Anonymous: The Club, Vol 1 and 2

If I had been careful and cautious and watched what I had said, I would never have come to know about “The Club", and certainly I never would have become a member and enjoyed the bizarre privileges which membership gives. For years I've known that some of my ideas were definitely not acceptable to most people, so I have to be very careful of what I say even among friends. All that time it had never occurred to me that there was any chance of actually doing the things I had thought about. My problem was simply not to let people know what I thought about.

I suppose it was the three martinis before lunch that got me started, but it was just plain old-fashioned good luck that gave me the proper audience for my slip, and turned what could have been a terrible mistake into wonderful good fortune. John Murphy and I were drinking our lunch at the bar in a swank restaurant just off Madison Avenue, as happens every now and then when you are in my line of business. I'm in charge of advertising for a big company that is pretty well known, so I won't stick my chin out by mentioning its name. And John Murphy is a vice president of a well known advertising agency who that year was handling our account, — a matter running into millions of dollars. This meant that he was duty-bound to be extra nice to me and buy me drinks and laugh at my jokes and otherwise brown-nose me, so as to keep me wanting his agency to have our account. John and I have hit it off pretty well for several years, business-wise, even thought we know almost nothing about each other outside of business. I know he is married and lives somewhere up in Westchester with his wife and a couple of kids, and he probably knows that I am divorced and live alone in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. Well, this day, after the third martini, and while we were waiting for the fourth to be delivered to our table, John excused himself to go to the men's room to take a leak. While he was gone, I idly picked up the early edition of the evening paper, and glanced over the headlines, just for something to do till he got back.

There were glaring headlines that the police had caught the man who had kidnapped and raped a six-year-old girl a couple of days before. The nude and mutilated body of the girl had been found, dead by strangulation, in a vacant lot within a matter of hours after she had disappeared. The authorities had picked up a drunken, middle-aged, moronic ex-janitor who lived in the neighborhood and had confessed the crime. He had a past record of several sex-offenses against children, so it looked like they had the right culprit.

I was reading all this over when John got back from taking his leak, and he glanced across our table as he sat down beside me, to see what I was reading. When he spotted the item that held my interest, he said, “It's all right to be eccentric in how you get your kicks, but that guy was sort of abusing the privilege.”

I grunted something meaningless and kept reading for a few seconds more. John then added, “And the worst thing that poor bastard did was get caught. That's the worst crime.”

Without thinking, — saying what was in my mind, but definitely not what I intended to say, I heard myself saying, “Maybe it was worth it.”

There was a pause of horrible silence while I realized what had come out in the few seconds that my guard was down. I glanced up quickly at John and managed a weak smile into his face which was staring down into mine with a peculiar interest.

“What I mean is, maybe the poor bastard was so hard up to get laid that he screwed the little girl because he couldn't get the real thing.” I tried to cover up the break I'd made. “I mean, even doing it to that child may have been worth it to that poor crazy drunk, — he was so mixed up.”

John just kept on looking at me without saying anything, and in a way that was worse than if he had laughed at the silly thing I'd blurted out, or even asked me what the hell I was talking about. In these few moments my brain was whirling with panic while I tried to figure out whether I should laugh it off as a pointless slip of my tongue or try to explain that I had meant something else. If John should learn that I had really meant exactly what I had said, even though I had not meant to say it, I had visions of my whole business and personal life going to pieces in an awful mess.

Who would want to associate in business or admit he knew as a friend a monster in human form who dreamed of raping and otherwise sexually abusing little girls? And that is just the kind of a perverted ogre I am. Lying in bed alone at night, all I have to do is start thinking in every possible lewd detail about having some immature girl in my power, naked, maybe eight years old, helpless, and I begin to get excited. If I go on in my fantasy so that I imagine feeling all over her writhing little body with my hands, and hearing her scream and protest against what I am doing to her, then my cock begins to stiffen and my fingers quiver with passion. And if I go on from here to where I'm trying to jam my big tool into the little slit and hole between her childish thighs, — well I just shoot my load and may not even have to touch my throbbing cock with my own hands to make it go off.

Adult mature women and girls, no matter how beautiful of face and body, all leave me fairly cold. That was one of the reasons for my divorce. I didn't work up enthusiasm often enough to satisfy my wife, and she began to suspect that my sexual interests were not centered around her. She never guessed what I really wanted, thank God, and we were divorced before anything happened to give her any hint.

Every now and then I'd find some pornographic book that told about men having sex with little girls, and that would provide me with some thrills, but most of the time my sexual activities were purely mental, in my own brain. And now that I was in my mid-forties and very successful in business, I had taken a chance on losing everything by my carelessness in speaking after martinis at lunch.

All this flashed through my mind in the few seconds that John Murphy kept staring at me in his intent way. He seemed surprised but not displeased at what I had said, so I hoped to be able to bluff him out of taking it seriously. I was trying very hard hot to look guilty so he would not attach any importance to my slip. “These drinks sure pack a wallop, don't they?” I said to him jokingly. “They sure got my tongue all twisted up.”

“What's in you when you're sober, comes out when you're drunk,” he answered, still looking at me closely.

Our fourth round of drinks arrived just then, to create a diversion, and I said, “You're crazy as hell, John.”

“Maybe I am,” he admitted. “But I'm sure I got the message you didn't intend to send me. And that makes both of us crazy. Doesn't it?”

I didn't know what he was getting at, but I knew that I was in very dangerous territory if I expected to keep my terrible secret to myself. I was about to protest some more when he silenced me with a gesture. After glancing around to be sure he would not be overheard, he asked me, “Have you ever heard of The Club?”

“I've heard of dozens of clubs here in the city. What one are you talking about?” I asked.

“I'm talking about a very special one. It has no other name, — just The Club. And it caters to members who have very special tastes, and who can afford to pay to enjoy those expensive special tastes,” he told me cryptically.

“I don't know what in hell you're talking about,” I said lightly. “It sounds to me as though the drinks have got you talking through your hat, just like me.”

“That could be,” he replied. “But I think we're both talking through the same kind of hat. I'll bet that if you'll admit the truth, your ideas of fun in some departments are just as crazy as mine. Since you can afford it, I'm surprised you have never heard of The Club.”