Whip Smart: A Memoir (26 page)

“Uh-huh. You want me to get you a ticket? I’m picking mine up from Purple Passion tomorrow.” Purple Passion was our favorite supply store: a small, intimate boutique in Chelsea that sold high-quality corsets, leather goods—cuffs, crops, clothes—and even the medical supplies appropriated by our profession, like sounds, TENS units, and clamps.

“No, I have a test on Monday. That thing is too crowded for me, anyway. I want to leave as soon as I get there.”

“Suit yourself.”

The Black & Blue Ball is one of the biggest fetish events of the
year in New York. At a different venue each spring, its spectacle draws an international audience of thousands. People go for the art, the music, the cameras, to schmooze and publicize themselves, to see and be seen. It was worth it just for the outfits.

That year, Camille, Miss K, Fiona, Georgina, and I met at the dungeon to get dressed before the ball. All of us crowded into the dressing room while the fresh-faced twenty-year-old night shift gawked from the couch. Miss K glued on two-inch magenta false eyelashes as Camille tucked peacock feathers into her headdress, and I baby-powdered the inside of my rubber minidress (latex is impossible to get on otherwise). Wanting to keep it simple, I smoothed some product on my black bob, put on red lipstick, and donned my most comfortable platform stilettos. One of our coworkers was performing. I loved to see the clothes, the local celebrity performers, the Amazonian trannies with their glitter and implants, and the dommes from other dungeons, but my reasons for going were also more pragmatic than any of that. There was business to be drummed up at the B&B.

When I left the dungeon for a “real” job, it had a lot to do with my limits and their disappearance. When I went back, that didn’t change so much as my attitude about it. If I was going to go all out, I was going to get paid for it, I thought, and that made it seem more like a choice. I also couldn’t get the rumors about Remy out of my mind. Supposedly, he had cameras rigged behind all the mirrors of the dungeon. To an onlooker, what I was doing in sessions may not have seemed much more intimate than before, but I knew it was. Whether or not Remy had cameras in the dungeons, it was paranoid of me; even if they existed, girls had been doing what I did, and much worse, for years before I got there. But it wasn’t getting in trouble that I was afraid of; it was being seen. Where I had gone in my sessions felt like stepping off of that cliff, as I had my first day, but it felt wilder, steeper, darker below. It didn’t feel completely within my control, and the way I controlled things was in secret.

Even as a kid, I’d found power in the ability to claim a hidden
world. Selecting items from my household that would be wondered about but not missed, I would bury them in far corners of our rural backyard or off the banks of the pond our house sat at the edge of. I hid detailed maps inside a diary with a minuscule lock, whose key was hidden in a copy of
Anne of Green Gables
whose final chapter I had hollowed out with a pair of sewing scissors. It wasn’t to prohibit others’ use that I did this but to claim the knowledge of the items’ whereabouts for my own, to stake out a metaphysical territory over which I had sole control. In my closet, I kept a Mason jar filled with the ashy remains of other expendable household materials. I would put bits of paper, fabric, plastic, hair, and food in the jar and burn them with long kitchen matches. Watching such vivacious transformation of the mundane mesmerized me.

I needed a more controlled space to observe the transformation of my sessions, like that jar in the bag in the back of my closet or a hole dug in the backyard. Some things I needed to bury to keep. That wildness promised destruction if not contained.

Skye, our colleague, was up on the balcony that overlooked the main floor of the club. They had oversold tickets worse than usual that year, and everyone you would have strutted by in years past you were now instead pressed up against. There was a glammed-up band playing, fire-breathers, and some sideshow sessions going on, but we couldn’t see any of it over all the heads. At five-two I had enough trouble seeing over the heads of other women, let alone men in heels. I found some breathing room on the balcony.

I knew that Skye was into suspension but had never seen it before. We milled through the crowd for a while before finding her. I posed for cameras with a group of gay rubber fetishists, their perfectly sculpted bodies ensconced from head to toe.

“There she is!” Camille finally shouted, and pointed to the corner where a tighter crowd had formed. We found Skye at the center. She had sculpted her black hair a foot high, weaving razor wire
and Kewpie dolls into it, among other things. She smiled down at us as we pushed our way to the front of her audience, and I could see that her eyes were glazed with something. She’d probably taken painkillers in preparation. Dangling off the ground by a few feet, she wore a spangled bra and hot pants. Strung from the ceiling by rope were two large, silver hooks. They pierced through the flesh of her back, and from these she hung, a head about the crowd.

As a teenager I had had needles stuck through my nose, lip, navel, and ears; I had stuck needles in my veins fairly recently, and I  pierced slaves at the dungeon all the time. This was different. Session piercings were usually superficial; they only punctured the topmost layers of skin and never bled much. Regular piercings hurt like hell for about three seconds. This woman was hung by deep-sea fishing hooks, as thick as my thumb. They had to pierce through enough flesh to support her entire body weight, to avoid ripping through her. They pulled handfuls of her back into two symmetrical tents of flesh.

At that point I was hard to shock; in fact, I had been for a long time. As if I had a lost gag reflex, there wasn’t much that made me gasp or cringe. I stared at the blood-encrusted holes in her back, her glassy eyes, and the shimmering light her spangles threw across all the upturned faces and I wasn’t shocked or disgusted or scared, but there was something. Skye once said to me in the dressing room that she considered herself an artist and that she was her own work of art. I thought of this as I stared up at her. She was magnificent, in a way. The idea of doing it myself was frightening, un-appealing, but I understood the impulse and her limp satisfaction, and maybe that is what disturbed me.

On my way down the stairs, I paused. Squeezing my eyes shut for a few seconds, I asked myself what if I could have seen this as a younger me, a glimpse of my future life. I had always wondered what I would be like at the age of eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-three. It was an impulse that reminded me of my childhood fantasy games, when I would lie in the woods, close my eyes, and open
them as someone just born, someone from another planet, to see everything so new and strange. Now I opened them on a writhing ballroom, strobes from the cathedral ceiling bathing everything in purple light: half-naked men and women led on leashes by towering she-males and dommes with cinched waists and rubber catsuits; a fire-breathing, Hula-Hooping troupe clad only in body paint and piercings; slaves in masks crouched over and used as stools by women at the bar; and behind me a woman hung by hooks with razor wire in her hair. Someone down on the floor called my name: “Justine!” I blinked, reached into my cleavage for a stack of business cards, and descended the stairs.

IN THE BEGINNING
, $75 had seemed like a lot of money. After a few years, it no longer did, not when I knew it could be more. For the small minority of dommes who stayed in the business longer than a year, mine was a common trajectory. After a time, you stopped focusing on the fact that you made $75 an hour and started thinking more about how you were getting $75 out of the $200 that your client was paying. Then you started talking to independent dommes who set their own rates, paid for their own space, booked their own appointments, built their own Web sites, and set up retirement funds. Then you figured out that that’s what the most senior dommes at your own dungeon were segueing into; they didn’t work fewer days only because they booked so many sessions but also because they were doing sessions elsewhere and harvesting new clients from the house. I wasn’t interested in getting a lease in Manhattan and investing in all my own equipment; I couldn’t afford it and believed that I might spontaneously quit any day now. But so long as I was still in it, more money and privacy were necessary. So I had my business cards made, and I started slipping them
to clients who tipped well and whose sessions interested me. I could charge what I wanted in private sessions; it was a sliding scale based on what I thought a client would be willing to pay. Most sessions ended up at around $300 an hour, four times what I made at Mistress X’s.

My first was with Tony. He constantly said things in sessions like, “Doesn’t Mommy want to take Baby to the ATM and make him give her money?” As promising as that might have sounded, I never took him up on it. Primarily, I hesitated because it would have looked suspicious, me going downstairs in the elevator with him. I also figured he was bullshitting. The man didn’t bother to tip in session. But while he wasn’t a favorite, he was familiar and benign. I didn’t know if he was bluffing about the ATM, but I did feel certain that he posed no physical threat to me, and that was my first criterion for taking sessions “outside,” as we called it.

I hated the phone part of it. What the managers at Mistress X’s spared me from I didn’t know until I started booking my own sessions. It was so
awkward
. Not to them, I don’t think; my affectation over the phone remained as seamless as in person, but to me it was harder. It discomfited me to hear those voices while wearing my street clothes, in the midst of my “regular” affairs, to talk into the same phone I spoke to my mother on. In effect, I was Melissa, not Justine, during those conversations. I missed the transitional elements: the dungeon, the clothes, and the darkness; without them it was jarring, and it took time for me to be able to slip in and out of character that quickly.

Autumn told me about a hotel in the Meatpacking District, right on the West Side Highway. It was cheap (for Manhattan), not too filthy, and rented rooms by the hour. Tony agreed when I suggested it but asked if we could meet at a bank ATM a few blocks away.

“Perfect,” I told him.

We met just after dark on a Friday evening, a mistake I wouldn’t make again. I was early and made my way west from the Eighth
Avenue subway station. West of Ninth Avenue the crowds thin and the shops, while still chic, are farther apart. The blocks go from quaint to industrial, all loading docks and the locked grates of galleries. I stepped carefully in my heels across the cobblestones and was glad, then, for the early clubgoers who straggled past me on otherwise deserted streets. Even with the glowing ATM and a nearby gas station, our meeting place was desolate. I smoked outside the glass doors and fiddled with my phone until he arrived. It was odd, waiting there with my suitcase of dildos and rope. I felt both vulnerable and excited by the nearness of my two lives. It seemed so brazen. His familiar stride and shining head bobbed toward me under the streetlights.

“Hello, Mommy.”

I felt a wave of embarrassment, hearing that voice outside the muffled walls of the dungeon. Like sudden nausea, I suppressed it and smiled. “How is Mommy’s baby?”

“I’m very good, Mommy. Does Mommy want to go into the ATM?”

“How did you know? You’re so good at pleasing Mommy, aren’t you?” At the dungeon I had become used to this kind of talk; I did it automatically, unselfconsciously. Here, though—hanging in the air over the cobblestones, the river of traffic behind us and the Hudson shining beyond that—the words rang false. In the open air they sounded phony, the way they had during my first session. It seemed the world was too honest for them, as if the river and the sky and the street were too real to suffer our falsity. We could only get away with it in an environment as contrived. I was struck with sudden fear: What if I saw someone I knew? What if my suitcase fell open on the sidewalk, dildos rolling into the street? What if Tony and I were arrested for some reason? What if I couldn’t do it? What if this was the moment when it all stopped? Tony clearly did not notice or share my discomfort.

Unlocking the door with his card, he opened it. I followed him into the glass cubicle, turning to squint at the street behind us for
signs of life as he settled himself in front of a machine. There were only a couple of cars at the gas station on the next block, too far away to see us in detail. Joining Tony, I saw that he still had his card out and was smiling at me expectantly. Before I could think of what to say, he reached for the zipper of his coat and pulled it down slowly. Watching this towering man sensuously lower his parka zipper, coy as a burlesque dancer, would have been funny if Autumn were there. Knowing this only made me more alone, made our scene in this fishbowl more lurid and sad. The jacket covered him to mid-thigh, and when he unzipped I saw that the zipper of his jeans was also down, though the waist buttoned. His semi-erect penis was threaded through the hole, clasped lightly in the teeth of the open zipper. He must have arranged this before even leaving his apartment, titillated by the concealed transgression as he walked here through the Friday crowds, perhaps even brushing against anonymous hips with his hidden member. He disgusted me, and his perversion acquired a kind of menace here, where I could not meet its enthusiasm. The disconcerting parallel was not lost on me: both of us with our secrets, precious and thrilling.