I’m not sure what made Doug bashful, but as the evening progressed he became prone to crossing his legs. Earlier on he exhibited his unit as if he were showing a selection of prizewinning fruit at a garden show. With the third rousing rendition of the German national anthem ringing out, bridge class was over for the evening. We left in a staggered fashion, Dimitri first, me a minute later, while Sam stayed behind to ask more questions.
I got back to the office a little before eleven and crashed on the sofa. Rufus wouldn’t mind me spending a few nights here but would no doubt nix my plans for making it my primary residence. Still on Greenwich Mean Time, I found myself wide awake at four thirty. I made a cup of coffee and climbed the fire escape six flights to the building’s roof and watched the summer sun begin to rise. The vistas were perhaps more impressive when the towers still stood, but looking downtown as the sun turned the city’s buildings orange, it was hard to imagine that they were ever really there. Anxieties about finding a new place to hang my hat were pushed out by the feeling that made my body buzz. Goddamn, I love this town.
HATE MAIL
THE 3,549 E-MAILS in my inbox said more or less the same thing: that I was a despicable person. I refreshed the screen every few seconds—3,551, 3,558—the number was growing ever faster. A few of the e-mailers were disappointed but pragmatic about what had happened in the woods of rural Maryland. Some wanted to take me to court. Others promised me physical harm. They said I betrayed them, deceived them. The word choices, the frantic grammatical errors, and the heavy use of uppercase type were frightening indicators of how acutely I had enraged an entire subculture, a group of people who were actually defined by their collective urge to inflict pain on others. Within a few hours they had mobilized against me and I was running scared. E-mails came in waves that corresponded to time zones. Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, from sea to shining sea. Then a second wave of venomous prose from Europe.
For a few weeks in July, I was the scourge of everyone who’d ever donned a gimp suit, brandished a bullwhip, or attached electrodes to a pair of testicles. The BDSM community wanted me dead.
I’d first heard of Leather Camp during a Nerve editorial meeting. Leather Camp is a five-day retreat in which extremely kinky people from the United States and abroad get together and enact their wildest fantasies. The idea was that I would attend and report back on the scene. Michael Martin was initially lukewarm about the idea, but I shot the organizer an e-mail expressing an interest in joining in anyway. He replied saying that Leather Camp doesn’t need publicity; that it sold out every year; that its location and schedule is a closely guarded secret; that he is trying to foster an environment free of judgment; that journalists are absolutely forbidden to attend.
“Now you’re definitely fucking going!” said Michael, suddenly adrenalized with intrigue. “What don’t they want people to know about? You are going undercover.”
None of the installments of my column had ever hinged on my using an assumed persona. Usually I was courted by companies to promote their products and services and, among a specific subset of people, my name had clout. I could help companies sell hundreds of chin-mounted dildos or bottles of supplements “specially formulated” to make one’s semen taste like applesauce, just by giving them a quick mention.
The brief was to go live among these folk at their summer retreat and report back on what I found. Should anyone ask, I was to tell them that I was attracted to BDSM and thought that Leather Camp would be a good way to find out what worked for me.
I had already delved into some BDSM-type activity in my column before now: I’d been shrink-wrapped in latex, infantilized by a dominatrix, and had seven shades of shit beaten out of me by a female wrestler. These articles were blogged—and usually ridiculed—on BDSM Web sites, so there was a fairly good chance that people might recognize my name. My pseudonym was Simon, which I thought went well with my accent. I have found that when forced to lie, keeping the lies parallel with the truth can help thwart revealing inconsistencies. To that end, I said that I was a customer service administrator, which I was up until twelve months earlier.
A portion of the Leather Camp Web site dealt with travel arrangements and carpooling. I ended up getting a ride with a guy called Manflesh. I traveled to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, to meet up with him at his parents’ home.
Manflesh was red-haired, soft-spoken, and in his mid-twenties. He had borrowed his parents’ vehicle for Leather Camp: a large silver minivan with a large disabled sticker on the back and a mechanism for getting wheelchairs in and out of it.
“Hey, for a minivan, this thing can really move,” he assured me, then faithfully observed the speed limit the whole way down past the Mason-Dixon Line.
The location of Leather Camp was shrouded in secrecy right up until the event, though it was always based within a two hour’s drive of Washington, D.C. Previous years had seen local communities getting wind of the goings-on at a Leather Camp event and arriving at the premises in heated protest, presumably with pitchforks and torches.
Manflesh astounded me with tales of Leather Camps past—this year was his sixth—until we were well into Delaware. Like the time he and all seven of his cabinmates kidnapped a bi-curious male (consensually, of course) and wouldn’t release him until he’d fellated them all. I imagine that his curiosity was quenched after that. Manflesh took a satisfied drag on a Parliament and looked longingly out the window.
“It was intense,” he said. “You know, for a beginner, you are taking on a lot by coming here. It’ll be a baptism by fire.”
“How do you mean?” I asked. I began to panic.
“Leather Camp is fucking hard-core. It’s no joke. That’s why we love it and you probably will too. It’s great because, for four or five days, it’s life as it should be: no rules, no judgments, no limits. But after four or five days, the weekend is over and—Bam!—it’s back to reality.”
At a typical BDSM event (bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism), Manflesh probably got more tail than I’d had in my entire life. He told me that he’d been whipped, flogged, pissed on, shat on, and generally bothered countless times since he discovered the scene at the tender age of nineteen. In fact, he was scheduled to give a two-hour tutorial on pissing that weekend. Last year, ten and one-third women showered him with golden degradation.
“One of the girls was three months pregnant,” he explained the fraction cheerfully.
This time around, Manflesh had rallied fifteen through a BDSM Web site; he assured me it was not to be missed. I took my Blimpie sub from my lips and gazed out the window, ruminating upon what the weekend would have in store.
I was in the death throes of a four-month relationship with Sophie. Sophie had some understandable misgivings about my attending a country retreat for sexual miscreants. Sophie was not really the jealous type, but her hormones were currently out of whack due to her being on fertility medication. She was “donating” her eggs.
I assured her that I was just going to be there in an observational capacity, though I really couldn’t gauge how I’d feel once I was there. I’d never been into the theatrical nature of the BDSM scene, though some of what Manflesh had said saying piqued my interest. Apparently, the previous year’s big hit was the “merry-go-suck-and-fuck,” in which eight “bottoms” assumed prone positions on a merry-go-round while a corresponding number of “tops” stood around the circle’s perimeter. Condoms were changed with every spin of the wheel.
As we headed closer to camp, the clouds cleared. In the final mile of our journey, we passed through a quaint little village that listed the times of church services on its welcome sign. There I was, driving in with a man who made the Marquis de Sade look like Pat Boone. Did Littlebrooke’s residents know that four hundred more of us were on the way?
We slowly pulled up the gravel driveway to the checkpoint, where two fifty-year-old women in Stars-and-Stripes T-shirts checked our credentials.
“Let’s see yer dicks!” one of them
yelled.
“We gotta check that you ain’t vanilla!” said the other, laughing.
After three hours with Manflesh, I was feeling more vanilla than at any point in my life. He was poised to unbuckle his belt when a car came up behind us and we were waved into a parking area. About twenty-five yards from our car was a fifty-year-old man dressed as a little girl, with a bright red wig, pink dress, white knee-high socks, and Mary Jane shoes. He looked like a dry-cured Strawberry Shortcake. He skipped along the dirt road before hopping into a buggy and taking the reins.
“Hyah!” he squealed, jerking his steed into motion.
The steed was a sixty-year-old man. He wore a harness, black boots, blinders, a bit for his mouth, a butt plug replete with faux horsetail, and a cock ring. He pulled Strawberry Shortcake a few yards before the old man–little girl called out, “Whoa.”
The centaur obligingly came to a halt. While the passenger buckled his shoe, his horse whinnied loudly, thrashed his head back and forth, and dragged a foot along the ground.
Manflesh put my mind at ease when I confessed that I hadn’t brought any fetish wear whatsoever.
“That’s fine,” he said, “about half the people don’t. Leather isn’t a literal term. Leather is a state of mind, an umbrella term that covers all sorts of people who are into all sorts of things.”
As we loaded our luggage into a golf cart, I heard what I thought was a rifle range in the distance. As we trundled over the brow of a hill, I saw a large meadow dotted with several crucifixes. Attached to each was an individual being whipped, flogged, and/or beaten. It was just like that scene in Life of Brian. But instead of looking on the bright side of life, the whippees were emitting the most bloodcurdling screams I’d ever heard. The air was full of agony.
The camp was flanked by three hills and a small lake. Manflesh and I registered, got our cabin assignments, and went our separate ways. He had already secured a private cabin with several of the scene’s luminaries. Their cabin was called “Oink” because, as my new friend explained, “We’re all fucking pigs.”
I was assigned a cabin on the opposite end of the camp. It was about twenty feet by thirty, with ten stripped twin beds around the perimeter and some cubbyholes in the center of the room for personal effects. I thought I was the first to arrive, but in the far corner of the room lain a rotund blonde-haired woman in a pair of terry-cloth shorts and one white ankle sock. She was lying topless and facedown in a noisy slumber. My shuffling caused her to open her eyes slightly.
“Hi,” I whispered. “Sorry to wake you.”
She grunted and cut a spectacular fart that sent me scurrying outside for air.
From the porch of the cabin I saw a petite blonde woman leading around a huge, white, naked, entirely hairless man wearing a zippered gimp mask and “SLAVE” tattooed over his pubic bone. What was really unusual is that the gentleman seemed to lack any identifiable genitalia. In the area where one would normally find a penis, there was something that looked like the tied-up end of a balloon. His testicles were not in evidence. I wondered if he had tucked everything inside, like Samurai warriors did before going into battle. He was completely at the mercy of his owner: I saw her walk up to a swing and place a dog bowl full of a brown substance ten feet in front of it. Her slave got onto all fours and hungrily ate from it. At the end of her swing’s arc, his tormentor would spit, and her saliva would land on her slave or in his food. Every thirty seconds or so she would get off the swing, walk over to him, and flick her cigarette ash into his bowl for him to consume.
My cell phone didn’t work. I couldn’t unburden myself of any of the nightmarish vignettes being played out before me. I suddenly realized that, for perhaps the first time, I was truly alone. I ran across the camp to find Manflesh. He said that his crew was all around our age.
With the large, plushy pig toy on the veranda, cabin Oink wasn’t too hard to spot. Twenty paces from my destination, I was almost stampeded by a team of six “ponies” that were pulling a chariot at speed, provoking laughter from Manflesh and his cabinmates.
“You gotta watch out for that if you are going to last the weekend!” he called out.
Manflesh introduced me to a dozen of his friends, who were all very nice and had tons of questions about my kink, my sexual orientation, and my funny accent. There was Malcolm, a stout Uncle Fester type; Candy, a shy blonde woman in her late twenties; Julia and Dominique, two girls also in their twenties who could have been the two nerdy, spookily inseparable girls from any high school.
“How are you doing, Jeff?” called Manflesh to a man dressed up as a pony and being flogged nearby.
“Another day in paradise, man!” he answered as large welts began to appear on his back.
At that point, I’d been asked “Are you a top or a bottom?” at least ten times. I just said that I wasn’t entirely sure but hadn’t ruled anything out and that I expected the weekend to shed some light on things. That usually stopped people from digging much deeper and exposing me as an outsider. Having a shared history in the scene, everyone else had plenty to talk about. There were inside jokes, slang, and a lot of jargon I found hard to decipher.
“Have you seen Bolt-Thrower lately?”
“No, last I heard, he married Desire and disappeared off the scene. Moved to Tallahassee.”
I held up my end of a conversation by constantly asking for explanations. Everybody was talking about “doing a scene” with one person or another: “I’ve got a bondage scene with Cumbucket on Sunday at two, a humiliation scene with Donkey-boy on Friday morning.” They kind of scheduled them all in like power meetings.
With as much fanfare as he could muster, Manflesh produced his “new toy”: a 10,000-volt cattle prod designed for cattlemen involved in carrying out something called “close work.” I swallowed hard. The device emitted a soft buzzing sound, like that of a honeybee, which belied its ability to render a human being helpless and in unspeakable pain. Manflesh said he wouldn’t use the prod until somebody had used it on him first—he wanted to know what the pain would be like.
“I’ll do it,” said everyone in near perfect unison.
With about an hour to go before the opening dinner, I headed off to the pool. A huge majority of attendees at Leather Camp were older than my parents. Some were grandparents. Many were obese and leathery. There were about ten older walrus-people sitting on lounge chairs around the pool’s edge. A man who looked like Santa Claus stood next to my chair. In addition to his pillowy beard and trademark belly, he wore black sandals, orange-tinted aviators, and, most interestingly, a pair of assless hot pants showcasing an ornate barbed-wire cock ring.
By the time of my trip to Leather Camp, I had two years of immersive sexual research under my belt and had noticed several common themes among the attendees at these sorts of things, whether it be a trip to the nude beach, porn shoot, a sex party, or any other sociosexual event: people looked either like NASCAR fans or the sort of people who spent their weekends reenacting historical battles. They were almost always overweight, overtanned, and bereft of almost any body hair. Most interestingly, they would use any excuse to whip themselves and each other up into a nationalistic fervor. These people may have their genitalia unencumbered by clothing but would always be wearing hats or T-shirts with slogans like “Welcome to America, Now Speak English!” “These Colors Don’t Run” replete with weeping eagle/World Trade Center backdrop, or, most worryingly, “Nuke ’em All! (let Allah sort ’em out).” Manhattanites like myself could easily forget that, with every mile west beyond the Hudson River, this variety of American became more numerous and commonplace. To that end, these events don’t attract society’s misfits but rather the hoi polloi. In fact, the only demographic that’s notably lacking are urbanites.
I was walking to the cabin to change for dinner when Manflesh, Candy, and Malcolm appeared by the pool and started doing a scene about ten yards from where I was sitting. Malcolm was standing behind Candy, pulling her hair and biting her neck as M
anflesh slapped her tits from the front. To my horror, Manflesh pulled out an ornate pocketknife that looked like a miniature scimitar. He crouched down, pulled up Candy’s skirt, and ran the blade over her exposed vagina. Candy was moaning and thrashing around; I couldn’t tell if she was actually being cut or not and I was about to pass out.
Manflesh looked over at me and smiled. I fumbled for my cell phone and had a pretend conversation while looking hard into the woods in the other direction. There was no way I was going to get involved in this. When I pretended to hang up, Manflesh was striding toward me. “You can get a decent signal here?”
“Er, yeah,” I said unconvincingly.
“Who is your service provider?”
It seemed like an extremely normal conversation to be having while a knife-point rape was being played out five yards from us. “T-Mobile.”
“That’s amazing. You must be the only one who can get service out here. May I borrow your phone for just a second?” I gave him my phone, thinking I had been truly caught out. My phone service was spotty in parts of Brooklyn. Miraculously, it worked, and after a brief conversation, Manflesh handed it back to me with a smile. “It’s time for dinner,” he said. Shell-shocked, I followed him, Malcolm, and Candy to the dining hall. The dining hall was the only place on the campground where a dress code was enforced. Genitalia and breasts must be covered.
On the ride down, Manflesh had told me to keep my expectations low about the camp cuisine, but dinner was actually quite enjoyable: two different types of salad, gammon steak baked with pineapple, sautéed potatoes, mixed winter vegetables, and orange sherbet for dessert. I sat with Manflesh and the others I’d met outside his cabin. During dinner, camp announcements were made by one of the event’s organizers, the charismatic Vincent.
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