Most of my sessions were this far from transcendent. Maintaining my physical boundaries was a tedious, earthbound task. It was repetitive and simple, like most of the physical work I’d done: washing dishes, painting houses, sanding boats. Maintaining the mental boundary was another thing. Domming was sex work. Sure, it was psychological, it was acting, it was physical, but above all else, it was sexual. After an hour-long session, my clients would head back to work, refreshed, or home to their families, lunch, a nap. After my hour-long sessions, there was always another man with a hard-on waiting. I had to match the pressure of their desire somehow, but to engage my own sexuality would have been a kind of suicide. I had to keep it separate. I wouldn’t have lasted a week if I weren’t able to do that. Most of the women who came through the door with their fantasies of being powerful and desired didn’t make it to their second week. It required something beyond beauty, or seduction, or a craving for power and attention from men. These were useful, necessary even, but if you could not dissociate from their desire, no money would be enough for what you’d pay. Imagine reenacting the most painful traumas of people’s lives all day, becoming, one hour at a time, the embodiment of their obsessions, their sexual fixations; it would suck the life out of you. Being raised by a Buddhist mother had instilled in me a reverence for the value of being “present” for life, and the 12-step program’s belief in a spiritual path—however stumblingly one followed it—reinforced my trust in the practice of living mindfully, emotionally present. My efforts to do this did not transfer into the dungeon. I never made a decision to go emotionally numb in my sessions; I did it by default. Of course, I did feel things in sessions, though they all qualified as forms of excitement, that is, of anxiety, which was itself a kind of numbness, a lifting up out of myself. I didn’t need drugs to do that, it turned out.
Getting high, and everything I did in its service, had required a similar level of dissociation. To stay clean, I had had to retrieve my conscience, to reconnect emotionally with my actions. Once that was done, I could no longer get high. The lies I had told myself in order to rationalize my using were so unconvincing that once I chose to see them, they shriveled like balloons, the illusion irreparably ruined. Once you know the sleight of hand that gives a magic trick its magic, that’s all you ever see, as much as you may want to believe again. I could never again tell myself that I didn’t have a problem, that I used drugs because life was too boring without them, that getting high didn’t interfere with the rest of my life. With this refurbished consciousness, I lost the ability to tell myself a lot of other lies, too. Once you get into the habit of second-guessing your own rationales, it becomes easier to see their basis in convenience rather than truth. I couldn’t steal anymore. I couldn’t lie to other people with the same facility I always had. I couldn’t even enjoy sex with someone I didn’t love. I would still push as far as I could go, but boundaries emerged where there had been none before. I was surprised and relieved to find that I was not, as I had thought, capable of anything. The truth would just pop out of my mouth, as instinctively as distortions of it used to. While home one weekend, I hurried through dinner and then asked to borrow my mother’s car. Though I wasn’t going to cop drugs, as I had after so many family dinners in the past, I didn’t intend to tell her the truth when she asked.
“I’m going to an AA meeting,” I said, my eyes widening with shock at my own words. My new instinct for honesty scared me, though it simplified things. The conversation that followed was not an easy one. I watched my mother’s face as all the ill-shaped pieces finally slid into place.
“So, that time you disappeared to Seattle for two days?” she asked, and I nodded. “And all the mornings you’d come home and sleep for the next twenty-four hours?” I just kept nodding.
This phenomenon permeated every facet of my life, except at the dungeon. The rules were different there. Perhaps because it was my job, and because it felt increasingly isolated from the rest of my life, I was able to keep it separate. Whatever the reason, and whatever else I had finished with, I wasn’t finished there.
I acquired a steady boyfriend around this time, Dylan. Tall and brooding and dryly hilarious, he thought my job exotic, funny to tell people about, easy money. He relayed my funniest stories to his friends—and saw the job’s value to him, publicly at least.
I remember preparing for one of my first sessions booked outside of the dungeon. Another domme had asked me to meet her at the Waldorf Astoria in street clothes—nice street clothes—for a double session with a high-rolling private client of hers. The client would pay for the room, she said, and I’d get $200 of the $500 he paid her. Ninety minutes before our meeting time, I leaned against my bathroom sink wearing stilettos, black stockings, garters, and a red bustier. Widening my eyes at the mirror to apply mascara, I listened to Dylan clanging dishes in the kitchen. A piece of silverware clattered against the floor and he cursed under his breath. As I penciled in lip liner, he appeared in my periphery, one long arm resting atop the bathroom doorway.
“So, are you going to eat something before you go, or am I fending for myself?”
Hearing the acid in his tone, I looked over, raising an eyebrow. I did enjoy his possessiveness, just a bit. “I’m fine. I’ll eat something when I get home.”
“When’s that going to be?”
“When the session ends.”
He glowered at me in the mirror, then hunched his broad shoulders to cough down the neck of his T-shirt. Dylan suffered from chronic chest infections. Privately, I suspected his sickliness was a somatic manifestation of repressed emotion. Having a therapist for a mother had long endowed me with a know-it-all-ism on the psychology of others. Besides, it seemed obvious. Dylan practically vibrated with anger so long ignored that it had settled into an oily reduction that coated all of him; it was part of what attracted me. It was charismatic, and maddening, and made for great sex. He sure could put on a mean sulk, though.
Dylan stayed in the doorway, watching me apply red lipstick. I felt his gaze harden further as I bent to adjust my stockings.
“What?” I challenged him, straightening my posture. Defiance can be difficult when you’re nearly naked, but I had a lot of practice.
“Nothing. Just nothing.”
“He’s not going to lay a hand on me,” I lied.
“I know,” Dylan said, still fuming. For a brief, thrilling moment I imagined how he’d react to the truth.
. . .
The rest of my life was so divorced from my work that I would sometimes forget that they were both me. There were times, at a raucous dinner after a meeting, or just in conversation, that someone related an anecdote about a perverted friend of a friend, or an article they’d read about sex clubs, cross-dressing, or some obscure fetishism. I would react with the same gasps and “ews” as everyone else, blocking out that I had done that very thing the night before, had done it hundreds of times.
I didn’t know where I’d acquired the skill and wasn’t even quite aware of it. When friends reacted with shock and amazement at what I was capable of, I felt proud but couldn’t really answer their questions about how I did it. What did they mean, how? I made a good argument for my adventurous nature, my open-mindedness, my compassion, the money. I still thought that it wasn’t necessarily something specific to me that made me able, which kept me there. It was just social mores that kept other pretty, intelligent, open-minded women with thin wallets from doing what I did, wasn’t it?
21
ONLY AFTER I stopped crossing certain lines in the rest of my life did I start crossing them in the dungeon. The first was brown showers.
Maybe I found it the easiest because it was so far outside of convention. You weren’t going to feel like a slut for shitting on someone; there wasn’t even a word for what that made you. Also, the extremity. To my anthropologist, interested in observing firsthand the scope of human experience, this was gold, the apogee of what most people would never know. Acts of extremity were my trophies. Li
ke that moment before I first shot up, before I took this job, before I got my first tattoo, I felt that invisible wall whose authority I’d never thought to question, its force field of resistance. Then I stepped through it. Once I made the decision, it just disappeared.
It was the ultimate act of will. I might not have been able to will myself not to do drugs—I might have needed a higher power for that—but I could will myself to defy not only social law but also biological law. Humans are not meant to shit on each other; I am certain of that. The body doesn’t want to do it. Why would it? Ironically, it is also such a human act. Only in self-consciousness could an animal exact such will. I am certain of something else. They put water in toilets for a good reason: the smell.
Gerald was a regular. Though raised in Manhattan, he worked abroad, flitting from country to country to conduct his business—something to do with the buying and selling of companies. Though he only traveled to the U.S. twice a year or so, Gerald always managed a visit to the dungeon. Everyone said he was a sweetheart, nice to the managers, profusely grateful to his mistresses.
“Good! Go for it,” Lena said when I booked the appointment. “He’s easy, sweet, a good one for your first brown. You’ll do fine. Just save your morning coffee and cigarette—they’ll get things moving when the time comes.” She showed me in which closet the industrial roll of plastic tarp was kept and advised that I secure the corners. “He wriggles around a bit,” she added, wrinkling her nose. Although she and Autumn had described the details of his session to me many times—everyone in the dungeon knew about Gerald—nothing could have prepared me for it.
I prepped as well as I could: big dinner the night before, no coffee or cigarettes until he arrived. I was often nervous before sessions, just for a few seconds standing outside the door. In a way, every session felt like my first; I frequently experienced a moment of shock at what I was about to do, of fear that I would find myself incapable. Justine would slip away like a dropped robe, and I would think, He wants me to do what? Then I’d walk through the door and begin, after which point nothing was more familiar. That trepidation hadn’t lasted more than those few seconds in years.
The whites of Gerald’s eyes were pale yellow, his smile brilliant and frequent. He helped me stretch the plastic tarp over the rug of the Blue Room, securing its corners with his shoes and a couple heavy coils of rope. He then took off all of his clothes and stretched his lithe body out on the crinkling tarp. Blinking up at me expectantly, he announced, “I am ready now.”
I picked my coffee up from the floor and chugged it. After lighting a cigarette, I stepped onto the tarp myself. Standing over him, I didn’t have to squat down to figure out that this was not going to happen without a toilet of some kind. Maybe in the woods I’d be able to shit without a seat, my thigh muscles tensed over rustling leaves, but not here. Not with someone breathing under me. I excused myself and retrieved one of the plastic-chair-style potties from the mop closet in the hallway. With cheap, metal legs and arms, it was like the folding chairs my family had kept in our basement for when more than a certain number came for dinner, only this one had a toilet seat where there wouldn’t normally be a hole.
And then I did it. I sat on that plastic seat and I pooped through the hole, onto his chest. Thankfully, I’m a vegetarian and it only took a few seconds. I don’t know if I could have withstood the humiliation of sitting there pushing. Afterward, I stood up, walked into the bathroom, wiped, flushed the paper, and took a deep breath. Then I smelled it. I think it’s safe to say that most people don’t mind the smell of their own shit as much as someone else’s. Most people also don’t experience that smell without it being tempered by water and quick disposal. Standing in the bathroom doorway, I told myself that the worst was over. I had done it. Another triumph over instinct. Another thing that could never be guessed by looking at me. I might not be capable of anything, but I was capable of a lot that most people weren’t. There was satisfaction in that, even at that moment.
I could see Gerald writhing on the floor, his grunts audible over the crinkling of the tarp. I knew what to expect but was still incredulous. What was I supposed to do next? Breathing through my mouth, I walked toward him. Back then I had a masterful control over my facial expression but still could barely suppress my disgust and dismay at the sight of him. His eyes half-closed, trancelike, he methodically smeared my waste over his body. His fingertips together, he rubbed it like a paste across his chest, his navel, his genitals, touching his body gently, and with reverence, as if he were cleaning a baby. Streaks of it decorated his shoulders and arms. Oblivious to me, he dabbed his thumbs in the concave of his chest and swiped them across his cheeks, down the bridge of his nose, and over his brow. He covered his face in a mask of it. Like clay, it quickly dried and cracked. As I stood there in the smell, looking down at him, my stomach lurched. I didn’t vomit, but that lurching motion continued, spreading through my body, jolting my vision with ripples. Then I could feel my feet against the floor but nothing between them and my head. My heels felt like two pinpricks of light in a room gone dark. My mind floated, a balloon, over this scene, his caked body receding below me. Where my chest would be was only a faint streak of horror, a curling vapor that something burnt leaves behind.
The second line was harder to define. I never did aloud. I guess it started in that session with Jack. Before that, I never did sessions topless. Before that, I never heeded an impulse in session because it was exciting to me. Exciting the clients was satisfying, though never physically, and I wasn’t willing to cross my boundaries in its service. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times I had been asked to take off my top. After drawing the line in my first week, I never considered it. There was nothing unique about Jack. I had seen Hasids before, been topped from the bottom, felt hateful toward my clients; the session was perfectly run-of-the-mill. He hadn’t even asked me to do it. It just felt good.
A couple of weeks after my session with Gerald, I was in Cross-Dressing with Mike, a firefighter from Queens. Mike just liked to talk. We made up stories together. It reminded me of babysitting as a preteen, when I would tell long improvised bedtime stories to my neighbor’s children, adding new chapters to them week after week, of adventurous princesses who escaped from endless series of perils, that sort of thing. Mike’s stories were the same, only instead of featuring princesses and talking animals, they were about Sally, the dirty slut. Sally didn’t always escape in the end. Who knows where Sally came from or what she did to poor Mike, but we spent many hours exacting vengeance on her. Mike and I had our routine down so pat that we didn’t bother with cordialities anymore; I’d walk in, and we’d get right into it. He would always start.
“So she’s on her way home, and decides to stop for gas.”
“On her way home from the salon, after getting her bikini wax,” I added.
“A Brazilian wax!”
“She’s still a little sore and swollen down there while she’s driving, and it’s distracting her, but in a good way.”
“She kinda likes how it hurts a little bit, the slut.” Mike started to fidget at this point, although he wouldn’t start touching himself until we got toward the end of the story. He started throwing in cuss-words when he got excited. “The string of her thong is pressing hard on her pussy and she’s thinking about, uh … dicks.” While Mike’s narratives were deeply felt, he was no wordsmith. “Biiig dicks.” He nodded appreciatively.
“What’s playing on the radio?” I asked.
“Judas Priest.” He answered without hesitation. “Judas Priest is playing when she pulls into the Shell station. ‘Breaking the Law.’ ”
“She waits for the song to finish before she gets out of the car.”
“Yeah, and when she gets out, her mini skirt is all rode up on her hips, and her ass is almost hanging out the back.”
“She doesn’t bother to straighten it, just struts over to the pump and slides her credit card in real slow.”
“Slut!”
&
nbsp; I laughed then, and he looked at me, startled out of Sally-world for a moment.
“Then she lifts that big, heavy nozzle and slides it into the hole,” I continued. He nodded and turned away, like a child falling back asleep. “Every man at that gas station is watching her, staring at that shadowy little place between her legs, imagining what’s just above the hem of her skirt.”
“Her pussy.” Mike sighed peacefully.
“She fills her tank, and slips the dripping nozzle back into the pump, feeling all of those eyes on her, like invisible hands, sliding up the inside of her thighs.”
“She wants some gum.”
“What?”
“She goes into the store to get some gum.”
“Right.”
“She buys some bubble gum, and puts a piece in her mouth. She blows a big, pink bubble and pops it with her fingernail. Then she asks for the key to the bathroom. She walks real slow across the store, to the door of the bathroom, and smiles at the dude behind the counter.” A smile flitted across Mike’s face.
“She winks over her shoulder at him.”
“Yeah, and as soon as she closes that bathroom door, he locks the store door and puts up the sign that says: closed. Then he calls all the guys from the garage in through the back door.”
“They’re all sweaty and covered in grease, wearing coveralls with the sleeves rolled up.”
“They’re waiting for her when she comes out. She opens the door all confident, ready to tease them all on her way back to her car, but instead they’re there, waiting. She looks nervous and tries to walk around them. They don’t let her. ‘You’re a very naughty girl,’ the one from behind the counter says. ‘I think you need punishment.’ Then he spanks her.”
Whip Smart: A Memoir Page 15
