Working Stiff (20 page)

“You didn't miss much,” said Dan, who had come to the cabin to change into his birthday suit.

“Aside from three cute submissives jerking off some guy at the pool. He took ages to come, but he didn't mind about that.”

“Um, is it warm out?” I asked.

“Well, it's just warm enough to walk around naked, which I find is the best way to advertise,” he deadpanned, giving his considerable Johnson a wave, as if to prove his point.

Lunch was three different types of what was labeled as pizza. I sat down with Trevor and Claire, a couple from the monumental clusterfuck the night before. When not “in the moment,” they seemed shy. It was only Claire's second event, and she was only marginally more in tune with the scene than I was. Trevor was worried he was about to be kidnapped.

Kidnapping is big at Leather Camp. You either had to consent to being kidnapped, or perhaps a partner or friend volunteered you for it. At some point, you'd be pounced upon by four or five assailants and receive an abduction made to order. It could be sexual in nature or just a good old-fashioned beating. Either way, Trevor was concerned that his kidnapping would come at an inconvenient time, like on the way to dinner or when he needed to go to the bathroom. He started getting animated and waving his arms around, spilling a cup of hot coffee that barely missed my lap. I didn't know what had happened to my appetite, but I could barely eat anything.

The weather was overcast. Glancing at the schedule of events, I decided I would catch the two-hour “Takin' It Up the Ass” tutorial, which was due to take place at 2:00. On the way out of the dining hall I bumped into Aimee, who was chatting to her boyfriend on the phone. He was turning up at camp tonight and she was terribly excited. Aimee was competing in the stripping contest that night, and she asked for my help in selecting a song and figuring out her choreography. Against my wishes, she picked Alannah Myles's “Black Velvet” from the songbook. We went to the pool and I watched her dance/gymnastic routine take shape.

Satisfied with her moves, we headed up to “the Barn,” which was, as the name suggests, a barn. Inside, twenty people were sitting around looking bored and perplexed.

“This is a lot less stressful than a lot of other SM events,” explained Aimee. “Tutorials happen, or they don't. Other events are more regimented, but this is like, ‘Fuck you, I'm on my vacation!'”

With the night's theme being Mardi Gras, Claudia was running a mask-making competition. We ran over to the dining hall and got busy with the glitter glue, sequins, and feathers. While we tinkered
with design concepts, the conversation turned to what other attendees had told friends and family about where they'd be that weekend. It was rare to hear people talk about the outside world, and I was happy they were. The premise of camp was that people could be “who they really wanted to be,” meaning that, for the most part, the trappings of the real world were checked at the front gate. I, for one, love the trappings of the real world. Without them to embrace or react against, I was getting really, really lonely. With my mask complete and Aimee running off to do a photographed “suspension scene,” I looked around camp for familiar faces, but again found no one.

I walked over to the lake's edge, where a fire had been lit and deserted. I don't like being alone. I'm not sure what's scarier: asking a sixty-year-old guy dressed as Pippi Longstocking to pass the Elmer's Glue, or sitting there by the lake with nothing but my thoughts. I hadn't felt so isolated since I was a bus driver at the oil refinery about five years before. At least then I had a book, the radio, and the occasional grease monkey to chat with. But having to essentially fib to these people all day about who I was and why I was there was making me feel like I was without an identity. It seemed that the more people were into it, the more I was feeling left out. I'm sure that I could have gotten into more situations, but I found it hard to have common ground with people. If you want to know the truth, I almost had a little cry.

I wasn't alone. A rustling in the bushes alerted me to the presence of three medievalists—one male and two female—caressing and canoodling together. The man was wearing Cossack boots, black jodhpurs, and a baggy shirt that looked like liquid chrome with a belt resting midway up his belly. The man gave me what I could only describe as a Shakespearean wave or hand flurry before turning back to his ladies and sipping some Bud Light, which he no doubt wished was ale or mead. Across the edge of the lake, a couple of guys—clothed and looking like civilians—were fishing for the elusive handful of bigmouthed bass rumored to be skulking around in the weeds. I took heart in the fishermen and a Cessna that flew overhead. All this sex, sex, sex was driving me absolutely crazy.

I found Claudia and Josh in the dining hall. In keeping with the Mardi Gras theme, shrimp gumbo, jambalaya, and corn bread were on the menu. In the buffet line, I stood next to a guy who was so manly he made the Brawny towel dude look positively fey. On his back was a woman of similar age—his partner or wife, I presumed. She was pretending to be his daughter, exhibiting the characteristics of a hyperactive seven-year-old girl and addressing the man as “Papa.”

As was becoming the trend, I put more on my plate than I was able to eat. Josh and Claudia introduced me to Martha, a smiley fifty-year-old with Farrah Fawcett hair.

“Oh, don't tell me, you are a bottom, aren't you?” she cooed. “Look at those wonderful baby browns! You wouldn't hurt a fly, would you?”

I
guess
not. I tend to dislike pain, being restrained, or getting generally bothered; I would only give someone a sound beating if they stole my stuff. So I suppose I'm a bottom by default.

During dinner, Josh developed a pronounced facial tic, like his eye was trying to jump off his face. I hadn't noticed it the night before. It seemed to happen every ten seconds and was accompanied by maniacal laughter from Claudia. It transpired that Josh was wearing a mini version of an invisible-fence dog collar around his cock and balls. Claudia held the remote control.

Vincent made his nightly announcements. The abductors of the inflatable dick had cobbled together a ransom note out of letters clipped from a newspaper. Vincent upped the reward for the dick's return to forty-five cents. The dining room erupted with laughter and applause. Vincent then revealed why the “Takin' It Up the Ass” seminar was a nonstarter.

Apparently some poor bugger had fainted and was carted off to the hospital in an ambulance. He had taken too much or not enough of his blood-pressure medication, and as an impossibly large object was inserted into a willing ass, he hit the deck faster than Anna Nicole Smith on a fistful of Vicodin.

There was another special announcement to be made: that day was the one-year anniversary of Peter and Madeleine, who had wed at
Leather Camp last year. Applause all around. Peter then grabbed the mic and presented the camp organizers with a plaque conveying heartfelt thanks. It was really touching. The four of them got a two-minute standing ovation. I got a little choked up myself.

After dinner, everybody filed outside for the stripping competition. Aimee was the first contestant. She did a perfect dance, ending with a headstand, split, and precisely executed bridge. The crowd went apeshit. Peter was up next. Despite his formidable bulk, he did some tantalizing leaps and landed in a split, soliciting oohs and aahs from the audience. Perhaps the biggest crowd-pleaser was a man named “Pluto's Revenge,” a six-foot-four member of the Oink cabin who wore a Mohawk, handlebar mustache, and wraparound shades. He threw his lanky frame around for two minutes while wearing a leather thong pouch. During the routine, he launched his sunglasses into the pool. For the finale, he recklessly somersaulted into the shallow end. When he didn't come up for five seconds, everybody thought the worst. There was uncomfortable silence, then murmuring. But Pluto reemerged victorious. He was wearing the sunglasses and holding his marble sack high above his head.

Another routine of note was Samantha and Craig's. As well as being boyfriend and girlfriend, they were both blonde, skinny, and tall. Dressed identically in pigtails and Catholic-schoolgirl uniforms, they did a naughty take on a mirror dance, backed by Nine Inch Nails' “Closer (I Wanna Fuck You Like an Animal).” At the end, they writhed on a section of indoor-outdoor carpeting wearing nothing but knee-high boots.

It's worth mentioning here that out of ten entrants in the stripping contest, six of them chose “I Wanna Fuck You Like an Animal” as accompaniment. After it was played three times in a row, the DJ declared the song banned. The other strippers were chagrined. “That's fucked up!” one of them cried behind me. Attention was momentarily deflected from the stripping when a woman in a Mardi Gras mask and front-mounted dildo went down on a fellow audience member. The
contest ultimately ended in a tie between Aimee, Pluto's Revenge, and an Audrey Hepburn–type performer known simply as Dancer. Each prize was a bundle of Leather Camp dollars, which could be used at Casino Night or the next day's slave auction.

Aimee's boyfriend finally came to camp, and she couldn't have been happier about it. They'd only been dating for a month, but she was already wearing a collar that indicated she was, in some way, his property.

After the stripping contest, I bumped into Claudia, and we strolled past the torch-lit pony races and down to the pavilion, where Casino Night was being held. Blackjack, poker, and roulette were being played at tables all around. Attendees wore differing degrees of fetish wear. I learned how to play blackjack and even came away with hundreds of (fake) dollars.

Being away from the city's energy made me lethargic, and I was fading fast. In addition to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a midnight snack was provided. That night it was cold cuts and rolls. I start talking to Claudia about how she got into the scene. She was really attractive and in her mid-twenties.

“I was a sorority girl,” she said and smiled. “That's how I learned to top and bottom. It set me up for being a switch. I didn't know it at the time, but a few years later something was definitely pulling me toward the scene.”

My curiosity was piqued, to say the least.

“But you know, I was a great pledge too,” she said. “I was all, ‘Yes, ma'am, yes, ma'am.' I loved it, even the really evil shit.” Apparently, in one hazing ritual the pledges had to strip naked so the seniors could use a permanent marker to circle each girl's less taut body parts.

I said good night and went back to the cabin. The remaining two unoccupied beds had been pushed together and an inflatable bed had been put over the top. Cliff and Liz were our cabin's only couple. They were in their fifties, and they brought everything but the kitchen sink to camp: a night-light, two drink coolers, an elec
tric blanket, a collapsible coat rack, a set of those plastic drawers on wheels with all sorts of medical and cosmetic supplies in them. The woman looked like Olive Oyl, and her husband was the spitting image of Mr. Kotter. I lay in bed wondering about their relationship. I wondered if there were vanilla couples where one partner had discovered the scene and the other just kind of went along with it. That's how Olive Oyl seemed. She looked like she wanted to be anywhere else but in this cabin.

Unlike the night before, I fell asleep immediately. I kept my clothes on and used two towels as auxiliary blankets. It was still bone-chillingly cold, but at least Dan wasn't making such a racket. I woke up at 6:00 on the dot, freezing. I went into the shower room and found that Cliff and Liz had even brought their own massaging showerhead. Unbelievable! I took advantage of their creature comfort and hung out under the shower for the better part of an hour. The majority of my cabinmates were still asleep. It was 7:30, and the rain outside was nothing short of torrential. Breakfast wasn't served until 9:00, but the kitchen staff already had some coffee brewing while they prepared eggs, bacon, and oatmeal. I sat down at one end of the huge dining hall, the only person there. I started talking to a kitchen staffer who was wearing a David Beckham jersey. I guessed he was English, but he was actually from Poland, on one of those Camp America programs.

“I'm from Gdansk,” he told me in perfect English. Not only did Stacek nail my country of origin, but he could identify what region I was from by my accent.

“What do you think of America?” I asked him.

“I much prefer England,” he said. “This place is weird.” I hoped he had seen other things than camp. “Next week, there will be more people here that will be naked and having sex everywhere. It's a strange place, America.”

“This isn't normal,” I said.

I was about to argue the case for my adopted homeland, but as I
opened my mouth, I caught sight of a sexagenarian male dressed as a female toddler and applying rouge at the other end of the dining hall. I shook hands with Stacek, the only person I had met outside of the scene in days, and I stared out at the gloom.

Before I'd left for camp, my editor had told me there were three categories of kids who went to summer camp. Some kids assimilate immediately, disappearing into the throng before their parents have left the parking lot. Others might feel lonely and uncool for the first few days before falling in with a like-minded crowd; they ultimately had to be dragged away. Then there are the kids who piss the bed and want to go home.

I had pissed the proverbial bed. As I sat in the dining hall, watching the rain drive against the window, I was overwhelmed by the need to leave. The continuing monsoon threatened to compromise the rest of the weekend's events; it had driven people inside, into more intimate, insular activities. Everyone at camp seemed to be having the time of their lives, and I was not included. Not being straight up about what I was doing there was starting to become a massive burden; I would make a useless double agent. I just wanted everybody to get on with having fun.