The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

While Lucy and Gloria are consummating their sapphic lust on stage, Livia, Mimi and I are hurriedly preparing the second Decan. “Larry arrived with the NCSS girls half an hour ago,” Mimi tells us; Larry’s our driver in Lauderdale. “We’ve got them backstage. It’s probably good if they don’t see any hijinks before they’re on stage.”

I nod. “Yeah.”

“Marc, Livia, listen. I’m still digging into Jeri. We just got her name an hour before the first Decan. I need more time. I’ll handle controls for the NCSS climax and do the cabinet assistant bit, but I’m going to vanish for the banana-eating until the end. Okay? I really need time on my computer and the phone. Only about an hour. I can’t get into this now, but I think that Jeri is not so much an ideal girl for the third Decan as she is a lightning-strikingly-improbable perfect illustration of everything it’s about. I can give you a lot of cues for the routine, but I need that time.”

“Gotcha. I’ll manage the music, and I think we can get Vendetta to add an extra set between the second and third Decans. Also, Jeri should really be kept backstage during the NCSS bit as well. It’s going to be raunchy, and I don’t want it to give her cold feet. The NCSS girls are ready for it — they can blame us, and use the scandal to advance their careers — but I think it might creep Jeri out.”

“Right,” Mimi says. “I’ll have Tilly keep her backstage and talk with her.”

Tilly’s the Gold Coast ringer from the Tequila Pops Tops routine. She’s a pretty fun girl, chill and interesting to talk to.

“Uh, ladies?” I ask. “Gloria and Lucy are, uh, making use of the roller couch we wanted to put Jeri on for the induction. It was by the side of the stage. We may need to sterilize it and clean it before the third Decan.”

“I’ll drop Larry two twenties and have him do that,” Mimi says.

“How’s the cabinet?”

Livia looks up. “Passed all diagnostic lists on-site,” she replies. “And I talked to Terri this morning. It’ll go great. Everything will.”

I flash a naughty smile. “I’m looking forward to the big climax.”

Everyone giggles. The feeling is mutual. We can be such utter, juvenile little perverts at times. We have schemes — zany schemes. Feeling like you’re fourteen again (and doing it right this time) is fun.

The three of us stride out on stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, the second Decan starts now! I hope you’re all primed to go, since I’m getting the distinct feeling that Lady Kensington and her mousy little assistant gave you guys an intermission show that really cranked up some heart rates — among other things!”

The tone of the crowd’s cheer indicates that, yes, something rad went down. I glance at Livia. We’re both looking forward to reviewing that footage. “Well, that first Decan sure was... what is the word I’m looking for here, Marc?”

I flash the crowd a shameless grin and make a ‘big bouncy ones’ hand gesture in front of my chest. “Breasty.”

“Yeah,” Livia laughs. “It sure was breasty. Maybe our most breasty ever. Well, we’re going to tone things down from here on out, just a little bit, although I do think there’s a bit the dudes in the audience are going to really like later in the show. But first, you know, we’re magicians. It’s time for some classic stage magic!”

The crowd cheers. It’s tepid, but that’s to be expected — they want tits and porn, not parlor tricks. But the symbolism in the next bit is important, and we’re going to give them a rather different kind of thrill to keep their interest. Here’s a real magician’s secret for you: shocking people, thrilling them, makes them suggestible. Their emotions are brought to the forefront; their defenses go down. We did it with Shanice, River and Norma Jean, getting them into the adrenaline-soaked mindspace where they’d cut loose and have a wild pie fight on stage. People in that mindspace hypnotize more easily, they sympathize more deeply and messages get through. And, being a variety show, we have a license to thrill. It doesn’t have to be straight eros, 100% of the time. We can mix it up, and we’re doing that in a very significant way here.

“Now, as I’ve said before,” Livia says, “I love the classic tricks, but I also love to put my own spin on them. This is the most complex and impressive variant I’ve tried yet, but I’m certain everything will go off perfectly! Well, mostly certain. You’ve all seen the Zig Zag Girl and the Mismade Girl, right?”

You probably have seen these tricks, albeit not by name. They are both tricks where a girl gets inside a vertical cabinet made of three boxes. In the Zig Zag Girl, the middle box slides to the side in a way that looks like it should crush the girl. In the Mismade Girl, the boxes get unstacked and restacked, and it looks like the girl is cut apart but alive, with her legs above her head and torso at the very bottom. They’re both impressive tricks, but we’re not really doing either, or a variant. This is all misdirection for the audience. While there’s a little bit of stage magic at work here, what we’re doing is less an illusion and more a wicked prank.

As Livia does patter and builds up the audience, Mimi and I roll three boxes out onto the stage. They are bigger than the normal boxes for the Mismade or Zig Zag Girl routines, a little over a yard on each side. Each side is covered with an opaque, two-color old-timey stage design in navy and orange. It looks kitschy, but that’s true to our brand. The boxes are heavy, so we actually have a little mechanical crane system to stack them. We circle them, subtly making sure all the mechanical parts interlink correctly. I do most of the heavy lifting, while Mimi is the misdirection — using her ridiculous, neon pink latex bimbo costume to flaunt her copious chest at the audience with lots of downblouse angles and labor-induced jiggling.

Once the three boxes are in position, we roll out the fourth item — which looks like a classic guillotine with a razor-sharp blade and a wooden frame. Our crane lifts it up and sets it atop the three boxes, and Mimi and I climb little staircases to slide the guillotine into a special ridge on the top surface of the top box. If a girl was standing dead-center inside the three boxes and the guillotine blade fell, it would cut her neatly in half from crown to sternum, separating the left side of the body — and the left hemisphere of the brain — from the right. That’s very much the intended symbolism.

“So,” Livia continues, “we’re going to need some volunteers from the audience for our trick. I need to warn you, this trick can get a bit scary, so we need a lady well-conversant with all things scary! How about... yeah, you! Get on up here, Terri!”

A petite, short-haired blonde makes her way out of the crowd. She’s dressed in a black frilly blouse and a red skirt, and even the loose clothing doesn’t conceal how busty she is.

She’s an oil wrestler using the alias Terri Lariat, from the “Broad Squad” — the same troupe Molly works for. She’s also known as Lisette Crauer, however, and is what is known in horror fandom as a Scream Queen. She has the distinguished honor of having played a horny, dumb teenager killed by both Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, though it didn’t bring her much mainstream name recognition. She’s not afraid to get racier, either, as her risqué graveyard striptease routine in one of Dario Argento’s zombie films showed.

More recently, she’s made Z-grade, nudity-driven pseudo-horror like Slave Girls of the Outer Rim, The Spa That Dripped Blood and Sorority Babes and the Murder Makeover. I understand she has a real passion for low-budget film, and sometimes directs as well as starring and flashing. And she’s in the messy wrestling circuit, here and at the Tropicana, mostly to raise money for her indie films. Livia knows her in depth and has told me a fair bit about her — the two of them go way back, and she put us in contact with Molly. We’d have used her for Molly’s role, but she just got into Lauderdale today.

“Wow, folks, wow! Anyone recognize this girl?”

When Livia asks that question, Mimi and I scan the crowd in a rapid but detailed manner. We’re looking for hot girls that clearly do recognize Terri, not just as a Summers wrestler but as Lisette Crauer. We look for a bit punkier girls — leather, piercings, darker clothing, tattoos, black eyeliner. We want horror fandom, because they’ll be less likely to be offended at what we’re about to do to them and more likely to take it as a cool story to tell.

One stands out immediately. Hi, Roach, welcome back! I see how enthusiastic you are. I don’t care if you’re going to take this in good spirits or not, you owe me one for what I let you walk out of here with on Monday! So I signal Roach and bring her up while still scanning the crowd. The next pick is a brunette in a strapless white one-piece and a hula skirt. She’s got black lipstick, and body language suggests she’s a huge fan of Lisette Crauer. The pick is a bit libido-driven, though — she’s cute and buxom, and Mimi has told me... things... about strapless tops in relation to the content of this routine. Our fourth girl is a cute but heavily tattooed Asian who I pluck because of her cocky stance and torn-up denim jacket with the anarchist symbol on the back.

Once all the girls are on stage, Livia walks them through the standard Trips oath. The brunette looks a bit nervous, but all the girls ultimately agree. After that, Livia turns back to the audience. “Now, this next trick is pretty thrilling and maybe even a little bit scary. If you have a weak heart or a weak stomach, leave now! This is going to be a serious, classy magic routine — I promise not to mess it up and turn it into a series of tawdry, contrived excuses for these lovely ladies to please remove more and more clothing!”

The Asian anarchist looks vaguely annoyed at that. I think she’s hoping for a real thrill. Well, she’s definitely going to get one! The brunette in white, conversely, is busy fangirling at Terri.

The crowd cheers — obviously, that’s exactly what they are hoping for. It’s actually misdirection, however. We may or may not get to see a bit of skin from our volunteers, but it’s not the focus of the number. It’s going to be a bit more extreme than that. I take the four female volunteers aside and we form a kind of football huddle. “Listen, ladies. This routine actually can get quite tense at moments. It’s really not an excuse to get your clothes off. We don’t want to traumatize any of you. We picked you because you look like you’re all the kind of girls who enjoy horror films.”

“Yup,” the brunette in white says.

“Don’t worry,” Roach says to the Asian. “If it gets scary, you can hold my hand.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m up for this.”

“Okay,” I say. “I want you all to know you’re not in any real danger. The thing with us not doing the trick right is patter for the crowd. Nothing here can really hurt you —”

“Spoilers!” the Asian anarchist complains.

“— but, if you want to sell to the audience the opposite impression, that would be super-peachy.”

“We’re gonna freak the normies?” Roach asks.

“Yup!” I reply.

All four girls seem enthusiastic about that, albeit with very different motives. Terri’s our contact, a rebel and a natural showoff, though even she doesn’t know the routine’s punchline. The brunette’s a fangirl of both her and horror in general. The anarchist wants to freak people out, and be thrilled. Roach wants to be macho, and possibly “comfort” anyone who gets scared. I picked well here.

Mimi and I lead the girls over to the chamber and open the three doors. Roach steps in first. There’s a triangular wedge on the bottom that pretty much forces the girls inside to stand facing directly forward with their legs spread. That’s not for pervy reasons — well, it’s not only for pervy reasons — though they clearly get the pervy bit and play along. Roach actually has to unzip her tight leather skirt to spread her legs, which she has no problem doing. She hands me her leather jacket before getting in, and I set it over a nearby chair. She actually looks really good in her tight, faded Metallica t-shirt without a bra — and, keep in mind, I’ve seen her in a balloon bikini and nothing at all. Some looks just work for some girls.

I stop the anarchist as she’s going in. Her tattered denim jacket is covered with safety pins, weird political emblems, chrome rivets and other hand-crafted stuff. It looks like some effort went into making it. “Miss, your jacket is tattered and has dangly bits. I’m concerned it’s going to catch on the rails at the edge of the boxes.”

She looks down at me. “You just want a better look at my tits,” she says sarcastically.

“Yup,” I agree. “I’d love a get a little peekie at your perkies. I’m sure everyone else here would as well. They seem really nice. But your jacket is also legitimately a safety problem.”

She walks over to the chair and tosses the jacket on it, leaving her in a loose black tank top. Then she throws up her arms and yawns very theatrically, thrusting out her chest and stretching her top. She pauses to consider for a second, then pulls the black tank top over her head and tosses it on the chair atop the jacket. The crowd cheers. Even after the complete nudity-fest of the first Decan, the anarchist still manages to get a decent pop by just having a sense of showmanship.

She puts her hands on her hips and saunters back to me, all while keeping a dry, sarcastic veneer. Her insouciant little C-cups bounce a bit with each step. “Well... there you go. This what you all wanted to see?”

“You got some damn fine chest cannons, baby. Is there a chill breeze here or are you just unusually horny?”

She gives me the middle finger, but it’s playful. “Get in the box, sweetie.”

I’ve just shown more respect for an anarchist’s personal property than I’m sure any anarchist has ever shown for anyone else’s personal property. One of life’s little ironies, you know?

Next was going to be the brunette, but Terri actually steps in front of her and into the chamber. I let her change up the script, and figure out why shortly after she does. The girl in last is in front, and will be facing the audience. Why not let the horror fangirl “audition”?

So the brunette is the last in. She’s acting more demure and nervous now, but I’m pretty sure that’s because she’s play-acting “girl in a horror movie” rather than horror fangirl.

Mimi shuts the cabinet doors once all four girls are inside. She cues up the music. We’ve set up special speakers to give a very deep, low, reverberant bass — both for the ominous music in this bit, and for the hypnotism that will come afterward. It’s hard to set up sinister and foreboding ambiance in the noonday sun during Spring Break... but we get at least a bit, and that’s important here.

Livia walks over. “Now, as I’ve said, I know you’ve all seen the Zig Zag Girl and the Mismade Girl, but we’ve got a very special twist to the routine, one that we think pushes it beyond the impossible...”

As Livia continues her patter, I can hear noises from the cabinet.

“Yikes!”

“Well, someone’s got some adventurous hands.”

Don’t worry, ladies, we won’t leave you alone with Roach much longer.

Livia’s carrying a showman’s cane. She walks over to the cabinet and raps it once, decisively, with the cane — and all the sides of the boxes fall away, clattering to the ground like a house of cards knocked over. It really is a spectacular cinematic flourish. We’re left with the four girls, crammed together in a row, in a tall rectangular plastic case with transparent Plexiglas walls. For bonus points, when the opaque squares fall away we catch Roach in mid-grope, with her hands firmly grasping those cute Asian ta-tas.

Livia delivers the bombshell. “Have you ever seen this kind of trick with a clear box?!”

Now, that kind of trick with a clear box is... just impossible, and anyone stopping to think about it will realize that. And we aren’t planning to try it — this is just setup for the punchline. But we’ve earned a fair bit of buy-in from the audience, and they seem genuinely awed at the possibility we’re going to try this for real.

Livia reaches into a square case on the stage and pulls out what appear to be two huge, square steel blades with wooden grips on one end, being a yard on each size. They would fit perfectly into the edges between the boxes, appearing to cut the girls horizontally just like the guillotine blade would bisect them vertically.

“Now,” Livia tells the audience, “these blades are really, really sharp. I’d pass them around so you lot can inspect them, but let’s be honest — it’s Spring Break and I know many of you are smashed out of your gourds right now, and I don’t want the Summers staff to have to mop blood off the stage.”

That gets laughter, but the blades gleam in the sun and actually look quite menacing, so it’s nervous laughter. “Those look... really sharp,” the horror fangirl whispers nervously. Good acting — I think, at least — and our mikes in the chamber convey it to the audience.

“So, without passing this around, how can I... ah, perfect.”

Livia sets one of the blades down beside the case it came out of — the second blade will never get used — and hefts the first one up in the air with both hands, using body language to “sell” it a weight it doesn’t really have. She “spontaneously notices” a folding chair off to the side of the stage, and kicks it out into the center of the stage, then walks over to the chair. “How’s this for a demo?”

Livia brings the blade down on the chair — obviously a pre-prepared prop — and it’s neatly bisected, falling to the ground in perfectly-cut halves. Livia sells it with charisma, body language and propwork, though the sinister music from the unnaturally-deep bass speakers we’ve scattered around Summers really does help. The audience gasps rather than laughing. Awe, and a real threat to the girls in the box, has been established. It’s not going to last too long, though, as we pace this faster than any Vegas routine. Now that the setup is done, we’re going to cut right to the meat of the matter before the audience has time to get skeptical — pun intended.

Livia walks up and hands the blade to Mimi. Of course, as our bimbo, it’s her responsibility to screw up the act with flair equal to Livia’s in setting it up. As Mimi takes center stage, I walk over to the control panel.

Mimi walks up to the chamber and edges the blade to get it into the lowest slot, around the girls’ thighs. She fumbles (and jiggles) a lot, looking incompetent, and making the girls nervous. Hilariously, Roach actually looks scared and the topless Asian cutie seems to be holding her hand to comfort her. Sometimes, life just gives you great, subtle comedy material without you having to do anything to earn it.

“Don’t worry,” Mimi assures our captive girls, “this turned out all right in at least some of our rehearsals!”

Mimi finally gets Tab A in Slot B. “Okay,” she says, “here we —”

She seems to stumble and push the blade forward unexpectedly. It’s well-acted. The blade only goes a few inches into the three foot wide chamber before hitting the girls’ thighs. Mimi presses a concealed button in the blade, and a spray of stage blood squirts out of its fake edge, running down the volunteers’ legs. Also, the blade’s surface has inked fibers like the tip of a marker, and it leaves visible red lines on our captives’ legs where it struck them.

“Oopsie!” Mimi squawks.

“My thigh is bleeding!”

“Mimi!” Livia hisses. Her lips are white, and she’s selling genuine fear fairly well. “What did you do! Didn’t you put the safety buffer pieces in when you were putting the cubes together?!”

“Um... I might have... um... forgotten?”

Livia’s gaze travels up the cabinet to the guillotine atop it nervously. When she speaks, it’s with a tightly controlled tone. “Mimi. Get those women out of the cabinet. Now.”

“Right, boss,” Mimi says, her voice trembling. “I remember this. The door catch should be right... here!”

Mimi reaches up and taps the case, but it’s actually me quietly pressing a button on the control panel that makes the guillotine start rattling back and forth ominously.

There’s a moment of dead silence. I’m surprised, honestly. Livia did it — she took a crowd of Spring Breakers wanting bare titties, lewd dancing and sapphic overtones and managed to totally transfix them with the tension of a stage magic act. Now that’s talent!

“Mimi,” Livia says in a dull monotone voice filled with dread, “that was not the door catch.”

I press the second button. The guillotine blade lances downward and vanishes from the audience’s line of sight. Horrifying — and horrifyingly loud — feminine shrieks pierce the air. The walls of the transparent chamber are plastered with a slick, visceral redness. Something that might be human intestines can be seen dangling, vaguely. Feminine handprints press against clear glass and slide down, leaving a trail in the redness.

The majority of the crowd screams, clutching the person next to them. I count out seven seconds of utter terror for the audience. We can’t go longer than that, as we don’t want the packed standing crowd to stampede and trample each other.

I press the third button. The ominous music cuts out, replaced by a comedy “wah-wah” sad trombone sound effect. Our projector casts out the word “Gotcha!” in red block letters.

“Calm down, folks,” I say into the mike in my most confident and masculine leader-voice. “It’s just a little prank, to give you all a thrill. The ladies in the chamber aren’t hurt.”

Livia grins. “They probably want to give us a right solid switch across the ears as soon as they get free, though. Don’t be cross, birdies — you took the oath...”

So, now let me explain the trick and what actually happened here.

The guillotine blade is actually paper-thin. It’s literally a banner. We’ve got a mesh grid of that invisible thread I told you about in the Tequila Pops Tops bit to form the parts of the guillotine where the blade isn’t there, and the blade itself is... well, it’s not tinfoil, because that crumples in a very obvious way, but it is a shiny metal foil that’s not sharp and can be rolled up into a roll like paper. When the guillotine blade “drops”, what actually happens is the bottom spool is motorized, and it’s like transferring paper from a roll at the top to a roll at the bottom — but some of the “paper”, where the blade isn’t, is instead a mesh of invisible thread. Make sense?

And the chamber... ah, that’s the fun part. I’ve already explained that Mimi is into WAM. Actually, Livia is too, and honestly it’s starting to grow on me as well. So, the idea seed that led to this routine was wondering what kind of weird pretext we could use to get unsuspecting, cute women into a gunge tank without them realizing it was a gunge tank. The symbolism for this specific show, with cutting women in half, was paired with the idea later. Inside the chamber there are a number of tiny, servo-directed ball nozzles. The mechanics that guide them come from a specific brand of spy camera, and we usually pair them with an actual spy camera.

I actually have little targeting reticles on the control panel for each jet, that I guide with a joystick. It’s a neat, if expensive and complex, setup. Livia’s got an heavy-duty industrial pump that can generate quite a lot of pressure. She originally got it for the syrup bit in her halftime debut show, to pump it in and out, though it’s actually designed for heavier sewage in a wastewater processing plant. Today it pumped nine gallons of ketchup out of five high-pressure nozzles in just under ten seconds.

The apparent intestines are just strings of raw breakfast sausages, dropped on the ladies from above.

The screaming in the live show is a horror-movie soundbite, but for the N-VHS release we dubbed in the four girls’ real screams. We weren’t sure how the real thing would turn out beforehand, but after the fact I can say the answer is: very nice, very loud and very naughty.

Now there is one additional salacious detail here that’s actually pretty raunchy. These servo-nozzles can get us substantial pressure — not enough to really harm anyone, but a mildly forceful spray-jet that could knock over a beer bottle from a few yards away. And... all three of us are perverts. One of the nozzles is on the bottom, on the edge of that triangular ridge the girls had to spread their legs over.

We said we wouldn’t do it, unless it was the right girl, one we thought would be game for something that rude. Well, folks... I am a bad man. I gave in to temptation. I shot a hammering stream of pressurized ketchup directly up Roach’s skirt, and pounded her between the legs with it for a good three seconds. Most of the streams aren’t that hard, being more wide-angle, but that one was. And, while we aren’t distributing any upskirt footage, you can see the expression on her face in slow motion as it happens on the tapes, and it’s... let’s just say it’s memorably entertaining.

Folks, don’t feel too bad for Roach. She is pretty shocked and a bit humiliated, but I wouldn’t say traumatized — and I’m pretty sure she will be able to work out any angst she might be feeling about the incident later tonight during a rather pleasant sushi dinner. Pun intended.

Anyway, Mimi unlocks the chamber for real this time, opens all three doors and helps the stunned women out. We really went to extremes with this one — they’re just plastered with ketchup from head to foot. Well, Mimi says that WAM is supposed to be like that — the more mess, the better. I’m not sure — these girls are kind of sexy, messed up, but they don’t hold a candle in my memory to the erotic intensity of Livia’s olive flesh lightly splattered with suggestive whipped cream from the Risqué Rope Routine.

The brunette is first. She takes Mimi’s hand and steps down out of the tank. She laughs. “Holy shit,” she says. “My heart is pounding. That was insane!”

Now, Mimi had shared with me and Livia one rather naughty bit of trivia that apparently WAM aficionados are familiar with. Gunge is not water. It is heavy, and being viscous it sticks to clothes in a larger volume than clothing absorbs water. When the clothing is strapless, well...

The brunette raises her hands to wring ketchup out of her long hair. She stretches a bit. Her formerly white, strapless one-piece has taken on a large amount of ketchup, and thus a fair bit of new mass. (Her straw hula skirt was already on the floor of the chamber when she stepped out.) It begins to slide downward. I see the left nipple pop out. Oh, yeah, it’s gonna happen...

She starts to look down, noticing too late. Her mouth opens. The garment, well-lubricated with ketchup, slides off her pert young boobies and gathers momentum as it falls. Her legs are neither spread nor tightly clamped together — the perfect position. The swimsuit passes her waist and just keeps going, turning inside out. It lands at her feet with a loud, wet plopping sound. For a brief magnificent second, we get some full frontal — lovely natural torpedo tits, with pink nipples made erect from fear and cold ketchup, perfectly trimmed black bush, odd crucifix tattoo above a shapely navel, shocked and mortified expression.

It’s all the more picaresque because we can still see the line of the swimsuit — her whole body is plastered with ketchup, except for the areas the swimsuit formerly covered which are perfectly clean. That doesn’t last, however — her arms snap up to cover her breasts and pussy, which mostly has the effect of smearing sticky ketchup all over the last clean parts of her anatomy. I’m sure there are portions of my readership that will find that very titillating. I’m not yet sure at this point in my life that I fit in with them, though.

Slowly, she stops being horrified at her extreme wardrobe malfunction and begins to chuckle ruefully, unable to deny the humor in her strange situation. She’s still covering, though, and definitely does not seem ready to start flaunting it. “Could you, a, could you help me with my swimsuit?”

“Sure, possum,” Livia says. “I’m going to need to wring it out, though.”

The brunette steps out of the fallen swimwear. Livia picks it up and wrings it out. Ketchup drops to the ground in large globs. I see mischief flash in Livia’s eyes and she fights with temptation. I can totally imagine her swinging the soiled garment over her head like an exultant stripper and tossing it out into the audience, sending the bashful brunette scurrying into the crowd naked after it — but she doesn’t. She holds out the suit at ankle level. “You’ll need to raise your hands,” she says, “so you might want to turn around.”

The brunette does, giving us a nice ass shot to go with the split second of tits and pussy. She wipes excess ketchup off her body first, facing away from the audience — but I can tell Livia is enjoying the jiggle show a foot from her face. The brunette does manage to get dressed again. It’s now a pink swimsuit, though, and just damp enough to show off hard nipples clearly and pubic hair faintly. Nice!

You might be familiar with this brunette cutie; she’s currently acting under the name Veronica Zeali. She’s done mostly disreputable B-grade horror stuff for Roger Corman, but you can also see her in at least one A-list flick as of the time I write this — The Haunting of Josie Masters, and she’s now moving more into indie horror. She’s something of a cult sex symbol these days — and we bagged her first nudity on film. Not to brag or anything, I just wanted to... er... brag.

We do get to know her a bit, though not immediately after this show. She’s horrified at her wardrobe malfunction when it happens, but will think the whole thing is pretty awesome in an indie-punk way later. She wouldn’t have got on stage with our oath and reputation if not for the chance to meet Lisette Crauer, but it retrospect she’ll say it was a good deal for her. After all, her first nude scene is definitely memorable, and it gets her some much-needed attention and exposure. Pun intended. I’m reminded of that thing Livia told me, about how women get more willing to strip off the more theatrical weight and glamour a situation has.

Over this time, Mimi has helped Terri out of the chamber and she’s also stripping as much ketchup off her body as she can. She looks vaguely annoyed, but not truly angry. Compared to the shit she’s been through in some B-movie shoots, our little stunt was a day at the office.

The Asian is next; she’s riding a major adrenaline surge, jumping up and down, flaunting it for the audience and raving about how “fucking hardcore” this was. Finally Roach gets out. She’s a bit shaken, and pissed. The visible splatter pattern around her crotch is also... way more overt than I had predicted it would be. I’ll resist making a crude joke about menstruation, even if many boys in the audience show no such restraint.

She walks over in a very threatening, domineering way to directly lean over me. I know you’re never supposed to say this, but... she’s hot when she’s angry. If I felt she was really hurt, I might not think that any more, but right now... yeah. Definitely hot. I play it cool. She glares at me. I mute the mike, so she can speak to me and not the audience. “You,” she says, “run a very nasty show.”

“Hon, you took the oath when you came up here.”

“Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

“If you were at the controls and the other three were in the box, would you press the button?” I ask.

I meet her gaze. Neither of us says anything for a second. Finally, she just chuckles and gives up, hostility dissipating. “I’d grind the shit out of that button,” she says. “I’d have so much fucking fun you couldn’t pry my finger off with a forklift!”

Suddenly it’s like we bond in some way, and she leans closer to me and whispers conspiratorially. “But why me? I mean, you could have nailed that delicious Asian piece-of-yes-please with your gizmo and you pick me? If you hit her, that would have been so fucking hot!”

I shrug. “It’s a live-by-the-sword deal. You’d do it to someone else, so I felt it was fair to pull it on you. Also... you underestimate yourself.”

She chuckles. “Ok, I get it, but you know I’m not into —”

“I know exactly what you’re into and what you want. Go make your move while she’s still riding the adrenaline high.”

So Roach scurries off happily, and I yet again suffer no consequences for doing something deeply obscene and inappropriate. Man, I love the Trips lifestyle.

We roll out our portable shower — yeah, the same one from the Noodle show — and we let the girls wash up. Roach strips off her ruined Metallica shirt and shows her large, pendulous breasts while eye-fucking the anarchist, who in turn flashes some brief bush. Terri’s loose blouse gets a bit see-through when wet, but it stays in place. Veronica’s swimsuit gets even more see-through — and her constant efforts to make sure it stays up are both endearing and oddly arousing. As the ladies clean up, Livia interviews them. “So, ladies, we need to ask you. How does it feel to be cut in half?”

Livia moves to ask Terri first, hoping her scripted answer will guide the other girls in the direction we want, but the topless anarchist grabs the mike aggressively first. “Awesome! It feels awesome! I can still hear my heart beating! I feel alive!”

Terri answers more thoughtfully — of course, it’s Livia’s scripted answer to set up the third Decan. “I guess it feels... liberating, in a way. Like you can cut away all the parts of yourself you don’t want and just be... free.”

Veronica is rueful but not angry. She doesn’t realize yet that we set her up to lose her swimsuit — we’ll admit it on the phone, later, when we get her to sign off on the release footage. “This was... this was definitely a thing that I did today. I’m not sure what to think yet. It was well done, though, and I can’t help but admire the humor and cleverness involved in it. So, well played.”

“Life is messy,” Roach tells the audience. “I guess sometimes you have to get all messy and fucked-up too, if you want to get the most out of it.”

I think it’s a fairly clever line, especially considered in the context of what you would say to get a punk-anarchist chick to respect you. As much as I might disdain anarchists, though, I think there’s some truth in that sentiment regardless.

We get the ketchup girls bundled into bathrobes and off stage, and roll away both the shower and the cabinet-guillotine, before we bring the NCSS girls on stage. Mimi, two stagehands and I actually roll everything but the shower offstage while Livia interviews the ketchup girls. Once we’re done, there are three bar stools on stage, about a yard apart and a metal frame in front of them about four yards high and six across — kind of like a giant coat rack, but with downward-pointing lights and cameras focused on the three bar stools. The control panel is now backstage.

We roll the shower offstage. Livia picks up the microphone. “Folks, we’ve got a real treat coming up with some very special guests. I’m wondering if any of you are familiar with New Century Swimstyles, or their models... the Daughters of the New Century?”

There’s a cheer from the crowd. “If you’re not, you’ve probably still seen these models in various places — in beer commercials, in music videos for major bands, in racy calendars... and sometimes even in major Hollywood motion pictures! Now, I’m sure some of you have noticed that there are three of these amazing young ladies right here in Fort Lauderdale, right now, shooting a calendar spread for Budweiser. They’ve agreed to come join us for an interview... and my silver-tongued Lord of Seduction over here has even managed to work his wiles and talk them into participating in one of the sexy contests that have become such a trademark of Summers on the Beach!”

The crowd goes absolutely ballistic — the boys far more than the girls, obviously. For once, though, Livia shuts them down rather than working them up. “Guys, guys, curb your enthusiasm! These are sadly the kind of respectable girls they like in Montana and Los Angeles, not the kind of respectable girls we like here in Lauderdale! That means, sadly, that this is going to be a show with absolutely no nudity, so don’t be expecting that. And no, this isn’t a lead-in to some gimmick that will get them out of their clothes. But... we’ve still set up a number with them that we think all the guys in the audience are going to find sexy. Like really, really hot. Trust me, guys, you don’t want to miss this show! An hour from now you’ll be telling me it was really worth being here for. Just... just take my word on that.”

The male audience is subdued, but intrigued. I wonder if Livia is on the verge of introducing these meatheads and frat boys to a more subtle form of eroticism, actually piquing their imaginations — but no, what we have planned is still pretty blatant, even without nudity. Still, she’s got buy-in from the male crowd, at least. The women look a lot less happy, and they’ve been plenty enthusiastic for the cavalcade of T&A we’ve put on stage so far. Indeed, many of them were part of that cavalcade!

And that’s probably the real root of it — the girls aren’t grossed out by other girls flaunting, but they — especially the ones who actually popped their tops, but also their peers who were living vicariously through the braver ones — don’t like models who won’t strip upstaging them. And that’s exactly what Livia predicted, and engineered. She suspects they’ll be a lot more enthusiastic by the end of this routine; I think she might be right.

So after a bit more patter, I escort the three Daughters of the New Century on stage and seat them on the three bar stools. They’re dressed in everyday clothes — jeans, sneakers, loose T-shirts — that are fashionable but still chaste by the standards of Fort Lauderdale. Yet, they look like supermodels, and are oddly alluring. Part of it is the hair — all three have the glamour girl hair down pat, and the makeup is perfect. Their clothes might fit in at any high school around the nation, but they look like they stepped off the set of a daytime soap opera — one of the steamier ones.

The boys are intrigued in spite of themselves. The audience girls don’t like these models at all. It occurs to me how much of this routine is parasitism on the NCSS marketing push, all the efforts their publicists and marketing men have put into branding these women as special, elite and sacrosanct, while also making sure everyone knows they’re still Girls Next Door™. Here’s a spoiler, folks — they’re gorgeous, and they’re nice girls, but they’re not that different from any other girls in the modeling world.

However, we can’t dare let that on. During the interviews with them Livia and I seem, if anything, a bit awe-struck. We have to establish them as being on pedestals, after all, if only so we can rather rudely shove them off said pedestals in true grand guignol style. In so doing, we hope to titillate the men in the audience, entice the girls with drama and schadenfreude, advance the careers of the NCSS girls through scandal and, oh yeah, indulge our own depraved fetishes in the process. Sounds like a great idea, right?

Livia and I interview each of the three NCSS girls in turn, and discuss a bit between them. The bit goes on about thirty minutes, and it’s indescribably vapid and banal. Livia and I are on our best behavior, not showing any signs of our usual naughtiness, and the girls are in formula good-girl personalities. Basically, think of the most banal Debonair Playgirl of the Month interview you’ve ever read, and add more cardboard and faux-sincerity.

We’re actually a fair bit creepier and more predatory than usual here, too. We usually play up the sleaze and strongly hint that we’re going to trick girls in some way when we drag them on stage. Here, we’re professional and smooth and really working to make the girls feel falsely safe. You would think we are terrible people, O Uneasy Reader, if I hadn’t shared the conversation between myself and Sandra Venturi where this was all arranged. Of course, this is for a reason — not to trick the girls, but to trick their bosses at NCSS, to make it clear the girls are innocent and have no blame in what’s coming next.

I’m not going to relate the whole interview segment, because it’s boring as shit. Instead, let me give you my own personal overview of each of the three girls, and thus grant you some actual insight. I won’t learn much of this until later, but it will be useful to my readers to help picture the girls and their performances and reactions in the contest.

You already know Sandra Venturi. Physically, she’s the tallest of the three. She has piercingly blue eyes of a seriously radiant hue and perfectly-formed red lips — not the plump bow lips that guide the male subconscious to think of blowjobs, but the lips of a more classical kind of beauty. Her hair is dirty blonde, and has that amazing look that makes you imagine it was recently wet when it’s perfectly dry — swept to one side and clumping into strands, yet still having volume. Her face does intense looks really well — I can see why she’s a photo model. I bet her most popular photos have her looking directly at the camera with an intense, challenging stare.

She looks smart but aloof. She’s the very picture of intimidating — I imagine guys walking up to her with a pickup line, meeting her sharp gaze, stammering something inoffensive and walking away shyly. She doesn’t do innocent, nor really dirty — unless it’s the dirty of a really jaded aristocrat with an active sexual imagination, who thinks unspeakably depraved things silently as she gazes at you with those eyes. If I were going to cast her in a movie, it would be as a vampire queen — the one the audience knows is scary but never suspects is a vampire until it’s too late.

Up top, she’s a C-cup, not that I can tell in her current clothes. Her Aura is stronger today — she’s not playing innocent, but she is playing demure very well. I doubt anyone but me would describe her as feeling lusty — but I do think she’s anticipating what’s coming up. She makes lightly flirting jokes, always staying in the carefully classy range — but she is clever with dialogue, and laughs at her own gaffes just enough to humanize herself and come off as very normal as opposed to an ice queen. She’s witty, but she keeps her wit in very strict bounds. In public, at least. That phone conversation made me wonder if she shares some of my kinks, which... definitely interests me.

Does Tracy Ponderosa sound like a sports car to you? Tracy Ponderosa sounds like a sports car to me. I suspect Tracy Ponderosa sounds like a sports car to Tracy Ponderosa too, and that’s why she chose the name. It definitely fits with what I said earlier — the idea that the Daughters of the New Century are the Lamborghinis of women. She’s a half-Taiwanese, half-native-Hawaiian grid girl and race queen — that is, what will later be called an Asian import model; the cute girls you see at car shows, doing sexy car washes and lounging on the hoods of cars worth more than their life savings.

She’s sassy and a bit rough, with a carefully constructed tomboy attitude. It’s not fake — she can fight, she can drive and she can fix things. I think she might have a bit of a vehicle fetish — she talks about how hot riding on motorcycles with men in tight leather gets her, and she does own both a Suzuki Katana and a Mitsubishi Starion. Needless to say, she’s loaded and has a high lifestyle — though apparently she’s also often in debt.

In retrospect, Tracy was never going to make it big with NCSS. I can tell she isn’t towing the lines the other two girls are. NCSS girls don’t have her kind of tough attitude. They’re supposed to be down-to-earth, normal and relatable in personality, while also being aristocratic and elite in their tastes and station. Tracy’s got brash attitude, independence and cocky confidence, but if I’m going to be honest she’s dimmer than the other two as well — not a bimbo and not vacuous, but also not a long-term or analytical thinker. She’s an impulsive and playful risk-taker.

Tracy has some nice D-cups, though I’m pretty sure she bought them — not the norm for NCSS girls. She’s got the very full blowjob lips, wears more makeup than the other two and has a bit of muscular development as well as a tiny but noticeable scar along her neck. If I were going to cast her, it would be as one half of a cocky detective duo in a T&A-driven, cheesy detective series set on a tropical resort — the kind of thing where the leads constantly tease each other and flirt competitively. She’d be the tough streetwise lead to balance the more introspective, intellectual, angsty male lead. Of the three, she’d be my first choice to bang on hotness alone — with Sandra a very close second. In retrospect, that might be because she’s the least “NCSS” of the trio of NCSS girls.

Regan Michaels is a weird girl who initially seems to be a very normal one, until you realize that her normalcy is her weirdness. You know the boring cliches that make up at least one out of every three Playgirl Profiles? That’s Regan. Most of the Debonair Playgirls, of course, are savvy models who know what sells to men, and how to seem sexy and wholesome at the same time. Regan likes long walks on the beach, moonlit dinners, sensitive but confident men, horses and astrology. She’s a rural girl, a bit new to the big city. Regan is not dumb; in fact, she’s quite smart, with a degree in veterinary medicine. That’s... not easy to get. She also has an indie travelogue column in a local newspaper where she reviews both cities and the fine-cuisine restaurants she visits within them.

She comes off as very introverted and reserved, and in some ways faintly sad. Her eyes are very dark and deep, and speak of there being layers to her that nobody sees. She reminds me of a sheltered girl with a very possessive boyfriend — the kind that wants to keep her innocent, safe and away from the normal world, and crushes down anything that doesn’t fit in with his vision of her. But I checked with Sandra — Regan is single, and has never had a long-term boyfriend.

Regan is in the best position to advance within NCSS of any of the trio, and has been with them two years to Sandra’s one and Tracy’s four months. Regan is a thin, slender Caucasian with very pale skin, long auburn hair, B-cup breasts and wide, dark eyes. Her appearance reminds me more of an ingenue character in a Victorian Gothic novel than a modern swimsuit model. She does look fantastic in a one-piece, though.

I want to get to know Regan Michaels. There’s layers to her. Wait, since this is me talking, I should probably clarify that. I want to get to know Regan Michaels because I’m genuinely interested in her oddness, not as part of a path to getting her bouncing up and down on my dick. Honestly, I’m not that sexually interested in her — I’d love to bang Sandra, Tracy or both of them at the same time. Regan I’m lukewarm about sexually; I just want to figure her out.

I’m not sure how Regan will react to the routine. I’d be tempted to boot her, since I can’t get a bead on her and don’t really know how it will impact her. If it was just a sexy prank, I’d do that — but it might also advance these girls’ careers, and I can’t shut her out of an opportunity out of misguided paternalism.

Livia explains the contest. It’s really simple. Each girl is going to be given a banana, and they’re going to eat it, and they’re going to try to entice me and the audience by doing so. The girls knew that before coming here... but obviously they’re going to need some extra persuasion on site.

“This sounds a bit dirty,” Regan says. She’s either really good at acting nervous or is genuinely nervous.

Folks, if you think the personas Livia and I use normally, where we’re all but broadcasting sleaze, are actually predatory... watch this segment. We normally broadcast sleaze as a kind of Sieve — to warn away girls that aren’t into that, and entice those that want to play the willing victim deniably. With the NCSS girls, well, this is what predators actually sound like. I’m very professional and formal, and coolly disinterested. I explain it in logical terms designed to both sound reasonable and to make anyone questioning them sound infantile and out of her depth.

“Think of this as being practice for serious modeling. If you want to stand out as a model, you’re going to have to sex the camera. You’re not actually doing anything — but you’re making it look as if you want to be doing something. You’re looking out of the page, making the reader think you’re into him. Well, that’s what you’re doing here. You’re eating a piece of fruit, and that’s it — but you need to make the audience think it’s more than that. You’re the one in control here, you’re exploiting the audience — not the other way around. If you can’t manage that with confidence and aplomb... well, modeling might not be the right business for you.”

While I pull this, Livia is standing by the girls, being motherly and empathetic, like a wise older sister figure who might not even have heard of lesbianism. Yes, it’s utterly false, and yes, it’s as creepy as it sounds. Ladies, when Livia is macking on you and she comes off as blunt or sleazy, and you blow her off, remember this: you got to do that because she’s an ethical person and used body language to show you exactly what she’s interested in. Watch this segment on the N-VHS release and respect her — because if she wasn’t ethical, you’d think she was that sweet older sister with your best interests at heart right up until the exact moment she stuffed three fingers up your cunt. She’s capable of that. So am I.

Anyway, the girls get adequately persuaded and go to their changing rooms to change. They’re going to be in there for twenty minutes exactly. These rooms are soundproofed, so they don’t hear what’s going on outside — that’s just standard for us; we have other routines where we let the audience in on the punchline before the mark comes out as well. Mind you, we do the induction at a high enough volume to reach the massive Summers crowd, and we have the deep bass system I told you about. I honestly have no idea if the NCSS trio can faintly hear us or not — we didn’t go to great lengths to prevent it — and I’m not sure it makes any difference in the end.

I’m quite happy to drop the more genuinely manipulative persona and fall back into my comfort zone of playfully juvenile sexual enthusiasm; I think Livia is as well. “Okay, guys,” she erupts, “I don’t know about you but even after the big first-Decan tit show I’m pretty enthusiastic about watching these NCSS babes swallow a banana! But, you better know it, this is the Sexy Scandal Spectacular and all of our routines are naughtier than they appear in the rear view mirror!

“All you guys, you dogs, the second that one of these ladies’ tongues touches a banana you’re all going to be visualizing her tongue on your wiener, am I right? If not, what the fuck is wrong with you?! That’s the whole point of being at a banana-eating contest! Well, we have one very special guest tonight, and it’s his forty-fifth birthday today, and he happens to be a guy who’s done a lot for Fort Lauderdale, for Summers on the Beach, for the Sexy Scandal Spectacular and for Spring Break as an institution! Let’s all give a big round of applause for Carson Blakely!”

So, we bring out this local bigwig, a forty-something dude with long curly blonde hair. He looks like a failed surfer turned beach hobo. He’s actually a Lauderdale bigwig, however, and very wealthy. He’s agreed to pay the Trips a lot of money — in the neighborhood of 50,000$ — if he gets this special spot in the show. I probably shouldn’t speculate, but I suspect he may have problems that make encounters with prostitutes less satisfying than they might otherwise be. Or he’s just stupid rich and not averse to throwing mega-bucks at something that sounds both novel and erotic.

This was negotiated before we knew it would be the NCSS girls specifically, though Livia did promise “girls hot enough to be in Clubhouse”. If we knew, I kinda wonder what we could have pulled. Did we cheat him? Well, he ends up getting exactly what much of the audience gets, just with a bit of a closer view. But he will have no complaints, and will sign the cheque happily after the show.

We cram a bit of ego-stroking of this dude into the patter, then get him into a chair facing away from the audience. I drag a large wheel with a spiral pattern out on stage, six feet across. Yes, it’s a cartoon hypnotism prop. However, we need something big and visible to grab the crowd. Ours is a little better than a pantomime prop — the black sections are glittery, and the white sections are translucent with subtle telescoping lights on the inside, so that it seems to pulse with an odd radiance as it starts moving.

Livia starts the hypnotic induction. We put headphones on Blakely. “You’re going to start feeling very drowsy... you’re in a pleasant frame of mind... you’re looking forward to feeling the tongues of those poor, innocent models sliding up and down you cock...”

This goes on for a while, and then at about the two minute mark Livia turns around. “Hey, I can hear reverb. Why can I hear reverb? I’m only supposed to be audible to Blakely’s headphones! Mimi!”

“Um, boss-lady, I may have made another tiny oopsie!”

“Okay, fix it.”

“Um. I can’t. I can’t get your audio into just the headphones. It may have something to do with that champagne I spilled on the audio mixer this morning.”

Livia adopts a long-suffering posture, walks over and chatters tech back and forth with Mimi. I do like the bit where Mimi slaps Livia’s hand as she reaches for the controls, protecting her territory — I get that Mimi is both playing a character and indulging a fetish, but part of me wishes that the routines didn’t diss her so casually. Anyway, eventually Mimi skitters off stage and I take her place at the controls. Livia walks up to center stage and takes on a naughty, mock-apologetic tone to deliver one of the best anticipation-building monologues you will ever hear.

“Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please. As you no doubt just noticed, we are having some slight audio problems here so you might be hearing the induction I’m giving for Mister Blakely here — an induction that was meant to be very private, for a very specific audience of one... but has unfortunately become a bit more public than intended. To the ladies in the audience — don’t worry, this specific routine cannot affect women.

“However, gentlemen... I’m hoping I can count on you to just cover your ears for the next twelve minutes. If you, ah, overhear too much, you may end up having a very vivid hypnotic sensory hallucination of the tongues of these innocent young models being in contact with your still-holstered meat pistol. And I’m sure none of you would ever want that! If you’re in a committed monogamous relationship and your girlfriend considers imagination a form of cheating, you might want to be extra cautious and leave the establishment right now... or you could just get a girlfriend who doesn’t hate fun. It’s up to you.

“Okay? Can I trust you all to be good boys while I finish the induction for Mister Blakely? Say ‘Yes, Miss Livia, you can trust us to cover our ears.’”

“Yes, Miss Livia, you can trust us to cover our ears.”

Many guys don’t even bother to act it out. Others hold their hands up, but keep them a full inch away from their ears. I look out across the crowd and see such an ocean of radiant, shit-eating grins as you cannot imagine. It almost makes me light on my feet, how sheerly, magnificently naughty this moment is. The women in the crowd... a few look uncomfortable, and the occasional one is trying to leave the establishment, but more are giggling, blushing and whispering among themselves like schoolgirls. I’m not reading massively turned on from them, but they’re on the edge of their seats and are having fun — like women transfixed by something especially saucy and cruel happening in a soap opera. At this point I’m thinking Livia’s dead on with her “gender-bent Revenge of the Nerds” premise. Well, bring on Revenge of the Sluts!

So, Livia now has twelve minutes to do a hypnotic induction on just under seven hundred people. (Assuming the full Summers crowd is a thousand, and a third of it is women.) We’re not expecting to actually trance all of them; hell, if we got a hundred we would be happy. Of the twelve, the first eight is getting everyone as deep into trance as possible. The spiral wheel spins, the hyper-bass sound system makes Livia’s voice oddly resonant and almost choral and I can feel faint vibrations as her words echo around me.

Normally, you can’t trance people in a crowd with all the distractions around them and various other desires. But we have three really strong factors on our side. First of all, most of the guys really want to be tranced. Secondly, the hyper-bass audio system we invented turns out to be really effective for this. The wheel is decent as well, but not as big a factor. Thirdly, we designed the gory shock routine with the ketchup specifically to tear down mental barriers and get people into a hypno-susceptible state.

I’m not getting tranced. I’m wearing headphones and am very consciously resisting the trance. Mimi’s backstage, and wearing earplugs. Despite the sketch scenario, our audio gear is fine and I can’t hear much. I’m describing the induction by the script, and by listening to later recordings. Livia actually threw a bribe at me to keep me on the straight and narrow and not “accidentally” get hypnotized with the crowd. Later, she’s offered to use her hypnosis in the bedroom to make me see her as each of the NCSS girls in turn, and then let me experience a blowjob from them in the more old-fashioned, hands-on way.

She seemed incredibly enchanted with this idea. I think she forgot that at this point I’ve never actually had a real, extended blowjob from Livia, and I’d trade a hardcore foursome with all the NCSS girls for that in a second. But when the induction starts, the sheer naughtiness of the scenario still tempts me. I resist, though.

So, eight minutes of vanilla induction. Livia’s good at it, but I’m not reproducing it here. You feel tired, you can’t move, your mind feels like a ball of yarn that is slowly unwinding, you are going deeper and deeper, so impossibly deep, etc. And then four minutes of Livia audio porn about blowjobs — and she’s being dominant.

“Male listeners, whenever you see a woman’s tongue, or her lips, come in contact with a banana, you will feel as if that women’s tongue, or lips, or throat, is in contact with your cock in exactly the same manner. This I command! You will feel the warm, slick wetness of her saliva with a vividness deeper than any sensory experience you have ever had! This I command!

“You will know, consciously, that it isn’t real, but your sensory experience will be unimpeded by that knowledge, and your mind will draw on any past experiences you have of oral sex to add any details you find pleasurable, while leaving out anything negative. You will never feel the model’s teeth. You will not feel any discomfort or loss if part of the banana is bitten off, but when the model swallows, you will feel the head of your penis go deep into her in a way that entices and excites you.

“The acuity of this will be overwhelming. It will start ten times more pleasurable than any sexual pleasure you have had in the past, and the longer it goes it, the better, the more intense it will get. You will not ejaculate, however, until all three girls are doing this at the same time and there is a minute or less left in their time. Before that, you will come close as often as your body permits you, but you will never ejaculate! I command it!

“Regardless of how you perform normally, when you are truly aroused by the models your cock will get as hard as a steel pillar, and it’s going to stay that way until you find release or the routine ends! This I command! You will not be permitted to feel nervous, nor uncomfortable, while under this hypnosis! Your insecurities and fears about sex will be locked away from your conscious mind, and will have no impact whatsoever on this experience! This I command!

“The part of your mind that governs guilt, anxiety and morality will know that this is unreal, imaginary, insignificant and harmless, and you will feel no guilt, no fear, no sense that it is sinful! But that part of your mind is locked away, and it cannot interfere with the vivid sensory reality your conscious mind is experiencing! This I command!

“Your words, your body language, will betray no outward sign that you are receiving sexual pleasure before the moment of climax! You will be stoic and composed, even as the tongues of these oblivious young maidens raise you to obscene heights of sexual pleasure well beyond anything you have ever experienced! This I command! To obey these commands is to unlock the ultimate sexual pleasure! Your very desire for it to be real will make it all the more real for you! And you will betray nothing of what you are feeling to the models. If you can not be casual, you will freeze like a statue, and be unable to move a muscle until the routine has ended! This I command!

“As soon as you leave Summers, or the sun sets today, you will no longer have any association between bananas and your cocks. In five seconds, I’m going to snap my fingers and you’ll all come out of trance — except you, Mister Blakely — and you’ll be on your best behavior, and not shout anything obscene, and not do anything else that might make our classy guests feel awkward.”

Livia snaps her fingers. The males in the crowd shake their heads. I’ve been watching the girls, too. They were never entranced, but they were pretty quiet throughout this. Sure, some look uncomfortable. Some are sneaking out. But relatively few. Most have looks ranging from amused, to shocked in a stimulating way, to outright sadistic glee — and yes, a handful look pretty worked-up sexually.

Carson Blakely is still in trance, staring, motionless. I pull him into a shadowy little prepared alcove, so he can see the girls up close but the girls aren’t likely to focus on him. He largely of drops out of everyone’s mind at this point, ours and the girls, until after the models have left, we pull him out of trance and he eagerly signs our cheque. Obviously, we also slide the hypno-wheel offstage before the girls come on.

Livia is just in time. I hear a changing room door click. The main event is about to begin. This is going to be really interesting. And really hot.

Regan actually pops out a minute early. It takes another minute for Tracy and Sandra to join her. The three models walk up to the barstools and sit down.

They’re swimsuit models, so it’s not a surprise they look absolutely ravishing in swimsuits. They are wearing identical black one-piece designs, with the gold NCSS logo placed discretely by the shoulder. The suits have an odd fabric over most of the body, both slightly fuzzy and glossy. The straps, and strips down the girls’ sides, are more conventional spandex. They’re in the high-cut style that’s such a craze right now — leaving the hips exposed to an unusual height, the suits create an optical illusion that elongates the legs and trims the stomach, making the wearer seem leggier and more slender in the same sense a Wonderbra makes a lady look bustier.

The suits are highly figure-conformant without being obscene about it, and these girls have very fine figures to conform to. They’re less racy than other swimsuits in a specific way, however — I suspect they have some extra padding or plates or something to prevent any sight of nipples or cameltoe, no matter what position the lady takes. There’s no exposed cleavage either; the suits are almost like a sleeveless, legless wetsuit that wraps all the way up to the neck.

Regan is up first. “Ladies,” Livia says, “please don’t speak to or distract a contestant while she’s performing. Each of you will have a five minute solo period to sensually eat your banana. Marcelo and I are the judges. If we disagree, there will be a five-minute tie-breaker round to resolve this where you all compete simultaneously. The prize is two collectible gold coins worth eight hundred dollars. I would suggest being slow and sensual with this, but if you finish your banana that’s fine — I’ll just hand you another one. There’s a digital countdown timer on the camera bridge above you; feel free to keep an eye on it to pace out your routines. Regan, you’re up first, then Sandra, then Tracy. Everyone understand?”

The three women nod. Regan is nervous. Her naturally wide, expressive eyes are even wider than usual. Sandra is majestic, intense and hard to read. Tracy is proud on the surface, but also excited.

We bought a box of two dozen bananas this morning and kept them in a small portable fridge, stripping out any bruised ones. We scored the stems so the ladies wouldn’t have any awkward moments trying and failing to peel them. (That would be funny, but also mess up the sensual and transgressive tone and deflate erotic tension.)

Regan is the only girl not wearing obtrusive lipstick. Livia hands her a banana. “Okay, Regan... go!”

She peels it entirely, dropping the skin in a basket. It’s not sexy... so far. She looks at it, as if puzzled by it. She looks nervous. I wonder if she’s freezing up. There’s real fear here. I doubt Regan is a virgin, and I wonder if she’s ever frozen at a model shoot. I notice she isn’t looking up at the crowd, which I’d expect a nervous girl to do — remember, the girls are secretly (mostly) in on the gag, here. She eventually leans forward and kisses the banana on the edge. Then again. She reaches out her tongue and licks it hesitantly. We’re a minute in and she’s doing the porn star lesbian kissing thing with the tip of the banana — you know, the things where the girls reach out their tongues and just touch the tip of their partner’s, without actually kissing in a way that might gross out a straight girl.

Her Aura is growing, a bit. Some guys are really, really into this footage — moreso than... well, let’s not spoil and just say some things we’ll shoot later. “Reluctant” is a fetish, and a lot of guys love it — but it’s not my thing, and I don’t think it’s doing a lot for the live Spring Break crowd either, other than starting off with a tease. She starts licking up and down the banana.

I turn to the crowd. They’re the quietest you’ll ever see at Summers. The majority of the guys are tranced. It’s just dawning on me how much of the crowd we snared. I wonder if many are just playing along, hoping it will work on them. Our script for the routine assumed we’d give the girls headphones, and there would be dozens of entranced guys, but they’d be hidden in the raucous crowd. The crowd isn’t raucous. I’m not good at reading male arousal (and doubly so for entranced guys), but I’m guessing they’re getting turned on, or possibly a bit weirded out.

The girls are not hypnotized, but they are fascinated and subdued, whispering and giggling. Regan’s performance may be a little too real for them to get a vicarious thrill out of her humiliation. Also, I realize at the back of my mind, Regan isn’t actually embarrassed or humiliated — none of the body language cues are there. She’s just scared, and not in the “fun daring novice exhibitionist” way. I do scan the crowd and pick out girls that are pretty and actually aroused — we obviously want to know about them for later, as potential marks. I realize I’m avoiding watching Regan’s show, and turn back to her.

More very cautious teasing. At two minutes twenty seconds, though, some kind of dam breaks in Regan’s mind, her posture shifts and her Aura brightens. She’s sexually confident. She gathers spit on her tongue and licks the shaft of the banana full-on, one side and then the other, until it’s all wet. She licks her lips. She opens her mouth ever so slightly and puts the tip of the banana in. She guides it further in, letting the banana itself open her mouth further and further to accommodate it. She slides it in about three inches in and holds it there for about four seconds.

I quickly glance back to the crowd. They are a lot more tense now, the men clearly aroused if you look for subtle cues, but not giving away the game. Regan pulls the banana out of her mouth. She hasn’t actually eaten any of it yet. She glances at Sandra beside her, who gives her an encouraging look. She looks out over the crowd, holding the banana, and gives what might be her first actual flirty look, a slight smile curling at the edge of her lip.

She leans her head way up and licks her lips. She holds the banana above her. She brushes the tip against her lips, teasing. Out of the corner of my eye I see a single guy in the crowd clutch his crotch and blush, clearly having snapped out of the hypno-trance. Oopsie! She opens her mouth and slides the banana in, with her lips again forming an airtight seal. Two inches... three inches... four inches... five inches... she closes her mouth around the banana, hiding it completely, and just stands there. Finally she opens it again and uses two fingers to push the banana fully down. I watch her stretched throat. I see it slide down and into her stomach. I’m pretty sure Regan just won the contest, though she did it in a more explicit way than I expected from the NCSS girls.

She’s still got forty-five seconds, though. Livia hands her another banana. She peels it quickly, grips it with two fingers and puts two inches in... then back out to one inch... two... one. She slides it back and forth rhythmically, neither slow nor fast. She’s not building up, just keeping a pattern, and... time! Looking out, I can spot a few guys in the crowd no longer tranced, looking about and blushing awkwardly. They seem to figure the best thing to do to avoid embarrassment is to pretend to still be tranced, though, which makes them effectively vanish.

Livia is about to interview Regan, ask her what her strategy was and how she thinks she did... but she wisely steps over her and moves straight on to Sandra. “You think you can keep up with our first contestant over there?”

Both of the other NCSS girls look a little bit shocked at Regan’s show. It was obviously going to be suggestive, and fun for the guys, but while we wondered if we might get the simulated blowjob body language from Tracy we really didn’t expect it from Regan. I don’t think Sandra did either. “I’m not sure, but I’m going to try.”

“Well, here’s a banana. Put your heart — and your tongue — into it! You’ve got five minutes. And... time!”

The tongue comment is the real Livia, the proud lech, peaking through. She’s not doing the kindly older sister any more, and I’m happy. I like the real Livia.

Sandra takes a banana and rapidly, skillfully peels it. She stares at it, using her intense blue eyes. She looks up and scans the crowd. She meets my gaze and lingers. I resist the temptation to Eyefuck her. She meets Livia’s gaze. She hold up her banana with two fingers from each hand on opposite ends. Then she quite intentionally breaks it in two. Well, that’s off script. She gets each half in one palm and closes her hands around them, like a girl giving two guys a firm handjob at the same time. Then, a slight smile tugs at the side of her lips and her eyes sparkle. She clenches both hands into tight fists, crushing the banana utterly. Messy pulp oozes out between her fingers and falls to the floor below her.

Everyone is shocked. The way Livia did the hypnosis, she can’t actually cause the guys pain... but in the moment I wonder if she knows that, or cares. (I will learn later she did briefly ask Livia backstage, but I completely miss it at the time.)

The big shock moment is only thirty-three seconds in. The next two minutes are simply glorious. It’s Sandra, licking banana pulp off her hands, one finger at a time, being very sensual and uninhibited with her tongue, while making good use of her piercing stare — occasionally scanning the crowd, but mostly making prolonged eye contact with Livia, then with me, then back to Livia, then back to me. I no longer resist the temptation to Eyefuck her. I show her everything I want to do with her.

Her Aura is very much active, pulsing. I wonder if there’s an actual hookup in the future. Not gonna lie, I’m really turned on by her at this point. I love her combination of chutzpah, tease, intensity and sensuality. We’re close to three minutes when she licks the last little bits of banana pulp off her deep red lips. Livia freezes for a second before handing her another banana.

She uses the last two minutes to give a more conventional performance, putting her mouth around the banana and gently biting off chunks, swallowing them with audible little gulps. She mimes being nervous a bit, with playful “I can’t believe I’m doing this” smiles mixed with “I just can’t take this entirely seriously and need to break the weird tension” giggling.

She’s being really smart about this, actually: her turning our admittedly puerile contest into a symbolic femdom thing makes her out to be the kind of brassy, assertive girl other girls idolize, but her performance still delivers the thing the crowd actually wants. I vaguely wonder if her routine would still have included the second banana if Regan hadn’t pulled a deep throat near the end of hers. Sandra’s Aura is pretty wild by this time as well, and I’m getting the faint feeling she may be a bit into Livia as well as more into me.

And now we get to Tracy. I watched her out of the corner of my eye during the other two routines, and I’m dead sure she’s either bi or lesbian at this point — she was interested in Regan, and positively transfixed by Sandra licking her fingers. Something tells me she hasn’t been with either, though, but I could be wrong about that. Initially, I expected the wildest performance out of her — but I was expecting the first two to be a lot more chaste. Still, Tracy has the elements to go full pornographic with this — she’s got those incredibly plump “blowjob lips”, and wore glossy lipstick, and my gut tells me she’s the least attached of the three to the NCSS contract and restrictions. And she’s got a kind of rebel attitude, and her D-cups look great in a figure-hugging black one-piece.

Livia hands her a banana and starts the timer. She peels it, but only half way. She brings it up to her mouth. She opens wide. She puts the banana in, briefly, but it never touches anything. She pulls it back out. She licks her lips and winks playfully. In the crowd, a guy clutches his crotch. Girls are laughing and snickering. She opens her mouth, puts the banana an inch in and closes her lips around it. And she holds that pose, and dear Christ it’s just achingly erotic: those full lips pressed tightly against a blatantly phallic object, that playfully naughty “dare I? yes, yes I do” look, the strange fabric clinging to ample breasts and well-toned curves... sheer beauty.

Gradually, slowly, the banana slides in a little further, inch by inch. It’s so slow. Then it slides back, equally slowly. Gradually the lips press shut, squeezing off a chunk of the banana and shaping the new end into a smooth curve. I watch the small chunk of banana pass down her throat. I notice that more guys in the audience are spasming, though you still have to know to look for it. I wonder how many will have sticky pants by the end. I think Tracy is the audience favorite so far — it seems like one guy “pops” every ten seconds, and those are only the ones that have a visible response. Tracy is making me seriously regret resisting the hypnotism. She’s giving raw pleasure, but surprisingly she’s also not being as pornographic as Regan was — there’s no interpretation for what Regan did other than a deep throat, but Tracy has the very flimsy veil of actually eating a banana in a very oversexed way.

Banana goes back in. Slowly slide forward an inch. Slowly slide back. I can see from her cheeks, though, that her tongue is getting really vigorous with that banana inside her mouth. She’s also working her whole body into the performance. She’s rubbing her legs together in a way that could be taken as self-stimulation. She squirms on the bar stool. She holds the banana in her right hand while the other grips her left thigh really tightly, squeezing and pinching it to increase sensation. She’s arcing her back to emphasize her impressive chest even more. In, out, in, out.

Her Aura is flaring — not like she’s about to actually orgasm, but she’s competitive and is getting sexual enjoyment out of teasing guys. She knows about the hypnosis, and she’s getting off on performing anyway. Five seconds before her time runs out, she slowly, sensually bites down on the banana, swallows a chunk, tosses aside the remaining stub, wipes a finger over her chin up to the corner of her mouth and sucks it clean and finally flashes the audience a wicked, knowing grin. There’s a lot of oopsie moments in the crowd at that exact moment.

So, we’re going to disagree on the winner and there will be a simultaneous tiebreaker round. Of course there will. I’m incredibly aroused at this point, but also vaguely nervous. I was expecting the banana-eating to be a lot more chaste. Livia picks her winner first, and it’s Sandra. I need to disagree with her, per the script. For a second, I consider agreeing — wondering if this whole thing has gone too far, if we’re not somehow screwing up here. But then I realize that would be stupid — we need to do something memorably awful to these models, because for their sakes we need to take the blame. Cutting off the show early won’t benefit anyone.

I pick Tracy. It’s the obvious dudebro choice — in this contest, you just gotta love those blowjob lips. Tiebreaker round, starting now! The girls cheer. There are a considerable number of girls in the crowd that look aroused at this point. Maybe more than the typical ten percent that I thought was the ceiling on gay and bi girls, demographically. But they all seem involved, and only a tiny minority look uncomfortable. I guess it’s just kinky and hot in some general way.

There’s a ton of giggling, and a lot of the straight girls are staring down at the crotches of the boys around them. I see some girls putting their fingers in their mouth and licking them, making them wet. I wonder if they are being really vulgar about masturbating, before it occurs to me what else they might be doing — reaching hands down and adding a little wet reality to their boyfriends’ hallucinations of imaginary saliva on quite real rock-hard cocks.

I see one guy pop off randomly, just by his facial expression, in the brief intermission. The crowd is right on the edge. I should say that I can’t actually see guys come, except for one guy in the front row by the pool with cum stains on his trunks. Mostly I can only see the crowd from the chest up. And nobody has their dick out, obviously, because Livia told them not to.

Livia hurriedly hands out three bananas. I notice that Mimi is back at the control panel before the tiebreaker round. The timer starts at five minutes, but I don’t think the crowd is going to survive that. I glance at Mimi, and I think she agrees. The NCSS girls go to work — all three, simultaneously. Regan is just sliding the banana in and out. Sandra is licking hers, but is looking directly at me when doing so. Tracy is spinning hers around in her mouth, toying with it, squirming, winking at the crowd. The crowd is moving, now.

We get to one minute thirty, and suddenly the timer skips ahead to three thirty. Livia told the crowd they couldn’t get off until the last minute, after all — even though some of their bodies were physiologically unable to obey her. The next thirty seconds seen to move in slow motion. I’m feeling actual pain in my balls, and Livia didn’t even hypnotize me. Three bananas, sliding in and out, being licked, three gorgeous models using all their natural sensuality, three tight black swimsuits concealing delicious bodies from everyone’s hungry gazes, three perfectly made-up respectable faces framed by glamour-girl fashion magazine hairstyles... well. Four minutes. Here we go.

So, that special climax I mentioned. The models don’t know it’s coming — Sandra did say she wanted some plausible deniability, after all. Livia came up with the idea and fixated on it, but it’s still partially my fault. I remember telling her how erotic I found her skin, with the whipped cream splattered suggestively on it during the Risqué Rope Routine. And I did pop off on her face that one time, and it was apparently more than a bit influential to her inner muse.

So, you remember those targeting nozzles from the bisected girl bit earlier? Well, we have three of those hidden in the camera rack looking directly down at the models. We’re not using ketchup this time, obviously. It’s vanilla yogurt, aimed directly at those gorgeous, glamourous magazine-print faces. It’s not gunge-tank amounts, either; that isn’t the imagery we’re looking for — only three ounces, though there’s room for a second blast if the first one misses. Mimi’s doing the sharp-shooting this time, since I did the ketchup one, and I don’t mind that in the slightest since it frees me up to just watch the havoc go down.

Whatever else can be said about what comes before and after it, the next twenty seconds, abstract of context, might be the most erotic thing ever filmed to not have any nudity in it — or at least, the lewdest possible naughty sight gag. It’s one of Livia’s perfect cinematic moments. The models are absorbed in their bananas — except Sandra, who’s trying to make eye contact with me. Their eroticism is absolute, their makeup and hair perfect, their poise immaculate. Then three threads of pressurized, obscenely suggestive white goo arc through the air, each striking dead on target, spreading out just enough to give maximum splatter.

White droplets and streaks stand out in perfect contrast against figure-hugging, slightly fuzzy black fabric. Mouths open in shock. Splatters of yogurt lodge themselves in perfectly styled hair. Faces get plastered. Yogurt drips down from eyebrows and streaks perfectly-sculpted cheeks. Red lips contrast sticky white liquid and faces grow increasingly pink with the flush of anger, shock and humiliation — or the exotic russet of Tracy’s Hawaiian-Taiwanese skin. Know, O Shocked Readers: we did not merely prank these models, we... we defaced them. We vandalized them. And regardless of what you think of us for this, we all find it intoxicatingly erotic to witness in the moment.

And the crowd... well, have you ever seen one of those videos with thousands of dominoes set up, where one is knocked down and it just spreads to all the others in a beautifully geometric sequence? That happens at Summers, right in that moment. The whole crowd falls over at once, in an oddly harmonious rippling wave. When planning this routine, Livia and I giddily wondered if we could make a dozen, or even three dozen, guys come within ten seconds of each other — and if doing so would set some kind of record. In reality, I think the number was closer to six hundred.

Regan’s eyes are hideously wide. Her banana just falls to the ground. She’s utterly stunned, and doesn’t stop being stunned until she gets off the stage. Sandra, who had her mouth open to lick the side of her banana, spits out a mouthful of yogurt. It takes Sandra and Tracy a few seconds to figure out what the hell just happened. Sandra’s face is cold with a stoic anger and humiliation. Tracy’s face twists in rage — and, knowing that it’s a performance, I allow myself to smirk, to admire how sexy they both look when angry, and in totally different ways. Tracy speaks first. “You... you... what the fuck is wrong with you, you sick subhuman sons of bitches!”

Sandra fixes me with her best superiority stare. “You know, you guys, your show... you’re really just pathetic. This is just sad.”

Livia just smirks radiantly, turning around and holding her hands up to the audience in a victory pose. “Ladies, don’t be sour — we provide cream topping free of charge to all our honored guests!”

There’s an overwhelming roar from the crowd, and it’s led by the women. (The men are feeling a bit distracted right now, I guess.) I was uncertain how the women would react, but they seem immensely amused — I guess Livia’s soap opera schadenfreude theory is dead-on.

Regan grabs Tracy’s arm. “Look, something’s... wrong with the crowd.”

I’m pretty sure that’s a genuine ick moment. We didn’t expect the impact on the crowd to be so visible. It’s not subtle. The trance is broken. The guys all blew a load in their pants, or at least most of them. There’s stained swimming trunks and Speedos all along the first row. Guys are... spreading out, laughing but also evincing the obvious homophobic body language and aversion to other guys’ cum. Girls are giggling and blushing furiously. There are variations of the same thing being said all throughout the crowd: “Oh my god, Derek came! Brad came! Did you pop one off, dude? Holy crap, I... I think they all came. They all came! Everyone just creamed their pants! Eew!”

Regan looks dazed. Sandra looks skin-crawlingly disgusted. Tracy... fucks up her persona, laughing in good-natured amazement for a second before her face shifts back to rage. I don’t think she’s facing the crowd, though, and we can edit it out in post-production, so it’s fine.

The models are stalking off stage in a huff. I follow after them. “Girls, girls... it was just a harmless joke! It’s just yogurt, I promise, just a little visual sight gag to spice things up!”

I stumble after them toward the changing rooms. Tracy pulls Regan in, with Sandra being the last to enter. The crowd sees her slam the door hard in my face. But when all three are in the changing room, out of the line of sight of the audience, Sandra glances at me. Before she slams the door, she smiles slightly, and winks at me.

Dear god, she’s... after everything we just did, she’s flirting with me, she... she winked at me, she winked at me with that... that... stuff all over her face and in her hair... Don’t come. Don’t come. Don’t come...

I manage to curb my enthusiasm and make my way back to Livia. I have a boner — but if I didn’t, right now, people would be doubting my sexuality. So that’s fine.

“You know,” Livia says breezily, “I think we might have offended those models ever so slightly.”

“Possibly a little bit,” I agree playfully.

“Well,” she says, “we were told they were respectable girls. And... we have so many respectable girls here already, who are also such fun girls... we just thought... well, I guess they’re not the right kind of respectable girls for the Sexy Scandal Spectacular, or for Summers on the Beach, or even for Spring Break overall. Tell me, do you respect those models?”

“Fuck no!” The crowd howls back, and it’s a chorus decisively led by the girls flashing from the first Decan. And it’s triumphalist and naughty and maybe just a wee bit scary, in a fanatical sense. I can spot Emily in there, looking frenzied.

“Yeah,” Livia agrees, “me neither. But... who cares about them? As long as we have you kind folks... fuck ’em!”

“Fuck em!” The crowd howls back.

I’m suddenly struck by an odd thought. Is Livia just having fun with naughty patter, skewering stuck-up social mores for laughs? Or, is she actually changing these girls in some way? Is she liberating them? Is she indoctrinating them? Can... can it be both? And... is it for her own selfish reasons — be they sexual, or for the success of our show — or is she trying to help them?

I really have no idea.

Shifting gears between the second and third Decans will be... challenging. The second was so mean-spirited, but the third — if we carry it off — will be a lot nicer. It’s been an hour and a half since the NCSS girls stalked off. There’s a kind of shutdown. They make up some kind of excuse — about ventilation, I think. Bars don’t really have an established protocol for what to do when the majority of their male clientele spontaneously and simultaneously ejaculates due to erotic hypnotism gone wildly right. It got Mimi the time she needed to finish her research, at least. A bunch of guys run down to the beach to use the beach showers, hopefully to return in time for the third Decan.

I’m shocked they don’t kick us out. I think management is doubling down on the head-in-the-sand strategy they took up after we followed Monday’s live sex show with a mass male orgasm event today. But we can finish our set, which is good — because we’ve got a doozy of a third Decan planned.

Mimi is all business. We’re not talking about whether or not she enjoyed vandalizing the NCSS girls, or what it was like. Honestly, there’s a faint knot of dread forming at the back of my mind. I know on some level the routine went way too far with the visible orgasms, that we crossed lines and there might be consequences this time. But I felt the same way after Monday night, too — and that apparently turned out fine, sexy disturbing bruises aside. And the devil on my shoulder is whispering, She winked at you! That means it’s all fine!

(Ever since I saw Hot Dog: the Movie in college, I’ve been compelled to visualize my shoulder devil as Shannon Tweed in a cheesy, red lingerie “sexy devil” Halloween costume, complete with headband horns, prosthetic barbed plushie tail and plastic pitchfork. I still get little shivers whenever I remember her delivering that one iconic bad-girl line with such verve and conviction — “first we take off our clothes, and then we fuck our brains out.” So it’s not surprising she set up shop in my head to personify my id and egg me on into making sexy, sexy mistakes. As my life story suggests, she can be very persuasive at times.)

Right now, though, I push her out of my conscious mind and focus on Jeri as Mimi does her infodump. We’re in an archive area in the Great Beast.

“Jeri Turner was born Cherry Mayweather, twenty-three years ago, in Philadelphia. She changed her legal first name six years ago. Her junior high yearbook suggests she had all the problems one expects a young girl with the name Cherry to have. Both of her parents were prominent in the local black community there, albeit in very different ways. Her mother was Albea Mayweather — a local celebrity, and a local scandal. They called her the Disco Queen of Philadelphia, back when the disco scene was still strong. She was a big deal — wild, hard drinker, definite hedonist, friends with the Pointer Sisters, pretty uninhibited.

“Arrested for possession of crack cocaine five years ago, unusually punitive sentence. She’s still in Eastern State Pen. If we ever do make A-list, I’d like to draw some attention to that. I think... I mean, she may have had the rocks, but I don’t think they motivated her arrest. She offended people’s sensibilities. I think she had some impunity and lost it as the disco era died. Pops was a lawyer, activist and hardass. Baptist, Marxist, stoic, straight-edge. He might have loved her — she apparently thought so — but at least some locals think he didn’t try hard enough to defend her, wanted to distance himself from the Disco Queen after her arrest. I can see why, as an activist, but it’s still pretty utilitarian.”

Mimi is flicking through archived newspaper pages on her microfiche reader. “Wait,” I say. “Go back one.”

Mimi does. “Yup, that’s the Disco Queen. Pretty hot, isn’t she?”

“Can we get color on that photo?”

“It’s from a newspaper from ten years ago, so no.”

“Zoom in and enhance,” I tell her.

“It’s a microfiche reader,” Mimi explains. “It doesn’t do that.”

Okay. I guess I can be a bimbo sometimes too. “Sorry. What color is that dress? Like, did any articles mention —”

“Emerald green,” Mimi says. “I’m surprised you’re not more interested in what’s stuffed inside —”

“Jeri wore that same dress at DanceSpace yesterday. I guess it belonged to her mum. I can see why she’d want to raise hell... and why she wouldn’t, too.”

Livia nods. “So Pops sounds pretty strict, rides her pretty hard I guess.”

Mimi shrugs. “He might have. I don’t know. He enrolled her in a wealthy upstate private school. It sounds pretty starched and preppie. But it doesn’t matter. He was shot dead two years ago. Might have been the KKK. He was a successful activist, after all.”

“Race hustler?” I ask.

“I don’t... think so,” Mimi says, unsure. “I mean, he paid all due respects to Al Sharpton — but if you’re a black activist, that’s just a thing you do to get by. He seemed more interested in lead in the water and bank redlining than in rising up or going apeshit on whitey. You can be a stuck-up square that hates orgasms and dancing, and still do some good in the world, I guess.”

“Dancing?”

“Yeah, Pops was... not big on it. He sued Philly strip clubs that drew the black crowd, and once described breakdancing as a gateway drug to moral degeneracy. I think he was a bit nuts, maybe seeing dance as something that ruined his wife — who may not have always been, well, loyal. But, now he’s a martyr who can do no wrong — in Jeri’s community, at least.”

Livia chuckles. “Wow, her life is like a weird black remake of Footloose with added family melodrama. Thanks, Mimi — and thank you, Marc, for spotting her. She’s perfect.”

I’m initially aghast. “Livia, we can’t! This is...”

“She’s exactly what the Bisected Girl Routine needs.”

“No, Livia. She’s not a shy girl who wants to show off but has inhibitions. She’s... I mean, this is real trauma.”

“Yeah,” Livia says, “life tends to have trauma in it at times. Nothing to do about that but try and get over it quickly and get back to the orgasms.”

“She is not our toy.”

“The girls that volunteer for the show are our toys,” Livia shoots back. “That’s the point. We play with them, they get off on it. Symbiosis. Like Cathy, like Mimi originally, like you at the Taurus show. Or they get something else out of it, like the NCSS girls. Did I traumatize you, or did you have fun and maybe even grow a little?”

“I wasn’t where Jeri is. I was a bored, middle class pickup artist, not... not this.”

“I kinda was,” Mimi says softly.

I should have paid more attention when she said that... but the truth is, I didn’t.

Livia contemplates a response. “Mimi, what’s Jeri’s major?”

Mimi taps keys for a few minutes. “Mechanical engineering,” she tell us.

“So... Marc, you said she was a pretty skilled dancer.”

“Yeah,” I say. Livia looks like Matlock, ready to deliver some devastating closing argument. I feel the vise closing, but I tell the truth anyway. “She’s good enough to have studied in depth... and there’s an erotic energy to it too, for her. Both sentimental and erotic.”

“Well,” Livia says. “It seems simple to me. Pops was a lawyer that hates fun, dancing and nudity. Mum is a dancer that loves fun, dancing... and, while we don’t know, I’m going to bet on nudity as well. She’s got no law training but sure knows how to dance. I bet she would be majoring in it... if she had been allowed. We didn’t trick Jeri into coming to Lauderdale — she has to have planned out the trip herself. We didn’t sign Jeri up for a wet t-shirt contest. We just watched, and the world would already have seen her delicious milkers get moistened if that shithead stagehand didn’t fuck it all up. We didn’t send her out in her mum’s favorite dress with what you said was a pretty premeditated little wing-lady.

“She’s not making a serious life decision, she made it already. If she wanted to be straight edge, she not only wouldn’t have been in the wet t-shirt contest, she wouldn’t be in Lauderdale period. She knows exactly which parent she wants to follow in the footsteps of. She just doesn’t have the self-confidence to do it yet. And I’m going to work a little hypno-magic to give her exactly that. And it’s going to be very humiliating, and very hot, and very liberating, and when we’re all done she’ll leave with a spring in her step and a stronger ego than she walked in with — and all the girls in the audience will want to be her — just like we planned.

“This is sexual healing, Marc. We’re going to fix her. And if we happen to get ourselves off in so doing, well... it’s pretty nice to have a job you truly enjoy, isn’t it?”

It’s all very logical. Her argument really does make sense. But I still want something from her. I don’t know Livia as well at this point as I will in the future. I don’t quite understand why she sometimes gets so hard-eyed and cold about her fetishes. But I don’t back down. I meet Livia’s gaze, and this time not in a kinky way. “Okay, you’re right. I can’t argue that. We’ll go ahead with the show exactly as planned. But...

“Livia. Be empathetic. Please.”

Livia scowls. “Don’t try that with me, Marc. You know I like dominant men, not milksops.”

Not everything is about sex and kinks and fetish personas, Livia! But I don’t debate that, or even acknowledge she said it. It’s beneath me, and she knows it’s beneath her, too. I just meet her gaze and stay calm.

“Let’s compromise,” she finally says quietly. “I’ll be more empathetic to her... when it’s important. But, you need to be less. You are not her sworn protector. We’re not actually therapists. We’re not going to be getting her to talk about her parents or trying to achieve some sentimental catharsis. The lady’s on Spring Break, and we’re going to help her have a good time like the little firecracker you’re sure she is, not explore her inner traumas.”

Yeah, no shit. But this is not the right time for sarcasm, so I let Livia think that I’m making a concession by consenting to that. “Agreed.”