Whip Smart: A Memoir

by Melissa Febos

  “Now, here you’re going to feel some pressure as it perforates the bladder.” Elie moaned and squeezed his eyes shut. “There we go. Not so bad, was it?” I smiled down at him in perfect nursey condescension. He shook his head childishly. I left Camille holding the jar to go fix again in the bathroom.

  On my return, a conversation ensued in which we learned of his deathly fear of water, due to an episode of maternal negligence at the shore during his childhood.

  “Oh yes, I remember the fear of death vividly; even now I do. I have tried many times to swim, and every time it returns to me, just as it was that day when I was a boy. I cannot even take baths. It’s very sad, I know.”

  Even at this early stage in my domme career I knew that nothing ever gets said carelessly in session. Camille knew the same. After she pierced his nipples while I held Saran Wrap over his face, we fed him a Dixie cup of water and stepped into the hallway.

  “I have an idea,” she whispered.

  We found a large plastic tub in the closet where the cleaning supplies were kept. While she released him from the chair and blindfolded him, I filled it with cold water from the shower in the neighboring bathroom (the Green Bathroom—also where I had been fixing). Leaving it on the floor of the shower, I returned to Med 3. Elie was now standing, naked, still trembling slightly, though now it was probably less nerves and more adrenaline from the pain he’d just withstood. Hardened tears of wax and their paths down his chest clung to his goose-pimpled skin, his swollen nipples. He reached his arms out gently and Camille guided them behind his back to tie his wrists together.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked.

  “That’s not for you to worry about, now is it?” I said. “It wouldn’t do any good anyway, would it?”

  He shook his head.

  We cautiously led him down the hallway and into the bathroom.

  “It’s cold in here, Mistress.”

  “You need to shut up now, darling. Nobody’s wants to hear a whiner, do they?”

  He shook his blindfolded head.

  “Now you get down on your knees for us.” Camille pressed on his shoulders from behind. In her heels, she was taller than him by two inches. He sank to the floor, trembling more violently now. I inched the tub closer to the edge of the shower, until it was just below him, waist high. He whimpered. Crouched on either side of him, Camille and I each placed a hand on the back of his shoulders, and his head. We silently counted together, one, two, three, and plunged his head into the bucket. The jolt that went through Elie’s body was first one of sheer physical shock, as if he were being electrocuted. Then the terror shook him. A flash of something crossed Camille’s face—the ripple of wind on a lake’s surface—as he arched his back and bucked under our hands, but her expression resumed its placidity as her eyes met mine and said, Now? I nodded. We lightened our grip and his head popped up, mouth gasping fishlike, water streaming down his cheeks into it. After a few noisy mouthfuls of air, mine and Camille’s eyes met again, one, two, three, and we pushed him back under the water. This time bubbles streamed up behind his ears and we could hear his submerged screams. His legs slid backward, bare knees slipping on the wet tile. We had planned to do three dunks but could tell we wouldn’t be able to hold him down another round. We released him again, and after a few ragged gasps his body crumpled over and he let out a mournful moan. The three of us sat on the floor, damp and shivering. Camille and I rubbed slow circles on Elie’s trembling back. Eventually we realized that he was weeping. Slow, wracking sobs, like fever chills, shook him for a long time. When they finally slowed, he pulled my hand under his body and pressed his mouth against it. At first he kissed my palm, wetting it with tears and mucus. Then I could feel his mouth moving, but it wasn’t until he looked up that I could hear him saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  . . .

  Years later, during my first therapy session, I had to explain to my therapist what a dominatrix was.

  “So, would you consider yourself a sadist?” she asked me, not a trace of judgment in her tone. I laughed. Of course I didn’t; the suggestion was absurd. I could barely watch someone get beaten on television, let alone on the street; I hid my eyes and plugged my ears when rabid dogs were shot in movies.

  But did I enjoy hurting people? Sometimes. But not simply for the sake of their physical pain. I couldn’t fathom hurting someone who didn’t want it, but how many people get to experience the moral loophole of hurting someone who wants to be hurt? I don’t know what it means that I enjoyed it, or what percent of the population would, if given the opportunity. But for someone so bent on mastering her given conditions, on inventing herself and her world in opposition to convention, it was an act of supreme defiance. As I had crouched on that bathroom floor, held that man’s head beneath the water, I experienced a kind of transcendence. It was that utter alienation from self, a loosening of the glue that made my reality whole. It felt both horrific and triumphant.

  Part Three

  12

  “ TEMPING?” my mother repeated. “But you’ve always hated office work.” She stirred her tea and squinted up at me. “I thought you were catering?”

  My brother stared at me over her head, waiting for my response. We stood in my mother’s kitchen, my brother and I leaning against opposite counters with my mother sitting at the table between us. She had asked about my financial situation, which I assured her was secure. He knew the truth, as he always did before either of our parents. My father—easy to avoid, as he was often halfway across the globe—was usually last to know. My brother was a friend, a friend with an unparalleled capacity for giving me the benefit of the doubt. In my shortsighted arrogance, I couldn’t foresee how I’d regret burdening him with my candor about so many things.

  “I kind of have a new job,” I said. “I’ve actually had it for a while.” This wasn’t the first time I’d broken unwelcome news to my mother, and while I knew how to keep an even tone, my stomach still fluttered. I wiped my palms on my jeans.

  “What?” She recognized that evenness of tone. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m a dominatrix.”

  She stared at me, her pretty face taut, practicing her own evenness.

  “Do you know what that is?” I asked her.

  “Kind of,” she said slowly. God, I hoped she couldn’t see through my calm as I could hers, and that what she saw beneath it didn’t make her heart clench as mine did.

  “I act out the role of a powerful, dominant woman. I tie men up, call them names, stuff like that. It’s like a kind of therapy, really,” I added, hoping to appeal to her therapist’s sensibility, “reen-acting childhood traumas.”

  She turned to my brother. “Did you know this?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t have sex with anyone, and I don’t take off my clothes,” I quickly added.

  “Is it safe?”

  “Of course!” I said. “Do you think I’d be doing it if it weren’t safe?”

  She just stared at me.

  “Haven’t I always taken care of myself?”

  She nodded, though I couldn’t read her face.

  “Don’t you trust me to make informed decisions? Hasn’t it always worked out?”

  “No, I do. I do trust you.” She paused. “Not that I could stop you if I didn’t.” Was she accusing me? Reassuring herself? I couldn’t tell.

  “It’s been great for me, Mom. It’s given me so much confidence. I get worshiped for a living.” Instinctively, I tried to appeal to my mother’s feminist, therapist values. “The women I work with, they’re amazing, strong, educated, creative women. It’s not like I’m a prostitute or something. I’m in control of everything that happens. It’s empowering.”

  She did trust me. At least, she wanted to. And I had always landed on my feet. So why didn’t I feel relieved after telling her? Certainly, I hadn’t always taken care of myself in the years since I’d moved out, but she didn’t know that. I’d worked hard to conceal all the
many unsafe conditions I’d sought out. I missed that sense of getting off the hook, of having the winning argument. I had a great argument; I really believed it, and kept on making it, but her face never relaxed. I told her about my alias, about medical sessions, about the money, about my nourished body image and my friendship with Autumn—what a kindred spirit I’d found in her. My mother kept nodding, but her eyes stayed worried.

  My mother and I were inseparable for my first eleven years of life, and she spoke to me like a person before it was in vogue to be friends with one’s children. In the long stretches of months that my father was away at sea, I was often her most available confidante. I don’t remember grieving his departures much myself after the age of five or six, but when my father left, everything in our home would assume an aura of sorrow that lasted for weeks. Some things, certain times of day, were worse than others: the accumulation of shadows at dusk, beneath sills and chair legs; darkness slipping across the kitchen table like a drawn cloth; the faint fur of dust on the lip of a vase. After I reached a certain age, it no longer seemed as though this sadness originated in her, or me, but that it was organic to everything it afflicted. Our belongings emanated despair, as if they’d realized they were soulless.

  By the time she became a practicing psychotherapist, I had already discovered men, and shut her out. When I slipped away from her, and began lying about where I spent my time, and with whom, she tried to rein me in with talk of rebuilding trust, with love and reason. This failed. Then she screamed and wheedled, and I grew to hate the stricken look in her eyes almost as much as I craved the illicit thrill of secrets and desire. She and my father sent me to a therapist of my own, who either bought my manipulations or gave up—I still don’t know which. I settled down eventually, when I scared myself enough. I don’t think she ever stopped fearing losing me again. At least, she never pushed that hard again, never tried in earnest to stop me from doing what I’d set my mind to. Through my dropping out of high school and moving out at sixteen, she tried to mother me with support instead of judgment; she gave as much as I would accept and made a decision to trust me. We remained friends. Ultimately, we were similar in our self-sufficiency, though hers was the result of a childhood lived in poverty and neglect. She had had no alternative but to rely on her own resources, whereas I was simply determined to, for reasons mysterious to us both.

  Not long after our first shift together, Autumn and I were talking on the phone daily. Our similar childhoods had eased us into fast friendship, and a slew of other likenesses cemented it. Together, we giggled and gossiped about the other dommes and delighted in our mutual appreciation for base humor and utter candor about all things sexual. The similarities seemed endless.

  One night, while I was covering a shift for one of the usual nighttime dommes, Autumn poked her head into the kitchen as I was stuffing a load of laundry into the washing machine.

  “Pssst! Justine!”

  “What?” I peeled off my rubber gloves and pushed the “Start Cycle” button.

  She beckoned conspiratorially and disappeared down the hallway. I sighed in mock exhaustion and followed her. Pulling me into the Green Bathroom, she locked its door and winked at me.

  “What?”

  “I’m bad,” she said. “Uh-oh.”

  “I’ve been a very naughty girl, Mistress Justine,” she announced in a nasal, lisping tone.

  “Well, perhaps Mommy Justine needs to give you a spanking,” I growled.

  Grinning, she reached into the cleavage created by her corset. Eyebrows raised in anticipation, she rooted around for a moment before withdrawing a folded square of paper and a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Tsk, tsk!” I shook my head at her but then made grabbing motions as she set the white square on the back of the toilet and unfolded it.

  “It’s only a couple grams, but you have class in the morning anyway, right?”

  I snorted. We both knew that as soon as she finished rolling up that twenty, having brain surgery scheduled the next morning couldn’t have kept the cocaine out of my nose.

  Sessioning on coke was unimaginable fun, so long as you didn’t run out. The high raised you above the grim tedium of predictable sessions, the humiliation of sensual ones, and left you with the energy to get creative. Coke allowed everything whose sheen had dulled to shine again. A fair number of nighttime clients would bring their own stash to share with their domme, if she was interested. The dungeon traded in sexual compulsion, and with one compulsion you usually find others. Autumn and I were always interested. That night, we made a web out of a single endless twine of black rope and hoisted a 250-pound man seven feet off the ground. As he gently rocked from the ceiling-mounted chains, the soft flesh of his back bulging around the lattice of rope, we smoked and laughed, intermittently flicking his exposed buttocks from below with purple riding crops. We refused to let him masturbate to orgasm until he had drunk an entire pitcher of our combined urine from a plastic champagne glass. We heckled him, taking long swigs from a gallon jug of water, in order to keep replenishing the pitcher. At one point, Autumn laughed so hard that water streamed out of her nose onto the satin front of her corset.

  “Well, that needed a good flushing out anyway,” I said, and we cracked up all over again.

  After closing the dungeon, we ended up at some signless bar on the Lower East Side, flirting with the lanky bartender and swiveling our hips to and from the bathroom every ten minutes to do lines. It being a weeknight, the bar was virtually empty by the time we licked that white square of paper clean and tried to suppress the instantaneous depression that follows every last line of coke. I silently concocted plans to get more, knowing them futile; it happened every time. Three o’clock in the morning was too late to call either of our dealers on a weeknight. Below my high lay the sheer drop of an excruciating comedown, compounded by the reality of a class that began in six hours and the fact that I’d spent more than I’d earned that night on shots. I kicked against the inevitable gravity of the crash, scrambling, determined this time to will my mind beyond the mental agony of withdrawal, the fever of worried despair and sleeplessness, that I could never seem to remember when I decided to inhale that first line.

  Autumn and I had gotten loaded together a handful of times, nights that we began like this one: feeling beautiful and bulletproof, intoxicated with our power. By morning, I’d end up as I did after that night: at home in bed, alone, listening to the chatter of birds outside my window, with bleeding nostrils and suicidal fantasies, choking down gulps from a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor from the bodega to soften the crash. The sound of car engines growling to life, apartment doors slamming as other tenants in the building left for work, and the squeal of city buses breaking to pick them up all sped my spiraling panic. Looking at normal lives from the ugly side of mine was a special hell. I silently prayed for sleep, and tucked tiny wads of tissue into my nostrils to stop the burning. Once, afraid to cross paths with Rebecca in such a state, I had urinated in an old coffee can in my closet.

  Two days later, as Autumn and I crossed paths in the dressing room—she arriving for the night shift as I was leaving—I mentioned that feeling, made a joke of it, something about being glad I didn’t own a gun, because I’d probably have killed myself that night just to escape another minute of it. She laughed with me, but the knowing I recognized in her eyes was as hopeless as my own.

  A few days after that, I almost asked Rebecca to leave New York with me. Our final semester of college had begun, and having fulfilled all my credit requirements for graduation, I was enjoying a cushy schedule. Monthly, I met my thesis advisor at a coffee shop to hand her the next ten pages of my novel—already twice the required length of the thesis. My weekly classes consisted of photography, chorus, and a course on Romanticism that would have been more interesting if it weren’t dumbed down for the design students it was intended for. Rebecca and I rode the C train into the city together for this class, which began at 9:30 A.M. The hardest part of my routine was
getting there on time. Eight thirty cast a bad light on just about everything.

  Leaning back against the scuffed train window, I watched Rebecca sleep, her long torso folded over her lap, cheek against her knee. She was a good friend, I thought, and looking at her softly mussed hair and flushed cheek, I appreciated how she managed to be both smart and innocent. As hard as I worked to annihilate my own innocence, I envied her sometimes. I hated keeping things from her, but how could I describe the misery of those sleepless mornings to her when I couldn’t even broach the subject to Autumn without making light of it? I couldn’t. I stretched my arms over my head, trying to shake off the dark feeling. The terror of nights like those usually slipped away after I finally slept, washed away in dreams and the particular amnesia of minds that, as Einstein famously defined insanity, “do the same thing over and over again, and expect different results.” Only when alone, with a specific quiet of mind, did I find it creeping back in. I was often my most sober in the mornings, before the static of the day crashed over me, before I could smoke or swallow or shoot anything.

  Watching her brow furrow in sleep, I almost shook Rebecca awake and suggested that we leave after graduation, go back to Boston and get a warm apartment, paint the kitchen yellow, and cook dinner in it every night. For a hopeful moment, I could imagine myself dropping everything in New York and leaving it there, living only as the version of myself whose name I whispered into my hand when I was afraid. What if I never had to see anyone’s worried eyes again, not over me? And then, like a loose garment, that hope slipped off of me and slid to the floor. I nudged Rebecca awake with my knee.