Sex and Bacon (21 page)

2.
I realize as I write this that I’ll need to give notice a few weeks before this book conies out.

TWO DAYS BEFORE HALLOWEEN, MY OFFICE MANAGER TOLD
me that we—the entire word-processing department—were expected to dress up in costume for the office holiday party.

“The clients enjoy it so much,’ she trilled. “It’s fun and festive!”

From 3:00 to 5:00 PM, I was informed, my department would be mingling with our clients in a big conference room, cheerfully entertaining them as costumed team players rife with holiday spirit. I imagined cotton-pickmg Negroes singing spirituals for their indulgent masters.
Festive
wasn’t the word I would have chosen, but it was clear I would need to drum up a nonoffensive, work-safe costume anyway. Two hours of standing and walking instead of being crouched behind my desk sounded like heavenly reprieve, even if I’d have to do it in a conference room filled with the men whose letters I typed.

According to my enthusiastic manager, some of the clients also dressed up for the annual bash. I was looking forward to the probability of seeing a few of the old white men who made up our client base in garish makeup and pantyhose—that old balloon-titted dude-in-a-dress routine never seems to go out of fashion for conservative guys looking for a reliably “outrageous’ Halloween costume. Most straight men who dress as women for comedic effect botch their drag deliberately—walking flat-footed and exposing thick mats of hair at their decollete—as if to underscore their own masculinity the way a lovely woman in a tailored suit can appear even more feminine and fragile than one in a dress. Unlike drag queens, though, their aggressive desire for the trappings of femininity has always seemed less like tribute and more like invasion, as if they’re daring us to ban them from any area of our lives, including the most intimate details of our own adornment.

But due to my previous work as a fetish-oriented dominatrix, I couldn’t help wondering how many of our cross-dressed clients would enjoy wearing their costume garb later—for erotic purposes —once the Halloween festivities were over. How many straight men had perched in front of my prop vanity table, jiggling their bare legs impatiently as I applied lipstick to the mouths that barked orders all day? How many had confessed the simple desire to be “pretty,” then in the same breath to be “treated like a slut”? My cross-dressing salarymen spent their days delegating their workload to women making $10 an hour, then they paid strangers a couple hundred bucks to watch them jerk off into a pair of panties. Men like them were far from uncommon—I could shave a rich old man’s legs with a disposable razor faster than I could shave my own.

Which meant I had a good chance of spotting a cross-dressed executive at the office Halloween party—the type who was just a little bit too serious about his makeover routine, or slightly too graceful in his high heels. Someone who didn’t just dress up in an evening gown once a year for yuks—a man who regularly stole and wore his wife’s lingerie under his business suits, or who paid a stranger like me to dress him up in satin and lace, paint his nails, then bully him into orgasm. Spotting him would mean knowing I could make the equivalent of my paycheck behind his closed office door by whispering ridiculous filth like “You little slut—I’ll bet your naughty pussy is wet,” into his ear, or by making him wear my panties as he typed his own damn correspondence.

Not that I
would
. Not anymore, anyway. But those old instincts die hard.

IT WAS SO
easy back then. It was like making money by breathing. The best part was, they didn’t even care how sexy I was because their whole focus was on how sexy
they
were.
They
were the hot ones,
they
were the whores—but only a foolwould think that a female dominant is somehow turning the tables on her customers or “transgressing gender roles” by treating her customers like sluts. All that kind of verbal play does is confirm their belief that it’s right and natural for real women to be treated similarly in the cosmology of porn—i.e., sluts wear lingerie and should be punished for their whorish nature by forced sexual performance, which they invariably enjoy. That’s not a message I’ve ever felt good about spreading. Eventually my reluctance to work in a system predicated on human objectification drove me out of the adult industry entirely.

But the money—Lord, how I missed the money! Fifteen minutes of watching a fat man rub himself through a lace thong, stockings pulled up to his knees, occasionally prodding his chest with the end of my riding crop and calling him a wet-pussied bitch—and oh, how the money rolled in. And oh, how I spent it: restaurant meals, travel, clothes, taxis, the best liquor, the purest drugs. I spent thoughtlessly—money flowed through me. It seemed like there would always be more of it, as if I could just reach out when I wanted more and scoop it up, like a bear lazily pawing salmon from a jumping creek.

It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that some of the office’s clients had actually been my customers in the past. Seattle’s a small town, and there are relatively few places for men to go where they can engage in gray-area, semilegal sexual activity with paid professionals. I was almost positive I’d recognize some of them if they had their cocks out. I wasn’t much for remembering faces, but every cock has its own quirks.

FIND H’WEEN COSTUME
, I scrawled on a Post-it note to myself after my boss returned to her cubicle. I had two days. I knew I could think of something. Maybe I’d shove a balloon in my pants and go in costume as a sexualized, clownish man, to give any cross-dressed clients a taste of their own medicine.

I imagined myself at the office party, rubbing my balloon cock between a bewigged and heavily made-up client’s balloon tits. “Take it, bitch,” I’d say. The squeak of latex would be the only response. I could drizzle ranch dressing from the inevitable supermarket crudites platter over his balloons as I “finished.’
See how you
really
like being treated like a slut
, I imagined myself saying.

My business-casual slacks didn’t have pockets—to reduce the theft of pens and other office supplies, I supposed—so I jammed the Post-it note into the handbag that sat under my desk next to my recycling bin and wastebasket. After a moment, I tossed the entire pad of Post-it notes into my purse, then added a stapler and a spool of cellophane tape. Maybe instead of going to the party as a balloon-cocked stud, I’d go as a white-collar criminal. Iwouldn’t even have to buy a costume —I’d just carry all the office supplies I’d stolen over the last six months in a big paper grocery sack.

AT HOME, I STARED AT THE CLOTHES IN MY CLOSET, TROLLING
for costume ideas. All my clothes were limp and black—if I wanted to dress up as an Amish person or someone with schizotypal personality disorder, I was good to go. Other than that, I was without inspiration.

I considered purchasing a premade costume at the Halloween store do-wn the street, but I wanted to avoid wearing anything “sexy” and most of their offerings for women were short, tight, and made of PVC. I hated “sexy” Halloween costumes, especially the kind from companies that made most of their money selling plastic dresses to non-sex-working ladies trying to be risque. I knew some people found it exciting to dress up like whorish versions of working-class women—the perennial popularity of the French maid costume is proof enough of that—but as a working-class woman who’s actually whored, the last thing I wanted to do was wear a cheaply made snap-front dress that reminded me of my previous incarnation. I had no desire to have my cleavage gazed at by the clients who currently paid my tiny salary when I used to make so much more from executives exactly like them without typing a single letter.

I may be a faded office flower
, I thought,
but I’m no fool
.

And besides—the old white men in evening gowns, heels, and wigs would be plenty “sexy” enough.

AS I PONDERED
balloon cocks and non-“sexy” costumes, Irealized the answer was hanging right in my face. I laughed incredulously as I reached out and petted my tightest, oldest, most beat-up pair of Levi’s, which hung in the shadow of all the black clothing in my closet.

Tight, pegged boy-pants—my motorcycle boots—a concert T-shirt. I’d add plenty of metal-studded belts around my waist and cuffs on my wrists, and a handkerchief folded flat and tied around my head. Underneath my bandanna, my hair would be matted, teased, and sprayed. I’d show my tattoos and wear black eyeliner. The piece de resistance would be Beau’s biker jacket. And voila—I’d be Axl Rose, Rock Star Royalty, life-size and in full color, like a glossy page ripped out of
Rolling Stone
and shoved in everyone’s face.

I pulled my Levi’s off their hanger and began rooting through my concert T-shirts for the most beat-up, bleach-stained, hole-y specimen.

As I assembled my costume, I had to admit that I especially loved the idea of showing my ink as Axl, since I’d been hiding my tattoos since the day the Xeroxed dress code had appeared in my inbox after I’d had the poor judgment to push up my sleeves one hot and busy afternoon. I looked forward to parading my Technicolor skin around like a banner of defiance for a day just to bring a little
Appetite for Destruction
to their stultifying office world. They couldn’t make me cover it up if it was part of my costume, could they?

I’m Axl fucking Rose, bitch
.

THERE’S A REASON ROCK
star boys have been reinterpreting the same general look for decades. It just
works
. It’s sweet, and hot. It says, “I’m an asshole,” “I have a big dick,” and possibly, dangerously, “I use drugs.” And to most of us ladies, the combination of two or three of those qualities is catnip. It’s irresistible. We want to roll in that rock star/asshole quality, inhale it, and take it inside us. We
need
it. It makes us wet, and hard. It makes us
hungry
. And whether that’s to fuck the nasty long-haired boy in the motorcycle boots with the Fu Manchu mustache, or to
be
him—well, what’s the difference, really?

All I knew is that if I couldn’t actually
be
Axl Rose circa 1987, when he was riding the crest of the killer typhoon soon to be known to the entire rockin’ world as Guns N’ Roses—well, at least I could dress like him one day out of the year.

Two days later, and despite my previous reservations, I attended my first office Halloween party in a sexy costume after all.

It was the kind of sexy that lived in my pussy and lower gut, more about the hot thrum I felt inside than the way I looked on the outside. My tattoos were out in all their heavy metal glory skulls and flowers twisting up my arms like vines. I wore a sports-bra that packed my tits back against my chest but I couldn’t help the way my hips swung, loose and saucy as I clumped into the conference room in my heavy chain-wrapped boots. I didn’t stuff an actual phallus in my britches made from a sock and a condom, the way Mick taught me. Dressing like a boy was one thing, but I was scared I’d be sent home for harboring such an untoward bulge.

But even without a Little Axl filling out my Levi’s, I felt like a stallion. With my tight boy-pants slung around my hips I was a strutting, preening rock star, cock-centric and insatiable; just waiting for my next sloppy blow job. I felt predatory in a way I thought I’d left behind when I traded my stiletto-heeled boots for sensible slacks, swapping the power to negotiate my own fees and determine my own labor conditions for an hourly wage and a bunch of purloined office supplies.

IF I EVER
decide to get back into business, I now know which executive on my floor is the covert cross-dresser.

There were a few dudes in dresses at the party as predicted—a Raggedy Ann, a Marilyn Monroe with a virile beard, a Dorothy in a gingham dress and red Converse high-tops—but only one cross-dressed fellow was attempting to hide an erection between his own thighs. Although I didn’t recognize him as a past client, I knew him for what he was. He wore an Elvira costume, his thin lips smeared with his wife’s expensive department store lipstick, cutting our store-bought sheet cake -with shaky, excited hands.

Hello, you wet-pussied little bitch
, I thought as I stared into his face.

He blushed as he handed me a paper plate full of cake.

Not that I’d ever say anything like that for real. Those days are over. I work as a typist in an office now, not as a dommatrix in a dungeon, and for the most part, I harbor little regret. Morally, I made the only choice I could.

But old instincts die hard.