When we pulled up behind the moving truck in front of our new home, my girlfriend and I looked at each other and grinned. May sunshine bathed the little house in radiance and stretched down the street, lined with thick-trunked trees and well-groomed lawns. I jumped out of the car and led our 70-pound pit bull out of his nest in the back seat. For a moment, Red stood dazed in the brilliant light, ears lopsided, watching a bumblebee hover over the overgrown lawn. He tilted his head toward the ground and collapsed onto the grass, flinging his legs into the air and rolling with glorious abandon.

Next door, our neighbor weeded her garden.

“Hi there!” I called out, peering around a tree.

“Hi!” she called back, pulling off her gardening gloves. “I’m Patti.”

Patti introduced herself as a college professor and area native. I told her I’d recently accepted a full-time position at a nearby college and (a bit more nervously) that my girlfriend and I recently moved from Brooklyn. I didn’t tell her that before joining the professorial ranks, I’d been a professional dominatrix and drug addict, or that I’d recently published a memoir about my days of spanking and shooting heroin. It unnerved me in that moment how much my recent success felt like something to hide. It just seemed impolite to mention.

But I was accustomed to hiding. In my early twenties, I juggled the life of a heroin-addicted dominatrix with that of a successful college student. It almost killed me, so good was I at keeping that secret, at maintaining my manners and appearance. For my first three years of teaching college, I covered up my tattoos with my students. I had been dating my then-boyfriend for three years, but in the months leading up to my book’s publication, I never even told his parents what it was about. Concealing parts of me that might upset other people was a way of life.

But the year before I moved upstate marked an end to all that. The book came out, exposing me completely. I broke up with my boyfriend. I stopped wearing long sleeves to class in the middle of summer. And I fell in love with someone who gently reminded me that I had nothing to hide. It was the most terrifying and liberating year of my life. After five minutes in the country, however, I remembered how much easier it is being the person you think other people want you to be.

Later that day, I strode across the street to meet another neighbor gardening who introduced herself as Barb.

“Where did you move from?” Barb asked without smiling.

“Brooklyn,” I said. “My partner, Sini, and I, and our dog, Red.” Through the picture window we could see Sini moving boxes and Red peering out with a worried look. Barb’s gaze traveled from the window to my battered Converse and cut-off shorts to my illustrated forearms. I felt a wave of anxiety, and wished I were wearing long sleeves.

“Oh,” she said. “The city.”

That night, I lay in bed listening to the crickets outside the open window. No sirens, no yelling, no car alarms, no footsteps on the floor above. The breeze drifting in the open window was sweet, but it took me a long time to fall asleep.

I didn’t want to become one of those people who never left New York, and never stopped whining about it: the cost, the filth, the lack of space, the people. I didn’t want to become one of those artists who never finished anything because they were too exhausted by making ends meet. And the life of an adjunct professor was turning me into one of those people.

My new dean had described the area around the college as a “red county in a blue state,” but it hadn’t really sunk in until we were driving through it looking for a home. In some of these towns, I didn’t want to get out of the car to pump gas. The people looked angry, they drove pickups and smoked menthol cigarettes, and I spotted a confederate flag flapping from one porch. We looked like we didn’t belong there. We looked unmistakably gay. It was difficult not to judge people based on superficialities, even as I was afraid of being judged myself. In fear, too easily I resort to assumptions, to narrow categorizations. I think we all do. Better to be safe than sorry.

It was with an equally unmistakeable pang of liberal, middle-class guilt that I acknowledged how much more at ease I felt when we rolled through Clinton. My girlfriend grew up poor, and so feels less shame in her bourgeois tastes. Clinton is “quaint.” It has bed and breakfasts, a health food store, a population of under 2,000, and the highest median income of the surrounding towns. It is the Park Slope of our county, minus any people of color, and minus the lesbians. Well, up until now.

We were pleased to find a large gluten-free selection in the supermarket, and plenty of almond milk. But I started to feel the subtle double takes people made in the dairy aisle. They weren’t unfriendly, but a little surprised, and perhaps a bit embarrassed. I was not embarrassed, but something else. Something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

In the city it isn’t notable to look gay. To say that our culture is post-homophobia is as ridiculous and infuriating as claiming that we are post-racism, or post-sexism, but I have lived in New York City for all of my adult life, and there are simply so many of us, so close together, that tolerance is a natural result of exposure. No one gawks at anything, certainly not a couple of tattooed lesbians. Less so in Clinton.

On the way home, Sini and I saw a middle-aged man and woman strolling across the village green. “Can we hold hands here?” she asked.

“I think it’s safe,” I finally answered, my tone hopeful.

“Yeah, but do we really want to?”

When I imagined living in the country, I saw the two of us in Adirondack chairs, grilling summer squash in the glow of tiki lights. But there was work to be done. We needed to build a fence in the back yard for Red, to prevent our friendly but aggressive dog from wreaking any havoc on the tranquil neighborhood, and I was eager to start our compost pile. So I went to Home Depot alone. People still stared, but only because I was virtually the only woman in sight, and certainly the only one cruising paint buckets in three-inch wedges and mascara. I made a mental note to save my heels for the city, where I wouldn’t feel so much like an off-duty stripper. When the fourth employee in an orange apron asked me if I needed help, I squirmed at the snarl of feelings the attention provoked — the simultaneous urge to preen and to run away. I remembered feeling that way in my small Massachusetts hometown, during the one year I went to high school, where I was the only self-proclaimed feminist and queer.

Later that week, our dryer was leaking gas, so I called a local plumber, which turned out to be two men with the same name.

“We tried replacing the tubes,” I said, leading them to the basement door. “But it’s still not working.” They were friendly, but I found myself faintly hoping Sini wouldn’t emerge from her office. Being stared at in the supermarket was one thing, but having to witness that moment of recognition in our own house felt too exposed, too vulnerable. That snarl of contradictory feelings emerged again: protective and defiant at the same time. I wanted to spare Sini any discomfort, any regret in moving here for me, but I knew the answer was not to let people assume that the “we” I referred to included a husband somewhere out of sight. In the following days, we were visited by the cable technician, a fence estimator, and the plumbers a second time. Every time, I felt torn between wanting to be understood, and not wanting to be judged.

Still, we became more comfortable – people here were all friendly, and if they objected to our gayness, they didn’t say. In the city, strangers on the subway reached out to touch my tattoos and tell me about their own. Here, it was a different kind of friendliness. People were polite, for which I was grateful, but also unnerved. One day, I was shelving books in the living room and a man rode by on a bicycle outside. I recognized him by face but not name. He looked right into the window and waved. Shocked, I fought the urge to hit the floor and army crawl out of sight. Privacy, like friendliness, was different in the country.

In mid-June, I drove Sini to the city to work for a few weeks on the documentary she’s directing. As I crossed the George Washington, and sped down the FDR, I felt strangely heartbreaky. Seeing the East River beside us, so gorgeous and contaminated, was like bumping into an ex you’re still in love with. The city wasn’t mine anymore, and it hurt to see it looking so beautiful, and so familiar. Driving down Second Avenue, we saw the usuals: skater kids and college students, queers and models and junkies. My heart hurt more and more.

To distract myself from my growing anxiety, I began obsessing over the fence. I pulled over on country roads to inspect strangers’ pickets, their welded wire and split-rails. I Googled, and watched YouTube videos illustrating the proper operation of post-hole diggers, and post-drivers. I convinced my generous and handy younger brother to drive out from Western Mass to help me build it.

A few days before he arrived, I drove to the town center and took a stroll around the tables, reusable shopping bag dangling from my arm. I watched locals chatting over handmade crafts and jams, kids racing around their legs, and I felt such a powerful surge of loneliness that it almost knocked me over. I fled back to my car, and drove up and down the rolling hills outside of town, smelling the lush twilit perfume of summer, the smell of my childhood, and wept. All of it: the beauty, the tears, the chirrup of crickets, even my own sadness was reminiscent of some past self. Change does that, brings back younger selves. The uncertainty of moving forward jostles the sleeping lions of childhood fears: that I am alone, that I am not seen, or seen wrongly. That I have made some terrible mistake. That the loneliness will last forever.

I’d felt this way before, and I knew to fight the instinct to isolate. So I invited our neighbor Patti over for dinner. I was nervous, chopping garlic and washing vegetables, and at first it was awkward, as I’d feared. But Patti was funny and humble and kind, and we bonded over our mutual love of Middle-Eastern food and Apple computers.

“This place is more interesting than it seems on the surface,” she told me, and I wondered if she could sense my trepidation. “I make a pretty mean baba ghanoush,” she added. “I’ll save you some next time.

As I walked her out, she paused by the refrigerator.

“Is this the cover of your book?” she asked. Indeed it was, an early copy of the paperback cover, magnetized to fridge.

“Um, yeah,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Why don’t I give you a copy?”

I regretted it almost immediately, and worried about it all the next day, as my brother and I struggled and failed to build a fence. Had I ruined the only alliance I had in town? What if she never spoke to me again? Feeling like I was just in the way with the fence, I grabbed a rake and decided to do something about the mess of grass clippings in the front yard. My jeans kept sliding down, and my t-shirt kept riding up, but I persisted until the yard was covered in neat green piles. Sweaty and rumpled, I shoved them all into a single giant trash bag to lug to the compost pile.

“Nice work, Melissa!” said Barb as she stepped back into her house. My heart whirred with nervous pleasure.

That night I sat alone in my home office and watched the live Senate hearing on gay marriage. As it passed, 33 to 29, a cheer rose up in the hushed Senate chamber, but our neighborhood was dark and silent. I imagined the celebration on the city streets, remembering the glee I’d shared when Obama was elected. I picked up the phone.

“The gay marriage bill just passed,” I told Sini, wiping my nose with my sweatshirt sleeve.

“That’s amazing!” she said. “Why do you sound so upset?”

“What if we did the wrong thing?” I asked, and felt something crack in me. I’d wanted to say that for so long. “I’m so afraid I dragged us up here, so far away from our people—” I deteriorated into sobs.

“You’re just scared,” she said. “Change is scary, but it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. You can be scared, and be changed. There’s enough room for all of it.”

The next day, as my brother and I came back from our last trip to the hardware store, Patti came running across her lawn, holding a Tupperware container. I pulled over and rolled down the window.

“Baba ghanoush!” she said. “I made it yesterday.”

“Thank you so much,” I said, accepting the Tupperware.

“I read your book,” she said.

“You did?” My palms were sweaty. I fought to maintain eye contact.

“I loved it,” she said. “Will you stop by and sign it for me later?”

All I could do was nod.

My brother finished the fence that afternoon. Excited, I led Red out the back door, and unclipped his leash.

“You’re free!” I said, waiting for him to race around, commencing his freedom. Instead, he just lumbered to a sunny patch of grass a few yards away, and rolled onto his side, happily panting. I had to laugh. Sometimes, it’s enough just to know that we’re safe. We don’t necessarily have to do anything differently, or be anyone but who we’ve always been.

People who don’t love the city talk about the freedom of the country and its wide open spaces; they marvel at how one could live in so cramped and crowded a space. But I always felt free in Brooklyn. I found safety in its enclosures. The city let me relax into being myself. Being who I am in New York doesn’t feel like an action I take — it just feels like living.

But I am free here, too. It is beautiful, and it is safe, and it feeds me in a way I think I need. I’m starting to breathe a little deeper. And I don’t have to hide myself. I’ve come to recognize that pressure as an internal one, mostly. In fact, being visible here means something. It’s more important to be honest when it’s difficult, and visibility is a kind of honesty. When you underestimate other people and their ability to see, you impose limits on your own experience of the world. Being here, for however long I am, may not be the easier life we fantasize about when the city wears us down, but I have a feeling it will make me a better person. I suspect that it already has.

]]> http://melissafebos.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=67 http://melissafebos.com/blog/?p=65 http://melissafebos.com/blog/?p=65#comments Sun, 01 May 2011 20:45:14 +0000 admin http://melissafebos.com/blog/?p=65 Tay Tay was my first friend in Bed Stuy. She stole my money, nearly got me kicked out of my apartment, and ultimately exposed the depth of my self-delusion, but she stuck around. Tay Tay, she was like glue.

Let me explain.

Crackheads are like seagulls: you feed one, and it comes back every day for the next year: staring at you with its flat, needful eyes; shifting from foot to foot; emitting an occasional squawk of impatience. It’s a particular kind of love, a pick-your-bones-before-your-body-cools kind of love. On Cape Cod, where I come from, only the tourists feed the gulls.

Now, I see the pieces sliding into place in your minds: white college girl from bourgie East Coast seaside town, moves to New York City, becomes “college poor” and ends up living in real poor neighborhood, naively takes condescending pity on desperate crack addicted prostitute, and then can’t shake her. Cry you a fucking river, right?

Let me explain.

Tay Tay and I had more in common than you think, than I thought. And I’m not talking about our Puerto Rican fathers.

How about some more context? This was the year 2000, pre-9/11, pre-George Dubya, post-millenium. We had partied like it was 1999, and we were still partying, because the world had not ended, because we didn’t need a reason. It was the year I ripped my first CD, my junior year of college. It was the summer that Aaliyah’s final hit song, “Try Again,” was all over the radio. I loved that song, despite the fact that I had invested most of my music-loving years to semi-obscure indie-rock and the kind of underground rap music that only arty white college kids and the black intellectuals who hate them loved (remember Ded Prez? Cannibal Ox?). I was a New School student, after all.

It was not the first year that I smoked crack, but, it was the first time I could buy it at the corner store. Though, I didn’t know that when I first moved in.

I should never have given Tay Tay my money. It was only that one time. See, when we first moved in, our apartment building’s door was busted, which meant that after dark, the vestibule that housed our mailboxes was consistently fishbowled with crack smoke. Tay Tay would wait in the vestibule for a tenant to open the second door, leading into the building, wedge her flip-flopped foot in as it closed, and then lead her tricks up to the roof. She used protection, I’m happy to report; the evidence was all over our roof, as if a horde of snakes had slithered up there, and molted en masse.

I wasn’t even looking for crack, that day. My heroin habit was much more pressing. But crack was the drug industry in Bed Stuy. She ripped me off, of course. I knew enough then that I shouldn’t let her out of my sight, but I wasn’t brave enough yet to insist that she take me with her to cop.

The next time I saw her, weaving down Gates Avenue, hair half braided, flip-flops flapping, one arm clutching a child-size pink raincoat closed over her skinny chest, the other raised high over her head, waving as she called out “Haaay-aaay!! Melinda!” I almost ducked behind a tree. I fiercely protected my double life, and only recently had my habits assumed the strain of desperation that threatened the compartmentalization of my ambitious college student identity and my street-savvy derelict. My literary heroes—those precious gold standards of junkiedom whom I referred to whenever the need to rationalize the obvious dangers of drug-use popped up—(William Burroughs lived into a ripe old age, nevermind that he shot his wife). Well, they had never written about what to do when your cover was blown in broad daylight by a crackhead in a pink raincoat. I gave her a dollar and scurried into my apartment as quickly as I could manage. Her hungry face disappeared behind the apartment door, but the gnawing fear in my chest hung around.

I never copped from her again, sticking instead with the dealers I quickly located around the block, who didn’t use their own product, and weren’t any eager to be seen in my company than I was in theirs. But Tay Tay persisted. “Girlfriend,” I’d hear her hollar from half a block away, on my way home from the Bedford Y—where I liked to lift weights in slow motion when I was high on dope.

Let me explain. My logic functioned on junkie arithmetic, which reasoned two bags of dope + one hour of exercise had an absolute value of zero; the two values neutralized one another. Throw in a shot of wheatgrass, and I was having a good day.

I tried to neutralize Tay Tay, by telling her I was on the wagon now. “White girl,” she’d say, sucking her teeth, “you. Are. Not.” She’d lean back to appraise me, squinting one eye theatrically. “You on that good shit. Tay Tay can tell.” It took one to know one. Her brain might have been pudding from years on the pipe and the street, but a fiend always knows a fiend.

We did get high together a few times, after I knew what a bad idea it was. Once, in a dilapidated car—one of many that roosted in the empty lot on the other side of Bedford Avenue. She beckoned and I followed, and we crouched on the shredded seat cushions with a local dealer whose name changed every couple weeks; I think he was going by Kevin that time. I watched the concaves of her face deepen as she inhaled, the pipe tucked between her cracked lips. For those few minutes of high, my pulse so loud it seemed my heart had flown into my head, she felt like my sister—the minutiae of our lives fallen away to reveal our essential sameness. My heart sang for Tay Tay, that day, until its song became a scream, and I had to run home, desperately wishing the trappings of my middle-class existence could contain that terror.

Eventually, my roommates, who drank and smoked like normal college students, started to feel uncomfortable, about my drug use, and my new friend. No one said anything—I never gave them an opportunity, and I never used in front of them, but I recognized that thickness in the air of our mouse-infested home, the gravity of silence clotted with words unspoken.

Then one night, I woke to one of my roommates prodding, her furrowed face leaning over me. “Wake up!”

“What?” I asked her, blearily rubbing my eyes.

“Listen.”

We stared at each other in silence for a moment, and just as I raised my arm in incredulity, I heard it.

BANG BANG BANG.

I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes again.

BANG BANG BANG.

“What the hell?” I said.

My roommate gave me an exasperated glare, and then I heard her.

“Melisssssssaaaa! Yo!! Me-la-nie!”

I froze, frantically hoping that I would wake up a second time, to find that this had been just another anxiety dream.

BANG BANG BANG.

“The neighbors!” hissed my roommate, and I sprung out of bed, hurrying through the kitchen and down the long hallway that led to the apartment door, my feet sticking to the never-mopped floor.

I secured the chain-lock, and cracked open the door, just as she began to call my name again.

“MEL—”

“Ssshhh!” I hushed through the crack.

At first I didn’t see her. Then I lowered my gaze. Tay Tay sat on the landing outside our apartment, smiling up at me with her three teeth.

“Oh, hey girl! It’s just me.”

She was obviously high—but not as agitated as her banging had suggested. I closed the door, and unlatched the lock, opening it again, but just enough to stick my head out.

“Tay Tay, what are you doing?” I asked. But it was obvious. She had an oversized sweatshirt spread out beneath her for a makeshift blanket, and neatly arranged across it were a couple of sooty crack pipes, a small pile of crumpled heroin bags, a battered box of Newports, and an empty 24 oz coca cola bottle. A crackhead picnic.

Perhaps this was all arranged just so for her convenience, but I later suspected, as I still do, that it was more for my benefit—either to entice me, or to horrify me, I’m still not sure. Drug addicts’ powers of manipulation can never be overestimated.

“Tay Tay,” I said slowly. “You can’t be here right now. It’s four o’clock in the morning.”

“Oh,” she said, tilting her head back. “You were sleepin’?”

“Yes,” I said. “And so were my roommates, and so were my neighbors.” I examined her to gauge comprehension. Or more accurately, to gauge cooperation. I silently prayed that she would go peacefully. I’d started talking to god more in those days than I ever had, being that I spent so much time in foxholes. “You have to leave, Tay Tay,” I said, not unkindly, but with what I hoped conveyed non-negotiability, and more confidence than I felt.

For a few moments, we didn’t say anything. She stared at me, then down at her picnic. I became aware of my goose-pimpled legs, my roommates breathing behind me, and the smoldering cigarette she had wedged in the cleft between her index and middle finger.

Finally, she gave a shrug.

“All right then. I’ll be on my way.”

I nearly collapsed with relief.

“But! You can at least do me this one favor.”

I didn’t know how I had ended up in her deficit, but I was willing to concede, if it meant that she’d pack up shop before my neighbors started poking their heads out from behind their peepholes. Bed Stuy’s sidewalks might have been scattered with crackheads, but its homes were mostly full of hardworking people, who just wanted a good night’s sleep.

“Okay, what?”

She cocked her head at me. “You gotta hair pic?”

“What? No. Wait, what?”

Tay Tay rolled her eyes. “A comb, you got a hair comb?”

“Ah, yeah, I guess. I mean, I think so.” I didn’t actually brush my hair often, but held up a finger to indicate that I would soon return. I pushed my way past my roommates, bare feet suctioning again to the sticky floors as I padded into the bathroom and slid open the medicine cabinet. On the top shelf, in a puddle of nail polish remover was a cheap black comb. I wiped it on the corner of a mildewy towel and scuttled back to the door, cracking it open once again.

“Here you go,” I sung, projecting an air of closure, as if it were now obvious to all that our business was finished.

“Mmm,” she grunted, and examined the comb. She dropped it onto the sweatshirt with her other goodies, and stared at it some more. A fresh spurt of anxiety chilled my chest. Tay Tay reached for the empty coke bottle and held it up to me.

“You got something to drink in there?”

I paused, “Yeah, yeah I can get something to drink.”

“What I’d really like is a shower. My head is itchiiin.’”

“Tay Tay…”

“I know! I’m only asking for a little something to drink. My mouth is dry.” She coughed dryly to illustrate.

I rolled my eyes, but took the bottle. Closing the door softly again, I hurried back to the bathroom and filled her bottle with water, careful not to touch its mouth with my bare fingers.

When I handed it back to her, heavy and cool, and beaded with droplets, she stared at it, much as she’d stared at the comb. As if she had been expecting something better.

“You don’t have no Coca-Cola?”

“No, Tay Tay, I don’t drink Coca-Cola.” This was true.

She looked at me like I was crazy. I stared right back at her, and there followed another long stretch of silence, in whose liquid thickness I knew more than one potential floated. I could practically hear her brain gnawing on the options, and their possible outcomes.

Finally, she shrugged, and began packing up her picnic. This took longer than I need detail, but suffice to say, it was with no urgency that she closely inspected the insides of each empty baggie for any valuable residue before folding their tiny rectangles into tinier rectangles and laboriously wrapping them in the foil from her cigarette box. With a disgruntled air, she finally hoisted herself up, and into her blackened flip flops, and slow motion scrambled down the stairs.

And that was the last real interaction I had with her. Sure, I saw her around the neighborhood, hustling across Franklin Avenue like her life depended on it, which it did. Or passed out on the sofa underneath the C train overpass, which we referred to as “the living room.” Every couple weeks the city would drag away the loveseat, hobbled folding chairs, and milk crates that had been collected there, and within another couple days, replacements would appear, with bodies sprawled across, or crouched over them.

I wish I could say that getting such a close-up view at what drugs did to human beings was what got me sober. I wish I could say that, at 20 years old, I realized that my middle-classness, my higher education, my wheatgrass shots, or theories of invincibility wouldn’t protect me from becoming someone who terrified me. None of that did. It was only the private revelation of my own suffering, and I had a few more years before that got worse enough.

Once, on my walk to the subway, outside a bodega, I saw a man punch a woman in face three times. I had seen fights, but no one had ever punched me in the face. I didn’t hesitate before throwing myself between them like some kind of tiny white feminist superhero, shooting rays of hubris from my knuckles. These two crackheads both looked at me like I was crazy.

I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing today. But the shame I feel thinking about it has more to do with my silent presumption than my actions. That I knew anything about their lives, or their states of victimhood, or what of. I might have studied racial politics in my New School classrooms, waxed on about hegemonic class dynamics, gentrification, and paradigms of subjugation, but I didn’t have a fucking clue. At least not how to place myself in the context of any of that. I still thought that knowledge was an action. That self-knowledge induced change.

Though I stopped hearing Tay Tay call my name down the street, I did receive a call from my landlord. He was a mild man, who never minded if our rent was a few days late, and so I knew something was up.
The three of us showed up on the appointed afternoon, and were seated in his tiny Park Slope office.
The performance that followed I am loathe to describe to anyone, though I was proud of it at the time. As my roomates looked on, I explained to this man that the neighborhood was just full of these sad cases, and I had only been trying to help. I had tried giving her food, and then just enough money for a metrocard, or the 24hour buffet down on Fulton. I wept real tears, which is somewhat of a miracle, considering how emotionally numb I was—they must have been on reserve for whenever I got quiet enough to feel how completely terrified and miserable I was.

As I remember it, my roommates didn’t say much, and my landlord gently reminded me not to feed the crackheads. For years, I thought back on it, despite with growing chagrin, as my most immaculate performance. And I gave many.

After I got sober, left Bed Stuy, and was living the clean cut life of a professional dominatrix, my old roommate Emily and I had lunch in Williamsburg. The subject of Tay Tay came up. I cringed.

“Do you remember that fucked up performance I gave our landlord, after she showed up at four in the morning that time? I can’t believe I pulled that bullshit off.”

Emily stared at me in disbelief.

“What?” I said.

“Do you remember that day?” she asked.

“Of course I do!”

“You were so high,” she said, “you practically fell out of your chair.”

“What?” I said.

She just nodded, eyes widened.

I reeled. “But why would he just act like he believed me. Why didn’t anyone say anything?”

She stared at me for another moment. “What was the point?”

Dear Writer,

We are sorry, but your work does not suit our editorial needs at this time. We sincerely enjoyed reading your proposal—yours is a compelling story, and just exquisitely written!—but the subject matter simply does not accord with our identity. We do not have the resources to figure out how to market a dominatrix memoir that falls above a 5th grade reading level. Perhaps ironically, we also suspect that this story has already been written.

Writer, we thank you for sending us this essay. You are a master of the finely wrought description, but have you ever heard of a plot? Perhaps we referred to it in our last letter as a “thru-line”? In any event, your story conspicuously lacks one. As a consolation gift, we will send you our next four issues, so that you can admire the prowess of our accepted writers’ thru-lines. Happy reading!

Writer, we regret to inform you that your writing suffers from a disconcerting superfluity of intimacy. In the parlance of our times, TMI, writer! Too Much Information. Our readers do not want read about your bodily excretions. They do not want the unsavory details of your most private humiliations. Readers want to feel like they are reading secrets, but they do not actually want to read about your secrets, writer.

Writer, we have done our best to remain polite, but you aren’t you listening. Perhaps our letters are too small. Please consider how many trees we are saving by rejecting your work on a less than a Post-it! Writer, we are trying. Can’t you try harder to assume a more familiar shape? You are making our heads hurt with all this brainy, dirty material. Sex should be sexy. Sex should be serious and sexy, or serious and not sexy at all, that is, serious and sad, and possibly so tragic that you never want to have sex again. Sex can also be funny, but it should only be funny and easy, and it can never be funny and gross and sad and smart. You should know this. You are a writer. Stop trying so hard to be honest. Nobody wants sex to be honest. You are making them uncomfortable. You are making our inboxes more crowded. You do not smell like money. You are making us lose our hard-ons.

Writer, we thank you for your submission. And your self-addressed, stamped envelope. Please rest assured that it’s not you, it’s us.

Love,

The Editors

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.