The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I’ve always felt like I was the main character in a movie that was being projected in a theater that was, if not entirely empty, nearly so, hoping that at least somebody in the audience would realize that it was a better movie than the sparse attendance would indicate.

Rick laughed as he spoke. Billie Holliday was singing These Foolish Things on the juke box.

But I was uncomfortably aware that the writers seemed to keep falling down and the script was flat and the director had no real idea how to pull the whole thing together and breathe life into it. I was in the wrong movie.

He paused and took a draught of the amber beer from his stein.

Sam looked at him with inviting eyes.

He caressed Sam’s cheek, gently, and continued.

About my own performance I was unsure. If only someone in the audience would see it for what it was, could gather all its nuances. Then I would be satisfied. Then I could be sure I really was what I hoped I was projecting.

Sam nodded, smiled.

The dim red and orange lights of Benny’s back room gave him a compelling allure.

About the script I was at a loss, too. It was like I had to improvise my scenes all the time, without having seen the script—or the rushes for the scenes I wasn’t in.

You disserve yourself if I may say so, Sam said, placing a hand warmly on his shoulder as he did. But maybe that’s part of your charm.

It was just what Rick wanted to hear.

Rick smiled. I’m glad you think so.

Indeed, I do, said Sam.

Because, Rick said, confident enough in his interlocutor’s sincerity to risk revealing intimacies—because I am always sure that someone will understand—that there are souls like mine, which can resonate with mine, who can see something of themselves in me.

I understand, Sam said, his palm still pressing against Rick’s shoulder, their faces near enough to each other now that their breaths could mingle.

I do see myself in you.

He drew nearer and Rick pressed a long kiss upon him, parting his lips with his tongue and by the pressure of that kiss and the strength of his body Rick announced his intention to have mastery.

Sam yielded.

You’ll come home with me tonight.

Rick rubbed his hand against Sam’s inner thigh as he spoke and groped him.

And then another kiss.

I don’t think you understand, Rick complained with an edge of reproach in his voice.

I don’t think you understand, Sam returned not even bothering to stifle his contempt.

Or, at least, Rick heard it that way, and it made his sense of frustration, of hopelessness and desolation worse.

But didn’t anything have meaning for you? I thought you understood.

Nothing meant that I was binding myself to be your prisoner, or your slave, or your fan club.

How can you talk this way?

I don’t need to talk at all. I’m sorry you’re making our last moments together so distasteful, but I guess you have your reasons.

Last moments?

It was late October. The days were becoming darker earlier, and the sky which had been leaden all day was now a heavier lead, one single foggy cloud.

Against all this grey, Sam still stood out, despite his retraction—and, truth to say, such is our perversity, partially because of it—in his faded jeans and Frye boots, buff-colored suede bomber jacket, and fulvous yellow silk scarf, with his green eyes and thick dirty-blonde hair—as an iridescent brightness more desirable than anything else.

And then he was gone, the moment lost, and the rest of life looming either like an impassable wall or an endless empty stretch. It came to the same thing.

Always it comes back to this, Rick said, smashing a cup on the kitchen floor and then sweeping up the shards with a dust pan and a brush and spilling them into the garbage.

It is always this way in your stories, too, a reader writes me.

You take your lonely, self-involved characters through a disappointment to an impasse, which seems to be as much an impasse for you as for your characters. Then the only thing you can do is break into the story like an old Greek god coming down in a creaking stage machine—or like Tolstoy in the boring sections of War and Peace. You do some narrative pirouettes and somehow think you’ve done something to move the story forward, broken the narrative plane through some post-modernist tricks of intellectual refraction or that you’ve changed the focus. Perhaps you imagine that by this device your readers will construct the story for you after you have failed to do so—perhaps interpreting it like a dream, transforming an incomplete fiction into pages of a surreptitious autobiography or a psychological allegory of an otherwise inexpressible erotic dimension.

But it lacks drama. It lacks suspense. It lacks sperm and blood and blaze. It lacks incident. And life, after all, is full of incident. If it is not like that for you, then as a writer you must either find the drama in walking under a leaden sky in a barren world, or prime your imagination and invent some rattling fiction: discover the what-never-was and make it the experienced what-is for both yourself and your reader, or—or just give it up already.

But I don’t give it up for the words themselves are hypnotic. Mind—what is it but an amalgam of charged words? Mind insists on being expressed. It is active. It is the activity of words and must be discharged, as much as the sexual energy must be discharged—the one in the orgasm, the other in utterances. All we do in stories is give the words which constitute mind volume and substance through embodiment and thereby enable their discharge and perhaps fertilize some distant imagination, meeting in a dimension we have not yet discovered.

And perhaps even more so does mind need to be discharged when it, rather than the material world, is the stage for living.

But what of the present story? my reader demands, burdened now by the same frustration as my character.

The present story.

Monday morning.

Rick—the name he gives, cropped from Frederick, when he goes out cruising; dressed in sleek black leather kidskin jeans, tight on his thighs like gloves and a form-hugging black microfiber T-shirt with sleeves so short they are only epaulets. It showcases the hard nubs of pointy nipples, the contours of his chest, the ripples of his biceps—Rick.

But during the day, every day at the restaurant, Fred is the name he is called, and sometimes, although he tries to prevent it, Freddy, by the kitchen crew.

Rick opens the window and the noise rushes at him—traffic and sirens. From somewhere, a passing car radio, perhaps, the insistent beat of a hip-hop song booming in the mix.

He gets in early, opens the place. The kitchen staff arrive. He sits in the office and does the books, tallies yesterday’s receipts, prepares the deposit pouch, locks it in the safe.

He checks the dining room. Tables set for breakfast. Rearranges a place setting not quite properly aligned. Jeannie and Miranda sparkling in their red bustiers, black skirts and white blouses say good morning. They flirt. Chad calls in, says his sinuses are stuffed, won’t be in. The guests from the hotel enter.

That sweet gay-boy, he hears one blue-haired women whisper to another. If only he could meet my grand-daughter.

He covers for Chad, taking orders, but Jeannie and Miranda bring the dishes to the tables.

I appreciate it, he tells them after the breakfast rush as they sit in the closed dining room over coffee and cigarettes—they smoke; he doesn’t—before setting up for lunch.

Hey, guys, athletic Billy comes through the kitchen looking more like a Roxy usher in his uniform than a waiter and takes a seat.

I got your message, Freddy, when I stopped at my place this morning. Sorry I couldn’t cover.

Then he notices Miranda’s new short haircut. Foxy, he says. She blushes.

I stayed over Jacqui’s last night, he offers by way of explanation, and then looking directly at Rick, waggles his tongue and winks. Anyone else would look like a jerk doing it, but he actually looks cute and little-boy sexy.

It’s ok, Rick says, ignoring it. We managed. I expect lunch will be hectic, though. But Ned will come in early and help with the second hour.

More of the same until late afternoon when Maury the night manager arrives and Rick walks east passed the Washington Square arch on his way to Avenue B.

His spinning mind stops on a dime. Sam is there under the arch, leaning against the wall, one foot on the ground, the other pressed against the wall, his head thrown back. A business man in an overcoat, carrying an attaché case is facing him. Sam is smoking a cigarette. With his other hand he reaches out and caresses the man’s cheek. The man turns his head slightly, enough to be able to kiss the palm of Sam’s outstretched hand.

Rick hastens his pace to pass them by before he is seen. He is embarrassed.