During the second term of my freshman year at City College in New York – this was the spring of 1974 – I had an unusual professor for one of my English courses. His name was Gordon Raskin, he was a specialist in Medieval Literature, and he was thirty-six-years-old at the time.

One of his courses was  “The Vampire: Certain Ideas of Evil in Western Thought and Art.” Dracula, of course, was on the reading list, but so were works like Dante’s Inferno. Two books by the Marquis de Sade, Justine and Juliette were assigned, but I found those to be wordy and unreadable, and I got away with just skipping them.

Maybe he was being tongue-in-cheek, but Raskin seemed to believe that vampires actually existed. Perhaps they mostly weren’t supernatural blood-suckers, but rather human beings with an obsessive desire to commit evil and obtain power. He suggested that many Nazis would have fallen into that category, and so would Vlad the Impaler. The latter was perhaps one of the inspirations for the Dracula novel.

One of his more explicit examples was a 15th Century French nobleman named Gilles de Rais who was alleged to have murdered hundreds of young boys. Before killing them, he supposedly took baths in semen with his victims. I found that extremely hard to believe and assumed it was just metaphorical. How would he obtain that much semen, and even if he did, how would he have kept it fresh in those days before refrigeration?

In any case, Raskin was a very engaging teacher. He was tall and had thick black hair and a bushy dark mustache. Even though he was very articulate, he cultivated an air of weirdness about himself. He had a reputation for seducing some of his female students, but not to an excessive degree as far as I could determine.

One mild afternoon in late May 1974 he invited me up to his office on the third floor of Wagner Hall, which contained many of the college’s liberal arts departments. He mentioned no particular reason for the visit, but he did offer a glass of cognac to me and poured one for himself.

After a bit of chat, he said, “Paul, I’ve never mentioned this to any student before, but I do dabble with potions. I have one that I’d like you to try for me.”

At first, I thought that this was some kind of elaborate joke. And if he was truly curious about it, why didn’t he try it on himself? But I had been trained to be respectful of my elders, including professors, so I simply answered, “All right, what is it supposed to do it?”

“If it works, it will make any female you run into instantly crave sexual intercourse with you. And it should have an additional effect. If you copulate with her in a place where other people are watching, they may look on mildly, but they won’t comment on it or try to interfere. That could be in absolutely any public place, the campus, the street, even the subway. However, the effects will only last for twenty-four hours.”

Now I knew he was full of shit, but something made me want to try it out anyway. I guess I was young and foolish. I assumed he wasn’t going to poison me. He was strange but not a murderer like Gilles de Rais had been. Perhaps I was just wanted to humor him. After all, I wanted a good grade on the course.

“Sure, Professor, I’ll give it a try. I mean, I have nothing to lose. But what are you getting out of this?”

He answered, “Well, of course, I’ll find out if it really works. And if it does, I’ll have an additional condition I’ll demand from you at the end. One more thing: you should have unlimited stamina to ejaculate into every female you encounter. It could be dozens, hundreds – the number won’t matter.”

Since I didn’t take him seriously, I didn’t ask what his demand from me would be. Without hesitation, he took a small green bottle out of his desk drawer and gave it to me. I said, “Bottoms up,” or something equally silly, and drank the few ounces of minty-tasting fluid inside the container.

Within a few moments, I did feel different, but it’s difficult to describe how. I was aware of being “high”, yet my mind felt sharper, more focused. It was just some drug, I guessed, but I didn’t have enough experience with those to know which one. Angel Dust? I supposed that it couldn’t be that particular substance.

Then he said, “You can go on your way now, and spread your seed widely. Don’t worry, no one will remember what you do in the next day.” How could the potion possibly control the thoughts of other people? Then he added, “By the way, I know you’re a virgin.”

He was right, but I just gaped at him. A lucky guess, perhaps. He smiled at me and waved for me to leave.

I went down to the first floor and out into the driveway in front of the building. There were only a handful of people out there, and I decided to try my luck in the Finley Hall student center across the way. My thinking was that I might see some of the female staffers of my college newspaper, The Salient, up on the third floor.

I felt contradictory emotions about the experience so far. On one hand, I didn’t believe a word of what Professor Raskin had told me. Yet I was also aware of confidence in my own attractiveness and sexual prowess that was completely alien to whatever I had believed about myself in the years since puberty.

I didn’t make it to the third floor immediately. I was just about to enter the stairwell when I saw a girl coming towards me from the opposite direction. She was dark-haired and her body was ripe, with her breasts pushing against the front of her tight blouse and her thighs nicely packed into her blue jeans. I was sure I had seen her before in one of my classes.

She stopped and stared at me, and I instinctively knew what she was thinking. All she said was, “I want to get it on with you right now.”

I was less surprised than I might have expected, “Okay, sure, but where are we going to go?”

She took my hand and pulled me towards one of the first-floor lounges. “Right in here. The couches are comfortable enough for what we need to do.”

Two other people were sitting in there, but they barely noticed what was happening. Within a few moments the girl has opened up my pants and she had removed her own jeans and panties and was sitting with her legs splayed out on one of the sofas. There was virtually no foreplay; within a few moments, I was inside her finally getting my cherry busted. 

An insight struck me about why the two other people were barely aware of our vigorous fucking just a few feet from them. After all, they had not partaken of the potion themselves. This is not really happening; it’s all a huge hallucination on my part! But it certainly felt real enough. Maybe some drugs did have such vivid effects, but I had no experience with anything more powerful than marijuana.

So it wasn't real; I didn’t care, which was not at all like my usual way of thinking. Rather, it gave me increased willpower to copulate with this dark-haired chick who left her socks and shoes on for the entire act. After less than ten minutes I felt my climax approaching, but my new lover had her own noisy, dramatic orgasm a few seconds before I did. Later I found that every woman I had contact with would come, or seem to come, quite intensely after I had penetrated her.

When we were done, I fell down on the sofa next to her, breathing heavily. Surprisingly, my new instant girlfriend started to immediately get dressed again. I asked her, “Hey, honey, what’s your name?”

She wasn’t rude or nasty, simply indifferent, “You don’t need to know that.”

I almost blurted out, but you just deflowered me, but that seemed like the wrong thing to say. Instead, I tried to remain cool but interested in her, “I would like to know, considering what we just did.” I had an inspiration, “How about we go for a drink, right now? Or even lunch. We could go to the West End down by Columbia.”

“No, I don’t think so.” My new paramour got dressed again very quickly, and she then got up to leave. I called out, “Baby, don’t go yet,” but I was already watching her behind swaying inside her tight pants. She was out of the room within a couple of seconds, but her lack of interest made me decide not to follow her.

The whole event was somewhat disappointing, but then again Professor Raskin had said nothing about any women falling in love with me. I put that negative thought out of my mind and headed up to the third floor. The women on The Salient staff at least had known me for a while, and maybe my romantic prospects would improve with them.

When I went through the open door of the office, I found two male staffers and three female ones inside. Some of them were typing their stories, and the others were just sitting around talking to each other. As soon as I entered, the three girls looked at me. The one I wanted the most was a tall brunette named Miriam Diamond, who was wearing a dark skirt and knee socks. The other two were Martha, a short girl with glasses and jeans – she already had a boyfriend – and Lilith, a junior who was the news editor.

Lilith was my least favorite person on the whole staff. She seemed to have some kind of contempt for me which I didn’t quite understand. Nevertheless, I tried out my newly acquired powers by merely saying, “How would you ladies like to have some fun with me, right now?”

It worked perfectly. Within five minutes I was on the couch on top of Miriam, copulating with her.  Meanwhile, I was going down on Martha, who was sitting at one end of the sofa.  None of us fully undressed. Miriam’s panties and Martha’s jeans and underwear were on the floor. I had simply dropped my trousers as I had with the unnamed girl in the lounge.

In ten more minutes, I had ejaculated inside Miriam and given Martha an orgasm with my act of cunnilingus of her. Then it was time to deal with Lilith. “You’ve been such a twat that I’m going to give you the good bare-ass spanking you so richly deserve.” She merely shrugged, lowered her jeans and panties, and place herself across my lap as I sat in a nearby chair. She yelled and bounced around as I spent several minutes reddening her behind with my bare hand.

Then I said to her, “It’s cowgirl time,” and she sat on me and fucked me as I sat on the couch. Within another few minutes it was all over, and she immediately uncoupled from me and got her clothing back on. She went right back to her typewriter at a nearby desk and started working again as if nothing unusual had happened.

I tried to get a grip on what happened, and I looked out the windows.  These faced south and I glanced at the New York State office building and the former Hotel Theresa on 125th Street. It all seemed so normal out there. But then everyone in the office was also rapidly returning to a state as if none of the wild sexual activities of the past half-hour had taken place. Even the two male staffers, Jeff and Warren, acted like they had witnessed nothing out of the ordinary.

I made one attempt to rally my newly-acquired harem and I used the same tavern gambit I had tried downstairs. “Come on ladies, let’s go to the West End right now and celebrate our fun times together. Hey Jeff, Warren, you guys are invited too.”

Again, I was met with apathy, but this time it was from five people instead of one. My thoughts were jumbled. Raskin has tricked me in a way. But then he had promised sexual conquests, nothing more. Certainly, emotional connections had not been part of the deal, but I had assumed that they would be. But then, as I had already figured out, this was all in my mind; none of this was happening in reality.

Perhaps the truth of that set me free, or perhaps I just went more than a bit insane. All right, it’s ‘just sex’ as the saying goes. So get out of here and have as much of it as possible. Screw every woman or girl you run into.

I walked from the South Campus to the North one, a distance of about eight blocks, and I had intercourse with more than twenty women along the way. I just grabbed them and threw them down on the lawns. I even banged one of the young professors from the Philosophy Department. Every incident was essentially the same. The necessary clothing got removed, I had my way with them, and then we both went on our way again.

By the time I reached 141st Street, I was at the end of the campus. There were only the streets of Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill beyond that. I paused as I tried to imagine where I’d go next. Having sex on the pavements didn’t seem appealing, although I supposed I could do it standing up in certain places.

I wasn’t physically spent at all, as Raskin had promised, but the craziness was taking a psychological toll on me. And my body did have one need to be met. It was beyond lunchtime, and I was hungry.

My mind seemed to shut down to minimal functioning, and I restrained myself on the long walk down to the #1 train on Broadway. On the subway, I tore off the pantyhose of a young woman and took her right there on the seat. I expected her to ask me to pay for her ruined garment, but like all the others she turned away from me and ignored it all.

Lacking both money and taste, I chose to go to the McDonald’s at 95th and Broadway. Before ordering, I banged the young clerk right on the counter. When she had her ugly fast-food pants back on, she took my order and I had my pathetic little meal at a table by the window.

While there, my biggest regret was that Miriam Diamond, the girl I had been infatuated with for months, had been completely unmoved by my vigorous fucking of her. I was sure she wouldn’t remember what had happened when I saw her again.

Fortified by my Big Mac, fries, and diet soda, I resolved to make the best of the situation, even if it wasn’t quite what I had wanted. Hadn’t I already had – or imagined I had – more than two-dozen orgasms already? I went out into the street, walked south, and tore a wide swath among the female population of the Upper West Side. They were all fair game to me.

A thought came at one point. Was this something like what the Soviet troops had done during the fall of Berlin in 1945? No, this was on an entirely different plane of existence. I wondered if Professor Raskin had told the truth of me being the first subject of his experiment.

In this urban environment, the best place to take my lovers was on the hoods of parked cars or by having them bend over and place their hands on a wall as I went in from behind. Sometimes I would go into a store if there was a lady in there who was worth my time.

All these events may sound marvelous, but by the late afternoon, it was starting to feel it was hellish instead. Well, I still had agency, didn’t I? I still could make choices. I wanted badly to just go home and do something else for a while. Twenty-four hours of sexual intercourse, without even having a drink with one of those ladies, seemed beyond what the human mind could handle. On top of that, my underlying feelings of loneliness had not been reduced in the slightest.

I restrained myself on the trip back home. When I was about to enter my building, I met the pretty super’s daughter and her plump red-headed friend as they were coming out. I did indulge myself with both of them in the park across the street.

******

The next day I decided to check in with Professor Raskin again. I suspected he would be in his office just as the twenty-four-hour deadline ran out, and I was correct.

I still in the last hour as I arrived on campus, so I “seduced” – hardly an accurate term for that phenomenon – three girls on the grass of the South Campus before heading up to see him in Wagner Hall. When he answered his door, about five minutes had passed since the end of the potion’s effects.

I felt weariness overcome me almost immediately, and he offered me a cup of tea. When I could, we chatted briefly about my exploits, if that was the suitable way to describe them.

He said, “As I told you, you do owe me something in return.”

“But it was all an illusion; I figured that out near the very beginning. None of it really happened.”

“Ah, but it felt real to you, and that is what is what is important.” At that moment, I felt a tremendous pain in my head and I collapsed on the floor. When I became conscious again or seemed to be so, I sat up and I was surprised to look down and see myself still lying there.

Raskin smiled...