Erotic Paradise (1)

Scanning Proofreading: CSH

What exactly is the difference between love and sex?

Where exactly is the line between love and lust?

How much distance exists between the sexes in terms of emotional and physical perceptions?

It’s a question that many people in troubled love often ask, but what is the answer?

The author recognizes that modern people dare to experiment with bold and wild sexual relationships, but they do not know how to face the true power of “love” in their hearts. Even when true love comes, they hesitate and are not sure… So, through the chapters of Elliot, a man, and Lisa, she has cross-examined the psychological and physiological process of “love from sex”, and the contradictory resistance of men and women who want to love but are afraid of being hurt when they are exposed to various kinds of emotions, and she has clearly emphasized the subtleties of the process. The story is a perfect illustration of the subtle emotions involved.

Want to know where true love is? This book will definitely help you find the most complete answer!

preamble

Originally titled ExittoEdin, Lust Paradise is a novel by Anne Rice, author of Vampire by Night and The Body Thief’s Tale. It was written by Anne Rice, author of Night of the Vampire and Tales of the Body Thief, under the pen name “Anne Rampling”. Anne Rice, author of “Night Vampire” and “The Body Thief’s Tale”, wrote the erotic story under the pen name “Anne Rampling”. Anne Rice is a popular American author. Anne Rice is a popular American author who was recently interviewed by Playboy magazine.

Although Lust Paradise has been written about the primitive desire of human beings to “abuse and be abused”, it really reveals two messages: first, it is better to make love (including sex and love) than to be trapped in the crisis of war in which one’s life is in danger of being lost; the so-called “make love, don’t fight”; the author emphasizes that “nothing about sex will make you disgusted, confused, or spoiled”. “The author emphasizes that “nothing about sex will make you disgusted, confused, or unhappy. Only real violence, real harm, real destruction of another person’s body and will, will arouse your hostility…”. Secondly, the author has gone to great lengths to describe the physical and psychological process of “love through sex”, and he has done so in such a way that he has crossed the paths of Eliot, a man, and Lisa, a woman, in separate chapters, so as to maximize the effect of the book on readers. Commentators have hailed this book as a skillful collection of erotic writers such as Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer) and John Miller (Tropic of Cancer). It has been described as a skillful combination of erotic writers such as Henry Miller (author of Tropic of Cancer), Anais Nin (author of Henry and June), and the author of the book. (author of Tropic of Cancer), Anais Nin (author of Henry and June), and D. H. Lawrence (author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover).

Lisa1 My name is Lisa.

My name is Lisa.

I am five feet nine inches tall, with long, dark brown hair. I often wear a leather coat with long riding boots, and sometimes, a leather undershirt as soft as a glove, even with a leather skirt. I love lace, especially if I can find one I like: very intricate, old-fashioned, snow-white. I have a very fair complexion, so I tan easily, large breasts, and long, slender legs. Although I never thought I was beautiful, I still knew I was. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be a trainer at the Club.

Well-boned and with big eyes, which is the real basis of what I consider “beautiful”, my hair is thick and substantial, and with the look on my face, I look lovely, and most of the time I even reveal a bit of a dazed look. However, once she starts talking, she can trigger fear in the hearts of both male and female slaves.

At the Club, they call me “The Perfectionist”. In a place like the Club, it’s a great compliment to be called that, because in the Club everyone is striving for some kind of perfection, everyone is trying, and “trying” is part of the fun involved. “Effort” is part of the joy involved.

“I was involved with the Club as soon as it was formed. I helped found the Club, formulated the purpose of the Club, and agreed to the membership of the earliest members and the earliest slaves. I laid down the rules and restrictions, conceived and created most of the equipment that we use there today. I even designed some of the bungalows, gardens, morning pools and fountains. I decorated many of the suites myself. Many people copied it, which made me smile. “The Club had no real rivals.

“The Club is so successful because it has confidence in itself. “It is from this that the charm and terror of the Club has developed.

This book is an account of a certain kind of thing that happened at the “club”.

Much of the story doesn’t even take place at the “club”. It takes place in New Orleans, and the poor countryside around New Orleans. Also, the story takes place in Dallas. But that doesn’t really matter.

The story begins at the Club. Wherever the story goes from the Club, it involves the Club.

Welcome to the Club.

Lisa 2 New Season

We waited for the plane to land in the clearing as the huge jet slowly circled the island. I say it was a scenic route because you could see everything so clearly: the sugar-white beaches, the coves, and the “club” itself, a vast stretch of land with high stone walls, tree-covered gardens, and an endless patchwork of tiled buildings half-hidden by mimosas and pepper trees. You can see clumps of white and pink mountain azaleas, small orange bushes, and fields of poppies and dark green grass.

The harbor is right in front of the gate of the “club”. On the far side of the land is the bustling airport and heliport.

Everyone is here for the new season.

There were twenty private airplanes, gleaming silver in the sunlight, and six snow-white yachts, moored offshore in the glow of blue-green water.

The “Blessed” had come to rest in the harbor, looking like a toy ship in the midst of a large bright light. Who would have guessed that there were some thirty or more slaves inside, waiting noiselessly for their masters to drive them, naked, onto the deck and into the middle of the shore?

The slaves, all fully clothed, traveled by boat to the “club” for obvious reasons. However, before they were allowed to see the island, let alone set foot on it, they were stripped of their clothes.

They were only naked and humbled. Everything they owned was cataloged in serial numbers, stored in a huge cellar, and not returned until it was time to leave.

Each slave wore a pair of very thin gold bracelets on his right wrist, with names and numbers skillfully engraved for identification purposes. It was only for the first few days that much had to be jotted down on that wonderfully naked body with a grease pencil.

The plane descended slowly, closer to the dock. I was glad that that little light had not yet begun.

I had a little time to stay in my quiet room for about an hour before the parade, enough time for a glass of Bombay gin on the rocks.

My body sat back, a slow warm feeling ran through my body, and a spreading excitement welled up from within that seemed to cover my entire skin with anxiety. It was a valuable feeling, because what the “club” had prepared for them was just about to begin.

I’m very eager to go back there.

I find that for some reason, vacations are getting harder and harder, and those days in the outer world seem very surreal.

Going to visit my family in Berkeley has become unbearable for me because I have to avoid the same old questions of what do I do most of the year? What are all the places I live?

“For the love of God, tell me, why this secrecy? What have you been up to?

”

There are times at the dinner table when I can’t hear what my father is saying at all, I just see his lips moving.

When he asked me a question, I had to make up excuses about having a headache and feeling sick because I had no idea what he was asking about.

It is strange that the best times were when I was a little girl, times that I hated: my father and I walked around the neighborhood in the evening, up and down the hills, he praying the Rosary, the night sounds of the Berkeley Hills ringing around us, and neither of us saying a word. During these walks as a child, I felt no pain, just a quiet silence like his, revealing a nameless sadness.

One night, my sister and I drove to San Francisco. We had dinner together at a bright little place called St. Pierre’s in North Beach. There was a man standing at the bar, looking at me all the time, the typical handsome young lawyer type, with a gray dogtooth plaid jacket and a white cable knit sweater underneath, his hair cut as if the wind had blown it away, and his lips ready to smile. Just like the type of man I always used to avoid as much as possible no matter how beautiful the mouth and how sharp the expression.

My sister said, “Don’t look now, he’ll eat you alive.”

I wanted so badly to get up, walk over to the bar, start talking to him, and give my sister the keys to the car and tell her that I wouldn’t see her until the next day. But why couldn’t I do that? I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Just talk to him? After all, he was with a couple guys and girls and obviously not dating.

What would that look like? What they call “ordinary sex”? A tiny hotel room overlooking the Pacific Ocean, inhabited by this very healthy “Mr. Righteous”, who doesn’t dream of sharing his bed with “Miss Fancy Dress” from the most exclusive and exotic sex club in the world? Maybe we’ll even go to a little place in his apartment with lots of hardwood furniture and mirrors and a view overlooking the bay. He’d pretend he was Mills Davis. We’d cook together.

O Lisa, you have a problem with your brain. Your specialty is fantasy, but not that kind of fantasy.

Get out of California right now!

But the usual amusements didn’t help me much in later years, although I did go on a shopping spree for new clothes on “Rodeo Drive”; made a whirlwind visit to Sharkovitz in Dallas one afternoon; went to New York to see “Cats.” “My One and Only,” and two or three great Off-Broadway plays.

I went to museums often, twice to the “Metropolitan Museum of Art”, went to ballets everywhere I could, and bought books, lots of books, and DVDs to get me through the next twelve months.

All of this was supposed to be fun. By the time I was twenty-seven, I had made more money than I had ever dreamed of making in my life. I occasionally try to remember what it was like to want to own all the gold lipsticks from Bill’s on Shattuck Street, when in fact there was only one silver dollar in my pocket, enough to buy a pack of gum. But spending money doesn’t mean anything, it just makes me exhausted and excited.

Except for a very few moments, the bittersweet moments when the dancing and the music in New York was ecstatic, I was always listening to an inner voice that kept saying: go home, go back to the club. Because if you don’t turn around and go back right now, the club might not be there anymore. And what you see in front of your eyes is not real.

What a strange feeling. What French philosophers call an absurd feeling that makes me so uncomfortable that I feel unable to find a place to take a deep breath.

In the beginning, I had been in need of a vacation and a walk through the normal streets. So why was this one so anxious, so impatient, feeling like the peace of my loved ones was being threatened?

I ended up watching the same movie over and over again in my little room at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas. It was a small movie starring the actor Rob Duvall. It was a small movie, starring actor Rob Duvall, called “Angelo, My Love”, a movie about gypsies in New York.

Angelo is a shrewd, dark-eyed kid, about eight years old, very worldly, very smart, very handsome; this is a movie about him, about him and about his family, and Duvall lets these people make up a lot of their own dialog. This movie is more real than real, depicting them in their own gypsy community of raw sells. They’re marginalized people in the center of things, and they’re in the middle of New York.

But I was mad as I sat in a darkened hotel room in Dallas and watched the movie over and over again, seven times, as its authenticity revealed the exotic. I watched this perceptive little brunette boy call his under-teen girlfriend and fool around with her, or walk into the chemist’s room of a girl star who sings country-western songs and flirt with her. This fearless, good-hearted little boy was totally immersed in life.

In the end, what does it all mean? I kept asking myself, like a college student, why would I want to cry?

Perhaps we are all marginalized, all of us moving in unusual ways through a wilderness of “normalcy” that is nothing more than a myth.

Perhaps even Mr. Righteous in the St. Pierre’s Bar in San Francisco, a kind of fringe young lawyer who wrote poetry, if I said the next morning, “Guess what I do for a living? No, it’s actually a profession, it’s serious, it’s… my life.” He would still drink his coffee and eat his bread as usual and wouldn’t act shocked.

It was crazy. Drinking white wine, watching a movie about gypsies, turning the lights out, gazing at Dallas at night, all those glowing towers, rising like steps to the clouds.

I live in “fringe paradise”, don’t I? A place where all your secret desires are satisfied, where you’re never alone, and where you’re always safe. That’s where the club is. I’ve spent my entire adult life.

I just need to get back there, that’s all.

Here we are again hovering over the “Garden of Eden” and can almost see in detail the new slaves coming in.

I want to see the slaves, to see if there’s something new this time, something totally extraordinary… Ah, the ancient romance!

But every year the slaves are different, slightly smarter, funnier, more worldly. Every year, when the “club”

became better known, and as more and more clubs like ours opened, the backgrounds of the slaves who came became more varied. You never knew what was going to happen there, and you never knew what new forms flesh and mystery would take.

Only a few days ago, a very important auction was held, one of three international auctions of note. I understand that we bought a large number of slaves, indentured for two whole years, about thirty men and women, all of them charming, with excellent documentary proofs provided by some of the best gentry in the United States & abroad.

A slave would have to be optimally trained to appear at that kind of auction, and would have to pass every test. From time to time, we have acquired an involuntary or unreliable slave from other sources, who has gotten into some kind of trouble, more or less accidentally, by playing with leather canes and belts. We would quickly free & seniorize these slaves. While we don’t like the loss, the slaves themselves are not at fault.

However, the amazing thing is: many of them will appear a year later on the most expensive auction block. If we choose them again, we will choose them if they are beautiful and strong enough, and they will tell us later that they have been dreaming of “the club” since they were liberated.

But in order to keep the auction going, these mistakes don’t happen in the big auctions.

Two days before the auction, the slaves were examined before the commissioners. They must show complete obedience, agility, and resilience. Documents were examined and re-examined. The commissioners rate the slaves according to their patience and temperament, and categorize them according to a series of physical criteria. If you want one, just look at the extensive catalogs and photographs to buy a satisfactory slave.

Of course, for our own purposes, we will reevaluate all of this and select the slaves again according to our own criteria. But this means that the “merchandise” that appears in the auction

It’s first rate.

If a slave is not a very fine piece of stock, and would not be skilled enough to stand on a lighted platform and be examined by thousands of hands and eyes, then he would not be able to enter the auction screening room.

In the beginning, I was in the habit of attending important auctions in person.

Not just because I like to choose what I want from amongst these inexperienced young men no matter how much private training they have received, they are inexperienced young men unless we train them but because the auction itself is very exciting.

After all, no matter how well you prepare a slave, an auction is a drastic change for him or her. The naked slave stands on a pedestal that is intentionally lit, his or her body often trembling, tears flowing freely, revealing a terrible loneliness. All the marvelous tensions and agonies here are displayed as exquisitely as a work of art, every bit as good as any “club” entertainment I have ever envisioned.

For a couple of hours, you walk around the huge carpeted screening room. The walls are often painted a pleasant color: vermillion or the blue of a bird’s egg. The lighting is perfect, the champagne is delicious, there is no distracting music, and the only rhythm is that of your heart.

When examining candidate slaves, you may touch them, caress them, and occasionally ask a question of those who are not muzzled, which is very merciless to them (we call this the trained voice.). (We call them trained voices, meaning: they are trained not to speak unless spoken to, and not to express the slightest bit of affection or hope). Sometimes the other trainers will direct your attention to a very nice item, perhaps one they think they can’t afford. However, a group of buyers will gather around an extraordinary beauty: she will be asked to make about twelve reference poses in response to twelve different commands.

I never caned or whipped a slave at an auction screening. If you wait, if you pay attention, you’ll see that some people are quite willing to do that. In fact, a few taps on the auction table at the moment of bidding will tell you all you need to know.

And you’ll hear a lot of free and sensible comments: this slave is too prone to scarring and it’s not worth the money you’re spending; this one’s skin is soft to the touch like a kitten’s, but it’s very elastic; or, little breasts like that really couldn’t be better.

If you can stay away from champagne, it can be a real education. But a really good trainer rarely reveals a message about himself or herself, or about the poor trembling slave he or she is examining. A really good trainer can learn all he or she wants to learn if he or she slips up to a slave and grabs the back of the slave’s neck very suddenly with one hand.

One thing that was interesting was to be able to see other trainers from all over the world. Sometimes they seemed to be gods and goddesses, sliding out of the black sedans lined up in front of the door everywhere with the kind of signs that symbolize high fashion, revealing the fragility of extravagance: the tennies of polished plush, the open-breasted shirts cut from the thinnest Indian cotton, the strapless silk dresses that looked like they were about to fall off. The hair was disheveled and the nails were like short swords. Otherwise, it was the more aloof-looking aristocrats in three-piece black suits. They wore antiquated silver-rimmed glasses and their short hair was combed flawlessly. Only the gibberish of the grunts was heard (though the international language of the slaves had been recognized to a considerable extent as English), a dozen different nationalities inscribed in a particular way on that almost inevitable commanding demeanor. A commanding demeanor that was implicitly revealed even in the cute, seemingly innocent trainer with the cute face.

I recognized the trainers wherever I saw them, and I could point them out everywhere, from the dingy little pavilion in the “Valley of the Kings” in Laxo to the balcony of the “Grand Hotel Olafsson” in Port-au-Prince.

On them you can see uninteresting giveaways, such as wide black watch bands, and high heels, which you won’t find in the usual stores. Also, they “undress” every good-looking man or woman in the room with a certain look.

Once you become trained as a slave officer, everyone can become your naked slave. You reveal a hyper-charged sensual vibe that is almost impossible to shake off. The back of a woman’s bare knees, her bare arms, the little wrinkles left behind by squeezing her body; the way a man’s shirt strains against his chest as he slips his hands into his pockets; the dynamics displayed by a waiter’s hips as he bends to lift his napkin from the floor No matter where you go, you can see all of this, and feel that timeless, hushed sound that symbolizes feelings of arousal. The whole world is a pleasure club.

But there is also a special thrill in auctions, and that is, to see a few very rich people who keep trainers in their homes or country houses, and who can go to the auction house and buy in slaves for their own use. They’re usually very prominent people, I mean these people who own slaves privately, and most of them are a very strange bunch of people.

I remember one year a handsome young man, only eighteen years old, accompanied by two bodyguards, flipping very gravely through a slave catalog. Peering at each slave from a distance through violet-colored glasses, then walking up to them and pinching their skin with great care. The lad was dressed entirely in black except for a pair of dove gray gloves, which he never took off. I could almost feel the gloves as he pinched a slave’s body. Everywhere he went, bodyguards followed him, and the trainer who I should add was one of the best also followed. His father had owned a trainer and two slaves for years, and now it was time for his son to learn to enjoy “this kind of entertainment”.

He has his eye on a very strong boy with an equally strong girl.

Please understand that when I say a “boy” and a “girl”, I do not mean a “child”. “The Club, as well as the famous auction houses, do not engage in the auctioning of children, for obvious reasons, since private trainers do not send them to us. Sometimes juvenile slaves turn up, but that’s because of pranks or forged documents; we send them back quickly.

By “boy” or “girl” I mean a slave who, whatever their real age, looks and acts young. There are slaves who are thirty years old but still qualify as “boys” or “girls”. There are slaves who are only nineteen or twenty years old, but in a state of bondage and humiliation, they also maintain a serious and dignified appearance that makes you think of them as adult women and men.

In any case, the eighteen-year-old owner bought two very youthful and muscular slaves. I remember this because he outbid the “club” at the auction for the girl. The slave girl had blonde hair, a tan, and never shed a tear, no matter how severely she was punished, while the master was getting more and more agitated inside. I wanted to own this girl so much that I remember feeling a little upset in my mind when I saw her tied up and sent away. This young master seemed to observe this, and so I saw him smile for the first and only time that day.

But I always worry about them, I mean the ones that were bought by people who owned private slaves. Not that these slave owners are not trustworthy. If you want to buy slaves from a reputable slave auction house, or from a reputable private trainer, then you have to be trustworthy; your people have to be tested and approved by others, and your house has to be safe. The reason I worry about them is: once you are one of two or three slaves on a large estate, it is lonely and weird.

I know this sort of thing because it was the case when I was eighteen. No matter how handsome and beautiful the host or hostess was, no matter how often parties or other entertainments were held, no matter how strong and kind the trainer was, there were always far too many times when you would be there alone with your thoughts.

Initially, the slaves were afraid of the Club, which terrified them. But the truth is that the Club is a big womb. It was a huge community that never gave up on anyone, the lights never went out, there was no real pain or hurt there. “Nothing ever happens to the Club.

But, as I said earlier, I haven’t been to an auction house in a while.

I was too busy with other work, supervising our tabloid, the “Club Official”, and dealing with the insatiable demand for new souvenirs and novelties sold in the “Club Shop”.

White leather canes, leather strips, leather shoes, leather blindfolds, and even coffee cups with the initials “Club” engraved on them were not sufficiently designed or supplied to meet the demand. Not only do these items end up in the bedrooms of Native Americans, but in San Francisco and New York they are sold along with out-of-date “Club Newspapers” for four times their original price. This means: this kind of commodity has already represented us. That’s all the more reason to make it first-class.

Then, some of the new members, I had to guide them on their first tour visit, introducing the naked slaves to them personally.

But the most important thing is: the work of instructing, training and improving the slaves themselves. And this is my real work.

A good slave is not only a thoroughly “sexual” person, ready to satisfy your every whim in bed. A good slave should be able to bathe you, massage you, talk to you, swim with you if you want, dance with you, make you a drink, feed you breakfast with a spoon. With the right phone call in your room, you can have a specially trained slave ready to play the role of a skilled Mistress or Mistress and be the kind of slave you desire.

Yes, I no longer have time to go to the auction house.

In addition to that, I found it equally interesting to wait for a new batch of slaves to arrive, and then choose the one I wanted to train.

We buy a very large number of slaves; at least thirty at a time if the auction is large enough, and I have not been disappointed. For two years now, I have prioritized slaves. That is, I choose the slaves I want to develop before any other trainer.

The plane seemed to hover for as long as an hour.

I became more and more anxious and thought to myself, “This is like an existentialist play. My world was there, but I couldn’t enter it. Maybe it’s all in my imagination. Why on earth can’t we land?

I stopped thinking about the fantastic “Mr. Righteous” in San Francisco, or the dozen or so faces I’d seen in Dallas or New York. (Did he walk to our table at St. Pierre’s when we left so abruptly? Or did my sister make it up?) I don’t want to think about “normal life” or all the annoying little things that happened during those weeks of vacation.

But as long as we were in the sky, I was still caught in the web. I couldn’t escape the atmosphere of big-city traffic, the endless gossip, the time spent with my sisters in California listening to them complain about their careers, their lovers, their expensive psychiatrists, and their “consciousness-raising groups”. All simple jargon about “levels of consciousness” and spiritual liberation.

My mother strongly disagreed, listing the must-haves for the Rite of Breakfast Eucharist while saying that people just needed to confess and didn’t need to have a psychiatrist. As she said it, the conservative Catholic spirit of her face combined with a weary look, and her small black eyes revealed a look of irrepressible innocence.

I was about to tell them that “that spa resort” often referred to in the gossip columns was the same notorious “club” they read about in “The Master” and “Playboy”. “The Club”. “Guess who founded it? Guess what we have to do with the ‘level of consciousness’ of the ‘club’?”

Ah, how sad. A fence that can never be toppled.

If you tell people the truth about things they can’t value or understand, you’re only hurting them.

Imagine my father’s face (he won’t say a word). Imagine a flustered Mr. Righteousness.

Hastily paid for coffee and bread in that Pacific Shores hotel room (“Eh, I guess I’d better drive you back to San Francisco now.”) , no, don’t imagine this thing.

It is better to lie and to tell the truth. As Ernest Hemingway said, telling the truth is foolish, like turning to everyone in a crowded elevator and saying, “Look, we are all mortal. We’re going to die, and we’re going to rot in the ground. So when we get out of this elevator…” Who cares?

I’m almost home. I’m almost okay.

The plane was crossing the island now, and the sun shone fiercely on the surfaces of the six swimming pools, and the hundred slotted windows of the great buildings shone with brilliant sunlight. Everywhere in the verdant paradise below I could see something dynamic, see people croqueting on the lawn, eating on the lunch terrace, and tiny figures riding beside their host and hostess, running along the horse trails.

Finally, the pilot announced that he was going to land, and then a soft voice reminded me to fasten my seatbelt.

“We’re going in, Lisa.”

I felt a subtle change in the air in the small cabin. Then I closed my eyes and for a moment imagined about thirty “flawless” slaves, imagining that for once I would have a hard time choosing.

Please give me a really unusual slave, I was thinking: a real challenge, something really interesting…

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt like screaming out. Something appeared in my head, a kind of small explosion, slow. Then there was a slice of thought or fantasy, like a slice of dreaming reserved for the next day. But what was the content? The disintegration was too fast for me to understand.

A certain image of a human being suddenly unfolds, as if pierced by something, but it is not. Rather, it is a human being who is naked in a wonderful ritual of “sadomasochism” until you reach out and touch the beating heart of that human being; that is the miracle. Because the truth is that you have never seen the beating heart of any other person; until this moment of touch, you thought it was just a myth.

Mentally challenged. Almost unpleasant thoughts.

I have heard my own heartbeat. I had heard and felt the pulses of hundreds of people. No matter how beautiful the slaves were, no matter how graceful they were, they would all be the same in two or three hours.

That’s why I want to come back here, isn’t it.

This should be something I want.

Erotic Paradise (02)

Elliott 3 Entry

They want me to take clothing with me for any clothing I will need when I leave. How would I know what I would need when I left? I had signed a two-year contract with the Club and I didn’t even think about when I was going to leave. All I could think about was: when will I get there?

So, I quickly packed two or three suitcases and put on my “optional clothes”, the kind of clothes they wanted me to wear on the trip. Except for an overnight suitcase with things I might need on the ship.

But, at the last minute, I put on a little dress. I thought to myself, “What the hell, maybe I’ll just stay at the Monte Carlo and gamble away every penny they’ve paid me in the last two years after this. A hundred thousand dollars to gamble with seemed like the perfect thing to do. I mean, it’s ironic that they’re paying me. I should be paying them!

I also packed my copy of the new book, only I don’t really know why I did it. By the time I get out, I may still be able to find the book in a couple of bookstores if the Middle East wars are still going on. Photography books are prone to flourish without fail, but maybe not always?

That’s what I had in mind: as soon as I left the “club”, I wanted to read the book immediately, or even flip through it on the plane ride out. One thing that might be really important is to remember who you were before you went. But how likely is that? What are the chances that I’ll still consider myself a decent photographer by that point? Maybe in two years everything will look like crap!

As for Salvador, the unfinished book, the one that wasn’t written when I left well, it’s too late now.

The only thing I care about in this regard is how to shake off the strange feeling that I deserve to die just because some scumbag is practically on the lookout for me to die. I want to shake off the feeling that it’s a special miracle that I’m alive, breathing air, and walking around.

Last night was rather strange. I am very tired of waiting. Ever since I signed the contract, everything has been waiting. I turned down jobs at Time magazine, which I would normally have gladly accepted, and avoided everyone I knew. And then there was that last phone call.

The same gentle, cultured voice. An American “gentleman”, or an American acting like an English gentleman without the English accent, something like that.

I closed the house in Berkeley and went for a drink at the Hotel Max in Opera Plaza.

It was awesome to look around and see the crowds of people amidst the brass appliances, plate glass and neon lights. Some of the most beautiful women in San Francisco walk through the Plaza de la Opera. You can see them at the Italian restaurant, “The Modest Lanzoni”, or at the “Hotel Max”, where they are gorgeous ladies with professionally done hair and always look fabulous in designer clothing.

Then there was the big bookstore, true to its name, “a clear, lighted place,” where I could find a large copy of Simon Hsi’s detective novels to take on board, and a few copies of Ross McDonald’s and Ray McDonald’s novels. I could also find a couple of Ross McDonald and Ray Carrey novels. There I could also find a couple of Ross MacDonald and Ray Carrey novels, which were high-class escapist reading, the sort of thing I would have read in my hotel room when the bombs were dropped on Damascus at three o’clock in the morning.

Almost called home to say goodbye again, but then I didn’t; then I took a cab to that waterfront address.

It’s just a deserted warehouse. Then the cab drives away, and then a decently dressed man appears, one of those featureless guys you see all over the city’s business districts at noon, wearing a gray suit and shaking your hand warmly.

“You must be Elliott B. Slater.” He guided me into the dock.

A beautiful yacht was moored there, dead silent, like a white ghost ship, a string of lights reflecting in the black water, and I walked up the gangplank alone.

Another man appeared, and he seemed much more interesting. Young, maybe the same age as me, with unkempt blonde hair, dashing, tanned skin, and white shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Smiled in an unusual way, showing nice teeth.

He guided me to the cabin and took the suitcase from me.

“You will not see these suitcases again for two years,” he said with a very friendly gesture. “What, O Elliot, is there that you will need on your journey? Everything that was in the cabin shall be in these suitcases hereafter, including your purse, your passport, that watch of yours, anything you left behind.”

I was a little surprised. We were standing together in the aisle, physically close. I realized that this meant that he knew what kind of person I was and where he was taking me. He wasn’t just someone who worked on a yacht.

“Don’t worry about anything,” he said, standing just below the light, showing some freckles on his nose and sun streaks in his hair. Then he took something small out of his pocket, which I could see was a gold smithy with a name tag on it. “Hold out your right wrist.” He said.

He put his hand refining cuffs on and snapped the hook and loop, and that touch of his fingers sent chills down the back of my neck.

“Your three meals will be brought in through that little hole, and you won’t see or talk to anyone during the voyage. But the doctor will come for a final checkup, so the door won’t be locked until then.

”

He opened the door to the cabin and a soft hornpipe-colored brightness shone in, a layer of plastic paint bright enough to see the dark-grained woodwork. His words were deafening in my head the door would not be locked until then. I was irritated by the tiny handles that clung to me like cobwebs. I saw my name on the nametag, and underneath it was like a code of numbers and letters. I felt the creepiness in my neck again.

The cabin was sort of nice. It had plush, brown leather anoraks, mirrors everywhere, wide beds with lots of cushions, a video library underneath a fixed TV monitor, and lots of books. The standout was the Sherlock Holmes detective collection, in addition to erotic classics such as The Story of O Maiden

, Justin, Sleeping Beauty’s Manifesto, Beauty’s Punishment, and Romance of the Flogger.

It also contained a machine for grinding coffee, coffee beans in glass containers, a refrigerator filled with French mineral water and American soda, a tape recorder, and elaborately decorated playing cards, unopened. I picked up a paperback copy of Sherlock Holmes.

Then, instead of hearing a knock, the door opened. I jumped up.

Apparently a doctor, in a pulp-hard white coat. He wore a self-effacing and kindly look and put down the black bag he always had to carry. Without the coat and the bag, I wouldn’t have guessed he was a doctor. He looked like a teenager with nothing better to do, and even revealed a bit of the lackluster, exhausted look that comes with pimples; his short brown hair was as messy as it could be. Maybe he was a resident on a twenty-hour shift. With a polite but bewildered look, he immediately took out his stethoscope and asked me to take off my shirt, then took another manila paper dossier out of his bag and opened it on the bed.

“Elliot B. Mr. Slater,” he says, scratching the back of his head and gazing at me, trying to determine what’s going on. He’s already pounding on my chest. “Twenty-nine years old. Good health? No major problems of any kind? Have a regular doctor?” He turns to check the file again, looking at the signed report from the physical exam. “Everything came back clean on the tests,” he whispered in a nasal voice. “But we still like to ask you in person.”

I nodded.

“You exercise, don’t you? You don’t smoke. That’s good.”

Of course, when my personal physician filled out the report, he had no idea what the physical was for. “Suitable for a long and laborious exercise program,” he wrote the text in barely legible handwriting in the space underneath.

“Everything seems to be going well in the Ministry, Mr. Slater.” The doctor said, putting the dossier back in the bag. “Eat well, sleep well, and enjoy the voyage. You won’t be able to see much out of the windows because they have a film on them and the scene looks a blur. We have one piece of advice: avoid any private sexual stimulation during the journey.” He looked me closely in the eyes. “You know what I mean…”

I was taken aback, but I tried not to show it. Then, he knew everything, too. I didn’t answer.

“You’ll arrive at the ‘club’ in a state of sexual tension,” he said as he walked to the door. He might as well have told me to take an aspirin and call him next week. “You’ll behave much better if you’re in that state. I’m going to lock the door now, Mr. Slater. The door will open automatically if there is any emergency on board; there is also very adequate life-saving equipment on board, but the door will not open for any other reason. Perhaps you have a final question you’d like to ask; do you?”

“Um, last question!” I couldn’t help but whimper out a laugh, but couldn’t think of anything. My heart was beating a little too fast.

I looked at him for a moment, then said, “No, thank you, Doctor. I think you’ve explained everything clearly. You said you couldn’t masturbate, and that’s too harsh, but I don’t ever want hair to grow on my palms (it’s said that masturbation makes your palms hairy).”

He laughed so suddenly he looked like a different person. “Enjoy yourself, Mr. Slater.” He said, struggling to control the smile. The door closed behind him and I heard the lock turn.

For a long time, I sat on the bunk and stared at the door. I could already feel a stirring between my legs, but I decided to try to play the game. The situation would be like being twelve years old again, and the guilt was based on the general truth. Except that I knew he was right. It’s best to arrive at the “club” with all your organs revved up and ready for action, not with an empty tank.

For all I know, they’ll be watching me through some mirrors, after all, I belong to them now. Oddly enough, the word “slave” wasn’t engraved on the handiwork. I had signed all the documents myself.

I took a book from the shelf… not a work on pornography. Then I leaned back comfortably on my pillow and began to read. It was by James M. Cane. Great stuff, but I’d already read it. I reached for the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. It was a wonderful facsimile of the story that had originally appeared in “Riverside Magazine,” complete with little ink drawings. I hadn’t seen anything like it for years. It is wonderful to be with Sherlock Holmes again, and to remember just enough to make it interesting to read, without being too precious. It’s what they call highbrow fun. After a while I put the book down and looked at the shelves again, hoping to find Richard. Sir Bolton’s book, or Stanley’s book on the discovery of Livingston, but there was none. I did have Bolton’s books in my suitcase, having loaded them in a few days ago but forgotten them. Now for the first time I feel like a prisoner. I try the door, it’s locked. Can’t be helped, get some sleep!

Sometimes it’s hard to play the game.

I spent a lot of time showering, dipping in the tub, doing pushups, and reading all of James M. Cane’s works, including The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Guarantee, and A Little Night Music, and watching all of the DVDs.

One movie really touched me. The movie was brand new, still wrapped in its brown mailing envelope, and I finally opened it. It was a little movie about gypsies in New York called “Anne-Paul, My Love.” I hope there will be two or three episodes, all about the same gypsies, the same kid named Anne-Paul.

But it’s strange that a movie like this should appear in a collection of Bogart’s “film noir” classics mixed with sharp, hip “flashdance” trash. I took the wrapper out of the trash can. The disk had been couriered from a Dallas tape store two or three days before we left. Strange, as if someone had watched the movie, liked it, and ordered it on impulse for a cabin on a yacht. I don’t know if anyone on the boat was watching the movie. But not a sound seeped into the room.

I slept for a long time. In fact, I slept most of the time. I don’t know if the food brought in through the door was laced with drugs. But I think it was not, because I woke up feeling in good spirits.

Occasionally, I wake up in the middle of the night and realize what I’ve done.

I was to be sent to this strange place, the “Club”, for two years; two years I was not allowed to leave, no matter how much I begged or pleaded. But that was the least important part. The most important thing was: what would happen there. I remember that my master, the man who trained me, my secret sexual mentor, Martin Halysachs, kept saying that it was always the same. Martin Harrisacks, kept talking until the end. Two years is too long, he said.

“Go for six months! Elliot, a year at the most. You really can’t imagine what ‘the club’ is all about. You’ve never been incarcerated anywhere for more than a few weeks. Those are small places, Elliot. ‘Clubs’ are big places. We’re talking about two years now.”

I no longer wanted to argue with him. I’ve said it a thousand times: I want to get lost in it, no more two-week trips and exotic weekends. I want to get lost in it, so deep that I can’t remember time because I believe it will end one day.

“Forget it, Martin, you’ve sent all the documentation,” I said. “They’ve checked me out and accepted me. They wouldn’t have accepted me if I wasn’t ready, would they?”

“You’re ready,” he said with one side of his musing. “You can handle what happened there. But is that what you want?”

“I want to jump into the proverbial deep end, Martin. I keep saying that.”

I actually remember the rules and regulations. I will receive a hundred thousand dollars in consideration for my service. For two years I would be their property to do with as they pleased. If they paid us that much, I wonder how much they charged the “guests” who were going to use us.

Now that I was on the yacht, it was impossible for me to turn back: although I could hear the sound of the sea, I could not see it, nor could I really smell it. I rolled my body over and went back to sleep.

In fact, I couldn’t wait to get there; I wanted to be in that place now. I got up during the night, felt the door again, made sure it was locked, and then the desire was uncontrollable in my mind, and in a half-entangled state of painful and sweet dreams, it broke out.

I was a little remorseful later, but there was only one mistake in it that looked like ejaculation, like a Catholic boy in his sleep.

I’ve often thought of Martin, of that way of beginning. “A secret life,” as he put it, and I say that to myself.

He mentioned “the mansion” so many times that I finally asked someone to tell me everything. It was hard to call that number, but it was so easy to stand outside that huge Victorian building at nine o’clock on a summer night, feeling nervous and excited. Vehicles blew past me almost like a gale up the hill, while I turned around and took a short stroll under the tall, straight eucalyptus trees to the cast-iron gate there. (“To the basement gate!”)

Forget the hookers in black leggings and spiked heels! (“Were you ever a bad boy?

Do you need a whipping?”) Or forget about those dangerous little whores with baby faces and mean voices! This time it will be a real “masochist and masochist luxury escort tour”.

It starts with civilized conversation.

Small lamps burned in the large rooms with their dim, disordered stretches of Xiangban boards; the light was no brighter than candles when it illuminated the pictures and hanging felts on the walls. Oriental screens, windows of crimson and gold swirling tweed . Dark French doors painted with bug paint, along the far wall, with mirrors for door glass, and a large comfortable leather high-backed chair. I leaned one foot against the low stool, and the man behind the table reflected the shadowy figure.

Martin would soon be my lover, my mentor, my therapist, and my generous partner in the private room. He was tall, with black hair and a youthful-sounding voice, silver threads faintly visible at his temples, a fifty-something college professor in the country, wearing a brown V-neck sweater with the collar of his shirt open. The eyes were small, but showed a bright inquiring gaze that seemed to be forever examining something marvelous. An old gold watch gleamed against the black hair of his arms.

“Do you mind the smell of the pipe?”

“I love it.”

Sobranie tobacco from the Balkans, great.

I’m nervous, but sit quietly in my chair, my eyes examining the walls, where old landscapes appear beneath cracked bug paint, and colorful figurines appear on the mahogany armoire. This was a place of transcendence. Mounds of purple flowers in an ash vase contrasted with a marble clock. The carpet was of that smooth dark purple velvet now only seen on the marble steps of very old hotels. There was a sound coming from above the house, a cackle from the boards, a dull echo of music.

“Now, I want you to speak to me, Elliot.” He assumed a posture of comfortable authority, as if this had not been rehearsed and had never happened before. “I want you to relax and tell me about the kind of fantasy you’ve been enjoying for several years. You don’t have to describe it vividly. We know how to describe it vividly because we’re geniuses at it.”

He sits back, his gaze wandering across the ceiling, his eyebrows revealing a slight hint of gray. For a moment, the pipe rises in thick smoke, then disappears.

“If it’s difficult to describe the fantasy, you can write it down if you like. I can leave you some time, give you paper and pen and a typewriter if you prefer…”

“But I think you made things happen, and that’s called a circumstance, a world…”

“Yes, Elliot, don’t worry about it. We’ll control it, completely, once you get through that door. We have a thousand ideas, a thousand ways of doing things, and they’re all proven. But it’s important that we talk first, about you, about your imagination. That’s a good way to start. Would you like a cigarette? Elliot.”

I knew I had to start doing this, I had to start pushing the spinning wheel, yet how troubled and restless I was inside! As I walked to the door, I understood myself to yield. “Yes, I have sinned. Punish me!” How troubled and disturbed within, for I find myself saying, “I want to go through that door now.”

“It’ll be quick.” He replied, smiling. His eyes scrutinized me and appeared soft, becoming larger and rounder. It was the self-effacing look of someone who had known you well all their life. Someone like that could never hurt anyone. A face like a family doctor, like a college professor who understands and respects your passion for the subject: like a perfect father…

“You know, I’m not the type you’d expect to do this.” I said uncomfortably. God, he was a handsome man with a physique that revealed the kind of elegance that young people don’t possess no matter how good looking they are.

“As a student I was tiresome,” I said. “At home, people thought I was grumpy and I was disobedient. When it comes to male hobbies, I’m practically a veteran. I’m not boasting, I think you understand.

“I shifted my sitting position slightly in my chair uncomfortably.

“I think that’s ridiculous. To go a hundred and fifty miles an hour at Laguna. Racing at the risk of one’s life on a color truck track; charging down the world’s most treacherous slopes in skiing; pushing a ten-pound light airplane to its highest altitude and fastest speed with the amount of gas in a teacup.”

He nodded for me to continue.

“There’s a certain compulsory element to it all. For two years I was a photographer, but on one level it was just routine. The dangers were increasing, and the predicaments I was getting into could be really tiresome. Last time, I almost died in El Salvador because I ignored the curfew, like a rich kid on vacation…”

I don’t really want to talk about it. It was one of those horrible, endless moments when, for the first time in my life, I heard my watch ticking. I’ve often recalled it over and over again since then, and that’s what almost happened: the Time and Life photographer was shot down by an assassination squad in El Salvador. Elliot Slater’s life was over. The end of Elliot Slater’s life, when he could have been writing the great American novel in Berkeley or skiing in Gstaad, but instead he did this.

There’s no way it’s going to be news on the news networks for two nights.

“But that’s the type of person who comes here from time to time, Elliot.” He said calmly. “The kind of person who doesn’t submit to anyone or anything in the real world. The kind of people who are used to dominating power, who hate and intimidate people. They come to us hoping we’ll turn them over big time.”

I guess I can’t help but smile when I hear that. I hope we turn them over big time.

“Don’t edit the fantasy, Elliot. Talk to me as much as you can! You’re obviously speaking clearly.

Most of those who come to us are people who speak very clearly. They have sharp and subtle imaginations, ripe with fantasies. But I don’t listen to these fantasies like a doctor, I think of them as stories, like a literary scholar who doesn’t know whether you like the word or not. Would you like a drink to help you tell it? Perhaps a glass of whisky would be better.”

“Whiskey,” I said blankly. I had no desire to get drunk. “There’s a particular fantasy,” I said, while he stood and walked toward the bar. “As a boy, this fantasy haunted me from time to time.

”

“Tell me about it!”

“God, you have no idea how much of a sin that all was! Having those fantasies made me admit to myself that I was a little crazy because everyone else was in real life with their mouths wide open looking at ‘Playboy’ cross-page pictures of beautiful women and cheerleaders on the football field.”

“John Walker” Black Label. Good luck. Just a little ice. Even that fragrance, and the thick crystal glass in my hand, had its effect.

“When people discuss fantasies, they often only talk about the acceptable parts,” he said, settling down behind the table again and reclining back. He wasn’t drinking, only smoking his pipe. “They talk about stereotypes and say absolutely nothing about what they really imagine. How many of your class do you think have the same fantasies?”

“Um, I’m used to a thing that I imagine has to do with a Greek myth,” I said. “I imagine that we’re all young men in a big city in Greece, and every few years, seven of us, you know, are sent to another city as sex slaves like in the myth of Theseus.”

I dropped out of my whiskey.

“It was an ancient and extremely sacred arrangement,” I said, “and it was an honor to be chosen, yet we were afraid. We were taken into the temple, and the priests told us that we were to obey whatever happened to us in another city, and to offer our sexual organs to the gods as well. This has been going on for countless generations, but the boys who have been through this and are older have not told us what will happen.”

“Very well,” he said softly. “And then…”

“As soon as we arrive in another city, our clothes are removed and auctioned off to the highest bidder for several years of service. We seem to bring luck to those rich men who buy us. We were a symbol of fertility and male power, like the image of Pleiades, the fertility god, in the gardens of the Romans, and like the image of Hermes, the guardian god at the entrance of the Greeks.”

How weird it felt to talk about these things, even to someone who was a very good listener, it still felt that way. He didn’t show a hint of shock.

“Our masters think highly of us, but we are not people. We are very humble and frankly we are just people’s playthings.” I took another slow sip of my wine. Might as well tell it all! “Meant to be beaten by others,” I said, “to suffer sexually versus starving to be herded down the street to keep the owner amused; to stand by the front door for hours at a time, trapped in a state of sexual tension, to have people passing by stare at you, that sort of thing. Torturing us belongs to a category of things that reveal religious connotations while we hide our fears and humiliations inside.”

Did I really say all that?

“Wonderful fantasy,” he said sincerely, raising his eyebrows slightly as if in contemplation. “Includes all the best parts. Not only are you ‘permitted’ to enjoy depraved behavior, but there are wonderful elements of religion revealed in them.”

“Look, inside I’m a big circus with three different shows going on at the same time in three arenas.” I laughed, shaking my head.

“This is true of all sadomasochists-cum-masochists,” he said. “‘Circus animals’ almost never abandon us.”

“There must be a skeletal structure present,” I said. “Everything is ingenious. It would be quite inconceivable if you actually suffered compulsion, and yet there must be compulsion.”

I put my glass on the table and he immediately stood up and filled it.

“I mean, if the matter is to be a really good fantasy, then there has to be an element of consent and coercion,” I said, gazing at him. “And yet it has to be a humiliation, a struggle within, a struggle between the part of you that wants to fantasize and the part of you that doesn’t want to fantasize. The ultimate degradation is this: you agree, and you like it.”

“Yes.”

“We are objects of respect and objects of contempt. We are figures of mystery. We are not allowed to speak.”

“Could be priceless.” He whispered.

What did he really hear in the few hours we talked? Did he hear anything really different, new or unique? Maybe he just knew that I was like a thousand other people who had walked through his door.

“Your master, the man who bought you in another Greek city…” he asked. “How does he look? How do you feel about him?”

“If I told you, you’d laugh at me. He fell in love with me and I fell in love with him. A romance in captivity. Love finally won.”

He didn’t laugh, just smiled pleasantly and smoked his pipe again.

“But when he began to love you, he didn’t stop punishing you or using you…”

“No, not ever, he’s too good a citizen to do that. But there is one other thing.”

I could feel my pulse racing. Why on earth was it necessary to mention all this?

“Yes?”

For the first time, I felt a slowly intensifying anxiety and confusion about why I was here.

“Well, it’s about having a woman in your fantasies…”

“Eh.”

“She is the master’s wife, I presume. Si, I know it is so. The power of illusion operates against her from time to time.”

“How does fantasy power work against her?”

“No, I don’t want to involve women.” I said.

“I understand.”

“You have a thousand reasons to choose a man or a woman as a partner in love versus a partner in sex, don’t you? The situation isn’t as difficult to cross the line as it used to be.”

“No, not like that anymore,” he said. But he paused for a second before answering. “Do you spend time with women besides men?”

I nodded. “Too much of both.”

“And she comes in fantasies.”

“Yeah. Fuck her. I don’t know why I brought her up. I sort of resorted to her, trying to find a compassion, tenderness, while she was interested in me becoming more and more her husband’s slave, but then she got worse.”

“How did she get worse?”

“She’s tender and loving, but she’s also simultaneously harsher, stricter, and more ruthless.

That humiliation is like mourning. You know what I mean? It’s strange.”

“Yes…”

“She’s not always there. But sooner or later…”

“Yes.”

“But that’s really far from the point.”

“Yes?”

“Um, I mean I want a male lover, a male dominant, allow me to say that. That’s what I’m really saying, he’s the reason I’m here, for men. I’ve heard you have good looking men here, the best…”

“Yes,” he said. “I think, when it comes to making a choice, you’ll like the information scrapbook.”

“Do I have to choose the guys who dominate me?”

“Of course. That said, you can always leave the choice up to us if you want.”

“Well, it has to be a man,” I said. “Men to me are a very peculiar and hot sex, a sex that likes playfulness and wild adventures…”

He nodded and smiled.

“That’s the best, that feeling when you’re with someone who’s as tough as you are. When a woman intervenes, it breeds sadness, excitement, and an element of romanticism…”

“Which sex did you used to love truly? Men or women?” He asked.

Silence.

“Why is this issue so important?”

“Oh, you know why it’s so important?” He said gently.

“A man. And a woman. At different times.” Please close those doors.

“You love them equally.”

“At a different time…”

Within three months, we were talking in the same room again, only I would never have imagined that after all that had happened upstairs, I’d be sitting in a room, fully dressed, talking to him again and he’d be saying, “But you don’t have to pay me anything, Elliot, that’s what I’m telling you. I can arrange this for three or four interested ‘owners’ and they will pay for everything. You come here as you always have, but on their dime. You belong to them while you’re here.”

“No. For that matter, money doesn’t mean anything to me, and besides, I’m not ready to face this…” completely dominated by another person, his fantasies replacing mine. No, not yet. Be careful. Things are difficult enough.

But the situation was like a flight of stairs that formed a spiral, stretching upward from the basement room, and I was going to have to climb all the way to the top.

“I want a woman,” I said suddenly. Did I say that? “I mean I… well, a woman,” I said. “I… think it’s time to do that, a really good looking woman.

She knows what she’s doing and I don’t want to know anything about her, I don’t want to pick her out of any profile scrapbook. Just pick her. Make sure she’s good at it, that she specializes in it, that she can do it. It’s time to… I mean, it’s time to be dominated by a woman, don’t you think?”

Martin smiled pleasantly.

“As the demon in the Arabian myth said when he appeared from the lamp: ‘Yes, master.’

Just one woman for you!”

“She has to be good looking doesn’t have to be pretty, you understand she’ll know how to do what she does…”

“Sure.” He nodded patiently. “But tell me…” he draws on his pipe, slowly puffing out the smoke. “Would you like to see this woman in a Victorian bedroom? You know, an old-fashioned kind of setting. I mean a very ladylike room lace window bands, four-poster bed, that sort of thing?”

“Oh, oh, God! Do I have to face this?”

Constantly climbing the stairs, through layer after layer of lovely dreams.

Now, after six months, where am I headed? “The Club”.

“That’s exactly what I wanted,” I said. As soon as I had read the regulations, I drove on, waited an hour to meet him in the tiny waiting room, and kept looking at my watch. “Why didn’t you tell me about this place before?”

“You must prepare to travel to the ‘club’, Elliot.”

“Eh, I’m ready now. A full two-year contract, that’s exactly what I want.” I sat on the floor, my body sweating. “How much time will it take to get there? Martin. I can be ready day after tomorrow. I can be ready this afternoon.”

“A two-year contract?” He asked, weighing each word very carefully as he spoke it. “I want you to sit down and have a drink. I think we should talk a little bit about what happened in El Salvador, Elliot.

Talk about what happened there regarding the assassination squad and all.”

“You don’t understand, Martin. I wasn’t running away from anything that happened there. I learned things about violence there that don’t have to be actual violent parties to operate.”

He listened intently.

“When a man seeks violence,” I said, “whether it’s war, sport, adventure, he wants to make it symbolic, and most of the time he thinks it is indeed symbolic. And then that moment comes: there is a man literally holding a gun to your head. You literally almost lose your life. And then you realize that you’ve been mixing up the real with the symbolic.

Well, I learned about it in El Salvador, Martin. I’m not running away from it. I’m just here because of it. I want violence. I’ve always wanted it. I want a sense of danger, Martin.

I loved the feeling, I think I even wanted to be wiped out by that. But I didn’t really want to get hurt, I didn’t want to die.”

“I understand,” he said. “I think you express it well. But for some of us, O Elliot, the ‘sadistic masochistic’ mania may be just a phase, may be part of some quest to pursue something else…”

“Then, ‘sadistic masochism’ mania is a two-year phase for me, Martin. The ‘club’ then, is the perfect vision for my quest.”

“I’m not so sure, Elliot.”

“This is so much like a childhood fantasy I once had, don’t you know? Sold to a Greek master for a while.

It’s perfect…”

“In some kind of fantasy, time doesn’t have a great deal of significance…” he objected.

“Martin, when you told me about this place, the matter was decided and cannot be changed. Now if you don’t sign the document, I will find another way…”

“Don’t be mad.” He flashed that self-effacing smile and I immediately calmed down. “I’ll sign the docs, and for two full years if that’s what you want. But let me remind you that there are a lot of factors present in that childhood fantasy you told me about.”

“This is so beautiful!” I said.

“You may be seeking a man rather than a system,” he continued. “When you go to the ‘club,’ O Eliot, you get exactly the system very splendidly!”

“I want the system,” I said. “I cannot escape from the matter! If the matter is half as good as you describe, I say nothing to miss it.”

That’s it, a two-year contract to stay in the Club, which has male and female slaves, male and female guests, male and female managers, trainers, and staff. Okay. – Okay!

Okay. This is exactly what I wanted. I don’t think I can stand it. How could anyone stand it? But that’s what I want.

It’s best not to think about it all when trying to be restrained.

After six days at sea, I was like a male dog suffering at the hands of a bitch in heat. At that moment, I finally heard the sound of a key on the door.

It was late afternoon and I had just gotten out of the shower and slept really late. Took a shower afterward – shaved.

Maybe they know that they don’t have to labor them.

It turned out to be the young blonde lad with tanned skin and white sleeves rolled halfway up his arms.

He walked in with another smile.

“Well, Elliot,” he said. “We’re eighteen hours’ sail from the harbor. You’re not to speak unless you’re spoken to. Do as you are told.”

Two other men followed him, but I didn’t really see them. They immediately turned my body around and clasped my hands behind my back. I caught a glimpse of a piece of white leather blindfold and then my eyes were blindfolded. I had a moment of panic in the darkness, but wished they hadn’t used the piece of leather blindfold that went it. I felt my pants being pulled down and my shoes being removed.

It was about to start, to really happen. My dick immediately hardened. But I couldn’t see it myself, which was tragic, indeed tragic.

I waited for the gag to be stuffed in my mouth, but it wasn’t; as soon as they stripped me, they put leather cuffs on my wrists and raised both of them above my head. Not too scary, not as scary as being tied up tight.

I was led to the ship’s breezeway. Despite my training, I was a little alarmed.

But it felt like an aphrodisiac had been injected into me. They hung my wrists on a hook above me, and I regretted that I had followed the rules of the game every night that I was alone in the cabin.

I don’t know where they took me, except that: based on speculation, it sounded like a large room. I sensed that there were other people there. I could hear faint sounds coming from others, and I could hear a sobbing sound, as if one of the slaves near me was on the verge of crying out. I knew it was a female slave.

Well, then, we are truly mixed, male and female, as they say. I can’t imagine such a scenario. Listening to that woman’s voice, I felt puzzled. Maybe I felt even more powerless because I couldn’t protect her. Or maybe I was doing something inside because I knew I was suffering silently, just as she was suffering. I just can’t put my finger on which feeling it is.

I loathe that leather eye patch. Can’t help but hate it. I rubbed my face with my arm in an effort to remove the leather blindfold, but it was no use. I had to give up.

I thought to myself that maybe for the hundredth time maybe Martin was right and I had made a terrible mistake. What was the training that took place in Martin’s house in San Francisco? And a few short stays in country places, terrible as they were, what were those stays compared to that? But I felt that most intense and wonderful relief, and thought to myself, “It’s too late now, Elliot. I can’t say, ‘Let’s stop now, folks, and all go out for a steak and a few beers.'”

I mean, things pass because things start. That’s the beauty of things. It’s true, like Martin said.

Suddenly I had a glorious feeling, a feeling that for the first time in my life I was beyond the capacity to be in the middle of it. I had inflicted this irrevocable violence on my life, and this was the excitement. In any case, I was not going back.

The noises I heard, no doubt meant: more and more slaves were being brought in. I heard the sound of their bare feet making light touches and the manager’s heels clacking. Everywhere I heard moans, the sip and rattle of the refiners, and the jingle of the metal grommets that slid over the hooks. Leather handcuffs pressed tightly against my wrists.

Mostly faint sighs and moans, male and female noises. It seems some of the grunting is coming from behind the mouthpiece.

I knew for certain: some distance away, a man, a man, was struggling, and this was immediately confirmed by a scolding voice, which was calling his name and telling him to “behave”. It was almost cajoling, with a tone of voice that said, “You know you can’t do that.” The belt snapped sharply and I heard a loud groan. Then there was the sound of a real whipping, sounding so intense it was like fingers touching my skin.

I’m shaking. It was terrible to suffer that kind of punishment for misbehavior. It wasn’t like being humiliated for the pleasure of waiting for someone, but it was a peculiar sponsorship of pain. No, it was a loser in a cabin here, a bad slave.

The whipping seemed to go on forever. Then I heard the belt closer to me making splintering noises haphazardly, and humming and snorting and moaning. I could feel movement all around myself. The belt lashed across my thighs and then across my ass, but I stood still and didn’t make a sound.

A few hours passed.

My arms and legs ached. After dozing for a while, I woke up feeling completely naked, the passion in me like a knot.

Once I awoke, I found myself writhing my body as if striving to touch another body, the desire was so strong at this point that I felt a thick strap hit hard.

“Stand up straight, Elliot.” A voice said, and I physically recognized in a moment of embarrassment that it was the young blonde with the nice teeth.

Then I felt his cold, giant hands open up against the freshly pumped muscles and squeeze them hard. “There’s only six hours left, and they want you to be in the midst of the Upside Down.” I felt his thumb on my lips, telling me to be quiet, as if I had the audacity to speak.

I was sweating all over, and I couldn’t tell if he had gone away or was right next to me. I felt terrible because I wasn’t perfect; yet I was quite excited, so it was wonderful to feel that bone-crushing sting of both pleasure and pain in my loins.

By the time I woke up again, I knew it was late at night.

An inner clock told me so, and so did that dead silence on the boat, except that I still couldn’t tell you what the original noise on the boat actually was.

It’s just quieter now, that’s all.

Unpleasant scenes from home come to mind: last weekend in Sonoma with my father, a log fire was built in the game room. My father faced me across the green velvet of the pool table; he was ready to explain his plans to me. A final shower of seasonal rain rinsed the windows above the olive-green hill, and a feeling of wholly unexpected rebellion, much like malice, rose up in me; it was pathetic. You think you’re so worldly, you think you always know everything, you know every little movement, you analyze, evaluate, predict the final shape of every “phase” even before it begins.

Handing me papers on masturbation and Penthouse and Playboy magazines when I was fourteen; and, on my sixteenth birthday, handing me two $200 call girls in Las Vegas, not one, but two, fuck it, two! Call girls and then the brothel, the posh one in Tangier, filled with dark-eyed, smiling little boys. All that worldly nonsense about it being healthy, about the unsoundness of a mother’s thoughts, the need for words to be present again as flesh, the poetry of an enlarged soul, Si, I’ve got one thing to tell you now, and you’ll burn your testicles listening to it. Dad, do you know what your son really wants?

“You won’t be serious. You wouldn’t come to a place like this for two years!”

The last time I talked to him on the phone, he said, “You’re not going to do this. I want you to tell me: who are these people? I’m driving to Berkeley tonight.”

“Dad, just die, okay? Write to the New York address I sent you. Someone will open the letter, but I’ll get it. Don’t try to do anything dramatic, Dad, and don’t hire any detectives to follow me, okay?”

“Elliot, do you realize that I could incarcerate you for this? I could lock you up in the state mental hospital in Naha. Why would you do that? Elliot.”

“Forget it, Dad. I’m doing this for pleasure, words now made flesh (like those call girls with the Arab boys), for pleasure, pure and simple pleasure, all the way to the moon.”

It was also another thing that even I could not understand, a torture of the soul, an adventure, a refusal to live outside a dark and heated inner world. And this inner world exists behind the civilized faces I see in the mirror. This matter goes back a long, long time.

“I’m really scared to death over this. Do you hear what I’m saying right now? That Middle East thing I can live with. I let you leave El Salvador less than two hours after you called. But this thing, Elliot, this sex club, this place…”

“Dad, this place is a lot safer than El Salvador. There are no guns or bombs where I’m going. The violence is fake. I thought a man as worldly as you would be the last…”

“You’re too much.”

Excessive?

Dad, we’ve left the Earth’s atmosphere. We’re landing on the moon.

I knew the time was morning because I heard people stirring around me. About an hour later, the ship actually woke up. The doors opened. Footsteps could be heard while both of my bound wrists were unhooked from the sling, the leather handcuffs were removed, and I was told to hook my hands behind my neck.

“Remove its blindfold!” I thought. Someone pushes me and I feel another naked body right in front of me. When I lost my balance, a couple of hands steadied me and told me to take a step back.

I’m going crazy and can barely resist the urge to rip off the blindfold on my own. But the moment has come, and I won’t run away from it. My heart was beating like a rapid staccato. I know my mind is blank.

Suddenly, a few more hands were touching me and I was hard. A strap surrounded the base of my dick. My balls were lifted and pulled forward. When the tiny belt suddenly tightened, the loose skin bound my dick.

Just when I think I’m going to go crazy from this, the blindfold is finally ripped off.

For a second, my eyes squeezed shut against the bright light. Then I saw above those heads and shoulders in front of me, a narrow passageway and a metal ladder leading up to the almost blinding sunlight on the deck.

There was a lot of noise on the deck, with shouting, talking, and even laughter. I saw a slave being forced up the steps, while a manager by the side of the steps was urging her on with a belt. It was a female slave with very fine, thick red hair that looked like a cloud hovering around her shoulders; I was completely paralyzed at the sight of her naked body. She ran quickly up the steps and disappeared into the sunlight. I could never decide: who is more naked when stripped? The man or the woman? But the sight of those plump female hips and tiny waists made me even more crazy than before.

But we’re all moving forward.

I felt someone push me and then whip me. For a moment I see the dreamy blonde man, then he orders me up the steps.

“Up to the deck, Elliot.” He said, wearing the same gentle scowl, and I felt his belt hit me. “Put your hands on the back of your neck.”

When I reached the top of the ladder, I heard the command, “Eyes down,” and “Forward,” but I saw blue water and white sand.

I saw the island itself.

Dwarf trees of tender green, roses propped up against painted white stucco walls, the terrace piled up in tiers, like a Babylonian sky garden, with glowing kudzu sprouting everywhere in a deep tropical green. There were people at the tables on the terrace, hundreds of them, maybe thousands. This was it, really it was. The feeling in my throat, like a knot in my throat, hardened into a rock-like sensation.

Many of Martin’s warnings come to mind: you can’t prepare for a system that works so well. They can tell you everything about the system, but the scenario, the scale of it, is an unforeseen shock.

Orders are being given sternly and quickly. Before my eyes the slaves are running across the deck and into a wide, moist ladder board. Perfectly formed bodies, the muscles of their bodies rippling in motion, their hair flying. The light swaying, leaping movements of the women are in stark contrast to the quick, powerful strides of the men.

I could not accept nor resist what was happening. In a singular moment, I don’t wonder if what is going on around me is real, but if what has happened to me before is real.

As I walked down the gangplank with the others, there was a definite feeling in my mind that all the comfort of my previous life had been an illusion, and I had been. I can’t tell you how incredibly true this is. I always have been.

I had to catch up with the others and do exactly what I was told. The blond lad appeared again, like a kind of demon (I almost said: “You again, you little bastard.”) His belt hit me almost caressingly, the tanned arm bent.

“Good-bye, Elliot,” he said in his friendliest voice. “Have a good time at the ‘club’.”

I offered him my most malicious smile, but lost my sense of direction. After walking up the ladder boards, I looked up at the creeper-covered walls and the endless tiers of terraces with their immaculate soft blue roofs.

Another strong, young, vicious fellow was whipping the slaves up a winding path. I had to pass him and take his whipping as I ran with the others.

The manager shouted impatiently for us to speed up. I was thinking: why do we obey? Why is it so important to do what he says? I mean, we were brought here to provide pleasure to thousands of people on the terrace. How can they feel the same pleasure if they see someone hobbling and being whipped?

But if anyone is hobbling, it won’t be me. It’s important, I think. I want to please them. Not only do we act like slaves, we think like slaves.

Erotic Paradise (03)

Lisa 4 Love at first sight

It was dizzily warm, but the floor was crowded. As I hurried to my room, I could even hear the persistent, loud conversations coming from the cavernous breezeway.

There was no time now for a quiet drink or a walk in the garden, or even to watch them drive the slaves off the yacht.

The slave will show up at the foyer acceptance desk in an hour and I haven’t even finished reading the file yet.

Each slave was accompanied by a full description, plus life and comments, all three collected together, plus detailed photographs; I learned to pay attention to the slaves themselves as well as to their dossiers.

As soon as I opened the door, I saw Diana waiting for me. She was wearing no adornments and her hair was slicked back, my favorite look for her. Some trainers think: slaves look more naked when they wear clever little decorations. I didn’t think so.

In a room like ours, with thick blankets, hung with ancient velvet draperies, with all the little civilized accoutrements; a naked slave burns like a flame in such a room.

In the drab tones that flow through the fluorescent screens and the low carved furniture, Diana reveals pure animality and an air of infinite mystery that only an animal like man can.

If you place her in an arrogantly decorated room like mine amidst Haitian paintings, potted goat’s teeth, and barbaric stone carvings, then you have a very rich and ripe whatnot, being able to smell fragrance where there is none, and to taste the smoke and saltiness of flesh at first sight.

There was nothing like that moment: finding her there for the first time no matter how many slaves I had watched in the foyer and the garden seeing her two heavy swaying breasts, seeing the moist triangle of pubic hair while she waited for my command.

Diana was always like a dancer, sleek and lean, with snow-white hair cascading down her elegant shoulders and back. Her face was as different as it was fascinating. It had large, almost pouty lips and the roundest, most flexible eyes I had ever seen. But what really got me going was her French accent. I had tried to analyze her accent, to analyze that effect, to try to get used to it. But it was one of those strong and ill-defined values of hers.

I couldn’t take her in my arms and kiss her. I didn’t have time to start doing all these things. I could see the big pile of manila paper files sitting in front of the white computer screen on my desk. All the information is entered into the computer, but I still like to hold the photos in my hands, as well as the clear drafts. I always ask them to send the files no matter how pristine they look.

“Open the window, honey.” I said.

“Yes, Lisa.”

The Bombay Gin was waiting, the glass had been put on ice and the lime fruit had just been cut. Bombay Gin is the only gin I can drink straight, and I don’t ever add anything else to it.

With the rest of my eyes, I watched her, moving with the same kind of cat-like speed and agility, her long, slender hands slowly reaching out as if they were even in love with the rope that pulled the heavy purple drapery.

For three years, “she lived inside these walls,” as the saying goes. For six weeks of the year she was not to be seen on holidays. I must confess that I don’t know where she went, what she did, or what she was like during that time. It is said that members of the Club have offered to sign her up for movies, to find her a marriage partner, and to arrange for her to enjoy a luxurious private life in a foreign country. But all this is not so unusual for slaves here. That’s one of the reasons why we want them to sign up, stay for a while, and pay them so much money.

I once saw her dressed for a vacation, walking arm in arm with another slave to a waiting plane. Some say that five of them joined together and rented a castle in the Swiss Alps.

Diana had put on a white coat of rolled wool and a white woolen hat in the snowy weather. She looked Russian, like a ballet giant, and all the other girls looked like dwarfs, for she was the only one who strutted freely, walking through the stopping-places, with her chin tilted up and her little French mouth naturally curled up as if she were always ready to be kissed.

But I don’t know Diana at this point. I only know her as the naked, humble slave who serves me here day and night. She is the embodiment of perfection, if there is such a thing as “perfection”; and in the quiet of the undisturbed night, I often tell her so.

Sunlight poured in through the French windows, and the large leafy branches of the California pepper tree acted as a kind of veil over the blue summer sky.

The sky was too clear. The faint sound of wind chimes came from the garden, and a pile of clouds that had swept swiftly across the south suddenly disappeared.

She crouches close to me, and I reach out, sliding my fingers over her breasts perfect breasts that won’t be too big to feel as she kneels there, silently yielding. Her hips are resting on her heels, and I like her that way; her eyes are moist as she looks down.

“By all means,” I said, starting to organize the file. “Do you keep the rules while I’m gone?”

“Yes, Lisa, I try to please everyone, Lisa.” She said. I took the glass from her hand and waited in agony for a few seconds to let the gin get cold, then took a deep, cold swallow, letting the instant warmth spread to my chest.

She was poised like a cat, ready to jump up and wrap her arms around my neck. I couldn’t really resist her like that, but I hadn’t shaken off the anxiety of my vacation yet. It was as if we were still circling the sky.

I stepped forward and made an indescribably weak gesture that indicated to her that it was okay. She pushed herself up in a kneeling position and pressed herself against me, the embodiment of tenderness, and I turned my head, kissing her big pouty mouth.

I could see the feeling piercing through her, through her limbs, her nakedness offering everything. Could she possibly feel my body stiff? She frowned and opened her lips. At the same time I let go of her.

“There’s no time now.” I whispered. Yes, I needed to tell her that. She was as well trained as any slave I had ever owned. But there was that tenderness that existed between us that excited her as much as that coldness that always brought tears to her eyes.

I turned on the computer’s video monitor and quickly typed “teaser” on the white plastic keys. Silent strings of shiny green letters immediately appeared across the screen. Fifty new slaves in all. I was shocked at the number.

I’ve recognized thirty of them from the auction, but twenty more were sold independently. All were two-year deeds! So, our new rules and regulations are working. I hadn’t expected it so soon. I had thought, really, that due to some of the six-month slaves, or at least the one-year slaves, that it might put us in a bind because of the release when they reach the topsy-turvy state. It really takes us two years to train a slave and recoup the cost from him or her, but a lot of slaves just aren’t ready to face that.

Now is the time to see the sample.

Each file had an enlarged photo of a slave on the front cover. I quickly flipped through them, immediately tossing aside six, seven, ten photos. All were beautiful women, and some people would love them and torture them. But I wouldn’t.

But here was a wonderful woman with locks of brown hair that formed big natural curls and an American oval face.

I slowly broke away from Diana and guided her body down so that her arms were around my waist. I could feel her wonderful weight against me, her forehead nestled against my stomach as my right hand stroked her hair. She was trembling. She was always jealous of new slaves. Her breasts felt hot. I could almost feel her heart beating.

“Did you miss me?” I asked.

“Missed you terribly, Lisa.” She said.

Kitty B. Cantwell, I remember the name of a slave on the file. According to the illustration, she was tall, 5’6″, and would be fun to handle, and the profile also showed: she had a high IQ, a Master’s degree in journalism, had traveled all over the world, was a TV weatherwoman in Los Angeles, and hosted a talk show for a while in San Francisco. At a private club in Bel-Air. Trained by a Parisian named Irina Giffner at a private club in Bel Air. A Parisian named Irina Givner. I didn’t know the trainer. But we used to get good deals from Giffner. I turned back to the page of photographs.

“Do you do a lot of work?” I asked. I had given Diana deliberate permission to work. She needed to work, and maintenance wasn’t enough.

“Yes, Lisa.” She said and I could hear her voice suddenly change. I pulled her hair from the back of her neck place. She was hot all over. I knew the pubic hair between her legs was soaking wet.

The brunette in the photo is indeed an American beauty of the type pictured in the Playboy crossover photo, the perfect female weathercaster, yes. I could visualize her on the nightly news. Round eyes, big eyes, like Diana, but with a worldliness that can’t be hidden even if her bones are lovely. But then, her face exudes an intense intellect, and it’s hard to hide a little inquisitive curiosity. A healthy American girl with cheerleader breasts.

Indeed, this one needs to be examined.

I drop out of my gin and work quickly, flipping the hard covers back into place one by one. Diana was kissing me.

“Quiet.”

I was gazing at a picture of a man.

Blonde hair, and according to the picture was six foot two tall. But I looked back at the picture and for a moment couldn’t understand my reaction, couldn’t understand why my reaction was so strong unless it was the expression on the man’s face that made it so.

They rarely smiled in the photos, they all looked straight ahead as if police personnel were taking their pictures.

Sometimes the whole weakness is revealed right there, which is that fearfulness. They’re about to suffer imprisonment, not knowing what’s going to happen, and maybe it’s a mistake altogether. Yet, this person is smiling, or at least revealing some pleasure, some intelligence.

Thick blonde hair, almost curly, fell slightly over the forehead and was very nice near the ears and neck. The eyes were gray, or perhaps blue, and a pair of large glasses resembled two rings of pale smoke, casting only a slight shadow at the top, so that the lenses above the quivering bones were very clear. And there was the smile. He’d worn a black pullover to the photo shoot, and had his arms crossed instead of at his sides. It was a rather relaxed stance.

I flipped to the back of the file to see a picture of him naked. I leaned back and gazed at the photo, sipping my gin.

“Look at these pictures,” I said. Diana looked up and I showed her two of the photos. “A handsome man.” I whispered, tapping the picture of Slater. I move my body to get ice and pour gin.

“Yes, Lisa.” She said, adding as much hurt as she could to her words, and poured me a glass of wine as if the gesture had great significance. I kissed her again.

In the nude photo, he is standing, arms at his sides, but revealing the same faintly pleasant look clearly trying to hide it slightly, perhaps having been told not to smile. A surprising sense of presence emanates from the photograph. There wasn’t a gesture, an imaginary self-image protecting him. It was a flawless body, a true Californian body, showing wonderful muscles in constant motion, and strong calves. It was not overdeveloped, and had the complexion of a true beach tan.

Elliott B. Slater. Berkeley, California. Twenty-nine years old. Trained in San Francisco by Martin Halifax. Trained by Martin Halifax.

That’s interesting. It’s my hometown. And Martin Halifax is the best trainer in the world. Halifax is the best trainer in the world and my best friend. A little crazy, maybe, but aren’t we all a little crazy?

When I was twenty years old, I worked at Martin B. I worked in Martin Halifax’s Victorian house in San Francisco. There were only fifteen dimly lit and elegantly decorated rooms, but it was like a universe, as vast and mysterious as the Club. It was Martin Halifax who had organized the club for the benefit of the slaves. It was Martin Halifax who made the solarium perfect for the slaves, with little bicycles and exercise bicycles for the slaves to ride when they were being punished. Let a Californian, even one as pale as Martin, think of healthful devices like that!

But Martin Halifax and the Mansion existed when there was no Club. But when Martin Halifax and the Mansion existed, there was no Club, and in one sense the Club owes as much to me as it does to him, or, in other words, to him. He supported the club with money. Martin chose not to come here with us. He was never able to leave San Francisco or the Mansion.

I turned to Martin’s handwritten report. Martin likes to write.

“This slave was very worldly, financially independent, perhaps wealthy, and despite a wide range of interests, was hell-bent on becoming a slave.”

Wide range of interests. PhD in English Literature from Berkeley, California. An old alumnus of mine. Since he’s a doctor, he should get a Purple Heart. IQ not as high as Kitty C. Cantwell, but pretty high anyway. He is a freelance photographer of rock ‘n’ roll, celebrities, and often war photographs for Time and Life. Has published two books on photography, Beirut: Twenty-Four Hours and Scanning the San Francisco Playground. Owns a gallery in the Castro area and a bookstore (which bookstore?) in Berkeley. All the bookstores I know. Doesn’t say which one). Passionate about dangerous situations, and dangerous solo sports.

That’s unusual, much like his face.

I looked at my watch. The slaves won’t arrive in the foyer for another forty-five minutes, and I’ve already picked two, I’m sure of it. It was either Kitty B. Cantwell, or Elliot Slater. Elliot Slater. All I had to do was look at Elliot Slater. I only had to look at Elliot Slater to know that I’d go crazy if I didn’t get first pick.

But I do have first choice.

So why the surge of anxiety? Is it the sudden feeling that you may not be in control of something very important? Screw it, I’m off the plane. The vacation is over. I’m home.

I pushed the other files aside and began to read on about Slater.

“This slave automatically requested to be trained on August 7th of last year.” (Nine months ago. It’s absolutely remarkable that he’s here. But Martin knew what he was doing.) “Decided to accept the most in-depth program we had to offer while refusing to work with masters outside the house although he was almost always enthusiastically offered several masters after every group event that used the slave.”

“He is extremely resilient and strong, requiring severe punishment to make an impression, but feeling easily humiliated in many situations, almost to the point of panic… This slave reveals a subtle stubbornness that is not easy to detect unless…”

I stopped. This was the sort of thing I would discover on my own terms and feel wonderfully joyful about. I flipped forward a few pages because I knew Martin’s descriptive habits.

“The slave was incarcerated for a short time at the country house in Marin County, and evidently found the whole week of training very arduous, yet asked to go almost immediately. He slept extremely well after each training session. Regularly read books during the break at the end, covering a wide range of classics, boredom, and sometimes poetry. Indulged in detective novels as well as the James B. Bond series of thrillers, but apparently read the great Soviet Russian novels verbatim.” (This is so interesting. Who but Detective Martin would have noticed?) “This slave is a romantic. Up to the present time, however, after every training session, without ever approaching any of his masters, and only asking me for suggestions to be made in the future, he says he wants to face what he fears most.”

I look at the photo again. A square face, even the features were square except for the mouth, which was a bit plump. That smile could be interpreted as: revealing a hint of sarcasm, a slight contempt. There should be a word that expresses some kind of disdain but not the ruthlessness of disdain. He has a “nice” face, which is the opposite of the word “contempt”.

God, two weeks ago, I might have walked by him on the street in Berkeley and seen him in a bar in…

Don’t be so serious, Lisa.

You’ve read the 1,000 files on the slaves from San Francisco. There is no life outside this island, is there? The information in this dossier, as you have repeatedly told the new trainers, should serve you well here.

I flipped to the summary of the training passed.

“Amazingly, the slave was returned immediately after a fortnight’s training in the country; in the meantime, many of the out-port guests were almost relentless in their efforts to get him to work. The elderly Countess of ‘Soho-Puru’ fell in love with the slave (see the accompanying note later). But the slave said that if a longer period of imprisonment could not be arranged, he would go elsewhere. Money was not the goal. The slave mentioned several times that he was afraid of younger masters, but he did not ask to avoid them. He said that it was especially terrible that people weaker than him insulted him.”

I turned to the last page. “This slave is sent with the highest recommendation (ideal for a ‘club’), but it must be emphasized: this slave is a novice. Keep an eye on him. While I can vouch for his agility and mental stability, I must add that he has not had much time to train! Although he passed the tests of the female managers here, they were stressful situations for the slave, who obviously feared women more than men. However, the slave refused to talk about women, saying that he wanted to do as much as he could to be accepted by the ‘club’. Repeat that again. He is to be watched. This slave responded well to women and was obviously deeply excited by them, but love created a strong conflict in this slave’s mind.”

I was skeptical about both sides of this man’s personality. I flipped through the file until I found a couple of small photos. I was correct in thinking that in the side shots, not facing the camera, Elliot B. Slater looked serious, almost cold. The pensive face reveals an element of true dread. I turned back to the page of smiling faces. It was endearing.

I closed the file without reading “P.S.: Some of the Mistresses and Mistresses who loved this slave.”

The Part. God knows how much more Martin writes. Martin should have been a novelist. Or maybe Martin should have been exactly what Martin was supposed to be.

I sat there, just looking at the manila paper cover. Then I opened the cover and gazed at Slater’s picture again.

I felt Diana near me, felt her warmth and her need. I was also able to feel in her a little apprehension about my nervousness about something else.

“I won’t be back for dinner,” I said. “Now get the hairbrush, I want a little cool Chanel to spray my face with.”

As soon as she walks toward the hairbrush, I push the button on the table.

She put the Chanel in a small refrigerator in the chemist’s room, let it get cold, and brought it wrapped in a clean facecloth cloth.

I patted my cheeks with Chanel perfume while she brushed my hair. No one combs it better than she does. She knows how to comb it.

Before she could finish brushing, the door opened. Daniel, my favorite valet, appeared in the doorway.

“It’s good to see you back, Lisa, we missed you,” he said. He looked at Diana. “Richard says the slaves will be in the foyer in another forty-five minutes. He needs you for something special.”

What a coincidence.

“Okay, Daniel.” I gesture to Diana to stop combing. I turn her body around and gaze at her. She lowers her head, her white hair flowing down around her body. “I’ll be busy,” I say. “I want Diana to work.”

I could feel her slight shock. For us, the most passionate moments always come after we part. There would be time nearer the evening, wouldn’t there? And she certainly knew that.

“Count Sorosky is here, Lisa. He wanted her and was refused.” Daniel said.

“Yes, good old Count Sorosky, he’s going to make her an international movie star, isn’t he?”

“That’s him.” Daniel said.

“Give her to him as a gift. Tie her up nicely with a ribbon, just like that.”

Diana threw me a shocked look, but she pouted and looked beautiful.

“If he doesn’t need her right away, let her work in the bar until late.”

“She didn’t offend you, did she, Lisa.”

“Not at all. It’s just the jet lag that got to me and we were hovering overhead for two hours.”

The phone is ringing.

“Lisa, we need you in the office.” It was Richard’s voice.

“I just got in, Richard. Give me twenty minutes and I’ll be there.” I put the phone down.

Diana and Daniel are gone. It’s so quiet.

I take another long sip of my cool gin while opening the file again.

“Elliot B. Elliot Slater. Berkeley, California… Trained in San Francisco by Martin Halifax. Halifax.”

Not just home, but places like Berkeley, San Francisco where you go on a special kind of austerity called “vacation.” No, they’re not. They’re the landmarks of a long journey that has taken me to this island, to this room.

In a semi-trance-like state, I seemed to remember things, or rather, to summon up again the way in which they had all begun. And in the beginning there was no Martin Halifax for me. Halifax.

I saw that first hotel room where I had made love if that’s what people call it remembering that hazy forbidden encounter, the smell that emanated from that leather, the lovely feeling of surrendering all self-control.

Was there any passion like that first passion? How strange it was, those long hours before the dream and its long hours of a ruthless master, a cruel master, a play of punishment and submission without real harm daring to describe it to another living person. And then there was meeting Barry, as handsome as a boy in a romance comic strip, in a university library in Berkeley, just a few blocks from my house, and having him ask, quite by chance, about the book I was reading, the very book the psychiatrists of the masochists had documented in their horrific imaginings, proving that… what was it? That there are people like me who want to break people and tie them up and be disciplined and tortured in the name of love.

Then there was that typical first date with his whisper in my ear. He said that it was exactly what he wanted, that he knew how to do it and did it well. He worked on the weekends as a bellboy in a very small but also very elegant hotel in San Francisco, and we could go there.

“Just go wherever you want.” He says this, and the blood throbs in my ears in a way that a kiss wouldn’t.

As I climbed the marble steps, I was terrified that we wouldn’t be able to use the elevator in the front hall and we looked like a couple of criminals as he opened the darkened junior suite. However, that was exactly what I wanted, yes, unfamiliar surroundings. He came across as determined, in control of the situation, with the right sense of timing, speed and knowing how to apply those strengths skillfully.

It was the flames of passion that ended up consuming everything even more quickly, because I hardly knew who he was.

Even now, I can’t remember his face. Only that he was good-looking, young, and healthy-looking, like every young man in Berkeley. Also, I know the house, and what street he lived on.

But the passion was almost unnameable, we were like two animals, we were crazy, we knew absolutely nothing about each other. A quiet, young high school girl, too serious for sixteen, and a college boy, barely two years older than I was, reading Baudelaire, uttering esoteric words about the senses, smoking marvelous light-colored Sherman’s cigarettes ordered directly from the company, wanting things I didn’t want, and having the status to do so, and what seemed to be real and reliable skill to do so.

We make discordant but beautiful music. What about danger? Is that exciting? No, it was an ugly undercurrent that only dissipated at the end of the night. At that moment, exhausted and silent, I followed him out of the hotel, peeked through the side door, and breathed a sigh of relief to know that nothing “terrible” had happened, that he hadn’t gone mad. “Dangerousness” was not a condiment, it was just the price I had to pay in those days.

In the depths of the Club, there has never been a price… that is its essence, its contribution, its raison d’être. No one has ever been harmed.

I met with him two more times and then he suggested a meeting with his friend David. By mid-afternoon, the three of us were together. At this point, the relationship lost its intimacy, and suddenly, we weren’t equal participants, and I was starting to get scared, wasn’t I? Suddenly, inhibitions came over me. He came to me with another friend and once again proposed and I felt betrayed.

It was followed by agonizingly long nights, wandering through downtown San Francisco, seeking out the faces that passed me by, peering into the lobbies of posh hotels, thinking. Yes, somewhere, somewhere there was a man, an elegant and experienced man, a new beginning, a certain man, a million times smarter, more majestic, more discreet than the original one.

Sitting next to the phone at home with the personnel section of the newspaper in front of me. Is it a code of sorts, representing that which is on my mind? Dare I dial two numbers? Bewildered by going through the routine of experiencing formal dances during my senior year of college, mumbling lies at movie dates, defending my indifference, my callousness. And that awful feeling of being a decadent, a secret criminal. Walking past the counter in the midst of idleness, there were leather gloves on the counter inside a glass box that looked faintly ominous despite the white toilet paper in the shallow box.

Yes, I would love these, these very, very long and tight black gloves… and the wide belt around my waist cinched like a peculiar girdle, and yes, once I could afford it, adding black silk and calf-hugging high boots. Finally in a bookstore close to the Berkeley campus, amidst silent skepticism and blushing excitement, I found the soul-stirring classic others must have known for years with its smooth white cover looking so innocuous, “The Story of Mother O”.

No, you’re not alone.

As I paid for the book, I felt that everyone in the bookstore was looking at me. However, I sat in the “Mediterranean restaurant” with my face flushed and my eyes staring blankly, flipping from page to page to see if anyone had seen the book, commented on it, and approached me. I closed the book when I had finished reading it all, and then gazed through the open door at the students hurrying down Telegraph Street in the rain, thinking: “I don’t want to spend my whole life in a fantasy, not like this, even if…”

I don’t ever call Barry again. What shocked everyone was not a mysterious personal ad in an underground newspaper, or a raucous conversation between a sadist and a masochist, but one of the most innocuous-looking little ads in the local San Francisco paper: the

Special Announcement. Applications are still being accepted at Roissy College. At this late date, only those who are fully familiar with the training program will apply.

“Roissy” is the fictional villa to which O is taken in the French novel “The Story of O”. It is impossible to misunderstand its meaning.

“But you won’t be using a whip, I mean, something that would actually do damage and cause intense pain…” I whispered over the phone. By this time we had discussed all the arrangements, including an interview at a restaurant in San Francisco and how we would get to know each other.

“No, honey,” Kim B. Paul said. “No one would do that except in a book.

”

Oh, those moments of waiting were pure agony, and those secret hopes and dreams…

When Kim Paul stood up from the table at the Enrico restaurant, he looked so European. When Paul stood up from the table at the Enrico, he looked so European. Velvet jacket, narrow collar. Like a handsome, dark-eyed French actor in a Visconti movie from memory.

“A really sexy American woman can be a real treasure,” he said as I finished my coffee.

“But why are we wasting time in this place? Come with me!”

Yes, agony, that’s the word, for being so young, so forced, so frightened… A certain pagan angel was watching over me in those days, yes.

But my mental clock has issued a silent warning. Richard was waiting, and now we were pagan angels. We had less than half an hour left before the new slaves would enter the foyer acceptance office.

(to be continued)