Whip Smart: A Memoir (19 page)

As I became increasingly depressed, I increasingly avoided Greta. After that final weekend binge, I slipped even further from my daily phone-calling schedule than usual. I didn’t have the will to assume any false cheer and grew tired of hearing the same suggestions: go to a meeting, pray, help a newcomer with less clean time than me (the last would have been harder than Greta knew). Her and Autumn’s concern only seemed to drive me deeper in. The thought periodically occurred to me to confess my relapses, but I quickly dismissed it. Yes, I cringed at every reference to my clean time, but then I’d always known that secrecy could be lonely. I
knew it wasn’t the source of my misery and the humiliation of confessing, in addition to that of counting days all over again, would surely be worse. More concerning was my waning ability to work, the evaporation of my interest in anything but the fleeting escape of television.

Only when I had reached such a nadir that my only future options seemed to be checking into Bellevue or returning to Cape Cod to live out the rest of my days a recluse in my mother’s basement did my resolve against telling Greta and Autumn the truth weaken. What did I have to lose? My life in New York couldn’t go on much longer. I finally called Greta and made a plan to meet at her apartment, with the intention of telling her about my using. Perhaps, I thought, her disgust in me would make giving up the life I had here easier. I must have had some fragment of hope left, to have made the decision to confess, but it didn’t feel that way.

I kept my eyes lowered on the L-train ride into the city; I hated the wild envy I felt when I looked at normal people, young and pretty and with a capacity for excitement about what might happen. What had changed in me?

“Hi,” Greta greeted me at the door to her building, one eyebrow cocked. “Good to see you again.” She pulled me against her in a hug, and I felt the strength of her muscular little body, her hands pressed against my back as if she hoped to imbue me with something. I plodded behind her up the stairs to her apartment.

“You want some tea? I have that soy milk you like.”

“Sure.” I sat on her couch, hunched over to examine some invisible message on my phone. After she had carried two mugs over and placed them on the coffee table, Greta pulled the phone out of my hands and placed it beside them.

“What’s up?” She sought my gaze and held it stubbornly. She let the silence stretch on until I couldn’t bear it anymore.

“I didn’t really get ninety days,” I said, my gaze skittering away from hers, settling on a knot in the wood floor. “I relapsed. A couple times.” I swore I saw her frame relax slightly.

“Twice?”

“A few times. I’m not sure how many.” I waited for her eyes to harden and quickly wished for a lecture instead of straight-out dismissal. I hoped our relationship could end on a decent note, with her giving me the opportunity to apologize and explain myself, though I had no idea what such an explanation might entail. I told her about the night of speedballs, the brunch with my dad, and the wretched sock-drawer organization that followed. “There were a couple others before that weekend, too,” I glumly added, still inspecting the knot in the floor. “I figured I might as well tell you the truth, since I’m probably leaving town anyway. I know you can’t fix this. I don’t even know what’s wrong with me.” I looked up when I heard the familiar whinny of her laughter.

“Of course I can’t fix this!” She chuckled again. “But I can tell you what’s wrong with you.” She smiled. “You’re a fucking
drug addict
, Melissa. And congratulations; you’ve lost the ability to tell lies comfortably.”

I kept listening, my eyes on her now.

“Of course you feel this way,” she said. “Of course you relapsed and lied about it; you’re a junky! But you don’t have to do that anymore. And you don’t have to feel like this anymore.” She took my hand and stood, leading me to a clearing on her bedroom floor.

“What are you doing?” I asked skeptically, but I could feel a kernel of hope in me, swelling with every word she spoke that didn’t tell me to leave. Standing before her bedroom window, Greta sank to her knees, pulled me down beside her, and in her husky voice she asked her God to help me. She prayed that my “god-shaped hole” be filled, and when she spoke that phrase, “god-shaped hole,” something cracked open in me and that hope spilled out, threading through my body like some happy poison.

When I walked out of Greta’s apartment that night, a veil had lifted, and the city shone for me as it had since I was a little girl—emanating
its own sooty hopefulness, its promise that even if I stopped moving, got caught in some human inertia, it never would. Whatever dismal lens had slipped over my eyes lifted. I knew as soon as I’d heard Greta say that I had lost the ability to tell lies comfortably that it was true. At least about my sobriety. Something in the past months had magnetized my moral compass.

A lot of things changed after that night. Greta’s laughter, her relentless acceptance, had tenderized something in me, softened me enough to let help in, to admit that I could be wrong. The evidence was hard to ignore, this time. It remained mysterious to me what about her prayer had cracked me open, but I was starting to figure out that some things could remain mysterious, that you could not understand them and believe in them at the same time. This relieved me, though I also still bucked against it. So much of my life had been lived with an opposite dogma: to believe only in what I knew and live accordingly. The moment I allowed myself to doubt that way of living, I stopped drinking and drugging and stayed stopped. I stopped lying. I stopped feeling smarter than everyone at meetings. I stopped stealing, even the duffel bags of books from Barnes & Noble that had been a monthly routine of mine. B&N might have been the corporate dev il, but clearly I wasn’t the best candidate to be making moral judgment calls. I wasn’t Robin Hood; I stole because I didn’t want to pay, and because I liked getting over, not because of any principle. Rationalizations fell away like scales, crisp and translucent. It suddenly wasn’t enough to know, as I always had, that deep down at my core I was a good person, or to simply
feel
compassion for other creatures; I wanted to
be
good. Not
good
, but good. It was a huge relief. I had had no idea how burdensome it was to be a liar and a thief. The weight of my justifications wasn’t felt until it lifted.

I COULDN’T COMPREHEND
how domming fit into this new paradigm of living. You don’t hear about a lot of bodhisattva dominatrices. But it must have fit, because I didn’t stop doing it. When people asked me how the work affected me, my line was: “I don’t know yet; ask me in ten years.” When I thought about how long I would do it for, I assumed that there would come a day when I simply couldn’t anymore, when everything about it had become banal and sad and I was done. While I wasn’t completely oblivious to the failure of this kind of thinking where my addiction had been concerned, I couldn’t imagine myself as a thirty-year-old dominatrix. There were plenty of women who made a career of it, but their interest was genuine, not born of curiosity and social touristing. Occasionally they would pass through the dungeon, working a few weeks as “guest dommes.” Despite their obvious enthusiasm for it, and lack of shame, they scared me. Those women were cynical, and saggier than me. They had the rough voices of long-time smokers, and despite their profound expertise and wisdom on our trade, I sensed some essential immaturity about them and
knew inchoately that the romance of this life was finite, only for the very young.

When an end came to so many other aspects of my life, I suspected that the end to this might come as well. I figured that the sessions would become harder without the drugs, without the haze of self-delusion that had accompanied them.

Some things did become more difficult. When my depression lifted, the world held light again. Some sights returned, and some were revealed anew. I was no longer amazed at my coworkers’ ability to conduct sessions. What I found amazing was the contradiction of their lives, the hypocrisy. The women whom I’d idolized, who had taught me everything about entitlement and power, and in whom I had believed turned out to be shams.

The week of my rise from the walking dead turned out also to be a dramatic one at the dungeon. On one of my first normal shifts back, after an appointment with a new client, I carried my supply box into the dressing room, high only on post-session exhilaration, which so far hadn’t waned as I’d thought it might. Camille sat curled on the love seat, clutching a silk kimono around her body, her eyes swollen and despondent.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s wrong with you?”

She answered without looking up. “It was all lies, Justine, all lies.” Her chin trembled.

I dropped my box on the sofa and crouched down to face her. “Oh, sweetheart, what happened to you?”

“I can’t believe I thought he was going to
marry
me.” Her voice turned venomous on the final words, as she raised her eyes to mine. Camille’s London master, the professed love of her life, turned out to have a whole stable of soul mates, whom he lovingly tortured and fucked on a rotating schedule. “We ate
scones
and read
The Times
together,” she sobbed as I held her. The whole dungeon had watched love transform Camille. At her master’s command, she had quit smoking, sent away for graduate school applications, and begun to exude a new air of self-preservation. The scars seemed
more than a fair trade, in my eyes, and she claimed to enjoy them anyway. She had been
happy
. All that ended with him.

A few days later, I sat in the dressing room, organizing my locker. It had been a slow day, despite Bella having called in sick. Lena knelt farther down the mirrored wall, neatly packing some of her personal equipment into a leather suitcase. She wasn’t working, had only stopped by the dungeon to pick up some things. I watched her wind wires around a “TENS unit,” “TENS” being an acronym for “Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation.” A TENS unit is a small, battery-operated device used to send electrical impulses to select parts of the body. The electrical currents it produces, when mild, can prevent pain messages from being transmitted to the brain and are thought to raise endorphin levels in medical patients. At the end of the wires Lena wound around the palm-sized box—which had knobs designating settings like “pulse” and “ripple”—disposable electrodes could be attached and then adhered to body parts. Conventionally, that would be shoulders, neck, and joints. In our case, it meant nipples, scrotums, and penises.

“What plans do you have for this weekend that include that?” I asked her, smiling. After our one night together, Lena and I had settled into a flirtatious, comfortable friendship. It turned out she had a habit of sleeping with new blood.

“I’ve got a session planned for Sunday,” she said. “I can’t wait.” I nodded, about to ask with whom when Fiona appeared in the doorway.

“How’d you like to take a sub session with a regular of Bella’s? He comes every week, and I can vouch for his not being a psycho.”

I glanced at Lena and then shook my head. “You know I don’t do sub.”

“Okay.” Fiona shrugged. “But it’s easy money.”

I had never had second thoughts about submissive sessions but for some reason felt hesitant this time. I had been underearning for weeks, I thought, and had some catching up to do, now that I was
able. But there was no chance I was going to agree in front of Lena. Maybe after she left I’d agree to consult with the client and see how that went.

“Well, he’s going to call back in an hour to see if anyone is available, so let me know by then,” Fiona said, and headed back to the office.

“You should take the session,” Lena said, without looking up. “Bella is an automaton. The client could be yours after today.”

“Yeah, but he’s
a top
.”

“So, it’s nothing that intense; I’ve seen him before.”

“
You’ve
seen him before?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you didn’t do sub?”

“No, I just don’t take sub sessions that walk in here off the street. My session on Sunday is a sub session.”

“It is?” I stared at the TENS unit.

“Yup.”

“How much do you charge for that?”

“Nothing. I mean, not this weekend. Sunday isn’t work; it’s on my own time. He’s
hot
.”

I didn’t know how to react to this. I felt pissed off, as if I’d been cheated somehow. They’d sold me one thing, an image of one thing, and I’d gotten another. Was I the only one playing by the rules?

Even Autumn, my best friend, was at Western Union every week, sending money to her deadbeat boyfriend in California. This had been true since I’d known her, but I hadn’t really
seen
it before, examined it in the context of who I thought she was: stronger than me. They had all not turned out to be the enlightened women I’d thought but suddenly seemed damaged little girls, compulsively subjugating themselves to men. My disappointment and disgust at this revelation burned away the glow I’d seen for my first year in the dungeon, the hope and invigoration that came from having proof that the world could have pockets of things I’d never imagined. This was a sight I’d seen before: women relying on men
who let them down,
choosing
those men, men who were an expression of their own low self-regard. Even here.