Desire Paths

On New Year’s Day, I embarked on a three-month experiment to catalog all my unmediated encounters with strangers. An effort to sublimate a particularly rancid bout of cabin fever and test out certain ideological commitments, I’d follow — and when appropriate, solicit — chance encounters. This is why, one day in January after the year’s first brutal snowstorm, I ended up accompanying a drug dealer on his afternoon route through Brooklyn.

I met M on what, for all intents and purposes, is a sex app. The following day, I arrived at the deserted Clinton Hill playground where we agreed to meet. When he asked if I was ready to go, I realized “play in the snow” had probably been a euphemism. As we crossed the street toward the train, I paused and looked both ways before jaywalking, while he dove headfirst into the torrent of oncoming traffic, striving ahead so quickly he couldn’t see he was leaving me behind. We rode trains up and around Brooklyn and trekked across freshly salted concrete. M exuded the self-assuredness of someone who had built a real life here, navigating the streets by heart with an almost balletic quality. Our first stop was a luxury apartment building in Williamsburg, which proudly advertised its artist-loft past life. We took turns deriding the unsavory, generic hallway designs on the way up to the unit, where its primary occupant, a middle-aged tech worker, purchased some molly.

If Edward Hopper, famed chronicler of American loneliness, had turned his brush toward Ridgewood, Queens, today, he might have found his subject in M One of the first things he told me about himself online was that he spent a lot of time alone, especially due to his “particular line of work.” On our way to a stop in Carroll Gardens, while simultaneously attending to a stream of messages on two phones, he expressed a wish for a kind of urban equivalent to citizens band radio, used by truckers to share information about road conditions, and for company. As he was running late to the next appointment, he offered to let me Uber with him up to Harlem before he returned to Ridgewood and prepared to venture out again at night. I politely declined, exhausted from three hours of nonstop movement, and went home.

Beyond the novelty of my “unpaid internship,” as one friend called the experiment, my afternoon with M reinforced my sense that meaningful cross-class contact has become increasingly rare in this city. Unsanctioned encounters with strangers, especially the most different from ourselves they appear, are often viewed less as socially generative than as suspect. For decades, critic and author Samuel Delany cruised the now shuttered porn theaters south of 42nd Street, which at the time were frequented by men of all backgrounds — more often than not poor, working class, or located on society’s fringes. “Situations of desire . . . are the first objects and impellers of intellectual inquiry,” he wrote years later in his elegy to Times Square — the city’s once seedy, beating, erotic heart-turned-neon-effigy for global capital. Delany makes a potent case for the rarity and importance of heterogeneous spaces in fostering curiosity.

Winter had naturally thrown a wet blanket on my social life and any attempts at romance. It didn’t help that my friends were spread across the boroughs. And the inclement weather exacerbated city life’s existing inconveniences. I’d feel it acutely when the bitter wind stung my face as I was Citibiking to the train station, where I’d have to wait and transfer again to reach my final destination an hour later. In the lead up to the experiment, I’d often remind myself that I had, in a way, chosen these things. If New York City had thus far taught me anything, it was that eschewing the algorithmically determined existence that is often framed as aspirational — wherein one smoothly careens from one point to the next — is the sacrifice demanded to realize the grand mythos of city life. Here, you never know who or what you might find just around the corner, how it might in turn change your life. But in exchange, you have to be willing to stake something — be it your time, energy, comfort, or safety.

So, for just over three months, I kept a record of such interactions: [Jan. 1] I split an Uber home from JFK with a woman returning from Argentina, who had recently moved to the city to be with her boyfriend. We rang in the New Year with our driver, watching the illegal fireworks from out the window along the LIRR underpass. [Jan. 9] I met my elderly neighbor — who I learned had lived in our building for over 40 years — because she had taken it upon herself to counter the rampant package thievery. Everything had gone south under the current management, she told me. [Feb. 7] A Facebook Marketplace seller in Sunset Park accused me of scamming him after I repeatedly ignored his clumsy advances.

**

About a week and a half after meeting M, I paid a solo visit to the East Village’s storied Russian and Turkish Baths, which has historically served as a meeting place for many kinds of New Yorkers. Its patrons, however, were by and large men (straight during coed hours, gay during select, explicitly designated windows during which anecdotally, it transforms into an orgiastic free-for-all, as a number of one-star Google reviews forewarned).

Descending the stairs into the baths, I found myself in the middle of a runway framed on both sides by tiled bench seating where over a dozen swimsuit- and towel-clad bathers lounged and conversed between rounds, assessing the new arrivals, myself included. Perhaps the contrast was not so stark in the past, but here in the crowded basement on 10th Street emerged a rare oasis. Not a single phone was in sight.

At the far end, past the pool and showers, was the Russian sauna, the largest and best-lit room with a low ceiling and three tiers of wooden bleacher-like seating configured in a U-shape. It was nearly impossible to find a seat without clambering over another body. Once every few minutes, someone got up to douse themselves with a bucket of cold water from the center wellspring, which upon contact with the floor immediately sizzled and dissipated upward into steam.

In addition to the health benefits, many bathers also enjoyed the psychological challenge of pushing the body to its limits, conditions that forcibly attuned one to the present. With everyone dripping wet, facing one another, and every word, cough, and sigh carrying immediately across the room, the sauna was ripe for socializing. In fact, it felt more awkward not to talk. Several times, I made eye contact across the room with A, who conversed in Turkish with the bathhouse attendant hitting a bundle of leafy branches against another prone bather. Over the course of multiple rounds getting up to cool off, A — tan, lithe, artfully adorned with tattoos — had navigated himself closer to me, though at a respectful distance two steps below. He eventually swiveled back and opened with a comment about the oppressive heat: “Bold of you to be sitting all the way up there.”

We discussed the bathhouses we had visited and liked; how the recent, distinctly corporate ilk (including one apparently powered by Bitcoin mining) mostly attracted the young, moneyed, self-optimization-obsessed, and largely homogenous crowd; and how as a result these appealed to us less than the old-school, low-tech variety, for which diversity and friction were part of the attraction. I mentioned that I usually witnessed at least one loud emotional admission to no one in particular and a middle-aged man, sweating it out a few feet away, chimed in, “This is our therapy.” For a major subset of heterosexual men, the sine qua non of real intimacy seems to be the literal act of laying it bare. Inversely, amid the clusters of seminude men, I was more on guard.

“We would love to be invisible the way a man is,” writes Lauren Elkin in her cultural history of the female flâneuse. As the experiment progressed, I became increasingly aware of how often real and perceived threats — part legacy of such classist, racist paternalism — were conflated, and the consequent necessity of discerning, where possible, the difference. My encounters with other women were largely polite and positive, centering around a desire for mutual recognition and perceived safety. Once, upon exiting the train station at night, I was accosted by a young traveler, who appeared to be around my age. She immediately latched onto my arm and incoherently instructed me to walk with her to a nearby hostel, which I did for most of the way in a state of semi-shock at such forwardness. 

But that night at the baths, I allowed myself to indulge in the city’s myth. I delighted in the companionship of my gorgeous conversational partner, who I found out had lived close by my current apartment for years while waiting tables in Union Square. We stayed until close and after, walked to the 14th Street station together and parted ways.

A day later, A texted asking if I knew where he could score clean molly, since, in his own words, he “didn’t trust anyone.” I asked what about me suggested that I was a reliable source, given that we hadn’t really broached the subject. It was the combination of having met me at the baths, along with my recommendation of an unlisted DIY ambient music venue. He wasn’t wrong: I gave him M’s phone number and we never spoke again.

The definition of what constituted “a stranger” eventually came into question: At the end of February, I bumped into S, an ex-lover from the year prior, an architecturally trained downtown line cook, in a yoga class on St. Marks on a weekday afternoon. [Feb. 23] Not too long after, some neighbors who I met while the city was on blizzard lockdown, independently brought up that they used to do yoga in the same loft prior to the pandemic. That was until the previous studio owners were exposed for running a sex cult and the whole operation got shut down.

After class, I proposed a walk to S. I described a photo project I was working on around ugliness, providing as an example of “spiritual ugliness” that I knew he’d appreciate: the VC-backed ghost kitchen, Wonder, hoping to make “dining out” involve less going out. We conducted a relationship postmortem — boiling it down to him, classically, being commitmentphobic — in the near empty north end of Tompkins beside the skate park, jointly contemplating the odds that we’d run into each other. After we split, I had mentally rehearsed the countless scenarios in which we might cross paths. The present was never one of them. Neither of us lived in the neighborhood nor had we ever discussed doing yoga with each other. The romantic in me wanted to call it fate, but more than likely it was just proof that our lines of work, and their unconventional schedules, belied a specific, shared sensibility. I remembered that he was the first to introduce me to Delany’s work.

“Well,” he asked, “What do you want now?” A group of college kids had trudged through the freshly fallen snow and started up playing ping pong ten feet away. In pursuit of desire, I had searched for the shape of myself in another. Maybe it existed not in one other, but across many others, a place, a city — being continuously built. I didn’t mention the experiment.