Whip Smart: A Memoir

by Melissa Febos

  The press’s office was in a large, open space on the fifth floor of a warehouse. The editorial, payroll, and copyright departments were separated only by tall, metal shelves full of collections like that of their annual volume of Dickens criticism, from the last fifty years. I was interviewed by a woman my own age. The first minutes were awful. It felt like the first date after a divorce. To be questioned by this stranger, to even be sitting so close to her, felt oddly intimate. I was so used to being immediately privy to the needs and shame of strangers that I almost felt I knew hers already. I could see it when she tucked her hair behind her ear and in the bulge of her belly when she sat and plucked at her blouse, in the shift of her gaze. It took me a while to turn that off. I didn’t have to find her shame to get this job, as I did at the dungeon, but I looked for it habitually. I took control of the interview the way I did pre-session consultations. I began asking the questions, squinting and nodding at her answers as if in careful consideration. She had to want my approval. I left feeling that I’d won. Two days later she called to offer me the job. Impulsively I accepted. It felt so good to be wanted.

  The job paid $12 an hour and required a minimum of twenty-five hours per week. I hadn’t worked more than twenty-five hours per week in years. There was no way I could maintain my lifestyle on $12 an hour, but I had wads of cash hidden all over my bedroom and wasn’t thinking longitudinally. I didn’t want to quit; I just wanted to know that I could. I considered it an experiment, a way of assuring my easy assimilation back into the real world, whenever the time for that arrived. Keeping the wheels greased. Remy agreed to give me a few months off to take some imaginary classes. Autumn was skeptical.

  “You’re going to work in an office? Eight hours a day? You’re going to hate it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know you, stupid. You are going to be bored out of your mind. Have you ever worked in an office?” I hadn’t really. “Why don’t you just swallow your pride and get a job waiting tables?”

  She had quit for good a few months before, under more dramatic circumstances. Remy had used spyware to break into her e-mail, and when she found out Autumn had raged through the dungeon, cursing at him while packing her things. A blowout like that was something to be grateful for, she said; it made it impossible for her to go back.

  “You could always go somewhere else,” I had told her.

  “Yeah, but I won’t. I’m done.”

  I both pitied and envied her. While I was expecting to feel as she did, what I was doing felt less like putting something down than running away from it. I was afraid of drowning, not sick of swimming.

  Having cobbled my concept of office life together from movies, I was surprised to find that I did not spend my days clicking around the office in heels, answering phones, and flirting with handsome coworkers. Nor was I actually editing, or wrangling with difficult though genius writers over the phone. My days were an endless spool of quiet, miserable boredom, punctured only by the scrape of metal from the construction site outside my window. My coworkers were all women. The one with whom I had the most contact was Ilse, the office manager. Ilse had been with the press for thirty years and was easily in her seventies. She must have once been beautiful, with an angular face that years of scorn had sharpened into a shingle. Shrewd and efficient, with no use for social niceties, she would have made a great domme fifty years ago, I thought. I had joked many times about wishing I had a domme of my own in college or at the gym, someone to make me get my life in order. I always knew I could do more to please someone else than myself. Ilse was not this person, although she acted like it.

  “Melissa!” she would bark my name across the office. When I made it over to her desk, she would glower at me, her eyes pointedly resting on the tattoo peeking out of my sleeve. “What are you doing?”

  “Uh, I am proofing the Dickens annual.”

  “Stop that. File these.” She would point to one of the decrepit towers of paper on the wall of shelves behind her desk, which held all the company’s records before 1980.

  I didn’t have a computer, only endless yellow pads of Post-its. Ilse was in at six every morning and left at three in the afternoon. After the click of her heels faded down the hallway toward the freight elevator, I would read novels and sometimes the MLA Style Manual, picking choice citations from it, or the payroll secretary’s personal calls, to write on the yellow squares.

  After a month at the new job I went on a fast. “The Master Cleanse” limited my diet to laxative tea and a mixture of water, lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. Maybe I missed the extremity of the dungeon, or maybe I just wanted to quit. Boredom was something to withstand, but it wasn’t what I was used to; there were no sharp corners of boredom, no distance to fall. Monotony has blunt edges, unchanging landscape. It was an Oklahoma highway of time, my month there.

  I started my diet on a weekend. The first day of no food was invigorating; I was hungry, but what was hunger to me? I had survived a disease of craving. The second day I was exhausted. The third day I went to work. At nine in the morning, on my way to work, I stood outside of pizza shops, the scent of melting cheese bringing tears to my eyes. This hunger resembled only pain in its power to subsume all other desires. I had always marveled at the way a splinter or stubbed toe could suddenly put things into perspective. Other ambitions are the luxury of those whose bodily comforts can be taken for granted.

  I read the same cumbersome sentence all day at my desk, little red pencil poised between my fingers. My dysfunction felt like being stoned, minus the fun. I could not complete anything or focus for more than a few seconds. All I could do was space out into vague anxiety, watching the construction site out the window, the crane bending its great skeletal arm to scrape through the dirt.

  “Melissa!”

  “Yes, Ilse?”

  “Come here.”

  (Long shuffle across the office.)

  “Yes, Ilse?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Proofreading.”

  She suspiciously squinted into my eyes.

  “Sort these files.”

  The fourth day, when I walked into the office with my jar of spicy lemonade there was a bag of muffins on the table by the refrigerator. They were blueberry Hostess Mini Muffins, mushed in a sealed bag into an exquisite clump of sugar and preservatives. My taste buds spasmed, flooding my mouth with saliva. I shuffled to my desk in agony and, sitting, nestled my face into my folded arms.

  “Melissa?”

  I could not move. I could not answer her without those muffins.

  “Melissa?”

  “Yes?”

  “Come here.”

  “Yes?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing, Ilse.”

  “Finish these promotional packets.”

  For the new annuals, we sent out publicity materials made with colorful paper, glue sticks, and Ilse’s typewriter. Ilse was usually too fetishistic about straight corners to permit me this task.

  At noon, I put down my scissors and glue stick to retrieve my “lunch” from the refrigerator. The muffins were still on the table. The payroll secretary stared into the microwave, watching the carousel of her own lunch, which was always the same: diet meals in plastic cups that she had mailed to her by the caseload. They made the whole office smell like canned dog food and SpaghettiO’s. Sipping from my jar of lemonade, I stared at the muffins.

  “Better not!” The payroll secretary smiled, stirring her cup of orange stew. “I think those are Ilse’s. You know how she is.” She smiled conspiratorially and wrinkled her nose. “I think she’d notice.” I wrinkled my nose back at her and returned to my desk.

  Three hours and two glue sticks later, I heard Ilse push back her chair. She clicked her way over to my desk and surveyed the mess of sticky paper cuttings.

  “What’s this?”

  “This is what you asked me to work on.”

  “This is a mess. Where are the
finished materials?”

  I handed her a card on which I had typed all the publishing information before gluing it onto a red background. She examined it, scraping at a minuscule clump of glue with her fingernail. “Look here.” She ran her fingernail along the edge of the card. “It is crooked.” She dropped the card onto my desk. “Do it over.” She clicked back to her desk and I heard her chair’s legs scrape the floor once more, the tap of her typewriter resuming. Beyond the window, the crane shuddered in mid-air, clumps of dirt falling from its blunt bucket hand. Rage made every sound louder: rips torn in the quiet. Ilse slammed a desk drawer, and the payroll secretary whispered into her phone. I couldn’t do it. Whatever had prompted me to get and keep this job was dwarfed by my fury. As soon as I stood up and knew my intentions, it drained out of me and I was free. I tucked my chair under my desk and walked into the kitchen. The muffins squished inside their bag when I squeezed them into my pocket. I left my lemonade in the fridge and walked out.

  Part Four

  24

  THE FRAYED EDGE of the rug was just discernable through the slit at the bottom of the blindfold, and I used it to navigate my way toward the bathroom, groping the air with my hands until they found a wall. Pulling the bathroom door open, I took tiny steps, wary of water on the floor in my stilettos. Feeling my way along the sink, I moved on to a marble shelf bearing a stack of Dixie cups, an industrial-size bottle of Scope, and a collection of disposable toothbrushes individually wrapped with their own tiny tubes of fluoride paste. After I navigated along the heated towel rack, my shin finally bumped into the rim of the toilet.

  “Today, Justine …”

  Larry was closer than I thought. If not in the doorway watching me, he was almost that near. His eyes on my back, I unfastened the top button of my white shirt.

  “Are you going to make me come in there and do it myself? Are you trying to provoke me?” Hurrying, I removed the shirt, pausing with it bunched in my fist as goose bumps rose along my back and shoulders. “Turn around, Justine.” I turned slowly, the cold lip of the toilet against the back of my calf as I faced him, conscious of my nipples, taut under the breath of the air-conditioning vent overhead. “That’s it. Good girl.” After he appraised me, his footsteps descended to the opposite side of the Blue Room. The door of the wardrobe against the far wall groaned as he opened it, and I heard the scrape of heavy chain across the wooden shelf where chains were kept. As the chains clinked against themselves in his hands, I could tell he spoke over his shoulder.

  “Stop fucking around, Jus; I want it dripping. Do you hear me? Dripping. If it’s not dripping, Jus, I’m gonna to stick your head in there; I’m gonna wash that toilet with your hair. Got it?”

  “Yeah.” My own voice sounded frail and ambivalent; gone was the husky assurance with which I denigrated my clients.

  “Not ‘yeah,’ Jus’, ‘yes.’”

  “Yes.”

  “Good girl, now hurry the fuck up.”

  Crouching over the toilet, one hand bracing myself in the treacherous heels, I dunked the fist holding my blouse in the toilet water. It was freezing. Squeezing the sopping fabric gently, I attempted to wring just enough liquid from it to still qualify as dripping.

  “What did I say about dripping, Justine? I can hear what you’re doing in there, and you’d better not squeeze another goddamn drop out of that shirt!” Standing up, I peeled the fabric apart and found an armhole. Streams of frigid toilet water slid down my breasts, back, and belly onto the bare skin underneath the waist of my pleated skirt as I buttoned the shirt.

  I might have engineered this punishment in one of my own dominant sessions. It was the familiar choreography of verbal humiliation and psychological mind-fucking that impressed me. Larry knew what he was doing, and that’s how I could let him. I actually stole a few of his tricks to use on my own submissives.

  Larry was a big man at six-two, a little hefty, with warm eyes and a solicitous disposition. He bred Yellow Labs and in our first meeting reminded me of one. Before we even got to his to-do list, we bonded with the instantaneous goodwill and enthusiasm of two dog lovers. After we traded stories of canine food allergies and yeast-infected paws, the conversation rolled around to his erotic penchants, which included face spitting, forced gagging, and intense verbal humiliation. Larry’s fantasy was a common one and a personal favorite of mine: the high school bitch. It should be surprising to no one that she made such frequent appearances here, where our business traded so often in the resurrection of childhood tormentors, both real and imagined. She was of the most requested bullies, along with mom, stepmom, teacher, babysitter, and nurse.

  Larry wanted the tight jeans/braless T-shirt/high heels/ponytail combo, in which I was to strut around the Blue Room in cock-teasing antagonism, batting my eyes and coyly suggesting that he’d been staring at me an awful lot in algebra and how would he like to help me with my homework after school? This masterful plot would of course end in evil laughter, some humiliating remarks about the size of his penis, a swift kick to the balls, and a loogie in the eye.

  “Just give me a safe word and do whatever you want,” he said. There was nothing I appreciated hearing more, especially in a session whose fantasy I might enjoy. I heartily endorsed the idea with a handshake and promise to return in ten minutes.

  Don’t mistake my enthusiasm for identification; I was not this type of girl in high school. While commanding a certain amount of respect from my peers, I was an outsider, with no status to lord over lesser social castes. I had neither the motivation nor the capacity for this caliber of cruelty. The closest I came to antagonism as a teenager were a few instances of championing the more endangered passengers of my school bus. An empath by nature, I could barely stomach the gait of my neighbor’s three-legged cat, let alone the humiliation of those with a surplus of social handicaps to begin with. High school was painful enough from a voyeuristic standpoint.

  So how did I transform so comfortably into this sadistic persona? Perhaps I longed for a sort of freedom from conscience, or at least the ability to override it, that would sanction cruelty. The dungeon was the only forum in which I could enjoy the fancied freedom of cruelty, and there was a part of me greedy for it.

  So I dressed with gusto: black stilettos, tight ponytail, and lipstick so sharp and bright it might have been a tear in the olive slope of my face. I slathered my hairless limbs in scented lotion, not unlike the fruity kinds popular with teenage girls; olfactory triggers can’t be beat for evoking memories of sexual awakening and its subsequent traumas. Clicking down the dim hallway to the kitchen, I sucked down the remains of my morning coffee under the eye of the camera perched over the washer-dryer unit. The lazy swivel of the fan over the door forced me to waste one, two, three matches before my cigarette lit and I took a hungry drag before heading to the Blue Room.

  “You’re for sale, Justine. You’re on the auction block. Show them what they’d be paying for.” Larry trod a slow circle around me, prodding my ass with a riding crop. “Don’t let those chains fall, Jus. You can’t blame me for what happens if you do; you’ll only have brought it on yourself.”

  My shoulders were on fire. Still blindfolded, I was balancing in the middle of the room on a small podium that usually bore an ornate wooden throne from which I would degrade my own slaves. Just that morning, one of them had been fellating the heel of my boot while I sat in it. Now I wore only the sopping white blouse and heels, whose punishing angle was cramping my arches so badly I feared collapsing. In each outstretched hand I held four feet of heavy chain.

  “How many times have you done this to some poor fuck that was paying you to abuse him, Justine? How many times?” He rapped my tit with the tip of the riding crop, catching me off guard. It took me a few seconds to regain my balance before I could reply.

  “A lot.”

  “You bet a lot. And much worse, huh, Justine? This is kiddy stuff, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “How many times have you humiliated some p
oor bastard with a choice like the one I’m giving you: hold up the goddamn chains or drop them and get punished? I know you can’t hold ’em up forever, darlin’—that’s the fun part.”

  As he spoke, I let my arms drop slightly, hoping he wouldn’t notice their incremental sinking. All those hours at the gym would only get me so far. The burning in my shoulders was spreading, smoldering down my biceps and into my forearms. After Larry came to see me, I was always sore for days.

  “How much, Justine? How much would you go for? How much would it cost to sell you on the block for an hour’s time? How much for some stranger, some sick fuck, to fuck your brains out, kick your ass, do whatever he wants to you for sixty minutes? How much are you worth, darlin’?”

  Explaining the bruises that dotted my arms and legs never posed much of a problem; I had always collected bruises as a by-product of my daydreaming. My hip never met a table corner it didn’t like. I moved too quickly and haphazardly for someone so prone to spacing out. I did manage to hide my ass from Dylan for ten days once, until a particularly telltale purple stripe faded. But the only real worry any of the minor wounds inflicted by submissive sessions gave me came when Larry’s sloppy bondage pinched a nerve in my wrist. See, I had never pinched a nerve. During my post-session shower, when my left hand began tingling, I first thought I might be having a heart attack. I crouched under the stream of hot water, bracing myself against the shower walls, pulse racing. The cold sweat of panic ceased when chest pains failed to follow. The tingling, however, continued to creep up my forearm. By the time I returned home after work, a solid stripe of numbness covered the distance from my elbow to my pinky finger. I hadn’t lost mobility, only feeling.