Whip Smart: A Memoir (15 page)

When I began working at the dungeon, the thought of taking cabs never occurred to me; it simply had never been an option. For all my years of city living, I had always walked wherever I could, biked from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and remained infatuated with the subway longer than anyone. But it took only a few weeks for impossibilities to become luxuries and for luxuries to become necessities. I took cabs
everywhere
. I ate in restaurants nightly and bought clothes without trying them on to kill time while waiting for a date. I could suddenly have bouquets delivered on Mother’s Day and take the Acela train to Boston instead of Fung Wah, the
gypsy bus that went from Chinatown to Chinatown for $10. Between my weekend drug binges, weekly mani-pedis, cab fares, and restaurant checks, I soon had a lifestyle whose financial demands eagerly rose to meet my income.

It wasn’t only my economic status that had changed. My rise in popularity among the dungeon’s regular clients coincided with the sudden privilege of a more flexible schedule and the disappearance of fines to my pay for arbitrary things like failing to follow room-cleaning protocol, leaving a shift early, or eating in the dressing room. I found myself one of the few mistresses whom Remy cracked bad jokes to and occasionally teased in his flushed, unintelligible way. It helps not to make enemies; I’d always known this.

Contention with phone girls would leave you undersold to clients, as every appointment had to come through Fiona, Jordan, or one of the other phone girls. While your income could plummet as a result of offending them, the reverse was possible if they liked you, so I made sure that they did. While there was a natural relay of clients between mistresses, overtly stealing someone else’s regular slave before either party had reached the requisite state of ennui was bad form and could make your life hell in the dungeon. So I didn’t. The same went for performing sexual favors in session that crossed a certain line. It was simple etiquette: if no one is giving blow jobs or getting naked, then the clients won’t expect it and there will be a fair distribution of patronage. When it happened, it never stayed quiet for long. I witnessed many a rookie, not pretty or skilled enough to justify nabbing every walk-in who came through the door, finishing hour sessions in fifteen minutes. They never lasted. Physical confrontations were occasional but uncommon, though rare was the girl who could withstand more than a few weeks of our ostracization; the dungeon simply wasn’t big enough. If social pressure failed, Remy could always be persuaded to fire them. The disgruntled consensus of his highest earners was powerful enough to end many careers. We used to kid about forming a union, demanding hourly minimums and health insurance,
but so long as you were steadily earning for Remy, the threat of leaving for another dungeon was usually enough to get you what you wanted.

Still, there was jealousy, snotty asides from mistresses who had been there longer than me or whose look resembled mine (busty, petite, Betty Page haircut). There were also Autumn’s former friends, who resented her neglect since my arrival. Recognizing my own naïveté humbled me early on, when it became obvious that the dungeon was no sanctuary from the atmosphere of competition between women that is fostered so avidly in this culture. I believed then (as I do today) that this is largely due to the conspiracy of a multibillion-dollar industry to convince women that we are not good enough and that good equals beautiful by its unattainable definition, so that we will buy more stuff. It was hopelessly naïve of me to think that the dungeon would be an exception. Sure, the sexual ideal of many of our clients contradicted that one paraded through SoHo on the thin, coltish legs of malnourished teenage models. Our clients often requested big butts, and bodies that smelled human; they fetishized body hair and physical strength. But these were still the characteristics that determined our value; it was still a sexual prescription. It was still a competition. I kept score, too. The ugly reality, like many, was easy to stomach while I appeared to be winning.

Though in my first year there I became more comfortable in my body than I had been since childhood, my confidence reflected a perceived sexual value. I had always thought I was smart, but I still changed my clothes inside my sleeping bag at summer camp. Despite my feminist ’zine making, unshaved legs, and proclaimed bi-sexuality as a young teen, I still silently behaved and thought like someone who hated her body. At the dungeon, I finally felt free of that, and the power of my sexual confidence and the money was intoxicating enough that I could choose not to examine it too closely.

This is not to say that the dungeon was the cesspool of cattiness, insecurity, and sabotage that I have heard strip clubs and escort agencies to be. It
was
exceptional in many ways. The women
there spoke frankly about subjects that are aired much less often than they ought to be. Especially in my first year I admired them, when the mistresses were more experienced than me. They spoke about their insecurities and eating disorders (past and present). They discussed sexual abuse histories and unconventional sexual practices. Camille once told me, in a casual kitchen conversation, that she thought she’d been a submissive since childhood. As an adolescent, she used to scrub her vagina with a hairbrush in masturbation. Now as an adult she had a master in London who dressed in Nazi uniforms for sessions (his clients were mostly men). He and Camille were in love, she said, and would marry one day. He knew how to treat her tenderly, but he also carved designs into the back of her neck with a razor blade, locked her in the trunk of his car for hours, and flogged her back purple. She said that she knew it was a result of her history that she had desire so twisted up with hurt. “I accept that,” she told me. In her way, she seemed more content with her lot than most of the women I knew. Who was I to judge her happiness?

I’d always had many more male than female friends, and it was an unexpected relief to spend so much time around women. I felt comfortable. We got our periods at the same time, bickered and made up like siblings. We laughed until it hurt. These women were the first people I ever felt comfortable being naked in front of. They tied my corsets for me, showed me how to be confident in my body and how to be a great dominatrix. But in the end, we were still lining up ten times a day like pageant contestants to compete for biggest turn-on.

After six or eight months, however, I had markedly less down-time in the dungeon with which to form alliances and rivalries; I was too busy. Like most new hires who were pretty enough and stuck out the first few weeks, I enjoyed an early boom in business chiefly owing to the same batch of dungeon regulars that every domme before and after me would know. We had nicknames for
them, as we did for most of the clients we shuffled among ourselves. This first wave of undesirables included: Pi lot Dave, Fish Bill, Pussy John, Hairless Billy, White Sneaker Fred, Fisting Jack, Dan Dan the Jerk-off Man, and Mental Dental Roy. Though they would occasionally reattach to a more experienced domme, they preyed mainly on new girls, who proved less adept at setting boundaries and more comfortable with sensual sessions. This motley cast made the rounds at every major Manhattan dungeon: Pandora’s Box, Mistress Elizabeth’s, The Ball and Chain, The Den of Iniquity, Rapture, Arena, and so on. On Internet forums shared by the citywide commercial S&M community, they were often mentioned, in jokes and warnings. I still saw some of them by the close of my first year, but my relationship with most had completed the life cycle from intimidating, to exhilarating, to more tedious than $75 could account for.

The easiest way to terminate with a client was to perform badly. While a fair number of clients paid to be ignored, insulted, and laughed at, the majority wanted nothing less than to see a dominatrix whom their fantasies bored. When yawning, monotones, and abruptly ended sessions failed, I would have to dump them, suggesting a recent hire whom I thought better suited to the job. Most of these scenes were relatively painless, with no more discomfort than my usual fear of others’ disappointment and hurt feelings. In a few cases, they played the disconcerting role of jilted boyfriend, weeping, pleading, and calling repeatedly to beg for reconciliation. While it was part of my job to act as though I shared their fantasies, as if the money were a mere formality, the strength of their delusion in these cases was sad and disturbing. By the time summer rolled around, I had replaced them with regulars who were better tippers, more challenging in the good ways (creative sessions, intense role-plays), and less challenging in the bad ways (annoyance, attachment, hygiene, tedium, and sleaze factors).

And I had discovered something. I was good at my job. I greeted
this discovery with genuine surprise, still believing that it was more chance than personality that had landed me in the dungeon. I lived in New York, had an open mind, and needed money, but I didn’t want to strip or prostitute myself. It seemed obvious. I was surprised that I didn’t know more women who had tried it.

THE LAST TIME
I shot heroin was the day I moved upstairs from Autumn. I had left the Bed-Stuy apartment I’d lived in for almost three years with barely a glance back. Though if Rebecca had been home, I might have found that harder. She had helped me pack, though I wished she hadn’t. I wanted to preserve my excitement about leaving, and her wistful presence agitated my doubts. I was moving forward—leaving behind the water bugs and mice, Kevin’s wolf whistles, and the innocence with which I’d knocked on my neighbor’s door that pivotal morning.

“Williamsburg isn’t that far away,” I said, though Rebecca and I both knew how little we’d see each other. As close as everything is geo graphically in New York, it’s easy and comfortable to become cloistered in your own neighborhood. Factor in the lifestyle I was moving closer toward and how much it differed from hers, and the likelihood of our maintaining the same intimacy grew even less. But my desire for that lifestyle prompted my move: the shiny parts of being a domme. I wanted to move closer to the money, the invincibility of it, and how big it all made me feel: the shadowiness
and the sex of it, the distance from any sense of insecurity or neediness. I wanted to feel that strong always. The old apartment, the decrepitude of Bed-Stuy, even my friends seemed like relics of an earlier, less knowing, more vulnerable version of me.

The tiny Williamsburg studio wasn’t worth what I paid for it, but it was mine. My bedroom window looked out over our land-lord’s concrete patio. All day, the harpy matriarch would sit out on a plastic chair and scream at her husband and adult daughter in Italian, prompting the daughter to then scream at her own children in Brooklynese, leaving the children to torment the dog, an incessantly barking dachshund named Precious. “Go the fuck to sleep!” was their nightly refrain.

Autumn was out of town when I moved in, so I enlisted the help of an old boyfriend to carry my crates of books up the staircase. He brought with him five bags of South Boston dope and a syringe the size of a flashlight.

“What am I supposed to do with this monstrosity?” I said.

“I couldn’t get to the needle exchange before I caught the bus,” he said. “So I had to steal it from my doctor.” Junky logic.

“You know that you can buy them at Duane Reade here?”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, okay, sure.
You
ride the train into the city and go to the pharmacy. I will be here when you get back, enjoying these drugs.”

So I stuck that javelin into my arm, and as soon as we could move, we moved.

It had been weeks since I’d gotten high—the longest I’d gone in years—so it was ironic that that was the night my problem became apparent to my coworkers. A few hours after moving, I was in session with Vinny and four other mistresses. As usual, we occupied Med 3, sweating beneath the mirrored ceilings and maintaining our stony faces. Bella was naked on a footstool, her blasé expression appropriate for once.

“Don’t smile!” Vinny scolded the new girl, Sasha, as she tortured his nipples with a pair of long-handled clamps. Camille held his arms behind the upright examination table, her bored face resting against the side of his headrest, watching the wall-mounted television. On the screen, a potbellied man in riding pants whipped a woman tied to a wooden post. Hay lay scattered around their feet in an obviously haphazard attempt to create a barnlike atmosphere. Vinny preferred those videos that might have been taped in some-one’s actual basement or backyard. His favorites featured older women (
GrandMILFs Go Down
), unshaven women (
Hirsute Honeys XII
), and stars with cellulite, potbellies, and bad teeth. A part of me liked him for rejecting the usual choreographed, silicone-enhanced fare.

Miss K—a veteran with the duel honors of an Ivy League degree in architecture and the roundest ass ever seen on a woman of her stature and proportions—held a butt plug in place with one gloved hand. Situated between his stirruped feet, I teased his urethra with the tip of a catheter. The tube of rubber was as long as my arm and thin as a knitting needle.