in every day wanting money for their nude shots, ideas in their silly heads that this one day might lead to Hollywood and some kind of stardom on the screen. They were all hippy chicks, of course; at first Kaff didn’t care much for this drug-and-sex culture, mainly because they all seemed to hate soldiers…but what did it matter if he fucked them? So he fucked them, and he smoked pot with them, and he went to orgies and did a lot of acid and let his hair grow long and started wearing bell-bottom jeans and beads and granny glasses and saying the usual shit like, “heavy, man” and “I can grok that.” He read Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac and Robert Heinlein and Kurt Vonnegut. What he did around the office was dubious; the outfit was called The Beck Consulting Group but that was just a shell to keep the cops away; they were putting out half a dozen girly magazines with revolving names like Twat and Public Pubic and Beach Gal, etc. What Kaff mostly did was interview potential models, take some photos, and fuck them. Lance Williams was doing editorial work, and dealing with distributors, while his father also did editorial and a lot of the writing, using up to twenty pen names. Luke had an idea about starting a line of soft-core sleaze novels—the genre was hot, others were making money off it, and Luke knew plenty of starving sci-fi and hardboiled detective writers who could churn these things out. Kaff figured why not, and took the money he’d made so far and re-invested it into this paperback line, dubbed Moonlight in Lace Editions. Moonlight started with six titles a month and graduated to twenty. They paid the writers $1,000 a pop, no royalties, and sold an average of 100,000 each, pocketing the profits. The more books they published, the more money they made. Kaff sat down and penned one himself. It was awful, but it sold. It was a lesbian novel called Housewives of Sin, and he imagined his mother the whole time he sat behind the typewriter. It was a grueling, two-month task that he had the occasional hippy chick fuck bunny sit behind the typewriter (naked, of course) and write some scenes. “I love eating pussy,” one would say, and Kaff would say, “Go write about it.” Anyway, they moved this operation out to San Diego—better real estate, better weather, and no more cops coming around looking for handouts. Once in San Diego, they published more books and magazines and made more money. They became millionaires. Kaff invested his money to make more money to insure he would grow old in comfort. He knew this business would never last. Eventually they sold the business off. Kaff traveled around Europe for a while, enjoying his money, and moved three years later to Los Angeles, thinking about getting into Hollywood. He hated the Hollywood people; he tried writing screenplays but was no good at that. He knew there was some kind of art in him so he began to paint, and painting was something he knew he was good at. He returned to England. He had gallery showings; people bought his stuff. He sculpted and did pottery. He began to write poetry. He went back to America in the 1980s and traveled a lot with a young girl he met (there were so many of them). Women! Oh there were many women, many women, and he learned a lot about fucking, about love-making, about how to keep his cock hard for hours: those ancient techniques. Yes, lots of women, but he was never serious with them; he never married or fell in love; when a woman became too close, he sent them on their way, damn the tears! Back to Queen and country he went, broken hearts behind him. No, Edward Kaff never knew love, until he met Kathleen. How absurd, yes! But it happened. And we know how it happened: one day Edward Kaff was nearing his sixtieth birthday and all his art crowd friends in London wanted to throw him a shindig/birthday party at a gallery. Kaff thought about his wild sexual days in the 1970s, recalling a party he was at where three women masturbated as a show for all the attendees. How marvelous would that be? Kaff was going to hire a call girl to do this, until one day he was looking at some classifieds and saw Kathleen’s ad.
VIII.
And so the big night finally came. “Are you ready?” Kaff asked Kathleen and she said: “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Then let’s put on a show they’ll never forget,” said Kaff, giving her a light kiss on the cheek.
The gallery was located central London on Charing Cross Road. It was a big place with three levels and on every wall was a painting by none other than Edward Kaff himself. Kathleen didn’t know much about art, but what she saw seemed okay—a lot of it was violent and sexual and, well, weird. Everyone attending looked rich and cultured; there were about 100 people and they were well-dressed, of all ages, and mingled about, drinking imported champagne and talking and laughing and looking at each other and, Kathleen assumed, gossiping. She was glad she didn’t have to be around them; they were from a different world and they weren’t the kind of people she would ever want to know. She was here to do a job and get the rest of her quid. So: she entered the gallery completely naked, holding a bag of assorted sex toys. Needless to say, without a doubt, and completely to Edward Kaff’s plan, all chatter stopped, jaws dropped, eyes widened as Kathleen made her way though the people in the splendor of her skin.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” announced Kaff, wearing a tuxedo and looking rather dapper, “may I present to you—my slut!”
No one knew what to make of this.
Kathleen walked over to a large beanbag that was placed in the center of the gallery. She lied on her back, spread her legs, closed her eyes, and went to work with her hand.
She could feel all the eyes on her, the heat of bodies closing in, the warmth of the lights…mumbles, confusion, fascination, one woman saying, “She has a small and pretty pussy.”
“Fear not!” said Kaff, “for this is all part of the show. This young trollop, this lover of mine, this luscious piece of girl meat, this comely little whore who loves to diddle—she is my new canvas, my finest work of art, my erotic masterpiece!”
Hearing his voice…doing this…the people around her…the excitement of the strange…it made Kathleen come, and she was quite vocal about it.
Scattered applause.
“You see,” said Kaff, “magnificent!”
She reached into the bag and took out the first sex toy—a small dildo.…
She peeked through her eyelids: so many faces and eyes watching her with blasé interest.…
“And now,” said Kaff, “I shall read a very long poem. If you get bored, have a drink, have a finger food, watch the girl jill-off…it is all part of the show.”
He read his poem, which took about an hour. She half-listened to it, paying more attention to her pussy and making herself come, going from the small dildo to the bigger one and to an even bigger one, as well as a butt-plug… fucking herself with the rubber cocks as Kaff read his words that were filled with images of Europe and travel and vampires and music and Russia. What it all meant, she had no idea. She was no longer concerned with the people watching her…it didn’t take long for most of them to become bored and go back to mingling, whispering, and drinking.…
When Kaff was done reading, he went to her, joined her, touched her, kissed her, put his mouth to her vagina…
“More avant-garde theater, Eddy?” someone asked with an appropriate amount of sarcasm.
“You haven’t seen nothing yet,” he replied.
He undressed, and began to fuck her.…
IX.
…and fucked and fucked for many hours like planned and promised and practiced. Most people got bored and left.
Then it was over.
“And so my latest art installation ends,” said Kaff.
X.
“Here is your money,” he said, handing her the second check.
She didn’t look at it.
