Working Stiff (18 page)

With some frightfully fruity underwear purchased just for the occasion, I stood on a chair in the Nerve bathroom and tried to take a self-portrait looking both sexually alluring and eager to learn a card game whilst precariously balanced. I sent the picture along to Doug and received a reply some hours later that made no judgments on my twinkish shot but did suggest that I arrive at his apartment early so that I could be shown the basics. “I will be naked,” he advised.

I'd surmised from our e-mail exchange that Doug was much more of an exhibitionist than a voyeur. As I strolled the alien world of the Upper West Side, I meditated on whether bridge or any activity that was predicated on sitting around a table was ideally suited for exhibiting one's genitalia as, for the most part, his phallus's majesty would be obscured by the playing surface. As I walked along I made a mental short list of other activities that might be more effective to that end. They included yoga and jump rope.

Doug wanted me to arrive at seven with the other pupils arriving at seven thirty, but I decided that ten minutes alone with Doug and his special something would be more than sufficient. I was jet-lagged, suddenly homeless, and about to kick back with a naked man in his
sixties. With my heart thumping, I walked into a very grandiose but dimly lit marble lobby that smelled strongly of hearty, simple, Central European foods. I told the doorman the apartment number.

“You're here to play cards?” he asked. “Go on up.”

Apartment 8H; the home of the whopper. I knocked on the door and waited nine long seconds before Doug appeared around the door, seemingly dressed.

“Grant?” he asked with a broad and kind grin. “Come on in!”

I was in Doug's place for several more seconds before becoming aware of a swaying movement around my host's mid to lower thigh. I'd assumed naked meant bereft of clothing, but Doug was wearing a rather jolly animal-print T-shirt, slippers, socks, and a pair of bookish spectacles with a velvet cord that linked the parts that hook over one's ears. His loins and legs were especially pink, naked, and open to the elements. Doug seemed puzzled by the six-pack of beer that I'd brought along, more as common courtesy than from a need or desire to get tipsy.

“You did grocery shopping on the way here?” he asked.

“I just picked up some beers.”

“Oh,” he said, seeming slightly miffed. “We actually don't do
that
here, but you are welcome to indulge if you'd like.”

This exchange was the evening's only conversation that didn't directly relate to the folly of bridge. A shame, as I had prepared nuggets of small talk and benign chatter on a variety of subjects.

“Well, we have ten minutes before the others arrive so let me just run you through the basics.”

The dual decorative themes for Doug's place are “fruits of the forest” and gold lamé, which seemed too disparate a pairing until I spied a wreath of gilded plums that neatly tied the two motifs together. Doug sat down at the circular glass table in the middle of the room and urged me to sit opposite him.
The table is glass! Of course
, I thought. Doug placed an ace, a king, a queen, and a jack on the table as I took my seat. The placement of the cards seemed deliberate as they perfectly eclipsed his much-hyped appendage. Doug explained the numeric value of the
picture cards and the pecking order of the four suits and immediately quizzed me. As I began to deliver the answers to his questions, Doug slid the cards around, allowing partial glimpses of the monster member, a sort of dance of the seven veils. I found that I had to use every ounce of concentration as the relatively simple questions came with a peek-a-boo glimpse that I found very distracting. I couldn't help notice Doug's grin widen as he deliberately sabotaged my ability to count to four. With a Herculean effort I answered most of his questions correctly, prompting my host to sweep the cards off the table and reveal the element that made this card game something special. There it was. Based on its size, I was convinced that Doug owned the world's only bifocal tabletop. I tried not to look directly at it by focusing on a coffee ring on the glassy foreground. I was struggling with whether I ought to vocally acknowledge its presence when I was saved by the doorbell. The star of the show went to greet the other pupils, with Doug following several moments later.

Sam and Dimitri had arrived. I was glad that the other bridge wannabes were here to give me an idea of how to behave in this unique scenario. Sam set himself down on the sofa, waking a noticeably annoyed white Persian cat.

“Be careful with those black pants,” said Doug, grinning. “You'll leave here with pussy hair all over you and we wouldn't want that, now would we.”

“It'd certainly be a first,” parried Sam. We all laughed mischievously.

I hadn't been invited to disrobe and wondered what the others would be “feeling comfortable in.” One-and two-lesson veterans respectively, Sam and Dimitri looked like stereotypical denizens of the neighborhoods in which they resided. Dimitri, heavily muscled, tanned, and wearing a baseball cap, khaki shorts, and tight white tank top was from Chelsea. Sam was a nebbish, bookish, buttoned-up gent from midtown. They each clutched Xeroxed handouts that had been their bridge homework from last time. Sam held a copy of
Bridge for Dummies
.

“Throw that away,” said Doug disdainfully. “You can't learn what I'm about to teach you from a book.” I took this as alluding to some hanky-panky, but he went on to talk about the card game as if it was delivered to mankind from a higher being and should be handed down, person to person. The conversation was so immediately and wholly bridgecentric that I wasn't even introduced to the other guys; we threw around a cursory nod as cards were being dealt.

Bridge seems to have a language all its own, as foreign to English as Urdu. Terms like “singleton,” “doubleton,” “trump,” and something called “the Gerber method” were all mentioned with nary a regular English word to give any clues as to what it all meant. “If you are feeling confused, that's okay,” said Doug with a chuckle. “You should be.”

Sam and Dimitri remained fully dressed. I watched my fellow players' gazes intensely. Sure, they had been to Doug's class before, but I was surprised that no one was doing or saying anything to reference the fact that one of the four of us wasn't wearing any pants. The others seemed as if they actually wanted to buy in to what Mrs. Montague called a recipe for madness. They wanted to learn how to play bridge, regardless of the distraction. We silently looked down at our hands, tallying points. We looked as if we were studying some prehistoric species of sea cucumber through a glass-bottomed boat. I had counted my cards incorrectly during the past two hands, so this time Doug got up and walked around the table to look at my hand over my shoulder. Despite my fear that his schlong would swing into my ribs, no contact took place. Doug returned to his place satisfied that I'd leaned something. I had. But he thought it had to do with cards.

At 8:00 a din filled the room as five clocks chimed out the hour simultaneously. The racket was an indistinguishable cacophany but the clock nearest to us was definitely playing
“Deutschland Über Alles.”

“Is this tune what I think it is?” I asked Doug as he shuffled the deck.

He neither confirmed nor denied it but instead closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and pursed his lips as he conducted an imaginary orchestra by moving his forefingers in a wide U-shaped motion.

I decided I could probably use a drink. I offered everyone a beer, but they politely declined while looking at me as if I had a drinking problem. I hardly drink at all, but I felt obligated to get rid of at least some of the beer. Returning from the fridge, I noticed that in my thirty-second absence Sam had stripped down to a pair of black boxer briefs. I'd decided that if Dimitri took his clothes off, I would follow suit. No one was taking a blind bit of notice of either of the two partially naked players, which I imagined was a little disheartening for Sam, as he'd really put himself out there. He looked nervous—perhaps about his gynomastia, more commonly known as having man-titties. I made sure that he caught me looking at his adolescent-looking physique so he would feel that stripping hadn't been an entire waste. Unencumbered by clothing, Sam soon became a different type of player, bidding high, taking risks. Dimitri was very kind and gave me guidance when he could see that Doug's instruction left me more bewildered.

Ultimately, Doug's mighty penis seemed incidental. No one was overtly looking at it or talking about it. I wondered what he got out of our indifference toward it. Was he getting off by having his equine penis ignored? His ad said that he loved showing off his “cock and nuts,” but he really made little effort to draw our attention to it. Doug always steered the conversation away from anything that had nothing to do with cards and really got quite passionate when any of us had played a good hand or conversely made a “silly, silly mistake.” In the few hours I'd had to speculate on how the evening would go, I never once entertained the idea that there would be an entirely scholarly atmosphere with little or no mention or deference given to the pink elephant under the glass tabletop in the living room. Doug spent too much time tsking our silly mistakes to revel in his exhibitionism.

I'm not sure what made Doug bashful, but as the evening progressed he became prone to crossing his legs. Earlier on he exhibited his unit as if he were showing a selection of prizewinning fruit at a garden show. With the third rousing rendition of the German national anthem ringing out, bridge class was over for the evening. We left in a
staggered fashion, Dimitri first, me a minute later, while Sam stayed behind to ask more questions.

I got back to the office a little before eleven and crashed on the sofa. Rufus wouldn't mind me spending a few nights here but would no doubt nix my plans for making it my primary residence. Still on Greenwich Mean Time, I found myself wide awake at four thirty. I made a cup of coffee and climbed the fire escape six flights to the building's roof and watched the summer sun begin to rise. The vistas were perhaps more impressive when the towers still stood, but looking downtown as the sun turned the city's buildings orange, it was hard to imagine that they were ever really there. Anxieties about finding a new place to hang my hat were pushed out by the feeling that made my body buzz. Goddamn, I love this town.

THE 3,549 E-MAILS
in my inbox said more or less the same thing: that I was a despicable person. I refreshed the screen every few seconds—3,551, 3,558—the number was growing ever faster. A few of the e-mailers were disappointed but pragmatic about what had happened in the woods of rural Maryland. Some wanted to take me to court. Others promised me physical harm. They said I betrayed them, deceived them. The word choices, the frantic grammatical errors, and the heavy use of uppercase type were frightening indicators of how acutely I had enraged an entire subculture, a group of people who were actually defined by their collective urge to inflict pain on others. Within a few hours they had mobilized against me and I was running scared. E-mails came in waves that corresponded to time zones.
Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, from sea to shining sea. Then a second wave of venomous prose from Europe.

For a few weeks in July, I was the scourge of everyone who'd ever donned a gimp suit, brandished a bullwhip, or attached electrodes to a pair of testicles. The BDSM community wanted me dead.

I'd first heard of Leather Camp during a Nerve editorial meeting. Leather Camp is a five-day retreat in which extremely kinky people from the United States and abroad get together and enact their wildest fantasies. The idea was that I would attend and report back on the scene. Michael Martin was initially lukewarm about the idea, but I shot the organizer an e-mail expressing an interest in joining in anyway. He replied saying that Leather Camp doesn't need publicity; that it sold out every year; that its location and schedule is a closely guarded secret; that he is trying to foster an environment free of judgment; that journalists are absolutely forbidden to attend.

“Now you're
definitely
fucking going!” said Michael, suddenly adrenalized with intrigue. “What don't they want people to know about? You are going undercover.”

None of the installments of my column had ever hinged on my using an assumed persona. Usually I was courted by companies to promote their products and services and, among a specific subset of people, my name had clout. I could help companies sell hundreds of chin-mounted dildos or bottles of supplements “specially formulated” to make one's semen taste like applesauce, just by giving them a quick mention.

The brief was to go live among these folk at their summer retreat and report back on what I found. Should anyone ask, I was to tell them that I was attracted to BDSM and thought that Leather Camp would be a good way to find out what worked for me.

I had already delved into some BDSM-type activity in my column before now: I'd been shrink-wrapped in latex, infantilized by a dominatrix, and had seven shades of shit beaten out of me by a female wrestler. These articles were blogged—and usually ridiculed—on BDSM Web sites, so there was a fairly good chance that people might recognize my
name. My pseudonym was Simon, which I thought went well with my accent. I have found that when forced to lie, keeping the lies parallel with the truth can help thwart revealing inconsistencies. To that end, I said that I was a customer service administrator, which I was up until twelve months earlier.

A portion of the Leather Camp Web site dealt with travel arrangements and carpooling. I ended up getting a ride with a guy called Manflesh. I traveled to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, to meet up with him at his parents' home.

Manflesh was red-haired, soft-spoken, and in his mid-twenties. He had borrowed his parents' vehicle for Leather Camp: a large silver minivan with a large disabled sticker on the back and a mechanism for getting wheelchairs in and out of it.

“Hey, for a minivan, this thing can really move,” he assured me, then faithfully observed the speed limit the whole way down past the Mason-Dixon Line.

The location of Leather Camp was shrouded in secrecy right up until the event, though it was always based within a two hour's drive of Washington, D.C. Previous years had seen local communities getting wind of the goings-on at a Leather Camp event and arriving at the premises in heated protest, presumably with pitchforks and torches.

Manflesh astounded me with tales of Leather Camps past—this year was his sixth—until we were well into Delaware. Like the time he and all seven of his cabinmates kidnapped a bi-curious male (consensually, of course) and wouldn't release him until he'd fellated them all. I imagine that his curiosity was quenched after that. Manflesh took a satisfied drag on a Parliament and looked longingly out the window.

“It was intense,” he said. “You know, for a beginner, you are taking on a lot by coming here. It'll be a baptism by fire.”

“How do you mean?” I asked. I began to panic.

“Leather Camp is fucking hard-core. It's no joke. That's why we love it and you probably will too. It's great because, for four or five days, it's life as it should be: no rules, no judgments, no limits. But after four or five days, the weekend is over and—
Bam!
—it's back to reality.”

At a typical BDSM event (bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism), Manflesh probably got more tail than I'd had in my entire life. He told me that he'd been whipped, flogged, pissed on, shat on, and generally bothered countless times since he discovered the scene at the tender age of nineteen. In fact, he was scheduled to give a two-hour tutorial on pissing that weekend. Last year, ten and one-third women showered him with golden degradation.

“One of the girls was three months pregnant,” he explained the fraction cheerfully.

This time around, Manflesh had rallied fifteen through a BDSM Web site; he assured me it was not to be missed. I took my Blimpie sub from my lips and gazed out the window, ruminating upon what the weekend would have in store.

I was in the death throes of a four-month relationship with Sophie. Sophie had some understandable misgivings about my attending a country retreat for sexual miscreants. Sophie was not really the jealous type, but her hormones were currently out of whack due to her being on fertility medication. She was “donating” her eggs.

I assured her that I was just going to be there in an observational capacity, though I really couldn't gauge how I'd feel once I was there. I'd never been into the theatrical nature of the BDSM scene, though some of what Manflesh had said saying piqued my interest. Apparently, the previous year's big hit was the “merry-go-suck-and-fuck,” in which eight “bottoms” assumed prone positions on a merry-go-round while a corresponding number of “tops” stood around the circle's perimeter. Condoms were changed with every spin of the wheel.

As we headed closer to camp, the clouds cleared. In the final mile of our journey, we passed through a quaint little village that listed the times of church services on its welcome sign. There I was, driving in with a man who made the Marquis de Sade look like Pat Boone. Did Littlebrooke's residents know that four hundred more of us were on the way?

We slowly pulled up the gravel driveway to the checkpoint, where two fifty-year-old women in Stars-and-Stripes T-shirts checked our credentials.

“Let's see yer dicks!” one of them yelled.

“We gotta check that you ain't vanilla!” said the other, laughing.

After three hours with Manflesh, I was feeling more vanilla than at any point in my life. He was poised to unbuckle his belt when a car came up behind us and we were waved into a parking area. About twenty-five yards from our car was a fifty-year-old man dressed as a little girl, with a bright red wig, pink dress, white knee-high socks, and Mary Jane shoes. He looked like a dry-cured Strawberry Shortcake. He skipped along the dirt road before hopping into a buggy and taking the reins.

“Hyah!” he squealed, jerking his steed into motion.

The steed was a sixty-year-old man. He wore a harness, black boots, blinders, a bit for his mouth, a butt plug replete with faux horsetail, and a cock ring. He pulled Strawberry Shortcake a few yards before the old man–little girl called out, “Whoa.”

The centaur obligingly came to a halt. While the passenger buckled his shoe, his horse whinnied loudly, thrashed his head back and forth, and dragged a foot along the ground.

Manflesh put my mind at ease when I confessed that I hadn't brought any fetish wear whatsoever.

“That's fine,” he said, “about half the people don't. Leather isn't a literal term. Leather is a state of mind, an umbrella term that covers all sorts of people who are into all sorts of things.”

As we loaded our luggage into a golf cart, I heard what I thought was a rifle range in the distance. As we trundled over the brow of a hill, I saw a large meadow dotted with several crucifixes. Attached to each was an individual being whipped, flogged, and/or beaten. It was just like that scene in
Life of Brian
. But instead of looking on the bright side of life, the whippees were emitting the most bloodcurdling screams I'd ever heard. The air was full of agony.

The camp was flanked by three hills and a small lake. Manflesh and I registered, got our cabin assignments, and went our separate ways. He had already secured a private cabin with several of the scene's luminaries. Their cabin was called “Oink” because, as my new friend explained, “We're all fucking pigs.”

I was assigned a cabin on the opposite end of the camp. It was about twenty feet by thirty, with ten stripped twin beds around the perimeter and some cubbyholes in the center of the room for personal effects. I thought I was the first to arrive, but in the far corner of the room lain a rotund blonde-haired woman in a pair of terry-cloth shorts and one white ankle sock. She was lying topless and facedown in a noisy slumber. My shuffling caused her to open her eyes slightly.

“Hi,” I whispered. “Sorry to wake you.”

She grunted and cut a spectacular fart that sent me scurrying outside for air.

From the porch of the cabin I saw a petite blonde woman leading around a huge, white, naked, entirely hairless man wearing a zippered gimp mask and “SLAVE” tattooed over his pubic bone. What was really unusual is that the gentleman seemed to lack any identifiable genitalia. In the area where one would normally find a penis, there was something that looked like the tied-up end of a balloon. His testicles were not in evidence. I wondered if he had tucked everything inside, like Samurai warriors did before going into battle. He was completely at the mercy of his owner: I saw her walk up to a swing and place a dog bowl full of a brown substance ten feet in front of it. Her slave got onto all fours and hungrily ate from it. At the end of her swing's arc, his tormentor would spit, and her saliva would land on her slave or in his food. Every thirty seconds or so she would get off the swing, walk over to him, and flick her cigarette ash into his bowl for him to consume.

My cell phone didn't work. I couldn't unburden myself of any of the nightmarish vignettes being played out before me. I suddenly realized that, for perhaps the first time, I was truly alone. I ran across the camp to find Manflesh. He said that his crew was all around our age.

With the large, plushy pig toy on the veranda, cabin Oink wasn't too hard to spot. Twenty paces from my destination, I was almost stampeded by a team of six “ponies” that were pulling a chariot at speed, provoking laughter from Manflesh and his cabinmates.

“You gotta watch out for that if you are going to last the weekend!” he called out.

Manflesh introduced me to a dozen of his friends, who were all very nice and had tons of questions about my kink, my sexual orientation, and my funny accent. There was Malcolm, a stout Uncle Fester type; Candy, a shy blonde woman in her late twenties; Julia and Dominique, two girls also in their twenties who could have been the two nerdy, spookily inseparable girls from any high school.

“How are you doing, Jeff?” called Manflesh to a man dressed up as a pony and being flogged nearby.

“Another day in paradise, man!” he answered as large welts began to appear on his back.

At that point, I'd been asked “Are you a top or a bottom?” at least ten times. I just said that I wasn't entirely sure but hadn't ruled anything out and that I expected the weekend to shed some light on things. That usually stopped people from digging much deeper and exposing me as an outsider. Having a shared history in the scene, everyone else had plenty to talk about. There were inside jokes, slang, and a lot of jargon I found hard to decipher.

“Have you seen Bolt-Thrower lately?”

“No, last I heard, he married Desire and disappeared off the scene. Moved to Tallahassee.”

I held up my end of a conversation by constantly asking for explanations. Everybody was talking about “doing a scene” with one person or another: “I've got a bondage scene with Cumbucket on Sunday at two, a humiliation scene with Donkey-boy on Friday morning.” They kind of scheduled them all in like power meetings.

With as much fanfare as he could muster, Manflesh produced his “new toy”: a 10,000-volt cattle prod designed for cattlemen involved in carrying out something called “close work.” I swallowed hard. The device emitted a soft buzzing sound, like that of a honeybee, which belied its ability to render a human being helpless and in unspeakable pain. Manflesh said he wouldn't use the prod until somebody had used it on him first—he wanted to know what the pain would be like.

“I'll do it,” said everyone in near perfect unison.

With about an hour to go before the opening dinner, I headed off to the pool. A huge majority of attendees at Leather Camp were older than my parents. Some were grandparents. Many were obese and leathery. There were about ten older walrus-people sitting on lounge chairs around the pool's edge. A man who looked like Santa Claus stood next to my chair. In addition to his pillowy beard and trademark belly, he wore black sandals, orange-tinted aviators, and, most interestingly, a pair of assless hot pants showcasing an ornate barbed-wire cock ring.

By the time of my trip to Leather Camp, I had two years of immersive sexual research under my belt and had noticed several common themes among the attendees at these sorts of things, whether it be a trip to the nude beach, porn shoot, a sex party, or any other sociosexual event: people looked either like NASCAR fans or the sort of people who spent their weekends reenacting historical battles. They were almost always overweight, overtanned, and bereft of almost any body hair. Most interestingly, they would use any excuse to whip themselves and each other up into a nationalistic fervor. These people may have their genitalia unencumbered by clothing but would always be wearing hats or T-shirts with slogans like “Welcome to America, Now Speak English!” “These Colors Don't Run” replete with weeping eagle/World Trade Center backdrop, or, most worryingly, “Nuke 'em All! (let Allah sort 'em out).” Manhattanites like myself could easily forget that, with every mile west beyond the Hudson River, this variety of American became more numerous and commonplace. To that end, these events don't attract society's misfits but rather the hoi polloi. In fact, the only demographic that's notably lacking are urbanites.