I’m not sure I’d ever known a more invincible feeling than that of walking into a party feeling beautiful, with drugs in my purse and a double life that everyone was dying to know about. I’ve seen the girls who feel this way walking into rooms. Sometimes beauty is enough. They are irresistible; one can’t help looking at them, their smooth hair and self-conscious hands, their eyes bright with secret joy. But they are so delicate, in their preening and their need. I fear for them, now, knowing what they might do to keep that joy from trickling out of them, as it always does.
“So …,” my date said, a few hours later, and I could see him wanting to ask.
“Go ahead.” I smiled.
“I’m sorry, I just …” He ran his hand through his hair. “I’ve never known anyone who … and you seem so—”
“Normal?”
“I mean, yeah, kind of.” He was cute, and I’d already decided to sleep with him. “So, you don’t, like—”
“Have sex with them? No.” This was everyone’s first question. “And I keep my clothes on.”
I felt a pang of annoyance at his visible relief. If only people knew how predictable they were.
“So do you do it because you’re—”
“Into it? No.”
More relief. It was important to defang myself first thing, so that people knew I was safe to question about it, assured that I was just like them, only a little braver. After those two questions were out of the way, they always relaxed and became more eager for details. Were I into it, or willing to have sex for money, I would have been less of a curiosity, easily consigned to the diagnosis of broken woman—instantly diminished in intelligence, psychology, morality, or class. I understood this and shared their logic, even as it irritated me in its unexamined narrow-mindedness. The last thing I wanted to be mistaken for was into it. The glory lay in my ability to do it despite not being into it, in having the balls to choose it based on curiosity rather than compulsion.
“It’s an acting job,” I said, shrugging. “Probably one of the most reliably paying acting gigs in New York.”
He chuckled. They always did at that one. I excused myself to go to the restroom.
There was a line, and I didn’t feel like waiting; it had been a couple hours since my last trip to the bathroom, and my mouth felt gummy, eyes glassy. Lately, I couldn’t seem to get or stay as high as I wanted. Getting a plastic cup of water from the kitchen sink, I wove through the party and stepped out into the building’s hallway. It smelled of sawdust and metal, and I could see my breath—tiny clouds that dispersed quickly in the chilly air. For all the crowd inside the loft, the hall was empty, probably due to the cold. I wandered around the corner, finding a disabled freight elevator and a few empty apartments that were clearly under construction, their doors ajar.
I walked into one of these and knelt on the floor beside a window, where the light from a street lamp outside fell yellow and bright enough to illuminate a patch on the floor big enough for me to do what I needed. I dug the rolled-up sock out of my purse and removed its contents. Sprinkling a tiny dash of each powder into the concave mirror of my powder compact, I added a squirt of water from the plastic cup, using the syringe as an eyedropper. I mixed the brown puddle with the needle’s tip, sucked it into the syringe, and carefully emptied it into my arm. Then I filled the syringe with water and emptied it a few more times—a ritual—watching the thread of liquid arc through the shadowy emptiness as the high crept up the back of my skull. Just as I had tucked the sock back into my purse, I heard footsteps approaching in the hallway. The light didn’t reach to the door, so all I could see was her silhouette for a few seconds as Rebecca hesitated in the doorway.
“Hey!” I called to her, knowing the huskiness in my voice was a giveaway. I rose to my feet, brushing the sawdust off my knees.
“Hey.” She walked over and squinted into my eyes. When she reached for my arm, I felt twin surges of panic and nausea rise in my belly. Before she could see anything, I yanked my arm back and hoisted the window open, thrusting my head out to vomit onto the street five stories below.
9
THE DUNGEON’S OWNER and namesake, Mistress X, had once been an employee. In glossy full color she was shown to me in a book of Eric Kroll’s photographs that decorated the Cross-Dressing Room’s coffee table. A slender Latina in vintage lingerie, her doe eyes widened over a ball gag, she was pictured tied to a chair, or poised with a riding crop over another bound woman. Women who had been at the dungeon the longest had stories of her bursting in on sessions of theirs and jerking off their clients in order to vacate the room for the next waiting patron. Anna had once costarred in a minor fetish porno with Mistress X and reported that despite the staunch moral limits regarding sexual conduct adopted by some old-timers, “Mistress X would do most anything. She wanted them in, and out, whatever it took. She was always a businesswoman.” In Lena’s words, this was “a slut.” Allegedly, I had been hired just after the birth of Mistress X’s first child and some of her last appearances at the dungeon. While I heard once or twice of her making cameos in my absence, I was never to meet her. The only authority I ever negotiated with was Remy.
Originally from Argentina, Remy was a middle-aged man with a face nearly handsome, who spoke a broken English that took me months to accurately interpret. For a long time I would just nod at his wavering tenor and later seek translation from a witness more fluent in Remy’s harried Spanglish. We all loved to rant and rail against him (as I am sure goes on today), but we could have had much worse to answer to. I never once heard of Remy making any kind of sexual advance on anyone, and though he could be unreasonable, he was predictable. By adopting a method of placation, I never suffered any major conflict with him; if anything, I received especially lenient treatment. In the end, all Remy gave a damn about was the money. If you expected to be treated with respect based on humane or ethical grounds, you would be disappointed. To get along with the boss man, you simply had to make him money, know when to ignore him, and avoid drama.
A late sleeper, he rarely showed up before 5:00 p.m. Unannounced, he would creep in via a back entrance, through a supply closet whose key he possessed the only copy of. Emanating waves of anxiety, he would pace around the dungeon, blotting his perpetually sweating forehead with a white handkerchief. He had the kind of face—forever squinting when he addressed you, his brow crumpled in distress as though he were speaking into a heavy wind—that begged for mimicry. Tacked to the walls of the kitchen, dressing rooms, and office we would find notes in his wake like the one I had seen during my interview. For the most part, we ignored these. If the esoteric message was repeated in subsequent notes, with increasing emphasis, eventually he would throw a tantrum—such as the time he burst into the kitchen with a knife, spitting and sputtering in Spanish, and sawed the cord to the television in half before exiting nearly in tears. When his frustration reached this level, we would lazily acquiesce.
Remy shopped impulsively, and the dungeon was full of his impractical purchases. One morning, we arrived to find in the walk-in supply closet a “Skybox” fridge that dispensed tiny bottled waters and cans of beer for our clients (he stopped ordering Diet Coke when he figured out that only we drank it). It was painfully tacky and so large that the door to the closet could no longer be opened wide enough for our full-figured mistresses to retrieve their supplies. We were convinced that he had found it on sale at Costco and couldn’t resist. The supply closet also had an entire corner devoted to the storage of handcrafted Argentinean equestrian equipment, including spurs that fit no one, bits, saddles, and riding crops too stiff for our use. His fetish for electronic gadgetry explained all the cameras—they were rumored to be installed behind the mirrors of all the dungeon and medical rooms, as well as the magnetic doors. They also facilitated an intricate system of recording if, how, and by whom the rooms were cleaned properly, which would be as complicated and tedious to explain here as it was to perform. Rumors circulated periodically that he had once been Mi
stress X’s personal slave, with a particular taste for brown showers. I also heard it said that he was gay, or a pornographer who sold illicit videos of our sessions in Europe, among many other theories. Although he did have a decidedly submissive personality—hence the walking-into-a-stiff-wind face at the prospect of even the most minor confrontation—I doubt many of the rumors held any water. I believe to this day that Remy was a shrewd businessman, an immigrant with a strong work ethic who, without harboring any deep animosity, felt generally harassed by us.
And so it would go, for two shifts out of my weekly four, I would arrive after my daytime classes around 5:30 p.m. to contend with this particular cast of characters. Jordan, the night manager, would already be manning her desk when I arrived. In her uniform black jeans, a black T-shirt, and her specter-pale complexion, she would inform me of my appointments, the half pound of sliced roast beef she ate every night sitting beside the appointment book, the evening’s sound track of the Pet Shop Boys or The Cure already piping through every room of the dungeon. Although the majority of the night-shift sessions came in the form of meets, for which we all had to get tarted up and parade in one-by-one, it was on the night shift that I acquired my first regular. Vinny.
A burly Italian American with a potbelly and boyish features, Vinny was the type of client (like many) who slowly made his way through a string of mistresses. Reliable as an old dog, he would show up every night that his currently favored mistress was working until the point at which she could no longer stand him or whatever it was about her that had struck his fancy ceased to do so. The content of his sessions evolved similarly.
The scene went roughly like this: having reserved Med 1 (the smallest and hottest of the medical rooms) ahead of time, Vinny would park himself in the examination chair and select a porn tape to play on the wall-mounted television. Vinny had been pouring money into the dungeon for so many years and his porn collection was so extensive that he enjoyed the rare privilege of having it stored at the dungeon for him. Given that it required two massive wheeling suitcases—both large enough to hold any one of us—to accommodate his collection, it was also a kind of insurance policy on his sustained faithfulness to Mistress X’s. Who could imagine him lugging those anywhere else? It wouldn’t have been physically possible; it often required two of us to lug just one of those suitcases out of the hall closet. While widely varying, his taste in video ran along the lines of showers (he especially liked the foreign scat videos, in which the women always had natural breasts and spat foreign curse words while smearing feces on each other), corporal punishment (perpetrated on either sex), and enemas. Sometimes he kept a magazine (older women and hairy ones most often featured) open on the table beside him to glance at as well. For tips ($20 to $40 each) he would bring three or four other mistresses into the session. These visitors, along with his primary mistress, would be arranged as such: one very slowly inserting a catheter into his urethra; one perched on a stool beside him, torturing his nipples with her fingernails or clamps (they were deformed from years of this treatment); one squatting over a bedpan pretending to defecate; and one standing beside him threatening to pee into his outstretched hand, and eventually doing so. At least one of these roles would be altered slightly each session. Sometimes someone would be holding Vinny’s arms behind his back, holding a butt plug in place, or whispering threats in his ear. It was imperative to him that everyone in the room remain expressionless, with immaculate poker faces. There were so many factors that had to be gotten just right: the perfect combination of intensity, timing, and company, only to be intuited in the moment, that Vinny occasionally failed to reach climax. Due to the strain of finding this ideal combination, the length of his sessions could vary anywhere between fifteen minutes and sixty. During my stint as his favorite, I saw him find many perfect elements: a particular new video, mistress, phrase, or outfit I would wear that had the power to immediately create his ideal. Once it was Cuban-heel stockings and a rubber dress with a nurse hat, once a fantasy we would discuss (in expressionless voices) about the perfect world: one in which we would all walk around naked, expressionless, holding hands, and releasing enemas anywhere we pleased—“true freedom,” as he put it. Inevitably, the talisman would lose its power, and then it would be a week of taxing sessions that stretched on as his frustration grew, trying to re-create whatever feeling he was missing.
Vinny lived a kind of sexual samsara. To my surprise, the impetus of our relationship’s end was not my own boredom and repulsion at his depravity but the empathic discomfort of having to not only bear witness but also be party to his pathetic chase. It was easier seen in his desperation than in the routine economical interactions of the day shift, our roles of not merely supply-and-demand but also pusher and addict.
This was another routine: I would sit with my back against the locked door of the Green Bathroom, the shower running, a Dixie cup of tap water on the floor before me, my spoon, works, and two tiny Baggies of white powder laid out on a purple washcloth from the towel rack across the room. I would mix a dash from each bag in the spoon with a few drops of water, stirring as they dissolved with the tip of my syringe. After I shot the speedball, I would lean against the door and let the hiss of water against the shower’s wall ring in my ears until I knew I could stand without vomiting. Then, I would pack up my kit, smear a dab of makeup in the hinge of my arm, light a cigarette, and go kick ass.
10
ON WEEKENDS I sometimes worked nights. Saturdays were known for being slow; our clients took their girlfriends and wives out on weekends, spent time with their kids. Due to the low volume of clients, these shifts only required a few mistresses. I found the quiet of Saturdays cozy. The dungeon—emptied of voices, the click-clack of heels and bare feet thumping down hallways, the open and shut of doors, the shouts of “Walking,” and laughter—reminded me of a museum after-hours. It felt more mine. Also, Lena worked Saturdays. Her clients showed up every night of the week.
One such Saturday, I sat sprawled on the dressing room sofa, half watching television, half studying. I had a paper due on Tuesday and insisted on pretending, as usual, that I was going to start writing it before Monday night. I frequently lugged schoolbooks to and from the dungeon without ever opening them. The weight would remind me to read, I told myself while packing them, as if the problem were in forgetting. I’d been sitting there for an hour, partly enjoying my lethargy, partly trying to wish away the anxiety of work yet done. I often wished I’d simply fail for once, get an F instead of getting away with the least possible amount of work. Always getting away with doing so little stressed me out. I had just resolved to focus on my book when Lena walked in.
“Phew!” she sighed, grinning at me and kicking off her stilettos. Reaching behind her back, she deftly loosened her corset and then unhooked the front eyelets, revealing her torso, striped with pink creases where the seams had pressed against her for the past two hours. Tossing the corset into her open locker, she unhooked her leather bra and threw it in as well. I tried not to stare at her breasts. They were as big as mine—at least Cs or Ds—with pierced nipples and a snake tattooed between them. Breasts didn’t usually make me shy. I didn’t worry about staring at Autumn’s. Autumn also had no interest in inciting my bashfulness. Lena held my gaze for a beat too long before pulling on a white wifebeater and collapsing onto the couch beside me. Wrapping her arm around my shoulders, she kicked my books onto the floor. I laughed at her brazenness, giving in to the warmth of her body next to me, and her attention. “What are you watching?” she asked.
“Simpsons reruns.”
“Sweet.”
I can’t now recall what episode we watched, couldn’t if my life depended on it. I remember that she laughed out loud a lot, turning her face toward me each time, so that the hot rush of her breath rustled against my neck. At one point, she idly wound a hank of my hair around her palm and let the weight of her hand gently tug on it. The excitement of being with her wasn’t just a result of Lena excelling at sedu
ction or touching, though she did, but of my trusting her in some unprecedented way, believing that she knew more than I about something. I didn’t always know what she was thinking, and I loved that.
My flirtation with Lena remained within the dungeon walls for some time. Aside from a couple of frustrated, maudlin affairs with straight girls in my adolescence, I had only ever dated women who looked like boys. First I had gone from the dreamy, long-skirted, messy-haired girl to the ponytailed high school jock, and then the androgynous downtown college hipster, all the way to the androgynous downtown hipster transgender “boi” (female to male). I had been hoping to find, in their studded belts, narrow hips, and husky voices, some element of power that I could not find (and probably would not have accepted) in the men whom I loved. While I never quite admitted it, to myself or anyone, I expected to be dominated by these women. To my disappointment and eventual lack of surprise, I found that the more masculine they appeared, the more submissive the role they took in bed, and in every aspect of the relationship. Not that I was uncomfortable behind the wheel. I knew how make all the decisions, how to get myself (and them) to orgasm, how to fix things, break things, dance, fight, manipulate, get the drugs, drive the car, talk my way out of a ticket and into anybody’s mother’s heart. I knew how to be the girlier girl and the bigger man. All I had ever known was that safety, and that loneliness.
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