Whip Smart: A Memoir

by Melissa Febos

  “I did,” volunteered the topless woman, without pausing her lipstick application. “It isn’t used, obviously.”

  “It’s still not okay, Georgina,” Fiona scolded. “Remy would shit if he came in here and found a dick in the sink.” Someone giggled from the couch.

  “Yeah, yeah,” grumbled Georgina, hoisting herself to her feet and breezing by us, breasts bouncing. She grabbed the dildo from Fiona as she passed.

  “Anyway,” Fiona glanced at me and then pointed with her long finger at each mistress as she said her name, “this is Camille, Autumn, Miss K, Bella, Lena, and that was Georgina.” She then motioned to me. “Girls, this is the interview. She doesn’t have a name yet.” I gave my second feeble wave of the afternoon. They coolly scanned my interview outfit, a few offering lukewarm smiles before their eyes shifted back to another wall-mounted television over my head.

  Fiona interviewed me in an office covered with monitors. They revealed any activity in the elevator, the outside stoop, all of the hallways, the entryway, and the stairs. Her desk faced the screens, and on it sat a phone and an open appointment book, crammed with names and notes in various colors of ink. I later learned that each manager, or phone girl as we called them, had a color, so that Remy knew who to give the commission to for every session booked. The phone girls earned an hourly wage between $15 and $20, in addition to a $5 commission per session booked with a repeat client; new clients got them $10. The opposite wall boasted a complicated stereo system and a smaller desk with a computer monitor. At this smaller desk sat the topless Georgina, furiously typing.

  “Okay, get out of here so I can interview this nice girl,” Fiona demanded after my tour.

  “Let me just finish this forum post.” Georgina kept typing.

  “Out!”

  The interview lasted about four minutes. I didn’t have professional experience, I said, but I did have personal experience. The look on Fiona’s face made it immediately clear that this was a common lie. I didn’t realize I was hired until she asked me what days I’d like to work the following week. Of our conversation, mainly I remember this: $75 per one hour session, plus tips, which could range anywhere from $5 to $500. I told her I’d be in on Monday, 10:30 A.M.

  4

  I WAS NO STRANGER to what I recognized in the women of that dressing room. All women are used to being perceived sexually to some degree, especially in New York. Still, not all of them acquire that mesmerizing sheen, which is really self-consciousness hammered into a kind of grace. They shone, mirrors of desire, their images pliant, shimmering with mutable fantasy. I wanted that—to effortlessly seduce, to reflect desire rather than emanate it. I’d been practicing for a long time, but my skills were amateur in such company; those women were professionals.

  The year I turned eleven, I had transformed from a bookish tomboy into a sex object, at least in the eyes of men. I felt their gaze everywhere: men in cars, men in coveralls, men in suits, men at chalkboards. Men behind desks, men married to my schoolmates’ mothers, and the nascent men of my middle school classrooms. At twelve I passed for sixteen; at fourteen, eighteen. I didn’t need to be in New York to discover the duality of sex appeal. I had lost the ability to be invisible and the immunities of childhood—but to be seen! I couldn’t escape it, and mostly, I didn’t want to. Desire intoxicated me. Seduction became my primary pursuit, my first and most compelling drug. In ju nior high, I filled my diaries with lists of names: conquests and conquered; the daily entries mainly consisted of logs of my progress. It seemed that I could will boys to want me with force of mind, by invisible waves of provocation, a kind of magic, really. My peers proved easy marks, so I collected girlfriends with homes less supervised than mine, girlfriends with older brothers, older brothers with older friends. The thrill of older men, their deep voices and sinewy limbs, was sharper, alluring as only danger can be without any knowledge of consequence. My hunger to be desired was bottomless, consuming. I sensed that it was a thing to hide, and I did so reflexively.

  I found that the high of seduction didn’t translate to sex, though. Once the chase ended, so did my confidence. I loved the taut line of seduction, but what I reeled in was often unwieldly, a slippery, writhing thing, bigger than me. I hated the child I reverted to in sexual situations—awkward and strangely numb, shy in my body, unable to conceal my innocence. I strategically avoided technical intercourse until the age of seventeen. Nothing else really counted, I thought, and became, in addition to an adept rationalizer, a master of placation, granting lesser acts in place of actual sex. I figured a hand job was worth the pleasure of seduction that preceded it—though the disconnection between the two confused me. By the age of thirteen, I had developed a reputation as a slut. Though I was unsure what I was being punished for, the humiliation drove me away from men for a while.

  For the next few years, I experimented with girls instead. They were different, but not that different. I could swoon over them, too, even love them, or as close as I knew to it. But I couldn’t stop aligning myself with their desires, and I was disappointed when they didn’t intuit mine. What were mine? I didn’t have an orgasm with another person until I guided the hand of a girl at summer camp, and suddenly I hated the feeling of being in control. Though addicted to the power of seduction, I didn’t want to play the man.

  At eighteen, after more than two years of dating women, I thrilled in love with my first real boyfriend. In the year that followed losing my official virginity to this sweet, stoned, boy, the monotony of his sweetness became tedious, his adoration irritating. Out of fear of hurting him, I ended it the most painful way: by slow, unexplained secession. I avoided him, claiming everything was fine. I moved to the other side of the city and stopped answering the phone. He didn’t know that we were broken up until he learned I was dating someone else. When I didn’t know how to leave gracefully, dropping off the face of the planet was my go-to. I quit jobs, apartments, friendships, and relationships this way for years. My history was scattered with people who hated me for this.

  Even my friendships adhered to this model, to some degree. As a kid, rather than groups of friends I’d always had one best girlfriend with whom I was emeshed for a period of time, often years. These girls were my soul mates, for as long as our love, and the insular world we created, could last. A point would always come when they’d tell me their secret histories, the abuses they’d suffered from mothers, stepfathers, brothers, or unknown men. I wondered whether everyone had such hurts or these wounded were simply drawn to me. I felt privileged to be the keeper of secrets, to be so trusted. But inevitably, I’d feel the burden of too much power; like my future lovers, they needed me more than I did them. When I became an adult, my friendships became less dramatic, less fraught with need, but still singular in their intensity. I was never, my entire life, without a best friend. At the time that I started working at the dungeon, my roommate Rebecca was one of these.

  By the time I got to New York, I’d fallen in love a few times and had plenty of happy orgasms. But even with long-term lovers, my need was bottomless. They could not want me enough. I always managed to love those who loved me more, but after some months of feverish infatuation I’d grow bored and become repulsed by their desire. Paradoxically the craving to be desired never abated and was only temporarily soothed by the next smoldering gaze.

  . . .

  What my neighbor had referred to as “paying your dues” meant the apprenticeship that all novice dommes must complete as their training. Being an apprentice entailed sitting around the dressing room for untold (and unpaid) hours until an appointment came in and then asking awkwardly to sit in on the session of a more experienced mistress. The goal of these was not only to pick up what technique I could while trying not to get in the way but also to do more than stare dumbly from behind the door, blushing. Unfortunately, on my first night of “training” I gathered only a small amount of experience witnessing the expertise of Mistress Bella, whose session consisted of putting her potbellied slave i
nto authentic wooden stocks and jerking him off into a Dixie cup. Bella, a thirty-two-year-old Chinese-American woman who could pass for preadolescent, had issued a stream of expletives as she reached around his paunch from behind, her black tresses sweeping across his hairy back in time with the mechanical thrust of her arm. She might have been reading aloud a car manual.

  “Just imagine my sranted yerrow pussy under my panties you srobbering pig wouldn’t you just rove to fuck my rittle Asian pussy you big perverted cow’s ass too bad I’ve got you stuck in tose tings rike a piece of meat and I’m gonna torture you so bad you won’t even be abre to diddre your rittle tiny … tat’s a good boy. Drink up now.”

  My lack of interest in her methods aside, Bella had little wisdom to offer on anything except for The Rules, a battered copy of which she carried around the dungeon at all times. Perched on a kitchen stool with her dog-eared book and a pack of Virginia Slims, her child’s body curled in only a yellow slip, she would meet most addresses with silence. Did her appointment show up? Nothing. Did she want to add anything to the sushi delivery order? A twitch that could be liberally interpreted as a negative. Did she have a light? Nothing. But ask her about The Rules and she would go on at such length about the differentiations between first, second, and third date etiquette that you would be forced to walk away from her mid-sentence, at a loss for an appropriate pause. Specterlike, Bella would drift from room to room, spraying Lysol disinfectant in a fog behind her, all the while quietly humming Top 40 radio hits.

  Sessions, by definition, are divided into three categories: sensual, corporal, and switch. As Fiona explained on my first shift—stripping the genres of their euphemistic titles—“Just think of them as sexy, mean, and submissive. Well, and medical, but really that could be any of those.” The spectrum within and even between each of these was nuanced; usually clients—or slaves, as they were also referred to—wanted a combination of sensual and corporal, with an emphasis on one or the other. Ste reo typical dominatrix images: verbal humiliation, bondage, and torture, are straight out of a corporal session. But every domme begins with sensual. Distinguished by their gentle, sexual quality, sensual sessions usually included one or more of the following: light bondage, tickling, light spanking, and nipple play. “Play” in other contexts might refer to electrical torture or piercing, but the “light” always meant caressing, kissing, and other nonviolent forms of titillation. Teasing-and-denial was also featured heavily in sensual sessions. Sometimes that meant what it sounds like: physical teasing (either the domme touching her client or the client touching himself) and then denial of orgasm. But “teasing-and-denial” could also be a euphemism for a hand job. Smothering was similar. In a corporal session, smothering usually included a rubber mask, pillows, a plastic bag, or Saran Wrap—it was a form of torture. In sensual sessions, “smothering” meant rubbing your breasts or ass against your client’s face. Role-play—the acting out of specific scenarios, domme and slave playing predefined, usually archetypal, roles—was also frequently requested in sensual sessions, and in these it was usually limited to playing the role of naughty and flirtatious schoolgirl/secretary/girlfriend/babysitter, the only difference between each being a particular costume and pitch of giggling. When someone requested role-play in a sensual session, you knew you weren’t going to be playing the part of serial killer or Gestapo interrogator.

  New hires began with sensual sessions because they didn’t require a lot of training; the majority of women in this country have been trained for this their whole lives. New hires were encouraged to start with them quickly, so as not to waste any time not making money on the house’s behalf. Sensual sessions didn’t require specific and expensive clothing; most of these clients were indifferent to rubber, leather, and corsetry. Their interest lay in that whatever the fabric, it be scant; they preferred lingerie to fetish wear, wanted naughty instead of dangerous or powerful. The sensual mistress’s power lay in her inherent feminine sexuality, in her coos and cleavage, not in her hands or head; her slaves wanted a woman who wasn’t quite aware of her strength and who needed the right man to unlock it for her. Like many women, I had been instructed by my culture to play this role since childhood. The catch was that you couldn’t get caught playing it; you should act like a tease, a sexpot, and ooze “sensuality” but never let it appear intentional or self-aware, or unchaste for goodness’ sake. And so, there was certainly a kind of freedom in having that unspoken demand be acknowledged, and even having my efforts financially compensated.

  It came easily, this cartoonish enactment of the process I’d been practicing since adolescence. Sensual sessions were all soft-core, late-night paid cable channel movie scenes—the “Skinemax” flicks I’d always stayed awake for during sleepover parties at homes that had cable, watching mesmerized with the volume on low while all the other girls slept. In my mind I wanted to cast myself as a corporal domme—to ooze the confidence and intimidation of those women on the cover of The Vault—but in reality I feared making the transition from the safety of sensual sessions.

  In the beginning of my tenure at the Dungeon of Mistress X, the word “shame” was not one that I’d ever associated with myself. Shame was pathetic, applicable to my clients: people who paid for what hurt them, who had no power over themselves or their environment. Still, I quickly became familiar with a feeling that followed indulging in the roles that sensual sessions featured. I was letting myself act out the paradox that I believed my feminism, my liberal upbringing, and my intelligence should have immunized me to. That feeling was a sister to the exhilaration of secrecy, with an equal sense of groundlessness. It was a spiral, that feeling, a twist of motion that sucked my breath out of me in a murky wisp. In the shower, in the quiet of my still body after those sessions, I felt less a sense of having taken a leap than of having lost my footing.

  5

  THE NIGHT BEFORE my second shift at the dungeon, I arrived home from class to find a message from Fiona on my answering machine.

  “Hey, it’s Fiona. Make sure you’re on time tomorrow. Someone is coming in to see you.”

  My stomach flipped with anxiety. Sure, I’d complained to her about needing money, but the idea of carrying an entire session myself terrified me. I’d assumed I had a comfortable cushion of time to get used to the idea. What did I have to go on at this point—Bella’s example? Emulating that performance was out of the question, but I wasn’t equipped to improvise something better. I was going to be revealed as a fraud.

  As I sat beside the phone at the kitchen table, trying to muster some confidence, Rebecca wandered in, gnawing on an apple.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “How’s work? Any action yet?” My roommates had been updated at every step along the way, and as far as they knew I was chomping at the bit for my own sessions.

  “Oh no, not yet.”

  “Bummer. You have class tomorrow?”

  “No, work.”

  “Let’s make dinner; I’m starved.”

  I nodded, glad for distraction. She dragged an old radio with a cassette player out of her bedroom, and we blasted a mix tape I’d made of old soul music—our favorite—and chopped vegetables while a pot of rice cooked.

  I’d known Rebecca since my years in Boston, where she’d grown up and we’d met through mutual friends. We hadn’t become close until I moved to New York, where she was already attending our college. If we hadn’t become roommates, we may never have figured out how much we had in common; in all the superficial ways we seemed opposite. Rebecca was as tall and willowy as I was petite and curvy. With her sleepy eyes and close-cropped Jean Seberg haircut, Rebecca had a dreamy way of talking that sometimes belied the sharpness of her observations. She was a spacey, mod beauty, who was always thinking the same thing as me. It was easy between us from the beginning. Mine and Rebecca’s conversation vacillated easily between the intellectual and trivial, with equal pleasure. The only thing I ever hid from her was the extent of my dru
g use.

  Our other two roommates came in as I started sautéing garlic and onions.

  “Smells good,” said Luke, our household’s only male member. He leaned over my shoulder and grabbed a slice of pepper from the pile on the cutting board. “Thank god for your Italian mom, Melissa.”

  “It’s no secret, my friend, just garlic and olive oil.”

  “Can I do something? I have a take-home physics exam to procrastinate.”

  “Ah, yeah, there’s a block of tofu in the fridge. Try and squeeze the water out of it and then cut it up.”

  We cooked and gossiped and sang along to Otis Redding and Irma Thomas, and for a little while the dungeon seemed farther away than just across the East River. Amidst the warm clamor of familiar voices and cooking my anxiety slipped away and I remembered that I was capable of anything. Dinnertime in my childhood home had often produced the same effect; the crackle and smell of sautéing garlic coupled with the murmur of NPR’s “All Things Considered” lulled me into a feeling of safety beyond which my daily worries seemed remote and flimsy. That comfort had always been fleeting, though. That night, as I lay alone in the dark of my bedroom, the world outside loomed again, pregnant with uncertainty.

  An hour can be a long time. Hell, a minute can be a long time. The minute before your first kiss with someone is a painstaking collection of seconds, each one more bloated with anticipation than the last. The first minute of a tattoo is a long one as well. Pain has few rivals in its ability to slow time. Fear, excitement, elation—these are kissing cousins, all with the sensorial power to render each second humming with every tick and gasp of our bodies, the whirr of insect wings and distant car engines. Sometimes, I could savor these moments, relish them as opportunities to walk straight into the fact of being alive. In the seconds that crept into the minutes of my very first domination session, I had no idea what I wanted. The $75 certainly, but beyond that? Character-building life experience? I would have confidently named these motives right up until the moment that the door of the Red Room closed behind me. With the clasp of its latch, all bravado and ideology dimmed with the light of the hallway behind. It was only me, a naked old man, and sixty minutes of palpable expectation. An hour alone with a naked man with whom you do not intend to have sex can be a very long time.