The Happy Hooker: My Own Story

12. BIFF-BAM-THANK-YOU-MA’AM

As long as there are grown men with adolescent-originated emotional hang-ups that bubble to the surface as their sex drive, there will always be the “freak…” A freak is basically anyone who needs fantasy, degradation, or punishment in order to achieve his interpretation of erotic gratification.

I classify freaks in two categories: sadists and masochists, who need to inflict pain or have it inflicted; and weirdos, or sickies, whose preference is for more subtle, way-out fantasy.

Based on what I see and what I hear, I would guess that as many as one in ten adult American men has a freak streak, latent or blatant, in his sexual makeup.

Sadists and masochists, referred to by the cognoscenti as “S and M,” or “slaves and masters,” are the most prevalent of the freak syndrome, and ninety percent of those that I know are slaves, preferring to have punishment inflicted rather than mete it out.

Being both master and slave is very rare and would be like being heterosexual and homosexual all at the same time.

There appears to be no obvious reason for a man becoming one in preference to the other, and an interesting illustration of how two people, exposed to identical environmental influences, can react in opposite ways is a pair of brothers I will call William and David Lyons.

The Lyons brothers grew up in a home presided over by a tyrannical mother and a doormat of a father, and both harbored tremendous amounts of filial resentment. As a result, both men became freaks – one is a heavy sadist and the other a meek masochist.

William, the masochist, is called the “Humble Servant” in my house and pays to be treated like one. He comes up regularly, gets into an apron, and wants to be ordered around like a houseboy.

If by chance the Humble Servant completes his list of chores, like running the errands, doing the dusting, and even washing out the girls’ stockings and underwear, we accidentally on purpose drop ashtrays full of matches, ash, and cigarette ends on the floor, and he gratefully cleans them up.

Freaks are not, as many people suppose, faceless little misfits slinking around corners hoping to get splashed by a passing taxi or stepped on for free.

Some of America’s wealthiest and most respected citizens have been beaten, chastised, insulted, dressed up like girls, chained like dogs and even ordered to bark in my house, and have paid big money for the privilege.

There is so much money in freak scenes that one girl I know bought herself a beautiful villa in Switzerland with the proceeds of a twice-weekly visit from her freak boyfriend over the period of only a year.

But to me that higher fee is still not always worth participating in freak scenes, for both moral and business reasons. You might think it would be quick, easy money to land someone a quick right to the jaw or give him a push down a flight of stairs, but that is not the case. Freak scenes are far more subtle and require the patience of a Job and the psychology of a Freud.

For that reason there are professional girls who specialize only in freak scenes. A recently published book on sex claims that sado-masochistic scenes are generally done by older prostitutes who are no longer attractive enough to get straight customers. This is not entirely true. The girls are older, and often unattractive, but that is because they have the maturity to understand where a freak’s head is at and the experience to know how to cope with it. As far as looks go, freaks are generally not interested in attractive feminine girls as masters in their scenes, preferring tougher-looking types.

Freak scenes are just that – scenes. They are well-staged one-act plays with a beginning, a story line, and an end, but not necessarily a climax, as sex is often an unimportant aspect of their game.

To many it’s a harmless romp elaborately acting out an immature fantasy. To others it can be a sick and degrading addiction.

One of the most tragic I ever witnessed involved a stage and movie star, and it happened just this spring.

One Sunday afternoon when it was quiet and I was looking forward to a much-needed rest, I had a phone call from Laura, the black girl I’d swung with at Madeleine’s. She wanted me to do her a favor, for money, of course.

“I know you don’t make house calls anymore if you can avoid it, Xaviera;” she said, “but do you think you could break the rule this once for me?”

Laura explained that she wanted me to participate in a way-out freak scene involving a famous showbusiness couple who had a townhouse in the fashionable East Sixties.

“You’re the only one I know who can get into it without a whole lot of hassle, and you may even enjoy it,” she said.

I liked Laura. She was fun-loving, freaky, and, like me, she really enjoyed her work. Since leaving Madeleine’s she had become a top-notch courtesan, catering only to the crème of the carriage trade. I wanted to help her out, and I also remembered that caramel-colored body of hers and got horny just thinking about it.

“Okay,” I told her. “Give me the address, and I’ll come right over.” Twenty minutes later I entered the four-story brownstone and met the famous couple.

“Thanks for coming,” Laura said. “Let me introduce you to Mr. and Mrs. Showbusiness.” Through the grapevine I was already aware that the woman and her former husband were well-known swingers in New York high-society bedrooms, but she divorced him when his gradually increasing hang-ups finally turned him homosexual.

Her current husband, it was said, now scouts the city for young girls to give her for their little slave scenes. The actress, however, picks up the tabs.

Inside their house, where the atmosphere reeked of money, and success oozed out of the woodwork, we had a brief guided tour before the raven-haired woman, dressed in an exquisite turquoise silk house gown, led us upstairs.

Adjoining the bedroom was a bathroom where a Jacuzzi whirlpool bath was all ready. Without any prompting from the couple, Laura started to remove her clothes, and asked me to take mine off. The idea was for her and me to get into a swing. We started caressing each other as we climbed into the whirling tub. Laura sat on the side of the bath, and I knelt down doggie fashion and started kissing her all the way down her sinuous brown body to her familiar purple pussy with the springy hair.

All the time I was doing this the water was gushing against my clitoris from behind, and we were both getting very excited. The couple stood near the door, and the actress started stroking her own body through the soft silk of her gown, while her husband was saying, “Wow, give it to her, baby.”

Laura too was gurgling with pleasure, and soon she started to squeal as she climaxed and slid down into the tub.

This turned the actress on like a 100-watt lightbulb, and she wanted her own action. “Let’s go inside and get down to some basics,” she said impatiently. So we climbed out of the tub, toweled off, and adjourned to the bedroom for the heavy freak scene.

Laura, who knew the script well from regularly doing it, shoved the beautiful actress roughly down onto the bed and started undressing her. Without any resistance she removed her gown, panties, and bra, and I must say, for a forty-year-old woman who was the mother of a child, she had a dynamite body – slender and delicate, with big, strong tits and milk white skin.

Laura grabbed the actress’s wrists and bound them with her gown sash and tied them to the top of the bed, while I pulled her legs apart and tied each ankle to the other end, using her husband’s expensive neckties.

Then I was handed a huge double dildo – a rubber penis with identical heads on each end – and I was to abuse this beautiful creature with it. After I greased it up with Vaseline I inserted one end into her vagina and the other into her rectum, and not very gently, either. The treatment this woman wanted was rough and painful.

While I manipulated this monster, Laura slapped her around the face and breasts as she writhed with pleasure, making low moaning sounds.

During all this her husband stood leaning against a bureau calmly watching, popping amyl nitrates for himself and feeding her cocaine, which whacked her out of her head and sent her almost berserk.

Her husband was not allowed to touch the hired girls, although I have since found out he secretly auditions the very young ones when he goes on his talent-scouting sorties to brothels.

“Give it to her with the vibrators now, Xaviera,” Laura, the director, said, so I withdrew the double dildo and replaced it with two little rapidly whirring mechanical devices.

Her passion rose to a crescendo, and her husband could tell the climax was not far off, and in their twisted thinking the whole scene is justified as love if he completes it with her. He dropped his robe, climbed onto her convulsing body, and banged away for minutes until she climaxed, hysterically shrieking, “My God, my God, my God.”

It’s sick and it’s pathetic. Here’s this gorgeous-looking woman who should be in a sensitive, gentle love scene with someone tenderly kissing her all over, and instead she is hooked on this hideous depravity.

Furthermore, she is torn between her heterosexual duty to her husband and her increasing need for female domination, even though she is not yet a lesbian.

The couple paid me a substantial amount for my part, but really it was money I could live without, so I told Laura to forget about inviting me again.

But the scene left a lingering impression on me, and I figured maybe the actress needed the debasing to balance the heavy adulation she gets from her theater audiences and movie fans.

Who knows? All I know is she’s lucky she earns so much, because she spends big money for the freak scenes. Laura alone is paid $1,000 to stop by five times a week and give a convincing performance.

German George is another pathetic case who needs to be cruelly degraded before he can get his rocks off. He is a wealthy forty-five-year-old businessman who got his first taste of sex under the most extreme kind of conditions as a teen-age Jewish prisoner in a German concentration camp.

A tough woman guard, naked under a raincoat, ordered him behind the lavatories one night and forced him to perform cunnilingus.

To this day German George remembers vividly the fear mixed with reluctant excitement that he felt. And he has failed to overcome the trauma to the extent that he cannot have sex without re-creating the sights, sounds, and smells of that carnal moment.

I came in contact with German George when he called the house where I worked before I became a madam, requesting a girl who spoke fluent German, was reasonably strongly built, and could freak a man out. The madam assured him I was tailor-made for the part, and sent me to his apartment in a luxury high-rise building in the East Fifties.

German George, after greeting me politely at the door, wanted to get right down to brass tacks, and the first thing he did was lead me to a locked hall closet.

The slight, pale man fumbled with the locks, and from the way he acted, I thought he must be hiding the crown jewels. But as he pulled open the door with a grand gesture, I saw that the closet contained nothing else but six or seven original SS raincoats – and the smell of perishing rubber was so thick inside you could cut it with a knife.

This man wanted me to undress and put the raincoat on over my naked body and carry out a mock SS raid and a beating.

“Don’t forget to put on the belt,” he reminded me as he attached a swastika to the arm and handed me a toy gun.

The scene was to proceed with me going out of the bedroom while he arranged himself, naked, on the bed with his head toward the closed door.

Outside the door I had to bang with my fists, boom, boom, boom, and roar out in German: “Gestapo here! Open the door immediately!”

But there is no reply. So I kick the door open and burst in, to find him lying there with his penis in his hand. “Herr Cohen,” I demand in a menacing voice.

“No, no, I’m Mr. Smith,” he says meekly, pretending to tremble.

“Don’t lie to me, you’re a Jew – Verdammte Jude, schweinhund.” Bam, bam, I slam him on the face.

Little German George quivers all over, gets an erection, and is very excited. He starts waffling about the “bloody Jews” and how he hopes every last one of them gets what he deserves.

“Shut up, Jew,” I hiss, and to assure that he obeys, I sit on his face and force him to eat me. Then I get mad because he does it wrong, and take off my belt and spank him up until he is almost about to climax, but just then he calls a halt to activity.

“Let’s stop and do it all again,” he says. So we repeat the scene once again, and the third time, while I spank him hard, German George jerks off.

The poor man is happy and pleased to pay me, but this kind of thing also makes me sad, because I’m Jewish, too, and even though I was only a baby during World War II, I hate to be confronted with things like this.

Still another freak who got his hang-up in a war camp is the rabbi who can make it only with non-Jewish girls, and only after they paint him all over with swastikas.

Just as freaks each have their favorite scene, so they have their favorite atmosphere and conditions. For instance, full moons and gloomy or stormy weather is very big with the average freak. I often think they are as predictable as the little blue boy in those miniature European weather vanes. When the weather is lousy – out they come.

Perhaps people who dig suffering at any time consider it an added bonus when the weather is mean to them, too. Freaks are also very intrigued by umbrellas, which represent to them a potential weapon of chastisement.

Umbrellas are so important to many freaks that the biggest S-and-M supply store in Manhattan is a West Side umbrella shop where I purchased the contents of my “goodie bag.”

Every good master needs at the very minimum a good set of manacles, whips, rawhides, handcuffs, chains, paddles, and a dildo. Those who specialize exclusively in the scene have much more variety and perhaps more expensive, subtler instruments. I have one lovely slave who combs Europe searching for medieval leg irons and handcuffs that don’t leave any marks, and he always brings his own bondage accessories for his freak scenes.

Incidentally, this man recently visited my fellow countrywoman – a madam who ran a famous “torture house” in New Jersey until she was raided, and is now experimenting in Europe with a brand-new treat for masochists called “cell isolation.” In her house in The Hague, this woman has had a special cell built in which she locks her customers after she has clapped them in irons. Sometimes she strings their hands to the ceiling. I understand she is doing a roaring business.

A little slave customer of mine named Nicky took me to the umbrella store one gloomy freak day to equip myself for my slave scenes. Jonny Starr, the Negro manager of the store, who has since worked for me as a stud, slave, or master, showed me his collection of whips and paddles, all of which I tested out against my hand or Nicky’s ass. As I was making my choice I happened to glance at the store window, and standing there was a well-dressed man completely mesmerized.

Even through the glass I could recognize that familiar spaniel look they all have of “Beat me up, hit me, please,” like a faithful dog.

In order to tease him I gave Nicky another smack on his ass, and the whip made a swishing noise that made this window-shopper get all shook up.

Then I got the bright idea that if I was investing so much money in the new instruments of bondage and torture, I should assure myself of at least one customer, so I walked outside and stood alongside him pretending to study the umbrella display.

I happened to be dressed appropriately as a master that day, with black pants, black turtleneck sweater, and my hair in a severe upswept style, and the combination of me and the manacles drove him to speak to me.

“You handle that whip so beautifully,” he said in Hungarian-accented English. “I bet you could do a lot with it to make people happy.”

“If you think I could make you happy, please allow me to try,” I answered.

“That I would just love,” he glowed. “Where can I find you, and when will I come?”

“Come at six P.M. sharp,” I ordered, because with slaves there is never an approximate time. They are always punctual because of the need to be obedient. I handed him my card, and he nodded and walked away.

As expected, the window-shopper arrived on the stroke of six, all sad-eyed and full of expectancy. That night I tried out everything in my new goodie bag, which he loved so much he became a regular slave until he moved away from New York a year and a half later.

A freak, no matter how he was first acquired, usually becomes a faithful one-master slave. I have even kept obscene phone-callers on the line, freaked them out, and turned them into regular and profitable clients.

My ability to spot a freak is uncanny. I can recognize a freak in any environment, and often before he knows it himself, because I can read eyes the way palmists read hands.

This happened on the beach in Puerto Rico with a famous New York city disc jockey I’ll call William H. Robinson, who definitely had a masochistic tendency, but had never acknowledged it, probably out of fear that the reality might either disgust or addict him.

Robinson was wearing dark glasses when we were introduced, and as we stood talking at the water’s edge, I could feel those freaky vibrations, so I asked him to take the shades off.

“I want to see your eyes, because in the eyes of a human being lies his soul,” I told him.

He unsuspectingly took the glasses off, and straight away I said, “I bet you’re a masochist.”

The disc jockey’s reaction was startling. I had really hit a nerve. His whole casual attitude changed, and at once he became afraid of me.

To win back his confidence I told him the truth about myself, and he was shocked all over again, but it made him confess something he had never told anyone in his life, including, and especially, his nice Jewish wife.

For years he has had a recurring dream, and he starts the story this way. “As I get off the air, I see myself dialing the telephone number of a woman in black, whose face I can’t see, but she has a mane of black hair.

“She wants me to come to her at a certain hour, but I never seem able to complete the phone call, because my fingers keep slipping out of the dial.

“All the while I know she will be furious with me because I am unpunctual, and when I finally reach her house, an hour late, I deserve punishment and humiliation.”

The woman in black, he continues, orders him to come to her on his knees, but suddenly he is on one of those amusement-park crazy roads where you take two steps back to every step forward.

Somehow in the illogic of the dream he is in bondage, his knees hurt badly, and when he finally reaches the woman, who is sitting on a tall stool in a room shaped like a bowling alley, she is talking sexy on the phone to other people, but she yells obscenities and laughs and spits at him.

“On your feet, slave,” she orders, and ties him firmly in bondage and beats him, at which point he wakes up sweating beside his little wife, who accuses him of talking to his mistress in his sleep.

By now, Robinson told me, he was secretly distressed and getting desperate. Should he go on suffering this masochistic anguish, or would participating in a real scene rid him of the nightmare?

At this point I looked at my watch and discovered I was late for an appointment myself, so I told him to call me in my hotel room that afternoon and I would try to help him out.

Robinson and I were staying in the same hotel, and in the middle of the afternoon my phone rang. He wanted to know if I had thought about his problem.

“Yes, I have,” I said, and started spinning him a long fantasy over the phone of how he would get shipwrecked and rescued by naked islanders, only to discover too late they were cannibals who would cook him and eat him.

I could tell the story was freaking him out as his heavy breathing came through the phone. “Hang up and came straight to my room,” I ordered him, just like the woman in black.

He arrived wearing only his bathrobe, and was at such a pitch that all I had to do was touch him lightly with my hand on his thigh, and he climaxed.

The freak world of make-believe is so delicate and sensitive that the essential mood can be shattered by the least lapse in reality. Therefore, the fantasy you spin, the clothes you wear, and the atmosphere you create are absolutely important.

Early in my career as a practicing master I welcomed to my house a man who called himself Marco Polo, who was in fact a famous public personage who makes speeches at the Waldorf and has his picture in the Times.

When this man walked into my living room I was looking very feminine, wearing a diaphanous nightgown, my hair hanging demurely to my shoulders. “You’re not the type of woman I expected to see,” he said, backing off. “You couldn’t freak me out.”

“Perhaps if you will be patient for a little while I could find you a woman who could freak you out,” I said, and slowly, as he made himself comfortable in the armchair, I faded into the bedroom and came back wearing a black leather outfit, with fishnet stockings, and my hair in a severe pulled-back style.

The transformation was for him perfect, and immediately he was reassured. For half an hour we sat in the living room discussing what was his hang-up, and our plan to satisfy it. Marco Polo described to me a set of symptoms that were familiar with many successful and powerful men.

As absolute ruler in his corporation, he manipulates the men beneath him like a puppeteer. However, this daytime domineering makes him feel insecure, and as a balance to reality, he craves being submissive. These powerful men become slaves to release the tension of running other people’s lives.

Having recognized Marco Polo’s preference, I suggested the bedroom, which was prepared with flickering candles and black lights to create a spooky atmosphere, and once inside, his uptight living-room manner disappeared; instead, he became very freaky.

Marco Polo’s desire is to make you believe he is some kind of docile animal, and he needs first to be talked into a different world – which is the mentally exhausting part of it. It can take more than an hour, gradually and convincingly getting him into his fantasy world while dressing him with wigs, makeup, handcuffs, and leg irons. I then add a blindfold, which is something I invented to increase the thrill of fear and humiliation. To masochists the feeling of being in bondage and blindfolded as well can be compared to the classic double ecstasy.

While doing all this I talk about the ocean, the huge white-capped waves, the fishermen in their boats, and this beautiful mermaid. At this point my roommate, Mary Jo, assists me to lay him down on the bed with his head facing the wrong end. We bind his legs together in hospital bandages, make him a tail, and tell him he is that mermaid.

To complete the illusion, we throw a fishnet over him, all the time popping amyl nitrate under his nose, which most freaks love for the aphrodisiac effects.

As he lies in his aquatic fantasy I take off my clothes and stand with my body above his face and let him start eating me, and then it is time to introduce the mystery guest.

The mystery guest is Jonny, the umbrella salesman, but Marco Polo must never be allowed to see or hear him, because he doesn’t want to be confronted with his homosexual tendencies.

Marco Polo, I have recognized, is like many freaks who are respectable businessmen and family men – a latent homosexual who will not admit it to anyone, least of all himself.

As he lies there eating my pussy, his hands in bondage, with just enough freedom to play with my tits, I signal the black stud, who creeps up behind me and slides his enormous cock in between my legs.

Marco Polo is suddenly eating a cock, which, so far as he knows, I have just grown.

Then I step slowly out of the scene and release his hands and the bandages to give him enough room to jerk off, which he does while indulging in his never-to-be-acknowledged homosexual leanings.

Before I remove the blindfold, Jonny is paid and sent away. Then I release Marco Polo from his bonds, and he is so delighted he wants to arrange another identical session.

But I had to turn him down. His scene is too much of a hassle for the money, because I have to turn off my phones and neglect everyone else. With that kind of loss of business, he could be profitable only if he paid me $1,000.

Clothes make the man, and also the freak scene.

I have an entire wardrobe for transvestites, including special nighties, lace dresses, garterbelts, stockings, big-sized padded bras and girdles, gloves, and oversized women’s high heels.

At the time I was going seriously into the freak trade, I went to a small shop on Lexington Avenue to buy the appropriate clothes.

Being relatively new to the scene, I needed a little guidance, so I walked over to the faggy-looking young salesman. “Can I help you?” he asked, and all of a sudden I could see those eyes.

“Yes, you can help me,” I replied. “You see, I need a wardrobe for freaking people out, and you look like you know what it’s all about to me.”

At first his mouth fell open, but then he smiled. “Well, dear, now that you put it that way, let me suggest to you these divine garterbelts, these darling black crotchless panties,” he lisped effeminately, “and how about something in a fishnet stocking?” The sales assistant also recommended a few nice feminine garments in case one of my slaves was in the right mood to wear them.

The first night I had the new collection, I had a slave customer who was so thrilled I could dress him in such heavenly clothes he almost came by looking at them.

Snapping my fingers and slapping my hands together like a bossy mother teaching her school-age son to dress, I ordered him into them. But he was so enchanted being in the new bra and panties that he climaxed before he got the nightdress on.

This slave doesn’t take more than half an hour usually, but at least I have to work on him. “Nut,” I told him, “if that’s how you felt, you could have come in your own underpants and saved the fee.” To make sure he got something more for his money, I gave him a friendly spanking as a dessert.

Freaks will perform the most incredible kind of emotional and physical acts in their pursuit of gratification, but basically they never fuck. They come by masturbating or having it done to them, or with a dildo in their anus, or, like the one I just mentioned, with no help at all.

One exception to this characteristic is one of my sweetest and most regular slaves, a closet gigolo named Tame Timmy.

Tame Timmy loves to fuck, as long as he is in bondage – and I must say that he does it well. I guess he would have to, making, as he does, a career out of marrying much older women who happen to be wealthy.

Tame Timmy is twenty-nine, always suntanned, with a really lovely face and a darling disposition.

His routine had been to come to my house, but lately, since he divorced his last wife, he implored me to came over to his house and freak him out.

“Okay, Timmy, don’t you worry, I’ll come over as soon as I can get away,” I assured him. Fortunately, it was a Saturday night and quiet at my house.

It was around eight o’clock when I got there, and already dark, and he was in a really freaky mood. He wanted me to dress him in women’s clothes, tie him tightly down to the bed, switch off all the lights, and leave him alone in the gloom.

I left the front door ajar while I went home, watched a movie on TV, and had something to eat. It was dusk when I left him three hours before, but when I returned the apartment was in total darkness, and the atmosphere was kind of spooky. The silence was eerie, because I knew that somewhere in a back bedroom lay my living slave.

I walked into the bedroom and switched on the lights and found Tame Timmy in almost exactly the same position as I had left him. There was a sad expression in his eyes, and an erection in his penis. I released the bonds and gave him his freedom, but only temporarily. I dressed him up again in a different outfit and, with him back in bondage, I raped him strong and forcefully, meanwhile slapping my beautiful helpless, tied-down slave in the face. At the same time, I fed him an entire box of amyl nitrates, to get him good and stoned.

He has since made another home appointment to coincide with the television screening of a Boris Karloff horror movie, and I had to bind him up in an excruciating position, like a giant pretzel, close to the set, which is where he spent the next two hours being spooked out of his head.

Not all S and M’s are harmless or docile, and I heard that when the New York freaks held a convention this year in a Manhattan hotel, two slaves were so savagely beaten during a demonstration by overenthusiastic masters that they had to be hospitalized.

There are those like the Cucumber Kid who come to my house wanting all kinds of damage done to them.

This man, who had just been released from the hospital after another girl shoved a cucumber up his ass and split him in a thousand pieces, wants you to impale him on a hatpin, drip hot wax on his balls, or do anything else that will cause him unbearable pain.

This kind of treatment does more than cause pain, and I refuse to do anything that might cause anyone real damage, although I myself was almost murdered in my own house in a freak scene gone haywire.

It began innocently enough when a man named Larry Lerner called up late one night with a reference from Madeleine Henry, and he wanted to come by. I honestly didn’t want any more business, because it was three A.M. I had shut up shop and was relaxing over a fruit juice with a girl named Sarah, my roommate and also a working girl. But I had promised Madeleine I would take good care of her customers, and to stick to my word, I let him come up.

Lerner was skunk drunk when he arrived, and at once I regretted letting him come. If I’d had my radar working properly, I would have realized he was trouble and told him to come back tomorrow. I hate drunks at any time, let alone at three in the morning.

They are slow in their sexual activity, and altogether they are a pain in the neck. I figured with Lerner normal sex would be impossible, bur I couldn’t quite figure the man’s number. There was something kind of sinister about his eyes. They were alternately harsh and dreamy. As I’ve said, I usually can tell a lot by a man’s eyes, but this night I really got the signals crossed. I decided he was a masochist.

“Why don’t we do something really weird,” I suggested. “You are going to be my slave, and I’m going to be your master, and I want you to do exactly what I say.”

“No,” he said, “I’m gonna be the sadist.”

“Maybe you didn’t understand what I mean,” I said. “I will be the domineering one.”

In general you don’t try to talk people into freak scenes. You can mention the subject and see their reaction, but with a drunk you’ve got to be careful; because he can react exactly the opposite of what he feels.

At that point, however, Lerner had become quite passive, so I figured he was going to play my game, although he insisted on Sarah watching, even though he paid up front only for me. In Lerner’s case I had to bend standard procedure, because he was so drunk and erratic, and accept his money beforehand.

We decided to use the living room and pushed the nearby furniture to one side while he undressed. Then I got out my goodie bag and put him in bondage with rawhide, ties, handcuffs, and everything. I also put him in a blindfold, but I did it all very gently and did not beat him at all.

We laid him down in the middle of the floor while Sarah sat swiveling herself in the chair teasing him and saying how ridiculous he looked.

During the fifteen or twenty minutes Lerner showed little life and was altogether a very boring slave, so in order to hurry this thing along I whispered to Sarah I was going to the kitchen to get some amyl nitrate to freak him out fast.

And this reckless gesture was the worst thing I could have done, but I was then naive about the lethal combination of alcohol and drugs.

Immediately after I popped the amyl nitrate under his nose, he stiffened. “What is that you’re giving me?” he choked.

“I’m just giving you a harmless popper,” I told him, “so don’t worry about it. Inhale, inhale.”

But Lerner was momentarily panicked. “Everything has gone completely black,” he bellowed; “get me out of here.”

“It can’t last more than thirty seconds,” I assured him, but he was impossible to placate. So Sarah and I spent the next ten minutes removing the blindfold and the bonds, by which time we supposed he had calmed down and was over his experience.

But we couldn’t have been more wrong.

As he reached toward me on the pretext of getting a cigarette from the coffee table, I saw the sadistic look in his eyes too late. Before I could jump out of the way, his huge hamfist had landed me a vicious blow to the jaw and sent me reeling.

The madman pounced on me, grabbed my long hair, and started hammering violently at the back of my neck, my chest, and my groin. He had gone stark mad, berserk.

Sarah was screaming and made a few attempts to pull him off me, but he sent her running with a karate blow to the head. She vanished, and I didn’t know where, because I was too busy trying to save my skin.

The savage beating went on for about fifteen minutes, blood was coming from my nose and lips, and it was a wonder I was not already dead. Any other woman would have crumpled already, but luckily I have a really hard head.

To show you how hard it is, once I was riding my bicycle along the canal in Holland when the car in front braked suddenly and threw me forward onto its roof, then down to the ground. When I stood up and felt my head, it was a little bit sore, but no bruises. There was a big, deep hole in the car.

After what seemed an eternity, the telephone mercifully rang, and I grabbed it, and Sarah was at the other end saying, “Hang in there, Xaviera, I’m coming up with the police.” This to me was the worst she could do, because you don’t call the police up to a whorehouse! But on the other hand, to just let me get killed was no good, either.

At that point Lerner said: “I’m going to kill you.” And with murder in his eyes he picked up the heavy wooden coffee table with the big brass feet and had it held over my head.

Just then the doorbell rang, and Lerner dropped the table and suddenly calmed down. But he still had hold of what was left of my hair and was still threatening to kill me, although he was rational enough to try to put on his underpants with the other hand.

I seized the opportunity to struggle out of his grasp, threw the door open, and was never so relieved to see a policeman in my life.

“What seems to be the trouble?” the two fresh-faced young Irish cops asked. As if they couldn’t see for themselves! My eyes were as big as artichokes, my nose was bleeding like a tap, and my mouth was three times its normal size. I looked like I’d gone five rounds with Sonny Liston.

“Oh, nothing much, officers,” I said. “Just a little family squabble. You know, my boyfriend here had a little too much to drink and got a bit frisky.”

If that looked like a family squabble, we must have looked like the Munster family, because sitting on the floor in full view was my goodie bag with the whips, manacles, and handcuffs all around.

I tried to bend over to pick them up, but the pain in my body made it impossible. Sarah could see what I was trying to do, so she scooped up the stuff and put it in a closet.

“Do you want to press charges, then?” the cops asked.

How could I press charges? I could be hung by the heels from the Empire State Building and not be able to press charges in the business I’m in.

“No, thank you, gentlemen, but if I could ask you to escort him off the premises, I would be very grateful.”

When the police left and the shock wore off, I really started to feel sorry for myself. My hair was falling out in big handfuls, and it almost filled the wastepaper basket. A tooth was chipped, the guy had banged me black and blue in my vagina, and my stomach felt like I just gave birth to a dinosaur.

So far I had kept my cool, but by now I was at breaking point, and I needed a strong shoulder, so I called the contact between me and my boyfriend. Half an hour later Larry came over and took me to the emergency room at the hospital on Seventy-second and York.

And what I went through there, it was a toss-up whether I might have been better just staying at hone. We sat there waiting for half an hour before anybody even bothered to see what was wrong, and then someone came along and asked a whole lot of questions, name, address, education, and whether I had ever been there before, and if so, did I pay my bill.

After about another hour a doctor came by and knocked me on my knee, knocked me on my head, knocked me on my nose, and said: “X rays.”

I was directed into a room where this little Spanish X-ray technician with a black moustache told me to get into a paper robe that opens down the front, and climb onto the table. He watched me undress, and he could hardly believe his eyes when he saw how badly I was beaten.

“My God, whatever happened to you?” he said.

To hell with it, I thought, I might as well tell him the truth in twenty words, no more, and I could use a little sympathy.

“Ah, you know, a little freak scene. I like to turn people into slaves, but tonight the slave turned on the master.”

But sympathy is not what I got. As I glanced out of the corner of my swollen eye, I could see there was a big hard-on in his pants. “Before we start,” he said with a slimy smile, “how about a blow-job?”

With all I’d gone through, all I needed was a horny Puerto Rican X-ray technician at five in the morning! “Baby, get your work done, one animal a night is enough.”

“If you give me a blow-job I’ll give you the X rays free; otherwise it will cost you $100 or $150,” he persisted.

“Forget about it, Charley, quit, split, get on with your work and send me the bill.”

The technician was crushed and disappointed, but not completely discouraged. “All right,” he said. “But can you let me have your card?”