“Wait, how hard does he spank her?” I asked.
Mike looks at me in surprise. “Uh, hard?”
I got up off the couch and turned to face him. “So she walks out of the bathroom, and looks nervous.” I raised my brows innocently. “Then what? Does he just grab her, or do the mechanics hold her while he spanks?”
“Uh, he grabs her.”
“Show me.”
22
IN MAY OF 2003, I graduated from college. My family came to watch me walk across the stage in my gown and to take me out to lunch. I was early to meet them at the French café on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 11th Street where I had spent many afternoons smoking at the bar over conversation and books of poetry or physics, acting and sometimes feeling like a normal college student, infatuated with my own green intellectualism. I had also gotten high in that café’s restroom after classes more than a few times, along with the one at the student center, every Starbucks within a six-block radius, and even the piss-splattered McDonald’s on a few desperate occasions. It had been months since the last time I’d used in that neighborhood, but when I locked the café’s restroom door behind me I felt a rustle of dread in my chest, like water quickening, and wished I’d suggested somewhere else to meet.
It was a habit, throwing the pieces of my disparate lives together, as if in the spirit of a mischievous hostess with a seating chart. Still, I knew my motives were not so fatuous and assumed it was a form of self-punishment. Maybe if I wanted to enjoy the exhilarations of a life lived in multiplicity, I had to endure the rare, excruciating juxtaposition.
Spooked by the restroom’s associations and without a book to distract me, I fidgeted at the bar, checking my cell phone repeatedly. I knew it would help to be in motion, and so I maneuvered through the busy blond waitresses to step back out in the springtime. Wandering around the block of my school, I thought how quickly my first three years in New York had passed. My eyes had changed since I’d seen these buildings for the first time on the day of my admission interview. Still a teenager then, I had taken an early-morning bus alone from Boston. I hadn’t been to New York since a day trip at age nine or ten with my grandmother. The subway was stifling in the unseasonable heat. I saw my own desperation on every person’s face and felt that stone of dread sinking in me, whose descent whistled that nothing, not even this drastic attempt to regain control of my life, would have an effect. And then I nailed it. Sweat and fear evaporated into the air-conditioned admissions office. I was an expert in discerning what people wanted from me, in who I was supposed to be. It didn’t feel like pretending; I was that person, when I decided to be. I returned to Boston victorious. My determination was both that of a childhood dream (New York City!) and an addict’s hope that a change in geography could induce one in self. I was so different now, I thought on the day of my graduation.
For the ceremony I was wearing a strapless black dress that I knew suited me. Without question, I dressed better than in those early days. I had more money, friends, and confidence. I no longer needed to wander the streets every few days, looking for a high junky to cop for me when I couldn’t reach my regular dealers. I no longer lived in that tiny SRO (single-room occupancy) boardinghouse, immobilized with loneliness and bad heroin, comforted by a pack of razor blades that I kept under my mattress like a trapdoor I could use if things got bad enough. I was finishing with a 3.9 GPA. I had a glamorous, lucrative, secret life.
So long as that list was longer than the number of ways I was hurting myself, I was winning. I counted its items as a way of lulling myself when anxious. It proved that I was okay. I had believed for a long time that I needed to get through college, not just survive it, but win at it. It would prove something, I thought, and then I could finally relax. But even with the end in sight, I tallied that list with increasing frequency. It was fundamental to the system of checks and balances that I used to allay the dread, a way of accounting for the damage I did. In its equation, straight A’s offset crack smoking. Being publicly esteemed made up for all of my antisocial behaviors: the stealing, vomiting on the subway, and promiscuity. I don’t know where I learned it, but I could not remember a time after puberty when I did not believe that to the degree I succeeded by public standards, I could covertly defy them. I could only be as bad as I was good. Each carried a separate worth, and mine was based on what wealth I could have in both.
That morning was beautiful, the spring air creased by the laughter of brunchers at sidewalk tables. Something ragged in me made it lonely, though, some fear emerging like a jetty from an ebbing tide—far from the excitement and pride I’d been anticipating feeling. The rationalization equation contradicted the way I felt. I had spent so much time lamenting the amount of time and energy that school consumed and calculating how much more money I could be making if I didn’t have papers to write and classes to attend that I had taken for granted what it gave me.
School had been my cover, from sixth grade on. A’s came easily to me and were a free ticket to get away with whatever badness it was that I wanted—or needed—to be doing. When I was drinking and lying about my age to high school boys at twelve years old, it was my cover. When I was tripping on acid, sniffing coke, and skipping every afternoon in high school, it covered me. When I was smoking crystal meth, popping ecstasy pills like aspirin, and robbing the cafés and tattoo shops that employed me, I was also getting A’s at Harvard’s night school, and no one asked questions. Lying came easily to me and I never asked for money, so how would anyone looking at me from the outside have known?
On the inside cover of more than one journal during my college years I had printed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assertion that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” If this was true, then I embodied first-rate intelligence, of a certain kind anyway. Success in the environment of small, discussion-based classes came easily to me. I knew how to talk better than I did anything else. I could feign expertise with only a shred of knowledge and never wrote a paper sooner than the night before its due date. I’d always cruised through school this way and figured that in college my hand would be called, but it wasn’t. In a few classes, I did sweat over the work, but I never could have said with confidence that I’d done my best—being an academic con woman meant I avoided that, even when I did care.
Some of the ploys I pulled to get out of having not done the work make me cringe to think of now—what performances! I faked sicknesses, deaths, once even a pregnancy and subsequent abortion to avoid getting anything less than an A. Not doing the work was more work than doing it, sometimes. The steadiness of my hand when it came to crossing certain moral lines didn’t concern me then. I took pride in my ability to work systems and people; I was simply getting from Point A to Point B, I thought—besides, if I didn’t work the system it would surely work me. With this kind of survivalist mentality, you’d think I’d had a hardscrabble childhood, known poverty or hardship in a way I never had.
The thing was, I loved college. I had always loved school. Not only because I was good at it and because I wanted to be good, but also because nothing compared to the explosion that happened in my mind when I understood the concepts of physics or unlocked the meaning of a poem. I craved the pop and spark of ideas, of new pathways searing through my consciousness. The excitement I felt in classes and in writing felt pure.
There had been moments as a teenager, reading alone, when the prismatic, interconnected meaning of things exploded into my consciousness and I would feel as though I had stumbled up to the lip of a canyon, paralyzed, but vibrating with inspiration. And in college, there were teachers who really knew things, who had learned out of love, and the experience of learning from them felt like a kind of love itself.
But my desire for that feeling had always been trumped by my desire for escape, and the quickest escapes, I quickly learned, were found in the illicit. Even as a kid. In fifth grade I was at the right age at
the right time to participate in the D.A.R.E. program—a short-lived and impotent crusade in George Bush Senior’s War on Drugs. As the final presentation given by a rotund lady cop my class was presented with what we would take to calling the drug box. It was a metal briefcase that opened into a kind of medicine cabinet, with Plexiglas panes covering about fifty cellular compartments. In these compartments were an assortment of colorful pills, roach clips, joints, bags of white powder, and even a blackened teaspoon with a mottled crust in its concave. I had counted the days leading up to this event. The anticipation that mounted in me was marked by the same piercing thrill as secrets and, imminently, boys. As we crowded around the display I thought, with a matter-of-fact sort of clarity, I would do any of it. Maybe it was a subconscious desire to rebel against the prescription to just say no, or the pragmatic ideologies of my parents—a psychotherapist and the son of an alcoholic—but it didn’t feel defiant. It was a conviction that drifted up through me like a leaf in water to rest on the surface, as much an unconditional truth as the sky’s being blue, or the fact of my own name. It was with this same tranquil assurance that I knew I would become a dominatrix.
As a result of my tendency to fall down stairs and walk into walls, my family nickname as a child had been Crash, so it was a characteristically miraculous feat of clumsiness that I managed to give myself a paper cut on my eyeball minutes before the graduation ceremony. Seated in the front row of the auditorium, I couldn’t open my eye without tears streaming from it. I dabbed mascara from my face through all the speeches and fielded curious looks from everyone who crossed the stage. By the time my family and I made it outside, my eye was horror red and I had to hold it shut. My parents chuckled sympathetically, in familiar wonder at my knack for calamity.
We made our way northwest, toward Chelsea, where I had made reservations at a Thai restaurant. We were a sizeable group for Manhattan sidewalks and fell into single file by twos. There was my mother’s sister, my father’s tiny Puerto Rican mother, my maternal grandmother, and my three immediate family members.
As we walked together, my brother handed me an envelope.
“Open it!” he said. Tearing the seal, I pulled out a handmade card. On the front was a colored pencil drawing of me, in graduation cap and gown. From under my hem poked out a pair of stilettos, and my hand held a whip that wound its way around the card. The drawing was good, and I laughed.
“Let me see!” demanded our father from behind us.
My brother and I exchanged a look. I felt my mother’s look as well, though I didn’t turn to see it. Sometimes I regretted having told her. Like the moment when she spotted the leather strap-on hanging from the back of my closet door and simply looked at me and said, “I know what they make you do with that.” For as much as she didn’t say, she saw a lot. I didn’t know if I wanted her to see less or say more. We both feigned comfort with the knowledge of what I did between us, but every time it was mentioned the look on her face sandpapered my insides.
So I handed my father the card. The silence while he examined it shimmered between my brother, mother, and me, disrupted only by the scrape of our shoes against the sidewalk and the murmur of my aunt’s telephone conversation ahead. My grandmothers lagged a few yards behind in silence, having accepted the failure of Grammy’s hearing aid.
My father looked up at my mother and brother and me, and I didn’t need to turn my head to recognize the furrow of his forehead, to feel a pang of anxiety and faint revulsion at its innocence.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“I guess I have to tell you something, Dad.”
“What?”
“I’m a dominatrix.”
My dad has an assortment of laughs. His loudest is reserved for moments not necessarily of great hilarity but of surprise. The three of us, my mother especially, had spent many moments blushing with embarrassment in the darkness of movie theaters as my father bellowed with laughter at dinosaurs tearing human bodies apart with their teeth or scenes of bloody murder. When other people gasped, my father shook with uncontrollable laughter, his hand clamped over his mouth. I knew it was a nervous instinct; I had experienced the occasional spasmodic smile while being reprimanded as a child or in reaction to a piece of shocking information. But other people didn’t know that, and to them there was simply a sadist in the middle row.
This was the laugh that greeted my news. While it lasted, I chose to look at my brother but not my mother. What had shimmered between us in my father’s silence continued for his laughter. When he stopped and wiped the tears from his eyes, his first question was, “For how long?”
“A few months.”
He laughed briefly again.
“Wait, so you guys both knew?” His eyes shifted between my mother and brother.
They nodded.
He looked back at me. “I can’t believe I was the last to know!” he shouted. “I’m the cool parent!”
As it turned out, a young coworker of his at the Berkshire retreat center where he had worked between voyages had also worked as a domme. I gathered that she had censored her anecdotes as I would have, saving me the assurances of my safety and dignity. He was delighted.
Something relaxed in me that afternoon, but not the part that held my dread. A future was sprawled out before me, one in which I was free to continue on the path I had taken. No one was going to protest; I had made sure of that.
23
TOWARD THE END of my second year at the dungeon, I had started cruising the craigslist job listings outside of “Erotic Services.” It was a response to the gnawing feeling that my eligibility for other kinds of work was slipping away.
As a young teenager, I would ride my bike to the ocean at dusk. When the sun landed on the horizon, the beach would be empty except for a few people with their dogs, and couples in parked cars watching the sunset spill red across the water. The lifeguards were off-duty, and I would swim out until my shoulders throbbed. Right at the point where I tired there was a buoy moored. It was an old nicked thing, white with a red stripe around its potbelly. I would cling to its neck and catch my breath, watching the dogs on the beach glide like gnats in wide figure eights. Without the buoy I probably couldn’t have made it back. I had been foolish enough to try the distance once, and then it became my routine. Sometimes, bobbing there with the waves softly slapping my back and no human sound except for my breath, I would hallucinate the shore receding, the tiny figures of people becoming tinier. Panic crashing through me, I’d be certain that the buoy had lost its mooring, that I was drifting out to sea.
I had moments like that at the dungeon. When I heard news of an acquaintance’s success at a normal job, acceptance to graduate school, or engagement, panic would again crash through me. I was drifting too far away; by the time I turned back the swim would be too long, the water too cold, the fear too great.
It was a slow but insidious transformation of my thinking. “You are what you do, not what you say,” they told me in meetings, and it was true. What I did dictated who I felt like, and in direct proportion. When I was getting A’s in college and shooting up every day, I felt like a smart junky. When I ran twenty miles per week, I felt like a runner. By my third year of being a dominatrix, I felt like a sober sex worker. I spent all of my time concentrating on not getting high, and becoming men’s sexual fantasies. Being in recovery was the first time I felt like an honest person, and not that deep-down-inside-God-knows-I’m-good feeling, but like someone who actually tells the truth. You can’t get as honest as I did about my drug use and still do it. You also can’t spend every day banking on your sex appeal and not start feeling like it’s the most valuable part of you.
When I sent my résumé out in response to the editorial assistant position, it didn’t feel like anything. I had no plan to leave the dungeon; I just wanted to know if I could still get a real job, if I could still pass so easily for normal. I just pressed a few buttons on my computer and a list of my accomplishments up until college graduation zi
pped through the Internet ether. I didn’t tell anyone, so I wouldn’t have to tell them that I had been ignored, or rejected. My whole life I had expected to win things. School readathons, friends, spelling bees, lovers, internships, attention, permission—I just always had. I didn’t think twice about dropping out of high school, I was so sure that it was an obstacle to my success. It was childish grandiosity and my intelligence helped, but hunger is what made it so powerful.
The office was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an industrial park that looked across the East River at lower Manhattan. I wore the same outfit that I had to my interview at the dungeon. All my business clothes purchased in the last few years had been for sessions, not actual offices, and I knew better than to show up at an interview dressed like a pending sexual harassment suit.
I took the bus through Williamsburg, watching the skinny hipsters with asymmetrical haircuts change into Hasids with all their black wool, beards, and kerchiefed women ushering broods of children across the streets. I glided by men in suits, clutching briefcases and barking into cell phones. One in particular—a thick, jowly man with a clipboard, leaning against a sedan—struck me as familiar. Whenever I vaguely recognized a man on the street, I felt a pang of anxiety, my mind flooding with all the things I might have done to him, the ways he might have seen me. Occasionally, I did see clients out in the world. How many did I not recognize? How many of the men I passed in the street had been to Mistress X’s? What did they think when they stared at me deboarding the bus? I knew that all of them weren’t perverts and that it was wrong of me to think that way. Still, I couldn’t help feeling as if they recognized me, too, as if in the meet of our eyes all pretenses fell away and we were simply dominatrix and client, meeting in the street. I couldn’t help feeling that we knew each other’s secrets, as if in passing each other our clothes fell off. It felt both humiliating and privileged. I had lost my anonymity, in a sense. If I could not see these men without imagining them groaning in a puddle of urine under me, how did they see me? I did not even share their obsession. How did any of my clients see women as anything else?
Whip Smart: A Memoir Page 16