The Academy (31 page)

“Come on, slut—we’re here,” he said, smiling, as he pulled off his own helmet, then helped her extract her befuddled head from her own. Freed from its almost too-tight headlock, she shook her head—both to clear it and to free the many tangles of her long brown hair—and had the delightful sight of Spunk, smiling, as he sucked her juice off his leather-gloved hand.

Then she saw the house.

Still, seeing it, she didn’t know exactly where she was. The street was like so many, too many, in San Francisco: tall, elegant homes like the sides of a filigreed canyon, a gingerbread gulch. Even simplicity seemed baroque in the ornamental chaos of the street—a window in San Francisco could never escape being just a window. Stickers, age-old political posters, and a citywide delightful kaleidoscope of gay pride rainbow flags decorated or despoiled in colorful confusion.

The house that Spunk nodded her towards was hardly simple. Yet it wasn’t the fractal business of some of San Francisco’s more outré homes. It walked a neat line without falling one way or the other. Not plain with windows colored with signs, posters and flags, and not achingly busy. Its basic form was Victorian, three floors; three bay windows; three smaller, square ones; and one delightful oval peering out of a peaked attic. It was blue—a peaceful, just-after-dawn blue—trimmed with a lighter—a little later after dawn—blue. It looked well-kept and serene without the anal retentive fragility of never-touched china. People lived in this house, Doris knew, but didn’t live for the house.

“Come on, slut,” Spunk said, retrieving the helmet from Doris with a playful grab, “you gotta meet the folks.”

“Yes, Sir,” she said, reflexes kicking the words out of her numb mouth as her—maybe—Master walked up a short set of stairs to the little-after-dawn blue of the front door.

“Jeeze, slut,” he said, turning to smile and gently shake his head, as he fed a key into the lock, “knock it off, willya? Sound like a fucking Stepford slave or something—”

Then the door was open, and Spunk stepped aside, a Mohawked gentleman bidding her to enter and—taking an unconscious breath—Doris did.

The room was surprising, enough to stop her one foot inside. If there’s one thing that never seems to go with ridiculous baroque San Francisco architecture it was austere Japanese—yet that’s what she was facing, in all its meditative simplicity: shoji screens, tatami mats, elegant cabinetry, futons placed with a powerful feng shui precision, leafless branches polished to religious smoothness set in deep islands of oval black rocks, and even a tiny wood-framed alcove—a miniature zen garden filled with immaculately raked sand and focused with elegantly placed stones, brilliant with redirected sunlight.

“Ma! Pa! We’re
home
!” bellowed Spunk from behind her as he closed the door and dumped their helmets discordantly on the polished hardwood floor.

“Hi, honey—we’re in the kitchen. Did everything go okay?” a chiming, elegant voice said somewhere behind the Asian decorating.

“No problem, man. Found her turning tricks in the garage. Had to wait my turn,” Spunk said, smiling down at her, twinkles dancing in jewel-blue eyes after he took off his glasses. Doris was so shocked by their beauty that, for all of three seconds all she could do was stare—until he took her gently by the hand and pulled her, still shocked and more than a little frightened, through the serenity of the living room and past an open, immaculate, shoji screen and into the kitchen.

Three heartbeats to take it all in: Japanese outside, smooth, cool, crisp industrial inside. A set of absolutely clean windows overlooking a riotous green backyard of vines, painfully brilliant flowers, and a distant, high wooden fence. Simple steel cabinets lining almost every other surface of the kitchen, surrounding a massive wooden cutting block.

Doris liked to cook, so, naturally, her eyes first danced over the equipment: Wolf, Krup, and all their expensive kin. She lingered over the brass pots and skillets, paused at the ornate and beautifully displayed jars of herbs, spices, and dried fruit and vegetables.

Doris was a slave, so next her eyes quickly saw the people there:

“Welcome,” said a large man with that musical voice she’d heard. It would have been easy to call him fat, but not accurate: he was large, tall (though sitting down), broad, and his skin—what Doris could see of it—was smooth and supple, but he wasn’t fat. Bald, eyebrow-less, he had a playful elegance about him, a kind of divine contemplation of the universe. He wasn’t as fat as the Buddha, but he was almost as serenely powerful. He was dressed in a deceptively simple black silk shirt and pants, and sat, contemplative and immobile, on a black barstool. On his feet were a pair of split-toed tabi slippers. “I’m Maurice. You can call me, ‘Ma’,” he said with a beautifully balanced nod of his finely sculpted head.

Then someone slapped her hard on the back, pitching her forward against the pull from her single bag she still carried. She didn’t fall, but she did stumble a bit, reaching, but not needing to catch, the side of the butcher-block table.

“Ain’t she a fine one, hon? Dig this ass—ain’t that a divine ass? Man, can I pick ’em, or can I pick ’em?” said a thunderous voice from behind Doris. Dropping her bag, completing the motion of her near fall, she turned.

If Ma was regal elegance, then this woman was raw power, barely caged. She was tall and evenly distributed, almost as tall as Spunk who was standing behind her, with a face that was hard but not brutal: as if she’d sculpted herself, manipulated her demeanor to hang somewhere between male and female. Her breasts, for instance, were obviously large and well-shaped, but were trapped behind a firm sports bra, under a spotless T-shirt, then behind a shiny leather vest decorated with perhaps a dozen brilliant insignia. On her head was an equally immaculate leather cap, and on her legs were polished leather chaps over a pair of artistically worn jeans. She didn’t have any earrings or jewelry of any kind—but she did have a mustache: it was fine and delicate, a soft brown line that was only a shade or two away from her own butch-cropped color. Roughly, she reached out and took Doris’s hand and shook it firmly. “Put ’er there, babe. Welcome to the house of the rising ass—” She thought that was hysterical, and laughed like a longshoreman. “I’m Pauline—’Pa’ around here. Glad ta have ya!” Then Pa bent down and picked Doris completely off her feet, touching her head on the ceiling, in a wild hug—laughing even more.

“I’m happy to be here... Sir,” Doris mumbled, shaken (literally). It had all been too much: the flight, her stomach, the ride, Spunk’s thumb, the strange house, the even stranger... masters?... all of it was a jumble, a mad chaos in her mind. She wanted to scream for order, for someone to say Me: Master, You: Slave. She wanted to please, to be what she always wanted to be: Doris the prized property, Doris the cherished object.

She felt like she was on the motorcycle again, tearing through unfamiliar territory at breakneck speed—and she feared she was going to fall off at any second....

Seeing the elaborate play of emotions across her face, the woman who wanted to be called ‘Pa’ smiled, and as she did her mask of roughness seemed to lift a bit, to be lifted to show a thin slice of firm reality beneath it: “You’re among friends here, slut; friends and much more. We might not be the ‘ideal’ as far as the Marketplace is concerned, but we are all skilled Masters, good Slaves, and fine people. It might seem odd at first, but before you know it you’ll know... you’re home.”

Home was a bad word, it kicked her hard in the gut, making her already weak knees even weaker. It was a frightening word, the last word in a thought, a spoken phrase that meant humiliation (of the bad kind), pain (of the bad kind), and sex (of the very, very bad kind) as in “I have to go home now.”

But she wasn’t that Doris, the frightened Doris. She could feel her Trainer behind her, his warm, firm hand on her back, reminding her that she was Slave Doris—and that Slave Doris was very, very special.

Still... San Francisco... family....

“Thank you... Sir?” She put a warbling inflecting in the last word, a slight beg for clarity.

“Now, now, now—” the strong woman said, wagging a finger under Doris’ nose and smiling broadly, “— it’s Pa, remember? That’s Ma, I’m Pa, and you know Sonny already—”

“Spunk,” he said from the doorway with a teenager’s practiced disgust and embarrassment. “It’s Spunk, remember?” But it was done with a drag queen’s performance, a routine of broad gestures and winks at the audience.

“Kids these days,” Pa said, playfully putting Spunk in a headlock and wrinkling his Mohawk. “To me you’ll always be that little snot-nose kid I picked up at the bus station.”

Dazed, glazed, floating a few inches off the floor, Doris felt a firm hand on her shoulder. “Are you hungry, dear? I bet you are—what with nothing but airplane food all the way here. What would you like? I can cook just about anything,” Ma said, his voice like a slowly running brook: musical and shimmering. It was a voice, Doris realized, she could listen to for hours.

Was she hungry? It was a strange feeling, to be asked rather than told. She had expected to be asked to serve, and then serve herself. But to be asked was just as staggering as the strange environment. She thought, probably longer than she would have normally, before deciding that she actually wasn’t. “I’m actually fine, Sir—I mean, ‘Ma.’ Thank you.”

“What a precious child,” Ma said, beaming with delight. “So polite... and so sexy.”

“She is at that,” Pa said, hooking her thumbs into the top of her chaps. “Can I pick ’em or can I pick ’em!”

“I’ll say,” winked and leered Spunk, pushing past Pa and moving toward the sink. “She’ll fit right in.”

“You’ll have lots of fun here, dear,” Ma said, rising from her stool to step towards Spunk. “We all get along famously.” With the practice reactions of people who’ve lived together too long, Spunk opened a cabinet, pulled out a stainless steel container, and wolfishly started eating the... granola?... he found there, till Ma walked over to him and calmly pulled the container out of his hands, put the lid back on, closed the cabinet, and said, “You’ll spoil your dinner.”

“I... I’m sure I will, Ma,” Doris said, watching them, wondering if she ever would, really.

“I know we will, kid: we’re one helluva fun family. You could say that we get along... real well.” Pa might have looked like a leather man but her—his? tone and gestures were a broad parody of a leering heterosexual male. There was something there, something in the playful absurdity of the act that made Doris relax a bit, and smile. It was like a bit of proof that this was all a game, a kind of act that simply overlaid the game she knew too well.

As if reading her mind, Pa said: “It’s real simple, kid. I’m the head of the household: the fucking breadwinner, the man of the house. Ma here is the lady of the house. She stays home and does the ironing or whatever she does all day.”

“I cook, I clean, and I write mystery novels,” Ma said, smiling as he hugged a widely-grinning Spunk.

“And that good-for-nothing is our sort-of son. We call him Sonny just to piss him off.”

“Which they do—all the time,” Spunk said, smiling.

“We might not look it but we are something you’re used to—just a little different packaging. You’ll get the hang of it.”

Confused, but more at ease, Doris nodded.

“Fer instance—get over here you worthless lay-about,” Pa said sharply to Spunk.

“So what the fuck do you want... dad,” Spunk said, sarcastically, disengaging himself from the tender embrace of Ma and walking over to the stern visage of Pa.

“Now didn’t I tell you that you were supposed to pick up... Doris?” The last of what he said died in a question. “Got to change that name. I’m sure we’ll think of something. Weren’t you supposed to just pick up Doris and bring her here.”

“Yeah, Pa, that’s what you said.”

“Well, sport, if these superbly trained nostrils are right then I think you did more than just pick this poor young thing up—” Quicker than she’d seen anyone move before, Pa had Spunk’s still-gloved left hand in his own and brought it sharply up in front of his nose.

Spunk, in response, hissed in delight at the sudden movement and the domination, sagging slightly to his knees.

Pa gave a long sniff of Spunk’s glove. “Definitely did more than just pick her up, I’d say—isn’t that right, Sport?”

In delighted submission, Spunk whined: “Yes, Pa.”

“You’ve been a bad boy.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“What have you been?”

“A bad boy, Sir.”

“I think we’ll have to punish you, Sport. Something, I think, appropriate—right, Ma?” Pa said, dripping power and strength, pure masculine dominance.

“I think a little discipline would do wonders for his whole attitude on life,” said Ma, in his musical tones.

“But not tonight. Oh, no, I want you to have to wait till later on—to really think about how you’ve misbehaved. Then, maybe, we’ll teach you a nice, firm, lesson.”

Spunk caved in even more, dropping his eyes and whimpering like a punk puppy. “I’m sorry, Pa. It won’t happen again.”

“What’s the worst thing to do to a masochist?” Pa said, a stage-whisper in Doris’s ear.

“Make them go to bed without any... supper,” chimed Ma in response, behind her.

“Now you, young lady—” Pa said, straightening and putting her male-echoing voice down at Doris.