special pleasure too at the auctions in seeing those few very rich individuals who maintain trainers in their homes or country houses and are permitted to buy slaves through the auction for their own use.
They are often stunning, the private owners, a curious lot. I remember one year there was a handsome eighteen-year-old in the company of two bodyguards going through the catalogue with great seriousness and peering at a distance through his violet sunglasses at each victim whom he would then approach and quite deliberately pinch. He was dressed all in black except for a pair of dove-grey gloves that he never removed. I could almost feel those gloves myself when he would pinch one of the slaves. Everywhere he went the bodyguards went, and the trainer, one of the best I should add, was also right at his arm. His father had been keeping a trainer and two slaves for years, and now it was time for the son to learn to enjoy 'the sport'. He settled on a very robust boy and girl.
Understand when I say a boy and a girl, I don't mean children. The Club and the reputable auction houses don't deal in children for obvious reasons. The private trainers know better than to send them to us. When teenagers do get in sometimes, through trickery or with false papers, we fly them right back out. By boy or girl, I mean a kind of slave who regardless of his or her real age looks and acts young. There are slaves thirty years old who qualify as boys or girls. And there are slaves of nineteen or twenty who even in bondage and humiliation retain an air of seriousness and injured dignity that makes you think of them as women or men. Anyway, the eighteen-year-old master bought two very youthful and well-muscled slaves and I remember it because he outbid The Club in the auction for the girl. She was one of those darkly tanned blond-haired creatures who never sheds a tear no matter how hard she is punished, and the master becomes more and more enflamed. I wanted her badly, and I remember being a little out of sorts when I saw her bound up and packed off. The young master observed this and I saw him smile for the first and only time that day.
But I always worry about them, those slaves who go to individual owners. It's not that these owners aren't trustworthy. To buy from a reputable slave auction house or a reputable private trainer, you have to be trustworthy, and your staff must be tested and approved and your house must be safe. It's just that it's lonely and eerie being only one of two or three slaves on a great estate. I know because that is what I was when I was eighteen. And no matter how handsome or beautiful the master or mistress is, no matter how often there are parties or other entertainments, no matter how vigorous and good the trainers are, there are too many moments when you are left alone with your thoughts. The Club frightens the slaves at first. It terrifies them. But in a real way, The Club is a great womb. It's an immense community where no one is ever abandoned, and the lights never go out.
No real pain or damage is ever inflicted. There are never any accidents at The Club. But as I was saying, I don't go to the auctions now, and haven't for some time. I'm simply too busy with my other duties -- supervising our little newspaper, The Club Gazette, and meeting the insatiable demand for new souvenirs and novelty items sold in The Club Shop. White leather paddles, straps, boots, blindfolds, even coffee mugs with The Club monogram -- we can never design or supply enough. And these items don't end up in bedrooms back in the States. In San Francisco and New York, they are selling, along with back issues of the Gazette for four times the original price. That means this merchandise has come to represent us. All the more reason to make it first rate. Then there are the new members who have to be guided on their first visits, have the naked slaves personally introduced to them.
And then there is the all-important indoctrination and training and perfecting of the slaves themselves, which is my real work. A good slave is not merely a thoroughly sexualized being, ready to serve your every whim