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For the first WYSIWYG Talent Show, "Worst. Sex. Ever."

The Betty Page-ish bartender at the rocker bar on the Lower East Side is my new friend. I'm early for my date and the only one sitting at the bar, so we strike up a conversation as she shakes up an apple martini for me. I tell her I'm waiting for a Nerve date. This is Nerve date Number 19. Nerve is foreign to Betty Page so I have to explain it. Then she says, "I live with my boyfriend of eight years. I'm so glad I don't have to do the dating thing," she tells me. "It sounds awful. Not that you made it sound that way, but I just like knowing who I'm coming home to, you know?"

When Nerve Date Number 19 walks in to the smoky rocker bar to meet me ( -- this was back when you could still smoke in bars -- ) I'm more than halfway done with my first martini and the bitch is strong. Nineteen is in a Stryper concert shirt and an unfortunate blue and white trucker hat. He's shorter than I would have liked and his jeans are way too tight and a little too faded. Also, he smokes Dunhills and calls me "dude" and not in an ironic kind of way. As he sits down and lights one up, I gulp down the rest of my cocktail hoping I look if not graceful at least discreet. I notice the tongue piercing that shows itself whenever Nineteen says something. My bartender friend with her watchful eye is already making me another martini before asking my friend what he'd like to drink.

He's eager and attentive, focusing in on my lips and my eyes every time I speak. We get along well, good conversation over three more martinis, but we don't have all that much in common. He tells me about his last relationship -- a five-year stint with an old college friend -- so I know fairly early on that he could be boyfriend material, but just not my-boyfriend-boyfriend material. My mind fast forwards to the next best, or possibly better thing: unbridled sex with a stranger. Besides, I've never been with anyone who has a stud in his tongue and I'm admittedly curious. So, I decide that tonight, I'm up for feeling like a teenager, throwing caution to the wind and doing a little bit of what parents tell you you're not to do. "He's kinda cute," the bartender says to me when Nineteen trips over to the men's room. "Yeah," I shrug. "Cute enough."

Above a bar in a tiny apartment on West Houston is where Nerve Date Number 19 lives, and where we end up. The only way he can stand the noise, he says, is because he sleeps through anything and everything. It takes two alarm clocks to wake him up in the morning.

His studio is strewn with magazines and comic books. Overflowing ashtrays abound. The bed is an air mattress on the floor barely covered in wool blankets. This is kind of teenagery, I'm thinking. Nineteen could be the kind of guy I would have wanted to hook up with in high school. He has a certain brand of spontaneity that reminds me of my adolescence. He leads me to step on the bed to crawl out the window and on to the fire escape. There I come face-to-face with Mr. Chris Cornell, former 90s grunge rock God. He's larger than life on a billboard ad for a clothing line. Cornell keeps looking down at me, arms folded, like he's just waiting to see what I'm going to do with Number 19. There was a time when I loved Chris Cornell. Like, deeply.

"I like you," Nineteen says to me. He leans in to kiss me and I think he's going to topple right off of the balcony.

Sitting outside, I'm so drunk that I almost spit on a pedestrian below. Not because I'm trying to, but because I need to spit and can't think straight enough to do it where people aren't walking. The bald headed side walker looks up at me directly. "I am so sorry," I call down. "I am sooo sorry." Oh my God, I say to myself, how old am I?

Inside, The Clash is on his stereo at full throttle. While Nineteen sways in front of me, planting kisses on my neck, I hear banging. "Is someone knocking at your door?" I ask. He goes to answer it and as I watch from out on the fire escape, two cops step into his entryway. Some neighbor made a disturbing-the-peace call to 911. When the officers leave, Nineteen turns down the music barely one decibel and flips off his middle finger toward the door as if the cops were still standing there. Anarchy is alive on West Houston.

I go into the bathroom to pee, only to discover he has no toilet paper. I call this out to him and he says he'll find some for me. I don't even mind that this stranger is in the bathroom with me while I'm sitting ass bare on the pot even though that's a really domesticated thing to do with someone. He kneels down on the floor below the sink and starts rummaging through the cabinet. He's pulling everything in there out and onto the floor like he's ransacking the place: contact lens cases, tissue packs, a leather dopp kit, soap and a box of Magnum condoms, extra large, of which I take a mental note. He has everything but the toilet paper. I know that I could do without and sit there to drip dry like we used to do when we were teenagers when the only place to pee when partying in the woods was, well, in the woods, only deeper.

"I'm so sorry," he's saying, with the smile of a lush. "I'll go get you some T.P.," he says. Like a shot, he runs out of the apartment without any shoes on. He returns with a wad of paper towels he got from the Indian guy at the bodega downstairs.

Before I know it, we've fallen into bed and clothes keep peeling off. One shirt thrown over there, a skirt tossed somewhere around here. Though he says he could just kiss me all night, my vote is for some of the sex. Well, all of it. The bed being up against the window, Chris Cornell's eyes are on me the entire time. The tongue piercing offers nothing special, to be honest. I can hardly feel it. But as soon as Nineteen put that metal to my petals, I should have known that something was bound to end up wrong.

It's true what Nineteen said about being able to sleep through anything. I have never heard a man snore so loud and I've heard a lot of male snoring in my time. When he passes out post-some-of-the-sex, the sound echoes throughout the apartment, the garbage trucks outside are no competition for Nineteen. I'm sure the neighbors hear him nightly.

Everything looks different in the morning. I'm starting to sober up and haven't slept a wink for all the noise and the reality of what was to come. "The Clash on Broadway," a double CD, is on repeat. Blue light hangs above me from the open window next to the mattress and I hear the backing up beeping of a garbage truck on Houston. It's a Thursday morning and work is in less than five hours.

The back of my hair is matted and staticky from rubbing against the air mattress. The boy sleeping next to me stole all the covers and no longer appears to be the kind of boy I'd be crushed out on at age sixteen. He's a slightly balding thirty-something with trucker hat head and a hairy chest. If anything about last night was like being a kid again, it was the sex. It was Big Drunken Sex. We were too drunk to know what we were doing, too drunk to do it well. Would have been better if we weren't drunk, but who's to say whether or not I would have been there at all if I'd been sober. I seem to remember a vague sense that I was being slapped with a large piece of wet meat for ten minutes. I can still taste the makings of martinis in my throat and I swear I feel the beginning itch of a yeast infection from that stupid tongue stud.

I have a nightmarish vision of having to do the morning-after-thing with last night's date. Awkwardly saying good morning, heading out together to start our days, complete strangers with cigarette breath, wondering when he'll ask if he can see me again and not knowing how to respond. I look out of the window past Nineteen and there's Chris Cornell, looking down at me, arms folded, and he's speaking to me: He sleeps through everything, he's saying. I hear the voice in my head on repeat like a delirious person. He sleeps through everything, he sleeps through everything. I can think of nothing else. I get up and plant my bare feet on the sticky hardwood floor, trying not to look at Nineteen next to me. I find various articles of my clothing strewn on the floor around the bed. I pull on my underwear and my skirt as I walk toward the bathroom, which, I remember, was near the front door. When I sit down to take a quick pee I notice that the cabinet under the sink is open and everything in it is tumbling out on to the bright white tiled floor. I recall the fist of crumpled up paper towels that I wiped myself with just a few hours earlier and am forced to go without this time.

I find my way out of the apartment, not looking at him even once, creeping quickly out of the unlocked door and shutting it gently behind me. I walk down the unfamiliar hallway stairs, pulling on my shoes and my shirt as I go. Though I've had one-night stands before, this kind of sneaky escape is completely uncharacteristic of me, but I feel it necessary. And besides, when Chris Cornell speaks to me from a giant billboard over Soho, I listen.

When I come to a red door, I bound out of the building onto the street at 5am, according to my dying cell phone and I hail a yellow taxi to take me home where I can peel off my smoky clothes again and curl up in my plush, sunny bed for the next three hours. In the cab, speeding me over the Brooklyn Bridge, I'm thinking, I'm too old for this. This is my last one night stand.

And Nineteen stays put through it all, on his back, snoring. He's still drunk when he wakes up hours later, unsure of the circumstances under which he finds himself alone in his apartment when not that long before I'd been vaguely passed out drunk and naked beside him. And I think about what my Betty Page bartender friend said over my third apple martini the night before; that thing about being grateful for knowing who you're coming home to.