Whip Smart: A Memoir (31 page)

WHEN I APPLIED
for an extra student loan, I wasn’t thinking any further ahead than that. I was curious what it would be like to subtract the financial factor. Perhaps if I relieved that pressure I would be able to see more clearly. Money obscured things, I knew, but never how much.

When the loan was approved, I didn’t do anything. I went to class, work, meetings, and therapy as usual for two weeks. Work got harder, though. Fiona was angry at all the sessions I wasn’t taking. “Tell him I’m booked,” I said, “tell him I went home sick,” as if my clients were boyfriends I didn’t have the heart to dump. I had disturbing moments of objectivity while working, flashes of disgust and anxiety as my sessions momentarily transformed, the way pornography does after orgasm—its emptiness and desperation no longer obscured by desire.

The last client I ever saw at the dungeon was Jack. This time, instead of sorority girl Margie, he wanted to be “Little Margie,” her child incarnation. We had conducted this scene many times before. Instead of sorority girls, Little Margie’s antagonist was, of course,
Mean Mommy. Mean Mommy role-plays had always made for some of my favorite sessions, as soon as I found the confidence to pull them off. Jack’s topping from the bottom annoyed me, but it had improved since I stopped capitulating to it so much. When Jack pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and started to brief me on the intricacies of the scene, I gritted my teeth; he didn’t like the sneering to begin
before
the scene did, in keeping with the typical topper from the bottom. I gently tugged the paper from his hands.

“I know what the scene is, Jack. We’ve done it before.”

“Yes, but I, I made some changes to the, the original script? I’d really like you to incorporate a more
sadistic
tone of voice when you find me in the bathroom, and if you could pull my panties down
first
, before my—”

I reached out my finger, as if to press it against his lips, but stopped short.

“Shh! I will look this over,” I shook the limp paper, “and be sure to work in any revisions. Okay?”

“Well, okay. If you could just—”

“Good-bye, Jack. I’ll be back in five. You should be changed by then.” I quickly stepped out of the Red Room and closed the door behind me. Alone in the dim hallway, I sighed long, feeling my shoulders slump. An hour with him was going to ruin my day; I could already tell. My process of slipping in and out of character had only been getting messier. My clients couldn’t usually tell, but from the inside the veil of my persona had grown opaque; I could see too much through it. I felt too awake. Many sessions had started to feel like surgery without adequate anesthesia. Walking to the dressing room to put on my business suit, I felt tired, the kind of tired that sleep or a vacation wouldn’t remedy.

The scene began with me getting home from work. I strode into the room, sighed theatrically, and then very slowly removed my stockings. Little Margie hid behind the bathroom door, spying on me. As I unclipped my garter, I could hear him wheezing and fidgeting and shivering with a wave of disgust.

Then I answered the phone.

“Hello? Oh, hello, Ms. Jenson, I hope everything is all right at school. Has Margie been behaving herself?” I paused to allow for the fictional teacher to respond. “You don’t say.” My tone darkened. “Well, rest assured I’ll take great pains to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.” I glowered in the general direction of the bathroom. “Yes, well, thank you, Ms. Jenson. Bye-bye now.” I slammed the phone down, and then the scene really got rolling.

Ms. Jenson usually informed me that Little Margie had been caught touching herself in the girls’ room. With this information, I stormed the bathroom and dragged Little Margie out by the hair of her wig (not an easy thing to accomplish). Berating her all the way, I forced her to show me exactly what she had been caught doing in the girls’ room. Following this humiliation, I beat her with a riding crop. The corporal punishment part of the scene always segued into the finale, wherein I decided to “teach her a real lesson.” Using a giant pink dildo, I gave Little Margie a taste of what she had coming to her.

It should have been a cakewalk.

Objectively, it was a disturbing scene. Early on, twisted sessions like this had given me a kind of satisfaction; during them I felt I most deeply plumbed the anthropological depths of my job. Imagine my own depths, to have witnessed,
participated
in, such perversions! Experiencing the reality of obsessions like this made me feel unique, and powerful for having faced their hideousness. They rarely horrified me. After the first year, repetition robbed them of all novelty and they became, while still among my favorites, rote and unmemorable. Jack’s fantasy was unexceptional, a stock role-play.

In this session with him, however, I felt smothered. Not explicitly horrified but as if his presence, the story we spun, and even the sound of my own voice were a sealed surface under which I was being snuffed out.

When the session ended, I walked Jack out and returned to the
dressing room. My shift ended in half an hour. I peeled off my pencil skirt and pulled on my jeans. Padding down the hallway in bare feet, I opened the supply closet where the huge yellow depository for all our session trash was kept. Under the familiar buzz of the overhead light, I inhaled that old sickening smell of Lysol and latex and pulled a couple of garbage bags from the box on the shelf.

As I transferred the contents of my locker into the bags, my heart began pounding. I decided to leave a few items: pairs of torn stockings, all the shoes that hurt to stand in, hot pants with shot elastic, an ugly silk negligee. I didn’t want to look like I was cleaning the locker out, not to mention how difficult it was already going to be to carry just the quality stuff. I had thousands of dollars’ worth in clothes, shoes, lingerie, uniforms, wigs, and equipment.

“What are you doing Justine?” asked Camille, who was on the couch painting her toenails.

“I have a photo shoot this weekend.” I tried not to visibly hurry and suppressed the insane fear that someone would try to prevent me from leaving. No one did. In the elevator I clutched those garbage bags, their necks sweaty from my nervous hands, and eyed the camera in the corner. It was just before five on a spring afternoon with summer heat. I burst out onto the sidewalk into a stream of tourists and rush-hour commuters. Weaving my way down the block toward the subway, I found myself grinning like a kid on a homeward school bus, infected with the smell of pollen and freedom.

“I quit!” I adjusted the phone against my ear and waited for my mother to respond.

“That’s great,” she said, hesitantly. I could picture her expression exactly, the hesitation drawn in her delicate features. “That’s what you wanted, right?”

“Yeah, for a while now, I—” I stopped myself. “Yeah, I’ve been ready to leave for a while.” Talking with her about it never stopped
being difficult, even with news I knew she wanted to hear. I always felt myself scraping up against something painful and backed out of conversations on the topic. She never seemed interested in prolonging them, either. There was less unspoken between us than there had been in a long time, and so it stood out, the rawness, our unreadiness to reveal how we felt about it, and to hear each other.

I knew she underestimated the extent of my using—I let her—but our relationship had changed since I’d gotten sober. On the surface, our interactions remained much the same, but I was less afraid of her, of what she’d see in me, or not see. I began to realize how much more
interesting
relationships became when they weren’t so restricted by omissions and half-truths, though harder in some ways. But it didn’t feel hard anymore, to keep up with our friendship; I didn’t have to work so hard to modulate what information I leaked. It’s difficult to feel known when you hide so much; advice becomes meaningless; assumptions about your identity or character, unbelievable. For a long time, our relationship had been haunted by the sadness I felt in her believing that she fully knew me and my knowing that she didn’t. The more I revealed, the more I could breathe.

“I’m really happy for you,” she said, and I knew she meant it.

I’ve never quit anything all at once, though, and I didn’t this. I kept seeing my private clients: Albert, Tony, Billy, Jeremiah, and a few others. After a few weeks, I had whittled it down to Jeremiah and Tony. The money made it easy to hang on to Jeremiah, and Tony was simply more persistent than the others; he refused to accept my retirement. He called and e-mailed multiple times per week. For every ten or twenty of his entreaties I accepted one. I quit him first. The sense of humiliation that followed his sessions lasted longer than the sticky slicks of lube on my arms and legs; it had only increased over time, and exponentially since I’d quit the dungeon.

I closed my work e-mail account. [email protected] no longer existed, and I hoped Tony himself would disappear so easily. He didn’t. When I first began taking private sessions, I had naïvely given my phone number to a few of those first clients, including Tony. When his e-mails began bouncing back, he started calling. I kept all my clients in my phone book under “S,” for “Slave” Albert, “Slave” Jeremiah, “Slave” Tony. The appearance of his name on that little screen soon prompted the same stomach lurch that my old drug dealer’s number had when I first got clean. The dealer stopped calling eventually, I told myself, and Tony would, too.

He probably would have been more inclined to stop calling if I didn’t pick up every once in while. It became a cycle that mimicked my early sobriety in a number of ways. When I got clean, it was partly due to a system of postponement; I would pick a day, next Thursday, say, and plan on getting high that day. When Thursday rolled around, I would get scared, go to a meeting, and decide on another day to get high. In this way, I made appointments with Tony for a week or two in advance, feeling confident that I would be able to handle it. I just needed some extra cash to feel financially secure, I thought. As the day of our appointment neared, my anxiety would loom, a mountain on the horizon that I was speeding toward. My anxiety never felt directly related to the session; like the melancholy of my childhood, it would seep into everything. My schoolwork, meetings, even the industrial Brooklyn landscape would seem waterlogged with dread, all that gray concrete dense with portent, the threat of something terrible: a failure, incurable loneliness and fear.

A day or two before the session, I would call my therapist and leave a frantic message. “Something is wrong!” I’d say to her answering machine, and then insist that she not call me back. I had learned in meetings that inditing fears had a special power. There was clarity on the other side of putting things to words. I still
didn’t
feel
a connection between my dread and the session, but I had a reference for this sort of dissociation, in lying about being clean, and knew that the two could still be related. So I’d cancel at the last minute, and just like that my dread would leave, a swept cloud cover.

The same process applied to Jeremiah—I became anxious and doubtful in the days leading up to our appointment—though I still went through with it and saw him and Eva every couple months.

“Why is it so hard?” I asked my therapist, hoping for a prescriptive answer, something to
do
. Getting sober required a lot of action: list making, reading, going to meetings, helping people, visiting psych wards and rehabs, little exercises to trick me into looking at myself. I wanted this from her, but she resisted. She never gave homework.

“You’re still attached to it. Why do you think? What do you get out of it?”

“I don’t know. Money. It’s really hard to not have a lot of extra money. I’ve gotten so used to that.”

She looked at me, skeptical.

“I mean, it still feels exciting in some way, getting dressed up and going over to that fancy apartment, leaving with all that money. A part of me still feels satisfied, on a kind of power trip, when it’s over.”

“But during?”

“During, I pretty much am waiting for it to be over. With those two anyway.”

“The way you have described it, it sounds more uncomfortable than that.”

“Yeah, it’s terrible. It didn’t used to be, though.”

“You are
feeling
more.”

“Yeah. I mean I felt things before, not like this. I felt strong. And sexy.”

“Feeling powerful made you feel sexy?”

“Yes! Of course it did. Everyone likes to feel powerful, don’t they? I mean, wouldn’t everyone like to feel more powerful?” My question was meant rhetorically.

“I don’t necessarily think so.”

“Really?”

“Really.”