Whip Smart: A Memoir

by Melissa Febos

  “You okay?” Dylan asked me that evening as we watched a movie.

  “Sure.” I shrugged. “Just tired. Long day with the perverts.” I flexed my hand and surreptitiously pinched the outside of my wrist, waiting for the movie to end and for him to leave so that I could scour WebMD.com, where everything always ended up being a symptom of cancer. There was so much I still hid; it must have often seemed to him that I’d pinched more than a nerve. I never lost my mobility, but I sure spent a lot of time gone numb.

  Larry was too big to pick up and dunk in the toilet, as I would have liked, so I just made him crawl, kicking his ass, clad in a pair of huge pink panties, the whole way to the bathroom. This must have been our second or third session. When he was finally kneeling before the toilet, I stepped over him and hiked down my Levi’s.

  “Are you thirsty, Larry? Did all that studying make you thirsty? I hope so. I would make you close your eyes, you little sicko, but I want you to see this.” Standing over the raised seat, I peed for a good long time, holding his gaze the whole while. Pulling up my jeans, I stepped over him again and planted myself behind him.

  “Drink it.” He hesitated. “Drink it, you little fuck!” He leaned forward, but that was all. I grabbed a fistful of his hair and dunked his face in the yellow water. “How. Dare. You. Even. Speak. To. Me. This is what you get, you pathetic piece of dog shit, for thinking for a second that I would even want to be seen speaking to you in public, let alone go on a date with you!” I pulled his face out of the toilet gasping, water streaming down his chest.

  “Eww! You are getting piss-water on my shoe! What are you going to do about it, pig? Huh? What are you going to do about that?”

  “I dun-nun-nun-no, Mistress.” Larry’s sub voice was unrecognizable from his normal speaking voice. Like most of my clients, the change in persona he underwent in session was so thorough that everything from his facial expression in repose to the tone and manner of his speaking was transformed.

  “Well, I have a fucking idea, Little Lara; why don’t you clean it off with your scummy little mouth?” He didn’t resist.

  With Larry blindfolded and kneeling execution-style in the middle of the room, I finished the session whispering in his ear.

  “Show me how you touch yourself at home, Larry; show me what you do when you think about me alone in between your Superman sheets after you’ve finished your homework. Show me how you diddle yourself every night so that I can tell the whole cheerleading squad and the football team and we can all laugh and point at you in hallways and call you Little Larry. That’s right, Lar, I’m gonna divulge to the whole goddamn student population precisely how small it actually is.”

  He came into his own hand.

  “Eat up, Larry, down the hatch.”

  Afterward, I pulled my hair back in a bun, kicked off the heels, and donned a clean pair of latex gloves to wash the dildos in the sink while he showered.

  “That was amazing!” he shouted through the steam.

  “I’m glad,” I answered, peeling a condom off a black trunk as thick as my arm. I was surprised he didn’t split his lip trying to get his mouth around it.

  “Do you ever switch?” he asked.

  “Not often.”

  “Why not? I bet you like to.”

  I paused, deciding whether or not to let this pass. We weren’t in session anymore and I liked Larry, so I decided not to correct his presumptuousness.

  “Have you any idea the types that come through here? They have no clue what they’re doing. I end up having to run the session myself, so why bother? I’d rather just top than top from the bottom.”

  “Can’t blame you for that. So you don’t have anybody good that you see regularly?”

  “Nope.”

  “Shame.”

  “Why? Have you got designs on me, Lar?” I laughed.

  “Yes.”

  Well. It was true that ever since my failed reentry into the straight job market, I had been experimenting increasingly often with submissive sessions, taking ones I never would have in my first years at the dungeon. This evolution had partly to do with ennui, sick as I was of seeing the same sorry twenty clients for almost three years, and partly the laziness that resulted of my boredom. Like my powerful, Armani-suited slaves, I had grown tired of my monopoly on executive power, which also meant doing all the work. Having sole responsibility for conducting my sessions, for injecting them with the imagination and enthusiasm that had made me so successful, had become burdensome. Passivity looked like vacation. But this was not enough to justify a dismissal of boundaries as stringent as mine had been. I had always had a lot of submissive fantasies, though not to the extremity of my clients; I dreamt more of being ravished than ravaged. But now, almost exclusively in my private fantasies, I had become the subjugated. On a few occasions, I had actually reversed scenes from my workdays and imagined myself in the position of my clients, though it was never they whom I envisioned dominating me, only a faceless male figure, a masculine phantom of myself. I would surmise that even the few sessions in which I had trusted the expertise of my dominant enough to let go and successfully submit, it had been essentially an autoerotic experience. The conditions of my switch sessions always included being blindfolded, and the men were prohibited from all but the most rudimentary verbal interaction. To hear my pathetic, panting partner’s voice—the desire in it, let alone any trepidation or nervousness—was a certain mood killer. To experience pleasure in submission I had to be able to remain in my fantasy without the intrusion of their personality, without any reminder of the reality of our business arrangement. And I was not as disconcerted as you’d think, to witness in myself what I had judged my coworkers so harshly for. It seemed so separate, the way all things that I never spoke about did. It just was, not existing in the context of anything else.

  “Well, what would you have us do in such a scene, Larry?”

  “You mean what would I have you do? Or do to you?” He turned off the shower and pulled a fluffy white towel from where it hung over the shower stall door. Facing the vanity over the sink, I could see his silhouette as he dried himself, his hulking form obscured through the opaque glass behind me.

  “I suppose that’s what I mean.”

  “Well, I would say I’m best at doing what I enjoy having done to myself.”

  I laughed, slightly relieved at the obvious improbability of such a scene.

  “Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be drinking anybody’s pee in the near future. Sorry to disappoint.”

  “Well, not that necessarily,” he replied, stepping out of the shower with the towel wrapped around his waist. “I know how to respect limits. What I meant was the general tone of my sessions. I like the psychological aspect to it. The physical, too, of course, but I’d like to get in your head.”

  Our eyes met in the mirror, and I couldn’t help smiling.

  “I don’t know if I could let you in there, Lar, even if I wanted to.”

  “You’d be surprised, Jus; dommes usually make the best subs. Why do you think I’m so fun to abuse?”

  “Oh, so now you’re a dom?”

  “Most of the time. This is just to balance it out.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’d hate to lose you as a domme; you’re fantastic. But I get this sense about you. And I think we both know you can’t do both with one person; there’s no such thing as a real switch session; either you’re on top or you’re on the bottom.”

  I could taste the soap still on Larry’s fingers when he shoved them down my throat. Saliva ran from the corners of my mouth as my throat lurched around his fingers, my whole body convulsing with the gag. As it sank toward his knee, Larry pushed my forehead up with his free hand, looking down at me like a hardheaded dog, his tone firm and patient.

  “Look at me, Justine. Right here.” He pointed toward his own eyes. “I want you to look me in the eyes while I do this to you.” He tapped his fingers in the back of my mouth again, proddin
g my uvula and instigating another short round of gagging. “I know how easy it is to just go to another place, to leave your body while I humiliate it, but I’m not going to let you do that. I want you to feel every minute of it. I want you to think about this, my fingers in your mouth, when you are fucking your boyfriend. I want you to think about me when you are kicking the shit out of some guy later today.”

  An ugly sound came from my throat. As it echoed around the cavernous room, I heard how animal it sounded. The involuntary voices of our bodies are so strange to us, who are used to controlling them, calculating the way that others hear us. The guttural cries that came from me were painful in their betrayal of the facility with which I manipulated language and how expertly I enlisted its power to disguise this bestial truth. It was excruciating to be exposed in this way. And also freeing.

  Though reflexive tears already wet my face, I felt the sudden urge to cry. It was not an urge of pure grief, and the grief in it was not that of my predicament there, with that man’s hand in my mouth, but of other bondage, which abhorred the naked humanness in my submission, its discomposure. The pain I felt was mingled with gratitude. Maybe because I was incapable of freeing myself from the bindings of power, of self-control, without help.

  To me, desirelessness had always meant power. The people I have been most instinctually attracted to are those who are unavailable to me; their power is irresistible. The arousal I felt as a dominant was not sexual but psychological: my submissives desired me, and without any desire myself, I enjoyed the freedom to refuse them. It was in this freedom that I entertained the possibility of a greater power, of mine as an agent in my own life, a person without need of faith in anything but myself.

  When the session was over, we each showered and then sat on the leather bondage table to talk dogs. I felt more at ease and warmhearted toward Larry than any other client of mine. In fact, it was through my sessions with him that I began to develop an unprecedented empathy for my own submissives. After dominant sessions, I was often exhausted, peeved, and anxious to get them out and put my sweatpants back on; I resented their dewy gratitude and lingering, their chatty amicability. Preferable, most days, were the ones so consumed with shame, with the immediate emotional hangover, that they fled without showering or ever meeting my eyes.

  After a session with Larry, the peace of our induced intimacy was a warm place to be, and I was not anxious to leave it. Having survived something, I felt lighter and strangely hopeful. In defying my own boundaries, I nurtured a hope for the illusory nature of other limits and in my own ability to set and break them.

  25

  “UGH.” AUTUMN SLUMPED BACK against the sofa, the book sliding from her hands onto the floor. “I’m cooked. Stick in a fork in me, my love, because I’m done.”

  “Oh, stop,” I said, looking up from my carton of Chinese food. “School is easy. Life is hard.” I ceremoniously lifted a piece of broccoli with my chopsticks and stuffed it in my mouth.

  Autumn snorted. “School is easy for you, smarty-pants, but thanks for dropping some knowledge on me—that was deep.”

  I rolled my eyes and put my bowl on the coffee table. “Give me the book.”

  “It’s killing me, Melissa. It’s like breathing sawdust.”

  “See, that’s very creative—just use that in your paper!” I laughed and took the slim volume from her. “The Metamorphosis? This is a classic!”

  She raised her eyebrows and mouthed, Nerd.

  “You just have to get used to the language—it’s old.” I smiled at the book. “I’ve written papers of my own about this story.”

  “Great! Can I borrow them?”

  “Let me see what you’ve got so far,” I told her.

  Autumn was midway to finishing her bachelor’s at Long Island University and was considering switching focus from criminal psychology to nursing. I was of no use when it came to her science homework but regularly helped her out with English, which she hated. Working on her papers thrilled me, more so than working on my own ever had. I’d had to scale back my editing after she was gently accused of plagiarism by a professor.

  I disappeared into the work—plucking at sentences, scanning the pages of familiar books—the way I sometimes disappeared into sessions, but without any hangover that followed, no shame or disgust, only a sated wearines. I missed the way I could disappear into that kind of work; I’d forgotten how easy it was, how fast time flew when I was engrossed. I still read a lot but found it increasingly difficult to focus on anything for long. Gone were the days when I could read for five, ten, eight hours at a stretch. Downtime in the dungeon I spent perusing the newspaper or magazines or wandering around online, killing hours in the vortex of Friendster—the soon-to-be-obsolete precursor to Facebook.

  Autumn flipped through the television channels while I sat with her computer on my lap.

  “What are you doing this weekend?” she asked absently.

  “Black & Blue Ball is this weekend.”

  “You going?”

  “Uh-huh. You want me to get you a ticket? I’m picking mine up from Purple Passion tomorrow.” Purple Passion was our favorite supply store: a small, intimate boutique in Chelsea that sold high-quality corsets, leather goods—cuffs, crops, clothes—and even the medical supplies appropriated by our profession, like sounds, TENS units, and clamps.

  “No, I have a test on Monday. That thing is too crowded for me, anyway. I want to leave as soon as I get there.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  The Black & Blue Ball is one of the biggest fetish events of the year in New York. At a different venue each spring, its spectacle draws an international audience of thousands. People go for the art, the music, the cameras, to schmooze and publicize themselves, to see and be seen. It was worth it just for the outfits.

  That year, Camille, Miss K, Fiona, Georgina, and I met at the dungeon to get dressed before the ball. All of us crowded into the dressing room while the fresh-faced twenty-year-old night shift gawked from the couch. Miss K glued on two-inch magenta false eyelashes as Camille tucked peacock feathers into her headdress, and I baby-powdered the inside of my rubber minidress (latex is impossible to get on otherwise). Wanting to keep it simple, I smoothed some product on my black bob, put on red lipstick, and donned my most comfortable platform stilettos. One of our coworkers was performing. I loved to see the clothes, the local celebrity performers, the Amazonian trannies with their glitter and implants, and the dommes from other dungeons, but my reasons for going were also more pragmatic than any of that. There was business to be drummed up at the B&B.

  When I left the dungeon for a “real” job, it had a lot to do with my limits and their disappearance. When I went back, that didn’t change so much as my attitude about it. If I was going to go all out, I was going to get paid for it, I thought, and that made it seem more like a choice. I also couldn’t get the rumors about Remy out of my mind. Supposedly, he had cameras rigged behind all the mirrors of the dungeon. To an onlooker, what I was doing in sessions may not have seemed much more intimate than before, but I knew it was. Whether or not Remy had cameras in the dungeons, it was paranoid of me; even if they existed, girls had been doing what I did, and much worse, for years before I got there. But it wasn’t getting in trouble that I was afraid of; it was being seen. Where I had gone in my sessions felt like stepping off of that cliff, as I had my first day, but it felt wilder, steeper, darker below. It didn’t feel completely within my control, and the way I controlled things was in secret.

  Even as a kid, I’d found power in the ability to claim a hidden world. Selecting items from my household that would be wondered about but not missed, I would bury them in far corners of our rural backyard or off the banks of the pond our house sat at the edge of. I hid detailed maps inside a diary with a minuscule lock, whose key was hidden in a copy of Anne of Green Gables whose final chapter I had hollowed out with a pair of sewing scissors. It wasn’t to prohibit others’ use that I did this but to claim the knowledge of the
items’ whereabouts for my own, to stake out a metaphysical territory over which I had sole control. In my closet, I kept a Mason jar filled with the ashy remains of other expendable household materials. I would put bits of paper, fabric, plastic, hair, and food in the jar and burn them with long kitchen matches. Watching such vivacious transformation of the mundane mesmerized me.

  I needed a more controlled space to observe the transformation of my sessions, like that jar in the bag in the back of my closet or a hole dug in the backyard. Some things I needed to bury to keep. That wildness promised destruction if not contained.

  Skye, our colleague, was up on the balcony that overlooked the main floor of the club. They had oversold tickets worse than usual that year, and everyone you would have strutted by in years past you were now instead pressed up against. There was a glammed-up band playing, fire-breathers, and some sideshow sessions going on, but we couldn’t see any of it over all the heads. At five-two I had enough trouble seeing over the heads of other women, let alone men in heels. I found some breathing room on the balcony.

  I knew that Skye was into suspension but had never seen it before. We milled through the crowd for a while before finding her. I posed for cameras with a group of gay rubber fetishists, their perfectly sculpted bodies ensconced from head to toe.

  “There she is!” Camille finally shouted, and pointed to the corner where a tighter crowd had formed. We found Skye at the center. She had sculpted her black hair a foot high, weaving razor wire and Kewpie dolls into it, among other things. She smiled down at us as we pushed our way to the front of her audience, and I could see that her eyes were glazed with something. She’d probably taken painkillers in preparation. Dangling off the ground by a few feet, she wore a spangled bra and hot pants. Strung from the ceiling by rope were two large, silver hooks. They pierced through the flesh of her back, and from these she hung, a head about the crowd.