David is working hard, but it's difficult to feel sorry for him, isn't it? Look at what he does here in Chapter 17. Can you imagine anything more indulgent?
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The foundation was growing rapidly, and I was working myself to exhaustion. So many tasks had to be done for the very first time. It would have been nice to simply hire people to do them, but that wasn't always possible. We had to do a lot of things ourselves because we needed to figure out how those tasks had to be done. It was only then that we could tell others what to do. That last sentence was a bit of a tongue twister, I know. All you really need to know is that lots of people were working hard at the foundation, and none of them were working harder than me and Victoria.
As the foundation recruited more women as clients, it gradually became obvious what services they needed. Patterns emerged. We weren't surprised that lots of them needed emergency housing, so Victoria bought all the condo units listed for sale, and she started placing women in each unit. Sometimes they brought kids with them. Victoria wouldn't permit boyfriends to move in; the women frequently had toxic relationships, and that wasn't something we wanted to facilitate.
There's no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to be honest. A lot of our clients didn't have much common sense. They were struggling because they'd made a lot of poor choices, and they didn't seem to possess the part of the brain needed to understand where they'd messed up, or how to fix it. We needed to teach them to make good decisions.
This is nothing new. Lots of organizations teach people to make decisions they should have made on their own. Alcoholics Anonymous has a 12-step program that boils down to teaching people not to have vodka for breakfast. It is slow, painful, agonizing work that fails as often as it succeeds.
But the Gaia Foundation was different because of the sonic stimulator. I had particularly high hopes for an innovation I thought of by myself. We commissioned videos that taught the life skills our clients needed to thrive. How to cook wholesome meals so you don't feed your kids nothing but frozen pizza with instant mac and cheese. Parenting skills. Budgeting. Diet and exercise. How to quit smoking. The foolishness of spending too much money on beer, cigarettes, and lottery tickets.
Having a person watch some video isn't enough to expect improvement. Lots of our clients are the kind of people who zone out anytime they watch something less stimulating than car crashes or sex scenes. I arranged for our videos to be recorded with the signal from a sonic stimulator playing in the background.
We'd organize rotating viewing sessions in a big conference room on the second floor of the building, a short walk from the foundation offices. It featured a big projector TV we used to present the videos. When the person on the screen said women should never stay with a man who beats them, the ladies actually absorbed that information.
They absorbed everything else we taught them with the sonic stimulator. There was objective evidence this was working and the women's lives were improving. It took some effort on my part, because I couldn't let anyone else know what I was putting on those soundtracks. I had to teach myself to use video editing software I would never need to learn otherwise. But there was no alternative, so I did it.
The building manager became a good friend of mine. He knew the occupancy rate of the complex was much improved because the foundation leased office space and bought all his vacant condo units, which were suddenly occupied. There was more foot traffic in the public spaces, and lots of those feet belonged to attractive young women. Established residents who'd been considering selling were gratified by this evidence they'd made a good investment by deciding to live there. There was no single thing that made the difference. It was a lot of little things that just kept happening.
There were more things that were happening, and lots of them required my personal attention. The most important thing, by far, was the need for me to find new donors. By this time I had a well-rehearsed process for persuading rich people and rich corporations that they wanted to give money to the Gaia Foundation. We were swimming in money. But I realized I had to do something to guarantee the foundation's future. If I got hit by a bus, the foundation would eventually face financial pressures. I'm sure Victoria could hire the best fundraisers working in the nonprofit sector, but there's no substitute for making the pitch with the help of a sonic stimulator. Lots of charities create endowments, which invest money in stocks, bonds and other things that generate income. It's possible to create an endowment so big it eventually becomes self-sustaining. Think Rockefeller Foundation. Carnegie Foundation. Things like that.
The problem, of course, is that people who have spare money laying around would usually rather invest it themselves instead of letting someone else invest it. My goal right then was to quickly build an endowment large enough to eventually eliminate the need for me to spend so much time talking people out of their money.
As you surely see, I was a very busy boy.
I decided that I needed to stop finding new girlfriends, at least for a while. Victoria loved being in her first romantic relationship, so I spent a lot of time with her. I spent a lot of time with Mary and Mariana - separately and together. We made a nice trip to a resort in France. Mariana wasn't fluent in French, but she spoke enough to help us navigate. All of us enjoyed the nude beach, but nobody liked it more than Mary.
Alana was an important part of my life, even though she was so busy we were only able to get together at odd times. It was the same with Loretta. She was making steady advances with the Olympic team, and she spent a lot of time at a training facility in another time zone. I made sure to buy tickets so she could fly home as often as possible, but I knew she was a busy girl who had limited time for a man.
I was seeing Esta more often because I moved her into the building. She needed a better place to live, and she needed a lot of help learning basic living skills. Now that she had a good income, it was time for her to participate in the foundation's programs, especially the courses on personal finance. The fact that having her in the building meant I could see her more often was a nice bonus.
This is all meant to convey the fact that I was a busy boy who was getting more than enough female attention. I'd made commitments to many women, and the right thing for me to do at that moment was be sure to honor those commitments. The search for fresh pussy had to stop.
That's what I was thinking on a night when I went to watch Mary dance. I didn't get to go to the club as often as I liked, but Mary enjoyed it when I did. She loved displaying herself to the world in general, and to me in particular.
It was a pleasant evening. I drank diet ginger ale without the vodka because I was having so many restaurant meals with donors it was getting challenging to follow Mary's diet. I had to keep a limit on the times I permitted myself to have cocktails.
Mary's first set was the best I'd ever seen. She just kept improving as a dancer, and she enjoyed hearing me say it. There were a couple of girls who were new to me. It's always nice to see a woman naked for the very first time. I felt good.
That's when the DJ announced a new dancer. "We have a special treat for you tonight," he said. "This talented young dancer has never performed anywhere before. It's your privilege to see her for the very first time. We're sure you'll love her. Please welcome the amazing Zippy!"
There was polite applause that got a bit louder when Zippy stepped out on stage. It was immediately obvious that she was special. She didn't know much about the way exotic dancers are supposed to move, and she knew nothing about using the pole, but she danced with so much energy and enthusiasm the crowd loved her immediately.
Zippy made one common rookie mistake. She was supposed to remove her clothes slowly enough to get through three songs. She didn't know how that was done, so she was completely naked early in her second song. Nobody complained, naturally, although I imagined that later the other girls would give her some advice about how to disrobe slower. She did one thing I'd never seen before. She kicked off her shoes right after removing his panties. That was new. It was unexpectedly erotic. Dancing barefoot seemed earthy. Zippy wagged her tongue back and forth in a way that might have looked silly and exaggerated on another woman, but it looked sexy on her.
She looked special in a way that's hard to describe, but I'll try. First of all, she was short. I was certain she was less than five feet tall. She was compact in other ways, with smallish breasts and a tight little tush. But she seemed to be built from solid muscle. That, and the frenzied way she danced, gave the impression of great energy, like a coiled spring. Her short haircut let her hair fly as she moved in every direction at once.
Zippy looked young. Extremely young. Girls must be 18 to work as a dancer, and Fran is meticulous about checking IDs. I would later learn that she'd turned 18 exactly three days earlier. She auditioned for a dancer job on the first day she was old enough.
She had tattoos. Lots of them. Everywhere, including her face. They were nice tattoos. I'm not fond of the blurry, bluish tats that look like something acquired in a maximum security prison. Zippy's tattoos looked colorful and artistic.
"You like her, don't you?" Mary asked. She wasn't upset. Mary encouraged me to pursue other women. She got turned on hearing about these liaisons. She sometimes became friends with these ladies, like she'd become a friend (and lover) with Mariana.
"Why don't you ask her out?" she said. "Dancers aren't supposed to date customers, but Fran knows you're not like a regular customer. The fact that you're my boyfriend makes a difference. Try it. You can be very persuasive sometimes." Hearing Mary say that was ironic. She had no way of knowing that so much of my powers of persuasion came from the sonic stimulator I kept in my pocket.
"If you like, I'll tell her you want to meet her," Mary said.
"Tell her I'd like a lapdance," I said. "That way, she'll at least get a nice tip if nothing else happens."
Zippy was, of course, a big hit. She was excited to see so many men who wanted to stick so much money into her garter. The applause went on for a long time, and Zippy blew kisses at the crowd as she gathered up her clothes and left the stage. A few minutes later I saw Mary whispering in Zippy's ear, then pointing in my direction. Zippy looked me in the eye, flashed a bright smile, and winked. I would learn that Zippy winked a lot. It was a kind of non-verbal punctuation. Like an exclamation mark. While I waited, I put in the hearing aides that would shield me from the effects of the sonic stimulator.
It wasn't long until Zippy skipped over to my table. "Hi there, big guy!" she said. You want a lap dance!?"
