She goes back to her friend on the phone. I wonder how far to push the masquerade. "I'll come back later," I say, leaving with relief. Surely the reader can imagine the kinds ot rooms upstairs, without my having to inspect the decor. Nor do I check out the remaining S&M bars in the area, though I well remember how, at the height of the Stonewall era, this whole "west coast" of Greenwich Village was turned over nightly to men having sex in beef, poultry, and pork storage trucks, the irony of the term "meatpacking district" lost on no one. The writer Michael Lassell elegized that epoch in nuo village corridor 75 THE S О H u ay for the anthology New York Sex: "Once upon a time the riverfront the westernmost edge of Greenwich Village was a place for queer pio 41 to lean between the uprights of the elevated highway, trolling for For decades, fearless, defiant men sucked dick and buttfucked the huge warehouses that loomed above the nowrotting planks that are ff limits bigtime... . Nowadays the waterfront is 'Hudson River Park,' a hunk of tobedeveloped green belt that is still a totally botched West Side Highway expansion. The oncedangerous turf has sprouted rules, regulations, and little green putputs driven by dickless pissants in ugly uniforms." ONE OF THE THINGS I LIKE about the waterfront is that it is ill defined and still in transition. Maybe it's not such a bad idea for New York to hold on to incomplete zones that inspire dreams and anxieties. If you walk around Manhattan's waterfront today, you encounter a bewildering mix of edgeexperiences that range from the blighted to the elegant, to the postmodernist pastiche, to the unfinished, to near wilderness. The sense you most often get is that everything the city doesn't want to deal with, everything "repressed," has been pushed to the water's edge. Salt mounds, auto salvage shops, beercan recycling companies, defunct factories with smashed windows peeling in the sun, parkingviolation tow pounds, huge parking lots for all the sanitation trucks on earth, S&M bars, public housing. Not for nothing do so many storage warehouses exist along the river, sheltering the old family dining sets, college books, and other obligations to the past that spacepinched New Yorkers think they need to hold on to, but are halfway to abandoning. The repressed flourished best in the cracks of the decaying port, especially once it had begun to fall into ruin. The novelist Andrew Holleran °nce considered this phenomenon in an essay for Christopher Street magazine: Why do gays love ruins?' I said to my friends. . . . 'The Lower West Side, the docks. Why do we love slums so much?' ne can hardly suck cock on Madison Avenue, darling,' said the umnus of the Mineshaft, curling his lip as we strolled down that very P •.. When the shoreline is made pretty by city planners, and . . . the •Meatpacking district is given over entirely to boutiques and cardshops- then we'll build an island in New York Harbor composed entirely of rot ting piers, blocks of collapsed walls, and litterstrewn lots.