Long Hard Road Out of Hell (13 page)

Her customers, who are between 19 and 74, locate her through a personal ad that reads: “Sincere, mature, dominant woman has slave quarters available for short- and long-term stays.” Generally, her clientele are businessmen with families, she claims. “I believe the higher the executive, the higher the pressure and the more they do these things,” she decides. “I see faces and I recognize them from campaign posters. I find that it’s not unusual that I’ve had firemen, police officers, attorneys, judges, airline pilots and football players.” Laughing, she adds, “I get most of my calls after the three-day holidays when these men are at home with their wives and they’re not accustomed to spending that much time with their families. So I get some pretty frantic calls that they’ve been ‘bad boys’ and that they need to be spanked.”

Not only does she provide services for sexually depraved clients, her personal live-in slaves give her everything they own. Presently, the peon of this V-girl’s bawdy house is a gaunt, middle-aged gentleman named Stan. Despite the fact that he is a good two feet taller than Mistress Barbara, her tyrannical demeanor causes him to cower beneath her like a maimed cat. As my photographer, Marc Serota, prepares some additional lighting, she orders Stan to undress for the picture; the slave scuttles out of the room obediently. Turning back to me, she explains, “You can’t be a good dominatrix without understanding submission. The game that we play is—I play as though I am in control and I’m forcing them to do these things. But in reality it’s what they want to receive.

“They make no decisions. Not even what to wear or when to speak. I totally control their lives. I am everything to them. These are people who have not been able to run their lives. They’ve made such a mess of their lives and have never been satisfied with any woman. So I just take everything over, they don’t even have to think.”

Apparently, men like Stan live with her and cater to her every desire whether it is sexual or otherwise. In return for her care, he gives her a nominal amount of money each week that she uses to pay his bills. She becomes a mother of sorts. What they don’t know is that she saves most of their cash and returns it to them when they decide to move on; she likes to give them a fresh start.

Stan finally returns. I am a little more than surprised by his appearance. Aside from the fact that he is totally naked, his body hair has been shaved entirely and he is wearing four or five (I don’t get close enough to get an exact count) of those attractive metal hoops that I described some 27 paragraphs ago; they jangle as he walks into the room. Sheepishly, he crawls onto Mistress Barbara’s black leather chiropractor’s chair, where she proceeds to crucify him against the wall. After he is secured at the neck, wrists and ankles, she casually applies surgical hemostats to his nipples.

“Does that hurt?” she asks coyly.

“Well...” he begins, but before he can finish she grabs his denigrated genitals and squeezes with the ease of any Publix produce shopper.

“Get a little more uncomfortable,” she commands and her battered boy toy responds quickly, stretching his leg sideways at an awkward angle.

As pancake-size red welts form around Stan’s mangled breasts, I ask him how he feels. Slowly and carefully he mumbles, “Restrained… I feel something but it’s hard to pin a certain emotion on it.”

“Stan is not an articulate person and he always understates everything,” the groin-gouging guru interjects. “I’ve always treated men in this fashion. I’ve always felt that men should be kept in cages and stables like dogs and horses and taken out only when you want to play with them. It’s very convenient.”

The camera begins to flash and Stan winces for the paparazzi as Mistress Barbara answers the door. It’s Bob, her part-time slave. He carries in a large box that she says is filled with black market transvestite videos. Bob is a retired grandfather who serves Mistress Barbara with his wife’s reluctant permission.

“My wife accepts this but she’s not into it,” Bob explains while fidgeting with the change in his pocket. “She knows it’s a big fantasy of mine and I enjoy it. As long as she knows where I’m at and that the people are sane and discreet, it’s okay. I would never lie to or cheat on my wife. I don’t go with other women, and there’s no real hanky panky going on here.”

Whether it’s with Bob, Stan or any of the others, Mistress Barbara leads a hedonistic life. She spends her free time sailing, flying, or diving. She eats when and where she wants and she never has to worry about sexual satisfaction; she has them trained for that. “Stan’s not allowed to have an erection unless I say. He has learned to function on command.”

She represents everything a woman is about while at the same time contradicting what we believe is normal behavior. Besides that, she has never been arrested and she makes a hell of a lot of money.

I decide that it’s time to head back into apple-pie-and-no-sex-until-marriage America, so I don my adhesive eye patches and follow her into the humid afternoon sunlight. As we trod forward by Braille, in search of the car, she concludes by whispering, “They think I’m wonderful. Somebody else might think I’m the biggest jerk. So why not be where you have adoration?”

*  *  *

I soon met a woman who would torture me in ways much more subtle and painful than anything Mistress Barbara could devise with her hellish instruments of sadism. Her name was Rachelle. I was nineteen and she was twenty-two when we met at Reunion Room, a local club that, though I was underage, let me in because I was a journalist. She was so beautiful she was painful to look at because I knew I could never have her. She was a model, with red hair in a Bettie Page cut, a gently curving body and a face stretched perfectly over well-defined cheekbones.

As we talked, Rachelle explained that she had just broken up with her boyfriend, who was still living with her but trying to find his own place. Once I realized she was on the rebound, a slow flush of confidence began to creep over me. She was leaving for Paris for the entire summer in a month, which gave me just enough time to pursue and miraculously catch her. The letters we exchanged across the Atlantic were as steamy as they were inspirational. I was smitten. When she returned, our relationship resumed even more passionately than before. In desperate need of her affection (or just to get laid) one night, I paged her. My phone rang minutes later, and I picked it up.

“Why are you paging this number?” asked a hostile man’s voice.

“This is my girlfriend’s number,” I told him belligerently.

“It’s also my fiancee’s number,” he fired back, and at that moment I felt my heart freeze and shatter, each shard dropping painfully through my insides.

“Did you know,” I stammered, “that she’s been sleeping with me?”

He didn’t get angry or threaten to kill me. He was in shock, like I was. I walked around for months in a heartbroken daze. Just as I was beginning to pull myself back together, she called.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said, “but I’m pregnant.”

“Why are you telling me?” I asked as coldly as I could.

“I don’t know if it’s yours or his.”

“Well, I guess we’re just going to have to assume that it’s his,” I snapped back, hanging up before she could say anything else.

Two years later, I ran into her in a local diner. She looked the same—drop-dead gorgeous—but modeling hadn’t worked out for her. She had become a police officer, and looked like every man’s fantasy dominatrix in her blue uniform, cap and nightstick.

“You should meet my son,” she said. “He looks just like you.”

My face blanched and my jaw dropped open in the process of trying to exclaim, “What?!” I pictured child support payments, weekends spent baby-sitting and a husband plotting brutal revenge.

After savoring my shock, she pulled her dagger out of my chest just as swiftly and cruelly as she had plunged it in. “But I know it’s not yours. I had a blood test.”

As a result of discovering that Rachelle had betrayed me and was engaged to someone else, I promised myself that I would try to close myself off emotionally to the world and trust no one. I didn’t want to get carried away by my feelings again; I needed to stop being victimized by my own weaknesses and insecurities about other people, especially women. Rachelle left me with a scar deeper than any I’ve since inflicted on myself. It was partly out of anger and revenge that I wanted to get famous and make her regret dumping me. Another reason was that I was frustrated with music journalism. The problem wasn’t the magazines or my writing, but the musicians themselves. Each successive interview I did, the more disillusioned I became. Nobody had anything to say. I felt like I should be answering the questions instead of asking them. I wanted to be on the other side of the pen.

I interviewed Debbie Harry, Malcolm McLaren and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I wrote promotional biographies for Yngwie Malmsteen and other metal assholes. I even published an article on Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails with no premonition that we were about to begin a relationship that, like a long stay in Mistress Barbara’s dungeon, would be strewn with unforseeable peaks of pleasure and pain.

When I first saw Trent, he was sulking in the corner during soundcheck as his dreadlocked tour manager, Sean Beavan, hovered protectively over him. Once we started talking, he thawed and became affable. But I was just another journalist. Talking to me was as good a way as any for him to kill time before a show in a city where he knew no one.

The next time Trent Reznor came to town, I was his opening act.