![]() Besides the Times Square area, I had noticed on one of my movie nights at a theater in the East Fifties that Third Avenue was, perhaps, an even heavier cruising area than Times Square, so it, too, became a hunting ground. But more than a few times I had to invent something, since I had stayed in Manhattan to wander the streets looking, and sometimes finding. I often hung out with Regis friends who were back from college for the summer. There were many evenings for which I did have a story to tell. Mom and Dad expected me to account for my whereabouts if I didn’t come home for dinner. More and more, I found myself staying in Manhattan after work and not getting home until it was almost bedtime. The dinner conversation about family happenings that had so engrossed me as a child no longer held my interest. Politics, religion, and, of course, sex: none of it was safe ground. I couldn’t talk to Mom and Dad about anything that mattered to me. But it did confirm in my head that this was the path I was on.Īfter nine months in a dormitory, living at home that summer was not easy. Nothing ever emerged from that cruising, since all of us were on lunch hour and could not retreat anywhere for a sexual encounter. I used those midday breaks to explore a part of Manhattan that was unfamiliar to me-the streets of the financial district, the waterfront at Manhattan’s southern tip, the huge construction site from which the World Trade Center would soon rise. Soon, I was taking longer and longer lunch hours, and no one seemed to notice. Assigned to the personnel division, I was pointed by my supervisor to a long row of filing cabinets containing the personnel folders of every bureau employee and was told to put them “in order.” He didn’t provide any substance for the phrase, and so I began arranging the files alphabetically and putting the materials in each file in chronological order. The job was available through a federal Great Society program designed to provide work experience for college students. The summer of 1967, I had a job at the Federal Bureau of Customs, whose offices were in Lower Manhattan near Battery Park.
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