Whip Smart: A Memoir (9 page)

I STILL HAVE
the first photographs taken of me at the dungeon. My building a clientele depended on publicity, I was told, and pictures were needed for the dungeon’s Web site (an impressive spectacle itself). They also ran in the pages of local fetish magazines with our phone number emblazoned below my face. Within my second month of working, before I had even earned enough to purchase my own clothing, Fiona showed up one evening with a bag of cameras and commandeered the Red Room for an hour. At least the cost of her art school education was getting put to use, she claimed, which was more than could be said for most.

The first photo they published was a full body shot, in profile, with my face turned toward the camera. Propped on a large wooden chest, I have one heeled foot on the floor, the other leg dangling over the edge of the chest. Without stockings, my legs are painfully bare. I would not say this while observing a recent, bare-legged photo of myself, but my self-consciousness of that day returns so clearly to me now that I cannot help seeing the picture through the lens of that memory. I might never have felt so naked before. I had
to borrow clothing, and the tiny hot pants left the bottom of my ass exposed, while the strapless bustier must have been two cup sizes too small. My mother frequently commented back then that my dyed-black Betty Page haircut looked like a wig, and I agree now more than ever. If I did not remember the night so vividly, I might not recognize myself. My hair is natural now, a brown so light that it shocked me after the years of black, my face leaner, and my eyes open in a way that makes those in that old photo impenetrable by comparison, even in their stark innocence. It was in my innocence that I had so much to hide.

In the grainy version that ran for months in the fetish magazines, you could not make out one detail that I can see now on the disc I have of the whole roll. In the crook of the arm that braces me against the trunk is a shadowy smear. It is of both the mismatched makeup that I used to apply there and the bruise that it was meant to conceal. Perhaps no one noticed on those night shifts my elbow’s mismatched inside or that I carried my purse into the bathroom before many sessions and emerged with a voice an octave deeper and the pupils of someone poised beneath a floodlight. I might have been as good at my hiding as I thought I was. But when I think back, it is more likely that I confused ignorance with apathy. I underestimated the wisdom of my witnesses, who could see the futility of intervention, that my course was inobstructible.

If the day shift was the office, with its comforting predictability and gossip traded at the watercooler, then the night shift was a sleepover party, a persona parade under whose playful atmosphere lay a scrupulous network of social politics and pathology. Here were the women for whom the job was not a substitute for an imminent, socially acceptable one. Here were the new girls: the coeds not yet out of their teenage rebellious phase. To them the job was a badge of cool, congruent with their recently acquired taste for nonconformity. They rarely stayed long, usually a maximum of six months. Here were the ex– strippers and escorts, girls from Harlem and the Bronx, neither prepared for nor satisfied with the cut in pay and
increase in labor (of a certain kind). The majority of them quit or were bullied out within six months as well. But the demographic that most interested me among the night-shifters was the “lifestyle” dommes. Predominantly college educated, they capitalized all words referring to themselves and other mistresses (She, Me, Mistress, Her, We) and required it from their clients (You). They posted regularly not only from the computer in the office on our Web site’s official forum but also on various other S&M community boards, both locally and nationally based. They attended and organized seminars, conferences, parties, and performances, taking pride in their work, so that it became craft. Dominatrices certainly come in the “sluts with whips” variety. This was actually an unfortunate nickname that our dungeon garnered among the serious New York dominatrix community. The name referred to our allegedly liberal hand-job practice, though I doubt we were any more guilty of it than any other dungeon, just looser lipped and less concerned—the day shift at least. The spectrum of domming is broad, with strippers in fishnets at one end and women like Lena at the other.

If anyone was my mentor (Autumn aside, as she and I so quickly became friends and equals), it was Lena. In those first months she was an idol, a larger-than-life symbol of what I thought the job could be; she seemed to exercise real power. My first sight of her was in the dressing room, as I arrived for the night shift. The mountain bike she rode from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, was parked in the hallway, shining beneath the wall sconces, as out of place as a cell phone in a period film. She stood fully nude before the mirrored lockers, dark curls dripping water onto her full breasts and down her tattooed back as she patted handfuls of baby powder between her legs.

“Hey, Ma,” she greeted my reflection. “Just shaved. Keeps it dry, no ingrowns. Antiperspirant works, too, but who wants to smear aluminum on their pussy, right?”

I was a goner. Mouth agape, I would watch her verbally humiliate her clients with a semi-automatic mouth, punctuating
insults with a hand just as fast across their faces. That first night, I watched her terrorize a man until a pool of urine formed on the floor between his feet. He nearly wept when thanking her as she walked him out to the elevator, tucking two hundreds into her broad hand. She taught me how to chalk the ends of my bullwhips and floggers so that I could practice hitting a mark from three yards away, and tricks such as, when being fellated by a slave, to announce that you’re about to come while yanking his head off the strap-on by the hair and spitting in his face. I saw her fuck them like a man. Lena never took her clothes off, or gave hand jobs. She was meticulously clean, exact in all her methods. Each of her sessions was a complete narrative, a performance unto itself; she would no sooner have cut a session short than take one that didn’t interest her. Her slaves were utterly devoted, and despite (or perhaps because of) her brutality, there seemed to exist a genuine regard between her and them. I discovered years later that she made $85 a session instead of $75 like the rest of us. She raked in the money, sometimes pulling five or six sessions a shift ($85 × 6 = $510 per day, which doesn’t include tips, ranging anywhere between $20 and $500 per session). Lena made her own schedule, and never got any flak from Remy.

As Justine, I still worked hard to hide my insecurity in sessions, sticking to sensual sessions, though their predictable scenarios and the pressure from those clients to give more than I wanted wore on me. Outside of the dungeon, however, I might as well have been Lena.

I had never liked parties. Even as a child, I tended to form intense, one-on-one relationships, rather than groups of friends. Unless there was dancing, I didn’t see the point of hanging out in a large group, which made it impossible to connect with any single person and triggered a shyness that I liked to hide. I also typically wanted to get so high that public locations were impractical. At a party, I
might have to share my drugs, or talk to someone who’d care that I’d forgotten how my legs worked.

After a few months of working at the dungeon, however, my interest in social events spiked. I now had the power to hijack any conversation, to commandeer the attention of however many people were within earshot at any given moment. As far as I could tell, no one was immune to the curiosity that the phrase “I’m a professional dominatrix” provoked. I lolled happily in the silence that followed uttering it, knowing the torrent of questions that would follow, the shine of eyes that saw me suddenly new. Knowing that I was likely the sole spokesperson for a subculture most people would never experience imbued me with a confidence I otherwise lacked. I was the reigning expert, the beautiful geek, and I loved their shock at how normal I seemed, how unlike what they would have imagined. With this ace in my pocket, parties became fun. Whether I pulled it out or not, I still had its power, and took comfort in worrying it like a lucky stone.

On Halloween, Rebecca and I went to a party in DUMBO—an up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhood full of industrial lofts and brick streets—where I was supposed to meet a date. With a vile of cocaine, three bags of heroin, and a disposable syringe folded in a sock that I had tucked in an inside pocket of my purse, I convinced my roommate to take a cab, and had her laughing the whole way there. The giddiness of anticipation always made me funny. I had her in stitches with my description of Gene, the “Sweater Man,” who brought a duffel bag to the dungeon every week, full of knitted clothing. He liked to be completely swathed in sweaters: sweater socks, sweater underpants, sweater mittens, sweater hats, sweater trousers, sweater masks. When he had nary an inch of naked skin bared, I’d immobilize him with rope bondage. That, really, was it. He liked to be tickled sometimes, while bound and sweater mummified, but really, just being sweaty, sweatered, and bound was enough for him. I could just hang out in the room while he gently writhed and cooed in his fuzzy cocoon. Gene made for
an ideal anecdote: ridiculous and benign. I also wanted to distract Rebecca from any nervousness I might exhibit in omitting the fact that I had a purse full of drugs. I had become more comfortable omitting things from her, though I suspected she knew more than I told her. We both felt the distance my lies created, and with increasing frequency I would catch her looking at me with worried eyes. Sometimes I’d meet her gaze, in a fleeting moment of defiance, but more often I’d evade her. She hadn’t yet had the courage or the opportunity to voice concern.

I’m not sure I’d ever known a more invincible feeling than that of walking into a party feeling beautiful, with drugs in my purse and a double life that everyone was dying to know about. I’ve seen the girls who feel this way walking into rooms. Sometimes beauty is enough. They
are
irresistible; one can’t help looking at them, their smooth hair and self-conscious hands, their eyes bright with secret joy. But they are so delicate, in their preening and their need. I fear for them, now, knowing what they might do to keep that joy from trickling out of them, as it always does.

“So …,” my date said, a few hours later, and I could see him wanting to ask.

“Go ahead.” I smiled.

“I’m sorry, I just …” He ran his hand through his hair. “I’ve never known anyone who … and you seem so—”

“Normal?”

“I mean, yeah, kind of.” He was cute, and I’d already decided to sleep with him. “So, you don’t, like—”

“Have sex with them? No.” This was everyone’s first question. “And I keep my clothes on.”

I felt a pang of annoyance at his visible relief. If only people knew how predictable they were.

“So do you do it because you’re—”

“Into it? No.”

More relief. It was important to defang myself first thing, so that people knew I was safe to question about it, assured that I was just like them, only a little braver. After those two questions were out of the way, they always relaxed and became more eager for details. Were I
into
it, or willing to have sex for money, I would have been less of a curiosity, easily consigned to the diagnosis of broken woman—instantly diminished in intelligence, psychology, morality, or class. I understood this and shared their logic, even as it irritated me in its unexamined narrow-mindedness. The last thing I wanted to be mistaken for was
into it
. The glory lay in my ability to do it
despite
not being into it, in having the balls to choose it based on curiosity rather than compulsion.

“It’s an acting job,” I said, shrugging. “Probably one of the most reliably paying acting gigs in New York.”

He chuckled. They always did at that one. I excused myself to go to the restroom.

There was a line, and I didn’t feel like waiting; it had been a couple hours since my last trip to the bathroom, and my mouth felt gummy, eyes glassy. Lately, I couldn’t seem to get or stay as high as I wanted. Getting a plastic cup of water from the kitchen sink, I wove through the party and stepped out into the building’s hallway. It smelled of sawdust and metal, and I could see my breath—tiny clouds that dispersed quickly in the chilly air. For all the crowd inside the loft, the hall was empty, probably due to the cold. I wandered around the corner, finding a disabled freight elevator and a few empty apartments that were clearly under construction, their doors ajar.