Chapter 3

Actually my wicked plans for dominating and oppressing Margot were actually extremely minimal. I was going to make her dress up nicely for me and then, like candy under my arms, I was going to take her about to all of the 'can't miss' places I knew of in San Francisco, and I knew hundreds just off the top of my head. In actuality, getting to even the top layer of good stops was going to take much longer than my allotted six days, but I thought it would be a start.

In the spirit of Taming of the Shrew, I had decided that she needed some actual human contact with the lower classes and I thought that making her interact with some of the wonderful flakey characters found plentifully here in Sodom-by-the-Sea might bring her out of her pampered princess shell a little bit. Or else it would give me the excuse to start abusing the heck out of her. Either option was perfectly fine with me.

The sub-part of the plan was that I was going to wine her and dine her and be such 'a great guy' that she would undoubtedly soon wonder why she ever held a grudge against me in the first place. Yeah right buddy ... dream on. The worst part was that with each minute I was spending with her I was becoming alternately increasingly attracted to her - and even more pissed off at her attitudes and snooty behaviors.

From the very start of breakfast the next morning, I learned quickly not to let her talk whatsoever to any of the serving staff. Polite requests for assistance seemed to magically morph in her mouth into bluntly barked demands for instant deference and obedience. After a second semi-polite rebuke to her, and after repeatedly explaining that this sort of New York style rudeness is not tolerated well in this more enlightened city, I had to issue General Order #3, in which, after making her desires and wants known to me, she was to keep her pie hole firmly shut in the presence of her 'lessers', which seemed to include just about anyone and everyone she met ... including me.

"Gawdamnit Margie!" I bellowed, nearly splashing a bit of the precious nigh-irreplaceable treasure that is double-cream whipped Ghirardelli hot chocolate onto the breakfast tablecloth. "You're not back home on your little antebellum plantation, complete with house and field slaves and your Archie Bunker mentality father. In most parts of the county these days, and especially here in the Bay Area, the hired help don't like to be talked down to as menials! Besides, the smarter and meaner ones might spit something nasty into your order. It's a more enlightened world these days; it's long past time you learned that despite having a dungeon full of money, you just can't lop off the heads of uppity peasants anymore. I know it's sad, but there are laws against that sort of thing now too. It will be hard, but just try to be nice to people for a change! It won't necessarily poison you if you do it for a week, besides then you'll have lots of vile stories about the lot of the working wretches that you can tell to your mother's blue-blood friends in 'Nawlins'." She flinched. I don't think anyone had ever called her Margie in her entire life ... and lived to repeat that same mistake twice. Well it was going to be a long week of firsts for her.

She grumbled, a lot, so I grabbed back the initiative by making her take a long walk down Powell Street towards Market, stopping in most of the shops along the way. Naturally she liked the designer shops in and near Union Square, but I didn't find much there that I liked or wanted her to wear for the week.

"Not on my nickel, cupcake. You can come back here on your own dime next week and play the snooty fancy piece all you want to. You're on my meter today and I'd like you to look much more casual, flitty, flirty and sexy. I did weaken and allow her one off-shoulder designer frock for a fancy evening do. I did have Sunday night tickets for the San Francisco Opera House, but alas no grand opera was scheduled. I had to settle for a special production of an old Broadway musical, 'South Pacific'. Better than nothing I guess, and I did want a better look at those nice alabaster white shoulders.

Early spring in San Francisco is usually rainy, or foggy, or misty, and/or just plain wet and cold. A piercing sort of miserable wet-cold that you can feel all of the way down your spine. Today it was just cold, wet and misty, with no actual rain yet, but the day was young. This doesn't stop the wonderful young ladies of the city from showing off their shapely figures. There is sort of an eccentric art to tastefully layering clothes enough to stay sort of warm but yet display their charms and hotness. This was what I wanted, at least for a start, for Margot to be wearing. If she pissed me off later, I could still drag her around to freeze in a mini-skirt all day.

In the end I found just the sort of shop I was looking for a few doors further down the hill. Trendy and with just the right touch of urban hipness that radiated fun rather than industrial moroseness; the perfect place to dress up my reluctant naughty librarian in training. I bought her six sexy but functional (and mostly warm) outfits and would had gladly bought several more if I'd thought she would have had time to wear them all properly. I even allowed her a nice pair of black walking boots that were comfortable but still had a good bit of lofty heel; she was going to need them. I selected one of the outfits for her to wear today and she stomped off in a fit to change.

The shop was delighted to accept the Commissioner's black AmEx card (I have one of my own but this vacation trip was all on his dime) and they even offered to deliver all of our purchases up to our suite in the Fairmount.

Ok, life at the top is sometimes pretty good, but remember the folks you meet on the way up are sometimes the same people that you meet on the way down. I had started a good ways down the ladder so I had a pretty good sense of this. Margot, having started at the very top, was now in unfamiliar territory at her fall from the height of social and business power. Frankly, she wasn't adjusting very well at all.

I had to kick Margot in the shins twice to get her to thank the sales ladies for their time and effort. In fact, I made her repeat her thanks twice more, to the gals genuine amusement, until she sort of vaguely muttered something that almost resembled sincerity. I opened up my little pocket day-timer and started to make a note of Margot's current offenses so far today while she looked herself over in the mirror. Secretly, I think she liked what she saw; it showed off her figure well in a nice combination of sexiness and practicality. The v-neck thin black sweater showed off her chest nicely, and the warm hose kept the legs comfortable despite the fact that her new black leather skirt just barely covered her pert ass. A black leather raincoat (mostly) covered the ensemble with her new boots making the perfect accent piece.

Very nice! I was so pleased with the appearance of my new dress-up doll that I allowed her one last stop in another designer shop on Union Square where she found the perfect Italian leather shoulder bag that I had to admit did perfectly fit her ensemble. The Commish would squeak at what that bag cost ... but it did add to the decoration.

Now it was time to get down to some serious walking and sightseeing. So far she had only walked a couple of blocks today, but when she realized she was about to now walk the full length of Grant Avenue through Chinatown, she began to squawk.

"Where is our car and driver? I know that you have one on call for the week. Why do we have to walk?"

"Because sunshine, the streets in Chinatown are small and narrow and it is impossible to ever find a parking spot, let alone a good one. We are going to take the air today and you're in need of some good exercise anyway. Besides we're going to stick our nose into nearly every shop and you can't experience the local flavor behind a pane of window glass. Be a good obedient girl and I'll feed you the best real Chinese luncheon in the city."

That mostly soothed her nerves. I learned long ago that women think about food the same way that men think about sex ... roughly about every eight seconds.

She was mostly good as gold the rest of the afternoon. We worked on her 'please' and 'thank you's' all afternoon and if I hadn't known better I would have believed that some of them were even genuine. She really enjoyed her lunch in one of the best hole in wall restaurants in the city, down under street level where the menu was completely in Chinese and we were the only occidentals out of the near one hundred other diners there. I ordered the garlic chicken pot for each of us and we noshed together in warm contented bliss. I think Margot knew that this was the wrong place entirely to raise any sort of scene and was cowed into her best behavior.

Some people say that Stockton Ave is a better walk instead for more of the real authentic Chinatown experience, complete with open air seafood, produce and herbalist shops, but I've always loved Grant, even if it is a bit touristy. It took us the rest of the afternoon to make it to the end, right before the crossing at Columbus Ave for the long walk (slightly downhill) through North Beach with its Italian cafes (and the occasional remaining beatnik coffee shop).

I think, left to her own devices, she would have bought out half of the jewelry shops. One place had some cloisonné that she badly coveted, another had set pearls, another with antique carved ivory, and yet another displaying magnificent old pieces of jade. Not today, at least not on my dime! I told my increasingly unhappy slave girl that I wasn't buying bangles or trinkets today. She howled a fit; mostly because I had made her leave her wallet, credit cards, ATM card, checkbook and her cash all locked up in my desk back in Houston, and I had to yank her, kicking and screaming, out of more than one shop.

More notations for my notebook.

Thoroughly exhausted from the most walking she'd probably ever done in her life, I had to let Margot rest a couple of times at a few outdoor cafes along Columbus, near Coit Tower. That was fine with me; I've never needed an excuse to stop to enjoy an Italian Orangina, or two.

It was sunset by the time I had dragged my knackered and more than annoyed, and very unwilling tourist to the very end of Columbus, right near the start of Fisherman's Wharf. The view of the sunset with the Golden Gate Bridge is always lovely, especially with the fog rolling in. Even my panting lady guest had to admit that the walk was worth it.

Absolutely true. I rewarded her with a pair of take-away Dungeness crab cocktails as a reward for uttering some sense for a change.

We walked along the wharf until it became dark and after towing her away from the shopping perils of Ghirardelli Square (damn, I missed the old chocolate factory and the huge multi-story original Cost-Plus building!), I decided that I'd abused her enough for now and treated her to a first rate seafood dinner at one of the famous restaurants right on the pier.

I toyed with the idea of telling her that we were going to do the walk all over again (mostly uphill) all the way back to the Fairmount, but I decided that would be just too cruel. Besides, she was armed with a sharp knife and fork and probably knew how to use them as weapons.

Instead we took the cable car ride over the hills which took us right straight home in front of the Fairmont. She kicked off her boots and flung herself into her bedroom and only half-heartedly slammed the door on me. I think she was snoring less than five minutes later. A few minutes after that, so was I.

Thursday we spent in Golden Gate Park, complete with my hired car and driver, as I took her through the museums and the aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences and the De Young Museum of Art. She had been a bit tired still from yesterday and had been mostly on her best behavior until she had a bit of a relapse to old bad habits.

We had stopped for tea in the Japanese Tea Garden to enjoy some nice hot Jasmine green tea while waiting out a brief rain shower before tackling the nearby botanical gardens, when Margot's nerves snapped. The seating in the Tea Garden is fairly cozy, with not a lot of room between tables. Seated in the chair behind her was a rather ill-attended to youngster who was amusing himself by rocking his chair — banging Margot's in the process. Upon the second bang, she became unglued and launched into a tirade at both the kid and his hyper-protective parents. A lot of bad language got used on both sides and several statements were made by an increasingly incensed Margot that could have been misconstrued as verbal terroristic threats.

Abandoning all hope of defusing the situation, I just gave up and grabbed her hard by an ear and tried to tow her out of the Tea Garden before she did something to get us all arrested. When she struggled loose, I just seized her roughly and tossed her over my shoulder. I then carried her out kicking and screaming, hopefully before someone phoned in the disturbance to SFPD. Fortunately, I had already paid our tab.

She wasn't terribly appreciative of my rescuing her from a night spent in city lockup as we sped away in our waiting car.

"You spineless bastard! Why didn't you let me finish dealing with those Midwestern pieces of tourist trash. I was handling myself just fine!"

"Fine my ass. That magnificent specimen of corn-fed womanhood had you out-weighed by nearly two hundred pounds. Your first punch would have been lost in one of her fat folds and then she might have sat on you and probably broken you. I couldn't allow that to happen to anyone ... even you."

"I was telling her to keep her little bastard by-blow under control. I should have just smacked the little punk!"

"For starters, it's not polite to call a woman's child a bastard, especially in front of her husband. I've got as good eyes as you have and while I might agree that boy probably has zero genetic association with his father, it is very impolite to mention that fact. Nearly as impolite as just turning around in your chair and grabbing some other woman's child by the throat and shaking him while screaming at the top of your lungs! I swear ... I can't take you out anywhere!"

She screamed and protested, loudly, all of the way out of Golden Gate Park and she was still giving me excuses at the top of her lungs when we pulled in front of a small shop on Haight Street. One of the interesting things about San Francisco is that you often don't have to go very far to find a world class sex aid or fetish shop. In this case, one of the best ones in the city was located just a few blocks north of the park right on Haight, in the heart of the old former hippie Haight-Ashbury district. These days, real estate in the Haight-Ashbury was high priced and rather snooty, but it kept a faint glow of its old counter-culture heritage.

Dragging Margot inside, it didn't take us long to get down to some serious business.

"Maggie, General Order #6. Since you definitely can't be at all trusted to speak or behave like a proper lady while out in public, we're now going to have to take some firm prophylactic measures. Since I know this gentleman standing before us rather well, the owner of this fine facility of many long-standing years, I'm now going to allow you the privilege of making a suitable acquaintance with him as well. Properly! Bitch get your knees on that floor and say 'hello' to Mr. Blackstock ... appropriately. He prefers to be called Sir ... and you'd better mean it!"