The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The Trips make a food break just outside Delaware. I cook scrambled eggs and bacon for Mimi and Livia — I’ve become the designated cook for the Trips, since they are both terrible at it. I long ago learned that cooking for your guest is a great way to charm a woman. If a lady goes a little (or a lot) further on a first date then she meant to — and with me, that usually happens — having her partner fix her breakfast in bed the next morning acts as a wonderful shame antidote; it lets her feel slutty in the good sense without feeling slutty in the bad sense. (It can also tend to lead-in to the most fun kind of cure for morning wood.)

I’m not saying I’m a miracle cook or anything, but I know my way around a kitchen better than anyone else on the Beast — and the girls seem quite happy about it. My cooking does skew to breakfast foods, though, for the reasons given above.

“I’m still processing it.”

“What?”

“Did we seriously take the most popular girl at a major university — a lady with a nigh-angelic, virginal reputation — and hypnotize her, strip her naked before hundreds of her peers, humiliate her, and then have it turn out that not only wasn’t she hurt, she was kinky enough to enjoy it? And then she got so horny I got to bang her? That actually happened? Because that’s like something that leaked out of a Golden Age of Porn script right there. It’s... not how things normally work in real life.”

“Ooh,” Mimi says. “We’ve always been so careful about moisture and temperature for the long-term storage of VHS tapes — and I know we have a huge porn stash. After the RoRo trip, maybe something actually is leaking?”

Livia ignores Mimi. “We knew Cathy was kinky before we did any of it. And there’s a lot of very pretty, very popular, very superficially innocent girls at a school that size. It was just a matter of doing the background research and picking the right one.”

I nod, trying to be subtle about my pride. “Hey, that’s what you hired me for.”

“Well,” Mimi says, “I guess if you want a more boring explanation...”

“I still want the juicy details tonight,” Livia says, her mouth full of scrambled egg as she talks. This is actually encouraging — she’s no longer the full-time glamour girl around me. I am a member of the household now. She doesn’t care if I see her when she’s shaving her pits or with curlers in her hair. I’m not sure if that increases or decreases her mystique, but it bodes well for my future with the Trips.

“I hear you have some juicy details to spill, too.”

Livia nods. “The hookup crib was put to good use. We didn’t actually take Charlene home. Macy brought up what I did to Blair, and I pointed out that I can do fantasy scenarios. Macy and Karen talked her into a little erotic hypnosis, so the five of us went to the hookup crib together. The four girls with the more, ah... ‘cosmopolitan’ orientations got to watch their straight friend strip down and air-fuck. She got double-teamed by imaginary John Cusack and imaginary Brad Pitt.

“It was incredibly hot, four girls into girls watching a straight girl gyrate against, mime-blow and vigorously pump imaginary dudes. And the level of physiological response I got from Charlene was simply amazing — not just orgasm on command, but nipples getting stiff when licked by imaginary celebs, inflamed pussy lips, goosebumps, writhing, the whole deal. She’s an amazing natural suggestible. Said straight girl didn’t feel too exploited either, I must say. This morning she couldn’t shut up about how awesome it was. She was tossing around offers in the multiple grand range for a repeat session, and the other two might have been willing to lay down cash in similar ranges for some hypno-enhanced sex, too.”

“Hold on,” I say. “We’re currently in debt. Why aren’t we driving back and doing that? Er... I mean, I’m not implying that you’re a prostitute; I meant the hypnosis.”

“I am totally a proud but selective whore, and am quite happy to fuck any girls or boys that are both as pretty and as enthusiastic as last night’s trio. The only reason I don’t usually take money for sex or hypnosis is that it prevents me from being a selfish bitch in the bedroom. I’d rather marks pay me in sexual services and indulgences of my kinks than bills — but I’m not averse to mixing that up a bit.

“However, we don’t linger in the area after an Escalation if we don’t have anything else big to do there — at least, not until we hit LA. You yourself explained to me the value of being the mysterious stranger in seducing Cathy. Same principle here — we need to maintain the mystique. People need to come into our venues thinking of it as a once in a lifetime opportunity to see — or do — something raunchy, not a thing they can think about for a while and maybe try next time. That means we don’t milk the market, and we don’t wear out a gimmick until it becomes mundane. I’m sure we’ll find a lot of girls and boys willing to pay for exactly what Charlene wanted, as soon as our show gets enough momentum and I show the world what I can really do with erotic hypnosis.”

But we’re in the red right now, I think — though I don’t press the point. There are more expenses coming up as well — Livia and I both had costumes wrecked by chocolate, and Livia’s custom bustier is actually quite expensive.

“Anyway,” Livia says, “you probably want a complete retelling. I’ll spill when you spill later tonight, but for now, let me just say this. We all had a great time ogling Charlene as she had a great time, and then I put her into a deep sleep with hypnosis, and then Mimi and I took on Karen and Macy. Mimi took Karen first; they’re peas in a pod, though Karen’s actually a bimbo all the way down. So much giggling and playful fondling and faux-vacuous innuendo. It was amazing to watch. Macy, conversely, is a great big ball of lust. Most gay and bi girls are slow, tender lovers with long buildup times, but Macy... oh boy, what a firecracker.

“There were like three minutes of foreplay before we got into the rough, almost competitive tribadism. And Karen got a bit jealous of us — Karen and Macy are lovers, by the way, though before yesterday Karen had kept trying to pretend it was a ‘just those few nights’ thing and wasn’t going to keep happening — and Karen and I ended up double teaming Macy. I taught Karen how to use a strap-on. Then Macy had her turn with Mimi, and from there, well... let’s just say all those chains and appliances you see above my waterbed were put to very good use for some creative, sweaty, multi-orgasmic group sex. I think it was five AM when we finally drove the nympho trio home.”

Mimi leans over to Livia, obviously turned on even by her abbreviated retelling of last night’s adventures. “I want the juicy details, too!” she says plaintively.

“You were there, Mimi!” Livia points out.

“Oh,” Mimi replies, disappointed.

We laugh. Mimi is fun. Even being a cute girl inaccessible to me, she still raises my spirits. I think she does that for everyone.

“I’ll tell you whatever Marc shares with me about Cathy,” Livia promises the downcast bimbo, which cheers her up instantly. “And I’ll leave out any bits with too much cock.”

“That might be a challenge,” I joke.

Everyone laughs.

Later that night, I have time alone with Livia. I first made sure anything I tell her about Cathy is for Trips ears only. She agrees quickly, and I trust her — this becomes a general company policy for all our marks and conquests. Fellow Trips get all the juicy details, but we’re not out to ruin girls’ reputations. The exceptions, of course, are the girls that are only too happy to have us spread stories about them — and this will eventually include Cathy herself, after some life changes, which is why her real name’s in my memoir at all.

Then I broach a different topic. “How much did this custom motorhome really cost, Livia? Where did you get that, and why can’t you get more now?”

She looks at my face, making a decision. Then she shuts the door and makes me promise not to tell Mimi. She’s already had this conversation with Mimi, and Mimi doesn’t want to know. But I do. I will give a very limited version of the story here.

Livia can do what she did for Charlene for others. There was an older man, a very rich banker. He wanted fantasies from Livia — the most repulsive kind of fantasies. As a child, he had been the victim of pederasty. As this crime does with many victims, it shaped this one’s sexuality. He was a pedophile. He was absolutely not, however, a child molester. He scrupulously kept children away from himself, eschewing all contact with them. He actually had a reputation for hating children, which he nurtured specifically as a kind of shield against temptation.

I will not disclose how he and Livia met, as that could risk his identity. “He was, in the end, a good man — one of the minority of responsible bankers in Canary Wharf. And he was a lifelong celibate, who knew the only sex he would ever want would be an atrocity. And then he heard about this hypnotist, who made clients’ fantasies real in their minds — for a price. I did nine sessions with him. The first time I got him in trance, I probed him, made sure he had never actually violated children. But I knew he hadn’t.

“And then, I... I gave him his fantasies, just like with Charlene. In the beginning I was hideously uncomfortable narrating this. But by the end, I came to have a deep respect for the guy. We all have these formative experiences, after all. A sleazy amateur magician’s Baffling Bra set the whole course of my life. For him, it was an incestuous child rapist. I was actually happy, in the end, that this man was able to find some true sexual pleasure in his life, even if his desires were so viscerally repugnant. We all have taboo fantasies, and there’s usually some way to indulge them without hurting people. He taught me that.”

She actually sounds maudlin. She had clearly come to respect this man. There’s a moment before she continues on in a more detached tone.

“Anyway, he was obviously a big sugar daddy. In concrete money, I only got about half a million pounds out of him. This was pocket change to him. The actual cost of the Jumbocruiser, with all its gear, is about two million — but I didn’t pay for it. The rest is just... gone. I spent it preparing the half-time show... and, I’ll admit, on a rather high lifestyle and overly expensive prop materials and other toys for wealthy madwomen.

“But he did more intangible things for us, as well. He got an amateur magician an appearance on a Super Bowl half-time show. That... costs more than a few million; let’s just leave it at that. We have a lifelong, ‘shadow’ contract with some of the best lawyers in the world. We’re never going to be charged with indecency, obscenity or sexual harassment for what we do. Public prosecutors will get a late-night phone call and just decide not to pursue the case. We are effectively earmarked there. We have impunity. He hooked me up with a few very pervy, very influential men. They get videos of the shows right after we do them. Sometimes they get voyeur videos of my sexual encounters where they think the other lady doesn’t know she’s on film, too.

“These are men whose kinks are like our own — who see me as an artist, as the next Benny Hill. They love my work, and they’ll make sure we don’t get slapped down by the FCC, Ofcom, the Concerned Parents’ League, NOW or the family values crusaders. Oh, all those people will rant, but it will never go anywhere. We can provoke them as much as we like, and flaunt it — that will only amuse our shadowy patrons. They love a little un-PC humor. But they’re also not going to drop huge sums of money into the show. That was not the original agreement, and said agreement is very specific. Our main benefactor deliberately set it up that way. It may be possible to re-negotiate, if we were truly desperate — but I don’t want to go there. The impunity and the props are more valuable than immediate liquid cash, in the long run.

“Anyway, you’ve probably figured out that my pedo sugar daddy is no longer with us. He passed away two months after my half-time debut. He never got to see even the Capricorn Escalation. That makes me very sad, honestly — I think he would have followed it raptly, despite being categorically incapable of sexual attraction toward adults. He was kind of a mentor near the end. Nobody expected it. Just a —”

Livia names a form of death, which I am omitting to help obscure said benefactor’s identity. She mentions the age he died at — an older man, but not infirm or elderly. It was unexpected. “He was kind of a mentor to me, near the end. He had told his most terrible secret to me. I was the only one. How could we not bond? He cared about my dreams and my ambitions, and wanted to see me succeed. He also wanted sessions, though, which is why he never gave me more actual concrete money than he thought I could blow through in a reasonable period. He gave me favors worth far more than the money, but he never gave me enough money at any one time that I wouldn’t need to come back. I can admire that as a player myself, but you’ve seen the halftime show and the Capricorn Escalation. You can see the radical dip in financing between them.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I remember. At the time, I put it down to the scandal from your syrup-coated tits on CBS live broadcast wrecking your finances.”

Livia grins in spite of herself. “God, tits on TV are cool, especially when presented with a little showmanship. But no, the impunity protected me from fallout. I just thought I had a money faucet going forward, so I blew the finances. And then our main sponsor died, leaving no precautions to ensure continued funding, and I got the same harsh life lesson about the reality of money everyone eventually gets — just on a bit of a different scale than most. I’m lucky the Beast was never repossessed — if we were to lose it, that would be the end of the Trips for sure. But we’ve been getting out of debts gradually ever since then.”

Now, O Anticipatory Reader, you are no doubt expecting certain names you have heard a great deal about in the news recently to be mentioned here — the Libertine Network, Adam Lowenthal, the Margrave Decision, Corrine Bletchford and so forth. None of that comes up. I can truthfully say that at the time I did not see any of what this conversation is hinting at, and had never in my life heard the phrase Libertine Network. Few had — it will not become a household name for another two years. At least, if I did it would be a passing mention I attributed no importance to. That sort of thing all comes much, much later in my tale.

I move the conversation elsewhere. I have the answers I want at this point, and feel I’m on the edge of a big life decision. Livia and I eventually end up on the waterbed. I retell to her in explicit detail everything that happened with Cathy, and she praises me for my eloquence. She does in turn spill some very explicit details about her recent lesbian foursome, but the truth is that for all her great lines, ringleader showmanship and solar-fire charisma, Livia is not great at narrative storytelling. Suffice it to say, there’s a reason she didn’t write her own memoir. Our mutual gossip session actually inspires the major content of our next Escalation, but I’ll get into that later.

We actually get each other really worked up whispering naughty stories and including some especially lurid details. I’m good at talking smoothly, confidently and explicitly about sex, and it really turns her on. She really wants to bang hard right now, but I rebuff her. As I’ve said before, I have a pretty good idea what she wants for her first time with me — and this isn’t big enough. Besides, as much as I adore Cathy, I don’t want to play second fiddle to her in Livia’s sexual imagination. Desperate horny Livia sure is fun, though, and I get a dominance-thrill out of holding off. I even make her beg. She enjoys begging. When I don’t give in, though, she pulls something completely out of left field.

We’re lying on the waterbed, spooning fully clothed. I’ve been subtly feeling her up; she loves it and wants it to get less subtle. “You know,” she tells me out of the blue, “when you finally do get around to taking me, you can go in raw. It’s safe, I’m sterile.”

She says it like a come-on, in a really sultry voice — almost a growl. It hits home with my libido — I’m fairly meticulous about safe sex, and it’s been years since I’ve been inside a woman without a condom. Only two total over the course of my insanely promiscuous life, too — neither of which hold a candle to Livia. My cock gets hard, digging into her bum; she grinds back.

At the same time, though, I’m shocked and unsettled. It’s just... fertility is such a complex issue, so often shameful to women. I never in my life imagined I’d hear a woman brag about her barrenness. It staggers me. “Tell me more,” I say, carefully keeping my voice perfectly level. “Is that safe?”

Livia describes herself proudly as an avowed, lifelong sexual libertine. There’s an unsettling level of zeal there. (I’m less pretentious, at this point, just thinking of myself as a pervert and horndog.) She hates the Pill — she tells me it messes with a woman’s ovarian cycles and diminishes her enjoyment of sex, like condoms do for men. So, apparently, she had her tubes tied sometime after her halftime debut but before the Capricorn Escalation, when she was busy blowing her patron’s money on weird props and what she whimsically calls the “true essentials of life” — hookers, gigolos, designer shoes and other pleasures best enjoyed to extreme excess.

One can’t just walk into a hospital and get that done, mind you — the medical establishment looks askance at permanent harm to the reproductive system in single young adults in service to blatant sexual profligacy — but I understand that a combination of charm, contacts, medical tourism and sexual favors to an attractive MD got the job done for Livia.

She even offers to set something similar up for me, if I’m ever interested — but while Livia hates children (perhaps due to the... unpleasant scenarios she’s imagined concerning them), I’m not truly certain yet that my wild hookup lifestyle will be life-long. I’ve always thought there would be a family in my future, that one day I would finally settle down. Honestly, I find it faintly unsettling at this point that someone would just cut off their chance at lineage for sensual gratification alone — but I know how hypocritical that would sound coming from me, so I keep my mouth shut.

She’s also really well-versed with antibacterials and has a solid grasp of layered safe-sex methods. Her personal risk tolerance means she uses rubbers with the vast majority of her partners just like I do, but not with a few longer-term lovers. I’m not going to engage with this emotionally right now, though. It’s just too big, too weird and too disquieting. Instead, Livia’s horny, so I tease her with my hands and we soon forget the odd talk about sterility as we get more heated. She never realizes I was disturbed as well as turned on, I think.

I do compromise a bit so we can have some more kinetic fun without true consummation. Livia cues up raw footage of Cathy’s various humiliations, and we grind our fully-clothed bodies together until we both reach sweaty orgasms just from playful, rough dry-humping and watching the deliciously evil things happen to the now-quite-thoroughly-tasted Forbidden Fruit of the Big Noodle. Afterward, we chat softly and incoherently for a bit and finally fall asleep in each other’s arms (and definitely regret skipping the normal post-coital showers the next morning). That’s just how life goes in the Great Beast.

Part of me is still waiting for the hammer of consequences to fall from what we did at the Noodle. To my ongoing surprise, it never really does.

The worst thing that happens is that we cost Roni, one of the sorority girls, a significant modeling contract. She was apparently lined up to be a model for New Century Swimstyles, an agency with a strict no-nudity clause in their contracts. I’m not sure why she volunteered, given what we did in the First Decan — not a wise life choice. Mimi strikes up a conversation with her using CompuServe mail, and while she’s bummed, she doesn’t hold any rancor toward us. She had apparently not considered how widespread the gossip about the show would become, and thought it would be like flashing at a more low-key party.

We keep her number, and agree to keep an eye out for any contacts with modeling agencies that might be interested in her — a little compensatory cross-promotion. I have a feeling we’ll be dealing with models and starlets a lot in the future, so we’ll probably be making contacts in the future even if we don’t have them right now.

Cathy does get in contact with Livia, asking for glossies of the photos we took of her. We have the rights, and she apparently has no problem with that — she just wants copies. Sure thing, babe! I never get to talk to her, though, and the exchange is apparently fairly formal. Livia assures her the nudes won’t go public until after she graduates, so as not to make problems for her.

We follow Cathy’s social presence at the Noodle, though, both by talking to some BROs and through more illicit means. Her role in our show is at the center of all the hot gossip on the campus student BBS, which Mimi can get into. She gets a lot of the expected jokes and scorn, but people say she’s weathering it with good humor and hardly seems beaten down. Indeed, given her kinks and love of attention, she may well be having the time of her life.

She’s really adept in how she frames things. She does blame us, but not to a level that demonizes the show — just to the point that we are her excuse, which was exactly what we want to be. She seems incredibly socially adroit, for all her shyness and inability to express kinks directly. I guess it makes sense — the most popular girls in school are going to have the skills needed to keep that position — but her aplomb still surprises me.

It’s a month after the Noodle show that we get an amazing gift from a BRO — a copy of the latest Overview, the Noodle student newspaper. Like at a fair number of party schools, it’s not unheard of for them to publish some racy photos of willing student bodies from time to time — nothing explicit, but carefully-covered hidden nudity fundraisers and such. You know, like the kind of charity calendar where cute girls do something naked, but there’s always some object in the way of their nips in the photo to keep it all PG-13?

I’ve honestly tracked down a few of those kinds of issues from my old Alma Mater in my time. Even though they don’t show anything, it’s profoundly exciting to me as a voyeur to see everyday girls I know and met flaunting their bodies in a risqué photo — stimulating in a very different way than a glossy but impersonal magazine centerfold.

Well, Cathy gets an actual interview in the Overview about her role in the Virgo Escalation. It’s all very bubbly — she laughs it off and talks about how it was all in good fun, and felt so very liberating. The word ‘liberating’ gets used an inordinate amount of times, honestly. Whatever else I have to say about feminists, they sure did give the world’s cute college girls a great excuse-word there!

She even drops in a few innuendos. But most amazing of all is the photo of her with a scandalized expression, covered in chocolate. It’s cropped not to show her nipples, of course (barely!), but it still shows a mouth-watering portion of her upper chest and chocolate-plastered body. Of course, students might imagine the photo was taken by someone else — only we know Cathy is the one who actually supplied it. God, I adore Cathy.

I wish I could talk to her, ask her what it’s like for reasons both pervy and genuinely supportive — but she has our computer mail address, and in respect of her wishes I’m not going to contact her unless she contacts us first. Beyond asking for the photo to begin with, she doesn’t.

There is some other fallout, too. Some East Coast feminists insist there must have been a “rape spike” the night of the big party at the Noodle. It’s a thing they just think intuitively must be true, despite lacking any evidence. The faculty looks at it, and responds that no reports bear that out. There was certainly a hookup spike, but not a lot of reported violence — sexual or otherwise.

It seems like living out an exploitative fantasy vicariously served as a release valve for tensions more than some kind of gateway drug, and sexual violence reports actually go down at the Noodle. Then some feminist activists get caught trying to cook numbers — pressuring girls to report groping with language that implies it was rape — and the whole activism angle dies a slow heat death from media disinterest.

We apparently injured people. Three frat boys tore their vocal cords at the Virgo Escalation. Not even joking. I feel bad for them, but my id is dancing. Saying you got the audience so hyped-up that they tore their vocal cords... well, that’s actually a pretty big deal for a spectacle performer. Two of them are fine in a day or two. The third spends a week in a hospital before he can talk again. I do send him a personalized “get well” card with some prints of party pictures (no, not those pictures, but a few hypnotized cheerleader cleavage shots and an especially expressive shot of Blair “enjoying” a frat boy’s handshake).

He sends us back electronic mail right away, and we read his enthusiastic, barely-literate bro-speak in Lotus Notes about how absolutely worth it the night was. (Richer members of the younger generation are apparently big into this computer mail thing, and Livia tells me I need to get up on it to stay in touch with college babes. Makes sense, I guess. Honestly, I still need Mimi’s help to log in to CompuServe.) Apparently the Beta Rho Omegas are bestowing upon me the honorary title of Lifetime Mega-BRO, and are even happy to send the Trips a formal certificate attesting to that.

Focus on the Family sends paid protesters to picket outside the campus, protesting the cultural degeneracy of the Greek lifestyle. Nobody takes them too seriously, though — liberals never did, and conservatives have been decidedly cool since their antics cost Reagan his second term. The new group, the Christian Socialist League, is there too — the fundies going over to the Democratic isle after the Steinmeyer-Turing Realignment. The two puritan groups coexist and cooperate so calmly you wouldn’t see them as opposed — which, in reality, I doubt they are. The most media love this gets, though, is when a cute sorority sister manages to pull a topless photobomb of one of Pat Buchanan’s speeches just outside the campus. That’s pretty cool.

So... no real consequences. Can one do that? Can we just hypnotize the class valedictorian, strip her naked in public, flash a view of her intimates from an overhead projector and dip her in chocolate — all with no lasting consequences for anyone involved? Apparently, for us at least, the answer is a resounding “sure, as long as you’re careful.”

The potentials of what deliciously naughty stunt we would get away with next boggle my imagination.

Like many enterprises, we have strategy and direction meetings. Ours just tend to be a lot more interesting than a typical corporation’s. You might expect, O Dismissive Reader, that I would zone out during these meetings, or flirt incessantly, or just use them as an excuse to ogle Livia and Mimi’s pronounced upper attributes. Actually, however, I’m very attentive and disciplined during them.

I was a slacker and a semi-legit self-help guru. I rarely did anything honestly meaningful with my life beyond shallow hedonism. At the Noodle, though, we captured the imaginations of a huge crowd, made them laugh and gave them an erotic thrill. I’m no longer a slacker — I’m an entertainer and an entrepreneur. I feel pride, and while immense success may be visible on the horizon I’m not naïve enough to doubt that reaching it will take a lot of talent, hard work and good decision making. I want to be a part of that, to give it my all. The first step of doing that is to learn.

“We’re halfway on track to mega-success,” Livia announces. “The frat show hooked the masculine id, dragging them right by their hairy, dangling Freudian fantasies, and they’re going to be our core paying audience and source of funding in the future. We just fulfilled a primal, abiding male fantasy about the unattainable girl for an audience large enough to get us really strong word of mouth. But we can’t just keep leaning into that. We’ve made the pitch and closed the deal with the guys. But we can’t do it with guys alone. If there isn’t a constant stream of enthusiastic, fresh-faced female volunteers the show will wither.

“Cathy was special. She was at a very specific turning point in her life, and we were her catalyst. We can’t just expect to find a few dozen more Cathy’s, and I don’t think the Virgo show did the best possible job of selling to girls the reasons they’d really want to be in Cathy’s shoes. You know who, from a female viewer’s perspective, really had some fun that night? Blair. I mean, obviously. Even when girls have sex, they don’t always get to come. But Blair... I liked her, I even admire her for her courage, but most girls won’t. Let’s not mince words here; she was pretty slutty, and that means most everyday girls won’t want to be her.

“We need to repackage the experience a bit. I’m not saying make it into a Lifetime movie or anything — the content of the Virgo show was perfect, but we need to shift the metaphorical camera lenses a bit to emphasize how much fun girls like Blair and Cathy end up having, and how that’s accessible to any girl that wants to get up on our stage. We all want to Trip the stunners, but we also need to sprinkle in some ordinary-looking girls here and there — like Blair, but not as overtly slutty.

“Also, I think I need to tone down the frat-boy humor, at least for some audiences. I had wild fun with it, but it can’t be for every show. Although, the rope-tension gag is a keeper. I really love that one; it’s deeper than it looks on the surface. It passes itself off as a masturbation gag, and it worms its way into your mind in that innocuous cover. But our whole society is tense, neurotically fixated on what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate. When you let the audience vicariously experience the inappropriate, it becomes tremendously exciting to them on a psychosexual level.

“It lets them know they’re not freaks for having fantasies that are inappropriate, and shows the absurdity of stigmatization as an enforcement mechanism even for legitimate moral causes like preventing sexual assault. I can take all the stigmatization the fundamentalists and the feminists have so carefully built up, and turn it into fetish, and then from fetish into farce. And doing that fills a raw, primal need, and thus transfixes the audience.

“That’s actually the root theory behind both the Taurus and Virgo shows. Long before we were ever born, people wanted to see the archetype Mimi’s bully-cop persona represented get humiliated in a kinky way, and they wanted to see their school’s most popular ‘Good Girl’ do the stuff Cathy did. And it’s all based on stigmas, and on turning them into fetishes, and then turning around and proving that no, we didn’t do anything really wrong. It was all an illusion. We just let you think we did, and we let you live the moment along with us. And wasn’t it hot?

“And we’re going to do the exact same thing with the next show, except it’s going to be focused on how much fun, how much positive experience, a woman can have when she makes the conscious choice to let go of her inhibitions. We need to teach the girls we want that, just as roses have thorns, so too is putting on a show for the boys a necessary part of their personal journey toward success in modern dating, sexual confidence, rediscovered sensuality and twelve-minute orgasms.”

I should note, to avoid reader confusion, that what Livia is talking about here ended up influencing the Fifth Escalation more than the Fourth — but Livia lays out the psychology and marching orders here, and I’m just relating that.

“Er,” I say. “You do know women have have a fulfilling sex life without turning into exhibit—”

“Shh!” Livia aggressively presses her fingertip to my lips, cutting me off with such force and authority as to quiet me immediately. “If you want to keep your dream job, young man, never utter words like those in my presence, or in public, again!”

That particular point will not be raised again, and as an inveterate voyeur I cannot in truth say I am overly sad to see it ignored.

The topic of the student newspaper inevitably comes up at the meeting. Livia is ecstatic. “I think we might have actually pulled it off in Delaware,” she says.

“Cathy is saying the Noodle show was just blowing off tension and it’s all in fun and she had a great time. She’s doing that publicly and repeatedly, and we can’t possibly ask for better publicity. She’s selling that to other girls! And it’s having an effect. The boundaries of what a respectable young lady can do, and be seen doing, all in the name of blowing off a bit of tension and having some fun, are shifting. Slightly, perhaps, but they’re still moving. We are making history, my friends! We are building a more libertine, more hedonistic, more gloriously sexualized world!

“Do you want to know the best part, the shining sign of our ultimate victory? That girl... that awesome, ravishing, kinky, pure, spectacular, courageous young coed... is still the valedictorian of her class. She’s still going to deliver the valedictory address at her graduation this July. Isn’t that amazing?”

Livia has chosen the setting for our next Escalation. It’s something of a given: there are certain tropes one just has to hit in any given genre, and we are about to do Spring Break. We have a booking with the notorious and iconic Summers on the Beach in Fort Lauderdale. We will be doing at least two shows there, and have the option for a third. There is every indication it’s going to be a pretty epic year for the Spring Break phenomenon, as well.

The film Spring Break was a blockbuster in major theatres when it first released (even if critics ravaged it) and has just hit the cable markets via USA Up All Night. It gets played all the time on late night, unedited, as Spring Break draws near. It’s very inspirational. (“Nelson, those are Debonair tits! I haven’t seen Debonair tits anywhere except Debonair!”)

The cultural phenomenon itself will get bigger and more crowded in the future, as MVTV — Music Video Television, the most popular music channel in the world — sinks its hooks in deeper. In my eyes, though, it will never be better than it is the year we do it. We hit the sweet spot — the time when it attracts both fresh-faced college girls and achingly-perfect glamour models, and the brazen sexual contests are in full swing, but before it gets turned into manufactured, focus-grouped kitsch by MVTV, devoid of spontaneity or adventure and shunned by respectable girls.

Our visit will be in early April this year — we have a few months between now and then, and we begin a long tour (mostly) down the I-95 from Delaware to Florida. Over these months, we will hit Washington, Richmond, Virginia Beach, Myrtle Beach, Florence, Savannah and Jacksonville.

We do a bunch more shows along the way. They break even — we work hard. We mostly work for various frats and nightclubs on our tour route. Our shows are abbreviated versions of the Big Noodle show, but never get close to as epic as that one. There’s never another girl like Cathy, at least not yet. We do get some college titties out on stage, even some that have never been seen in public before.

The Blair routine proves popular and easy to duplicate, so a lot of college cuties have a lot of very pleasant handshakes that are as enticing to onlookers are they are satisfying to the subject. It’s great, but lacks the raw sexual electricity we tapped into in Delaware. This is, to a degree, by design — we certainly put effort into the shows, but they’re not Escalations and Livia doesn’t want them to overshadow the Escalations.

Mimi tears a muscle driving our bumper car prop in Myrtle Beach. We spend two weeks there with her in a hospital recovering. Livia and I both feel guilty, though our guilt subsides slightly when we come to visit Mimi in the physio center with gifts and catch her with a rather comely East Indian physical therapist sitting on her face.

We still do everything we can for her, of course. We build a better bumper car prop — one with a motor. I’m fairly skilled with mechanics and carpentry and take real satisfaction in putting those skills to use — and I learn a fair bit about handicrafts and propwork in this time as well, though I’m still at best an assistant to Livia. We learn our lesson about stage safety, and are generally more careful in the future.

She scares the hell out of us, though, by just not getting up the morning after we bring her back from the hospital. She’s all sleepy like she’s been chloroformed, aware but hazy and barely able to move. It’s honestly terrifying, when we realize how drugged up and out of it she is. We need to carry her to the car and rush her right back to the hospital. It turns out to be some kind of adverse reaction to the pain meds they gave her, possibly exacerbated by a touch of bourbon to celebrate being out.

Everything’s fine the next day and she gets a different prescription — but she seems weirdly introspective and thoughtful about the incident, like she wants to talk about something but can’t put her mind on what it is. Neither of us presses the issue — any brush with mortality is scary. Time heals all wounds, though, and very soon we have our cheerful, bouncing bimbo back on her feet and eager to help plan out our next show. This absorbs us: the whole way from Washington to Jacksonville, we are eagerly plotting and planning for the next demented Escalation.

I distinctly remember when I get the awkward question. We’ve just pulled into Florence, South Carolina to rest for a night. No show planned, just a bit of downtime. Livia is out at a local bar, on the prowl. Mimi and I have decided to just relax, though, chilling with a few Bollywood films. The girls are both into those Nintendo games, and often play them late at night to relax — I know, since I often hear the faint, tinny video game music through the thin RV walls in my bunk. It’s a peculiar hobby for two adults, but honestly it doesn’t even rank in the top ten strangest elements of life with the Trips.

It’s nice to have a quiet night alone with Mimi for once, myself — to get to know her. I like Mimi — I can’t have her, but I try not to really care. She’s just a cool person to hang out with. We have a rapport. O Uninitiated Readers, I must inform you: if you appreciate tacky but sincere spectacle, you will absolutely adore Bollywood — and East Indian cinema has a sense of male machismo that is both genuinely sexy and knowingly ridiculous, which I appreciate and learn from.

It’s also exciting to watch beautiful and exotic actresses from one of the world’s most puritanical nations gleefully subvert the moral codes that are imposed on them through the frequent and scandalous wet sari scenes. I think I’m developing a crush on Kimi Katkar. Mimi might be, too.

She’s not in bimbo mode tonight, though, and that leaves her the agency to ask me the awkward question. “Marcelo... what do you do? Other than pick up girls, I mean?”

It’s not the first time I’ve been asked this question. The truthful answer is that my interests and hobbies are incredibly eclectic, but I lack a deep attachment to any of them. I mostly picked them up from the girls I’ve had more enduring Friends-With-Benefits agreements with. Sometimes this verges on the ridiculous — I know more of the plotlines from One Life to Live than I want to admit to, but only from two specific years. When a girl I’m into asks me, I usually respond with something I’m at least conversant with that they might like as well. When a guy asks, I can crack macho locker-room jokes about how pickup is my life.

But I’m not macking on Mimi, and she’s not a guy — so that makes the question difficult. The truth is, I have been too focused on pickup to the exclusion of other things in my life, and I know it. And now, I’m with the Trips, and the mechanics and rehearsals of the show along with the side-girls are more than enough to take up my time. When I answer her, it’s basically honest — really, it’s a more honest answer than anyone else would have gotten out of me.

“My interests are all over the place. I’ve made dough as a freelance writer before I was a commercial pickup coach. I did travelogues, bar reviews, nightlife columns and such. I like novelty, and I like doing new things with new people. I’ve done woodcarving since I was a child. I’m pretty good at it, actually — you’ve probably seen all the little elephant statues, miniature totem poles and Celtic knot blocks in my room. I studied to be an electrician, because I actually thought that was where my life was going at one point. I read a lot. I grew up rich and introverted, in an actual mansion with its own show-library no one else ever used. All those old books, seen as nothing but status symbols.

“My parents would have dropped a log if they caught me with copies of Clubhouse or Debonair in middle school, but I could read whatever I wanted in the family library — and there were some surprisingly racy things there. In high school, I built HAM radios and hung out in arcades. I used to be really good at Galaga and Frogger. Those damn machines ate all my quarters and time and never gave me nothing back, though, so I just cut it off cold turkey when I hit college, only visiting arcades to socialize or mack.

“I was on the football team in college, but I never really enjoyed playing — I like fitness, and I like cheerleaders, but I’m not actually fond of competition or male status games. I didn’t practice enough and mostly ended up a backbencher. And shockingly, college athletes have a pecking order. The team captain doesn’t like a backbencher that can jump the dating queue on charisma and moxie and get the head cheerleader’s bedroom eyes. Fucker planted pot in my locker, and my parents had to pull name to avoid me getting expelled. I was seen as a druggie loser outcast for ages after that. Really put a damper on my interest in athletics, obviously.”

“He just got away with that?”

“Mostly. I did meet up with some of the old college crew a few years after graduating. I got the chance he apparently never managed to plant something in his cheerleader crush, and it wasn’t pot. I have no idea if he ever found out — he wasn’t at the meetup, obviously — but it was still satisfying. That lunkhead was the very definition of Peaked in High School, anyway.”

Mimi giggles, but doesn’t say anything. She likes happy endings. I do too, in both senses. (Pun intended.) Regardless, I continue talking.

“I did still follow the sport as a fan, though, even after that — I’ve been to more than a few Atlanta Falcons games in my time; I’ve even got the jersey, though it’s still packed up right now. I can skate — on skateboard, ice skates or rollerblades — passably but not impressively. I am similarly decent at volleyball and tennis — the sports sexy girls tend to play, unsurprisingly. I can identify birds and handle a model rocket, and sew a bit — all stuff picked up from various girlfriends. I majored in statistical analysis and minored in East Indian cultural studies —”

Mimi raises an eyebrow. “Interesting choices.”

I laugh ruefully. “It’s the kind of transcript you end up with when you don’t consciously realize how much weight you’re putting on potential classmates’ cup sizes when you’re picking out courses.”

Mimi takes that moment to adjust her top, tucking it back into her jeans — and highlighting her ample chest against the momentarily tight fabric. She catches me looking and giggles — ah, she’s just messing with me. She doesn’t acknowledge it, though, so I just go on talking.

“I got lucky, though, as both topics did genuinely interest me as well as pairing me with attractive coeds. I’m fascinated by statistics, actually — it appeals to me, modeling the world with numbers and analyzing survey methodologies and predicting events based on trends. It’s not the sexiest topic for small talk, obviously, but I kept with it anyway. Reality is made of numbers, I think. I wonder if Livia agrees — she quotes Crowley at the end of every Escalation, but I only started to read him recently. I read bits of Hypatia of Alexandria, though — in part thanks to a crush on her namesake, Hyapatia Lee. That’s what the Neoplatonists used to say, you know — that reality was really made of ideas, and matter was just an illusory façade. Weird, huh? Definitely a topic to go into if you ever want to date a stoner chick.”

“Livia’s an atheist, actually,” Mimi interjects. “All the occult stuff is just for show.”

I nod. “Yeah, that seems like her. Anyway, I dropped out after I got my Bachelor’s. Like I said above with the pot — college gets unpleasant if you sleep around and you don’t have the backing of the right cliques to do that. My parents really wanted me in law. I was interested in sales, but never studied it formally. It was the source of our rift. After college, I broke ties with my family and got into pickup as a serious thing. I was in a band in college, Prismatic Horizon, and for a bit after. I played guitar.”

Mimi grins. “Really? You, a rock star?”

I chuckle bitterly. “Only sort-of really. I was good with a guitar, I guess. Not great, but good. And I had personal style and glamour, even before I called it pickup. But... you know how amateur bands always seem to have one guy that really knows what he’s doing, two guys that are learning and doing their best and that one slacker-loser who’s just in a band to meet girls? Well, guess which slot I fit in.”

Mimi giggles. “Sounds like you had fun, at least.”

I’m so used to telling hyper-glamourized stories about my life — how I got my necklaces, how I was in a band, what plays and techniques I liked best when I used to be a football jock. Not lying, per se, but lionizing. Being honest with Mimi is hard; it means I need to be honest with myself, too.

“Not always. I was a real chunderhead in college. The other three guys in the band were decent, at least, and I let them down until they booted me. I don’t know how things would have gone if I was more serious. We had a Korean lead singer, and he was really good. Do you know how rare that is, in American music, for a Korean dude to get a shot fronting an actually-decent band? His name was Jason Roh, and I screwed him over, and I regret that. I had mediocre musical skill but real charisma; he had the inverse. We could have complemented each other, if I’d been mature enough to be responsible. But, well... I wasn’t, back then, and the band’s history.”

“If you stayed with Prismatic Horizon, you probably wouldn’t be here now.”

“Yeah. Good point. I like it here. It feels right for me. Way better than a garage band.”

“Go on, though.”

“Horizon broke up two years after they booted me. Apparently my replacement was a cokehead with a switchblade, and I’ve heard he’s in prison now. I don’t talk to the others anymore, except the drummer — Howie. He’s pretty chill, an old-school hippie seven years older than we were back then. Taught me some good stuff about meditation and metaphysics and such. But I haven’t heard from him in years. I don’t know if we’d get along these days — we were careful not to talk politics, back in the day, but it was always a potential wedge. We’re on opposite sides of the spectrum.

“I had a serious squeeze in college, Sharon, and I cheated on her. I let her down, hurt her. I wasn’t all premeditated and reptilian, it just kind of... happened. I never made serious emotional commitments or promises to girls after that. I didn’t even mean to with her — I just wanted to be decent and not say things I know would hurt people, and suddenly there were emotions, and somehow that meant I was now in a serious relationship. I even wanted to talk more openly about attraction and commitment with her, but some girls have ways of shutting down conversations about that.

“I wasn’t born a pickup artist. I figured this stuff out because of Sharon. I decided I wanted to be a hedonist with no strings attached, ever. It weirdly seemed more decent than the serial dating game where the guy pretends to be emotionally serious and maybe even believes he is, when he’s really just a dumb, horny young buck.

“And from there on I consciously took up interests that enhance that: men’s fashion, dancing, witty repartee, fitness, confidence-boosting exercises, club-based networking. I... I had to make mistakes to get there. Most people aren’t like Cathy Delapointe, with that kind of social adeptness and self-actualization in their college years.”

“Yeah,” Mimi snorts. “You got that right. Let me tell you, Marc — you sound like you were a lot more like Cathy at her age than I was. So don’t beat yourself up over it.”

I’m tempted to question her back. I’m curious about her earlier life, and how and why her bimbo dichotomy evolved. But my intuition tells me not to pursue that line of discussion just yet, so I don’t. We just chill out to our movie marathon. After the third film, Mimi brings up my living space.

“I noticed Liv gave you a shitty cubicle-style bunk room. You should get a better one now that you’re part of our family. You should be able to unpack your stuff, play guitar.”

I feel an indescribable emotional surge when she says that, but push it aside. “Don’t worry about it. Livia gave me free access to her personal pickup crib, which is absolutely awesome. I don’t need a big room. All I do there is sleep, anyway, and I know space on the Beast is at a premium. I don’t want status shit to eat the spare prop shop or reduce the wardrobe space or something, when I have no real use for a big room.”

Mimi asks to see my carvings, so I take her back to my room to show them to her. I even promise to make her one, when I get some spare time. Then we hear the door unlock as Livia gets back — and she isn’t alone. We hold hands and quietly giggle and perv together as we listen to the muffled sounds of her banging some random coed, and the sloshing sounds of a waterbed put to vigorous use.

My adventure in Savannah is memorable enough to warrant a chapter title. The city, that is — not the lovely, late adult actress. As much as I’d like to spin an elaborate tale about just what it would have taken for a pickup artist to get the notoriously free-spirited Savannah to spread those long luscious legs off-screen, I can’t honestly claim to have the personal experience to back it up.

It would be a bit tasteless now, anyway — you’ve no doubt heard she passed on after the Trips wrapped up. Fantasies, blessings and mourning prayers are now all any of us who could have claimed to be her fans have to offer her these days. Thank you, Savannah, for making the days of so many men a little bit brighter in the better time when we both dwelt in the same world.

Anyway. Savannah, the city. We’re at Hostess Central — a big nightclub with a chintzy western theme popular with the upscale college crowd, with a more permissive attitude than most in the local country scene. The crowd is young, rugged and uninhibited. They’re not really scantily clad, but they are dressed real sexy in a Down South kind of way.

The look is surprisingly unisexual — lots of thigh-high leather boots, frilled shirts, tight denim, rodeo neck-scarves and Stetson hats. It’s not explicitly a costume club, but there’s country music and the cheesy aesthetic is there. Of course, these are rich Southern city kids play-acting Dukes of Hazzard who’ve never been near a farm in their lives — but the girls look great in tied-up plaid belly shirts none the less. There’s lots of really handsome, buff guys in the crowd too, in tight black shirts with bare muscular forearms. That’s a great sign — it gives the babes a tangible motive to flaunt it, in the hopes of going home with someone they desire as much as everyone else desires them.

We’re dressed all country, too — though in retrospect, we might have overdone it a bit. I’m sporting the vaunted “Canadian Tux” — jeans, a denim jacket, a custom Trips belt buckle and a matching fedora. Mimi’s working a Dolly Parton look — jeans, a tight and low-cut sleeveless buckskin top dyed pastel purple with lots of dangling white fringes and a sparkling, gaudy rose quartz necklace.

It’s Livia who inevitably captures the eye, however — she looks absolutely luscious in a figure-hugging, sleeveless, strapless denim minidress. She went the extra mile on this outfit, sewing herself denim wristbands with unicursal hexagram cufflinks and a denim choker for her Sitri medallion.

I’m not sure if we’re overdoing a theme to the point of being a bit condescending to the Southern country audience — but she did put in personal effort, and the men at least will forgive her as a result of her being raw sex on two legs: the dress is deeply provocative. Denim oddly manages to visually convey the appeal of ‘tight’ in a way quite distinct from other, thinner fabrics. It’s got big metal buttons all down the center, and you can really see them strain to keep all the flesh in. The first three are all undone, to show off her cleavage.

It’s not a great getup for freedom of movement — it’s so exciting to look at specifically because if she tried to bend fully over something would have to pop or rip — but it makes up for that in its ability to constrict audience blood-flow. Her Clubhouse key looks very distinct dangling from the curve of her hip against the pristine, light blue denim.

Livia starts right in with the standup. “You know, when I booked this gig, my agent called me — he was stuck in traffic in New York at the time — and he says to me: Livvy, baby, why you wanna play some backwoods Southern hickville with no cultural significance? Three reasons, Benny: hot seafood, hotter women and eight hundred miles of open air between me and your grabby little hands!

“One thing I can really say about Savannah, though — it’s a great city to just kick back, breathe and relax in. I only learned about the Southern hospitality once I got here, mind you — everyone’s been so amazingly nice to us. Such sweet, helpful little church ladies. Man, are they going to feel like chumps when they learn exactly what kind of show I came here to host! Benny, conversely, well... when I call him back, we’ll compare notes to see who had a better weekend. I expect him to still be stuck in the same traffic jam he was in during the first call, so it won’t even be a contest!”

The crowd laughs. There is no Benny and Livia’s never even been to New York. However, you can’t be a legit standup comic in our era unless you crack jokes about the Big Apple’s traffic situation, so Livia’s checking that off her bucket list.

“Now, lemme tell you, a New York traffic jam is not a great place to be a lady, and in completely unrelated news it’s also not a great place to be me! Not that I would ever claim to be a lady, mind you — any time you see a hot-ass bitch refer to herself as a lady, you just know she’s going to have a boring as fuck personal life no matter how great her bod looks. Am I right, blokes? Come on, admit it — you know it’s true. You don’t want a girl who knows how to weave sleekly though the corridors of polite society in a pair of Dolce Gabbanas — you want a girl with a big pair of Dolce Gabbanas up top who can suck a grapefruit through a plastic straw!”

The men laugh. The women glare angrily at the men while trying not to laugh themselves. Livia pauses for a beat, and then Mimi flashes an image on the overhead projector — a cute topless model with a pair of expensive designer shoes strung around her neck, dangling by the straps to cover and obscure her bare breasts. She’s holding a grapefruit cut in half, with a striped plastic straw stuck in it, and sucking on that straw with sensually pursed, plump lips slathered in bright, glossy red lipstick. She’s wearing mirrored aviators and has a general “give no fucks” sensual elitist air about her.

Livia laughs. “Oi! Now that’s what I’m talking about. I mean, of course that’s what I was talking about. What did you think I was talking about? Oh my god, you perverts! Wait, this is my R-rated show, isn’t it? Okay, it’s fine — we’re all here to be perverts anyway. Being a pervert is fun, isn’t it? I sure think so! Gets the blood flowing in your secret swimsuit places, doesn’t it? You wanna know what the funniest thing is, though? Both the boys and the girls want to steal this young lady’s shoes — just for completely different reasons! Okay, I admit it. Some ladies, myself included, might have more than one reason — if you know what I’m saying and I’m sure you do...”

There’s some laughter in the crowd, but a bit of awkwardness as well. Savannah is not the most gay-friendly city on our itinerary.

“What?” Livia asks. “I’m not ashamed, I tell you. Women have desires, and I refuse to live in fear of what my heart tells me is a fundamental emotional need in my life intrinsic to my very being — and it’s saying those are damn nice shoes and I need to own a pair!”

That gets an actual laugh. Livia glances back at the racy picture. “Really, the exposed ta-tas would just be gravy. Definitely high-grade gravy, though — like the delicious Southern red eye gravy they serve right here in Savannah! Now that’s something you can’t get in New York City — and let me say, it’s worth the road trip. Anyway, distracting shoes and even more distracting grapefruits aside, we were talking about traffic jams up in the barbarian Yankee hinterlands, weren’t we? Yeah, the thing about traffic jams is that women drivers always seem to catch the blame for them. It doesn’t matter if you’re Michèle Mouton, the lady driver jokes are imprinted on blokes’ consciousness everywhere.

“And one thing that seems to keep happening to women in New York City is this weird, unique variant of road rage they have up there. Specifically, scary, enraged and likely chemically altered guys coming up to lady drivers’ vehicles, dropping trou and shoving their genitals against her window as a gesture of contempt. And it’s never the guys that look like Calvin Klein models that pull this shit either — it’s always the balding, pot-bellied furniture salesmen in ratty suits that look like seventies upholstery who peaked in high school back in the class of ’53.

“Now, lads, I don’t recommend acting like this to any women, anywhere, but if you absolutely must do this there are two very important safety precautions to take when performing this maneuver. First of all, make sure the woman you want to pull this shit on is a lady, and secondly make sure her windows are actually up. If you get both wrong, well, I’ve got those new electric power windows on my Cadillac and the last guy to try this little trick with me ended up leaving me with a souvenir...”

Livia flair-conjures a prop and holds it up. It takes a few seconds to dawn on the audience that what she’s holding is, in fact, supposed to be a severed dick and testicles — stage blood and all. It’s rubber, of course, but it’s memorably floppy rubber. Everyone’s shocked — the girls are covering their mouths, and the guys are wincing and clamping their legs. I wonder idly how many Southerners in the audience take Livia’s absurdist tale of Northern urban lunacy as gospel truth.

Fun little anecdote: that’s actually a rubber cast of my own banana and grapes. Livia made it. She didn’t exactly tell me what she was doing, either. She just called me into her prop lab one day, greeted me in glossy lipstick and a translucent babydoll and told me to pull down my pants. Well, I didn’t have any motive to resist — I mean, what guy would argue with an order like that from a girl like Livia? So she picked up this bowl and ladle and started smearing blue goo all over my crotch in an oddly methodical manner. Being who I am, I decided to play it cool and not ask what’s going on — even though I had no clue. I honestly thought this was the kind of WAM fetish play she’d told me Mimi was into.

So I got a rather erotic (albeit clinical), slimy rubdown of my most intimate area from a centerfold beauty with a coolly detached, professional demeanor. I was definitely semi-chub at that point — it was pretty kinky already. She wanted me fully erect for the prop, though, so she just told me bluntly, in this casual everyday voice, to stare at her breasts. Appreciating Livia’s chest is something of a hobby of mine, but I’m usually covert and gentlemanly about it, only glancing off-handedly — getting an excuse to overtly ogle was pretty thrilling. Of course, I had to play it all dry and disinterested — push/pull flirting and all. “What exactly am I looking for?”

“You’ll figure it out.”

She reached inside the thin babydoll and started tugging her nipples and massaging her breasts with her hands, a twinkle in her eyes. Unsurprisingly, I did in fact get really hard really quickly. She just nodded thoughtfully in approval, pulled out a hair dryer and started methodically steam-drying my block and tackle.

Well, apparently at this point my bafflement was no longer concealable. Livia and Mimi glanced at each other and burst out in giggles, and Livia finally explained the routine. Then she stripped the now-solid mold off my genitals, glanced down at my erection slyly and asked me if there was anything I’d like. Well, yes, there really was something in that exact moment I deeply and profoundly wanted to get from her.

But as I’ve told you, O Impatient Reader, at this point I’m playing hard to get with Livia. So I blew it off and said everything was fine — and left the prop lab with a raging case of blue balls. She just gave me a faint, ambiguous smile and nodded, the wicked little tease. “Go get cleaned up, then.”

I wonder even now if she came up with this whole window-castration monologue just as an excuse to fondle and tease me. I tell you, push-pull flirting can sometimes be the most frustrating thing in all the world — and also the most satisfying. An hour later, I was in the big shower in Livia’s crib, jacking furiously, and I caught Livia spying on me — staring wide-eyed in illicit delight through the slightly-open door crack.

I didn’t stop. Other guys would get all self-conscious and such, but I’m shameless. I just pretended I never saw her, leaned back under the hot water and kept crankin’ my ratchet proudly. Actual spying-voyeurism is rare even for me, and a girl being genuinely motivated to spy on me while I jerk off — indeed, being transfixed by the sight — thrilled me. I felt the vigor, the power of my thick hardness as my hand slid rhythmically slid up and down it. Imagining the things Livia would be driven to do to her own body shortly after this to fulfill her own needs, I busted a nut so forcefully the now double-frosted shower door rattled in place from the spray. Good times.

Anyway, back to Savannah. Livia looks around for a place to set the severed genitals. “Marcelo, could you...”

I hold up my hands defensively and take three steps back before delivering my line. “Fuck, no, I’m not touching that! What the fuck? Why would you even keep something like that?”

Everyone laughs, probably because my reaction is relatable and sane. Livia shrugs casually. “I thought I could use them as a prop in a comedy routine. Which I clearly can, since I just did. Funny how that works out. Real comedy has to come from the things you find in your daily life, you know?”

“You have a weird daily life.”

Livia tosses the rubber testes over her shoulder disinterestedly. My severed cock and balls bounce off the stage like they were a goddamn basketball, sound effect included, and the sheer slapstick absurdity of that — combined with Livia being all blasé and never looking back after the toss — gets a huge cackle from the crowd. It was a lot of work to set that up, but I think it paid off nicely.

“Tell me about it. Anyway, traffic jams. You know, in the Big Apple, they’re working on a computer program to help with the congestion. They run it on this big mainframe at NYU. It’s supposed to reduce both travel time and pollution. Al Gore was raving about it on 60 Minutes. They’re testing it out right now — at least, that’s the reason Mayor David Dinkins gave for the lights being red for four and a half hours along Central Park South last week. I’ve got to say, names count for something. They can be omens, is what I’m getting at. I’m just waiting for that thing to say ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.’”

Livia holds up a little gadget she made and speaks into it when she says the HAL 9000 line. It makes her voice sound like a tinny speech synthesizer, and she speaks in a flat affect monotone. The movie HAL didn’t have a tinny synth-voice, of course, but the prop really sells the coming punchline. “Of course, it’s New York backdoor machine politics, so Dinkins will just offer the hopped-up gizmo some hookers and blow, and then it’ll totally be all ‘Yeah, Davey-boy, I can totally do that! Now lay me another line on that redhead’s tits, you municipal muppet!’”

That line, in the flat affect synth-voice, gets a big laugh from the crowd. Livia even does Mr. Roboto stiff-arm movements as she delivers it.

“That might be easier said than done, though. There’s been a big narcotics crackdown in the Rotten Apple recently. They say drugs are the cause of the sky-rocketing homicide rate, but I think they’ve got it reversed. If the city just gave every driver a free joint before their morning commute, I guarantee it would cut that rate in half! Might not do great things for the college GPAs, mind you, but it’s a liberal city. Face it — the kids are probably already well-acquainted with the Demon Leaf.

“But no, they’re dead certain computers are the answer to all their problems. The thing is, nobody really understands computers, so we all think they can do anything. Computers are like voodoo for civilizations too educated, stuck-up and pretentious to believe in actual voodoo any more. That’s probably why Gore loves them so much.

“The Neidermeyers that program this stuff always say, trust us — we’ve got a formula for this! Well, let me tell you, Gore and weed, the stuff that’s out on the media, it goes way beyond that. Back at the campaign trail in ’88, I was tragically partnered with Al Gore trying the Macarena while he was hopped up on blotter acid and Nicaraguan speedballs — and I’ve got the scars on my feet to prove it! Let me tell you, once you’ve survived that you’ll never just trust the Al Gore Rhythm again!”

That’s the end of the stand-up intro, and gets a big laugh. The lesbianism and castration jokes made the audience tense and nervous, but the silly pun releases that tension, landing harder than it otherwise would have.

Because this is one of our earlier shows, it of course starts with some less risqué stock comedy hypnosis and magic show bits. Livia runs through the hat routine and the stink-bead routine. Giving out vibrators is taken as a bit weird and scorn-worthy by this crowd, men and women alike — but Livia persists, and I admire that. She’s got a message here, about women pursuing pleasure for the sake of pleasure, and it matters to her.

After the warmup, we select attractive volunteers using the Sieve — about two-thirds female, and about three-thirds hotties — and Livia puts them in trance with the Newton’s Cradle and runs them through comedy hypnotist basics. We get them all mock-stripping to Randy Travis, and they get pretty grindy — it’s hot. There is also one girl who defies stereotype to punk the hell out of one of our stock routines in a way that’s both hilarious and awesome.

Comedy hypnosis is playfully humiliating; that’s why it’s so very entertaining (and so very kinky). Given Mimi’s bimboification fetish, we sometimes skew it a bit more in that direction — making cute girls forget their own names, or specific words, or be a bimbo briefly. My honest favorite is making them credible, just because it leads into so many raunchy but clever tricks and punchlines.

In this case, however, we invite a girl I’ll call Norma Jean up on stage. Many names are changed here, obviously — as with most spontaneous outbursts of eroticism in otherwise mundane lives, many of the people involved want to stay anonymous even now. We encourage our volunteers to give fake names for just this reason.

We hypnotize Norma to think the answer to any math problem is always zero. She’s a tall, stacked blonde with long straight hair reaching down to her waist and radiantly blue eyes. She’s got a long face with a prominent nose and thin, expressive bow lips. There’s a beauty mark on her jaw, just under her lip. She’s wearing really tight white jeans and a plaid, tied-off belly top.

Norma’s great. She shows a bunch of very subtle cues I’ve learned to recognize in latent submissives — she’s kinky, but doesn’t quite know it yet; she likely can’t explain why she’s so intrigued by the idea of being on our stage, and might not admit it anyway. She’s more the sassy submissive than the passive quiet kind, however. We use this initial routine to feel out her kinks and limits, bringing her back in the third Decan for a raunchier bit.

In retrospect, I feel certain she has a great time on our stage in spite of (or because of) all the wacky humiliations we put her though — in the “moist panties” sense and the “wacky party story” sense alike. I suspect this evening ends up as a bit of a sexual awakening for Norma Jean — something she thinks on after the fact, trying to figure out why it felt so good — though I have no actual evidence of that. Sadly, she’s no Cathy; while we get to have some subtextually kinky fun at the expense of her dignity we aren’t going to be getting her to strip off on stage — not tonight, anyway. That would be well outside her personal boundary for “sexy but harmless nightclub antics”.

I’ll admit the humor of the routine is a bit sexist — it’s playing off the “math is hard” trope — but that edginess is what makes it so funny (and so illicitly thrilling), and we’re not mean about it. Livia tells Norma she’s won a free vacation to Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break, but she has to answer a skill-testing question first.

“That’s fine,” she says cheerfully. “I’m really good at math!”

We probably should pay more attention to that, but we don’t. The thing is, Norma really does have a background in math.

Livia smirks at the audience. “Okay, what’s seven plus seven divided by two?”

Norma Jean’s brow furrows. She’s very cute when she’s both struggling to think and struggling to keep her composure — it makes her look both proud and vulnerable. “Um... is it zero?”

“Nope, it’s ten point five. Gotta remember the order of operations, possum.”

“Ah, yes, of course,” she nods, clearly recognizing the phrase yet puzzled by her own answer.

“Okay, we’ll be nice. Here’s a easier one. What’s five times three minus two?”

“Oh, that’s zero!”

“No, possum, it’s thirteen. You want one more chance? Come on, everyone’s counting on you — so start counting right!”

“Okay.”

“What’s two plus two?”

There’s a look of dread on her face as she struggles to work out the answer. “Zero?”

The crowd laughs uproariously. Livia goads her a bit. “Come on, Norma Jean — how could the answer to all three problems be zero? If you’re so good at math, why do you think every sum is zero?”

Norma’s brow furrows — she actually thinks about the question.

“Perhaps,” she finally says, “for some reason I’m working in a base one arithmetic, which by virtue of its single uniform digit has a non-expressive natural cardinality.”

Livia blinks, works her mind through the words Norma Jean just said — and bursts out laughing. The crowd is mostly perplexed by her answer, but eventually everybody’s laughing — Livia’s raw charisma carries them with her. It really does make sense — in the weird edge case of a base one number system, every answer really would be zero!

We pull Norma Jean out of the trance at that point, and give her the prize — she earned it, after all, and none of our canned patter can top the comedic high-point she just pulled out of her ass.

The second Decan is a magic show with a ringer volunteer. Her name is Lorraine — a demure, soft-spoken brunette girly-girl with a fantastic figure. I picked her up at a bar, spent an evening chatting with her and smooth-talked her into joining our show. She’s a fumigator by trade, stuck as one cog in a gradually failing family business. She’s good at her work, but it leaves her feeling like an involuntary tomboy. She tells me she sleepwalks through her days at work, living for the few “nightclub nights” where she can get all dolled up and feel feminine again. My attention and praise all but intoxicates her.

Her dad and uncle are both a kind of guy you’ve no doubt met — big sports fans, big beer guts, cynical but loyal, loves Miller Lite, guns and girlie calendars. They’re not sophisticated people, but they are the perfect blend of genuinely loving relatives and dirty old men only too happy to support Lorraine’s involvement with our show. Better still, Lorraine was in drama club in high school, so she has at least a bit of ability to act, memorize lines and follow a script.

It’s ironic Lorraine is a ringer, because if she wasn’t she’d be a perfect mark. She fits our profile exactly: a girl that would never do kinky stuff on her own and needs to be carefully talked into it, encouraged and walked through it by more dominant figures — yet positively radiates joy and fulfillment when doing it. She seems to be intrigued by erotic hypnotism as well, especially as a source of escapism — Livia had to put her under several times to rehearse the routine she’ll be doing with us, and she really grooved on it.

I don’t peg her as a one night stand girl. She’s not aggressively horny (though hardly a cold fish either). For her, it’s more about attention and validation of her femininity than sex. If I wasn’t recruiting her for entirely different purposes, she’s be a great challenge to heat up, seduce and conquer over the course of a few dates carefully designed to pump up her libido.

She’s not immune to the showbiz dreams it seems every girl as pretty as she is seems to harbor. While I don’t set up any false expectations, she does talk about exposure and possible modeling with that familiar gleam in her eyes. (Given the celebrity status we will later attain — boy howdy, does she ever get all she wanted and more!)

We’ve got a background matte painting of night clouds, a happy cartoon moon wearing a nightcap and a large ornate four-poster oak bed — all peaceful slumberland imagery. Livia asks the crowd if any attractive ladies have any sleep problems, and would be interested in trying out an experimental hypno-therapy treatment. A bunch of girls who probably don’t actually have sleep problems raise their hands. We pick Lorraine out of the crowd and bring her up on stage. Guys cheer as she steps up, probably due to a nice rear view of her tight jeans.

The scenario is that she’s a sleepwalker — a fitting irony given what she told me about her life — so Livia will hypnotize her to try and cure her. Of course, it’s a saucy trick — we heavily telegraph that to the audience. Lorraine plays cute but naïve fairly believably and appealingly, eliciting both sympathy and more exploitative forms of excitement from the crowd. This is the same deal as with Moira at the Noodle show — we pull something rude on a ringer, to show the audience that yes, our show does in fact go there. Then, we ask for the real volunteers...

Livia and Lorraine engage in some dialogue to set up the scenario. Livia asks her if she’s ever tried sleeping in a waterbed, since they’re supposed to be good for treating somnambulism. (They aren’t; it’s just part of the sketch.) Livia then sends our alleged sleepwalker to go change into her pajamas, to put her in the right mental space for the ‘therapy’. I roll a table on wheels — a big metal contraption — out on stage. It’s covered with a black silk sheet.

Lorraine comes back out on stage, dressed in satin pajamas and a silly bed-cap — like a Santa hat, but in the same powder blue as the pajamas. The crowd cheers and laughs — the pajamas cover her whole body, but they’re still really sexy, accenting her ample figure much the same way a negligee would. She’s got her hair fluffed out, glossy brown lipstick on and is barefoot with neatly painted toenails. Her nipples stand out against the glossy satin — I know she planned to ice them in the changing room. It’s how women look before they go to bed, in the fevered imagination of a sex-crazed but still classy male glamour photographer.

Mimi comes up behind Lorraine, and gives her a nightmask which she puts on without comment. Then Mimi sets our headphones on Lorraine’s head to block out sounds. This gets some murmurs from the crowd; the cute babe is now oblivious to everything but Livia’s voice, and they perceive the innate naughtiness of that setup. The lights overall dim, but a soft blue spotlight focuses on us. With this simple change of lighting, the whole scene suddenly has a very ethereal, calming feel to it.

Livia takes her hand, and does a slow verbal induction in a husky voice while running fingers over her palm and up the creamy skin of her arm. The sexual tension is delightful, though I doubt this crowd caught on to that. Soon, though, Lorraine is staring ahead blankly. “You’re feeling so sleepy, so very sleepy. You can feel the need to sleep, peacefully and in perfect stillness, roll over your body like a comforting wave. Embrace it, and let it out. Stand up, and give us a big yawn.”

Lorraine does so, raising her hands above her head and thrusting out her chest. The loose-hanging satin grows tight, showing the crowd very clearly that she isn’t wearing any underwear and has more than a handful up top. It’s a good thing she’s got our headphones on, since this triggers a big wave of hooting, whistling and catcalling from the crowd. The hypnosis here is authentic, even if Lorraine does know what she’s really in for over the course of the act.

Livia guides Lorraine to the platform I wheeled out and gets her to lie down on it, standing directly behind her. “Now, you will sleep in perfect peace, and you will stay absolutely still. Your mind is at ease, and you feel no compunction to move your body. Stillness brings you a wonderful feeling of warmth, enwrapping your body like a comforting blanket you have no desire to leave. Your body feels as light as a feather, buffeted and held aloft by the wind and the cool night air. You can feel yourself rise up, Lorraine, but you’re perfectly calm and it all feels good...”

I crouch down and turn a crank, lowering the platform I wheeled out on stage by about a foot. As it sinks down, however, Lorraine doesn’t lower with it — she stays hanging there, in mid-air!

Yeah, it’s a levitation routine, and Livia and I are carrying it off well. I’ll admit to being nervous — this is the most complex stage magic I’ve been involved in up to this point — but it’s all going off nicely. I’m not saying how we do it, because it’s not really Livia’s own trick. A lot of magicians have contributed different flourishes to the basic routine, but it probably owes the most to Lance Burton. I will say, however, that as far as I know this is the first time it’s been done with the assistant in a legit hypnotic trance. (Lorraine has some pre-programming to fill the assistant’s normal role in the trick — if you know how it’s done, you know what I’m talking about.)

Lorraine’s long hair dangles in midair beautifully, and the sleeves of her satin pajamas dangle down below her. The fabric clings to her body, showing off her curves and letting the audience see her chest rise and fall as she breathes deeply. It’s a striking visual, perfectly costumed — beautiful in both style and eros, with neither element clashing with the other.

Mimi and I pick up silver hoops and run them over the hovering body of Lorraine, showing that she’s not being held up by ropes or strings. I had to rehearse this bit a lot to get it right — let’s just say it takes a nimble hand and an awareness of the use of angles in visual illusion; those silver hoops aren’t as complete as they’re designed to look. But I manage to carry it off flawlessly, and breathe a quiet mental sigh of relief.

The mood up till now has been very awe-inspiring and serious, but that’s about to change — the only reason the Trips ever evoke real gravitas is to demolish it later for the sake of a gag. Livia turns to the audience with a smirk. “Man, when you tell this broad not to move, she really takes it to heart — am I right or am I right?”

The crowd laughs at the sudden tonal swerve.

I pull the black satin sheet off the platform Lorraine was resting on, and slide the padded top down on rails to the back. Ripples of laughter and indrawn anticipatory breaths spread through the ranks of the audience — it’s now clearly visible as an open dunk tank full of underlit, rippling blue water, and Lorraine’s floating in mid-air directly above it.

Livia whispers to Lorraine in a husky voice, though the mike projects her words to the whole audience. “Now, Lorraine, I want you to remember this. You are at peace, and still. You do not move your body while you sleep. You know this, and you will stay still as you sleep in the future, or else what’s about to happen to you will just keep happening, again and again. Do you understand, Lorraine?”

“Yes,” the suspended model replies in a dull tone.

“Lorraine... try to walk.”

The pajama-clad bombshell raises her hands as if in a zombie walk and starts to sit up, but she never gets the chance. As soon as she starts moving, she plummets like a stone — or like the girl in the dunk tank at the county fair, which is probably a better analogy. She lands in the tank of water with a massive, cinematic splash — sending water gushing all over the stage. The club probably won’t be too happy about that — we knew there would be a splash, but not that it would be so big. Still, it’s a perfect cinematic punchline moment.

Livia turns to the crowd with a wicked smirk, raises her hand up in the air and snaps her fingers. At her command, the lighting changes instantly from soft, dim and intimate to a sharp white glare that reveals every possible detail. A new matte painting quickly rolls down to replace the old one, and a record-screech sound effect interrupts the soothing instrumental lullaby, replacing it with an adrenaline-pumping hard-rock crescendo.

Of course, it’s Moving in Stereo, because every last red-blooded male of my generation intuitively understands that this is the song you play when you have a hot woman everyone wants to see naked climbing out of the water. To say otherwise is pure blasphemy.

The backdrop now depicts a gleefully lewd scene of cartoon women in a wet t-shirt contest at Spring Break. Colorful text in wacky fonts advertises the upcoming Sexy Scandal Spectacular shows at Summers on the Beach in Fort Lauderdale. This has the whole effect of framing Lorraine as a shocked, involuntary entrant in the pictured wet t-shirt contest — and the sheer over-the-topness of the tonal transformation briefly stuns the crowd.

Eventually, as Lorraine splashes about, the audience starts to laugh in sympathy — and then breaths catch in throats as Lorraine pulls herself fully out of the water tank. You see, we got her measurements and sowed the pajamas she’s wearing ourselves — albeit from a store-bought pattern. It’s not the style that’s special — it’s a special gimmick fabric Livia came up with, a very sheer chiffon that looks like opaque satin by virtue of essentially being essentially painted on the inside with a water soluble compound. As a result, it turns just impossibly sheer when it gets wet.

Lorraine is obviously no longer entranced — being dumped in cold water will do that — but, per some carefully worded suggestions in her earlier hypno-training, completely fails to notice her state of exposure as she crawls out of the tank.

It’s almost like she’s naked in bodypaint. The fabric clings to her body, showing the shape of her flawless teardrop C-cups perfectly and tenting around firm brown nipples made sharply erect from the cold water. Her now-clinging pajama pants present an enticingly dark patch between her legs to reveal her neatly-trimmed black bush and the outline of her plump pussy lips. The cold water left her with intimate goosebumps and a visibly erect clit.

She pulls the headphones off angrily and stands there dripping. It takes a few glorious seconds before she’s finally able to realize the tenor of the crowd’s uproarious laughter and cheers are a little more enthusiastic than they should be, and looks down to see her own clearly visible nipples standing at attention.

She squawks in horrified panic and covers her breasts and bush with her hands, crouching down in a defensive, embarrassed pose that only makes her look more enticingly vulnerable. Lorraine knew this was coming, of course, but she acts it out well — or maybe she really does feel a little bit vulnerable in front of the crowd. We told her the pajamas would go transparent, of course, but she’s still a bit shocked by the sheer degree of their sheerness. Pun intended.

Livia adopts a calm, casual tone. “So, did you find the waterbed therapy helpful?”

Lorraine is understandably unamused. “What the hell! How is this supposed to cure my sleepwalking?!”

Livia grins at the drenched model. “It’s association conditioning. Haven’t you ever put someone’s hand in a glass of warm water when they’re asleep?”

“That water was ice cold! And... wait, you don’t mean...”

Livia smirks at the much-put-upon Lorraine. “Let’s just say, in the future, if you start moving around at night, well... you’re going to experience a sudden feeling of dampness and wake up. Problem solved, right?”

Our moist model puts her heart into the performance, sounding nearly hysterical. “You... you deranged lunatic! Are you saying you’ve made me into a hypnotic bed-wetter?!”

That thought is enough to draw Lorraine’s attention away from her revealing clothing — she throws out her arms and starts gesturing about angrily, showing the crowd more of her wet tits and bush.

“Hey, we cured your sleepwalking. That’s what you wanted, right? Therapy is a matter of give and take, you know.”

“No, I don’t ‘know’! Undo it!”

“Sorry, love. My first therapy session is always pro bono, but any later sessions are... rather exquisitely expensive. In spite of that, though, I find they get a high uptake after my sleepwalking therapy, so at least you know they’re popular!”

Livia and Lorraine bicker and shout at each other as Moving in Stereo plays and the crowd laughs — Livia playfully teases Lorraine, who in turn chases her around the stage angrily. The slapstick chase, and Lorraine’s wild gesticulation, are both fantastic for sheer jiggle factor — we’ve got it in slo-mo on the tapes for a reason. This is probably one of the early crowning moments of Livia’s dream of styling herself as an erotic version of Benny Hill — it’s both very funny and very hot.

Finally Livia ends the elaborate ruse. “Oh, calm down. We didn’t turn you into a bed-wetter! We’re just messing with you.”

“So... so, I’m still a sleepwalker?”

“No, you won’t be doing any sleepwalking; don’t worry about it.”

“I’m cured, then?”

“Nah,” Livia says. “You’ve never been a sleepwalker. I just had you hypnotized to think you were since last Wednesday...”

“Oh, wow, that’s wonderful! Wait, what?! Why did you hypnotize me last Wednesday, then?”

Livia leans over and whispers something in Lorraine’s ear. Her eyes go very wide and she blushes, looking rather scandalized. “Oh, well, that’s... um, well...”

“Hey,” Livia says, “if it’s a problem, I can try to reverse it. How do you feel about my place, tomorrow night, around seven?”

Lorraine slaps her across the face and stalks off stage in a huff, bouncing delightfully with every over-emphasized step.

“So that’s a maybe?” Livia calls after the offended volunteer, but gets no reply.

The crowd laughs. “Well,” Livia says ruefully, “you know how it is — win some, lose some! Jeffrey Rackham is going to lead you all in karaoke for the next half hour, but the third Decan of the Sexy Scandal Spectacular will begin as soon as he finishes — if you’ve liked what we’ve done so far, you really won’t want to miss what we’re going to pull next!”

I’ve got an interesting final tidbit here. The comedy patter between Livia and Lorraine was scripted; I even watched them rehearse the lines. Livia did have Lorraine over last Wednesday, though, and did ask me and Mimi to give her some space. I don’t know if anything actually went down, but Livia and Lorraine sure are on good terms when we next catch up with her. Feel free to use your imagination — I sure have!