19
I COULDN’T COMPREHEND how domming fit into this new paradigm of living. You don’t hear about a lot of bodhisattva dominatrices. But it must have fit, because I didn’t stop doing it. When people asked me how the work affected me, my line was: “I don’t know yet; ask me in ten years.” When I thought about how long I would do it for, I assumed that there would come a day when I simply couldn’t anymore, when everything about it had become banal and sad and I was done. While I wasn’t completely oblivious to the failure of this kind of thinking where my addiction had been concerned, I couldn’t imagine myself as a thirty-year-old dominatrix. There were plenty of women who made a career of it, but their interest was genuine, not born of curiosity and social touristing. Occasionally they would pass through the dungeon, working a few weeks as “guest dommes.” Despite their obvious enthusiasm for it, and lack of shame, they scared me. Those women were cynical, and saggier than me. They had the rough voices of long-time smokers, and despite their profound expertise and wisdom on our trade, I sensed some essential immaturity about them and knew inchoately that the romance of this life was finite, only for the very young.
When an end came to so many other aspects of my life, I suspected that the end to this might come as well. I figured that the sessions would become harder without the drugs, without the haze of self-delusion that had accompanied them.
Some things did become more difficult. When my depression lifted, the world held light again. Some sights returned, and some were revealed anew. I was no longer amazed at my coworkers’ ability to conduct sessions. What I found amazing was the contradiction of their lives, the hypocrisy. The women whom I’d idolized, who had taught me everything about entitlement and power, and in whom I had believed turned out to be shams.
The week of my rise from the walking dead turned out also to be a dramatic one at the dungeon. On one of my first normal shifts back, after an appointment with a new client, I carried my supply box into the dressing room, high only on post-session exhilaration, which so far hadn’t waned as I’d thought it might. Camille sat curled on the love seat, clutching a silk kimono around her body, her eyes swollen and despondent.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s wrong with you?”
She answered without looking up. “It was all lies, Justine, all lies.” Her chin trembled.
I dropped my box on the sofa and crouched down to face her. “Oh, sweetheart, what happened to you?”
“I can’t believe I thought he was going to marry me.” Her voice turned venomous on the final words, as she raised her eyes to mine. Camille’s London master, the professed love of her life, turned out to have a whole stable of soul mates, whom he lovingly tortured and fucked on a rotating schedule. “We ate scones and read The Times together,” she sobbed as I held her. The whole dungeon had watched love transform Camille. At her master’s command, she had quit smoking, sent away for graduate school applications, and begun to exude a new air of self-preservation. The scars seemed more than a fair trade, in my eyes, and she claimed to enjoy them anyway. She had been happy. All that ended with him.
A few days later, I sat in the dressing room, organizing my locker. It had been a slow day, despite Bella having called in sick. Lena knelt farther down the mirrored wall, neatly packing some of her personal equipment into a leather suitcase. She wasn’t working, had only stopped by the dungeon to pick up some things. I watched her wind wires around a “TENS unit,” “TENS” being an acronym for “Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation.” A TENS unit is a small, battery-operated device used to send electrical impulses to select parts of the body. The electrical currents it produces, when mild, can prevent pain messages from being transmitted to the brain and are thought to raise endorphin levels in medical patients. At the end of the wires Lena wound around the palm-sized box—which had knobs designating settings like “pulse” and “ripple”—disposable electrodes could be attached and then adhered to body parts. Conventionally, that would be shoulders, neck, and joints. In our case, it meant nipples, scrotums, and penises.
“What plans do you have for this weekend that include that?” I asked her, smiling. After our one night together, Lena and I had settled into a flirtatious, comfortable friendship. It turned out she had a habit of sleeping with new blood.
“I’ve got a session planned for Sunday,” she said. “I can’t wait.” I nodded, about to ask with whom when Fiona appeared in the doorway.
“How’d you like to take a sub session with a regular of Bella’s? He comes every week, and I can vouch for his not being a psycho.”
I glanced at Lena and then shook my head. “You know I don’t do sub.”
“Okay.” Fiona shrugged. “But it’s easy money.”
I had never had second thoughts about submissive sessions but for some reason felt hesitant this time. I had been underearning for weeks, I thought, and had some catching up to do, now that I was able. But there was no chance I was going to agree in front of Lena. Maybe after she left I’d agree to consult with the client and see how that went.
“Well, he’s going to call back in an hour to see if anyone is available, so let me know by then,” Fiona said, and headed back to the office.
“You should take the session,” Lena said, without looking up. “Bella is an automaton. The client could be yours after today.”
“Yeah, but he’s a top.”
“So, it’s nothing that intense; I’ve seen him before.”
“You’ve seen him before?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you didn’t do sub?”
“No, I just don’t take sub sessions that walk in here off the street. My session on Sunday is a sub session.”
“It is?” I stared at the TENS unit.
“Yup.”
“How much do you charge for that?”
“Nothing. I mean, not this weekend. Sunday isn’t work; it’s on my own time. He’s hot.”
I didn’t know how to react to this. I felt pissed off, as if I’d been cheated somehow. They’d sold me one thing, an image of one thing, and I’d gotten another. Was I the only one playing by the rules?
Even Autumn, my best friend, was at Western Union every week, sending money to her deadbeat boyfriend in California. This had been true since I’d known her, but I hadn’t really seen it before, examined it in the context of who I thought she was: stronger than me. They had all not turned out to be the enlightened women I’d thought but suddenly seemed damaged little girls, compulsively subjugating themselves to men. My disappointment and disgust at this revelation burned away the glow I’d seen for my first year in the dungeon, the hope and invigoration that came from having proof that the world could have pockets of things I’d never imagined. This was a sight I’d seen before: women relying on men who let them down, choosing those men, men who were an expression of their own low self-regard. Even here.
We were all topping from the bottom, it seemed. Both my clients and my coworkers were designing their own humiliation. Freud said that there is no sadism without masochism. I can vouch for that truth in my dungeon. If any of us were sadists, we were the masochistic kind. And if there ever was a sadistic masochist in New York City, he undoubtedly crossed the doorway of Mistress X’s. Jack was one. Those clients who preyed on new hires were looking for victims, not masters. I met many men whose real pleasure seemed found in demanding torture methods more humiliating for their domme than for them. It was their fantasy, after all. Is it worse to be fisted as you fantasize or to shove your arm up a strange man’s ass for money? To have your yarmulke shat in or to have to shit in a yarmulke while a stranger watches?
“Mistress!”
“Yes, Margie?”
“Don’t you think I deserve a harder punishment than that for what I’ve done?”
“Sure, Margie. Sure I do.”
I unfastened the rope that tied his wrists and ankles together and then untied both his hands and feet.
“Up against the cross, Margie.” Formally calle
d a Saint Andrew’s cross, the seven-foot wooden structure was secured to the wall, equipped with cleats like those used to tie boats to docks.
“But Mistress, I—”
“Please shut up. I know what I’m doing.”
Jack staggered over to the cross in his giant stilettos and pressed his belly against its center. “No, facing me,” I corrected him. After tying his wrists and ankles to the cleats on each leg of the cross, I gagged him, ignoring his protests. His body now mimicked the shape of the cross, only with a sagging belly in the center. The bikini he had brought with him also sagged, the weakened elastic of its strings hanging dutifully around his hips. He was pathetic. Looking at him, I felt like a dominatrix, like I meant it. I also felt free for the first time in our forty-five minutes together. I selected a whip from those hanging on the wall. Stepping back a few yards, I took aim and flicked the whip toward him. It snaked through the air with a sigh, only its very tip grazing the bulge of his testicles. He gasped around the gag and flattened himself against the cross. It was the first sincere expression he’d made.
Whips are the most elegant of a dominatrix’s tools, mechanisms that rely on skill and accuracy rather than strength. Their strength is in simple physics. All the energy of that long tail’s undulation collects in the narrow tip, and when it touches you it is a finger of fire. With that strength under my control, I did feel powerful. I took pleasure in his pain. The humiliation of the first forty-five minutes had cultivated that sadism in me. I had always thought of sadism as a predisposition, a condition you couldn’t easily catch or shake. I had not thought it so fluid, something that could be engendered by an hour’s resentment.
After a couple more well-aimed licks, I put down the whip and walked forward to face him. His breath smelled like rubber. The gag was wet, and saliva dripped from the corners of his open mouth. Though his eyes skittered across my face, their dark centers were level. Jack also knew how to withstand. Who was this man? What did we have in common to have both ended up in this room? I teetered over his face, peering into it for a dizzy moment. In what direction had this man come from, and where was he going? It was a feeling too objective to be compassion, but I suddenly felt on equal footing with him. For a moment, we formed two halves of a perfectly balanced scale.
And then I looked down at his erection and realized that the feeling was probably not mutual. The dungeon suddenly felt filthy, the film of dust and lubricant that covered it becoming a coating of hypocrisy, of lies and rationalization. No one was ever truthful about their motives for being here. There was a superficial layer of honesty, a line often given about consenting adults, people who were robustly unashamed of their desires. It was bullshit, and I knew I had a part in it. This place was so soaked in shame that I could hardly breathe sometimes. What were my lies, and what were they hiding? When I tried to figure out my part, it eluded me. My thoughts suddenly seemed abstract and arbitrary, like a lost memory or a dream, a tarp’s loose corner flapping in the wind.
I could taste his rubbery breath, I was so close. I could smell the sweat of his scalp, the stink of long-congested sinuses. He flinched when I finally reached out my hand and lightly brushed it against the cup of his bikini top.
“You think these are tits?” I whispered. He panted around the gag, eyes down. “These aren’t tits.” I reached behind my back and unhooked my bra. His gaze rose slightly, moving from his body to mine. Sliding the straps down my shoulders, I let the bra slip to the floor. My breasts hung over the top of my corset now, nipples hardened into beads. I leaned close enough that they nearly brushed his chest, exhaling a few breaths on him before I spoke. “These are tits,” I whispered. “You pathetic fuck.”
20
SOME DOMMES HATED corporal, some sensual. Some hated talking in sessions, while others couldn’t bear silence. Our tastes in role-play spanned a broad spectrum and usually changed over time and often from client to client. The fluidity of our preferences matched our moods, our experience, and the generosity of our clients. Limits were different. Hard lines were most often drawn short of switch, or submissive sessions, and those involving bodily fluids other than urine. If a girl wasn’t comfortable with golden showers, she was wasting her time at the dungeon, where at least half of all sessions required them. It was an insurmountable handicap, equal to a phobia of dildos or high heels. But many refused sessions involving “bloodplay,” which included piercing, cutting, severe corporal, and “ruby showers” (with menstrual blood). There wasn’t much demand for “roman showers,” so it didn’t matter much if you were opposed to vomiting on someone. “Brown showers,” however, were regularly requested. A small minority took these sessions, usually dommes who specialized in corporal and had a few years of experience. Lena did brown, Miss K, and Autumn, too.
A fair number of us would take switch sessions, which were often more role-play than anything. A primarily submissive client who claimed he wanted to give his domme “a taste of her own medicine,” when asked to demonstrate in consultation, would often pat instead of spank, while inquiring obsessively about his victim’s comfort. The dommes who took real submissive sessions were a small minority. In my 12-step meetings people liked to say that “some were sicker than others,” and that was how I thought of those girls. To be pitied—albeit more generously than my clients—for their low self-regard and obvious trauma history.
From very early on, I drew my lines: no brown, no submissive sessions. I considered everything else worth experiencing, so long as I had my box of rubber gloves and bottle of rubbing alcohol. By my third year at the dungeon, I had established a reputation for corporal expertise. My list of preferences included electrical torture, piercing, verbal humiliation, spitting, face slapping, most forms of corporal punishment (whipping, caning, and flogging especially), and very nasty role-plays.
I enjoyed it, not only with the martyred pleasure of withstanding, or vengeance, but also more wholly. Even without the drugs, it could induce an altered state. I was good at it, and as in all things I’ve done well and with practice, there was a rhythm to be captured. A beat emerges, silent but sure, as if you can detect its vibrations in the air, in your blood, through the floor. In it, your movements string together with sound and consciousness to form one long, sinewy stroke. In the dark of the Red Room, with the right tools and my hands’ intuition, everything else could just fall away, and I would be pure motion, pure drive. Maybe “love” isn’t the word for how I felt about it, but one just as strong. I couldn’t pinpoint what frightened me about this; it was only a small flutter, without any sound.
That kind of experience required a client who trusted me, like Elie, and whose list of preferences matched mine. It required the right mood. The consistency of these variables could not be relied on. I might have a session like that three nights in a row; I might not have one for a month. In between was everything else, and everything else kept getting harder.
A more common session required constant redirection of tone, narrative, and the client’s hands. I spent many hours wishing they just would shut up, that time would pass more quickly, that they would need an enema so I could smoke alone in the room for a few paid minutes. The dread I’d felt before every session during my depression had passed, but only as far as true corporal sessions were concerned. My limbs turned leaden when Fiona announced many of my regulars’ names: White Sneaker Fred, with the roving hands and featherlight voice, who always left a box of Tic Tacs as a tip; Airplane Fred, the ticklish pi lot with boggy breath who cooed and giggled and expected me to as well; even Enema David, who tipped heartily and spent most of his time in the bathroom, made me cringe with his need for affection, his demand to be petted like a child while the giant rubber udder emptied into him. There always seemed to be fewer Elies and more Tonys.
Tony was almost seven feet tall and bearded, with a voice like murmuring thunder. This towering Thor often came to see me multiple times a week. Stretched out on the bondage table, he was like a felled tree, and something in his size m
ade me even sorrier to play his mommy.
There were mommy roles I enjoyed playing, the kind where I got to receive a phone call from an imaginary teacher and then chase my son around the room shouting threats, followed by an earnest spanking. If I was going to play mommy, I wanted to pull ears and break a sweat; I wanted to go all out and become a roaring hurricane of bitch. Tony’s mommy was not a bitch. She was a creep.
The session would begin with Tony sitting upright on the bondage table. Facing him, I fought to maintain the distance between our bodies. The pressure between us was a constant contradiction of our roles. I was ceaselessly pushing him away and he drawing me closer. His hands grabbed at my hips, waist, and chest, trying to pull me into him, wrapping his legs around mine. This part was supposed to be the seduction. He wanted all the things that I hated doing, all those expressions of affection that repulsed me more than any spilled enema could. He wanted face stroking, tickling, caressing, and was always begging for kisses and hugs. “Don’t you want to be a good boy for Mommy?” I’d ask, the negotiating molester. His voice in session was breathy and moist, octaves higher. “Ma-ma!” he would stutter. “Good boy for Ma-ma!”
In his baby voice he would ask me to undress, to “smother” him with my various body parts, to bring my pretty friends in to show him off to. There are only so many ways of saying no so that it doesn’t sound like no. I invented new ones, reasons that used the logic of his fantasy. The charade of our role-play so thinly scaffolded our real negotiation that there was never a moment lost in the fantasy, not a moment that didn’t require complete effort.
The second part of the session was easier because molesting him didn’t require that I be so close to his face, or his hands. Sliding the slender vibrator in and out of his anus was mindless work compared to his groping, his breath on my face. Our idiotic talk would continue as he rubbed his penis against his stomach and spastically jerked his hips. “Who’s Mommy’s very best boy? Are you Mommy’s bestest boy?” I’d intone. He would groan in his normal, deep voice and then speak in the baby voice: Mmmmmmm … Ma-ma, Ma-ma’s best boy!”
Whip Smart: A Memoir Page 14