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said, care for a drink?”
    I’m spacing out, and surprised to see that my trick’s still there. I finally get a good look at him. He’s pretty cute, with just enough hair to still be sexy for a thirty-something, but I’m not going to let him get me that easily.
    â€œNo thanks, I’m still working on my iced tea.”
    â€œYou have a great ass. Mind if I touch it?”
    â€œYou can’t afford it.”
    I jump off the stage. The other clubbers have cleared a space
around us.
    â€œHere’s a hundred bucks,” he says.
    â€œWhat the fuck for?”
    â€œFor nothing ... For being sexy. Well, actually, if I’m giving you a hundred, I want you to use my name. It’s Jason.”
    â€œHi Paul.”
    Tricks like it when you fuck with them like that. I give him my tough punk look, my raised eyebrow and lip sneer, and take the money.
    â€œIt’s only half of the two hundred I won in a bet that I couldn’t get you off the stage. I don’t mind losing it.”
    I was obviously dealing with a professional. But a professional what ?
    Paul points to his friends drooling at the bar. They’re getting me more drinks, I can tell by the parade of rainbow-colored cocktail umbrellas.
    I’m getting woozy. I hold my glass up to the strobe lights and swish it around. It splashes in arrested clicks of time, but I can’t see anything suspicious dissolving on the bottom.
    â€œI might be able to give you the other hundred,” he says, chewing his liquor. “What do you do?”
    That question.
    â€œI’m a writer.”
    â€œPerrrfect. I happen to be doing a photographic project on New York writers in the nude.”
    I love seeing the flicker of a lie in a trick’s eyes. It makes me pre-cum.
    We leave Jackie 60, I sit my ass down in the taxi, and we’re off.

    Stuff I just happen to come across:
    Snot wads frozen into gumdrops on the sidewalk in winter, rats speared by syringes, Lego revolvers, hair-weave tumbleweed, congealed balls of motor oil, barely recognizable people lost in building cracks, doggie mud pies you find by surprise when the snow melts, ants swarming popsicle sticks in summer.

    While we crossed the bridge to Williamsburg, an industrial-cumhipster Brooklyn neighborhood, I sat alone in the back seat of the cab, chauffeured. Paul told me that it was good we were both artists because artists could feed off each other.
    Did he honestly think I was falling for his crap?
    The elevator doors opened to his loft and he flipped a set of switches. On came the lights and The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” and the blinds retracted to give a twinkling view of the Manhattan skyline.
    Living pretty large for an artist, he was.
    â€œGet comfortable.”
    I pulled my notebook out of my back pocket and laid it on the giant Lego coffee table, then flopped into a La-Z-Boy chair and put my feet up.
    â€œI mean take off your clothes.”
    â€œHow much are you paying me?”
    â€œTwo hundred. These shots might not even get printed. I’m only doing it to keep my camera from rusting.”

    â€œThree hundred or I walk.”
    â€œHave fun walking over the bridge. Two hundred.”
    â€œAnd fifty.”
    â€œTwo hundred. If I give you an extra fifty, it’ll be a tip because I like you.”
    I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to take control, so far from the street, so far from my comfort zone. He loaded film into his camera and tossed the empty plastic canister like a peanut shell. I shucked my jeans.
    â€œTell me about your writing.”
    â€œIt would go over your head.”
    â€œI like it when you’re saucy. Give your cock a squeeze. Make it purple and angry for me ... Riiiiiiight.”
    Click, flash, and that electronic camera whirrrr .
    â€œNow give me a sad face ... Sadder. Think about your mother dying. Your cat chasing a moth into the fireplace. Photography is about emotion.