Whip Smart: A Memoir (12 page)

I waited a minute or two, then followed him inside.

Knowing the session would require dexterity, I decided to forgo the elbow-length gloves that I usually wore on nights I was using. In the bathroom, I waited until the angry red spot inside my elbow stopped beading with blood to smear makeup over it. I had missed
the shot slightly, and my elbow went numb and tingly as the cocaine seeped through the tiny blood vessels under my skin.

The beautiful thing about heroin is that it eradicates fear. It’s hard to know how much of it you suffer from until you experience total freedom from it. Most of the buzzing, the anxiety, the ticker tape that streamed ceaselessly through my mind, was motored by fear.
What’s going to happen, how can I control it, what can go wrong, what has already gone wrong, how can I fix it, what if I can’t fix it, what if I’m not good enough, what if nobody else is, what if there is no use in anything,
and so on, ad infinitum. Heroin pulls the plug on that. Imagine the quiet! The paradox of narcotics is that while they allow you to experience the present moment painlessly, the plug is still pulled, and so you are numb to it; nothing sinks in. The joy of the high never lasts longer than your drugs. It can make you feel as if everything is okay, but it can’t make it true. While the bliss of a heroin high has a lot in common with the sense of well-being that years of meditation can give you, narcotic serenity is spiritually toxic. It’s Sweet’n Low, fucking a prostitute, and cheating on anything (except maybe your taxes); it makes life less tolerable, not more.

So take the empty palate that heroin makes of your consciousness and splatter it with mania. Cocaine is drive. I’ve witnessed the mania of bipolar people, and the first thing that always strikes me is how identical it is to a cocaine high. It is grandiose, marveling, indiscriminate, tireless, and then suspicious, paranoid, angry, psychotic, debilitated. Heroin subtracts all the ugly parts. That’s why I shot speedballs. The feeling of both well-being and ecstatic mania flooding your bloodstream is unparalleled. I become so agitated even writing about it, years after the last time I experienced it, that I have to make cup after cup of tea and start praying that the phone will ring. There is a retroactive fear that is slow to wane.

Though I had watched a number of Lena’s and Autumn’s corporal sessions, which were heavy on verbal humiliation and torture, I had still been nervous to take them myself and found it difficult to
imagine punishment coming as naturally to me as it seemed it did to them. But everything feels natural when you’re high.

“He’s in Med Three,” Jordan told me as I walked into the office. “And he booked both you and Camille.”

“Camille? Excellent. Is his stuff—”

“It’s on your box.”

I carried my box into the dressing room and dug through the black garbage bag on top of it until I found the aprons. Shiny and black, Elie’s butcher aprons were straight out of a horror movie. They reached our shins, were adorned with wide pockets at the hips, and he couldn’t session without them. He once ran out of the dungeon in a tantrum because they had been lost somewhere in the rubble of the office supply closet. I hung one around my neck and cinched it tight around the waist of my zippered white nurse dress. Walking up to my reflection, I reached into my locker and pulled out a tube of lipstick. Adding a coat, I smacked my lips together, leaned in to check out my eyes, and stepped back to make sure my arm didn’t look like it had a botched fake tan. Assured, I grabbed another apron and headed into the smaller dressing room to see if Camille was ready.

Though Camille had only been hired a few months before me, it was difficult to imagine her doing anything else. With endless legs and a faint twang of Jersey in her gossamer voice, she collected vintage lingerie and already had one of the largest wardrobes in the house, full of genuine nurse, schoolmarm, and military uniforms. She had a dancer’s body, not only in proportion but also in that mesmerizing agility that never becomes tiresome to look at. She smoked Benson & Hedges, cut her hamburgers with a fork and knife, and was the only domme I had met who was an admitted submissive, though never with her clients at the dungeon. Hers was the only affected girliness I’ve ever encountered that I didn’t find insufferable. She lounged around the dungeon reading BDSM-themed books, from intellectual highbrow to pictoral how-to, and was always asking if she could practice some new bondage technique on
you. “Ooohhhh! Isn’t that beautiful!” she’d coo after you were trussed on the rug with your arms bent like wings behind you.

“Ready, Freddy?” I threw the apron at her.

She sighed and crinkled her smooth, white forehead. “He really is quite perverted, isn’t he, Justine?”

“Oh, quite.”

“I’m really looking forward to this.” Camille had some connection to London, a parent who lived there or had lived there. It was enough to justify the accent that also sometimes crept into her speech, apparently—and something else that only on her person did I not find pathetic and irritating. She stared dreamily at her own reflection and made an imperceptible adjustment to the nurse cap alighted on her coiffed head. “It’s from the sixties,” she sighed. “I got it on eBay.”

We made certain to walk heavily down the hallway, knowing how the click-clack of heels frightened the Frenchman, in a good way.

“Hello, darling,” I greeted him. He stood in the largest of the three medical rooms, ashing his cigarette into the sink beside the steel cabinet that held most of our scopes, probes, pinchers, and other instruments that looked as cruel as they sounded. I saw that he had removed a pinwheel (like flatware with a tiny wheel at the end decorated with spikes) and some long-handled clamps and laid them on the stand beside the adjustable table.

“Oh! You are so beautiful, just as I remembered.” His voice, thick with his native French, trembled slightly, as did his hands. He stepped forward and then back, sucking vigorously on the lit cigarette.

“Of course we are. Now come say hello,” I demanded. He scurried forward and kissed both of my cheeks, then Camille’s.

“Are you due for some punishment?” Camille asked him. While thorough and enthusiastic in her techniques, Camille didn’t like to talk much in her sessions, and I could see that it made her nervous.

“I am.” He looked so forlorn, and said it with such dismay, that were I not buffered by the drugs, I would have stumbled over my next words.

“Well then, it’s time for you to put your apron on and let us worry about the next few hours; they are not your concern.” It was with a kind of relief that he then stripped off his tailored suit and folded it neatly on the stool beside him.

I have always known what people want from me. This skill played a large part in my success as a dominatrix. That is essentially the job description: know what your client wants, and indulge or deny as prescribed. Of course, it’s a more delicate operation than it sounds. And being high didn’t hurt, as the quieter your own mind can be, the better to hear theirs. I could already see Elie’s craving for maternal reassurance; he wanted to be told exactly what to do, albeit within specifications, not all spoken. A tall order, and a common one.

He let us tie his own black apron around his slender waist and guide him into the chair, which we reclined, and we firmly tied his feet to the stirrups, his hands behind the headrest.

It is too taxing to maintain strict character for the duration of a four-hour session. You end up slipping in and out of character (“out of character” not being yourself but rather a low-gear version of your domme persona), revving up at the client’s cue, and giving him a rest when necessary. This improvisation requires a close attention to subtle tonal shifts in his responses and facial expressions. There is never anything so obvious as an “okay, let’s get back to business, ladies.” Many new dommes sour their business by being overzealous and not knowing how to discern when is enough. And so, after a slow crescendo that began with bondage (fishing line skillfully knotted around his nipples and strung to the great mobile lamp overhead) and ended with “fire-and-ice” (cigarettes and cubes from the kitchen freezer), we settled down into easy conversation and the slow process of emptying his bladder into a glass jar with a catheter.

“Now, here you’re going to feel some pressure as it perforates the bladder.” Elie moaned and squeezed his eyes shut. “There we go. Not so bad, was it?” I smiled down at him in perfect nursey condescension. He shook his head childishly. I left Camille holding the jar to go fix again in the bathroom.

On my return, a conversation ensued in which we learned of his deathly fear of water, due to an episode of maternal negligence at the shore during his childhood.

“Oh yes, I remember the fear of death vividly; even now I do. I have tried many times to swim, and every time it returns to me, just as it was that day when I was a boy. I cannot even take baths. It’s very sad, I know.”

Even at this early stage in my domme career I knew that nothing ever gets said carelessly in session. Camille knew the same. After she pierced his nipples while I held Saran Wrap over his face, we fed him a Dixie cup of water and stepped into the hallway.

“I have an idea,” she whispered.

We found a large plastic tub in the closet where the cleaning supplies were kept. While she released him from the chair and blindfolded him, I filled it with cold water from the shower in the neighboring bathroom (the Green Bathroom—also where I had been fixing). Leaving it on the floor of the shower, I returned to Med 3. Elie was now standing, naked, still trembling slightly, though now it was probably less nerves and more adrenaline from the pain he’d just withstood. Hardened tears of wax and their paths down his chest clung to his goose-pimpled skin, his swollen nipples. He reached his arms out gently and Camille guided them behind his back to tie his wrists together.

“Where are you taking me?” he asked.

“That’s not for you to worry about, now is it?” I said. “It wouldn’t do any good anyway, would it?”

He shook his head.

We cautiously led him down the hallway and into the bathroom.

“It’s cold in here, Mistress.”

“You need to shut up now, darling. Nobody’s wants to hear a whiner, do they?”

He shook his blindfolded head.

“Now you get down on your knees for us.” Camille pressed on his shoulders from behind. In her heels, she was taller than him by two inches. He sank to the floor, trembling more violently now. I inched the tub closer to the edge of the shower, until it was just below him, waist high. He whimpered. Crouched on either side of him, Camille and I each placed a hand on the back of his shoulders, and his head. We silently counted together,
one, two, three,
and plunged his head into the bucket. The jolt that went through Elie’s body was first one of sheer physical shock, as if he were being electrocuted. Then the terror shook him. A flash of something crossed Camille’s face—the ripple of wind on a lake’s surface—as he arched his back and bucked under our hands, but her expression resumed its placidity as her eyes met mine and said,
Now?
I nodded. We lightened our grip and his head popped up, mouth gasping fishlike, water streaming down his cheeks into it. After a few noisy mouthfuls of air, mine and Camille’s eyes met again,
one, two, three,
and we pushed him back under the water. This time bubbles streamed up behind his ears and we could hear his submerged screams. His legs slid backward, bare knees slipping on the wet tile. We had planned to do three dunks but could tell we wouldn’t be able to hold him down another round. We released him again, and after a few ragged gasps his body crumpled over and he let out a mournful moan. The three of us sat on the floor, damp and shivering. Camille and I rubbed slow circles on Elie’s trembling back. Eventually we realized that he was weeping. Slow, wracking sobs, like fever chills, shook him for a long time. When they finally slowed, he pulled my hand under his body and pressed his mouth against it. At first he kissed my palm, wetting it with tears and mucus. Then I could feel his mouth moving, but it wasn’t until he looked up that I could hear him saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

. . .

Years later, during my first therapy session, I had to explain to my therapist what a dominatrix was.

“So, would you consider yourself a sadist?” she asked me, not a trace of judgment in her tone. I laughed. Of course I didn’t; the suggestion was absurd. I could barely watch someone get beaten on television, let alone on the street; I hid my eyes and plugged my ears when rabid dogs were shot in movies.

But did I enjoy hurting people? Sometimes. But not simply for the sake of their physical pain. I couldn’t fathom hurting someone who didn’t want it, but how many people get to experience the moral loophole of hurting someone who wants to be hurt? I don’t know what it means that I enjoyed it, or what percent of the population would, if given the opportunity. But for someone so bent on mastering her given conditions, on inventing herself and her world in opposition to convention, it was an act of supreme defiance. As I had crouched on that bathroom floor, held that man’s head beneath the water, I experienced a kind of transcendence. It was that utter alienation from self, a loosening of the glue that made my reality whole. It felt both horrific and triumphant.