The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I don’t call Livia and Mimi right away. I take the wheelchair and look for a part of the hospital with a payphone that’s quieter. I finally find one, an out-of-the-way alcove. I might as well do it now. I know the number; I’ve just been avoiding it. I could just not call. I don’t have an obligation, after all. I never made any promises. But that’s not what I’m like. I’m expecting this to be a long and difficult call, but it really isn’t. Long, I mean.

I call Sandra Venturi. “Hi,” I say. “It’s Marc.”

“Oh,” she says. “Hi, Marcelo.”

Her voice is dead, lacking any inflection, almost robotic and very weary. “What’s wrong?” I ask her, even though I already know.

“New Century Swimstyles let me, Tracy and Regan go yesterday, shortly after we were on your show.”

I was hoping that wasn’t going to be the outcome — that she might just feel ashamed and weird and want to talk — but in the back of my mind, I knew it. I just didn’t let myself realize it until now.

“I’m so sorry,” I tell her. “I really am.”

“You got the show you wanted, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I admit. I did enjoy what we did to her and her friends; I don’t want to lie about it.

“Then what does it matter?” she asks dully.

“I wanted it to get you ahead,” I say. “Make a scandal that would help your career, like a sex tape but weirder and kinkier.”

“You failed,” she tells me bluntly. There’s a deadness in her voice that is horrifying to me. “You failed horribly.”

“We tried,” I say. “Listen, if there’s anything I can —”

“No,” she says bluntly. “You can’t do anything. You’ve done more than enough. You’re... uh, not useful right now, at all, and really the last person I want to talk to.”

“Maybe Mimi could —”

Finally there is emotion instead of the dead affectless schizoid voice, but it is raw fury verging on a sob. “What the fuck did you think was going to happen, Marc?! The whole fucking crowd got off!”

“We didn’t... I mean, I didn’t mean for that to happen. I thought it would be a few guys in the crowd, not everyone. It would be subtly pervy instead of whatever it was that actually happened.”

I realize mid-sentence I can’t assure her we didn’t mean that. I don’t honestly know if Livia wanted to pop the whole male audience or not. She did want publicity, after all, and getting clear answers out of her is often complex. I feel a knot in my stomach. I also realize I can’t be utterly certain that I’m telling the truth, even though I’m trying to. Livia and I had fantasized about getting everyone off. I just didn’t expect it to happen. I think. The knot gets tighter.

Nobody says anything for a while.

“I believe,” I finally say very slowly, “that people can indulge dark desires in clever ways, and cheat the devil of his due by not hurting the people they’re involved with, if they’re careful.”

I realize, as I’m saying the words, how vacuous they sound, how they are more about me and my situation than hers. They are like a mantra I repeat, more trying to make myself believe it than to reassure her.

“Were you careful?” she asks.

I close my eyes for a second, and images flash on my eyelids. Mimi’s torn tendon. Audra’s bleeding ear. The mob Jeri and I narrowly dodged at DanceSpace. A dozen oiled women, some with long press-ons, grabbing at my junk. The bite-mark on Livia’s ass. Victor’s berserk roar. And yet... we tried. We try to take care of the marks who submit to us, to make everything safe, fun and carefree. But nothing related to sex is ever perfectly safe — physically, emotionally or medically.

But it’s worth the risks! my shoulder devil insistently tells me.

“Not enough,” I finally say back.

Sandra speaks very quietly. “Do you know what being fired from New Century even means?”

I know about their very valuable contracts, and their Hollywood dreams. I can’t fix that, I realize slowly. I don’t think it can be fixed. But it gets even worse than that. “I remember you told me how important it was,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“I can’t have,” she whispers. “I didn’t know what it means when I talked to you. Only Regan knew — that’s why she was scared.”

I feel sick. “Er, what?”

“It’s not just contracts; there’s blacklists, and image rights, and NDAs, and compliance officers, and... god, why am I even telling you this?!”

“I’m willing to listen?” It’s supposed to be light-hearted, a quip, but I’m not able to make it come out that way so it’s just condescending.

“Listen, Mister Knight,” Sandra says to me. I do not want her to call me Mister Knight ever again. It’s not sexy when she does it; it just makes me sad. “You and I had an agreement that involved a level of discretion. The only thing you should focus on right now is maintaining that discretion. You will do that?”

“Yes! Yes, of course —”

“I think it would be wise for both of us if you don’t contact me again. I just... I can’t deal with this right now.”

“All right,” I say. “Ten-four. But call me if you want —”

Click.

I read women — it’s my thing. I’m good at it. I’ve known something was profoundly wrong here since I watched Regan eat her banana. I knew something was wrong, and I let it go on because I was getting off on it so much — and because I want the Trips to be a success. I just couldn’t admit that to myself, so I pushed it out of my mind. It’s even deeper than what Sandra admit to me just now, too. I know that as well. My mind told me in a dream.

I stumble over to a concrete garbage can in the hospital parking lot and vomit in it. I wait for an hour, just doing controlled breathing. I have probably ruined three women’s careers. I hope I haven’t ruined their lives. It is chill out, even more overcast today than it was yesterday. The Florida sun that scorched us during the Cancer and Gemini Escalations is gone. Clouds are gathering; it will rain soon. I call Livia and ask her to come pick me up, telling her the entrance number I’m at. I go back into the hospital entry room to wait — I recall thinking I hear angry dogs barking madly outside, though in retrospect it’s likely my subconscious playing tricks on me.

I tell Livia the story in Scarlet on the way back. I trail off when I realize she doesn’t seem to care. I just focus on breathing, then, and not throwing up again.

“Jeez,” she finally says. “I guess it sucks, but you don’t have to be so moody about it.”

How did the banana segment go wrong? I ask myself. Everyone turned up the heat a degree or two. Livia turned it up with the hypnosis wheel, getting more of the audience tranced than we expected. I turned it up when I agreed to the yogurt nozzles. Sandra turned it up when she framed what we were doing to Regan in a more innocent way. Regan turned it up when she went full sloppy blowjob on the banana.

It’s like the old wives’ tale about a school prom back in the Fifties. People are more willing to get it on when they’re warm. The long, hot summer and the sudden heatwave are porn tropes for a reason. Maybe it’s psychological. Maybe it’s just that pretty people look prettier when they sweat just a little bit — they glow. And this gets shared around the school as grand male wisdom, and some girls even buy into the idea too. So people that want to get busy on prom night wander by the gym thermostat and just nudge it up a degree. After all, it’s just a degree, right? No one will notice, not consciously — but they’ve got a better chance.

But it’s not just one degree — everyone has the same idea, so it’s one degree per student who wants to get laid. Suddenly, it’s thirty degrees hotter, and I guarantee you everyone will notice that!

The Trips are a seriously weird little social bubble. We’re deranged perverts and we love each other for it. Spring Break is a weird social bubble on its own, and our Monday show made the Summers audience an even weirder little free love bubble — it set the tone. And when people want to know what’s acceptable and what’s over the line, what do they do? They read the room. We set up the room to lie to them, though — it’s one of our best tricks, for getting people past their own inhibitions. Maybe we set up the room to lie to ourselves as well, in terms of what people can get away with in the broader spectrum of society.

We touch base with the Gold Coast girls Tuesday afternoon. They make their flight back to Queensland, and will be on a road trip down to Surfer’s Paradise the next day. Friday’s first Decan alone has discharged our legal responsibility to the Queensland Board of Tourism, but it isn’t what they — or the girls — had been hoping for. Livia promises to promote Surfer’s Paradise in future shows, and the Tourism Board seems content. For their part, the meter maids are as well. Why wouldn’t they be? We did get them a free Spring Break in America, even if it ended rather weirdly. I think most of them would be willing to work with us again, schedules permitting, so we could film the You Bet Your Bikini finale we all really wanted — or at least, so they can get another free vacation.

We go down to the Broward County Courthouse on Thursday. All the charges against us end up getting dropped. I’m not sure if that’s impunity or just police incompetence, though — and there’s not much, beyond public indecency, we are actually guilty of anyway. So, we’re free to leave Lauderdale, and set out on the open road on Friday morning.

We’re going on tour again, but this will be slower paced than the one from Delaware to Lauderdale. Livia feels we’ve locked it down with the Gemini Escalation, that we just have to be mildly active and wait for our fame to spread. The plan is that we will gradually make our way toward Los Angeles, that immemorial mecca of the celebrities and performers, and when we enter the City of Angels it will be as triumphant lions with an entourage of fans and groupies, not hapless amateurs. I am still slightly skeptical of the scope Livia asserts, mind you, though even I feel something big is happening.

We will hug the Florida coast at first, hitting Boca Raton, Delray, West Palm Beach, Palm Bay and Daytona Beach before heading inland to Orlando, where we’ll end up bunkering down for a few weeks. Livia will pull a lot of beach pickups in this time, but I’ll be less active. I’m pretty morose and if I’m being honest my work in planning and rehearsals for the Trips does slip a bit. I will end up having one really memorable hookup in Daytona — but for the sake of narrative pacing I’ll tell you about that a bit later, O Horny Reader.

Things Sandra said on our last phone call haunt me. She seemed so broken, so terrorized. Why does being fired from a modeling agency have so many extra consequences, beyond not having a job? Now that Spring Break is over, I want answers to these questions. Livia does not — she shows active contempt toward my initial efforts to investigate. But I’m able to pull Mimi in, who does listen quite attentively to my concerns, and my recitation of both conversations with Sandra.

And I’m thus able to leverage her skills as a hacker, and we do the detailed research into NCSS as a company we should really have done before involving any of their models in the Trips. What we learn initially disturbs me, and then sickens me, and then leaves me in a state of all-consuming existential anger and disgust — but this is a slow and gradual process. I’ll spell out everything we learn in just a bit.

The worst news hits on a rainy Wednesday morning in Boca Raton, when we only know some things. Mainstream media seems to be ignoring the mass orgasm thing, but the sleazier papers aren’t. Mimi shows me a copy of the latest National Inquisitor she picked up. She says a similar story will be in the larger-circulation British tabloids, and in all the newspaper gossip columns. We show the paper to Livia, along with a draft of the article Mimi has ‘procured’.

“They’re are calling Sandra, Tracy and Regan the ‘Blowbang Gang’ — well, they’re careful to say that’s what the locals call them, and just not sourcing that — and saying their ‘sexy performance’ caused the Lauderdale Mass Assisted Orgasm, or LMAO, event.”

“The Sexy Scandal Spectacular caused a scandal, and it was both sexy and a pretty big spectacle,” Livia says airily. “Whoever could have predicted that?”

“But they never actually performed any kind of sex act,” I say. “The media are just glossing over that. They mention an erotic hypnotist, but only in passing. The article is constructed to imply the girls did far more than they did, without actually saying it.”

“It’s the tabloids,” Livia tells me. “They do that. They’re garbage. And those girls did show some nice technique with their bananas.”

“Livia, did you hypnotize the models to be lewd, to actually simulate a blowjob? I was expecting some hesitant touching of lips to bananas, some suggestive swallowing, but what happened was... not that, and I still don’t know why. Did you plant some kind of subtle suggestion?”

Livia looks at me very coldly. I actually feel intimidated by her right then — it calls to mind how briefly terrifying she had been during Cherry’s ‘exorcism’. “I did not trance the NCSS girls. I’ve never used anything conventionally called hypnotism on them. I did nothing to deny them the ability to think or choose. As for ‘suggestion’... yeah, of course. We gave them thousands of subtle cues.”

I am actually pretty tense back. “I don’t follow. Maybe you should tell me exactly what you said to them.”

“I didn’t say anything, per se.”

I don’t argue back. I just stare at her and wait for more.

“We are a libertine brand, Marcelo. Everything, from our color choice to the oath to the body language and costumes, tells girls in the audience how much fun they’ll have getting their kit off on our stage. We also have a recurring thing for malicious compliance, and living to the letter of the word in order to have naughty fun you’re not really supposed to — another recurring theme with the Trips. You are not blind to this. We’ve had long, enthusiastic discussions about all the thousands of subtle ways at our disposal to send that particular message.

“I don’t know what the deciding factor was for the NCSS models. I suspect probably the first Decan put the crowd in a specific mental place, and the Make Her Blush bit two days earlier set that up for the girls. And you know what models and starlets do? They read the room. The audience was like the photographer to the NCSS models, and they did what it wanted. But nobody made them, or even limited their ability to perceive the consequences.

“Look. You told me those three ladies were going to be dropped at the end of the year unless they did something to stand out. They made a choice and took a gamble. You know what that’s like — a few months back, you dropped your life savings into the Trips’ kitty. Six months from now, you’ll be getting literal millions back on your investments. The NCSS girls did the same thing, but it was a bad gamble.

“I don’t know if they misjudged what they could get away with, or misjudged us, or misjudged their own self-control on a stage. They tried malicious compliance without really reading the contracts or the room, assuming that no nudity meant they were home free. Regardless, they got screwed. It’s sad, but it’s not our fault. They not only knew the risks, they knew way more about how NCSS operates then we did — back then, we had no clue.

“Sure, when we have time, we’re nice, we do due diligence for other people. But we don’t have to, and it’s not really our responsibility to do so. Unless you’ve been lying to me, you warned them that they’d be the punchline of a crude joke, and that guys in the audience would get off. That’s exactly what happened.”

“Did you try to get the whole audience off?”

“Yes, of course. I didn’t think we could, but — probably because of the Daughters’ performances — we managed it.”

“You didn’t think about how society might read that?”

“Not my responsibility.”

“Don’t you care?!”

Livia stands up. She isn’t casual any more. She’s furious, genuinely so. “Marcelo, figure out if you want to be in the line of work you’re in, and if you can deal with it. If you can’t decide, I won’t hesitate to decide for you.”

And this honestly intimidates me. The Trips is far and away the best life I’d ever had. Livia is generally a bro, not The Boss — but she still owns everything, and could fire me. I think — I put money in the kitty, but just like every other amateur rock star or up-and-coming starlet, I never had a lawyer check over the papers first. (If you’re curious in retrospect: she can fire me, I’d still own shares, and I’d get residuals from the later shows — my contract isn’t actually super-exploitative, but she can fire me.) The Trips has been, to date, the best part of my life by a long shot — both in terms of sex, and in more subtle ways too. There are so very many reasons I want to keep my role in the show.

Needless to say, this particular conversation is over.

If calling Sandra had been hard, this next call won’t be any easier. But the tabloids and gossip columns will run the story in two days, and I feel obligated to do something. We don’t know much about Oscar “Papa” Valetti — the founder and owner of New Century Swimstyles — at this point (though what we do know is not pleasant), but Mimi gets me a number, and one piece of specific information that will get me past his receptionist.

“Mister Valetti? Hello, my name is Marcelo Ambrose Knight. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of me, but we have a mutual interest in the form of three ladies —”

Uproarious laughter cuts me off. It’s an older voice, cavalierly macho in the particular way the Italians have. It’s jovial and playful, but there’s also a sharply dangerous undercurrent. “Marc, you dirty son of a bitch! I know exactly who you are, and what you did!”

“That’s good,” I say slowly. “Speaking as someone who was on stage at the time, I want to clarify your understanding of what happened. There was no sexual contact, at any time, between the models associated with your company and either myself or the audience. Nor was there any nudity, or inappropriate conduct, from your models. The show I work for played an immature and unexpected visual gag on them, and some men in the audience got off. That’s all that happened.”

Valetti chuckles. “Oh, Marcelo, you really assume you’re the first pickup artist to take a shot at my models? Come on, vecchio, you wanted to call Papa and brag. I’m not mad. In a weird way, you did me a service. NCSS prides itself on having quality women. You found three who happened to be trash, and helped me weed them out.”

“Those women are not trash, Valetti.”

An outburst of laughter. “Quit tryin’ ta fluff me, Marci. We’re both faccia di culo kinda guys here. Act like it. You really think I didn’t have a guy in your audience when you had my Daughters up there? NCSS looks after its girls. What I heard is, well, those three puttanas really know how to work a cazzo.”

God damn it. Out of everything, that’s the one thing I was hoping he would be misinformed about.

“You seem to be under the impression that this is a personal call. Let me correct that. In two days, several national-distribution newspapers are going to run a story which implies very unflattering things about these women. I understand your company has a strong investment in the public image of its models, and in fact has a diverse array of legal talent skilled in litigation aimed at protecting that image. I think under British libel law — where neither truth nor evasive wording is a perfect defense — you would have a solid case to prevent that story from going to press.”

“I’ve already seen the story. The tabloids work with us. They cover a lot of events our models are at in the UK. NCSS itself won’t be mentioned. As for the whores, I actually suggested they make an example of them. It will help with keeping the worthwhile girls on the straight and narrow.”

This honestly shocks me, and I lack anything to say for a second. Valetti misinterprets this. “Yeah, vecchio, I’ve got connections. Why are you so exercised about this anyway? They were puttanas. I understand defiling low-grade women is something of a way of life for you.”

O Wise Reader, understand the nuance of my revulsion. I am not as much of a hypocrite as I may appear. I do believe I told you, back in Chapter Sixteen, that the Trips “vandalized” and “desecrated” the NCSS models’ faces with yogurt, much like I vandalized Livia’s face with my cum the night I met her. Livia and I may even have spoken of “defiling” women, while bonding over our feverish shared fantasies. And I took some erotic delight in those words, and if you, O Sinful Reader, are truly in my target audience then you likely did as well.

So why, then, would I be so enraged now? Well, the answer is simply context. This difference between me and Oscar Valetti using the word ‘defiled’ very closely parallels the difference between a dominatrix telling a man he is her slave, and a plantation owner telling him the same thing. I do not think Valetti understands the distinction; to him both uses of the word are one and the same. But there is no utility to me right now in expressing this anger and revulsion, so I don’t.

“Mister Valetti. Let me make something crystal clear to you. If you allow that story to go to print, with the models’ full names in it, then I will in turn do everything I can to ensure that the corporate name of NCSS is also associated with said story. So it is in our mutual interest to —”

In retrospect, there was always a deep and primal current of hatred and anger in Valetti’s tone toward me, beneath the laddish faux-candor and hollow joviality. But that all goes away now. “Vaffanculo a chi t’e morto! Who the fuck do you think you are?! You are the pervert assistant in a crude, and crudely amateur, magic act! I am the sole owner of a major fashion concern! I have Darby Winesteen, Michael Winner and Roman Polanski on my speed dial! I was lodgemates with Silvio Berlusconi back at Propaganda Due!

“I am bigger than you, and I am bigger than that trumped-up harlot pulling your leash! I could end your show right now, legally or by other methods. The only reason I don’t is because I like it that shows like yours exist to parade an endless stream of worthless sciattonas before the masses. It helps to have a crucible, to sort out the trash and low-quality, low-intellect, low-virtue wannabes from the real beauties — and it helps to remind everyone why my girls are better than washed up bimbos like your bubble-headed victims or that withered old tart Konapolis.”

“Don’t say that about Livia.”

“Or what?” Valetti laughs. “You’ll cry?”

“I want you to know something,” he continues, and follows it up with my name — not Marcelo Knight, but the one I was born under. “I want you to know the difference between a Playgirl and a Treat in men’s eyes. Playgirls at least pretend to be the kind of girl a guy would want to marry and set up a family with. They’re not — after all, they’ve shown it off to everyone and are worth nothing but a cheap fuck — but they at least try. A Clubhouse Treat like Lily... that’s a girl that’s only good for being jacked off on and dropped back in the trash where she belongs, and I take great satisfaction in apparently being the first guy to ever explain that to you.

“So I’ll tell you what, Mister World Champion Pickup Artist. You go back and enjoy the girl you clearly think is such a prize, well-used as she may be. You don’t say a thing about NCSS to the press, ever, and you stay the fuck away from my girls. And, in exchange, I will not make some phone calls to set a few simple things up, and you won’t get called in to a police station to identify Lily Konapolis’ heroin-wracked corpse. Do we understand each other?”

I don’t know what I expected from this conversation, but it wasn’t this. I can’t escalate this further or make threats without talking to Livia and Mimi first. I doubt I’m physically capable of being suave, or even civil, to Oscar Valetti at this point, and I’m increasingly aware that anything I say could have serious consequences. So I do the smartest thing I can possibly do in this situation, and just hang up the phone.

He knows a great deal about us, I realize. Nothing that’s really hard to look up, and not on the level of the background checks we do. But enough to imply effort. I think Livia and I made him really, really angry before I even picked up the phone. That is frightening, but also oddly satisfying.

For the first time in my life, I actually contemplate the cold-blooded, premeditated murder of a fellow human being. I don’t mean idle fantasies about killing someone you hate — everyone does that. I mean actually working out the practicalities and dynamics of the act in a realistic way, and giving it serious moral consideration. I would do it, I think, if it was remotely practical. I believe I have the conviction to carry it out, in this context, but I doubt I have the skills required.

The conclusion I come to is that it isn’t logistically viable — the story will go to press in two days, Valetti isn’t in Florida and might even be in fucking Italy, at his family’s ancestral loggia. I can’t think of any travel arrangements to reach him in time, and if I make him a martyr a month from now that will probably mess up the lives of Sandra, Regan and Tracy even more — not to mention ruining Livia’s career and her artistic vision for the Twelve Escalations in a scandal even she can’t spin. So in the end, the mental argument that turns me away from serious consideration of murder is simply that the act lacks true utility in solving any of the problems before me.

I give Livia a very abbreviated version of the conversation. It’s difficult for me, but I do convey the critical points: that I tried to intercede with NCSS and botched it, and that the conversation ended with him threatening her life, and that he bragged about having the future Prime Minister of Italy as a contact and might actually be dangerous. She is cavalier to the point of psychosis about it, but at least the security concern does get her to give Mimi and I the leeway to keep investigating NCSS — though we move with a lot more caution after this. I don’t ask her about doing anything for the NCSS models. I know this isn’t the right time. I have just fucked up, badly, in a way that might have hurt her professionally — or endangered her life. It’s not the right time to tread on thin ice.

I do something really stupid anyway, though it’s different. I am out of my normal equilibrium after the conversation with Valetti, and what he said about Livia deeply disturbs me. I want to... to refute it somehow, but I can’t even bear to repeat it, so Livia doesn’t have any context. I grab her and hug her, crushing her to me with force born of desperation, and I say, “Livia, I love you.”

I don’t mean I want a romantic relationship or am in love with her. What I really mean to say is, “I respect you,” but there’s no way to say those specific words to a woman without sounding condescending or ironic, so my brain just reparses them. Livia freezes in my arms, and not in a good way. If there’s one thing she and I have truly bonded over, it’s that we don’t do romance. I have even mentioned to her that I consider a pickup artist saying those words without facetiousness being a signifier of sociopathy.

“Marcelo?” she asks quietly, with genuine trepidation in her voice. “Are you having a brain aneurysm?”

It isn’t snide. It’s sarcastic, but she’s really scared. I think she thinks I might actually be having a mental breakdown. She forces her way out of my arms.

We don’t fuck after that, for about the next month. Everything is very awkward. I wonder in that moment if I’ve messed up our dynamic in a way I won’t ever really be able to mend.

In the more immediate situation, however, I do have another contact in mind who might be more helpful. I take an hour to gather my emotions before calling her, because I apparently really need it. When I finally do, I’m pretty smooth while also being honest.

“Cathy Delapointe? Cathy? Yes, it’s me, Marc Knight. You remember — the guy who got you hypnotized, stripped naked and dipped in chocolate at a school event, then took you to a Love Motel? You know, Lascivious Livia’s Arm Candy?”

Cathy laughs with sincere warmth. “Marc! Yes, of course I remember you. It was a pretty wild night. Hard to forgot. Maybe we can have a second go at it sometime, if you’re up for it.”

I wince a bit at the anticipation in her voice — though I certainly am up for it, geography is a major barrier right now. “I would love that, but I’m not in your area right now. How have you been doing? I hear you’ve done quite well for yourself recently, and are graduating in just a few months.”

She tells me a bit about what’s going on in her life, and I listen. Not insincerely — I am interested — but perhaps impatiently. “I’ve been following your presence a bit on the Noodle campus BBS,” I tell her. “You’ve dealt really well with the fallout of what we did to you.”

“I had a fairly good idea what I was getting into when I volunteered,” she tells me. “I wanted to do something scandalous for a while, so I was ready for it.”

“You’re really lucky that way. Not all girls are. Listen, I need to ask you a really big favor.”

“I’m listening. What?”

“We do with other girls what we did with you. It’s our gimmick. We’ve gone a bit too far, though, and screwed up.”

“Is this about Cherry, or about the Daughters of the New Century?”

“You’ve heard.”

“Would it surprise you to know I follow your show?”

I had forgotten how into gossip Cathy is. Of course she would know. “I guess not. We share some fetishes in common, I suspect, so it makes sense.”

“You put it so clinically. I like to think of it as passion and drama.”

“Okay. Anyway, it’s about the Daughters of the New Century. Cherry is doing fine. Can I tell you something and have a guarantee that it stays secret?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t know how much you heard, but what we did there was pre-arranged. It was supposed to create a scandal that would advance their careers, but it actually destroyed them — professionally and as people.”

“Huh.”

“So, the favor. They’re in a really bad place. The didn’t actually get naked or do any kind of real sex act on stage, but the media is ignoring that. They’re about to be dubbed the ‘Blowbang Gang’ by the tabloids. There’s a blurry Polaroid circulating. That’s yogurt on their faces, by the way, not anything more unwholesome.”

“Ow.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what do you want me to do?”

“You handled this kind of thing really well in your own life. Would you be willing to talk to them, give then some advice? Maybe just emotional support?”

“That’s... honestly, that’s actually a lot to ask. It wears a person down.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m trying, but it’s not all stuff a man can do. It’s different for us.”

“No kidding.”

“So?”

“Why isn’t Livia doing this?”

That’s a difficult question for me to answer. “We’re all weird people. We’ve given up on normal lives, so it isn’t the same for us. Livia has many strengths, but she doesn’t do the touchy-feely stuff well.”

“I want something in return.”

“What?”

She actually pauses to consider.

“Two things. First of all, I want an IOU from the Trips for a future favor. Then I want your Spring Break videos. The unedited versions.”

“Easily done. We have to get them out ASAP anyway, to prove the girls didn’t do what the tabloids are implying.”

I negotiate with her a bit. She’d like to see me again. I’d love that, but can’t do it right now. I promise her a future date. That’s not part of the deal, though. I just can’t manage to be self-serving enough to accept sex with Cathy as payment for a favor. I offer her money, in the future, but can’t name amounts right now. We’ll talk about that later, she assures me.

Thank you, Cathy. You are a godsend.

Now Sandra. Mimi could get Tracy and Regan’s numbers, but I want to talk to the one I actually know first. I haven’t talked to her since that day at the hospital. It’s actually a pretty strong rule with me, a boundary as a pickup artist to avoid straying into pressure tactics just because you’re horny. If a girl tells you not to call her, you don’t call her any more. Simple, right? Except today it isn’t, on multiple levels.

I dial Sandra. “Listen,” I push out quickly. “Sandra, don’t hang up. Please give me just a few minutes. This is about important stuff that might impact the rest of your life.”

“Marc? Marcelo Knight?! Why didn’t you call me all this time?!”

“You specifically told me not to,” I say, “but I really need to —”

“What’s your damage?! You’re a pickup artist! I didn’t expect you to actually listen!”

My hand clenches so hard that my fingers penetrate a half-inch into the Melmac RV table I was tapping them on. I manage to keep my voice level. “When a woman tells me not to call her again, I take it very seriously. This is a genuine exception to that standard, for emergency reasons.”

“Do you... do you have some time to talk?”

“All the time in the world.”

So I listen to her. The last two weeks have not been fun. The girls caught a Greyhound back to L.A. together. They have no job. Their rent is due. In a week and a half, they’re homeless. They’ve been blacklisted. They have a compliance officer to answer to. (What’s that? Don’t worry, I’ll explain in a bit. Sandra explains it to me a bit here, but her version is disjointed.) Tracy is talking about hooking. “The Trips will pay out part of your modeling contracts,” I tell her. “All three of you. And no, nothing expected in return.”

“Regan won’t take that,” Sandra says. “She has weird self-sufficiency ethics. But I will, and I suspect Tracy will. And I’ll make it up to you. Just me, though.”

“I don’t want that. I’m not buying you. I... no offense, but I have lots and lots of women. I’m genuinely not macking on you. I just want to fix the thing I broke.”

“You can’t,” she says finally. “But this will help.”

“Sandra, listen. There’s a reason I called, and it’s not about your finances per se. I... I have some really awful news to give you.”

“Oh, god,” she says. “This gets worse?”

“Yeah. I’m so sorry. There’s already been a story in the National Inquisitor that focuses on our show and you three. There’s going to be other stories in other papers, including some British tabloids with national syndication. They’re going to name you and downplay us, and make crude implications. I can’t stop it. I don’t have the power. I’ve seen a draft of the story. You’re... they’ve written it to imply you did things you didn’t do. They’re quoting stuff from gossip BBSes without refuting it, calling you... uh, calling you the ‘Blowbang Gang’.”

Sandra laughs. “Oh, don’t worry about it. That will never see print. NCSS prevents things like that. They call it Papa’s Promise.”

“Sandra, have you ever met Oscar Valetti? Has Regan, or anyone you know?”

She giggles. “No, of course not. What a silly question.”

“Why is it silly?”

“It’s like asking a KFC clerk if they’ve ever met Colonel Harlan Sanders in person. It’s... I mean, I guess the guy exists, but he’s a mascot. When NCSS girls talk about Papa, they’re talking about a PR network inside the company that looks out for us. It’s... uh, not always nice, they can be really pushy and... I don’t know. Weird. Invasive. But I never thought of it as an actual guy.”

“Sandra, listen to me very clearly. Oscar ‘Papa’ Valetti is a real live human being. I literally just talked to him on the phone today. And he is a total, sociopathic dick-nugget. Please take this on faith, even if you don’t believe anything else I’m telling you. And he is aware of you, and me, and Tracy and Regan, as individuals. And he is angry, and he told me he is going to make an example of you three to keep other models in line. He outright told me this, in very crass terms. He threatened Livia’s life, and he has contacts.”

“Producers,” Sandra says. “Yeah, I knew NCSS could get very favored girls private meetings with Hollywood bigwigs and Sports Illustrated and such. That’s... that’s all gone, now. They have a blacklist, Marcelo. Other modeling agencies won’t talk to us, even the scuzzy ones. They’re... it’s like they’re scared to work with former NCSS girls. And this is L.A. It has a number of modeling agencies.”

Holy shit. I believe her. This is surreal. This isn’t a swimsuit brand, it’s a mafia crossed with a cult. “It’s not just producers. You know Berlusconi?”

“I’ve heard the name, but I’m blanking on context.”

“Owns a big football club. A politician and businessman likely to become the next Prime Minister of Italy. The very corrupt next Prime Minster of Italy. Valetti lives in Italy, and bragged about being close with him.”

“Wonderful.”

“I’m just saying. That story will hit print in two days. I wanted to give you warning, so you three can talk to the people close to you before it happens. Papa won’t protect you. He doesn’t give a shit.”

“I don’t feel safe.”

“I don’t blame you. I can’t provide security, but I will get you money very, very soon. I would recommend you get a professional bodyguard, one that is not on any level affiliated with NCSS and will stand up to these ‘compliance officers’. I will have Mimi get a list of LA agencies not tied to NCSS, and get back to you with it.”

“Okay.”

“There’s one other thing I can offer. I know a girl, one of the ones who was on our show before, and she might be able to give you some advice...”

I give her Cathy’s full name and number.

“I need to go. I guess I have more things to deal with now.”

“I’ll call back tomorrow, for sure.”

I go to see Livia in one of her workshops. She’s kept a very glib air recently, but I think she’s tense underneath. I hear that tinny Nintendo music coming out of her crib at odd hours, suggesting she can’t sleep — she plays those cartridge games for fun, but also for stress relief.

“I need to discuss how Trips finances work with you. I need access to a large amount of cash, quickly.”

Livia looks at me. “Are you sure you’re competent to be spending it right now?”

“Yes.”

She explains, in simple terms, that I have shares. She’s expecting big windfall profits, very soon. Really big. After the Gemini Escalation, the master plan is right on track, and that includes profits. Millions, within six months. She’s certain. But right now, finances are tight. Spring Break was expensive, flying in the meter maids, and Summers is dealing with a bear-related legal crisis and hasn’t paid yet, and paying Cherry back our bail — that’s ten grand — didn’t help matters. “I need to cash in some shares,” I tell her.

“That’s bad, right now,” she says. “You’ll cheat yourself to an insane degree — we are talking millions here, honestly — and it will weaken the Trips.”

“The Trips are going to pay off some of the NCSS girls’ contracts,” I tell Livia. “They need money urgently, right now. They’re going to end up homeless, and maybe hooking, in L.A. They need rent, and security, and probably quite hefty legal fees and PR services, and it needs to happen quickly.”

“Not in the budget. Sorry. Maybe we can spare —”

“How much are all my shares worth, right now?”

Livia looks at me. She’s scrutinizing me carefully. She isn’t just being brassy and sardonic. I can’t read her well. “This will hurt us,” she says. “It will delay the schedule for our shows at the apex of our breakout.”

I look at Livia. I do value her. I ask myself what I am willing to give up. It’s a really tough question. “Livia, I need money. Are you willing to cash my shares?”

“No,” she says. I’m not sure if it’s playful or experimental or dead serious. She wants to judge me, I guess. She’s analyzing, evaluating. “I’m not willing.”

Am I really going to burn this all up? I love this life. I love the Trips. But I have to fix what I broke, do what I think is right. “Livia, if I can’t get it from you, I’ll go to our benefactors. I’ll mention that benefactor, if I have to. I will get money, quickly, no matter what.”

Yeah. Blackmail. Against Livia. My stomach churns. Livia chuckles sadly, amused at a private joke. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, and no idea what kind of a wasp’s nest you’d be poking. Our patrons are good people, but not people to be messed with lightly.”

“Then I’ll go to my parents. They’ll pay, in exchange for promises from me to mend my errant lifestyle and be what they want me to be. That would end my association with the Trips, though. It doesn’t matter — I will do it.”

Livia nods slowly, sadly. “I want to say you can’t give it up, you won’t, it’s too good — but you can, can’t you? And you would. It’s part of your nature.”

When she meets my gaze, the hurt and betrayal is obvious. “You said you loved me.”

“I didn’t mean that. It was... Valetti said a bunch of really hateful stuff, and I wanted to prove it wasn’t true, that I care about you. As a friend I share a very deep and personal, but not romantic, bond with. I wasn’t trying to —”

Her next question is oddly sincere — a genuine curiosity. “Do you love Sandra Venturi? I mean, ‘put a ring on it’ love?”

I snort. It’s sincere and un-acted. “What? No! Don’t be stupid. I mean, she’s not even on my top twenty list of lovers. She’s not even my lover at all! I don’t even really want her that much at this point! And you know I don’t do that, anyway.”

“Then why place her interests above mine?”

It baffles me that she would even ask that. “Because it wouldn’t surprise me if I heard she commit suicide, and we both have moral culpability in her being at that point.”

“No,” Livia hisses with a surprising, cold fury. “We do not.”

Then she shakes her head, and her entire demeanor shifts. “You know what? I’m screwing with you. The money’s not that big a deal. I’ll get it together ASAP. Maybe even tonight. And it won’t cost you any shares, either. I want you to get stupid rich along with the rest of us. If you didn’t, it would make things awkward in the future. So I’ll make a deal with you. The Trips will cover this, as a business expense. We can get each girl fifteen grand — enough for rent, living expenses, legal defenses and private security for at least a few months. All for spraying yogurt in their faces. But I want something in exchange, and it is a big deal.”

“What?”

She looks at me with a playful gleam in her eyes. “Three full nights, at times of my choosing. You. Hypnosis. Blanket consent to everything, no limits, no questions, complete cooperation.”

I stop and think. That actually sounds really scary — but it’s not. Remember, O Concerned Reader: hypnosis is not sorcery or mind control. She can’t make me do anything truly horrible. Science has proven quite decisively, after all, that hypnosis can’t make people into assassins, or otherwise get them to commit violent crimes — and I don’t think Livia has any motive for that kind of thing, anyway. It’s Livia, so it’s probably some kind of kink, I reason. Can she humiliate me? Sure. Depending specifically how, I might even end up enjoying it.

I wonder what she wants. Take me to a gay orgy? Not as big a deal for me as it might be for some straight men — an unpleasant night, but not scarring. (I have experimented, and it was “unsatisfying” rather then revolting.) Have me strip off and fuck the Thanksgiving Turkey at my family’s next get-together? That would mean she wildly overestimates how much I value my blood-family ties — it would even be amusing, if a bit extreme, and certainly less harm than is befalling the NCSS girls. Just really rude sex? Heck, bring it on! I’ve seen Livia be cold, and I’ve seen her be kinky — but never genuinely malicious, never doing things to try and do lasting harm to people. Maybe this was just a way of her giving in gracefully, I don’t know.

“All right,” I say. “I agree.”

Livia grins. “Peachy!”

The money is in our accounts the next night. As far as I know, Livia doesn’t even leave the Beast. I set up a wire transfer to each of the NCSS models the same day. Regan refuses hers — but it’s there, if she needs it.

Weeks pass. We stall in Orlando, and the Beast is really tense. Mimi and I do a lot of research into NCSS, though we’re more careful at this point. And I don’t just mean surface research. Mimi is an admin on the very anonymous and secretive Daughters of Bilitis BBS network, and is able to use “Internet Relay Chat” to talk anonymously to a lady who was an NCSS model back in the sixties — a lot of our intel on NCSS and Oscar himself comes from this loquacious source.

Livia, when we finally get her involved, has a background in forensic psychiatry. I don’t have either of those skill sets, but I can sometimes charm women to divulge things they otherwise wouldn’t, even just over the phone. And I do that, several times. We start to put all the pieces together and build an actual file on New Century Swimstyles and Oscar ‘Papa’ Valetti. And I suppose, O Perplexed Reader, that it is time that I try to explain to you what the fuck this supposed swimsuit company actually is.

Italy has always had ties to high fashion — surely the names Gucci, Armani and Givenchy are familiar to you? The entity that would eventually become NCSS was initially incorporated in Genoa in 1933 as Valencia Swimwear, by its lead fashion designer Gianna Valencia. An industrious women, her hand-stitched beachwear was highly valued by Italian aristocracy in the inter-war era. Gianna became the second wife of Oscar Valetti in 1947, and he quietly took possession of the company. Valencia herself fell to influenza in 1956, and was rumored to have an icy relationship with her husband after the initial romance.

The poster boy for the darker side of Italian machismo, Valetti was infamous for his numerous love affairs — and, in his youth, some allegations of abuse. He married a Patrizia Salo, a younger model, in 1957, less than a year after his second wife’s death. Oscar did, indeed, hold membership in the infamous Italian rogue Masonic lodge, Propaganda Due, which has been associated with Mussolini’s fascism, organized crime and massive embezzlement, and it is credible but not certain that he formed a close friendship with the man who will later become Italy’s Prime Minister while there. We obviously have a motive to learn as much about that as we can — without drawing attention.

Valetti has neither talent, nor true interest, in high fashion. What does interest him, however, is status symbols — a topic closely related to, but not always coequal with, haute couture fashion. And it is fair to say, given his second wife, that he saw the potential of women to be status symbols — both within and beyond the traditional culture of machismo that characterized far-right Italian cryptopolitics. Valencia Swimwear was rebranded Elite Swimwear in 1958, and again rebranded as New Century Swimstyles around a decade ago. From the sixties on, however, it becomes far more about selling the girls than selling the swimsuits. The suits are valued, of course, but it is the models and mystique that keep the dough rolling in.

NCSS has been a combative company. They clashed with Debonair over offers made to NCSS contract girls to pose as Playgirls, and likely with the magazine’s liberal politics (sexual and otherwise) as well — a clash that is rumored to have escalated to threats against Hepler’s person, and an attack on the reputation of his then-wife. NCSS was also, according to an Inside Edition expose, involved in exacerbating the feuds of the even-more-famous Gucci fashion family — feuds which are playing out to this very day. Valetti is reported by some male subordinates to be the very archetype of the Boss From Hell: demanding, shouty and intolerant of reality.

Many others admire him, however. Women do not speak of him in the language women usually use for dominant men, however, whether condescending or complementary. There is very little about his relations with famous models, but after careful study Mimi and I do abridge my initial opinion that he might, in fact, be privately raping his way through the company back catalogue. The only thing remotely prurient women who know Valetti closely have to say about him is that he is tortured — in the way that women often say that men are tortured as a way of ascribing to them layers and complexity. He is said to be very demanding of successful models, however, in terms of propriety and public image — while NCSS is known for that as a company, it takes a bit of research to confirm that it all comes directly from the psyche of its owner.

And NCSS is merciless in its treatment of models that step outside of its dogmatic boundaries. If we had known that a month ago, our actions would of course have been very different — but I also wonder, in retrospect, if the outcome would truly have been better. As unpleasant as some of the subject material is, it’s also weirdly exonerating and cathartic for me to study the surreal empire that forms as a Rorschach blot of its disturbed owner’s psyche.

It’s possible continuing on with NCSS would have led Regan, Sandra and Tracy to roles in Hollywood — but I do not believe it would have let them to happiness, and I think it would have taken more in the long run then it ever gave back. And that holds not only for the three models I knew, but for the hundreds of women still on the company’s roster as well. But we make careful calls to a select group of former NCSS models, who are hard to locate in and of themselves, and it becomes clear why models are reluctant to defy the company dictum.

Some of you, O Attentive Readers, may have heard about the horrible shit ABC did to Suzanne Somers after she quit Three’s Company. If you don’t know, they claimed ownership over all the ticks associated with her character from the show, Crissy Snow. Some of these were the character, some of them were ambiguous, and some were just who Somers is, and what her acting range and skills do for her. They then embarked on a campaign of legal harassment against her, a major television network against a single daytime actress, that nearly ended her entire career.

This particular tactic is apparently also stock and trade for NCSS. The girls can’t model for NCSS anymore. Fine. Their stage names belong to NCSS, and they can’t use them. Unfair, but not that unusual. Other companies that hire NCSS models are also contractually prohibited from employing former NCSS models. That’s legally questionable, but NCSS is big and influential and disgraced models aren’t. But it goes further. Much further.

Regan Michaels lives on a ranch. She’s a skilled veterinarian. She works to rehabilitate injured horses, and is quite adept at it. Yeah, you can say it’s stereotypical Playgirl Profile stuff, but it also happens to be what this real woman is doing with her real life. It’s more a calling to her then modeling is. She talks about it in profile videos she’s done for NCSS. As a result, Regan cannot ever mention horses in any video, interview or profile done in her future modeling career. The character quirk of liking horses is part of the persona created for her by NCSS. Any use of any element of that persona is an infringement of NCSS’ intellectual property. Violators will be prosecuted.

NCSS doesn’t just fire models. They end models entirely, using legal threats, blacklists and syndicalism to keep them out of the business entirely. And “the business” here isn’t just modeling, but anything performance or showbiz-oriented. When a model signs with NCSS, they agree to a degree of what the company calls “lifestyle management”. You’ve got an agent assigned to you, known as a compliance officer. He watches out for you. He makes sure you don’t get entangled with anyone unsavory by controlling who you come in contact with. He helps you build a positive image by keeping you from doing anything that might damage said image. Modeling can be stressful and models can burn out, so you’re encouraged to treat him as a kind of counselor, too. If he seems kinda scary or rough-edged at times, well, it’s his job to scare away the creepers, right? He can’t do that and be a creampuff.

And if you decide to break ties with the company, he’ll still check in with you every now and them, like a weirdly-friendly parole officer. Just for a year or two, to make sure you’re not doing anything deleterious to yourself or the good image of NCSS — and to make sure you’re not violating any of the non-compete clauses. It’s in the contract. Said contract is probably not enforceable — and the idea that a contract is itself a trade secret is most definitely not enforceable — but this hadn’t yet been challenged in a court of law.

In this case, lifestyle management is a euphemism for surveillance, morality policing and domineering paternalism — the branch of the company that is formally called human resources is nicknamed “Papa” for a reason; it has a lot of former private detectives among its employees, and could even be compared vaguely to a badly-run state intelligence agency. And, unlike many exploitative contracts, most NCSS models don’t feel the contract is overly harsh — at least, during their active tenure with the company. The corporate culture is indoctrinary to the point of nearly being a cult. The company knows what you say about the company around the water cooler, so you quickly learn not to be too expressive about the real deal around the freshmen models.

Models trust NCSS. A lot of smaller modeling agencies in the LA area are infamous for taking sexual advantage of models. Photographers end up in bed with naïve young models. Sometimes it’s genuine romance, sometimes it’s a bit of ladder-climbing by savvy models and sometimes it’s just grossly predatory men pushing an advantage on desperate and insecure newcomers. And it doesn’t happen at NCSS studios. At all, ever. Sounds nice, right? It’s really not. At least, it’s not worth the price.

There’s only two photographers, in the entire history of the company, who are rumored to have been intimate with models at various points. One of them was fired, and completely vanishes from any legal and bureaucratic records at that point. Some people think he went to scout foreign models in Mumbai, but no one’s heard anything from him after his time working with NCSS. The other, however — he worked in a big, well-funded New York studio. He was a rising name in the business. Police fished his body out of the East River. Probably gang-related, reports say. No strong leads. People initially seem to remember his affairs with models coming out after his death. We check the dates, though. The scandals were already starting when he died. Scary stuff. Circumstantial, but still scary.

Livia builds up a psychological profile — an actual criminology one this time, not a pervy one like we did for Cherry. The story of NCSS is the story of Oscar “Papa” Valetti. The NCSS models are the Daughters of the New Century. Are you making the connection yet? Wait, it gets squickier — a lot squickier. Oscar Valetti is, at the time, sixty-nine years old. He had a single daughter, Antionne Valetti, born to his first wife Rosemarie Valetti, when he was twenty-two years old. She was a slender, long-faced, auburn-haired wisp of a girl who wore long, flowing white dresses and had wide, plaintive eyes. She took her own life on her seventeenth birthday, around thirty years ago.

She’s buried in the ancestral loggia of the Valetti family in Italy. She has a crypt on the property. You can see it in some of the modeling videos Oscar filmed back in Italy, in his younger days. It’s an insane thing out of Tim Burton’s nightmares, a monstrosity of black-veined white marble with fearsome gargoyles and strange angles that looks like it belongs in the pages of a Gothic horror novel. There’s room in there for dozens of people to walk around, but no one ever does — except some cleaning staff. We pay a lot of money to talk to one former janitor, even briefly. We don’t hear anything truly incriminating, but it’s still enough. Stuffed teddy bears, old toys, pink silks, everything all frilly, a total fixation on feminine innocence, purity and virtue paired with a near-psychotic ideation.

Best psycho stalker victim-shrine ever.

We don’t know if Valetti raped his daughter. We can obviously suspect it, but we also have reasons to hate the little shitstain. Ultimately, it’s academic — her death is well outside Italy’s statute of limitations anyway, and regardless I suspect Mister Valetti has the same level of impunity we do — if not more. But we’re pretty sure he has an insane fixation on her, and her beauty, and projects that onto every NCSS model. When they stray, when they stain his memories of his daughter, he destroys them professionally. When someone is perceived as taking liberties with one of his Daughters, he destroys that person. Sometimes, apparently, rather more literally.

Oscar Valetti may be a rapist, but he’s probably not a profligate serial rapist. At least, we think — he could be, I guess. He probably has consensual relations with a select few of his models. That’s not a huge shock — compare him to Howard Hepler or Bob Guccioni and he’s a veritable angel. We think, by looking at schedules of vacations and going over interviews, we might have a list of four or five that are special to him. They all fit a type. They’re in their mid twenties, but dress and act ten years younger. They never do the more risqué shoots. They’re pale, auburn-haired girls with long faces and wide, wonder-struck eyes — but you had probably already guessed that, right?

So, on the surface, NCSS is a great company to work for to many aspiring models. You don’t have to worry about being taken advantage of sexually. You can trust your photographer. There’s never any pressure to do raunchy poses or topless shots. Your company has credible ties to big Hollywood names, right? Well, it’s stressful, and super-competitive. There’s a forty-page contract. Girls are pressed to sign it on-site, not consulting a lawyer first. But what new model can afford a legal consultant, anyway? You never feel leered at, because no subordinate is ever allowed to leer — and you’ll never meet the man doing the real leering anyway. But then things start to come out.

There are clauses in your contract. Weird clauses. They aren’t enforced at first, but models who hold to them seem to do better than other models. NCSS is the psycho jealous boyfriend of modeling companies. They watch you. Sometimes they know you’ve done something, and you can’t tell how. You don’t let photos of yourself in low-cut tops get spread around. You don’t get drunk in public. You don’t visit Hooters. You don’t even crack crass jokes.

No, no, it’s not rules, hon, it’s a lifestyle. Be a good girl. It’s not a persona. It’s not fake. Just, you know, live it. That’s how you’ll get ahead here. Such a good girl. You don’t use words like cock or dildo or pussy. If, during a shoot, you need to refer to that area, well, it’s your intimates. You shouldn’t need a dildo; it’s unladylike. And if you even know what a cock is, well, it’s probably better not to talk about that.

Yeah, pretty weird. But when everyone around you treats it as normal, eventually you do as well. And if you’re desperate, or even on coke, it can still seem like a good deal. After all, you’re safe. The company will even lend you money, give you a place to stay, keep you away from anything unsavory — as long as you’re a good girl. And you won’t have to deal with Bob the Indie Photographer and his wandering hands, or worse the real creepers of the world, like those utter sleazoids that run that Scandal show you’ve seen out of the corner of your eye.

Hey, say what you want about the Trips, but we advertise our sleaze. When you volunteer for our shows, you probably know what you’re going to get — even though we leave it ambiguous enough for you to deny that you knew. Guys like Oscar Valetti are way sleazier, and they have just as much reason to keep it all carefully hidden away as we have to flaunt it.

I’m actually able to help Livia a bit with the profiling. You see, I’ve known a few guys vaguely like Oscar Valetti. Not as directly malevolent, necessarily, but possessed of the same basic need — and, as strange as it seems, that need has nothing to do with sex. Some of them wanted to be my apprentice in the pickup arts, yet got weirdly creeped out by how sexual I am. I didn’t get it at the time — the guys that desperately wanted to prove they could get the hot girl’s phone number, and were willing to lie to her and press on her insecurities to get it... and then had strangely little interest in calling that number once they got it.

One memorable jerkass took this to a real extreme — he’s go into restaurants, flirt with the waitress, charm her, get her to write down her number for him — and then make a point of letting her see him crumple up the paper and toss her number in the trash on his way out, just to screw with her. This same chunderhead also tried to start a rivalry with me, making a point of trashing me on underground BBSes and trying to drive away my pupils. He’s part of the reason my panel at SexCon was so hostile. It wasn’t about women as a source of sensual pleasure, it was about women as a ranking system, a way of proving true masculinity.

Another one of these guys even said he didn’t want to bang a girl until he was ready to marry her! Can you believe that? A pickup artist (or a pickup wannabe, at least) staying pure until marriage? Why? And even more baffling, what could he have expected the marriage to do for him, given how he wanted to procure it? Did he think it would actually work?

Back then, it seemed “quirky” — I couldn’t understand why someone not driven by his libido would want to learn what I know — or even how they could, really. It reminded me of the weird little collector-nerds that never read all the comics they owned, never took them out of their plastic bags for fear of damaging them. But it wasn’t about the sex, it was about women as status symbols and the purity complex, and feeling powerful. I’ve seen this before, and I’m no longer amused now.

The whole infrastructure of NCSS is an appendage for the ego of Oscar Valetti, Livia discerns. It exists to show the world the beautiful women he owns, his prized Daughters, his possessions, his living status symbols. By flaunting this oddly sterile, sexless purity-harem to the world, by marketing it, he profits tremendously. And he sees nothing wrong with that, because his morality is wired in a way utterly alien to, and incompatible with, our own — a vision of sexual purity, masculine competition and rightful dominance. And, perhaps, a peculiar form of deranged atonement for a shameful act he may have committed with his own biological daughter, almost forty years ago — after all, look at all the women he is protecting and honoring now!

Feminism emasculates men, shaming us for our sexual desires and masculine instincts. Men resent this. Nobody respectable speaks up against the feminists, though, and they brook no disagreement in the liberal media. That makes them feel they are invincible. Absent an avenue for rational, moral dissent men who seek to rebel end up revering trash like Oscar Valetti, forming a cult of personality around him. Action and reaction, choice and consequence. Seriously, I thought Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death was funny and sexy, but I never expected the doily-men from it to be salient or insightful about serious events in my life!

And that cult, that public display of possession and paternalistic dominance over women marketed as the most beautiful in the world, has been very profitable to Valetti. It won him respect from older men of power and influence in Italy. They are men whose fragile coming of age stories had been cast against the backdrop of Mussolini’s mad dreams and the Second World War, then lived through the the hideous ideological terror of the Years of Lead and are now being forced into the feminized, ultra-liberal social structures of modern Europe created by Pertini’s seemingly eternal reign and Mitterrand’s terrorist collaboration. I can almost relate to their devotion to a figure like Valetti, though I can never condone it.

This odd cocktail of machismo, ideation of purity and paternal dominance may be the psychological key to both wealth and tangible political power in shadowy alcoves of Italian culture, unlocked by men like Oscar Valetti and Silvio Berlusconi — and possibly by Benito Mussolini before them, who infamously said “Women are angels or demons, born to take care of the household, bear children, and to make cuckolds.”

Eerie stuff, huh?

During our investigation of NCSS, I keep in touch with Sandra. I spend a lot of time listening. Maybe that helps a bit, I don’t know. She does get in touch with Cathy, which is good. I obviously also have questions to ask her. Much of what we know comes from clues that she gives me. I fill her in... to a degree. She’s under a great deal of stress, and I want to avoid making that worse.

The Lauderdale trio’s compliance officer is Jeff Wittimer, and apparently not as much of a jackass as some — not that this stops him from doing what the company expects. We get a description of him from Sandra, and given Valetti’s thoughtless comment we are able to pick him out of the crowd at Summers at both the Wednesday and Friday shows. And wouldn’t you know it, there he is, sitting right beside “Wild Ron” Cargandier.

Now, I’m not saying the mean crowd was an NCSS conspiracy. I don’t actually think that. We did something, and it had sociological and psychological blowback, and we learned how important it is to manage the crowd at events like these in so doing. But still — those two dillweeds, side by side. Let me just say this: I think the purity complex, and the outrage it can generate, played a part in the meanness on Friday — and, of course, we know that NCSS has built up said purity complex in a conscious and premeditated way.

I could say we didn’t know what we were stepping on, but really I’d be lying — we knew exactly what we were stepping on. We just didn’t expect society to fight back the way it did. Of course, NCSS is a bit of a weird thing for anyone to predict — but, if we weren’t doing three shows in five days, we’d have done a lot more research beforehand and been more cautious, and maybe had more introspection time to realize we were wearing the fetish equivalent of beer goggles as well. But it’s done now.

The money helps. Tracy and Sandra eschew Mimi’s list of security agencies in favor of paying people Tracy knows — people involved with the illegal street racing circuits in LA, I guess — to act as security. Given how Sandra describes it, any of those guys would snap Jeff Wittimer in half. He looks like a gym bunny — nice muscles, nice attitude, probably never actually fought in his life. He could mess me or Livia up, I guess, but Mimi would school him and he wouldn’t even be a speedbump to anyone with a real street background.

Regan has gone home to live with her family. Wittimer politely asks her to stay in town, and Tracy’s thugs tell him to back off, and escort Regan to the Greyhound. I really doubt Valetti has any influence in the flyover states, so that — as they say — is that. She is, so I hear, done with modeling forever.

So Sandra and Tracy bunker down in their LA studio apartment, and just don’t go out after the news story breaks. Society will forget about the ‘Blowbang Gang’ in a month or two — at least, we hope — and they will be able to find jobs giving them a degree of anonymity. In the mean time, they call it “hurricane weather” and just stay in their apartment 24/7 like a kind of self-imposed two-month lockdown. Tracy goes out. Sandra never does.

They buy like a hundred discounted old VHS tapes at their local Blockbuster, and watch movies, and just keep out of contact with society at large. Hired security keeps the tabloid journalists and fringe activists stalking them away. Their dreams of Hollywood careers are over, of course — I know there’s no way they’ll ever get any kind of serious audition with this sensationalistic mess hanging over them. But they are, at least, coping.

I ask for Regan and Tracy’s numbers, so I can call them in person — both to see how they’re doing, and to probe out clues about NCSS. Sandra clams up right away, and I get that she does not want to talk about it and it struck a raw nerve. So I leave it, then. But four days later, I ask again. It takes her a long time to answer. “Marcelo, I did not accurately convey all the content of our conversation to Regan and Tracy. Please forgive me.”

And she keeps talking, telling me things — rather incoherently, but I get the overall picture. Regan has been with NCSS since she was fifteen — yes, like many fashion houses, models can start as children. Gross, but not especially shocking. She knew more about how NCSS worked, but never shared it with Tracy and Sandra. Sandra didn’t know why, but later I figure out about the many subtle psychological techniques Papa uses to stifle introspection and discourage models discussing the mechanics of the company among themselves. But Regan did worry.

And Sandra didn’t want her to worry, so she didn’t communicate that we would hypnotize the audience, or that I had warned about a humiliating prank. She apparently isn’t angry, which is baffling to me. She’s just terrified, and other things Sandra can’t articulate. Probably suffering a bit of an identity crisis, given the indoctrination she was subject to. Tracy is angry, really angry, at first. The money helps, though — not just in paying her off, but that it surprises her that the Trips would actually care.

I try to reach Regan, but only get to her parents. Her father is understandably furious, and I let him scream at me and threaten me with the faux-bravado of one who knows he is helpless. He tells me never to call again. I call again, once every half hour for four hours, until he agrees to listen to me. Then I present to him a great deal of information about how NCSS indoctrinates its Daughters, and how their contracts work, and how they use harassment lawsuits. Regan’s father already knows that — the family ranch is apparently suffering harassment already.

I just want the people supporting Regan to know she hasn’t just been the victim of a mean prank and a meaner press — she had been subject to years of subtle conditioning, and that needs to be deconstructed to help her heal. And I tell him about the offer of money, that it is still open if they need legal fees or NCSS harassment damages their ranch or something. I do get her dad at least listening to what I have to say — and then I implore him not to let on that the information had come from us, as I don’t want Valetti to know we are investigating him in case that would provoke retaliation.

I elect not to speak to Tracy, to avoid either lying to her or ruining the bond between her and Sandra in their most difficult time. Of the three, she seems the most able to cope with this anyway — tough, streetwise and with not a lot of self-esteem invested in the good girl persona. She was already comfortable — happy, even — living in the margins of society rather than the limelight.

Talking to Sandra is cathartic for me, as well as for her. Gradually my guilt and self-doubt fades, and is replaced by a growing anger at NCSS and Valetti. We may have made a mistake, but it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as it is if they weren’t intentionally making it worse. It’s about three weeks later that I eventually get up the courage to ask a question I have been dying to know the answer to: “Sandra, why did you and your friends actually simulate a blowjob with the bananas, rather than just eating them?”

It’s not a great question to ask. I know that. I want to avoid making them feel guilt or shame. But it’s a question I desperately need to know the answer to, in order to determine my future with the Trips.

“I... I don’t know, really. I told you when I first met you I wasn’t really a good girl. You just kind of have to be, 24/7, when you’re with NCSS. You have no idea how much effort I had to go to, in order to evade Wittimer. Regan, she knew NCSS. I think that it was a kind of rebellion for her. Part of her resented what they were shaping her into, and with the enthusiasm of the crowd that just broke through. And when she did it, I wanted to as well — both because I wanted to stand with her, and because... honestly, it was fun. I enjoyed it. It’s exciting to do something bad, that doesn’t hurt anyone. I don’t know why... why it has to cause all this.”

“It shouldn’t,” I say. “None of you did anything wrong. And while the world can be immensely cruel about sex, this is exceptional by even those standards.”

And we chat a bit, and stay in touch, and her temperament improves over time. And soon we are laughing, and analyzing movies and talking of other immaterial trivia. And finally, a month after Spring Break, she says the words that are as a balm to my disturbed soul.

“Oh, Marcelo, you’re such a sweetie. I wanted you to know, what you pulled — it was outside the bounds of what I expected, but your show is pretty clear about pushing the limits. I don’t want you to think I suffered. I had a chance to see the video where we got, er, splattered, and I will say you have a gift for capturing a genuinely cinematic moment. It made me laugh. You got really funny reaction shots out of all three of us. And a deep-down part of me, part usually buried, wants me to admit it was even a little bit sexy. From my end, I mean. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can realize it was hella incendiary from the male viewpoint.

“So, no hard feelings on a personal level. Now that I no longer have a contract, I can’t even say I’d be closed to a return visit on your show. But — not right now. I have what is a shockingly obsessive modeling agency trying to systematically destroy my career and my life, and I’m still way too stressed to think about anything naughty. Keep my number, though, will you?”

I don’t hear as much from her after that, though we do keep in touch.

I’m going to present to you, O Patient Reader, a dialogue between me and Livia. It doesn’t actually happen like this, all at once. This is not a conversation we had. It was all less coherent, scattered over dozens of brief exchanges over a rather bleak and tense month and a half on the road. But, all the points get made, and for the sake of coherent narrative, here it all is in one big, hypothetical conversation.

“There was a game of telephone. We planned, I talked to Sandra, Sandra talked to the other two. Some bits got lost along the way at each step.”

“But you still told them we’d humiliate them. You asked. They agreed. Everyone involved thought it would be good for their careers. Everyone was wrong. Shit happens, and we get over it. We have to.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Look,” Livia tells me. “How many girls have you fucked?”

“A lot.”

She stares at me.

“Okay. Hundreds.”

She doesn’t stop.

“Two hundred and seventy-seven.”

“I guarantee you have done crippling emotional harm to one partner. You’ve gone too far with a kink, said something hurtful, figured out she does like the rough stuff and then got a bit too rough —”

“Do you mean —”

“No, Marc. Not with me. But I’m saying — you’ve hurt someone. Somewhere. Girls always think they’re ready for their own fantasies, and often they aren’t. And you know what? That’s okay.”

“No, it’s —”

“Yes. It is. You must affirm that if you want to survive. I would say you should get out of our business right now if you can’t, but two hundred and seventy-seven, Marcelo. You cannot survive mentally if you try to take responsibility for the emotional well-being of your partners. Normally, guys that do that become needy and paternalistic, but you... you’re past that. On your scale, a man won’t end up needy — he’ll go bat shit insane, as surely and utterly as if he stood face to face with Great Cthulhu himself.”

“Great Clue Loo?”

“Never mind.”

“I just want —”

“Ok. I’m cold sometimes. You’ve made that point. But I have to be. All the bullshit Mars and Venus pop psychology Hollywood spews... you want to know a real difference between men and women? Men can make it through life thinking like a sexual knight in shining armor. For women, sex begins with blood and pain. Literally, with defloration, and metaphorically, when you get used or hurt. Any you know what? It gets better when you keep at it, and eventually it gets really good. But it all starts with blood, and in the end it’s worth bleeding for.

“And I’m not talking romantic ‘with the man you love’ bollocks, either — I’m talking about hedonism, raw animal fucking, the shit actually worth doing. What happened to the NCSS girls, that’s not on us, and they’ll get better in the long run, and none of it was real anyway. They sucked bananas, and we squirted them with yogurt. That’s all that actually happened, outside the realm of societal stigmas and preconceptions. If it made them bleed a bit, well, I have trouble feeling too bad about that, because for girls that’s just part of growing up.”

“It was real to them — and to the men.”

“Men have a right to have sexual fantasies about women. They do not need the consent of women to fantasize about them — and we had their consent anyway. I just helped a bunch of men have a very vivid fantasy. But that’s all it was. And how NCSS and the tabloids and god knows who else decided to read it — that is not something we should ever take responsibility for, or can even survive taking responsibility for.”

“There’s more to it —”

“No. There isn’t. Hypnosis is fantasy, not reality. Do you realize what you’re saying about me, to my face, when you say otherwise? If imaginary things done with hypnosis are real, then I’m a bloody child trafficker, Marc. Think about it. Look around you. Everything you see was bought giving an old man some very detailed mental images of children. And, I’ve done my soul-searching for that, and the conclusion I’m come to is that it was a decent and righteous thing to do. And that’s what girls — what people — have to learn to do, to be both wildly promiscuous and psychologically healthy.”

I do actually think. I really consider what she’s saying to me. It takes a month to answer. “I cede the argument. You are actually correct here. I want to be kind to my lovers, but I won’t confuse charity with responsibility. The latter ends with consent.”

Livia finally nods. “I know that emotions are involuntary. I’m not trying to be hard. I recognize you feel guilt. I empathize with that. If you still want atonement...”

“I don’t want atonement. That isn’t what this is about anymore.”

“I’m just saying...”

“They’re related, you know.”

“What I mean... wait, what?”

“Mimi and I have been investigating... okay, being fair, I’ve been pushing Mimi to investigate, and charming some women on the phone to get them to tell me things, and helping her where I can. And you’ve seen it as a guilt trip and shut it out. NCSS, the tabloids, the Lauderdale Gazette, the casting directors, the mean Summers crowd, all of it. It ties back to one man. This isn’t about my emotions any more. That’s why I said I don’t want atonement. I want payback. And I need your insight as a shrink to get it.”

“Okay,” Livia says. “I misjudged. You now have my full attention.”

I sketch what Mimi and I have figured out about Oscar Valetti and NCSS. “We have to get even with this motherfucker. It’s a moral imperative.”

Livia nods slowly, chewing over what I’m saying. This is where we finally get her on board, and get her to help work out the psych profile I described above.

“Look,” I continue. “At the Gemini Escalation, you made grand speeches about wanting to change the meaning of the word respectable.”

“More like destroy it,” she says. “But that doesn’t play as well to the audience. A life without social norms is scary. I should know; I live it.”

“Well,” I argue, “it might as well have been Ganesha Himself who put Oscar Valetti on the Trips’ path, and chose him as your sacred obstacle. You want to redefine what’s respectable? Who could personify resistance to that change more than this motherfucker? He is your dragon, your ordeal and your destiny. Stop sulking and pick up your sword. I’m ready to fight, to show the world what real machismo looks like. Are you going to join me, or keep withdrawing?”

Livia nods slowly, and fix a very cold, analytical gaze on the glossy publicity photo of Valetti I slide across the table to her.

“Let’s do this,” she says.

And we plan, and study, and for almost the next year seek with cold precision and careful forethought the best way to make our next move. The die is cast. War has been declared — Valetti just doesn’t know it yet.