Whip Smart: A Memoir

by Melissa Febos

  This is not to say that the dungeon was the cesspool of cattiness, insecurity, and sabotage that I have heard strip clubs and escort agencies to be. It was exceptional in many ways. The women there spoke frankly about subjects that are aired much less often than they ought to be. Especially in my first year I admired them, when the mistresses were more experienced than me. They spoke about their insecurities and eating disorders (past and present). They discussed sexual abuse histories and unconventional sexual practices. Camille once told me, in a casual kitchen conversation, that she thought she’d been a submissive since childhood. As an adolescent, she used to scrub her vagina with a hairbrush in masturbation. Now as an adult she had a master in London who dressed in Nazi uniforms for sessions (his clients were mostly men). He and Camille were in love, she said, and would marry one day. He knew how to treat her tenderly, but he also carved designs into the back of her neck with a razor blade, locked her in the trunk of his car for hours, and flogged her back purple. She said that she knew it was a result of her history that she had desire so twisted up with hurt. “I accept that,” she told me. In her way, she seemed more content with her lot than most of the women I knew. Who was I to judge her happiness?

  I’d always had many more male than female friends, and it was an unexpected relief to spend so much time around women. I felt comfortable. We got our periods at the same time, bickered and made up like siblings. We laughed until it hurt. These women were the first people I ever felt comfortable being naked in front of. They tied my corsets for me, showed me how to be confident in my body and how to be a great dominatrix. But in the end, we were still lining up ten times a day like pageant contestants to compete for biggest turn-on.

  After six or eight months, however, I had markedly less down-time in the dungeon with which to form alliances and rivalries; I was too busy. Like most new hires who were pretty enough and stuck out the first few weeks, I enjoyed an early boom in business chiefly owing to the same batch of dungeon regulars that every domme before and after me would know. We had nicknames for them, as we did for most of the clients we shuffled among ourselves. This first wave of undesirables included: Pi lot Dave, Fish Bill, Pussy John, Hairless Billy, White Sneaker Fred, Fisting Jack, Dan Dan the Jerk-off Man, and Mental Dental Roy. Though they would occasionally reattach to a more experienced domme, they preyed mainly on new girls, who proved less adept at setting boundaries and more comfortable with sensual sessions. This motley cast made the rounds at every major Manhattan dungeon: Pandora’s Box, Mistress Elizabeth’s, The Ball and Chain, The Den of Iniquity, Rapture, Arena, and so on. On Internet forums shared by the citywide commercial S&M community, they were often mentioned, in jokes and warnings. I still saw some of them by the close of my first year, but my relationship with most had completed the life cycle from intimidating, to exhilarating, to more tedious than $75 could account for.

  The easiest way to terminate with a client was to perform badly. While a fair number of clients paid to be ignored, insulted, and laughed at, the majority wanted nothing less than to see a dominatrix whom their fantasies bored. When yawning, monotones, and abruptly ended sessions failed, I would have to dump them, suggesting a recent hire whom I thought better suited to the job. Most of these scenes were relatively painless, with no more discomfort than my usual fear of others’ disappointment and hurt feelings. In a few cases, they played the disconcerting role of jilted boyfriend, weeping, pleading, and calling repeatedly to beg for reconciliation. While it was part of my job to act as though I shared their fantasies, as if the money were a mere formality, the strength of their delusion in these cases was sad and disturbing. By the time summer rolled around, I had replaced them with regulars who were better tippers, more challenging in the good ways (creative sessions, intense role-plays), and less challenging in the bad ways (annoyance, attachment, hygiene, tedium, and sleaze factors).

  And I had discovered something. I was good at my job. I greeted this discovery with genuine surprise, still believing that it was more chance than personality that had landed me in the dungeon. I lived in New York, had an open mind, and needed money, but I didn’t want to strip or prostitute myself. It seemed obvious. I was surprised that I didn’t know more women who had tried it.

  14

  THE LAST TIME I shot heroin was the day I moved upstairs from Autumn. I had left the Bed-Stuy apartment I’d lived in for almost three years with barely a glance back. Though if Rebecca had been home, I might have found that harder. She had helped me pack, though I wished she hadn’t. I wanted to preserve my excitement about leaving, and her wistful presence agitated my doubts. I was moving forward—leaving behind the water bugs and mice, Kevin’s wolf whistles, and the innocence with which I’d knocked on my neighbor’s door that pivotal morning.

  “Williamsburg isn’t that far away,” I said, though Rebecca and I both knew how little we’d see each other. As close as everything is geo graphically in New York, it’s easy and comfortable to become cloistered in your own neighborhood. Factor in the lifestyle I was moving closer toward and how much it differed from hers, and the likelihood of our maintaining the same intimacy grew even less. But my desire for that lifestyle prompted my move: the shiny parts of being a domme. I wanted to move closer to the money, the invincibility of it, and how big it all made me feel: the shadowiness and the sex of it, the distance from any sense of insecurity or neediness. I wanted to feel that strong always. The old apartment, the decrepitude of Bed-Stuy, even my friends seemed like relics of an earlier, less knowing, more vulnerable version of me.

  The tiny Williamsburg studio wasn’t worth what I paid for it, but it was mine. My bedroom window looked out over our land-lord’s concrete patio. All day, the harpy matriarch would sit out on a plastic chair and scream at her husband and adult daughter in Italian, prompting the daughter to then scream at her own children in Brooklynese, leaving the children to torment the dog, an incessantly barking dachshund named Precious. “Go the fuck to sleep!” was their nightly refrain.

  Autumn was out of town when I moved in, so I enlisted the help of an old boyfriend to carry my crates of books up the staircase. He brought with him five bags of South Boston dope and a syringe the size of a flashlight.

  “What am I supposed to do with this monstrosity?” I said.

  “I couldn’t get to the needle exchange before I caught the bus,” he said. “So I had to steal it from my doctor.” Junky logic.

  “You know that you can buy them at Duane Reade here?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Oh, okay, sure. You ride the train into the city and go to the pharmacy. I will be here when you get back, enjoying these drugs.”

  So I stuck that javelin into my arm, and as soon as we could move, we moved.

  It had been weeks since I’d gotten high—the longest I’d gone in years—so it was ironic that that was the night my problem became apparent to my coworkers. A few hours after moving, I was in session with Vinny and four other mistresses. As usual, we occupied Med 3, sweating beneath the mirrored ceilings and maintaining our stony faces. Bella was naked on a footstool, her blasé expression appropriate for once.

  “Don’t smile!” Vinny scolded the new girl, Sasha, as she tortured his nipples with a pair of long-handled clamps. Camille held his arms behind the upright examination table, her bored face resting against the side of his headrest, watching the wall-mounted television. On the screen, a potbellied man in riding pants whipped a woman tied to a wooden post. Hay lay scattered around their feet in an obviously haphazard attempt to create a barnlike atmosphere. Vinny preferred those videos that might have been taped in some-one’s actual basement or backyard. His favorites featured older women (GrandMILFs Go Down), unshaven women (Hirsute Honeys XII), and stars with cellulite, potbellies, and bad teeth. A part of me liked him for rejecting the usual choreographed, silicone-enhanced fare.

  Miss K—a veteran with the duel honors of an Ivy League degree in architecture and the roundest ass ever seen on a woman of her stature and proportions
—held a butt plug in place with one gloved hand. Situated between his stirruped feet, I teased his urethra with the tip of a catheter. The tube of rubber was as long as my arm and thin as a knitting needle.

  “No, no, no,” Vinny moaned, jerking against Camille’s grasp. He spoke in his slave voice, which was higher pitched, and unheeded. He had a “safe word,” as most sessions did: a code word to call out when “no, stop” could be mistaken for part of the scene. Vinny’s safe word was “red,” but he never used it, because we could always tell his real voice from his fantasy one. Vinny provided a classic case of topping from the bottom. He wasn’t submissive but had a submissive fantasy. So we pretended to dominate him, under meticulous stage direction. He wasn’t the worst case of this, but it added to the tedium of his fantasy.

  Like any addict, Vinny had a high tolerance, and that night was not one of his easier ones. The hour felt interminable. Vinny wheezed and mewed, even his hairy shins slick with the effort. Sweat slid off my forearm and down the length of the orange catheter. Bella sighed, looking down to check her nails as she flicked her own nipples. Miss K wiggled the butt plug with one hand and reached up to rub her back with the other. Sasha increased the pressure of her clamps, Vinny’s moaning building, building, building, and then waning. He did not look like a man indulging in lascivious pleasure. He looked like a man suffering from painful constipation. He was working harder than any of us, and his face began to take on a maniacal look of desperation. Then it looked as if it might happen. We all increased our effort, threw ourselves into as passionate an act of apathy as we could muster. Vinny announced, “I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna—,” and then my stomach turned. The catheter hit the floor with a little slap, like the tail of something. I lunged for the sink under the television and vomited into it.

  It wasn’t the first time Vinny had failed to climax by the end of his session, but it was the first time my coworkers had ever looked at me that way. “I’m sick,” I offered as they filed out, pushing their damp hair off their foreheads. Vinny had booked the session with me, and so I stayed to clean up and walk him out. When he got out of the shower, I had already finished cleaning and sat on the disinfected examination table. Vinny smiled at me, removed the towel from his waist, and began buffing his shoulders and back with it.

  “I used to have a coke problem, you know,” he said.

  “Oh yeah?” I stared at his genitals. They jiggled beneath his belly, purple and withered.

  “You’re on heroin, aren’t you? I know what it looks like.”

  “I really just used to have a problem,” I said. “I only do it every once in a while now.”

  His knowing look made me want to punch him in the face.

  15

  WALKING INTO an AA meeting didn’t feel the same as walking into a party, but having Autumn beside me made it easier. I also felt buoyed by the social power I’d have as a domme; after all, I’d be in a room full of folk with an admitted taste for illicit activity. Autumn and I dressed to make an impression: jeans and knee-high leather boots, tight T-shirts, tattoos visible. Funny how bait and armor can be the same thing. We arrived a few minutes late, and the staccato of our heels echoed against the cathedral ceilings, interrupting the meeting leader, who read from a laminated paper to the seated crowd—close to a hundred, on folding metal chairs. Heads turned to look at us. I clenched my hands and relaxed my face, vacillating between wanting the attention and wanting to become invisible. We slid into a couple of empty chairs in the back.

  The chair of the meeting finished his preamble, emphasizing that “we encourage the discussion of drugs as well as alcohol.” Autumn nudged me, and I nodded.

  The chair then introduced a speaker, a slender middle-aged woman in a leather jacket who sat in front of the group, between two five-foot window shades on which were printed the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Though I instinctively rolled my eyes at the word “God,” I didn’t mind these so much. Their cultish tone irked me, but I had always been partial to lists and knew there was relief in clear instruction, though I’d gone far to defy it. I wanted stopping doing drugs to be simple; a step-by-step process sounded easy. At least, I’d always succeeded easily at that sort of task, when I tried.

  The speaker had a good story, lots of heroin and 1980s Lower East Side debauchery. I loved the stories in meetings, like live renditions of my favorite books and movies. Alcoholics all sought extremity in some way, it seemed, all experienced an affliction of craving—even as children. There was a thrill in hearing a stranger describe my own private rituals, filthy habits, and obsessions. When the speaker described pissing in a bottle in her bedroom between lines of blow, and vomiting into her mother’s kitchen sink, I laughed along with everyone else and marveled at the alchemy that could convert shame into humor. I admired her weathered, pretty face and gravelly voice and felt momentarily reassured that I could be both clean and cool. I didn’t plan on becoming one of the bland, apple-cheeked women I saw in the rows in front of me, smiling down at their knitting and vigorously nodding whenever anyone uttered the word “miracle.”

  And Autumn had been right; there were men here. Sitting in a room full of men could be like having a pocketful of drugs—the yet of who and how I’d seduce comforted me; it was the longest distance from being alone. She and I were so full of desire—it wasn’t sexual but something easily mistaken for it. We must have glowed, because the men all stared, and so we stayed. It only took me a few minutes to settle on a man across the aisle, a motorcycle helmet tucked under his chair, looking at me without looking at me.

  . . .

  At the time of the Vinny incident, it had been weeks since I’d last gotten high. I had already been to a few 12-step meetings, that humiliating last resort. It seemed I’d always known about them; my mother was a therapist, after all. The Twelve Steps were great, I’d always thought, for those who couldn’t find their own footing. I had no doubt that meetings worked wonderfully for people who weren’t strong enough to suffer their own craving, or smart enough to find a way around it.

  My very first meeting I attended alone. One weekday afternoon, I slunk into a church basement in the East Village, hoping to go unnoticed. I mostly was, despite being virtually the only white person in the room and the only person of any kind under the age of forty. To my surprise, the people there seemed happy. They laughed and clapped and stomped their feet, and when the woman who sat at the front of the room told her story she talked about the misery of running back and forth between the bodega ATM, her drug dealer, and her apartment. I knew what she meant. I knew I was an addict; I just wasn’t convinced that this was my solution. I was too young for AA anyway, I thought. I was only twenty-two.

  Then, in the dungeon kitchen one evening, Autumn walked in for the night shift as I was folding towels, about to head home.

  “God, it’s wet out,” she complained, tossing her umbrella into the corner and dropping her purse on the counter. She opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. Unscrewing the cap, she hopped onto a stool and sighed. I joined her, reaching for her purse.

  “Give me a cigarette,” I said, rifling through the jumble myself. I spotted a gray booklet with newspaper-thin pages. Alcoholics Anonymous, it read on the cover. I pulled it out. “What’s this?”

  Autumn glanced up. “Oh, nothing. My boyfriend in California goes.” She pulled her yellow pack of cigarettes out of the purse’s side pocket and tucked one between her lips.

  “Really?”

  She paused for a long moment, looking at me.

  “No, not really. I’ve been going myself.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me, too.”

  We grinned at each other and laughed, sheepish and relieved.

  “Where have you been going?”

  “Well, not AA actually, NA.”

  “You should come with me to an AA meeting—they’re better, less depressing. Cuter men.”

  “But I’m not an alcoholic.” />
  “This is New York, Melissa. Half the alcoholics here are junkies anyway.”

  The motorcyclist was a painter, with tattooed arms and a vintage BMW bike. He was my mother’s age, kind, and worshipful without passion. We attended that meeting weekly and others that he frequented in SoHo and all over the East Village. I loved swinging my leg over the back of his bike and pulling off the helmet, feigning nonchalance in front of the crowd smoking outside the church. He taught me to save my bathroom trip for when the boring people got called on, who the zealots were and the desperate women who would disapprove of him. “They’re just bitter,” he told me. “AA is full of bitter women.” The painter brimmed with such nuggets of wisdom.

  My job was a source of great amusement and novelty to him. The thought that the sexual nature of it could or even should be unacceptable to a lover never crossed my mind. I knew that were the tables turned, I could never accept such a situation. Money would not make it any less a betrayal. Do you see how I was able to decide where my reasoning stopped? Secrecy and careful selection of people was my armor. I had eliminated people from my life who challenged my drug use, and hid it from those who would have. I chose carefully the stories I told about my work, and lovers who would cosign it with their acceptance. There was never anyone who knew the whole truth. So it didn’t exist. That is the magic of secrecy. It creates a vacuum. My secrets were like rooms where I could hide things and preserve the truth I designated for them.

  His being twenty years my senior further facilitated this. I’d never gone for men that much older than me, but his age seemed to make him even safer. Part of the appeal of older men to young women is a way that they can never completely accurately see you; you are always a little bit of a marvel to them, an immigrant from another generation. To women who feel broken, or hidden in some way, it feels safe: they can hide behind the sheen of freshness that older men cannot help but see. Being with an older man makes you feel young.