Whip Smart: A Memoir

by Melissa Febos

  “We’re here,” I said, and stood.

  On my first and only date with Lena, we walked by that signless bar on our way to The Whiskey Ward, on the Lower East Side. After a few drinks, we moved on to some place on Eldridge Street. It was packed, dark, the kind of bar you want to be taken to by someone who knows the bartender, not to mention the pretty Latin boys selling coke by the ladies’ room, so that you can get something better than the yellow mixture of baby laxative and gasoline they sell to the underdressed Jersey girls. I could tell she thought this was new to me, that I’d be impressed by her knowing Carlos’s name, and flattered by the way she held my arm so that he’d know he could look, that she wanted him to, but that was all. I was flattered. But that was the only thing new to me. Cultural tourism had always been an obsession of mine.

  The DJ played both of our favorite music for dancing, that is, any music not made by white people (hip-hop, reggae, Latin), and when Lena pushed a pill into my mouth I feigned hesitation. Happy to play the girl for once, I nestled my hips into hers but wished I had two pills, wondered if she had more. These are the scenes in movies when they employ tired camera effects to illustrate how fucked up everyone is: swooping shots that smear the faces in the crowd, paired with distorted audio to give everything a muddled, carnivalesque atmosphere. That was what I wanted, from the booze, the drugs, and the sexual charge between me and the people I chose. I wanted to lose control, to have things happen to me that I did not engineer or even anticipate. It never worked. No matter the number of pills or drinks or miles from my cultural landmarks, there always remained something that I could not disable. While I could occasionally disable myself physically, I still always knew what was going on and believed I had a hand in where it went. And so, though it became harder to walk in my heeled boots and my mouth stumbled against her ear when I whispered, I knew all along that we were going back to her place to fuck.

  Sunset Park is in south Brooklyn, below Prospect Park and the baby stroller– studded yuppie haven of Park Slope. It is Chinese, Indian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, with wide avenues and squat commercial strips of bodegas, discount stores, and narrow ethnic groceries that double as social clubs. It was a warm night, for late January; it must have rained earlier. The trees shone, mostly bare, a few slippery leaves papering the sidewalk beneath our feet. The unfamiliar neighborhood at the end of a long cab ride (of which I only remember the mirror of the East River gleaming blackly beneath the Manhattan Bridge, and Lena’s mouth on my neck) left me feeling stranded, which I liked. I clung to her arm and blinked at the streetlight in front of her building. Through my hazy high, the light was bloated, seeping into the dark like a billowing stain.

  The light in her hallway was harsher and the dark of her apartment seamless after it. I followed the tug of her hand, rubbing with the pad of my thumb the uneven edge of one bluntly shorn fingernail as she opened one door, and then another, eventually guiding me up a wooden ladder.

  Her lofted bed was flush with a window, and so I could nearly make out her face in the silvery light that crept through the branches outside. Spirals of hair stuck to her neck with sweat, she pulled off my boots and jeans and pushed my panties aside. She had mentioned keeping her nails short (unlike the talons of many of our colleagues) to avoid damaging the delicate tissues of her clients’ vulnerable parts, and that night I was grateful for that consideration.

  As a sometime lover of women, I have always scoffed at strapons. To me, the rubber penis was an impotent device in its sheer lack of reciprocity. While I liked being fucked, I suspected that in using one, or having one used on me, I would be convinced that my partner was simply waiting for me to finish so that she could have her turn. Did that say something about my view of relationships in terms of competing interests? I liked to be the best at everything I did, and the passivity of offering my lover an aerobic experience in exchange for my erotic one simply seemed bad form.

  I could not see Lena’s face with much clarity, especially once she had me on all fours with my face to the wall. However, when one has spent as much time as I had contemplating how and what it means to be desired, one knows what it feels like. I could hear her panting, and felt her fingers digging into my hips too spasmodically to be calculated. She was actually getting off by dominating me, regardless of deficient genital stimulation. I had always drawn a strict line between our clients and us, them being psychologically fixated in a way that interrupted “normal” sexual development and us just needing some good old-fashioned clitoral stimulation to get off. But never was the evidence more plain: Lena’s desire was to dominate me, and knowing that made my stomach flutter, made my opinions about strap-ons melt away to leave only the bare physical sensation, the paradoxical pleasure of being objectified, which made me feel more real, not less. A total mind-fuck. While this experience did make the world of erotic possibility suddenly larger, it took me much longer to frankly apply the significance of that revelation to myself, in my private life as well as my work.

  Usually, I negotiated the upper hand on dates, a dynamic further facilitated by my being a domme. On a date with a man I’d met online or at a party, I’d mention it early on, but after I’d established myself as not crazy. After the appetizer, and once assured that I’d captured their interest, I’d tell them. I enjoyed watching these men squirm, unsure of how to react. If they expressed too much interest, personal interest, the date was already over. I wanted admiration, to elicit desire prompted by my embodiment of both intelligence and sex, not by the prospect of exploiting my professional skill set. I never met with disapproval; without consciously doing so, I managed to never choose anyone who might judge me harshly. Whether for reasons I preferred or not, they were always impressed.

  The only lasting romance I was able to sustain in the first year was with a woman I’d dated in college, and our reprise lasted only a few months, though not for lack of intensity. Gin was freckled, lovely, and lean, often mistaken for a boy by old ladies. “Why, thank you, young man,” they’d coo when she held doors for them. Like everyone else, she was infatuated with this new facet of my persona. I was infatuated with how I looked to her eyes. She saw me as I wanted to be seen: wild, brilliant, sexy, and a little bit tragic, a force. But how could that possibly sustain us, when I knew it was at least partially an illusion? I could never trust others’ perceptions of me—a terrible catch-22. Ultimately, my relationship with the job, and the drugs, didn’t leave room for much else. It required a lot of energy to publicize only select aspects of each and to conceal the rest. I edited my experiences instinctively—there were rarely moments when I consciously decided to lie, willfully omit, or distort the truth—but it was still a sophisticated juggling act to ensure that I projected an image of seamless confidence and control. I found it uncharacteristically easy to stay out of long-term relationships in the early days at the dungeon; in many ways, it scratched the itch that my relationships always had. It was my job to be desired, rather than simply my most consuming pastime. Every “meet” was an opportunity to flex my seduction muscles, to prove once more that I had the power to compel, not with my own desire but with my will.

  13

  THERE ISN’T ANYWHERE to hide in Tiffany’s. The store is enormous, and jewelry is small. The twenty-five-foot ceilings don’t accommodate much more than a few chandeliers and the fog of luxury that rises from those long glass display counters. On my first visit to Tiffany’s, I breathed it in and smiled. The women behind the counters smiled back.

  I had loved Breakfast at Tiffany’s since adolescence, but I’d lived in New York for years without ever setting foot in the famous flagship store on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. There were two reasons for this. One, I didn’t believe in diamonds. That is, I knew that the racket of luxury goods and their value—invented merely to give those with too much money something to waste it on—was a disgusting hoax. My mother had always shaken her head at luxury cars and considered driving them tantamount to flipping all the poor people in the w
orld the finger. To her, status resulted from humanism, not ostentation. I fancied myself too smart for Tiffany’s.

  Second, I didn’t feel like I belonged there. Not that I grew up poor; in fact, I was shocked to find out as an adult how much we had during my childhood. But both my parents grew up poor, and poor children either turn into adults who worship money or firmly don’t. My parents belonged to the latter group. So I never felt privileged. And while my disbelief in diamonds was tinged with pride, I still grew up in this culture, and no one is immune to the magic of luxury. Women who walked into Tiffany’s did so swathed in a confidence I’d never had. A part of me knew that if I walked into Tiffany’s, my raised-by-hippy shabbiness would emanate from me like a stench, draw glares, and the discomfort of not belonging would eventually drive me back out that revolving door, humiliated. I might have been a good many admirable things, but I was no Audrey Hepburn.

  A year at the dungeon changed all that. I walked just about everywhere swathed in confidence now. And somehow, it didn’t matter that I didn’t believe in luxury goods, only that I now wanted them. I walked into Tiffany’s in my red lipstick, heels, and furtrimmed coat and felt completely at ease. I strolled along the carpeted floor, peering into the displays. I tried on a diamond bracelet, accepted the clerk’s compliments with a smile, and finally settled on a silver locket, its chain a slender, shining thread, cool against my neck. As far as Tiffany’s goes, a modest purchase, but spending many hundreds of dollars on something I absolutely did not need was, to me, a thrilling extravagance.

  In the summer of 2003 I had money. Rolls of it nestled in between my paired socks and under my growing collection of slippery underthings—always more money for less fabric. There were fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills tucked inside certain books: Les Fleurs du mal, a fat de Sade collection, a Bible with split binding. I found distressed twenties in jacket pockets, at the bottoms of purses, and in the Laundromat drier until I no longer did my own laundry.

  When you work real jobs—jobs whose work consumes whole days ticked by on wall-mounted clocks—you know what you are spending when you hand money over a counter. A pair of shoes = five hours of washing tourists’ dirty sheets and toilets. A taxi from Midtown Manhattan to Bed-Stuy at 2:00A.M. = four hours scrubbing chowder-encrusted pots and eating facefuls of noxious steam. A thirty-minute spree in Victoria’s Secret = fifty hours of scraping paint off the bottom of a boat. But what are you spending when a man hands you hundred as you walk him out the door? Autumn once told me that there was no such thing as free money, but I didn’t believe her yet.

  For a time, I would do the calculations in my head, or on scraps of paper in the dungeon’s kitchen while I smoked. Take Dave (one of many Daves), who came to see me once a week to arm wrestle for about twenty-five minutes. A good tipper to begin with, he would often cough up an extra $50 for each of us if I brought another mistress in for a tournament. He would occasionally win with the third party, but never me. A half-hour session cost him $100, $50 of which went to me, plus the $100 tip. If a second girl came in, the extra $50 then left me with $200 for about twenty-five minutes’ work. That’s $8 per minute. What’s three minutes of arm wrestling in false eyelashes for a cab ride to Brooklyn that saves you an hour in travel time, not to mention the stench of the 34th Street subway platform and who knows what potential late-night dangers? Worth it from any angle I could see.

  There were also slow nights: the preholiday slump when our clients’ children were home for vacation, the clients’ finances saved for gifts and trips abroad to allay the suspicion of neglected wives; nights of play-off games and Jewish holidays; inclement weather. If the clients didn’t come, we made nothing. An average could have been calculated but wasn’t, and so I never quite knew what a pair of shoes cost me in work. The $8-a-minute nights came to mind easier than the $0 ones when I was deciding between 300-and 1200-thread-count sheets at Bed Bath & Beyond.

  Was it even work? Some sessions certainly were. Handling clients who didn’t wipe properly was work. Cleaning up an enema spill from the medical room floor was work. Pretending to admire a 250-pound man in a ratty wig and pink muumuu with lipstick smeared on his teeth and pretending enough to play his lesbian seductress often required rigorous effort. When I had another mistress to share the burden, that effort was paid mostly to prevent hysterical laughter. Relentlessly spanking anyone for an hour is grueling. But I had never considered work something that shaped you; it was more like Styrofoam packing peanuts: stuff that took up a lot of space but was necessary for a certain degree of comfort. It certainly didn’t define you. Being a dominatrix so quickly became a part of my identity. I watched it happen, watched myself turn into the women I’d seen on the day of my interview, felt myself absorb that confidence and sensuality. It bore such intangible results that I couldn’t class it with any kind of work I’d ever done for money.

  Law dictates that you cannot receive more than $10,000 per year as a gift without the IRS breathing down your neck. To be safe, we dommes rarely let banks hold our money, unless it was in safety-deposit boxes. The most successful (and pragmatic) dommes exploited the talents of their stockbroker clients, who were never in short supply. I never accumulated enough to stash or invest, and so I was simply cash rich: a dangerous status for someone who had never had much expendable income. I can tell you that to have a few thousand dollars in cash feels a lot richer than to see a number on an ATM receipt. It’s also a whole lot easier to spend.

  When I began working at the dungeon, the thought of taking cabs never occurred to me; it simply had never been an option. For all my years of city living, I had always walked wherever I could, biked from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and remained infatuated with the subway longer than anyone. But it took only a few weeks for impossibilities to become luxuries and for luxuries to become necessities. I took cabs everywhere. I ate in restaurants nightly and bought clothes without trying them on to kill time while waiting for a date. I could suddenly have bouquets delivered on Mother’s Day and take the Acela train to Boston instead of Fung Wah, the gypsy bus that went from Chinatown to Chinatown for $10. Between my weekend drug binges, weekly mani-pedis, cab fares, and restaurant checks, I soon had a lifestyle whose financial demands eagerly rose to meet my income.

  It wasn’t only my economic status that had changed. My rise in popularity among the dungeon’s regular clients coincided with the sudden privilege of a more flexible schedule and the disappearance of fines to my pay for arbitrary things like failing to follow room-cleaning protocol, leaving a shift early, or eating in the dressing room. I found myself one of the few mistresses whom Remy cracked bad jokes to and occasionally teased in his flushed, unintelligible way. It helps not to make enemies; I’d always known this.

  Contention with phone girls would leave you undersold to clients, as every appointment had to come through Fiona, Jordan, or one of the other phone girls. While your income could plummet as a result of offending them, the reverse was possible if they liked you, so I made sure that they did. While there was a natural relay of clients between mistresses, overtly stealing someone else’s regular slave before either party had reached the requisite state of ennui was bad form and could make your life hell in the dungeon. So I didn’t. The same went for performing sexual favors in session that crossed a certain line. It was simple etiquette: if no one is giving blow jobs or getting naked, then the clients won’t expect it and there will be a fair distribution of patronage. When it happened, it never stayed quiet for long. I witnessed many a rookie, not pretty or skilled enough to justify nabbing every walk-in who came through the door, finishing hour sessions in fifteen minutes. They never lasted. Physical confrontations were occasional but uncommon, though rare was the girl who could withstand more than a few weeks of our ostracization; the dungeon simply wasn’t big enough. If social pressure failed, Remy could always be persuaded to fire them. The disgruntled consensus of his highest earners was powerful enough to end many careers. We used to kid about forming a union, demandin
g hourly minimums and health insurance, but so long as you were steadily earning for Remy, the threat of leaving for another dungeon was usually enough to get you what you wanted.

  Still, there was jealousy, snotty asides from mistresses who had been there longer than me or whose look resembled mine (busty, petite, Betty Page haircut). There were also Autumn’s former friends, who resented her neglect since my arrival. Recognizing my own naïveté humbled me early on, when it became obvious that the dungeon was no sanctuary from the atmosphere of competition between women that is fostered so avidly in this culture. I believed then (as I do today) that this is largely due to the conspiracy of a multibillion-dollar industry to convince women that we are not good enough and that good equals beautiful by its unattainable definition, so that we will buy more stuff. It was hopelessly naïve of me to think that the dungeon would be an exception. Sure, the sexual ideal of many of our clients contradicted that one paraded through SoHo on the thin, coltish legs of malnourished teenage models. Our clients often requested big butts, and bodies that smelled human; they fetishized body hair and physical strength. But these were still the characteristics that determined our value; it was still a sexual prescription. It was still a competition. I kept score, too. The ugly reality, like many, was easy to stomach while I appeared to be winning.

  Though in my first year there I became more comfortable in my body than I had been since childhood, my confidence reflected a perceived sexual value. I had always thought I was smart, but I still changed my clothes inside my sleeping bag at summer camp. Despite my feminist ’zine making, unshaved legs, and proclaimed bi-sexuality as a young teen, I still silently behaved and thought like someone who hated her body. At the dungeon, I finally felt free of that, and the power of my sexual confidence and the money was intoxicating enough that I could choose not to examine it too closely.