“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?”