Notes on perverts I've encountered over the years (by me, a very wholesome lady)
As I write this, Substack is informing me that this post—a collection of loosely related vignettes about the perverts I’ve encountered over the years—is “too long for email.” Maybe that’s a good thing. I assume the platform will truncate this article, cutting off the most disgusting bits, or perhaps fail to deliver it to your inboxes entirely. All of this would be a blessing. As with all my posts, these stories are all quite true but not to be taken seriously. I’m just here to give you a cheap laugh. ❤️
I. Mr. Pee Tub
I met “Mr. Pee Tub” (or MPT for short) at a bar in the east village over 15 years ago. It was a sociable time back then, nothing like it is now. Dating apps had not been invented, and the city’s youngsters balked at the idea of signing up for Match.com or LavaLife. Instead, they flocked to bars, clubs, parties, or even speeding dating events1 in search of sex, love, or just someone to piss away the time with.
We had an instant connection, one thing led to another, and eventually I found myself in a relationship. After a couple months of dating, he invited me to a house party of a friend of a friend. At one point in the party, after both of us were slightly past tipsy, he turned to me with a serious look on his face and said: “Hey, do you want to go hide in the bathtub and listen to people pee?” I didn’t know how to respond. The thought of doing something like that had never occurred to me.
Why would I spend my time hiding in a bathtub when I could be mingling, laughing, and living wholesomely in the sunlight like a sane person? But instead of immediately declining, I hesitated. The purposeless of it intrigued me. “ok.” I said. And so, we vigilantly watched the bathroom until it was empty and unguarded and crept inside. We shut off the light, crawled into the bath tub, laid down, pulled the curtain behind us, and lay wait.
Over the next hour, people came and went. We lay in silence as people unbuckled, unzipped, dropped trou, and waited for the sound (of pee). First a trickle, then a heavy stream. We looked at each other and smiled and shook our heads. Every so often a stray fart would slip out from someone’s behind and I would softly cover my mouth to prevent a childish giggle from escaping. Once, someone had what can only be characterized as explosive diarrhea. MPT clutched me tightly to prevent me from laughing. At times, people would come in the bathroom together. We’d eavesdrop on the chatter and then listen for what always came next: the sound of a credit card lightly clacking against the linoleum, and then we’d exchange furtive glances that said “naughty naughty.”
I can’t describe the exhilaration of it. It wasn’t sexual in nature, it was just the thrill of doing something wrong and maybe getting caught. Sometimes it made me feel like we were the only two people alive. Other times it made me feel inhuman, like a house spider who had suddenly become aware of its own existence. We did this 8-10 times together over the next year, when the opportunity at select parties presented itself. Sometimes the parties were thrown by our friends or friends of friends, sometimes coworkers. they were birthday parties, music/art project launch parties, new years parties, engagement parties. Nothing was off limits, really. The only requirement was a bathtub with a shower curtain.
It was anonymous. I never saw anyone, or knew who they were. I couldn’t identify any specific person by the sound of their tinkle, grunt, gait, or even the occasional coke banter. In fact, once I left the bathroom, it was like it hadn’t happened at all. All I had were fleeting memories of prosaic bathroom noises. The ephemeral nature of it muted the faint voice in my head that said “yo what if this is actually kind of fucked?”
Eventually MPT and I broke up. It was a difficult break-up that left me melancholy for too long. One evening, after several months no contact, I received a call from his number. I scrambled to answer my phone, only to be greeted by the soft swish of blue jeans and the muffled sounds of city traffic, none of which stopped me from desperately yelling “hEllO?!?!?!” into the void with all the vigor of a World War I lady switchboard operator.2
A few weeks later I attended a house party solo. Late in the evening as the crowd thinned out, I crept into the bathroom, snuck into the bathtub, and pulled the curtain behind me. I stared at the ceiling for what felt like ages. But this time it wasn’t fun and it wasn’t exciting. It was just sad. I never did anything like this ever again. It was over.
II. The Sex Club Trolls
At the time of the break-up, I was living in absolute dump of an apartment in Soho with a finance bro and another chick I met off craigslist. While living there, I learned that a sex club called “the Bowery Bliss” had opened down the street. I structured my commute so that I would pass it every evening. I rarely saw people enter or leave the establishment, which imbued it with a sort of mystic quality. “What’s going on in there?” I often wondered.
Too cowardly (and broke) to satiate my curiosity firsthand, I opened my laptop and logged onto “Yelp” (the only website that you could review things on back then), and searched “bowery bliss.” Truly a bygone era, a time when people would publicly review swingers clubs on Yelp with their real name and photo visible for the world to see.
Back then, I always loved reading the reviews of sex clubs, slum apartments, and disaster restaurants/bars. In the aughts, NYC was absolutely littered with these seedy sex clubs, many of which had permanent locations unlike the “revolving underground sex parties” of today. Le Trapeze,3 for example. a pioneer of the sex club scene that had been around since the early 80s, which became a favorite of the Gilgo beach killer. It eventually fell into disrepair and lost its lease: the NYC equivalent of being reduced to ash like Sodom and Gomorrah by the grace of God. Before its closure, Yelp patrons noted that it “smelled of sweat of tears” and that although “the food was great” there “were single guys in the corners jacking off by themselves”—something I’ve personally only had to deal with in a buffet line once.
My favorite review of the Bowery Bliss, however, came from Brooklynite Joey G. He wrote of his dissatisfaction that patrons had been treating “the bowery bliss” more like a homeless shelter than a sex club, with people choosing to use the beds to sleep and eat on instead of fuck on (much to Joey G’s chagrin).
Every time I read this review I can’t help but laugh at the raw humanity of this sad tableau. If I came in from out of town to pay $120 to go a disappointing sex club there’s a small part of me that would just be like “fuck it I live here now” and start snacking on some General Tso’s chicken and watching the Gilmore Girls instead of leaving & shelling out $300 for a room at the Holiday Inn. I also love the “it gets the job done” like it’s a shitty protein bar that you eat solely to prevent fainting and not, you know, a sex club.
The other reviews were not much different. Even Time Out published a review from Grant Stoddard, one of those Buzzfeed-type “journalists,” documenting his sad experience at the club shortly after it opened.4 He wrote of one patron that sojourned far in search of pussy:
“[Peter] too had driven for hours to get here and seemed exhausted. When the club closed at 4, he’d be driving back. “Unless I hook up,” he said, hopefully yet solemnly. After asking K the same question three or four times, Peter put his hands in his lap, bowed his head, closed his eyes and dozed off.
This sort of broke my heart. They just wanted to connect in a way they thought would make them happy. They’d driven hundreds of miles and paid $120 to sit in a windowless room with mostly other guys.”
The article made me chuckle when it came out. The thought of a bunch of guys driving 6 hours to go to the Bowery Bliss just to watch other guys jerk off in a filthy dank room used to amuse me. But now it makes me feel a little blue, reminding me of an article I read last year concluding that male giraffes, on average, have to approach approximately 150 females before getting laid once, with many hopeful bulls killed by a lion in the process.5
III. The Carpet Worms
But all empires fall, and the allure of the city’s sex club scene faded along with the other microtrends of the time (froyo places, overpriced juice joints6, tacky brunch/day clubs). In true cockroach fashion, the fuck clubs didn’t die completely, they merely retreated underground and mutated into “revolving” private parties, where administrators could heavily vet patrons and charge obscene membership fees to ensure that no one would have to ask “a fat spanish guy eating a big plate of food” to move off the lo mein-stained fuck mattress.
As the sex club scene waned, the warehouse party scene, which had better music with slightly less men jacking off in dark corners, thrived. I liked going to these with girlfriends, you were guaranteed either a good time or, in the alternative, a good story.
At one party, I wandered off to find the bathroom, tripping on a rolled up rug along the way. I remember being angry that it was there. Yes, it’s a warehouse party and there’s garbage and exposed wires everywhere, but this felt like a hazard. Over the course of the night, I found myself queuing for the bathroom several times. At one point, I expressed my frustration over having to stand on the rug. “WTF is this doing here?” I asked. The girl behind me nonchalantly said, “You know there’s a guy in there right?” “In the rug?” I asked. “Yeah, in the rug. I guess it’s performance art?”
But the performance abruptly ended when word got out that there was a dude in the carpet, and people started taking liberties with stepping on him, particularly his balls and face, which enraged him. At one point he was yelling at people to stop stepping on his face, which just made everyone laugh and step harder. It was wild. Just like the elderly Titanic survivors said they could never forget the screams of the people jumping off the sinking boat, I think I’ll feel the same way about the carpet worm’s bizarre behavior that night. It’s a memory I’ll take with me to the grave.
I never thought I’d have to discuss the carpet guy again but, months later, I received a group text from a friend with the the following photo.
“It’s the guy from the party.” My friend said.
“What app is this from?” I asked.
“Feeld…” She responded.
“I see.” I said, quickly googling “Feeld” and then grappling with the fact that my friend would deign to sign up for such thing.
A discussion over the point of the app ensued, and I learned that the purpose of “Feeld” is to connect people with fetishes. Later that week, I went out with the group and two other friends admitted that they too were on “Feeld” and one of them even had a “Fetlife” account. All of this disgusted me (a woman with the sexual aura of planters’ Mr. Peanut), and I was suddenly struck with the urge to physically beat my friends and lock them in a praying closet like Piper Laurie’s character in Carrie (1976).
Before getting the text, I hadn’t really thought of googling “nyc rave carpet pervert” but now I was intrigued. What I found was shocking: there are apparently no less than THREE human carpets lurking within this city at any time.
Peter the Carpet, a 28 y/o bushwick man on “Feeld,” ready to pay 100 smackaroos to any woman willing to tapdance on his balls like Jesco White.
Kevin the Carpet: a much older gentleman who routinely makes appearances at NYC clubs and raves, but swears that he doesn’t get off on it according to this piece of cutting edge journalism by the Cut
Georgio “the Human Carpet” - the apparent OG of NYC carpet fetishists, according to this NYT piece from 2009.
But which one had I stepped on? Was it young Peter? Perhaps it was Kevin? Had I heard the Maltese accent of Georgio? I had to know. I needed closure. After reasonable investigation, I determined that I had stepped on Kevin based on his public meltdown at the party I had attended.
Let this be a lesson to women in this city (and perhaps women everywhere): if you encounter a rolled up carpet in a place where it shouldn’t be (basically anywhere other than a home depot), there might be a lil bitch inside who needs to get out of the kitchen (the rug) if he can’t take the heat (some fat guy in flannel stepping on his face & balls).
IV. The Mudfucker
After the carpet guy conversation, I was forced to confront a rather a horrifying question: were most, if not all, of my single friends on disgusting sex apps? The thought of it repulsed me and pushed into the “what I am doing here” crisis that every New Yorker experiences at least once in their time living in this godless city. All of a sudden, everything that had drawn me to this beautiful seedy metropolis seemed tedious, shallow, and transient.
I needed to get out. I wanted a sabbatical. I wanted to go purify myself somewhere where I could LARP as Henry David Thoreau for a few months before returning refreshed and before resuming being the lotus-eating city garbage I was born to be. I started looking for a cabin in the woods far outside the city, somewhere in the country. “Ah yes, the country.” I thought to myself, envisioning myself in head-to-toe L.L. Bean, drinking an “indian pale ale” with people who have never heard of some fellow named Vincent Gallo.
And I did eventually relocate to the country. By this point, I had lived in the city for nearly a decade. As someone who had gone years without saying a single word to my neighbors, one of the things I was hellbent on doing in the country was to become active in my new community. And so I joined the local community Facebook group in search of making connections with the locals, staying apprised of happenings, and just doing my best to not isolate myself in my new home.
While scrolling through, I came across a curious post from a man named Jack. It was a post about muddy boots made on a very rainy day. I thought it was odd, but I tried to repress the bitch in me and instead reframe it as whimsical. “These are the type of things they post in the country.” I said to myself.
But a week later the man made another post about mud. This one had several comments. I expanded the thread and saw that Jack had been tagging random women in the group asking if they had ever gotten their boots muddy. While I immediately knew this guy was a freak, much to my surprise most of the women tagged actually answered him in earnest.
Every week I saw more and more mudposting from this guy, with 10-20 random women tagged in each post. “How muddy do your boots get?” “Are your boots filled?” “How deep do you like to sink?” Eventually, he figured out how to post anonymously, and the bizarre mudposting became even more frequent.
Over three months, there were no less than 20 mudposts from this freak, the comment sections of which were full of naïve middle aged women—someone’s mother (perhaps YOUR mother)—eagerly replying to the mudfucker without a clue they had become complicit in a sinking fetish, which, of course, is a thing.
This was my first foray into a mud fetish specifically, but I had known for some time that many men have a quicksand fetish, and get off to videos of women slowly sinking into a pool of muck. Quicksand fetishists always amused me, partially because a big piece of me doesn’t believe quicksand is real. And before you get all indignant and leave comments on this post dropping scientific data proving that quicksand is real, please understand that I won’t read it or believe it. Getting off to quicksand is like jerking off to someone crossing a decaying rope bridge or a giant clam holding a diver underwater. It’s just cartoonish to me.
But perhaps there’s some evolutionary reasoning behind a quicksand fetish. Maybe 500,000 years ago a caveman named Gronk watched his mate sink to death in a pit of tar after reaching too far for a fig and grunted “she look hot” as the crown of her head disappeared under the bubbling pitch. And that irrational and shameful thought has been lurking deep within the folds of man’s reptile brain for millennia. We can never be sure.
In a twist that will shock no one, my efforts to make country friends were futile. I arranged several “ladies meet-ups” for young women in the area interested in typical women-y things (yoga, book club, happy hours), but it was all hard going. Things my friends at home would have laughed at (like the MudFucker or the Armie Hammer cannibalism scandal) were met with horror or, even worse, disinterest. I had to face the music: I was lonely and needed to go home. Besides, the MudFucker had all but shattered my idealized vision of the country. Not only was my Walden Pond all gross and muddy, there was some weird guy there sticking his dick in it. Although cliched, it really is true what they say: “no matter where you go, there you are.”
V. The BugSquisher and Epilogue
Why had the Carpet Worm and the MudFucker struck such a chord with me? I think it’s because they remind me of the deviants I dealt with daily during my time selling used socks (and other items I will not go into detail about) to perverts on the early days of the internet, which I wrote briefly about in this article:
I recall one particular goblin from the Netherlands who emailed me every day requesting to purchase a custom video of me stepping on things. At first, the requests were innocent enough, usually just wanting me to step on some overripe fruit like grapes or bananas. But of course the requests got darker, mostly bugs and, eventually, live rodents. It was deranged but this website did NOT have a block feature, and so I endured his unsettling requests for the short few months I was on the platform. “What’s he going to ask me to step on this time?” I asked, always opening the email out of morbid curiosity. “LEGOS?!”
BugSquisher dude creeped me out. He made the regular stinky sockfuckers look so vanilla in comparison. Once after reading one of his unhinged requests, I opened another email from a man asking to buy some of my chewed-up bubble gum for $150—a request I honored without hesitation, giggling quietly to myself over the thought of a man stroking to my chewed up bubblicious or perhaps even trying to clone me in his rudimentary science lab.
Which all brings me to my thesis of this article: I like some perverts! I hate to brand myself as the Goldilocks of perverts, but some of them just have that je ne sais quoi that makes me chuckle. Their dedication to their craft is so authentic, they would be pursuing it even if they lived their life in Plato’s Cave and never knew of a single other person who shared the same proclivities. It’s admirable really. Plus, how boring would this world be without the MudFuckers and Carpet Worms? Yes, they’re sick and twisted, but they’re mostly harmless and they make me laugh.
Other perverts disgust me. Obviously this includes men who harbor the “dark” fetishes that are inextricably tied to the pain and suffering of women. But it also includes the pseuds. So much of modern fetish culture feels performative. It’s the product of living in the internet age of instant connectivity and gratification. Download an app and pick a kink for the day, hell maybe one you’ve never heard of before. It’s all so mainstream it’s no longer subversive. When the entire staff of your dental office is on Feeld and all of your uncles and cousins have Fetlife accounts, maybe the kinkiest thing to do is simply unplug.
“Hello Girls: Topics in Chronicling America.” Library of Congress. https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-hello-girls
“Sampling the Delicacies at the Le Trapeze Swingers Club.” Saara Dutton. The Observer, September 6, 2011. https://observer.com/2011/09/sampling-the-delicacies-at-the-le-trapeze-swingers-club/
“Inside a new swingers club on the Lower East Side.” Grant Stodden. March 17, 2013, Time Out New York. https://www.timeout.com/newyork/sex-dating/inside-a-new-swingers-club-on-the-lower-east-side
“Flehmen, Osteophagia, and Other Behaviors of Giraffes (Giraffa giraffa angolensis).” Lynette A. Hart and Benjamin L. Hart, Animals 2023, 13(3), 354. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/13/3/354
“Is Juice Over?” Emily Laurence. September 28, 2021, Well and Good (lol). https://www.wellandgood.com/popularity-of-juice/
> imagine being in the bottom 3 quicksand girls
Pretty sure the bottom 3 quicksand girls *are* the top 3 quicksand girls, but ten minutes later
Despite perverts being the title, I did not see the carpet guy thing coming