Whip Smart: A Memoir (22 page)

“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!”

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.”

“Wait, how hard does he spank her?” I asked.

Mike looks at me in surprise. “Uh, hard?”

I got up off the couch and turned to face him. “So she walks out of the bathroom, and looks nervous.” I raised my brows innocently. “Then what? Does he just grab her, or do the mechanics hold her while he spanks?”

“Uh, he grabs her.”

“Show me.”

IN MAY OF 2003
, I graduated from college. My family came to watch me walk across the stage in my gown and to take me out to lunch. I was early to meet them at the French café on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 11th Street where I had spent many afternoons smoking at the bar over conversation and books of poetry or physics, acting and sometimes feeling like a normal college student, infatuated with my own green intellectualism. I had also gotten high in that café’s restroom after classes more than a few times, along with the one at the student center, every Starbucks within a six-block radius, and even the piss-splattered McDonald’s on a few desperate occasions. It had been months since the last time I’d used in that neighborhood, but when I locked the café’s restroom door behind me I felt a rustle of dread in my chest, like water quickening, and wished I’d suggested somewhere else to meet.

It was a habit, throwing the pieces of my disparate lives together, as if in the spirit of a mischievous hostess with a seating chart. Still, I knew my motives were not so fatuous and assumed it
was a form of self-punishment. Maybe if I wanted to enjoy the exhilarations of a life lived in multiplicity, I had to endure the rare, excruciating juxtaposition.

Spooked by the restroom’s associations and without a book to distract me, I fidgeted at the bar, checking my cell phone repeatedly. I knew it would help to be in motion, and so I maneuvered through the busy blond waitresses to step back out in the springtime. Wandering around the block of my school, I thought how quickly my first three years in New York had passed. My eyes had changed since I’d seen these buildings for the first time on the day of my admission interview. Still a teenager then, I had taken an early-morning bus alone from Boston. I hadn’t been to New York since a day trip at age nine or ten with my grandmother. The subway was stifling in the unseasonable heat. I saw my own desperation on every person’s face and felt that stone of dread sinking in me, whose descent whistled that nothing, not even this drastic attempt to regain control of my life, would have an effect. And then I nailed it. Sweat and fear evaporated into the air-conditioned admissions office. I was an expert in discerning what people wanted from me, in who I was supposed to be. It didn’t feel like pretending; I
was
that person, when I decided to be. I returned to Boston victorious. My determination was both that of a childhood dream (New York City!) and an addict’s hope that a change in geography could induce one in self. I was so different now, I thought on the day of my graduation.

For the ceremony I was wearing a strapless black dress that I knew suited me. Without question, I dressed better than in those early days. I had more money, friends, and confidence. I no longer needed to wander the streets every few days, looking for a high junky to cop for me when I couldn’t reach my regular dealers. I no longer lived in that tiny SRO (single-room occupancy) boardinghouse, immobilized with loneliness and bad heroin, comforted by a pack of razor blades that I kept under my mattress like a trapdoor I could use if things got bad enough. I was finishing with a 3.9 GPA. I had a glamorous, lucrative, secret life.

So long as that list was longer than the number of ways I was hurting myself, I was winning. I counted its items as a way of lulling myself when anxious. It proved that I was okay. I had believed for a long time that I needed to get through college, not just survive it, but
win
at it. It would prove something, I thought, and then I could finally relax. But even with the end in sight, I tallied that list with increasing frequency. It was fundamental to the system of checks and balances that I used to allay the dread, a way of accounting for the damage I did. In its equation, straight A’s offset crack smoking. Being publicly esteemed made up for all of my antisocial behaviors: the stealing, vomiting on the subway, and promiscuity. I don’t know where I learned it, but I could not remember a time after puberty when I did not believe that to the degree I succeeded by public standards, I could covertly defy them. I could only be as
bad
as I was
good.
Each carried a separate worth, and mine was based on what wealth I could have in both.

That morning was beautiful, the spring air creased by the laughter of brunchers at sidewalk tables. Something ragged in me made it lonely, though, some fear emerging like a jetty from an ebbing tide—far from the excitement and pride I’d been anticipating feeling. The rationalization equation contradicted the way I felt. I had spent so much time lamenting the amount of time and energy that school consumed and calculating how much more money I could be making if I didn’t have papers to write and classes to attend that I had taken for granted what it gave me.

School had been my cover, from sixth grade on. A’s came easily to me and were a free ticket to get away with whatever badness it was that I wanted—or needed—to be doing. When I was drinking and lying about my age to high school boys at twelve years old, it was my cover. When I was tripping on acid, sniffing coke, and skipping every afternoon in high school, it covered me. When I was smoking crystal meth, popping ecstasy pills like aspirin, and robbing the cafés and tattoo shops that employed me, I was also getting A’s at Harvard’s night school, and no one asked questions. Lying
came easily to me and I never asked for money, so how would anyone looking at me from the outside have known?

On the inside cover of more than one journal during my college years I had printed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assertion that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” If this was true, then I embodied first-rate intelligence, of a certain kind anyway. Success in the environment of small, discussion-based classes came easily to me. I knew how to talk better than I did anything else. I could feign expertise with only a shred of knowledge and never wrote a paper sooner than the night before its due date. I’d always cruised through school this way and figured that in college my hand would be called, but it wasn’t. In a few classes, I did sweat over the work, but I never could have said with confidence that I’d done my best—being an academic con woman meant I avoided that, even when I did care.

Some of the ploys I pulled to get out of having not done the work make me cringe to think of now—what performances! I faked sicknesses, deaths, once even a pregnancy and subsequent abortion to avoid getting anything less than an A. Not doing the work was more work than doing it, sometimes. The steadiness of my hand when it came to crossing certain moral lines didn’t concern me then. I took pride in my ability to work systems and people; I was simply getting from Point A to Point B, I thought—besides, if I didn’t work the system it would surely work me. With this kind of survivalist mentality, you’d think I’d had a hardscrabble childhood, known poverty or hardship in a way I never had.

The thing was, I loved college. I had always loved school. Not only because I was good at it and because I wanted to be
good,
but also because nothing compared to the explosion that happened in my mind when I understood the concepts of physics or unlocked the meaning of a poem. I craved the pop and spark of ideas, of new pathways searing through my consciousness. The excitement I felt in classes and in writing felt pure.

There had been moments as a teenager, reading alone, when the prismatic, interconnected meaning of things exploded into my consciousness and I would feel as though I had stumbled up to the lip of a canyon, paralyzed, but vibrating with inspiration. And in college, there were teachers who really
knew
things, who had learned out of love, and the experience of learning from them felt like a kind of love itself.

But my desire for that feeling had always been trumped by my desire for escape, and the quickest escapes, I quickly learned, were found in the illicit. Even as a kid. In fifth grade I was at the right age at the right time to participate in the D.A.R.E. program—a short-lived and impotent crusade in George Bush Senior’s War on Drugs. As the final presentation given by a rotund lady cop my class was presented with what we would take to calling the drug box. It was a metal briefcase that opened into a kind of medicine cabinet, with Plexiglas panes covering about fifty cellular compartments. In these compartments were an assortment of colorful pills, roach clips, joints, bags of white powder, and even a blackened teaspoon with a mottled crust in its concave. I had counted the days leading up to this event. The anticipation that mounted in me was marked by the same piercing thrill as secrets and, imminently, boys. As we crowded around the display I thought, with a matter-of-fact sort of clarity, I would do any of it. Maybe it was a subconscious desire to rebel against the prescription to just say no, or the pragmatic ideologies of my parents—a psychotherapist and the son of an alcoholic—but it didn’t feel defiant. It was a conviction that drifted up through me like a leaf in water to rest on the surface, as much an unconditional truth as the sky’s being blue, or the fact of my own name. It was with this same tranquil assurance that I knew I would become a dominatrix.

As a result of my tendency to fall down stairs and walk into walls, my family nickname as a child had been Crash, so it was a characteristically
miraculous feat of clumsiness that I managed to give myself a paper cut on my eyeball minutes before the graduation ceremony. Seated in the front row of the auditorium, I couldn’t open my eye without tears streaming from it. I dabbed mascara from my face through all the speeches and fielded curious looks from everyone who crossed the stage. By the time my family and I made it outside, my eye was horror red and I had to hold it shut. My parents chuckled sympathetically, in familiar wonder at my knack for calamity.