Whip Smart: A Memoir (5 page)

Sessions, by definition, are divided into three categories: sensual, corporal, and switch. As Fiona explained on my first shift—stripping the genres of their euphemistic titles—“Just think of them as sexy, mean, and submissive. Well, and medical, but really that could be any of those.” The spectrum within and even between each of these was nuanced; usually clients—or slaves, as they were also referred to—wanted a combination of sensual and corporal, with an emphasis on one or the other. Ste reo typical dominatrix images: verbal humiliation, bondage, and torture, are straight out of a corporal session. But every domme begins with sensual. Distinguished by their gentle, sexual quality, sensual sessions usually included one or more of the following: light bondage, tickling, light spanking, and nipple play. “Play” in other contexts might refer to electrical torture or piercing, but the “light” always meant caressing, kissing, and other nonviolent forms of titillation. Teasing-and-denial was also featured heavily in sensual sessions. Sometimes that meant what it sounds like: physical teasing (either the domme touching her client or the client touching himself) and then denial of orgasm. But “teasing-and-denial” could also be a euphemism for a hand job. Smothering was similar. In a corporal session, smothering usually included a rubber mask, pillows, a plastic bag, or Saran Wrap—it was a form of torture. In sensual sessions, “smothering” meant rubbing your breasts or ass against your client’s face. Role-play—the acting out of specific scenarios, domme and slave playing predefined, usually archetypal, roles—was also frequently requested in sensual sessions, and in these it was usually limited to playing the role of naughty and flirtatious
schoolgirl/secretary/girlfriend/babysitter, the only difference between each being a particular costume and pitch of giggling. When someone requested role-play in a sensual session, you knew you weren’t going to be playing the part of serial killer or Gestapo interrogator.

New hires began with sensual sessions because they didn’t require a lot of training; the majority of women in this country have been trained for this their whole lives. New hires were encouraged to start with them quickly, so as not to waste any time not making money on the house’s behalf. Sensual sessions didn’t require specific and expensive clothing; most of these clients were indifferent to rubber, leather, and corsetry. Their interest lay in that whatever the fabric, it be scant; they preferred lingerie to fetish wear, wanted naughty instead of dangerous or powerful. The sensual mistress’s power lay in her inherent feminine sexuality, in her coos and cleavage, not in her hands or head; her slaves wanted a woman who wasn’t quite aware of her strength and who needed the right man to unlock it for her. Like many women, I had been instructed by my culture to play this role since childhood. The catch was that you couldn’t get caught playing it; you should act like a tease, a sexpot, and ooze “sensuality” but never let it appear intentional or self-aware, or un
chaste
for goodness’ sake. And so, there was certainly a kind of freedom in having that unspoken demand be acknowledged, and even having my efforts financially compensated.

It came easily, this cartoonish enactment of the process I’d been practicing since adolescence. Sensual sessions were all soft-core, late-night paid cable channel movie scenes—the “Skinemax” flicks I’d always stayed awake for during sleepover parties at homes that had cable, watching mesmerized with the volume on low while all the other girls slept. In my mind I wanted to cast myself as a corporal domme—to ooze the confidence and intimidation of those women on the cover of
The Vault
—but in reality I feared making the transition from the safety of sensual sessions.

In the beginning of my tenure at the Dungeon of Mistress X,
the word “shame” was not one that I’d ever associated with myself. Shame was pathetic, applicable to my clients: people who paid for what hurt them, who had no power over themselves or their environment. Still, I quickly became familiar with a feeling that followed indulging in the roles that sensual sessions featured. I was letting myself act out the paradox that I believed my feminism, my liberal upbringing, and my intelligence should have immunized me to. That feeling was a sister to the exhilaration of secrecy, with an equal sense of groundlessness. It was a spiral, that feeling, a twist of motion that sucked my breath out of me in a murky wisp. In the shower, in the quiet of my still body after those sessions, I felt less a sense of having taken a leap than of having lost my footing.

THE NIGHT BEFORE
my second shift at the dungeon, I arrived home from class to find a message from Fiona on my answering machine.

“Hey, it’s Fiona. Make sure you’re on time tomorrow. Someone is coming in to see you.”

My stomach flipped with anxiety. Sure, I’d complained to her about needing money, but the idea of carrying an entire session myself terrified me. I’d assumed I had a comfortable cushion of time to get used to the idea. What did I have to go on at this point—Bella’s example? Emulating that performance was out of the question, but I wasn’t equipped to improvise something better. I was going to be revealed as a fraud.

As I sat beside the phone at the kitchen table, trying to muster some confidence, Rebecca wandered in, gnawing on an apple.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“How’s work? Any action yet?” My roommates had been updated
at every step along the way, and as far as they knew I was chomping at the bit for my own sessions.

“Oh no, not yet.”

“Bummer. You have class tomorrow?”

“No, work.”

“Let’s make dinner; I’m starved.”

I nodded, glad for distraction. She dragged an old radio with a cassette player out of her bedroom, and we blasted a mix tape I’d made of old soul music—our favorite—and chopped vegetables while a pot of rice cooked.

I’d known Rebecca since my years in Boston, where she’d grown up and we’d met through mutual friends. We hadn’t become close until I moved to New York, where she was already attending our college. If we hadn’t become roommates, we may never have figured out how much we had in common; in all the superficial ways we seemed opposite. Rebecca was as tall and willowy as I was petite and curvy. With her sleepy eyes and close-cropped Jean Seberg haircut, Rebecca had a dreamy way of talking that sometimes belied the sharpness of her observations. She was a spacey, mod beauty, who was always thinking the same thing as me. It was easy between us from the beginning. Mine and Rebecca’s conversation vacillated easily between the intellectual and trivial, with equal pleasure. The only thing I ever hid from her was the extent of my drug use.

Our other two roommates came in as I started sautéing garlic and onions.

“Smells good,” said Luke, our household’s only male member. He leaned over my shoulder and grabbed a slice of pepper from the pile on the cutting board. “Thank god for your Italian mom, Melissa.”

“It’s no secret, my friend, just garlic and olive oil.”

“Can I do something? I have a take-home physics exam to procrastinate.”

“Ah, yeah, there’s a block of tofu in the fridge. Try and squeeze the water out of it and then cut it up.”

We cooked and gossiped and sang along to Otis Redding and Irma Thomas, and for a little while the dungeon seemed farther away than just across the East River. Amidst the warm clamor of familiar voices and cooking my anxiety slipped away and I remembered that I was capable of anything. Dinnertime in my childhood home had often produced the same effect; the crackle and smell of sautéing garlic coupled with the murmur of NPR’s “All Things Considered” lulled me into a feeling of safety beyond which my daily worries seemed remote and flimsy. That comfort had always been fleeting, though. That night, as I lay alone in the dark of my bedroom, the world outside loomed again, pregnant with uncertainty.

An hour can be a long time. Hell, a minute can be a long time. The minute before your first kiss with someone is a painstaking collection of seconds, each one more bloated with anticipation than the last. The first minute of a tattoo is a long one as well. Pain has few rivals in its ability to slow time. Fear, excitement, elation—these are kissing cousins, all with the sensorial power to render each second humming with every tick and gasp of our bodies, the whirr of insect wings and distant car engines. Sometimes, I could savor these moments, relish them as opportunities to walk straight into the fact of being alive. In the seconds that crept into the minutes of my very first domination session, I had no idea what I wanted. The $75 certainly, but beyond that? Character-building life experience? I would have confidently named these motives right up until the moment that the door of the Red Room closed behind me. With the clasp of its latch, all bravado and ideology dimmed with the light of the hallway behind. It was only me, a naked old man, and sixty minutes of palpable expectation. An hour alone with a naked man with whom you do not intend to have sex can be a very long time.

On my second shift ever, and after only Mistress Bella’s example, I teetered over my first client in a borrowed pair of seven-inch platform stilettos. Anxiety, and a corset that cinched my waist six inches smaller than nature intended, confined my breath to the shallow region of my chest. My bosom literally heaved, straining against its lacy contraption and obstructing my view of the naked man who knelt at my feet. Cold tears ran from my armpits. The darkness smelled of stale incense and the briny tang of bodies past and present. It was hot, and the red walls seemed to breathe slightly, as if I were inside a great belly.

Despite the fact that I was high on heroin, I felt only fear. It snuck up on me as I stepped into the room, and my confidence lifted like a flock of startled birds. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother. What was I, my mother’s daughter, doing here? It suddenly didn’t make any sense. But that’s what the drugs were for: to keep Mom out of moments like this. Narcotics create distance, and I only needed an inch to turn away from that question.

I knew I had to say something. My mouth was gummy with 99-cent lipstick from the all-night drugstore down the block. Opening it, I prayed that the waxy paint would bear some talismanic power and bring the right words to my lips. Instead, I burped.

“Yes, Mistress? Are you all right?”

I felt his breath on my fishnetted knees and fought the urge to back away. “Yeah,” I croaked. My gut—displaced by the corset to somewhere near my bladder—clenched in panic. I itched to turn and slam the door behind me on this naked man and the politesse affected to camouflage his entitlement. Everything about him, from his hunched back to the quaver in his voice, was a demand phrased as a question. But I could not fail at this, much as I wanted to flee the shadowy room, my own image in the mirrored walls, and the inquisition-style cage that dangled from the ceiling. My urge to escape was met with an equally familiar will to persist. It was this second urge that had both rescued me from failure and damned me to finish every game in which my hand was called. Language
had always saved me: from ever being arrested, attacked, caught in a lie or with my pants down. I would not allow words to fail me now.

“Yes, of course I’m all right. Pig!” I heard my voice echo in the room the way I had on answering machine recordings and home videos, and winced at the wavering childishness of it. In our presession consultation, my client had listed verbal humiliation among his requests, and I had nodded knowingly. “Verbal,” I’d heard, and assumed it would be easy. Now I was at a loss. Name-calling had always been a last resort, I told myself, something better left to children, drunk people, and those without the capacity for some more sophisticated form of shaming. But it wasn’t true. I had always known a lot of words, and how to use them, but never in the service of humiliation. In truth, I didn’t know how to be mean. In the past, I had been the one who felt humiliated by my failed attempts at cruelty. I had never sounded more false. I waited for him to scoff and retreat, to call me a phony. My gift for faking it ended here, I thought, where I could not convince even myself. Relief?

Miraculously, no words of reproach were spat against my knees. The old man did not rise from the floor in disgust. When a solid minute had passed with nothing but a vague shifting of limbs below me, I began wracking my brain for follow-up insults. In an adrenaline-fueled excavation of memory, I searched through every television show, movie, and schoolyard scene I could recall for examples of humiliation and struck gold.

“Stop breathing on my legs, you crust of scum on a rat’s cunt!”
Rather than creating the berth I’d intended, my words inspired only a scuttling around my feet. I could feel him nuzzling my toes with little kisses and licks, devotedly pressing his cheek against the patent strap of my shoe. “
Get away from me!
” I shouted.

“Yes, Mistress.” Scampering backward, he knelt on all fours and stared at the floor, bald pate gleaming with perspiration. Hands upon hips, I wheezed, the gravity of power alighting on my shoulders once more. Nonetheless, shouting that first insult took all of two seconds. There were 3,598 left. I decided to give him a spanking.
He was amenable to the idea, and I was glad to contend with his pasty rear instead of his searching gaze. Eye contact was an intimacy I was determined to avoid for as long as possible.