Chapter 2: Ravish Me

I get up at seven. I have a shower and go through the routine of dressing to the nines and styling myself — I’ve been a bit casual at SexCon; now I have a motive to look my best. But this is all nearly robotic for me. Inwardly I’m a mess. The show rattled me, and I’m still not sure what I feel. Sure, Livia dropped the “get out of jail free” card at the end, and it turns out I hadn’t done anything really inappropriate, given that ‘Mimi’ was a ringer all along. But ... I still enjoyed the illusion of crossing lines. Like, really enjoyed, on a primal level. Did that say bad things about me, the amount of pleasure I took combining sex and revenge?

I love sex. I will always love sex. People say you get jaded over time and it becomes hollow, but I’ve got a special psychological trick I’ll tell you about later — I managed to dodge that. I am, at heart, a sensualist, and I will never stop taking pleasure in sex acts with beautiful women. But it certainly does get less raw and more routine as time passes. And the scandal show ... that was raw again. I felt like I had felt hours after losing my virginity.

Livia’s business card is quite stylized, with the same old-timey circus font as the standups. It names her and the show, and has an abbreviated form of her disclaimer (“You’ll probably lose your dignity. You may lose you modesty. But you’ll certainly have the time of your life!”), but no address. That was written in pen on the back. I’m surprised that the address Livia has given me leads not to an upscale hotel, but to a trailer park. The stall number is for an oversize stall, currently holding what at first glance is the largest double-decker custom bus I have ever seen. The only external clue that it belongs to Livia’s show is the color scheme — orange and navy highlights on a white bus some 18 meters long, four tall and three wide. I park my rental close by and get out to examine the luxury RV.

The door, like on any megabus, is naturally three feet off the ground. I’m puzzling how to get up there, when a mechanical whirring sounds and grated metal steps fold out from the underside of the vehicle. It’s impressively gadget-like, and seems to be custom work. The door then swings open and I see Mimi from the show. “Marcelo. C’mon in! You’re in the right place. We’ve been hoping you were going to show!”

I climb up and step inside. The interior is like a cramped home, with a corridor only two feet wide and multiple interior rooms. There is wallpaper on the walls, carpet on the floor and even hung paintings — which I quickly notice are primarily boudoir art. It strikes me as very influenced by the custom van craze that had been such a big deal back when I was in my teens. It’s ridiculously opulent, but also showing subtle signs of disrepair — so, they had big money, but don’t necessarily have it right now. And it’s personalized, with the aesthetic and craftwork drawn from effort I saw in Livia’s standup earlier, and a sensibility that’s intentionally tacky — I like the style immediately.

This is also the first time I meet what is apparently the real Mimi. It’s awkward. “Ma’am. My behavior earlier today ... wasn’t normal for me. I apologize.”

“Er ... me too,” she says.

Her natural voice (or at least her current voice) is about an octave higher than her cop voice. She sounds like a stereotypical southern-fried bimbo. Her face is now wide, expressive, cheerful and open, and in a weird way I find that reaffirming — it fits a subtle vibe I got from her when we first met, “underneath” the cop. Her platinum blonde hair is now unbound and teased, looking gloriously glam — it’s Loni Anderson or Judy Landers style flair.

“I was playing a role for the show. I’m not normally an industrial-grade turbo-cunt. And ya shouldn’t worry about how you treated me — it went down exactly like we wanted it to. Livia set you up. She choreographed everything. She does that. I like naughty attention and the show pushed my buttons, so I had a fine time.”

“Mimi,” I hear Livia’s voice say from deeper in the RV, “can you show our guest to my room, and then give us the evening?”

“Sure,” she replies. “I’ll be at that line-dancing club we spotted by the Motel 7 if you need me.”

Mimi leads me past several closed doors to the end of the corridor, and opens one. She leans over to whisper to me. “You two make sure and have fun while I’m gone, now.” She winks and scampers out; I can hear her calling a cab.

I step into what is presumably Livia’s personal room, and am immediately dumbstruck — it’s unabashedly decked out as an almost caricatural pickup crib. The room is brightly lit. There’s an imitation zebra-skin rug on the floor, a queen-size waterbed with tangerine underlighting, a disco ball hanging from the mirrored ceiling and a column that pulses like a lava lamp in one of the corners. One wall is covered with a psychedelic mural, an imitation Julie Bell with scantily-clad harem damsels clutching the legs of a topless barbarian babe holding a greatsword aloft.

Posters on the walls advertise Hardbodies and the new adult video game, Leisure Suit Larry 4. There is also a poster-sized blow-up of the cover to Jack Kahler’s The Hypnotist, which is oddly on the nose for Livia. The opposite wall is a library which to a casual glance seems to be all trade paperbacks, sealed behind a locked glass case. The walls and parts of the ceiling are covered with colorful shag carpeting.

I love it all for its shameless embrace of both tackiness and decadence. Livia is clearly someone who’s as deeply into the libertine lifestyle as I am — maybe deeper. Indeed, I think it’s the décor that pushes my interest in Livia beyond a simple desire to fuck and into a genuine crush tinged with hero-worship. I’m not, and never will be, a one-woman man; I don’t ‘do’ serious relationships — but this is a woman I want to know intimately, understand, hang out with and keep as a lifelong friend with benefits.

Livia steps out of the bathroom. Her voluminous hair is tucked in with a hairband, and she wears a white men’s button-up shirt ... and nothing visible below that. Well, except for her long, sleek olive legs and elegantly manicured feet. Her toenails, like her fingernails, are purple. The shirt is long enough (barely!) to cover her modesty, so she might have panties or very short shorts on underneath it. The mystery intrigues me. She probably intends me to believe that I had caught her unprepared, but her immaculate glamour makeup puts a lie to that — she would have had to fix it after the show this afternoon. “Marcelo Ambrose Knight. I’m so glad you came.”

Livia sees the look on my face and grins. “Everyone truly worth knowing lives by a motto, Marcelo. Mine happens to be, ‘just because it’s ridiculous doesn’t mean it isn’t sexy’.”

This resonates with me deeply. “Well spoken.”

“I have a pitch to make to you that might change your life — if you choose to let it.”

“I’m willing to listen,” I reply. The fact that she had promised me a blowie is a big part of my being here, but I’m not going to be so crude as to mention that. She leads me over to a black leather couch, and we sit down together.

“It’s not complex,” she says. “I’ve got an adult magic show. I hope I’ve convinced you by this point that I’m competent at my craft.”

“Oh,” I say honestly, “you’re very skilled. I’m deeply impressed.”

As I’ve said, I don’t do casual negging. You can pick up women just as effectively by lifting them up as by tearing them down — as long as you’re interested in the ones that truly want sex on some level, not the ones who must be bullied or manipulated into it. But I am genuinely impressed with her show as well; I’m not just buttering her up.

“The pitch is pretty simple, then. I want you to join my show as my partner in crime. We’ll be the perfect duo.”

I blink. I was sure she would want someone seduced, or want money for sex, or something ... well, possible. “I’m so sorry to disappoint you,” I say. “I have no skills with stage magic.”

“I am very well conversant with your skill set, Mister Knight. You are a pickup artist, one of the best, with raw natural charisma, good looks and a great game. And, like me, you covet girls who have a deep sexual longing and have built up a fairly effective toolbox for getting them to unleash that longing. I’ve read both of your books — not just casually but as a deep, detailed read with note-taking and passages highlighted. I know exactly what you can do, and I want it as part of my show. I know you are on the ropes with your current target audience due to having values I find laudable and I know you’re going to turn thirty soon and don’t have an ironclad direction in your life yet. I believe this show can become a real cultural phenomenon, Marcelo, and I’m offering you ground-level entry as a partner.”

“A cultural phenomenon? Livia, you’re talented, but so are Siegfried and Roy. I don’t see you displacing David Copperfield even if you’re actually better than him. A-list stars aren’t born or made, they’re carefully designed by studio executives.”

“I’m not trying to be best magician,” she replies. “My show is the adult magic show, remember? There isn’t yet a superstar adult magician, despite the mainstreaming of porn, and I can make a strong (albeit personal) case that there’s a real cultural and psychosexual vacuum waiting to be filled by a prominent adult magic show.”

That sounds a bit overblown, honestly, but I’m also intrigued. “What exactly is your show, Livia, and why does it need a pickup artist? What’s this vacuum? And what’s this massive RV?”

She takes a deep breath. “You’ve probably gathered that I know a lot about you. I guess I should share some things in return. The thing is, the best way to answer your questions involves telling you some fairly personal things about me. Do you want to listen to that?”

“Sure,” I say. She does know a lot about me, to an almost invasive degree, and I want to know more about her. I usually try to avoid my targets sharing deeply personal things with me — I try to pull the pleasure-seekers and socialites, and to avoid any pretension of false intimacy or emotional bonding. But I am also more genuinely interested in Livia, and curious about, well, everything.

“Firstly,” she says, “I am bisexual. At least, that’s the common label. I’ve always preferred the term ambisextrous, though — Tallulah Bankhead is my spirit animal. Regardless, I like men and women. That’s actually pivotal to all of this. I genuinely enjoy sex with men, but I have a driving salacious interest in exposing the bodies of women. It can be fun with men, too, but it’s not the same. Women have a particular aesthetic appeal that men lack. I love the act of conquest, the hunt, the exposure. But, like any decent person, I want to indulge that hunger without hurting people. That’s why your books were so useful to me.”

I nod. “I can see by the décor that you don’t view pickup artistry the way most women who know about it do.”

She grins. “Okay, flashback time. I was born in Greece but raised in the UK, and sent to Montana for college. Women bloom earlier than men. You know that, right? I was feeling attractions to girls when I was like twelve, though I didn’t consciously realize it. In particular, I had developed a huge girl-crush on a senior, Suzie M—, while I was still a freshman. She was amazing — a classical English beauty. If she was in the US, she’d have been prom queen for sure.”

At the time, Livia actually blurted out the lady in question’s full name — but there’s no way that belongs in this memoir, obviously.

“I didn’t know what a lesbian or bisexual was. Schools didn’t do sex education back then; the Sexual Revolution changed things. I just knew Suzie was really pretty, and I really wanted to shower with the seniors before gym class. I got a bit of a fixation on seeing her naked. Most women aren’t about the visuals, in sexual terms, as much as men are — but I am, and always was.

“Anyway, one of the rich juniors at our school was having a birthday party, and he invited me, Suzie and a bunch of other girls to it. For whatever misguided reason, his family hired an amateur magician to entertain, and this was before Mary Whitehouse and the Moral Majority and public decency being really enforced. He did the Baffling Bra trick. You’ve heard of that?”

I shake my head. “Here,” she says, “let me show you. Be right back.”

She runs out of the room and comes back with a red scarf, which she tucks into the neck of her shirt. I see flashes of sheer black panties under the shirt as she moves. “Now, if I were doing this for real, there would be a pretext to put that there, and a pretext for the magician to tug on it — like being part of a rope trick or card trick. But for the sake of the story, just pull the knotted scarf out of my shirt.”

I do so. As I do the knot comes apart, revealing a white lacy bra between the ends of the scarf.

“Oh my god,” Livia says in over-acted, playful mock-concern, “you stole my bra, you naughty magician you.”

“You weren’t wearing a bra under that shirt before,” I deadpan. “I definitely noticed — and liked — that.”

Livia laughs. I’m actually wondering the extent to which I can openly perv on this woman and still get what I’m reading as a genuinely positive response. The notion is oddly exciting to me. “Well, yeah, but you get how the trick works now. The bra is actually made of a highly compressible material called 20th Century Silk, which is why the trick is sometimes also called the 20th Century Bra.”

“Honestly,” I say, “it’s a bit tame by the standards of your show.”

“Later I’ll show you my special variation of it. You’ll think that’s pretty amazing. But the point is that I was a high school freshman, not consciously aware of what lesbianism even was, and a magician did this to my dream girl. It was my formative sexual experience. It also led me to some ... indiscretions a year or two later — stuff I’d rather not go over in depth. There was a voyeurism scheme pairing stealing Suzie’s bra and a failed water balloon prank, and later getting caught peeping in the seniors’ shower room.”

I laugh. “Why not tell the story? Your early life sounds like one of those teen sex comedies come to life.”

The idea intrigues me more than it rightly should. I’ve got a lifelong fascination for wacky, carefree, hedonistic softcore — gems like Joysticks, H.O.T.S., The Bikini Carwash Company, My Tutor, Malibu Bikini Shop, Private School, Recruits and Hardbodies. My favorites would have to be the Screwballs trilogy, however. This interest goes back to my teen years — on my first early, awkward date, I took a girl to a sleazy local drive-in to see Flesh Gordon, pretending I thought it was a Flash Gordon film — I loved it, and I was surprised how much she did as well. We didn’t do anything beyond making out — we were young — but the making out sure was intense! It awakened me to the idea that girls like the naughty stuff just as much as guys do, especially if it makes them laugh.

The best sex comedies have a kind of innocence to them mixed in with the honest depiction of male lust and fantasies — even when they characters are committing what, in real life, would be sex crimes they still (usually) aren’t hurting anyone in the film’s reality. That has always fascinated me — the paradox of the harmless violation. It was probably the sex comedies, in retrospect, that inspired me to explore pickup artistry. Lots of guys want a life with more T&A in it than they currently have — but not as many want it so much they’re willing to really focus on learning an entire, complex skill set to achieve that reality.

Sadly, this is not the right time for my nostalgic enthusiasm to bleed though my voice — Livia’s words caught my imagination, and I missed her wry, bitter tone.

“I never got to see anything, for the record, and the consequences of being outed as a lesbian before you know what a lesbian even is are rather less fun in real life than they would be in a sex comedy. I ended up becoming a total introvert-nerd in high school, and crossed the pond for college to escape bullying.”

I clasp her hand. “Genuine sympathy,” I say. “Not macking, not flirting. I’m really sorry you went through that.”

She nods. “Those years were tough, but my escapism was sexual fantasies. I read all my mum’s Harlequins voraciously, and sought out pulp stories involving magicians or hypnotism — especially the less savory kind. I became a gloriously deranged little pervert, and swore an oath to never let the world change me back. I have a fairly conventional sense of gender, I suppose — I like manly, dominant men and damsels in distress. Comes from all the pulps and romance novels. I wanted to be both the sinister, salacious magician and the lovely, innocent woman he would transfix and exploit.

“I withdrew from the college social scene completely, devoting all my time to studying stage magic. I could hypnotize people reliably by my seventeenth birthday. I came to believe that ‘ravish’ was the most beautiful word in the English language. Being ravished was like being raped, except the woman was allowed to enjoy it. It was exciting because it was spontaneous, because there was no need to ask first. It’s also weirdly safe for the woman — she never has to admit she wants sex; she just gets it. I wanted to both be taken advantage of, and to take advantage of others — especially of women.”

I walk over to the paperback bookshelf, looking more closely. There are stacks of pulp magazines — Weird Stories, Spicy Detective, Scream Queens — and a bunch of tattered Gor books, but the vast majority are Harlequin paperbacks with yellowed pages and spines well-curved from use. Those set out cover-forward often featured a handsome pulp magician threatening a scantily-clad young lady. “You kept them all.”

“I’m a collector. I read them only infrequently, these days — they’re not explicit enough for me anymore, but they are a shot of nostalgia.

“Anyway, as I said, I was a total nerd and introverted shut-in until I was in my mid-twenties. I finished my Masters in forensic psychiatry — a study I chose for ... less than wholesome reasons — but ultimately dropped out of the Doctoral program. I worked as an editor for salacious magazines, working anonymously by mail and later using BBSes. I could be super-flattery and say your books saved me, but the truth is I read a lot of confidence-building stuff, and used liberally-applied self-hypnosis. But your books did provide me with some wonderful strategies for picking up girls without breaking them, and for general confidence building. So I used that, and the self-hypnosis and mnemonics, to rebuild myself in the carefully constructed persona of a sleazy but sexy magician.

“And here I am,” she says with a grin and a Vanna White ‘presenting’ pose. “Now I’m thirty-four years old, and I’ve pulled off three successful ‘stunt’ shows, and all my ambitions look to be within my reach. The sleaze, by the way, is an important and conscious part of the show and my persona. It’s my filter, like your Sieve. It attracts the girls I want to attract, and serves as a warning to anyone that might actually get hurt by the Sexy Scandal Spectacular antics to give it a wide berth.”

I do note that she moves straight from self-employed nerd to ... this — she doesn’t make any mention of financing, or the luxury RV. But now is not the right time to press that point.

“So you can see why I want you, Marcelo Ambrose Knight. You’ve already had a big impact on my life and my self-confidence. Yes, Marc, I had planned this from the beginning. I used some feminine wiles to get SexCon management to send you a speaking invite, I asked Sunset Thomas to recommend to you my show and I manipulated the scheduling of my own show so you were likely to blunder into it on casual interest.”

“It wasn’t casual interest,” I reply. “I have this odd relationship with the word ‘naughty’ —”

“Yes,” she says excitedly. “I know. That’s why it was there. You magnificent bastard, I read your books! I can’t believe I actually got a chance to use that line in real life. Anyway: the word ‘naughty’ is like a magnet to you. It’s like me and ‘ravish’. You’re always deeply disappointed when you buy porn with the word naughty in the title, hoping it will involve some playful but harmless transgression and the mood of naughtiness and it ends up just being vanilla fucking. Focus groups, you said, want the word naughty in the title of pornos because there’s a deep societal hunger for pornography to depict things that are naughty, but then the directors don’t actually know how to depict naughtiness, so they either fall back to vanilla fucking or dive into the kind of depravity and cruelty that sickens rather than titillates. So there’s a lot of porn with the word ‘naughty’ in the title, but very little that actually is naughty.

“I took that particular monologue to heart, Marc. I want the Sexy Scandal Spectacular to be the very essence of the word naughty as you defined it. Crossing boundaries, tricking people and getting hot girls naked in public ... without actually hurting anyone. That’s why I think the show can go big-time — because there’s a demand for naughty that isn’t been filled. You yourself made that case.”

I can’t argue the case Livia is making. I feel her design, her plan locking around me. I wonder if I’ve put too much of my inner and secret desires into those books, and am now getting played. But if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be getting this offer to live them all out, now, would I? It’s complex and scary, and I realize for the first time that saying yes to Livia, and pushing my life onto a totally new path, is a real possibility here. Inwardly, I promise myself that I won’t commit to anything here, tonight, regardless. I will leave, sleep, and think on the offer. My response is perhaps a bit more sarcastic than it should be out of defensiveness. “This sounds like an overly elaborate and labor-intensive way of trying to be the next Joe Francis.”

“I have copies of all nine of the VHS tapes filmed by Girls Gone Wild — yes, including the one that never got sold and was still in pre-production when Valerie Solanas shot Joe Francis through the head last year. They could have been way bigger than they were, if things had been different. But that leaves the niche still open — for us. I can’t deny I’ve had some quality fun time with those tapes, but there’s also no real showmanship, no artistry.

“If this ‘World Wide Web’ concept journalists keep chattering about pans out, our world will soon be inundated with naked fun bags. Heck, just look at Usenet or some campus social BBSes. To stand out, a show would have to make the audience really want to see the girl’s tits before showing them the girl’s tits. It would need to cultivate anticipation. That is exactly what a magician does, and why a naughty magician has the potential to be so successful. Magic has always been about subtextual fetishes, Marcelo — damsels in distress, trapped in boxes, being impaled by swords or the targets of thrown knives. My show brings the fetishes right to the surface. Volunteers do things they’d never imagine doing normally yet still really, deeply want to —”

“Yeah,” I say a bit sardonically. “I know all about that part.”

“You do know how hypnotism actually works, and what it can and can’t do, don’t you?”

I nod. “In general terms, yeah. There are unsavory types in the pickup community that want it to be some kind of enslavement, but it’s not.”

“Yeah,” Livia says. “I can only hypnotize people to do things they really want to do anyway, and they won’t do things that are anathematic to them. I can get past inhibitions, habit and nervousness with deceptive scenarios or blunt charisma, but not actual convictions. Hypnotized people still have volition. There’s actually a medical study on this that uses stripping the girl as the deciding factor.

“In 1926, Doctor Pierre Janet hypnotized a young lady and demonstrated that she could be made to act out a staged murder. When someone asked her to strip, it broke the trance — she knew, on some level, the murder was staged, but the stripping would have been real and over her limits. I can — and will — strip girls with hypnosis, but by definition the only ones I can get to strip are the ones that, on some level, choose to. In the Taurus Escalation, we needed to make you actually want to dominate and punish Mimi before I could hypnotize you to do it. When you were tranced, I told you she’s a ringer, and into it. I didn’t let your conscious mind remember that, but your subconscious did.”

She’s right. A memory of her voice I couldn’t access before the moment she told me it existed echoes in my mind: Unleash your inner beast! Trust that I am a magician, and capable of grand feats of illusion from which all walk away miraculously unscathed...

“I ... think some of my performance came from me,” I say slowly.

“Probably,” Livia agrees. “But not in the way you’re thinking. You’re a pickup artist. You probably get accused of, and berated for, being sexist all the time. It’s your personal pink elephant — that comes across in your books, at least to a trained shrink. We live in a neurotic society, Marcelo, with all the taboos and stigmas. Being given permission, being able to actually do the forbidden thing, the taboo, without consequences ... it’s immensely cathartic, like a dam breaking, like an orgasm for your psyche. It’s hot, it’s relaxing and it’s seriously fun.”

“Uh ... huh.”

“Look me in the eye and say it wasn’t fun,” she says, “and I’ll admit I misjudged and got the wrong guy, and I’ll give you your blowie and send you on your way.”

I look up at her and stare her in the eye. “It wasn’t fun,” I say. “I was terrified that I’d just destroyed my life.”

I wait a second as different emotions play over her face.

“That was total bullshit, by the way. I just wanted to see how much you could read me. I mean, I was genuinely terrified, but it also gave me a massive erotic thrill. I’m still reorienting over how much it pushed some of my buttons, and how I feel about that.”

She laughs. “You utter wanker! Well, I suppose I gave up any moral right to chastise you for dickishness when I hypnotized you to be a dick.”

She sees the look on my face. “Don’t worry; that’s a joke. All my suggestions ceased when the smoke touched you, remember?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“You’re as good at this as I hoped you’d be, though! I’m good at reading people, but you’re better. I’ll admit that. And you lie well.”

“But infrequently, and never maliciously.”

“Really?”

I hold up my little finger. “Pinky swear.”

That is cheesy enough to get a giggle out of her. “I’m much the same, really. Passionately in love with the mechanics of deception, illusion and conquest, but with a strong desire not to hurt people for real.”

“Okay,” I say, “Go on.”

“The Sexy Scandal Spectacular will run on the Sieve method you codified in your books for finding the ‘Girls Who Do’, only we want to find the ‘Girls Who Want To’ and turn them into the ‘Girls Who Do’, live and on stage. The pulling vibrators out of hats and stink beads, that stuff is just set dressing. It sets up an intentionally tacky and sleazy but fun mood, brings the audience’s prurient interests to the forefront and lowers their inhibitions ... but the meat of the show is getting cute girls to volunteer. So you can see why an attractive male pickup artist would be a core component the show needs to succeed — both on stage, and for some social engineering of the supposedly spontaneous volunteers before the show proper takes place.”

Something clicks for me then, and I laugh. “I know what your game is. You’re lesbian, not bisexual. You need beefcake in your show to give the straight girls a motive to volunteer, and then you can get your thrills vicariously by stripping or pranking them with me.”

She winces. “I am bisexual. That is the gospel truth. Join my show and you won’t have any doubt about it after a while. But I won’t deny that straight girls are a large potential volunteer pool I want to be able to tap into, or even that I might gain a certain vicarious enjoyment in being the architect of their unexpected sudden-onset nudity. And with you there, it will be a positive experience for them, provided we choose the volunteers right — and your Sieve will let us do that. And, if some of these young ladies can be persuaded to try something new in their lives, something more feminine, well...”

“So this is a zany scheme to get laid,” I interject gleefully.

Livia holds me with a transfixing stare. “Essentially, yes, albeit on an impressively grand scale. You can hardly claim to be above such a thing, Marcelo...”

“You kidding? Zany schemes to get laid are what I live for.”

Livia nods. “So I’ve heard. It does work out for you as much as me. Say your more cynical interpretation was true. So what? You’ll still be directly involved with a lot of horny, naked birdies under a marginally permissible social context. It wouldn’t change the fact that I’m proposing a scheme that has the potential of making you famous while also surrounding you with pretty young things with seriously lowered inhibitions. Seven out of ten of them will be straight, given the most optimistic demographic assumptions for a hopeful lesbian, so I won’t be competing with you on many at all.”