“Perversity is the human thirst for self-torture.”
Edgar Allan Poe
They pay good money for humiliation at the Red Cindy. Up to five hundred dollars a session. More if they want you to touch yourself which Karen does only for Dr. Wong.
“There’s something in his eyes,” she tells Winnie. On her breaks Winnie reads magazines where the cover photo has little to do with what’s inside. Karen thinks this makes Winnie think she knows things Karen doesn’t. When she tries to describe what she meant about Dr. Wong’s eyes she says, “They look downtrodden.”
Winnie glances up from her magazine. This one has a picture of an oversized pink tea cup with a tarantula trying to crawl out. “But he’s always wearing his surgical mask,” she says. She’s in her black page-boy wig which adds to the effect that a magazine with a tea cup and a spider is exactly what she should be reading. “How can you tell if he looks”—she tries to hide a giggle— “downtrodden?”
Karen’s answer is a shrug. That’s basically all she wanted to say. Often she blurts out things not worth mentioning, peripheral sentences followed up by nothing. She knows she’s doing this, actually prefers her statements to be out there under the shadows of their own little question marks. Karen’s parents, who are both quite old due to Karen being a menopause baby, used to warn her not to give away all her present requests to Santa. “Leave some room for surprise.” Then later her mother’s attempt at supporting her through a late-stage abortion: “There are some things better left unsaid.”
A shrug, she thinks, is a good enough answer to so many questions.
In her used, military-issued combat boots Karen’s feet are as big as a man’s. She can feel the bulk of their stories in her calves, pushing her body forward like a separate person walking ahead of herself down the black tile hallway. The name on her desert fatigues is Miller which of course has nothing to do with her real last name. Her 4:30 waits in the wet room. Businessman from London. Descent attitude. Basic everything. On his customer card under Tell Us What You Like, he wrote that he comes to San Francisco for the weather and the hard salami sandwiches. Under, Do You Have any Medical Conditions, he wrote, unfortunately not.
Karen enters the wet room through the back employee door. The floor in that part of the building never really dries all the way. The turn-of-the-century pipes to the entire bathhouse and the little sex shop downstairs all seem to end in the rooms Karen works the most. There’s a constant odor of Alcatraz. Her steps make rodent noises in her boots. Big rats like from Food of the Gods. London 4:30 waves a little greeting then snaps shut the face covering of his Burqa. Today he wears his blue one. Gorgeous. Silver sparkles in the netting over his eyes and little embroidered snapdragons throughout the silk. It’s the prettiest thing Karen will see all night. Sometimes she wonders if the water and the spit and all the other body fluids will ruin such delicate fabric. Most of them bring their own costumes. If Karen closes her eyes while rubbing London 4:30 into completion, the soft swish of the material and the buzzing overhead interrogation lights make the whole room like butterflies all moving towards the same sky. Who does the dry cleaning? Do the ever wonder?
In Food of the Gods the rats got into some science experiment nectar then ate the humans because it seemed like the next thing to do.
London 4:30 lies back on a raised wooden slab. His credit card has been charged discreetly by Bay City Health Services for five hundred dollars. Once, Karen actually had to stop herself from laughing out loud in the middle of a session when she thought of what would happen during a slip up, if Mrs. London 4:30 calmly asked over her dark lager and Dunhill, “What is this charge for water boarding?”
The people who know how Karen makes her living sometimes say, Oh those poor men must be so sad, such a lack of self esteem and satisfaction in their lives. Karen knows this is true for only a few of them. London 4:30 isn’t sad. Even though she can barely see his eyes under the cloak of Muslim Wife Caught Masturbating in Public, they are not like Dr. Wong’s. They are not downtrodden. When it’s time to stuff the scarf into London’s mouth, she’s all of a sudden embarrassed of using such a pretentious word in front of Winnie.
Dr. Wong once told her she tries too hard.
____________
Ramen noodles are the only thing you’ll smell in the reception room at Kiros. Not so at the Red Cindy. At the Red Cindy it’s all about vanilla scented Lysol, maybe a little designer cologne from the customers. Natural orange spray. The owners, Jack and CeeCee love natural orange spray. They used to let everyone smoke in there before Jack got some sort of benign abscess on his lung and became all involved in air filters and acupuncture and something in a non aerosol can called Prayers in the Grove. People come into the Red Cindy bathhouse smelling of cigarettes and airports. They leave with the coppery scent of old pipes and a little essence of orange oil clinging to their skin. CeeCee says the noodle smell at Kiro’s is all part of their marketing. To act like they have mostly Asian girls working there (which is actually true).
Winnie explained to Karen why so many bisexual men want extremely young looking Asian women. She even asked her if she knew what the word asexual meant. Karen told Winnie to fuck off, that she wasn’t born yesterday. But stuff like that on Karen never comes out sounding as unborn yesterday as she wants it to.
You used to be able to smoke in Kiro’s back when it was All Night Long with the Kiro Shinto, then a corporation LLC’d it, thought up the ramen thing and now it’s one of the most booked sex houses in the city. Now it’s got a full on finished basement and clean IKEA sofas and a big plasma screen TV in the reception room that plays the news with the volume turned down.
You get to watch Amber alerts while you wait for your soft electrocution session.
They hold all the meetings at Kiro’s. Sex Worker’s Rights meetings. Women’s safety awareness classes. Modern approaches to Medieval flogging. One meeting Karen did not attend was hosted by a theatrical makeup artist to teach the girls better techniques for covering stretch marks and razor burn. But Karen doesn’t wear the see-thrus or do the crotchless thing. Sometimes she’ll rub around down there when Dr. Wong is almost finished with himself, but it’s usually through her latex nurse’s uniform so pretty much useless. He has never asked to see what’s in between her and the uniform.
“There’s no meeting tonight.” A new girl stands from the juice bar in the reception area at Kiro’s. She is plump in the cheeks and shoulders and has no makeup on. Behind her is a fireplace set inside an arc of green and tan tiles. Next to the fireplace is some sort of prayer or gong bell and a watercolor of a pear blossom. The new girl looks like all of these things.
“I’m not here for a meeting,” Karen says. “I’m here to pick up the massage table.”
The new girl doesn’t answer Karen with words. Instead she points to an oversize bag like a huge packed tent. Jack and CeeCee bought the table for the new Happily Ever After room. They don’t expect their girls to know anything about massages, but they do expect them to do things like pick up a fifty pound table and lug it the length of where upper Castro meets 24th Street in the chilly evening mist without help. CeeCee said it was Jack’s deal since he insisted on the purchase. Jack said he can’t move it because of his lungs.
“Shit, it’s a heavy little bastard,” Karen says. She pulls on the straps of the cover while the new girl turns back to whatever she was doing at the juice bar. In her head Karen says, If you help me it isn’t going to break any code of bitterness. The girl turns around and gives her a funny look.
Just as she makes it out into the street the wind chimes on Kiro’s door jingle and Karen feels as ease of weight lifting behind her.
“This thing’s a monster,” the man says. He’s smiling and lifting and then he asks Karen where her car is. “I offered to pick it up for a friend,” she answers, “guess they forgot to tell me it’s the size of a schoolhouse.”
“That’s funny,” the man says and Karen realizes who it is, and she’s worried now that she won’t be able to hold her expression long enough for it not to be obvious that she knows him.
They walk together, each holding one side of the ridiculously large table. So stupid and funny—trying to find a balance in the bay mist that never fully exhales into rain. When they stop in front of the Red Cindy, Karen doesn’t feel embarrassed about where they are. Why should she? She’s sure now this man is Dr. Wong. What she wants to do is ask him why he was at Kiro’s. Does he go there when he’s not with her in the exam room? Does he know the bitchy girl with the chubby shoulders? The man hails a cab and Karen says Goodnight, thanks, very sure now it’s Dr. Wong–same wrists, also the way he tilts he nods and smiles to say you’re welcome like an old Chinese man even though he’s not that old. She watches the red tail lights in the wet air until the street slopes down hard and the lights are gone completely.
__________
After the dog collar snaps into place Karen’s 10 pm has to be hit hard with knotted ropes. More than once he’s asked for a tazer even though he’s been told several times it’s illegal. Karen tugs on the leash and walks him around the stage-prop dog house onto patches of Astroturf where 10 pm can piss and scratch at the ground and eat kibbles from a bowl he said someone made for him. She cracks the rope over his back and the sound that fills the room is like falling face first into a swimming pool. 10 pm says, “It’s not hard enough. It’s not hard enough.”
When Karen first started working at the Red Cindy it was Winnie who’d been put in charge of showing her around, going over her handbook, observing and critiquing her technique from the surveillance camera. At the end of a session Winnie would help Karen clean up whichever room she was working and give her tips on how to make the humiliation experience a pleasant one. “You’ve got to hold character,” is what she said the most. “I saw you laughing. You can’t laugh. You absolutely cannot laugh.” Even when Karen didn’t laugh Winnie said this. “We’ll lose tons of money and clients if you laugh. It’s about punishment. You’ve got to remember this. They want to be punished.”
Karen got it. She got it right from the beginning. Maybe she didn’t read the same obscure magazines as Winnie and didn’t make a thousand dollars a month in tips like Winnie (not that she couldn’t she just wasn’t a full timer) but the psychology of why these men were here, why a perfectly respectable, usually quite wealthy, well mannered person would spend the equivalent of what she paid in rent to not get any real sex, to be spat upon and chained and beat, to have clothes pins clipped to their openings and told to cry because they were useless pigs despised by the world—the defective reasoning of it all had somehow been almost too easy for Karen to understand. When Winnie gave her a Jungian book on the interpretation of torture in literature and let her borrow her DVD of Venus in Furs, Karen felt annoyed. A few weeks later she returned both items—yes and yes about reading the book and watching the movie though she had done neither one. What Karen did do after her first two trial weeks at the Red Cindy was hang out with her roommates, smoke pot, eat Lean Cuisines and Peking duck, email her mom to say please stop forwarding cat pictures from I Can Has Cheezburger, fell asleep in front of Conan O’brien, barely woke up in time to catch the bus to her morning Abnormal Psych class, and somewhere in the center of all these familiar edges, in between picking up a disposable razor to shave her legs and opening her cell phone bill, she saw clearly every detail of what she would ever need to see about these men and why they went to the Red Cindy. By whatever sense stops a woman from walking into a dark parking lot then tells her it’s ok to have unprotected sex with a man she knows she will never see again—Karen understood her clients came to her in the hopes that her whips and her saliva and hateful words would dispel them from the terrible things they wanted, that their secret desire to be in hyper control of everything from wives to a teetering sexuality required a pause between sick ambition, a sense of freedom one can only achieve by leaving their own skin. All the penetration in the world would never bring these men to a place where they would ever be as close to their true selves than the hours they spent paying for pain. By the end of a few months at the Red Cindy it was clear to Karen a person would have to spend two months on a psychiatrist’s sofa to clear up what she could in two sessions.
What was also clear was that Dr. Wong wasn’t a part of any of these things, and that as long as he showed up to his sessions she could work at the Red Cindy for quite a while without turning into a bitch.
Traci Foust’s debut memoir NOWHERE NEAR NORMAL- a Memoir of OCD (Simon and Schuster/Gallery Books) is on sale now
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