Safe Words:

I wasn’t the sort of kid who told the other children where babies came from. Those messengers were most often the kind of pale, sneering boys who loitered in the back of the second grade classroom with a crusty ring of snot dried around their nostrils. These were the boys who licked their lips till they chapped, and lifted the lids of their desks when the teacher wasn’t looking just long enough for you to glimpse their father’s heisted Perfect 10 magazine.

As a child I was a baseball player, a tree-climber, the last blue-lipped kid to crawl out of the pond at dusk. It was not that I did not also covet the frilly, mesmeric trappings of girlishness; I doggedly wore down my mother’s opposition to Barbie dolls and their cripplingly tiny feet, and she let me keep the ones gifted by less enlightened relations. I was not one of those tomboys who didn’t realize she was a girl until she got her first period, or noticed that her bathing suit was different from her brother’s. There was simply never any mistaking myself for the kind of girl for whom ruffled socks and coddling was appropriate. I was strong and brown and fell down a lot, not because I was frail; but because I moved through life with a force not always containable, a haphazard need to get to someplace just beyond where I was. Nicknamed “Crash” by my parents, by the time I was ten I was falling down the stairs that led to my attic bedroom on a daily basis, and was perpetually pocked with bruises from banging into the edge of cabinets, doorways, railings, tables, and bookcases. I once suffered a lump on my forehead that lasted for days after walking into a light-switch.

My kindergarten class photo features me in the front row. A gift from my grandmother (a woman with native expertise in the art of all things feminine), I am wearing a pink sweater-skirt with rows of yellow ducks and a matching top. My hair is long and shiny with pink barrettes, and the smile on my face belies the pleasure I remember feeling at my girliness that day. I would have gotten away with it, at least in retrospect, had I not been in the front row. The image is perfect, until you travel below the hem of my skirt, where my sturdy legs are encrusted with fresh scabs, and anchored by a pair of dilapidated sneakers. It was not often that I attempted this disguise, and the feeling was never lost that it was a futile task to obscure my unkempt underneath.

It wasn’t the implication of sex that made me nervous in dresses. My parents sat me down the first time I asked, around the age of four or five, and told me exactly where babies came from. They drew pictures and gave proper names. There was no element of shock or shame in this information; it simply was, exciting in the way of moths in chrysalis, whose cottony sacks clung to the trees in our yard. In my house we peed with the bathroom door open, and I knew what everyone in my family looked like naked. Bodies were curious, mesmerizing, but the only one I ever remember embarrassing me was my own.

Jessie was my first best friend. When I was five, my family moved to Cape Cod to be closer to the maritime base where my father, a sea captain, shipped out from. We lived on a dirt road with a farm at the end, a stone’s throw from Otis Air Force Base, so that the apocalyptic rumble and whoosh of jets flying overhead was a common disruption. Chatting in backyards, we would pause and stare into each other’s faces for whole minutes while engine thunder filled the air, waiting to pick up our words like a dropped laundry line. Jessie’s family lived a few houses down. Blond and impish, she and her brother Ben were the same ages as my younger brother and me. Our friendships flourished accordingly. Her parents were a concrete foundation layer and a housewife, and I don’t believe I ever saw either of them without a sweating glass of orange juice in their hand.

“They’re called screwdrivers,” my parents informed me. “It’s not just orange juice in their glasses, and that’s why you come home before dark.”

“You are not there,” I pointed out. “You don’t see. I know what orange juice looks like.”

I thought that I knew what a lot of things were like. Bed sheets were worn soft and flannel, toiletries came in bulk gallon bottles from the health food co-op and were under the sink, and nicknames were Crash, Boo, and sometimes Punkin. I had the confidence we do during the period of childhood grace when everything we know is taken for granted as the way of everything in the world, before we have some basis for comparison, and what we have becomes forever not good enough. I had never seen cable television, or tasted snack foods with refined sugar until I went to Jessie’s house. While I gulped in awe and desire, my parents exchanged looks that I now recognize as some combination of pity and dismay. They also shared the wordless phew of two working-class kids from Jersey who grew into an educated, white-collar liberalism that allowed their own children to be spared the perils of meeting Daddy at the bar after school enough times to name “Lady in Red” as a favorite song, as Jessie did.

Jessie’s daddy called her Kitten (my request for the same courtesy was met with laughter), and her whole family used words like ca-ca, an all-inclusive term not only meaning shit, but any kind of nasty substance that might get stuck to you, smell bad, or induce a flinch with its given name. My family’s comparative lack of flourish (poop meant only poop, never mind its grievous onomatopoeia) struck me as both embarrassing and dull. On Christmas afternoon, when she stopped over for cookies, my brother and I touted how not only the cookies we had left with a note for Santa had been eaten, but also the carrots we’d left for the reindeer.

“Yeah,” she replied. “Santa ate all our cookies too, and he had a beer.”

Like so many loves, Jessie was the perfect combination of that which I recognized in myself, and that which I sought to possess. There was an effortlessness to her prettiness: the thrust of her little hand as it reached for things, for me, discarded worries, gum wrappers, tears; the speed of her mouth as it spoke, and her seamless inflections; her cheap clothes, and milky skin. Jessie knew how to lie, how to cry at will, and even in her sadness I saw none of the bald coarseness of my own grief.

It was I that poured hydrogen peroxide on the tooth-marked gash in her left buttock after Ben bit her in one of his tantrums, blowing as my mother did on the frothing wound while she whimpered, clutching a box of Band-Aids. It was me that told her where babies come from.

One afternoon in her bedroom, we were playing Barbies. Watching her mash the two nude, sexless bodies of a Ken and Barbie doll together in a series of frustrated clicks, I wondered aloud what Jessie’s couple was doing.

“They’re making a baby,” she replied. “They are kissing without their clothes, and then Barbie’s belly is going to get fat, and then the stork is going to come with the baby.”

“A stork?” She was clearly lost in some hideous deficit of information, so I offered my expertise on the subject, proudly enunciating the multi-syllabic vocabulary: fallopian tubes, ovaries, uterus, intercourse. I felt satisfied by her widened eyes, powerful in my knowing.

Later that day, as we sat in the back seat of her family’s minivan, she crawled onto the armrest between the two front seats.

“Melissa said that storks don’t bring babies, Mom. She said that babies come from intercourse.”

I sensed instantly in her mother’s silence my faux pas. Staring at the back of her frizzy head, my face grew hot, insides curling like those little shreds of fabric and plastic that I burned in the Mason jar in my closet, conducting my secret “experiments.” Though not yet tall enough to touch the floor of the van with my feet, I felt myself grow in conspicuousness, as if self-consciousness were bloating my body: a great vesicle of crass knowledge, lodged in the back seat of the van.

I knew that my error had not been one of fact. What I had mistaken is the atmosphere in which it was told me for that larger context of the world. It was an instant awakening to the fact that truth could be a crass thing to know. I did not play so often at Jessie’s after that, but I did not forget Jessie. I think of her every time I hear “Lady in Red.” I also did not forget that in this greater world, for the privilege of sweeter tastes, for prettier names, toys, and smells, one has to pay in the integrity of things whose truth defies the coy obfuscation of prettiness.

In academe, publishing a book is certainly grounds for congratulations—it’s a boon to any teaching career, a big step toward the goal of all of us adjuncts: to land a full-time professorship, and the time it affords to create our own work. My writing and teaching careers have so far gone according to plan: graduate school, adjuncting, publishing a book, and now pursuing the full-time gig in earnest. Only my original plan didn’t include publishing a book about the most personal and shocking experiences of my life.
While I don’t regret having been a dominatrix or a heroin addict—I emerged on the other side of both with a greater understanding and compassion for myself and other people—I never intended to write about those experiences. When that story of my past hijacked my creative energies I was in graduate school, knee-deep in a novel. On a whim, I had taken a survey course in nonfiction. After book reviews and op-eds, we arrived at memoir. The piece I wrote, about having been a dominatrix, was simultaneously one of the easiest and most difficult I’d ever written. It bubbled forth with the urgency of a story that wants to be told. But I knew it wouldn’t be worth writing with anything less than total honesty. I didn’t want to write a sensationalized account; I wanted to understand the personal transformation I had gone through as well as its universality. But these were not experiences that I had ever planned to share in detail with, well, anyone. Still, when my professor demanded that I abandon my current project and write this book, I knew the advice was sound. So, after having a small heart attack, I wrote it.
I am proud of the book. I did my best to practice what I teach: to merge honesty and experience with careful craft. Nonetheless, the book is full of everything no one ever wants her family to know about her past—or her students, let alone her boss, or potential boss. The material of my book is not the stuff of job interviews.
Like most realistic writers, I expected the book to be received with resounding silence. On some level I hoped, unrealistically, that I would be able to reap the benefits of being a published author without having to confront the vulnerable position that my subject matter put me in. And so, when I was scheduled for an interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and featured on the front page of the New York Post, I was thrilled, but also terrified.
The week after I appeared in the Post, my boss congratulated me at a faculty meeting. “Thank you,” I replied, smiling, but my heart raced. I quickly brought the subject back to grading rubrics.
My colleagues knew that I had a book coming out, but I hadn’t broached its subject directly with anyone I didn’t also consider a friend. In fact, I haven’t yet—now more than two months after the book’s release. I’m embarrassed by my own meekness, but equally embarrassed by the prospect of discussing my past with colleagues. Before my mother read Whip Smart, she asked me to divulge the most intense parts so that she wouldn’t cringe in anticipation while reading. “Mom!,” I half joked. “I wrote it down because I couldn’t say these things aloud.” I had made a decision at the outset to write the book in a vacuum because I knew that if I let myself imagine others’ reactions, I’d never finish it.
My own trepidation is surprising on some level; it’s incongruent with certain long-held self-perceptions. But so many of my self-perceptions have been upturned throughout the process of writing and publishing this book.
I’d always been drawn to extremes, to ways of living outside social prescription. Before writing the book, I would have named my rebellious nature and anthropological curiosity as primary motives for ending up in the “dungeon.” But my motives, like the job itself, were not what I had imagined. The iconic image associated with the word dominatrix—a dominant, self-possessed woman—is somewhat based in truth. However, it is a job that entails embodying the fantasies of other people, transforming oneself into a specified object of desire. It requires the ability, and on some level the desire, to conform to what others want from you, and a need to be desired. Admitting that I have those qualities makes me feel much more vulnerable than admitting that I have a rebellious streak.
Though loath to face it, I care what other people think—my family, my colleagues, and of course, my potential employers. While I privately relish embodying contrasts—I’m a high-school dropout with a graduate degree, a college professor covered in tattoos, a former heroin addict who hasn’t had a drink in seven years—these are not facts I advertise in my classrooms, or on job interviews. And I’m not immune to shame. I may not regret any of my decisions, but neither am I proud of them all.
As much as I’ve always been drawn to dark undersides, I also always wanted to teach. The only thing I’ve wanted longer is to be a writer. My desire to absorb—knowledge, experience, the kinds of education that happen both in and out of classrooms—is matched by a desire to give out as much as I take in. That, I think, suits me to the jobs of writer, teacher, and even sex worker. They aren’t as disparate as you might think.
Although it is part of the sex industry, the job of dominatrix doesn’t include sex. Perhaps for that reason, it is especially dynamic work: equal parts performer, therapist, and personal coach. I’ve heard teachers describe their jobs similarly. As in teaching, you get as much as you give. I brought a tremendous amount of energy into my “sessions,” and when my ability to do that waned, I stopped being able to perform my job. Now I try to bring a lot of energy into my classrooms, and because I believe in what I teach, my reserves are deeper.
At the crux of my pedagogical philosophy is honesty—about the difficulty and compromise inherent in the writing life, the outlandish tenacity it requires, and the transcendence possible. But the challenge of adding to that list honesty about who I am has called my philosophy to task. I often talk to my students about writing as a series of risks. Now that I’ve taken what may turn out to be the most terrifying risk of my career, I’m doing my best to land gracefully—to avoid injury, but also to prove, to my students and to myself, that it’s worth it.
I’m often asked if I think the subject matter of my book will inhibit my chances of landing a full-time faculty position. I worry, yes, but know it’s beyond my control. For better or worse, I cannot isolate my experience as a human being from my work. Increasingly, I don’t want to. I’ve learned that it doesn’t serve me as a writer to view any experience as “good” or “bad” or beyond examination. As my belief in the acceptability of my embodiment of seemingly contrasting traits deepens, my instinct to hide them wanes.
For the most part, my job hasn’t changed since the book came out. My students don’t often bring it up in class. I’m grateful for that. But they do approach me after class sometimes—young women mostly—thrusting their copy of the book onto my desk. I always smile, though my heart races, as they thank me for my honesty.

All couples love to tell the “how we met” story, but especially New York couples. So much of life here is carried on in public that opportunities for serendipitous meetings abound. No doubt, my ex-boyfriend and I could have trumped any unique story, but a mutual friend, we used to say, and leave it at that. While it stung a little to not take credit for such a good one, are were parts of it that I’m not proud to take credit for, and those stung more.

I first saw Barrett outside a vegetarian restaurant near Washington Square Park. Though we’d never exchanged photographs, I recognized him immediately against the brick wall beside the entrance. Lean and long-lashed, he tugged his earphones out and smiled at me.

“Hi.” We kept smiling at each other and awkwardly shook hands. How do you greet a blind date? I’d never been on one.

We took turns sharing hunks of information about ourselves until the food arrived. He grew up in Westchester, had gone to film school, and recently returned from a three-month stint in Mexico, following the Zapatistas around with a video camera.

I talked about the MFA program I was enrolled in, my dog, and cracked my usual jokes about being the daughter of a shrink. We avoided the most obvious topic, though it grew in conspicuousness over the course of our meal, like the small collection of onions on the rim of my plate. When the food came we ate quickly, sharing bites, half-covering our mouths as we chewed.

Chemistry is funny. When it’s not there, I can’t always tell, and often wonder if I’m just overlooking it. But its presence renders that thought laughable.

After paying the check, we stood under the awning over the restaurant’s entrance. Dinner had only taken an hour, and I scrambled to think of the best way to prolong our date. Then the sky opened up. Torrents of rain pounded the awning above us, and pedestrians ran, shrieking, clutching soaked magazines over their heads.

“So,” he said, his body so near I could smell his shampoo.

“Yes?”

“How long were you a dominatrix?”

No one plans on becoming a dominatrix; at least I hadn’t. I was a liberal arts student with no income, an aversion to poverty and taking orders, and I’d always enjoyed a good high. I also loved to feel desired. Perhaps I wasn’t the most unlikely candidate for work in a commercial “dungeon.” All it took was answering an ad in the Village Voice.

Very quickly, I was hired at a posh midtown dungeon. When my first client requested verbal humiliation, I figured it would be easy; my verbal skills were top notch. I quickly realized that an hour alone in a room with a naked man whom you don’t plan on having sex with would be a long one. I trembled atop my platform stilettos and wheezed for breath beneath my borrowed corset, cold tears of sweat streaming from my armpits. As I willed my lips—gummy with dark lipstick—to part around the right words, it occurred to me that I’d never been very good at being mean. I felt my kneeling client’s breath on my fishnetted knees, and fought the urge to flee. And then, I remembered that he had already paid for my expertise. I had nothing to prove! In that moment, my fear lifted like a flock of startled birds, and I became Justine: my stage name, and dominatrix persona. The words came to me then, lots of them, ones I won’t repeat here.

For two years I wore a corset and strutted in stilettos through those opulent rooms as though I’d hit the jackpot. It’s an acting gig, I bragged to my friends. One of the most lucrative ones around. I was good at it: the verbal humiliation, the acting, and pretty handy with a rope, and a whip.

But by my third year, the sheen had dulled.

“You’ve been very naughty, haven’t you?” I asked a regular whose sessions I’d always looked forward to. After so many replays of the same scene, I struggled to muster the enthusiasm necessary to be convince him I really cared whether he’d been naughty or not. He was always naughty. After I’d trussed him in a complicated series of knots and blindfolded him, I sighed, and kicked off my stilettos. Along with Japanese bondage, I’d mastered the art of administering hot wax with one hand, while text-messaging with the other.

I’d also realized that you can only work in the sex industry for so long before you start feeling as if it’s the only thing you’re qualified for. So I applied to graduate school, hoping for a ticket out. And by the end of my first year at Sarah Lawrence College, I had stopped seeing all my clients, except for Jacob.

My specialty in verbal humiliation made me a natural choice for Jacob, but our shared interests didn’t end there. He had a penchant for petite, curvy women, and the same alt-country and indie-rock bands that filled my iPod. For a year, we traded mix CD’s and he paid me to reenact his childhood bullying.

A few days after my 24^th birthday, he picked me up outside my Williamsburg apartment.

“Where are we going?” I asked, sliding into the passenger seat of his old Saab. I assumed we’d head to his apartment in Queens, have a session, then dinner at the nearby diner.

“It’s a surprise,” he said, smiling. I guessed possible destinations all the way into Manhattan, where he parked outside of Best Buy.

“What are we doing here?” I demanded. “This is not a hot air balloon ride!” I followed him, laughing, all the way to customer service, where an employee hoisted a box onto the counter. It was the Bissell 37601 Lift-Off Revolution Turbo Upright Bagless Vacuum: my dream vacuum cleaner, in candy-apple red.

“Happy birthday,” said Jacob, grinning. I threw my arms around his neck.

As soon as he parked the car in Queens, I lodged the heel of my shoe between his legs, and he gave me a sweet smile, tinged with a mixture of desire and regret. The rest of our evening continued as usual: a session at his apartment, then dolmas at the Greek diner.

I enjoyed my sessions with Jacob, but what I looked forward to all week were our dinners at the diner afterwards Though I had a boyfriend during most of our friendship, it was Jacob with whom I shared three-hour phone-calls, Jacob I called when I felt lonely. My loneliness had been incurable for some time at that point. Love hadn’t fixed it, but somehow Jacob did. He made me laugh, and feel known. Occasionally I’d catch a tenderness in his gaze that made me look away, fuss with his car radio, or make a joke, but otherwise I felt more at ease with him than anywhere else in the world.

When I finally stepped out of my rubber catsuit for good, and decided I was ready for a real relationship, I begged Jacob to set me up with one of his friends, ignoring the continuing sadism of this. Couldn’t a man and his former dominatrix be platonic friends, I thought?

When Jacob landed a serious girlfriend, our friendship waned. When he told his girlfriend our how-we-met story, it shrank to a phone call every once in a while. And when his girlfriend became his fiancé, I was officially forbidden. Who could blame her?

It was a fluke that I happened to call him out of the blue on a day when he was fighting with his betrothed. He later claimed to have answered the phone out of spite.

“Hey!” he said.

“Hi!” I smiled for the pause that followed, our mutual knowledge of each other pooling like water into its shallow basin.

Turns out he was with an old friend, one with whom I’d always tried to get him to set me up.

“Put him on the phone,” I demanded, and perhaps out of habit, he obeyed.

A week later I sat across a table from Barrett, a plate of steaming soy chicken and my checkered past between us.

Not one of us expected anything to come of it, but we were all happily wrong. That is, except for Jacob.

Three months later, Barrett and I had moved into a one-bedroom in Prospect Heights, the nesting capital of Brooklyn, where young couples flock to buy their first apartment and have their first baby. I had never lived with anyone before, had never been the type of girl who fantasized about lifelong monogamy, but it’s true what I’d heard people say about the right person at the right time; three weeks into our relationship I was happily domesticated.

We had found each other, but each lost a friend. Jacob couldn’t stomach the reality of having his secret life walk into his real life, on his best friend’s arm. Barrett and I chalked it up to necessary losses, and figured everyone, not least Jacob’s fiancé, would be happier if we just slipped quietly out of the picture.

Over the next couple years, thinking of Jacob never failed to prod a tender spot in my conscience, but I was happy in love, and didn’t think of him very often. That is, until I wrote a book about my experiences as a dominatrix, and then sold it to a major publisher.

Writing a memoir necessitates creating a kind of vacuum, at least until the book is written. I could not consider what the characters in my story would think about my depiction of them, or what anyone would think about the extremity of my experiences, not until I finished. But when I became certain that this book would see the light of day, my elation mixed with terror. I feared reactions: my family’s, my boyfriend’s family, and that of everyone in the book—especially Jacob. I couldn’t seem to stop airing his dirty laundry. I agonized over whether to tell him, or just pray that he never stumbled upon it in a bookstore. I had changed his name; was that enough? Ultimately Facebook decided for me, by suggesting he “become a fan” of the book.

“Please tell me I didn’t rate important enough to make it into the memoir,” read his email to me, the first in more than two years.

I called him.

And then Jacob reminded me of why I had been his friend in the first place. He was freaked out, sure, but also extraordinarily generous.

“I’d never ask you to change it,” he said. “It’s not for me to say.”

I was flabbergasted.

“I’m proud of you,” he added. “This is your dream, and it’s happening. Congratulations!”

That night, I combed through the final, copy-edited version of my manuscript, and cut out every detail about Jacob that didn’t absolutely need to be there. He deserved at least that. I wished I knew how to make a better amends.

In all my time as a dominatrix, I’d never felt as though I’d won while my clients lost; there was always a perfect reciprocity to those relationships. Even if I privately mocked them, we each always got what we wanted. But Jacob was different. He gave more, and accepted less. His final generosity threw that into stark relief. Sure, we were both happy. Sure, the pieces of life fall where they may, and it isn’t always fair, or someone else’s fault, but I couldn’t deny that he’d gotten the short end of the stick. I’d always had more power to wield. My publishing a record of our history was an act that he had no control over, but the grace with which he met it was the most powerful gesture made between us.

I can’t say that our friendship picked up where it left off. Or that he and Barrett’s friendship has been repaired. Or that Barrett and I lasted, in the end. None of us really speak, these days. But I harbor a hope that we might be someday. I sometimes picture us all laughing around a table, a little battered, but relieved to have weathered the storm of our pasts, with bigger hearts all around.

Dear America,

Baby, I love your particular strain of capitalism, how its muscular hand caresses every part of me, everything in sight –I have always loved a firm hand, Baby. I love how it has turned everything into a product, one that looks suspiciously like my own body. I love how this has made me hate myself, and hawk myself, and fostered an extreme poverty of imagination in my young self, and in everyone I have ever known.

I love how this has forced my imagination to grow bigger. Because to live in you, Baby, I’ve got to be big, I’ve got to grow to fill the space that you don’t cover, not with billboards, not with wrapping paper, not with snuggies or makeup or powerpoint slides or music that makes me want to buy shit. Baby, I’ve got to have strong bootstraps, to always be pulling myself up by them, Gortex bootstraps, sport utility bootstraps, strap-on bootstraps.

Darlin, I love your food-grade plastic, because what would I have done in the years before I discovered crack and heroin? I love that reading was my first drug, that you enabled me to wack off to stories about men and women fucking, women and women fucking, men fucking meat out of the fridge, women fucking dogs, because not only do I feel a sense of sexual entitlement that I did not learn from your teachers, but I also feel entitled to write about whoever the fuck fucking whomever the fuck they want and is willing, and not for a moment do I fear for my life.

Baby, I love you especially because most of the time, I take this for granted.

Honey, I love that your institutions of education failed to meet my imagination half-way. I love that when I went to the appointed counselors of these institutions for guidance, they too suffered from a lack of imagination, a lack of inspiration, a lack of information. I love that this, along with my sense of entitlement, thrust me out into the world, fluent in the wrong language, so that learning to learn was like being thrown off a cliff and told to fly.

Baby, I love you because I did.

Sweetheart, I love that you can take a tool as magical and powerful as a television and use it to manufacture food grade plastic. That you have the balls to call reality something that has nothing whatsoever to do with it. I love that this dearth of true stories has not only allowed me to escape reality for necessary amounts of time, but also necessitated that I write true stories my own.

Baby, I adore all of your sweet systems: your laws and leaders and prescriptions and transit adjudication bureaus and assembly lines and lotteries, because when this staggering division of labor and power fails, it reminds me to depend on something bigger than all of that.

Baby, I love that you make me deep fried anything, that you make people so flawed and fearful and brave and fat and complacent, breaking my heart on the subway with all those little ugly things they do to make themselves pretty, to make themselves invisible, to make themselves immune to suffering- that I can’t help but love them.

Baby, I love that you give me so much to fight against, so much to choose from, so much to grow around and through, and up with. Baby, I love that no matter how much I boast a disaffection for your charms, I swoon in you, indulge in you, crave you. Like my mother, and my father, and all your slick and weary systems, I come from you. If that’s not a kind of love, Baby, than I’ve been wrong all along.

And Baby, I can’t help but love you the most in MY city, where your musky neck smells of donuts and vomit, piss and plastic, money and oil and lipstick and home. Where your touch feels like a thousand tired shoulders brushing against mine, your breath like the suck of a thousand trains burrowing under these rivers. Where your heartbeat shakes me like a thousand street drums, a thousand car horns, a thousand peels of public laughter, a thousand skyward wails asking you please, Baby, come back to me, be good to me, give it up for me, hold on to me a little tighter; I know you have it in you, because I know I’ve got you in me.

Love,

Melissa

Most relationships after a certain age begin with a body or two under the bed.  Usually these are ex-lovers, whose legacy manifests tangibly in shoeboxes of old letters and photos, those morbid and sentimental curations that pulse faintly from the closet shelf.  Or maybe they are the specters of bad parenting, grade school bullies, criminal records, actual deaths, and surely, in some rare cases, actual cadavers. In my case, it took the form of a garbage bag full of S&M equipment.

I hadn’t been retired long from the “dungeon” when I met my last boyfriend. We had actually been introduced by a former client of mine, also his best friend from college.  On our first date, my skeletons were nowhere near the closet, but perched, rather, on the table between our plates of soy chicken and blanched greens.  He knew before we met that in addition to having a hearty collection of exes, I had been a sex worker, a heroin addict, and that I was writer—an occupation loath to let sleeping ghosts lie.  I had already begun building the frankenstein of my checkered past: a memoir based on my vanquished habits of spanking men and shooting dope.  As a man with possessive tendencies, he should have known what he was getting himself into.  But love makes us stupid, and we were no exception.

Also, I may have had a worrisome past, but my present practically defied its existence.  His girlfriend was a college professor who hid her tattoos under pearl-buttoned cardigans, who went to bed at 10pm, and hadn’t had even a cocktail in years.  The door to my former life seemed firmly closed, and so, three months into our relationship, the door to our new apartment opened.  I left my loft in the hipster ghetto of Williamsburg and moved to the leafy haven of Prospect Heights, where there were more baby strollers than bars, and prepared to enter the next level of domestication.

And then the paddle slipped out from under the bed.  It was black, the length of an arm, and outfitted with a strip of sandpaper on one side.  I found him standing over it one afternoon, brow furrowed.

“Um.  Do I want to know what that’s for?”

“Probably not,” I laughed, and kicked it back under the bed, hoping my nonchalance was contagious.  He stared at the floor where the paddle had been, and then up at me. I scrambled to think of something to distract him from whatever it was he wanted to say.

“You planning on using that again any time soon?” He smiled halfway and cocked an eyebrow.

“Of course not! I just need to get around to selling it.”  I reached across the bed to the window and turned up the air conditioner. He was still looking at me when I finished, so I grabbed a stray t-shirt and began folding it. “You know, what I really need to do is get on eBay.”  I didn’t look up again until I felt his gaze move away from me.

The paddle wasn’t alone. Its sharp edges had simply chewed a hole in the black garbage bag that housed a wide assortment of similar artifacts. Leather cuffs, corsets, rubber (disinfected!) enema bags, and platform stilettos nestled into a cocoon of a latex catsuits, nurse uniforms, and pleated miniskirts I was pretty sure I’d crossed the outer age bracket of eligibility for. When I had hung my floggers up for good, and cleaned out my locker in the dungeon dressing room, I had shoved it all—thousands of dollars worth of equipment and costumery—into the industrial strength bag.  The bag had sat under my bed in Williamsburg for months, and then among the last of my boxes as I’d moved, its fate uncertain. As I’d stood over it in those final moments, the pang I’d felt—something between the feeling of throwing a birthday card from your grandmother in the trash and that just before you answer a phone call from someone you know will probably break your heart—was too strong to override.  The body in that bag was still too warm.  I rationalized that the contents of the bag were worth too much money, and carried it to the moving van.

A month after the paddle incident, a red, leather, riding crop wandered out from under the dust ruffle. My boyfriend was at work this time, and I got down on my knees and tugged the lumpy mass out from under our bed.  When I unknotted the bag’s neck, it exhaled a ghostly breath: the scent of stale incense, body sweat, leather, my old perfume (Dior’s “Addict”), and rubbing alcohol.  My heart and stomach lurched in unison. It was the smell of the dungeon, the smell of my past, the smell of desire and money, of secrecy and sex.  It was the olfactory equivalent of an old mix tape: a sensory time capsule.

I reasoned that the memoir ought to have presented a graver threat of the past’s reincarnation.  But my writing happened in silence; it didn’t have a smell. Reliving the past in writing was intense, but also left the memories flattened somewhat, defanged. I know that the potential rise of that frankenstein, though it gave my partner pangs of his own, seemed at that point mostly hypothetical.  The act of writing down a story places it firmly in the past, draws a line between then and now, the story and its telling.  So long as my alter identity—Mistress Justine—and her interest in the business of desire, stayed on the far side of that line, he could see her as evidence of my depth; she was enough to render me exotic, but not too dangerous.

But the objects in that bag did have a smell.  Their presence was a tangible reminder of my reluctance to let them go.  I knew they would only get louder, their smell more pungent. And I felt his wariness—a texture in the air between us that hadn’t been there before, as he must have felt that body under the bed go bump in the night while I slept.

I didn’t keep the bag around for its monetary value, true, but the straight life was cash poor.  I knew it was time to unload the past, but I wasn’t so dramatic that I needed to burn it in effigy.  Sifting through the contents of that bag, half in inventory, half in nostalgia, I thought of the iSold It On eBay store on Flatbush Avenue, a few blocks west of our apartment.  I’d noticed it the day we moved in, was reminded of Catherine Keener in The 40-Year-Old Vigin, and had since nurtured a warm association to the bland storefront.

So, after a thorough wipedown with said rubbing alcohol, I loaded the corsets, heels, leather goods, and nurse uniforms into a compact wheeling suitcase.  The latex, dildos, clamps, gags, and rope I left in the garbage bag, reknotting the neck.  I dragged both down the apartment stairs, and as I passed the garbage can on the corner of our block, I unceremoniously dropped the bag into it.  The pang I felt this time was manageable.

It was summer, not sweltering yet, but enough that after four blocks in jeans, pulling the suitcase as it bumped cheerfully over every crack and pebble, I boasted sweat-stains and a shiny forehead when I arrived at the door of the iSold It On eBay store.  I had spent the walk awash in memories of my old life, the exhilaration and shame that I’d felt each day, going to a job that paid me in cash and desire. For what? What had I been selling then? My body, fantasies, my own deep-seated need to be desired. As fantasies always had, the ones I traded at the dungeon had allowed me to lose myself, and they’d forced me to.  The symbolism of this imminent act wasn’t lost on me.  I was selling my disguises, the freedom they afforded, and the alienation they afflicted.  Regardless, it hadn’t dawned on me how public an act it was going to be.  When I entered the air-conditioned cool of the store, my sweat turned cold as I beheld the small crowd inside.  Building a secret life almost always happens in private, but eschewing one, it seems, never can.

I joined a short line of waiting customers and watched as they were each delegated to an iSold It employee.  The sellers plopped their unwanted valuables on the long sales counter and the employees examined them.  The iSold It employees performed searches on eBay for similar items, and then affixed tags with a comparable prices to the objects in question, to be posted live at a later time.  As I moved closer to the counter, my palm slipped on the suitcase’s handle.  I wiped both hands on my jeans and cleared my throat, watching the door for other hopeful sellers.  Dear God, I thought, I know I must be some kind of exhibitionist, but let there not be an audience for this.  Two of the employees were men, youngish, not ostensibly the type to have encountered the sort of contents my suitcase held.  But then, I knew better than anyone the misleading superficiality of covers, especially the kind to those sort of books.  Nonetheless, I prayed to be assigned the woman employee, who looked like the kind of bland, hearty stock that could at least affect a nonplussed disposition.  She wore pleated chinos and a face like uncooked poultry.  Hoisting a complicated looking baby napsack over the countertop, she smiled earnestly at the man in front of me.  Nice, she looked really nice.  Not at all like the type to try and trade her services for spankings, like a personal trainer to whom I’d once made the mistake of divulging my work.  I desperately hoped she was nice, as sturdy as her body looked. Perhaps in the narcissism of my own fear I was like a child petrified of a honey bee – oblivious to the outlandish threat of my own size.  A different person would have been worried for her, I suppose.

It only occurs to me now that I might have been seeking such a thrill.  One of the principle pleasures of being a dominatrix had been the shock I could elicit from almost anyone.  In my book, I’d already admitted my lifelong fascination with “the ability to appear one thing, and to be another.”  I had always sought to embody polarities—high school dropout with a graduate degree, marathon-training smoker, summa cum laude heroin junky—because they empowered me to not only defy social prescription, but also upset just about anyone’s expectations.  I loved the look of shock on people’s faces when I told them I was a dominatrix. Because I was nice.  I didn’t hate men.  I could have gotten real jobs if I’d wanted to.  I was a sex worker by choice, not out of desperation. The high of exercising that power was part of what I dreaded surrendering. But I didn’t feel empowered as I stood in the iSold It store in my girl-next-door outfit with my suitcase full of domme gear.  I felt quietly horrified.  There is a high in horror, I know, as a former junky and sex worker.  But if there was pleasure in that moment, I sure didn’t feel it.

I got the woman.

“Hi there!” she chirruped. “And what do you have for me today?”

I just smiled back to the best of my ability, and hoisted the suitcase onto the counter between us.  She tilted her head to the side, waiting for some further introduction.  I knew there was nothing for me to say and so I let the silence swell between us until she finally gave a little, “N’kay,” still cheerful, and unzipped the suitcase.  She opened it, and stared inside for perhaps only a few beats longer than if it had held a collection of doilies.  I surveyed her surveying my old bondage equipment, and didn’t take a breath until she raised her gaze to mine, and mercifully suggested that we “take this to the computer in the back, where there is a little more room.”  Her tone in that moment may have contained a note of humor, but it was so subtle that I didn’t dare to respond except to say that yes, a little more room might be nice.  Though we spent the next 30 minutes head to head, poring through the trappings of my old persona, she went no further to acknowledge the remarkability of my wares.  Not that I wasn’t grateful for the gesture.  It broke my heart a little, in that sweet way, her effort to circumvent both our embarrassment.

“And what would you call these?” she asked me, pulling the leather, fur-lined cuffs from the suitcase.

“Cuffs?  No, leather restraints.”

“N’kay. Leather restraints,” she repeated in her pragmatic voice, typing the words in the search window.  Together we watched similar images appear on the screen.  I could feel the warmth of her shoulder, inches away from my own, smell her clean, powdery scent.  And so on with the stilettos, riding crop, paddle, and uniforms.  I didn’t have the heart to argue when she vastly underpriced the value of my favorite corset.

Leaving the iSold It store with my empty suitcase was like waking from a dream.  Not a nightmare, but one I was glad to wake from nonetheless.  The garbage bag with my dildos in it was still at the bottom of the can on the corner when I passed by on my way home.

My boyfriend was unmistakably relieved when I told him I’d sold the body under the bed.  The checks arrived by mail over the next few weeks, a small fraction of what I knew my past was worth.  I wasn’t done, of course.  I let go of that life, yes, but not the story.  I couldn’t lay that body to rest until I’d learned how it ended.  The book sold a year later, and not to an anonymous buyer on eBay, whom we’d never have to face.  That relationship didn’t survive in the end, not my history, and everything else that weighs on love, and more heavily as it thins over time.  There wasn’t enough room in our home for both my story and ours, and we never managed to fit them together into one narrative.  Now, he haunts me, and surely my new love wishes his phantom gone, as I do hers.

Of course, it is we who are most haunted by our own histories, who absently run our fingers over old scars, our gaze drifting out windows at the familiar notes of old songs and the scent of sweatshirts pulled out of storage. But it is also the living inhabitants of our lives who suffer their presence.  Who hasn’t nurtured the private exhaustion of loving patience, and wished for the exorcism of our lovers ex-lovers? Our lover’s former lives? We want our loves to ourselves; we want to occupy the parts of them that belong to other people, other places, things that cannot be exiled because they are already gone. We harbor this desire out of selfishness, but ultimately, perhaps out of fear.  The most considerate partners try to keep these corpses out of sight, behind the dust bunnies and unused workout equipment, or even better, finally lugged out with the objects we keep out of sentiment. I haven’t always been this kind of partner, but I have tried.  And I’m not sorry to be haunted by my ghosts.  They guide me from one life to the next.  But I am not sorry to let them go, either.

So, I realize that the odds are, no one will even read this, because my blog has been dead in the water since, well, forever. But just in case, here is a list of my upcoming readings, leading up to, and around the book’s release. I will be blogging proper after the holidays, probably in a new format, so if you are reading this, stay tuned.

Upcoming Readings (excluding regular Mixer events):

January 7: Actors Reading Writers, 7pm
With Josh Henkin, Courtney Eldridge, Hossanah Asuncion
Cocoa Bar
21 Clinton Street
New York, NY

January 8: Picasso Machinery, 7pm
45 Broadway/Wythe
Brooklyn, NY

January 16: NYU SCPS Reading
with Mark Jude Poirier
KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street
New York, NY

February 8: Franklin Park Reading Series, 8pm
Franklin Park Bar and Beer Garden
618 St. John’s Place, between Franklin and Classon Avenues
Brooklyn, NY

February 4: Sex Worker Literati, 8pm
Happy Ending Lounge
302 Broome Street, between Forsyth and Eldridge
New York, NY

March 3: Happy Ending Music & Reading Series, 9pm
(w/Lucy Corin and musical guest The Castanets)
Joe’s Pub
425 Lafayette Street @ East 4th & Astor
New York, NY

March 14: Whip Smart Book Party (w/special guest performers), 8-11pm
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, NY

March 17: Mixer Reading Series, 7pm
(Melissa actually reads, w/Sonya Chung & Shelly Oria)
Cake Shop
152 Ludlow Street, between Rivington and Houston
New York, NY

March 18: In The Flesh Reading Series, 8pm
Happy Ending Lounge
302 Broome Street, between Forsyth and Eldridge
New York, NY

March 23: REZ Reading Series, 7pm
Church of the Resurrection
85-09 118th Street
Queens, NY

March 24: Teaching FREE Memoir Class, 7pm
BookCourt
163 Court Street, between Pacific and Dean
Brooklyn, NY

March 29: Olympia Timberland Library, 6:30pm
313 8th Ave SE
Olympia, WA

March 30: Orca Books, 6pm
509 E. 4th Ave, between Jefferson and Cherry Streets
Olympia, WA

April 1: Powell’s Books, 7:30pm
3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, OR

April 3: The Barbershop Reading Series, 8pm
2150 Market St, between Church and Sanchez
San Francisco, CA

April 4: K’vetsh Reading Series, 8pm
Eros
2501 Market St. at 14th St.
San Francisco, CA

April 6: RADAR Reading Series, 7pm
San Francisco Main Public Library
100 Larkin Street
San Francisco, CA

April 9: AWP Conference Panel, 12pm
Truth or Trash? Women Writing Memoir
with Kerry Cohen, Rachel Resnick, Sue Silverman, and Meri Nana-Ama Danquah
Room: 201 - CCC

So, everyone always asks if I am reading at Mixer, and I think, who would read at their own series? But this is the month, people. I just finished edits on my book, and so it seems like an appropriate time to air it a little. On March 18th, we are featuring Jedediah Berry, Matthew Zapruder, and Leni Zumas - I know, kick ass lineup - and me!  Also, Rebecca and Megan Gilbert (who has both read and played Mixer in the past) have formed an amazing duo christened La Marcha, and they are going to play.

I am super excited. You should come. Details and bios below.

MIXER Reading and Music Series, TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY EVENT!!!
With: Jedediah Berry, Matthew Zapruder, Leni Zumas, and music from La Marcha
with special performances from your hosts Melissa Febos and Rebecca Keith
Wednesday, March 18, 7:00 p.m., Free
Cakeshop
152 Ludlow St .
F, V to 2nd Ave., F, J, M to Delancey
http://www.myspace.com/mixernyc

Matthew Zapruder is the author of two collections of poetry: American Linden and The Pajamaist, Copper Canyon, 2006). The Pajamaist was selected by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also co-translator from Romanian, along with historian Radu Ioanid, of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2007). His collaborative book with painter Chris Uphues, For You in Full Bloom, will be published by Pilot Press in 2009 and his third full-length collection of poems, Come On All You Ghosts, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2010. He lives in San Francisco, works as an editor for Wave Books, and teaches in the low residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert.

Jedediah Berry was raised in the Hudson Valley region of New York State. His first novel, The Manual of Detection, was published by The Penguin Press this year. His short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New American Voices and Best American Fantasy. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and works as assistant editor of Small Beer Press.

Leni Zumas grew up in Washington, DC. She is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008). Her work has appeared most recently in New York Tyrant, Quarterly West, Harp & Altar, Open City, and New Orleans Review. She is a 2008 Fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been awarded fellowships by Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the University of Massachusetts. A graduate of Brown University and the UMass–Amherst MFA program, she is currently an Artist-in-Residence in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program. She is Associate Director of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. She has taught at Hunter College, The New School, and the University of Massachusetts, and currently teaches at Columbia University.

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir WHIP SMART, forthcoming from Thomas Dunne Books in 2010.  Her fiction and essays have been published in The Southeast Review, Redivider, The Rambler, Storyscape Journal, Bitch Magazine, and Smut Magazine, among many others.  She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches at SUNY Purchase College and The Gotham Writers’ Workshop. More information about her work and projects can be found at melissafebos.com.

La Marcha is a supergroup of two: Megan Gilbert (Drop Nineteens and BB Gun) and Rebecca Roulette (The Roulettes, New York Times). From four bands you’ve never heard of comes one duo fresh from the checkered shower. It only took three bottles of Merlot to figure out who’s Hall and who’s Oates. Hopefully they’ll stick to their assigned parts for their first show.

October’s Mixer is going to be really good, obviously. The bad news is that it’s the night of the third presidential debate, so we are going to have to start right on time (7pm), and skip the post-reading schmoozefest. I should be able to be home in time if I cab it, and so should you. There’s also tons of bars around that will probably have it on. Maybe that’s delusional; we are talking about Ludlow St., after all. Who knows.

Anyhoo, Cakeshop, 7pm, Wednesday the 15th. See you there.

Sloane Crosley’s essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, NPR, The Village Voice, Teen Vogue, GQ, Playboy, Black Book (where she was a contributing editor) and Maxim (where she wrote the cover story for the worst-selling issue of all time). Her collection of essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, was released in the Spring. She currently lives in Manhattan and works as a director of publicity at Vintage Books.

Nathaniel Rich’s novel, The Mayor’s Tongue, was published this spring by Riverhead. He’s also the author of a book of nonfiction, San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present, and an editor at The Paris Review. He can be found on the web at www.nathanielrich.com.

Sean Wilsey is the author of Oh the Glory of It All, a memoir, and the creator, with Tamara Shopsin, of a related Web site, ohtheglory.com. He is also an Editor-at-Large for McSweeney’s, and the co-editor, with Matt Weiland, of The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup.

The Neverbeens, formed in the winter of 2006, when founding members Steve Ferrara and Tali Hersh, two established singer-songwriters, crossed paths at a Brooklyn open mic. Over time, Katie Fuller and the Reverend Crawford Forbes signed on to fill out the band’s unique sound. As a band of multi-instrumentalists, The Neverbeens now take turns playing different instruments, often switching between guitar, piano, mandolin, trumpet, percussion, harmonica, electric bass and drums. A Neverbeens live show will travel from neurotic crashes of rhythm and soul down to a melodic whisper. The band released a self titled EP in February ‘07 and their debut full length album ‘Straight line’ came out in September ‘07.