I remember leaving the campus feeling like I was exactly like anyone.
But it would not be the last time I touched her.
I didn’t know yet that desire comes and goes wherever it wants.
I didn’t know yet that sexuality is an entire continent.
I didn’t know yet how many times a person can be born.
Mother.
Before I met her in that auditorium in Eugene, Oregon, I’d been to exactly three SM play parties in Eugene. Wanna know how? Because my former best friend who went on the little beach excursion got me invited. At the SM play parties I saw some awesome things happen. Once I saw a man wrapped in plastic wrap with nothing but his mouth and dick unwrapped. Sometimes he got drops of water in his mouth. Mostly he got his dick whipped until it was red as a screaming infant.
I saw a woman ample as a Michelangelo cherub with her wrists bound and hung above her head get her twat whipped for over an hour while her pussy swelled and reddened and purpled until even the air shuddered and felt faint.
I went back.
I saw a woman’s thighs pierced with tiny blue capped needles — 20 up one thigh and 20 down the other — her eyes streaming with tears, her endorphin rush coming at those around her like a tsunami, her cunt gushing.
I saw reddened welts rise on a woman’s ass like swollen railroad tracks from caning, I saw a tranny pierce her cheek with what looked like a barbeque skewer all the way through to the other cheek without blinking, I saw a man hang from giant meat hooks carefully puncturing his back slabs. I saw bondage in 300 varieties, fistings, bloodsport, dungeons, crossbeams, strange wands shooting out electricity anywhere you wanted.
Some of which I began to let happen to me.
Watching pain and feeling pain mattered on my skin more than anything had since I was a child. Unlike drinking. Unlike drugs. I could feel it. I could more than feel it.
But I wanted to feel it more. Harder.
“ Tell me what you want.”
That’s how it began. If I said something dumb like, I’d like a kiss, she’d say, “No, that’s not right, Angel.” And lightly sting my skin with a riding crop or this crop with thornish things dangling from it in a kind of tassel. “Try again,” she’d say.
I’d try again. And again. Until I said what it was I really wanted.
What I really wanted was to be taken to whatever the edge of self was. To a death cusp. Maybe not literally. But maybe literally.
I suppose it’s good I was in the hands of a professional. A calm sadist. An intellectual. Because she took my request and made it deeper.
“Can you take the pain and go somewhere? Can you make it a journey?”
I don’t know why, but I thought of my mother — who was under hypnosis during my birth. “Dorothy? Do you have pain? Where is the pain?”
At first I didn’t know what she meant by “journey.” I just wanted to be with her. I just wanted her to hurtpleasure me. So when she asked me that, it was annoying. It involved thinking. Can’t we just do it?
This woman though, she was 25 years older than me. For her, having sex — that anchor of heterosexual scripture — she’d left that behind more years ago than my age. So it seems true enough to say that in her hands I became again. I became a daughter again. I became a student again. An athlete. I became a sister again. A lover. And the most difficult: a mother. All the crucibles of my life were now available across the surface of my own body. With her.
This: territories that had caused me psychic pain were now available to recross physically through a pain that … cleansed me like water.
This woman unlike any other woman I ever met in my life didn’t want to be in a relationship. If by “relationship” we mean living together with someone else and entering the social realm as two people you could point to and go look, there’s a couple. Or any of the domesticity that comes with cohabitation or long term close proximity. In fact, my only option for seeing her and being with her and doing with her was to meet her when she came to the west coast or I went to the east. The longing in between? I could feel it in the bruises and cuts and welts left on my skin for weeks. My skin story.
Look I’m not trying to creep you out. Or shock you. I’m trying to be precise. I’m just saying maybe healing looks different on women like me.
She read every story I wrote. Where I placed my truths, just underneath the skin of wild girls — junkies and prostitutes and child thieves and girls with their hair on fire. And that is why the third year she told me to call her “mother.” Because my real mother? She’d been a numb drunk folded into her own pain when I needed her. This one took action. This one could have killed my father. I wanted her to ravage me.
The cross beam was not in a dungeon — those remade basements in the homes of people you would never suspect. It was in broad daylight in her loft, bathed in white and golden light when the sun came in. Or hued black and blue when it rained. The crossbeam was lodged at an angle, not straight up. And there was a padded bench on it like on a weightlifting bench. And a ledge for your feet. When she bound my wrists with thin black leather twine christ-like to the wood I started crying.
“Mother, I would like to be whipped.”
Then she would present a long cat of nine tails — its dark red leather strips the color of blood. “Tell me where you would like to be whipped, Angel.”
So I told her. And begged her. She whipped my breasts. She whipped my stomach. My hipbones. Late into the day. I did not make a sound, though I wept a cleansing. Oh how I cried. The crying of something leaving a body. And then she whipped me red where my shame had been born and where my child had died, and I spread my legs as far as I could to take it. Even my spine ached.
Afterwards she would cradle me in her arms and sing to me. And bathe me in a bubble bath. And dress me in soft cotton. And bring me dinner in bed with wine. Only then would we make love. Then sleep. Ten years to bring a self back. In between seeing her I swam in the U of O pool. I swam in the literature of the English Department. In water and words and bodies.
My safe word was “Belle.”
But I never used it.
My Mother Demonology
IN THE END, THE BOOKS I LOVED THE MOST IN GRADUATE school were the deviant ones. The underbelly of literature. George Bataille and the Marquis de Sade and Dennis Cooper and William Burroughs. Which makes it easier to understand how I found a literary foremother in Kathy Acker.
So if you’ve never read Kathy Acker’s books, then you don’t know how often fathers rape their daughters. Without artifice or affect. Without any literary strategy to lyricise or symbolize or otherwise disguise. A father will show up on a page and rape his daughter, and the daughter will be the one narrating, and she will not be in any kind of victim position you’ve ever imagined. You’ll be reading going, mother of god, that’s some horrific shit, but the daughter won’t be. The daughter narrating the rape by her father will be extremely articulate even if coarse, and the narration will be the jumping off point for radical adventures of a girl child or robot woman or she-pirate. Her rage will drive her. The transgression will write her very body.
When other people I knew in grad school read Kathy Acker’s books they were shocked. Appalled. Particularly most of the budding young feminists. I actually began weeding out women friends by their reactions to her books. The ones that smiled and lowered their eyes with sly understanding and touched themselves, I kept. The ones that freaked out, well, they were idiots. Once I read a paragraph from Empire of the Senseless in my theory of gender class and one of the women began to cry and ran out and barfed. No shit. Pussy, I thought.