One night, stood up by a date at an Indian restaurant nearby, I coasted past St. Mark’s stainless door and saw a line atypically short. I pulled a U-turn, then circled the block six times. Finally I vowed to follow strangers in and do exactly as they did. If cautious French-accented Canadians could risk it, so could I.

One assumed that one was, by now, unsurpriseable. But what I found at the “tubs” (can we finally talk here?) shocked me. It just did.

I had been memorizing Blake epigraphs. Now the scent of steam, poppers, rubber soles brought one to mind. “Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.”

Well, you got to start somewhere.

Having surrendered my clothes and checked my shoes, I found that what really made me feel nakedest was peeling off that last black holey Orion sock! How pale and huge and North Carolinian this foot looked. After wrapping all of me in a smallish white towel—Miss Sarong stalks Mr. Right—I set out to try and seem, not naïve but, native.

Three hundred people circled each other, seeking sex from the one person not present. I read a sign THE ORGY ROOM. I entered, prepared to see three seated elderly gents, their midriff terrycloth sorely tested, discussing the rumor that Callas died of tapeworms she’d consumed to control her weight. Instead, I found one hundred males, all young to recently-so. Each was naked, all were working on each other in a tumid smacking hellish lovely silence, nearly post-Titanic. In the so-called orgy room, I met the last things I’d expected: no room, an actual orgy!

I next found four to seven hands under my towel is what I found as, gingerly, I excused and, oops, unhasped myself. God knows, I didn’t mind being groped; having lived a good while in New York, I no longer required extended previews, credential-establishing conversations. (Go to buy a necktie, wind up with the customer behind you in the giftwrap line who winks, “Got a few minutes, Dropdead Gorgeous?”)

But I was still old-fashioned in certain thank-you-note folkways. I did not need names and school affiliations, I didn’t even ask to hear the guy’s voice, but I did like having one face to match each pair of hands working on and under me. Call me conventional.

Was the orgy room this dark as a gentle nod toward our older clients? Fingers felt like some web of tentacles let loose, presumed welcome, up under my rental towel, set free on home-boy home-grown goodies. You know how in a car wash, hula skirts of octopus-sponge shimmy your vehicle rudely clean, almost against its will? Like that. Would the universe allow this much wet mischief at once? My parents on perfect days told us, “Enjoy this weather. We’ll pay later.”

I’d grown up.