Febos - Whip smart: a memoir

WHILE WRITING A BOOK can be a lonely task, it is not one that can be done alone. Above all, I must thank all the brave and beautiful people I knew during the years that this story takes place, the ones I included, and the ones I didnt. I am enormously grateful to my agent, Scott Hoffman, for asking all the right questions and accepting nothing less than my best, but most of all for his faith and encouragement throughout the painful process of ushering my story into the right hands, and for knowing whose those were. I cannot imagine a more perfect editor to have worked with than Karyn Marcus, whom I trusted instantly for her marvelous vision, understanding, and belief in this book. For their invaluable guidance, I owe more than I can say to Jo Ann Beard, Nick Millswho suggested I write this, and especially Vijay Seshadri. And thank you to those who helped me maintain my sanity all along the way, among them my first readers: Caitlin Delohery, Susan DeFord, Shelly Oria, Elizabeth Reichert, Jill Jarvis, Alanna Schubach, Shoshana Sklare, Michael Mah, Erin Duff Shanahan, Emily Anderson, Claire Boland Gage, Anne Hall, Laura Snyder, Jill Stoddard, Jenna Giannasio, Kat Byrne, Beth OBrien, Laura Schurich, Will Mangum, Nelly Reifler, Joan Silber, Kathleen Hill, Irini Spanidou, Jan Clausen, James Marcus, Seth Colter Walls, William Georgiades, and all my Saturday ladies, who listened. And to Ann Roberts, without whom this book could not have been written. And to my family, for never doubting me. And to Barrett, my happy ending.

EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK is true to my memory of it. Most characters names and many identifying characteristics have been changed. In some instances, time was compressed or altered slightly to facilitate an economical telling of the story. I had to leave a lot out. Transforming actual people into literary characters is unavoidably reductive, and for that Im sorry.

I am Human, let nothing human be foreign to me.

MONTAIGNE

I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED SECRETS. Growing up in rural Cape Cod, I used to bury household objects in the woods behind our home, or on the banks of the pond we swam in all summer long. I drew maps with crayons, detailing the locations of my buried toys, or random kitchen utensils, and then cut out the insides of my books to make hiding places for the drawn plots. Those ravaged books on my shelf comforted me. To think of their secret contents, and the hidden knowledge in my own mind, gave me a surge of joy. The point was not that anyone would realize that something had gone missing. What thrilled me was that I was the keeper, I alone possessed the knowledge of a thing that was hidden away. Over time these secrets carved out a space in mea tiny part of reality over which I had full control. Those parts of me, unknown by other people, felt stronger, safer, removed from the perils of an unpredictable world.

As a teenager, I traded the fantasies of books and daydreams for mind-altering substances and social landscapes as far from my own as I could get. The allure of dark undersides pulled my life toward a future of increasingly fractured extremes. I pursued older lovers, intoxicated by their attentions, and soon found that seduction promised the greatest high of all. I had experienced a happy childhood and I was generally disposed to a calm and gentle demeanor, but underneath I craved the polarities of unmitigated power and total submission. I took drugs to control my world and subjugate my mind. Then I took drugs to escape them. There was no gray area, no middle way; it was always all or nothing.

It made sense that I ended up in New York City, where this story begins, though in the beginning it felt like waking from one dream to another. At twenty-one, I still knew how to be good; I was a college senior with a 3.9 GPA, a prestigious internshipand a new secret life as a professional dominatrix. I was also addicted to drugs, although the craving for that kind of high would prove less tenacious than what I found at the upscale S&M house where I spent the next four years. I walked through the door a self-described cultural anthropologist, and then watched every self-description Id ever had dissolve.

I was a student of human behavior long before I had the words to articulate what it felt like to be a watcher. For as long as I can remember, I saw people, their needs and worries and motives, as people assume children cannot. I thought for a long time that my driving force was my intrinsic curiosity about strangers and all the illicit things that other people do. I thought I sat on the outside, observing, manipulating, and drawing conclusions. I was wrong.

What began as a job became a life, and my most captivating secret of all. Behind that unmarked Midtown door, I uncovered hiding places that I hadnt known existed in me, and whose contents werent easy to behold. Ultimately, though, when I did, it surprised me to find that my own dark underside wasnt so strange or sick as I feared.

This book is that story.

STEVE KNEW TO BE KNEELING when I walked into the Red Room, his torso bent over his knees, forehead resting on the rug. He knew to be clean. He knew to undress, and to fold his clothes neatly behind the door, so that I walked into an immaculate room, nothing between me and the softly folded fist of his body but anticipation. While desire rose off Steve in fumes, steeping the whole room in its cloying vapor, I reveled in its absence. Just minutes before entering the Red Room, I adjusted my garters before the dressing room mirror, wrapped my fingers in electrical tape, and felt that happy absence, whose vacancy made room for some other, unnamed thing to fill me. I felt it already, the way you can smell autumn coming. Steve was into heavy flogging, and the tape protected the clefts between my index and middle fingers where I would soon clench a flogger handle in each hand.

I had cued the musicwhich piped from the main office into all twelve rooms of the dungeonto begin just a few seconds before I walked into the Red Room. The music I sessioned to was all the same; while I preferred angrier music for meaner sessions, all that really mattered was the bass line. I didnt need a plan to have a good session; I needed a pulse.

If that great red-walled room was a womb, I was its heart. I was the moving center, my will a muscular force. There was nowhere I could go, it seemed, that the cushion of my clients longing wouldnt support me. It happened to be 10:45 in the morning, but the only time that mattered in that room was indicated on the wall-mounted timer that I turned a full circle when I walked in. There was only ever one hour in the dungeon.

As I closed the door behind me, the pale stripe of my body shifting on the mirrored walls, I dropped my supply box on the floor by the door. Steve flinched at the sound, as Id intended. I let my heels fall heavy against the wood floor on my way to a row of hooks lining the wall. Retrieving a smooth length of rope, I draped it around my shoulders. Then, finding Steves favorite floggers, I held one in each hand, letting their thick tassels swing against my legs as I approached him, knowing the gentle slap of leather against my legs would agitate him. Standing over his curled body from behind, I dropped a flogger to the floor on either side of him and bent over so that only the tips of my hair, and my breath, touched him.