Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy (26 page)

“Okay, now spank me!” he said with a grin.

I thought it was sort of funny, so I smacked him lightly over his jeans with my hand, and out of nowhere a small crowd gathered to watch.

Worried, I whispered, “David, get into character. It’s showtime!”

I started spanking him harder for the benefit of my audience, shouting, “It’s for your own good! You should learn to take your punishment with a smile! Yeah! You are very bad!” and then muttered under my breath, “Are you okay?” David gave me a thumbs-up.

I felt a cold hand on my shoulder and spun around to find a mustached man in black leather. He handed me a wooden ruler and introduced himself as Bill. He was one of the owners and wanted to welcome me and offer some pointers. He instructed me to whack the ruler around on David’s butt. As soon as I did, an image appeared in my head: Now I was an evil schoolteacher and David was a bad speller!

Bill stood by and threw out instructions. “Aim more for the bottom, fleshy area. Now alternate hitting with rubbing in small circles. Good! Good! Try paddling his inner thighs. Look at that! You’re a natural!”

I was concentrating so hard on being Bill’s star pupil that I didn’t notice that I was beating the shit out of David, until I heard “. . . soy chai latte . . .
soy chai latte!
SOY CHAI LATTE!”

That was our safe word.

I helped David out of the stocks. He genuinely seemed pleased, but I had no time to register what had just happened as men lined up to get punished. It was time to put in my hours.

I started with the bald man who approached me earlier. After all, he was first.

Bill handed me a leather riding crop—very stylish. I started on baldy and tried to talk the talk but could only come up with uninspired
dialogue. “You’re bad! So bad! You know it!” I was basically reciting Michael Jackson lyrics, so I tried to switch it up. “Tell me. Why are you bad? Huh? Why are you bad? Yeah. Tell me! Why are you bad?”

And then he answered. “Because I’ve been thinking of younger and younger girls all the time.”

There was a hush in the dungeon.

Note to self: Never, ever, ever,
ever
ask someone why they are bad. Just assume while we were in the dungeon, we’re
all
bad.

Part of me wanted to turn to the crowd like an expert showman and say, “It’s okay, everyone! I know this guy admitted to being a latent pedophile, but I’m going to smack him a few more times, because that’s why we’re here, right? And then we can all go home and hope for the best. Is there a therapist in the house? No, for me.”

But he sensed my hesitation and whispered, “That’s enough,” and like a bad dog crawled away.

My feet hurt, and I didn’t feel sexy. I felt desired but in a way that didn’t turn me on. I liked the theater of it but had no emotional connection to administering punishment. The majority of the people there—at least six out of the seven—had a deep, unflinching desire they needed to fulfill, an itch to be scratched. I wasn’t sure if I was too fucked-up or not fucked-up enough to get it. Or just fucked-up enough to question the whole domme/sub thing, which is a problem only found in the first world.

Bill brought me back to the sub reality by introducing me to a guy who wanted to be trampled. He was in his forties and possibly Jewish. Hadn’t our people suffered enough? Apparently not. I wanted
to go home, but everyone was so eager to play with me that I felt bad and didn’t want to let them down. I was the most popular girl in the dungeon. And coincidentally, the only one.

Bill hoisted me on top of this poor guy, and he screamed in pain that my heels were too intense. He asked politely if I could take off my shoes. I wanted to check in with Bill on the rules—is he allowed to tell me what to do?—but he was busy strapping someone to a bench, so I tossed off my heels and hopped on the stranger’s chest with my fishnetted feet. I watched pain creep onto his face, like a kaleidoscope turning. His eyes bulged out of their sockets, and his expression became devilish, dark, and almost beastly. A carnal voice from within him suddenly screamed, “Mercy!”

I jumped off, and his normal expression returned. He thanked me and asked if I’d like another root beer. I was completely envious. It must be so nice to know specifically what you like in life.

A guy named Rich, wearing a dog collar and black yoga pants, reminded me he was next. While taking off his pants, he told me he could really take pain. Bill searched through his bag, and with a glint in his eye, handed me an electric bug zapper. It looked like a small squash racket with fine silver mesh, and when I tested it by lightly touching it to my palm, a shivering zap that both stung and burned ran through my arms and legs.

Rich said he could take five of them. With every touch, his body flinched and crumbled. On the fourth swing, I missed his butt completely and instead tagged his defenseless balls.

Horrified, I cried out, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry! Are you okay?”
Then I turned a shade of red slightly brighter than his ass and instinctively embraced his fallen body in an awkward spoon-like hug.

Rich turned around and gave me a puzzled look and then laughed. It was clear he was laughing at me. Bill joined in, and between giggles, pulled me off the ground, put his arm around me, and proclaimed that I was the “cheeriest domme” he’d ever met. Not exactly the quality you look for in a top.

I was totally disappointed. I’d hoped to have a sort of epiphany; understand my own sexual appetite in a deeper, more profound way; and get it on. Instead, it reinforced that I was nice—a people pleaser who was not at all dangerous—and painfully middle-class. If anything,
I
was the submissive. I’d let everyone tell me what to do: Bill, the pedophile, Jewey McCrazy Eyes, Richie Balls, even the editor at the magazine. The only person who was my approximate equal throughout the whole process was Jonathan, who’d texted me,
How’s it going Mistress O? Ha!

The whole scene was so cut-and-dry. Where was the flirtation? The sushi rolls? The torture in not being sure if you can close the deal? But the men didn’t seem to care that I was going through a mid-dominatrix crisis.

As I gathered up David to leave, Richie Balls and Jewey McCrazy Eyes called out, “Thank you, Mistress! Thank you, Mistress! Please come back, Mistress.”

One thing was certain: A cheery mistress was better than no mistress at all. As I shook Bill’s hand and thanked him for his instruction, one last hopeful notion ran through my head: I wondered if any
of these guys would like to come to a comedy show. But I guess we weren’t exactly exchanging business cards here.

Back at our apartment, Jonathan was fast asleep and the television was rolling credits for
The Matrix Revolutions
. My outfit must have inspired him. I woke him and asked if he had a deep, burning desire to be spanked, flogged, trampled, or otherwise humiliated. He sleepily responded, “God, no! Life’s too hard! I like a strong massage though.”

It made me smile.

I called my editor the next day to come clean. “Listen, I really tried, but it turns out I don’t get it. I was terrible at the whole thing. I got an intense triceps workout, but I don’t think I’ll be bringing any of the principles I learned in S&M into my own relationship.”

The editor seemed unmoved. “Okay—so you’re a Vanilla Mistress.”

I laughed, but was confused by her use of words. “A what?”

“A Vanilla Mistress. You know—like vanilla ice cream. Plain.”

I wanted to correct her that no, the people in the dungeon were plain. They liked one thing and one thing only. I, on the other hand, was very complicated. Neopolitan-mixed-with-mint-in-a-chai-latte complicated.

“You’re just not into the whole S&M thing. It’s okay. We’ve had about seven writers pitch us this same article before, but no one seems to be able to actually write it. Keep the outfit though. It’s on us.”

I should have gone for the latex.

T
he Peter Pan bus carrying me home from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, finally pulled into Port Authority Bus Station. I looked rumpled, felt beaten down, and had the sniffles. I don’t care how on top of the world you are when boarding a bus; an hour into the trip you’ll be braiding a noose out of your own hair. Added to this was my most recent injury: dying on stage in front of a room full of Christian lesbian alcoholics in recovery—which is a long way of saying, “Not my crowd.”

The funniest thing about the whole gig was that I got booked to do it. They’d originally secured a prominent gay female comedian, but she canceled at the last minute, so in a panic the event organizer did some creative googling. With the combination of “queer,” “comedy,” and “female,” she found that I’d once played a lesbian in an episode of
Queer as Folk
and figured that was enough to qualify me to entertain
her crowd. I would think hiring someone who played a lesbian for ten minutes on TV would be the exact opposite of a person who would appeal to an audience of actual gay women. Her flawed logic only exposed how much pressure she was under to find a replacement fast. I, in turn, was desperate for any paying gig, so we were all good! I was sure I could handle the crowd.

Wrong.

The organizer also failed to mention the “in recovery” part over the phone and chose to deliver that information backstage, fifteen minutes before the show. At the time, my set list covered two major themes: drinking and dating. For this show, I had prepared by removing all the pronouns from my relationship jokes to make them sound more universal: “You know when you’re on a first date and
that person
doesn’t pick up the bill? And you think, do I still have to pleasure you orally?” But could I water down my alcohol-related material to make it work? “Who here still plays
cold medicine
games? Ever throw up after a long night of
Advil
and
St. John’s wort
and think to yourself, ‘Wow—that was expensive!’” I looked blankly at my notebook, hoping that if I stared at it long enough, the perfect jokes would materialize. If only I had a joke about field hockey or Melissa Etheridge.

Clenching my jaw, I gave myself a little pep talk. The upside of not working with a manager was that at least I didn’t have to report back to anyone. The downside was that I had to talk myself into the game. The only way to make it through was to talk to the crowd. Hopefully, they’d be fun.

Wrong.

But in all fairness to this crowd, they were getting the raw deal. These women were not just saddled with religious guilt, they’d also relinquished the pleasures of drugs and alcohol. All they did was repent. Talk about Hell. And now they had to listen to me. Maybe empathy would get me through this gig.

It didn’t help that the setup of the room was comedy death: A wireless microphone balanced on a stool in the middle of a massive dance floor with folding chairs set up along the edges, as if they were expecting a basketball team. That might not sound like a big deal, but trust me, the less a space looks like the standard comedy club—low lighting, low ceilings, and people crammed close together toward the front of the stage—the less successful the show is going to be. There I was, under a gigantic disco ball, stranded miles of parquet away from an audience of painfully sober women, with not one joke that they could relate to.

But there comes a point in every show that regardless of the shitty setup, the last-minute information, the mismatch of audience to performer, you have to put that all aside and get out there. It’s too late. You have to take a step toward the stage, whisper to yourself whatever motivational saying works for you, and hope for the best. I always say, “They can all go fuck themselves.” It’s my mantra.

Since we were in the heart of Amish country, I told them that I wasn’t “really a comedian—this was my Rumspringa.” Then I made fun of the room, claiming that my contract states that I only perform in the “eye of the room,” and that I felt a little like Diana Ross, alone under an enormous disco ball. “But don’t worry, there ain’t no dance floor large
enough to contain my comedy.” Then I sang a couple of bars of
Dancing with Myself and
moved gracelessly around the floor to an imaginary beat. They actually laughed at that. It was far from groundbreaking material—it wasn’t even good—but it was goofy enough to create some warmth in the room and suspend harsh judgment for a few minutes. I foolishly believed that it might be possible to walk away unscathed.

But as the saying goes, three wrongs don’t make a right.

I ran out of riffs about the weird room and the weird Amish, so I segued into a few jokes about my weird name. When I felt like I had them on my side, I defied orders and told my drinking games joke, justifying it by thinking they
used to
abuse substances, so at least they’d get it. Asking an audience in recovery to reminisce about the positive side of irresponsible
using
turned out to be a horrible idea, and the room went dead silent. I even watched a woman in the front row clutch the silver cross around her neck. My usual bad habit of scanning the crowd for the purposes of finding the person who was not enjoying me was far too easy; there were too many choices. Instead, my eyes darted around, trying to find anyone who didn’t look annoyed. There was one woman excessively laughing and clapping, not at the right moments, but still behaving in a way that was appropriate to comedy. She wasn’t angry but clearly mad-crazy, and she became my touchstone, the only thing that kept me going. I was able to muddle through the remaining thirty minutes because of her, which I whittled down to about seventeen. No one would complain that I got off stage too early.

The second it was over, I began to shake and quiver as the pent-up nerves overtook me. Failure nausea filled my gut, and I considered
fleeing out the emergency exit, if only I could find it. Unfortunately they hadn’t paid me yet, and I was hungry. Satisfying both of those needs meant returning to the ballroom and wading through the crowd to locate the event coordinator and the buffet.

I finger-combed my bangs, straightened my top, and told myself that regardless of what happened, my mother still loved me. Sort of. Everyone was mingling, sipping diet sodas, and swaying to Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do.” My usual way of dealing with a disaster-of-a-gig was to soothe the emotional aftermath with heavy drinking and light sex (see
chapters 11
–on), but I couldn’t do that this time. It wasn’t just because it was a dry event attended solely by lesbians—I’m sure if I had to, I could make that work. This self-imposed boundary had more to do with the new life I was building with Jonathan that I didn’t want to fuck up because a room full of gay women booed me. At least not anymore.