On my second shift ever, and after only Mistress Bella’s example, I teetered over my first client in a borrowed pair of seven-inch platform stilettos. Anxiety, and a corset that cinched my waist six inches smaller than nature intended, confined my breath to the shallow region of my chest. My bosom literally heaved, straining against its lacy contraption and obstructing my view of the naked man who knelt at my feet. Cold tears ran from my armpits. The darkness smelled of stale incense and the briny tang of bodies past and present. It was hot, and the red walls seemed to breathe slightly, as if I were inside a great belly.
Despite the fact that I was high on heroin, I felt only fear. It snuck up on me as I stepped into the room, and my confidence lifted like a flock of startled birds. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother. What was I, my mother’s daughter, doing here? It suddenly didn’t make any sense. But that’s what the drugs were for: to keep Mom out of moments like this. Narcotics create distance, and I only needed an inch to turn away from that question.
I knew I had to say something. My mouth was gummy with 99-cent lipstick from the all-night drugstore down the block. Opening it, I prayed that the waxy paint would bear some talismanic power and bring the right words to my lips. Instead, I burped.
“Yes, Mistress? Are you all right?”
I felt his breath on my fishnetted knees and fought the urge to back away. “Yeah,” I croaked. My gut—displaced by the corset to somewhere near my bladder—clenched in panic. I itched to turn and slam the door behind me on this naked man and the politesse affected to camouflage his entitlement. Everything about him, from his hunched back to the quaver in his voice, was a demand phrased as a question. But I could not fail at this, much as I wanted to flee the shadowy room, my own image in the mirrored walls, and the inquisition-style cage that dangled from the ceiling. My urge to escape was met with an equally familiar will to persist. It was this second urge that had both rescued me from failure and damned me to finish every game in which my hand was called. Language had always saved me: from ever being arrested, attacked, caught in a lie or with my pants down. I would not allow words to fail me now.
“Yes, of course I’m all right. Pig!” I heard my voice echo in the room the way I had on answering machine recordings and home videos, and winced at the wavering childishness of it. In our presession consultation, my client had listed verbal humiliation among his requests, and I had nodded knowingly. “Verbal,” I’d heard, and assumed it would be easy. Now I was at a loss. Name-calling had always been a last resort, I told myself, something better left to children, drunk people, and those without the capacity for some more sophisticated form of shaming. But it wasn’t true. I had always known a lot of words, and how to use them, but never in the service of humiliation. In truth, I didn’t know how to be mean. In the past, I had been the one who felt humiliated by my failed attempts at cruelty. I had never sounded more false. I waited for him to scoff and retreat, to call me a phony. My gift for faking it ended here, I thought, where I could not convince even myself. Relief?
Miraculously, no words of reproach were spat against my knees. The old man did not rise from the floor in disgust. When a solid minute had passed with nothing but a vague shifting of limbs below me, I began wracking my brain for follow-up insults. In an adrenaline-fueled excavation of memory, I searched through every television show, movie, and schoolyard scene I could recall for examples of humiliation and struck gold.
“Stop breathing on my legs, you crust of scum on a rat’s cunt!” Rather than creating the berth I’d intended, my words inspired only a scuttling around my feet. I could feel him nuzzling my toes with little kisses and licks, devotedly pressing his cheek against the patent strap of my shoe. “Get away from me!” I shouted.
“Yes, Mistress.” Scampering backward, he knelt on all fours and stared at the floor, bald pate gleaming with perspiration. Hands upon hips, I wheezed, the gravity of power alighting on my shoulders once more. Nonetheless, shouting that first insult took all of two seconds. There were 3,598 left. I decided to give him a spanking. He was amenable to the idea, and I was glad to contend with his pasty rear instead of his searching gaze. Eye contact was an intimacy I was determined to avoid for as long as possible.
I ordered him to kneel on all fours facing the wall while I quietly pulled on a latex glove from the box I had been handed on my way in. Whether he would be offended or not at my precaution, I was unsure, but nor was I ready to bare-hand it my first time. In my mind, I was allotting ten or even fifteen minutes to the spanking, ample time to brainstorm my next move. This plan lasted for about three minutes, when my palm began to feel as though a hot iron had been pressed to it, rather than just a saggy butt. I hadn’t been warned of this difficulty, nor the nerves that were soaking the borrowed corset with sweat.
In fact, I had been informed of little before entering the Red Room, a practice I would later find was not in keeping with house protocol. It was the resort of office managers sick of cajoling their more experienced dommes into sessioning with undesirable regulars. Toilet Timmy, as they called him, was one of these. He conveniently preferred new hires. I could continue the usual apprenticeship for as long as I wanted, I was told, and certainly shouldn’t do anything I didn’t feel ready for, but Timmy was sooo easy, and couldn’t I use the money? I could. Of course I asked why the moniker.
“Oh, he’s just a pee slut, likes it right on his face,” offered Mistress Autumn, a cool redhead whose nonchalance was tempered with a warmth that most of the other dommes lacked.
“On his face?”
“Uh-huh. And you might want to try not to get too close. …”
“How so?”
“He can be grabby. And he has accidents sometimes.”
“Accidents?”
“Don’t worry about it; it’ll be fine.”
Everything did seem almost fine, after I figured out the solution to the eye-contact problem (a blindfold) and found an activity that didn’t cause me as much pain as it did Timmy (nipple torture).
“Oh, Mistress!” He squirmed on the bondage table as I pulled on his nipples with my gloved fingers.
“That’s right, uh, piggy, you take that!”
“Mistress, Mistress, I am feeling very excited!”
“Well, perhaps I should pinch them harder, eh?” I dug my nails into his fleshy nubs.
“Mistress!” He let out something between a groan and a squeal, and mesmerized as I was by the distortion of his face, the twinkle of his dental fillings, and the excruciating realness of my situation, I felt the warmth of his urine on the back of my gloved hand before I saw it arching up over his belly toward me.
I credit the surge of humiliated anger that rose in me as I beheld his stream of piss for the efficiency of my next move. Stepping back, I reached my gloved hand with little forethought down to his penis, which needed to be raised only a few inches for the stream to reach his yawning mouth. He wasn’t nearly so sorry as I would have been to end up with a mouthful of my own pee, but I did feel that the power in the room had shifted. It struck me then, though fleetingly, that Timmy’s incontinence might have had less to do with a physical quirk than a passive-aggressive gesture of dominance. Not until I won some power to wield did I realize how unarmed I had been; I had been sweating for the approval of a man who preferred to see dominatrices as inexperienced as me.
As the timer near the door crept closer and closer to its mark, I knew that I would have to initiate the golden shower portion of our session. Taking into account the warning about Timmy’s roving hands, and his soon-to-be close vicinity to my privates, I decided it was also time to try my hand at bondage. I was glad to have had the foresight to blindfold him earlier. How could I have forgotten where the ropes in the Red Room were kept?
“What are you doing, Mistress? Am I going to receive your golden nectar soon? I am feeling very thirsty today. …”
“Still?” I replied, scouring the room. “Why don’t you do your job and let me do mine, piglet?” Where were the
y? I pulled open drawers and found only clothespins, a few candle stubs, and a single pair of man-size panties with the crotch torn out.
“What’s my job, Mistress? Would you like for me to worship your magnificent body?”
“Right now your job is to shut up, piglet, and prepare yourself for just desserts.”
“Ooohh, Mistress, I like dessert! You’re going to give it to me good, aren’t you?”
“Indeed I am.”
“I can’t wait!”
“Well, you are going to have to, my pet. This isn’t, uh, the place for getting what you want, when you want it, is it?”
At last I found them, in a drawer of the leather bondage table not far below the mottled legs of my client. Was it the sock garters that I had forced him to remove earlier that had rubbed his pallid calves hairless? Grotesque or not, unless in the medical or sex industry, one doesn’t get much opportunity to unabashedly observe the bodies of other humans, least of all those of elder men. It would take a few months before my slaves’ bodies would cease, in a fundamental way, to be so human to me. They would become more akin to dishwashers, vacuums, or any of the other implements I had grown familiar with by virtue of their necessity to whatever job I was performing. But in the beginning, the bodies were spectacular, both hideous and marvelous.
After trussing Timmy to the table with a few square knots—silently thanking the fates for designing me as the daughter of a sea captain—I removed my heels and climbed gingerly over him to stand with a bare foot on either side of his head. Here I was, towering over this wizened body with a handful of toilet paper, in this outfit, in this room.
While certainly there is fear in the alienation from all things familiar, for me it was coupled with exhilaration. I was so distant from everything that had defined me up until then. It was close to the feeling I had gotten in the moment that I first shoplifted a candy bar from the grocery store, lied to my mother about my whereabouts, stepped off the plane alone, or pierced my skin with a needle. How can I explain this kind of weightlessness? It is like stepping off the edge of a cliff that has no bottom. There are a few minutes of complete terror: there is nothing to grab onto, nothing that matches anything in your memory. You are certain that you will perish without the ground, without the reactions that define you. Then you realize that you are still here, you are still a body, still a person, but the reality you have known no longer exists. Of course it is in our nature to settle, wherever we are, to create schemas and repeat reactions, so that we can become something that seems solid. This instinct is part of how we survive. But there is a brief period of time, when the fall has just begun and we are thrust out, when we have no choice but to accept ourselves as utterly strange, bottomless, empty. In this moment you are like a baby: a miraculous hunk of flesh and raw potential. The terror gives way to a tremendous feeling of power.
After a brief moment of vertigo, I reached down and pulled aside my panties.
6
WHEN I GOT HOME at 2:00 A.M. after that first session, only Rebecca was awake. She sat at the kitchen table, sleepily bent over Ovid, a pencil tucked behind her ear. She smiled up at me as I dropped my purse on the table and unzipped my jacket.
“I waited up for you,” she said. “I’ve been reading the same verse since midnight.” Closing the book, she tilted her head. “So? How was it?”
“Totally bizarre. But great. Really fun, actually. Guess what my first client’s nickname is?”
“What?”
“Toilet Timmy.”
Her laughter was infectious, and with its first peals all the details of the past eight hours turned hilarious. We laughed at Timmy’s “accident,” his saggy ass, and every contrived phrase I’d uttered. Rebecca’s laughter erased the fear I’d felt, softened the edge that I’d rubbed up against alone in that room. Sharing her laughter, I knew I’d never tell her about the painful uncertainty, the self-loathing I’d felt, about anything that wouldn’t elicit the happy ease of her laughter. I wouldn’t have even known then how to describe the other side of that fear, the high I’d felt by the end of the session. That feeling seemed even more private than my suffering.
After my inaugural session with Toilet Timmy, I resumed the usual apprenticeship. On my third shift at the dungeon, only three mistresses were working. Fiona manned the silent telephone, alternating between online poker and the chat room on our Web site. I had already spent half a pack of cigarettes and the better part of an hour in the kitchen listening to Bella detail methods of securing a rich husband.
“See, you must not appear to be arr that interested, and you must not sreep with him too soon. The powerful man has to wait for what he wants, or he wirr not want it anymore.” I left her humming atop the kitchen hamper and wandered into the dressing room.
Four hours into an eight-hour shift, 9:00 P.M. found me roosting on the couch with the television remote, a stack of books waiting to be read for a Monday class, and a heap of gently heaving blankets nearby that had been referred to as Mistress Autumn. After an attempt at reading while avoiding my own reflection in the wall of mirrored lockers, I had abandoned my highlighter and stretched out, remote in hand. The only evidence of Autumn was a single voluptuous leg thrown over one arm of the overstuffed chair and a few long strands of strawberry blond splayed across the other. For an entire episode of Law & Order, I jumped at every sleepy grunt that the heap produced. Folding my legs back under me and adjusting the volume of the television, I didn’t want to be caught sprawled across the furniture with such entitlement before I had even qualified for one of those lockers. Finally adjusting to what only sounded like waking, I began to relax and turned up the television’s volume loud enough to decipher.
After I flipped through several stations, a sleepy voice commanded that I “go back; that was COPS! How can anyone not like COPS?” Squinting at me, her green eyes bright with sleep, Mistress Autumn scowled. She had a tousled mane of hair, and a tattoo of a cherry blossom nestled in her cleavage. “Is there anything more pathetic than COPS?” She yawned and leaned her head back against the white seat. “I love it.” My fingers scuttled on the remote, and we caught the rest of the intro. “Thanks.”
She turned toward the mirrors and pulled her hair into a haphazard bun with the skill and subtle affectation of someone aware of her physical mien. I tried to watch only peripherally. “I’m Mel—uh, Justine. I’m Justine. You’re Autumn?”
“Justine, huh? That’s kind of ironic, no? Naming yourself after a famous submissive?”
I couldn’t help smiling. I had felt clever adopting the name of the Marquis de Sade’s heroine.
“No one else has gotten the reference.”
“What’d you expect? These people don’t know anything about what they’re into, or even why.” She reached her arms over her head and pointed her legs out with a groan, languidly arching her back with the stretch. Full and smooth, she had the sort of limbs that would never be skinny but always fill their shape with integrity. I wondered if she was straight. There was a confidence in her movements that I hadn’t seen in many women. I wasn’t sure yet if I wanted to fuck her or to be her. I was then (and had historically been) easily disarmed by the desire to be liked by someone, and often confused it with the desire to seduce them. I recognized a familiar brand of cultivated sexiness, but either hers was more genuine or she was better at faking it than me. She caught me staring in the mirror and smiled at my reflection.
“I am fucking starving. Should we order something disgusting?”
I shrugged affirmatively, despite the homemade tofu salad in my backpack. The trill of the phone sounded from the office and we heard Fiona answer.
“Hello.” An answer, not a question, no, This is the Dungeon of Mistress X. How can I help you? Just, Hello.
“So I don’t know what you eat, but you look like a veggie, and there’s this place on Ninth Ave. that’s veggie, but they sneakily fry everything so it tastes amazing and you get to pretend you’re being healthy-”
“Z
en Palate!”
“I knew it.” Autumn smirked. “Did you convert, or were you raised on Frookies, soy milk, and carob, like me?”
“Frookies! I have nightmares about those things!”
“Did you have a wooden toothbrush?”
“No, but I did get fruit in my Easter basket.”
Autumn snorted with laughter.
“Don’t tell me you’re from the Bay Area. …”
As I shook my head, Fiona appeared in the open doorway. Craining her neck at the television, she smirked.
“Of course, COPS. It must be another bustling Saturday night at the dunge.”
Autumn raised her brows in mock indignation. “COPS is a good show.”
“Uh-huh. There’s a meet coming up in ten minutes.”
“Dom or med?” asked Autumn.
“Dom.”
“Newbie or regular?”
“Says he’s been here, but I don’t know who he’s seen. I’m guessing it’s yours.”
“Unless he’s susceptible to our little Asian persuasion, I better get pumped, huh?”
“Superpumped.”
Fiona ambled back to the office as Autumn kicked off the hoary blanket with a sigh, revealing a pair of boxer shorts and a wife-beater that read: Oakland in black Old English lettering across the chest. “They have such a knack for timing, these pervs. If I get the session you should come in, as long as it’s okay with him. It always is. Two for the price of one? They love a bargain like they love a dildo up their ass.”
Whip Smart: A Memoir Page 4