What came down almost immediately was a hair dryer, one of those hair dryers with a long snout. I’ve never even heard of this perversion before, and I’m sure Chuck’s eyes were open wide. She began with the setting on warm, and she played the machine over my body. Everywhere. But still, there was no pain to speak of, not yet.
Michelle then switched the control up to hot, very hot, and, at the same time, she moved it across my body more and more slowly. And then she prodded me with it here and there, just letting it touch my skin before she pulled it away. The pain was real now but not unbearable. Michelle seemed to know just when to withdraw it, just when to pull it away and move it to another spot.
None of the others seemed to be participating in Michelle’s ceremony of pain. I was bent into a position where I couldn’t see them, but they weren’t making a sound. The only way I knew they were still there was that Michelle would refer to them every now and then; she said they were there to bear witness to the punishment, to give testimony that justice was being done.
“And now, my dear Linda,” Michelle said, “the foreplay is coming to an end. You must prepare yourself now for the . . . ah . . . true punishment. Before we begin, you must know that this is not personal, that we all love you very much and we’re all happy to have you back among us again.”
At this point, Michelle led me into a second room, a den. There was only one candle in this room. As the others found seats, I was bent over again, this time over the arm of a chair. The whip and the hair dryer had been left in the other room; this time her tool was to be a dildo.
“I only wish you were a man, not a girl,” Michelle was saying. “I wouldn’t do this to a girl unless she had been very naughty.”
Then she began with the dildo. She prodded me with it gently at first and then she worked it into my rectum. This was not exactly a new experience; naturally, Chuck had done this many times in the past. Of all the things he made me do, this was one of the worst. I’ve always despised the insertion of any strange matter into my body. It had happened often enough so that I had devised a strategy for dealing with it. By this time I was familiar with my own pain threshold and I would begin shrieking before it hurt me seriously, before the real pain became too intense. My shrieks would cause Chuck to climax and leave me alone.
I had always been able to fool Chuck that way but Michelle was a different case. When I began screaming, she did not slow down. There was no way to fool her, and I was left with my last line of defense. I tried to adjust my body, to cut down on the pain through muscular control. Whenever she pushed into me, I’d move ever so slightly with the force. Even that didn’t work. She compensated by pushing still harder.
Now I was screaming for real. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of Chuck. The candlelight glistened off the perspiration on his face. He was in a state of extreme excitement, so much so that it made me feel sick to my stomach. I had never seen that expression on his face; his face was
alive
with pleasure. You know, when you’re making love to someone and you’re in love with someone, the two of you will have very beautiful expressions on your face. He got that same expression on his face from watching that woman rip into me.
Occasionally, Chuck would look away from me and stare at Michelle. His expression changed to one of great admiration. He had finally met someone who knew more about administering pain than he did.
When I tried to squirm away from Michelle and her dildo, Chuck complained.
“She’s trying to back off.”
“You shut up!” She was a wildcat screeching at Chuck. “I’m taking care of her now and
you just fuck off!
This is my work, this is me.”
As she screamed at Chuck, she was stabbing into me faster and faster, harder and harder. My numbness defense mechanism was no longer functioning. There was a short circuit in my
Off
switch and I panicked. Not just from the pain, although this was the most intense pain I’d known. But suddenly I had the feeling that Michelle had slipped over the edge of sanity and there would be no way of stopping her until I was lying there dead. I was sure she would stab at me and rip at me with that dildo until there was nothing left of me.
“Oh, God!” I called out. “Stop her! Make her stop! She’s killing me!”
Michelle was clearly in a high state of excitement herself, sobbing out her breaths. But it got worse and worse, always worse. She had both hands on the dildo now and she was stabbing it into me. Then I felt the warmth of blood gushing out my rectum. There was no way to stop the pain and there was no way to stop her.
Finally, someone did speak up. It was the other male in the room. Joe College. Until that moment he had not said a single word. And when he finally did say something, I was feeling faint from the loss of blood.
“Whoa! Whoa right there,” he said. “What the hell are you doing to this chick?”
I was astonished. All the things I had been involved in—everything that had happened to me up to then—I had never heard anyone else stand up and say that it was wrong or crazy. When I realized that he was on his feet, my only fear was that he’d leave before stopping Michelle. But no, he walked over to the high priestess and grabbed her arm.
“That’s all,” he said. “We’re ending this right now. You fucking people are crazy. We’re going to get this girl to a hospital right now.”
Michelle seemed to have some trouble hearing him. It was as if she was coming out of a heavy trance. She had been getting off on the blood.
“Yes,” she said, finally. “I suppose that is enough punishment.”
“I’m going to call the hospital,” the young man said.
“No, I can handle this.” Michelle seemed back in full control of herself. “I’ve got just the things to take care of this. Don’t worry about it. It’s nowhere near as serious as it appears.”
“Yeah, don’t get in an uproar,” Chuck chimed in. “Linda loves this. She does this kind of thing all the time.”
Michelle then produced a jar of some kind of ointment and she rubbed that into my wound. It seemed to stop the bleeding.
“Sometimes the punishment will hurt a little,” Michelle cooed. “But it hurts me just as much. It’s just that we must be sure that you don’t run away again. We wouldn’t want to hear of you doing anything naughty again.”
I was so grateful that the pain was coming to an end. It was the worst pain ever. I would have much rather been punched and kicked by Chuck than have had Michelle sticking that thing into me.
“If this gives you any more trouble,” Michelle was saying, “you should check into a hospital for a day or two. But it won’t. It’ll clear up, and you’ll be as good as new.”
As we drove home that night, Chuck seemed angry with me.
“You had to go bleed and ruin everything,” he said.
“What?”
“Your fucking bleeding,” he said. “That Michelle was just getting into it when you started bleeding all over the place.”
“You’re blaming me for
bleeding?
”
“It’s the way you were fucking doing it,” he said. “Your whole fucking attitude. You couldn’t look like you were enjoying it a little? You couldn’t beg for more? On, no. Not you. And that other guy, that fag, he has to go and open his mouth. Take you to the
hospital
—where’s that guy been all his life?”
The evening may not have gone perfectly for Chuck but remembering it later on brought him no end of pleasure. The mere act of remembering was enough to set Chuck off again.
“I wonder what Michelle is doing tonight,” he’d say. “She was really some piece of work, that Michelle. Remember that night we were over at her house and she tied you up—remember that?—and she was coming at you with that fucking dildo? God, that was some night.”
fourteen
Chuck put me through so many degrading scenes, so many Michelles, that I’m sure people wonder why I didn’t find a way to murder him. Well, the thought
did
cross my mind. But whenever I was filled with the resolve to kill him, there was no way to do it. And when there was a way, there was no will.
Once one of my tricks gave me some poison pills; he said that two of the pills in a glass of water would kill a person in just a few minutes. I kept those pills for days while I thought about it. That was one inner battle I almost lost. But finally I flushed the pills away. There were other times when Chuck would have a diabetic seizure; I could’ve just left him on the floor, just walked away, but something stopped me.
No matter how evil a person is, I couldn’t just walk away and let him die. I could never be the cause of someone else’s being killed. I have always believed in God and I knew that God would get me out of my troubles. I know today that God will take care of Chuck without any help from me or anyone else. If people do bad all the time, they’re going to suffer.
However, back then it seemed as if God was looking the other way. Chuck and Michelle had been evil; yet, I was the one who suffered. And the suffering was getting worse. Several days after the “party,” an infection set in and began hurting. When the hurting became unbearable, Chuck finally came up with a doctor for me, a proctologist I’ll call Dr. James.
Dr. James was short, about fifty years old and he wore heavy horn rimmed glasses. He completed his examination quickly.
“You have an infection,” he said. “Nothing we can’t take care of. But let me tell you something, you shouldn’t fool around like that any more. I must be blunt—you should have no more anal sex.”
I couldn’t have agreed more heartily. I wanted to tell him that this wasn’t my idea in the first place. But, as usual, I said nothing. What would he have thought? What would he have said if he knew the infection had come from some maniacal woman stabbing me with a dildo?
“If you don’t stop the practice of anal sex,” he said, taking on an almost fatherly tone, “this will cause you a great deal of pain. And that’s not the worst of it. There will come a time some day when you will lose control of your muscles there, the sphincter muscles, and you won’t be able to regulate your bowel movements. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen. This is a not uncommon phenomenon among older members of the homosexual community. But what is bothering you now is the pain; I think you should look on the pain as a warning.”
“Doctor, do me one favor. Don’t tell my husband about the pain, about the anal sex causing me pain.”
“But surely he’s just the one I
should
tell.”
“No, really, Doc,” I said. “Just don’t tell my husband. If he knows it hurts me, he’ll just go on doing it. I’ve got to tell you, he’s a little weird that way.”
The doctor guided me back out to the waiting room, and Chuck whispered to me.
“Did you work out a deal?”
“What?”
“A deal—what kind of a deal did you work out for the bill?”
“Chuck, he’s a
doctor!
”
“Oh, Doc!” Chuck raised his voice. “My old lady tells me she didn’t work out a deal for the bill yet.”
“No, we haven’t discussed payment,” the doctor said.
Chuck took the doctor to one side and their whispered discussion lasted no more than a minute or two. As Chuck came over to me, he gave me a wink and a smile. The meaning was clear. Chuck was not going to have to pay for the bill; I was. Not in cash but in services. It was to be a professional service for a professional service.
“Your appointment will be one week from today.” The doctor’s attitude was very matter-of-fact. “I’ll see you at the end of the working day. Just after my nurse leaves. Let’s see now, you’ll be the last appointment of the day. There’ll be no one else here. No, no, I’ll tell you what. Before coming, call me first at this number—that way you can be sure everyone has gone. That should do it for now. It was nice meeting you, Mr. and Mrs. Traynor.”
“Yeah, so long, Doc,” Chuck said. “See you Thursday.”
“Oh, there’s one more thing,” the doctor said. “Mr. Traynor, I’ve already told your wife this: No more anal sex. Any more anal sex will cause her a great deal of pain.”
“Right,” Chuck said, smiling.
What kind of world do we live in? Would you believe that a doctor, a professional man, would accept sexual favors as payment for a bill? I would assume that a doctor would ask you whether you had Blue Cross or Blue Shield or medical insurance, but I never heard that kind of question from a doctor. No, they listened to Chuck for just a minute and the only question they would ask me was whether I could see them after regular office hours. I guess this shouldn’t have surprised me; it happened often enough.
The only good thing to come out of my meeting with Dr. James was a prescription for
Percodan
. When Chuck asked me what the pills were for, I didn’t bother mentioning their pain-killing properties. I told Chuck they were supposed to reduce the infection. As you might imagine, Chuck had only negative feelings about pain killers. And I sensed that
Percodan
could make life a good deal easier for me. I managed to hide most of the pills from Chuck and use them as necessary. If I got a vial of several dozen
Percodan
pills, I’d empty out most of them and let Chuck see only a half dozen of them.
Every Thursday afternoon, Dr. James went through an examination that seemed quicker than the week before. And then he’d give me some
Percodan
pills out of his drawer with a hand that trembled slightly.
“Everything looks fine,” he’d say. “Just fine. Let’s go inside.”
After leading me into a second office, he locked the door, sat down, unzippered himself, and waited for me. The tricks always found a way to let me know just what they wanted. If they undressed themselves, they wanted intercourse. The ones who just unzippered themselves wanted oral sex. Dr. James was nervous throughout the process, constantly glancing toward the locked door of his inner office, anxious to dismiss me as soon as he had finished.
“See you next week,” he’d say.
At this time, Dr. James was one of four professional men I was servicing in a single office complex in downtown Miami. In addition to the proctologist, I was visiting a dermatologist on a regular basis. And, when Chuck developed eye trouble, he added an optometrist to our list. And, finally, there was a former lawyer of Chuck’s. I found it absolutely amazing that so many professionals would be so willing to trade services. And I also found myself praying that Chuck and I stayed in good health.
The dermatologist—his real name is Dr. Gross—supplied Chuck with pill prescriptions, either ups or downs, in exchange for me. Chuck always liked to have plenty of pills around to give as favors to the girls who worked for him.
Dr. Gross, a young man still in his thirties, always seemed to be in a good mood. One reason for his high spirits might have been the nurses who worked for him: he seemed to have surrounded himself with nurses who had unusually large and perky breasts. When Chuck commented on this one day, he learned that Dr. Gross had given his nurses silicone injections. Chuck decided that would be just the thing for me. But first he asked one of the nurses what the breasts were like.
“Do they feel natural, or do they get hard?”
“Why don’t you feel for yourself?”
Naturally, Chuck needed no further encouragement. I had to wonder at that. Was the nurse such a tramp? Or was it possible that her breasts had lost their sensitivity? Something else bothered me about the whole thing. I learned that it was illegal to have silicone injected into your breasts. It seems to me when something is illegal, there’s usually a danger connected with it.
Dr. Gross pointed out one of the drawbacks himself. He said that if I used silicone, I’d never be able to breastfeed a baby. I would never agree to something that would interfere with that. Even then I clung to the belief that someday I was going to have a normal life. I was going to marry and have children and those children were going to feed from me in a natural way.
I think every woman dreams about having beautiful, large, well-shaped breasts, but the notion of silicone terrified me. It was connected somehow to my feeling about dildoes. Because I can’t stand the thought of any unnatural object being placed into my body, I certainly didn’t want them injecting any chemical—or whatever it was—inside of my breasts.
However, the decision was not mine to make. Chuck decided that I would be better off with bigger breasts. And if that meant I could never nurse a baby—well, so what? What would that ever mean to him?
Dr. Gross informed Chuck that this was too big an operation to do in exchange for services; he would require cash. Chuck agreed and, needless to say, the cash was raised through my professional services.
This, then, was one of the few times I visited a doctor during his office hours. That first day I was scared to death. I was lying on a table and he began with injections of pain killer. Then he produced a huge needle, a tube filled with a gel substance. It looked like something from a cartoon, something you might use for knocking out a horse or decorating a cake.
The gigantic needles were shoved into all four sides of each breast; that awful stuff was pumped right into me. Despite the early pain-killing injections, the insertion of the silicone was extremely painful.
At first, while I was still lying flat on my back, I didn’t notice any difference. But when I got to my feet, I could see the change. That quickly I went from a size 34-B to a size 36-C. Although my breasts did appear much fuller, I had the feeling they no longer belonged to me.
Chuck kept looking at the new me in disbelief. And I must admit, my new breasts gave me a temporary break from Chuck’s abuse. His favorite descriptive phrase for me had always been “flat-chested.” Now he was at a loss for words. He would find other failings in time, but at least for a few days there was a breather.
Chuck was able to accept the new breasts more easily than I could. In the years to come, as I heard more and more about the dangers of silicone, I began to realize that Dr. Gross had put time bombs into my breasts. And, in fact, the time bombs went off a few years ago. What happened was that the silicone did not stay together. It separated, slipping here and there, and my breasts became lumpy and painful. A doctor in California decided that my breasts had to be removed at once. He said that later it might be possible to do reconstructive surgery, putting in implants and building them up all over again.
I waited a week and went to another doctor. He said that what was happening was that my milk glands were starting to swell up and that I was going to have a baby. Fortunately, that doctor was correct. I did have my baby. And there was a second pleasant surprise—I was able to nurse him.
Since then, I’ve seen other doctors. I’ve been warned that the disintegrating silicone could form a clot that could kill me. I’ve also been told the breasts should still come off. But I don’t have much faith in doctors anymore.