Whip Smart: A Memoir (33 page)

“What if it wasn’t a secret?”

“I don’t know; it always was with them. I mean, let’s also not forget that these were grown men who wanted to talk in baby voices and wear diapers. It really is pathetic.”

“Why?”

“Why? I mean, grow up, man!” I laughed at the carpet. “Besides, isn’t there something essentially immature about imbalanced power dynamics? They mimic parent-child relationships, not adult-adult relationships.”

“Yes, but does that dynamic have to permeate every aspect of the relationship, for people who desire it sexually?”

“I don’t know,” I sighed, a little lost and suddenly tired.

“How did he even know to broach the subject?” she asked. “I mentioned it in my profile. As a precaution really. I said
former
dominatrix. To discourage people who would be too freaked out or turned on by it.”

She gave me the look that said she wasn’t buying my reasoning. “Maybe you wanted to alert potential suitors about something else.”

“What? That that’s my main skill set?”

“No.”

“Let me guess, you think I’ve internalized the demoralization of that role and I still think it’s all I have to offer. Is that it?”

She chuckled. “No.”

“Then what, what am I trying to tell them?” We stared at each other for a few seconds. “Are you suggesting that I’m actually
into
it?” I asked, in honest surprise. Her nod belied how patient she had been with me on this point.

Anyone who has ever had a good therapist knows the feeling when an obvious truth that you have been committed to not seeing is so neatly pointed out to you. You see, even after four consecutive years of participating in dominant and submissive sexual practices, whether for money or not, I was still telling myself that I wasn’t
really
into it. It was for the money. I did it for anthropological interests. I did it for the ego trip. I did it to feel desired, to be bad, to rebel. These reasons were true, but they were not my only reasons, and even if they had been, would they not qualify me as sufficiently interested, as
into
it? I still badly needed to feel separate from my clients, to scapegoat them with my own shame and secrecy. It has been my experience that the people I judge most harshly are the ones in whom I recognize some part of myself.

Shame has rarely been a feeling that I’ve experienced consciously.
My shame in my own desire to dominate and submit to men sexually (and otherwise) did not manifest as a dirty or guilty feeling but as a denial of it. I was not like them! And if my date thought I was like
him
, he was wrong and could therefore never know the
real
me, only the charade of the dominatrix. I was judging myself via him. I knew this now and felt the resistance drain from me, though I still argued.

“I don’t know. My subconscious waving a flag of surrender to my secret desires? On my online dating profile?”

“But why else even mention it?”

“I mean—it’s such a big part of who I am, who I’ve been.”

“Exactly.”

After therapy that day I walked through the Union Square farmers’ market with the particular lightness of step that I’ve come to associate with such hard-won revelations. Believing myself apart from the people I dealt with as a domme gave me a sense of safety; it protected me from parts of myself of which—despite my bravery in facing tangible unknowns—I was deeply afraid. Telling the truth to other people, about my job, my addiction, or anything I concealed, had had the same effect, had been followed by the same lightness of step. Honesty brought my double lives together and in doing so made the world a bigger place, in which I could move more freely.

I didn’t end up at the dungeon out of financial desperation, nor anthropological curiosity. I was not a tourist but a member of that world, with reasons for being there similar to those of everyone else: an obsession with power, having it and having it taken away from me. These existed long before I ever walked into the dungeon. My experiences at the dungeon were a result of my own desire and pathology, not the other way around. I had been looking, ironically, for a set of boundaries—someone who might give them
to me. While I didn’t find that at the dungeon, I found a way to give myself permission to admit my own fantasies of powerlessness. Like all truths, it had been there all along, waiting to be seen. There were still questions. Would I continue to want what Larry had given me, in that form? Was its extremity caused by my inability to acknowledge the desire in lesser ways? What traumas had I suffered that led me there? I surmised that it didn’t really matter, just as it hadn’t mattered why I became an addict, or whether I was born one or not. It just was, and where it would lead now mattered more.

My sessions stopped here. I let them go with relief, like sandbags that had kept me from floating out into sprawling blue of my own desire. My judgments loosened as well; I no longer had to cling so tightly to my superiority over the women I’d worked with, or the men. It felt good to renounce my expertise in judging others’ limits; it also made the world bigger, gave it back some of its mystery. Funny, that I had spent so much time trying to shrink the world to a manageable size when that smallness so broke my heart, when the burden of it weighed so heavily. The unknowable
is
frightening and difficult to trust, but what is the alternative?

In the weeks that followed, I filled with a surprising tenderness, for myself, for all of us humans, so much more alike than we thought. I felt the urge to somehow make amends for my ignorance, my small-mindedness. It never ceases to amaze me, the conservatism that those who consider themselves liberal are capable of, myself a case in point. Scary, how easy it was to judge and belittle those around me, even while I shared their experience. In my meetings, people talked about those who were constitutionally incapable of looking at themselves with honesty. Honesty had turned out to be something I grew into. Some truths are too much for some constitutions, though I have seen my constitution change more than once.

But whom did I have to make amends to? Calling old clients was out of the question. It wasn’t about apologizing to anyone or even articulating my new awareness to another person; I wanted to
simply exist in honesty about my current constitution in the presence of someone who might understand. But who? Autumn was still my closest friend, but I didn’t know the particulars of how she and her therapist handled the subject; besides, instinct told me she wasn’t the person for this. I needed to call Jacob.

I PARKED MYSELF
on a bench outside the health food market across the street from our warehouse building. We called it the Snatch, partly a play on the actual name, Brooklyn’
s Nat
ural, and partly because it snatched so much of our money away, with its monopoly on soy milk and vegan cookies in the industrial waste-land of our neighborhood.

I have always been fetishistic about preparation and the minute circumstances surrounding activities both pleasurable and not. For instance, I could never smoke while dirty (I had to shower first) or while walking a dog. I didn’t like to mix pleasure with duty and enjoyed prolonging the anticipation of pleasure. To call Jacob (an experience both pleasurable and anxiety producing), I armed myself with a fresh pack of cigarettes, a five-dollar iced tea, and freshly shaved legs. Late May, and the heat already lubricated the inside of my thighs under my cotton dress. I shifted to separate them and lit a cigarette. I had quit and then begun again after leaving the dungeon. I still spoke to Jacob occasionally. I usually called him. I knew that he couldn’t refuse my calls or even articulate why
he should. Although I privately knew his guilt over our continued contact was in some way justified, the pang of my own misgiving when I dialed his number was manageable, and whatever still drew me to him I didn’t resist.

“Hi!” That stagy quality his voice always had was still there—a symptom I think of his internal reaction to me: a simultaneous push and pull, an urge to give in and to resist, to expose and to hide; his words fell somewhere between these dual urges and thus always seemed a little false.

“Hi!” I smiled for the pause that followed, our mutual knowledge of each other pooling like water into its shallow basin. This was why I still called. “What are you doing?”

“Well, I am sitting on my couch with Barrett.”

“Oh!”

Barrett was one of Jacob’s three best friends; they had interned together during college, and been close ever since. When I first began dating and Jacob and I still got together for an occasional meal, I had asked him for boyfriend recommendations, half-kidding, knowing it was a little bit cruel, but still hurt that he had abandoned our friendship for a girlfriend. Jacob had recommended Barrett. “He’s tall and lanky, just your type,” Jacob had said, implicitly self-deprecating. “Give him my number,” I’d said, and he had claimed to. Barrett never called, Jacob said because he was going through an ugly divorce and off making documentaries in Latin America to escape it.

“So, what are you guys doing?”

“Talking. Hanging out.”

“Yeah?”

“Yup.”

“Huh. Why don’t you ask him if he wants to go out with me sometime?”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

I’m not certain what prompted me to do this, and I didn’t even wonder then. Historically, this was the spastic approach I usually took when it came to matters of dating and sex; many of my first
kisses were initiated by a non sequitur “wanna make out?” My prospects usually interpreted it as confidence or caprice, which I encouraged, though it was born more from anxiety.

There was a muffled scraping as Jacob passed the phone to Barrett.

“Hello?” There was nervous laughter in his voice, and excitement tickled my diaphragm.

“Barrett?”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering if you wanted to go on a date with me.”

I hid behind what little irony this phrase offered; the formality of proper dates was an alien, old-fashioned concept to me and, I assumed, to the rest of my generation.

“Ah, sure.” I could hear his smile mirror my own.

“Well, good.”

“How about this Friday?” he suggested, and I felt the subtle shift in power between us, his delicately grappling for it. It reminded me of some pre-session consultations, but not in an unpleasant way, as the dynamic with Brian the architect had.

“This Friday, the first of June. Sounds good.”

“Okay, I’ll call you later this week about the details?”

“I’ll talk to you then.”

“Okay, I’m going to put Jacob back on now.”

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye.” The phone shuffled between them again.

“Wow. You don’t waste any time, huh?” Jacob was laughing, but his tone had a bitter edge.

“I guess not.” I suddenly felt sheepish. “I should let you go.”

“Yeah, another time.”

“Sure, I’ll call you.”

Barrett and I met at a vegetarian place outside Washington Square. Though we’d never exchanged photographs (but he’d seen one of
mine, in full nurse costume), I recognized him immediately against the brick wall beside the entrance. Lean and long-eyelashed, he tugged his earphones out and smiled at me.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” We kept smiling at each other and awkwardly shook hands. How do you greet a blind date?

Being a regular, I knew the menu by heart, and suggested the most benign incarnation of pseudochicken. When the apathetic tattooed waiter wandered over I ordered for both Barrett and me. He adjusted his legs under the tiny table. We took turns sharing hunks of information about ourselves until the food arrived. He grew up in Westchester, went to NYU, and just got back from a three-month stint in Mexico, following the Zapatistas around with a video camera.

I talked about writing and sobriety, my family a little. When the food came, Barrett and I ate quickly, sharing bites, half-covering our mouths as we chewed. Eating feels surprisingly vulnerable in situations like this; you are trying to present yourself as fairly immaculate, and feeding is so animal. For me, hunger is a naked state, a symbol of innate need, and desire. The height of vulnerability to me, then and now, is the expression of need and desire. My dependence on being a dominatrix was partly due to the power I felt in my lack of desire, relative to the need of my clients. I’d unearthed my own need beneath that craving for desirelessness and power, but the impulse to reach for the safety of that emptiness was a long time going.

Chemistry is funny. When it’s not there, I am never sure and often try to convince myself that it might be. But its presence makes that effort laughable. I’d learned not to wholly trust my instincts, especially when it came to attractions. The craving to get out of my head, out of reality, muddied desire. The knowledge that my desires often hid deeper, truer ones confused things further. Trying to figure it out didn’t work. I’d learned to ask for help, to run things by people not influenced by the rationalization machine
in my head, the wily, default escapist. But being
in
it, that chemistry, doesn’t make you worry about what it means; that’s for later.