Chapter One

In moments of grandiosity (which are not all that infrequent), I like to imagine myself as a modern male version of the Renaissance Venetian courtesans. Historians describe them as women of great beauty, to be sure, and undoubted prowess in the realm of the boudoir. But they were prized more for their minds and the careful study they made of deeply gratifying the men they served on every level from base to exalted. These paragons of prostitution, in close parallel to the geisha of medieval Japan, were reputed to employ their keen intelligences to sniff out things a man needed that even he might never have considered. Then their ultimate art was to gratify those needs, both psychological and carnal, with consummate skill and panache. Achieving that goal with women is what I was brought up to do by my rather complicated Stepmother, rigorously trained to accomplish by my Mistress, and have adopted as my calling in life to my deepest core. This is my story, to the limits of my self-awareness: how I came to be the way I am, and how that plays out with the clients I so willingly serve with my body, mind, and soul.

I remember a cynical comedian saying, ‘Oedipus, schmedipus, a boy oughta love his Mother!’ Well, that certainly applied to me, and in spades, since my earliest memory. My Father was nominally around until he died when I was 21. But he remained throughout my life as a friendly but distant figure who was always too busy making truckloads of money in his arbitrage business to have much of a relationship to his only offspring. He provided me and my Mother with a very comfortable life and showed up vaguely for important celebrations. But his true passion was for his work, which left my beautiful Mom with a great deal of energy that had only one outlet, which was her cherished son. My few memories of her are all very idyllic, as if filmed through a light glaze of Vaseline on the camera lens (as film directors used to do when portraying romanticized scenes). But she must not have been entirely happy, or she wouldn’t have been found dead of a lethal combination of booze and pills when I was 5 years old.

I dimly recall being looked after by a series of nannies for a couple of years after she died, all of whom were perfectly nice to me as far as I recall, but there was no change at all in my Father’s absenteeism. And then he made up for all of his shortcomings by bringing me my stepmother, the lovely graceful Jeanne. For a lonely grieving 7 year old he could not have chosen a more wonderful Mom, the antithesis of the wicked stepmother in every way. She was beautiful, resembling Disney’s Snow White in coloration and disposition, and cheerfully upbeat at any hour, day or night. Even better for a little boy hungry for female attention, she was very physically affectionate, constantly hugging and petting and caressing me whenever she was around me. I noticed that she shifted these attentions to my Father when he was around, but since that was seldom, it didn’t bother me much. After all, once he was back at work, which he seemed to do about 18 hours a day, Mommy Jeanne was all mine. My only worry was that she would have some brat of a baby brother or sister, but fortunately that feared sharing of her love never came to pass.

What did happen was an almost blissful decade in which I had the most attentive and loving Mommy imaginable. I tried very hard to please her, both because it is my nature to do so, and because it seemed only fair since she was always going out of her way to take the best possible care of me. Of course, when my Father was around, his needs and desires