****** St. Louis Satyricon by Clayton Holiday ******
===============================================================================

St. Louis Satyricon


Jaime O'Keefe knew from the moment he met her that he'd never be the same
again. He could tell she considered boredom the worst offense in life.

He saw Lorna Collins for the first time in the summer of 1957. It was early
Thursday evening, around seven o'clock, when he arrived for a party at #24
Portland Place, a prestigious street in the Central West End of St. Louis. Some
fifty people had been invited to the affair, and nowhere in the city was all-
out glamour more alive than this area, which maintained a high-style tradition
of formality and luxury.

Portland Place was expensive territory, a neighborhood on the rise after the
tornado of 1893 ripped through the elegant mansions around Lafayette Park, on
the near south-side of the city. That night the ambiance was hot and slightly
hazy, as O'Keefe strolled across the lovely, manicured lawn. Birds circled and
perched in the tall trees around the house. The air was heavy with the threat
of rain.

A young Negro valet parked O'Keefe's immaculate blue and white Chevrolet Nomad.
Persons whose social position prevented them from entering the estate, stood
looking at the mansion from the street. After standing in the drive and
surveying the palatial house, O'Keefe approached the front door and lifted the
lion's-head knocker and let it drop. A middle size, middle-aged man, complete
in tailcoat and affecting the snobbish servility of the perfect English
servant, ushered him inside. O'Keefe entered the main room which smelled of
polished wood, and quickly met people who exchange vapid pleasantries and
nauseating repartee with jotting-pad brevity. He crossed the sweeping space of
the former ballroom that now included the lobby and a lounge, which overlooked
an English garden through floor-to-ceiling windows. Intricate borders
distinguished the rich caramel parquet floors. O'Keefe wore an old white cotton
shirt fully buttoned and baggy, well-worn beige chino trousers. Off to the
side, a string quartet of violin, cello, viola and bass played selections from
Antonym Dvorak's "Requiem."

Before O'Keefe could do more than swipe a cocktail, another servant led him
into the pseudo-Renaissance library. In full view of everyone, Lorna Collins
expressly handled and stroked the sexual organ of a man wearing the Roman
Catholic collar and a pair of black FBI-style sunglasses. O'Keefe was enchanted
instantly by the aura of the slender redhead with innocent blue eyes. Lorna was
a dazzling opaque beauty who, through the course of the evening, came to burn
with an unholy fire. She looked 18-years-old, though she was eight years older.

Lorna marveled over the size of the appendage and its mysterious beauty.
O'Keefe recognized the impostor as the party's host, who stood beneath a large
portrait of himself. The reverend was a distinguished-looking man in his late
20s, with dark hair. He wore a black robe to the floor, with a shoulder cape to
match. He resembled the jaded Marcello Mastroianni on the Roman street of
nightclubs in "La Dolce Vita."

"Oh Father, you're wonderful," Lorna said, and slowly parted his robes. She
took hold of his penis carefully, studying it. "Just look at it. Why does it
have to be so big?" she asked. Lorna sighed, and looked at him, now holding it
very firmly in her right hand. "I must stop it from throbbing, yes?"

"Certainly, my dear," the priest said, with a vulgar grin overspreading his
face.

"It is a beautiful thing," Lorna admitted. Closing her eyes, and moistening her
lips, she opened her mouth and slowly, gently took it inside.

Because this behavior excited her admiration, Lorna began to perform fellatio
in front of everyone. The nonchalant host simply parted his robes even further.

O'Keefe soon retrieved a volume of Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Rebours, from one of
the many book shelves and reposed in a down-filled chair of calf leather. At
intervals, while turning the pages of his book with listless fingers, O'Keefe
studied Lorna's performance with her Jesuit lover. That evening she wore a
light summer dress; her arms, exposed from the loose sleeves, were very white
and fair, and a belt was tied round her waist to help set off her trim figure.
However, Lorna slowly and deliberately pulled up her dress with one free hand,
exposing her baby-shaved slit to O'Keefe. Her sex was smooth, except a half-
dollar sized patch of red hair at the very peak of her mound. There was a row
of four tiny silver rings along each of her labia, and a larger one through her
clit. Lorna radiated an improbable allure.

O'Keefe sank back into the soothing arms of the chair as if it were an old
friend. In the living room, upholstery came in tones of cream, beige, and
taupe. He took down another cocktail and hoisted his legs onto an expensive
rosewood coffee table. With considerable aplomb and a shrewd eye, he watched
this erotic reverie. The priest's hardened flesh filled Lorna's mouth
completely. This reminded O'Keefe of medieval France, when the gendarmes
entered a village, and the first thing they sought out was the whore of the
sacerdote fornicarri (fornicating priest).

O'Keefe took down some more cocktails, and observed the oak-paneled library,
bookcases that were filled with the fine morocco bindings of editions by Oscar
Wilde, Valdimir Nabokov, Henry Miller, and James Joyce. The collection took up
a good four feet of his library, a fiefdom exceeded only by the complete works
of Shakespeare. O'Keefe looked at the titles as if he were evaluating the rare
treasures of a scriptorium. He was a passionate belletrist, who preferred the
company of books to people.

Despite Lorna's deft applications, the sham clergyman looked over his shoulder
and noticed O'Keefe scrutinizing his bookshelves. He had a love for the genius
of Swinburne, the Pre-Raphaelite poet, though a far greater appreciation for
his addiction to flagellation. Swinburne's mania for this asceticism began at
Eton, when he was introduced to the works of the Marquis de Sade, and Richard
Burton, the Victorian explorer and adventurer.

"When I was younger," the priest said, "I read to be entertained; now I read to
be educated. My favorite books are really my dear friends, now and forever."

O'Keefe nodded in affirmation. "After sex, book collecting is the most
exhilarating sport of all."

"There's no mistaking that," the spurious priest said. "If you cannot read all
your books, at least fondle them."

Around O'Keefe was a stunning congregation of people, all caught up in an easy
reverence. Among the revelers, a large well-dressed ape of a man, wolfed down a
sandwich, nipped from a pocket flask of sherry, and stared at Lorna with a
doglike smile and sleazy thoughts scarcely veiled beneath his heavy eyelids.
His features were not sharply defined, though his hair was perfumed with some
oily extract. Between refreshments, a cigar reminiscent of a horse's penis was
set afire by the fat buffoon, after the ritual circumcision with a bejeweled
cutter. O'Keefe couldn't figure out, through the noise and flourish, if he was
among perpetrators or victims. It wasn't clear which the small crowd enjoyed
most: the domination or the servitude.

The priest carefully undid the two top buttons of Lorna's dress, gently slipped
his hand inside, and firmly cupped her left breast - just holding it for a
second before tenderly taking the nipple between his thumb and forefinger. At
the pressure, slight as it was, she faltered - but relaxed, even moving forward
a little, as the nipple began to swell and distend while he softly squeezed and
rolled it between his fingers. This "submission" - allowing the priest to
fondle her breasts, had an effect on Lorna that went quite beyond whatever
immediate sensation it may have produced, and caused her to apply herself with
mounting excitement. While she continued, closed-eyed and breathing hard, her
hands groped, opening the top of his trousers, taking them down enough to put
her hands inside and grip his bare waist, and then urgently pulling him toward
her, sucking voraciously, with gasps and moans, though occasionally taking so
much that she gagged.

The Father, with her breast in play and this convincing show of passion,
wondered if this moment might not be extremely opportune for the emancipating
experience she needed, which he didn't mind performing, and his inclination
toward this was heightened as he looked down on the lithe curve of her body,
and wondered if touching her might disrupt the whole spell. Instead, the priest
turned his attention to Lorna's remarkable head; she had a particular affinity
for his broad hands with prominent tendons, stretching out like rake tongs
through her hair. She stopped for a moment and looked up with a soft smile, all
breathless, and wide-eyed. "Are you going to cum in my mouth?"

"Absolutely, my child," he said, and robbed the passing tray of another drink.

Lorna nodded, closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and then looked up at him,
assuming a coquettish manner, "I guess I have to swallow it, right?"

"Indeed," the priest answered, in a voice that was expressionless.

Lorna resumed in earnest, the priest fondled both nipples, squeezing them hard,
and she reacted more ravenously the harder he squeezed.

"You are beautiful, my child," the priest said, holding a metallic cross.

After thrusting himself into Lorna's exquisite mouth for a lengthy period, the
priest finally made the sign of the cross and, as he discharged, distinctly
said:

- In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. [In the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.]

Lorna received his liberal contribution like a holy sacrament. She looked up at
the priest, her eyes shimmering, knowing she had pleased him.


Chapter Two

After Lorna stood up, the priest removed his sunglasses and kissed her hand as
if she was Princess Grace. At the signal of his snapping fingers, a young male
servant appeared before the rogue priest with a bowl of water. He splashed a
few drops on his fingers and wiped them on the young man's head. Another
servant, tout-de-suite, next approached the Machiavellian with a tray of
chopped liver, tuna fish, and homegrown-eggplant spread. With this under his
belt, he began to feel more sanguine.

"To those of you who do not gossip, read the society pages of the St.. Louis
Globe-Democrat, or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps
necessary to introduce myself," he purred. "My name is William Regent, and my
native habitat is this Gomorrah."

There was always that mellifluous voice, a three-martini buzz in the blood, the
feeling of silk sheets and summer rain, and the ironic hauteur of his delivery,
especially when he tried to regale his company with some extemporaneous
witticism. He was James Bond quoting Lord Byron.

Carefully sealed wine bottles were immediately brought, and while the guests
examined the labels, Regent clapped his hands and said:

"This is satyrion, one of the best known of ancient aphrodisiacs. So let's wet
our whistles. I'm giving you a real gift. I didn't put out such good wine last
week, though the company was much better class."

William Regent had every quality degenerates esteem in their hosts. He was an
expert master of ceremonies, easily able to penetrate to the real depths of
debauchery. Regent had already mastered the art of not listening to others with
an air of attention. However, he never made the mistake of overestimating the
intelligence of his guests. He was their unparalleled professor.

Regent was also a member of that class who are not obligated to work. He
practiced the great aristocratic art of doing nothing, and doing it
magnificently. Yet he had such enduring charm. Regent was an emissary from a
world that no longer existed. And he gave such glorious style to his mien that
one would rather burn in hell with him than sit in heaven with the good, the
true and the martially dutiful.

A narrative of his modus operandi could be called The Gentleman of Ardor.
Regent drew significant inspiration from the 18th-century philosopher Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, a shameless charlatan. With an irresponsibility
characteristic of his entire doctrine, Rousseau fathered seven bastards. At
various times he practiced voyeurism, exhibitionism, and masturbation with
equally feverish enthusiasm. Rousseau died insane.

Therefore, it was no surprise that Regent had sex from the time he was twelve-
years-old; he started with the maid from Panama. He was also notorious as a bi-
sexual. When Regent was seventeen, he was already quite the sexual gadabout. He
set up a boyfriend in a house on Newstead Avenue, a street named for Lord
Byron's English estate, in the Central West End of the city. Regent, unlike
King James I and Liberace, was not into buggery, preferring fellatio instead.
He was an excellent college student in Mexico City, in the sense that he "had"
more than 200 women one year, and learned to speak excellent whorehouse
Spanish. He was married four times, including once to Magdelina Passaro and
once to her sister, Saffron. After a second failed marriage, Regent spent six
months living in a peculiar ménage à trois with his buxom first wife and her
third husband, Sholom Reitzel, a tall and serious-looking Yiddish scholar, with
big hands and a small, neat mustache. Regent had an abundance of affairs during
his four marriages, many on the raunchy side. His last wife found him receiving
fellatio from the middle-aged widow of an emeritus professor of French culture,
in the side-room of a distinguished funeral home.

Regent was also deviously related to Childe Harold, that youth of noble birth
in the later cantos of gin-drinker Lord Byron. Among several traits, the
Byronic hero is enigmatic, cynical, and has a disreputable secret. Regent's
dirty secret was that he loved his sister, Miranda, not fraternally, but
incestuously. Salacious gossip swirled around him and included problems like
incest, bi-sexuality and marital sodomy. Incest may actually have been the more
socially acceptable sin. Like Lord Byron, Regent could not resist that perverse
pleasure, and whenever Miranda wanted sex, her brother always obliged.

The two siblings were notorious degenerates. They told each other everything
about their sexual relationships, and they talked about whom they fancied and
how they should make love with them. Yet when and why their depraved
familiarity began was a matter of endless debate among St. Louis tea readers.
That sovereignty of perversity, that very blueprint of their erotic heredity,
was a planet far removed from the view of everyone else they knew. As an
adolescent, Regent got his revenge on an older Negro maid who tried to betray
this shameful affaire d'amour by dipping his genitals in her drinking water. As
an adult, Regent loved morphine and developed a little oil-burner of a habit.
Miranda was constantly plotting to steal it from him.


Chapter Three

"You were a rather good girl this evening," Father Regent commented to Lorna,
between hors d'oeuvre. "You seemed well pleased with my member."

"Yes, Father," she replied. "You are very nicely endowed."

"Have you ever given pleasure to a nun?"

"No, Father," Lorna replied, nearly at a whisper. "I have never been intimate
with another woman."

"Well, then," he replied with a commanding tone of voice, "it's time you learn.
We might need you to deliver the same service to a woman that you so eagerly
deliver to a man."

Right on cue, the grand lady of the house walked majestically across the room,
and smiled approvingly at Lorna and her brother. Resplendent as a Carmelite
nun, Miranda Regent was of medium height, had startling green eyes, and also
had a smooth, tanned face. Sister Miranda was in full habit with a black dress,
a white collar and skullcap, covered by a black veil. She wore a black leather
belt with matching shoes. The only quality, which suggested her age of twenty-
eight years, was a scant frost of gray at the edge of her temples, which
remained concealed beneath the veil. Her tress was cut short, in a boyish
style, though few would regard her as anything but a most elegant, feminine
lady.

At that point, Sister parted her dress to reveal she had inherited her mother's
seductive curves from the waist down. She wore no panties and her sex was
glistening and fully exposed.

"Feast on a bride of Christ," she said in a gently modulated voice.

Initially, Lorna was repelled at the thought. However, as she moved to her,
Sister threw her head back, as she felt Lorna starting to kiss and suck her
parted thighs.

"You are my joy," Sister said. "You are my honor, you are my beauty, you are my
consolation, and you are my strength. Your humility, your docility, your spirit
of sacrifice makes you specially the loved daughter of this holy house."

However, after a few minutes of hearing her responses, Lorna began to enjoy
pleasing her in this manner. As Lorna ministered to her, Sister allowed her
clothing to become more disorderly. She opened her dress and weighed her
breasts in her hands and fondled them. With eyes closed, her fingers aimlessly
touched her pubic area, while also holding a crucifix and her Rosary beads.

Sister Miranda began the Rosary by blessing herself with the crucifix:

- Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. [Hail, Mary, full of grace the Lord
is with thee].

- Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
[Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is thy fruit of thy womb, Jesus].

- Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis
nostrae. Amen.

[Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our
death. Amen].

Then she followed the small beads above the crucifix, repeating the "Apostles'
Creed," one "Our Father," three more "Hail Marys," and one "Glory to the
Father."

Soon the nun's legs were astride Lorna's shoulders, and Sister held her head in
her hands as Lorna aroused her even more. Sister moved her legs farther apart
and Lorna fondled her buttocks and stroked her soft thighs, before her fingers
gently found her swollen, damp labia.

Then Sister meditated on the mysteries, saying one "Our Father" and then ten
more "Hail Mary's." It took Lorna more than a half hour to bring Sister to a
climax, who, at the decisive moment, exclaimed loudly: "Hail, Holy Queen."


Chapter Four

O'Keefe possessed a certain laissez-faire wisdom about life. So he was
thoroughly prepared for a loose and idiosyncratic party, possessed of a lazy
decadence, like a cotillion for oddballs. Early on, the party had an odor
overlaid with the synthetic sweetness of prophylactics and costly perfume.
Amiable, if not eager Negroes, dressed in black swallowtails and crisp white
ties, flitted distractedly about the rooms, depositing platters of cold meats,
lobsters, salads and cheeses. With Afro-Sheen pompadours, all the waiters
looked like Little Richard on American Bandstand. They shuffled their Stepin
Fetchit best to score some stash, and later glide to a big Zulu club on Olive
Street in a decaying 1949 Cadillac.

"Why didn't someone tell us we are in Africa?" asked a flashy, big-breasted
tramp with a hazardously plunging neckline and bouffant peroxide hair. Every
time she moved, her womanly mounds jounced like special globes of enthusiasm.
Strictly speaking, Tiffany Mason's attitude toward Negroes was that of a
political lightweight, someone too dippy to know anything about St. Louis
activist Tyrone X. Of course the Black Muslim was a world-class philanderer,
perhaps second only to "Bad Back Jack," the U.S. Senator from Massachusetts.
Tiffany's companion, an older man from Louisiana with a mink mustache, knew
that certain notable men honestly achieve their moral development through women
in the sack.

"Very honorable man, Tyrone X," said Ethan Barrie in his velveteen Cajun
accent. "Even if he is a Don Juan. At least he's not a pederast. At least he's
not a queer."

In a brown leather jacket, black trousers, and boots, Ethan Barrie looked like
the scampish fifty-five-year-old he was: New Orleans bred, literate,
thoughtful, well-traveled, and good for a story. Barrie told Tiffany how a
reporter found Tyrone X, naked in his office, with a white woman sitting naked
and astride him. While the Black Muslim expressed his views on Civil Rights in
iambic pentameter, his thick genital went back and forth like the smooth slide
of a trombone.

For O'Keefe, the party offered a floozy opportunity for free behavior.. He
walked over to the bar and ordered a double scotch. The bartender wore a red
waistcoat, a white shirt with long collar-points, and a flowing black silk tie.
All around him, there was public whipping, fornicating and copious amounts of
candy and finger food and a buffet served off of naked people. This also
reminded O'Keefe of "Traumnovelle," that slim novella written in 1926 by Arthur
Schnitzler, an Austrian novelist and playwright. Like Anton Chekhov and Louis-
Ferdinand Celine, Schnitzler practiced medicine before pursuing a literary
life. Composed of three floors with dozens of nooks and retreats, the mansion
at #24 Portland Place was one of the most amazing in the city. The Italian
Renaissance style estate was designed in 1909, by architect Thomas Barnett for
financier Jonathan Benton. The house was notable for its entrance hall with
twin curving stairways inspired by the palace of Lorenzo de Medici.

In a modest room on the first floor, O'Keefe accidentally joined a small group
of black-tie judges, shysters and ambulance-chasers, who listened to Dr. Brian
Medoff hold a discourse on southern High Plains Indian culture. O'Keefe was a
compulsory witness, though he found the episode slightly vapid, like a
persistent snore in the next room. The 52-year-old entomology professor from
Washington University had recently studied coitus habits of the Ponca tribe of
North Central Oklahoma. Dr. Medoff carried himself with unconscious authority.
Yet there was something irritating about his dry voice, his excessive neatness,
and his pedantically correct speech. The professor had a face only slightly
marred by a harelip, but he had a magpie brain, which retained all sorts of odd
facts. Accompanying him was a man of rawboned features and forbidding aspect.
Joseph Primeaux, a man of mixed French-Canadian and Ponca descent, was known as
"Road Chief," the moniker for the tribal peyotist. Primeaux was way past sixty,
with a face as worn as an old Rawlings baseball mitt. With his apathetic eyes,
the Road Chief resembled a lizard waiting to snatch a fly.

"Dry, abrasive vaginas are seen as desirable in sexual intercourse by the vast
majority," Dr. Medoff explained. "Many Ponca men regard the smell of vaginal
secretions as entirely repulsive. Plus the women are embarrassed by the noise
of sloppy, wet sex."

Abruptly, the prissy, anally retentive professor cast an enigmatic glance
toward a 1870s English backless sofa, where a young and overheated blonde in
smoky sunglasses, an untied camisole and no panties, gazed into a hand mirror
and masturbated indecently. The charming woman had spread her lips wide apart
with one hand, and with her index finger straight like a pencil, flicked the
side of it rapidly across her clit.

Last year, Bettijane Fenton drew scandalous attention to her first book,
Thermal Pudding (1956), with the revelation that she'd spent a portion of her
time at St. Louis University as a lesbian hooker for prim suburban ladies
visiting the city for shopping. She gave details of pick-ups at the Alice B.
Toklas Bistro on Euclid Avenue, and spiced the tale with claims that she had
been paid in expensive clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue that the women had put on
their husbands' credit cards. She bragged how she loved to swing with the semi-
sapphio suburbanites, muff-munching in the posh rooms of the swank Chase-Park
Plaza Hotel. Bettijane had a practiced eye for the half-baked intrigues that
formed her life. Most of her friends doubted her credibility, but did admit she
had a lot of nice finery.

Regardless, the professor stroked the growth of beard on his chin, which looked
like moth-eaten gray plush, kept his cool and sailed on, as if drifting
downstream. "Dry vaginas that are swollen with friction are also tighter; this
pleases the Indian men because it makes them feel larger."

"I like my men to be really large," said the 28-year-old Bettijane,
interrupting the quid pro quo.

"Southern High Plains women attain this dryness," Dr. Medoff continued, "with
special herbs wrapped in a stocking and inserted into the vagina for 10-15
minutes."

"Is that really necessary?" asked the outspoken and boisterous Bettijane.

"Dusty soil where a buffalo had urinated was an older traditional Ponca
method," Dr. Medoff said.

While the noted entomologist delivered his oration with a great many waves and
flourishes of the hand, the Road Chief handed out dried peyote buttons to the
20 or so people in the room. He was in the early 19th-century adornment of the
Southern Ponca tribe. Primeaux wore a shirt of otterskin, with a red cloth
collar, a necktie of blue broadcloth with a symbolic silver tiepin, leggings,
two-piece High Plains moccasins of hard parfleche soles and soft buckskin
uppers, and a white sheeting blanket.

Shortly after Bettijane Fenton consumed her peyote button, she approached the
6-foot-2 Road Chief, from White Eagle, Oklahoma, and tugged at his leggings. He
admired the buxom blonde, and ran his finger softly over her lips. Primeaux
might have seen four-and-sixty summers on the reservation in White Eagle, and
was certainly beyond autumnal. Bettijane backed up and pressed her naked,
attentive derriere against the tautness beneath his pants. With one hand, the
Road Chief took her wrists in a viselike grip, and with the other caressed her
flanks. He paid particular attention to the softness of the furrow between her
thighs. Most of his fingers slipped easily into her vagina, which he found to
be altogether too wet, and therefore offensive. So, the Road Chief forced her
to bend over. With his index finger moistened from her vulva, he entered the
hallowed portal of her buttocks, and moved his extremity around in a small
circle. After Bettijane started to moan, the Road Chief retreated, and took her
again with that swollen flesh, now released completely from his pants.
Bettijane delighted in the slow repeated hammering of his invasion. Soon she
dropped her sunglasses and her eyes were wide and blind, like a statue's. This
lurid activity between the Road Chief and the buxom blonde affected Dr. Medoff
not in the least. Meanwhile, Primeaux hauled on his special peyote pipe as if
he were inhaling oxygen, and then held it up in six directions, for all to see:
toward the four life-giving winds, the ground, and the upper world.

O'Keefe knew that one room on the second floor was full of play jail cells,
replete with toilets and benches. In the room's center, a woman was tied down
spread-eagle and gagged. Above her, a gorgeous 6-foot-4 schvartze swish named
Alban occasionally tweaked one of the clothespins on the woman's nipples.
Wearing a bustier and leather pants that ended in stiletto heels, Alban roughly
massaged the woman's crotch with his hard, shiny toes, while yet another man
drew a whip across her prostrate body. A bit animated were two young women,
ensconced around a French brocade armchair, with monotonously perfect skin,
hair sculpted and plumed, who praised the performance with rowdy cries and lewd
laughter.

In another corner, a grotesquely muscular man tied his wife's hands to a pole
and took off her blouse and bra. She was beautiful but not at all fresh. The
man obviously enjoyed showing off her large breasts. But she was a shrill
moron, a squeaking bimbo, utterly bereft of poise, grace or personal charm.

Turning the corner O'Keefe encountered some dissolute blue-bloods, scores of
writers, artists, parasites and other apathetic characters. A spry octogenarian
with a rich and unchaste vocabulary regaled the small gathering with depraved
stories. The man held his dental plate in one hand and his candy-striped boxer
shorts in the other. "You should have made the party last month," he said. "You
would have seen an epileptic priest fall dead singing an obscene song. Later
his mistress went home and threw first his children and then herself out a
seventh story window." Physically, the man was asthenic. Long-limbed, long-
bodied, slight, with knobby knees and elbows. Advanced age had caused his thin
shoulders to droop, of course, and there was a melony potbelly below his waist.
He wore steel-rimmed bifocals, had no great quantity of hair, was even slightly
hunchbacked and had a croaky voice, like Everett Dirkson.

In the main hallway, an effeminate young man, wearing a tuxedo, performed
cunnilingus on a phenomenally fat woman in a fur-covered ottoman. He looked
sad-eyed, and a little drooly. The middle-aged matron wore no panties and kept
her jellied thighs spread wide and her dress hoisted above her waist with pudgy
fingers. The eyes in her fleshy face were like raisins in unbaked dough. A
number of earnest people turned away because this scene was not slow in
nauseating them.

One room off the main hallway was called the Chapel, where mock weddings took
place. The marriages were solemnized by Father Regent; and the nuptials were
frequently consummated by two, three or four couples, in the same room, and in
the sight of each other. Another section served as a brothel where men circled
round naked women standing beside placards giving their price. A man
impersonating Caligula led another person dressed as a horse through this part
of the mansion.

Downstairs was the dungeon, adorned with the usual assortment of leather
benches and restraints, all of it surrounded by many voyeurs with a penchant
for rough trade. A hefty man in a ponytail and leather pants turned his zesty,
curvaceous girlfriend over a leather bench and lightly whipped her bottom with
great pep. She displayed the pole-axed numbness of a steer. On a bed to one
side, a frumpy woman in librarian glasses spanked a naked woman lying facedown,
using both hands, as if she were tenderizing a steak. Although most of the
onlookers in the basement appeared cultivated, a few seemed unconscious of a
line of evolution abandoned by nature.

The third floor was the "electrified forest," a room decorated with fake
evergreen boughs and teepees. There was a sex maze where, walking through, one
passed various couples and trios fornicating in cubbyholes. One could stop and
watch for a while, but eventually moved on because some of these scenes would
have disgraced a race of alley cats.

The sky had gradually darkened from bruise blue to gentian violet, and it was
only a few minutes after eight thirty. O'Keefe stepped into the cultivated back
yard, which he particularly favored for the seductive visual splendor of
landscape. For instance, on the long north-side of the mansion, where tall
doors opened from all major rooms, an earlier Edwardian landscaper designed a
modest formal garden of highly structured, lushly romantic scheme. There was
rondel of tightly clipped yews and a paraphrase of a Moat Walk, a long grass
path terminating in classical statute of Flora, goddess of flowers, within a
niche of clipped birch trees.

This evening, everything was in full bloom, and the odors were enhanced by that
freshness which comes from well watered lawns. At the far end of the property,
on a sloping grade of the yard, Crabapple trees grew to shade a grass terrace,
and flower borders were laid out along the eight-foot high garden walls of
handmade brick. Nearby, a heavy woman, wearing only a short, spotted ocelot
coat, reclined erotically on a chaise-lounge. Her heavy breasts and big round
ass were incongruously mature in contrast with her innocent face. In a
diminishing world of first-rate musicians, it was glorious to hear Flaco
Morales, a tenor saxophonist, playing a swamp-rock lovers' waltz, swaying in a
deeply hypnotic state. The liberally tattooed ex-con strolled down the Moat
Walk, where off in the grass terrace a young lesbian couple did nothing to
conceal their homo hijinx and disported in the nude.

O'Keefe noticed Thibault Clairborne, chef of a nearby trendy Gaslight Square
restaurant, on the backyard patio with a steel grill banked with charcoal. In
the late 1950s, Gaslight Square evoked the picture of local existentialism in
smoky basement cafes of Olive Street. Between short-dog bottles of vin
ordinaire and left-handed cigarettes, beatniks and benny-heads regaled one
another with brilliant variations on the theme of despair. A tripper couldn't
be hip without endorsing the holy trinity of Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis and Jack
Kerouac. Yet a few blocks away in dingy neighborhoods of rundown bars, seedy
restaurants, and store-front tabernacles, Negro children sat relegated like
mice in the gaping doorways of bleak spectral mansions.

Meanwhile, Clairborne diced collard greens to simmer alongside meaty gigante
beans in black iron pots, quartered heirloom tomatoes and combined them with
julienned basil, and moistened scored mangoes with olive oil before they
caramelized on the grill. Clairborne used fresh corn in the husk, steeped in
vanilla-infused milk that gave it a marshmallow flavor. He also brushed a cut
knob of ginger-root across the flesh of melons for a subtle flavor that guests
adored, as they listened to a rumba-fueled version of "That Old Black Magic,"
by Louis Prima and Keely Smith on a new Hi-fi system.


Chapter Five

Forty years ago, St. Louis still retained a southern atmosphere of languor,
shaded verandahs, and bourbon. The accent was soft, the state called: Mizzoura.
The debutantes of high society were presented at the annual Veiled Prophet
Ball, first held October 17, 1878. The Veiled Prophet was a mysterious figure
from the Far East, escorted to his Court of Love and Beauty in the Merchants
Exchange by Bengal Lancers. The first Veiled Prophet parade was held after the
harvest, to bring farmers and other country people into St. Louis. It was a
business booster like the Agricultural and Mechanical Fair, started in 1856 and
held annually ever since.

Like many of her peer group, Lorna Collins was presented to high society in
1950. The debutante ball in America is the closet thing to the bygone New
Orleans slave market. Fine young women are displayed publicly to attract worthy
bids from wealthy families. The pomp and circumstance is more refined than
selling Negroes on the levee of the Mississippi River, but the results are
similar. Lorna was born in the exclusive Washington Terrace section of St.
Louis where her father, celebrated surgeon Dr. Brendan Walsh, held lavish
summer parties for other patricians. So affluent were residents of the
Washington Terrace neighborhood, their garbage could have been delicatessen.

Dr. Walsh was six foot and then some, and with his ironic brown eyes, he
resembled a pampered heart-throb cruising easily into mid-life. An affected
man, constantly screwing into a holder the half of a Viceroy cigarette, Dr.
Walsh italicized his smiles and quoted his gestures. He talked in unbelievably
long, cheerful paragraphs; nothing made him ill-natured. A tour of a rotting
brothel in Guadalajara couldn't spoil his buoyant personality. Always echoing
Oscar Wilde's Gwendolyn, Dr. Walsh said: "In matters of grave importance,
style, not sincerity, is the vital thing." During fleeting moments of sarcasm,
he claimed that he learned everything he knew from Buddha, Jesus, and Cary
Grant.

Lorna's mother was a lively monologist with eyes basking in subtle lunacy.
Everyone liked the doctor's full-figured wife, despite her intellectual
denseness. Maureen Walsh was a plain, handsome woman, with a long equine face,
mouse-brown hair, and blue eyes. She wanted to be like a sage under the Bodhi
tree, and since she was generously made, she looked the part. But Maureen was
not a candidate for being philosophic. Her wide hips were meant for child-
bearing and comparable pastimes. She was dowdy as a badly bound hymn book. All
of her conversation naturally began and ended with herself and her own
concerns. When she entered a room all dialogue ceased and monologue started.
Maureen always wanted to be considered amusing, which in itself never failed to
amuse. Her main regret in life was that she wasn't somebody else. In truth, she
was wildly unclever and had all the acumen of a hair dresser.

The neighborhood of the Walsh family suggested a compendium of plutocratic
pleasure palaces. Lorna was raised by a succession of au pairs, and attended
City House, a smelly all-girls Catholic High School. She fell in love with one
of the other school girls at the age of 16 and began to think of herself as a
lesbian. When this occurred, Lorna fell out spectacularly with her mother and
left home briefly to live with relatives. By the time she first arrived at
Washington University, she dressed as Lorne Walsh, her opposite sex twin. While
in college, she developed a crush on fellow student Eliza Pound. When the young
girl didn't return the compliment, this period only served to accent Lorna's
aimlessness and a wasted intelligence. Like her mother, she grew up highly
ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless, her sole occupation being
reading books about Hollywood film stars.

Lorna tried to be very respectable and proper at first, but the life of humdrum
virtue grew tedious to her before long. A certain abatement and degradation
took place, and soon Lorna was no innocent Candide, abroad in a senseless and
brutal world. She acquired, by degrees, an explicit interest in perversity and
sensual satiety. Two years after her debut at the Veiled Prophet Ball, her
envious peers could not help seeing a disturbing streak of debauchery as
striking as the stripe of a skunk. Soon, she was a confirmed slut, a lush, and
a stout apostle of the "easy come-easy go" philosophy.

Lorna drew inspiration from entertainers, courtesans, an aristocratic St. Louis
dominant and submissive subculture and the fin de siècle homosexual aesthetes
whose "fetish worship of human beauty" she shared. She admired the bravery of
lives lived on the sexual edge, the consciously chosen tastes and prejudices,
the risk of physical danger. At age 26, Lorna was married when she met William
Regent. Yet she was like a supplicant joining a religious order. Regent made
her his mistress immediately. Each day it seemed impossible to get through the
desolation of not seeing him. Regent loved to watch Lorna fall prostrate and
obscenely desirable across his favorite leather chair.

Of course everything about Regent suggested not the out-of-doors, however, but
the tightly-sealed edifices of sexual impropriety. An icy, asexual manipulator,
he was made up of lounge-lizard incarnations: the lustful impertinence of a
supercharged bounder, the gross, authoritarian appetites of an aristocrat.

At first Lorna's dull spouse suspected nothing of this affair, which, however,
was instantly the talk of St. Louis. It wasn't surprising since Nick Collins
always wondered how his wife could remove her bra without taking off her
blouse. Over nobody had Nick any complete ascendancy, especially his wife, who
having allied himself in wedlock to the young socialite, performed a penance
for his foolishness every day of their marriage. Lorna thought Nick was humanly
unserious; she could get no real masculine resonance out of him. He always
sounded like an old soak and a bore. Not surprisingly, he was a feckless fool,
a political aide to Mayor Raymond Tucker.

One morning Regent and his new mistress, who had passed the night in his
majestic early-19th century canopy bed of mahogany and birch-veneer, renewed
their ardor when they heard Lorna's depressive and generally below-par husband
talking with a maid in the hallway. Nick said he could hear Lorna's regular
breathing from Regent's bedroom, and could smell the scent of her perfume.
There was no doubt Nick was drunk; his breath smelled disagreeably of cheap
whiskey. Besides, he had a dissipated air, which repelled most. His attire was
in a state of disorder, which strongly suggested that he had gone to bed in it.

Soon the husband knocked on the door. Regent thought Nick Collins was a garden-
variety asshole, a loser, a creep, a jerk-off, a schmuck and an idiot, to be
sure. He was number two on Regent's list of the 10 most boring people he'd ever
met. He was terribly unfair and hit below the intellect. Regent ordered the
cuckold be admitted to the master bedroom, but not until he had covered Lorna's
face with the pure white sheets. The bedroom in which Regent and his mistress
enjoyed themselves was embellished by walls designed of splendid light-colored
moldings and graceful panels above and below the three windows, which gave
bland openings the elongated elegance of French doors. Banding the room
horizontally in three shades of ethereal gray-green paint, the colors broke at
hair-and-picture-rail heights. White-on-white striped silk layered with seafoam
green chiffon was tacked over windowpanes to fall as casually as a Grecian
tunic. A simple Billy Baldwin slipper chair upholstered in white kid glove and
natural linen faced the ornate fireplace. Middle European paintings of saints
hung on the wall and framed the bed. Another wall was lined with photographs of
Jean Cocteau, Little Richard and Tennessee Williams. To one side of the room
were two armchairs, with lively Tonkinese embroidery, acquired in Isle-sur-la-
Surge, a French town known for its antiques and flea markets.

"Where is she?" Nick rasped in his whiskey-stale voice. "I know my wife is your
whore."

"To tell the truth," Regent said in a tone of great commiseration, "I don't
know what you're talking about."

"I know she's in your bed," Nick retorted.

"Not at all," said Regent.

To subdue his worst fear, Regent offered to show Nick the most beautiful body
he had ever seen. Nick sent his bright blue eyes, like glistening diamonds, all
around the room. Regent uncovered Lorna, except her face, and permitted her
husband to view her nudity at his ease, to admire her most secret beauties, and
even to touch them, in order better to appreciate what they were worth. Next
Regent led Nick's attention to an unusually shaped bottle of expensive whiskey.
Nick immediately drew it off into a glass with the skill of a practiced hand,
and mixed it with about a fourth of water.

So far from being stimulated by the spectacle, Nick sat despondently in the
Billy Baldwin slipper chair by the fireplace, his face suffused with a crimson
glow, and contemplated the glorious figure of the woman as she began to satisfy
Regent's sexual appetite. Lorna bit her lip and thrust her hips, watching her
husband through her veil of sheets with great interest. In the chair Nick eyed
the performance with a mocking smile. His eyes, which gleamed with fury and
passion, were constantly directed towards the bed, and if he withdrew his
attention for a moment, it was only to glance at a clock. That the obsession of
voyeurism was an unwholesome one, and that Nick was too weak to force himself
away, was clear from his unwillingness to leave. Regent paid no attention to
the man with eyes as opaque as limo-glass. He considered Lorna's husband such a
silly born bastard that he deplored Nick's pathetic fate with a sadistic
attitude.

The unfortunate son of Cork looked at his wife. He had a nervous staccato
laugh. Nick Collins: semper fidelis. Even though he was an object of sheer
ridicule and absurdity, soon an expression of anguish shot for an instant
across Nick's face, and Regent realized that, despite being utterly drunk, he
actually recognized Lorna, and loved her desperately, but knew there was no way
out for him. Regent's own ugly behavior was revealed, as if moonlight had
suddenly illuminated a blasted landscape. Nick just loitered about, and formed
sundry odd figures with his legs and arms, accompanied by painful contortions
of his face. The whole time, Regent and Lorna pursued a barbaric and adulterous
custom, and made enough noise to waken the dead.

Just before their momentous crisis, and between the violent creaking of
bedsprings, Regent took every opportunity to speak to Lorna in half-words,
naughty-sounding fragments that were suitably vulgar, telling her she was a
great slut. Nick, who wanted no cause to doubt his wife, but wished every
reason for relying on her honesty, was completely staggered. Visions of her
nightly absences from home for which he had accounted so strangely, now made
him insensible. Yet Nick remained passive while his wife gratified Regent, and
he muttered desperate imprecations upon himself and mankind in general.
Afterwards, the couple dozed in postcoital peace.

Nick Collins rightly perceived that he had been weakened in the biological
struggle. His marriage to Lorna barely lasted another two weeks.

The belief that opposites attract is clearly demonstrated in a relationship
between a dominant and a submissive. For Regent, the joy was the ability to be
assertive, controlling and dominant. For Lorna, the joy of being with Regent
wasn't just a silly kind of slavishness; it was the very substance of her life.
This created a sense of well-being for her. Her purpose was erotically simple:
she served her teacher.

Many times, like Rene giving O over to Sir Stephen, Regent entrusted Lorna to
Miranda, who paddled the well-heeled types from Ladue, a very affluent suburb.
Invariably, Miranda had the hard feline hauteur that was lingua franca of the
emerging, cool hipster culture. Yet for this role, she appeared as the
prevalent schoolmarm rather than a now-and-then domnitrix: dark hair pulled
straight back in a bun at the nape of her neck; granny glasses, and a severe
lightweight suit that did nothing for her figure. But she had her fans: men who
appreciated her deep, forceful voice, the tight blouses from which her breasts
threatened to overflow, and her ability to humiliate convincingly. Men drove
hours to spend $100 for a session of her charms. She didn't mind stomping on
the hearts of her clients. Of course, Miranda had no direct sexual contact with
any client during a session. That was all left to Lorna, who was very deep in
the secrets of the debauched part of the Regent coterie.

In point of fact, Henri Chouteau, an underground film director in St. Louis,
arrived days earlier for a session with Miranda Regent. Psychologists studying
the baffling contrasts of the human psyche could scratch their heads over Henri
Chouteau. He was a man who had bad taste in women and liked to carouse. He was
a drunk and a pussy-whipped chump. He was a sadist and a masochist, a
contributor to liberal causes and a smasher of whisky glasses, a gentleman and
a swinger drawn with equal fervor to millionaires and thugs. For years, the 5-
foot-9 ex-Marine had a checkered employment history: 32 jobs, including stints
as cook, waiter, artist's model and whorehouse security. Chouteau was out of
Soulard, out of an orphan asylum, and he could punch. He threw a guy against a
car and punched until the guy's eye fell out.

His real name was Blake Harris, but for some reason it became "Henri Chouteau"
after a brief fling with Evelyn West, of the $50,000 Treasure Chest fame. A
woman with a well-developed figure, the stripper's magnificent breasts, with
nothing for cover but diamonds, had a certain enchanting fullness. She was the
real thing. Evelyn West had the feathers and the G string, the erotic teasing,
the amorous greatness of a burlesque Queen. After a few drinks, she offered the
hallucination of a Goya masterpiece.

Chouteau met the celebrated ecdysiast when he worked as a bouncer at the
Stardust Club in the old DeBaliviere Strip, a bustling neighborhood of
nightclubs, restaurants and bookmaking places. In the heyday of striptease, St.
Louis was one of the jewel cities of the bump-and-grind circuit. Evelyn West's
nickname came about when she had her breasts insured by Lloyd's of London for
$50,000 - big money during the Eisenhower era.

Although the double-chinned 49-year-old Chouteau was a slice of pie away from
200 pounds, he still had a finger-snapping, no-time-to-waste attitude. He often
walked around in a bathrobe to prove that he was not a dignified flunky for
Frank Costello and the local mob. He also had a St. Louis Browns baseball hat
glued to his head and a secret coke habit everyone knew about. Chouteau was one
of those rare men able to auto-fellate in his younger days.

Lorna's function was always the same. Comfortably robed, she greeted Chouteau
and directed him into the very elegantly furnished living room. After placing a
leather collar with a chain firmly around his thick neck, she served him two
shots of unblended scotch and performed oral sex. What Chouteau felt was the
heat, the feather-light sensation of Lorna's mouth on his equine-like
endowment. He gasped as she received him, as her hands caressed his thighs.
Whenever he neared the brink, Miranda's large blue eyes looked steadily into
Chouteau's, and holding his chain in her right hand, she said, "Not yet!" and
he'd feel the sting of her riding crop against his chest. Lorna stopped.
Chouteau never felt so hard, had never ached to come like this. "Please," he
begged. But the crop slapped his flesh again and again, taking him to another
plane of sensitivity.

Chouteau repeated out loud:

Yea, though I walk through the valley of bondage and discipline, I will fear no
heavy scene, for thou art with me. Thy whip shall comfort me. She leadeth me
with a collar, and annointest my body with the scent of leather. And I shall
dwell in the game room of my Mistress forever. Amen.

When Chouteau finally placed the empty glass down, Lorna's orders were to
straddle and ride his male member, yet disengage before the moment of climax.
Admittedly, the sex was predictable but Lorna enjoyed it. Chouteau was
deliciously thick. He felt good inside her. Chouteau never spoke to her and she
wasn't allowed to speak with him. After Lorna detached from him, Chouteau
provoked his own resolution as Miranda held the chain and flogged the film
director.

This story is part of White_Shadow's_Nasty_Stories.
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