A Walk on the Wild Side

It begins with a taxi ride to the West Village in Manhattan, near the docks. Medieval map makers would have marked this space with fire-breathing dragons. To the north and the south are wide streets and warehouses; to the west, the Hudson River. During the day, the area is a center of commerce. At night, it is something else again.

I have heard about this place from a friend who has been covering the New York sex scene for 20 years. "I thought I had seen everything," he told me, "but there are things happening at the Hellfire Club that made me nervous. There is one room ... I couldn't stay in there for more than a minute. You're on your own. I won't go back."

I study the triangular building that fills the block at the intersection of 13th Street and Ninth Avenue. The ground floor is a leather bar. One of the patrons sizes me up and points me toward a narrow staircase. At the bottom of the stairs, I encounter a mountain wearing spiked wrist gauntlets and a leather vest--the bouncer. He is busy showing Polaroids of his last orgy to a woman in spiked heels and a leather pushup bra. I glance at her exposed breasts, her wasp-waisted corset. I pay the $15 admission and sign a waiver that says I am not a cop or a prosecutor, that I will not gamble or use drugs. I push through beaded curtains and enter the club.

The room is like a cavernous basement rec room, with a low ceiling and black cinder-block walls illuminated by red, blue and green light bulbs. Benches and tables line one wall. A man sits at a table halfway down the wall, fashioning leather and chrome into S/M regalia. A bare-breasted woman stands next to him. A chain runs from her wrist to a collar around the neck of a middle-aged man; he is silent, house-broken. From behind a square bar, a stark-naked male serves drinks in plastic cups. Beyond the bar is a steel frame with manacles--unoccupied. At the far end of the room is a disc-jockey booth. Over the sound system, Elvis is singing Don't Be Cruel.

I examine the crowd. A pudgy man walks by, wearing a ski mask, a tutu and gold-lamé ballet slippers. A chain runs from his neck to his scrotum, circling his genitals. My guess is, he didn't ride the bus dressed like that. He is so ridiculous that I suddenly feel safe. Another guy walks by, wearing a sweat shirt, red socks and loafers--nothing else. In the corner, someone is jerking off. If we all knew how silly it looked, we probably wouldn't do it. He doesn't seem to care. I notice a girl standing alone in the middle of the floor. She is world class, a model or a groupie. She is clad in a black T-shirt that is ripped down the back. Tiny chains hold the pieces together. I make out the message that was silk-screened on the back: Only an animal could understand.

The room is charged with the feeling that something is about to happen. I go on patrol down a corridor and into a back room. It is a labyrinth of stalls, cubicles, partitions. I am acutely aware of thighs and buttocks, sweaty torsos. Spectators stand shoulder to shoulder near the back wall, rigid, enigmatic. They look like carrion birds waiting to snatch a shred of sustenance. I look over their shoulders at a woman who is sitting on the lap of a white-haired man who looks like Archie Bunker. She is young; he isn't. She is sucking the cock of one of the strangers in the crowd. A circle of men stand, stroking themselves, waiting for their turn. Nothing registers on the face of the man in the chair as he watches the erect penis move in and out of his companion's mouth. I move away.

Someone notices my baffled expression and comes to the rescue: "For two months, they've been coming here. She sits on his lap and sucks off whoever gets there first. He watches." Well, I thought, that explains everything.

There is no room left in the circle of spectators, so a restless young boy goes around to the side of the partition, unzips his pants and pushes his erection through an opening. It's called a glory hole. The woman looks at the offering without apparent interest. A man in the crowd kneels down and takes it into his mouth. I wonder if the guy on the other side knows that the mouth is a man's, not a woman's. I wonder if it matters. He is offering up his excitement, pure and simple, trusting the strangers on the other side. When you think of it, the man who penetrates a new acquaintance on a one-night stand isn't doing anything much different. What do we ever know about the person on the other side of the partition? There is trust; the rest is friction.

I try to make sense of what's going on. I study a middle-aged man supine on a saddle suspended by four chains. He is naked from the waist down, lying with his legs raised, offering his ass to all takers. No one accepts, but he doesn't seem to mind. He is content to lie there exposed, his need on display. On the other side of the room, a muscular black slowly rubs oil over his body. In an alcove, a young boy kneels before his boyfriend and fumbles with a zipper. A bystander urges me to take a look. "You don't see this every day," he says. He presses his eye to a chink in the cinder block and watches.

It is clear that the crowd consists of two kinds of people: the spectators and the performers. There are those who come to present the pure form of their desire, without apology or pretense. For them, the presence of an audience contributes to the excitement. Their ability to respond to one another in front of a crowd of strangers seems to be a declaration. They can achieve that private space against all odds. The observers are something else. They cannot participate; they can only watch. They are no different horn the fans who jam stadiums to watch athletes do what they can't do themselves. The room seems to offer a choice: Are you spectator or participant?

I sit down on a folding chair next to a small, clean-featured girl in a red running suit. She seems out of place, almost too healthy for the Hellfire Club. The phrase "What's a nice girl like you ...?" is dangerously close to being spoken. I look away. When I look back, I notice that she has removed the suit, folded it carefully, placed it on the chair and sat down. She wears a leather collar and the thin silk outline of a halter top. The black cords accent her breasts, which happen to be perfect, alive with surface tension, the best in the room. I realize that I could be dominated by breasts like those for months at a time. My guess is she did ride the bus like that. For the rest of my stay in New York, I will look with new awareness at every jogger, knowing that under the sweat shirt may be a dominatrix, someone into whips and chains.

Before I can make a fool of myself, my attention is drawn to a couple on my other side. A preppie tries to pick up a similarly straight lady. "Are you into S/M? Are you submissive? Most of the women who come here are into domination. It's hard to find someone submissive. By any chance, do you like to be spanked? My name is Fred. I like to sky-dive and drive my Mercedes fast." Scratch the surface and this is just another singles bar.

I look around the room. The girl in the ripped T-shirt is talking with a tall, longhaired man who looks like a philosophy professor from a community college. The girl with the red running suit and the perfect breasts is still sitting against the wall, next to me. The room still seems charged with the energy of something about to happen. It is three o'clock in the morning. I leave for my hotel. I am out of my league. I can describe what I have seen, but I can't yet explain it. This is going to be an interesting week.

•

My mission is simple: Take a stroll along the sexual frontier, spend five days on the S/M scene in New York and come back alive. It's the kind of assignment I can't turn down. Years ago, Richard Halliburton could swim the Dardanelles or spend a night at the Taj Mahal and write an article that took readers to a new world. Nowadays, the best adventure stories are sexual. A few months ago, I discovered a series of ads for S/M dubs in a New York tabloid, and when I showed them to my editor, he said, "Go." Easy for him to say.

In the past five years, I have visited Plato's Retreat, massage parlors, topless/bottomless bars--all on assignment. Those places were a piece of cake. When you walk into a room where 200 people are fucking, the article writes itself. An orgy is mainly heterosexual; it's just normal sex performed en masse. I wasn't so sure about S/M clubs. I wasn't sure how I'd react.

I decide to warm up with the basics, spending an evening on a tour of the live sex shows around Times Square. I begin at a three-story maze of flashing lights and carnival signs called Show World Center. A barker sits, like Oz, behind a curtain, whispering invitations into a microphone: "This way to the live sex shows; this way to the X-rated movies." (continued on page 167)Walk on the Wild Side(continued from page 90)

I walk up the stairs, pay my six dollars and make my way into the theater. Two girls are there, on a bed up on the stage, writhing in time to the music. It looks like an aerobics class or a Jane Fonda workout. After a few songs, they leave the stage. They are replaced by a girl who throws a fresh sheet onto the bed (how quaint that these people bring their own linens). The men in the audience change position, the better to scrutinize the action as the girl plays with a vibrator. Penetration seems to matter. A lean Spanish guy joins her onstage. She takes his penis into her mouth, moving up and down the shaft with no particular zeal for an incredible length of time. The song changes. They switch positions. He enters her and strokes to the end of the song. The action does not build to a climax. Arousal and penetration are the main event. What I am seeing is not sex--it is merely endurance, the tilling of time. The music ends and the performers leave the stage.

I walk around the emporium, enter a booth, deposit tokens and watch a shutter slide open. I look through a Plexiglas panel at a naked woman, who looks back. There are no instructions posted, but if I don't feed tokens into the slot fast enough, the window descends. It is not unlike putting quarters into a Pac-Man machine. This is the voyeur's video game. Men stand in the booths and masturbate. The women offer encouragement but no contact. I cannot figure out the attraction. It is a cheap thrill--but no bargain.

I take a taxi from Show World to a block of warehouses on 34th Street in search of real sex. Plato's has moved downtown from the Upper West Side, and I wonder what's happened since last I was there. I enter a white-brick building near the Port Authority terminal and pay $75, twice what I paid five years ago. I do not, however, buy a Plato's Retreat Frisbee or a T-shirt, which are for sale at a booth inside. In the men's room is a gallon jar with a pump like a catsup dispenser's, labeled Mountains of Mouthwash. I walk past a dance floor, a pool table, a buffet, a video room. Couples lie on pillows watching porn movies. Times have changed; the scene is dead. The crowd is mostly middle-aged, mostly naked. This is where you go if you've always wondered what your parents looked like making love. People seem more interested in the buffet than in the bodies entwined in the mattress room. The old energy and the novelty are missing.

It is clear now that all the predictions I heard were correct, that the half-life of a sex scene in New York is about a year and that I'd better hurry if I want to catch the established S/M spots before the action moves somewhere else.

•

Most of Manhattan's S/M clubs are located on 19th Street near Sixth Avenue. The first one I walk into is a carpeted room. I sit on a bench and wait for something to happen. There are other men spaced at perfect intervals around the room, also waiting. A year ago, there were lines around the block. Now people are talking about the good old days: "You should have been here when the woman had her breasts nailed to the back wall," I hear someone say.

There is certainly no reason to be here anymore, so I walk down the street to another club that has taken over a once-notorious porno theater. An overweight woman in black takes my money, holding it under a light in the hall to count it. A young girl behind the bar sells me a glass of wine. There are three other men in the room. The mistress is running an encounter group, an improv theater for sadomasochists. A salesman from California recounts a story of his youth, how he discovered that spiked heels turn him on. A young black man is reluctant to air his fantasy. He claims that he is obsessed with sex, that he has done it with animals, that he's finger-fucked his cat.

When it's my turn to speak, the mistress asks about my fantasies. I tell her that I'm curious about the scene, but I haven't had time yet to fantasize. "You are obviously a submissive," she says. "You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to be dominated."

I panic. "I'm not a submissive. I'm a Pisces."

The mistress makes a general request to the audience for fantasies. The salesman rattles off four or five. Two girls and the black guy take the stage to enact them. It is worse than summer stock in Des Moines. The black guy portrays a student who is sent to the corner and told to masturbate. He is instructed not to come until the mistress gives permission, which she will signal by urinating on him. As I watch her guzzle wine, trying to fill an uncooperative bladder, I decide that it isn't worth waiting to see. I leave the mistress drinking wine, the salesman kneeling slavishly beside her, the black guy jerking off. For all I know, they are still at it.

•

The next day's paper says that Mistress Belle's show will start at nine P.M., immediately after a tour of the dungeon. Running late, I ride a small elevator up to a loft where a very large person takes my money and directs me to the theater.

Maybe 30 people fill the bleacher seats. They are well dressed, young. They are paying complete attention to the skit that is unfolding on the stage. It involves a fake rape, a gun, a role reversal. The male and female performers are attractive. I am sorry that I have missed most of the episode.

When they leave the stage, I look around. There is a buffet that includes a white-porcelain punch bowl in the shape of a circle of breasts. S/M people are definitely into breasts--large ones, maternal. Another act takes the stage. This one involves a priest and a young girl. The girl confesses to carnal thoughts. The priest asks her to demonstrate them, then punishes her, fondles her, forgives her. Nice work if you can get it.

In the next act, a girl is forced to perform a pagan ritual, to hold a skull above her head. The pose reminds me of a Conan the Barbarian comic-book cover. It does something for her breasts. A man who is swathed in a tattoo of indecipherable design lights a candle and then, with a sweep of his arm, throws hot wax across her body. The act is exact, graceful, succinct. As the drops of wax meet her skin, she does not flinch. He takes the skull from her hands, binds her feet, then hoists her upside down till she spins free of the floor. He works his way through a ring of candles, splashing her body with wax, then extinguishes each one in turn. He removes a knife from his belt and slips it beneath her panties. Blood flows down her stomach in rivulets. He lowers her and they leave the stage. (Later, I hear him explain that the blood was calf's blood from a butcher shop on Sixth Avenue.)

A man comes out and sits on a chair. He places a board between his thighs. Mistress Belle approaches. She swabs a nail in alcohol, then proceeds to drive it through his scrotum into the board. She follows with a second nail. The man wails, in mock horror, "My cock! You've ruined it! It will never work again!"

Belle answers, "That's just a piece of flesh. You still have a mind." The man stands up, holding the board, and walks off the stage. His genitals look like a tray of canapés.

I have just seen a man have nails driven through his scrotum while he told jokes, and I am still waiting for my reaction. The act is not something that I have read about in The Joy of Sex. I turn to the couple next to me. The man says, "He really trusted her. Can you imagine what it would have felt like if the hammer had missed?"

I surmise that there are levels of pain and levels of horror. I cringed as the hammer descended. My ribs felt like collar stays. But I did not run from the room, shouting, "Are you out of your mind?" The nail freak appears twice a week, I am told. He is famous for his idiocy. I try to figure out what motivates him. Maybe he needs to prove that he is an ironman, that his genitals are invincible. Maybe he is just nuts. It is beyond me. It takes all kinds to fill the freeways, and in New York you can always find someone who shares your fantasy.

The cast returns to the stage. Belle asks if there are any members of the audience who want to participate. A man goes down, drops his pants and allows a tall blonde to spank his bottom. He is unashamed of his erection. An overweight woman flings herself across the lap of the girl from the confessional skit. "It's one way to lose weight," she says. The crowd shouts, "Whip like you live!"

I learn later that the cast consists of unpaid volunteers. It is amateur night at the dungeon. They are into the scene, and they want to show off the latest moves and embellishments to a jury of their peers. It is high-class, professional, soft-core S/M, with one gut wrencher. Belle has a sense of the dramatic. This is vaudeville for the voyeur, burlesque for the bizarre. The girls are Belle's slaves. In their workday, they are submissives, but they can portray the dominant role when their work demands it. They know both parts by heart--and buttocks. This Wednesday-night program is just a sampler. If you have a fantasy that needs to escape, you can sign up for private sessions. The sessions are expensive--$150 an hour, or about what you'd pay a shrink to tell you to cope.

I walk out of Belle's thinking about trust, the exchange of permissions, the knowledge of roles. Trust is an issue that has fallen into neglect. It seems to be absent from a lot of conventional heterosexual relationships. Couples endure: They go through their entire lives without saying what is really on their minds. Afraid to confess their fantasies, they watch the old passion wither away.

And then there is the sex that takes place between strangers, based on blind luck or pretense. Do you trust a woman to use birth control? Do you trust her not to have herpes? Do you trust her when she says that she doesn't need to reach orgasm, that sex is emotionally satisfying? Do you trust her when she allows you to have morning sex--when she acts as though she wants it before she's even awake? Do you trust her when she gives head enthusiastically? And if she finally goes along with something new and strange, do you trust her not to turn on you, not to bring it up in court?

An evening at Belle's place has raised a lot of questions. I know now where I'll have to go to look for the answers.

•

The following day, I find myself back at the Hellfire Club. I stand at the bar, gawking. I may as well be wearing a T-shirt that says, Would someone please tell me what's going on? For a few minutes, I play observer. I notice a 3" x 5" index card on the bulletin board: Slave wanted, with van, to move furniture for well-known mistress. I examine the souvenirs hanging over the bar--the pair of torn panties, the handcuffs, the collar, the frayed whip, the gag, the remnants of costumes.

I could go on recording--inductive irony--but I force myself to talk, to question. I sit down with Frank, a leather-maker, a hippie craftsman who looks like he belongs in a Renaissance fair. He shows me the gauntlet he is working on, explains how he chose each hide individually. The finished product will mold itself to the owner's hand and to no other. I try it on and feel the power of costume.

"I've been into this scene for years," Frank says, "and you can't really explain it. People are always trying to come up with reasons. So-and-so does it to relieve the tensions of being an executive--things like that. But that's bullshit. We do it because it's fascinating, because it requires our full attention. It is not casual sex. It is not the old in and out. Most people don't think about sex; they just do it. We think about it.

"S/M is more involved than regular sex. You don't just put it in and thrust. You create a script, a fantasy. Then you act it out. It is more elaborate, more intense and more demanding. It is not something you can do with a stranger on a one-night stand. If you go home with some guy, you can really get hurt. This is not a scene for horny tourists.

"In New York, at first, there are doers; then come the watchers, the people who just want to observe. When the tourists outnumber the regulars, nothing happens. We aren't going to do our scene for the uninitiated, the guys just looking for a fuck. Some nights, we don't even get undressed. Other nights, there is something happening every minute, scenes blending into one another. Someone gets fist-fucked. Someone gets whipped. Someone gets spanked. I've had some incredible scenes here."

Frank introduces me to two of his ladies, Deborah and Sandy. For the next hour, I watch them try on pieces of leather: a wrist gauntlet for one; for the other, a bra with two rings through which she pushes her breasts until they look like water balloons. The rings focus attention, create a specific sensation. They prepare the breasts for what will follow.

I ask Deborah how she got started in this scene. She doesn't pause before she answers. "My parents never showed affection, except when they gave me a beating," she says. "I knew they loved me when I did something wrong and they cared enough to punish me. It was the only experience of love I had. I don't know any other way to feel emotion. I was married. I had two children. My husband fucked me while I was asleep. I never came. Then I started hanging out with Frank."

I ask her to explain the sensations she gets from various moves in the S/M repertoire. "A spanking is warm, almost like a massage," she says. "Nipple torture is a way of getting close to your guy. Hot wax is tricky--if the candle isn't exactly right, you can get burned, each candle is different The perfumed kind are deadly. You have to test them." She demonstrates the movement. It is elaborate, slow motion. "You don't know what to expect, don't know when the next drop is going to hit. Whips are also special. Frank makes them so they don't cut. It isn't pain but something else--a slap, a stinging sensation. Your skin turns red and becomes sensitive to touch, to a kiss. When you spank, you massage. When you whip, you kiss.

These people are students of their own sexual routines; they take them seriously. Even now, Deborah is concerned that her partner has slipped out to get high.

"Drugs interfere with the pain," she says. "There is no direct connection. The person is somewhere else. What you are doing has no meaning. You can hurt someone and he can't even feel it. We are purists. The only things that count are the pain and the reaction to pain. Some people scream, which lessens the pain--or increases the drama. I don't make a sound."

I recall an essay by Ernest Becker called "Every Man as Pervert." A woman can fake orgasm, but she can't fake pain. Direct and uncomplicated, it guarantees the undivided attention of the victim. "By treating the flesh with violence and causing it great pain, the sadist literally makes his partner a predominantly external organism," Becker says. "The mind 'comes out in the open' in the screams and pleadings of the body. There is no longer anything private or aloof: The victim is reduced to the barest terms of the body; all indwelling values, all cultivated sensitivity ... all that man earns and learns as a cultural animal are reduced whimperingly and totally to the terms of the tortured flesh."

Apparently, though, Deborah and Sandy do not agree completely about their respective roles in all of this: "Submissives have it together," Deborah says. "The dominants are insecure."

"No, the dominants have it together," Sandy says. "The submissives are looking for attention."

It is an interesting question: Who is the master and who is the slave? Most agree that the masochist sets the limits; he yields to the master but within clear bounds. Slave and master are equals. They know their parts. This is not a power play but a play.

Sandy allows herself to be tied to the Swedish chair. Deborah drops wax onto her body. Sandy flinches--sort of. She is not entirely there, and I suspect that she did slip into the alley to do some drugs. After a while, they give up, but the image of a nude woman writhing lingers. It is powerful stuff.

I ask the leathermaker what it all leads to. "It's all in the anticipation," he says. "They've been thinking about this for two weeks. This was just foreplay. We will go home and fuck our brains out."

I wonder if anyone ever gets off in the club, if anyone ever comes. I watch a woman climb into the saddle, her legs spread, her arms pulled tight to the chains. She is surrounded by several intent men. Two of them play with her breasts. Another inserts a fist. A fourth takes possession of her mouth. She is a sine wave of shrieking, the scream rising and falling in regular rhythm. Yet, when I look at her hands, they are delicate, the fingers rubbing against one another as if examining a piece of fine fabric. She is detached, luxuriating in the drama. She relishes the attention. Later, she explains that she dominates her attendants. She is powerful, she gives permission. They try to please.

•

I leave the Hellfire Club, still wondering about the question of dominance but troubled, too, by my reactions to some of what I'd seen. There were postures that had caught my eye, that had a certain appeal. I could vaguely envision myself in the vicinity of such behavior, could almost imagine taking a date to such a place to compare notes on our reactions, to see whether or not any of the scripts rang a bell. After all, everyone had a role. It was not threatening. Watchers were welcome. But the women's movement has made it impossible to explore dominant/submissive fantasies blithely. You can go out with someone for months without discovering that she really wants to be spanked, that she wants to play rough. And when you run into a woman who likes to be taken, you confront a compelling part of yourself--the animal, the athlete.

The psychoanalyst Robert Stoller says that we all keep secrets from ourselves, that it takes years to get people to admit their deepest fantasies, the images that cluster around orgasm. I was pretty certain that nothing I saw at the Hellfire Club--or any of the other S/M spots--came close to mine. But I still had to consider the possibility that those people actually reach true ecstasy because they know exactly what it is that they want. Normal heterosexuals may be blundering, ambiguous, noncommunicative by comparison. Without a doubt, the people I'd seen in the leather-and-chain lounges had tapped the primal power of a sexual script--a script that for most of us will always remain beneath the surface.

"It is clear now that the half-life of a sex scene in New York is about a year."