Park and . . . Yikes.

Guys are always asking me in email or on an instant messenger about the park-and-ride lot I visit. They picture it as basically a roadside orgy, an outdoors bathhouse—a spot where cruisers approach my windows the minute I drive up, hoping for a taste of my dick. Throw in some roller skates and a chocolate malted and the cruisers sound like carhops at a sexy Treasure Island drive-in.

Obviously, it’s not like that at all.

No, the park-and-ride lot is first and foremost just a parking lot in the middle of nowhere where businessmen and women meet for carpools into Manhattan in the mornings. It’s where families from different parts of the county will meet to transfer crap for a weekend tag sale from one trunk to another. It’s the spot from which busses carrying school groups to a weekend theater matinee will leave, and where the parents will idle at the appointed time to pick them up again. At any given time, eighty to ninety percent of the cars in the lot are there for legitimate business.

Frankly, there are days on which the remaining ten percent aren’t worth hanging around for. I’ve had a little more time to myself than usual this month and I’ve ended up hitting the park-and-ride a little more than usual in the last couple of weeks. I went at eleven on a Sunday night (“Sunday nights are incredibly hot at this place!”, read the online review at a cruising site) to find myself the only car in the lot at all. I left after a very quiet and action-less fifteen minutes.

I paid the lot another visit when it was on my way home the next night. It was after rush hour, so there were plenty of open spots around. I was a little disappointed when, after a couple of minutes in a quieter corner of the lot, a woman pulled in next to my car. It was dusk, and her van had some kind of tinting on the windows, so all I could really see was a blond bob. I figured it was some suburban housewife picking up her husband after a late night at the office.

Then she got out of the car with a black clutch in her left hand. It wasn’t a woman. It was definitely a cross-dresser. Not an artful cross-dresser, either—that is, not one who went to any lengths to create an illusion of femininity. Basically, it was an old bald man with a wig in a Lily Pulitzer dress, with thick chest hair sprouting out of the neckline. He looked like Benny Hill’s sidekick, Jackie Wright, stuffed into leftovers from the local Methodist church rummage sale.

Luckily I’d already pulled out my cell phone to check mail when I’d thought it was a housewife; I slunk down in my seat and did my best to appear invisible as she made several passes by the front of my car in an effort to entice me. It didn’t work.

Another time I went back to find the place hopping—just not with anyone I found remotely attractive. After I parked my car, two guys—one Phillip Seymour Hoffman lookalike who was actually wearing a trench coat that made him look like a flasher, and the other a married guy with a comb-over who pulled a fifth of bourbon out of his trunk and took a massive swig from it before approaching—circled around my car like it was a fishing boat, and they were sharks from one of the Jaws movies who’d caught the scent of bloody chum. When I maintained a studious (and oblivious) concentration on my cell phone and proceeded to make an imaginary call to no one, they took off into the woods and presumably went at each other. And they were welcome to it.

A third man approached my car after they left. He wasn’t bad looking. He was tall, in his forties, and wasn’t actively cultivating the image and dress sense of a child molester. My bar isn’t too high, you know. “How’re you doing tonight?” he said, rubbing a bulge in the front of his jeans.

“I’m good,” I told him, giving him a great big smile. Men like my smile. I like to disarm them with it.

He was so charmed that he smiled back. I actually recoiled at the sight of his teeth. At the roots they were yellow. Out toward the ends, they were a rancid brown. Even as I type these words, I’m trying not to gag at the memory. I don’t know whether I was looking at active decay, or the kind of tobacco stains that came from religiously packing chaw into his mouth before every bedtime. But it was vile, whatever it was. It was so disgusting that I was actually speechless. “You looking for fun?” he leered at me with those brown teeth, as he leaned in to look through the driver’s side window.

I was totally speechless. There was no way I was having sex with that man. I didn’t want that mouth and those teeth anywhere near my dick.

Despite the fact that he’d already peered in to see the outline of my hard-on beneath the flimsy shorts I was wearing, I was considering initiating another imaginary phone call. Then the guy saved me, when he saw my left hand scrambling to cover up my quickly-evaporating arousal. “Aw, fuck,” he said, heaving his shoulders. “You’re married.” He wheeled around like a teenaged girl upset that I hadn’t bought her the pair of shoes she’d wanted. “Fuck. Why do I always have to fall for the married ones?”

“OH WELL!” I nearly shouted with relief, as I rolled up my windows. “SORRY ‘BOUT THAT!”

I think the tread marks are still there that I left as I peeled rubber home.