The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The next three months of my life are busy ones. Livia trains me in stage magic — not to nearly her degree of skill, but enough that I can participate competently in the show. She’s a harsh and demanding teacher — things in the Scandal Show have to be perfect for her to be satisfied, and she focuses obsessively on getting all the little details right. I didn’t expect how rigorous the training would be, but I take to it well. My life prior to this had grown indulgent and lackadaisical; I had become stagnant. Men need structure to grow. I thus find my new boss’s rigor and professional demands refreshing.

Having a centerfold as a teacher probably provides some motivation, too — especially one I officially have permission to flirt with. (I mean, I totally would anyway, but still...) It’s not long before I’m a genuine magician’s assistant — the sexy kind, of course. That’s pretty cool. Like a lot of pickup artists, I have an interest in self-improvement, so expanding my horizons is always a positive thing for me. It’s a really optimistic time — I no longer feel my life is stalled; something new is happening.

I also learn the skills of a grip and gaffer — for those not in on the Hollywood lingo, grips are people who move things around on a film set, and gaffers are movie-specific electricians responsible for wiring on set. Livia actually hires a film veteran to teach me for two weeks. Both hats come very quickly to me — I’ve got a history in trades, and unlike many glamour-focused men I’m not at all averse to a little manual labor. I’m proud, honestly, to be the show’s heavy lifter — it makes me feel both masculine and productive. Livia ogling me covetously whenever I work up a sweat is a nice side-perk — I work shirtless whenever believable, and not just for the reasons of comfort in the Australian heat that I share with her.

Once the show acquires support staff, I will end up as the key grip for the show, training said staff in how to set up a location for filming. Casual blue-collar hires often don’t take Livia as seriously — they try to flirt with her and ignore her instructions, so having a dominant male organizer is good for the show. The leadership aspect is more novel to me than the labor aspect — but I’m charismatic and a natural leader. Or so I’m told, at least. The leadership’s in the future, though — for now, it’s just the three of us.

I live with Livia and Mimi in the Beast, getting my own room — nothing as opulent as Livia’s, and really a fairly cramped space. I do, however, get an enthusiastic approval from Livia to use her crib for hookups any time I want — provided I don’t mind her taping the results. Kinky!

We agree that anything she tapes would be for her private collection — I have no problem with the idea of there being a sex tape of me circulating; it can only serve to improve my profile. But most of the ladies I pull would not be up for that. I’m sleazy enough to make secret tapes of an encounter, but not enough to let them get out and hurt a partner’s reputation. Livia even offers to show me choice selections from said private collection if I get her something hot enough. That’s tempting, but I blow it off for now.

I don’t progress with seducing Livia much in this time. I could — I probably could bang her by the end of the first month — but we are both people that appreciate the chase, and we’re going to be in close quarters for the foreseeable future, so I don’t want to use up the sexual tension too quickly. I know I need to wait for the perfect setup to actually ‘capture’ her the way she seems to want.

So, you’re probably wondering about Life with Lascivious Livia™. It’s not actually as over-the-top as you might expect — she’s a character, for sure, but she can also be down-to-earth. You all, O Impressionable Readers, have only seen her larger-than-life stage persona. It’s not entirely fake, but it also doesn’t give a good picture of her day-to-day existence.

First, Livia wasn’t kidding about the prop thing. I quickly learn she’s some kind of perfectionistic, perverted polymath. She’s incredibly driven, systematic and meticulous for a woman whose basic motive is weird kinky indulgence. We always imagine libertines to be laid-back slacker types, but Livia demolishes that archetype. She’s a technical thinker at heart — the type of nerd that, even if charismatic, has a rough time in casual social interaction. She’s the perfect mark for the ‘magic formula’ angle on pickup artistry — the sort of person that wishes sex appeal was procedural rather than interpersonal.

It’s obvious to me after spending some time with her that she’s a deadly serious workaholic devoted to running a very silly, sexy show. For me — at this point, at least — this is all a lark; a novel experience with lots of opportunities to meet hotties and get laid. It’s also Livia’s odd, perverted dream, though, and I resolve not to be insensitive to how much this seems to mean to her.

At least she’s not neurotic. The stereotype about stand-up comics is supposed to be that they’re all some combination of neurotic, angsty and misanthropic in their personal lives, right? You know, the tears behind the laughter and all. I wouldn’t say that about Livia. She’s a bit OCD and has her melancholic periods, but overall really is sunny, impish and wildly oversexed.

The other thing I learn about her is how deeply Livia wants. She was being completely candid with me in our first long conversation. Her libido rivals my own. It burns inside of her like a whirling dynamo, powering her stage charisma and drive to make her peculiar show-concept not just a success but perfect.

I’m so used to girls being sexually naïve — caterpillars that have to be carefully cultivated into the chrysalis of exploring their own sexuality and discovering the depth and peculiarity of their own carnal needs. Livia’s self-assured, goal-oriented sexuality is refreshing to me even if its intensity can seem faintly threatening at times. I’ve never met a woman as methodical or process-oriented in fulfilling her intimate desires as Livia is.

What she wants isn’t just cock, or pussy, or exceptionally attractive partners. Fetishes are games and novelties to me — ways to spice up sex and keep it interesting. To Livia, they’re basic needs. She hungers for very complex, fetishistic scenarios of trickery and teasing that all tie back on some level to the primal scene she described to me of the magician stealing the girl’s bra.

I’ve always been about experiencing each new conquest as a distinct individual, a person with her own foibles and quirks inside the bedroom and out. Livia’s less concerned with her partners as people than she is with the fetish archetypes they can be cast into. Like a lot of more serious fetishists, Livia also struggles with intense frustration. When she gets near her perfect moment and it goes off in a different direction or the victim isn’t wearing the right thing or doesn’t respond the right way, she perceives it as a veritable tragedy and grows embittered and melancholy. She recovers, though — she dresses down for a while and locks herself in the prop labs and focuses obsessively on crafting things, and after a few days she’s back to her cheerful old self again.

Funding is an issue for us. I can’t imagine what the Great Beast had cost to purchase, but even its upkeep is substantial. I know that profits from the NFL half-time have gone into the Beast, and apparently much of Mimi’s life savings as well; she’s “all in” with Livia’s dreams to a degree that honestly makes me a bit uncomfortable at this point.

There are also apparently some some “wealthy private investors” whose involvement may have been secured through Livia’s sexual wiles. It is mysterious, and vaguely sinister, to me. I get a four grand speakers’ fee for my SexCon panels, and Livia gets ten for the four shows she did there culminating in the Taurus Escalation. SexCon apparently fined her two grand for the smoke bombs and vanishing act at the end. I put the SexCon money into the Spectacular, since Livia was apparently responsible for me getting the gig to begin with.

I have substantial residuals from my books — they were both bestsellers for a few weeks the year each was published — but they have also been depleted in my decline by a moderate and lackadaisical lifestyle. And I have a small stipend from my family to never cause them trouble. So I work for three months without actually getting paid — not a big deal to me in my position; my expenses have never in my life been this low — but I don’t drop any personal funds into the kitty. Yet.

One night in the middle of January, I awake with a start to feel very tiny, very sharp legs digging into my abs. I tear off the covers — and experience a moment of surreal terror, being uncertain if I am asleep or awake, faced with a visual image so dissonant I’m paralyzed for a few seconds as my mind struggles to process it.

A... thing stares up at me. It’s about six inches long, chitinous and has something like a vertical crab’s pincer where any creature put together in a sane way would have a head. Initially, I think it is some kind of plastic child’s toy — it’s only when I look carefully, and realize it is very much organic, and alive, that the true terror begins. An insect, or a crustacean, or perhaps an alien parasite looking to burrow its way into my body and eat my spinal cord. It stands on my naked torso, arching its carapace insolently at me.

The fact that it is dyed hot pink and metallic purple, and its carapace is patterned with ornate psychedelic swirls, does nothing to conceal its Gigeresque anatomy or the sheer surreal horror of its inexplicable presence. In fact, I think it may be heightening both.

I raise a clenched fist up in growing panic to crush the abhorrent creature — and then I remember the scene from Dr. No with the tarantula, and why Bond didn’t just crush it. So I stand very still and study the creature. Eventually I can see the brush-marks where its shell has been painted in such colorful patterns. This isn’t some otherworldly predator; it’s someone’s eccentric pet. Given the color scheme, it only takes me a moment to figure out the most probable owner.

I pick up a manila folder from my bedside table, hoping to get it off my torso and on to the cardboard. I blow on it slightly, hoping to nudge it forward. With shocking speed, the twin sections of its carapace split apart and it spreads its wings. They make a ferocious sound like a jackhammer, and the creature leaps into the air — it must have cleared a good four meters in the blink of an eye.

I scream like a girl. (I’m not suave all the time, you know — just most of the time.)

When I manage to force my panic back down, I shout for the party I am pretty sure is responsible. “Mimi! MIMI! Get your ass to my room NOW!”

I hear a muffled shout back. “Ass coming pronto, Marcie!”

A minute passes. This... neon aberration perches on top of a green-lidded, retro-style banker’s lamp with an ornate and vaguely Gothic bronze frame on top of my dresser in the cramped room, and I end up engaged in a kind of staredown with my unexpected, surreal nemesis, Sergio Leone style.

A minute later, Mimi opens the door. She’s wearing a frilly pink babydoll, and it’s faintly translucent. I can almost see her nipples. Yes, I notice that. I might only be suave most of the time, but let’s be honest here — I’m a horndog 24/365.

“Mimi... is that yours?”

“Ooh! Marc, meet Keith Rand Buchanan. Keith, this is Marcelo Ambrose Knight, our staff pickup artist. He’s hyper-awesome, and a real sweetie. You two should be friends!”

“Flattery stops working when my heart rate clears one forty, Mimi!”

“Sorry. He must have got out of his case. I had to put him in isolation. He and David Byers Tannen are both alphas, you see, and they fight, and it messes up the dye-work on their horns so I had to separate them last Tuesday. The new wing of the Grand Manor must not have been sealed properly...”

“Mimi... what is it?”

“Keith Rand Buchanan.”

“Mimi!”

The creature apparently gets startled when I shout. It hops down from the lid of the lamp — and kicks the two-pound desk lamp over defiantly. Yikes!

“Umm... Keith is a Hercules beetle, Marcelo. I keep them as pets.”

“The, uh, the lamp...”

“They can lift eight hundred times their own body weight.”

“Right. Of course they can. Silly me.”

“Also, I, um... make have made use of certain legally ambiguous hormone-steroid cocktails to breed them for size...”

“Why is it... er, why is he pink?”

“I dye and style them. Don’t worry, it’s a safe organic dye that doesn’t cause keratin irritation, and I’m very careful about the wings and —”

“I don’t care, Mimi. Can you get him out of my room?”

“Sure.”

So Mimi goes over and makes cooing noises at the eldritch atrocity in pink. I would be irritated, but she needs to bend over to do so, and as she does, she... dangles. So I bring out my inner voyeur and let it gently massage my heart-rate back to a healthier level. Eventually, Mimi entices the beetle into the palm of her hand, and we walk to a normally-locked closet. Above tightly-packed dresses, sexy costumes and other clothes there’s a shelf, and on that shelf is an ornate, miniature Antebellum mansion. I actually noticed that earlier, a few times — it’s very finely-crafted, with a lot of detail work — but I never noticed that it was inhabited.

Now, I see another beetle — this one dyed in shades of metallic blue — peek out at me from one of the windows. It... is wearing a little, beetle-sized black felt top hat. The absurd image burns itself into my mind. Tally ho, motherfucker! I’m a beetle, I can lift 800 times my body weight, and I’m wearing a hat like the Monopoly guy because my owner is a bimbo with too much time on her hands!

I can already tell life with the Sexy Scandal Spectacular will be many things, but predictable is not going to be one of them.

In early February we drive the Beast down to Surfer’s Paradise, an Australian surfer town and tourist mecca vaguely similar to Fort Lauderdale in the US. You have to love Queensland weather — hot days top twenty degrees in February, with colder ones around fifteen. One of the city’s iconic attractions is its bikini-clad meter maids — ladies who patrol the streets paying up the parking meters of cars about to incur a ticket. It’s a scheme by the local tourism board that has blown up and attracted a lot of media interest and tourist revenue.

Many of them are amateur models eager for exposure. I can say from personal experience many of them are gorgeous, with their bronze-tanned skin, trim athletic bodies and gold lamé bikinis. They wear big cowboy hats and sashes with the words “meter maid” on them, making them look like contestants in a cowgirl beauty pageant. A few of them hate the work or are just puritanical, but many of them are party girls and libertines. Queensland is one of the most conservative regions of Australia, and Livia believes that a lot of bi and gay girls here deny their own sexuality. She and Mimi hope to “educate” some of them in a rather intimate manner.

Interspersed with my magic training, I’m apparently going to get some field experience — we’re going to run a racket on the meter maids. We invent an amateur gameshow that we call “You Bet Your Bikini”, which is exactly what it sounds like. The maids aren’t supposed to get naked on the job, obviously. But we have a clever scheme.

Mimi hacks the tourism board employment database and the local college’s enrollment lists. Many maids are just paying their way through college, and plan to leave Surfer’s Paradise once they graduate. So we compile a long list of names and pictures of meter maids that will have “nothing to lose” in five months, and correlate it against mentions on scene BBSes to find the party girls and wild types.

Then we use our access to the shift rosters to park a rented van — not our huge Neoplan, obviously — where the girls we want would pay for it. It helps that our party girl marks hang together in cliques, so we can grab a bunch at once. Running pickup on them is ridiculously easy. They want exposure, and we offer them two hundred each (plus any prizes they might win) with a clause on the model release forms saying the footage wouldn’t be released in the next six months or damages will be paid. I’m in a black Speedo with Ray-Bans and my Triskelion and Livia’s in a tight, pink spandex one-piece. I think our marks want me as much as they want exposure.

We film six episodes with three or four girls each. That’s over forty exposed nipples, folks! It’s a simple trivia quiz show, with the girls against each other; in the later three episodes we reconfigured the format to fit what the girls seem to want most — I am a contestant and they can compete to try and strip me, as I can them. God, my new life kicks ass. Livia takes a maniacal, almost supervillain-esque glee at using me as bait to separate cute girls from their clothing. Her energy is just infectious.

The show is built from the ground up to become a promo reel — to be released for free to promote one of the big shows we intended to be an Escalation — and for late-night public access broadcast, censored, with an infomercial to buy the real tapes. We coach many of the girls to be more coy and demure than they might otherwise be about losing their tops, giving the resulting footage far more sexual tension and transgressive thrills, and Livia affirms her chosen epithet by providing some deliciously lascivious one-liners as the tight lamé bikinis pop off.

And yes, there are some glorious hookups. I bring a busty meter maid back to Livia’s crib and have the pleasure of being her first introduction to anal sex. I hear from Mimi that the fresh-faced young Chinese girl Livia brings back to her hookup den proves to be depressingly straight, but does agree to some erotic hypnosis and apparently leaves with an entirely consensual post-hypnotic suggestion to have a body-wracking power orgasm whenever a guy she considers cute smacks her ass.

I actually track her down to test out this rumor, trailing her from a distance until a cocky surfer smacks her and she collapses writhing as he runs off. I help her up chivalrously, and brazenly ask the deep-breathing nymphet if she feels she ought to be spanked for such a lewd public display.

She agrees, and the results are quite pleasurable for said young lady, and quite appealing for me to watch. I walk away with a big grin on my face, a new phone number to call and a damp spot on my slacks where she ground against me as the pleasure overcame her. Hypnotism fascinates me at this point, and its apparent power makes Livia seem even more captivating.

There’s one episode of YBYB that stands out above all others, however. Its star is a cute half-Maori optometry student I lure in named Whina. (Early editions of our tapes list it as ‘Fina’ — sorry about that, sweetie! Sincerely! We only ever hear it verbally, we all end up a bit distracted given what goes down when she signs the final model release, and she never initially corrects it. We do get it fixed much later in the remasters, at least.)

She’s about my height, with dark black eyes, luxuriantly smooth golden skin that contrasts amazingly with gold lamé, all-natural C-cups and short, curly black hair. She’s very demure and shy, but also deeply horny — her Aura is radiant. She giggles nervously a lot and seems very eager to please everyone around her — especially me, even if she can’t keep her eyes off my body whenever I’m near her.

It’s the thin, long, devilish sideways smile she constantly flashes that makes her so intriguing to me. It says to me, I want to do wicked things I’ve never done before, but I’m just too shy. I need someone to talk me into it, guide me through it. Would you do that for me? Yes, baby — I sure would. She’s like a naughty moon to Livia’s naughty sun: demure, passive and meek where Livia is bombastic, lecherous and brassy, yet still conveying a deeply-embedded horniness and sexual need.

She doesn’t talk a lot, but her blissful smiles speak volumes about the private, nasty images running through her mind as we film. She proves to be incredibly susceptible to my Eyefucking — and really seems to love it. I can tell her private imagination is running away with the subtly lewd hints I seed into her subconscious with my gaze and body language, and I wish I was privy to the details of what she’s visualizing.

She isn’t the first to lose her bikini top — and sadly for Livia, shows no interest in her friends getting naked. When she finally blows a question, she hesitates, almost panting, before untying her gold top to reveal her perfect caramel teardrops and plump black nipples. She’s sweating, squirming and giggling — clearly embarrassed to be topless, but also incredibly aroused. I think she’s both a strong exhibitionist and a strong submissive.

After losing her top, she competes fiercely to get me naked. She really has no chance, though, when I can annihilate all conscious thought in her mind with a simple gaze. She constantly covers her chest with her hands defensively, which only makes it all the more alluring to me and Livia — though we do talk her into doing some jumping jacks to please the more mainstream audience. Livia even cheers her on. “Bounce, baby, bounce!”

Her chest can’t help but obey. Her modesty is strong, but her desire to please people — and, honestly, to obey me — is stronger. She can’t resist it. I think she enjoys that feeling of helplessness, honestly. Livia clearly loves her predicament as well, vibrating in place with excitement.

Well, predictably, she ends up botching a question with her bottoms on the line. She’s simultaneously mortified and aroused by that, and toys with the strings nervously. She’s a magnificent natural tease without even trying to be. She pulls the string bow on her bottoms undone and lets them hang there, staring at me desperately, covering her dangling boobies with one arm. Black bush peeks enticingly over the line as her gold bottoms slide slowly down and hit the floor. Her fellow contestants giggle at her expense.

She looks directly at me. “Do you like my body, Mister Knight?”

Yes, I sure do. But Livia is right beside me and almost giddy, and I can’t resist the temptation to impress her a bit. “Yes, Whina, you’re just gorgeous. Mimi, get a long slow pan up her body, would you? But first... Whina, can you stand a bit more naturally?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re covering your chest again and you’ve got you legs clamped so tightly together. Could you run your hands through your hair and get your feet in a bit of a wider stance?”

She knows exactly what I mean. I use my eyes and give her a little lewd incentive to show us more. She raises her hands to her head and gives me and the camera a nervous smile, giggling awkwardly. Her nipples are so hard right now. She’s sweating slightly, and it makes her golden complexion positively radiant. Her legs start to slide apart, and we get a much more explicit look at the black bush and golden lips between them.

The camera gradually climbs up her body. I’d like it to catch her with an especially aroused and erotic look on her face when it reaches there, however. I stare at her and thrust my body forward subtly. Yeah, baby — imagine it sliding in, just like that! Wouldn’t that feel so good for you right now? I know it would feel pretty good for me...

Making Whina squirm is so very much fun, and I can see she enjoys it as much as I do. Unfortunately — or rather, fortunately — I push things a bit too far. Whina’s gaze is locked on mine, living out a somatic-tactile fantasy with me, when her eyes go wide and she gasps loudly. Her hands snap down to cover her chest once more. Mimi wisely focuses out, back into a full body shot. And then, well... she just can’t control herself. Whina falls on her cute little butt, legs splayed, and pops off like a vigorously-shaken bottle of champagne.

Yes. I not only made a girl come with just my eyes, I made her squirt. I mean, until now I wasn’t even sure that was a real thing outside pornos! Her whole body trembles as she hoses down the pavement with the byproducts of her overly fertile imagination. I swear to God, I did not know she was such an epic squirter until she involuntarily demonstrated it right there in the middle of our tacky amateur game show on a public beach. Oops! That little accident and its furiously blushing aftermath makes for one of the best “woah!” moments we have on film to date.

As soon as Livia is alone with me, she abandons her poise and signature coy sophistication — trading it in for high-pitched girlish giddiness. She’s literally jumping up and down. “Bloody hell! That was fuckin’ ace! You made that bint squirt just by starin’ at ’er! Even I have to get ’em to sit through an induction first! How the bleedin’ Christ did you do that?! I mean, I mean, I know — I read your books — but still! Jumpin’ Jesus on a pogo stick, that was sick! I wish I could do it! I’d go totally spare with it too, you know. Just wall-to-wall drenched bloomers everywhere you look!

“I’d see some random totty with a nice rack walking by on the streets, and pull down my sunglasses to stare at her all aloof and cool-like, and BAM! The little chickadee’s on her hands and knees, helpless and moaning, desperate for it! And that’s not even considering how much fun I’d have at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, or even the Oscars. And, oh boy, would it have made my high school years more bearable! The reputations of all those priggish girls that sneered at me for bein’ some kind of pervert would get a right good seeing-to! A really, ah, abrupt, public, noisy and moist seeing-to, if ye know what I’m sayin’!”

I’m imagining the ending of Zapped here, just with squirting orgasms in place of telekinetic stripping. “My dear, you should never be allowed near power,” I tell Livia in a droll but playful tone.

“Well, I already have lots of power, so pffht!” she quips back, sticking her tongue out at me. I’ve got a feeling this new chapter of my life is going to be... interesting, in the old Chinese sense. And probably also a wee bit deranged.

I could point out that Whina is a unique case — she apparently just discovered through practical experience how into exhibitionism and teasing she can get — and I can’t do this to other girls. I don’t, though. I’ll explain it later. Given how I’ve slid into revering Livia recently, it’s deeply satisfying to me to be able to elicit some awe from her for once. She’s, like... I dunno, my role model or something. She has all the same pervy interests I do, but instead of treating them as a disgraceful slacker period that’s going to end Any Day Now™, she’s got this huge ambitious vision to actually make use of them as a career.

With the model release forms, we have no legal need to negotiate with Whina to release the orgasm footage, but there’s still a moral concern. She ran away, mortified, after the incident. She also apologized profusely, despite both of us assuring her that she was the star of the show — I guess it comes with that ‘pleaser’ personality type. We track her down the next day, though, once she’s had time to calm down.

She does finally agree to sign off on the footage in exchange for both a decent chunk of change and the unspoken agreement that I will give her a bonus for her on-screen humiliation in the form of an extensive, off-screen deep dicking. Her idea, not mine, even if she only ever suggested it in the most elusive of terms. Sadly, she isn’t interested in playing with Livia, or any other girls. I’m happy to say I hold up my end of the bargain with attentive interest and great sensual skill. I hold up her end too, actually, albeit in a rather more literal way. Whina has a very nice end — firm, brown and fit.

Unfortunately, I can’t cover what goes down in private in too much detail. It’s always the sweetest, most submissive girls that settle on the most jealous and possessive boyfriends and husbands, isn’t it? I suppose, to them, that possessiveness must be really attractive. Thus, in the interests of discretion, I will simply say that each of us have two showers during the evening we spend together and leave the rest to your imagination, O Dirty-Minded Reader.

Whina is not our last adventure in Surfer’s Paradise, even if she’s hard to top. Livia and I plan to double-team another promising mark who Livia is sure has a “bendable” sexual orientation, but she sadly ditches us before the planned date. I probably could nail Livia that very night, she’s so worked up, but in retrospect I’m glad I show restraint — our first real sex is still several chapters ahead, but it is clever, hot and well worth waiting for.

I also hear that Livia and Mimi are introducing a very petite, shy brunette with a bob-cut to lesbianism in the form of a spontaneous threesome. The three of them have a date to drive down to a kinky lesbian club in Brisbane for a night out. (I’m not invited, obviously.) Their mark will end up bailing after a finger-orgasm, leaving Livia in a hellacious, bitter mood — but that’s not what’s most memorable to me right now. It’s Mimi’s prep for their triple date. She’s been a bit stressed, working hard on editing the YBYB tapes. I remember this, because it’s the first time I see Mimi “change”. The duo saunters into the Beast’s kitchenette and ask me how they look, decked out in their best fancy clubwear.

“Ridiculous and delectable,” I tell them, and it’s true — Livia’s outlandish eyecatch fashion sense and Mimi’s obsessive pink color theming definitely make them memorable.

The ladies are pleased with my assessment, looking at each other and giggling in delight. Then Mimi says, “But if we’re really going to cut loose, I think I need to get a lot stupider first!”

“Sure,” Livia agrees. “I don’t think it will freak our date too much, and you’ve definitely earned it.”

So Mimi goes over to a small mirror on the wall, meeting her own gaze and staring into it before she says what I assume is a hypnotic trigger word.

The only thing that changes is the body language and voice, but it’s still striking. I didn’t realize there were faint creases of worry on her face until I see them just vanish in an instant. There’s a nimbus around her suddenly of vacuous positivity and good cheer. Her eyes seem wider, making her almost doe-eyed and childlike. She seems unnaturally happy, blissing out, and giggles uncontrollably as the pink hypnotic rush flows through her mind. The transformation is subtle, but also eerie and otherworldly, evoking in me a strong sense of wonder and a vague foreboding.

Once, long ago, I hear Mimi had a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde deal, where she cultivated two distinct personas: a serious, somber and smart woman and a vacuous, pink-obsessed hypnotic bimbo. That’s no longer the case, however — the bimbo lifestyle is present even when she’s not hypnotically altered like this. So sometimes she’s playing at being a bimbo, and sometimes she really is a bimbo. When she’s on stage, for example, she often plays a bimbo role — it’s her default persona — despite being in full possession of her mental faculties. But when she looks in a mirror and says her trigger words, it’s like she enters an altered state of consciousness.

To complicate things even further, Livia tells me every subject of hypnosis has something called a Hilgard’s hidden observer — the higher part of the mind that can stay unaffected by the hypnosis. That’s why, for example, when you hypnotize people to tell them they can’t see a chair, they still subconsciously walk around it instead of walking into it and falling over. In Mimi’s case, this means that if she’s in her bimbo state and something’s happening that her higher mind is really uncomfortable with (or that her hidden observer perceives as dangerous, even if a bimbo wouldn’t), she drops back out into her natural mind. All Livia’s trances are built to lean into rather than work around this Hilgard observer concept, apparently, as an added safety measure.

Mimi’s been in full hypnotic bimbo state several other times around me. I can’t honestly say I’m not tempted. She radiates a kind of pervading, submissive horniness. I dropped a file once, and asked her to pick it up. She did so, giving me an outrageous view of her ass in a hot pink skirt. She was totally oblivious to my motives. It was like the scene in every secretary porno ever. No one ever said anything about it to me. She seems so credible, so gullible, as a bimbo. I just know I could talk her into anything. But... I don’t want to screw this up, so I don’t push my luck.

It’s only hours later, when Mimi and Livia are dancing in Brisbane, that the thought coalesces in my mind. I’ve naturally been seeing this whole hypno-bimbo thing as a bit sinister. I mean, Mimi clearly consents, but there’s still a creepy element.

It hits me when I consciously realize I can’t stop thinking about Mimi’s conditioning — I can’t stop thinking. I mean, thinking is autonomic, isn’t it? You can’t stop doing it, just because you want to. Except Mimi — she can. I had been thinking that Mimi’s hypnotic conditioning makes her unable to think. But through the simple realization that I can’t stop thinking about it, a very different interpretation occurs to me — one that I’m honestly a lot more comfortable with. Isn’t is also possible that hypnosis makes her able to not think?

Food for thought — pun intended.

It’s also in this period that the tradition of Pervy Movie Mondays in the Great Beast is established. It’s a bit weird at first — watching films with Livia and Mimi that normally guys watch and girls pretend not to have seen — but I quickly get over that. Livia wants me to catch up on The Benny Hill Show as part of my training to grok comedic timing — it’s a big influence on her prop comedy — and we all get distracted by the sexy dance troupe, the Hill’s Angels. From there we end up raiding the local Blockbuster for anything that looks pervy, funny and hot. It’s a weird new frontier to perv on girls with other girls, but I like it.

I show Livia some of my favorite, less-known and more-exploitative teen sex comedies — the Screwballs trilogy, Gimme an F, Joysticks, Hardbodies, School Spirit, Malibu Bikini Shop, HOTS and even a new one that just came out — Can It Be Love. She adores them, and (perhaps frighteningly) takes notes on the elaborate pranks used in them to expose young ladies.

We eventually get to the mainstream ones like Revenge of the Nerds, which she was already a huge fan of — it seems to resonate with her even more deeply than it does with me. She’s over the moon for the moon room scene (pun intended), loving the idea of going down on an oblivious coed beauty who thinks it’s her boyfriend. I’m more about the voyeur bits earlier in the film, but I admit to liking that too. It’s weirdly cathartic for me — admitting to a hot woman I’m into that yes, that’s a rape scene, and yes, I find it pretty hot. Those were always secret thoughts I was vaguely ashamed of, before that night.

Livia explains to me that she mostly had British movies in her sexually formative years — British sex comedies are much like American ones, but uniformly terrible. Yes, even by the low standards of Chuck Vincent and Fred Olen Ray, Robin Askwith casts a long and gruesome shadow. There are, as Livia puts it, some choice young crumpets in the frequent nude scenes. Shame about literally everything between those scenes, however. I agree with her assessment on both counts.

She also introduces me to The First Nudie Musical, a genuinely good if obscure film. That bottomless tap-dancing number has to be seen to be believed — it’s both scorching and hilarious, and probably inspired Livia’s love of sexy formal suits on sexy women (and men, though that’s far more mainstream). The dancing dildos, on the other hand, are just hilarious.

The lesbian butch dyke song might not be very PC, but it’s still the first time in a non-porn film that a sexually aggressive butch lesbian was made to seem sexy and interesting as opposed to just repulsive or scary — I can see why she’d adore that so, even if her own image leans more femme. And all three of us bond over our bitterness that, despite the film’s fluffy, pro-nudism theme, cute lead actress Cindy Williams never gets her kit off (as Livia puts it).

What sticks in my mind the most, though, is a moment that happened when we were watching Caveman — you know, the Ringo Starr slapstick comedy. Mimi’s in full bimbo mode, and Livia and Mimi are giggling and whispering to each other throughout the film — it would be a bit irritating if I hadn’t already seen it. Admittedly, it is a very silly, endearing film — exactly the kind of thing that inspires that kind of crazy wheezing laughter. We get to the very end — the bit where Ringo picks up Barbara Bach’s sexy bad girl character and tosses her into a huge, messy pile of what’s supposedly dinosaur doodoo. Mimi starts laughing at this, staring at the screen — I guess it might be appealing to her WAM fetish, as it looks more like mud than real poop — and just can’t stop.

She’s sitting in Livia’s lap, laughing hysterically. I can’t help but stare at her — she’s in casual clothes including a tight t-shirt, and she’s jiggling wildly as her whole body convulses. Tears run down her cheeks. Slowly, though, the body language changes. She’s flushed. She starts gasping and moaning, rubbing her thighs together. I wonder if I’m hallucinating even as I quietly pick up a pillow to cover my raging hard-on. Livia clearly knows what’s up — her hands snake down to squeeze and grope Mimi’s immense breasts. The bubbly blonde arches her back and sighs, and Livia leans down and kisses her gently on the temple as she comes back to earth.

Yeah, she just had a full-on orgasm. No doubt in my mind whatsoever. It just came out of nowhere, and was honestly pretty hot to watch. I should probably just ignore it, but I can’t. I’m too curious. “Mimi?”

The flushed blonde laughs awkwardly. “Oh, uh, you know. Sometimes when I’m really happy, I just have an orgasm. Laughter feels good and orgasms feel good, and they kind of blend together.”

Ah. I’m guessing that’s a bit of positive association conditioning linking sexual pleasure to vacuous giggling that went a bit overboard. I’m almost envious. She clearly had fun, though, and a spontaneous, literal laughter-gasm just sounds like a neat experience.

Another memorable conquest on Surfer’s Paradise features a bronzed amazon meter maid almost a foot taller than me — a toned Aussie hardbody with bolt-on fake tits, about as muscular as a lady can be while still looking feminine. She has severe features and curly, tangled blonde hair that hangs down to her waist. After the last rather heated YBYB round, she asks me if I would walk with her on her shift by the beach. I sure would! She suggests we make out, but warns me that I better not have “wandering hands” or I might bring out her “animalistic side”.

Well, I know a cue when I hear one. I grope her ass as we kiss, and she moans softly. People are watching. I spin her around and press her up against the railing to the beach as I run my hands over her body, squeezing her knockers. We have onlookers at this point. She swings back around and straddles me. She is on shift, I might remind you. It’s mid-day and the sun is blazing down. People are watching our embrace, but we aren’t doing anything obviously illegal. “You’re a very bad man,” she whispers into my ear. I trace my fingers along her pussy lips, enjoying the feeling of the slightly damp gold lamé.

I balance her against the opaque railing so the beach-goers can only see her back, with her ass obscured by a promotional poster, and my body blocking the passing cars and shop-fronts from seeing below her waist.

“One of the worst,” I reply to her as I slide the tacky gold bikini bottoms aside and shove two fingers into the wet pussy of a woman who, if angered, could probably break me in two. I vigorously fuck her to a wet vocal orgasm right there on Surfer’s Paradise Beach, using only two fingers and two eyes. I hug the sweat-soaked amazon for a few minutes, resting my face on her shoulder and gazing down at her magnificent gold-encased cleavage as I wonder if there’s any way to do something with my cock. Then we both see the cops approaching and bolt apart in different directions. I never see her again, unfortunately. I can’t remember her name, but I’ve remembered her voice, attitude and bangin’ bod to the day I write this.

Good times.

I invented the Sieve, but it’s fair to say Mimi perfects it. She takes my simple lists of the subtle cues women give indicating that they’re aroused, or sexually frustrated, or turned on by a specific fetish, and refines it into a nearly industrial process.

The root method of Livia’s magic ambitions lies in the act of picking an audience volunteer. The volunteers are all-important, both to the visceral appeal of the show and to Livia’s very specific and personal kinks and fetishes. We need to find girls who secretly want to get naked, or be groped, or otherwise get compromised on a public stage — and will enjoy it, but haven’t yet fully acted out that desire. We will create the conditions where they’ll feel comfortable, and even aroused, and will end up enjoying the experience. And we’ll provide them with the all-important excuse, and be their scapegoat. Ideally, to maintain the glamour of our brand, the ladies selected will also have to be dick-hardeningly gorgeous.

“Sure,” the starlets, models and coeds would say, “I may have lost my top. But it was a great evening and it gave everyone a giggle, so who’s complaining?”

That quote, that kind of that attitude, is the perfect summary of the zeitgeist of the Trips. (Backstage, we always call the Sexy Scandal Spectacular itself the Trips, after initially calling it the Triple-S. And yes, this does lead into the obvious innuendo about who we’d most like to “trip”, or how any given hottie could best be “tripped”. It’s a wonderfully suggestive bit of jargon, once you get used to it and its implications.)

How do we end up finding so many of these rare and precious creatures? Well, first of all, they are rare — but not as rare as you might expect. We actually discover over the course of our production that women with a submissive bent, or the right kinks to genuinely enjoy a bit of fetishistic humiliation or unexpected exposure, are not as rare as a layman might expect. The trick is creating a social context where it’s expected and seems normal. A lot of women who would never admit they have a fetish or agree to fetish play when the request is phrased like that still have desires, and have spent years waiting patiently (consciously or unconsciously) for the right excuse to indulge them.

I knew that even before I met Livia — it’s why I made sussing out women’s fetishes such a central part of my pickup handbook. Another thing to note is that beauty often correlates with exhibitionism. Keeping a model’s looks takes a lot of hard work in a gym; Livia and I both know this from personal experience. How could you work that hard and not want to show the results off? The catch is that most women who would ever consider stripping off in public but haven’t already done so want to have the act mean something — like a first kiss or lost virginity specialness. They want to be feted, to feel important and wanted, and get the full payout in attention, scandal and fame that they feel they’re worth. What better vehicle for that than a gonzo variety show? We build the Trips with features specifically intended to tempt and indulge that egotism.

Beyond that, the answers are careful networking, attraction branding and watching the crowd. We get complemented on the cinematography of the N-VHS releases or our shows, the many angles and different shots. The big secret is that our shows have half a dozen cameras panning the crowds, all coordinated by Mimi. (Before any of you obsessive collectors send me inquiries, most of that footage is destroyed now and none of it that isn’t public is going to become so — we have no interest in the possible shaming or identification of members of our audience!)

In the breaks between the Decans, when the novelty acts come on, Mimi and I rapid-scan the audience footage, mark out potential cuties, and look for the ones that react with arousal or deep excitement to the more scandalous or kinky bits of the first-Decan routines. When we ask for volunteers, we always choose ones who we’ve basically already profiled deeply — we’ve even put ringers in the audience to do a bit of the old magician’s force on especially choice volunteers. (“You should volunteer, Laurie. You’d have so much fun!”)

In the later shows, of course, this all morphs into brand attraction. We deliver a specific brand of kinky entertainment. We get infamous for doing so, and so our shows attract people interested in that. A lot of the seats in our audience are chosen by us, given away though invites or fixed raffles. We try to keep the real creepers out, and filter the female audience for both attractiveness and what in my books I call the Aura — the signs of a long-term buildup of sexual desire that makes women more prone to going out on a limb for things like our show.

It’s actually pretty premeditated and ruthless, how we engineer exactly the crowd we want, and maneuver the choice cuties, starlets and ingenues into it — but in our defense, we’re not just looking for girls that would let us ‘trip’ them and suffer silently — we want the ones who will genuinely enjoy the experience. And ho boy, do we get them as the shows go on!

Nowhere is the selection process I’ve described above as critical to the show’s success as in the third Escalation (though it isn’t yet as refined as what I describe above; that will come in the fifth and later Escalations). Livia is planning to use a routine she calls Peeling a Peach, and it definitely lives up to the name.

The Trips secure a performance contract for a college super-party in January — a post-vacation, back-to-school “reconvening” blast to start off the academic year with a bang.

Ah, Newark University in Delaware, known informally as the Big Noodle, where incoming freshmen are called Newdies for more than one reason. Notoriously lax on alcohol consumption, student pranks and bizarre traditions, it was ranked second in Debonair magazine’s recent list of America’s foremost party schools. Faculty efforts to fight the label were performative at best — they know what draws both students and investors to the campus, and it isn’t their record of unparalleled academic excellence. Indeed, the Debonair article had given many alumni, luminaries, investors and fraternity presidents an unquenchable hunger to become number one — and thus, a willingness to drop surprising amounts of money into novel forms of party-friendly entertainment. Like us, your friendly neighborhood erotic magic variety show.

There are apparently two frats that pool money to get us, and the payout is substantial. Livia and Mimi do a lot of correspondence with frat guys. In a way we might be scamming them — we are always very cryptic about what is actually going to happen at any given show, and while the Third Escalation ended up very pleasing to us with our performance aesthetic and specific kinks, I’m not sure if the frat boys expected an actual orgy or cavalcade of strippers or something. (We won’t be doing actual orgies for another several Escalations.) Overall I hear that everyone was happy with what they got, though, especially in terms of the cultural impact of the later Escalations — the frats were proud to brag that they got in at the ground floor.

The trip back to the US by cargo ship is as brutal as I expected it to be. We make a note to improve the air conditioning and humidity control in the Beast with some of the money, not just for our comfort but to avoid damage to our large archive of film stock and N-VHS tapes. Before leaving Australia, we put in an order by phone with Future Aesthetics, a Delaware vendor in custom neon signs, for a prop Livia insists we’ll need to make the show perfect. It’s big, and it’s expensive, but Livia’s a perfectionist. There is a gamble, too — it almost doesn’t arrive in time for the show, and I have to drive out and pick it up in person in a rented pickup truck after a miscommunication about shipping.

Before we even get to Newark, Mimi is cramming intensive research on the Noodle students, their campus culture, their student BBS and their party scene, using me for more detailed readings and insight on specific girls. A born Phreaker, Mimi is able to covertly get admin access to the student BBS and quickly pick up and profile the local gossip and trends. I spot our “Peach” pretty quickly. Given what will happen with this girl and us after graduation, I have her consent to talk quite openly about her.

Her name is Cathy Delapointe, and she’s the school’s sweetheart. She’s active on the student BBS and a constant presence in the campus party scene, but strictly eschews the more sexual side of campus life — she’s straight-arrow, gorgeous and stacked. A strawberry blonde from the Midwest, she has a reputation as the “forbidden fruit” among the frats that proves the root of her popularity. Scuttlebutt is that the frats have a trophy for anyone that can bed her, and frat guys constantly try their Romeo routines on her.

The thing most people don’t see is, she clearly loves this. She’s a smart girl and a massive cock-tease, and she likely understands consciously the appeal of the unattainable — she’s used it to become a minor icon. She seems to genuinely enjoy trading flirtations, sarcasm and back-and-forth subtle innuendo with frat boys. Her family is rich as fuck, but — yes, of course we check — not especially litigious, and not especially socially conservative either. This is a girl that loves attention, and is not in a life position where getting her boobies out will cause great trauma. She might be dethroned and demystified, but I doubt she’ll feel degraded — though she might put on a superficial show of such, if it suits the social dynamics around her.

While you’ll never catch her with crude innuendo coming out of her own mouth, every one of the seven frat guys she dated has been a rugged, muscular player with shirtless photos and a habit of making crass boasts about women. I strongly suspect she follows gossip about herself with interest — even the salacious rumors. She would dispel them, of course... but not immediately. It’s like she wants to live out the crude fantasies her coarse boyfriends share with the world — but she knows that if she does, she won’t be Top Girl on Campus any more. She never shows any interest in the handsome but gentlemanly good students who would, in theory, have been a good match for her public façade (and are in truth equally handsome and rich); it’s always the crude, hunky, dumb frat boys.

Cathy’s gorgeous, obviously, albeit in a girl-next-door way more than a model or centerfold way. She’s 5′4″ and only nineteen, neither overweight nor rail-thin. She’s got a heart-shaped face, plump rosy cheeks, faint freckles, deep-set green eyes, thin lips and elegantly curved, soft eyebrows. She normally wears her hair in a prim back-bun, but has two wavy symmetrical flair-strands loose that dangle down on either side to frame her face. She often wears a pair of understated silver earrings shaped like two interlocking triangles.

Her usual makeup is subtle — nude pink lipstick and faint blush. She’s got a wide, congenial smile she employs freely and often, and perfect white teeth. She bites her lower lip pensively whenever a situation gets sexually charged — a flirty tic I find alluring. Her bust is unconcealable and extravagant, which lets her wear relatively chaste outfits and still look mouth-watering. She adores that, not that she’d ever admit it. Her body language comes off as demure and self-conscious about it on the surface, but I don’t buy that for a second.

And she has the Aura, big time — the nimbus of subtle cues imperceptible to anyone but a trained pickup artist that reveal when a respectable girl is deeply, long-term horny. One of her boyfriends scanned some sexy gym photos of her and uploaded them on the campus BBS to brag, and while they are well within the level of sexy allowed to respectable celebrities I can still tell that she adores her body, and loves eliciting people’s interest in it. She wants to show more, I’m certain. She dreams about it, the naughty little showoff.

But she also has inhibitions and real modesty. That’s perfect; we want a girl with actual lines left to cross. She’s never voluntarily gone further than sexy photos in spandex aerobics gear. A Polaroid of her in skimpy underwear looking shocked and offended is supposedly in circulation among the Beta Rho Omegas, snapped during a fraternity panty raid. One rumor claims they keep it in the same locked cabinet with all their athletic trophies.

Reading about the incident, I can’t believe she was really exposed by drunk boys with IQs literally half her own. She knew in advance what would happen that night — her shocked, blushing pose in the alleged photo is the body language of a girl getting a massive sexual thrill. Apparently, while she dumped the boyfriend responsible, she also refused and actively impeded the college’s efforts at disciplinary measures for the panty raid. I read her as being a deep-seated exhibitionist waiting for the right excuse. This is fortuitous, as Livia and I are honing the manufacture of just this sort of excuse into a veritable art form.

I chat up a local Blockbuster clerk after watching her go in there, and manage to get a little dirt on her viewing habits. Her seasonal festivities apparently include bi-annual re-watches of Dangerous Liaisons. The clincher comes in the form of her library activity, however. She is careful to seem studious, always quietly reading late in the university library. Mimi sits down at Cathy’s favorite terminal, hacks it in all of thirty seconds and checks the recent usage logs.

The terminal has Usenet access — getting alt.sex.stories through a clever trick to bypass university filtering. The terminal is anonymous, of course — in theory, it might not have been Cathy. But it was; I know it. Apparently, she has among her reading habits a series of erotic stories about Victorian prep school girls with strong themes of bondage and humiliation. My predictions about her fetishes and tastes have been decisively confirmed. She’s a sweet, innocent and proper young lady — just like Laura Palmer was.

Now, we just need to get her to our show. It might have happened anyway; as I’ve said, she likes frat parties. But might isn’t good enough — we want certain, and we want her excited about us.

“So this is where you earn the big bucks,” Livia tells me. “You going to go talk her into coming to our show?”

I already have a plan. “I’m not going to talk to her,” I tell Livia. “I’m just going to... intrigue her.”

The Newark University Library is suitably quiet, professional and subdued — I’m the only one stylin’ here, and even then I can pass for normal. I’m dressed in black satin pants, a white silk button-up shirt and a brown leather jacket, with my hair clipped back. I walk past Cathy covertly. She’s dressed nicely, albeit a bit preppy — a polo shirt, plaid slacks and the ubiquitous cashmere sweater tied around her neck. Even a relatively loose shirt can’t conceal her ample bustline, though. She’s hot, but in an unobtrusive way, and isn’t being social — she’s sincerely absorbed in the chemistry text she’s studying. She taps her pencil on her glasses when she concentrates. It’s cute.

I navigate to the back of one of the more desolate stacks and wait for her to get up — outside her line of sight, but listening. I’d make a good spy, honestly. One of the many uses of the confidence I’ve worked so hard to build up is the ability to look casual even when the situation is tense — like when quietly surveilling someone. She’s a focused reader, but after about twenty minutes I hear her get up. I watch her enter the ladies’ washroom from a distance. I make a few adjustments to my attire. As soon as she’s gone, I walk past her work area and set two items amidst her texts and notebooks — her handwriting is aggressively precise and tightly packed.

Then I move toward the big double doors at the back end of this area. The Noodle library is a heritage building, so the doors are this lovely arched 17th-century oak business — what a wonderful backdrop to pose against. Cathy looks at her study area and spots the anomalous items. She picks up the freshly-cut rose first — she’s a smart girl and has seen a real rose before, so she holds it the way you’re supposed to, with two fingers, not the way that tears open your palm on the thorns. (I clipped them all off anyway, but it’s still nice she knows.) Then she notices the enigmatic little invitation with the old-timey circus font and the gleaming embossed letters. “Mme. Cathy Delapointe, you are formally invited to attend a show both spectacular and crass, a grand exercise in expertly-choreographed indecency...”

Cathy looks around — perplexed and vaguely nervous, but also clearly intrigued. I timed this perfectly, though. When she spots me, I’m lounging in the ornate doorframe in a cocky pose — confident smile, legs crossed impudently, one foot flat on the ground and the other perched jauntily with only the tip touching the floor, leaving my whole body tilted slightly askew. I’ve got my hair unpinned and all fluffed out, and the leather jacket slung over my shoulder. Four of the six buttons on my silk shirt are undone — enough to show that I go to the gym regularly, and I have some nice chest hair to show off. Yeah, I do look like I walked off a Teen Beat photospread or a boy band audition — that’s the point. I am way too glam for the university library right now.

I’ve already copped to being vain, right? No shame in a little vanity; it helps make the world more glamourous, and thus more worth living in.

Cathy looks up at me and blinks. I’m a good twenty meters away from her, by design, so she can’t just get up and come chat with me. I smile proudly at her from afar. She meets my gaze, and I do that thing I’m known for. It’s never invasive — I should clarify that; it’s more like an invitation for her subconscious mind to join me in a fantasy. Her mouth drops open as she visualizes me leaning over her, running my hand along her hips, feeling the warmth of my body... and then I’m gone, sauntering out the door with a smirk. As soon as I’m out of her line of sight, though, my whole bearing changes — I walk briskly and rebutton my shirt, getting out of the library and hopping into the Scarlet Lady where Mimi’s waiting to drive me off.

Bam! Perfect timing! Ten out of ten, motherfuckers! Only when we’re well away from the library do I burst out laughing like a maniac. Damn, that was fun! An amateur would have fucked it up — gone up and tried to talk to her, or not had the confidence to go full cheeseball and just embrace it, or needed to wait and see how she reacts to assuage nervousness.

Folks, the “Man of Mystery” is a female fantasy for a reason — it isn’t a role you can play in a real conversation, at least not without a really good setup. It won’t get sexier if you try to joke about it, or if you try to have a conversation acting like a character that can only exist in archaic novels. But catching a glamourous stranger’s gaze, and not knowing anything about him — avoiding the conversation avoids having to justify the tropes of erotica mysteriously crossing over into real life for a brief moment, and in terms of pickup that’s a staggering win.

I don’t know if you can still pull this today, at the time I write this. I think after Rebecca Schaeffer’s murder and the growing awareness of stalking not so long after I pull this trick, women might not react as positively — the balance might be more toward anxiety and caution than erotic intrigue. But right now, Cathy and I still live in a simpler time, and it’s a glorious bit of fantasy pandering and glamour pickup that Cathy received in exactly the spirit it was intended: come, join me for a night of magic ripped from the fabric of your fantasies...

There’s a topic I should briefly elude to before covering the Noodle show, because it’s going to become a bit perplexing how we will pull some of this off if I don’t: support staff. Let me be clear on something: there are three core, consistent members of the Trips: Livia, Mimi and myself. Prior to Los Angeles, Chantal and the Hottie Express (and that’s a good long ways in the future at this point), those are the only people I consider to be members at all. But there are, for lack of a better term, contractors of varying degrees of quality.

We have low-paid roadies that lift and carry stuff, and we have tech assistants, and we have between one and three secondary camera operators at any given time. The roster of these people shifts a lot. We do pick up one very loyal cinematographer at the Noodle (which has a notable film studies department) just before the reconvening show. He’s our best early-era support guy. Larry, one of our drivers, is really good too. He usually drives the Scarlet Lady while the three of us are together in the Great Beast.

The Beast has Livia’s opulent pickup crib, Mimi’s gloriously pink bedroom, and three other relatively cramped guest quarters — one of which is mine. Despite this, no one lives in there with the three of us. The support staff, in theory, travel with us entourage-style in their own vehicles. They are not always reliable. They tend to vanish rather than dropping letters of resignation. We will pick up some frat guys with credentials after the Noodle show. One works out, but the other two don’t — one gets jealous of me and tries to pick fights, and the other keeps macking on Livia after she tells him to stop.

Most of our support staff are hired in a city, and stay there when we leave. We do have one really bad hire — a dude who breaks into the Beast to loot and vandalize it before running off. We’re lucky he didn’t know what is really valuable in there. He might have been a junkie.

There are no names showing up here, for a really obvious reason: these people did not expect us to actually become famous. We pay well and the work isn’t too hard, and the guys get to be serial voyeurs — but they aren’t part of our “lifestyle”, and have normal jobs these days. As such, there’s no way I’m giving names (except for a big, loving shout-out to Larry Tollman, who loves talking about his time with us) — some of these people have become skilled in cinema or music support fields, and they don’t need me digging up their “old shame”. So that’s one reason they’re so enigmatic in the narrative.

The final reason the pre-Chantal support staff get so little mention in my memoir is that it’s my narrative. In these early days I am somewhat blind to what goes into making a show like this work on a technical level, and I treat the support staff as invisible and interchangeable. Yeah, not great, I know. I will learn better later. Mimi is the staff coordinator as well as everything else. She wears an absolutely insane number of hats in the early days, and has a crazy workload — but I won’t really appreciate that until substantially later than our first visit to the Noodle.

If you do pick up our tapes, know that we owe the cinematography to Mimi. She wasn’t behind the camera for every single shot — obviously not for the ones where she’s on-stage — but she did train the junior camera operators and imprint her own philosophy for filming erotica on them, so credit for everything that’s distinctive there — the visual style, branding and elegant angles — belongs to her.

Our venue is a large school gymnasium with bleachers, part of the campus proper. The Noodle is huge as a sports school as well as a party school, and parents of the Beta Rho Omegas donated money to help build the auditorium. In exchange, said frat gets to use it and its indoor bleachers to host mega-parties. This one is expected to overflow even this generous enclosure; there will be a large open-air crowd, and the stage inside will be broadcast on to huge projector-screens for the outdoor audience. We also have a high-intensity overhead projector set up in the rafters of the ceiling and pointed at the flat east wall of the gymnasium. People not close enough to see the stage clearly will still be able to watch our 5x blowup — and will get a good look at anything Mimi decides to zoom the cameras in on.

I think everybody knows some exhibitionism is going to happen tonight, and plans accordingly — but we are there at 3 AM the day of the big party, and we make sure that the lighting is optimal for our rafter-mounted cameras and decidedly punitive toward the inevitable cheap camcorders frat boys will bring. This is both ethical — we want to get thumbs-up from the titty-talent, albeit after the fact — and pragmatic, since we plan to sell our own N-VHS tapes of the various Escalations. You’re probably getting that Greek orgs are pretty influential on this campus, and that’s part of our plan — it means that our show can get raunchy and the powers that be will still be reluctant to shut it down early.

Livia’s going to run the first Decan alone. There are some requisite things an adult comedy hypnotist has to do at a frat party, that aren’t especially sexy for either me or Mimi. So she hypnotizes a dozen Beta Rho Omega pledges, has them pretend to be dogs, has them ride each other like ponies and has them re-enact scenes from Bachelor Party and Animal House. The plan is only to get them down to their tighty whities, but we learn that night that frat dudes are remarkably willing to flash wiener given half an excuse.

She ends with a routine that really turns them on — visualizing two incredibly hot strippers grinding against each of them, but only as long as they stay standing on one foot. The end result? A bunch of frat jocks in their briefs, looking incredibly silly hopping around, desperately trying to stay balanced on one foot while also having huge, obvious boners. It’s physical comedy gold! She tells them they’re “right on the edge” multiple times, but never lets them actually get off.

After the hypnosis, Livia runs a flash card prank on them while they’re still horny and stuck in their underwear. Mimi puts up flash cards with an image and a word on them, and has all the guys read out the words in unison: a Christmas elf, a taxi cab, hospital, a family of mice, a bank, a soccer ball, a house, some ice cubes in a glass. The memory cards have intentionally childish art more suited to a kindergarten class on them, as part of the ‘frat guys are morons’ gag — ironically, a diss they seem to embrace and eagerly play down to.

Livia promises them a ‘special reward’ if they can manage to get the next bit perfect. Mimi switches to versions of the cards without the noun at the bottom — but they’re all still really obvious and easy to remember. She increases the tempo... and they never see our prank coming (pun intended), being so eager for the ‘special reward’. Soon we have a dozen macho pledges on stage in only their briefs, chanting “Ice Bank Mice Elf! Ice Bank Mice Elf! Ice Bank Mice Elf!”

Livia grabs her breasts, forcing up and exaggerating her already captivating cleavage. “Well, boys, if you’re that eager to knock one out in public, I guess the least I can do is offer you a bit of encouragement!”

She turns to the BRO pledges — and, regrettably, away from the audience and the cameras — and pulls down her bustier, flashing them. One guy comes right there. When she tugs her nipples and moans, more join him. I’m not sure how many in total, but in a hilariously gross gag, our cameras catch one buff jock walking off stage completely oblivious to the big lump of cum that somehow got lodged in his military-regulation crew cut. They don’t seem pissed off about the kinky humiliation — to them this is all riotously funny, normal male bonding and a great rowdy party.

I have no idea how into all of this Livia actually is — some of the guys are hot in a Neanderthal way, I guess, but to my sensibility they lack refinement and style. Mind you, I’m pretty decisively straight — I’ve certainly experimented with my own gender in my endless pursuit of new sensations, but it’s never been at all fulfilling to me. Mimi, conversely, seems actively grossed out and almost offended in a possessive way that Livia is near so much rampant helicopter dick.

Mimi and I are in the Scarlet Lady. It’s an impressive setup — a Dodge B100 Tradesman with a satellite projector mounted on top, and the back filled with CCTV screens, audio mixer panels and homemade radio signal switches. There are even Atari-style joysticks wired to custom breadboards to direct Mimi’s special servo-mounted cameras. It’s like NASA Mission Control in here — high-tech controls from floor to ceiling!

Mimi can watch half a dozen CRTs at a time and pick clues out of any of them. I can’t, but she points me at ones and tells me to read girls, and I do so to the best of my ability. The crowd is the dream crowd for our kind of show — so many women seem hot, fun, uninhibited and loose. I quickly notice that the uniform of one of the local sororities is a strapless tube top with Greek letters on it — Epsilon Rho Omega. The fashion seems so popular that other, non-Greek girls have taken it up as well.

“What do you think about that?” I ask Mimi.

“As a girl,” she replies, “I think that the any girl that wears that to a frat party isn’t going to have a problem flashing her cans, because there’s no way you go to frat parties dressed like that regularly and don’t get it yanked down every now and then.”

I laugh. “Feeling an urge to shop for a strapless tube top once we finish the show?”

Mimi flinches a bit. Not a good comment, apparently. Her face looks so ambivalent — simultaneously disgusted and intrigued. It must be weird at times, being a lesbian exhibitionist when most crowds skew so heavily male. “Sorry, only joking.”

She shrugs, already having forgotten the matter.

We keep a close watch on Cathy as well, obviously. She’s our primary mark. She’s dressed in excellent low-key exhibitionist clothes — tight tan designer slacks and a striped top that shows off the shape of her ample chest without being as overtly trashy as the tube top girls. More notable is her reactions: she is disciplined, not hooting and hollering like the frat boys and drunk party girls, but she’s also obviously (if you know the signs to look for, at least) turned on by the lewdness of the show.

She stares like a woman possessed when the hypnotized BRO pledges pull out their big floppy wieners for a cheap laugh, then stumble around with raging erections and pop off at a glimpse of Livia’s sweater puppies. Her Aura, that metaphorical nimbus of pent-up sexual desire, burns with the heat of stellar fusion.