Whip Smart: A Memoir

by Melissa Febos

Lena didn’t look like a boy. She didn’t act like a girl, either. I wasn’t sure how big of an act hers was, and didn’t much care, as it was as good as or better than any of mine. It was nice to be convinced for once. Smelling of baby powder and musky perfume, she would walk up behind me and squeeze my waist with both of her hands, her breath on my neck, or reach across my chest to grasp my chin in her hand, turning my head to face her.

  She would crawl under the blanket with me as I napped on the couch in Cross-Dressing, and we would faux-sleep, or half-sleep, in a sweaty knot of limbs, rising an hour later exhausted by the attention to every muscular twitch, every shifted hand or hip or breast, every consciously measured breath. Women do know better, that this is often the sweetest part, and how to make it last.

  After an instruction session she had given to a group of new recruits, she finally invited me out for a drink. I had played teacher’s pet while she listed safety measures (always ask if a client takes Viagra before using Rush—the inhalant amyl nitrite, or “poppers”—as the combination causes seizure) and legal concerns (always make a new client insert the enema tube into himself). Choosing me as a model, she demonstrated bondage techniques and how to operate the rooms’ various mechanisms (Catherine wheel, stocks, ceiling suspension, et cetera). The new hires giggled nervously when, following tips on anal play, including how to fasten an adjustable strap-on harness, what to wear (always a condom, no fancy corsets; keep a pair of rubber or plastic hot pants available for easy post-session cleaning), and how to carry forth based on the client’s fantasy (lesbian sex-slave fantasy = easy does it; rape fantasy = not so easy), Lena announced that she was going to demonstrate on someone, say, Justine. After a long pause, she and I meeting eyes while the rest of the room tittered, she announced she was kidding, “kidding! Don’t look so scared.”

  11

  DECEMBER CAME FAST. When Fiona phoned about my first session with Elie, it was one of those afternoons whose cold is clean. Everything was fine and sharp, as if hewn by the hard sunlight—the trees, the tidy row houses, and the faces bobbing past me down the sidewalk. Between school, work, and everything else, my double life felt more like three or four, and I joked about needing a personal assistant. Fiona would often call if a favored client wanted to schedule an appointment on a day I wasn’t in, or if she booked a session for which I’d need to prepare beforehand (by drinking extra liquids, or wearing the same socks for a few days). Though I had only just left a class whose final paper was due that coming weekend, I agreed to come in at 9:00 p.m. and stay for what promised to be at least a three-hour session.

  “He asked for you specifically, Justine; have you seen him before?”

  “No, I just went in for a tip on Lena’s session the last time he was here.”

  “But you know what he’s into? Lots of nipple work. His supplies are in the office closet with his name on the suitcase. It’s a pretty corporal gig.”

  “That’s what I’m counting on.” And I was. But three and probably more like four or five hours was a long time to torture somebody. I would have to get some supplies of my own. After I hung up with Fiona, I paged a number from memory and took the West 4th subway stairs two at a time.

  When I got off the train in Bed-Stuy, my little red phone was humming and blinking with a new voice mail. I dialed my code and a round, buttery baritone rolled out of the tiny speaker: “You page me? I be up round Eastern Parkway and Bedford in ’bout one hour. I got you covered, girl.”

  The flutter I felt in my chest, the sharpness of sound and light in that state of anticipation, I now recognize as a form of anxiety. The memory of that excitement is a bodily one, and when I recall it so do my hands, the small of my back, my chest and belly. It is the peak of the roller coaster, after the benign clatter uphill, but before the terrible fall.

  Christmas was coming. The churches on my block had hung their wreaths and strung the trees outside with blinking lights. As the last sliver of sun was eclipsed by the rooftops, I huffed breath on my hands and squinted down Franklin Avenue for the bus. I had four twenties and a MetroCard tucked in my bra. As it groaned up to the curb, I hurried into the warmth of the #48 and sank into a seat by the window, my belly flipping like it did before a first kiss. It would only get worse until I didn’t have to feel anything.

  Eastern Parkway passes the northern tip of Prospect Park and heads east toward Brownsville and East New York. It is flanked on either side by a tree-lined promenade. Kevin wasn’t hard to find, though as he walked up the sidewalk toward me I could easily have mistaken him for a man twice his size. Kevin carried enough merchandise on his body to open a kiosk: watches, jewelry, clothing, single-serving bags of nuts (cashews or almonds, roasted and un-salted), various herbal teas, bottled beverages, telephones, disposable cameras, cartons of Newport cigarettes, pipes, hair picks, and drugs.

  It was night, but just barely, by the time Kevin and I finished our stroll down the promenade and he handed me a folded square of tinfoil. The sky was that royal blue that doesn’t happen every night and, when it does, lasts only for a few minutes. The trees that lined the walkway reached over our heads, and with that luminous blue wrapped so tightly around me I felt that I could have reached my arm up and sunk a finger into it. To have something in your pocket is sometimes even better than having it in your blood.

  I rode the train back into the city straight after meeting Kevin. It being a Friday, people crowded the subway on their way out for the evening, their faces fresh and hopeful. I knew I looked like them: students in trendy sneakers, slouchy jeans, and hooded sweatshirts. The disparity between how I looked and how I felt, indeed who I felt like, had long been a source of pleasure. Knowing the difference between where they were going and where I was going still had its sweetness, but the distance had grown further than ever. For a moment, as I was pressed against all those buzzing bodies who had nothing to hide, panic fluttered in my chest. The rush of wind outside the train crescendoed, the squeal of metal wheels on the track piercing. I had a fleeting vision of my body being sucked out of the train’s car, swallowed into the black intestine of the tunnel. Cupping my hand over my mouth, I whispered my own name. I’d picked this habit up around the time I’d picked up hard drugs, in my late teens. “Melissa.” In my name lay the memories of everything I’d ever been before this, before I’d ever carried drugs in my pockets, or gone to places where no one I knew could have found me, even if I’d wanted them to. It served as a password to an internal control group: a part of me that could not be cut loose. The other side of anchorlessness, and the perfect detachment of the high, and the secrecy, was a terror in isolation, a pure and senseless fear that could strike without warning, though it didn’t often.

  I took a few deep breaths. Stepping off the train at 34th Street, I told myself that it was natural to be nervous about the session. Walking up the subway stairs toward the street, I thought of the class I’d had that morning. We had discussed a Rita Dove poem about the goddess Demeter, her fury at her daughter Persephone’s kidnapping. The mystery is, you can eat fear … and become a queen whom nothing surprises. As the meaning of Dove’s lines emerged in our class discussion, I’d felt the same swell of excitement that I had as a kid, watching from the deck of a boat as the backs of whales crested above the ocean’s surface. I’d left class light-footed, my thoughts fleet and electric, matching the crisp winter smells and the cheerful hurry of the sidewalk. Walking along the perimeter of Washington Square Park, I passed the windows of some dorms and saw students in the common rooms. They sat curled in over-stuffed couches with books, mugs, and earnest faces. Without warning, I had ached inside. A part of me belonged there, and sometimes I could feel how I was killing it; I could feel its deprivation in me like a great, sucking wind, an inverted scream. A part of me wanted to be good, to believe that I inherently was, and that everything would be okay, in warm places without secrets or the endless craving that drove me outside at night to fill a hole that was never full. But my craving was real, not only for drugs b
ut also for things that could only exist in the limitless world outside those cozy windows. I knew I’d have to quiet some other inconsolable part of myself to live in that safe world and wasn’t at all certain that I could, even if I’d wanted to.

  Most of the time, my lifestyle felt like a choice I had made, because I was smarter, more complicated, terminally unique. But not always, and in these other moments when it felt like a bondage to something I didn’t believe in I was choked with envy.

  Corporal sessions are named for their distinguishing element: corporal punishment. These sessions may or may not include sensual aspects, role-play, cross-dressing (i.e., feminization or forced feminization), and even switching—where the domme takes at turn at being submissive—but they always include a hearty dose of violence. In retrospect, the word connotes beatings: flogging, whipping, slapping, spanking, kicking, paddling, and so on, although the term was also used to describe sessions of a more precise violence, like Elie’s. It seems odd now, but I can’t remember the word “torture” being used very often, though that’s what it was.

  By the time I arrived in Midtown for my session, the office grunts and tourists had already been replaced by clubgoers in their leather, hair product, and sunglasses. Women with blown-out highlights shivered outside the twenty-four-hour deli, smoking and casting sidelong glances at their reflections in the windows. At this early hour, the Garment District still showed life, but by the time I left it would be a wasteland of locked storefront grates and concrete broken only by steaming manholes and the whiz of cars.

  Elie could easily have blended into the early-evening demographic, with his combed black hair and Mediterranean complexion. His jacket was leather, designer, his Gauloises ever present, though as a Frenchman he would never do anything so crass as wear sunglasses after dark. He was early that night, as I would come to expect from him, and I hung back beside the newspaper stand outside the deli while he rang the buzzer and was let in. Shoulders hunched, he pinched his cigarette and sucked it down to the filter before ringing the bell, shifting his gaze around the street, behaving exactly the way I had trained myself not to while buying drugs.

  I waited a minute or two, then followed him inside.

  Knowing the session would require dexterity, I decided to forgo the elbow-length gloves that I usually wore on nights I was using. In the bathroom, I waited until the angry red spot inside my elbow stopped beading with blood to smear makeup over it. I had missed the shot slightly, and my elbow went numb and tingly as the cocaine seeped through the tiny blood vessels under my skin.

  The beautiful thing about heroin is that it eradicates fear. It’s hard to know how much of it you suffer from until you experience total freedom from it. Most of the buzzing, the anxiety, the ticker tape that streamed ceaselessly through my mind, was motored by fear. What’s going to happen, how can I control it, what can go wrong, what has already gone wrong, how can I fix it, what if I can’t fix it, what if I’m not good enough, what if nobody else is, what if there is no use in anything, and so on, ad infinitum. Heroin pulls the plug on that. Imagine the quiet! The paradox of narcotics is that while they allow you to experience the present moment painlessly, the plug is still pulled, and so you are numb to it; nothing sinks in. The joy of the high never lasts longer than your drugs. It can make you feel as if everything is okay, but it can’t make it true. While the bliss of a heroin high has a lot in common with the sense of well-being that years of meditation can give you, narcotic serenity is spiritually toxic. It’s Sweet’n Low, fucking a prostitute, and cheating on anything (except maybe your taxes); it makes life less tolerable, not more.

  So take the empty palate that heroin makes of your consciousness and splatter it with mania. Cocaine is drive. I’ve witnessed the mania of bipolar people, and the first thing that always strikes me is how identical it is to a cocaine high. It is grandiose, marveling, indiscriminate, tireless, and then suspicious, paranoid, angry, psychotic, debilitated. Heroin subtracts all the ugly parts. That’s why I shot speedballs. The feeling of both well-being and ecstatic mania flooding your bloodstream is unparalleled. I become so agitated even writing about it, years after the last time I experienced it, that I have to make cup after cup of tea and start praying that the phone will ring. There is a retroactive fear that is slow to wane.

  Though I had watched a number of Lena’s and Autumn’s corporal sessions, which were heavy on verbal humiliation and torture, I had still been nervous to take them myself and found it difficult to imagine punishment coming as naturally to me as it seemed it did to them. But everything feels natural when you’re high.

  “He’s in Med Three,” Jordan told me as I walked into the office. “And he booked both you and Camille.”

  “Camille? Excellent. Is his stuff—”

  “It’s on your box.”

  I carried my box into the dressing room and dug through the black garbage bag on top of it until I found the aprons. Shiny and black, Elie’s butcher aprons were straight out of a horror movie. They reached our shins, were adorned with wide pockets at the hips, and he couldn’t session without them. He once ran out of the dungeon in a tantrum because they had been lost somewhere in the rubble of the office supply closet. I hung one around my neck and cinched it tight around the waist of my zippered white nurse dress. Walking up to my reflection, I reached into my locker and pulled out a tube of lipstick. Adding a coat, I smacked my lips together, leaned in to check out my eyes, and stepped back to make sure my arm didn’t look like it had a botched fake tan. Assured, I grabbed another apron and headed into the smaller dressing room to see if Camille was ready.

  Though Camille had only been hired a few months before me, it was difficult to imagine her doing anything else. With endless legs and a faint twang of Jersey in her gossamer voice, she collected vintage lingerie and already had one of the largest wardrobes in the house, full of genuine nurse, schoolmarm, and military uniforms. She had a dancer’s body, not only in proportion but also in that mesmerizing agility that never becomes tiresome to look at. She smoked Benson & Hedges, cut her hamburgers with a fork and knife, and was the only domme I had met who was an admitted submissive, though never with her clients at the dungeon. Hers was the only affected girliness I’ve ever encountered that I didn’t find insufferable. She lounged around the dungeon reading BDSM-themed books, from intellectual highbrow to pictoral how-to, and was always asking if she could practice some new bondage technique on you. “Ooohhhh! Isn’t that beautiful!” she’d coo after you were trussed on the rug with your arms bent like wings behind you.

  “Ready, Freddy?” I threw the apron at her.

  She sighed and crinkled her smooth, white forehead. “He really is quite perverted, isn’t he, Justine?”

  “Oh, quite.”

  “I’m really looking forward to this.” Camille had some connection to London, a parent who lived there or had lived there. It was enough to justify the accent that also sometimes crept into her speech, apparently—and something else that only on her person did I not find pathetic and irritating. She stared dreamily at her own reflection and made an imperceptible adjustment to the nurse cap alighted on her coiffed head. “It’s from the sixties,” she sighed. “I got it on eBay.”

  We made certain to walk heavily down the hallway, knowing how the click-clack of heels frightened the Frenchman, in a good way.

  “Hello, darling,” I greeted him. He stood in the largest of the three medical rooms, ashing his cigarette into the sink beside the steel cabinet that held most of our scopes, probes, pinchers, and other instruments that looked as cruel as they sounded. I saw that he had removed a pinwheel (like flatware with a tiny wheel at the end decorated with spikes) and some long-handled clamps and laid them on the stand beside the adjustable table.

  “Oh! You are so beautiful, just as I remembered.” His voice, thick with his native French, trembled slightly, as did his hands. He stepped forward and then back, sucking vigorously on the lit cigarette.

  “Of course we are. N
ow come say hello,” I demanded. He scurried forward and kissed both of my cheeks, then Camille’s.

  “Are you due for some punishment?” Camille asked him. While thorough and enthusiastic in her techniques, Camille didn’t like to talk much in her sessions, and I could see that it made her nervous.

  “I am.” He looked so forlorn, and said it with such dismay, that were I not buffered by the drugs, I would have stumbled over my next words.

  “Well then, it’s time for you to put your apron on and let us worry about the next few hours; they are not your concern.” It was with a kind of relief that he then stripped off his tailored suit and folded it neatly on the stool beside him.

  I have always known what people want from me. This skill played a large part in my success as a dominatrix. That is essentially the job description: know what your client wants, and indulge or deny as prescribed. Of course, it’s a more delicate operation than it sounds. And being high didn’t hurt, as the quieter your own mind can be, the better to hear theirs. I could already see Elie’s craving for maternal reassurance; he wanted to be told exactly what to do, albeit within specifications, not all spoken. A tall order, and a common one.

  He let us tie his own black apron around his slender waist and guide him into the chair, which we reclined, and we firmly tied his feet to the stirrups, his hands behind the headrest.

  It is too taxing to maintain strict character for the duration of a four-hour session. You end up slipping in and out of character (“out of character” not being yourself but rather a low-gear version of your domme persona), revving up at the client’s cue, and giving him a rest when necessary. This improvisation requires a close attention to subtle tonal shifts in his responses and facial expressions. There is never anything so obvious as an “okay, let’s get back to business, ladies.” Many new dommes sour their business by being overzealous and not knowing how to discern when is enough. And so, after a slow crescendo that began with bondage (fishing line skillfully knotted around his nipples and strung to the great mobile lamp overhead) and ended with “fire-and-ice” (cigarettes and cubes from the kitchen freezer), we settled down into easy conversation and the slow process of emptying his bladder into a glass jar with a catheter.