The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The Story

The last golden shots of fireworks broke apart in the sky, leaving a blanket of smoke hovering, in a heaven abandoned by its splendor, above the river, which had no more bursting pride to reflect. The crowd began to break up too, scattering in clusters in several directions. Larry watched it dissipate but stayed put on his perch by the water where he’d watched the sky during the kaleidoscopic explosions.

Then the ripping pops and blasts of amateur fireworkers began thudding, and he jumped down and made his way downtown.

The night was sultry and heat was like a weight in the air that made it hang heavy. The glare of the street lights and the flare of the store windows gave everything the feel of the cheap and the lurid.

He was torn between two forces. He was looking for something he was afraid he couldn’t find. He was hiding from something he was afraid he would.

Is this another story about loneliness and longing? Benjamin asked me as he leaned over my shoulder and read off what I had typed up on my computer screen.

It looks like it, I said, a little defensive, a little annoyed.

What’s the matter kid? Ain’t you happy with me?

It’s not that Benjy, I said, and you know it. But writing is something else. Maybe just because it is a solitary experience, so much of it is about loneliness and longing. In order to write you’ve got to cultivate a certain kind of loneliness which the writing is undertaken to relieve by making some kind of deferred contact with a phantom reader. The words become a song the lonely soul sings to itself that it desperately hopes will be overheard and find a place in someone else’s breast and find a channel in someone else’s voice.

You should put that in one of your stories, Ben said. But I knew he was thinking something else, that he was upset that I wasn’t contented with my place in his breast.

I can’t, I said. It’s too personal and besides, it lacks dramatic thrust or narrative momentum. All my stories keep getting subverted by lyricism.

Just like you, always fleeing from the earthbound, my tender little sparrow, my sentimentalist, he said, burying his face in the hollow formed in the place between my neck and shoulder and caressing my chest.

See, I said. What you’re doing right now empties out my mind entirely. All the vectors dramatically clashing against each other just lose all their force and sink into an inert mass.

I know, he whispered breathily into my neck. Writers have to suffer. Their lives must be defined by stress and unresolved conflicts. Flaubert lived with his mother, Balzac was plagued by debts, Tosltoy was afraid he was going to hang himself, Dostoevsky was torn between God and gambling, Mailer has to pay half a dozen alimonies, Pope was a hunchback, and you, you’re trying to give people a hard-on.

And I don’t seem to be succeeding, I said.

You are with me, he said.

But I haven’t sold one manuscript, I said, resolutely sticking to my complaint. I think I’m going to be an adjunct English teacher for the rest of my life.

And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’re still very sexy. You are, in fact, the sexiest adjunct English teacher I know. Actually, Benjy slipped into a Grouch Marx imitation, you’re the only adjunct English teacher I know. Come to bed with me and we can split some infinitives together. We’ll forget about syntax and be transitive. Meet me in the bungalow under the moonlight in half an hour. Or better yet meet me in the moonlight under the bungalow.

There was a lot of activity on the streets, and Larry wasn’t ready to call it a night. The recent boom of the fireworks as they broke in the sky and sped like spermatozoa towards him in their shredding concentricities had loosened something in him. When he got downtown, he stopped at a bar where a lot of guys were hanging around outside, posing and eyeing and waiting. He got himself a beer.

It was cold and he took a good swallow. The effect was immediate.

He looked around inside the red and yellow darkness. The guys he wanted to talk to, he felt nervous to approach. That one slouched all in black against the wall there and looking slightly undernourished, but oh, what that did for his cheekbones.

The guys he felt he could approach, he did not want to. He looked down when he saw a balding guy in a Hawaiian shirt open over a thatch of wiry chest hair looking to make eye contact.

Larry crunched the can as he took the last swallows of his beer and guided himself out of the bar before…before what? When he’d gotten half a block away and passed the crowd and by-passed any possibility of meeting anyone, he was relieved and disappointed.

He had to do something. He found a hypnotist in the yellow pages and made an appointment.

I want to take more initiative in my life, he told Dr. Melrose the first time he saw him. I want to achieve something in the world not just live in my inward ruminations. I don’t want to shrink every time I start to want something. I don’t want to get panicked in the face of my desire.

It’s you, thinly disguised, Benjy said, after he’d read the next section and we’d shut the lights and begun to cuddle.

No it isn’t, I said. It’s a work of the imagination. It’s fiction.

O cut is out, Arthur, he said. I live with you. I know you. I know your insecurities. I live with them, too.

He took me in an embrace and kissed me gently, and I knew he was trying to make me hear anything he was going to say without feeling threatened.

The funny thing is, he said, that the only reason you might have to be insecure is your insecurity. When it’s in control, you actually do become less attractive and less interesting—he kissed me gently on my lips before he finished the sentence—than you really and truly—punctuating each word with a kiss—are, both physically and…and other ways.

Thanks a lot, I said. It gave me strength to take offense. What he said, it was intended to knock me down. He didn’t need to say it.

Hey, he said. Am I still with you?

It’s not you, I said. It’s me. I’m not even with me sometimes. Sometimes I just get as stuck as the characters in my stories.

The quick shifts in my moods and my perspectives confused him. It felt like I was rejecting him—teasing him. But he made it into that. He was always cajoling, hungry for my acceptance. That made everything worse. He had chosen me to undermine his confidence. I blamed him for seeming so dependent.

Is it because I’m older than you? he said.

That’s out of nowhere, I said with a tone that sounded more annoyed than I meant it to.

He sighed.

I lost my hard on and with it that magnetic pull that drew me to him, and I turned over.

He put his hand on my thigh, but I didn’t respond.

The hypnotist kept telling Larry that he was not a magician, that it was all a matter of his own desire to change and, at best, he, the hypnotist was only a guide.

He told Larry to get the image of Svengali out of his head. He wasn’t going to capture his mind and turn him into a high tech robot rigidly obeying his will. In fact, he suspected that Larry wanted someone to impose his will on him, to control him and refashion him, he said. But it didn’t work that way. Hypnotism, in fact was hard work, he explained. Not the induction or getting the subject into a trance; that really wasn’t so hard, but making the changes suggested inside the trance. That was day to day, routine work. And that was not work that the hypnotist could do. There was only one will each person could be guided by, could follow, that had to be strong. And that was his own.

I’m the hypnotist, no? Benjamin asked as we were walking to the restaurant to meet Carl and Marty.

Oh, Benjy, I said. Must you see everything as pointing back to the real world? I’m trying to write fiction, to create characters, to describe made-up situations that reveal real truths. I want to go beyond myself and you and all that to get to something deeper, truer, more abiding.

I don’t know, Benjamin said. Sometimes I’m convinced that you have more feelings for ideas and abstractions than you do for people.

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I snapped back.

You always try to be so rational, I said.

It sounded harder than I meant to. That kept happening. And I know I hurt him. That also kept happening.

I’m sorry, I said.

It’s ok, he said, as we walked inside Mike’s Place and joined Carl and Marty who were waiting for us. But it really wasn’t so ok. We’d just act like it was. For how much longer?

When Michael moved to San Francisco he told Larry he wished it could have been otherwise.

Larry said perhaps it still could be. But Michael was resolute, which meant he wasn’t there anymore. It was the same body, but a different spirit, and when Larry tried to get a hold of him, he came up against a side of ice. It was impossible to get a grip. There was no traction what-so-ever. Michael had been replaced by another Michael.

The only reason you have for going away is because you’ve already gone away.

Larry felt the flicker of Michael’s former self pass over him like a phantom.

He’d always remember their first months together, Michael said, but it had to be this way. It couldn’t be otherwise. They’d gone too far and to deep, and the distance between them was unbridgeable. And the differences he’d discovered were too fundamental. Not only was the current shut off; the wiring wasn’t even there anymore.

Larry insisted and drove him to the airport, but Michael told him not to wait for his plane with him but to go. And he said it was better not to kiss good-bye or even embrace. Just a handshake and Good-bye; good luck.

That was already three months ago.

Dr. Melrose took Larry through some of his grief, slowly opening him to experiencing its pain. But when he started to work on Larry’s anger they hit a wall. Larry would not go into a trance.

There’s nothing, he’d say as it became obvious the induction was failing.

Perhaps, the hypnotist suggested after repeated failures, we ought to take a break for a few months.

Yeah, Larry said, with a tone of bitterness.

Yeah?

I feel like you’re abandoning me.

I can only take you as far as you will go. I told you I’m not a magical mesmerist who can compel you to visit mysterious realms against your will. I practice a technique which some people can avail themselves of. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. Right now, for you, it isn’t. And you wish I could force you to do what, it seems, you may not want to. You might consider looking into other sorts of interventions like psychotherapy, or perhaps even pharmacology.

Larry was quiet afterwards and left the office with a sinking feeling.

During the days that followed, he absorbed himself at work writing complicated computer programs. At night he walked through the hot city as we have seen, waging a battle somewhere inside himself. He didn’t know over what. Often he thought of Michael with a mixture of anger and desire.

After hours of this sort of nocturnal desolation he’d return to his small walk-up studio buzzing with exhaustion.

He didn’t get a therapist, and he didn’t try to get on meds. Summer gave way to autumn, and his company sent him to a programmers’ convention in Seattle where his paper on algorithms was a big success and made him the focus of a lot of attention over the five days of the conference. He was even offered a job in Santa Barbara by a guy who cornered him at the cash bar after he’d read his paper.

At first he thought Philip was looking for a night away from home, but soon it was clear that it wasn’t that, or that it wasn’t only that or that he wasn’t only looking for a one night stand.

You’re awfully cute when you get confused, Philip said, especially when I contrast it with your deadly logical mind when you’re thinking about algorithms.

Larry blushed.

See, said Philip putting his arm around him. That’s what I mean. I really do want you to come to Santa Barbara. You’re just what the department needs.

And you? Larry said, surprising himself, what do you need?

Oh, me, Philip said giving him a tongue lick in the ear. I’m gay, I don’t need anything.