Whip Smart: A Memoir

by Melissa Febos

  “So, I should go in to meet him, right? That’s how it works with new clients?”

  “Not just new clients, any client that wants something new. Or just wants to milk his two hundred bucks for some extra time staring at cleavage. But yeah, you should go in for the meet. Ask him if you can sit in.”

  The process of “meets” entailed each available mistress getting dressed up and conducting a brief interview with the new client or returning clients who simply wasn’t sure whom he wanted to see, ostensibly to see if their interests aligned. Since so few of us claimed to have any genuine shared interests with our clients, meets were all about winning the session. I found the overt competition of this setup, and its nod to iconic brothel procedure (everyone lining up and batting their eyes), both anxiety producing and thrilling.

  I had been instructed to bring, during my training period, a black dress or slip for domination sessions, a white one for medical, and a pair of heels. For this I was grateful, after a quick Internet survey revealed the price of actual corsets running anywhere between $300 and $3,000: far beyond what I was managing to scrimp for MetroCards and occasional weekend drug binges. Still, dress-up was one of my favorite games as a child and I’d be lying to say that the costumes weren’t part of the job’s appeal.

  To forestall the discomfort of changing into my black slip in front of both Autumn and the wall of mirrors, I knelt with my cosmetic bag on the floor and pulled out my eyeliner. I rubbed at my smeary eyelid, having yet to master the art of makeup application.

  When I looked back up at her reflection, she had pulled off the wifebeater and was studying herself in the mirror, from the front, from the side, then sighing. “God, why didn’t I get big boobs like yours, Justine? I was meant to have enormous breasts.” She unlocked a door from the middle row of lockers that had a Scotch-taped piece of notebook paper stuck to its mirror that read: CASH COW in ballpoint pen, accompanied by a crude drawing of a coyly long-lashed cow with a money sign emblazoned on her flank. The overstuffed locker coughed out a garter belt upon opening. The hangers and plastic drawers were burdened by more lingerie than I had ever seen: a mélange of lace, rubber, satin, and leather, with shoes, wigs, hairbrushes, and other unidentifiable articles poking out from the mass.

  I have always enjoyed watching women dress. The appeal isn’t sexual. Most girls’ first glimpse of private female life is watching their mothers dress and put makeup on. It makes sense that we’d find it comforting. Childhood fascinations often crystallize this way. Isn’t beauty forever defined, in a sense, by the first things we found beautiful? Surely part of my pleasure results from the inundation of images that we all experience. But I also love ritual, and it is a mesmerizing one. I enjoy the ritual of dressing myself, too. It is a form of basking in a kind of femininity that I am opposed to as an ideal, but for better or worse, I think we all fetishize the female body, and intellectualization doesn’t spare anyone the obsession.

  Autumn replaced her boxer shorts with a tiny black thong, clipping the garter belt around her waist. Digging into the pocket of a shoe rack hanging from the inside of her locker door, she pulled out and unraveled a pair of stockings, diaphanous and flaccid as the molted reptile skin. Sliding them up her legs, she pinched their edges into the eyelets of the dangling garters and pulled a pair of black lace shorts over the whole contraption. This transformation took about two minutes, and utterly changed the lower half of her body. Hooking a black bra around her waist, she pulled the straps over her shoulders and lifted each breast into the cups, whose lacy seam reached just over her nipples. Kneeling beside me, she dug into a bag of makeup too big to carry onto a plane and pulled out a handful of pencils and brushes. In under five minutes she applied foundation; eye-, brow, and lip liner; mascara; sparkles; and lipstick that matched the walls of the Red Room. Her face had become another, each feature’s elegant dimensions as emphasized as those of a comic book heroine. I had never seen anything like it. She looked like a completely new person. My chin must have been hanging, because when she turned away from the mirror to face me, her smile curled with self-satisfaction and an affectionate condescension.

  “I’m going to need your help,” she said, and stood. Out of the crowded locker she extracted a satin corset the bruised color of plums. Sucking in her stomach, she fastened each of the twentyish hooks that cinched the front of the boned, hourglass brace. “Can you give me a hand with this?”

  “Um, sure. How?”

  “Just tighten the laces in the back, like a sneaker. You’re going to have to pull hard.”

  “Okay.” I tucked my fingertips under the crisscrossed lacing, which looked delicate but could easily have docked a small yacht, and pulled, very much like I was tightening a pair of shoelaces.

  “Harder.”

  “Okay.”

  I pulled harder and she jerked back toward me slightly, bracing herself on the locker door.

  “Harder, Justine; don’t be such a girl.”

  Stepping back with one foot to brace myself, I yanked on the ties with a grunt, my biceps straining. The corset tightened an inch or so, her flesh squeezing out the top in a painful-looking bulge.

  “Good.” I continued until her already slender waist was narrowed to Betty Boop proportions. “Perfect. Now just tie the ends together.”

  “He’s here!” Fiona yelled from the office, where she could see the client at the street level in the little black-and-white screen on her desk.

  After stepping into a pair of patent-leather platform stilettos, Autumn appraised herself in the mirror with a sigh and strode out of the dressing room, the staccato tap of her heels fading down the hall toward the kitchen.

  Left alone, I sat there on my heels, staring into my own face. It was bland as a hunk of clay after the sight of her, and I found a curious mixture of dejection and curiosity in my own eyes.

  Watching Autumn transform herself had awakened a phantom limb of longing. I had always been awed by the transformative power women appeared to have. I also wanted to become something else, to pull that kind of beauty and sexual ease out of myself like a dress from a wardrobe. It must exist in them always, I had thought. It must arrive with the swell of breasts and hips and bellies and thighs, a wisdom and ability like that of survival that blooms in the mind, a kind of built-in manual for use from which mine was missing pages.

  “Um, Bella? Could you maybe put some shoes on?” Fiona arched her brows and offered the unshod mistress a managerial smile. Bella responded with a blank stare before sliding into a pair of sandals that could easily have qualified as shower shoes, the sort one might don to take out the trash. As she shuffled down the hallway in her yellow slip, Fiona called after her, “He’s in the Black Room, by the way.”

  “Uh-huh, yeah, okay,” Bella muttered under her breath. As she disappeared at the end of the hallway into the Black Room, Fiona turned to Autumn and me.

  “Not that it really matters, I guess. If they want an Asian mistress, they want an Asian mistress, shoes or no shoes.”

  “Or horrific shoes.” Autumn cracked her knuckles against the hip of her corset.

  A minute later, Bella emerged from the Black Room and shuffled away toward the kitchen.

  “You’re up, Justine,” said Fiona.

  “Me?”

  “Knock him dead, sister.”

  I traced Bella’s path down the hallway, stumbling only once in my heels. Heart pounding, I opened the door and blinked, my eyes adjusting to lights dimmer than those of the hallway.

  “Hello.” The man’s voice came from the corner of the room. Squinting, I saw that he was seated in a tall wooden chair, adorned on its arms and legs with leather straps.

  “Oh, hello.” I strode over with what I hoped was an air of blasé confidence and put out my hand. “I’m Justine.”

  “Hello, Mistress. Nice firm handshake, I like that.”

  “My father told me never to trust a man with a weak handshake.”

  “I suppose the same goes for a beautiful wo
man.”

  Now, I’m not certain what I had expected. Toilet Timmy had been naked and kneeling during our introduction, as he’d already chosen me, sight unseen, as his mistress. I had figured that this client would be clothed, but also that his sexual druthers would be somehow more apparent. Instantly I felt embarrassed at my own ignorant dilettantism. Had I expected him to be a slobbering, greasy-haired lecher with a permanent hard-on, muttering uncontrollably about enemas and rubber masks? Sort of.

  “I’m Roger.”

  “It’s very nice to meet you, Roger.” Roger was sporting a well-tailored suit, a full head of not overly gelled hair, and a pleasant, if somewhat unmemorable, face. As we held our smiles and the comfortable pause became an uncomfortable silence, I realized he was waiting for me to speak.

  “Well, I’m new.”

  Roger kept smiling.

  “Oh?”

  “I mean, I’m still training. So I was wondering if I could, uh, assist on your session.”

  “Sure. Does that cost me any extra?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “Well then, count me in.” His smile returned, with an added solicitousness that made it obvious that he was now the senior in our exchange. Not that I had known what to do when the upper hand was mine, or even that it was mine, but I felt a twang of defiance at his subtle condescension. “Well, thanks.”

  “Thank you, Justine.”

  With nothing left to say, I turned and left the room, aware of his eyes on my back with every step. I had rarely experienced such explicit appraisal. Living as a woman in New York, you get the once-over a few hundred times a day, but not with the same entitlement as of someone who has paid for the pleasure.

  Autumn hopped up from the saggy white chair as I entered the dressing room.

  “What does he want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, didn’t you ask?”

  “No, it was weird.”

  “Yeah, you’ll get used to it. Did you ask if you could sit in?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine with him.”

  “Great, now let’s get this over with.”

  Autumn strode into the Black Room and strode out thirty seconds later, listing the necessary equipment to Fiona as she stepped into the office.

  “Latex enema, colon tube, Bardex, clamps, catheter, piercing needles, leather cuffs, and, um, diapers.”

  “That it?” Fiona punched the security code into the numbered pad beside her desk, unlocking the door that led to the supply closet where all the valuable equipment was stored. “All that and no dildos?” she asked while sifting through a basket full of rubber bladders.

  “And dildos.” Handing Autumn a handful of tubes, Fiona knelt in front of a dresser whose drawers had carefully hand-printed signs that read: small; medium; large & fists; plugs, beads, & vibrating. A dildo dresser.

  After hoisting her assigned box of personal supplies into her arms—each mistress had one whose contents included a box of rubber gloves, a tube of generic lubricant, a box of condoms (for dildos), and a varied assortment of clothespins, clamps, rope, man panties (manties!), and hoarded favorite house supplies—Autumn turned to me.

  “Give me ten minutes to get started, then come in and just follow my lead.”

  “Should I know anything else? What’s his fantasy?” “Don’t worry about it; it’ll be obvious.” I hoped so.

  “Come in!” After a few moments poised outside the door of the Black Room, listening to the rhythmic slap of what I assumed was her hand on some part of Roger’s body, I had given a tentative knock. The lights had been turned up, and this time it was Autumn seated in the pseudoelectrical chair. Roger was bent awkwardly over her knee, his tailored slacks around his ankles, his face flushed. He craned his neck to see me, peering around the slope of her calf. “What the fuck are you looking at, Roggie?” Autumn bellowed, and reached her right hand down to grab a handful of his coiffed hair. “Why don’t you keep your goddamn eyes in your head, huh? Your auntie has come over to help me discipline you, you little shit.”

  I was speechless, awed by the facility with which Autumn’s entire personality had shifted, disappearing beneath the sheath of her role. In her domme persona, even the subtle nuances of her personality were absent. The characteristics that almost instantly identify a person, those we like to believe cannot be erased at will, she had erased. The force with which she inhabited her body and the space around her, the way she spoke and gestured, had all been eradicated.

  “Noooooo!” Roger whined. “You’re not going to tell her what I did, are you?”

  “Would you like to hear what sort of trouble this little asshole has gone and gotten himself into now, Auntie?” Autumn raised her brows at me and smirked. It was as if she had lifted a veil with that smirk, revealed her personality to me from wherever she had folded it up and tucked it away to. Such is the disconcerting miracle of good acting; at its best it implicitly challenges our faith in who we are, who anyone is.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what he did, Auntie. This.” She whacked his rosy ass cheek for emphasis. “Little.” Whack. “Creep.” Whack. “Ate a bunch of garbage.” Whack. “A bunch of the sugary,” whack, “salty,” whack, “crap that he knows is forbidden.” Autumn winked at me as Roger flinched in anticipation of the whack that never came. She leaned over his back and hissed, “Don’t be such a drama queen, darling; your punishment hasn’t even begun yet.” Roger moaned, and I felt my lip curl involuntarily. The poised man whom I had introduced myself to a mere fifteen minutes ago had also disappeared, and with him, any advantage he may have held over my inexperience. “Have you ever seen such a despicable excuse for a man, Auntie Justine?”

  “I have not.” And at that moment, I wasn’t sure I had.

  “And have you any idea what the punishment for this sort of misbehavior is?”

  “Well, I’m guessing it includes a spanking.”

  “Yes, a spanking, and a great big enema. Little Roger here knows all about his problems with constipation, and yet still, still he cannot seem to control his piggy urges.”

  “No self-control at all, I see.”

  “None to speak of, Auntie.”

  “I’m sorry, Mommy! Please don’t give me a great big enema to clean out my bum!”

  How could I not laugh? Instinctively I clapped my hand over my mouth in an effort to stifle the giggle. To my surprise, Autumn’s face broke out into a genuine grin, her face shedding its disguise completely as she clutched Roger’s back with her gloved hand and dissolved into unaffected laughter of her own. Composing herself, but still smiling, she tilted her head and began.

  “Auntie Justine—” She choked on another round of giggles, raising her brows at me while deepening her tone for an added note of cruelty. “Auntie Justine, it is a truly ridiculous sight, I agree. He is a joke of a man.” She abruptly looked down at Roger, wrinkling her nose. “Are you humping my leg, Roger, you little scum bucket?” Indeed, he appeared to be slowly grinding his hips against her stockinged thigh.

  “I’m sorry, Mommy; I can’t help it. You and Auntie were laughing at my dirty bum, and I got too excited.”

  Autumn sneezed with laughter once again and avoided my gaze to facilitate speaking. “You need to get the fuck off of Mommy now, Roger. If you want to hump my leg like a dirty little dog, that’s what we’ll have to treat you as.” She kicked him onto the floor, where he knelt on all fours, pants still around his knees. His Ralph Lauren boxer briefs remained pulled down just enough to reveal her crimson handprints on his bare behind, an obvious pup tent pitched between his legs. Striding over to the four-poster bed fitted with black leather, a matching hammock swing strung to its posts with heavy chains, Autumn reached into the open box on the bed and pulled out a black dildo the width of my wrist. Lifting the menacing hunk of rubber over her head, she flung it across the room, where it slapped the wall like a fish and bounced crudely onto the Oriental rug. She smiled and turned her gaze to the kneeling Roger. “Fetch, you motherfuck
er!”

  Half an hour later, Autumn walked Roger back out the complicated series of doors leading to the elevator, and I could hear his professions of gratitude as they passed the dressing room door. When she returned, Autumn pulled a crisp fifty-dollar bill out of her bra and handed it to me.

  “Here, you earned it just for sitting in that room after he released his enema. I mean, not that it’s ever pleasant, but that was exceptional.”

  “I guess that’s good news.” I stared at the fifty. “But you don’t have to give me that. It’s two-thirds of what you’re making, and I definitely didn’t do two-thirds of the work you did.”

  “I know I don’t have to give it to you; just take it.” I took it.

  At 1:30 in the morning, after the four of us had cleaned the kitchen, stocked towels in the bathrooms, vacuumed the rugs, and thrown the orphan shoes and articles of clothing behind the couch in the dressing room, we piled into the elevator with the massive black garbage bag from all the day’s sessions. Fiona explained that we had to drag the trash around the corner and deposit it on 39th Street, to avoid the suspicious proprietor of the tiny twenty-four-hour deli next door.

  “He thinks we’re whores,” Autumn explained. “Just try getting change for any bill bigger than a twenty. He’ll look at you like he can smell the semen in your panties.”

  Fiona laughed.

  “We’ll take it, Fiona.” Autumn took the garbage bag from her and turned to me. “You’re going to the F train with me, right?”

  “I am.”

  Fiona raised her hand and stepped into the street.

  “Okay, I’m gonna grab a cab here then. I’ll see you ladies tomorrow?”

  We nodded and waved as she flagged a cab and headed uptown. As I reached for the knotted neck of the garbage, Autumn shouted to Bella, who was scurrying downtown, the back of her dark head already disappearing into the slippery shadows of the avenue.

  “Bye, Bella!”

  The lift of Bella’s hand could have been a wave, a dismissal, or only a change in pace. Autumn shook her head. “It takes all kinds.”