The ethos hasn’t changed: Not what you want, but what you need.
My own education in the dungeon was, Turk felt, essential to a complete understanding of her business. To understand what it’s become you have to understand where it started, she said.
These days we don’t get much call for the leather and rubber, but occasionally I open up the cells, pull the sheets off the saltires and stockades, oil the chains. They’re all older clients who’ve been rummaging around in the past, looking for the key to a door that won’t unlock. If, as I’m whipping them, they peer back over the welts rising across their sagging skin (moisturize first or it tears like paper), I can see they’re searching, listening to each lash, mind focused, hoping to catch the ignition of a single dendrite, dim for all those years, because sometimes it only takes the one and, presto, you’ve got it, you’re back, you’re rising off the surface of the earth with a nuke jammed in your crotch, old Slim Pickens run in reverse, out of the carnage of the lived life back into your mom’s bomb bay, and the mouth says, More, More! and within reason, okay, but where else can a person go? How far back into the nothingness do you really want to travel? Yes, I’ll do what I can to help, of course. I’ll create a rhythm with the strokes, an exit through which they can be reborn, deborn, vaporized.
Those souls who still need a stranger’s hand, the presence of a sentient life force in the room, I’ll admit I have a soft spot for them, and I’m the only one who caters to their needs because it makes zero financial sense to keep a domme on staff, and a reasonably priced freelancer—well, you get what you pay for there, mostly NYU and Columbia kids who are working through something, don’t have the stomach for skin contact, and otherwise don’t have the proper practical experience. It’s one client every couple of months. So I get into the gear and sweat a little. Keeps me in touch with our roots. Am I working through something myself? Of course I am.
I’ve accepted that, just as I lived first in my father’s book, I now live in a construction fashioned by Turk, my very own personal complication. I was not graced with this knowledge via a broiling cumulonimbus extending a luminous finger to tap me on the crown of my head. No wizened African American man on the bus turned and spoke to me in metaphors. So how could I realize I am completely enmeshed in a complication, a full-scale operation that has no end, a supreme act of love, the sort of love that makes real the interlocking nature of everything in the universe, the visible, mystical, intellectual, farcical, organic, mechanical? I realized nothing. I realize nothing even now. Yet I have no doubt she set in motion a great mystery that has begun to unravel, and the mystery is part of the complication, just as the complication is itself part of the complication. Cue the music, full-cast soft-shoe to that old favorite, “I Know That You Know That I Know That You Know That I Know That…,” jazz hands, heel spin, scissor, scissor, sliiiideee. I have my delusions, and perhaps I’ve lived strangely, but I’ve lived. My granite soul has cracked and the question inscribed there has crumbled.
13.
Back to 1978. Tanawat Kongkatitum was the grandson of Lazlo’s third employee, Sasithorn, a Thai linguist who, while studying at Columbia, pulled rent teaching at the Brunn Institute. Now his grandson, Tanawat, aka Hiwatt, had himself matriculated Columbia to study chemistry and was occupying one of Turk’s empty bedrooms. Turk didn’t mind the company, and Hiwatt’s father sent rent money via Western Union every month, which Turk, who didn’t need it, turned over to the boy, who didn’t need it, either, since he also had an account at Chemical Bank that magically replenished itself whenever the balance dropped below $10,000. The rent money went primarily to Times Square peep shows.
Turk was ethically opposed to moral advice, and any dead-of-the-night thoughts she might have had about warning Hiwatt away from Times Square always vaporized in the light of morning. There was no judgment at the breakfast table, where she sat in an ancient terry-cloth bathrobe, crunching on toasted Roman Meal with butter, 1010 WINS droning from the transistor on the windowsill over the sink while rumpled Tanawat compared—not without eloquence—the skills of employees of Show World, Satisfaction Emporium, and Peep-o-Rama, the Harvard-Yale-Princeton of jerk-off joints.
Every few weeks, she traded him a couple of twenties for a lid of Oaxacan Red, a strain he’d introduced to her after securing a hookup his first week on campus. It wasn’t that pot was particularly hard to come by, but since the previous May, when her dealer graduated and loaded up his Fiat for medical school in Ann Arbor, the stuff she’d been able to lay hands on was just a cut above what she could liberate from her own spice rack. She kept the stash in a golden box shaped like a single cell of honeycomb, adorned at the edge with two bees made of onyx and yellow sapphire, a gift from her father on her thirtieth birthday.
Her after-dinner routine was invariable: she cued up some Grand Funk Railroad, propped her feet on the ottoman, and blazed a fat doobie, which was exactly what she was doing the night of the blizzard, the only difference being that Hiwatt, usually engaged by 10:00 p.m. in a masturbatory revel on 43rd Street, had been turned back by the ferocity of the
