Our conversation on the train was easy. Her fresh-scrubbed face seemed already familiar, and I felt myself ease into the comfort of new friendship. I found it difficult to imagine the woman beside me spitting on and slapping the face of a man while he shat, though I had just seen it.
We hugged good-bye at the Union Square station, where she transferred to head to hip Williamsburg and I continued on to Bed-Stuy. Listening to my headphones for the following thirty-minute ride home, I studied my own reflection in the train window and the dark tunnel behind it. I could not have articulated anything other than the glow of hope, throbbing like a vague, sweet ache in my limbs.
7
AFTER THOSE FIRST NIGHTS, I mostly worked the day shift. Sensual sessions intimidated me less, and daytime clients wanted them. I adjusted quickly to my new routine. Four mornings a week, I’d pack up my schoolbooks and leave the apartment by 9:00. I loved the subway ride from Bed-Stuy, chicken bones rolling across the subway car’s floor as the C train’s ungreased wheels shrieked the forty minutes to West 4th Street, where I transferred to the F. Squeezed between the hips and elbows and briefcases of the late-morning crowd on their way to work at 9:30 a.m., I loved passing as one of them while knowing I wasn’t. I loved the hard glare of sunlight reflected off car windows and dark sunglasses as the weather grew colder, my cheeks prickling as I climbed up out of the Herald Square train station.
Each of those mornings that I worked was the same: the same train ride, the same crush of grimly purposeful bodies carrying me up the steps to where the cold splashed my face and excitement gently writhed below my diaphragm. They knew me by name (Justine!) at the café where I bought my morning coffee and peach bran muffin. Midtown is lousy with places just like this one: shiny tiled floors and smiling immigrant workers behind polished glass display counters bearing baked goods, create-your-own-salad stations, and hot pressed paninis that look a lot better than they taste. Inevitably you get stuck in line behind the guy who pulls a crumpled envelope out of his paint-splattered pocket that has all the orders for the whole crew of the construction site across the street, or the woman whose latte cannot be got right: it’s vanilla when she wanted hazelnut, skim when she wanted soy, foam when she wanted less foam. These assholes I loved, too; they made me privy to the kind of adulthood (sighing, hurrying, heeled) that I admired, in the childish way I still enjoy writing checks and parallel parking, but could not stomach actually experiencing. It was playing at a role that I wasn’t sure I believed in and was fairly certain I wasn’t qualified for. Passing through the realms of normal folk and clutching a secret. At this I was already an expert.
Coffee and muffin in hand, I would make my way across Sixth Avenue, dodging bike couriers and the less agile café deliverymen on their battered mountain bikes with wide, shallow baskets and naked handlebars. It wasn’t uncommon that I’d run into one of my bleary-eyed coworkers as I approached the building whose second floor housed the dungeon. Poking my tongue out at the intercom above the doorbells where the tiny eye of a camera led straight up to Fiona’s desk, I would wait for her to buzz us in. Also in our building was a nursing school (a laughable coincidence), a soon-to-fail yoga studio, and sundry other offices, the employees of which were indistinguishable from one another. It was never clear how much the denizens of the other floors actually knew about us. Suspicion was probably as far as their thoughts ever got on the subject, as Remy, the manager of the dungeon, ran a fastidiously tight ship so far as discretion was concerned. If a new domme carelessly happened to fetch her food delivery in a pair of fishnets and a robe, it was the last delivery ever dispatched to us from that place. Still, that suspicion was sometimes apparent when you got stuck on the elevator in mixed company. God forbid you fail to recognize a client and end up sharing the elevator with him.
After Fiona came to retrieve me from the vestibule between the elevator and the first set of doors, we made our way back in through the following two, which magnetically locked. I would follow her into the office to check the appointment book. Then it was a stop in the dressing room to say hello and drop off my belongings; the bathroom to wash my hands and, depending on if I had an appointment or not, pee; and finally the kitchen to stick my lunch in the fridge (I packed it from home regularly in the beginning). I would pick the peaches out of my muffin to eat first and smoke a cigarette with my coffee before putting my makeup on. I loved this routine as well. The morning chitchat in the kitchen, the opening doors, chores, and ringing phones, were all a soothing version of a work ritual that would have been much less enjoyable if they were a preamble to sitting at a desk.
Due to the clients’ time constraints and the brisk efficacy with which the day crowd satisfied their perversions, day sessions were more often by individual appointment than the meet-and-greet, mistress-à-la-carte parade. Clients of this particular stripe attracted mistresses of an according one. Businesslike mistresses serviced the businessmen, women who had a straight-job cover to maintain, who took their calls in the bathroom so that their boyfriends wouldn’t hear the shouted conversation about dildos and bondage. “Lifestyle” dommes rarely worked the day shift: women who wore their domme personas to nightclubs, kept personal slaves (for bathroom scrubbing, luggage carrying, and other domestic uses), gave public performances, and carried on purportedly congruent personal sex lives. No, the extraordinarily grotesque or obscure fetishist did not excite the day-shifters the way he did the night-, unless he was also an extraordinarily generous tipper.
The day shift paid heed to details like the high volume of thirty-minute sessions during the early afternoon, which, at 50 bucks a pop, paid more for your time and required far less of it endured with a single client. These half-hour sessions were frustrating to lifestyle dommes, who disliked them for the very reasons the others preferred them. It was explained to me early on by Anna, the statuesque Russian veteran (she had been at the dungeon for three years at the time that I started) with the inexorably perky breasts, flat stomach, and husky accent, that if I spent a good long time tying and untying the client and talking a lot, I could easily shave fifteen minutes off of a session. A thirty-minute enema session was Anna’s ideal: these clients spent most of it in the bathroom, leaving barely enough time to assume their preferred ejaculation position (legs suspended over head to target mouth and face, crouched over Dixie cup, et cetera), ejaculate (this was never required but more common than not), and run back to the office.
Mistresses like Anna relied on a lot of hand jobs, which were the easiest way to control how quickly your session ended and to ensure that your client would return despite being cheated out of his full time. I didn’t see Anna as necessarily lacking the integrity of other dommes, who refused to stoop to hand jobs. It was all the same to her. The difference lay less in boundaries than value systems. To believe that it is a drastically more degrading act to jerk someone off than to shove your arm up his ass is, in a sense, to believe in the entire premise of the thing. It is to believe that subjugation resides in the submissive nature of an act, rather than the sexual. But if the fisted client desires that fist as much as another desires a hand job, how is submitting to one desire any more powerful than the other? And yet most sessions—if not all—were based on such paradigms, so many being a kind of inversion of misogyny, the subjugation of women reenacted by men on themselves. Our clients wanted to be dressed in women’s clothing and raped, molested, infantilized, humiliated, and physically abused. Did this kind of mimicry reinforce or subvert the power of these paradigms? The rationales and moral codes of the dungeon were complex beyond my comprehension, though I was promised by those most committed to it that its logic was steady. For a long time, the apparent inconsistencies did not concern me. I was too infatuated with my new life.
The simplest explanation is that this was the brightest time. This was the time when it was all too new to be understood, when its meaning was not yet even suspected, or speculated upon. In that first fall, I was in the manic flight of a change. Luminous with an a
ura of new, my excitement, the high of it, was distinctly reminiscent of countless shifts I had made in the past. I’d brokered deals with myself to exchange a thing that had lost its power and become banal or frightening for a newer version. I had traded and abandoned lovers in this manner, best friends, mood-altering substances. With each there was always this brightest part: the narrow edge between the exhilaration of the new and its descent into corruption, mundanity, or the sort of wildness that is less likely to sweep you off your feet than to crush you. Here the comfort of routine that other people seemed able to sustain was briefly attainable. On this peak, beyond the reach of both what came before and what was sure to follow, I was not only happy; I was also invincible.
Part Two
8
I STILL HAVE the first photographs taken of me at the dungeon. My building a clientele depended on publicity, I was told, and pictures were needed for the dungeon’s Web site (an impressive spectacle itself). They also ran in the pages of local fetish magazines with our phone number emblazoned below my face. Within my second month of working, before I had even earned enough to purchase my own clothing, Fiona showed up one evening with a bag of cameras and commandeered the Red Room for an hour. At least the cost of her art school education was getting put to use, she claimed, which was more than could be said for most.
The first photo they published was a full body shot, in profile, with my face turned toward the camera. Propped on a large wooden chest, I have one heeled foot on the floor, the other leg dangling over the edge of the chest. Without stockings, my legs are painfully bare. I would not say this while observing a recent, bare-legged photo of myself, but my self-consciousness of that day returns so clearly to me now that I cannot help seeing the picture through the lens of that memory. I might never have felt so naked before. I had to borrow clothing, and the tiny hot pants left the bottom of my ass exposed, while the strapless bustier must have been two cup sizes too small. My mother frequently commented back then that my dyed-black Betty Page haircut looked like a wig, and I agree now more than ever. If I did not remember the night so vividly, I might not recognize myself. My hair is natural now, a brown so light that it shocked me after the years of black, my face leaner, and my eyes open in a way that makes those in that old photo impenetrable by comparison, even in their stark innocence. It was in my innocence that I had so much to hide.
In the grainy version that ran for months in the fetish magazines, you could not make out one detail that I can see now on the disc I have of the whole roll. In the crook of the arm that braces me against the trunk is a shadowy smear. It is of both the mismatched makeup that I used to apply there and the bruise that it was meant to conceal. Perhaps no one noticed on those night shifts my elbow’s mismatched inside or that I carried my purse into the bathroom before many sessions and emerged with a voice an octave deeper and the pupils of someone poised beneath a floodlight. I might have been as good at my hiding as I thought I was. But when I think back, it is more likely that I confused ignorance with apathy. I underestimated the wisdom of my witnesses, who could see the futility of intervention, that my course was inobstructible.
If the day shift was the office, with its comforting predictability and gossip traded at the watercooler, then the night shift was a sleepover party, a persona parade under whose playful atmosphere lay a scrupulous network of social politics and pathology. Here were the women for whom the job was not a substitute for an imminent, socially acceptable one. Here were the new girls: the coeds not yet out of their teenage rebellious phase. To them the job was a badge of cool, congruent with their recently acquired taste for nonconformity. They rarely stayed long, usually a maximum of six months. Here were the ex– strippers and escorts, girls from Harlem and the Bronx, neither prepared for nor satisfied with the cut in pay and increase in labor (of a certain kind). The majority of them quit or were bullied out within six months as well. But the demographic that most interested me among the night-shifters was the “lifestyle” dommes. Predominantly college educated, they capitalized all words referring to themselves and other mistresses (She, Me, Mistress, Her, We) and required it from their clients (You). They posted regularly not only from the computer in the office on our Web site’s official forum but also on various other S&M community boards, both locally and nationally based. They attended and organized seminars, conferences, parties, and performances, taking pride in their work, so that it became craft. Dominatrices certainly come in the “sluts with whips” variety. This was actually an unfortunate nickname that our dungeon garnered among the serious New York dominatrix community. The name referred to our allegedly liberal hand-job practice, though I doubt we were any more guilty of it than any other dungeon, just looser lipped and less concerned—the day shift at least. The spectrum of domming is broad, with strippers in fishnets at one end and women like Lena at the other.
If anyone was my mentor (Autumn aside, as she and I so quickly became friends and equals), it was Lena. In those first months she was an idol, a larger-than-life symbol of what I thought the job could be; she seemed to exercise real power. My first sight of her was in the dressing room, as I arrived for the night shift. The mountain bike she rode from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, was parked in the hallway, shining beneath the wall sconces, as out of place as a cell phone in a period film. She stood fully nude before the mirrored lockers, dark curls dripping water onto her full breasts and down her tattooed back as she patted handfuls of baby powder between her legs.
“Hey, Ma,” she greeted my reflection. “Just shaved. Keeps it dry, no ingrowns. Antiperspirant works, too, but who wants to smear aluminum on their pussy, right?”
I was a goner. Mouth agape, I would watch her verbally humiliate her clients with a semi-automatic mouth, punctuating insults with a hand just as fast across their faces. That first night, I watched her terrorize a man until a pool of urine formed on the floor between his feet. He nearly wept when thanking her as she walked him out to the elevator, tucking two hundreds into her broad hand. She taught me how to chalk the ends of my bullwhips and floggers so that I could practice hitting a mark from three yards away, and tricks such as, when being fellated by a slave, to announce that you’re about to come while yanking his head off the strap-on by the hair and spitting in his face. I saw her fuck them like a man. Lena never took her clothes off, or gave hand jobs. She was meticulously clean, exact in all her methods. Each of her sessions was a complete narrative, a performance unto itself; she would no sooner have cut a session short than take one that didn’t interest her. Her slaves were utterly devoted, and despite (or perhaps because of) her brutality, there seemed to exist a genuine regard between her and them. I discovered years later that she made $85 a session instead of $75 like the rest of us. She raked in the money, sometimes pulling five or six sessions a shift ($85 × 6 = $510 per day, which doesn’t include tips, ranging anywhere between $20 and $500 per session). Lena made her own schedule, and never got any flak from Remy.
As Justine, I still worked hard to hide my insecurity in sessions, sticking to sensual sessions, though their predictable scenarios and the pressure from those clients to give more than I wanted wore on me. Outside of the dungeon, however, I might as well have been Lena.
I had never liked parties. Even as a child, I tended to form intense, one-on-one relationships, rather than groups of friends. Unless there was dancing, I didn’t see the point of hanging out in a large group, which made it impossible to connect with any single person and triggered a shyness that I liked to hide. I also typically wanted to get so high that public locations were impractical. At a party, I might have to share my drugs, or talk to someone who’d care that I’d forgotten how my legs worked.
After a few months of working at the dungeon, however, my interest in social events spiked. I now had the power to hijack any conversation, to commandeer the attention of however many people were within earshot at any given moment. As far as I could tell, no one was immune to the curiosity that the phrase “I’m a professional domin
atrix” provoked. I lolled happily in the silence that followed uttering it, knowing the torrent of questions that would follow, the shine of eyes that saw me suddenly new. Knowing that I was likely the sole spokesperson for a subculture most people would never experience imbued me with a confidence I otherwise lacked. I was the reigning expert, the beautiful geek, and I loved their shock at how normal I seemed, how unlike what they would have imagined. With this ace in my pocket, parties became fun. Whether I pulled it out or not, I still had its power, and took comfort in worrying it like a lucky stone.
On Halloween, Rebecca and I went to a party in DUMBO—an up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhood full of industrial lofts and brick streets—where I was supposed to meet a date. With a vile of cocaine, three bags of heroin, and a disposable syringe folded in a sock that I had tucked in an inside pocket of my purse, I convinced my roommate to take a cab, and had her laughing the whole way there. The giddiness of anticipation always made me funny. I had her in stitches with my description of Gene, the “Sweater Man,” who brought a duffel bag to the dungeon every week, full of knitted clothing. He liked to be completely swathed in sweaters: sweater socks, sweater underpants, sweater mittens, sweater hats, sweater trousers, sweater masks. When he had nary an inch of naked skin bared, I’d immobilize him with rope bondage. That, really, was it. He liked to be tickled sometimes, while bound and sweater mummified, but really, just being sweaty, sweatered, and bound was enough for him. I could just hang out in the room while he gently writhed and cooed in his fuzzy cocoon. Gene made for an ideal anecdote: ridiculous and benign. I also wanted to distract Rebecca from any nervousness I might exhibit in omitting the fact that I had a purse full of drugs. I had become more comfortable omitting things from her, though I suspected she knew more than I told her. We both felt the distance my lies created, and with increasing frequency I would catch her looking at me with worried eyes. Sometimes I’d meet her gaze, in a fleeting moment of defiance, but more often I’d evade her. She hadn’t yet had the courage or the opportunity to voice concern.
Whip Smart: A Memoir Page 6