No topic is off-limits. "I've slept with more than five hundred women and about a half dozen men," he tells me. "I've had a whole bunch of threesomes" -- one of which involved a hermaphrodite prostitute equipped with dual organs.

And according to Blanton, it's effective. He tells me about a woman he once met on a Paris subway and asked out for tea. When they sat down, he said, "I didn't really want any tea; I was just trying to figure out a way to delay you so I could talk to you for a while, because I want to go to bed with you." They went to bed together. Or another seduction technique of his: "Wanna fuck?"

"That works?" I asked.

"Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's the creation of possibility."