Cuff’s was located on the ground floor of a Bowery building that had once been a flophouse. The street windows of the floors above had been blanked with sheets of galvanized steel. The bouncer, an appropriately shaven-headed, pierced, and tattooed ogre, gave them the eye at the door and, apparently pleased with their equipage, passed them in.
It was immediately apparent to Marlene that you didn’t go to Cuff’s for the music. At the end of the black-painted room was a low stage, upon which a suitable leathered and painted quartet was doing a cover of a New Order song, the lyrics to which consisted largely of the words “baby” and “body,” heavy on the feedback and writhing, at glass-cracking volume. When her eyes adjusted to the gloom, Marlene saw that they were in a large room that occupied the entire floor of the old flop, with a bar along one side, a dozen or so round tables in the center, and a dance floor in front of the stage. Everything that would take paint was painted matte black, of course, and the room’s only light, aside from the glow behind the bar, came from red and blue mini-spots focused on the stage and on the obligatory spinning glitter ball, the great seal of the republic of fun. The walls were decorated with mock-ups of antique torture implements-at least Marlene hoped they were mock-ups-and a remarkable variety of dusty whips, chains, and manacles hung from the ceiling, like the webs of large, messy spiders. There were about fifty people in the room, all dressed to kill, or at least to harm, in the sort of outfits Marlene and Wolfe were wearing.
“Nice place,” said Marlene to Wolfe. “See anyone we know?”
Wolfe made a noncommittal noise and cast his eyes around the crowd, as did Marlene. No Ginnie Wooten, no Evarti, unless, like many of the patrons, they were wearing masks. The two pushed their way to the bar and ordered a pair of five-dollar Schlitzes. Marlene paid with a twenty and asked the bartender, “Has Ginnie Wooten been in tonight?” The bartender was wearing a laced leather vest over a hairless chest. He was a skinny, hatchet-faced man with a badly pocked face, and to improve his appearance he had dressed his hair into three Velcro-like tufts with shaved furrows between them and driven a chromed twenty-penny nail through his nose, like a cannibal chieftain in a cartoon. It gave his voice a curious buzzing quality.
“You’re new,” he observed.
“Yeah, Ginnie said I should check out the scene.” Here she gestured to the room. “It’s pretty cool. So, have you seen her?”
“She’s around. What about you? Top or bottom?”
“Oh, top, definitely,” said Marlene. The bartender seemed to lose interest. She attempted to rekindle it by twitching one of her five-dollar bills. “I’d appreciate knowing where to find her.”
The bartender took the bill and put it in a pocket of his vest. “You try upstairs yet?”
“No.” Marlene had not been aware that the place had more than one floor.
“Private club,” said the man, turning away. “See the guy, Melvin. On the stool there.”
Back in the corner, to one side of the bandstand, nearly obscured by the huge speakers, was a door, lit by the red of an exit sign, and by the door they found the stool and on the stool was Melvin. This person weighed at least three hundred pounds and was naked to the waist except for several dozen chains around his neck, Mr. T fashion, and a black executioner’s mask.
“Ten bucks lifetime membership,” said Melvin when Marlene and Wolfe made inquiries, and to Marlene, “I like your outfit.” He had a surprisingly light voice for such a large man.
“Thanks,” said Marlene. “Membership in what?”
“The Asperians. We’re an umbrella group, you know? Affiliations with the Til Eulenspiegels, Samois, Gemini, the S-M Church. We take anyone-male dominant, female dominant, gay, the whole nine yards. We rent the rooms upstairs.”
They paid their money, and Melvin recorded their names and addresses in a ledger, and handed over a pair of membership cards.
“There’s equipment for borrowing upstairs if you haven’t brought your own. The only rule is have fun and don’t get hurt,” advised Melvin cheerfully, and nudged open the nearby door with his foot.
They ascended a narrow stairway lit by weak red bulbs, and at the top of it came to a room about half the size of the one below. It was carpeted in some industrial material, and its windows were covered with the metal sheeting they had seen from the street. There were perhaps a dozen people in the room, largely coupled off, most of the women in dominatrix gear and most of the men in a variety of costumes designed for ritual humiliation-petticoats, sheer negligees, diapers-or nude except for complicated-looking leather straps, both jock and restraining. Many were attached to their mistresses by chains or leashes. The room was lit by several photographic spots directed at its center, and in this pool of light a woman was shouting insults at her partner, a man dressed only in a diaper, who was cringing in ecstasy at her feet. She kicked him lightly with her pointed boot and called him a naughty, dirty little boy. It went on for quite a while. Some of the spectators watched with interest; others, the dominants, chatted. It was like being at a big dog show, Marlene thought, except that here the dogs were people. She looked at the faces in the group. Allowing for the peculiar qualities of the lighting and the odd makeup many of the women favored, they looked like quite ordinary people: supermarket rather than horror-movie faces, and Marlene concluded that Professor Malkin’s assessment was correct, just plain folks having odd fun. The diapered man was led off by his mistress, crawling, through a door Marlene had not noticed. Shortly, through the same door issued a woman dressed all in white, a startling sight in the circumstances, drawing an appreciative murmur from the group. She was clearly posing as a little girl going to first communion, in a white dress, tied with a sash, white stockings, a white patent leather purse, and white patent mary-janes on her feet. Her face was made up to look not made up, and she wore a white ribbon in her straw-colored hair. She walked into the spotlight and waited, twisting her toes girlishly.
Marlene looked around for Wolfe, who had, however, wandered away. “What’s going on?” Marlene asked the man next to her, a beefy fellow wearing a dog dollar, red corset, and panty hose. He started to answer reflexively, but the woman he was with cut him off violently by yanking on his collar.
“You dare to speak without my permission!” she hissed. “You dare! You filthy, disgusting worm! Get down! Lower!”
He groveled, his face in the carpet, while she put her booted foot on his neck and ground his face, while giving him a couple of good ones across the bottom with a little cat-o’-nine-tails she carried.
Marlene was about to apologize and then realized that the rules of courtesy were different here. She smiled at the woman, who was thin and pretty and younger than Marlene, and dressed in a formal black-silk suit, velvet hat, and veil, like Marlene’s grandmother. She got a bland smile in return, of the sort you get in the laundromat when you’ve handed someone a quarter.
Another stir in the crowd. A man in a long raincoat had come out of the door and approached the faux little girl. He was dirty and unshaven and wore a slouch fedora that shadowed his face. He was breathing hard; the rasping noise he made seemed to drown out the faint throb of the music coming from the room below. In a violent motion he flung his raincoat open to reveal that the crotch had been cut out of his trousers and that his penis was rigidly erect. There was a moment of frozen silence. Then the girl-woman let out a piercing shriek and attacked the man, kicking him in the knees and shins and shouting, “Filthy, dirty old man!” over and over. She reached into her purse and brought out some kind of flail and swung it at the man’s head. No, Marlene saw, not a flail, a heavy rosary, of the type borne by old-fashioned nuns. The man’s hat flew off. He was Felix Evarti.
The white-clad woman kept up her frenzy of beating and kicking, shouting all the while (“Dirty! Filthy!”). Evarti made ineffective shielding motions, and went down on his knees and then his back. Marlene knew enough about serious fights to realize that for all her extravagant motion, Mary-Jane was pulling her blows. The
others were closing around the scene in a circle, avid. With Evarti down, the woman could now concentrate her fury on the peccant member, which remained upright and twitching. She beat at it with the rosary, and Marlene wondered how she kept from doing him damage. The vituperation reached a crescendo. The woman leaped upon Evarti’s naked belly and ground her white mary-janes into his genitals, grinding the penis underfoot as if squashing a cockroach. Evarti was making incomprehensible noises, groaning, thrashing from side to side. He arched his back and shouted something in another language, Romanian, Marlene supposed, and then came in a thick gush over the woman’s white shoes.
“Euugh! You disgusting man!” cried the woman. “You dirtied me with your filth! Clean it up! Clean it up this minute.” Evarti started to dab the shoes with the edge of his raincoat, but this was clearly not satisfactory. After a few especially vigorous lashes, the woman shouted, “Lick it! Get it all off, you foul man!” Evarti prostrated himself before the woman and licked the semen off her shoes. She made sure he got it all and then, straightening her dress and replacing her rosary in the little purse, she skipped off. She actually skipped. Evarti rose shakily, clutched his coat around him, picked up his hat, and shuffled away. There was a collective release of breath around the circle.
Marlene was again conscious of Wolfe standing close by. In a low voice she remarked, “Gosh, and I thought I had some weird relationships. What did you think of that, Wolfe?”
Wolfe shook his head. “Un-fucking-believable. I checked the place. He’s here.”
“Who?” said Marlene.
“Robinson. I think he must have been in one of the little rooms off the corridor there, behind the door. Now he’s over in the corner under the windows.” Marlene looked. There was a man standing in the corner, leaning against the wall. He was wearing a dark suit and tie and a white shirt, but Marlene could not make out his face.
The woman in the black grandma outfit was putting Mr. Panty Hose through his paces under the spot, but Mary-Jane was obviously a hard act to follow. The circle of watchers grew more diffuse. Marlene moved away from it, pulling Wolfe along.
She said, “Look, why don’t you go and get a drink downstairs?” and at his doubtful grimace, added, “Wolfe, I can take care of myself, and besides, if you’re not around I can try my flagging charms on the bozo. And you can look for the lovely Virginia Wooten.”
Wolfe shrugged and walked off, a good soldier. Marlene removed her leather jacket and walked toward Robinson’s corner, dragging her jacket behind her. She walked slowly, thrusting out her breasts in the leather bra and rolling her hips, although the spikes on her boots did most of the rolling for her.
She walked to the wall of covered windows, took a turn in front of Robinson, walked to the other end of the room, and then walked back, slowly. When she was a few paces away from him, she could see that he was looking at her. She turned and started to stroll away again when he spoke.
“Trailing your cloak?”
She stopped and faced him.
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she said.
“Do I know you?” Odd, Marlene thought. It was dim and she was heavily made up, so perhaps he really hadn’t recognized her. Or maybe this was part of the game. She decided to play it out.
“I don’t think so. But I always make it a point at any gathering to approach the most interesting-looking man in any room.”
“And why am I that?” he asked, smiling now.
“Well, for one thing, you’re not dressed up. How come, I wonder.”
“But I am dressed up,” he replied, spreading his arms and posing ironically. “This is a dominance and submission party, and I’m wearing the most dominant possible costume-a blue pinstripe, custom-made Savile Row suit, with accessories to match. This sort of suit rules the world.”
“I take your point. But that’s not very playful, is it? The leather, the little whips that don’t do any damage, the domination skits over there-it’s supposed to show it’s all fantasy.”
“I suppose so. Actually, all of that’s not particularly interesting to me.”
“Oh, no? Why not?”
“Because I take domination seriously,” he said. He stopped smiling and stared hard into her eyes, in the manner of Mandrake the Magician.
Marlene burst out laughing, and as she did she saw something truly dangerous pass across his eyes, but only for an instant, before he remembered and turned the charm back on.
It was considerable charm, Marlene thought, or rather, felt: the man had a remarkably powerful sexual aura, of the type often possessed by extremely nasty men. It was one of God’s little jokes, this, and Marlene had seen it played out innumerable times in her professional life. In fact, it might be said that it was nearly the source of her professional life. Not that she was immune to it herself; rather the opposite, to tell the truth. My, she thought, he is an attractive devil, and knows it too. She wanted to kick him in the groin. She wanted to bite that gorgeous mouth.
Smiling again (and the bastard knew just what she was thinking, he’d seen it before), he said, “So, there aren’t any interesting men where you come from, and so you drive in from … where is it? … Forest Hills? Valley Stream?”
“Ozone Park,” said Marlene coolly, naming her actual birthplace, a low-rent Queens district.
“Ozone Park!” repeated Robinson in a tone of mock amazement. “And what do we do out in Ozone Park? Help hubby run the brake shop?”
“Something like that.”
“Then you should fit in quite well with the … Asperians. Actually, it could involve some upward mobility for you. Play your cards right, and you might even get to urinate on an assistant bank manager. Would you like that, Queensie?”
Marlene regarded him with sick fascination. He didn’t recognize her. Instead, he was being casually, effortlessly cruel in a way that would have been devastating to the woman he thought she was. Marlene had met any number of awful people in her life, including some that could have eaten Vincent Robinson as a canape, but as an exemplar of that much misused category “sadist,” this guy took the palm. And still the attraction was there.
She asked, “If this is such a low joint, why’re you here?”
“Oh, one occasionally finds a rough diamond, a seeker after something a little more intense than those S-M sitcoms we just saw. And they make rooms available for more, ah, advanced practices. For a price.” He reached out his finger slowly and flicked a leather lace that dangled from the center of her brassiere, where the two cups met.
“Actually, I’m about to rejoin my party,” he said. “If you promise not to be shocked, you can come along.”
“I’m not easily shocked,” said Marlene, and thought, God, what a dumb thing to say! It’s exactly what some girl from Ozone Park would say.
“How nice for you,” Robinson said. He actually curled his lip when he said it. Then he walked rapidly away, leaving Marlene to hobble behind him on her ridiculous heels, feeling unbearably stupid. Which was the point, of course.
Robinson strode through the door from which the various “performers” had emerged, Marlene following, and then entered a dimly lit hallway lined with closed doors. He went into one of them, leaving the door open.
The man’s face was the first thing Marlene saw, staring out of the darkness of the little room, hanging in space like a jack o’lantern. His mouth was stuffed with some sort of elaborate medieval-looking gag, a wooden apparatus with complicated straps that distorted his face, which otherwise was twisted in either pain or ecstasy or perhaps both combined. His short dark hair was sticking up, stiff with sweat, and a thin trickle of black blood depended from his lower lip. She entered the room, and someone behind her swung the door closed.
In a few moments her eyes had adjusted to the light, which came from four huge black candles stuck in their own grease onto the old, splintery floor. The man, she saw, was naked, and he was hanging facedown and spread-eagled from padded cuffs tied to his wrists and ankles and affixed to chains
, rigid with tension, that extended up to the four corners of the ceiling. He was moving rhythmically in short swings, and at each swing he grunted. She could hear the breath whistling in his nostrils and another sound from farther back, to the same beat.
There was a woman standing behind him, between his legs. She had both hands sunk deep into the flesh of his buttocks, deep enough to draw blood, and she was using this grip to heave him onto the huge ivory phallus that was attached to her groin by a sculpted, thick black leather harness.
Remarkably, Marlene’s first thought when she registered what was happening was that the woman had a much better outfit than she herself did. It was a leather corset, laced up the front, and elaborately layered with black and red panels, into which had been set little relief sculptures in ivory and polished metal-skulls, and swastikas, and gargoyles-and the part of it that covered her small breasts was cut away to reveal her nipples. These were pierced with silver rings, from which long red velvet tassels depended. The woman was wearing a half-mask too, also in laminated leather, decorated with the appropriate domination designs and bearing a crest of black plumes. Despite the mask, Marlene could see, from the staring collarbones, the tight-tendoned neck, the sharp, small chin and the tight scarlet-painted mouth, that the woman was Ginnie Wooten.
She looked deeper into the room. Robinson was sitting at ease in a wooden armchair with his legs crossed. Behind him were ranged several people, all standing, including, Marlene was interested to note, the Mary-Jane from before. Robinson looked at Marlene and raised a mocking eyebrow. She cleared her throat heavily and said, “Okay, I’m shocked.”
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