by Nick Tosches
I signed the corrected letter, folded it, placed it in the book, prepared a FedEx form, put the book with the letter into a package, and made it to Mail Boxes Etc. on Greenwich Street in ample time for the last FedEx pickup of the day. On the way back, I bought a banana from the vendor on the corner of Chambers Street and ate it as I walked home, wondering about the night to come and the nature of “certain things” to be made known.
My haunted virgin angel, long, lean Lorna, lived up in Hell’s Kitchen, or Clinton as they liked to call it now. A third-story walkup in a decent enough old building on West Forty-ninth Street. Night was just beginning to fall when she buzzed me in. The three flights had no effect on my pulse or breath.
I gave her a bunch of yellow roses with red-edged petals. She seemed truly surprised, truly pleased. She was wearing an unbuttoned shawl-collar beige cashmere cardigan over a man’s ribbed white athletic undershirt. I wondered for an instant if the sweater had been left unbuttoned for my sake, to show off that irresistible flat chest in that tight, thin boyish undershirt. But I figured she had not. Flat-chested women, no matter how beautiful, do not very often believe just how sexy their barely-there breasts can be.
My eyes were then immediately drawn to a doorway draped with thick black velvet. From beyond that doorway a dark ruby light emitted a peeking blush that was dimly discernible at the hem folds of the heavy black curtain.
“I almost asked you if you wanted a drink,” she said.
“Old habits die hard.”
“I didn’t have a chance to shop after work. I really don’t have anything here.”
Oh, yes you do, my dear, oh, yes you do.
“We can order something if you like.”
I wondered aloud if Shun Lee delivered to West Forty-ninth Street. But I wasn’t really hungry. No, that’s not quite true. What is true is that my hunger for Shun Lee was eclipsed by a different, deeper hunger.
“I’m good,” I said. “Maybe in a little bit.”
“You’re sure? You don’t want anything?”
“I want to know what’s on the other side of that curtain.” I smiled.
She seemed oddly hesitant, as if she had been living here with this red-lighted curtained-off room of hers and nobody had ever before been curious about it. And come to think of it, why was that red light on if the drape was drawn as if to hide it?
“I want to show you,” she said. “It’s just that since we were talking this morning, I…” Her words trailed to silence.
“I just want you to feel comfortable,” I lied. Or maybe it was the truth. I did want her to feel comfortable. But it wasn’t the only thing I wanted. “I want you to feel better.” More sweet truth with the peach pit of a lie at its center.
She took me by the hand, led me to the big black velvet curtain, and drew it aside. The room was small. That dim red light came from a single bare overhead bulb. And there it was, overwhelming and oversized in this underwhelming, undersized room.
It was the big X of a Saint Andrew’s cross made of two planks of wood bolted together diagonally.
My first thought was: how does she keep that fucking thing upright? Then I saw that it was not upright. It was leaning against a wall with the bottom, about a foot from the wall, fixed to the floor with big fat galvanized nails, and the top fixed to the painted brickwork of the wall with big fat masonry nails. It looked as if it stood upright because the incline was so slight. At the top and bottom far-corner ends of the two planks were big fat old-looking steel eye-lags. Hanging from the top lags, one from each, were pairs of old-looking Smith & Wesson chain-linked handcuffs. Hanging from the bottom lags, one from each, were pairs of old-looking Smith & Wesson chain-linked leg irons, with the chains knotted to reduce their length.
I put my hand on the cross as if assaying its integrity. That’s when I saw the three or four whips of different sizes in a supple heap, like dead snakes, in the corner of the room. Real whips. Leather whips.
“Did you make this yourself?” I asked, moving my hand and my eyes over the grayed and slightly cracked and warped two-by-twelve lumber.
I suspected that she was indeed its maker. Whoever did make it wasn’t a carpenter. It was nigger-rigged. No notching of the beams where they traversed. No real joinery. No knee-brace struts. No joisting. Just nails, no screws except for the threaded eye-lags, which had probably been driven in, somewhat crookedly, by hammer blows followed by turns of a screwdriver shank or some other rod-like object placed through the eyeholes. Then again, nigger-rigged or not, it was one hell of an imposing piece of work.
“Yeah.”
“You want to show me how you use it?”
“Sure. Let me go change. You sure you don’t want anything? Coffee? Anything?”
“I’m good.”
“All right. I’ll be right back.”
Standing there by that certain thing, I realized that I might be the one who was supposed to get spread-eagled and cuffed to it. That would fit in with the father thing. The humiliation and punishment of the father-surrogate. Ah, yes, the Reverend Thomas Fuller, who gave us the adage “It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth.” In the same seventeenth-century book in which he said that, a book about his travels in Jerusalem, a book whose title I recalled only as a strange one, he also said, writing of the good old days of crucifixion—and why did I remember these things, when at the same time, entering a store, I could not remember what I had come there to buy, or to boost?—and I believe these were his exact words: “Hereupon a substitute or surrogate was provided for him to bear his Cross.”
Could the same be said now of Lorna’s father? Did she think that I was to be his provided surrogate in her longed-for freedom from the haunting he had inflicted on her? There were moments this morning when she could have been talking about anything. The thirst for her blood that she saw in me might have meant that I was the right and ordained sacrificial victim. “Maybe you could get it all out of me,” she had said. That could have meant anything. For all I knew, her father had turned her into a lipstick lesbian with intent to kill. She said she had gone to change. What the fuck was she changing into? A cuirass, mail gloves, and an executioner’s hood?
She returned barefoot and naked under a transparent vinyl raincoat that reached to just above her knees. She went to the cross. She positioned one bare foot then the other, so that, bowing down, she could adjust and clasp the leg irons above her ankles. She braced herself and stood. With one hand she handcuffed the wrist of her other hand. She raised her free hand to touch the opposite set of cuffs. She spoke over her shoulder to me:
“Could you do this one for me? I can do it myself sometimes but it’s a bitch.”
I handcuffed her wrist and stepped back to look at her and the way her long, slender limbs were stretched to form an open X that conformed to the X of the Saint Andrew’s cross to which she was shackled and pressed hard against its slight incline. The tautened curve of her spine and the tension clench of her buttocks were visible through the clear raincoat. I began to like the dim red light of this room.
“Why the raincoat?” I asked.
“A long time ago I read that the cops used to throw raincoats over people before beating them with rubber hoses because it left no marks or scars. It turned out to be true. I don’t like scars.”
She spoke with her face hanging slightly forward and resting sideways on the brick wall in the cleft between the cross-beams.
“Why a clear raincoat?”
“I like the way it feels. I like the way it exposes me.” Without a breath of transition, she said, “Get the blacksnake.”
“Where is it?”
She moved her head a little in the direction of the nest of whips. I didn’t know one whip from another. She seemed to sense this.
“It’s the biggest one.”
I lifted it by its thickest part. Its narrowing braided leather, a good deal of which lay on the floor as I held the thick handle near my hip, appeared to be about six feet long.
&n
bsp; “I clipped the fall and cracker,” she said, as if making clear to me something about this. I had not the vaguest notion of what she was talking about, but I asked her why.
“Too much. They hurt too much. Way too much.”
I instinctively moved farther from her with the whip in my hand. She sensed this and she asked me to go farther, to just within the doorway.
“All right,” she said. “Go for the center of the raincoat. Stay away from the legs.”
When she said that, I looked at her bare slender ankles and bare arched feet in the dim red light. I wanted to rape her.
I raised the whip and cast my arm forward to let it unfurl. It was not as easy as I thought. There was not enough force. The end of the whip did not even reach her. It just drooped awkwardly to the floor in midair. I thought of the summer days when I was a little boy trying to perform lariat tricks and lasso dogs with a length of old clothesline.
I reeled the narrowing plaited leather into a loop, which I hooked with one finger of the hand that grasped the girth of the whip’s stock. Unhooking my finger and heaving forward with a much faster and more violent pitching motion, I heard the loud smack of the whip against her vinyl-covered body, seeing it strike her at the small of her back. She uttered a sound that struck me as being more an expulsion of anticipation than an expression of its fulfillment. I struck again, with even faster and more violent movement. This time she cried out as the lash struck her hard below the shoulder blades. Her cry was intense.
“Get me something for my mouth,” she said.
“What should I get?”
“A facecloth. A wet facecloth. Anything.”
I looked for the bathroom and found it. On my way there, I passed her bedroom, looked in, and saw her pretty pink cotton panties lying on the bed. I wanted to put these in her mouth instead of the facecloth. I ran them under cool water, wrung them in my hand, rolled them somewhat, and took them to her open mouth. I watched her bite into them, and again I wanted to rape her. Maybe I had not stopped wanting to rape her since seeing her bound ankles and arched feet.
When I next cast the whip, it was as forceful as an act of rape. I was aiming for her buttocks, but the end of the whip passed hard and with angry noise across the backs of her thighs directly below her buttocks. I heard a muffled yelp through the dampened panties that were jammed in her mouth.
I was getting used to the physics of it. The power of the propulsion had to extend not merely from the shoulder of the arm that whipped. It had to begin in the heel of the foot on the side of the body that whipped. I felt the strength and velocity of my strikes, as well as their accuracy, increase. By the time I finally hit the meat of her ass, my upper arm was growing sore and tired.
This was strenuous shit. I could see how doing it with any regularity would give you biceps like a those of a pickaxe ditchdigger, but probably also the back ailment that came with the muscle.
It was a good cardiovascular workout as well. Fuck those assholes who went to the gym every morning. What was that stupid fucking country song? Well, fuck that. Whip an angel good morning. That was the way to go.
Yes, I was sore and I was tired. But what I saw made it all but impossible for me to lay down that whip.
The restrained writhings and jolts of her body drove me more wild with lust than if they had been allowed free rein and unfettered abandon. And her juices, which I had earlier noticed trickling down her leg in thin tendrils of chrism, had become a cascade that spilled to the floor from between her outstretched legs.
Her muffled screams grew less fierce. They became merely low muffled groans, as if she were spent. It was then that I decided that I would in fact rape her, in my way. I walked to the cross and ran my hand up her raincoat to the heat of her drenched cunt. She made a sound that I could not interpret. She seemed unable to spit the panties from her mouth. I worked the lower part of her raincoat up to her waist, and I bunched it tight and fast in the close cranny I forced between her and the center of the cross. I beheld her like that, and I backed away and shot the whip through the air with all my gathered might, slashing one of her buttocks and the back of one of her thighs. The sound was like that of a loud sudden hiss from hell. Something worse than a muffled scream shot from her gagged mouth.
I stood and watched the slashes on her raw flesh begin to bleed, slowly and slightly at first, then more copiously. I tossed aside the whip and knelt behind her. I sucked the warm running blood from her buttock and thigh. The more freely it ran, the more deeply I sucked. It was delicious. I drank until the flow was greatly diminished, than I ran my tongue down her legs, stopping to lick, kiss, and savor here and there along the way, following the lacy trails of blood that led as far as the slender ankles and heels of the lovely arched feet of her captivity.
We were both spent, she draped on her Saint Andrew’s cross, I lying at its base on my back, looking up through the dim diffuse red light. For a moment it occurred to me to leave her there. I had done what she had asked me not to do. I had lashed open her bare skin. I did not know what hostile censure was to come if I yanked those cotton dainties from her mouth. But I had to do what I had done. I had to open her skin to let flow the sweet warm ichor from beneath it.
I lay awhile longer, then rose. I was ravenously hungry. I was thinking of Shun Lee as much as of the damnation, exculpation, and calls for expiation I faced. I removed the saliva-drenched panties from her mouth. Her face was flushed, her eyes half closed, strands of her long soft hair clung to her sweating forehead, cheeks, and neck. I asked her where the keys to the cuffs and leg irons were. She seemed too exhausted to speak. This was a good sign, at least for now, I thought. She gestured with her head to a small round wooden end table in the corner of the room near the heap of whips. There was a little crochet-lace doily atop it, and the keys were on that doily.
I unlocked the handcuffs, gently massaging the reddened areas of her wrists, to show that I cared. I unlocked the leg irons, stroked the reddened marks above her ankles, again to show her that I cared, but really because it gave me pleasure to fondle the tendons near the base of her slender calf muscles. I did not touch her where I had slashed her, as I felt that any show of caring here would only serve to bring further attention to my misdeeds. She remained silent, and I took this, though awkwardly, to be a good sign.
“How about that Chinese food?” I said.
“Sure.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t care,” she said. “You pick it.” Her voice had a vague, lifeless, bereaved quality to it. She walked very slowly to the bathroom. I heard water running. I knew that she was washing blood from herself, maybe from her raincoat as well. Then I heard the shower running.
By then I had ordered the food. I lit a cigarette and looked for something I could use as an ashtray. In the kitchen cupboard I found a pair of two miniature Asian bowls, like the ones they give you to mix the cheap soy sauce with the fake wasabi for sushi in Japanese joints. Fuck it. Function follows form. I would be sure to wash it out good before I left. To show that I was a nice guy, and that I cared. If she didn’t end up throwing me out before I got around to it.
I felt wonderful. Even the soreness and tiredness induced by my exertions were giving way to a balm-like inner restfulness. Even my anxiety over the wrath of Lorna became dreamlike and inconsequential. My communion with her, and my fill of her succoring blood, had brought new rejuvenation, new life; and with every renewal this rejuvenation and life became stronger and more magical within me. I looked forward to the Chinese food and my next breath with greater anticipation and appreciation than the wretched and the self-appointed inheriting meek of the earth look forward to the envisioned glories of their eternal paradise.
She appeared clean and lovely, in flannel pajamas, her lovely long hair freshly towel-dried.
“How do you feel?” I asked her calmly, as if we were two souls merged and lingering for a single infinite breath. Her wrath would fall unheard and unfelt on one, a god coming into bein
g, who would use it only to rinse and refresh his palate before the Chinese food got here.
“I feel fucking great,” she said.
She smiled beatifically. At that moment I respected and cherished her with all my being, and her happiness was my happiness. I was proud of her, and I was proud of myself for making her feel as she did.
“Don’t worry, I’ll wash this,” I said, grinding my cigarette butt into the little Asian bowl thing.
The Chinaman came. As usual, I had ordered too much stuff, almost everything that I had been craving from that joint for a long, long time. Roast pungent duck, steamed dumplings, prawns with garlic and scallions, twice-cooked pork, dry shredded crispy beef, and more. She got us cans of Caffeine-Free Diet Coke out of the fridge.
As we ate, we talked. As it should be, the talking was secondary to the eating, but on this night they went together well. The talk was natural and easy.
The red light was still leaking from the edges of the drawn black curtain at the doorway of the room where we had spent the last hour. I asked her if she always kept that light on.
“Sometimes,” she said. “Like a night-light, sort of.”
“Who usually does this?” I said.
“Buys me Chinese take-out?”
“Whips you.”
“Sometimes I pay somebody. Usually a chick. Sometimes I do it myself.”
“Why do you pay?”
“Anonymity. I like the anonymity. They don’t know me, I don’t know them, and that’s that.”
“And why usually a chick?” Maybe she was a lipstick lesbian after all.
“They’re gentler. And they seem to understand more what’s going on.”
“And how do you manage to do it by yourself?”
“It’s easy. That free right hand after I lock myself up, I use the crop. That’s the short, stiffer one. It’s got a popper, a little leather loop, on the end, but the popper doesn’t really hurt because it’s pretty hard to crop yourself hard over your own shoulder. Same with the Rose whip, the other short one, the one with the separate leather thongs, the one that’s sort of a candy-ass cat-o’-nine-tails: softer leather, no knots in the lashes. Though I guess you could knot them if you wanted to. I don’t know. The leather strips on that one may not be strong enough for knots that would last.”
