Whip Smart: A Memoir (30 page)

Fifteen hundred dollars. For an hour’s work. It sounded amazing, when you didn’t know what the work meant, or when you pretended not to.

I WAS ENROLLED
in Sarah Lawrence’s insurance plan. When I called Health Services and requested a referral for a therapist whose fee my insurance would cover, they said I would have to make an appointment with someone on staff first.

“I’d rather not, if possible,” I told the friendly receptionist.

“I’m afraid it’s required.”

“I’m afraid that I need someone with more experience. Off campus.”

“It’s just the one appointment, miss, and our staff is
very
experienced.” Most of the warmth had left her tone. “When would you like to come in?”

It was uncharacteristic of me to be so confrontational. My fear of conflict in everyday life (however ironic) extended even to phone conversations with strangers. I was much more the be-friendly-and-accommodating-now-and-fume-later type. In this case, though, I was filled with panic at the prospect of saying aloud what I planned to say, to some idealistic ignoramus in a room only yards away from my professors’ offices. It wasn’t what I had imagined.

Not that I had imagined ever telling anyone the exact details of my sessions. Spilling my secrets was a last resort. Still unsure if I wanted to quit completely, I had tried stopping, to see if I could. It was harder than I’d hoped.

Most of my private sessions were made by e-mail at this point. My clients would contact me to discuss a session, and then I would either book a private space or have them call the dungeon to make an official appointment on one of my two shifts there. All I had to do was not check that e-mail account. I called in sick to Mistress X’s and committed to no sessions for one week. It would be easy, I thought, a vacation. All I would have to do was my homework. I knew how to
not
do things, after all, didn’t I? But I couldn’t stop checking that e-mail. I made it the first few days, but my head was crowded with earnest reasons why this was the wrong time to take a break. The holidays were looming; I was still building a private client base, trying to get rid of the Tonys; didn’t I promise to get back to Albert about the following week? It wouldn’t be cheating if I just wanted to reply to someone and let him know I was off this week; it would be professional courtesy. This logic was good enough, and I ended up doing one session that week and scheduling three for the next. I finished the session anxious, instead of exhilarated; I had failed to uphold my commitment. No, the timing had been bad, and I had
chosen
to reconsider my decision. Who was I letting down anyway? Satisfied with that explanation, I tried again two weeks later, with the same result. When abstaining, I obsessed, and when I gave in, I felt guilty and anxious. The money offered a fleeting comfort.

When I had first begun working with Greta and was only a few weeks off heroin, she made me look up the word “compulsion.” I had been arguing with her over the idea of powerlessness. She said I wouldn’t stay clean unless I could admit mine. I said that I had survived by my own agency. According to the dictionary, a compulsion was
an irresistible impulse to perform an act that is contrary to one’s will.

“Do you believe in truth?” she asked me.

“Of course.”

“How about caring for yourself?”

“Sure.”

“And you want to practice these things?”

“Yeah.”

“But do you?”

I saw then that I could not even abide by my own beliefs. I had kept getting high long after it stopped being fun, after I began wanting to stop. In order to abide by my craving, I had acted contrary to my beliefs, to what I knew to be true. I had always suspected that I felt capable of anything because I was morally corrupt, or intellectually superior, or both. I discovered that my compulsions were simply stronger than my will. Never mind taking care of myself, I had tried everything within my power to stop shooting heroin and cocaine into my body. Telling the whole truth had been the only thing that worked.

“But why?” Dylan asked when I broke up with him. We fought more days than we didn’t, but I had still known that it would catch him off guard.

“I just don’t think we can change fast enough to love each other well.”

He squinted at the pillow in his hands.

“We haven’t been very good at it for a while,” I said.

True as this was, I had other reasons. I wanted to take a clearer look at my job, and in order to do that I needed to disentangle from his vision of me—and all the omissions in his version of what I did. I wanted a clean palette. I had a list of other reasons for leaving him, including his chronic sickness—which I, ever the psychotherapist’s daughter, considered a somatic manifestation of his anger at his parents. Also, his inability to express verbal affection. And then my general feeling of resentment and malaise in the relationship. I
didn’t actually count among them the confusion of my desire to get honest. I couldn’t admit then that I resented his tolerance of my job. I didn’t consider how my own behavior had damaged the integrity of our relationship, and underestimated the corrosive power of what I kept from him. I don’t think we ever could have recovered. I had chosen him partly
because
he would cosign what I did, like the painter had, and my parents, and everyone else I told my half-truths to. In a way, Dylan and I were perfect for each other but also doomed: in our silence we simultaneously protected and betrayed each other.

The counselor at school was probably five years older than me. I had become nauseous a few hours prior to my appointment. I felt like a defiant child walking into the Health Services office. The counselor looked nice, her face studiously free of suggestion or judgment. It occurred to me, looking at her well-meaning face, that she would pity me for what I did. I wasn’t used to telling anyone about my job who wouldn’t be impressed by it, find it shocking in a
good
way. I felt angry then, at her, for that pity.

“I’m Megan.” She smiled. “What’s been going on?”

“I torture people for money and I can’t stop,” I said, wanting to punish her for my shame.

They referred me to a woman whose office was on Fifth Avenue, just west of Union Square. Dressed conservatively—as I was most days by this time—in jeans and a turtleneck sweater, I exchanged covert once-overs with the other woman in the waiting room and took that same old pleasure in her likely misconception. I probably looked as if I worked for a magazine, a publisher, a designer. She did. She probably assumed I was just like her: same cool job, boyfriend, sadness. When a man in a jacket opened the door and smiled at her, she followed him out into the hallway. I wondered if
I shouldn’t have asked for a referral to see a male therapist. That would have been less intimidating. I would probably have been feeling excitement rather than dread at that moment. Which is why I knew that a male therapist would have been useless. I knew a lot about myself in fact, and when my own therapist led me into her cozy office overlooking 16th Street, I proceeded to inform her of it for the next thirty minutes. I needed her to know exactly how knowledgeable I was.

“You should know that I’ve been to a number of therapists in the past,” I told her. “My mother is a therapist. I have all that vocabulary; I practically learned to read on
Codependence No More
,
Healing the Ties That Bind, The Road Less Traveled
, all that stuff.” She only smiled at me, nodding encouragingly. “And I’m sober. I’ve been clean and sober in AA for two years now. So I’ve got all that information, too, about addiction, and spirituality. I’m a good person now. I sponsor people. I have a lot of self-knowledge. I pretty much know how to change; I mean, I
am
changing. There are just a few things I can’t seem to stop doing. I mean, I
get
them; I just don’t know how to stop. That relationship between knowing and changing, I mean, applying my knowledge to my actions, it’s always been hard for me.”

“Okay,” she said.

I heard my own voice as I spoke, and it sounded false. I sounded desperate, defensive, like I was trying to prove something. I sounded like someone who was trying to sound like she was fine. But that was what I had always done. The difference was that I didn’t want to hustle this woman; I actually wanted her help. So why couldn’t I sound honest? I sounded like a
kid
, all trembling bravado. It was pathetic, but I couldn’t stop. I kept trying to emphasize how ready I was to change, to accept help, to find a solution; I kept trying to get the tone right, to sound sincere and present. My effort only made it worse, only made me sound more desperate to convince her of something I feared wasn’t true. Distressed, I finally shut up. We stared at each other.

“I sound like I’m trying to convince you of something,” I said.

“Yes, you do.”

“I don’t know why. I’m really trying to be honest. I just think there is a lot you should know.”

“Why don’t you just tell me why you are here?”

“I want to stop being a dominatrix. I mean, I think I want to stop. I want to be
able
to stop.”

“What is a dominatrix?”

I gaped at her. Of course, my perspective was also skewed by my own experience in this regard. I wouldn’t have expected her to know what a roman shower was, although it was quotidian vocabulary to me, but I still found it hard to believe that there was a person in New York City who didn’t know what a dominatrix was. There were beer commercials featuring dommes and entire fashion lines derived from our costumes; Madison Avenue featured a Diesel Jeans billboard advertising women with whips, for God’s sake! But she didn’t. So I had to describe it for her. This was so much harder and more humiliating than I ever would have imagined. I had always enjoyed shocking people, having the privileged information. She wasn’t shocked, though, not visibly. She just listened. She listened to me describe a job that entailed acting out the sexual fantasies of men who want to be tortured by women and dressed in their clothes; who want to relive the trauma their mothers inflicted upon them with enemas, high-heeled shoes, paddles, and verbal abuse. I explained how we all had to file in to meet new clients and wait for them to choose whom they wanted to pinch their nipples or coo obscenities in their ear. It did not sound glamorous. It did not sound tough, or cool, or sexy. It sounded humiliating. She didn’t react at all. All these judgments welled up in
me
, as I spoke. If I had been eavesdropping on our conversation, I would have judged my words the way I did other dommes’: as the misguided rationalizations of someone in bondage to her sex issues, man issues, daddy issues, trauma history, whatever. “It’s really just one of the few well-paid
acting gigs in this city,” I told her, having delivered that line hundreds of times. I gave her all the neat and clever explanations that I had in stock. They sounded as flimsy and transparent as the insults I had shouted in my first domme session.

In meetings I spoke a lot about perspective, about context. It was important to actively seek out things that shifted your perspective, I often said;
it’s all about context.
Well, taken out of context, my job became a wholly different beast. My perspective shifted so violently, the bookshelf might have spun around, transporting me from a library to a bat cave. Glamorous didn’t exist in her office. There was no cool, no badass, no invincible. There was only real and unreal, and what I believed didn’t necessarily have anything to do with it. I had had many moments—on acid, or just heightened intimacy with a best friend or a lover—when I could see this. I knew, on some basic level, that glamorous and cool and tough didn’t exist, just like I knew that beauty was on the inside and that love was the solution to everything and that everything was part of one giant whole, but
really
. I had always had the ability to ignore that knowledge and enjoy fashion magazines, seducing people, and my personal triumphs. At that moment I couldn’t. It was very nearly the opposite of that feeling I chased in the dungeons, bedrooms, highways, and hotel rooms that had carried me outside of myself and into the yawning infinity of power and weightlessness. It was not falling, or flying, or evaporating into a dew of consciousness; it was being pinned to one spot, one self, one definition of something that resisted spin, philosophizing, or romance.

When I walked out of there, I didn’t know how I felt. It was easy enough to leave our conversation in her office and go on about my usual business. Later on, I felt similar to how I had when I began drinking wheatgrass and going jogging just before getting high. The sense of having done something good for myself increased my license to do what I suspected might not be so good. I was
working on it
.

But I kept working on it. I stopped trying to quit the dungeon and went about my usual routine. Every week I returned to that office overlooking 16th Street and went through the painstaking process of describing my work to someone for whom it didn’t connote status, romance, or power.