The Juliette Society (13 page)

She came over to my apartment. We got ready together and she brought something for me too, because we’re about the same size. And Anna was adamant that I had to stick to the dress code. She said, ‘You’ve got to play by the rule. It’s the only rule there is.’

And I was adamant that, dress code be damned, my modesty would prevail. So I put them on when she wasn’t looking.

She made me look at myself in the mirror, while she stood behind with her hands on my hips and a satisfied smile on her face that said, job well done. All I could think was, I look kind of cheap and slutty, like the way young female movie stars have to dress if they want to make the cover of
Maxim
, but Anna looked at me and said, ‘I’d fuck you.’

Right after that, I made an excuse to go to the bathroom and that’s when I put my underwear back on – a thong and my demi-cup bra. I checked my ass in the bathroom mirror to make sure the panties couldn’t be seen and did up one extra button of the shirt, so the cleavage was still visible but its support was not.

Anna played by the rule. She picked out a black leather catsuit that fits her like a second skin. It has a zip that runs from the neck all the way down the front and disappears between her legs. She couldn’t wear underwear even if she wanted to, because it would show and ruin the effect. And anyway, she has it open almost all the way to the navel and her tits are half-exposed.

As she touched up her makeup, I asked her what I should expect.

‘It’s not a society ball,’ she said. ‘It’s a place where people go to fuck. You look around, you scope out what’s going on, what you like the look of, and you get into a scene. It’s no big deal.’

Anna tells me the Fuck Factory is legendary. It’s been around since before she was born. And busted more times than Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton combined for almost any health and safety statute you’d care to mention, even the most minor infractions, anything that could provide a pretext. And every time it’s busted, the club moves to a different location and starts afresh, further away from the rest of polite society, further away from civilization, where it can exist without fear of harassment or prosecution.

Now, it’s moved here.

If there was a place called Nowhere, this is probably what it would look like. A war zone. Like those photos you see of some battle-scarred city in some territory on the other side of the world that seems to be in a permanent state of conflict. Or the long-forgotten ruins of a lost civilization. A city that’s long been abandoned. Streets that are empty. Buildings bombed-out and barely standing. No inhabitants. No sign of life.

That’s what it feels like here. Spooky and eerie. We’re two girls standing on a deserted street at the edge of the city. There’s nothing to indicate that there’s a club here. No signage. No people. Nothing to suggest there’s anything here at all. Except something that looks like graffiti. As primitive as a paleolithic cave painting. Or something someone might have drawn on a bathroom wall.

A cartoon penis and balls, spurting four large teardrops of come.

White stains on a dirty black wall. Below that, a pair of legs raised in the air, in a v-shape, like devil’s horns. It reminds me of the way Anna’s legs were strung up when she was tied to the toilet in that video. And between the legs, a hole. A crudely drawn vagina. With teeth. Lots of small sharp pointed teeth. Below that there’s an arrow, pointing down, to a steep, stone staircase that leads below the street.

As we head down the stairs, into the gloom, I imagine what it must smell like in the Fuck Factory. Maybe like an old basement dive bar, wet and moldy and sweet from all the alcohol consumed in such a confined space. With every step, I can feel an air of mystery and deviance brewing around us.

At the bottom we’re confronted by an unmarked black door, like the door to the underworld. Anna knocks twice then pauses and knocks again three times. And it opens. And when it opens there’s not a whole lot more light inside than out. Just a half-light so dim that your eyes need time to adjust to it. A shadowy, hulking figure, the kind of man mountain you always find working the door at a club, ushers us inside without saying a word.

I follow Anna down a long thin corridor, with walls so close that we can only walk in single file, like a passage in a catacomb, then down two more flights of stairs. We’re under the city now. And it feels like we’re so far down that we’ve burrowed through the earth into a section of hell.

We’re in front of a large steel door painted dirty green. Anna knocks again and it swings open, held by another man mountain.

The first thing that hits me is the smell. And instead of the faint smell of alcohol and mold, this place smells like sex – the smell of hot bodies colliding and combining.

The second thing that hits me is the heat. Wet and humid. The kind of heat that makes you break into a sweat the second you step into it.

The third thing is the sound. Techno. Because what’s a club without techno and, specifically, German techno. German gabber techno at ear-destroying volumes. The perfect sense-disorientating, high-velocity fuck music.

We walk into a large rectangular room with brick walls, a bar all along one side and a ceiling so low it seems as if I could reach out and touch it. It’s packed with every kind of freak you could imagine; those who are freakish in appearance and others who are just freakish by nature, in behavior, all congregating and in some form of congress, whatever that may be. It feels as if all the social misfits of the world have been drawn here. They don’t know why. They just know that this is their place. Where they won’t be judged or condemned or looked at strangely. Where they can indulge in whatever their particular peccadillo is.

Two large cages sit on either side of the bar, the kind you’d keep a hamster in but larger, much larger. One contains a naked girl, the other a guy. There’s a tray for food and a feeding bottle attached to the bars; both empty. A midget, wearing a top hat and nothing else, is standing on the bar throwing peanuts through the bars of the cage at the girl.

Opposite the bar there are several arched passageways that lead off into other areas of the club.

‘That’s where all the real action goes on,’ Anna tells me. ‘But once you leave this room it’s like a labyrinth. You can easily get lost and it feels like you’ll never find your way out.’

I look around and I tell myself that this is like every club scene you’ve ever seen in a movie. There’s loud, pounding music, it’s dark and populated by freaky-looking people who don’t look like regular people, who barely even look human. And the protagonist is frantically searching for something or somebody vital to their quest but clearly doesn’t belong there. Clearly doesn’t even want to be there.

And, at the same time, this is a club scene like you’ve never seen in a movie, like you will never see in any movie. Because club scenes in movies are made by people who have likely never set foot in a real club. They’ve just recreated one for their stupid movie so the hero can wander through it looking totally weirded-out by the strange freaks with no fashion sense whatsoever, who are dancing like loons to some of the worst club music you’ve ever heard in your life.

The people who make club scenes in movies have likely never set foot in this club, or any club like it. The Fuck Factory is a place where people are defined only by their kinks, their fetishes and their desires. Nothing else matters. Nobody cares whether you’re young or old, who you are or what you do in the real world, whether you’re a janitor or a CEO.

Anna says, ‘I want you to meet Kubrick,’ and she pulls me towards an older man leaning against the bar. Kubrick is the manager-proprietor of the Fuck Factory. Not Stanley, Larry – but everyone just calls him Kubrick. He is short, fat, Jewish, camp and bald. Because if life’s going to deal you one bum card, it’s probably going to deal you the whole deck. But Kubrick doesn’t seem to mind. He’s happy as Larry.

Kubrick has a friendly smile and a tactile manner, but he looks pretty harmless. He has a long snow-white beard, a curtain of downy white hair all over his body, down his arms and over his chest, covering his belly, which is the size and shape of a beach ball, and not flabby but hard and taut like muscle. He looks like Santa Claus. If Santa Claus had ditched the big red fur-trimmed coat for a black leather jerkin and had the word SADIST carved into his bare chest.

Kubrick has the word SADIST carved into his chest and it looks someone put it there with a can opener. It’s written in large jagged letters that stretch across his torso, between his neck and his nipples. And I wonder if he really is, or if he just got his wires crossed, because it must have hurt like holy hell.

The Fuck Factory is Kubrick’s place, his creation, his happening. A pansexual laboratory of carnal pleasure where anything and everything goes. There are things going on in here that, hard as it is to believe, you won’t even find on the internet.

If you’re going to name your club the Fuck Factory, you’d better make pretty damn sure it lives up to its name. Kubrick seems pretty confident it does because he welcomes me, saying, ‘I’m telling you, sweetheart, this is the greatest sex club in the world. The greatest sex club there’s ever been.’

Kubrick calls me sweetheart. He calls Anna ‘this one’.

Kubrick’s big meaty arms are wrapped around Anna’s waist and he’s pulling her into him so her breasts smoosh against his chest. He has upper arms like hambones and forearms like Popeye. On one arm, I can see a faded blue sailor tattoo; on the other, some strange-looking sigil or pictogram that, try as I might, I can’t work out what it is.

He gives Anna a squeeze and says, ‘This one, she doesn’t know when to stop.’

Then he laughs and casually slaps her on the ass. And she’s not expecting it so she jumps with a start and then giggles.

Anna puts her hand on my chest and says, ‘It’s Catherine’s first time.’

‘It is?’ says Kubrick, in mock surprise. Then, looking at me, ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about, sweetheart. We’re all friends down here.’

I’m not so sure about that, but Kubrick sounds sincere.

‘Just look within yourself,’ he says, ‘follow what your heart desires and your body craves. And you will find it.’

Kubrick’s suddenly come over all zen and he’s giving me life advice like a New Age guru. He has his hands clasped together in front of him as he talks, so he’s even starting to look like a guru.

‘There’s no big secret,’ he says. ‘All you need to know in life to get some head is that everyone needs to fuck or be fucked. That’s it.’

It’s not exactly Deepak Chopra, but I think I get his drift.

Kubrick’s philosophy, simply put, is this:

Come one, come all.

Fuck one, fuck all.

Fuck whomever you want, however you want.

And that is the whole of the law.

‘Just one word of caution,’ says Kubrick, leaning into me and indicating behind. ‘Stay away from the midget.’

I look over Kubrick’s shoulder at the midget, who’s now on top of the cage, on all fours, growling like a dog. And the girl is curled up in one corner of it on a bed of straw.

Why? I say, he looks harmless enough.

‘He’s really horny,’ says Kubrick. ‘And he may not have much to work with but that doesn’t stop him trying.

‘The thing about midgets is they’re all super-macho and never do anything in half-measures. So they usually either want to beat themselves up because they’re so small or they want to fuck the world. And this one, he’s a real sadist.’

I look over again and now the midget’s holding himself up with one arm, like he’s about to do one-arm press-ups, holding his cock with the other, and pissing through the bars of the cage. The poor girl is scurrying back and forth on her hands and knees trying to avoid the spray and not doing a very good job of it.

I must look shocked because Anna says to me, ‘Don’t worry, that’s part of her kick. She wouldn’t be there otherwise.’

‘OK, kids,’ Kubrick says, clapping his hands together like a summer camp counselor, ‘I have a club to run and people to fuck. Have fun.’

He hops down off the bar stool and we watch him scurry away, off down a passage like the White Rabbit.

Anna turns to me and says, ‘You’d never guess what Kubrick did before this.’

I have no idea, I say.

‘Guess,’ she says.

‘Life coach?’

‘No.’

‘Fitness instructor.’

Anna shakes her head.

‘Librarian.’

‘Nope.’

‘Anesthetist.’

She laughs.

I smile, ‘I give up,’ I say. ‘What?’

‘Accountant.’

I try to imagine Kubrick in a three-piece suit poring over ledgers in an office. And fail miserably.

‘Not just any accountant,’ she says. Then leans into me and whispers, ‘C–I–A.’

The way Anna tells it, back when Kubrick was an accountant, he was living a pretty normal life. House in the ’burbs, married. Healthy, regular sex life, no kids.

But Kubrick had a secret. He used to sneak off to the garage and jerk off over beefcake mags. It’s not that he was pretending he was straight when he was really gay, or that he was more of one than the other. He just found himself bored of the sex he had with his wife and was looking for a new kick.

He started thinking about what else could get him off. He decided to let his imagination really fly and see where it would take him. He started collecting catalogues.

Not underwear catalogues. That would be far too obvious, too easy. Catalogues of garden furniture, of seeds and cereals and grains, of dental instruments, of woods and metals and concrete. He followed his whims and collected whatever tickled his fancy. He would look at the photos and he found out that he was pretty adept at constructing detailed sexual fantasies around inanimate objects, the more mundane the better, because Kubrick was training himself to sexualize the world around him.

He figured that was a world that would be a far more exciting place to live in, that it would take him out of the drudgery of his government desk job, his normal suburban life. It would be far more exciting than even beating off to beefcake magazines in the garage after dinner.