My paraphernalia is a problem. Some of it is probably illegal. The law is vague. One hustler I know got raided, and the only kinky thing they could find was a riding crop, so they busted him on an old statute against cruelty to animals. Vibrators are okay if they can't be inserted, but dildoes are “a device which demeans women.” So I've got a secret hiding place. It's actually a crate, but it looks like a window seat. It doubles as a whipping bench. I try to keep everything put away in there under a false bottom. But there's no way to really hide what I do and still be able to do it. Besides, if the public safety officers want to get you, all they need to do is drop a nickel bag of junk on your pillow and “discover” it.
My pride and joy is a complete set of leather restraints. I ripped them off when I left a residential drug-rehab program. It was stupid of me to have ever gone there. I am not an addict. I can stop getting high any time I want to. And if I was hooked on something, well, I wouldn't do anything but that, would I? I try to be flexible. If you don't stay flexible the street will eat you up, one big mouthful of crunch and juice.
I also have some acupuncture needles, a hairbrush, some candles, clothespins, a riding crop, and a cat-o'-nine tails I braided myself. I've gussied up an old ping-pong paddleâdrilled holes in it and painted it blackâand I have a nice handful of willow switches cut from the vacant lot on the corner.
Most of the scene is me, my imagination, and my intuition. Clients give me equipment sometimes, things they get hot for that they don't dare keep, and I'm always looking around for new gimmicks, but this is not exactly a dungeon. There are some unrealistic M's who can't overlook a few flaws in their surroundings. They may see me once but they don't come back. I don't know where I'm supposed to find the elaborate costumes and torture devices that some of these janes think you need to do “real” S/M. Sometimes they even bring me pictures of what I'm supposed to look likeâand scripts! I prefer the ones who need it to be a little rough and raunchy, who like it impoverished and spontaneous. There must be people doing this who make a lot more money than I do, maybe the people who advertise. I don't dare run one of those ads. I don't see how they can get away with it, why they don't get busted.
Somebody is walking toward me. She sees me coming and crosses the street, swinging a knotted-string bag full of artichokes and something wrapped in white paper. Fish, I'll bet. She looks over her shoulder to make sure I'm not following her. If I told her what my name was, do you think I could clear up her misconceptions about my gender? The only thing I can do for her is just keep on walking. By the time she gets home, she'll have forgotten about going out of her way to avoid me.
I don't eat fish very often. But the janes keep telling me I'm pricing myself out of business. A spanking is more expensive than a blow-job, but anything you negotiate off the curb isn't as pricey as those snotty houses. If you work in a house, you have to pay for a slot there, and you wind up hooked on something so you stay in hock with the madam. She's the one who says who you see and what you do with them and she brings you a clean towel. Thank you, I'll just scuff the lube into the floor, and wipe my hands on your ass.
I am
not
a parasite. I don't roll anybody, and I treat them all like human beings. This may be hard for you to imagine, but some of these folks are not sweet. They feel bad, and they are paying for a chance to make me feel like shit, tooâafter I've made them feel better. Sometimes I think they're all that way, but really, most of them are not nasty, just freaked out about themselves. Sometimes I think I help some of them get over it by giving them a chance to really do it. I'm not claiming it's healthy, but if they see me they don't have to do it with anybody else. Keeps it under control, like.
Whenever I think about this I think about Jackie, because what we did was none of this sick shit, I mean, we were lovers. She was always telling me, “I have to take care of you and teach you what's what. If I slap you around a little, it's to make you listen.” Sometimes I would slap her back. And after we fought we always made love, I couldn't stand to let her stay mad at me. I had to make her touch me, be sweet to me, after she was mean. Nobody else loved me. If she didn't, or if I thought she didn't, I would go nuts and start breaking things. “There's something wrong with you, you know that?” she would yell. I don't know what, I don't know when it went wrong, but I know it's true.
Maybe it started in group care. As soon as I learned how to read, I started getting chastised for being verbally aggressive. We had one teacher who kept taking me aside for long talks about the stabilizing and calming influences of manual labor. She gave me biographies of union organizers for holiday gifts. But I knew I wasn't headed for the fucking proletariat. Nobody wants to be sent to the farms, the road crews, the decon teams, or the factories. But we need farmers and ditch-diggers and machinists very badly. It's okay to grouse about that kind of work if you're going to end up doing it. If you ain't, you better pretend nothin' could make you happier than throwing a shovel full of mud over your shoulder all day.
It was like the future was chasing me. I learned as fast as I could. I used big words like magic spells to keep the other fetuses away from me. (That was what we called each other, and we lost dessert or even got smacked if the teachers heard us.) I couldn't tolerate the kids who were as smart as me because they were my competition. And the faster I learned, the faster I propelled myself into classes full of older kids who resented the smartass mouth on my pint-sized body. So I learned even faster to stay ahead of them, get away from themâ which landed me in a one-year, college-prep program at the ripe old age of fifteen. I wasn't the youngest one there, but I came close.
For a while I thought I would be a historian. But there aren't many gigs in esoteric fields like history, unless you have a minor in political education. Then you wind up writing draft propaganda for the Ministry of Self-Defense or some eagle job like that. Doctors, though, they always need more doctors. I wasn't too sharp in the hard sciences, but I had a hell of a class consciousness that I hoped would make up for it. See, doctors are part of the elite. They almost never get remanded to rural re-education even if they get caught doing abortions. Sometimes the courts sentence them to learn to take joy in the dignity of labor, but they usually wind up just doctoring the inmates and guards and any farmer within traveling distance. The powers that be (that-aren't-supposed-to-be) get worried about subversion and intellectualism in such a powerful profession. I tried to make it clear that wouldn't be a problem with righteous little jargon-spieling me.
The college-prep program was a privileged slot no matter where you were headed. I had a room of my own. This was supposed to leave me with lots of peace and quiet to concentrate on my studies. But it also gave me freedom to do other things, things I had wanted to do since childhood. Like masturbate.
Sex was problematic in group care. (Not that there's any place where it ain't.) Adults are free to form loving, egalitarian relationships. And since you are free to do that, why would anybody want to do anything squalid like fucking strangers? There's no law against adultery or sodomy, but most people think if you're not saving it for your mate, you are either exploiting someone, being exploited, or (what's worse) wasting time. Children are obviously too young to form relationships, but they do have to be protected from sexual abuse by adults or bigger children. The workers and teachers are too busy cleaning up, giving lessons, and reinforcing good work habits and androgyny to tell you about sex, except for routinely discouraging the boys from paying too much attention to their winkies. They don't touch you because they are all paranoid about being reported for “fondling.” I don't remember being left alone long enough to fool around with other little kids.
Nevertheless, I was intensely sexual. I hurt down there. I knew that I wanted to touch the hurt place, and do even worse things. I wanted to pull other people's clothes off and see how they were made. I wanted to stick things up all my holes. I wanted to inflict (here my mind would go blank and mumble) something on myself. I couldn't very well talk about this because nobody else did. Yet we all had a rich vocabulary of insulting sexual slang. I guess we acquired it by osmosis because none of the adults used these words in front of us. Since the toilet was one of the only private places available, I learned how to make myself come in the amount of time it takes most people to pee. If anybody else did that, they were in another stall or lined up in front of one, so how would I know? I was convinced that nobody else needed to do that. I was a freak. But I could fool people. I really could.
Now that I had my own room, I masturbated every night and during the day too. When I laid down, it didn't feel right to touch the top of the slit, that bump, the way it did when I sat on the toilet. So I tried sticking things in my cunt, my ass, my urethra, my mouth. I tried different positions and rubbing on things. When I thought more about what might work I could only think it had to be something more, so I could feel it. I tied my feet up so I could pull on the ropes. Sometimes I tied the other end of the rope around my neck. I put paper clips on my labia. I hit my thighs with a ruler. I bought a box of candles, and melted two of them together to make something I could get in my ass and my cunt at the same time. When I was very horny, I would try to carry out my tests or rituals all day long. I would put a few pins in my underwear, or I would wear these little clamps on my nipples under a heavy, loose sweatshirt. In summer, this takes true dedication. I wanted to leave my candle-thing in all day, but I was afraid it would melt.
I was studying one afternoon and having a hell of a time concentrating. I kept getting sleepy, to the point where I would have to lie down, and as soon as I did, I would discover I was ferociously horny. I would masturbate. As soon as I came I would be wide awake, and I would go back to studying. I carried on like this for nearly two hours before I realized what I was responding to so strongly. I was preparing for an exam in Human Anatomy 101. I had been studying colored plastic plates that flay the human body layer by layer, taking off skin, then muscle, till you get down to blood vessels, organs, and finally bare bone. I wanted to vomit.
My completed paper for my History of the State class was lying next to the anatomy textbook. It had some grandiose title like “The Technology of Oppression.” I had compared the way the Inquisition treated women suspected of witchcraft to the treatments meted out to female leftists in the tiny military dictatorships that defoliated South America in the twentieth century. I flipped it open and started counting pages. Half of it was nothing but the descriptions of torture. How could anybody read this and not know about me? At that point, I think I did vomit.
Another passerby is cruising me up and down. My feelings are still a little hurt about the woman who crossed the street to get away from me. Sometimes I feel like such a menace to society when I walk down the street, my legs get rubbery and I can't keep track of whether or not my feet are hitting the sidewalk. And I think if one more person even looks at me, I'm going to have hysterics. So I straighten my shoulders and give this one a level look, acknowledging that what she is thinking about me is not nearly outrageous enough. She looks a bit put-off, but a little wistful, too. She sticks her hands in her sleeves and walks on. Her robe is a dark, conservative color, but the cut and fabric is expensive. She does not look back, but I know it will take more than a walk home to make her forget me. It wouldn't surprise me if she turns up as a client some day. Maybe she already has.
This collision with the law has forced me to evaluate my life in a way that is thoroughly unpleasant. I keep going back, trying to find an explanation in my past that might appease the faceless authorities who seem determined to stomp me flat. Or maybe it really is my fault, maybe somewhere in this story I should have made a different choice, and maybe it's not too late to fix it.
Aw, what can you do? I knew way back then I was abnormal. Knew it as clearly as I knew I had two hands and only nine fingers. And what could I do about it? Nothing. (Well, I had a chilly premonition of city streets and crumpled money and dark, smoky bars. Where do we learn these things that everyone is so scrupulously careful not to tell us?) I felt like I needed some therapy, but I didn't want some ego-shrinker getting me in a corner and writing down my answers to her questions. So, for the first time in my life, I joined a group, an ad hoc committee called Students for Solidarity. It was going to be my salvation.
We were just a lot of juvenile troublemakers. And we irritated enough people in high places to make ourselves feel righteous. We were a self-appointed band of ideologies and vigilantes who kept tabs on suspicious professors, administrators, and students. If somebody seemed to have regressive tendencies, we would call a public meeting and air our grievances. We would also hold sit-ins outside their class, office, or dorm roomâor burn them in effigy. Among the things that concerned us most were the ⦠uh, it takes a minute for the lingo to come back to me ⦠the holdovers, that was the phrase, the holdovers from exploitative, male-dominated, consumer-capitalist sexualities.
Now, you tell me, is there a better place for a novice pervert to hide than inside a moral crusade? Who would have thought to look for me there, speaking primly into a bullhorn or carrying my crudely lettered sign like an ax that could sunder right from wrong? How I despised myself, and struggled to become what my fellow crusaders thought I already was, and how I scared myself. It was too easy. I couldn't believe how quickly people scuttled back into line when we threatened them with exposure. It was my first taste of intimidation. I got to be well known as a spokesperson for this cosy cadre, and professors would blanch when I wound up on their rosters. I started getting invited to a lot of faculty teas. I also started getting some mild harassment. My records were always being misplaced or some other paper blunder being made that would take me weeks to straighten out. I became such a minor celebrity that I started getting private tips. Students (and others) with their pubes in a knot would come to me and explain that they couldn't do anything about it as an individual but maybe in the strength of community that Students for Solidarity had we could handle it. You see?