I’ll be your mirror

It's half past one in the afternoon, lunchtime, I wonder if it's too early to whip a guy, I pull down the blinds, draw the velvet curtains, I should let my hair down or tie it up?

In the background, on the turntable, the Velvet. Origin and form. The first time I listened to them with enough awareness to translate their lyrics, a door opened for me to another dimension almost as exciting as the drug itself that they talked about in their songs, at last someone was explaining to me in an absolutely descriptive and graphic sequence what it feels like to take a peak.

In the early 90’s the kids of my generation grew up with the atrocious fear of being pricked by a syringe in the schoolyard.

Lou Reed preached on an electric melody, out of tune and cardiac, the journey of the anti-hero: there was a descent into hell, the liberation of the corporeal when the shot reaches your brain and a sentence, like a wave against the seawall, crowned the sunset: -heroin is my Life and it's my wife-.

That guy had the ambiguous charm of rescuing and hooking images so diffuse now, as present and incomprehensible at the time, frames of syringes between bushes, that subtle trail of blood with drops that widened on cement cobblestones and took you to an alley, all that imagery that rested in a dead corner of my brain and was hidden behind the wall of the terrace, to which I looked out, on a stool when I was six years old; from where I saw for the first time the junkies of my street injecting themselves and without fully understanding it, I assimilated partly because the lemons always appeared in the street as a foretaste of the murder weapon.

Life that passes quickly, death, the pain that spreads through the body, the empty feeling of disconnection, freedom, the absence of it, the chains, impulses and drives twisted like baroque columns, the pathos, so many things in one song.

The immeasurable power of the first times.

Neither my world nor my understanding was sufficiently developed to comprehend and cross the threshold of the second door that remained ajar for much longer, that of BDSM, I saw it as something medieval. It took me a while to realized that Heroin and Venus in Furs were touching at the tips and separated in the middle. I had to face violence, frustration and experience pain in its many versions and distortions, to come to understand that the journey the Velvet songs talked about was directly connected to the human experience.

I was 12 years old, I changed schools and I spent some time without leaving home. The girls from my class threatened  me, they didn't want the new flittering with their guys. When I saw how they sprayed a friend's hair with graffiti spray and they spread fire, in my face, I realized they were serious. I was told I was the next. In my time of confinement I rented at the video club all the banned movies with stories of violence: Transporting, American History X, Natural Born Killers...There was still no internet at home and the porn on Canal Plus was encrypted. I thought about a trip like Lou Reed's, about getting out of my body, if I had drugs I would have taken them all together.

That's when I gathered my meager experience. My brother had been my first object of torture, I played at kidnapping him and gagging him to a chair. When I was sick and didn't go to school I would tie him up with a string of wool and tell him to run free until he got caught on a doorknob, then no one would come to his rescue.

One day I woke up and decided to put an end to my frustration, I came to what for me was a logical and liberating reasoning: if I had spent my life fighting at home, how could I not be ready to face the kinkies at my school?  The previous summer a guy had chased me, when I was coming back from the pool, and while I was opening the main door of my building he had jumped on me to touch my ass, I kicked him as hard as I could and knocked his bike to the ground. I had reflexes, strength, I just needed strategy, mine was to make friends with the guys, to enjoy their protection.

They say that to be a good top you have to have been bottom before and I think that's very accurate.

Then came the Saturday disco evenings. The kisses on the red velvet armchairs in the merged almost in sequence with the slaps that fell on me, not exactly from heaven, when I arrived home drunk, I always received them with stoicism, my greatest defense was not to shed a tear, I distributed them with ease behind the disco, there was always some duel. Humiliation was the greatest subjet.

Lou Reed sang ‘strik dear mistress and cure his heart’. Someone could like to be beaten with a belt? the day when  my father tried it I left home.

The human brain relativizes and discards negative experiences in order to move forward, but some traumatic memories remain subtly attached, like fingerprints to the subconscious, creating nervous responses, states of alarm. It is up to you to let the traumas take the reins of your life or to be the one who tames the horse, to be the winning rider.

With 18 I left behind a gray and rainy city, skater boyfriends and half of my drug dealer friends with whom I had spent afternoons watching the microwave to cut the pieces of cost and putting ecstasy in bags, if anything I thank them is that until I came of age they never let me get a line. I left with a yearning to discover new horizons, like when I peeked behind the terrace wall, but without junkies.

My university years were like a roller coaster of much more diverse and, fortunately, less violent sensations. I discovered drugs and tried almost all of them, I experienced all those trips with skids, ups and downs. If I learned anything, it was that my slippery interpretation of carpe diem, together with my hedonism, with which I only tried to make up for lost time between punishments, caused my brain to turn into a soft and gelatinous place, like Dali's clocks on Sunday afternoons it led me to dark alleys, where I met monsters that didn't exist. Of course, I combined all this with the glow of feeling inevitably young and irresistibly sexual, I guess like many I didn't think about tomorrow.

In my first post-college summer I was in one after with a flirt when I got confused looking for the bathroom and literally opened the second door that had been left a long time ago ajar, before my eyes a gagged guy full of clamps and tied to a closet. That image engraved in my brain, I went back to bed with the guy in question and told him: people are getting out of hand with drugs, you have to see this, after a few minutes he came back and answered me: he is waiting for his dominatrix, ok let's fuck, I said, to avoid a conversation of which I had little knowledge. I didn't know if what he was telling me was good or bad.

I had heard stories of domination, read Sade in college and I knew that someone masochistic enjoyed pain, as I also knew that there were people who were capable of self-mutilation to experience physical pain that made them abstract from the internal, but my idea of BDSM was biased and limiting, I thought that the whole universe belonged to gay dark rooms, satanic groups and fans of Marilyn Manson.

It was at that moment when I connected doors and corridors and went into the back room of the Velvet Underground in which latex and leather, pleasure and pain, sweat and tears were braided like the strings of an eight-pronged whip.

I revisited and re-meant the same songs, read books, looked for magazines and with ten years more I discovered the metamorphosis and the telluric power that was hidden within BDSM, the transformation of the elements to get pleasure through pain and how sex could become an almost mystical experience, I remember thinking that the martyrs, in religious ecstasy, had been the first masochists.

Venus in Furs and Heroine spoke then of the same journey, of transcending the body, of an escape from the reality we construct, which is ultimately an extension of ourselves, only that drugs were much more socially accepted, in comparison. I became interested later in subspace and how to reach flux, it was fascinating how pain inflicted, the suffering of some or humiliation could become the liberation of others. Physical pain as relief from emotional pain or absolution from guilt, or pain as a path to pleasure, light and darkness, eternal dilology. The others are heaven, the others are hell, they say in the book “A Course in Miracles”, but the real miracle is the change of consciousness, understanding it as the one that occurs in your brain to see the same situation from a different point of view.

I had to experience inner pain, suffering, loss, desolation and angst for the miracle to happen, for periods of time I felt as if there was a red hot thermostat inside me, I envied those who had anxiety attacks, I saw them as ephemeral episodes, while my pain was constant and unlimited, until I realised that it was my responsibility to know how to cross the pain without burning in my own hell. And that was when that shift occurred, when I realised, that that hand, the one that regulated the cadence, mine, was ready to grasp the whip. I had mastered the experience and felt able to alchemise the elements.

As your mind opens up new realities almost unintentionally they come to you, that happened to me the first time I saw a girl under six feet tall dominate a guy twice her size, it happened in one of the massage institutes I worked in. How do you feel?, I asked her when the session was over, very relaxed, she replied. That's when I realised that everyone re-interprets what they do, but if you want to do something well you can't forget the passion. I feel that there are many who can start in this for money, but only the truth is sustained over time.

Those who think I do it because I enjoy torturing men or because I need to feel adored, are wrong, as are those who think my clients have sex with me, the most they lick my legs are knee high and latex gloves. I understand that it is easier to put our thoughts in boxes because they give us security and reaffirm us in our beliefs, in the same way that I see this experience as part of my life, and life as a succession of decisions, important or subtle, sometimes dystopian that mean renunciation, and acceptance: if you had not spent the last few minutes of your time reading me you would perhaps be in front of another article or looking at IG; if my next client hadn't found me I would be in front of another door, but the decision, the desire, the silences, the impasse that passes between this action and that other semi torn or semi contracted in small lapses of time, that subtile and underlying space called pause is where Frankel said that freedom resides and I believe that it is in pursuit of the magnanimous and absolute freedom, the one that goes through your body and in the name of it that I dedicate myself to this.

My favourite clients are the masochists, I am fascinated by their capabilities, but each one is a world, an experience and a dopamine and adrenaline trip, I thank them all for being so brave and able to navigate vulnerability, to face their frustrations, their fears and all their pain, past or present, to embrace the darkness as part of the path to pleasure, to the power and rebirth that comes after every ‘petit morte’.

I have three minutes left, when I open the door to my client, right after he gives me his offering, I will prostrate him on my knees, I will tell him, as I always do, that as much pleasure as he can give me as much pleasure as he will have, in the end, it is a game of two, then I will let my intuition guide me. I will possibly tie him to a chair, handcuff him, and make him crave my Loubotin's with all the frustration of having your fetish in front of you, with no hands to touch him, and then I will slowly shove my heel up his ass, so that he melts into flesh and blood with his dark object of desire. He has explicitly told me that he wants me to whip him, I will spit in his face and ask him to masturbate with a corner, I will let him ejaculate my hand? Semen, the origin and the form.

Jung says that what we do not integrate is presented to us as destiny, a game of projections: I’ll be your mirror.