In Praise of Messy Lives (27 page)

Of course, I want to know why Alexis is drawn into “the Scene.” This will not be a question that she answers easily, though she is generous enough to try. In fact she has already told me that this is the very question the Scene is designed to obscure; it is backstage, off-limits, hidden in some box with chains.

“I know no one goes through this world untouched,” she says. “But I needed to be touched more.”

One day when she was still trying to be an actress, a man came up to her on the street and told her she should be a dominatrix. He said that he was opening a dungeon, and he would like her to come and work for him. She brushed him off, but not before he told her why he had picked her. Something in her walk. He had seen some mannish edge, some unusual confidence, in her walk.

Another time, when she was nineteen, she was in a sex store picking out a studded costume for a role she had in a film, and someone thought she worked there. She didn’t understand why. She was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, but again, someone recognized her, claimed her.

In this version of events, the Scene has chosen her. But Alexis has other versions, like the one where she is an aspiring actress, an artist, a smart, dyslexic, creative girl from the Upper East Side without obvious office skills in an expensive and demanding city, and she accidentally stumbles on an easy way to make a living.

But why
this particular
easy way to make a living? Or maybe a better question is, Why is this particular way to make a living easy for her? Alexis says that she has “anger issues,” but she is not sure where they come from.

One day she tells me about a boyfriend she had who was an editor at
The New York Times
. She was drinking then, and one night at Elaine’s, for reasons that are obscure to her, she punched him.

Recently she was angry at her current boyfriend for not doing something that he said he would do. There was a whip in front of her, and sort of instinctually she reached for it. He started running. She says, “What could he do? A big, strong man can’t grab a whip. That’s what’s so fascinating; you can decapitate someone with a whip. He was literally running away.” She laughs as she tells this story. “Of course I was like, I am sorry I am sorry I am sorry! It’s bad. It’s like I don’t know how else to act.”

Some of her anger she attributes to the frustrations of her childhood. She was a dyslexic, wild, imaginative child trying to fit in at Spence, a rigid, highly structured Upper East Side girls’ school, where it was still considered important to teach girls to curtsy. There, from a very early age, she would come up with elaborate lies to cover up for her dyslexia, to try to obscure the reasons she couldn’t read aloud or fast enough or well enough. She also felt like the slightly poorer, slightly bohemian kid in a school full of rich girls with doormen.

She remembers one day in art class they were making clay figures. Alexis made hers with breasts, and the other girls thought she was strange.

When Alexis was growing up, there were no other children in the house but there were cats. When she was three or four, she remembers going to the birthday party of a classmate, who was a maharajah’s grandson. His face was covered in scratches because she had scratched him. “I didn’t have siblings,” she explains. “I learned to fight from the cats.”

Around this same time one of her teachers told her parents that the girls in her class tended to build blocks outward into sprawling cities, and the boys built up into towers, and Alexis built way, way, way up.

“I actually
have
penis envy!” she says.

When I ask her what separates her from the girls in her films, the other dommes and adult actresses she hires, who are not as compelling to watch, she says, “I hit harder.”

She tells me she stands behind them and teaches them how to do it, like a tennis instructor.

Sessions are exhausting because you are managing someone else’s fantasy. Alexis describes it as “walking on eggshells upon eggshells.” She watches her subs very closely, for a glance
averted, a flicker of an eyelid, tension in shoulders, for the slightest alterations in body posture, for signs that she is going too far or not far enough or in the wrong direction. She is intuiting the fantasy from them, almost drawing it out of their bodies, and she has to be fluid, shifting, perfectly responsive. These guys, she says, are about to blow.

What is striking in her description is that it is the
slaves
who sound dangerous. The way she talks about it, it is like there is an explosion that she is working around, managing, navigating, negotiating. She compares it to being with mental patients on a ward without guards.

Alexis describes the sadomasochistic drama as being organized around the idea of
not
facing what there is to face; the whole structure of the fetish replaces any kind of rigorous introspection. She says, “It’s like these guys walk in and need surgery, and we are giving them a massage.”

If she begins to sense the sub is getting nasty, or the resentment is building too much, or he is starting to go over the edge, or she feels that he is doing something physically dangerous to himself that she doesn’t want a part in, she will cut him off. The cut-off sub can become obsessed or controlling, calling and texting a million times, as she puts it, “like a teenage girl.”

I ask her if she is ever tempted to laugh at something a sub wants her to do. She says that she is never tempted because for the sub it is too serious, too intense, too intimate. She says that she might laugh before or after, or when telling the story, but she doesn’t laugh during.

One day when we are sitting in an upscale white-tiled coffee shop on the Bowery, Alexis goes for just a second into a voice I have never heard before. She is showing me how easy it is to
enter the character of Domme Dietrich, which is her dominatrix name. “Now open your tiny little ears,” Domme Dietrich is saying. “Open your tiny little eyes.” The voice is rich, contemptuous.

“Is it acting? Well, yeah. But to be good at a role, it has to be you. And this one comes very naturally to me.” She says, “It’s a way to get out my anger, and I don’t feel bad for them because I have this six-foot-tall man standing in front of me, and I am like, Poor you. Poor fucking you—I mean, they could get up at any moment and punch me in the face. Game over.”

One rainy day over more mint tea, I mention that if I had her particular array of skills and talents, I might be tempted to find a rich sub who would buy me an apartment and come once a week for a session. But for some reason this fantasy doesn’t work for Alexis; even the thought of it irritates her. She has trouble taking a check from her investor for her films. She can’t stand the idea of being dependent on a man, subjugated in that particular way; even the idea of a rich boyfriend who buys her presents somehow ruffles her, and when, in a former life, she did have rich boyfriends buy her presents, she didn’t want them, thinking, “What am I, your doll?” In fact, she likes it that her boyfriend works
for her. The possibility of a rich man supporting her is clearly as repellent and unthinkable as what she does would seem to many of the stay-at-home moms sipping eleven-dollar lattes at D’Ambrosios on Madison Avenue.

I ask Alexis how she would reply to an imaginary feminist who argues that she is degrading herself to fulfill male fantasies for money, that she is being exploited, in her latex dishabille, for oppressive patriarchal fantasies.

This is not how she thinks about the power relations in what she does, and she thinks about them a lot. She says that the payments are called “tributes.” She sees that money as equalizing the situation, undoing the humiliation a little, delivering back to these men their ego after they have been totally broken down. In some way the tribute or payment restores these bent-over, shirtless, beaten men back to the often exalted place they have in the outside world.

And of course, being dependent on one man’s fantasies or whims is different from being dependent on various fairly interchangeable and shifting subs’ payments for services rendered. She compares her work sometimes to being a therapist.

One day, by accident, in an email to Alexis I write S + M instead of S & M. She likes this. In fact she likes it so much she thinks I have done it on purpose as some sort of philosophical comment, but I confess that it’s just a slip. “It’s much more interesting and true,” she writes. “S + M = ?”

A psychiatrist I know once described how the lines between sadists and masochists are blurrier than the roles imply, how dommes identify with injured things, how subs identify with aggression, how each is carrying around both sides, no matter how fixed their roles and defined their fetish. It occurs to me this could
be why Alexis likes my typo, that she could be a little more S + M than she appears. Or maybe it’s just that my accidental formulation has a sort of fun constructive problem-solving feel to it, like there is an answer we can figure out if we stand there at the blackboard long enough.

I begin to notice that whenever Alexis talks about an interaction between humans and animals she identifies with the animal. She tells me a story she once heard from an artist in Boston about a scientist who thought that dolphins were smarter than people, and argued that
humans
should be put in a glass enclosure, and the dolphins should be allowed to swim around and examine them. Everyone thought he was crazy, Alexis says. He also happened to be the scientist who invented the isolation tank. The artist in Boston actually had an isolation tank in his loft, and Alexis is very interested in isolation tanks, or rather in the question posed by isolation tanks: Who are you alone in the water in the dark?

Alexis volunteers for an animal shelter a few times a week,
cleaning cages, petting the cats, some of whom scratch her arms up, they are so “crestfallen,” as she puts it, from being caged. She has taken in about sixteen rescued cats who were going to be killed by the city: Voovoo, Dango, Trotsky, Isis, Chairman Mao, Cole, Gracie, Tiger, Drako, Neko, Snow Shoe, Duther, and probably a few more whose names she can’t remember. These cats are divided between her dungeon-slash–film studio and her parents’ house, in spite of her parents’ slightly tepid enthusiasm for the venture. These rescued cats are in addition to her tortoise, her Japanese koi fish, and her three dogs, Shiva, Lulu, and Kuba.

Alexis tells me that taking care of the koi fish and keeping them healthy is like learning chemistry: you have to learn how to delicately balance all of these complicated elements of their environment. She had one called Aiko, who had a sense of humor and did tricks when people were around. “He was like a little dolphin with a little human soul,” she says. One day he got sick and she tried to save him, but she couldn’t. She still keeps him in her freezer. Sometimes someone will say it’s time to bury the fish, but she can’t.

Once, right out of college, Alexis had a very brief marriage. She knew it was over because she began to order wild animals over the Internet. For a while she had one wolf and one half wolf running around her apartment on the waterfront in Brooklyn.

Alexis has talked to me about the following slaves and subs (when I ask her how she uses these two words, she says “slave” is the more derogatory or slangy word for “sub”): there is the man who wants her to stand above him and drop shoes on him; there is the Scandinavian man she has never met who has a shrine of her photographs in his house, whom she instructs via the Internet, and who sent her money to pay for a coffin for a film shoot; there is the lawyer who she pretends is the only male worker in a shoe factory; there is the Chinese billionaire who wants to be beaten bloody, and was badly abused as a child (she tried to interest him in some other less bloody form of humiliation, but he drifted away, only to come back when she advertised for a sub who wouldn’t mind being badly beaten for one of her films); there is the man high up in the Department of Social Services who wants to play the role of an abused child; there are doctors, surgeons, financial guys; there is a descendant of Freud who responded to an ad she posted that quoted Freud saying something like “Only through pain is there consciousness”; there is the man who paid for her to go out to a fancy dinner with her boyfriend so she could text him pictures during the date and show him that she was just using and humiliating him; there is the shadowy English investor who has given her $300,000 to make her fetish films; there are the slaves who come and clean her studio.

Alexis says that she is transitioning out of sessioning, which she rarely does anymore anyway, out of fetish films, into maybe a reality show about the business, into making respectable but still alternative films.