“You should know that I’ve been to a number of therapists in the past,” I told her. “My mother is a therapist. I have all that vocabulary; I practically learned to read on Codependence No More, Healing the Ties That Bind, The Road Less Traveled, all that stuff.” She only smiled at me, nodding encouragingly. “And I’m sober. I’ve been clean and sober in AA for two years now. So I’ve got all that information, too, about addiction, and spirituality. I’m a good person now. I sponsor people. I have a lot of self-knowledge. I pretty much know how to change; I mean, I am changing. There are just a few things I can’t seem to stop doing. I mean, I get them; I just don’t know how to stop. That relationship between knowing and changing, I mean, applying my knowledge to my actions, it’s always been hard for me.”
“Okay,” she said.
I heard my own voice as I spoke, and it sounded false. I sounded desperate, defensive, like I was trying to prove something. I sounded like someone who was trying to sound like she was fine. But that was what I had always done. The difference was that I didn’t want to hustle this woman; I actually wanted her help. So why couldn’t I sound honest? I sounded like a kid, all trembling bravado. It was pathetic, but I couldn’t stop. I kept trying to emphasize how ready I was to change, to accept help, to find a solution; I kept trying to get the tone right, to sound sincere and present. My effort only made it worse, only made me sound more desperate to convince her of something I feared wasn’t true. Distressed, I finally shut up. We stared at each other.
“I sound like I’m trying to convince you of something,” I said.
“Yes, you do.”
“I don’t know why. I’m really trying to be honest. I just think there is a lot you should know.”
“Why don’t you just tell me why you are here?”
“I want to stop being a dominatrix. I mean, I think I want to stop. I want to be able to stop.”
“What is a dominatrix?”
I gaped at her. Of course, my perspective was also skewed by my own experience in this regard. I wouldn’t have expected her to know what a roman shower was, although it was quotidian vocabulary to me, but I still found it hard to believe that there was a person in New York City who didn’t know what a dominatrix was. There were beer commercials featuring dommes and entire fashion lines derived from our costumes; Madison Avenue featured a Diesel Jeans billboard advertising women with whips, for God’s sake! But she didn’t. So I had to describe it for her. This was so much harder and more humiliating than I ever would have imagined. I had always enjoyed shocking people, having the privileged information. She wasn’t shocked, though, not visibly. She just listened. She listened to me describe a job that entailed acting out the sexual fantasies of men who want to be tortured by women and dressed in their clothes; who want to relive the trauma their mothers inflicted upon them with enemas, high-heeled shoes, paddles, and verbal abuse. I explained how we all had to file in to meet new clients and wait for them to choose whom they wanted to pinch their nipples or coo obscenities in their ear. It did not sound glamorous. It did not sound tough, or cool, or sexy. It sounded humiliating. She didn’t react at all. All these judgments welled up in me, as I spoke. If I had been eavesdropping on our conversation, I would have judged my words the way I did other dommes’: as the misguided rationalizations of someone in bondage to her sex issues, man issues, daddy issues, trauma history, whatever. “It’s really just one of the few well-paid acting gigs in this city,” I told her, having delivered that line hundreds of times. I gave her all the neat and clever explanations that I had in stock. They sounded as flimsy and transparent as the insults I had shouted in my first domme session.
In meetings I spoke a lot about perspective, about context. It was important to actively seek out things that shifted your perspective, I often said; it’s all about context. Well, taken out of context, my job became a wholly different beast. My perspective shifted so violently, the bookshelf might have spun around, transporting me from a library to a bat cave. Glamorous didn’t exist in her office. There was no cool, no badass, no invincible. There was only real and unreal, and what I believed didn’t necessarily have anything to do with it. I had had many moments—on acid, or just heightened intimacy with a best friend or a lover—when I could see this. I knew, on some basic level, that glamorous and cool and tough didn’t exist, just like I knew that beauty was on the inside and that love was the solution to everything and that everything was part of one giant whole, but really. I had always had the ability to ignore that knowledge and enjoy fashion magazines, seducing people, and my personal triumphs. At that moment I couldn’t. It was very nearly the opposite of that feeling I chased in the dungeons, bedrooms, highways, and hotel rooms that had carried me outside of myself and into the yawning infinity of power and weightlessness. It was not falling, or flying, or evaporating into a dew of consciousness; it was being pinned to one spot, one self, one definition of something that resisted spin, philosophizing, or romance.
When I walked out of there, I didn’t know how I felt. It was easy enough to leave our conversation in her office and go on about my usual business. Later on, I felt similar to how I had when I began drinking wheatgrass and going jogging just before getting high. The sense of having done something good for myself increased my license to do what I suspected might not be so good. I was working on it.
But I kept working on it. I stopped trying to quit the dungeon and went about my usual routine. Every week I returned to that office overlooking 16th Street and went through the painstaking process of describing my work to someone for whom it didn’t connote status, romance, or power.
32
WHEN I APPLIED for an extra student loan, I wasn’t thinking any further ahead than that. I was curious what it would be like to subtract the financial factor. Perhaps if I relieved that pressure I would be able to see more clearly. Money obscured things, I knew, but never how much.
When the loan was approved, I didn’t do anything. I went to class, work, meetings, and therapy as usual for two weeks. Work got harder, though. Fiona was angry at all the sessions I wasn’t taking. “Tell him I’m booked,” I said, “tell him I went home sick,” as if my clients were boyfriends I didn’t have the heart to dump. I had disturbing moments of objectivity while working, flashes of disgust and anxiety as my sessions momentarily transformed, the way pornography does after orgasm—its emptiness and desperation no longer obscured by desire.
The last client I ever saw at the dungeon was Jack. This time, instead of sorority girl Margie, he wanted to be “Little Margie,” her child incarnation. We had conducted this scene many times before. Instead of sorority girls, Little Margie’s antagonist was, of course, Mean Mommy. Mean Mommy role-plays had always made for some of my favorite sessions, as soon as I found the confidence to pull them off. Jack’s topping from the bottom annoyed me, but it had improved since I stopped capitulating to it so much. When Jack pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and started to brief me on the intricacies of the scene, I gritted my teeth; he didn’t like the sneering to begin before the scene did, in keeping with the typical topper from the bottom. I gently tugged the paper from his hands.
“I know what the scene is, Jack. We’ve done it before.”
“Yes, but I, I made some changes to the, the original script? I’d really like you to incorporate a more sadistic tone of voice when you find me in the bathroom, and if you could pull my panties down first, before my—”
I reached out my finger, as if to press it against his lips, but stopped short.
“Shh! I will look this over,” I shook the limp paper, “and be sure to work in any revisions. Okay?”
“Well, okay. If you could just—”
“Good-bye, Jack. I’ll be back in five. You should be changed by then.” I quickly stepped out of the Red Room and closed the door behind me. Alone in the dim hallway, I sighed long, feeling my shoulders slump. An hour with him was going to ruin my day; I could already tell. My process of slipping in and out of
character had only been getting messier. My clients couldn’t usually tell, but from the inside the veil of my persona had grown opaque; I could see too much through it. I felt too awake. Many sessions had started to feel like surgery without adequate anesthesia. Walking to the dressing room to put on my business suit, I felt tired, the kind of tired that sleep or a vacation wouldn’t remedy.
The scene began with me getting home from work. I strode into the room, sighed theatrically, and then very slowly removed my stockings. Little Margie hid behind the bathroom door, spying on me. As I unclipped my garter, I could hear him wheezing and fidgeting and shivering with a wave of disgust.
Then I answered the phone.
“Hello? Oh, hello, Ms. Jenson, I hope everything is all right at school. Has Margie been behaving herself?” I paused to allow for the fictional teacher to respond. “You don’t say.” My tone darkened. “Well, rest assured I’ll take great pains to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.” I glowered in the general direction of the bathroom. “Yes, well, thank you, Ms. Jenson. Bye-bye now.” I slammed the phone down, and then the scene really got rolling.
Ms. Jenson usually informed me that Little Margie had been caught touching herself in the girls’ room. With this information, I stormed the bathroom and dragged Little Margie out by the hair of her wig (not an easy thing to accomplish). Berating her all the way, I forced her to show me exactly what she had been caught doing in the girls’ room. Following this humiliation, I beat her with a riding crop. The corporal punishment part of the scene always segued into the finale, wherein I decided to “teach her a real lesson.” Using a giant pink dildo, I gave Little Margie a taste of what she had coming to her.
It should have been a cakewalk.
Objectively, it was a disturbing scene. Early on, twisted sessions like this had given me a kind of satisfaction; during them I felt I most deeply plumbed the anthropological depths of my job. Imagine my own depths, to have witnessed, participated in, such perversions! Experiencing the reality of obsessions like this made me feel unique, and powerful for having faced their hideousness. They rarely horrified me. After the first year, repetition robbed them of all novelty and they became, while still among my favorites, rote and unmemorable. Jack’s fantasy was unexceptional, a stock role-play.
In this session with him, however, I felt smothered. Not explicitly horrified but as if his presence, the story we spun, and even the sound of my own voice were a sealed surface under which I was being snuffed out.
When the session ended, I walked Jack out and returned to the dressing room. My shift ended in half an hour. I peeled off my pencil skirt and pulled on my jeans. Padding down the hallway in bare feet, I opened the supply closet where the huge yellow depository for all our session trash was kept. Under the familiar buzz of the overhead light, I inhaled that old sickening smell of Lysol and latex and pulled a couple of garbage bags from the box on the shelf.
As I transferred the contents of my locker into the bags, my heart began pounding. I decided to leave a few items: pairs of torn stockings, all the shoes that hurt to stand in, hot pants with shot elastic, an ugly silk negligee. I didn’t want to look like I was cleaning the locker out, not to mention how difficult it was already going to be to carry just the quality stuff. I had thousands of dollars’ worth in clothes, shoes, lingerie, uniforms, wigs, and equipment.
“What are you doing Justine?” asked Camille, who was on the couch painting her toenails.
“I have a photo shoot this weekend.” I tried not to visibly hurry and suppressed the insane fear that someone would try to prevent me from leaving. No one did. In the elevator I clutched those garbage bags, their necks sweaty from my nervous hands, and eyed the camera in the corner. It was just before five on a spring afternoon with summer heat. I burst out onto the sidewalk into a stream of tourists and rush-hour commuters. Weaving my way down the block toward the subway, I found myself grinning like a kid on a homeward school bus, infected with the smell of pollen and freedom.
“I quit!” I adjusted the phone against my ear and waited for my mother to respond.
“That’s great,” she said, hesitantly. I could picture her expression exactly, the hesitation drawn in her delicate features. “That’s what you wanted, right?”
“Yeah, for a while now, I—” I stopped myself. “Yeah, I’ve been ready to leave for a while.” Talking with her about it never stopped being difficult, even with news I knew she wanted to hear. I always felt myself scraping up against something painful and backed out of conversations on the topic. She never seemed interested in prolonging them, either. There was less unspoken between us than there had been in a long time, and so it stood out, the rawness, our unreadiness to reveal how we felt about it, and to hear each other.
I knew she underestimated the extent of my using—I let her—but our relationship had changed since I’d gotten sober. On the surface, our interactions remained much the same, but I was less afraid of her, of what she’d see in me, or not see. I began to realize how much more interesting relationships became when they weren’t so restricted by omissions and half-truths, though harder in some ways. But it didn’t feel hard anymore, to keep up with our friendship; I didn’t have to work so hard to modulate what information I leaked. It’s difficult to feel known when you hide so much; advice becomes meaningless; assumptions about your identity or character, unbelievable. For a long time, our relationship had been haunted by the sadness I felt in her believing that she fully knew me and my knowing that she didn’t. The more I revealed, the more I could breathe.
“I’m really happy for you,” she said, and I knew she meant it.
I’ve never quit anything all at once, though, and I didn’t this. I kept seeing my private clients: Albert, Tony, Billy, Jeremiah, and a few others. After a few weeks, I had whittled it down to Jeremiah and Tony. The money made it easy to hang on to Jeremiah, and Tony was simply more persistent than the others; he refused to accept my retirement. He called and e-mailed multiple times per week. For every ten or twenty of his entreaties I accepted one. I quit him first. The sense of humiliation that followed his sessions lasted longer than the sticky slicks of lube on my arms and legs; it had only increased over time, and exponentially since I’d quit the dungeon.
I closed my work e-mail account. [email protected] no longer existed, and I hoped Tony himself would disappear so easily. He didn’t. When I first began taking private sessions, I had naïvely given my phone number to a few of those first clients, including Tony. When his e-mails began bouncing back, he started calling. I kept all my clients in my phone book under “S,” for “Slave” Albert, “Slave” Jeremiah, “Slave” Tony. The appearance of his name on that little screen soon prompted the same stomach lurch that my old drug dealer’s number had when I first got clean. The dealer stopped calling eventually, I told myself, and Tony would, too.
He probably would have been more inclined to stop calling if I didn’t pick up every once in while. It became a cycle that mimicked my early sobriety in a number of ways. When I got clean, it was partly due to a system of postponement; I would pick a day, next Thursday, say, and plan on getting high that day. When Thursday rolled around, I would get scared, go to a meeting, and decide on another day to get high. In this way, I made appointments with Tony for a week or two in advance, feeling confident that I would be able to handle it. I just needed some extra cash to feel financially secure, I thought. As the day of our appointment neared, my anxiety would loom, a mountain on the horizon that I was speeding toward. My anxiety never felt directly related to the session; like the melancholy of my childhood, it would seep into everything. My schoolwork, meetings, even the industrial Brooklyn landscape would seem waterlogged with dread, all that gray concrete dense with portent, the threat of something terrible: a failure, incurable loneliness and fear.
A day or two before the session, I would call my therapist and leave a frantic message. “Something is wrong!” I’d say to her answering machine, and then insist that s
he not call me back. I had learned in meetings that inditing fears had a special power. There was clarity on the other side of putting things to words. I still didn’t feel a connection between my dread and the session, but I had a reference for this sort of dissociation, in lying about being clean, and knew that the two could still be related. So I’d cancel at the last minute, and just like that my dread would leave, a swept cloud cover.
The same process applied to Jeremiah—I became anxious and doubtful in the days leading up to our appointment—though I still went through with it and saw him and Eva every couple months.
“Why is it so hard?” I asked my therapist, hoping for a prescriptive answer, something to do. Getting sober required a lot of action: list making, reading, going to meetings, helping people, visiting psych wards and rehabs, little exercises to trick me into looking at myself. I wanted this from her, but she resisted. She never gave homework.
“You’re still attached to it. Why do you think? What do you get out of it?”
“I don’t know. Money. It’s really hard to not have a lot of extra money. I’ve gotten so used to that.”
She looked at me, skeptical.
“I mean, it still feels exciting in some way, getting dressed up and going over to that fancy apartment, leaving with all that money. A part of me still feels satisfied, on a kind of power trip, when it’s over.”
Whip Smart: A Memoir Page 22