Audit Of Desire, Laundry of History

We trace an audit of desire from a house of obsolete machines to a balcony in New Orleans, then down into the champagne room and a bruised philosophy of boundaries and rest. We refuse an easy deal and ask what ownership, visibility, and intimacy truly cost.

• Collecting obsolete office gear as a refuge from surveillance
• Discovery of a hidden clue and a complicated bargain
• Refusal of protection for the love of risk
• Mardi Gras story about being seen versus being loved
• Ask a Sadist on boundaries, cruelty, and service
• Text romance, labels, and the fantasy of rest under swagger
• Sensual vignette on dominance, attention, and worship
• Jenna and Valerie’s hustle, control, and vanishing act
• Interrogation of power brokers, menace, and escape

If you’re drawn to smart, sensual storytelling that interrogates power, shame, and the modern romance between surveillance and selfhood, this is for you. Hit follow, share with a friend who loves a good audit of the heart, and leave a review telling us what you’d refuse—and why.

Chapters

• 0:00 Depreciation of Desire in the House of Obsolesce: A Bite-Sized Erotic Thriller
• 7:44 Show Opening And Program Ethos
• 13:01 Balcony Royalty and the Economics of Being Seen: A Bite-Sized Erotic Thriller
• 27:57 Ask A Sadist: A New Incentive for Boundary-Enforcement
• 35:27 The Fantasy Of Rest
• 36:59 Isabella Rose: Blindfold, Wax, and Worship
• 44:08 The Champagne Room at the Cockroach: A Bite-Sized Erotic Thriller
• 55:37 How Can You Disappear If I Won't Miss You?
• 59:15 Okay, That's It, for Real, Get Out

Transcript

Emerson Dameron: 0:17

I didn't start collecting obsolete office equipment because I yearned for the past. Don't give me that look. I know what that means. I can tell when someone's romanticizing me. If you put me on a pedestal, I'm just gonna fall off and bang my head. I'm tall. If I liked knots on my head, I'd know by now. I started collecting obsolete office equipment because the present wouldn't stop pinging me. You know what I mean. The present is chatty. It touches in, checks bass, whatever. It wants to know how you're really doing, like it's allowed to care. Much as much pity is sugar-coated contempt. Concern is just surveillance with better table matters. A man can only be looped in so many times before he begins to crave the honest click of a rotary dial. The kind of sound that doesn't flatter you. It resists, it drags, it makes you work for it. You seem like the type who appreciates a little effort. I wanted machines that didn't pretend to be friendly, machines that didn't smile with their fonts, machines that didn't ask about my weekend while quietly archiving my loneliness. So I bought them. Adding machines, staplers, a steel three-hole punch that looked like it had survived a war and didn't understand and didn't feel the need to explain. I arranged them in my apartment by parishioners in a small tax-deductible cathedral. No, I don't know how that sounds. And I don't care. Moving on. I told myself it was a hobby. I told my accountant it was a business. That was the first lie I ever enjoyed telling, so I told it extra slowly. Slowed and bass boosted with a reverb. The second lie arrived wearing Brooks Brothers. He was polite, unhurried, dressed like a man who could ruin you without raising his voice, which, I'll admit, has its own kind of charisma. He held my documents the way some people hold hands, with a tenderness that implies anticipated leverage. He didn't look at me at first, but he looked at the stapler. Interesting, he said, stroking the chrome like it might purr raspily vintage. Conditions. Intimate. I laughed. That reflex courtesy laugh, you know the one. You do it when someone makes your possessions feel indecent. You'd have laughed too, Giggles. Don't pretend you wouldn't. He didn't laugh back. His mouth stayed flat, like humor was an expense he'd already budgeted for. He'd asked to see the inventory, which I'd never called it before. Funny how authority renames things just by looking at them, colors them in Schrdinger's beige. I led him through the apartment. He walked slowly as if each step were a fresh evaluation. When he touched the adding machine, it made a small, obedient whirr. He closed his eyes, not in pleasure, too decadent, too undisciplined, but in recognition. By the sound it said his name. Do you know, he murmured, what people used to hide inside these dust, I said. Regret. The occasional stray paper clip. He smiled with no teeth. Film. And there it was. The chill. Nothing dramatic, just enough to notice, as if the air had been reclassified. He pointed to a mustard yellow telephone with a scuffed receiver. This one, he said. May I? He didn't wait. Something twisted, something I hadn't known could twist, and a thin brittle strip slid out like a tongue. Microfilm, old enough to feel illegal just by existing. He held it up to the light as if checking the transparency of my soul. Then he looked at me. Congratulations, he said. You've been laundering history. Now here's the part I won't pretend to be noble about. When I saw that hidden sliver narrative, I felt a thrill, a charge, not because of what it contained, whatever ledger, favors, and bribes and quiet destructions, but because something had been hidden so carefully for so long and I had found it by accident. I had stumbled into someone else's secrecy, which, if you think about it, is basically how intimacy works. Maybe you haven't tasted that yet. You will. He sat at my kitchen table as if it were a courtroom and I was the furniture. He explained gently that the film documented a ring. Embezzlement, blackmail, private arrangements recorded in office language so dry it could start a fire. Names, dates, amounts. The kind of numbers that only add up after you subtract your dignity and divide it by the sum of your self-reproach. Why are you telling me this? I asked. I've never even wanted to be part of a ring. He tapped my receipt. Because you claimed depreciation. I claim truth, I said. This was a mistake. I knew it as soon as I said it. You probably did too. Don't worry, we all have our little tells. I've already caught two of yours. He leaned in closer. I caught his aftershave. Clean, bureaucratic, faintly predatory. Objects lose value, he said. But desire doesn't. It just changes its packaging. I felt the sharp tickle of that sentence worming its way into my brain. He offered me a deal. No sex, no romance, those are amateur bribes. He offered protection, anonymity, assistance, a clean path through the labyrinth. If I handed over the collection and kept my mouth shut. It should have been easy to refuse, but I'd recently learned the eroticism of paperwork. Divorce will do that to you. Who signs? Who yields? Who keeps the Russian doll collection, which is a blast to inventory? I knew how cleanly a life could be reduced to initials on a line. So I told him no. Not dramatically, not heroically, just no. Like closing a small door while maintaining eye contact. His eyes narrowed. Then you understand, he said, that you're choosing risk. I'm choosing ownership, I said, of my mistakes. And yes, I know how that sounds. He stood, smoothed his suit, and headed for the door. In the pause before he left, I felt the full, ridiculous weight of it. This morning I lived in a house full of dead office equipment. Now I'd moved into a live grenade. He didn't threaten me. He didn't need to. He just said, keep your receipts. After he left, the apartment felt louder. Every machine hummed with new attentiveness. I had awakened something that had been waiting patiently inside metal and dust. I sat on the floor between the adding machine and the rotary phone and realized the real depreciation wasn't on my tax phones. It was in me. The slow annual decline of my ability to pretend I didn't want trouble. Desire, it turns out, isn't an expense you can write off. It's an asset. You already know how this ends. Someone always wants to audit it. This is Emerson Damron's Medicated Minutes, LA's number one avant-garde personal development program. The show that loves you back. I'm Emerson Damron, your witty and wounded romantic hero. I love you personally, Levity Saves Lives. Episodes premiere seven o'clock every first Wednesday of the month. And I do mean every first Wednesday of the month. I don't think we've missed since COVID. And that was not my fault. I'm gonna give myself a pass on that and say the last time I missed appointment listening was in 2019. Oh, it was early 2020. Yeah, because I had stuff going on and then some. But ever since then, my perfect attendance record has made me a legend of song stage and scream. But if you can't make it at the time when it happens, it will be archived at medicated-minutes.com as the OnlyGood Podcast. Tonight, uh, we have some loosely connected material, all of it dealing in one way or another with matters of the heart and the loins, because sex and love are everywhere and everything, and that's where we came from. Sex is the force of creation itself. It is essentially God. So we're gonna be celebrating that. This evening, we have some bite-sized erotic thrillers, some more bite-sized than others. One of them in particular is more than a mouthful, but then again, so am I. And we've got Ask a Sadist to deal with some questions about matters of relationships. Should I stay or should I go? We're gonna rock the Chasma and get all of those things settled once and for all, so that you are not faced with the vertigo of possibility. You know what to do. You have been told by people in white coats, you can't see me, but that's by design. There will never be a video component to this program. I can't remember who said we took great radio and turned it into garbage television, but that's what's happening with podcasts right now. I don't want to watch guys talking for three hours. I can watch Rude Goldberg machines for cats. Nobody needs to sit there and look at my face and look at me talking out one side of my mouth for an hour a month. If you don't have better things to do than that, I will give you better things to do. You can reach out to me personally. If not being able to see this show on video is a problem for you, get in touch. I will not change anything about the show. I'm gonna change your life. Because changing lives is what I do. For a living, often for the better. It's always complicated. There are all the second-order knock-on effects and contingencies, and is X equal to Y? All of this kind of stuff going on. I'm gonna make it simple. I'm gonna change your life, and then you can decide whether you like it or you don't. A lot of people with great lives hate their lives and themselves. So do a lot of broke people. That's the human condition, and we don't deny it. We celebrate it. We don't let it happen. We condition ourselves actively, classically, humanely, for fun, for keeps. You're listening to Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes. On Kaychun Los Angeles, Levity Saves Lives. Let's get into this. But strongly discouraged her from showing up during Mardi Gras, which the friend, a lifelong New Orleans resident, thought was gross. She was fascinated. She could always find something else to get immersed in, something else to make her circuit zing and fire up her synaesthesia. She loved New Orleans, the city of a very particular sort of overstimulation. As tends to happen with anything that we're deprived of or told as taboo. She always wanted that whole Mardi Gras experience. So when she had the resources to get it herself, she did. She did it right. And she was enthralled. The humidity was so thick. It was like you were wearing the city as a coat in every street corner. Had women doing just about anything for a 50 cent pair of beads. The balcony royalty, they were. As she drifted through the French quarter after one too many watered-down cocktails, feeling that loose, limber way you tend to get when you want to be seen. Not loved, seen. When you're loved, it's generally by someone who has made an agreement with you or at least themselves to ignore certain things about you. When you're seen, you're exposed, maybe humiliated, maybe celebrated, and realism that you never gave anyone enough information to celebrate you in before. Seen. There's a difference. It's the difference between being treasured and being hunted. She'd been hunted before, but not like this. And she liked it. All she needed was the right pair of shoulders to sit on while waving around a bottle of cheap tequila. And getting rewarded for certain acts of self-revelation. It didn't take her long to find the right guy, a member of the balcony royalty, probably somebody's brother or cousin. Somebody who's good at making his way into these sorts of scenes. Somebody who knows the right people, or somebody who just loves a nice pair of titties enough to make it happen. She saw him leaning over the wrought iron, smiling down at the street as if it was full of people he owned, people that owed him something. For a moment, his sense of entitlement, which would normally be predictable and perhaps off-putting, became all embracing. And it was the kind of hug that he was something. The crowd down below, clamoring with lust, yelling out for beads, didn't even remember deciding to look up. Her body did it for her, like a flower growing toward the sun or a compass that always points to trouble. A strand of beads fell slow as summer in the south, and it landed right on her wrists. Split up her arm, like it belonged there, like it had found what it was looking for. The plastic was cheap, hollow, still warm from balcony man's hands, and against her skin. It felt like a challenge. She laughed. Laughing was always her favorite way to lie. She held the beads up, like a trophy conquest. Like she was challenging everything higher up in the food chain to come make a meal of her. He was smiling like he was ready to do it, like he'd already done it. Like he'd already talked her into tattooing his name somewhere. He just needed to figure out where it was. And she wants to feel not owned, not coined, abused, exposed. Everything she is out there, in contact with Earth's atmosphere. She wants to see how she, someone she knows well. Maybe not entirely. There are a few people that know her better, but someone she has always been a little bored and frustrated with. She wanted to be seen as a sex object, a sexual dynamo, also a prop in someone's fantasy. Some guy, some other guy. Not any kind of royalty. Or maybe he was. He was acting important. He wasn't acting like royalty, but he was acting like he owned the place. He filled her in a cloud of beer breath and cologne. He spoke softly, like he was trying not to rouse the demons he didn't want to know about this. And keep it among the ones he did. Nice souvenir, he said, touching the beads. It's just beads, she said. She liked her plausible deniability. Served neat with a cherry. She'd do something interesting with later. Beer breath touches her neck again and says, I mean you're in. In what? She asked. He smiled like a tow truck driver, looking at the only car that was left parked when the clock flipped over to rush hour and he got a chance to tow it. If somebody does that, it means they love you. But it also means they're about to start hating you. The man looked at her like he was gonna ruin somebody's life. She knew this was her cue to walk away, but she could feel the beads warming somehow. Even in the soup of humidity, they seemed to be heating up in time with her pulse. If her pulse was on the ones and the threes, the beads were on the twos and the fours, which meant they had the funk deep within them. And she was remembering much too vividly how it feels to be wanted, which was nothing new for her, but wanted in public. That was a thing. An electric humiliation, the panic dipped in honey, white hot shame that cuts through your loneliness and lets you finally be acknowledged by a crowd full of strangers who will never hear your last name. Forget your first name. They're drunk. They won't appreciate what a beautiful creature you are when you'd surrender like this. And that's fine. They aren't the point. If anything, their cavalier callousness brings the focus back to you. In this case, back to her. She wanted to be balcony royalty. And as if on cue, Beer Breath says there's a balcony spot open. He mutters out of a weird nothing crazy. Just you'd look good up there. She looked uh balcony royalty, checking her out. Her voice got low. She woke up this morning wanting to be seen, and now it's happening. Her syrupy southern draw slowed down until it was slowing the pace of her heartbeat and soothing anyone who heard it like a ceiling fan in August. You want them to want you? The man said. She swallowed, her throat click, click, clicking against the bead. I want, she said, hating how honest and unfun it sounded, to stop owing strangers' interests on my own desire. He said, I don't know what you're talking about. I know it's time for you to get on out there. If you don't, I'm gonna regret it for the rest of my life. So she went up. Of course she did. She wasn't brave, but she was so curious that she was willing to pick freedom over security pretty consistently, more than she even noticed. She was very self-conscious about being prim. Some awful pipsqueak ex boyfriends had convinced her that she was dim, an assessment with which she concurred because the truth hurts. The more it hurts, the more true it is. And it can cut especially deeply when it's the kind of truth that's not true, but rather obviously false in else, taking it good. Faithful. Look at it. But she was the kind of person that wasn't willing to settle for things as they were. Whenever things settled down too much, she knew it was the responsibility of the artist to provoke, to mix things up, and sometimes to perform pieces of performance art that are easily mistaken for just acts of garden variety, rebellion, and pro forma degeneracy. On the balcony, the air felt thinner, even cool against her flush skin, like an ice cube trailing slow across a bare torso. Then suddenly the heat would rush back in. Humid, way too close, all enveloping, and she was caught between those two sensations. The chill and the malicious embrace. Soft and hard, hard or smooth, cool or burning. The streets surged below, and you cheered less out of celebration, more out of purgative catharsis, hunger, anger even. Hands roamed up from the crowd, reaching through the railings toward bare legs, and she understood completely why those women let strangers touch them. The vulnerability of it, the way it could make you feel like a sweet possession, a play toy, something to be doted on and then devoured or destroyed. She got up next to the railing and got on her knees, feeling the reliable, cool, little bit cool, wrought iron against her bare thighs. She lifted up her skirt. One of the men reached up from the street through the railings. The hands found her first and then the mouth. One eager, possessive, seeking, lusting, wanting. His hand clamped over her thigh so he could steady himself. He was quite drunk. Fingers pressing into her skin, leaving a mark that she could still see the next day. She was helpless to do anything but surrender to it. She had decided to be helpless, and she didn't feel that way. She was committed to helplessness, and she didn't have to fake it to make it. She got what she wanted, and then some. Her little secret, the one she shared with this man, hidden under the fabric of her dress, as the crowd roared below like they knew exactly what was happening, gave her this sort of furtive, dangerous, somewhat embarrassing thrill that made her feel absolutely electrified, which caught fire when she felt the man's fingers sliding inside of her. Something primal rose up at that moment. A fire in her chest, a roar, a growl, something feral, something she didn't know she had in her. She was begging for release by the end of it. She didn't care who heard. She was gonna get it, and she knew she could. And she did several times. She chose what to reveal, and to whom. She also chose what to withhold. She was helpless, but not some sort of free use harlot, at least not in this situation. She was saving that. She was practicing, making a show of surrender, because surrender is the only thing that gets anywhere close to touching the transgressive, liberatory grandeur that all these people are trying to get their hands on, even if they don't know it. When the man was done, he pressed something into her palm. Not beads, but a charm in the shape of a key. Keep it, he said. Or don't. Either way, you're part of the story now. She wanted to put it on display in her domicile, like an important souvenir. Something so mundane that it had to have a story behind it, and that story had to be a testament to some sort of unbridled desire. The kind of desire that takes over everything. Either makes it uninteresting or makes it interesting. Because it is now consumed by that fire of desire. She eaves herself back down into the crowd, into the noise, with her throat lighter, as though some sort of rigid, gripping shame had been released. She knew that more shame was in the cards, but as it turned out, New Orleans was treating her right in its own way. Behind her, the balcony was still glittering, the balcony royalty were holding court as they do, and in the street around her. People kept disappearing into the quicksand of the humidity, swallowed whole by this airsatz ecstasy that gets you off, makes you feel good, and can set you free if you know how to ride it. And if you want to be free. Freedom hurts. Freedom's not for everybody. And they don't give it away free in New Orleans. That's not freedom. That's a string of beads. Cheap ones. Not even gold and silver, earth tones, green beads, brown beads, yellow beads. She realized too late, too perfectly, that the real danger wasn't in being watched. It was in wanting the watching to mean something. Wanting this little moment with this man and his finger to be transcendent, unique. Because more than anything, she wanted to transgress the boundaries and cross over into some strange new world. Something that well-intentioned dullards had invested hugely in protecting her from. Really protecting themselves from the girl they were afraid would emerge. From a world that was only inhabitable for dreamers, for human explosions of lust, perhaps for the odd drunk with some finger skills. But she came out on top. She took sex seriously. She considered it a form of art, an avenue of creative expression. That shocking and provocative, and perhaps creating a before and after experience. Peak experience. Perhaps a whole new form of spirituality and we're doing it right. Everything is a practice when we do it right. Sex is certainly a practice. Goes way beyond a PV sex, and nothing turned her off faster than the idea that this experience wasn't special. She'll never know if it was special for him. That is almost certainly for the best, because when she is alone with you, or with a memory of hers, that is dangerously special. There was a whole bead economy with which she avoided engaging, mostly to not let the cat out of the bag, the cat being how much she really knew about economics and what she hid, because going toe-to-toe with the sort of people who would want to go toe-to-toe on economics is a waste of her valuable time. And time is only valuable if you value your own. A sadist, the heart of gold. I'm here to hurt you in the ways that most help you, and it means the world to me. When you let me be mean to you. You know me, I know you. I've got things to do. Let's skip the chit-chat and go right into the large scrotal sack known as the mailbag.

SPEAKER_00: 28:17

Dear sadist, my therapist says I need to set boundaries, but every time I try, people get angry and I immediately cave. How do I get better at this?

Emerson Dameron: 28:26

If you set your boundaries appropriately, inevitably, someone is going to drive a tank through them. That's what people do. Their lives are not painful enough, so they seek out punishment, which you can give them by enforcing your boundaries. People test you to see if you can give them the sweet pain that they crave so desperately that they don't even know it. One of their unknown knowns. So enforce your boundaries and enjoy doing it. Even if you don't get off on the cruelty, you can get off on doing them a favor, or perhaps situation-specific sadism, in which you are inflicting pain on someone who may as well have just straight up asked for it. People know what they're doing when they get in your face for no reason. If they act surprised, it's just that plausible deniability that all Bush League bullies need to survive, to avoid the curb stompings that they so richly deserve. You don't have to go that far. Just remember, setting boundaries necessary, enforcing them, is the thoughtful thing to do, not just for you, but for all of the unconscious masochists wandering around, craving pain. Only a true artist can dull out the sort of discipline that can really turn those people's lives around. I'd say we have a shortage of sadists. That's why I am announcing my master class, not right now, some other time.

SPEAKER_02: 29:58

Dear Sadist, I've been talking to someone for six months. We text constantly. What does this mean and what should I do?

Emerson Dameron: 30:13

There is a splendid tradition of literary romance. I personally have exchanged epistles with women who wrote so graphically of their cravings for my punishment that I almost didn't want to give it to them. I wanted to drag it out. I have exchanged letters and sex with witty, articulate, sometimes searingly brilliant women. Because I only torture winners, and I only dom the deserving. Being a sadist is one thing. I can take a drive-by whiz on you and call it a knight, but being a dom requires some project management skills, and I'm only willing to invest those. In these sort of literary women who can world build with their texts and sexts and naughty pictures, with such baroque magic, that some of those relationships have been better than some of the actual sex that I've had. I don't think that's a strange thing to admit. There's a sort of intimacy that comes in that format. People can mow it over, like need it, like go, and they can express the things that are just hard to get to on an impromptu basis. Now, in your specific situation, if they won't call you their girlfriend, drop it. That's not something you're gonna get from them right now, and you have to decide, is it worth it to keep going with the relationship nebulously defined? If it is, do it. If not, take a hike. There are a whole lot of gripe masochists out there. If you don't believe me, just go outside and look around. Here's another idea. If you're feeling dangerous, forget about what you want. Figure out what this person wants. Study them like a scientist, give it to them like an artist in a fugue state. Give them what they want. Elicit their values, find their fear, their thumb screw, let them have it. Let it come down, then take it back. Act like nothing happened, then give it to them, even harder than before. Then you take it away, shuffle it. Sometimes you're giving it to them, sometimes you're taking it away. It doesn't have much to do with what they're doing. This is what they really want. Well, it's on the way to what they really want. If you could figure out what they really, really want, and then help them get it. That is highly likely to ruin their lives. Or they will transcend into the realms of the living deities, who, as works in progress, can dom the gods themselves. And that's the least I would hope for for you. This has been Ask a Sadist. If you have questions, maybe try to figure out the answers yourself before you ask for help. People help those who, before they ask for help, give it all they got. So do that. And then if you still have questions that only I can address, I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out how to get in touch with me. And I say that because now you will want to live up to that. And that means I don't have to give you my email address. Do not put the word sadist in the handles that you use for your socials in your ad, whether it's Facebook, X, Instagram. Your account will be unceremoniously deleted before you have a chance to post anything. They are afraid of you, the billionaires, masters of the universe, are terrified. They crave punishment. But you gotta learn to play standards before you play jazz. So this is a perfectly good place to start. Believe me, if you need me as a mentor, the teacher will appear when you are ready. Could be in the form of your house cat. So watch for it.

SPEAKER_04: 35:01

Look at the pattern, he sermonizes about casual sex with the fervor of someone trying to convince himself it's enlightenment. He diagrams power dynamics like an engineer reverse-engineering his own emotional defenses, what he's actually asking for, in that recursive spiral he's perfecting, someone who sees through all of it and stays anyway. Someone who doesn't need the performance, who catches him mid-routine and says, Yeah, yeah, satanic Buddhism, very edgy. Now tell me what actually scares you. Someone who knows the swagger is scar tissue and touches it lovingly anyway. He keeps describing her in negative space. I don't really click with most people. You regulate my nervous system. I don't feel like I have to use any of that with you. That's not a fantasy of submission. That's a fantasy of rest. The contradiction he won't name directly. He's built an entire philosophy around radical autonomy and rules are for suckers, because what he actually wants, deep, sustained, mutual trust, requires the most frightening submission of all. Lowering the defenses he spent years welding into place after being hurt by partners, German engineered to make him miserable, who knew exactly where to land the blade. He wants someone who makes the defense mechanisms obsolete, who's dangerous enough to hurt him but disciplined, gentle, and kind enough not to. A real one who won't mistake his intellectual brutality for actual hardness, who sees the wounded romantic first and the cynic second. But admitting you want to be known, truly mapped and held means admitting you've been lonely, which means admitting the fortress didn't work, which destabilizes the entire persona. So instead, he talks about power dynamics, submission, someone who facilitates my personal growth, all technically accurate, but missing the beating heart underneath. Let me put the sword down, just for a minute, just with you. The question he circles but never asks would you still want me if I stop performing.

Isabella Rose: 38:01

Shallow and shivering, yours low and deliberate. The air hangs thick with lavender and heat, sweet, sharp, and waiting. I can't see you. The silk over my eyes ensures that. But I can feel you, I feel you in the way my skin prickles before you touch me, in the way my lips part even before yours are near. In the way my soul aches in delicious anticipation, as if the very idea of your presence is already inside me, moving through me, staking its claim. My wrists are bound above my head with the belt from my robe, the same robe you once slid off me with a smirk and a whisper. Now it holds me in place. A symbol, a promise, a dare. Your hands don't land where I expect them. No, you tease, you graze. The feather you glide down my chest feels like sin dressed in softness. It makes me gasp, it makes me giggle, it makes me beg, without words, without shame. Every time it drifts over the swell of my breast, over my ribs, down to the trembling edge of what I can take, I arch like a woman possessed. And then the heat. Hot wax, sudden and sharp, kisses the inside of my thigh. I yelp, my knees buckle, but I don't fall. Because you're there. Your hand, firm, warm, presses into my waist, grounding me, reminding me who I belong to. I whisper your name like a mantra, or maybe a warning, but you're not done. You never are. When the ice finds my skin, it's not just a sensation. It's a shatter, cold against heat, stillness against chaos. It rolls down my stomach, carving a wet Path of exquisite contrast. My entire body tenses, quivers. I cry out, not from pain, from overwhelm, from too much, from exactly, enough. You ravish me with more than your hands, more than your clever, wicked mouth. You ravish me with intention, with attention, with a kind of obsession that doesn't just take. It studies. It worships. It undoes. You peel me open like a fruit you've been waiting to devour. Slowly. Reverently. And then all at once. There is nothing clinical in your dominance. It's tender. It's terrifying. It's thorough. You don't just want my body. You want the tiny, trembling parts of me I keep hidden. You want the shadow, the shame, the shimmer, and I give it to you. Willingly. Cravingly. Completely. Every sound I make, you taste like it was made for you. Every twitch, every cry, every helpless moan. You collect them. Pocket them. Own them. And I, I forget what it was to be untouched. I forget my name. All I know is the echo of your voice in my ear. The press of your control in my mind. The glorious maddening ache of being made small under your gaze. You take me, and in that taking, you give me back to myself. Ruined, radiant, rewritten. When the blindfold slips away and I finally see your face, I don't speak. I can't. I just smile. Sop. Spent. Seen. Because I know. This is what it feels like. To be wanted, to be undone, to be yours. And long after the heat fades and the candlelight dims, I feel you inside me. Not just where your body met mine, but where your words live now, echoing. Where your rhythm pulses in my chest. Where your voice curls in my thoughts, whispering mine into yours. It feels like surrender. It feels like worship. It feels like falling into a gravity that only pulls when you're near. Even now the ghost of your touch makes me shiver beneath my sheets. Even now I part my thighs and remember how it felt to be fully taken, fully seen. Baby.

Emerson Dameron: 44:23

Sex of the roughest, most cathartic kind. The kind of sex that you can only have with someone you're not auditioning for a relationship with. I didn't want it at the time, and I didn't want it because I knew I was gonna be wanting it really bad. Jenna and her roommate Valerie live together in what feels like an indefinite slumber party. A little bit more alcohol, a whole lot more cocaine, a worse television, and a shared mastery of the erotic arts. Jenna and Valerie are dancers. They both do a little escorting on the side. That's where the money comes from. If you're a dancer who doesn't escort, using like a band that doesn't tour. Things got serious with Jenna faster than I wanted them to, as often happens in my relationships, such as they are. Because I'm swinging it. I can lay down the law in the bedroom. And more gets around about that. It means I have much to discuss and many good times to be had with women who are steeped in the dark arts, pink arts, fuchsia arts, of making men who believe that they're the center of the world feel as though they are the center of the world, and that their appendages, juiced up as they are with the blue pills, are powerful, desirable monuments to the civilization. I'm a security guy, a fixer, a plug for Jenna and Valerie, for which I take a generous cut of their earnings. I earned them. I earned them in part by uh being able to read minds.

SPEAKER_05: 46:06

Oh, for fuck's sake, you can't read minds. You read Desperation, which is basically every stripper's factory setting.

Emerson Dameron: 46:15

Not just any old mind, but there are particular minds that I can read. And it's not the majority, but it's more than you think, and it's more than I even realize, because everywhere I go, I start reading the minds, often the minds of Huds. I can read Jenna's mind very clearly. I I knew that she was struggling, the kind of struggle that there's a reason for it, but the struggle has transcended, or maybe the better metaphor would be uh limbo'd under the stick of the original condition to which it can be attributed. Jenna was in the middle of uh personal metacrisis. She danced under various names. Hannah, in honor of Kathleen Hannah, which I don't think anyone in the club got.

SPEAKER_05: 47:00

Nobody got it because nobody there went to college or gave a shit about Riot Girl. Present company included.

Emerson Dameron: 47:08

So she switched it over to Snaxxy for a hot minute. That name is taken. She went with SnackTastica, and finally Dallas, which is where Jenna's from. And that almost turned into Debbie. But then another Debbie showed up and she went back to Dallas. If you've been to Dallas, it's a sexy name. And if you haven't been to Dallas, that's some sexiness you gotta discover for yourself. Jenna plays tough. She likes to be perceived as tougher than she actually is, and in fact, she feels like that's necessary for her survival. But I've seen the other side. The worries about money, the rapidly escalating cocaine habit. I've been there, uh, in the club, when some of the city's more disgusting specimens of unconsciously wounded, destructive to the self and others, masculinity. They put hands on Jenna, she gets ripped off, short of money. She's been thinking a lot about porn. Adult entertainment as an escape pod from this. And she could do it because Jenna is a seductress through and through. And if you really live the life uh seduction, you're gonna go through the valley of cynicism. Some people never get out of there.

SPEAKER_05: 48:26

Some people don't want out. The valley's got great coke and no expectations.

Emerson Dameron: 48:32

And it seemed like she was stuck, and I gave her a little push in the form of some very good sex. She returned in kind, and we ended up getting closer as things got weirder. The champagne at the club is the nerve center, perhaps, of the whole city. This is a club that is nicknamed the Cockroach, because it is indestructible. It's spratted out, the couches are leather and old, and there was one that wasn't leather, that'll set on fire. Somebody's fantasy was fulfilled. Everything is various shades of mauve. The men who show up to this place typically fall into one or two categories. One desperately starved for the simulacrum of intimacy. To say nothing of intimacy itself. If you spend a lot of time with them, especially in the way that Jenna and Valerie do, you start to figure out why. The others are the power brokers, the big dogs that don't want to be hassled. So they're not even slumming it. They're saving a lot of money, they're getting more interesting girls, and they've got the champagne room, widely and incorrectly believed to be a place where no sex happens. There's quite a lot. And they don't run the same risk of being documented. I take Jenna's cell phone into my possession before she starts work.

SPEAKER_05: 49:54

He means I hand it over so he can pretend he's doing me a favor instead of just being a paranoid control freak with boundary issues.

Emerson Dameron: 50:03

And I go through it. She wants me to, because she knows I can read her mind, and there aren't gonna be any big surprises in there. My mind reading capabilities uh made the first part of my relationship with Jenna really good, even though it was moving way too fast. She was depressed, she was uh uptight, I enjoyed her tightness thoroughly, and I became, you know, I still like to say pimp.

SPEAKER_05: 50:26

He's not a pimp. He's muscle with delusions of grandeur and a Wikipedia understanding of street economy.

Emerson Dameron: 50:34

That's been my lifelong dream, and I know the term has gone out of favor. I'm not trafficking anything. I am protection, masculinity, I am a rock that these ladies can depend on, and they need that because they are closer to the pressure centers of our society, economy, and civilization than anyone else I know. And sometimes that sense of responsibility uh is more than they could handle. What they do is make these men fall in love with them.

SPEAKER_05: 51:02

What we do is let them believe their own bullshit while we count the minutes and calculate the tip.

Emerson Dameron: 51:10

When that happens, you can get sucked into all kinds of different realities. I remember waking up next to Jenna one morning when she was just getting in. I gave her back her phone. I took a big cut of her money, we pounded it out, doing the do, beating up her insides, really letting her have it.

SPEAKER_05: 51:28

Jesus Christ. Yes, we fucked. No, it wasn't poetic. Stop trying to make brutality sound like intimacy.

Emerson Dameron: 51:36

And then in the afterglow, which is significant. One of the warmest afterglows uh I've ever been in. I said, Hey Jenna, remember the time before we were boyfriend and girlfriend decided sex? She said, Yeah. I said, let's go back to that. She was a little bummed, but the sex got even better. Until on the first cool day of fall, Jenna was gone. Ow. Aw. Disappeared. Nobody knew where she went. She left the windows open, and it was a half-finished Corona White, which I poured on her old mattress, which I found in the alley. In honor of all the good times we had. Bunch of loose 20s lying around in the room. I scooped some of those up. By what used to be her door, and which I still think of as Jenna's room. It hasn't been long enough for me to redraw the maps of my world. There's a little symbol near the door handle. It says San Nicola, aka Santa Claus. I don't know what that means. Maybe she's found a movement to join. I always thought she might be vulnerable to those sorts of things. Her cynicism seemed practice. I'm gonna get deep back into Jenna.

SPEAKER_05: 52:47

My cynicism is survival, asshole. You don't practice staying alive. You just do it or you don't.

Emerson Dameron: 52:54

Jenna was born that way. Then Valerie had to learn the pink arts. Jenna just knew, knows, has always known, will always know. I tried to find a replacement. I tried quite a few young ladies, and I found Jenna to be irreplaceable as a source of income, as a source of very good sex, and as I'll go ahead and say it, a friend. So I had to find her. Because you don't just walk out on me and not give me notice and expect it to be okay. I'm either gonna put the Mac hand down on you, or I'm gonna find who's responsible for this. Who tried to hurt you, and I'm gonna put the Mac hand down on that, because nobody hurts Jenna but me.

SPEAKER_05: 53:36

Aw, that's so sweet. I might actually vomit on this pink carpet.

Emerson Dameron: 53:42

And where she is is so much more hazardous than I could have imagined. Now her every lap dance is an interrogation. Every nice guy she meets is in a bad marriage, is probably into something much more dangerous than her. Everything's a threat, everything's a menace. And I say again, in my world, only I get to menace, to be a menace noun, or to menace verb. At least when it comes to sexy doubts. Having access to her internal monologue. Maybe the people I can't read are just people that don't have much of an internal monologue to speak of. Jenna has a very lively one. From that I know that she comes from a dark world. A world of burns, a world of hunger and an escape. Ollie's running, running, running. And she's deep back into that. And I'm gonna find her. I'm gonna take her, and I'm gonna get deep back into it.

SPEAKER_05: 54:37

Yeah, good luck with that hero. I'm already three states away with a new name and zero interest in your rescue fantasy. At least until I get bored again.

Emerson Dameron: 55:33

Oh, that's great. It's not news. Your life is magical and fantastic. But I'm very happy for you. I hope that New England vacation is everything that you want it to be. You and your team, your little crew, sound like great people to me. I don't know them, but everything I've heard, I'm scared to meet them. Yeah, just great people top to bottom. I know you still carry a torch for that guy that blocked you in the face. It's not hard to see. Go back to him. Or stay where you are. That's what I would suggest. Do that. Then you get to be safe and you can resent it all you want. Because nobody's gonna do anything. You're not a good citizen and just a good Christian all around. You know what? Get out. There you go. Get out. Get out of my life. You don't have to do anything. I I have cast you. You're banned. You are not welcome. Oh, it's so hard to be the subject of a bidding war. I just wish it was easier to decide. It is now. I'm deciding for you. Get out. I've taken away one of your options. You're not invited. Don't show up. Because I'm sick of this. You're so clever. So early. Always so mysterious. You're like so many movies ahead. Get out. Get out. Go play games with somebody else. Go play with them. I'm so sick of this. I'm sick of me. I'm sick of you. Get out. Don't come back. I want you to come back. It's not good for either of us. Get out and stay out. That's what you want. When things got serious on the home front, I'm sure the first thing you did was have a nice long conversation with that guy. Then you immediately called me to say you're putting our friendship on ice. So you could deal with it. You know what? Get out. I'm so sick of you. You're so much better than everyone else, aren't you? You're every every little thing you do is such a grand adventure. Yeah, I was so lucky when you came into my life. Wave your magic wand and sprinkled your magic sexy dust all over my life. Get out. Get out. Get out of here. I'm tired of this. Go find someone you don't have to lie to. Or stay where you are. Where I guess you everyone knows everything. And everyone knows they don't like me. I will never be anyone's first choice. I am well aware of that. People have a lot of hostility toward the people they're supposed to like. And they crave the esteem and affection of people that they think that they hate. We've known forever that everything is defined by its opposite. Did you know that everything is its opposite? Yeah, because if you listen to yourself, if you listen to what you say, yeah, try it. Just carry a tape recorder around with you for a day. And then go back and listen. See how you sound. Or you're just making it obvious because you just really want to talk about it. There was a time when I wanted to hear whatever you had to say. At this point, I don't want to hear anything you have to say. If you know that there's a nuclear bomb heading from my house, I don't want to hear it from you. I would rather die. I'd rather get moved. I would take nuclear radiation overhearing your voice again. It's just gonna be the same crap. You waste of time for me.