Back in Brooklyn from China. It feels good to see familiar shapes again. American trash and American junkies. I’m starved for American Chinese food.
In the short time I was gone, they’ve repaired some of the roads in DUMBO. Slick black giraffe tongues now curl through this part of the city. I walk alongside one, checking for unlocked cars with cigarettes I can borrow.
And as I walk, I think about the tongues and what they could be searching for. I think about rich people. And very rich people.
Today, I’ve left my place in Flatbush to meet with a dominatrix friend of mine. She’s agreed to give me an interview while with a client. A live job. I want to ask her about why it is when you find a concentration of dominatrices in an area, you also find a similar concentration of billionaires.
Now in a four-bedroom apartment on Water Street, I’m sitting on a slippery white leather couch. Right in the middle. The room is practically barren, minus something that looks a lot like a pommel horse. (There’s also an expensive afghan rug underneath—seems a waste if just for juice-catching.)
“Would you like anything, sir?” a man’s voice asks from my right. A bartender has materialized. He’s got one of those little silver-wheeled wet bars. On top sits labels only a billionaire would expect. Silver deer heads. Names of rusty dynasties. Green, amber, and ultra-clear.
“Yes,” I say. “Whatever you think’s best.”
As he pours, muffled howls come through the walls of the other three rooms, letting me know there’s no invite to explore.
By two o’clock in the afternoon, I’ve had five pisco sours and some bad weed and I’m watching some blindfolded CEO suck the toes of a red leather-masked dominatrix. My friend, Eileen.
“So what do you want to know?” she asks me, not paying the fat hairy man on the floor any attention. Her heels are like ice picks.
The man yips like a dog when she kicks him to stop overindulging. His blindfold is constructed from what looks like dirty gym socks tied together. I can’t imagine what wonders are exploding in the blackness there behind his eyes.
“Well, uh,” I say. “I was sent to find out just how many billionaires hole up around here. Why they seem to concentrate themselves here, specifically.”
Eileen does not answer right away. This is her domain and her time. She gets up and struts over to a table by the corner, then, slowly going over the assortment, chooses a large black rubber dildo standing stiff in proud formation. When she comes back over, I can see it’s quite detailed. There are veins and balls and even a paint job on the side—Nixon as a pin-up girl. Like the ones used to put on the sides of warplanes.
“The pop psychology of it,” she says, tracing the monster down the man’s exposed back, “is that all these judges and bankers—toy makers—can never get enough. They have it all. People give them what they want on command. So, girls like me, that tell them no, or better yet tell them to bend over, give them something everyone else is afraid to give.”
“The ole’ we all want what we can’t have,” I say, wincing as the man obeys her.
“Simple,” she says, dusting her hands clean the way surgeons, or trained killers do, after a job well done.
After she’s changed into her civilian clothing, Eileen and I head to a bar back in Flatbush. We order pisco sours, but they don’t have them, so we settle for whiskey sours.
She tells me that symbioses of all types have always formed in these idiosyncratic ways, in back rooms all over the city. The billionaires and dominatrices. The garbage men and mobsters. Gambling rings and second floors of Chinese restaurants and helicopter moms and child-approved amphetamines. Things like this make the city run, for better or worse. She says what we should really worry about, is when such symbiotic existences become unattainable. When these pairs that could once feed on each other, spill out on the streets to hunt alone.
