Anyone You Want Me to Be (17 page)

Months later, in March 2000, Retia saw Robinson once again carrying a shovel on his land.

O
n the Internet, Robinson met another Canadian woman, Lore Remington, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who was in her early thirties and had a husband and children. Lore was pale and heavyset, with long, reddish brown hair and some defiance in her features. She had a tough, independent streak and was not entirely satisfied with the daily routines of housework. She had an active imagination and passion for other things and other people. In Halifax, Lore may have been isolated from much of the world, but the Internet changed that. It brought the world, or at least certain aspects of it, right into her home. Whenever she felt like it now, she could take a break from cleaning or cooking and log on to her computer, enter a chat room, and speak with others who were bored or lonely or searching for something to pick them up and get them through a long morning or afternoon. She quickly took to the Net and liked using its novel language: addie for “address,” nick for “nickname,” and LOL for “laugh out loud.” She was a natural for cyber-interaction.

She liked to go into Gorean chat rooms for role-playing games with dominants and submissives. The games were stimulating and very adult. They were a kick, a way to escape the confines of her work and her home and her children for a while, and to meet others who shared her desires. On-line, she could use those parts of herself that were buried most of the time, but still very much alive. She could be whomever she wanted to be without having to leave the house. She could connect with the passions and secrets and fantasies of others just by logging on and joining in the action. When the game was over, she returned to her other persona of wife and mother.

In time she began speaking with others through the Internet realm known as ICG, a personalized service that told Lore whenever her friends were on-line. The service made a sound letting her know whenever a new message had come in. She would then usually pause in what she was doing and go to the keyboard and respond. The dialogue could continue for hours, back and forth across time and space, people staying in touch and sharing their thoughts and feelings through the electronic web. It was a way of not feeling alone, of always having something to look forward to. You never knew what the next message might hold or if you were about to meet someone new on the Net. You never knew what was going to happen next.

In 1996, she met a young woman who lived in Monroe, Michigan. Suzette Trouten and Lore talked for hours in cyberspace, finding out that they had a lot in common. Suzette was not married but was looking for romance and a relationship, and she was eager to make new connections. Like Lore, she had a fanciful bent, a large need for escape. The youngest of five children and the daughter of parents who’d married and divorced each other three times, Suzette had long battled weight problems and emotional troubles; she’d once attempted to end them by shooting herself in the stomach, but received only a flesh wound. If she’d struggled with many issues, she’d come through them very much alive. In her midtwenties, she was energetic, curious, open to experience. There was something vital about the young woman with dark curly hair, as if the life force and the death force had fought a terrible battle inside her and the life force had won.

She wanted to be a nurse, but needed more training and education. By the midnineties, she was employed as a home health care worker, helping the elderly and the infirm, and worked part-time in the Big Boy restaurant that her mother managed. Suzette’s jobs were low-paying and repetitious and she had to repress much of who she was when on the clock, but once that part of her day ended, she went into cyberspace and met interesting people. She didn’t have to get dressed up to interact with them. She didn’t have to worry about her weight. She didn’t have to do anything but log on and start typing. The aspects of her that were not finding expression anywhere else were welcome here. Millions of people just like her were out there, all over the world, people wanting something more and to feel connected to something larger, people who wanted to feel less isolated and more appreciated and understood and loved. It was sometimes difficult to talk to next-door neighbors because you didn’t really want them to know who you were. But it was easier in cyberspace, where you were probably never going to come face-to-face with the other person anyway. Here you could let out the private side without so much fear. Here you could cut loose. Suzette struck up on-line friendships with numerous people and Lore Remington was one.

Tammy Taylor was another. She was from Ontario, Canada, and had met Suzette in a Gorean chat room. Tammy, Lore, and Suzette communicated on-line, sharing details about their daily lives and their interest in BDSM. Like so many others on the Net, they developed their own little community within the subculture of the chat room. Inside the group Suzette was known as Pandora. Her friendship with Lore grew to the point where they got together in Detroit for a week in 1998 and had an affair, although both of them were basically looking for relationships with men. In 1999, Suzette and Tammy met in person and also began a sexual relationship.

Lore had been searching the Net for a dominant partner and Suzette told her about someone she’d recently met on-line, a businessman out in Kansas who referred to himself as Master or JR. Suzette had first met Robinson in the spring of 1999 in the Silk & Steel Gorean chat room. When he told her that he was building a new Web site for the International Council of Masters, she was fascinated by the project and offered to assist him. They spoke via e-mail with some regularity and Suzette told him various things about herself, her employment, and her financial situation. He told her that he needed help with his elderly dad—a mysterious figure known as Papa John. JR said that he’d been looking for someone with health care experience to come to Kansas. He needed a nurse who was willing to travel, and a nurse was exactly what she’d long wanted to be. Would she be interested in taking a job in Kansas City, caring for Papa John? Suzette was intrigued with the offer and began thinking about making the move west. She was having trouble covering her rent and was falling behind in her payments. Maybe this was the break she needed.

She e-mailed Lore the cowboy photo of Robinson on his farm, and Lore herself eventually contacted Robinson through one of his cyber addresses, which carried the handle “eruditemaster.” This name, like so many other things in cyberspace, revealed the way Robinson wanted to be seen by others. It clearly showed his intellectual vanity (
erudite
means “deeply learned”) and his belief that he was smarter than most people. In the late 1990s, everything was loose on the Net, so why shouldn’t he let his egotism run rampant here? Why shouldn’t he set himself up as a master of this new realm? There would always be people who swallowed whatever he said about himself—and people who believed he had the answers for them.

Perhaps because she was a wife and mother, Lore was quite cautious about actually hooking up with her cyber-connections in the flesh, but Suzette wasn’t so hesitant. She’d meet people on-line and then go out with them, always willing to try something new.

When Suzette told her friend in Nova Scotia that she was in debt and looking into a lucrative job offer from a Kansas businessman, Lore was concerned. The position sounded too good to be real. When Suzette informed Tammy about the work, she got the same kind of response. Tammy was skeptical that something like this could be true. According to Suzette, the job paid $65,000 a year and included world travel to Hawaii and Hong Kong. Some potential conditions were attached to it; she was, after all, thinking about going to work for “eruditemaster,” so she might also be expected to have sex with her new employer.

Lore advised her friend against mixing business with pleasure. That could get complicated fast, especially if master-and-slave rules were part of the relationship, but Suzette was not easily deterred. She was always hunting for the next thing that would take her mind off the miscarriages she’d suffered, or off her debts, always looking for something to satisfy her longings for a man who could love her for herself. The only creatures who seemed able to relieve her ongoing loneliness were her two Pekingese dogs, Hari and Peka. Suzette decided to follow her wanderlust and told Lore that she was going to Kansas to meet her prospective employer, but added her own note of caution. She wouldn’t take the job unless she felt certain that he would be a good boss and the position offered her a future.

In the fall of 1999, after Robinson paid for her to fly to Kansas City, he had a limousine waiting to pick her up at the airport. Then he drove her by a mansion, which he claimed was his own. For several days, he treated Suzette royally, while constantly promoting the attractiveness of the job and her excellent qualifications. He’d even encouraged her to bring along her favorite companions, Peka and Hari, so the trip would be more enjoyable. It
was
enjoyable, but Suzette was not yet persuaded to give up her life in Michigan and take the job. She’d never lived anywhere but near her family. She was close to her mother, Carol, and had serious qualms about leaving her, but she wanted the opportunity to earn more money and eventually get a nursing degree. She liked helping other people, especially those who were ill or aging. Now she was being given that chance, while getting to travel and see the world. In November 1999, she made a second trip to Kansas to meet with Robinson. This was a good experience too. After going back to Michigan and weighing all the factors, she agreed to sign a year’s contract with Robinson, not knowing that his father had been dead for about ten years. Suzette was ready for a change and the “eruditemaster” seemed like a generous and considerate man, even thinking about her attachment to her dogs. She would give Kansas a try.

In mid-February 2000, after a lot of hesitation and inner debate, she left Michigan, driving a truck that Robinson had rented for her. She took along some of her possessions, including her computer, and the two Pekingese, anxious to start a new life. For months, going west had sounded like a good idea, but she didn’t actually know if she could say good-bye to her mother and the rest of her family. Through a series of e-mails she’d shared some of her worries with Lore about what she might find in Kansas City, but the positives would surely outweigh the negatives. Robinson had promised her an apartment in Overland Park and a leased car. He’d told her to get her passport ready because she could expect to be traveling to Europe soon. He’d let her bring along her dogs because they would make the transition easier for her. He understood her hesitation and appeared to be doing everything he could to alleviate it. He seemed to know that she was afraid of leaving home and needed to be eased out of Michigan.

When she arrived in Kansas City, on the afternoon of Valentine’s Day, things were quite different from what she’d expected. The plans kept getting changed. She didn’t start working right away with Papa John and she didn’t move into the apartment and, after turning in the rental car, she didn’t have a vehicle to get around town in. Robinson put her up in the Guest House Suites motel in Overland Park and told her to entertain herself for a few days before he could get the situation in order. Every now and then he would show up and want sexual favors or to take illicit pictures of her. Lore had already warned her about having sex with her boss, but it was too late to avoid that.

Suzette didn’t do much of anything for a while, except to sit and wait for the action to begin, all the time sending out e-mail messages to her friends and family members. At least she had Peka and Hari to keep her company in these strange new circumstances. She was growing bored and passed the time by braiding the dogs’ fur, but this distraction was only temporary. The motel did not allow guests to have pets in their rooms so she had to take the Pekingese to a kennel. Without the dogs, she felt even more isolated and homesick. She felt totally dependent on her new employer, but he wasn’t paying that much attention to her and she didn’t understand why the job hadn’t started. She wondered if she’d made the wrong decision, but then in the last week of February, Robinson told her to prepare for her first business trip to California, before sailing on to Hawaii and Australia on his yacht.

One of her first chores was to sign thirty blank sheets of paper and address forty envelopes to her friends and relatives. Suzette had brought with her to Kansas not only the names and addresses of these people, but also some of their dates of birth so she could remember when to acknowledge them. Robinson carefully explained to her that she was about to be so busy traveling that she wouldn’t have time to take care of these details. It was best to get them done now.

One day when they weren’t working on the envelopes or the stationery, he came to the motel and set up a video camera. He focused the lens on the bed and prepared to turn it on. Both of them took off their clothes. The homemade movie began with Suzette lying naked on the mattress. A large painting hung above the bed and in the background a radio station played “Down Under” by the once popular Australian band Men at Work. Suzette wore a chain, held together by a silver butterfly pendant, that connected her two pierced nipples. She thrust a dildo into her pierced genitals, swaying and moaning into the camera. She pulled on the nipple chains and said, “This is what you wanted, master, to tell you I’m your slut. Your ass, your cunt, your lips, everything is yours.”

“Who are you?” Robinson says, off camera.

“Your slut, your slave,” she says.

“Whose pussy is this? Are you a whore, a slut? Do you like your cock, bitch?”

“Yes, master.”

Robinson appeared on the screen, kneeling on the bed as Suzette gave him oral sex. He hit her several times on the back with a leather flogger. Then he spanked her and spanked her again. When they paused, it was to discuss how to use a piece of equipment known as a TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) unit, employed in football games or other athletic events to stimulate muscles after an injury. It’s been compared in size and shape to a TV remote control and can be used during sex to stimulate the genitals with a small electrical charge. With the camera running, Suzette explains to him how it works and tells him that it feels like pinpricks.