Alex rang the bell for a staircase situated above a Third Avenue Japanese restaurant. “You ready?”
“Fuck yeah.” I was a single girl in New York City.
In my head I was picturing the ritzy Playboy Club. That wasn’t quite right. The Key looked like any basic massage parlor: a small front desk in front of a hallway that led to several small rooms. These rooms were themed, depending on what the customer wanted. The whole place smelled like cheap rubber and antiseptic. At least the lighting was dim.
The manager’s name was Rose; she was a monstrous, man-hating, badass dagger bitch. Rose was the most popular dominatrix in the dungeon because for her it wasn’t an act. She was a bull dyke who truly despised men and enjoyed beating the shit out of them. (Before you get out your pitchforks, please note that these were all terms of high esteem at the dungeon, and Rose would not have me refer to her in any other way.)
“Pretty girl like you,” she said that first night, “you could make a fucking mint in a place like this. Just keep your nose clean, if you know what I mean. Treat it like a business and it’ll pay you like one.”
“What did she mean, keep my nose clean?” I asked Alex.
“She means don’t snort cocaine.”
That wasn’t going to be an issue. My nose was perfect. Why on earth would I mess it up?
Under Rose’s tutelage, I became a popular dominatrix. I moved into her spare bedroom a block away, and I’d go in to work with her every day.
Being a dominatrix was like an acting job, only with a lot more kicking guys in the balls. Rose helped me make up a backstory: I was going to college, my husband just left my daughter and me, and I had to pay for a babysitter.
All us girls would wait behind a curtain in back of the reception desk, doing our nails and reading fashion magazines. A john would walk in and tell Rose what he was into and she’d send him into the appropriate room. If he was into being beaten, he’d go to the wheel room. If it was more intimate, he’d go to the bedroom. If he wanted a girl to submit to him, he’d go into the cage room. If he was into something messier, there was a plastic-covered room for that.
Rose would come back and tell us what the fantasy was, and ask who wanted to take the client. I was highly motivated to take as many clients as I could, no matter what they wanted to do; I was there to make money. If it was something I didn’t like, I could just put it out of my mind and think about the money.
Most clients had a specific script they’d want you to follow. A lot of guys wanted to be humiliated for having a small dick. I’d get a magnifying glass and bring them in front of the other girls and say, “Can’t see it, can’t find it.” The girls would laugh and the guy would get off on it.
Some of them were into heavy pain—cigarette burns on their tongues, stepping on their balls in high heels, yelling and degrading them while wearing a police or Nazi uniform. Sex wasn’t important to them. They’d cum without even touching themselves.
I really liked having clients who were into cross-dressing, which was common. We had a whole tranny room that was just a big closet of outfits guys could try on. I’d help them dress up and they’d be hard the whole time. That’s not the same thing as being transgender, FTR, or even gay for that matter. They just got off on the feel of the lingerie.
There was one guy who got off on the time. I’d wear my day clothes and talk about the time the whole hour. I’d say things like, “Oh, do you have the time? I’ve been waiting for this bus and it’s really late.” He’d wear a trench coat and discreetly masturbate.
One time, this girl Mary Ellen and I read from the Bible to some guy while he jerked off. We made faces at each other and tried to make the other one crack up while we were reading. It was so bizarre, making a joke out of it seemed the only way to react. After that guy left, Mary Ellen and I sat in the lobby cracking up. We heard the door open and in walked Mary Ellen’s junkie bull dyke girlfriend.
“What the fuck’s so funny?” she barked. Mary Ellen stopped laughing. “You’re not here to have a good time, bitch, you’re here to make some fuckin’ money!” the girlfriend yelled, pointing her finger in Mary Ellen’s face.
Rose stepped out into the lobby. “Is there a problem out here?” she asked, crossing her arms. The girlfriend put her arm around Mary Ellen and they walked out. Even among bull dykes, Rose was the HBIC.
Being a dominatrix was a great career for me: it was easy work and the money was fantastic. I was able to pay for everything I needed. Most of the girls were spending their easy money on drugs but I was buying shoes and dresses and upkeep. As far as I was concerned, my look was my real estate, and any money I put into it was a good investment.
We had a lot of security at the Key, and I never had a problem with clients. The walls were paper-thin; you could hear everything that went on. Plus I’d usually work the same times as Rose, and nobody would fuck with her.
No girls were ever hurt inside the dungeon, at least while I was there. It was when the guys would want to meet you elsewhere that things would happen. They’d offer you more money, and for a lot of the girls that was hard to turn down. Rose used to say all the time: “If a client wants to see you somewhere privately, it means they want to kill you.”
I had one client want to see me outside the club. It was a guy I’d seen a few times before; he was into tying me up in elaborate knots, but that was it. He’d tie me up so I couldn’t move a single part of my body, jerk off, untie me, and pay handsomely.
He wanted me to come to his house because he had a bolt in his ceiling he wanted to suspend me from. It sounded like a bad idea, but he offered five times what he paid at the Key. I asked Rose and she thought that for the money he was offering, I should do it. “He’s a regular here,” she said, “so I wouldn’t be too worried. But I’ll drive you and wait outside, just in case.”
The client’s name was Joel, and he was a big guy, good-looking and polite. I walked into his Long Island house and he asked if I’d had a hard time finding the place.
“No,” I said. “My boss Rose drove me and she’s waiting outside.”
“Rose has a good sense of direction?” he asked.
“Yeah. Should I take off my dress?”
Joel tied me up same as he always did, then hooked the rope onto his ceiling and suspended me there. It was a strange sensation—flying free and being caged tight at the same time.
There was nothing out of the ordinary that day. He did ask me if I would blow him while I was tied up. I said no and he jerked off and untied me.
I saw him a few more times at the club but never went to his house again.
It was typical for girls to disappear from the Key. It was only a step removed from prostitution, and most of these girls were only working to pay for their and their boyfriend’s drug habits. A girl came to make money and get out.
Still, when Mary Ellen disappeared, Rose was sure something horrible had happened. Mary Ellen was a pretty and petite Latina lesbian with an overly friendly disposition. She was the first junkie I’d ever met, but even I knew she smiled more than heroin addicts were supposed to. Rose was sure that if Mary Ellen had taken off she would have said something first.
“Maybe she got clean,” I told Rose. “This could be a good thing.”
“No,” Rose said, “I bet it’s that bitch of a girlfriend.”
A week after Mary Ellen stopped showing up for work, the girlfriend came by looking for her, and that’s when Rose really started freaking out. “The girl’s heart was always too pure,” Rose said. “I shouldn’t have let her work. I should’ve known she’d do something stupid.”
I still wasn’t convinced of foul play. Rose told me, “You don’t know how the world works yet, Amanda. Men do bad things to women all the time.”
She was right, of course. I woke up one morning to Rose throwing a newspaper on my bed. There was a picture of Joel on the cover. He’d been pulled over for having a taillight out and the cops found the decomposing body of a woman in his car. They suspected he had m
urdered several prostitutes.
“Do you think he killed Mary Ellen?” I asked. Rose was sure of it.
At the Key there were two cops waiting for us outside. They showed their badges and Rose fainted into my arms, taking us both to the ground.
The cops helped me get Rose inside. When she recovered, they confirmed that Mary Ellen was dead.Her body had been found some time before but wasn’t identified until Joel admitted to killing her. Rose was furious. She punched the wall and cracked open her knuckles. The cops asked us all if we knew anything about Joel, but none of the girls said anything. They didn’t want to talk to the cops. I raised my hand. “I’ve been to his house,” I said.
We went into the fake bedroom and I told the cops everything I knew about Joel. Rose was right. I really did have no idea how the world worked. If she hadn’t escorted me to his house that night, I very likely would have been murdered.
“DO YOU THINK HE KILLED MARY ELLEN?” I ASKED. ROSE WAS SURE OF IT.
After the cops left I went to our locker room to gather myself. I’d been tightly gripping a tube of lipstick in my hand during my entire statement. By the time I let go, the lid had come undone and my palm was dyed red. It was Cherries in the Snow, the first color Mom had ever given me.
“I would give anything to have that man in here one more time,” Rose said. “They would never find that body, trust me on that one.”
One of the other girls, who looked like Ann-Margret after twenty years of smoking crack, came in to see what I had told the cops. “Did you rat us all out?” she asked. Drug paranoia. How tacky.
“I told them about Mary Ellen. It’s horrible what that poor girl must have gone through.”
“Life goes on,” cracked Ann said. “You gotta make your dollar.”
“What a horrible way to live,” I told her, and started crying. She rolled her eyes and left me alone.
Mary Ellen’s ex-girlfriend came into the locker room, but she didn’t notice me; she was catatonic. I don’t know if it was the heroin or the shock of what we’d all just found out. She opened Mary Ellen’s locker, which Rose had refused to let anyone touch, and started emptying the contents into a trash bag: a large black dildo, rubber gloves, a blindfold, and a leather whip. That was my tipping point. I started sobbing uncontrollably. The girlfriend didn’t even notice, but Rose came back in, hugged me tight, and walked me home. We hibernated for the next month, eating our emotions rather than dealing with them.
Joel was accused and convicted of murdering nine women, including Mary Ellen DeLuca, though it was believed he had many more victims. He told police he picked Mary Ellen up off the street and drove her around to score crack. She complained about how unhappy she was being a junkie, and he asked her if she wanted to die. She said yes. As he strangled the life out of her, she didn’t struggle at all.
It was impossible to be at the Key anymore and not think about what had happened. Whenever I wasn’t at work, I’d take a sleeping pill and try to zone out.
My designer friend Keni Valenti took me to a flea market one day to look for fabrics, and a policeman started hitting on me, laying it on thick, telling me he wanted to take me on a date. He was gorgeous, had to be 6'4", blue eyes, big arms, everything. I told him I was a lesbian to get rid of him.
“Are you crazy?” Keni asked. “You turned down Adonis himself.”
I just wasn’t feeling it. I went home and took another sleeping pill. But as I tried to fall asleep, I thought about the Adonis. It wasn’t like me not even to flirt with a guy like that. It occurred to me that since we found out about Mary Ellen, I hadn’t had sex with anyone.
Something had to change.
BLONDES
HAVE MORE FUN
MAMIE VAN DOREN
I met her at a Tom Ford party. She had to be eighty, with perfect skin, and she showed up in a sports car with a hot young man. She looked so great, it made me not worry so much about getting old.
PAM ANDERSON
Tommy Lee wanted to see my pussy at a party. We went to the bathroom, I sat on the sink, and he got a good look. Pam was pissed. Super jealous. He loved it.
COURTNEY LOVE
We were doing a photo shoot, and she said to me, “Force me to take these pills”—a big handful of them. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to swallow.” I put them in her mouth and she swallowed all of them. It was crazy.
PARIS HILTON
I brought this hot college boy to a party and Paris came up to me and said, “Hi, horny.” She wanted to have sex with me but I won’t do the lesbian thing.
LADY GAGA
She’s monstrously talented. Very Club Kid–inspired. Dressing up was a dying art form until Gaga came along.
I took a three-step approach to getting my life back on track:
1. Bulimia.
2. Sex at least three times a week, (I even called my old beau Construction Chuck to pound me out. A girl needs a good backup dick.)
3. A new living situation. (I feared Rose’s man-hating was starting to rub off on me.)
I moved into Keni Valenti’s Tribeca apartment, to help him cover his bills. He had been having a tough time: he’d sold his fashion line to a Japanese company and moved to Japan to launch a bunch of stores there. It turned out he had unknowingly sold to some not-so-great people. He came back to New York mentally and professionally in shambles, and with a huge financial payoff that he blew through real quick. He needed help.
I slept in his sewing room. During the day I’d work on his designs and at night he would escort me to and from the Key. Sometimes I’d have him come to work with me and my submissive clients would suck his dick. Keni thought it was hot, the guy got off on doing whatever I said, and I got to sit back and work on my nails. It was a win for everyone.
When we weren’t working, Keni and I bonded over our love for classic Hollywood glamour and the great actresses. Keni had a real talent for understanding the history of fashion. Our favorite was Jayne Mansfield, the cartoon version of Marilyn Monroe. Jayne was a fun, flirty, buxom blonde with the best breasts in all of Hollywood.
One afternoon we were watching The Girl Can’t Help It, my favorite Jayne Mansfield film, and Keni said, “You know, you would get a lot more attention if you tried for that look.”
Well, duh, I thought, but I said, “Yeah, I’d love that, but I wouldn’t know how.” My main goal for my look was real housewife realness circa 1989: lots of silk blouses and belts, very French-inspired. I dreamed I could be as glamorous as someone like Jayne Mansfield, but I had no idea how to go about doing that without looking like a drag queen.
Sixty minutes later, Keni had made me a tube dress out of black stretch Lycra, with a padded bra built into it. The dress was cut short and flounced on the bottom; it was simple but elegant. I spent the next three weeks bejeweling that dress to make it resemble what Jayne or Marilyn would have worn.
I taped three pictures on our (empty) refrigerator: Jayne Mansfield, an old pinup drawing of a Vargas girl, and Jessica Rabbit. These were my inspirations. Jayne had the glamour, the Vargas girl had the style and makeup, and Jessica Rabbit had the proportions.
There was no going back: Amanda the housewife was dead. Amanda the sex goddess had been born.
Keni treated me like a Barbie doll, which I loved. We went to fabric stores on Second Avenue in the East Village and picked out satin and cotton Lycra spandex in shiny pinks, matte reds, and virginal whites. Keni would turn these into simple little wiggle dresses and tiny jackets that I’d spend hours embellishing with beading and sequins while watching the classic Hollywood films that inspired me. We’d go to Bergdorf Goodman and check out what Yves Saint Laurent was doing, then we’d go to the Garment District and buy the materials to make those same looks.
“You’re not a housewife anymore, so stop dressing like it,” Keni once told me.
“Well, I can’t dress like a dominatrix, can I?”
“Why not?”
I threw away every flat shoe I owned and started a collec
tion of high heels from discount shoe stores. Louboutins were not an option back then but I became a shoe whore.
Bulimia was sort of outdated, and sometimes throwing up would break blood vessels around my eyes, so I switched back to anorexia. We would not keep any food in the apartment and would order out one meal a day. I’d allow myself to eat half of what I ordered and then douse the rest with dish detergent, to make sure I wouldn’t pull it out of the trash and try to eat it later. My proportions were right where I wanted them: 34 C bust, 24 waist, 34 hips.
To complete my Hollywood glam look, I knew I needed some physical enhancements.
Keni took me to a hairstylist who showed me how to wear extensions and hairpieces in a way that I could still show my real hair in the front, to make it look more natural. It’s so important to intertwine natural and enhanced looks, instead of going all one way or the other. The added volume was a confidence boost that I never expected; ever since then I never go out with only my real hair. Never. There’s always something in it, or I’ll cover it with a kerchief. I won’t go for coffee without a hairpiece. I only take it off when I take a shower or sleep. I don’t feel right if I can’t snatch my hair.
The other thing I wanted to enhance was my lips. There was nothing wrong with them, but larger lips are a sign of youth and I thought they’d look good on me. I asked Dr. Reinhorn about silicone injections I’d read about in Vogue. Models were calling silicone the fountain of youth, though it was controversial. Dr. Reinhorn tried to talk me out of it, but I had my mind made up: my lips needed to be bigger, and I didn’t want to deal with something I’d have to fix every six months. Silicone was permanent. Dr. Reinhorn relented, and gave me microdots of silicone so he could control how much he used. He also put a little silicone in my cheeks while he was at it. It was very minimal but made a huge difference.
Most of my time was spent beautifying in some way. I’d spend hours doing my nails (I’ve lost several friends who were sick of waiting for me to finish my nails), or plucking hairs, bleaching my pussy hair, or bejeweling a dress. That’s all I wanted to do. It still is.
Doll Parts Page 9