Macho Sluts, page 25
“I won’t tell you these aren’t going to hurt,” Tyre said sympathetically. “Why don’t you hold my hand? Squeeze me hard, it’ll make it easier.”
Roxanne moaned. There was blood on her thighs, and the antiseptic prevented the blood from clotting, so thin trickles of red ran across her thighs. These piercings hurt more than her ears had, but it was still not as bad as having the rings put in her nipples. The thought of Alex locking up her cunt was so exciting that she only crushed Tyre’s hand a time or two, when rings actually popped through and were closed. “What have you done to me?” she asked when Alex gave her the mirror and had her sit up again.
“I’ve made something visible that is supposed to be hidden, something that’s been driven underground and persecuted and rendered invisible. I’ve made you my witness and my accomplice and my thing. You can be chained now using your own genitals as the foundation. You are always in bondage, to me. Look at them.” Roxanne saw the faces of Tyre, Joyous Day, and Chris. Their eyes were cruel, hungry, envious. “How do you feel?” Alex asked her.
“I don’t think I want to walk home.”
Alex laughed. “I’m not going to take the mirror away any time soon. Are you proud of them?”
Roxanne was crying. “Yes, yes, everything—I will do everything—be worthy—don’t deserve, love you.” It was difficult for her to go to her knees, wounded as her cunt was, but she managed, and knelt with her legs wide apart. “I need you more now than ever.”
“Well, my expectations have been raised. I intend to be even harder on you. More greedy, more severe, more demanding, less forgiving.” Roxanne sighed. As she leaned forward, Alex put a hand to the back of her neck and rubbed her face over her studded leather crotch-piece. “I want your mouth on me,” she said, unfastening it. “Put your tongue on my clit and describe how your new jewelry makes you feel.”
Tyre, Chris, and Joy quietly cleaned up the operating table while Alex received her first service from the newly pierced slave. It was apparently a most exquisite, patient, and gratifying service. Alex took pleasure form her for a long, long time.
They made their way back to the bar for a final drink and debriefing. Alex finally joined them, followed by Roxanne, who walked bowlegged. They all laughed at her awkward gait, but kindly. “They’ll heal before you know it,” Joyous Day said. “You gonna go a lotta strange places, dancin’ girl, it’s good you always got your vex money with you now.”
Roxanne smiled, leaning against Alex’s shoulder. For the first time, they all noticed how bruised she was. There were dark circles of fatigue under her eyes. “Call us a cab,” Alex told Tyre.
“I’m not calling anybody anything but late for breakfast. What’s the point in having a limousine if you can’t take your orgy home with you? That is, if my driver hasn’t jerked off so much she’s gone blind.”
Michael put both of her hands out if front of her, and felt around until she found Anne-Marie’s latex-encased bosom. Anne-Marie tittered and goosed her. Michael’s eyes popped open. “Thank you, sister,” she gasped, “another miraculous cure performed by this holy sign.”
“Okay. What a nice invitation. Thank you, Tyre. Think you can stay on your feet long enough to let me finish this cigarette?” Alex asked Roxanne.
“What? Oh, sure. Whatever you want. Alex, I feel so good, but I feel really funny.”
They all laughed. “Funny how?” Joyous Day asked her. “Aside from getting a high colonic, being fisted, pissed on, tied hand and foot, turned into a pin cushion, whipped ragged, fucked some more, called a whole lot of bad names, and pierced repeatedly, nothing much has happened to you. What’s the matter with you? Gotta exaggerate every little thing t’make yourself feel important?”
“Fuck all of you,” Roxanne smiled. “I think I’m going to pass out.”
Only Tyre took this seriously. She made Roxanne squat, then sit on the floor, and put her head down.
“God, I hate for it to be over,” Chris said. “I’ve never been part of anything like this. I don’t think it can be repeated, but it will certainly inspire, my, uh, future exploits.”
“Really,” Joy said reverently. “Tyre, I hope you’ll keep me on tap for any carnivals you want to throw in the future.”
“Of course. All of you are on the A-list. No question.”
Alex slowly ground out her cigarette. “Is everybody coming to your place with us?”
There was a chorus of “I am.” Kay and EZ looked at each other. “I don’t know about you,” Alex said, “but I’m in no shape to drive the bike home. I got mine locked up good, and security will keep an eye on it for me. Think that’ll be okay, Tyre?”
“Sure, there’s a night watch. If it’s chained it’ll be fine.” She was relieved at Alex’s tact. She didn’t want Kay and EZ to pull away. Things were going to be weird enough for the two of them without a self-imposed exile back to the boys’-club world of Folsom Street.
“Okay,” said Michael, “I’m parked right outside. Only one condition—Roxanne has to go out the same way she came in.”
“In the mummy bag?” Roxanne said.
“No, on our shoulders.”
Tyre and Alex put their arms around each other and watched
everyone else get a handful of Roxanne and hoist her off the floor. “Good thing she’s just a little girl,” Tyre said. Alex snorted. The rest of the crew was singing, “She’s Got a Jolly Good Asshole” to the tune of “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
“You know,” Tyre said slowly, as she and Alex followed everybody else out, “we put your lady through some very heavy shit.” She turned out the lights and closed the door.
“You could say that, all right.”
“Where can you go from here? Even this has got to run out of steam eventually.”
Alex thought about it for a long time. “Sell her?” she said.
It was only half a joke. Tyre nodded, absorbed it. Would it be a permanent transfer of rights, or would there be a time limit? Would all privileges be sold, or simply a portion of them? Who would be able to afford such an exotic delight? It was a bewildering and exhilarating notion. “The Calyx of Isis wants the movie rights,” she said, and slid her tired, rich, albino ass through the limousine’s back door. All the way home, she stared at Roxanne, sleeping on Alex’s shoulder, and tried to calculate the fair-market value of that much love.
The Hustler
I’ve been more comfortable in a public toilet. This room is a crucifying closet, stifling hot, and lit with ghoulish, humming fluorescent lights. There are no windows—nothing to look at but this big mahogany box of a desk and the Big Box herself—excuse me, I mean the Big Boss—behind it. Normally, I find women of her size attractive. There’s a larger canvas to work on, and more padding. But this woman’s bulk is menacing, and the lack of distance between us isn’t decent. I can see the wax in her ears. I’m confused, crowded, put off my game. I don’t get this close to anybody who isn’t manacled to a wall. I can’t sit down because the chairs are piled with file folders and fat reports that threaten to escape their staples. The knocked-together bookshelves and battered gray file cabinets look too shaky to lean on. I don’t dare lean on anything anyway. The pose might call up sordid reverberations from my checkered past, and we’re going to hear enough about that any second now.
The placement of the shrine contributes to my disorientation. The mirror (bigger than usual) is behind and to one side of her desk, right across from me. Above, it says, “Behold the heroine of today!” These damn things are everywhere, so I don’t even have to look below it to know that it says, “In her, the revolution lives on!”
I see a woman who has square, but not broad, shoulders, and a body that looks wiry and muscular (I hope). Actually, she is thin and worn out because she’s been living on fifteen hundred calories a day and can’t sleep at night. She is wearing faded khaki pants (army surplus), a leather jacket, laced-up combat boots, a studded belt, and a crewcut. That’s me. The heroine of today, ha-ha.
The heat presses in on me. I can feel it beating against my eardrums, but I refuse to take off my jacket. Its fragile, blood-stained lining is ripping out, but if I replace it, I will lose another piece of Jackie. I can still hear the crazy conviction in the voice of our trick-turned-killer, replying to her cool suggestion that we talk about where we were going and what we were going to do when we got there. “You’re going to be whatever I want you to be,” she said, putting a gun to Jackie’s head. Well, people had been telling Jackie that her whole life. Why should she believe it now? She curled her lip in disdain and grabbed for the wheel.
These are terrible memories, but if I don’t work hard to keep them fresh, that andro will have won and Jackie will not-be, never will have been her vital, crazed, strung-out self. I am the only one who can keep her alive because I am the only one who knew her and the only one who cared, who cares.
I should have left the jacket on her body, left it to burn up when the gas tank exploded and turned the psychotic jane’s car into shrapnel. I could have remembered her without the jacket, without wearing her blood around my ribs, but I needed it. I knew that now I would be working the streets alone, had to toughen up, get a meaner act. I knew how much some women would pay to watch me stand over them, as long as I was wearing the jacket. Was I staving off grief, keeping myself from mourning her, or was I just being opportunistic, hustling my own poor girl’s dead body for the tools of my trade? Funny how just as soon as you realize someone you love is dead, you can think about everything except the simple, inescapable fact of your loss.
Something trickles down the back of my neck. Does this clinic have an unusually zealous energy conservation plan? Most likely, the air conditioning broke down. Well, that’s what happens when you shoot your technocrats. They can’t seem to get a broken window fixed in my building, let alone the furnace when it blew up last winter. I treasure no hopes for resumption of the space race, either—or genetic engineering. Men everywhere may heave a sigh of relief. The spectacle of a thawing sperm bank leading to the extinction of our species has stayed the just retribution of women.
Even if test-tube babies were possible, I doubt they’d be too popular. During the Two-Hundred-Year War, the End-of-the-World War, the Nine-to-Five War, whatever you want to call it, more than half the babies born were the result of artificial insemination. Now that they’re slowly cleaning up the air and water and the old munitions and chemical-waste dumps, the birth-defect rate has fallen considerably. There’s a widespread horror of any technological tampering that might further damage the gene pool. That’s why there’s no birth control employing synthetic hormones any more. That’s why there’s always some legislator agitating for sterilization of the unfit and more maternity incentives.
Myself, I think babies are a necessary evil, and I don’t want to get close enough to one to smell it. It’s just fine with me that men don’t run the world any more, that the war has stopped, and that we’re trying to stop contaminating the planet. But I can’t help but wonder why so many of us have not profited greatly from the women’s revolution, despite the fact that we are women. Perhaps it’s because I’m not the right kind of woman.
I try to imagine, sometimes, what it would be like to live then, with a debilitating ground war being fought on another continent that constantly bled resources and lives away while I endured hard, grinding work to keep the war machinery turning. There was intense legal and social pressure to stay pregnant, so you wouldn’t have been able to ignore the fact that you were a woman while you were holding everything together, making everything run. It must have been horrible, but in history classes they always say it was a necessary precondition for revolution. Women got radicalized during World War I and World War II, but it evaporated when the men came home. It took one generation to learn how to do the work, another generation to take competence for granted, and a third one to refuse to give up the control. Not that there was anything other than a halfhearted attempt to take it back. When the whole shooting match was over, most of the army didn’t want to be repatriated. They had wives, families, whole lives in Europe. So they stayed on the land they had laid to waste with trenches, napalm—everything except atomics. It sounds to me like nuclear weapons might not have been that much worse than what they used in their place. Maybe there is such a thing as poetic justice.
I’m not immune to the irresistible forces of social change. When Amanda Kim ran for president, I would have voted for her. When the national elections that defeated her were proven to be fraudulent, I would have gone on strike and rioted to put her in office. I would have thrown rocks at the National Guard when they tried to put down the revolt with tear gas and rubber bullets, and I would have cheered the women who deserted and came over to our side. When Kim was assassinated, I would have marched in her cortège and mourned for her and vowed that our first female Chief of State would not be the last. Maybe I would have been one of the witnesses who saw miracles in the wake of the funeral procession—people healed, springs cleansed, childbirth without pain. They say Kim’s body lay in state for months with no sign of physical deterioration, and an odor of roses still lingers in her tomb. I could have been one of the Hands of the Goddess, the religious order that sprang up to spread the glad word that She had manifested among us.
The day Kim was laid to rest, when a Russian missile removed New Orleans from the map and the South African Aryan Republic retaliated (as they had always promised they would if nuclear weapons were used) by simultaneously melting down Moscow and Washington, D.C., I would have joined my sister-workers on the rooftops to mow down the government troops who had finally been shipped home from Europe to straighten out the womenfolk. I can easily imagine myself lobbing bottles full of burning gasoline and detergent into their jeeps. All things considered, I would have been one of the happiest celebrants in the month-long carnival that followed the signing of peace with Mother Russia.
So why am I here, one of the bad guys, working up a sweat, my tension building, slowly poisoning my muscles? I unlock my knees, rock back and forth a few times, shift my weight onto the other foot, and try to settle my stomach. Am I bored enough to eroticize this situation? I try to pretend that the liquid dripping from my armpits and spilling over my back is blood. It’s been too long. I can’t really remember what it feels like to be whipped that severely. After all, it’s been two years.
Reconstruct, I order myself. You hang from your wrists, the tips of your toes scrabble for tenuous contact with the ground, cold air hits your bare skin as your shirt is ripped open. You hear the swish of the whip and scream before you feel the pain. The fear makes you scream, but the pain leaves you dumb. It doesn’t stop, it doesn’t alter its character, you have no choice but to learn how to accept it and take it and ride it out.
How did I do that? I cannot remember what it is like to abandon my will to the other’s careful, deadly hand and the impartial whip that will obtain the same truth from me it obtains from anyone who comes under it: to be human is to be a prisoner of your suffering flesh, but your physical senses allow you to catch a glimpse of some other possibility, something free and mysterious. I can only remember concrete details and conversation. Jackie’s whip, homemade out of unraveled hemp rope, had little nails in the end of it that she had sharpened by hand. She cut me down. She said, “I don’t love you.” I was crying, broken, liberated, and I said, “I don’t care. You’ve never lied to me. I’d rather have honesty than love.”
What a motto! Well, it was our idea of romance. People who said they loved us had done terrible things to us—locked us in cells, sent us away to a penal farm on a rocky piece of ground that couldn’t support the inmates, let alone produce a cash crop, starved us, given us nothing but summer clothes to do outdoor work in the middle of winter. But tough-talking Jackie, whose favorite nicknames for me were “asshole” and “dumb-shit,” Jackie would lie to me about how much money we had to make sure I would eat.
We were quite a pair, prowling the streets, outlaw aristocracy living on bottles we returned for the deposit in neighborhoods where nobody would recognize us, her in that leather jacket, me in my denim imitation. One of her epaulets was missing a star. I wore it on the flap of my breast pocket. When it got cold, she always tried to give me her jacket, but she wouldn’t have worn mine. She would have run around in nothing at all. So I never let her take her leather off.
I say, Jesus bless the janes who like them young, ’cause if it weren’t for them we would have starved. There was one time when we could’ve gotten ourselves set up as housegirls, maybe even adopted daughters, by this rich trick who just loved to be the filling in a chicken-salad sandwich. But we were as incorrigible as feral cats, and not about to accept any more adult supervision. We weren’t quite grown up enough to make it on our own, but we were bitter enough to know that if something was supposed to be safe and easy, it wasn’t.
My inability to conjure up the sensations of an actual whipping makes me wonder if I have any business telling another woman to get down on all fours and put her ass in the air. But I don’t have any business. I’ve been put out of business. Which is why I’m here.
My application rattles in the Big Bully’s meaty hand. It seems to be attempting to escape. Good luck. “Ms Mann,” she says, clearing her throat with my name, “how old are you? About twenty-five?”
I am not, but I nod. If they thought I was under the age of consent, I’d really be in trouble, and that unlucky jane would be busting up radioactive sidewalks in the District of Columbia. Ham Hocks, the Wonder Pig, has stopped looking at me. I wait for her to look up, then nod again at her impatient face. I would rejoice if society at large ignored me, but I cannot tolerate it from this petty bureaucrat.
“You’ve left Item 12 blank. Haven’t you completed even one child-rearing term?”
