Long Hard Road Out of Hell (12 page)

i wasn’t born with enough middle fingers

C
’MON BABIES GREASE YOUR LIPS
P
UT ON YOUR HATS AND SWING YOUR HIPS
D
ON’T FORGET TO BRING YOUR WHIPS
W
E’RE GOIN’ TO THE
F
REAKER’S
B
ALL
.

–Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, “Freaker’s Ball”

W
HEN
you have friends, you form a band. When you’re lonely, you write. So that’s how I spent my first months in Fort Lauderdale. As my father worked at Levitz Furniture, supposedly a big opportunity for him, I sat alone at home and brought my most twisted fantasies to life in poems, stories and novellas. I sent them everywhere from
Penthouse
to
The Horror Show
to
The American Atheist
. Every morning I rushed to the door as soon as I heard the mailman. But all he carried in his bag was disappointment: either nothing or a rejection letter. Only one story, “Moon on the Water,” about an alcoholic writer with a cat named Jimi Hendrix and a well that swallows everyone he loves, was ever published—in a small journal called
The Writer’s Block
.

Disappointment followed me like a ball and chain that first year in Florida. The more work I did, the less it paid off. I was leading a pathetic life: living with my parents and attending Broward Community College, where I studied journalism and theater because it was all that interested me. For extra money, I became the night manager of a local Spec’s, a record chain where I soon found an opportunity to revert to the type of behavior that had gotten me into trouble in Christian school.

There were two cute girls who worked at the store. The one that liked me, of course, was heavily medicated and obsessed with killing herself. The one I liked was Eden, named after the garden of earthly delights, but she refused to share any of those earthly delights with me. In a callow attempt to be cool, I made a deal with them: They could smoke pot in the back of the store if they agreed to steal cassettes for me. Since there was a security guard who searched our bags whenever we left the premises, I bought the girls sixteen-ounce soft-drink cups from Sbarro’s and instructed them to fill the containers with as many cassettes by the Cramps, the Cure, Skinny Puppy and so on as would fit. The week Jane’s Addiction’s
Nothing’s Shocking
came out, I had Eden steal it and then unsuccessfully tried to coax her into coming with me to their concert at Woody’s on the Beach.

My first article in my college newspaper,
The Observer
, was a review of that show, headlined “Jane’s Addiction Returns to Shock Crowd at Woody’s.” Little did I know that there was a word in that headline that would go on to be used several thousand times to describe my music, and it wasn’t “woody.” Even more unforseeable was the fact that many years later I would be in a Los Angeles hotel room trying to keep Jane’s Addiction’s guitarist, Dave Navarro, from giving me a blow job as we sniffed drugs together. (If memory serves me correctly, Dave ended up hanging out in the room of my bassist, Twiggy Ramirez, who had ordered two expensive prostitutes and was busy fucking them to the beat of ZZ Top’s
Eliminator.)

What I regretted most when I was fired from the record store for general job-shirking (they didn’t catch me stealing) was that I would never get to go out with Eden. Once again, however, time and fame were on my side, and a year and a half later I ran into her after a Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids concert. She didn’t even know I was in the band until she saw me on stage, and then all of a sudden she wanted to go out with me. So you can believe that I fucked her—and didn’t call her afterwards.

After getting fired, I delved into rock criticism, working for a local freebie entertainment guide called
Tonight Today
. The newsprint magazine was run by a creepy, burned-out hippie named Richard Kent, who never paid me a cent. He was completely bald except for a patch of gray hair he kept in a ponytail and he wore thick black glasses. He constantly walked around the office with his neck bobbing back and forth, as if he were a fat parrot in search of something to say. Whenever I asked him a question about an article or a deadline, he’d stare blankly at me for minutes. I never knew what he was thinking, but I always hoped it wasn’t about molesting me.

I soon conned my way into a glossy start-up magazine,
25th Parallel
, by telling the owners, two lovers named Paul and Richard, that I had a degree in journalism and had written for numerous national publications. They bought my lies and hired me as a senior editor. I always tried to picture Paul and Richard having sex, but it was an impossible image to conjure. Paul, a small, chubby Italian from New York, looked like a fun-house mirror version of Richard, who was gaunt and tall with terrible acne and monstrous teeth that looked like they were part of a Halloween costume. One of the things that creeped me out most about them was a picture Paul kept over his desk of Slash passed out naked in a bathtub. I always wondered about the circumstances under which the photo had been taken.

Paul and Richard were a hopeless pair. They would sit around the office depressed, destitute and in tears. The only reason the magazine came out month after month was because they made money selling the records they received for free in the mail. Like most people who don’t pay for their music, they didn’t appreciate it. I wrote nonstop for the entertainment section, but the piece that I was happiest with wasn’t about rock. It was about a subject that combined my aspirations in journalism and horror writing.

25
TH
P
ARALLEL
, A
PRIL
, 1990 W
E
A
LWAYS
H
URT THE
O
NES
W
E
L
OVE

(A T
RIP
I
NTO THE
W
ORLD OF
B
AND
D)

by Brian Warner

T
he cloying scent of stale sex and leather instantly accosts my senses as I stumble into Mistress Barbara’s dungeon. After being blindfolded and escorted here by her personal slave, I spend a few moments adjusting my vision to the dim lighting in this living-room-gone-torture chamber; carelessly, I stuff the adhesive eye patches in my shirt pocket. Once I finally focus, the carnal coexistence of this Fort Lauderdale apartment becomes quite apparent.

The short, corpulent woman who calls herself Mistress Barbara is, in fact, a B and D (that’s bondage and discipline for those of you who thought that the missionary position was still the standard) specialist and her house of ill repute is closer than you might think.

“Whatever someone’s fantasy is, I fulfill it,” she asserts, gesturing to a roomful of painful, though prurient, blue movie props and other pornographic paraphernalia. “In commercial sessions I use instruments of torture on people. I do [genital] torture, body piercing and bondage—I tie them in positions that are
extremely
uncomfortable and I leave them there for long periods of time. If it’s a good session and they’ve been a responsive slave, I will allow them to masturbate afterwards.”

On the wall opposite the door is a row of full-length mirrors and to either side of them are her
work tools
. I follow her to the rack on the right where she points out two jockey helmets, riding gear, electric shock equipment used for dog training, several flea collars, a pair of spurs and metal cuffs designed for shackling legs, wrists and thumbs.

“I don’t always apply them to wrists, ankles and thumbs, however,” she laughs.

Continuing down the wall are a plethora of clamps and accompanying weights that are used for stretching the more
tender
parts of the body. Below that she identifies a set of familiar-looking utensils as “escargot tongs.”

“These are
wonderful
for [genital] torture,” she beams, picking up the tongs fondly and snapping them in the air like some metallic lobster. “And besides, when somebody eats those snails again, they always think of me.” (Reader warning:
25th Parallel
recommends that you do not try this at home, or at Joe’s Stone Crab for that matter.)

Below that are 30 or so rubber, leather and metal hoops ranging in size from one to four inches in diameter. Apparently, these were invented by the Chinese to promote sexual endurance. I think they look like pirate earrings myself, but hey, what does an average-sex-life-with-a-little-Jell-O-on-holidays kinda guy like me know?

Farther down, she shows me a small leather and chain parachute. It looks like something for a child’s action figure; I can imagine it now—authentic bondage accessory for Teenage Pervert Ninja Turtles. She explains that this device is used to “stretch the genitals.” I don’t think you will find this one at Toys “R” Us.

Stranger still, there is a magnifying glass below the Freudian-nightmare-paratrooper gear. She pulls it from its peg and quips, “This is so the males I deal with can get a good look at [what] they have and they can see with their eyes how they view it
mentally
.”

Stashed at the bottom of the wall are a collection of spiked slave collars, leather bras, masks, gags and nipple/penis tassels. She picks up the latter and points out, “I make the men dance with these on and the tassels all have to swing in the same direction.” In addition to that treasury of ribald playthings there is also a horse’s tail (complete with fastening “butt plug” for the Mr. Ed aficionado) and a real ball and chain which she claims to have purchased at a garage sale.

Across the room, on the other wall, is where Mistress Barbara keeps her more dangerous weapons, so to speak. Of course, there is a slew of chains as well as an English birch cane, several paddles (wicker, oak, rubber, leather and plastic), a yardstick, a ruler, a Dutch Boy paint stirrer, a medieval spiked flail that she has nicknamed “ball breaker,” a few cat-o’-nine-tails and enough whips to make Indiana Jones salivate uncontrollably. Furthermore, the drawers that line the floorboard contain things like electronic muscle stimulators, disposable enemas, candles, rubber gloves, condoms (she uses both Traditional Dry and Naturalube Trojans), fake blood, plaster of Paris, Saran Wrap, a soldering iron, plastic garbage ties, Icy Hot, feathers, furs, brushes, baby powder, vitamin E lotion, Vaseline, an entire drawer full of marital aids (in various colors, shapes and sizes), more lingerie than Victoria’s Secret and Frederick’s of Hollywood combined, and a box of sparklers. Being the naïve layman that I am, I ask what the sparklers are used for—I wish I hadn’t.

“On birthdays and the Fourth of July I put one of these in the end of their penis and light it,” she confesses without a hint of sarcasm. “Most of these things are props but most men love to dress up like women. They come here to be feminine.”

Carefully, I find a seat on the black fur comforter that covers her full-size platform bed. Below it, where most normal folks might stash, oh say, a Monopoly game or maybe even their KISS dolls, I notice a caged sleeping cell.

Although Mistress Barbara has only been practicing bondage and discipline commercially (that’s not commercial as we know it; this practice is very illegal) for three years, she has been doing it privately for 45 of her 57 years. Her introduction to the whip-me-beat-me-jab-safety-pins-through-my-sex-organ world of B and D came at the ripe and uncertain age of 12.

“I was living in California and there was a man who was 21 that came to my house all the time,” she recalls, lighting a cigarette. “One day he was teasing me with his bullwhip and he made me mad. So, I took the bullwhip from him and made him take off his clothes and drive back to town naked.”

From that day on, she has been abusing men for their pleasure. However, she never actually lost her virginity until she was 16. Thereafter she continued to practice her trade privately, moving to Florida in 1980. Finally, she realized that if she advertised, she could do the same things to strangers for more money. Now, at $200 a session (which can last anywhere from 12 minutes to 13 hours), she earns roughly $25,000 a year, tax-free.