We hung out together at the house when everyone else went out to the casinos at night. She had brought some heroin with her and we would smoke it and make love. It was like camp for decadent San Franciscans. I had never gotten to go to real camp because of my asthma.
On the third night there I had returned to my own bed to sleep and had a grand mal seizure. It was generally controlled by a drug called Dilantin, but I think the heroin cut right through. I woke up on the floor with a number of people I did not recognize staring down at me. I had wet my pants. I did not know where I was. It was several hours before my memory came back. The girl I had been with held me and stayed with me until I got reoriented. I had never had a seizure in front of strangers before but everyone handled it well.
I think the film was called Snowballing or something like that. I made a couple of hundred dollars a day and it was nice to get out of the city. I never saw the finished product.
Here’s how I ended up with epilepsy:
I was a tremendously emotional, spoiled, asthmatic child who loved horses. I was stick thin and pale, and the floor of my room was stained from the ever-present vaporizer. My parents bought me a horse when I was ten to encourage me to be active, and to shut me up.
We found a totally wild, part-Morgan pinto mare up north in a town near Oroville called Bangor. We managed to tame her to some extent but she was always pretty crazy. She was even going over fences after about a year. I had a British ex-cavalry riding instructor who wasn’t there the day of the accident, but my father was and some visitors from LA. I was jumping a course of fences about four feet high and wearing a helmet that was not appropriate for jumping. The real “brain-bucket” style has a wide leather chin strap. This had elastic. My horse took a bad fence, caught the pole above her knees, crashed on the far side and did a somersault. I was under her at the time.
They say the saddle held her weight off me and that I was probably hit in the head by a stirrup iron. When they took me to the Children’s Hospital I was walking and talking but remembering nothing. The doctors sent me home. My mother was there and being a nurse, saw that my pupils were radically different from one another, a sure sign of a serious head injury. She took me to another hospital where it was determined I had a fractured skull. I didn’t remember anything for three or four days. I returned home after a week in the hospital and this part I remember like a photograph. I was walking to the refrigerator for orange juice when I felt a big pressure on my forehead, then I felt tremendously drunk. I woke up with my face under the water heater, staring at thick dust motes and the pilot light, my legs wet with piss, and my mother saying, “You’ve had a seizure, just relax.”
My body ached for days, as if I’d been bucked off a horse.
5 Highway 1
I came down the stairs with my little dog to answer the door at six in the morning, wearing only a long black and orange bathrobe. I was excited about seeing the man who was waiting there because I didn’t get to see him very often, and then only at his whim.
He had called at 5.30, drug-crazed, belligerent and exciting, demanding that I throw out whoever was in my bed, which I did. His name was Artie Mitchell and I had met him when I worked on my first porno film. He had continued to call after the work was through. Being addicted to bizarre sex, he was the only person I’d ever met who had no fear of the physical or chemical edge.
There was an air of chaos and sleazy glamor that permeated his life, now confirmed by the silver limo at the curb driven by his hunky blonde cousin who smiled as I was pulled without resisting into the back seat littered with children’s toys. I’d heard his wife was fertile.
I complained to him that I hadn’t locked my apartment door and he told me with drunken gallantry that he would replace whatever was stolen. There wasn’t much there anyway.
He had an uncommon ability for calling when I was on my period, but it wasn’t really that hard because I was bleeding more often than not. We did some cocaine and soon were humping like mink on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. Being concerned about the nice gray velour seats I told him I was bleeding heavily. He told me he didn’t care. We had hot, wet, mad menstrual sex on the bridge at sunrise, filling the back seat with orgasms while my little dog slept peacefully on the floor.
We took a break on the road to Mount Tam, where he pulled out a wad of money and wiped the blood off me and himself. He threw the bloody money on the floor with the dog and lit a joint.
Heading north on Highway 1, we picked up a suntanned girl hitchhiker with tangled blonde hair like the morning after. She was happy to be picked up by a limousine but after we’d started up again she saw the puppy and the blood money and got nervous. He teased her for being squeamish, and asked me to recite some poems. After she heard them, she asked to get out. We pulled over and left her by the roadside. We accelerated our intake of drugs.
We drove another hour up the perfect California coastline, then turned off on a dirt road that led to a little trailer with a small group of people standing around and sitting in lawn chairs drinking beer. We got out of the car and he told me they were his relatives. There was a sweet comfortable woman in her fifties who he said was his aunt. I was in my bathrobe with no shoes on. She was nice to me anyway.
The men had just been abalone diving. They were telling extravagant stories with their hands. I was astounded that my friend would ask anyone to meet relatives in my condition, but they took it well. They joked that they thought someone had died when they saw the limo in the driveway.
We stayed too long and he renewed his drunkenness with beer and hot sun well into the afternoon. When we finally left, we stood up in the open sunroof and made bird noises, calling to the crows.
We resumed our passionate fucking as we returned to the city. The tinted windows amplified the darkness, smudging the edges of things. It was late when we arrived and he wanted to eat, so we went to Japantown where they didn’t care that I had no shoes. I ate sushi for the first time, and being so high it seemed to slither down my throat.
A week later I got a card from him: the ace of spades folded in a dollar bill covered with dried blood. I framed it and hung it on the wall.
A CASTLE IN MILTON KEYNES
Sonia Florens
HE HAD PURSUED me relentlessly. I gave up and surrendered. Out of guilt, out of lust, and sheer lassitude.
I had betrayed him a few years before and I felt I had no other choice now but to insist he punish me as he saw fit. Repentance must come, I reckoned. To purge the evil of my cold heart. To wash the past away in one quick swoop.
“The first hint of your infidelity,” he had explained to me, “was when you came to me smelling of cigarette smoke, of dead ash. You put your lips against mine and the damn tobacco was all over your breath. I was breathing in another man as I kissed you.”
I lowered my eyes, fluttered my lashes.
He knew.
We parted ways.
There were other men. Minor, unfulfilling adventures. But none could erase his spell over me, the look of sheer danger in his eyes that kept me feeling ever wet on the inside.
I suppose that in the time we spent apart, he also came to know other women. The female form is his major weakness. But I can forgive that. Because all the while he kept shadowing me, writing, threatening, phoning. Loving me in that crazy way of his.
So, one morning in March, a few days before that damn Trade Fair I just couldn’t face attending once again – year after year of pointless negotiations with Eastern European entrepreneurs who just had no clue and had no subtlety whatsoever trying to get their paws into my underwear and thought taking meaningless options and inviting me for drinks at their hotel bar was the epitome of sophistication and seduction – I walked over to his building early. Half an hour or so before I knew he usually arrived. Stood by the door and waited. Wondering all the time whether I was doing the right thing.
He arrived. Didn’t even blink when he saw me there (later, though, he confessed that his heart ju
st dropped twenty fathoms when he realized it actually was me).
“I’m back,” I said.
“You haven’t changed,” he said quietly.
“Yes, I’m the same,” I answered.
His hand stayed in his coat pocket, fingering his keys.
“Back for good?” he asked.
“Forever and again,” I promised.
“Good.”
We went inside and he fucked me unceremoniously on his office floor. We didn’t talk. Just did it. It was good. As it always had been. Time and time again, he got hard. And harder. Ploughed me. The phone rang on and off throughout and we blissfully ignored it. Every time, he plunged deeper into me, extending my legs over his shoulders to ensure further penetration and I knew only too well that with each successive thrust he was trying to hurt me, but I bit my tongue and let him take his revenge. I was the guilty party. The betrayer. His fingers in my rear stretched me, tore me, impaled me, but it was all right. It was fine. He had to get over his anger. And the pain he was causing also excited me like I never thought it could.
Later, I told him:
“I have done you wrong, I know.”
“Yes, oh yes, you have, my love,” he said, pensively. “Two bloody years of longing, of constant ache inside, of sleepless nights that went on and on with no end in sight. Christ, you did make me suffer. But, you see, there was also hope against hope. That one day I would get you back . . . That somehow the impossible would happen. I never really gave up totally, even when things were at their darkest.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Truly, I am,” I babbled.
“You hurt me so,” he said, now with tears in his eyes.
“So punish me,” I told him.
“No. Now is surely the time to bury the past, forget the whole damn mess, start things anew.”
“I insist, you must punish me,” I heard myself saying. “I deserve it all. Do to me what you will, my dark-haired lover. Anything.”
He looked at me strangely. Smiled gently.
“Are you sure?” he questioned me.
“Absolutely,” I answered.
“Fine,” he said.
So my lover took me to the castle in Milton Keynes. One hour or so up the M1, travelling with no rush in the middle lane. I couldn’t see anything. He had carefully placed a black silk scarf around my head, fastened it tight, covering my eyes. He said it was Milton Keynes. I believed him. We’d spent the right amount of time driving up the motorway. But I suppose it could as well have been Blackheath, Finchley, Hendon or even Scarborough for all I knew or cared. It didn’t matter. Castles all smell the same, I reckon.
As I stepped out of the car, I sort of thought this was all very silly, was I really ready to star in the Milton Keynes version of “The Story of O”? Why had he allowed me to retain my underwear? In the book, that hadn’t been the case. Was the feel of the leather car seat caressing my bare buttocks an experience I had ever fantasized about? Would it initially have been cold against my flesh, then gradually warmer; would the fabric stick to my skin, would I sweat, squirm? And now I wouldn’t even experience that.
I wore my grey tailored power suit, the one with the stripes, made of quality wool. A white opaque cotton blouse completed the demure display, black sheer nylon stockings, my best, and matching bra, knickers and suspender belt set, black also. But right then those particular details were my secret. My lover didn’t know; he hadn’t watched me dress. I knew how he loved it when I wore stockings the old-fashioned way. Made my long legs look even longer, he would always say.
So the castle door opened. Well-oiled, it didn’t even creak in the slightest. Just a normal English spring day, a light breeze fluttering around my ankles and neck, not even a gothic day.
He guided me in, one hand on my waist, our steps echoing around the hall.
Then, I stopped feeling his faint touch against me. Was he still there, harbouring in the silence, or had he departed the premises altogether? This was already the first sign of emotional torture: I wasn’t to know whether he was ever present while all sort of terrible things would be done to me, to my body. Something inside me wanted him around, for my mental comfort, I suppose, but on the other hand, what would he think of me, react to the spectacle of my body being defiled, would I ever be the same for him ever again, thereafter?
Not knowing, that was the worst sort of punishment.
A voice – not his – said:
“Stay where you are and spread your legs apart.”
I obeyed.
Still the faint trace of an echo, bouncing between stone floor and high ceiling.
Standing in silence, trying to guess how many pairs of eyes might be watching me, male and/or female.
Something, a cane? a whip handle? brushed against my left cheek, tracing the faint line of my scar. Cold. I shivered briefly.
Then a hand took hold of my jacket, pulled on the sleeves and manoeuvred my arms out of it. Another brief moment of silence and inaction, while I tried to listen to all the minute sounds, murmurs of nearby voices, distant chirping of birds outside, almost inaudible scraping of material against material, against flesh? Was there another woman nearby, also wearing stockings?
“Stand still,” the male voice reiterated. I was sure I hadn’t moved.
I opened my lips, ready to say so.
“Jeezus . . . ” A sharp, sudden smack on my rear, before any sound could even escape.
“You may not speak,” the unknown man said, severely.
It didn’t hurt, but I had been completely taken by surprise.
“Spread your legs wider apart,” another deep male voice instructed, almost angrily.
The material of the grey skirt was tight against my thighs. It was awkward to assume the desired position without moving the rest of my body, which I knew they would disapprove of.
I felt the thin object against my knees, then it moved up my right leg, grazing the fabric of the stocking, slowly, lazily upwards, reaching mid-thigh when it moved into the empty triangle below my crotch. I shivered again, expecting its next movement. It made contact with my knickers, right where my sex was. I imagined a surge of electricity bolting through my body and felt the first wetness inside my cunt, and my sex lips engorging and opening slightly, pressed as they were against the silk of my underwear.
“Good,” one of the men said. “Stay like that.”
Then, nothing happened for some time. I stood uncomfortably listening to muffled noises all around. There were some more people arriving, chairs being arranged, seemingly in a circle around me. I was about to become the main attraction. Right there, in the hall. Looked as if I didn’t even get to graduate to a traditional gothic dungeon. Like in the books. Like in the movies. I must have smiled.
Another violent whack on my buttocks. This time it hurt.
“What’s so funny, bitch?”
“Nothing,” I summarily replied.
This time it was a whip and it struck suddenly twice, once on my shoulders and then immediately again on my breasts.
“This is your last reminder, woman. You may not talk.”
I bit my lips as the pain and the adrenaline subsided quickly.
Took a deep breath.
Some were talking in low voices, but it was too indistinct for me to really hear anything. But some of the voices were definitely female. And one was certainly my lover’s.
Behind the dark piece of cloth that obscured my vision, I closed my eyes. Tried to picture him with another. Was she sitting on his lap? Where was his hand? Was she also blonde? Was his cock hard, was she holding it as she laughed at me, standing there helpless, ready and willing to be ravaged by their combined obscenities?
Warm breath against my cheek. An intriguing smell, sweetish, a complex fragrance half human, half artificial, a remote smell of lemongrass. Male, I knew, as he moved closer, examining me, brushing against my back. Hands touching my breasts through the blouse, feeling them, cupping them, weighing them. Then his hands moved to my chi
n, to my lips, a finger slipped inside my mouth, a nail grazing my tongue, withdrew, out again the humid finger passed over my cheeks.
I could hear the sound of the unknown man’s breathing and the warmth radiating out from his body.
Goosebumps.
The hand retreated from my cheeks, neglecting my eyes and forehead. To be quickly replaced by the cold feel of metal against my throat. A blade.
I knew this was a test and was careful neither to move or utter a single sound.
The sharp metal edge drew a slow line down from my neck, over my white blouse between the valley of my breasts, then further along past my stomach, over my crotch and disappeared into the open triangle of my stretched grey skirt. It reached the lower edge of the garment and I felt the zip being pulled, either by the person wielding the knife or another protagonist. The skirt came loose and fell to the ground. The tip of the knife moved up and was inserted behind the taut elastic band of my black knickers and swiftly cut through the material like butter. The underpants were pulled from my body to facilitate the journey of the knife through them from front to back. The bisected knickers were then swiftly pulled away from the suspender belt, leaving me bottomless.
The cold air moved against my bare genitals and posterior.
A long, thin finger, certainly a woman’s, journeyed through my pubic curls and brutally pushed past my lips and entered my vagina.
I swallowed hard and held my breath as the finger explored my innards, drawing moisture as my body reacted uncontrollably, lasciviously, to the intrusion by releasing its natural secretions. She moved her finger around inside, enjoying the warmth and the growing humidity, her nail brushing slowly against my clitoris. My whole body trembled and I knew my cheeks must have turned red for all to see.
“Thirsty?” the woman’s kindly voice enquired.
I nodded, careful not to say anything.
The Mammoth Book of International Erotica Page 52