Phew, what a scorcher! That's what the newspapers in England always trot out as their headline on the one really hot day each Summer. But today, it was certainly true here in Manhattan. When I went out for my morning coffee and perusal of the New York Times, it wasn't too bad, but later in the day it got pretty nasty.

Morning coffee on Broadway

It's amazing how ghastly expensive New York is. I payed a dollar eighty- five for a tall black coffee. Incidentally, that cafe is the only cafe I've seen that requires a host to seat you in the evening. Like I've always said, you have to compete for every little bit of space in New York.

My main morning chore was to go to the local gym, called Equinox. It was a great gym - spacious, modern, well-equipped, very clean, although with a low cutie quotient, unfortunately.

At the gym

After working out, I weighed myself and was shocked to find I'd lost seven pounds since the start of my trip. I'm guessing it's mostly muscle, since I haven't been able to work out as much while traveling.

The gym also had a great snack bar, where I bought lunch and more coffee, before heading back to my hotel to figure out my plan for the day. Over the last year, I've become much better at organizing my life. This came about largely due to the requirements of the job I just quit, where I had to manage a large software project. Gradually, the practices I adopted spread to my personal life, until today I have multiple electronic do-lists and schedules. But when you start having a do-list for your vacation, perhaps it's too much!

I really have to watch myself, otherwise I find that I'm focusing on knocking things off the do-list, rather than enjoying myself. (By the way, I ended up getting most of my do-list done today :)

First off, I took a horribly steamy subway ride down to the World Trade Center to see if I could pick up a discounted ticket to "Snakebit", a play I fancied seeing. Unfortunately, they didn't have any tickets, so I milled around for a while, looking up at the towers.

The triple towers of the World Trade Center :)

I took an even more steamy subway ride to Wall Street (I shoulda walked - the heat on the sidewalk was much less than in the subway stations) to visit the Skyscraper Museum. It was kind of disappointing, since they really only had one exhibition on, about the Empire State Building. I liked the place they'd set the museum up in, though - the space had, until recently, been a very old, well-kept bank branch, and all the original fixtures were still in place. In fact, it looked as if the museum had just moved in the day before!

In the Skyscraper Museum

I also visited the nearbye South Street Seaport Museum, to see their small exhibition on Ocean Liners, which included a truly magnificent 15 foot model of the Queen Mary. In comparison with this model, the rest of the exhibition seemed a bit ... well ... twinky. Just a few months ago, I had dinner on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, which was something I'll never forget.

South Street Seaport has been, for at least a decade, a major tourist attraction, and has a dock-side mall with restaurants and stores. Going there again for the first time in ten years brought back many memories to me of my first visit to New York. That was a time before I'd come out as being gay, and I ostensibly had a girlfriend, Paula Porter, who lived in Harlem. I'd met her in London the Summer before moving to Philadelphia to go to school, and a couple of months after arriving in Philly, I'd taken the train to New York for my first visit.

I say that she was my girlfriend, but, in truth, we were both virgins. She was, conveniently, a born-again fundamentalist Christian, who didn't believe in sex before marriage (when I'd met her, so was I a fundamentalist, but that's another story). On my visit to New York, her teasing nature had shown itself, as she playfully fondled my thigh several times. I don't know what she thought of my totally blank reaction to this.

I remember one beautiful Fall evening, we'd gone to the South Street Seaport, and layen out on the wooden arm-chairs overlooking the East River, and watched the sun disappear and the stars come out over Brooklyn, and talked and talked, intimately. It was one of those magical evenings you remember long after, where you learn new things about someone you care about. Every time I go back to New York, I wonder where Paula is now.

An armchair with memories, at the South Street Seaport

Poor Paula. In the end, she had to come to terms with two massive changes in my life. The first was when I visited her that time in New York, and I told her that I'd lost my faith and no longer even believed in God. The second, perhaps a year later, was when I wrote to her to tell her that I was gay. At first, she was amazingly accepting. I even went back to stay with her again in New York and, again, we talked and talked. But a few weeks later, she sent me a truly horrible letter, saying how much I'd deceived her. We never spoke again, apart from a brief exchange of letters about five years later, where she apologized for that horrible letter.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I can't help thinking that Paula's extreme reaction came from a supressed desire to do exactly what I was doing - get free of the shackles of a restrictive, religion that made everything sinful and wrong, and robbed life of joy.

Looking out onto the East River

Across the East River, right under the bridge, I could see Paul's neighborhood in Brooklyn Heights, where I would have been staying if things had gone according to plan.

Reluctantly, I descended into the underworld again, for a trip North on the Subway Line No 4, to go to the National Academy of Design, for the show "Men Without Women", which I'd wanted to see ever since reading about it weeks before in the New York Times. I particularly loved a piece by Allyn Cox - I wish I could get hold of a poster, but they didn't seem to have any. I also wish John, one of the guys I'd stayed with just before coming to Manhattan, could have seen the show, as he is a wonderful painter of erotic images of men.

"Young man in a Barn", by Allyn Cox, at the National Academy of Design

Finally, I headed back to my hotel, gratefully stopping a while in the shade offered by Central Park.

When I got back to my hotel, the maid service had been at work. Why do they have to rearrange everything back to how it started each day? The chairs that I'd arranges "just so" had now been arranged with a certain "je ne sais quoi" instead :)

Tonight, I'm having dinner with one of my oldest and best friends, John Paul, who now lives upstate. Can't wait to see him.