She had long black hair, a small, thin, nicely proportioned body, a harshly attractive face with her father's aquiline Jewish features and her mother's white German-Irish skin. She was young, like me. Smoked, like me. Saw sneeringly, like me, into the grimy heart of the pseudo-immaculate American dream or whatever it was we were sneeringly seeing into the heart of. She worked as a photographer's assistant. Her ambition was to become a photographer herself.

We met at a poetry reading held in a church. We drank wine out of plastic cups and talked, standing close to each other in the corner under a station of the cross. She agreed with me-or at least nodded eagerly-when I expounded on what a con job, what a lie it all was. Society, I mean, Western culture: all just a disguise for the will to power and money and sex. She nodded and said in a scintillating tone of admiration, "That is incredibly true."

And so to bed.

Now, the media have portrayed me as such a withered puritanical moralist that I suppose I ought to say right up front: I have no qualms whatsoever about the games lovers play, and may God bless you all in your variety. But this is my story, so I can only tell you about the things I did and how they affected me.

Anyway, Lauren and I didn't get up to anything too grotesque or dangerous, not at first. We just tied each other up with belts and bathrobe ties and slapped each other's butts and pretended to choke each other, snarling nasty words and so on. All in good fun, you know. And I mean, I liked Lauren well enough. I liked the fragility and the longing I sensed under her sullen, cynical hide. We had, I guess, a relationship of sorts. Pasta and philosophy in the wine cellars of Alphabet City. Wrist-bound, red-bottomed nights in her apartment-because her apartment was nicer than mine, a sparkly brick-walled wood-floored studio in Chelsea her father helped her rent.