America Unzipped (31 page)

I am tempted to tell you a lot more about their childhoods and to say that Melissa drags Bob around by a leash because both of them lived through baroque family melodramas. There were sledgehammers through car windshields, and drug addiction and alcoholism and a kidnapping by Mafia-connected goombahs in New York, and life in a trailer in a redneck town in central Florida, and some sexual abuse from a relative, and a private eye beating up a dad, and something about a chain saw. But the fact is, Bob and Melissa aren't sure what, if anything, the childhood traumas have to do with leather and leashes.

Secret yearnings are the most powerful of all. You nurture them unshared with anyone else and in the closed hothouse atmosphere they grow until you can't suppress them anymore. Both Bob and Melissa went on with life despite their childhoods and their inner passions. When Melissa could no longer suppress her yearning for BDSM, she initiated an apprenticeship under a bondage master so she could properly learn the system for using rope. During a brief first marriage, she dominated her husband, and other people—mainly other women, but sometimes men—but he never seemed to understand that when she said she wanted a submissive man, she did not mean she wanted a doormat. A subtle point, perhaps, but vital. Bob had much less experience when he placed a profile on Bondage.com, part of the AdultFriendFinder network where Melissa found him.

“On our first date we went to a restaurant, then drove to a lake,” Bob recalls. “It was soon after July fourth and there were kids there shooting off bottle rockets, so forever after I have been able to say that fireworks went off on our first date.” They kissed on that date. Melissa squeezed his nipples a little.

They go on telling me the story of their courtship and I keep waiting for the bacchanalia of kink. Instead I hear about their second date and how Melissa screwed up her courage to ask Bob to spend the night at the town house she shared with her sister because she already knew she was nuts for him—“Hey, I'm a stud!” Bob says, laughing, at this point—and when she did, she announced her fear by saying, “I am trying to work up the courage to ask you to stay the night but nothing will happen and we will not do anything and I would like you to stay with me” all in one breath.

“Does your sister wear contacts?” he asked.

“Excuse me?” she replied.

“I cannot wear my contacts all night long,” he explained. He was hoping there was contact lens fluid in the house. There wasn't, so they drove to Wal-Mart. Bob bought a NASCAR toothbrush, too.

“Then we watched
Finding Nemo,
my favorite movie, and the next morning he left.” To Bob and Melissa their story sounds romantic and epic the way yours probably does to you, but as far as everybody else is concerned, you sorta have to be there, you know? So I'll skip the rest of the courtship and fast-forward.

They dated, they were engaged, they got married. Now Bob and Melissa are in their midthirties. Melissa works in a technical capacity for a military contractor and was a regional campaign volunteer for George W. Bush. Bob, funny enough, is a corporate controller. Bob drives an SUV. They bought a house they can't really afford, but they love it and work constantly to pay the mortgage. One recent Christmas, Melissa bought Bob a new Wii video game machine. Bob bought Melissa a Prince Albert.

Ahh, now we get to the kink.

Bob's Prince Albert is a piercing in the head of his penis that will attach to a chain Melissa can use to lead him. The Prince Albert was a big deal, because Bob is not into pain. Even scarier for Bob, they ran into the guy who was about to do the piercing, at Kmart.

“We went to buy some Lysol,” Bob recalls, “and we saw him and he said, ‘Hey! How you doin'?' and Brian, I am not kidding you, the guy had facial tics! Like Tourette's or something. He kept popping his neck, doing these half turns, and circles with his neck! It was a surreal moment.” Bob went through with the piercing anyway, a testament to love.

They've also done a little home improvement to their new place. They have added a bondage table, and a custom-made hoist for rope suspensions, and, in an extravagance they feel guilty about because it's so financially irresponsible, they bought a custom wood and steel cage. Bob spent Christmas night curled up in it. They are redoing the garage and will incorporate the cage and the hoist “so they are plausibly deniable” as handyman equipment.

Melissa uses all this on Bob, but not all the time. They have regular old vanilla sex, too. But if Bob acts especially cocky, she'll “verbally degrade him. I spit on him, urinate on him, absolutely anything I can think of to take that smug little look off his face.”

Bob and Melissa lead monogamous lives together, but have a different definition of monogamy than many people might. They will do BDSM with another couple, but there will be no intercourse or sexual touching. Group play happens rarely, though, because they look for fellow BDSM couples the way you might look for compatible golf partners—you want a couple you get along with off the course. Melissa, being bisexual, sometimes likes having a woman join them for sex, which Bob doesn't seem to mind, and which doesn't count as not being monogamous either.

Most of Melissa's friends know about her sexual life. When she worked for a previous defense contractor, she had security clearance in a government facility. “All had to be on the up-and-up, so I came out at work. Everyone wanted to be my friend and find out about it. A lot of people said, ‘I am so jealous of you. I wish I could do anything I wanted and not be afraid.' Out of about sixty people, ten said that to me.”

Bob has been much more circumspect. Fetish Con is his first real outing in public and he feels “like a scared kid in a candy shop. It's like such a big part of my life that has never been talked about, it's been considered taboo.”

When I contact Melissa and Bob some months after the convention, they will sound even happier. “Really, we are so happy it's ridiculous. It is quite disgusting.” Just one problem, though. Since they both work full time, they will look for a maid, but with the debt burden they already carry, they can't pay cash. Instead, Melissa will interview men who want to clean house in return for being dominated. “I'll have fun pointing out all his mistakes with the paddle!” Melissa will say. And Bob will approve because look, man, he wants a clean house and “if Melissa has to beat him, that's okay.”

“
L
adies, we are being far too nice to our men,” Chanta Rose scolds. Her accent, Australian by way of England, makes her sound appropriately authoritative in that British public-school way, and her modest floral-print dress, the way she has fixed her blond hair in a bun, reminds me of the teacher of the Junior League dance lessons my mother made me attend at the Knights of Columbus hall. The memory makes me shiver. I had a tough time in dance lessons. Being twelve, dressing up in my orange sport coat and a clip-on tie, and bowing at the waist with my left hand over my belly button to ask a twelve-year-old girl for a dance struck me as absurdly unnatural, like mixing peas with Hershey's chocolate sauce. It just wasn't done. I hoped this was not going to be mandatory in order to get girls.

I suspect some of the men in the meeting room of the Hyatt, where Chanta, who happens to be a friend of Madison Young's, is teaching Bondage for the Male Submissive, can relate to the feeling. Their arms are being tied behind their heads by women using hemp rope and a very elaborate technique demonstrated on a male volunteer by Chanta from atop a wooden platform set up in the middle of the room. Most guys are laced up in an array of complicated knots, their elbows now pointing toward the ceiling, their wrists crossed, their palms somewhere near their scapulas.

Doubtful looks shoot up at Chanta as she exhorts the women, especially when she tells them this would be a great bondage position to start the day.

“Yeah,” one guy interrupts, “but I'll be late for work!”

“Being late for work because you are tied up and being sucked off is not a bad thing,” Chanta barks impatiently.

Yes, well, there is that. He gives a little nod and tries to shrug his immobilized shoulders.

Others need no cheerleading. A man about forty is being tied up by a woman who has to be at least sixty. She is dressed in a one-shoulder black Lycra top and tight, stretchy pants. He seems eager. An elderly couple, each about seventy, he with a long white ponytail, she with giant hoop earrings and a beehive hairdo, are being downright studious. The other twenty or so couples are a mixed bag of ages and experience. Some are novices.

None of them, though, are meeting Chanta's demanding standards. So she explains again why it is important to get it right. “You know when a guy is eating your pussy?” she begins, suddenly sounding not at all like my dancing-class teacher. “Well, his head can't quite get the right angle.” The men and women splayed around the room nod in recognition of the problem. Yes, we see. Yes. “This is that clit-in-his-face position.”

The goal, she explains, is to create a weblike contraption of rope and forearm behind the head, forcing it up into the desired attitude. Some of the women adjust their ropes, mainly trying to make the bonds tighter, but Chanta is still dissatisfied. The women are not following directions with enough gusto. The fact that the men are not adolescent Romanian gymnasts may have something to do with the current troubles, but Chanta will brook no excuses.

She grabs her model and spins him around, pulling on an elbow. “Do you see? He can't wiggle.” Sure enough, the elbow barely moves. On the other hand, the skin on his arms is beginning to plump like water balloons between the bands of rope. The women in the room, seeing this, are unable to call upon their inner hostage taker.

Chanta scans their faces, gives a subtle cluck, and steps off her stage. She roams from couple to couple. “He could get right out of this!” “No, no, no.” “Oh, dear. He's not a baby, love. He's a big boy. He can take it.” The women nod, like Boy Scouts learning the bowline who finally see the bunny's route. A few release their knots, tug harder on the ropes, and retie, some achieving impressive results.

Chanta returns to her perch, spins her model around again, then crouches behind him. She begins reaching up under the inseam of his shorts. “Now,” she continues, “you can incorporate cock-and-ball torture into this.” (Hey! Maybe I'll finally learn cock-and-ball torture!) Chanta stands up quickly, interrupting herself. “Oh, and that reminds me. If you”—she indicates the men—“are someone's demonstration bitch, and you have a drippy cock, for God's sake wipe it off. Especially if you've just come from the bathroom, wipe it!” This man isn't naked as her eager volunteer models often are, this being the Hyatt and certain regulations against naked public cock-and-ball torture being in effect, but I gather this is something of a professional hazard for bondage instructors, something like dance teachers who remind twelve-year-old boys to dab their sweaty palms. A few of the guys laugh, but I am grateful for the tip, reckoning it just the sort of social wisdom like “Never walk in the line of another's putt” or “Shirt cuffs should show half an inch” that might come in handy someday.

“Okay, so I am all for tying down the balls…”

This is not a class to teach you how to handcuff a lover or use old neckties to tie their ankles to the four-poster, or even Bond Dave's scarf-tying seminar. A few of these guys are on the verge of a dislocation. Yet nobody is decked out in their fetish wear. Nobody looks like a lost cast member from
Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I haven't seen many of these couples around the convention. Most of them look like they read the Sunday paper events listings to each other over coffee this morning and figured this Bondage for the Male Submissive workshop sounded more fun than a flower show or a contract bridge lesson.

A young couple near me at the back of the room is being especially serious. She is petite and pretty in a tube-top dress of black-and-white paisley, and flip-flops that show off a new French-style pedicure. He is tall and handsome, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that says “Professional Gaming League.” His hair is cut short, like the young professional I imagine he is. They wear wedding rings. I picture them driving a Volvo station wagon.

She is a good student, studying every knot, every twist and bend Chanta Rose demonstrates, and then duplicating them almost exactly on her husband. Such precision is her nature, she says.

Linda is twenty-seven and works as an investment banker for a big-name financial institution. Like her husband, Chris, who is thirty-one, she studied finance in college back in Tennessee where they both grew up. They have come to Chanta's seminar after seeing a BDSM and fetish show at a nightclub. One of the models asked Linda if she would be a model for an upcoming event, something Linda did not pursue, but the show and the invitation made them curious about Fetish Con. Bondage for the Male Submissive just happened to be on offer when they arrived. It's the first time Chris has been tied up.