.