Whip Smart: A Memoir (11 page)

“Phew!” she sighed, grinning at me and kicking off her stilettos. Reaching behind her back, she deftly loosened her corset and then unhooked the front eyelets, revealing her torso, striped with pink creases where the seams had pressed against her for the past two hours. Tossing the corset into her open locker, she unhooked her leather bra and threw it in as well. I tried not to stare at her breasts. They were as big as mine—at least Cs or Ds—with pierced nipples and a snake tattooed between them. Breasts didn’t usually make me shy. I didn’t worry about staring at Autumn’s. Autumn also had no interest in inciting my bashfulness. Lena held my gaze for a beat too long before pulling on a white wifebeater and collapsing onto the couch beside me. Wrapping her arm around my shoulders, she kicked my books onto the floor. I laughed at her brazenness, giving in to the warmth of her body next to me, and her attention. “What are you watching?” she asked.

“
Simpsons
reruns.”

“Sweet.”

I can’t now recall what episode we watched, couldn’t if my life depended on it. I remember that she laughed out loud a lot, turning her face toward me each time, so that the hot rush of her breath rustled against my neck. At one point, she idly wound a hank of my hair around her palm and let the weight of her hand gently tug on it. The excitement of being with her wasn’t just a result of Lena excelling at seduction or touching, though she did, but of my trusting her in some unprecedented way, believing that she knew more than I about something. I didn’t always know what she was thinking, and I loved that.

My flirtation with Lena remained within the dungeon walls for some time. Aside from a couple of frustrated, maudlin affairs with straight girls in my adolescence, I had only ever dated women who
looked like boys. First I had gone from the dreamy, long-skirted, messy-haired girl to the ponytailed high school jock, and then the androgynous downtown college hipster, all the way to the androgynous downtown hipster transgender “boi” (female to male). I had been hoping to find, in their studded belts, narrow hips, and husky voices, some element of power that I could not find (and probably would not have accepted) in the men whom I loved. While I never quite admitted it, to myself or anyone, I expected to be dominated by these women. To my disappointment and eventual lack of surprise, I found that the more masculine they appeared, the more submissive the role they took in bed, and in every aspect of the relationship. Not that I was uncomfortable behind the wheel. I knew how make all the decisions, how to get myself (and them) to orgasm, how to fix things, break things, dance, fight, manipulate, get the drugs, drive the car, talk my way out of a ticket and into anybody’s mother’s heart. I knew how to be the girlier girl and the bigger man. All I had ever known was that safety, and that loneliness.

Lena didn’t look like a boy. She didn’t act like a girl, either. I wasn’t sure how big of an act hers was, and didn’t much care, as it was as good as or better than any of mine. It was nice to be convinced for once. Smelling of baby powder and musky perfume, she would walk up behind me and squeeze my waist with both of her hands, her breath on my neck, or reach across my chest to grasp my chin in her hand, turning my head to face her.

She would crawl under the blanket with me as I napped on the couch in Cross-Dressing, and we would faux-sleep, or half-sleep, in a sweaty knot of limbs, rising an hour later exhausted by the attention to every muscular twitch, every shifted hand or hip or breast, every consciously measured breath. Women do know better, that this is often the sweetest part, and how to make it last.

After an instruction session she had given to a group of new recruits, she finally invited me out for a drink. I had played teacher’s pet while she listed safety measures (always ask if a client takes
Viagra before using Rush—the inhalant amyl nitrite, or “poppers”—as the combination causes seizure) and legal concerns (always make a new client insert the enema tube into himself). Choosing me as a model, she demonstrated bondage techniques and how to operate the rooms’ various mechanisms (Catherine wheel, stocks, ceiling suspension, et cetera). The new hires giggled nervously when, following tips on anal play, including how to fasten an adjustable strap-on harness, what to wear (always a condom, no fancy corsets; keep a pair of rubber or plastic hot pants available for easy post-session cleaning), and how to carry forth based on the client’s fantasy (lesbian sex-slave fantasy = easy does it; rape fantasy = not so easy), Lena announced that she was going to demonstrate on someone, say, Justine. After a long pause, she and I meeting eyes while the rest of the room tittered, she announced she was kidding, “kidding! Don’t look so scared.”

DECEMBER CAME FAST
. When Fiona phoned about my first session with Elie, it was one of those afternoons whose cold is clean. Everything was fine and sharp, as if hewn by the hard sunlight—the trees, the tidy row houses, and the faces bobbing past me down the sidewalk. Between school, work, and everything else, my double life felt more like three or four, and I joked about needing a personal assistant. Fiona would often call if a favored client wanted to schedule an appointment on a day I wasn’t in, or if she booked a session for which I’d need to prepare beforehand (by drinking extra liquids, or wearing the same socks for a few days). Though I had only just left a class whose final paper was due that coming weekend, I agreed to come in at 9:00 p.m. and stay for what promised to be at least a three-hour session.

“He asked for you specifically, Justine; have you seen him before?”

“No, I just went in for a tip on Lena’s session the last time he was here.”

“But you know what he’s into?
Lots
of nipple work. His supplies
are in the office closet with his name on the suitcase. It’s a pretty corporal gig.”

“That’s what I’m counting on.” And I was. But three and probably more like four or five hours was a long time to torture somebody. I would have to get some supplies of my own. After I hung up with Fiona, I paged a number from memory and took the West 4th subway stairs two at a time.

When I got off the train in Bed-Stuy, my little red phone was humming and blinking with a new voice mail. I dialed my code and a round, buttery baritone rolled out of the tiny speaker: “You page me? I be up round Eastern Parkway and Bedford in ’bout one hour. I got you covered, girl.”

The flutter I felt in my chest, the sharpness of sound and light in that state of anticipation, I now recognize as a form of anxiety. The memory of that excitement is a bodily one, and when I recall it so do my hands, the small of my back, my chest and belly. It is the peak of the roller coaster, after the benign clatter uphill, but before the terrible fall.

Christmas was coming. The churches on my block had hung their wreaths and strung the trees outside with blinking lights. As the last sliver of sun was eclipsed by the rooftops, I huffed breath on my hands and squinted down Franklin Avenue for the bus. I had four twenties and a MetroCard tucked in my bra. As it groaned up to the curb, I hurried into the warmth of the #48 and sank into a seat by the window, my belly flipping like it did before a first kiss. It would only get worse until I didn’t have to feel anything.

Eastern Parkway passes the northern tip of Prospect Park and heads east toward Brownsville and East New York. It is flanked on either side by a tree-lined promenade. Kevin wasn’t hard to find, though as he walked up the sidewalk toward me I could easily have mistaken him for a man twice his size. Kevin carried enough merchandise on his body to open a kiosk: watches, jewelry, clothing, single-serving bags of nuts (cashews or almonds, roasted and un-salted), various herbal teas, bottled beverages, telephones, disposable
cameras, cartons of Newport cigarettes, pipes, hair picks, and drugs.

It was night, but just barely, by the time Kevin and I finished our stroll down the promenade and he handed me a folded square of tinfoil. The sky was that royal blue that doesn’t happen every night and, when it does, lasts only for a few minutes. The trees that lined the walkway reached over our heads, and with that luminous blue wrapped so tightly around me I felt that I could have reached my arm up and sunk a finger into it. To have something in your pocket is sometimes even better than having it in your blood.

I rode the train back into the city straight after meeting Kevin. It being a Friday, people crowded the subway on their way out for the evening, their faces fresh and hopeful. I knew I looked like them: students in trendy sneakers, slouchy jeans, and hooded sweatshirts. The disparity between how I looked and how I felt, indeed
who
I felt like, had long been a source of pleasure. Knowing the difference between where they were going and where I was going still had its sweetness, but the distance had grown further than ever. For a moment, as I was pressed against all those buzzing bodies who had nothing to hide, panic fluttered in my chest. The rush of wind outside the train crescendoed, the squeal of metal wheels on the track piercing. I had a fleeting vision of my body being sucked out of the train’s car, swallowed into the black intestine of the tunnel. Cupping my hand over my mouth, I whispered my own name. I’d picked this habit up around the time I’d picked up hard drugs, in my late teens. “Melissa.” In my name lay the memories of everything I’d ever been before this, before I’d ever carried drugs in my pockets, or gone to places where no one I knew could have found me, even if I’d wanted them to. It served as a password to an internal control group: a part of me that could not be cut loose. The other side of anchorlessness, and the perfect detachment of the high, and the secrecy, was a terror in isolation, a pure and senseless fear that could strike without warning, though it didn’t often.

I took a few deep breaths. Stepping off the train at 34th Street, I told myself that it was natural to be nervous about the session. Walking up the subway stairs toward the street, I thought of the class I’d had that morning. We had discussed a Rita Dove poem about the goddess Demeter, her fury at her daughter Persephone’s kidnapping.
The mystery is, you can eat fear … and become a queen whom nothing surprises
. As the meaning of Dove’s lines emerged in our class discussion, I’d felt the same swell of excitement that I had as a kid, watching from the deck of a boat as the backs of whales crested above the ocean’s surface. I’d left class light-footed, my thoughts fleet and electric, matching the crisp winter smells and the cheerful hurry of the sidewalk. Walking along the perimeter of Washington Square Park, I passed the windows of some dorms and saw students in the common rooms. They sat curled in over-stuffed couches with books, mugs, and earnest faces. Without warning, I had ached inside. A part of me belonged there, and sometimes I could feel how I was killing it; I could feel its deprivation in me like a great, sucking wind, an inverted scream. A part of me wanted to be
good
, to believe that I inherently was, and that everything would be okay, in warm places without secrets or the endless craving that drove me outside at night to fill a hole that was never full. But my craving was real, not only for drugs but also for things that could only exist in the limitless world outside those cozy windows. I knew I’d have to quiet some other inconsolable part of myself to live in that safe world and wasn’t at all certain that I could, even if I’d wanted to.

Most of the time, my lifestyle felt like a choice I had made, because I was smarter, more complicated, terminally unique. But not always, and in these other moments when it felt like a bondage to something I didn’t believe in I was choked with envy.

Corporal sessions are named for their distinguishing element: corporal punishment. These sessions may or may not include sensual
aspects, role-play, cross-dressing (i.e., feminization or forced feminization), and even switching—where the domme takes at turn at being submissive—but they always include a hearty dose of violence. In retrospect, the word connotes beatings: flogging, whipping, slapping, spanking, kicking, paddling, and so on, although the term was also used to describe sessions of a more precise violence, like Elie’s. It seems odd now, but I can’t remember the word “torture” being used very often, though that’s what it was.

By the time I arrived in Midtown for my session, the office grunts and tourists had already been replaced by clubgoers in their leather, hair product, and sunglasses. Women with blown-out highlights shivered outside the twenty-four-hour deli, smoking and casting sidelong glances at their reflections in the windows. At this early hour, the Garment District still showed life, but by the time I left it would be a wasteland of locked storefront grates and concrete broken only by steaming manholes and the whiz of cars.

Elie could easily have blended into the early-evening demographic, with his combed black hair and Mediterranean complexion. His jacket was leather, designer, his Gauloises ever present, though as a Frenchman he would never do anything so crass as wear sunglasses after dark. He was early that night, as I would come to expect from him, and I hung back beside the newspaper stand outside the deli while he rang the buzzer and was let in. Shoulders hunched, he pinched his cigarette and sucked it down to the filter before ringing the bell, shifting his gaze around the street, behaving exactly the way I had trained myself not to while buying drugs.