Whip Smart: A Memoir (16 page)

“No, no, no,” Vinny moaned, jerking against Camille’s grasp. He spoke in his slave voice, which was higher pitched, and unheeded. He had a “safe word,” as most sessions did: a code word to call out when “no, stop” could be mistaken for part of the scene. Vinny’s safe word was “red,” but he never used it, because we could always tell his real voice from his fantasy one. Vinny provided a classic case of topping from the bottom. He wasn’t submissive but had a submissive fantasy. So we pretended to dominate him, under meticulous stage direction. He wasn’t the worst case of this, but it added to the tedium of his fantasy.

Like any addict, Vinny had a high tolerance, and that night was not one of his easier ones. The hour felt interminable. Vinny wheezed and mewed, even his hairy shins slick with the effort. Sweat slid off my forearm and down the length of the orange catheter. Bella sighed, looking down to check her nails as she flicked
her own nipples. Miss K wiggled the butt plug with one hand and reached up to rub her back with the other. Sasha increased the pressure of her clamps, Vinny’s moaning building, building, building, and then waning. He did not look like a man indulging in lascivious pleasure. He looked like a man suffering from painful constipation. He was working harder than any of us, and his face began to take on a maniacal look of desperation. Then it looked as if it might happen. We all increased our effort, threw ourselves into as passionate an act of apathy as we could muster. Vinny announced, “I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna—,” and then my stomach turned. The catheter hit the floor with a little slap, like the tail of something. I lunged for the sink under the television and vomited into it.

It wasn’t the first time Vinny had failed to climax by the end of his session, but it was the first time my coworkers had ever looked at me that way. “I’m sick,” I offered as they filed out, pushing their damp hair off their foreheads. Vinny had booked the session with me, and so I stayed to clean up and walk him out. When he got out of the shower, I had already finished cleaning and sat on the disinfected examination table. Vinny smiled at me, removed the towel from his waist, and began buffing his shoulders and back with it.

“I used to have a coke problem, you know,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” I stared at his genitals. They jiggled beneath his belly, purple and withered.

“You’re on heroin, aren’t you? I know what it looks like.”

“I really just used to have a problem,” I said. “I only do it every once in a while now.”

His knowing look made me want to punch him in the face.

WALKING INTO
an AA meeting didn’t feel the same as walking into a party, but having Autumn beside me made it easier. I also felt buoyed by the social power I’d have as a domme; after all, I’d be in a room full of folk with an admitted taste for illicit activity. Autumn and I dressed to make an impression: jeans and knee-high leather boots, tight T-shirts, tattoos visible. Funny how bait and armor can be the same thing. We arrived a few minutes late, and the staccato of our heels echoed against the cathedral ceilings, interrupting the meeting leader, who read from a laminated paper to the seated crowd—close to a hundred, on folding metal chairs. Heads turned to look at us. I clenched my hands and relaxed my face, vacillating between wanting the attention and wanting to become invisible. We slid into a couple of empty chairs in the back.

The chair of the meeting finished his preamble, emphasizing that “we encourage the discussion of drugs as well as alcohol.” Autumn nudged me, and I nodded.

The chair then introduced a speaker, a slender middle-aged
woman in a leather jacket who sat in front of the group, between two five-foot window shades on which were printed the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Though I instinctively rolled my eyes at the word “God,” I didn’t mind these so much. Their cultish tone irked me, but I had always been partial to lists and knew there was relief in clear instruction, though I’d gone far to defy it. I wanted stopping doing drugs to be simple; a step-by-step process sounded easy. At least, I’d always succeeded easily at that sort of task, when I tried.

The speaker had a good story, lots of heroin and 1980s Lower East Side debauchery. I loved the stories in meetings, like live renditions of my favorite books and movies. Alcoholics all sought extremity in some way, it seemed, all experienced an affliction of craving—even as children. There was a thrill in hearing a stranger describe my own private rituals, filthy habits, and obsessions. When the speaker described pissing in a bottle in her bedroom between lines of blow, and vomiting into her mother’s kitchen sink, I laughed along with everyone else and marveled at the alchemy that could convert shame into humor. I admired her weathered, pretty face and gravelly voice and felt momentarily reassured that I could be both clean and cool. I didn’t plan on becoming one of the bland, apple-cheeked women I saw in the rows in front of me, smiling down at their knitting and vigorously nodding whenever anyone uttered the word “miracle.”

And Autumn had been right; there were
men
here. Sitting in a room full of men could be like having a pocketful of drugs—the
yet
of who and how I’d seduce comforted me; it was the longest distance from being alone. She and I were so full of desire—it wasn’t sexual but something easily mistaken for it. We must have glowed, because the men all stared, and so we stayed. It only took me a few minutes to settle on a man across the aisle, a motorcycle helmet tucked under his chair, looking at me without looking at me.

. . .

At the time of the Vinny incident, it had been weeks since I’d last gotten high. I had already been to a few 12-step meetings, that humiliating last resort. It seemed I’d always known about them; my mother was a therapist, after all. The Twelve Steps were great, I’d always thought, for those who couldn’t find their own footing. I had no doubt that meetings worked wonderfully for people who weren’t strong enough to suffer their own craving, or smart enough to find a way around it.

My very first meeting I attended alone. One weekday afternoon, I slunk into a church basement in the East Village, hoping to go unnoticed. I mostly was, despite being virtually the only white person in the room and the only person of any kind under the age of forty. To my surprise, the people there seemed happy. They laughed and clapped and stomped their feet, and when the woman who sat at the front of the room told her story she talked about the misery of running back and forth between the bodega ATM, her drug dealer, and her apartment. I knew what she meant. I knew I was an addict; I just wasn’t convinced that this was my solution. I was too young for AA anyway, I thought. I was only twenty-two.

Then, in the dungeon kitchen one evening, Autumn walked in for the night shift as I was folding towels, about to head home.

“God, it’s wet out,” she complained, tossing her umbrella into the corner and dropping her purse on the counter. She opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. Unscrewing the cap, she hopped onto a stool and sighed. I joined her, reaching for her purse.

“Give me a cigarette,” I said, rifling through the jumble myself. I spotted a gray booklet with newspaper-thin pages.
Alcoholics Anonymous
, it read on the cover. I pulled it out. “What’s this?”

Autumn glanced up. “Oh, nothing. My boyfriend in California goes.” She pulled her yellow pack of cigarettes out of the purse’s side pocket and tucked one between her lips.

“Really?”

She paused for a long moment, looking at me.

“No, not really. I’ve been going myself.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Me, too.”

We grinned at each other and laughed, sheepish and relieved.

“Where have you been going?”

“Well, not AA actually, NA.”

“You should come with me to an AA meeting—they’re better, less depressing. Cuter men.”

“But I’m not an alcoholic.”

“This is New York, Melissa. Half the alcoholics here are junkies anyway.”

The motorcyclist was a painter, with tattooed arms and a vintage BMW bike. He was my mother’s age, kind, and worshipful without passion. We attended that meeting weekly and others that he frequented in SoHo and all over the East Village. I loved swinging my leg over the back of his bike and pulling off the helmet, feigning nonchalance in front of the crowd smoking outside the church. He taught me to save my bathroom trip for when the boring people got called on, who the zealots were and the desperate women who would disapprove of him. “They’re just bitter,” he told me. “AA is full of bitter women.” The painter brimmed with such nuggets of wisdom.

My job was a source of great amusement and novelty to him. The thought that the sexual nature of it could or even should be unacceptable to a lover never crossed my mind. I knew that were the tables turned, I could never accept such a situation. Money would not make it any less a betrayal. Do you see how I was able to decide where my reasoning stopped? Secrecy and careful selection of people was my armor. I had eliminated people from my life who challenged my drug use, and hid it from those who would have. I chose carefully the stories I told about my work, and lovers who
would cosign it with their acceptance. There was never anyone who knew the whole truth. So it didn’t exist. That is the magic of secrecy. It creates a vacuum. My secrets were like rooms where I could hide things and preserve the truth I designated for them.

His being twenty years my senior further facilitated this. I’d never gone for men that much older than me, but his age seemed to make him even safer. Part of the appeal of older men to young women is a way that they can never completely accurately see you; you are always a little bit of a marvel to them, an immigrant from another generation. To women who feel broken, or hidden in some way, it feels safe: they can hide behind the sheen of freshness that older men cannot help but see. Being with an older man makes you
feel
young.

The painter didn’t ask questions; he doted on my precocity, my big breasts and hands, my little ears.

“Look at you!” he said once, after sex, lifting up his 300-thread-count sheet. “Every part of you is so smooth and perfect!” I blushed and scooted out of his bed, quietly loving it. His doting differed from that of my slaves; I got to play the child with him, and found that a surprising relief. After locating my panties and pulling on a T-shirt, I padded into the kitchen. I spent most of that summer like this: wandering around his central-air-conditioned house in my underwear—just a few blocks away from Autumn and my place in Williamsburg. I opened his fridge and stood in its pale light, surveying the contents. I grabbed a quart of organic yogurt, pulled a spoon from the drying rack in the sink, and headed back into the bedroom.

The painter reclined against his pillows holding a magazine, his reading glasses on. I curled up in a chair near the foot of the bed.

“What are you reading?” I said.

“Oh, just some stupid art magazine, did a profile on me.” He folded his glasses on the bed stand and clasped his hands behind his head, looking at me appreciatively.

“So what about this whole sponsor thing?” I asked, with a careful
note of irony. “I keep hearing that I ought to pick one of those up.” I ate a spoonful of yogurt and raised my brows at him.

Smiling faintly, he shrugged. “It’s a good idea, of course. But you should be careful. You can’t just take the first person who offers—they’re always the most desperate. There’s a lot of people in the rooms who get off on telling newcomers what to do, when it’s outside the jurisdiction of their own experience. Without sounding dramatic, it can be dangerous.”

“Do you have one?”

“I have people who I call when I need to work something out. That’s what matters—that you know not to try and figure everything out yourself.”

I put the yogurt on the floor and crawled up the length of the bed until I was straddling him. “So, if I have you, does that count?” I bent down, glancing up to see his smile broaden as I kissed his chest.

“It counts for something,” he said.

Most people in the program would have disagreed, of course, but I was relieved. I wanted to hide out in his cool, dark house for as long as possible. I didn’t need the cool, dark escape of a high as long as I had here to come to, it seemed. The painter had been sober for over a decade, and as much as he may have omitted in the interest of keeping me around, I learned a lot about sobriety from him, in his cool, nonchalant way. People in meetings could render everything so life-or-death. His was probably the only way I could have heard a lot of it.

When I arrived on his door one night with pupils pinned and a husky heroin voice, he let me in and believed my lie about codeine pills. However selfish his motives may have been, that nonplussed acceptance made it easier for me to stick around, keep going to meetings.

I think the only way I stayed as clean as I did was on the back of the painter’s motorcycle. At my request, we would speed up and down the FDR Drive at night, flying along the East River, past the
Pepsi-Cola sign, and the park where I shot up with street kids during my first summer in the city. Back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan. New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light. Then it did the same with my history. As a dark speck of energy hurtling over the water toward that galaxy, I felt myself disappear. Relative to that image of infinity I was nothing, a clump of quantum matter skidding through the ether. It was as good as any drug.