13. AN ADULT TALE; OR: FANTASY AND ME

“I am a four-times married contessa, simply rolling in money left me by my three husbands who have all mysteriously died,” I tell the man sitting fully dressed in my living room.

“My fourth husband is ailing and may not survive the night…”

“Yes, yes, go on, go on,” he urges impatiently in his thin, piping voice. “What happened to these men? Tell me!”

“The first, poor man, drowned right before my eyes in the sea at Deauville. I, uh, sort of held his head under water.

“The second, rest his soul, died an agonizing death when his bedroom caught fire and I could not get the door open to let him out.”

“The third?” he prods.

“He fell over a mountain in Switzerland. I was standing right behind him and saw it happen…”

While I am spinning the story, the man sits there spellbound. His bony hand, shaking from the first states of Parkinson’s disease, goes to his pocket and starts tampering with his cock.

H. Christian Andersen, as he likes to be called, is the scion of one of America’s wealthiest shipping families. He is also one of the biggest-spending weirdos I have ever met.

Weirdos – or sickies – are freaks who prefer much more exotic and ingenious humiliation than the usual masochist. They will pay any amount; sometimes, the more you charge, the happier they are; and some of their scenes would bend your brain.

H. Christian Andersen doesn’t want sex, and he doesn’t want to know you’re a call girl. He wants to believe you’re a rich but chiseling woman. In other words, he comes to a brothel for a different kind of tail – a fantasy tale. An imaginative storyteller, which I can claim to be, can earn a really fat fee from this sickie by spinning out the episodes over a series of days.

“What about the present husband?” Andersen demands to know. “What’s bothering him?”

“Poor man,” I say, “the doctor thinks he ate poisoned caviar. He is in terrible agony and may not last the night, but I’ll let you know what happened when you come back tomorrow.”

He is happy to treat me generously for that little half-hour story, makes his appointment for the following day, and leaves.

I always try my best to give H. Christian Andersen original fairy tales for his money, but if I am distracted and can’t invent one sufficiently intriguing, he will sometimes settle for his old favorite, which is my version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

In this story I play the role of the vendeuse at Dior’s New York salon and Andersen takes the part of Mrs. Rich-bitch ordering her new fall wardrobe.

On the first day we discuss fabrics and inevitably decide the entire collection will be done in crushed velvet – he adores crushed velvet – and satin. That being established, he pays far more than the standard fees for the consultation, out of which I have to buy the fabrics also. Before he comes back the next afternoon, I send out for ten dollars’ worth of the two fabrics, which he sits and fondles while we plan how we’ll make them up.

“Would you prefer to send the fabrics to Paris to be made by Cardin or Dior, or shall we summon one of them here?” I ask my client. Dior is several years dead, but he doesn’t know that.

“Bring me Dior,” he commands.

“These people don’t come cheap,” I warn him. “Dior will want at least $700 to cross the Atlantic.”

“Hang the expense, bring the man here,” he repeats, and produces his wallet.

Next day when he comes around to meet with Dior I have a very sad story to tell him. Dior’s plane has been grounded on the polar route in Anchorage, Alaska. “He is stranded in a snowstorm; and the cables, limousines, and hotel bills are mounting,” I have to inform him. Naturally, he covers the cost of all that.

While we’re waiting for the couturier to arrive, I make the suggestion that his new clothes would fit better if he had some silicone shots to plump up his breasts. “That is a splendid idea,” he, beams babyishly, and pays for a jab on each side of his chest with an empty syringe.

Eventually the clothes are ready, and I drape the invisible finery around him and assure him he is a vision of sartorial splendor. He settles up his massive account, thanks me profusely, and, goes merrily on his way. Andersen’s non-clothes have cost him dearly, but he is thrilled to pay, and always eager for more tall tales. However, that man has often exhausted my imagination.

Occasionally I have to tell him: “Hey, H. Christian, I’m running out of stories. Are you sure you don’t want to get laid?” I really would like to see him get more value for his money, but he prefers to be taken for a ride.

In fact, one time he wanted me to take him for a weird ride, literally. He wanted me to kidnap him!

What’s more, he offered such a big ransom fee for his kidnapping that I could not refuse. Together with a limousine driver I know, I planned to pick Andersen up outside a Fourteenth Street subway station, where he agreed to wait for us with a flower in his buttonhole and a rolled-up newspaper in his hand at twelve noon.

But, seeing he likes to suffer, I kept him waiting till two-thirty P.M., when I pulled up in the black limousine, lured him into the back seat, and stuffed a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag over his head.

We drove him to an upstate motel, where the limo driver kept guard over him for two days, refusing him anything but an occasional paper-cupful of water. On the third day we released him, and he was so delighted with his kidnapping that he paid us a tip on top of the generous ransom money.

The sickie syndrome, like the M and S, often involves the use of props; but rarely, unlike the latter, are they instruments of bondage or torture.

It is more often something relatively harmless like some surgical tubing knotted around the private parts, cigarette smoke, or expensive silk scarves.

One weirdo pays me to tie a nautical slipknot around his penis and balls, lead him around the room like a puppy, manipulate it while he sits on the floor and I sit on the bed, and when I want him to climax, I give it a sudden jerk, the knot comes away, and he pops his cookies.

Another sickie simply wants me to sit in a chair while he sits naked facing me in another chair, and puff on a cigarette and blow the smoke in his face while he plays with himself.

Expensive silk scarves are the hang-up of the president of one of Europe’s largest automobile manufacturing companies, whom I will identify as Mr. Bigwheel.

I acquired Mr. Bigwheel as a customer from Madeleine, who used to make lots of money selling him cocaine at highly inflated prices, which he then used in his nocturnal charades.

Mr. Bigwheel’s pet scene is having hookers come to his Waldorf Towers suite – always in pairs – to do nothing but stand motionless in front of a wraparound mirror while he dances around draping them in Hermes scarves.

When this man is in town, I usually do the first shift myself because I know that before the night is over he will request a whole gaggle of girls, and one previous time I couldn’t find enough.

When we arrive at his suite he greets us wearing a pair of chic silk pajamas and does not attempt to disrobe or expose his body at all during the next two hours, which is how long it generally lasts. However, the hired girls have to undress and put on a pair of his heavy woolen socks, get back into their own high-heeled shoes, and stand motionless while he does his decorating.

Then he dips cocaine on our breasts and pussycats and eats or sniffs it off and starts going berserk, babbling away in an incoherent mixture of French and his own language.

It becomes very tiring for the girls, because, except for the five minutes when we are allowed to lie down while he admires his handiwork, we are on our feet all the time, and those thick woolen socks really make our shoes pinch.