Illustration by Brian Taylor.

A few years ago, my friend Kabir raked in an amazing Christmas haul at work. “I got a cashmere sweater, really expensive wine, a super nice pen, a Le Creuset pan, a free dinner at Craft, opera tickets to the Met and a $150 watch,” he remembered. “Plus gift cards to everything from Dean & DeLuca to Banana Republic. I never got cash, but the gift cards added up to over a thousand bucks!”

Kabir is not a hedge fund manager, a high-end male escort, or—despite the fitting first letter of his name—a backup Kardashian. In fact, at the time of this unbelievable bounty, he was a 25-year-old assistant kindergarten teacher at the Grace Church School. 

When the holidays roll around, there are plenty of handy guides to tell you how much to give your mail carrier, your doorman or your dog walker. But what to get the beleaguered liberal arts grad marinating in Yellow Tail Shiraz and student loans who molds the mind of your child?

I’m referring, of course, to teachers, the most vexing of all gift recipients. They provide a service, sure, but educating your flesh and blood isn’t exactly on par with touching up your roots. Then again, you’re probably a lot closer to your stylist than to the person you entrust with your children every day. Their gift shouldn’t be a nominal tip, but it’s impossible (even bordering on inappropriate) to make it personal. And, perhaps most important of all, it should send the right message, whether you intend it as a token of appreciation, a status symbol, or even a cleverly disguised bribe.

I find myself already agonizing over a future of gift-giving. As a freelance writer, I may never make much more than a teacher’s salary, so will they understand if I eschew Bergdorf Goodman in favor of a pan of gingerbread? (What if it has Guinness stout in it, does that sweeten the deal?) Will the value of an iTunes gift card mean the difference between a fun, gossipy parent-teacher conference and one in which the teacher gives me the side-eye and pointedly calls me “ma’am”?

Teachers themselves attest that their haul this time of year ranges from a tower of home-made snickerdoodles to a necklace hand-picked from David Yurman’s private collection. “Gift certificates are probably the best,” one told me, “Because cash can be awkward.” But off the record, the consensus is that the higher the price tag, the better the gift—after all, there’s always resale value on eBay.

The city’s public schools are bastions of construction-paper cards, and well, worse. Susie, a teacher in Jackson Heights, gets “lots of Russell Stover chocolates, regifted jewelry and the like,” she said, adding that arroz con leche is a real treat in comparison. One wonders whatever prompted her to relocate to Queens from the Upper West Side, where a former private school colleague of hers was given $600 in cash one year. (“Any sort of thank-you means a lot,” she insisted.)

The thing is, public schools have tried to ban gifts outright. (I hear that Mayor Bloomberg also sends a yearly memo asking teachers not to accept presents of monetary value, which is summarily ignored.)

So what usually happens now is that a volunteer will collect money from everyone for a class gift, through a series of emails that some parents disregard altogether.“I don’t know what everyone’s situation is,” said a class parent in charge of just such duties. “But there are always people who give nothing and people who give a lot more than average, and am I going to think the people who ignore my emails are assholes? Yeah.”

Private schools have cheapskates too. One class parent recalls a “crazy rich” father who took issue with the $30 minimum donation she requested from each parent toward the teacher’s holiday gift. “You’re spending $30,000 a year to send your kid to school and you’re richer than God,” she said. “And you’re taking issue with spending $30 on your teachers?”

That’s chump change to Kelly, whose kids attend a private school where parents typically pony up $250 for teacher gifts. “Some give one really showy thing, like a bottle of nice Barolo, and others make a gift basket with a lot of smaller things that give the impression of being more extravagant,” she said.

This, naturally, incites panic. “You don’t want to be the only one giving a bag full of Clinique samples or whatever when everyone else is going big,” she said. “So right now, in early December, you get a lot more chatting during drop-off, with people finding out what everyone else is doing. You wonder, is this enough? Am I getting them less than everyone else?”

A few years ago, it was much worse. “All I remember is that one year I was buying little boxes of Godiva truffles, and the next year I was seriously considering getting my youngest daughter’s third grade teacher a Chanel wallet,” said Joyce, a mother of three daughters who attended an elite all-girls private school.

One teacher, who has been at her school for nine years and who refused to allow even her extremely common first name into print for fear of being fired, says that she once received a class gift (funded collectively by over 25 parents) with a retail value of almost $7,000.

To curb competition, some schools have started collecting money anonymously to divide equally among teachers, not unlike tips at a dive bar (although presumably more lucrative). Meanwhile, Brooklyn Friends, Brearley and Collegiate, among others, have a homemade gifts-only policy to avoid any haggling over money, but the results have been mixed. While some parents “buy cookies from a bakery and just stick them in a Tupperware,” according to one former teacher, other school parents interpret “homemade” to mean much more than cupcakes.

“A well-known photographer once offered to take my head shots,” said the former teacher. “And I rationalized it, because it was technically something he made. It was just something that should have cost me tens of thousands of dollars.” (Incidentally, a note to my son’s future educators: I would be happy to write a column about you for no charge.)

But the unrestricted, above-board free-for-all continues at plenty of places. And I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school to say that in the end, that is the policy that some teachers love best, if not parents. “The guilt that very rich parents feel at having their children educated and raised by young people making $29,000 a year is a strange thing,” Kabir—now out of the educational sector and resigned to his gift card-less existence—observes. “But, being young and broke, it was fucking awesome.”

The new Rockefeller Center location is the first of three Dean & DeLuca cafes coming to Manhattan in the next few months; the others are planned for the new New York Times building at 620 Eighth Avenue and the City Spire at 150 West 56th Street. The 2,500-square-foot Rockefeller Center location is holding a grand opening celebration all this week.

So what’s so revolutionary about this “new café concept”? It will boast “contemporary concepts and trends currently found in European cafes, markets, and food stores." Those Europeans and their cafes!

The distinguishing feature will be a prepared foods case, with complete meals to take out.

To Soho's Good Old Days

I'm always surprised when I walk into a brand-new restaurant that hasn't yet been written up and find it full of people. Where do they come from, and how do they know about it?

Giorgione, in Soho, is tucked away from the main drag, on a dark block of Spring Street between Hudson and Greenwich streets. It's a sleek, modern trattoria that reminds me of the ones I've been to in Rome (all it needs is a few Vespas parked outside for that final touch of authenticity). When I first came here, a week after the restaurant opened, the night was warm and tables had been set out on the sidewalk. Looking down the street, beyond the piers and the Hudson River, you could get a fine view of the magnificent old power station looming on the horizon like a Fascist monument, lit up in the colors of the Italian flag.

The maitre d' led us inside, past the bar and up a short flight of steps to a corner table. Just as I sat down on the banquette, Giorgio DeLuca came running up to say hello.

Anyone who's ever lived in Soho knows Mr. DeLuca: He was here before the neighborhood even had a name. Thirty years ago, when the only place to buy groceries was the corner deli, he opened a small cheese store on Prince Street. In 1977, three years later, he moved across the street, where he and Joel Dean established Dean & DeLuca, the fancy food emporium that had feathered game hanging from its ceiling and sold exotic foodstuffs that few people in those days had seen before, like hand-pressed extra-virgin olive oils and fresh white truffles. The store was so successful that, 12 years ago, it moved to a larger space on the corner of Broadway, where it became a prominent stop on the tourist circuit. But three years ago, Mr. DeLuca sold his interest in Dean & DeLuca, thus ending the era when he would patrol the store's marble halls, schmoozing with customers. Like so many other fixtures of the old Soho, he just seemed to vanish.

Now he's back-and so are his customers. They're coming here for dishes like squid served in its ink with

polenta (the dense black sauce goes down like chocolate), ceviche of bay scallops served in their shells, and thin-crusted pizzas topped with tomato and mozzarella. Among the kitchen's specialties are roast squab, which arrives on a golden mound of saffron risotto, and a thick veal chop with a wild-mushroom sauce.

Mr. DeLuca has always had a good notion of what people want. His restaurant serves straightforward Italian cooking (no prune gnocchi or foie gras with tuna here), and the prices are neighborly, starting at $11 for pizza to $24 for a veal chop. There's a seafood bar, of course. Balthazar, Keith McNally's French bistro at the other end of Spring Street, set this trend, and now restaurants all over town are outdoing each other with their fruits de mer platters. Giorgione's is smaller in scale than Balthazar's: The shellfish are set out on a mound of crushed ice by the bar in the front, and 10 different kinds of oysters are offered daily.

Everything-not just the shellfish-gleams in the restaurant. The tables have shiny metal tops you can see your face in, the chairs are leather and metal, and the floor is made of glittery white mosaic tiles. There are long gray banquettes down one side of the room, and the stark white brick walls behind them are stacked with shelves of wine. The kitchen is concealed behind a protruding, rounded white wall that looks like some sort of ancient Hopi Indian dwelling. The back of the dining room has a skylight, a giant smoky mirror and a vast back wall painted a luminous Giotto blue. As for the music, let's just say that it would provide fine background noise for picking out vegetables or choosing a hunk of cheese. But at least it's not intrusive.

Giorgione's wine list is entirely Italian (just as Balthazar's is all French), and the chef, Aldo Monosi, prepares classic Italian food that goes with it. The beef carpaccio, layered over warm asparagus and topped with slivers of Parmesan and truffle oil, is excellent. So is the salad of roasted beets with ricotta cheese, served in a raspberry vinaigrette with baby arugula, lemon and orange peel. Some dishes aren't quite there yet, such as the bland baby artichokes with diced yellow tomatoes, and the mozzarella di bufala served under a warm red pepper sauce. The latter was a bit like eating a pizza topping without the crust. You're better off ordering one of the pizzas, which are very good.

Mr. Monosi has a sure hand with pasta, beginning with his light, delicate crespelle (Italian crêpes) filled with ricotta and spinach, and his ravioli with mushrooms, truffle oil and sage. Spaghetti alle vongole is first-rate, made with Manila clams and loaded with garlic, olive oil and parsley. The trenette (a narrower version of tagliatelle), tossed in a creamy pesto sauce, is one of the best things on the menu.

Mr. Monosi also does a filet of perch baked in parchment with tomatoes, spinach, mushrooms, potato and white wine. When it's snipped open at the table, an enticing aroma is released. The fish is a little oily, but very fresh.

Not many restaurants have an old-fashioned dessert trolley these days. At Giorgione, if you're sitting in the downstairs dining room, it's wheeled up to the table loaded with cakes, fruit salads and tarts (there is also a delicious crème caramel ice cream available). The first time I came here, the pastry was rather doughy.

"Please try the fig tart again," said Mr. Monosi, who emerged from the kitchen on both my visits (since I had been recognized). "I fixed the crust. I got a recipe from a friend at Cipriani."

The new recipe made a world of difference; the crust was light and crisp, and the figs were perfectly ripe. The chef also makes a lovely tart filled with black and green grapes.

As we finished dessert, Giorgio stopped by to ask how we had enjoyed dinner.

"I don't want publicity," he said, somewhat disingenuously. "I want this to be a neighborhood place."

But the neighborhood is not, of course, what it used to be. Over the last decade, Soho has become a shopping mall full of billboards and giant chains. The art galleries are long gone; bankers and stockbrokers have taken over the lofts, and the old Dean & DeLuca has become a Club Monaco. Giorgio's former partner, Joel Dean, now looks out of his Mercer Street loft onto an Adidas store, which recently replaced the design store Ad Hoc.

"Poor Joel," said Giorgio. "I'm afraid Soho is going to get like Eighth Street," he added. "I mean, how many more sneaker shops do we need?"

None. But Soho is always ready for a good restaurant, and Giorgione is a welcome addition to this chain-store-ridden neighborhood. It brings back the best of the old days.

Two years ago, he said, he was subletting an apartment from a friend. He found a book on the shelf titled The Multi-Orgasmic Man by Mantak Chia.

"I've known women who have had six orgasms in a row," the Professor said. "That's always something I've greatly appreciated-I would be like, 'Wow!' It's a terrific turn-on, and something I didn't think was possible for men. I thought we were just wired differently. For me, orgasm meant ejaculation."

He read the book because he wanted the "Wow!"

"I wanted to have the sheer pleasure of that," he said. "And I thought it might be a way to understand women better, and improve how you are together."

He said he also had an occasional problem with climaxing too soon, and he hoped the techniques might help.

"A long time ago, I came after a few minutes," he said. "It was like, ' Whup ! Sorry !' And this particular woman I'm thinking of was like, ' Uck !'-and she slapped me on the back. It was a friendly slap on the back, and we just laughed about it. But the next time I didn't come so fast."

He read the book and started taking various Taoist meditation classes, including one called "Sexual Kung Fu," where he learned how to "retain semen." He practiced for about two years and just recently was able to experience his first orgasm where he did not ejaculate.

"It was breakup sex with a former girlfriend of mine," he said. "I knew we were saying good-bye, but subconsciously I didn't want to say good-bye. I wanted it to last. And I lasted for a mighty long time. I think we made love for one and a half hours. And then I had this warmth going up my spine. I was thinking, 'Hey, wait-something else is happening here!' I think it's similar to what women have."

Why didn't he ejaculate in the end?

"Women need to realize that it's not important whether a man ejaculates or not," he said. "They have this idea that they've performed better when a man ejaculates. Well, they can let go of that idea now."

After the breakup sex, he said he's been focusing on his "solo cultivation."

"I like ejaculating!" he said, "But now it's a game: How long can I last?"

A more elaborate version of withholding semen is sometimes called "injaculation"-a technical term describing when a man pulls his semen up into his body and, according to Taoist teachings, it gets absorbed into his blood. Most of the men I spoke with did not claim they had actually injaculated; they said they are practicing "semen retention."

In any case, the Professor said that he's ready to take on even more.

"One of my fantasies has always been to make love with two women. That sounds completely horrible!" he said.

Perhaps not surprisingly, he's started seeing a woman from his class. He said she likes the threesome idea, too.

"A few years ago, I would have been more tense: 'Am I doing it right? What should I do? What do the women like? Will they make love with each other?' All of that. Now I've got my staying power. I can just let it happen, he said."

In between forkfuls of baked eggs at Café Gitane on Mott Street, a 29-year-old yoga teacher and graphic designer told me how, within the last month, Tantric sex has turned his relationship with his girlfriend of two years upside-down. And not necessarily in a good way.

He had swirly brown hair, brown eyes and a slight gap between his front teeth, and was wearing a blue denim shirt with the sleeve rolled up above a diamond-patterned tattoo that circled his forearm. We'll call him Aaron.

A few years ago, he'd read some books and briefly took classes with a Taoist master in the city, but there were no fireworks.

"It wasn't even sexual," he said. "He was like, 'Learn this meditation and that meditation.' We were moving energy up and down the spine. Up and down, up and down. At the time I was like, 'I want to get to the fucking good stuff.'"

About a month ago, he found a shortcut.

"My friend went to a one-day workshop with a teacher named Carla," he said, "and he was like, 'I learned the techniques and they actually work and it's nuts!' And in my own sex life, there were lots of limitations. I wanted to go deeper with my partner. Deeper with myself. Deeper with sensual experience, on so many different levels."

So he booked a private session with Carla, who describes herself as a "Tantra Teacher, Love Coach and Intimacy Guide." The session was at her house in Queens. The price was $300 per hour. "Well-spent money," Aaron said.

The modern semen-hoarders can trace their roots to two traditions: "Tantra" is used to describe sexual practices coming out of the Indian Hindu tradition; Taoist sexual practices come from China. Ejaculation control is an important aspect of both. Anton, a Taoist instructor in New York who has studied both Taoist and Tantric techniques, said, "The Taoist practices have created more state-of-the-art techniques for mastering ejaculatory control." But becoming a master non-ejaculator can take two years. Men like Aaron who want to get to the "good stuff" faster get impatient and switch to Tantra. Which is how he ended up in Carla's apartment.

"When she told me to take my clothes off, I was like, 'Oh, my God,'" he said. "I felt like a 3-year-old boy who was suddenly naked in front of the whole first-grade class. And she's strong and powerful, and that's the scariest thing: I'm naked in front of this woman who knows this shit. Who lives this."

But he went with it, and soon he was having a kind of naked psychotherapy.

"We got through some shit that was so raw that I would never have gotten to in therapy, or it would have taken years," he said. "So I learned these breathing techniques and movement techniques and started playing with it .'"

With it ?

"Yes, it," he said. His eyes widened and he leaned forward and lowered his voice. "I did have an ejaculation, but it took fuckin' two hours. At first I was a little creeped out, and I was like, 'Now's the time to get the fuck out of here,' you know? And she was like, 'You were very honest and vulnerable and sweet and strong, and you're a special person, and go out there and see if you can engage your partner. Try it for a while-and if you can't, get out and find somebody who will."

He hasn't been able to get his girlfriend interested in his Tantric explorations, and furthermore she only wants to have sex about once a week.

"It becomes a drag," he said. "Honestly-because you become needy. And that neediness affects the interaction. I'm not getting the connection that I crave often enough. Sex once a week is like, 'Oh, seven days have gone by since I've had this.'" He looked sad.

"She'll have an orgasm, and then she'll be like, 'Are you done yet? What the hell is wrong? What's wrong? Why didn't you come? Could you please stop with all this?'"

So he's been doing a lot of "self-practice."

"When you get the control, you get to that point where you drive the energy up the spine," he said. "You feel little contractions, but nothing's coming out. I've gotten myself there a bunch of times in the last month."

Michael, a 29-year-old art director and design teacher, took a coffee break on a recent Tuesday afternoon at Dean & DeLuca on University Place to talk about how he accidentally discovered Tantric sex. He had almond-shaped green eyes, freckles and longish, mussed-up brown hair. He said he didn't really know anything about Eastern sexual practices when he met a woman last summer during a two-hour meditation workshop with about 200 other people inside a "Temple of Ishtar" at Burning Man, the annual massive be-in of artists and seekers in the Nevada dessert.

"We ended up in the desert, and it was the most intense sex. It was out-of-body," he said. "Our breathing was somehow just right. When you start using that breathing, it's amazing. My whole body got lighter. All the attention was taken away from my midsection. I was having this moment where I was blown out of the top of my head."

He wasn't on drugs.

"Time looped," he said. "I can't tell you how long we had sex; I would say probably two hours."

I asked her name.

He blushed and wrinkled his forehead.

"There was no space for names," he said. "We were both in pure 'Yes!'"

Back in the city, he took a seven-hour-long Tantric-sex workshop at the New York Open Center, where he met a practice partner, whom he described as "an Isabella Rosellini type." They practiced at his place.

"We had sex in almost a workshop fashion," he said. "It wasn't like, 'I'm going to rip your clothes off as soon as you get home.' It was fun and mutual, but after a while it was like, 'Yeah, this is ritualized and I want a relationship.'"

And he was eager to put his new knowledge to use.

"I used to get lost in this space of ' Wooh ! Woman !'" he said. "I used to come too soon. Why was I coming so quickly? Look at all the things I'd done to get in bed with her! Why didn't I want to be there having sex longer? What was I running from?

"With Tantra, you're confronting things. It has a way of talking to your heart that completely bypasses all the bullshit that happens here," he said, waving his hands in circles around his ears.

After he ended the "workshopping" with Isabella, he noticed that he was just generally living more in the moment. It wasn't just about the sex, though the sex was pretty good, too. Recently, he had a one-night thing at the Paramount Hotel with a woman he described as an "incredibly sexy fashion girl" from Chicago whom he'd known for just a few hours.

"I wasn't keeping score," he said. "I don't count orgasms. There were definitely peaks; there were waves and plateau changes. I was doing cobra breathing, where you're breathing strictly through your mouth as opposed to your nose. She was right in my lap, and we were able to really look each other in the eye. She was not aware that we were having a Tantric moment. I said, 'Slow down a second. Here. Does that feel good?' And she was like, ' Wooh !' It was fun! It wasn't like, 'Let's stop for a second and discuss the fact that we're going to have Tantric sex.' It was not like, 'Do you want to put some flowers by the bed so that I can be reminded of the fertility goddess?' Or, 'Let's fill a bowl of water so we can both look at it.'"

Alex bounded out of his office building just off Wall Street. He had an attractive, angular face and wing-nut ears, and he was wearing a dark suit, a purple dress shirt, purple socks, scuffed shoes and no tie. He said he was 30 and lived with his girlfriend of one and a half years in Park Slope. His mom is an energy healer in London, which explained his faded accent and maybe the purple socks. He didn't want to run into anyone from his office, so we took salads to Pier 17.

He said he first stumbled onto the concept of multiple orgasms for men when looking for information on the Web about Taoist meditation practices such as Tai Chi and Chi Kung.

"I was fascinated by the idea that I could have multiple orgasms for as long as I liked," he said. He took a seminar. He practiced the breathing and meditation techniques for four months. His first non-ejaculatory orgasm wasn't quite what he expected.

"The first time, I circulated the energy up and I had an orgasm on my tongue," he said. "It was like an explosion, like having Pop Rocks poured on my tongue, like an explosion of pleasure. I was absolutely clear that I was doing something off the chart. I was buzzing with energy.

"What you're doing is prolonging the millisecond before you ejaculate and keeping it going and extending it," he said. "So you have an orgasm, but you don't ejaculate. And then you can build up again and go further and higher each time."

Like the Professor, Aaron and Michael, Alex said several times that it's not just the sexual highs he's after, that he's also looking for intimacy and spirituality.

"I think guys are realizing that there is more to sex than just these tiny spurts of three minutes," said Judy Kuriansky, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Tantric Sex. "It can last longer, which can lead to tremendous benefits for them and also the woman. Guys are becoming more romantic and more spiritual and realizing this is cool instead of being goofy. "

"I do think men want to have more control over their ejaculation," said Sharna Striar, a sex therapist in Manhattan who sometimes teaches basic Tantric and Taoist principles. "Men want to be great lovers. It's not just about having a good erection; it's not about 'getting off' anymore. It's really about just 'getting on' with your partner in a very intimate and erotic fashion."

"I think what men are talking about with this is that it makes them feel more competent. Men want to feel competent, in control and powerful," said Dr. Frederick Woolverton, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and director of the Village Institute for Psychotherapy.

Does he think they're also using these practices to seek intimacy with their partners?

"Women are far more enthusiastic about intimacy than men are," he said. "This has just been demonstrated to me so many times. But despite everything, men yearn for intimacy. The problem is, when they get it, they don't know what to do with it. Intimacy, while desired, becomes threatening, and men sort of have to find their way out of that conflict."

Even if Tantric sex doesn't solve the male intimacy problem, it seems to make the lack of intimacy much more bearable.

"I think for a lot of guys, masturbating is like, 'Brush your teeth, wash your hair, jerk off, go to work,' said Aaron. "I think ejaculatory sex can start to feel that way. I know it has for me. To not have it feel like that is pretty cool. To maybe not even ejaculate-or if you do, to have brought it far enough so you're literally buzzing and shaking as opposed to feeling like, 'All right, grab a towel.'"

And maybe, without the climactic moment, it's not just the sex which is prolonged.

"When you're not ejaculating, it's hard to shut off," said Michael. "But it's nice. To not ejaculate and then get up and go for a walk with her after-that is probably the most incredibly romantic thing you could ever do. The city is dead. You're out, running around this grid, and you are just this live, electric conductor. You can hold on to her and feel really connected."

/

Transplanted Californians love to drone on smugly about how impossible it is to find superior produce, "real" fruits and vegetables in New York, like New Yorkers don't even know what that stuff looks like. And usually one just blocks them out–umm, excuse me, ever heard of Federal Express?

But that was before the Day of the Orange, when our beloved returned from an otherwise fruitless trip to Los Angeles bearing half a dozen gigantic citrus picked up for 20 cents a pound at "oh, you know, just a little stand off Fairfax."

They were oranges–or were they? They were as big as large-size grapefruits, barely fitting in one hand. What's more, they had these pores on top–what would be called navels in a regular orange–except that these navels seemed to be sprouting, sprouting little mini-oranges caught in ravenous midfeed at Mama Orange's belly.

Truth be told, they were grotesque. You brandished one at co-workers and they flinched. You felt faintly embarrassed to have it on your desk. People walked by and took potshots at it.

Still, it was perturbing to not be able to find a replica of this Angeleno super-orange in New York, where you're supposed to be able to find anything . A Valentine's Day jaunt to Gourmet Garage turned up blood oranges stained with red like Lady Macbeth, charming little kumquats, Joe-average navels–all presumably imported with commendable haste from exotic locales–but no fecund, grapefruit-scale oranges. Juan Vargas, the produce manager, promised he could get some, but he was vague about when, exactly. "The big ones–oof," he said. "It's very good fruit. Very nice and very sweet."

But Mr. Vargas was missing the point. These were not nice, sweet oranges. These were killer. Perhaps too killer for the Manhattanite's neurotically refined taste (which, let's face it, tends to prize things like fingerling potatoes and baby carrots).

Peter Romano, produce manager at Fairway, seemed to suggest as much. "Those are big monsters," he said as someone clamored for pignoli in the background. Apparently he'd been hooked up to the mega-orange by a special source in Florida, but turnover hadn't been great. "I did O.K., I didn't do too well," he said. "Unfortunately, people have to get used to them. If I were out on the floor a little bit more than I should be, probably I could be a salesman about it and make people buy them."

A phone call was placed to Dean & DeLuca, where a breathy recording eventually turned up a Kevin Pollack in produce. Did the fancy-dancy store stock the gigantic oranges? "Yes, we do, but what we have is a limited amount," said Mr. Pollack. "They're from California and also from Florida. They are a hot seller that we carry." Had customers expressed any shock–needed any explanation? "Not in particular. They kind of speak for themselves," said the produce manager in a tone suggesting that the average Dean & DeLuca shopper was worldly enough to handle oranges the size of bowling balls.

However, a trip to the actual Dean & DeLuca physical plant at 560 Broadway in SoHo revealed small, luscious persimmons jetted in from faraway lands, tangelos with obscene little nipples, a bin of Joe-average navels (priced at an astounding $1 each) and people in black leather blazers clutching espressos, and exactly zero rudely spawning King Kong oranges.

Down the street at Balducci's, assistant produce manager Mauritzio Madonia claimed that the time for the uncommonly huge citrus was past. "It's a very short season for those oranges," he said. "They are out of stock, they are not available no more. We had it about two months ago, that's it. It was the first time we got those oranges."

Did they cause a stir?

"I had no problems with those oranges," said Mr. Madonia "Nobody complained about it, you know. I don't know, to me it looked all right. I cut one. It was not bad. It was good. The medium, that's much better … We sell more of the medium than the large. It's not scary, just people, they don't know. They say, 'Oh, it's so big, what am I going to do with it for one person?'"

Perhaps New Yorkers are simply too selfish to understand, let alone to demand an orange that must be shared.

–Alexandra Jacobs

Web Purist Richard Metzger

Richard Metzger, 34-year-old founder of Disinformation.com, a Web site devoted to conspiracy theories, aliens, "magick" and the occult, stood in his West Village apartment showing off his treasures.

"This is a self-portrait of William Burroughs he did with George Condo," Mr. Metzger said. He was pointing to a narrow wood box topped by a basketball, barbed wire and one of Burroughs' distinctive hats.

His girlfriend, Naomi Nelson, 19, a former ballerina and now a student at Hunter College, was lying on a green couch across the room. "Everybody has tried it on," she said of the hat.

Mr. Metzger pulled a pair of beat-up eyeglasses out of a plastic bag tacked to the box. "These are William Burroughs' glasses!" he said.

Mr. Metzger grew up in Wheeling, W.Va. (population 34,000), where he spent a lot of time reading occult books in the public library. Now he has all this–the New York life, with the Burroughs souvenirs. On the logarithmic scale of Internet-gold-rush success, his ambitions look almost quaint. There are no I.P.O. stars in his eyes. Now, as a new batch of Web entrepreneurs compete with one another to do things like sell pet supplies or vitamins over the Net, Mr. Metzger looks like a purist simply because he still has a keen interest in what he does–not just faith that his business plan will be the next big thing.

He also worked on a TV show, for Britain's Channel 4, called Disinfo Nation . One of the programs was about people who think they were forced to participate in C.I.A. time-travel experiments on Montauk Point, L.I. Mr. Metzger wants to expand the brand: books, more TV shows and Internet sites for people who watch every X-Files episode and believe the National Security Administration may be monitoring their phone calls.

"It's not going to be for everybody," he said.

Mr. Metzger concedes he wants to get rich. At the Disinfo.Con, a conference held Feb. 19 at the Hammerstein Ballroom on 34th Street, Mr. Metzger told his audience of 800 people: "In a society where capital is king and when every fucking dipshit with a dot-com is making bank like they are printing cash in the cellar, and perhaps many of them are, the point should be to get as close to that AOL-Time Warner-AT&T-CNN-CBS-ABC-NBC-RCA money as you can." He added, "If they will give it, you should grab–and not think twice."

That's exactly what he's done. He started developing Disinformation in 1995 with funding from Tele-Communications Inc., a telecommunications company run by John Malone. Weeks after the site launched, TCI got wise and pulled the plug. Mr. Metzger was given the brand name from TCI and built Disinformation on his own. Last summer, he sold the company to Razorfish Studios, an I.P.O.-flush New York interactive agency.

After Mr. Metzger was kicked out of high school for smoking hash, he moved to Amsterdam. "I had been reading in one of those Time-Life travel books that pot was legal there," he said. In 1984, he ended up in New York. He took a job doing computer graphics for the Colgate-Palmolive Company and eventually started thinking about TV.

The whole Disinformation idea started out as a development deal he got with Showtime in 1992 for a documentary series called Weird America . It never aired, but Mr. Metzger kept at it. A break came when he cold-faxed a proposal to Oliver Stone. Mr. Stone, filming Heaven and Earth in Thailand at the time, put Mr. Metzger in touch with people who eventually got him in the door at the TCI-funded company where he started building the Web site.

On his apartment tour, Mr. Metzger moved on to a 1918 painting by "magick" expert Aleister Crowley. The painting cost him $6,000.

"This became available on, of all places, Ebay," the on-line auction Web site, Mr. Metzger said.

"Of course," said his girlfriend, rolling her eyes.

"On the very day we made our deal with Razorfish, I bought that," Mr. Metzger said. "It was a good day for me financially, and I knew I had to have it."

–Gabriel Snyder