The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I get up at seven. I have a shower and go through the routine of dressing to the nines and styling myself — I’ve been a bit casual at SexCon; now I have a motive to look my best. But this is all nearly robotic for me. Inwardly I’m a mess. The show rattled me, and I’m still not sure what I feel. Sure, Livia dropped the “get out of jail free” card at the end, and it turns out I hadn’t done anything really inappropriate, given that ‘Mimi’ was a ringer all along. But... I still enjoyed the illusion of crossing lines. Like, really enjoyed, on a primal level. Did that say bad things about me, the amount of pleasure I took combining sex and revenge?

I love sex. I will always love sex. People say you get jaded over time and it becomes hollow, but I’ve got a special psychological trick I’ll tell you about later — I managed to dodge that. I am, at heart, a sensualist, and I will never stop taking pleasure in sex acts with beautiful women. But it certainly does get less raw and more routine as time passes. And the scandal show... that was raw again. I felt like I had felt hours after losing my virginity.

Livia’s business card is quite stylized, with the same old-timey circus font as the standups. It names her and the show, and has an abbreviated form of her disclaimer (“You’ll probably lose your dignity. You may lose you modesty. But you’ll certainly have the time of your life!”), but no address. That was written in pen on the back. I’m surprised that the address Livia has given me leads not to an upscale hotel, but to a trailer park. The stall number is for an oversize stall, currently holding what at first glance is the largest double-decker custom bus I have ever seen. The only external clue that it belongs to Livia’s show is the color scheme — orange and navy highlights on a white bus some 18 meters long, four tall and three wide. I park my rental close by and get out to examine the luxury RV.

The door, like on any megabus, is naturally three feet off the ground. I’m puzzling how to get up there, when a mechanical whirring sounds and grated metal steps fold out from the underside of the vehicle. It’s impressively gadget-like, and seems to be custom work. The door then swings open and I see Mimi from the show. “Marcelo. C’mon in! You’re in the right place. We’ve been hoping you were going to show!”

I climb up and step inside. The interior is like a cramped home, with a corridor only two feet wide and multiple interior rooms. There is wallpaper on the walls, carpet on the floor and even hung paintings — which I quickly notice are primarily boudoir art. It strikes me as very influenced by the custom van craze that had been such a big deal back when I was in my teens. It’s ridiculously opulent, but also showing subtle signs of disrepair — so, they had big money, but don’t necessarily have it right now. And it’s personalized, with the aesthetic and craftwork drawn from effort I saw in Livia’s standup earlier, and a sensibility that’s intentionally tacky — I like the style immediately.

This is also the first time I meet what is apparently the real Mimi. It’s awkward. “Ma’am. My behavior earlier today... wasn’t normal for me. I apologize.”

“Er... me too,” she says.

Her natural voice (or at least her current voice) is about an octave higher than her cop voice. She sounds like a stereotypical southern-fried bimbo. Her face is now wide, expressive, cheerful and open, and in a weird way I find that reaffirming — it fits a subtle vibe I got from her when we first met, “underneath” the cop. Her platinum blonde hair is now unbound and teased, looking gloriously glam — it’s Loni Anderson or Judy Landers style flair.

“I was playing a role for the show. I’m not normally an industrial-grade turbo-cunt. And ya shouldn’t worry about how you treated me — it went down exactly like we wanted it to. Livia set you up. She choreographed everything. She does that. I like naughty attention and the show pushed my buttons, so I had a fine time.”

“Mimi,” I hear Livia’s voice say from deeper in the RV, “can you show our guest to my room, and then give us the evening?”

“Sure,” she replies. “I’ll be at that line-dancing club we spotted by the Motel 7 if you need me.”

Mimi leads me past several closed doors to the end of the corridor, and opens one. She leans over to whisper to me. “You two make sure and have fun while I’m gone, now.” She winks and scampers out; I can hear her calling a cab.

I step into what is presumably Livia’s personal room, and am immediately dumbstruck — it’s unabashedly decked out as an almost caricatural pickup crib. The room is brightly lit. There’s an imitation zebra-skin rug on the floor, a queen-size waterbed with tangerine underlighting, a disco ball hanging from the mirrored ceiling and a column that pulses like a lava lamp in one of the corners. One wall is covered with a psychedelic mural, an imitation Julie Bell with scantily-clad harem damsels clutching the legs of a topless barbarian babe holding a greatsword aloft.

Posters on the walls advertise Hardbodies and the new adult video game, Leisure Suit Larry 4. There is also a poster-sized blow-up of the cover to Jack Kahler’s The Hypnotist, which is oddly on the nose for Livia. The opposite wall is a library which to a casual glance seems to be all trade paperbacks, sealed behind a locked glass case. The walls and parts of the ceiling are covered with colorful shag carpeting.

I love it all for its shameless embrace of both tackiness and decadence. Livia is clearly someone who’s as deeply into the libertine lifestyle as I am — maybe deeper. Indeed, I think it’s the décor that pushes my interest in Livia beyond a simple desire to fuck and into a genuine crush tinged with hero-worship. I’m not, and never will be, a one-woman man; I don’t ‘do’ serious relationships — but this is a woman I want to know intimately, understand, hang out with and keep as a lifelong friend with benefits.

Livia steps out of the bathroom. Her voluminous hair is tucked in with a hairband, and she wears a white men’s button-up shirt... and nothing visible below that. Well, except for her long, sleek olive legs and elegantly manicured feet. Her toenails, like her fingernails, are purple. The shirt is long enough (barely!) to cover her modesty, so she might have panties or very short shorts on underneath it. The mystery intrigues me. She probably intends me to believe that I had caught her unprepared, but her immaculate glamour makeup puts a lie to that — she would have had to fix it after the show this afternoon. “Marcelo Ambrose Knight. I’m so glad you came.”

Livia sees the look on my face and grins. “Everyone truly worth knowing lives by a motto, Marcelo. Mine happens to be, ‘just because it’s ridiculous doesn’t mean it isn’t sexy’.”

This resonates with me deeply. “Well spoken.”

“I have a pitch to make to you that might change your life — if you choose to let it.”

“I’m willing to listen,” I reply. The fact that she had promised me a blowie is a big part of my being here, but I’m not going to be so crude as to mention that. She leads me over to a black leather couch, and we sit down together.

“It’s not complex,” she says. “I’ve got an adult magic show. I hope I’ve convinced you by this point that I’m competent at my craft.”

“Oh,” I say honestly, “you’re very skilled. I’m deeply impressed.”

As I’ve said, I don’t do casual negging. You can pick up women just as effectively by lifting them up as by tearing them down — as long as you’re interested in the ones that truly want sex on some level, not the ones who must be bullied or manipulated into it. But I am genuinely impressed with her show as well; I’m not just buttering her up.

“The pitch is pretty simple, then. I want you to join my show as my partner in crime. We’ll be the perfect duo.”

I blink. I was sure she would want someone seduced, or want money for sex, or something... well, possible. “I’m so sorry to disappoint you,” I say. “I have no skills with stage magic.”

“I am very well conversant with your skill set, Mister Knight. You are a pickup artist, one of the best, with raw natural charisma, good looks and a great game. And, like me, you covet girls who have a deep sexual longing and have built up a fairly effective toolbox for getting them to unleash that longing. I’ve read both of your books — not just casually but as a deep, detailed read with note-taking and passages highlighted. I know exactly what you can do, and I want it as part of my show. I know you are on the ropes with your current target audience due to having values I find laudable and I know you’re going to turn thirty soon and don’t have an ironclad direction in your life yet. I believe this show can become a real cultural phenomenon, Marcelo, and I’m offering you ground-level entry as a partner.”

“A cultural phenomenon? Livia, you’re talented, but so are Siegfried and Roy. I don’t see you displacing David Copperfield even if you’re actually better than him. A-list stars aren’t born or made, they’re carefully designed by studio executives.”

“I’m not trying to be best magician,” she replies. “My show is the adult magic show, remember? There isn’t yet a superstar adult magician, despite the mainstreaming of porn, and I can make a strong (albeit personal) case that there’s a real cultural and psychosexual vacuum waiting to be filled by a prominent adult magic show.”

That sounds a bit overblown, honestly, but I’m also intrigued. “What exactly is your show, Livia, and why does it need a pickup artist? What’s this vacuum? And what’s this massive RV?”

She takes a deep breath. “You’ve probably gathered that I know a lot about you. I guess I should share some things in return. The thing is, the best way to answer your questions involves telling you some fairly personal things about me. Do you want to listen to that?”

“Sure,” I say. She does know a lot about me, to an almost invasive degree, and I want to know more about her. I usually try to avoid my targets sharing deeply personal things with me — I try to pull the pleasure-seekers and socialites, and to avoid any pretension of false intimacy or emotional bonding. But I am also more genuinely interested in Livia, and curious about, well, everything.

“Firstly,” she says, “I am bisexual. At least, that’s the common label. I’ve always preferred the term ambisextrous, though — Tallulah Bankhead is my spirit animal. Regardless, I like men and women. That’s actually pivotal to all of this. I genuinely enjoy sex with men, but I have a driving salacious interest in exposing the bodies of women. It can be fun with men, too, but it’s not the same. Women have a particular aesthetic appeal that men lack. I love the act of conquest, the hunt, the exposure. But, like any decent person, I want to indulge that hunger without hurting people. That’s why your books were so useful to me.”

I nod. “I can see by the décor that you don’t view pickup artistry the way most women who know about it do.”

She grins. “Okay, flashback time. I was born in Greece but raised in the UK, and sent to Montana for college. Women bloom earlier than men. You know that, right? I was feeling attractions to girls when I was like twelve, though I didn’t consciously realize it. In particular, I had developed a huge girl-crush on a senior, Suzie M—, while I was still a freshman. She was amazing — a classical English beauty. If she was in the US, she’d have been prom queen for sure.”

At the time, Livia actually blurted out the lady in question’s full name — but there’s no way that belongs in this memoir, obviously.

“I didn’t know what a lesbian or bisexual was. Schools didn’t do sex education back then; the Sexual Revolution changed things. I just knew Suzie was really pretty, and I really wanted to shower with the seniors before gym class. I got a bit of a fixation on seeing her naked. Most women aren’t about the visuals, in sexual terms, as much as men are — but I am, and always was.

“Anyway, one of the rich juniors at our school was having a birthday party, and he invited me, Suzie and a bunch of other girls to it. For whatever misguided reason, his family hired an amateur magician to entertain, and this was before Mary Whitehouse and the Moral Majority and public decency being really enforced. He did the Baffling Bra trick. You’ve heard of that?”

I shake my head. “Here,” she says, “let me show you. Be right back.”

She runs out of the room and comes back with a red scarf, which she tucks into the neck of her shirt. I see flashes of sheer black panties under the shirt as she moves. “Now, if I were doing this for real, there would be a pretext to put that there, and a pretext for the magician to tug on it — like being part of a rope trick or card trick. But for the sake of the story, just pull the knotted scarf out of my shirt.”

I do so. As I do the knot comes apart, revealing a white lacy bra between the ends of the scarf.

“Oh my god,” Livia says in over-acted, playful mock-concern, “you stole my bra, you naughty magician you.”

“You weren’t wearing a bra under that shirt before,” I deadpan. “I definitely noticed — and liked — that.”

Livia laughs. I’m actually wondering the extent to which I can openly perv on this woman and still get what I’m reading as a genuinely positive response. The notion is oddly exciting to me. “Well, yeah, but you get how the trick works now. The bra is actually made of a highly compressible material called 20th Century Silk, which is why the trick is sometimes also called the 20th Century Bra.”

“Honestly,” I say, “it’s a bit tame by the standards of your show.”

“Later I’ll show you my special variation of it. You’ll think that’s pretty amazing. But the point is that I was a high school freshman, not consciously aware of what lesbianism even was, and a magician did this to my dream girl. It was my formative sexual experience. It also led me to some... indiscretions a year or two later — stuff I’d rather not go over in depth. There was a voyeurism scheme pairing stealing Suzie’s bra and a failed water balloon prank, and later getting caught peeping in the seniors’ shower room.”

I laugh. “Why not tell the story? Your early life sounds like one of those teen sex comedies come to life.”

The idea intrigues me more than it rightly should. I’ve got a lifelong fascination for wacky, carefree, hedonistic softcore — gems like Joysticks, H.O.T.S., The Bikini Carwash Company, My Tutor, Malibu Bikini Shop, Private School, Recruits and Hardbodies. My favorites would have to be the Screwballs trilogy, however. This interest goes back to my teen years — on my first early, awkward date, I took a girl to a sleazy local drive-in to see Flesh Gordon, pretending I thought it was a Flash Gordon film — I loved it, and I was surprised how much she did as well. We didn’t do anything beyond making out — we were young — but the making out sure was intense! It awakened me to the idea that girls like the naughty stuff just as much as guys do, especially if it makes them laugh.

The best sex comedies have a kind of innocence to them mixed in with the honest depiction of male lust and fantasies — even when they characters are committing what, in real life, would be sex crimes they still (usually) aren’t hurting anyone in the film’s reality. That has always fascinated me — the paradox of the harmless violation. It was probably the sex comedies, in retrospect, that inspired me to explore pickup artistry. Lots of guys want a life with more T&A in it than they currently have — but not as many want it so much they’re willing to really focus on learning an entire, complex skill set to achieve that reality.

Sadly, this is not the right time for my nostalgic enthusiasm to bleed though my voice — Livia’s words caught my imagination, and I missed her wry, bitter tone.

“I never got to see anything, for the record, and the consequences of being outed as a lesbian before you know what a lesbian even is are rather less fun in real life than they would be in a sex comedy. I ended up becoming a total introvert-nerd in high school, and crossed the pond for college to escape bullying.”

I clasp her hand. “Genuine sympathy,” I say. “Not macking, not flirting. I’m really sorry you went through that.”

She nods. “Those years were tough, but my escapism was sexual fantasies. I read all my mum’s Harlequins voraciously, and sought out pulp stories involving magicians or hypnotism — especially the less savory kind. I became a gloriously deranged little pervert, and swore an oath to never let the world change me back. I have a fairly conventional sense of gender, I suppose — I like manly, dominant men and damsels in distress. Comes from all the pulps and romance novels. I wanted to be both the sinister, salacious magician and the lovely, innocent woman he would transfix and exploit.

“I withdrew from the college social scene completely, devoting all my time to studying stage magic. I could hypnotize people reliably by my seventeenth birthday. I came to believe that ‘ravish’ was the most beautiful word in the English language. Being ravished was like being raped, except the woman was allowed to enjoy it. It was exciting because it was spontaneous, because there was no need to ask first. It’s also weirdly safe for the woman — she never has to admit she wants sex; she just gets it. I wanted to both be taken advantage of, and to take advantage of others — especially of women.”

I walk over to the paperback bookshelf, looking more closely. There are stacks of pulp magazines — Weird Stories, Spicy Detective, Scream Queens — and a bunch of tattered Gor books, but the vast majority are Harlequin paperbacks with yellowed pages and spines well-curved from use. Those set out cover-forward often featured a handsome pulp magician threatening a scantily-clad young lady. “You kept them all.”

“I’m a collector. I read them only infrequently, these days — they’re not explicit enough for me anymore, but they are a shot of nostalgia.

“Anyway, as I said, I was a total nerd and introverted shut-in until I was in my mid-twenties. I finished my Masters in forensic psychiatry — a study I chose for... less than wholesome reasons — but ultimately dropped out of the Doctoral program. I worked as an editor for salacious magazines, working anonymously by mail and later using BBSes. I could be super-flattery and say your books saved me, but the truth is I read a lot of confidence-building stuff, and used liberally-applied self-hypnosis. But your books did provide me with some wonderful strategies for picking up girls without breaking them, and for general confidence building. So I used that, and the self-hypnosis and mnemonics, to rebuild myself in the carefully constructed persona of a sleazy but sexy magician.

“And here I am,” she says with a grin and a Vanna White ‘presenting’ pose. “Now I’m thirty-four years old, and I’ve pulled off three successful ‘stunt’ shows, and all my ambitions look to be within my reach. The sleaze, by the way, is an important and conscious part of the show and my persona. It’s my filter, like your Sieve. It attracts the girls I want to attract, and serves as a warning to anyone that might actually get hurt by the Sexy Scandal Spectacular antics to give it a wide berth.”

I do note that she moves straight from self-employed nerd to... this — she doesn’t make any mention of financing, or the luxury RV. But now is not the right time to press that point.

“So you can see why I want you, Marcelo Ambrose Knight. You’ve already had a big impact on my life and my self-confidence. Yes, Marc, I had planned this from the beginning. I used some feminine wiles to get SexCon management to send you a speaking invite, I asked Sunset Thomas to recommend to you my show and I manipulated the scheduling of my own show so you were likely to blunder into it on casual interest.”

“It wasn’t casual interest,” I reply. “I have this odd relationship with the word ‘naughty’ —”

“Yes,” she says excitedly. “I know. That’s why it was there. You magnificent bastard, I read your books! I can’t believe I actually got a chance to use that line in real life. Anyway: the word ‘naughty’ is like a magnet to you. It’s like me and ‘ravish’. You’re always deeply disappointed when you buy porn with the word naughty in the title, hoping it will involve some playful but harmless transgression and the mood of naughtiness and it ends up just being vanilla fucking. Focus groups, you said, want the word naughty in the title of pornos because there’s a deep societal hunger for pornography to depict things that are naughty, but then the directors don’t actually know how to depict naughtiness, so they either fall back to vanilla fucking or dive into the kind of depravity and cruelty that sickens rather than titillates. So there’s a lot of porn with the word ‘naughty’ in the title, but very little that actually is naughty.

“I took that particular monologue to heart, Marc. I want the Sexy Scandal Spectacular to be the very essence of the word naughty as you defined it. Crossing boundaries, tricking people and getting hot girls naked in public... without actually hurting anyone. That’s why I think the show can go big-time — because there’s a demand for naughty that isn’t been filled. You yourself made that case.”

I can’t argue the case Livia is making. I feel her design, her plan locking around me. I wonder if I’ve put too much of my inner and secret desires into those books, and am now getting played. But if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be getting this offer to live them all out, now, would I? It’s complex and scary, and I realize for the first time that saying yes to Livia, and pushing my life onto a totally new path, is a real possibility here. Inwardly, I promise myself that I won’t commit to anything here, tonight, regardless. I will leave, sleep, and think on the offer. My response is perhaps a bit more sarcastic than it should be out of defensiveness. “This sounds like an overly elaborate and labor-intensive way of trying to be the next Joe Francis.”

“I have copies of all nine of the VHS tapes filmed by Girls Gone Wild — yes, including the one that never got sold and was still in pre-production when Valerie Solanas shot Joe Francis through the head last year. They could have been way bigger than they were, if things had been different. But that leaves the niche still open — for us. I can’t deny I’ve had some quality fun time with those tapes, but there’s also no real showmanship, no artistry.

“If this ‘World Wide Web’ concept journalists keep chattering about pans out, our world will soon be inundated with naked fun bags. Heck, just look at Usenet or some campus social BBSes. To stand out, a show would have to make the audience really want to see the girl’s tits before showing them the girl’s tits. It would need to cultivate anticipation. That is exactly what a magician does, and why a naughty magician has the potential to be so successful. Magic has always been about subtextual fetishes, Marcelo — damsels in distress, trapped in boxes, being impaled by swords or the targets of thrown knives. My show brings the fetishes right to the surface. Volunteers do things they’d never imagine doing normally yet still really, deeply want to —”

“Yeah,” I say a bit sardonically. “I know all about that part.”

“You do know how hypnotism actually works, and what it can and can’t do, don’t you?”

I nod. “In general terms, yeah. There are unsavory types in the pickup community that want it to be some kind of enslavement, but it’s not.”

“Yeah,” Livia says. “I can only hypnotize people to do things they really want to do anyway, and they won’t do things that are anathematic to them. I can get past inhibitions, habit and nervousness with deceptive scenarios or blunt charisma, but not actual convictions. Hypnotized people still have volition. There’s actually a medical study on this that uses stripping the girl as the deciding factor.

“In 1926, Doctor Pierre Janet hypnotized a young lady and demonstrated that she could be made to act out a staged murder. When someone asked her to strip, it broke the trance — she knew, on some level, the murder was staged, but the stripping would have been real and over her limits. I can — and will — strip girls with hypnosis, but by definition the only ones I can get to strip are the ones that, on some level, choose to. In the Taurus Escalation, we needed to make you actually want to dominate and punish Mimi before I could hypnotize you to do it. When you were tranced, I told you she’s a ringer, and into it. I didn’t let your conscious mind remember that, but your subconscious did.”

She’s right. A memory of her voice I couldn’t access before the moment she told me it existed echoes in my mind: Unleash your inner beast! Trust that I am a magician, and capable of grand feats of illusion from which all walk away miraculously unscathed...

“I... think some of my performance came from me,” I say slowly.

“Probably,” Livia agrees. “But not in the way you’re thinking. You’re a pickup artist. You probably get accused of, and berated for, being sexist all the time. It’s your personal pink elephant — that comes across in your books, at least to a trained shrink. We live in a neurotic society, Marcelo, with all the taboos and stigmas. Being given permission, being able to actually do the forbidden thing, the taboo, without consequences... it’s immensely cathartic, like a dam breaking, like an orgasm for your psyche. It’s hot, it’s relaxing and it’s seriously fun.”

“Uh... huh.”

“Look me in the eye and say it wasn’t fun,” she says, “and I’ll admit I misjudged and got the wrong guy, and I’ll give you your blowie and send you on your way.”

I look up at her and stare her in the eye. “It wasn’t fun,” I say. “I was terrified that I’d just destroyed my life.”

I wait a second as different emotions play over her face.

“That was total bullshit, by the way. I just wanted to see how much you could read me. I mean, I was genuinely terrified, but it also gave me a massive erotic thrill. I’m still reorienting over how much it pushed some of my buttons, and how I feel about that.”

She laughs. “You utter wanker! Well, I suppose I gave up any moral right to chastise you for dickishness when I hypnotized you to be a dick.”

She sees the look on my face. “Don’t worry; that’s a joke. All my suggestions ceased when the smoke touched you, remember?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“You’re as good at this as I hoped you’d be, though! I’m good at reading people, but you’re better. I’ll admit that. And you lie well.”

“But infrequently, and never maliciously.”

“Really?”

I hold up my little finger. “Pinky swear.”

That is cheesy enough to get a giggle out of her. “I’m much the same, really. Passionately in love with the mechanics of deception, illusion and conquest, but with a strong desire not to hurt people for real.”

“Okay,” I say, “Go on.”

“The Sexy Scandal Spectacular will run on the Sieve method you codified in your books for finding the ‘Girls Who Do’, only we want to find the ‘Girls Who Want To’ and turn them into the ‘Girls Who Do’, live and on stage. The pulling vibrators out of hats and stink beads, that stuff is just set dressing. It sets up an intentionally tacky and sleazy but fun mood, brings the audience’s prurient interests to the forefront and lowers their inhibitions... but the meat of the show is getting cute girls to volunteer. So you can see why an attractive male pickup artist would be a core component the show needs to succeed — both on stage, and for some social engineering of the supposedly spontaneous volunteers before the show proper takes place.”

Something clicks for me then, and I laugh. “I know what your game is. You’re lesbian, not bisexual. You need beefcake in your show to give the straight girls a motive to volunteer, and then you can get your thrills vicariously by stripping or pranking them with me.”

She winces. “I am bisexual. That is the gospel truth. Join my show and you won’t have any doubt about it after a while. But I won’t deny that straight girls are a large potential volunteer pool I want to be able to tap into, or even that I might gain a certain vicarious enjoyment in being the architect of their unexpected sudden-onset nudity. And with you there, it will be a positive experience for them, provided we choose the volunteers right — and your Sieve will let us do that. And, if some of these young ladies can be persuaded to try something new in their lives, something more feminine, well...”

“So this is a zany scheme to get laid,” I interject gleefully.

Livia holds me with a transfixing stare. “Essentially, yes, albeit on an impressively grand scale. You can hardly claim to be above such a thing, Marcelo...”

“You kidding? Zany schemes to get laid are what I live for.”

Livia nods. “So I’ve heard. It does work out for you as much as me. Say your more cynical interpretation was true. So what? You’ll still be directly involved with a lot of horny, naked birdies under a marginally permissible social context. It wouldn’t change the fact that I’m proposing a scheme that has the potential of making you famous while also surrounding you with pretty young things with seriously lowered inhibitions. Seven out of ten of them will be straight, given the most optimistic demographic assumptions for a hopeful lesbian, so I won’t be competing with you on many at all.”

She leans close in and whispers in my ear to deliver her closer. “Join me, Marc, and I will positively drown you in nubile young college pussy. We can drown together.”

I laugh. “That’s a mighty tempting offer.”

“You’re damn right it is. You wanted naughty porn, I’m offering you the opportunity to play it out in real life.”

“I’ll say right now, I’m not signing contracts or making any major life decisions tonight. I’m going to go home and sleep on it. But I can’t deny you’ve made a really strong case.”

“Are you leaving? Isn’t there something I can do to convince you I’m bi?”

As she finishes the line, she gropes my dick though my jeans quite aggressively. “I must say,” I tell her, “I adore the way you can deliver cheesy porno lines with a straight face. I’m being totally serious. When I first got into pickup artistry, I dreamed it would involve a lot more of people saying salacious but corny things to each other in breathy voices like in the sex comedies. Turns out that doesn’t work so well in real life — but I still look for the places where it can be made to work. And I’m happy to stay a few more hours.”

She laughs. “Wonderful. I’m wired as fuck right now. I want to plan and scheme. You probably have questions. Can we go forward on the assumption that you’ll say yes, but without any obligation for you to do so?”

“Sure, it sounds interesting. First of all, what’s the deal with the motorhome-on-steroids?”

“I am first and foremost a prop magician. All the great ones really are. There’s two big components to stage magic — the flair and the props. You need the latter if you want to go big time. So we have an extensive costume wardrobe in here, much of it from thrift stores, and a carpentry shop, and a machinist’s shop, and the colloid lab, and the audiovisual rig and compositing studio. And my living space, and Mimi’s, and the printer room, and the junk rooms. And a mini-gym, because Mimi and I couldn’t live on the road and keep our figures trim without one.

“The bus is a Neoplan Jumbocruiser — or at least, built on the frame of one — but we refer to it as the Great Beast, or just the Beast. It’s one of a kind, really. It was originally commissioned for Ground Force One, but the White House administration changed and the government contract went elsewhere, leaving Neoplan with this... thing... they needed to get rid of at a less than full price. It’s actually armored, would you believe that? And it has a few other unusual features as well.

“How it came to be mine is... well, a magician must have some secrets, you know? Suffice it to say, I’m the legal owner of the vehicle, and it’s an unbelievable asset to a traveling prop-based stage magic show. And yes, Mimi and I both have our Class A commercial licenses, and all the permits for the Beast. It’s a travelling show, and I want to hit the US and the UK, and maybe even Europe with one set of supplies. I have an agreement with a little-known shipping company that lets us send it overseas on cargo ships RoRo. Er, that means, roll-on roll-off — you drive the vehicle onto a cargo bay on the ship and just go. We can cross the Atlantic on a freighter, if you know who to persuade, and even live in it as it’s shipped. It doesn’t get inspected the way a normal RV would. It’s not a fun trip, but life on the road can be rough.”

I ask her some questions about props, and she actually teaches me a lot that night. Some of what she shares I’ve already told you — such as how her hypnotic jewel works — and other things I’ll explain when they become relevant in later shows, and still others are going to stay as mysteries. We also pass by the closet where they stow the Mitchell twin-reel cameras. “You’ve got an impressive filming rig for an indie performer.”

Livia nods. “Gerard Damiano was right. You want to made adult entertainment, you need to have respect for the craft — treat it like it’s worth being remembered by history, not a cheap payday. You shoot on ‘35, and in time new distribution technologies will vindicate you. If your early work, your breakout, is crisp and clear, you’ve ensured yourself a place in history. People will come back to your shows to watch them again and again, because they are a piece of the zeitgeist captured in crystal clarity.”

It’s shocking how accurately Livia predicts the future here, right from the beginning. A few years from now, when crystal-sharp N-VHS technology is spreading, we’ve exploded and our Collector’s Editions are in massive demand — while Canoga Park has gone cheapy-camcorder with their new quantity-over-quality attitude. We will make a veritable killing and cement our place in history. Clubhouse video and similar outfits bet on gimmick optical media technology, like LaserDisc or the obscure “digital video discs” that end up joining Betamax in the junk piles of history. Livia sees the shape of things to come. I obviously don’t know this now, however, so my attention drifts to other, bustier topics. “Who exactly is Mimi, and what is her role in all this? She comes off as a bit of a bimbo, but she also seems to be integral to the show.”

“Our names are Livia and Marcelo, and I’m guessing that like me you use that name in all aspects of your life.”

I nod. “Mimi is a persona and a stage name. Mimi is a bimbo by design. The lady who plays her was named Miriam Milton, and is not a bimbo. She uses the name Mimi full-time, now, but she’s still only a bimbo when she enjoys being one. She is one of my lovers, however, and is a quite brilliant computer expert, media editor, camera lady and hacker. She does the IT for our shows. She’ll also scour Usenet and Fidonet and use a digitally-enhanced version of your Sieve to pick out ideal volunteers for the show. She runs the cameras and the lights from the Scarlet Lady — that’s our tech-booth van — when she’s not being the cute, bumbling assistant in the show, and teaches our temps how to handle the cameras when she is.”

“Nice find.”

“Yeah, she’s super useful. And I’m sorry to disappoint you, but unlike me she’s a full lesbian. She’s also got a royal flush of sexual fetishes — yes, I’m cleared to tell you about them; we talked about it. You know she’s subby, and into spanking and exhibitionism, obviously. She also likes WAM — that’s an acronym for ‘wet and messy’, and it means people getting covered with water or food or slime. No, not bodily fluids. Like a kinky version of the old Nickelodeon children’s shows. It’s rubbed off on me to a degree as well, honestly.

“And, as you probably guessed, the bimbo persona is the fifth. She’s also into something called ‘bimboification’. That’s a sexual fetish where smart women get turned into, well, bimbos. I help her live it out via hypnotism. Basically it’s smart neurotic women idealizing being dumb or vacuous as a way of being carefree. It’s important to remember there’s still a smart girl underneath the hypnosis and play-acting, though, and she’ll remember it if you use her persona to hurt her.”

“Warning noted. I catalogue women’s kinks for seduction purposes, but this, er... ‘bimboification’ thing is totally new to me.”

“It’s pretty underground and relatively new. What about WAM?”

“I’m vaguely familiar with it. It’s never especially been my kink, but anything that keeps Louise Hodges taking her clothes off and spreading in the pages of Razzle and Splosh is good in my book.”

I should decompress this a bit. I’ve spent my whole life prior to SexCon in the United States. I’m a veteran of the Pubic Wars — the twin poles of my sexual aesthetic have always been Debonair and Clubhouse, both of which I’m an avid fan of. It wasn’t until three years ago that I had any exposure to nudie mags from across the pond — I dated a bisexual Brit with a lovely collection that held her formative sexual memories, and if I’m being truthful I fell more in love with her magazines than with her. They were paradigm-redefining to me, adding a third pole to my sexual aesthetics — something even hardcore tapes, as much as I love them, have not been able to do.

The UK has no native hardcore industry, and American XXX tapes generally aren’t legal there. They make up for this, though. You can see a topless babe on the third page of their mainstream distribution newspapers — a fact that caused me real existential doubt about my faith in American exceptionalism. How could the United States fairly be called the cultural leader of the free world, when Britain was free and open enough to include a topless model in every paper sold?

Their actual nudie mags have a much harder-edged presentation as well; titles like Razzle, Fiesta, Escort and Splosh. Some models in them might be said to be less attractive when compared to Playgirls or Treats — but some, like Amanda Long, Louise Hodges or Samantha Jane, I’d rate as the equal of any American centerfold. There’s a few different things you notice when you get a look at these Brit-mags: first of all, there’s vag everywhere — these models are completely uninhibited about spreading their legs, making the US Pubic Wars a bit of a farce.

So much glorious beaver on brazen display you’d think they must be Canadian! But it’s not just the bush — the attitude is different. Cruder, but also more joyful. A Debonair centerfold may be sultry, innocent, coy or playful — but always somewhat serious. The Brit-mag girls are willfully silly — laughing, tickling each other, making silly faces, being off the wall. It all just looks like so much fun.

And yes, every now and then, they’d have an issue where they had a food fight or otherwise get messy. This wasn’t a big plus or minus to me back then — I just noticed it was there. What got my attention was the casualness about vag, and the amount of gleeful immature fun the models always seemed to have at their photoshoots.

Livia laughs. “Why do my lovers always have a thing for Louise Hodges?”

“We’re lovers, now?”

“Well, I did promise you a blowie, so there’s that.”

I’m glad you remembered, and aren’t squirming out, I think, but don’t say anything aloud.

“Anyway, regarding WAM, I just wanted to mention it, in case you wondered why it was a thing in the show. I have an agreement with her to integrate it into two-thirds of the Escalations, as part of a way of covering her services. As I’ve said, Mimi is genuinely a lesbian. As such, I think we can expect the brunt of the messy punishment to fall on cute girls.”

“That isn’t actually necessary, and potentially not even desirable,” I reply. Livia quirks an inquiring eyebrow.

“My best pulling personas are built on arrogance. A lot of women find arrogance sexy, but it’s also an ‘unsafe’ marker. To stay inside their comfort zones, I have to puncture the arrogance somehow. Usually I do that myself by self-deprecation, but having a co-host dish out a little messy humiliation now and then would let me keep up the intensity.”

“Right,” Livia says, “so the mark still sees you as intense, but feels on more equal ground when you’re made vulnerable for a moment.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Vulnerable is always sexy. But I try not to use the word ‘mark’ for my conquests. My brand has always been about figuring out how to give girls an experience they’ll enjoy as much as I do.”

“I like that,” Livia says. “Many modern pickup artists are gross fat men with skills to pressure and bully low self-esteem women into sex, not entice and arose them.”

“My ways are neither cruel nor blunt like that. I follow in the footsteps of men like Albert Ellis and Eric Weber. Pickup should be poetic, respectful and exciting to both parties.”

“Your dick,” Livia intones in a mock-solemn voice, “is an elegant weapon fit for a more civilized age.”

I crack up in spite of myself. “That kind of resonates, honestly — though I’ll never be able to keep a straight face when watching that scene again, now.”

“Regardless, if you’re going to travel with us you need a better — and frankly, a more grandiose and bombastic — epithet. How does Lord of Seduction sound to you?”

I’m not sure I could call myself that with a straight face — but then again, I worried the same thing when I first took up the name Marcelo Ambrose Knight, and nowadays it’s just who I am. But it’s not surprising that I protest a bit regardless.

“Lord of Seduction? Really?”

“Would you prefer Vagina Whisperer?”

“Lord of Seduction it is, then — assuming I accept your offer.”

Honestly, Vagina Whisperer is funnier and more memorable, but I doubt it’s a good epithet for anyone trying to be suave and macho. Silly can be sexy, but one can also go too far.

“In any case,” Livia says, “they are marks, even if only for the sake of my own kink. We’re not going to hurt them. We’re not going to ruin lives, coerce or destroy reputations. We’ll be careful of people in socially-conservative environments — believe me, I do not have to be taught that lesson. But make no mistake: we are going to be tricksters, sexy scammers and scandal-makers, and they are the marks. It’s right there in the tagline: we’re going to steal your dignity, and your modesty — and in later shows, your virginity... and you’re going to enjoy every minute of it. Because in the bedroom, it can be fun to be the predator or the prey, but when no one is either all you’re left with is Tab A in Slot B.”

I actually consider what she said, working out my thoughts at the same time the words came out. “I just had one of the most intense and... not gonna lie, here, erotic... days of my life. I was acting predatory, and in a way I was also your prey. So I can’t deny that there is a deep appeal to me in what you’re saying.”

“The aim is not grotesque exploitation of unwilling women,” Livia adds. “If that’s what I wanted, it’s a lot easier to achieve. I could just visit a third-world brothel, or pressure drunk chavs to flash a camera. What I want is subtler. I want to find the girls — and occasional guys — that really do want to do something wild, that have an exhibitionistic streak they’ve never been able to indulge, or want to go a step further than has ever been socially permissible for them to go.

“The set, the logo, the slogan, even my stage name ‘Lascivious Livia’ — it’s all set up to subtextually warn volunteers about what we’re going to do. And the volunteers we want will go ahead with it anyway, because they’re bored, or horny, or ‘game for a giggle’ as we say across the pond. We’re not aiming to deal in ambiguous consent; we’re purveyors of deniable consent. We’re not getting people to sign forms or formally agree to get naked on stage — at least, not beforehand — both because the ones we want might be averse to the formalization even if they aren’t averse to the act, and because without it they can get involved in something naughty and then turn around and blame the terrible magician that made them do the terrible things they enjoyed so terribly much.”

Livia pauses to consider. Before she speaks, she moves markedly closer to me, invading my personal space and all but whispering into my ear. I do not signal her to stop, as I enjoy being close to her. I am, honestly, feeling pretty randy. “How much do you know about rape fantasies?”

“A bit,” I reply cautiously. My lust/caution dichotomy kicks into high gear, as I don’t really know Livia at this point and can see several potential very bad outcomes for me — including being set up as a scapegoat for a full-on sex crime.

“Rather more than a bit, I’ll wager,” she replies. “But for most women, they’re different then for men. Rape is a freedom from responsibility for doing something dirty. By being out of control, a repressed or straight-laced lady has the ability to participate in, and enjoy, something she would normally never do. Same with the watered-down submission making the rounds recently in mainstream media. Look at the wildly popular Anne Rice, with massive appeal to women, describing even the consensual sex in her books as being rape-like in its ferocity and roughness. Look at the male conquest scenes in Ayn Rand’s manifesto-novels — they’re like oases in a desert, giving so many young women the motive needed to struggle through the dry social diatribes and expand their political education.

“Look at Nine and a Half Weeks — as much as the feminists try to deny it, it’s a cult classic because it struck a nerve with women —”

“And with men because Kim Basinger looks great in a wet wifebeater,” I toss in.

It surprises me that I just say that — it’s not really a mixed company line — but it also doesn’t seem to be a misstep. Livia’s weird like that — I feel comfortable openly being a horndog around her even having just met her and still hoping to seduce her. It feels right.

Livia nods eagerly. “You’re not kidding! But my point is, it fulfills a need that isn’t being met — that mainstream media groups are determined not to allow to be met. These kinds of... of renegade fantasies break through the political consensus of respectability. The establishment hates them. Feminists are quick to denigrate any women liking bodice rippers or erotic thrillers, and thus there’s no ability of Hollywood to capitalize on the demand. But there’s still a lot of women buying these unacceptable books and watching these unacceptable movies.”

“Porn find a way,” I intone in my best pretentious Ian Malcolm impersonation.

Livia chuckles. “The market finds a way,” she clarifies, “and a skillful supplier can make an absolute killing catering to that demand, playing the role of the cultural renegade. But it has to be framed in a ‘safe’ way. Haven’t you noticed how all the kink, the lust, the freakiness, flows out of John Gray while Elizabeth McGraw is this conspicuously normal, innocent woman who would never normally be involved in any of it?”

“Yeah,” I reply slowly. “I can see that.”

In truth, my original response to the film was more ambivalent — Basinger was so hot, but I wished she wasn’t with such a creep. Then I talked about it with some of my recurring lovers, and slowly came to understand why Rourke needs to be a creep for it to be as hot as it is for women. And I started working out ways to do Rourke-inspired pickup routines, to be callous and cocky-dominant, while still having more empathy and respect for limits than John Gray did. In spite of using it as research material, though, it never truly excited me the way films like Malibu Bikini Shop or Loose Screws do.

“Well... you can be John Gray, the instigator, the corrupter — in persona, at least — to elicit volunteers from an audience to get up on stage and be naughty. But Liz, the volunteer — she’s a stand-in for the reader. She wants it... she just wants to be drawn in, so that she doesn’t have to admit her wants. To do that safely, without hurting the volunteers or picking the wrong ones... that would take an exceptional man with an exceptional ability to read women’s desires. With your particular skill set, we can bring together an act that will tap into the same energy that powers all those other renegade fantasies — but it will eclipse them all, simply by virtue of being participatory.

“Right now you’re a disgraced pickup artist running on residuals from your books. I’m offering you a shot at the big-time here — one that will make you bigger than all those that denounced you, give you purpose and structure and radically improve your already impressive sex life. But if you have what you consider a more credible offer, by all means take some time to evaluate and get back to me.”

The truth is, she’s nailed me and she knows it.

There is some other talk that I’m not going to include here because it would spoil the flow — it’s mostly about the potential legal consequences of what we plan to do here, how we will avoid and deal with censorship and safety measures to make sure we won’t actually hurt people. Morally, I think the worst thing we end up doing is some substantial invasion of privacy involved in selecting volunteers and maneuvering them into position. It isn’t nice and I don’t endorse it, but it’s part of the history of the show and this is a memoir. So there you go. People are not as concerned about privacy at the time as they will be when you read this, so it actually didn’t come up too much.

“What’s the deal with Decans and Escalations, anyway?”

“One of the oldest tricks stage magicians have is subtle implications of real occult power. That’s one part of it, and a way of grabbing audience by tapping into their secret fantasies of controlling or being controlled; the occult implications make the show dangerous, and we’re already going to offend the decency crusaders. If they scaremonger about the occult, they’ll end up looking ridiculous and undermine themselves — and that will be good for us. I should warn you — I am not above using seduction and blackmail to counter censorship efforts against the show.”

“I, er, I hope you don’t have to offer yourself like that to anyone.”

“And I,” she says, “hope I do. An actual seduction with stakes, like you see in the movies but rarely happens in real life... I am kinky, and I would enjoy perpetrating that a lot. Yes, including going all the way.”

“Pat Buchanan doesn’t deserve to get laid,” I throw back. “Least of all by an unearthly beauty like yourself.”

“Good argument,” she agrees, laughing. “Anyway, the Escalations. That’s my Master Plan. Twelve shows — not the only shows, but the main ones and the ones that will be big publicity stunts. A show isn’t announced as being one of the Escalations until it’s successfully complete. Each Escalation is tied to one of the signs of the Zodiac, symbolically, but that’s not the important part. The important part is that each show crosses a new line, does something new and extreme that hasn’t been part of any of the previous shows. And when we start drawing publicity, fans and gossip columnists will figure out what we mean by ‘Escalation’ and start trying to guess what the next one will be. We actually have a whiteboard for this.”

Livia takes me to a small room with a large whiteboard on one wall, and points numbered one to twelve. The whiteboard had a column for DEBUT, and twelve columns with Zodiac-sign fridge magnets under it. DEBUT has the words “Tits on Live TV” beside it. The first Escalation had apparently been Capricorn-themed in some way, and has the words “Full Frontal Magic” beside it. The second is the Taurus Escalation that I had just been a participant in, and was listed as “Staged Kinky Comeuppance” and “Surprise Wet Tee” beside it. The third Escalation is apparently planned to be associated with Virgo, and had the words “First Unexpected Amateur Nudity” and “Peeling a Peach” beside it.

What is far more interesting to my imagination, however, is all the magnet-phrases stuck to the portable fridge on the opposite side of this small room, however — “Come-Out Makeout”, “Sex on Stage”, “Lesbian Orgy”, “A-List Celeb Fucking”, “Amateur Masturbation”, “Orgasmic Catfight”, “Group Sluttification”, “Hypnosex”, “Stripper Sex Duel”, “Kinky Lucy Parody”, “Perverse Incentive Gag”, “Aphrodisiac Prank”, “Oblivious Bukkake”, “Giant Inflatable Dong”, “Sex on a Wager”, “Orgy of Unprecedented Scale”. I wonder how many of those phrases will get put beside an Escalation that actually happens, and how many were put there by Livia to either fuck with me, or stoke her own already overheated sexual imagination.

While there are certainly some phrases in that room that never end up on the board, by the end of the Twelfth Escalation every one that I actually listed above will get used. You see, O Libidinous Reader, Livia taught me well about the value of anticipation, and I figure there’s no harm in stoking a bit of that self-same anticipation in you, to keep you turning the pages.

“You know,” Livia says, “I have footage from my Debut and First Escalation, as well as some raw footage from today’s show. Want to enjoy a little catchup viewing with me?”

Livia and I lie on her backlit tangerine waterbed with the navy sheets. No doubt it would have made a great color-contrast shot in some avant-garde director’s arthouse film. She hits a remote and a rear-projection big screen TV folds down from the ceiling on a gyro. It’s one of those sleek new-style ones like something out of Logan’s Run, with rows of square grey buttons in place of the typical channel dials. The screen lowers and gets weirdly close. Between the large screen, supine position and surreal luminescent mattress, I can only imagine how trippy it must be to watch porn in this getup with a lover. Of course, in a sense, that’s what Livia and I are about to do — and probably also what the fancy rig was designed for.

I notice the oddest thing — one of those Nintendo boxes amidst the TV assemblage, the kind with cables you screw into the back of your TV set to make it run video games like an arcade cabinet. I’ve seen them advertised on TV. It’s odd to see here, because I very much doubt children have ever been in this room — nor should they be. Livia strikes me, in fact, as very much the child-free type.

“You never heard about my scandalous debut? It made quite a stir in the gossip pages and entertainment columns four years back.”

“I don’t follow those to any great degree.”

“It was the NFL half-time show four years ago, and on most of the East Coast it aired live. They censored it in later broadcasts, of course, but the real version is still in circulation among fans — and that couldn’t make me happier. It got me blacklisted from ‘respectable’ magic circles, mind you — the magicians’ community can actually be very prudish, in part because they don’t want the whole genre to be seen as bawdy — and people said that I’d torched a promising career for a cheap publicity stunt. And they’d be right — if I had ever planned to be a conventional magician instead of, well, Lascivious Livia.”

“Okay,” I say. “Curiosity piqued. What did you do?”

“See for yourself,” she says and flicks on the screen, selecting the file from an indexed archive with the remote.

It’s only a seven-minute show. Livia comes out dressed in a black blazer with a tight white shirt (and a clearly visible black bra) underneath, and black jean-slacks. Her hair is perfectly teased and she wears stylish but professional gold-rimmed glasses. Mimi walks by her side in a formal suit, waving to the cheering crowd. It looks like a Vegas venue, but according to the tagline was filmed in Seattle. The announcer introduces ‘Livia Locarno’ — apparently this wasn’t supposed to be a risqué show, beyond her tight clothes and obvious subtextual sexuality. Livia is apparently going to be chained up and escape from a 200 gallon keg of Canadian maple syrup set on a transparent podium. When she strips off the blazer, the music surges in excitement.

Mimi helps to chain Livia up, covering her mouth with duct tape and her body with padlocked chains. The two of them are flirting subtly, getting away with a surprising amount on network television — the branding says it was CBS. And, of course, the duo play up the kink aspect of the bondage (“it’s so tight”, Mimi says in awe, and Livia jokes back that she likes it tight) as much as humanly possible on live TV. Mimi lifts the glasses off Livia’s face tenderly and pockets them protectively. Together the two of them work up a lot of sexual energy, and I have to admit they turn me on. The keg is opened. Livia climbs a ladder and grins at the audience. She jumps in. A camera shot from above shows her form vanishing into a morass of syrup. The lid is placed back on and secured. A timer starts on screen. One minute passes. Two. Three.

Mimi plays the nervous bimbo assistant role really well, biting her lip and pacing around, working up the audience’s tensions. “It’s at four minutes without air that irrevocable brain damage sets in, right? You’re sure? I can never remember if it’s three or four.”

At three minutes thirty seconds, Mimi announces that something has gone wrong. “Get her out of there! Get her out! Get her out!”

Something like a cannon is fired at the two-meter-tall keg from offstage. It shatters into flinders; Mimi, the male announcer and everyone else on stage gets splattered with syrup. A pool of syrup forms on the luminescent platform, cascading down in tiny rivers. Livia is nowhere to be seen. Then Livia rises up out of the lake of syrup as if by levitation, a graceful and angelic figure with an intense stare and her hair slicked back by syrup. Everyone is staring at her in awe, for reasons both obvious and salacious.

The chains are completely gone. She’s still wearing the slacks, dress shoes and tight white shirt — but it looks like she lost her bra in the trick somehow. Her white shirt is glued to her ample chest, her nipples are clearly visible in the 35mm footage and the anchor gets a perfectly crisp waist-up shot of her delicious body with the syrup running off every curve, lingering for about three lovely seconds before he realizes what the hell he’s filming and wisely zooms in on her face. “I am Livia Locarno,” she says in a commanding and awe-striking tone, “and the Twelve Escalations are coming soon!”

Orange and navy smoke bombs go off. Livia and Mimi vanish, and the footage cuts away to an embarrassed-looking anchor. “In the demo tape I gave CBS, I never lost the bra while I was in the barrel, and I didn’t do the smoke-vanish at the end. They threatened to sue me, but I pointed out that what I did wasn’t all that different from what they were doing just the year before on Battle of the Network Stars. They actually shut up after that, because they didn’t want that particular show scrutinized in any kind of trial.”

I laugh. It’s the second set of wet tits I’ve seen today. Both were spectacular, and both benefited from anticipation — I really wanted to see them before I actually did. Mimi’s are bigger, but Livia is quite ample too and hers, going by the video, are absolutely perfectly formed. I’m aroused; my dick is hard.

Livia giggles. “Okay. Next video. This is the Capricorn Escalation. I can see you’re getting excited, so I’ll fast-forward the first two Decans. They’re not that interesting — some flirty, risqué card tricks, but more in a ‘you had to be there’ kind of way. They set up the mood for the third, though, which will titillate you but was the fulfillment of a lifelong sexual fantasy for me.”

She plays the video. Truthfully, I’m crazy horny at this point and have some trouble concentrating. The show is in an old UK pub, from back when the pub strippers were a big thing. The set is actually really shabby-looking, in contrast to both today’s and the debut. It’s obvious Livia paid for her half-time CBS stunt. Anyway, she coaxes a woman out of the audience and starts a card trick with her.

The volunteer is a pretty forty-something, but hardly a perfect ten like Livia herself is. That actually clicks with a lot of other things. Livia has a vibe of sexual energy about her — but also sexual frustration. She’s clearly had a fair few conquests, and obviously Mimi’s gorgeous — but I get the vibe from her that she strikes out more often than not when she really wants to score a home run. She has that same aura of desperation that many of the male schmucks I’ve given confidence training to radiate. She’s not the first sapphic scholar to learn pickup from me, but if I’m being honest she’s the first attractive one.

It’s surreal to think a centerfold beauty like her could experience that, but more credible the more I think about it. She likes pretty, innocent girls — but the hunger she radiates probably creeps out the bi-curious sorts. She likes dominant men and casual sex, which could very well translate to her picking up narcissistic muscle studs that last all of six or seven strokes before popping off inside a hottie like her. Most hot tough guy types are like that, honestly — they think they’ve got the biceps, so why worry about anything else? — and they also tend to scare off their more nuanced competition in clubs and bars.

In a way, I wonder if she wants a pickup artist on her payroll as a mentor as much as a coworker. Well, I’ve got no complaints in that department — I’d much rather train a centerfold stunner than yet another overweight dork in the middle of his midlife crisis!

Anyway, her Capricorn volunteer is giggly and playful. She’s wearing a pastel-print sundress, a leather jacket and has shaded glasses and novelty hair ornaments in her dirty blonde hair. The card somehow ends up inside the lady’s bra. The lady giggles; she’s a bit drunk and seems to be enjoying the lewd atmosphere and attention.

Livia finally gets to the part where she tucks a red scarf into the woman’s dress. She coaxes a male volunteer — a rough working-class guy who none the less has a warm smile— up on to the stage. It’s really just a cordoned-off section of the pub. She gets him to hold the other end of the scarf. I suspect she chose him for the faint resemblance to Benny Hill. She tells him to pull the scarf as forcefully as he can after she counts down from three. The woman shifts nervously and waves to the camera. Before they get started, though, Livia raises a cautionary finger at the female guest and whispers to her conspiratorially. “I should warn you, possum — there’s a very slight chance that in doing this trick, the audience might get a look at your bra.”

The volunteer giggles sheepishly. “I’m not an uptight old biddy, you know. I think I can live with that.”

3... 2... 1... the man pulls the scarf. I was expecting a rude payoff, but I will still admit to being surprised. The woman’s dress and jacket rip completely off and fall to the ground around her, dangling from the red handkerchief. The woman is stripped completely naked... except for a lacy, red, nearly see-through bra clasping her B-cups. The crowd, somewhat predictably, goes nuts. The man holding the hankie seems mortified, though no one would assume this was his fault. The woman is desperately trying to cover herself, which I find very appealing to watch. She’s pleasantly plump and has a full, curly, dirty blonde bush.

“I warned you,” Livia says with a playful smirk.

She looks utterly shocked but not terrorized — it’s obviously not her first time naked in public. A pub stripper, then. She probably expected some kind of brief naughty exposure, but not ending up bottomless on stage! The crowd laughs uproariously, and I do too — it’s honestly pretty funny, with Livia’s deceptive warning and misdirection. Mimi “politely” guides the denuded volunteer to turn around to shield herself from the crowd, and the camera takes the opportunity to zoom in on her fine ass, even managing a fairly clear shot of her pussy lips from behind. Mimi starts leading her to the back, staff area of the bar. Livia boldly announces, “The Capricorn Escalation is now complete! Love is the will, love under law!”. Navy and orange smoke. End of footage.

I glance up at Livia. I’m aroused watching the footage, but she’s obviously equally or more so. The gleam in her eyes is radiant. “Indulge my curiosity — how the hell did you pull that off?”

She laughs. “Oh, it’s a fun trick to prepare all right. First, you need to find a pub stripper that’s into girls and enjoys getting naked, and isn’t uptight about her body. Then, you take her home and bang her brains out. You suggest that a little erotic hypnosis might make the orgasms even better. While she’s in a trance, you give her a set of trick clothes and tell her to only wear these to the pub on this specific date. The trick clothes, well... you’re not interested in me explaining how that actually works right now, are you?”

She looks directly at my cock as she says this. “Why don’t you just watch them fly off again and again? We have x4 slow motion on this TV — I should know, I use it a lot.”

She turns to start playing around with the controls covertly as I watch the pub stripper get stripped in the pub, repeatedly, in slow motion, with multiple angles. I love the way her mouth flies open in an expression of utter shock. She looks so vulnerable. It’s hot.

“Ah, found it!” Livia finishes on the control box and snatches the remote from my hand. “I think you’ll love this. I enjoyed watching it earlier today.”

I recognize the footage she cued. It’s me, coming up behind Mimi with a huge pitcher of beer in each hand. It’s from a backup camcorder, not the 35mm reels — those take a lot of effort and time to post-process. Livia slinks off to the bathroom as I’m fixated on the video. I watch the scene play out in slow motion again, this time free from the terror that gripped me the first time.

The camcorder footage is pretty crisp, all things considered. I feel like I can make out the goosebumps on Mimi’s nipples once the shirt gets soaked — though that’s probably my overheated imagination. I watch it for a while, then skip to the beginning and watch it with audio at full speed. The words that come out of my mouth are horrifically sexist, but in the context it happens, knowing what I know now, watching myself say them is incredibly arousing. It helps that, in retrospect, I can make out so many subtle signs of how much Mimi enjoyed flaunting herself to the crowd in this role.

Livia steps out of the bathroom.

“Turn off the TV,” she says. “I believe I made you a promise I have yet to keep.”

I shut it off, and it folds back into the ceiling. Livia is posing with her hands above her head in a seductive style. She’s wearing a black bra and panties that are almost totally sheer, and has a fresh coat of lipstick on — a brilliant, glossy metallic red shade. She’s on the opposite side of the room from me, and I can still almost make out her pussy lips. “I hope that means you’re going to come lay next to me and do fun things with your mouth”, I say.

“No,” she says sharply. “Take off your jeans, sit on the corner of the bed and spread your legs.”

I comply nearly immediately, stripping with confidence and a bit of teasing eye contact. The downside of tight jeans is that it’s hard to look elegant getting them off — but by the time you’re doing so, they’ve usually done their work and the deal is sealed anyway. Livia does smirk a bit, but given her own wardrobe I suspect she can relate to my predicament. She’s visual in the way most men are (and many women aren’t) — I can tell that by how her eyes trace my nakedness. As I said, I’m already hard.

If you know my reputation but you’ve never seen any explicit video of me, O Blushing Reader, you might be inclined to visualize me with some kind of porn star monster cock like John Holmes or Sean Michaels. In actually, it’s well above average at six inches erect, but hardly a monster. Make no mistake, though — I adore my cock, and wouldn’t change a thing about it. It gets really hard, and it’s reliable, smooth-skinned, not overly hairy or veiny, neatly cut and pretty thick. I’m proud of it. I enjoy it.

Women, in my experience, are not nearly as enamored with gargantuan cocks as men are with big tits. I think the whole big cock mythology is something we made up among ourselves in locker rooms, without ever consulting the fairer sex. Not that women aren’t superficial — well-defined abs, big biceps and a firm ass all definitely help a player pull high-grade pussy — but while size queens do exist, the majority of ladies just don’t go moist for jumbo roosters.

I’ve also got a sneakier motive to love my size. As long as a lady’s genuinely into it, I just love to truly, vigorously pound a girl in the most literal, rhythmic, skin-slapping sense, and have it be as enjoyable for her as it is for me. I can assure you of this: I’ve been with girls who are into spanking, choking, slapping, spitting, hair-pulling and even outright brutality — but I’ve never in my vast menagerie of conquests met one who thought a bruised cervix was hot. Food for thought if you ever find yourself wishing you were born with a ten-incher, you know?

Livia’s eyes suggest she’s as happy with my package as I am. “I believe there is only one appropriate position for a woman to be in when she provides a man with oral sex — at least for the first time.”

Livia gets down on her hands and knees and starts to slowly crawl towards me. Holy fuck, just holy fuck. I’ve been with hot dominant women before, and I’ve been with hot submissive women before. Livia is the only one I’ve ever met who can be intensely dominant and intensely submissive at the same time. It’s honestly kind of amazing. That position, and that underwear, and that expression... my mind is melting.

“Should I dim the lights?” I ask, stammering slightly.

“Fuck no,” she says. “That’s for people that don’t work as hard on their bodies as we clearly work on ours. Do you like the lipstick? I always like to wear this style to do this. It looks so glamourous and pristine at first, and then it smears and starts looking positively nasty... in a quite appealing way.”

“Yeah,” I almost choke. “I like the lipstick.”

“Look me in the eyes. Show me that special talent you have. I bet it’s a good way to get a woman to keep eye contact when she blows you.”

I do so, Eyefucking her as she crawls toward me. As she gets closer, however, I am becoming aware I have a real problem. I’m normally stone cold incredible in the sexual endurance field — I’ve done marathon three hour fuck sessions, and gone over an hour without any kind of break — but today is not a normal day for me. I’m on the edge, and I strongly suspect I’m going to go over that edge soon.

The introspective part of my mind wonders if she planned it that way, so she could keep her promise and still have something to offer me later — or just so she could have a good laugh. Maybe she even did some sneaky hypnotic thing while I was watching the videos — or any other time, really; I doubt I could spot a covert induction from Livia — and planted a suggestion for premature ejaculation. One way or another, the playful gleam in her eyes says guilty as fuck.

Now, I am normally a gentleman in the bedroom, at least until I know a partner will enjoy something harsher. However, in my estimation the normal social niceties — such as “warn me before you come” — contextually shift a wee smidge when dealing with a woman who has tricked one into committing what is technically felony sex assault, then followed that up with an extended and passionate diatribe about the virtues of the word ‘ravish’, only to finish with a bit of tease-to-orgasm mind games as humiliation-based competitive flirting.

So, in short, I decide to give it all to her without warning. Yeah, that’s one more thing I love about my cock: I might never be mistaken for John Holmes, but my body can do a pretty decent impression of Peter North. It’s so notable that one old girlfriend named my cock the Lesser Vesuvius. (Yes, you may groan. It’s the expected response.)

I stare at her as she moves into position between my legs. Her high-volume hair brushes against the the hairs on my legs, raising goosebumps. She blows gently on the tip of my cock, and I almost come right there. She pushes it up to touch my stomach, leans forward and runs her tongue once along the underside of my shaft, starting at the balls and moving up to the tip. I like to think I keep at least some composure — she’s likely aware of my general problem, but not the exact timing.

What comes next is, well, pretty much as impressive as one would expect from a healthy young man already known for prodigious loads who has spent the last seventy-two hours tooling around a porn convention meeting various adult stars and watching stripper stage shows and lesbian sim-sex without actually ever getting off, then proceeded to involuntarily live out a transgressive fantasy in public, then spent the last hour watching fetish porn on a waterbed with his dream girl.

“Do you know,” Livia says with a delightfully playful gleam in her eye, “I have this special trick that I can —”

She never gets to finish. An impressively high-velocity strand of sperm strikes her dead-center in the face, arcing from her forehead down across her left eyebrow, with a globule running down her nose. She yelps a little as it strikes her, apparently genuinely surprised, and I find it so erotic to throw her off balance mid-sentence that my body feels compelled to add a second long, sticky rope to the voluminous mass of her hair. Wow — that feels so good, and it looks even better on her face.

“I’m so sorry”, I say, my voice dripping with sardonic mock innocence. “I can’t possibly imagine what could have set me off like that.”

We stare at each other for about five seconds. I keep up a cocky smirk and study her face. She isn’t angry or annoyed. She seems impassive, aroused and slightly amused. Notably, though, she doesn’t try to duck or evade my cum in any other way.

“Are you quite finished?” she asks in an almost caricaturally prim way.

Another two seconds pass, and then I answer her by splattering my fourth and fifth sticky strands over her right cheek and those agonizingly glossy lips. I’d say she looks like a bukkake debutante, but that’s silly — Livia’s way too hot for those sorts of videos.

“I think I’m done now,” I say.

She stands up. Her face is inches from mine, and in spite of my erotic vandalism much of her makeup and glamour is still intact. It’s achingly sexy to look at. She runs her tongue over her lips, experimentally tasting my cum.

“You see?” she finally says. “That was natural comedic timing. Yet another reason you’d be perfect for my show.”

“Let me get you a Kleenex,” I say.

“No,” she says sharply. “I want to see it. Help me get to a mirror without messing it up.”

What a peculiar request. Nonetheless, I comply, leading her to the bathroom. “I’ve never let a male lover come on my face before. I was curious; I just never had a good opportunity.”

“Technically speaking,” I sass, “you still haven’t.”

I get her into the bathroom without incident. She stares intently at her own face. She isn’t angry or ashamed; if anything, she is filled with a weird, childlike sense of awe. “I look so wicked and dirty with you on my face,” she says. “It’s like someone filmed a custom porno reel just for me, and edited me into it.”

She looks at me with a sudden flash of desperation. “Do you still have the Rabbit I gave you today?”

“It’s back in my hotel.” (A tiny white lie — I threw it out at SexCon, in the dazed time right after the Taurus Escalation.)

“Umm,” she says, “drawer by the bedside table. You need to push the bottom from the inside to open it. There’s a toy in there.”

I think about offering to eat her out. I’d really enjoy it, but she did try to be clever to subvert the blowjob promise so I figure there ought to be a bit more push-pull flirting before she earns my tongue. I figure out how to open the drawer and bring her an impressive-looking electric vibrator. “Thanks,” she says. “I’d kiss you, but I doubt you’d appreciate it right now.”

I’m not as freaked out as many men are by my own cum and I sense an opportunity to pump the temperature for future encounters, so I lean in and press my lips to hers, kissing her passionately as I hand her the toy. She tastes like coconut — such an exotic taste for a woman’s mouth. It surprises her, but I think it was a really good move — her body melts against mine as we kiss messily for several seconds, then she pulls away. “Don’t disturb the cum,” she says.

“I just wanted a chance to smear your lovely lipstick,” I reply. “After all, you just said that’s what it’s for. Now you look appropriately debauched as well as breath-takingly beautiful. Go enjoy yourself.”

I smack her ass teasingly as she hurries off. She locks herself in the bathroom, and I hear buzzing for the next half hour punctuated by the occasional clatter. It’s very realistic, actually — no performative porn star moaning, but an occasional gasp or decidedly unladylike grunt mixed with the bumping sounds from the shifting of positions one does during an extended masturbation session.

I lay on the bed and feel dizzy, exhausted physically and emotionally. It truly has been a crazy day, and I’m starting to feel nauseated from the extremes. Whatever else I feel at this point, any suspicions that Livia may have been a lesbian are utterly dispelled — I can’t imagine one acting the way she did in response to a man ejaculating on her face.

When Livia finally comes out of the bathroom, her hair is disheveled, her makeup smeared and her body covered in a faint sheen of sweat. She looks gorgeously unkempt. She still has her bra, though of course her panties are history — an odd parallel to the pub stripper from her Capricorn Escalation.

“That thing you did,” she says, “coming on my face without asking.”

I’m not going to admit I had to come somewhere. She must know, but I get the impression cocky plays well to Livia. “I didn’t think it was over the line, and you clearly liked it.”

“It was hot,” she says, “and I like you pushing limits. We might end up cohabiting together, so I want to spell some things out. Don’t do anything to me while I’m asleep or unconscious. Don’t drug me. Don’t do anything that could permanently damage my body or mind. Don’t ever read anything I said as an invitation to do serious violence to me. Don’t try to leverage the well-being of the people I care about to get me to do things you want. If you try any of those things, I might end your life.”

I nod.

“Other than that... anything not forbidden is permissible. I want to be conquered. I admire cleverness and trickery. I don’t like formal asking of permission. I like to be surprised.”

I grin. “Ah, the Red Sonja clause. I always thought that was hot.”

She smiles back. “Sure, exactly. If I don’t like something you do, I’ll tell you clearly not to do it again, but I won’t hold the attempt against you — so, hey, at least you’ll get away with it once, right?”

She winks at me. I laugh. She continues. “I want us to have a crazy sexual relationship, and to do all kinds of kinky shit. But I want you to work for it. That should be right up your alley, yes?”

“Damn right,” I agree.

“Make the first time special,” she says. “Force it on your terms. Indulge some kind of new fetish that catches your fancy. I’m game.”

“I accept your terms.”

“And Marcelo?”

“Yes?”

“All of this applies regardless of whether you join my show or not. Do that if it’s a thing you want to do with your life. If it isn’t, don’t. We’ll probably still end up fucking at some point, even if you say no.”

I laugh. “I’m surprised you aren’t indulging your admitted fantasy of really seducing someone for material ends.”

“I don’t want that kind of volatile relationship to mess up the Sexy Scandal Spectacular. And... I like you. I feel a similarity toward you, a resonance between our motives for doing things. Your books helped shape the person I am today. I feel like I know you far better than you know me. I genuinely want us to be friends, and that requires keeping the kinky power struggle in the realm of erotic games rather than real life.”

I don’t have to tell you, O Sensible Reader, of the decision I make the next morning, do I? After all, there’s only one answer that I can give Livia that will make this a more than a two-chapter memoir. But after time to sleep and think on it, I really do mean it. Right now, I’m aimless, pointless and useless. There is no better direction for my life to go at this point, and her offer does speak to many of my kinks and ambitions in a big way. So when I go back, I go back all in with a full devotion to my new life with the Sexy Scandal Spectacular.

She had me hooked before we even met, and she knew it.