Chapter 3

I tried to take a quick shower, but I was slowed by one of my other new girls, Mia, who insisted that she shower with me. Mia came into the shower stall and soaped my body with a warm, soft wash cloth. She rubbed my body erotically with the wet cloth, lingering much too long around my sexual areas. She soaped my crotch until it dripped with frothy bubbles of foam, and she slid her slippery hand slowly up and down the length of my dormant prick in an attempt to reawaken its hardness. Finally, she permitted me to get under the shower, and I washed away the soap and left her standing under the hot, biting sting of the shower spray as I stepped out of the stall.

My naked foot had just touched the bathroom floor when two other girls-Gloria and Maritza swooped down around me and covered my nakedness with two large open bath towels. The girls wrapped me around with the towels and began to rub my body dry with their rapid caressing strokes. Again I waited patiently while their working hands paid just a little too much attention to my crotch and my cock. Both girls wanted to make very sure that that one area was not neglected.

Maritza, a tall, statuesque, dark-skinned Spanish girl with enormous breasts and ebony-black hair that tumbled down to the middle of her back, got down on her knees so that she could dry my legs properly. Her hands went up and down my thighs, carefully rubbing between them, and she lifted my prick and balls so that, as she said, she could "dry underneath them."

When she was finished drying me there, she bent her body forward and began to get the area all wet again as she took the flesh of my cock between her lips. She crushed her chin against my crotch, lifting my balls in her hand, and she sucked energetically on my cock with her wet, pliant mouth. It felt very good and I could feel myself wanting to get excited, but in the end I had to push her away.

"Thanks," I said, "but I'm in a hurry, Maritza. Some other morning perhaps. I have an early appointment this morning and I want to get to the office."

She released my cock. "Sure, Mr. Caldwell," she said, smiling. "I understand. As you said: perhaps some other morning."

She dried me again there, only this time her hand was only interested in drying me. After a few more moments, the rest of me was dry, and I left the bathroom.

I dressed quickly now, sending away one other new girl who wanted to help me get dressed. I slipped on a pair of socks, a pair of shorts, pants and a lightweight sweater. I brushed my hair into place and slipped my feet into an old, comfortable pair of loafers. I was dressed for work.

"Good morning, ladies," I called to the various girls who were still in my suite. "I'm going to work now. See you all later."

A chorus of good-bys rang out, and I quickly cut them off as I stepped out into the hallway and closed the bedroom door behind me. For the first time since I'd gotten up that morning, I was alone. I savored the luxury of the moment by taking a deep breath of relief. Somewhere in the house a window or two was open, and the fragrance of spring was in ' the air. I took another breath and steeled myself for the morning. I walked rapidly down the long hallway of my estate Xanadu to my office.

Harvey Curtis, my business manager, was already in the office when I entered. In fact, he was sitting at my desk, in my chair. He was reading the Wall Street Journal, and he smiled at me as he looked up from his newspaper.

That seems to be a habit, I thought to myself when I saw him. Sitting in my chair, behind my desk. Harvey's doing that a lot lately.

"Good morning, Brian," Harvey greeted. "Did you sleep well?"

I nodded slowly. "Yes, I did. I slept very well."

Harvey smiled broadly, and his thick lips curled up at the edges, giving his balding, pudgy pink face a leering lasciviousness.

"How did you like the new girl?"

"Do you mean Patti Marshall?"

"Yeah. I think that's her name. How do you like her?"

Harvey made no attempt to move from behind my desk.

"She was good," I answered. "Quite attractive."

Harvey chuckled. "I heard that she has a pretty interesting way of waking a person up."

I thought of Patti Marshall and then I thought of Maritza, the beautiful Spanish girl who was drying my legs. "Yes," I said slowly. "There always seems to be someone in this company who is willing to suck my cock."

Harvey stood and stretched his body. The sight reminded me of a mountain rising up from the ocean floor and punching a hole in the sea. The layers of fat under his clothing moved like the swells of an ocean, slow and rippling.

"You make it sound like such a bothersome chore," he said. "Getting your cock sucked. Believe me, Brian, I'd trade places with you any time it got too troublesome. Any time."

He laughed, but I knew there was more truth in what he said than either of us cared to admit. Harvey would love to be in my place. Money and power excited him almost as much as women did. And as for trading places for sexual reasons, he wasn't missing anything because Harvey made it a practice always to personally interview any new girl who applied for work at Xanadu. As a result, anything I got, Harvey got first. He was my official "taster," and he was equally familiar with the sucking warmth of Patti Marshall's excellent mouth as I was.

Still, I thought, I didn't mind. There was more sex going on than I could easily handle. If Harvey wanted to skim a little off the top, let him. I really didn't mind at all.

"Remind me," I said, "to tell you something about Patti Marshall."

Harvey's eyes lit up. "Something good?"

"No. Nothing like that. I just promised her something. I told her I'd get her a spot doing commercials. I want you to put the wheels in motion."

Harvey leaned forward and scribbled himself a note in the corner of his Wall Street Journal. "Let me jot it down so I don't forget."

I waited until he was finished, then said, "Come on, Harvey. I'd like to sit down. Let me have my seat back so I can go to work."

"Sure, Brian. Sure."

Harvey lifted his vast, hulking body from my high-backed black-leather chair. He picked up his newspaper and walked around the side of the desk, vacating the chair for me. He smiled as he approached me and gestured toward the seat with his open hand.

"It's all yours, Brian. Sit down and we'll get to work:"

The chair was still warm from Harvey's body when I sat down, and that bothered me. To sit in a seat that someone has just vacated always made me feel uncomfortable, and the feeling was especially disconcerting with Harvey. The heat left behind made me very much aware of his thick, heavy body. The feeling was much too intimate for it to be comfortable.

I sat in my chair for a few moments and tried to ignore Harvey by shifting around the various papers that were left on my desk. Mostly they were letters to be read and signed, and I noticed that Harvey had prepared a new quarterly breakdown of Xanadu's financial standing. I studied the figures briefly, but they didn't mean very much to me, so I put them aside and signed a letter or two.

When I finally looked up, Harvey was sitting patiently across the desk from me. As usual, Harvey was impeccably dressed; perhaps overdressed. I guess it was vanity with him the way he tried to drape his gross bulk in the finest silks and mohairs; as though he could cover over the swollen obscenity of his body with a respectable camouflage. He had on a dark navy suit, a white shirt and a wide, pearl-gray tie. like his body, his cufflinks were gaudy and huge.

He smiled at me and his pale blue eyes twinkled through his tinted, mod wire-framed glasses.

"What do you think of the report?" he asked. He indicated the quarterly statement.

I picked it up. "I don't know. I didn't really look at it too closely. Why don't you summarize it for me."

Harvey snorted. "Well, briefly, it says that I'm making you a millionaire."

He let me savor the revelation, perhaps hoping that I would make some sort of comment about it. But I didn't say anything, and I could see the disappointment in his eyes. He waited a second or two more to be sure, then he continued to elaborate.

"That's right, Brian. A millionaire. We're zeroing in on the ten thousand membership mark with no lack of enthusiasm in applications. Membership is going like hot cakes. Xanadu has really caught on big across the nation. Ten thousand men and women willing to pay one hundred bucks each year for the privilege of attending the only legal orgy in the country."

Harvey let the last part of the sentence drop quietly so that I couldn't miss his intention.

"What do you mean legal?" I asked. I put the financial report down. "Since when did what we do become legal?"

Harvey chuckled gleefully. "I've been talking to Bill Prentiss, and he's been thinking about sponsoring a bill to make Xanadu legal. He feels any governmental interference with us violates the Constitution and our Civil Rights. What do you think of that?"

Bill Prentiss was a California State Senator. He was also a Xanadu member, enrolled under another name. I eyed Harvey suspiciously.

"What made Prentiss decide to fight in our behalf?" I asked.

Harvey's chuckle grew into a snorting, animal-like laughter. "Ever since a photograph of him fucking one of our members up the ass was brought to his attention. For your benefit, the other member was also a male."

I stared at Harvey coldly for a moment and didn't say anything. "You mean we're blackmailing Prentiss into sponsoring the bill?"

"You could call it that. There is no quicker way to end a promising political career than for your constituents or your opponents to discover that a virile, athletic man and politician is really-a faggot. Divorce, even adultery he might get away with, but never homosexuality."

I stared at Harvey. "Isn't that dangerous? Blackmail sometimes has a way of backfiring."

Harvey shook his massive head. "Not a chance. We have Prentiss right where we want him-by his balls. He's as good as on Xanadu's payroll right now."

I still didn't like the idea. "I don't know..."

"What do you mean, you don't know! Do you want to go on bribing half the police in the state to keep Xanadu open for our weekend parties? Do you know how much money that costs us every week? Thousands! Tens of thousands. But with this one bill, we could save that all. All that money would be right back in our pockets where it belongs."

I still wasn't convinced. "What if we got caught?"

Harvey sighed in exasperation. "Brian, is it any less dangerous to get caught bribing police? Especially on the scale that we pay off on? If they get us for one thing, they'll get us for everything."

"But a State Senator..."

"Brian, you're really something, do you know that? You speak as if we're on the side of the angles. Do you know what we're doing-we're running an orgy! An orgy every single weekend-Friday, Saturday and Sunday! Hundreds of people come to that orgy every weekend, and thousands more pay for the right to come to these orgies. Do you think that's legal?"

I thought for a moment.

"And since when did you become squeamish about applying a little pressure to get things done. Just a few seconds ago you tell me you want to get Patti Marshall a spot doing television commercials, right?"

I nodded. "Right."

"Now how do you think I get things like that done-by asking for a favor, please? Bull shit! I get it done by applying pressure. By blackmailing the right people. Jesus, you even get a kick-back on these commercials, and all of a sudden you're worried about legalities!"

Harvey unfolded his Wall Street Journal and dropped it on my desk for emphasis. "Brian, do me a favor. Let me handle this. I know what I'm doing. I know how to handle this kind of work. You stick to the creative part, I'll worry about the rest."

What's the matter with me? I thought. Harvey's right. Of course he's right. This is what I've always wanted, isn't it? Power and wealth. Political power. Of course he's right, I told myself again and again.

"Brian," he continued, "trust me. This is the way the system works. This is the American way. You have to readjust your thinking. We're not nickle and dime enterprises any more. Xanadu is big, Brian. This is the age of permissiveness and we've got to capitalize on it. And that means wielding power. You've got the power-now use it."

I picked up the quarterly financial report and pretended to study it for a moment. The figures seemed blurred. What was wrong with me today?

"You say I'm close to being a millionaire?" I asked, changing the subject.

"That's right," Harvey answered. "From membership alone you make close to a million dollars a year. And that's not including kick-backs, films, books, tapes, photographs, the modeling agency and all the other Xanadu enterprises. In less than two years, Brian, you're a millionaire."

"A millionaire," I said, but I didn't feel different.

"And next year you'll make even more. We up the membership fee from one hundred dollars to one-twenty-five. Not only will we be making more money per person, we'll be picking up thousands of new members. And if Prentiss's bill passes, there will be no stopping us."

I considered this for a moment. "If that's true," I began, "Then I think we should begin considering branching out on the east coast."

Harvey shook his head and laughed. "Brian, you certainly will never make a businessman."

I knew what he was going to say and I tried to prepare myself for it. We'd discussed this idea before.

"When are you going to learn that you do not need an east coast branch for Xanadu yet. Someday maybe, but not yet. All it will do is cost you extra money. It won't bring in anything. It's too soon for it."

"But you just finished telling me that membership was growing..."

"And it is. But how many members do we have?"

"A little under ten thousand."

"Right. And how many come each weekend to the orgies?"

"A couple of thousand."

"Right again. People come from all over the country to come to our orgies. People from New York. They save up their money to come out here once or twice a year or they wait for their vacations to come out here. What do our attendance statistics show us? That the further away each member is from Xanadu, the less frequently he attends. In fact, you have members paying one hundred dollars a year who come out to us only once a year! Now that's profit, Brian!"

Harvey paused a moment for emphasis. He was working himself up to a sweat, and the top of his balding head glistened with a shiny film of perspiration.

"Now you want to cut that thick profit to nothing. So what will happen if we build another Xanadu on the east coast? I'll tell you. All those people who'd come out here once or twice a year would find it easier now to go to our east coast branch. They'd go more often. And that would cost you more money in overhead and expenses. It would be an unnecessary output just for the benefit of their convenience. It would do very little for you financially."

I found myself hardly listening to Harvey. Everything just seemed so inexplicably boring today. I couldn't get my mind to it.

"So what do you suggest we do?" I asked finally.

"Wait. Waitl That's what you do-you wait. Until Xanadu gets so big that we can't contain the weekend flow. Then when that happens, then we can start thinking about expansion."

I picked up a pen from the desk and I twirled it through my fingers all the while Harvey was speaking. Then, when he paused, I flipped the pen suddenly with my fingers and it bounced on the desk and rolled off the edge.

"Sorry," I said.

Harvey bent over with an effort and retrieved the pen.

I sighed. "Okay, I guess what you say makes sense." I picked up the pen again and began to twirl it. "Is there anything else we have to get out of the way this morning?"

Harvey gave me a long, searching look. He carefully removed a silken handkerchief from the inside breast pocket of his jacket, and he dabbed the sweat from his upper lip.

"What's the matter, Brian?" he asked. He put the handkerchief away. "Is something bothering you?"

"No!" I snapped irritably. Then I softened. "Sorry, I guess I'm tired."

Harvey didn't buy my explanation, but continued to study me for a second or two longer. He nodded to himself, as though answering an internally asked question, and spoke again in a soft, almost apologetic voice.

"There is one other thing to discuss," he began. "The themes for next month's orgies. We have to get the newsletters out to the members so that they can prepare."

Themes for the orgies, I thought. What are we going to play-act next month? A Roman orgy? A bacchanalia? Another Black Mass? A Come-As-Your-Favorite-Perversion orgy?

I broke off my train of thought. "I don't care what we run. Why don't you take care of it this month, Harv? If you can't come up with anything new, just rerun something that we did before. It won't make any difference."

Harvey snorted and shook his head with growing incredulity. I had broken one of my cardinal rules-originality was a unique part of Xanadu's appeal. Always something new and exciting and different.

"Now I know something is bothering you," Harvey said. "When you tell me to run the creative end of Xanadu, then I know something is eating at you. What is it, Brian?"

His insight annoyed me. Harvey was so thick and gross and so constantly aware of how to make money, why couldn't his mind be as equally dull and occupied? Why did he have to see that there was something bothering me? Why couldn't he have just accepted it and leave me alone?

I sighed again. (I seemed to be doing a lot of sighing this morning, didn't I?) "I don't know, Harvey. I just feel very irritable and annoyed. I feel angry at the world. It's as though there's something digging in at me and I don't understand what it is or what its doing to me. Maybe I'm really tired. Overworked. Maybe I need a vacation."

I said the magic word for Harvey: vacation! His eyes seemed to light up with dollar signs and I could almost read his thoughts on his face. With me gone on vacation, Harvey could sit in my chair, behind my desk, for as long as he wanted.

"Well," he began, "if you think you should take a vacation..."

"I don't know, Harvey. I just don't know. I mean, I should be happy today, right? I should feel as though I have the world in the palm of my hands. But all I feel is this nagging, annoying sense of ... dissatisfaction. Yes, that's what it is-dissatisfaction.

It's as though all of this-everything that I have, everything that I own, all of Xanadu ... is meaningless."

I stared at Harvey and shook my head. "You don't understand what I'm talking about, do you?"

Harvey took a cigar from the box I had on my desk. He wet the cigar in his mouth and carefully clipped off one end with a little gold pocketknife he carried around for just that purpose. He put the cigar in his mouth and lit it, sucking in thick hot drags of smoke.

"You're right," he said, blowing out the smoke. "I don't understand. Nobody could understand what you're talking about because you're crazy.

"Brian, think for a minute!" he insisted. "Look at what you got. Today I told you that you were a millionaire. A millionaire! And just two years ago you were just a shithead! And next year you'll make two million dollars and maybe even three million! You live in a palace-you have a fifteen acre estate in the middle of California's richest community-and that whole estate is owned by you free and clear. Paid for by ten thousand horny men and women who are willing to pay for a safe place to get laid. You have beautiful women all around you, all over you! And their only function is to satisfy your every sexual whim or desire."

Harvey was waving his cigar as though it were a baton; as though he were trying to drive home the most important points with the burning tip of the cigar.

"And, Brian," he continued, "you have power! Real power. Prentiss is just the beginning. There will be others just like him. Xanadu has given us the foothold to immortality! And we are just beginning."

I couldn't help notice that he began his lecture telling me of my advantages and ended by talking about "we" and "us." That was so typical of Harvey. He actually did it without thinking.

"Yeah, I know," I answered. "I know all of this. I understand it fully. Every word is true. But it doesn't change how I feel. It's like you work so hard all your life to get something, and then you've got it, and it doesn't mean anything. It's like the feeling you have after you come-a big emptiness. like you're living your life in an echo chamber and everything you touch rings hollow."

I could see Harvey struggling with my words, desperately trying to grasp what I was talking about. But it was beyond him, beyond his mercenary, monetary, very capitalistic sense of values.

So he did the next best thing: he translated what I was talking about into practical, concrete ideas; into terms he could deal with inside of his businessman's mind.

"Is it the girls?" Harvey asked. "Are you tired of them? Do you want new girls, maybe? Bigger tits, smaller tits? Hairy pussies, shaved pussies? Tell me what it is-I'll get rid of them all. I'll bring in all new girls. I'll bring in girls who'll do anything you want ... anything! ... no matter what it is."

I shook my head. "No, Harvey. It's not the girls."

He crushed his cigar out in the ashtray on my desk. "What is it then?" he demanded. "Is it the decor? Do you want to have your office redecorated? Or your suite? Is that it?"

In his desperation to find a reason, Harvey did manage to touch upon something that triggered a response in my mind. I remembered how I felt earlier in my room, with all the mirrors dancing around me with distorted reflections of my naked body. The room was like a fucking brothel with all the mirrors and the drapes and gold ornaments.

"Yeah," I said, distaste in my mouth. "There is one thing you can do. You can redecorate my bedroom. Give me something livable. I'm tired of living in a palace."

Harvey nodded his head vigorously. "Sure, Brian," he agreed. He seemed to grasp at my request and I realized that my dissatisfaction was upsetting to him. He didn't understand it, and so, he couldn't control it. And anything he couldn't control could cost him money. That was enough to upset any businessman.

"First thing in the morning," he repeated. "I'll have the decorators in first thing tomorrow morning."

Strangely, the words seemed to relax me. I took a deep breath and tasted the sweet calmness of Springtime in the air again. Spring fever? I wondered.

Well, at least, changing the decor would help, I thought. Not much, but it should help. It was a beginning. A small beginning.