Whip Smart: A Memoir (13 page)

“ TEMPING
?” my mother repeated. “But you’ve always hated office work.” She stirred her tea and squinted up at me. “I thought you were catering?”

My brother stared at me over her head, waiting for my response. We stood in my mother’s kitchen, my brother and I leaning against opposite counters with my mother sitting at the table between us. She had asked about my financial situation, which I assured her was secure. He knew the truth, as he always did before either of our parents. My father—easy to avoid, as he was often halfway across the globe—was usually last to know. My brother was a friend, a friend with an unparalleled capacity for giving me the benefit of the doubt. In my shortsighted arrogance, I couldn’t foresee how I’d regret burdening him with my candor about so many things.

“I kind of have a new job,” I said. “I’ve actually had it for a while.” This wasn’t the first time I’d broken unwelcome news to my mother, and while I knew how to keep an even tone, my stomach still fluttered. I wiped my palms on my jeans.

“What?” She recognized that evenness of tone. “What are you doing?”

“I’m a dominatrix.”

She stared at me, her pretty face taut, practicing her own evenness.

“Do you know what that is?” I asked her.

“Kind of,” she said slowly. God, I hoped she couldn’t see through my calm as I could hers, and that what she saw beneath it didn’t make her heart clench as mine did.

“I act out the role of a powerful, dominant woman. I tie men up, call them names, stuff like that. It’s like a kind of therapy, really,” I added, hoping to appeal to her therapist’s sensibility, “reen-acting childhood traumas.”

She turned to my brother. “Did you know this?”

He nodded.

“I don’t have sex with anyone, and I don’t take off my clothes,” I quickly added.

“Is it safe?”

“Of course!” I said. “Do you think I’d be doing it if it weren’t safe?”

She just stared at me.

“Haven’t I always taken care of myself?”

She nodded, though I couldn’t read her face.

“Don’t you trust me to make informed decisions? Hasn’t it always worked out?”

“No, I do. I do trust you.” She paused. “Not that I could stop you if I didn’t.” Was she accusing me? Reassuring herself? I couldn’t tell.

“It’s been great for me, Mom. It’s given me so much confidence. I  get
worshiped
for a living.” Instinctively, I tried to appeal to my mother’s feminist, therapist values. “The women I work with, they’re amazing, strong, educated, creative women. It’s not like I’m a prostitute or something. I’m in control of everything that happens. It’s
empowering
.”

She did trust me. At least, she wanted to. And I
had
always landed on my feet. So why didn’t I feel relieved after telling her? Certainly, I hadn’t always taken care of myself in the years since I’d moved out, but she didn’t know that. I’d worked hard to conceal all the many unsafe conditions I’d sought out. I missed that sense of getting off the hook, of having the winning argument. I had a great argument; I really believed it, and kept on making it, but her face never relaxed. I told her about my alias, about medical sessions, about the money, about my nourished body image and my friendship with Autumn—what a kindred spirit I’d found in her. My mother kept nodding, but her eyes stayed worried.

My mother and I were inseparable for my first eleven years of life, and she spoke to me like a person before it was in vogue to be friends with one’s children. In the long stretches of months that my father was away at sea, I was often her most available confidante. I don’t remember grieving his departures much myself after the age of five or six, but when my father left, everything in our home would assume an aura of sorrow that lasted for weeks. Some things, certain times of day, were worse than others: the accumulation of shadows at  dusk, beneath sills and chair legs; darkness slipping across the kitchen table like a drawn cloth; the faint fur of dust on the lip of a vase. After I reached a certain age, it no longer seemed as though this sadness originated in her, or me, but that it was organic to everything it afflicted. Our belongings emanated despair, as if they’d realized they were soulless.

By the time she became a practicing psychotherapist, I had already discovered men, and shut her out. When I slipped away from her, and began lying about where I spent my time, and with whom, she tried to rein me in with talk of rebuilding trust, with love and reason. This failed. Then she screamed and wheedled, and I grew to hate the stricken look in her eyes almost as much as I craved the illicit thrill of secrets and desire. She and my father sent me to a therapist of my own, who either bought my manipulations or gave up—I still don’t know which. I settled down eventually, when
I scared myself enough. I don’t think she ever stopped fearing losing me again. At least, she never pushed that hard again, never tried in earnest to stop me from doing what I’d set my mind to. Through my dropping out of high school and moving out at sixteen, she tried to mother me with support instead of judgment; she gave as much as I would accept and made a decision to trust me. We remained friends. Ultimately, we were similar in our self-sufficiency, though hers was the result of a childhood lived in poverty and neglect. She had had no alternative but to rely on her own resources, whereas I was simply determined to, for reasons mysterious to us both.

Not long after our first shift together, Autumn and I were talking on the phone daily. Our similar childhoods had eased us into fast friendship, and a slew of other likenesses cemented it. Together, we giggled and gossiped about the other dommes and delighted in our mutual appreciation for base humor and utter candor about all things sexual. The similarities seemed endless.

One night, while I was covering a shift for one of the usual nighttime dommes, Autumn poked her head into the kitchen as I was stuffing a load of laundry into the washing machine.

“Pssst! Justine!”

“What?” I peeled off my rubber gloves and pushed the “Start Cycle” button.

She beckoned conspiratorially and disappeared down the hallway. I sighed in mock exhaustion and followed her. Pulling me into the Green Bathroom, she locked its door and winked at me.

“What?”

“I’m bad,” she said. “Uh-oh.”

“I’ve been a very naughty girl, Mistress Justine,” she announced in a nasal, lisping tone.

“Well, perhaps Mommy Justine needs to give you a spanking,” I growled.

Grinning, she reached into the cleavage created by her corset. Eyebrows raised in anticipation, she rooted around for a moment before withdrawing a folded square of paper and a twenty-dollar bill.

“Tsk, tsk!” I shook my head at her but then made grabbing motions as she set the white square on the back of the toilet and unfolded it.

“It’s only a couple grams, but you have class in the morning anyway, right?”

I snorted. We both knew that as soon as she finished rolling up that twenty, having brain surgery scheduled the next morning couldn’t have kept the cocaine out of my nose.

Sessioning on coke was unimaginable fun, so long as you didn’t run out. The high raised you above the grim tedium of predictable sessions, the humiliation of sensual ones, and left you with the energy to get creative. Coke allowed everything whose sheen had dulled to shine again. A fair number of nighttime clients would bring their own stash to share with their domme, if she was interested. The dungeon traded in sexual compulsion, and with one compulsion you usually find others. Autumn and I were always interested. That night, we made a web out of a single endless twine of black rope and hoisted a 250-pound man seven feet off the ground. As he gently rocked from the ceiling-mounted chains, the soft flesh of his back bulging around the lattice of rope, we smoked and laughed, intermittently flicking his exposed buttocks from below with purple riding crops. We refused to let him masturbate to orgasm until he had drunk an entire pitcher of our combined urine from a plastic champagne glass. We heckled him, taking long swigs from a gallon jug of water, in order to keep replenishing the pitcher. At one point, Autumn laughed so hard that water streamed out of her nose onto the satin front of her corset.

“Well, that needed a good flushing out anyway,” I said, and we cracked up all over again.

After closing the dungeon, we ended up at some signless bar on
the Lower East Side, flirting with the lanky bartender and swiveling our hips to and from the bathroom every ten minutes to do lines. It being a weeknight, the bar was virtually empty by the time we licked that white square of paper clean and tried to suppress the instantaneous depression that follows every last line of coke. I silently concocted plans to get more, knowing them futile; it happened every time. Three o’clock in the morning was too late to call either of our dealers on a weeknight. Below my high lay the sheer drop of an excruciating comedown, compounded by the reality of a class that began in six hours and the fact that I’d spent more than I’d earned that night on shots. I kicked against the inevitable gravity of the crash, scrambling, determined this time to will my mind beyond the mental agony of withdrawal, the fever of worried despair and sleeplessness, that I could never seem to remember when I decided to inhale that first line.

Autumn and I had gotten loaded together a handful of times, nights that we began like this one: feeling beautiful and bulletproof, intoxicated with our power. By morning, I’d end up as I did after that night: at home in bed, alone, listening to the chatter of birds outside my window, with bleeding nostrils and suicidal fantasies, choking down gulps from a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor from the bodega to soften the crash. The sound of car engines growling to life, apartment doors slamming as other tenants in the building left for work, and the squeal of city buses breaking to pick them up all sped my spiraling panic. Looking at normal lives from the ugly side of mine was a special hell. I silently prayed for sleep, and tucked tiny wads of tissue into my nostrils to stop the burning. Once, afraid to cross paths with Rebecca in such a state, I had urinated in an old coffee can in my closet.

Two days later, as Autumn and I crossed paths in the dressing room—she arriving for the night shift as I was leaving—I mentioned that feeling, made a joke of it, something about being glad I didn’t own a gun, because I’d probably have killed myself that
night just to escape another minute of it. She laughed with me, but the knowing I recognized in her eyes was as hopeless as my own.

A few days after that, I almost asked Rebecca to leave New York with me. Our final semester of college had begun, and having fulfilled all my credit requirements for graduation, I was enjoying a cushy schedule. Monthly, I met my thesis advisor at a coffee shop to hand her the next ten pages of my novel—already twice the required length of the thesis. My weekly classes consisted of photography, chorus, and a course on Romanticism that would have been more interesting if it weren’t dumbed down for the design students it was intended for. Rebecca and I rode the C train into the city together for this class, which began at 9:30
A.M.
The hardest part of my routine was getting there on time. Eight thirty cast a bad light on just about everything.

Leaning back against the scuffed train window, I watched Rebecca sleep, her long torso folded over her lap, cheek against her knee. She was a good friend, I thought, and looking at her softly mussed hair and flushed cheek, I appreciated how she managed to be both smart and innocent. As hard as I worked to annihilate my own innocence, I envied her sometimes. I hated keeping things from her, but how could I describe the misery of those sleepless mornings to her when I couldn’t even broach the subject to Autumn without making light of it? I couldn’t. I stretched my arms over my head, trying to shake off the dark feeling. The terror of nights like those usually slipped away after I finally slept, washed away in dreams and the particular amnesia of minds that, as Einstein famously defined insanity, “do the same thing over and over again, and expect different results.” Only when alone, with a specific quiet of mind, did I find it creeping back in. I was often my most sober in the mornings, before the static of the day crashed over me, before I could smoke or swallow or shoot anything.

Watching her brow furrow in sleep, I almost shook Rebecca awake and suggested that we leave after graduation, go back to Boston and get a warm apartment, paint the kitchen yellow, and cook dinner in it every night. For a hopeful moment, I could imagine myself dropping everything in New York and leaving it there, living only as the version of myself whose name I whispered into my hand when I was afraid. What if I never had to see anyone’s worried eyes again, not over me? And then, like a loose garment, that hope slipped off of me and slid to the floor. I nudged Rebecca awake with my knee.

“We’re here,” I said, and stood.

On my first and only date with Lena, we walked by that signless bar on our way to The Whiskey Ward, on the Lower East Side. After a few drinks, we moved on to some place on Eldridge Street. It was packed, dark, the kind of bar you want to be taken to by someone who knows the bartender, not to mention the pretty Latin boys selling coke by the ladies’ room, so that you can get something better than the yellow mixture of baby laxative and gasoline they sell to the underdressed Jersey girls. I could tell she thought this was new to me, that I’d be impressed by her knowing Carlos’s name, and flattered by the way she held my arm so that he’d know he could look, that she wanted him to, but that was all. I was flattered. But that was the only thing new to me. Cultural tourism had always been an obsession of mine.