~LAFF-CUE-ARCHIVE: sf-trip-6.Z
~Subject: Alex and Laylah's trip to SF - part 6 (March 15)

    General disclaimer: there may be a largish amount of material
not directly related to a.s.b, and what IS so related may be not to
your taste, as we do a large range of play, from the sweetest D/S
and spanking to cuts, burns, &tc - and I'm just describing what
actually happened.  Flames welcome, but I may well flame you
back...:-)

   I tried to remember to get permission from everybody we met to
mention them on a.s.b ... but forgot in a few cases... and didn't
keep written notes, so if you find yourself unexpectedly
unmentioned here, I apologize, but it must be one of the cases
about which I was uncertain - sorry!  Incidentally, if anybody
wonders whether it's all right to mention me and/or Laylah in posts
here, go ahead - blanket permission granted.

   These posts will be cut up at some compromise between reasonable
length and chronological boundaries.  As there's so much to relate,
I have not been editing as carefully as usual, so I apologize for
any errors!

    Mon, Mar 15

    Work starts today!  I rise bright and early, and I notice
Laylah is fully awake as well.  I propose to her that today, for
once, we get a *real* breakfast - the hotel's plush restaurant has
a breakfast buffet, and it looks very tempting from the ads in the
lifts - and I get the sort of enthusiastic assent one normally
associates more with other kinds of proposals...

   Very fast showers, ditto shave (and I even manage not to cut
myself up _too_ badly - that's *her* job, after all:-), and a suit
and a dress to match the hotel's class (what we'd wear anyway,
after all), and we manage to be there with enough free time to
really enjoy the all-you-can-eat offerings.  Let me assure you that
we get ample value for money, no matter that the price is in line
with the place's elegance: these things are never priced with
shameless sensualists in mind anyway...:-).  

   Laylah eschews sweets, as usual, but it seems she's getting
enough eggs, bacon, ham, sausages, fish, soft and hard cheeses, and
fruit to compensate...:-)  When I have to leave, after half an hour
or so, she's still tucking heartily into it.  It's lucky the
Italian standard for breakfast is a black coffee - at most a
cappuccino and a croissant - or we'd both get spherical *fast*...
thanks be that our *other* sensual vices aren't fattening, at
least!-)

   I walk briskly to Moscone Center, barely five minutes away.  At
the convention, all is helter skelter - seems half the speakers and
half the attendees were blocked or delayed by terrible blizzards on
the East Coast, with closed airports and canceled flights and
everything.  Hard to believe, what with the wonderful sunny spring
weather we're enjoying here!

   To try to compensate, they've rescheduled things around. 
<OUCH!> I realize that I'm not going to make it to my lunch
appointment tomorrow, and that both tonight and tomorrow's dinner
engagements should be moved earlier, since the evening "Birds of a
Feather" sessions are now scheduled to start at 8 p.m.... I make
several phone calls, leaving messages on sundry voicemail and
answering machines, and hope everything will be all right.  Luckily
I'm seeing Laylah for "lunch" - though I'll only have about ten
minutes! - so I can tell her about the new timetable and she can
try to arrange things.

   Fortunately, the technical sessions I'm attending today and
tomorrow aren't too badly affected - there's very few people
around, but that's to the good, as it allows us all to get quite
deeply into a few tricky technical problems.

   Laylah's morning hasn't been too good - seems there was some big
event this weekend in San Diego where all the tattooers went, so
they're keeping their shops closed today to rest...  still, she did
find a nice shop selling crystals and semi-precious stones, and
she's loaded up with those and books about them.  She comments that
the revised timetables aren't that bad, and undertakes to try and
reach people to adapt our appointments to them.

   Back to Moscone for the afternoon session, as interesting and
satisfying as the morning one, and it's not too late when I'm back
at the hotel again, and meet Laylah there.  She _has_ managed to
talk with Cassandra, who will try to be here for dinner earlier
than we had agreed, and with Mars, the shaman with whom we're also
having dinner tonight.

   "Mars" is a pseudonym, which I have chosen on his request not to
name or identify him - the exact choice springing from reasons that
I'm sure HE, at least, will understand perfectly. He's not active
on the net, but we had managed to get to know something about each
other, got interested in the possibility of playing together, and
agreed to meet for dinner tonight to chat, know each other better,
and possibly arrange something.

   Cassandra does indeed arrive quite early, and Mars too, and we
all stroll towards the place we've chosen for dining - a sort of
deliberately "'50s-style" diner (high time I got to taste some
*American* food...:-), neat and quite near the hotel where evening
BOF sessions are held, so I'll be able to walk to work rapidly, in
a couple of hours or so from now.

   Mars is a mature gentleman, his appearance somewhere in the mid
to late forties, in excellent physical shape, and above all an
absolutely charming conversationalist, with a wide breadth of
interest, a large culture, and impeccable manners.  I sort of
expected all this, from what mutual friends had told me - one has
nicknamed him "The Gentle Sadist"... - but not to such an extent.

   We already know much about each other - I know, for example,
that he's gay, almost exclusively a top, and very much into
traditional sorts of ritual magick, while he knows about my bisex
switch tastes, as well as what I've posted so far about my
philosophy and outlook - but that hardly leaves us with a dearth of
subjects to explore, even without counting the fascinating
conversational detours which keep springing up about everything and
anything.  Besides negotiating some details about our future play
(for very soon there's no doubt left in either of us that we DO
very much want to play together!), there's all sorts of details to
fill in about our past experiences and our very different outlooks
on magick and spirituality.

   At one point we're talking about childhood experiences.  It does
seem both Laylah and I are rather unusual, among the set of people
who are into BDSM, in coming from excellent families, and having
suffered no abuse or similar childhood experiences - he comments
that lack of such memories would normally indicate some mental
block, but he doubts it in our cases, given he sees us so "open"
and "spiritually advanced" (his words, and I disagree with the
implications, but let's not get into that now).

   As it happens, I *have* recently recovered the memory of a key
factor from my childhood, partly thanks to a very intense e-mail
exchange (some of you may recall that at the time I had changed my
sig quote [from Blake, as always] to "Opposition is true
friendship", in part to thank SG, the correspondent in that
exchange).  It also happens that I still haven't posted about it,
so here's the story...

    I grew up in one of the best families I could imagine.  My
father, a physician, an agnostic libertarian (in the European sense
of the word); my mother, a teacher, a mild Catholic.  As open as
one could imagine: as far back as I can recall, I've always known
I could ask either one about anything I wished to know, and I'd
either be told or directed to suitable books - and money to buy my
own books was never, *never* skimped.  Only *one* subject was taboo
in our house: violence - of any sort of kind (and the reason for
THAT, as I understood even as a child, went back to my parents'
experiences during WW 2).

   In the summer before what was to have been my last year in
kindergarten, we were in the country, in grandfather's villa, when
it happened that my father picked me up and held me high in his
arms right after I had been running up a small hill.  His ear on my
chest, he almost automatically listened to my heartbeat.

   When he put me down, his face was pale as death.

   Acute bacterial endocardithis is not a frequent disease in
children, but its prognosis (in the '50s) was still very simple:
almost surely unfavourable; no useful therapy known.

   My father plunged into research in the matter, and I ended up
the guinea pig for a massime cortisone shock-therapy.  Many
hundreds of injections, almost a year confined to bed; my little
baby veins ended up more scar than tissue, each further injection
harder and more painful.  Risky (I got lucky, since in the
following years the resulting vertigo slowly diminished, and I got
no other meaningful side effects), but the alternative was almost
sure death; and my heart is now sound, although sports involving
running have always been taboo to me (as a teenager I wanted to try
American football, an unusual sport around here at the time and the
passion of one of my friends - its violence intrigued me, and I
very much did have the physique du role - but of course the team's
doctor booted me out as soon as he glanced at an electrocardiogram
of mine).

   I think it was exactly this frequentation with pain (and later
that due to my kidney stones, and later yet to my teeth) that led
me to pain-related fantasies back as far as I could recall.  I
still recall the pained, loving expression on my father's face as
he bent down to administer yet more pain to me, to stick the steel
needle once more into my tortured flesh for another injection (he
did as many of those himself as he could, as they were difficult
and he did not fully trust the ability of others).

   So, I guess, the pain/love equation got imprinted early on.  I
*DID* understand that those tortures he did to me - and his friend
the dentist, and his other colleagues, mostly family friends - were
only motivated by love and care for me.  I taught myself not to
scream too hard - not to complain, as he was having a hard enough
time - to thank those "uncles" for their painful help.

   Pain was a constant companion.  I lay awake at night, in the
dark, trying to stand still and remain silent - not to wake up
whatever adult was sleeping near me, parent or other, as I had
learned that nothing could really be done - they did not dare add
painkillers to the chemical brew, fearing unforeseen interactions
(this was the late '50s, very early '60s; things would no doubt be
less terrible today).

   I lay awake and strained my eyes in the dark, silently praying
for my guardian angel to come reap me with his sword (don't know
why, but I've always visualized St. Michael when thinking of
angels), so that pain could at last be over... ...and in
half-dreams He came, I _think_ I recall, and the pain I felt were
His sword's wounds, and He was as loving and caring as everybody
around me always was - and the pain remained, and grew. In later
years, this slowly became homoerotic fantasies (sword->penis
plunging into me), fantasies about other kinds of pain, about
submitting...

   I'm not even sure how much of that is real memories, how much is
some sort of gloss on them - it all fits in too well, even hints at
why, later, in my early teens, I could be looking for an abusive
gay older male - the heart problems were about over, but the kidney
stones were frequent torture, and if I had that equation, "pain =
gentleness", etched deep enough by then, maybe I was looking for
non-gentleness, for a change, to get some non-pain... (even TOO
well, which is what makes me dubious, but it sure FEELS real).
Maybe even why, before that, I was such an ardent Catholic, despite
my agnostic father and barely "vaguely religious" mother.

   It sure explains that question which nagged me so long, why am
I into BDSM in the first place.  The first erotic stirrings of my
child mind were all happening in a generally pain-drenched inner
world, although in a solidly unfailing atmosphere of family love
and affection, and the connection between the pain and the rest was
indelibly strong.

    This brief story of my childhood seems to have an excellent
effect on Mars.  I continue with the story of my teen years, that
long monogamous D/S-abuse relationship with that older man, the
nervous breakdown when he dumped me in the end, the chemical
"scrubbing" in the clinic, onwards to the meeting with Laylah and
all the complex developments in our relationship over the years -
but I've already posted at length about all this in the past, so I
won't repeat myself here.

   Mars seems to be more interested in the part I have narrated
here, anyway, and I think I can gauge why - its effects must be
deeper in me, as they go back to deeper roots; and it also fits his
main style of play like a glove, both in the association of
affection and courtesy with extreme pain, and in its magical
connotations. Similarly, I appreciate what he has to tell me about
himself.  It's almost 8 o'clock now, so I have to run; we leave
each other with a tentative appointment for play next Sunday night.

    The BOF session on C++ is topical and extremely instructive,
mostly devoted to a report on the meeting of the standardization
committee that was held last week in Portland.  Optimistically, we
can look forward to a draft text that's essentially complete and
definitive from a technical standpoint by spring '94;
pessimistically, it will be _at least_ another three years before
that text is voted into a full-fledged official standard.  The
message is clear-cut enough that the meeting breaks up rather
early, so I walk back and by half past 9 I'm already in the lobby
of our hotel.

   I phone up to our room to check on things, and Laylah answers. 
"Is it all right for me to come up?", I ask her.  "Sure!", she says
- "Mars has left very recently, and me and Cassandra just about
started playing, and you _know_ you're totally welcome!".  Well,
yes, of course I do know, but an extra check never hurts.  The lift
rapidly brings me to our room.

   The spectacle which greets me in the room is wonderfully sweet.
Cassandra is spread naked on our bed, Laylah, in her garterbelt and
stockings and with both hands latex-gloved, delicately fisting her. 
Both women smile at me as I enter.  "Mind if I watch?", I ask
perfunctorily, preparing to enjoy the sight from the comfortable
armchair.  "What, just _watch_?!", Cassandra complains, "can't you
get that suit off and lend a hand or two - don't you see there's
nobody's around to handle my breasts...?!".  Well, yes, it stands
to reason - and I yet had not got a chance to play with the
enticing, very large gauge rings in Cassandra's nipples, so I'm
quite interested in cooperating.  "Gloves?", I ask - "Not needed",
is their answer.

   So I remove said suit (and tie and shirt), just wash my hands
thoroughly, and get down to cases.  The piercings, of course, _are_
perfectly healed, differently from Laylah's; not only that, but the
larger gauge rings make it _safer_ to play, even very hard - no
risk they will cut through flesh.  I knew this in theory, but
Cassandra manages to drive the message home to me, wordlessly and
_very_ effectively, soon after I had started exploring quite
delicately, by grabbing one of the rings herself, looking at me
square in the eye, and yanking HARD.  Ok, I get the point!

   Moreover, I see Laylah is not inflicting any pain in her fisting
(a very reasonable approach, by the way): she's entering extremely
slowly, and using the other hand for subtle caresses all around,
even on Cassandra's outer labia rings; no pinching, no yanking at
all.  It's then up to me to provide some pain, for variety; this is
definitely what our sweet Cassandra expects, I believe.

   I only have an instant's hesitation at the fact that we haven't
negotiated this explicitly - but she's not bound nor gagged, nor is
there any D/S aspect to this scene, so of course she'll be easily
able to have me stop if I'm misjudging; I judge she'd rather stay
non-verbal, in the space where Laylah is taking her, rather than
stop now for negotiation.  As I start pinching and pressing and
twisting hard enough to hurt, I get confirmation enough that I have
judged correctly.  It's always potentially a problem to enter
"mid-scene" like this, in a sense, no matter that one's invited...
but as I put these slight worries aside, and start fully enjoying
the twin pleasures of hurting a woman I love, and of seeing her
sink in deeper and deeper pools of pleasure, I'm most definitely
_not_ complaining about taking part in this!

   There is no orgasm to end this scene (very normal in a fisting),
we just stop and climb-down slowly from an arbitrarily chosen one
of the various plateaus of pleasure we've pushed our loved one to.
I let Laylah drive things, of course, as she has, so to speak, the
pulse of the situation; there's not much explicit communication
needed between us for that, of course.

   As she gets back to Earth, Cassandra appears refreshed and
brimming with energy.  "Thanks, loves!", she beams, "and now, may
I reciprocate?".  Amongst the toys she's brought up from her car to
our room there's the cane she bought last Saturday at Stormy
Leather, and I'd *really* like to try that - thick, heavy, black,
perfectly smooth and rounded, and with a very threatening look.

   I express my interest, but Cassandra turns to Laylah first -
"What about you, Ulla" - the slavename she still sometimes uses for
her, although I gather they have renegotiated their relationship
last Saturday night and it isn't a simple Lady/slave one any more
- "would you feel neglected if I turned my attention to Alex for a
while, hmmmm?".  While she's asking this question, Cassandra grabs
two folds of Laylah's skin between the thumbs and forefingers of
her hands, and pinches them both at once, squeezing and twisting
very hard.  Laylah closes her eyes, throws her head backwards,
crosses her wrists behind the small of her back, and moans.

   It doesn't take Cassandra very long to ensure herself that
Laylah does NOT feel neglected at all - a few minutes with fingers
and teeth, and Laylah gets very to close to screams already.  Then
Cassandra turns to me, with a fascinating predatory grin.  "NOW -
we negotiate!  Tell me everything - illnesses, specific limits
physical and mental, experiences...".

   "Come on darling, stop reciting The Good Top's ``Miranda'' at me
- you WERE there earlier as I was negotiating with Mars, and I and
you have been corresponding for almost two years...".  "Oh yes,
right.  Ok, anything specific to add?".  I remind her of my teeth
problem, but she doesn't seem interested in slapping my face
anyway.  Well, that was some *short* negotiation!

   She chooses background music (very thoughtfully she's also
brought up from the car a boom-box with tape and CD players) and
gets that interesting cane, while instructing me to strip and lie
face down on the bed.  "Let's not get into bondage or domination
tonight" - she says - "I just want to HURT you, that's all!". 
Suits me fine.

   Still, a perfectly-rhythmic beating, with a long sweet warm-up,
and without any touch of D/S, risks being a bit too, well, _easy_
for me to take - I tend to get a bit too much into the rhythm, and
into the sensual side of things, and to get hardly affected by the
pain unless it's very stinging (and that thick, rounded cane isn't
really) or very heavy, and apparently that's not the way it's going
to be tonight, partly because Cassandra's wrist gets sore.  Still,
a worthwhile caning, leaving some degree of soreness in my buttocks
- but, piggy as I am, it leaves me with quite an appetite...

   We end up with me caning Cassandra.  Since I don't have the
music I'd like, I prefer to do without: I weave a complex rhythm of
strokes, very fast at the start when the strokes are light, then
slowing down as their strength increases - rhythmic enough that the
mind can recognize that, but complex enough that the body can't
really "lean into it"; I gather this is about as close as
California tastes get to the broken-rhythm style which I enjoy so
often.  Hey, this cane is heavier than it seemed to be, taking into
account the lever effect from its considerable length; my own wrist
is also tiring...  more of a tool for a short, serious beating,
than for a long and sensual one.

   Although I'm enjoying the effect the caning is having on
Cassandra - at the start she was very silent and still, but now
there's an enticing, almost inaudible moan, and some swaying of her
hips - I think I'd better cut this to some reasonable length, in
part because it's pretty late: if she doesn't want to sleep here,
she has quite a long ride back home.  I get to the point of marking
her buttocks a few times, and eliciting explicit moans, then I
wind-down.

   As I feared, she doesn't want to sleep here: her sleep is always
quite precarious, and, as she really needs the rest, she'd rather
not risk an unfamiliar bed and two unfamiliar companions (I can
hardly blame her choice, although I'm sorry she won't be staying;
not all enjoy the bomb-proof sort of sleep that I and Laylah do, so
it could turn out to be an unrestful night for her).  So we tell
her "arrivederci" - we'll meet again tomorrow - and go to sleep by
ourselves.  Again, a very restful night follows.

    Alex