It was two a.m. and I had been playing around with my new toy for the past six hours. Yesterday I purchased a brand new IBM PC and laboriously worked my way through learning about the Disk Operating System that one had to master in order to use it. Today, I installed WordPerfect, a word-processing program that I had been led to believe would replace my trusty typewriter. It was a tough slog and definitely not for the impatient.
Desktop PCs had recently been introduced, and I had been issued one of the fifty that my company had purchased, so I wasn't starting completely from scratch. But unlike at work, technical support wasn't just down the hall. My personal investment in this new technology was for one reason, and one reason only.
In my youth, I had discovered underground erotic literature, mostly from the Victorian Age, that had sparked my teenage imagination and stimulated my teenage libido. Then, many years later, on long flights and in lonely hotel rooms, I recalled those experiences and began to write erotic stories of my own. Some were based on real events, but most were products of a fertile imagination.
First drafts were always written in pencil in one of the black-bound notebooks I always carried in my briefcase. Disorderly, doesn't begin to describe the contents of these dog-eared manuscripts. They had all of the cross-outs, rewrites, smudges, and coffee stains one would expect from an amateur writer still struggling with how best to translate thoughts into words.
Upon returning home, I would transcribe or, more honestly, re-write, the stories on my IBM Selectric typewriter that I had in my home office. I used liquid 'white out' by the gallon and when finished, the stories would be filed away in three-ring binders.
I had discovered a small erotic writers' group in a nearby city where we shared our literary efforts. I was pleased to find that my stories compared favorably with many of theirs considering that almost all of the other members were people who either wrote for a living or were English majors in college.
I was anxious to find a less time-consuming way to pursue my hobby, and as I pushed my chair back from the computer, I believed that I had found it. Typing on the keyboard was just like the typewriter, but the miracle of miracles was the 'backspace key.' With just the press of that little key, the previous word, sentence or paragraph disappeared, and wonderful blank spaces appeared to receive the new thoughts. As I typed, I would periodically instruct to 'save,' and all of my work would be transferred to something called a 'floppy disk.' Instead of shelves of binders, my stories would be in little boxes of floppy disks. It was a definite improvement.
Though I fully intended to start using this new device on the stories I already had in my 'library,' my recent experiences at the Freyja Club were fresh in my mind, and while I had made some 'notes,' I was feeling that I should begin to chronicle some of my experiences while the little details were still fresh in my mind.
In many respects, the Freyja Club's existence was still somewhat of a mystery that, like the proverbial 'pebble in your shoe,' I couldn't let go of until I learned how this unique entity had survived for over ninety years in almost total secrecy. I had applied some of the techniques that I used in my real-life occupation to fill in some blanks, but there was much that I still didn't know. What I did know was that writing it down helped keep the various elements clear in my mind.
By way of background, I had joined a small company in the Mid-Atlantic as an engineer when I returned from Vietnam in 1968, but I had shown an aptitude for being able to analyze businesses and, as a result, I had moved into the field of business development and acquisitions at the age of twenty-eight. Now, twenty years later, that little firm had grown into a Fortune 100 company with subsidiaries around the world, and I like to think that I had a lot to do with that. In any event, understanding what makes enterprises successful is what I do.
Several months previously, I had been at the club and been introduced to a lady named Hayley. It turned out that she was a tenured Professor of English Literature at Georgetown University and, like me, had been stimulated by Victorian erotica from an early age and, also like me, had an abundance of curiosity about the Freyja Club. That evening, we had channeled that mutual interest into a memorable exercise in mutual fornication. Later, during 'pillow talk,' I had learned that, while studying at Cambridge, Hayley had actually met the Chairman of the Freyja Club, Mister Charles MacDonald, and had some insights that I thought might be helpful in my quest. I suppose it would have been easy enough just to call Georgetown and get her number, but I decided to try to contact her through the club.
I didn't immediately recognize the voice that answered, "Hello, F.C." It turned out to be Ann, the very waitress that had served Hayley and me the evening we were together. I knew that the club used its female staff to answer the single line into the club on a rotating basis. It was a job that was employed to give the women a position during that period of the month when it would be awkward for them to work naked.
I explained that I was interested in getting a message to Hayley, and I'd appreciate it if Ann could arrange a date that we could meet again in the club. She said that she'd call her and let me know. Idly, I asked her if she was a dancer. When she had waited on us, I had noticed her lithe figure and I knew someone in the New York club who danced with the Rockettes was similarly built. Ann seemed surprised but pleased and told me that, indeed, she danced at the Kennedy Center and was part of the dance council there, but the Freyja Club paid a LOT better.
A day later, I received a callback. Hayley was more than pleased to meet and suggested the following Friday evening. I knew I'd have to rearrange my schedule, but said that I'd meet her for dinner at seven.
As I've previously chronicled, while the Washington Freyja Club is the closest to where I live, it's still a two-hour one-way commute, so it isn't something that occurs on the spur of the moment. Traffic around Washington on a Friday is horrific, so I left work early. As usual, I was dressed in a white polo shirt, beige slacks, a blue blazer, and brown loafers with no socks. I'd let my hair grow a bit lately and it was getting shaggy. When I arrived early, I 'clicked' myself through the 'Viking' door and walked to the bar.