Slutever Read online

  Back at the apartment, the slave put on his new stockings and showed them off by twirling around the room like a ballerina. Daisy unlocked the guy’s chastity belt and I watched as he jerked off and came onto the penis lollipop, which Daisy then forced him to eat. And I didn’t even gag this time! Turns out watching dudes guzzle their own cum is a lot like Adderall—you build up a tolerance really fast (but if you do it too much you’ll likely end up in a psych ward).

  In the week that followed, I watched Daisy put a grown man into diapers and pretend to breast-feed him. I watched her stick needles into a man’s scrotum and feed dog treats to a guy who was like seventy-five. Before Daisy, I had known about the existence of dominatrixes, who I understood to be women who inflicted some sort of physical and/or emotional pain onto (mostly) men, and that while these experiences were sexual in nature, they (usually) didn’t involve actual sex. But the reality of seeing my first BDSM sessions was just so much more, like…funny than I ever imagined. It felt playful and inclusive. One of my naive assumptions that was immediately debunked was that the role of a dominatrix was simply to abuse people in whatever way she saw fit in the moment. Sort of like improv theater, except with more pee. In reality, sessions are catered to a client’s specific desires, and in order to be a successful pro-domme you have to straddle the line between being an in-control bitch and accommodating what your client wants. It’s a tricky balance. The way Daisy handled it—which, I’ve come to find, is a common method among dommes—was to ask the client before a session to describe his ultimate fantasies and his hard limits. This tactic gives the domme an idea of the sub’s mental landscape, so that in the session she can address the things she knows they want, and then throw in some tangential surprises without crossing any of their hard boundaries. You always have to do enough of what the client wants, because if you just tell them to fuck off and then do whatever you feel like, they’re probably never going to hire you again, and you’re going to be broke. But most dommes are more likely to accept clients who present their desires in a subservient way, like “I enjoy being trampled” or “I would be honored if you trampled me,” rather than “Ho, trample me.”

  Subs can be picky, demanding little bitches. Whenever I saw a sub get bossy with Daisy I’d always think of this one scene in the movie Choke: the protagonist (played by dreamy Sam Rockwell) meets a woman in a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting who has a rape fantasy—as well as OCD. She wants to role play a rape scenario, but she wants to micromanage every step of the rape, and during the role play she’s constantly pointing out all the ways that he’s raping her wrong. In the kink world, this type of naggy sub behavior is often called “topping from the bottom.” Daisy pointed out that, while it’s generally good to challenge systems of authority‚ like in a “fuck the patriarchy” kind of way, in her dungeon, a slave who didn’t know his role would fall victim to the ultimate punishment: no piss for a week.

  What was intended solely as an apprenticeship quickly turned into a friendship between Daisy and me. I think she appreciated that I was nonjudgmental and curious, but mainly she liked that I was quite obviously in awe of her. At the end of the week, after I watched four sessions as an overenthusiastic civilian, Daisy offered me a job as her assistant. She’d pay me fifty dollars an hour to stand next to her during sessions wearing a leather bra, hand her butt plugs whenever she needed them, and—when the mood felt right—to chip in on the abuse, like a good sadist-in-training. Who knew you could get such a great job without a college degree? And at the peak of the financial crisis, no less!

  For my first day on the job, the plan was to beat up and then pee on a police officer. (It sounds too cliché to be real, but that’s pretty much the case with everything in the BDSM world.) I turned up to Daisy’s wearing the most fetish-looking outfit I owned: a black pleather skirt from high school that I’d since gotten too fat for and a black tank top with lots of zippers on it that was supposed to look bondage but was realistically more Claire’s.

  “So we’re going to start with what’s called a beat-down,” Daisy said excitedly. “Do you throw a good punch?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s not hard. Just make a fist and swing. No hits to the face, though—focus on the stomach and ass. We can’t leave marks; he’s got a wife.”

  I asked Daisy what would happen if I got stage fright during the golden shower—like if I couldn’t go when it was time to go. “Don’t worry about it,” she said with a shrug. “I’ll pee first, and the sound of my pee will make you pee.” It seemed like she knew what she was talking about.

  As it turns out, there’s actually a science to pissing on someone. If you start chugging water too early, then you end up struggling in pain for the entire session, feeling like you’re going to explode (or at least give yourself a UTI). However, if you start drinking too late, then you might only have a couple of measly drops when it’s time to go, which could lead to a bad Yelp review, so to speak. Knowing when and precisely how much to drink before a golden shower is an art, perfected over years of practice and dedication—think yoga, but with your bladder.

  By the time the cop showed up it was clear that I had made the rookie mistake of drinking too early, and was literally gripping a dildo with my inner thighs for dear life, which Daisy assured me is a tried and true method of “keeping it in.” The guy was around forty with broad shoulders, a red face, and a neck that seemed to be receding into his body. As soon as he walked through the door, Daisy began ripping his clothes off, punching him at the same time. I held his arms behind his back while Daisy cut off his underwear with a pair of scissors. My adrenaline was spiking so hard that I didn’t even realize that tiny drops of urine were trailing down my legs. Between blows the cop was making overly dramatic cries like, “Oh God, someone please help!” and “These women are abusing me!” I felt like I was an actress in a really bad porno.

  After about ten minutes of continuous beating, Daisy ordered the cop into the bathroom. Surprisingly, I felt more relieved than nervous. We all squeezed into the shower—the dude on his back, Daisy straddling his face, and me hovering over his stomach. I started peeing before I even had time to fully pull my underpants to the side. Daisy looked up at me, eyes glowing, which I knew meant she was impressed. Daisy started peeing, too, and as the slave gargled our piss we gave each other a high five. I felt oddly proud.

  As the cop got dressed he made some jokey comment about how he was going to have to hide his torn underwear from his wife. He said never in a million years would she imagine that he would do something like this, and at the moment she thought he was shoveling snow. He’d considered telling his wife about his kinky side many times over the years, but he could never bring himself to do it. Daisy just smiled and nodded and let him talk. And as he continued to blab away to her in this obviously cathartic release, it suddenly occurred to me just how important Daisy was to all of these people. She wasn’t just some hot chick who they paid to mutilate their balls; she was their escape. She saw them at their most vulnerable, she knew things about them that their wives and coworkers and friends would never know, could never know. And they really needed her. She was their therapist. Their confidante. The one person who knew what went on in the darkest corners of their minds. It’s like she was God or something, if God were a babe in latex.

  Mind Games

  Mistress Daisy had pretty high standards. I didn’t. This meant that whenever Daisy had a request for a session from a client who seemed super annoying, or like a potential serial killer, she would just pass him on to me, knowing that I was desperate and would do pretty much anything for money. We made a good team.

  Daisy’s sloppy seconds were my only clients. I was okay with that because I was never really interested in launching my own career as a pro-domme (“pro” meaning professional, as in you get paid for it, rather than just doing it because you’re naturally a monster). Becoming a successful dominatrix in your own right is no different from becoming successful in any other industry�
�it can take years to make contacts, gain a reputation, and grow your business. You have to devote time and money to making a good website, doing fetish photo shoots that represent your personal brand, and integrating yourself into the fetish scene through kink parties and online forums. You have to advertise your services on fetish websites, which is another big cost. If you can’t work out of your apartment then you have to rent out commercial dungeon spaces to session, and you also have to invest in the wardrobe and props, which aren’t cheap—a quality flogger will cost you between $150 and $300, and the only latex dress I ever bought was $350. (Not only was that dress my most expensive article of clothing, it was also pretty much equivalent to my yearly salary back when I was squatting, just six months earlier.) Basically, you don’t just become a successful dominatrix overnight, even if you have connections in the industry. I didn’t see myself being in the BDSM scene for long enough to devote the required effort to launching a solo career, and so in the meantime I was totally content with being a bottom-feeder.

  After assisting Daisy for about a month, I felt confident enough to do a few sessions without her. Because I was thrifty (read: poor) I bought most of my torture tools from Home Depot rather than at a chic sex shop, and I hit up Petco for my dog collar and dog bowl. (I was slightly embarrassed about this at the time, but have since learned that it’s somewhat normal protocol. I once heard a domme in San Francisco sincerely refer to Home Depot as “Home Dungeon.”) However, since Daisy tended to think it wasn’t worth her time to see someone for just a half-hour piss session, most of my solo sessions ended up simply involving golden showers. Because I lived in a decrepit Bushwick apartment with two craigslist hoarders, I couldn’t work from my apartment, so I would rent out a room in a dungeon on Thirty-Third Street, above a studio that held pottery classes. The room cost me $30 for a half hour, and I’d charge clients $150, so I’d be making $120 to essentially just empty my bladder. This felt fair to me, since I emptied my bladder all day long for free anyway. There was a solid year of my life where the vast majority of my income came from peeing into the mouths of middle-aged men, which I admittedly found quite glamorous.

  But the most memorable client that Daisy passed on to me had no interest in my bodily fluids. This guy’s name was Steve. He’d been pestering Daisy for sessions for a while, but she could never really work out what he wanted from her. “He doesn’t even seem like a sub,” she told me. “He seems more interested in playing these weird psychological games. He’s, ya know…twisted. Scary. Potentially dangerous.” I called him up.

  Steve was fifty, bald, smiley, and very thin. He walked with a cane to help counteract his severe limp, the cause of which he described only as “a disease that will probably kill me.” Steve and I met for lunch in Midtown, and he immediately started talking about how his wife was cheating on him. Recently, he told me, he had hacked into her email account, printed out all the e–love letters she’d exchanged with her side ho, and then scattered them around their house. His wife’s response to this passive-aggressive outing was to flush Steve’s erectile dysfunction medication down the toilet. “Flushing your Viagra,” Steve told me, “is the modern-day chastity belt.” I sat there, scarfing steak and Prosecco, nodding at appropriate intervals.

  Steve told me that he had a “friend”—a twenty-year-old aspiring model with fiery red hair and freckles—who he wired money to occasionally, as financial support “until she gets famous.” At some point, the Aspiring Model had led Steve to believe that she would fuck him—someday. However, after six months of his buying her gifts and giving her cash, she’d yet to put out (she once let him massage her back in a hotel room, but that’s as far as it got). Now, Steve said, he was fed up and wanted to give the Aspiring Model a reality check. “She needs to be shaken up a little,” he said assertively. This was where I came in.

  Steve’s plan was as follows: He would take the Aspiring Model out for a nice dinner. Afterward, he’d lead her back to a hotel room, offering her a massage. Once in the room, I’d show up and start banging on the door, pretending to be his wife and screaming bloody murder. He’d open the door and I’d threaten to kill both of them, and then (one assumes) she would run out crying. After a couple of days of radio silence, he would tell the Aspiring Model that he could no longer support her, now that his wife had discovered their secret pseudoaffair. Steve hoped that after he threatened to take the Aspiring Model off the payroll, she would finally bang him in an effort to change his mind. I asked Steve why he didn’t just threaten to cut her off now, and save the effort of the whole fake-wife hotel-meltdown moment. He just shrugged, spooning caviar into his mouth. “But where’s the fun in that?”

  Steve said that if I could pull this performance off, he would give me $500. I was slightly offended that he felt I could believably play the role of his wife, given that I was half his age and considerably less creepy, but I agreed nonetheless. While I did feel vaguely bad about being an accessory to the manipulation of the Aspiring Model, it wasn’t bad enough to keep me from making an entire month’s rent in a single night. As they say: Shelter before hos.

  So, the following week I showed up at the Plaza and downed an extortionately priced vodka soda at the bar while waiting for Steve’s text telling me it was showtime. While I waited, I tried to channel the anger I had felt the time I’d found a pair of women’s underwear in Max’s bed, only a month earlier (a trick I’d learned back in drama class during that embarrassing period when I wanted to be an actor). Eventually, I got the “action” text and headed to the elevator.

  Maybe it was my makeshift method acting, or maybe it was just the vodka, but as soon as I started banging on the hotel door, I really got lost in the moment—I became that cheated-on wife, pounding my fists on the door and screaming, “Steve, I know you’re in there! Open up! I know she’s in there with you!” I got so carried away that I unexpectedly went off script, yelling about how I’d read his texts and was going to chop his dick off Lorena Bobbitt style and then feed it back to him—a line I’d stolen from Daisy, but still, I thought it was a good ad lib. Eventually Steve opened the door and I stormed in, wielding a mascara wand and threatening to kill him, as planned. I came in just in time to see the Aspiring Model running into the bathroom. I followed, still screaming, to find the freckled waif cowering in the shower. She literally looked twelve, which was awkward. Steve eventually crutched in and started threatening to call the police, in what was some of the most appalling acting I’ve ever seen. I felt like I was trapped in one of those slow-motion sepia reenactments you see on late-night crime shows, except somehow even less believable.

  The awkwardness escalated quickly. After the initial burst of rage, the energy in the room suddenly crashed, and then I was just left standing there like…Uh…okay, where is this going? I looked to Steve for help, at which point he broke character and started clapping and shouting, “Bravo! Bravo!” with a big stupid smile on his face. I just stared at him, confused and sweating, as the Aspiring Model crawled out of the shower, looking seasick.

  “Wait, what?” I finally said.

  “You were great!” he said, laughing manically, endlessly amused by the bizarre scene that he’d masterminded. Basically, Steve had told the Aspiring Model ahead of time that I was going to come and pretend to be his psychotic wife, so really they were setting me up. I didn’t understand the point of this at all—and still don’t—but Steve was loving it. He was pounding his cane and laughing so hard that he was gasping for air, as if he were having some kind of senile orgasm-slash-seizure. The Aspiring Model just shrugged at me apologetically. I was too confused to be embarrassed, and for the next half hour the three of us awkwardly drank wine together on the bed, while the girl showed us images from her budget modeling portfolio on her phone. While this was unlike any other BDSM role-play scene I’d ever experienced—and while I was clearly not the domme in the scenario—I still left feeling pretty pleased. I mean, there are worse ways to make $500.

  A couple of weeks la
ter, Steve got back in touch, saying that he wanted to play another game. A part of me wondered if I could trust him, but another, less sensible part was curious about what other scenarios would emerge from his warped imagination. Also, on some level, I knew whatever we got up to would make a good story. I mean, I’m a writer: I’ll do pretty much anything for an anecdote.

  This time the game seemed pretty simple. Steve was going to put up an ad on craigslist, offering a girl $200 to have lunch with him at Le Cirque. My job was to sit at the bar and wait for him and Craigslist Woman to walk in. After about five minutes, I’d walk over and pretend to recognize him from work, and then I’d awkwardly invite myself to join their table for lunch. This was really when the game began: My challenge was to try to get the girl to agree to have a threesome with us by the end of the meal. (We were never actually going to have the threesome, Steve insisted—I just had to get her to agree to it.) If I could manage this, I would get $500. If I couldn’t convince her on the threesome, I’d only get $200. Conveniently (and somewhat bizarrely), Steve was not the first middle-aged man who’d given me the task of organizing an impromptu threesome with a complete stranger. Since I’d succeeded with Malcolm, I was confident that I could make it work again. This was literally one of the only professions on earth for which I actually had job experience.

  The plan started off smoothly. I lurked at the bar in the back of the restaurant, drinking a Bloody Mary, and watched as Steve and the woman—roughly thirty, heavy makeup, beige stiletto knee-high boots—came in and sat down. A few minutes later I clumsily inserted myself into their conversation, and quickly pulled up a chair. The girl seemed annoyed that I’d crashed their lunch, but also relieved that I was picking up the brunt of the conversational work. She kept looking at Steve like he was a bug that needed to be squashed, which made me feel oddly protective of him. I tried my best to steer the conversation toward sex. “So, are you two dating?” I asked. I think I saw the woman gag. Steve, on the other hand, was oblivious. “Well, I could be dating if I wanted to,” he said too loudly. “My soon-to-be-ex-wife filed for divorce a year ago. And yet we still share a bed, because she wants me to massage her shoulders! She’s making a mockery of the institution of divorce!”