At the time, I was working as a licensed sightseeing tour guide of New York City, atop the double-decker-tour buses.

I was upstairs on the second floor of those buses ten hours a day, floating fourteen feet above the streets of the city on an open platform, feeling omnipresent as I serenaded women from every habitable continent of the globe.

I was a tour guide with no sense of direction, working laboriously as emotions that run through saliva and overwhelm entire afternoons.

The double decker tour guide job, seven dollars an hour before taxes, was a shit job, like any other.  The only difference between it and other shit jobs was the internationality of it all.  Whereas most employees in this world get yelled at in only one language at a time, the double-decker guide is reprimanded in a vast array of exotic languages and accents.

The double-decker bus schedule runs on a tight, rhythmic circle, all day long, transporting thousands of voyeurs throughout this mass-concise-mess-of-a-metropolis. Passengers buy a ticket that is actually a two day pass that allows them to hop-on and hop-off, at the seventeen different designated stops.  The stops are, for the most part, just improvised spots chosen along random sidewalks splayed all over town.

When the schedule is working, a double-decker bus is stopping at every double-decker-stop along the double-decker loop every half-an-hour or less.  As if a subway-of-its-own-making, the buses depart the original terminal in thirty minute increments starting at 8:30AM until the final launch at 7PM.

The double decker emcee is working, actually, as a kind-of-train-conductor who, in between stations, plays the role of a tour guide. For, the tour’s narration is supposed to be consistent while the bus is moving, and so, the tour guide is responsible for announcing each stop as the bus pulls up to it then is in charge of helping passengers off the bus and checking to make sure those boarding the bus have valid tickets.

Right now, I’m describing to you the nuts and bolts of the job, but, it goes without saying, it was more than just a job to me.

First of all, to me, it was a great opportunity to do something I’d always wanted to do – stand up in front of crowds of people and start screaming about the hugeness of it all.

Second of all, to me, the double decker bus was not just an esoteric, tourist vehicle. It was an erogenous zone.

After all, the truly enormous heterosexualized, sexual frustration I was experiencing at that time, other men have used to conquer northern Europe with.  The double decker job was the closest thing to sexual intercourse I had going on in my life.

*           *            *