Whip Smart: A Memoir (8 page)

“I have not.” And at that moment, I wasn’t sure I had.

“And have you any idea what the punishment for this sort of misbehavior is?”

“Well, I’m guessing it includes a spanking.”

“Yes, a spanking, and a great big enema. Little Roger here knows all about his problems with constipation, and yet still,
still
he cannot seem to control his piggy urges.”

“No self-control at all, I see.”

“None to speak of, Auntie.”

“I’m sorry, Mommy!
Please don’t give me a great big enema to clean out my bum!
”

How could I not laugh? Instinctively I clapped my hand over my mouth in an effort to stifle the giggle. To my surprise, Autumn’s face broke out into a genuine grin, her face shedding its disguise completely as she clutched Roger’s back with her gloved hand and dissolved into unaffected laughter of her own. Composing herself, but still smiling, she tilted her head and began.

“Auntie Justine—” She choked on another round of giggles,
raising her brows at me while deepening her tone for an added note of cruelty. “Auntie Justine, it is a truly ridiculous sight, I agree. He is a joke of a man.” She abruptly looked down at Roger, wrinkling her nose. “Are you
humping
my leg, Roger, you little scum bucket?” Indeed, he appeared to be slowly grinding his hips against her stockinged thigh.

“I’m sorry, Mommy; I can’t help it. You and Auntie were laughing at my dirty bum, and I got too excited.”

Autumn sneezed with laughter once again and avoided my gaze to facilitate speaking. “You need to get the fuck off of Mommy now, Roger. If you want to hump my leg like a dirty little dog, that’s what we’ll have to treat you as.” She kicked him onto the floor, where he knelt on all fours, pants still around his knees. His Ralph Lauren boxer briefs remained pulled down just enough to reveal her crimson handprints on his bare behind, an obvious pup tent pitched between his legs. Striding over to the four-poster bed fitted with black leather, a matching hammock swing strung to its posts with heavy chains, Autumn reached into the open box on the bed and pulled out a black dildo the width of my wrist. Lifting the menacing hunk of rubber over her head, she flung it across the room, where it slapped the wall like a fish and bounced crudely onto the Oriental rug. She smiled and turned her gaze to the kneeling Roger. “Fetch, you motherfucker!”

Half an hour later, Autumn walked Roger back out the complicated series of doors leading to the elevator, and I could hear his professions of gratitude as they passed the dressing room door. When she returned, Autumn pulled a crisp fifty-dollar bill out of her bra and handed it to me.

“Here, you earned it just for sitting in that room after he released his enema. I mean, not that it’s ever pleasant, but that was exceptional.”

“I guess that’s good news.” I stared at the fifty. “But you don’t have to give me that. It’s two-thirds of what you’re making, and I definitely didn’t do two-thirds of the work you did.”

“I know I don’t have to give it to you; just take it.” I took it.

At 1:30 in the morning, after the four of us had cleaned the kitchen, stocked towels in the bathrooms, vacuumed the rugs, and thrown the orphan shoes and articles of clothing behind the couch in the dressing room, we piled into the elevator with the massive black garbage bag from all the day’s sessions. Fiona explained that we had to drag the trash around the corner and deposit it on 39th Street, to avoid the suspicious proprietor of the tiny twenty-four-hour deli next door.

“He thinks we’re whores,” Autumn explained. “Just try getting change for any bill bigger than a twenty. He’ll look at you like he can smell the semen in your panties.”

Fiona laughed.

“We’ll take it, Fiona.” Autumn took the garbage bag from her and turned to me. “You’re going to the F train with me, right?”

“I am.”

Fiona raised her hand and stepped into the street.

“Okay, I’m gonna grab a cab here then. I’ll see you ladies tomorrow?”

We nodded and waved as she flagged a cab and headed uptown. As I reached for the knotted neck of the garbage, Autumn shouted to Bella, who was scurrying downtown, the back of her dark head already disappearing into the slippery shadows of the avenue.

“Bye, Bella!”

The lift of Bella’s hand could have been a wave, a dismissal, or only a change in pace. Autumn shook her head. “It takes all kinds.”

Our conversation on the train was easy. Her fresh-scrubbed face seemed already familiar, and I felt myself ease into the comfort of new friendship. I found it difficult to imagine the woman beside me spitting on and slapping the face of a man while he shat, though I had just seen it.

We hugged good-bye at the Union Square station, where she transferred to head to hip Williamsburg and I continued on to Bed-Stuy. Listening to my headphones for the following thirty-minute ride home, I studied my own reflection in the train window and the dark tunnel behind it. I could not have articulated anything other than the glow of hope, throbbing like a vague, sweet ache in my limbs.

AFTER THOSE FIRST NIGHTS
, I mostly worked the day shift. Sensual sessions intimidated me less, and daytime clients wanted them. I adjusted quickly to my new routine. Four mornings a week, I’d pack up my schoolbooks and leave the apartment by 9:00. I loved the subway ride from Bed-Stuy, chicken bones rolling across the subway car’s floor as the C train’s ungreased wheels shrieked the forty minutes to West 4th Street, where I transferred to the F. Squeezed between the hips and elbows and briefcases of the late-morning crowd on their way to work at 9:30 a.m., I loved passing as one of them while knowing I wasn’t. I loved the hard glare of sunlight reflected off car windows and dark sunglasses as the weather grew colder, my cheeks prickling as I climbed up out of the Herald Square train station.

Each of those mornings that I worked was the same: the same train ride, the same crush of grimly purposeful bodies carrying me up the steps to where the cold splashed my face and excitement gently writhed below my diaphragm. They knew me by name (Justine!) at the café where I bought my morning coffee and peach bran
muffin. Midtown is lousy with places just like this one: shiny tiled floors and smiling immigrant workers behind polished glass display counters bearing baked goods, create-your-own-salad stations, and hot pressed paninis that look a lot better than they taste. Inevitably you get stuck in line behind the guy who pulls a crumpled envelope out of his paint-splattered pocket that has all the orders for the whole crew of the construction site across the street, or the woman whose latte cannot be got right: it’s vanilla when she wanted hazelnut, skim when she wanted soy, foam when she wanted less foam. These assholes I loved, too; they made me privy to the kind of adulthood (sighing, hurrying, heeled) that I admired, in the childish way I still enjoy writing checks and parallel parking, but could not stomach actually experiencing. It was playing at a role that I wasn’t sure I believed in and was fairly certain I wasn’t qualified for. Passing through the realms of normal folk and clutching a secret. At this I was already an expert.

Coffee and muffin in hand, I would make my way across Sixth Avenue, dodging bike couriers and the less agile café deliverymen on their battered mountain bikes with wide, shallow baskets and naked handlebars. It wasn’t uncommon that I’d run into one of my bleary-eyed coworkers as I approached the building whose second floor housed the dungeon. Poking my tongue out at the intercom above the doorbells where the tiny eye of a camera led straight up to Fiona’s desk, I would wait for her to buzz us in. Also in our building was a nursing school (a laughable coincidence), a soon-to-fail yoga studio, and sundry other offices, the employees of which were indistinguishable from one another. It was never clear how much the denizens of the other floors actually knew about us. Suspicion was probably as far as their thoughts ever got on the subject, as Remy, the manager of the dungeon, ran a fastidiously tight ship so far as discretion was concerned. If a new domme carelessly happened to fetch her food delivery in a pair of fishnets and a robe, it was the last delivery ever dispatched to us from that place. Still, that suspicion was sometimes apparent when you got stuck on the
elevator in mixed company. God forbid you fail to recognize a client and end up sharing the elevator with him.

After Fiona came to retrieve me from the vestibule between the elevator and the first set of doors, we made our way back in through the following two, which magnetically locked. I would follow her into the office to check the appointment book. Then it was a stop in the dressing room to say hello and drop off my belongings; the bathroom to wash my hands and, depending on if I had an appointment or not, pee; and finally the kitchen to stick my lunch in the fridge (I packed it from home regularly in the beginning). I would pick the peaches out of my muffin to eat first and smoke a cigarette with my coffee before putting my makeup on. I loved this routine as well. The morning chitchat in the kitchen, the opening doors, chores, and ringing phones, were all a soothing version of a work ritual that would have been much less enjoyable if they were a preamble to sitting at a desk.

Due to the clients’ time constraints and the brisk efficacy with which the day crowd satisfied their perversions, day sessions were more often by individual appointment than the meet-and-greet, mistress-à-la-carte parade. Clients of this particular stripe attracted mistresses of an according one. Businesslike mistresses serviced the businessmen, women who had a straight-job cover to maintain, who took their calls in the bathroom so that their boyfriends wouldn’t hear the shouted conversation about dildos and bondage. “Lifestyle” dommes rarely worked the day shift: women who wore their domme personas to nightclubs, kept personal slaves (for bathroom scrubbing, luggage carrying, and other domestic uses), gave public performances, and carried on purportedly congruent personal sex lives. No, the extraordinarily grotesque or obscure fetishist did not excite the day-shifters the way he did the night-, unless he was also an extraordinarily generous tipper.

The day shift paid heed to details like the high volume of thirty-minute sessions during the early afternoon, which, at 50 bucks a pop, paid more for your time and required far less of it endured with
a single client. These half-hour sessions were frustrating to lifestyle dommes, who disliked them for the very reasons the others preferred them. It was explained to me early on by Anna, the statuesque Russian veteran (she had been at the dungeon for three years at the time that I started) with the inexorably perky breasts, flat stomach, and husky accent, that if I spent a good long time tying and untying the client and talking a lot, I could easily shave fifteen minutes off of a session. A thirty-minute enema session was Anna’s ideal: these clients spent most of it in the bathroom, leaving barely enough time to assume their preferred ejaculation position (legs suspended over head to target mouth and face, crouched over Dixie cup, et cetera), ejaculate (this was never required but more common than not), and run back to the office.

Mistresses like Anna relied on a lot of hand jobs, which were the easiest way to control how quickly your session ended and to ensure that your client would return despite being cheated out of his full time. I didn’t see Anna as necessarily lacking the integrity of other dommes, who refused to stoop to hand jobs. It was all the same to her. The difference lay less in boundaries than value systems. To believe that it is a drastically more degrading act to jerk someone off than to shove your arm up his ass is, in a sense, to believe in the entire premise of the thing. It is to believe that subjugation resides in the submissive nature of an act, rather than the sexual. But if the fisted client desires that fist as much as another desires a hand job, how is submitting to one desire any more powerful than the other? And yet most sessions—if not all—were based on such paradigms, so many being a kind of inversion of misogyny, the subjugation of women reenacted by men on themselves. Our clients wanted to be dressed in women’s clothing and raped, molested, infantilized, humiliated, and physically abused. Did this kind of mimicry reinforce or subvert the power of these paradigms? The rationales and moral codes of the dungeon were complex beyond my comprehension, though I was promised by those most committed to it that its logic was steady. For a long time,
the apparent inconsistencies did not concern me. I was too infatuated with my new life.

The simplest explanation is that this was the brightest time. This was the time when it was all too new to be understood, when its meaning was not yet even suspected, or speculated upon. In that first fall, I was in the manic flight of a change. Luminous with an aura of new, my excitement, the
high
of it, was distinctly reminiscent of countless shifts I had made in the past. I’d brokered deals with myself to exchange a thing that had lost its power and become banal or frightening for a newer version. I had traded and abandoned lovers in this manner, best friends, mood-altering substances. With each there was always this brightest part: the narrow edge between the exhilaration of the new and its descent into corruption, mundanity, or the sort of wildness that is less likely to sweep you off your feet than to crush you. Here the comfort of routine that other people seemed able to sustain was briefly attainable. On this peak, beyond the reach of both what came before and what was sure to follow, I was not only happy; I was also invincible.