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"Yes. I grew up in the Berkshires."

"Herman Melville country."

"Yes. Herman Melville country," she agreed, then joked, "My book is sort of like 'Moby-Dick.'"

"Or 'Moby Pear,'" I suggested.

The dominatrix told me she went to school in New Jersey, then back to Massachusetts for college and ended up in Washington. "My husband and I had a political consulting business for a couple of years that did really well. Then in 1992 the electoral season ended and there just wasn't a lot of work in that area for bright people. It was really tough making ends meet."

"How did you slip over to the dark side?" I asked.

Sex Tips from a Dominatrix By Patricia Payne HarperCollins Publishers 224 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

"My husband was traveling," she explained. "I'd just gotten a new computer. I was home alone. It came with AOL installed. I logged on for the hell of it. I came to this chat room called 'Le Chateau.' I thought it was people practicing French, but it turned out it was an S&M room."

"How did you introduce this aspect of your personality into your marriage?"

"My husband knew that I had slowly been getting into it," she answered. "I got a pair of handcuffs." She paused. "It was funny -- one day we had been doing spring cleaning and I was taking a shower. When I came out of the shower, he'd found all my illicit materials. And he was standing there holding a riding crop saying, 'When did we get a horse?'"

"Were you waiting for the right moment to introduce it?" I ask.

She frowns. "I would prefer this not go too much into the sex life of me and my husband. My basic feeling is, I put up with 15 years of him being a Deadhead so he can put up with a few years of me being a dominatrix."

I laughed. We then discussed global S&M. Most S&M accoutrements are French, but Asians are into bondage big-time -- especially Japanese symmetrical rope bondage, where each knot corresponds to acupressure points. The best handcuffs are British, Mistress Payne informed me.

"You've been talking about dominating men," I said, chomping my burger. "Do you know any women who are submissive?"

"Yes," she replied.

"Can I have their phone numbers?"

She laughed.

"Are you friends with anyone who wants to be tied up, spanked, forced to clean the house?" I asked.

"I've never met any woman who wants to be forced to clean the house!" She paused, then told an amazing anecdote that held me spellbound. "I know a woman who is submissive," Mistress Payne said, "but falls into that type-A male personality that we were talking about earlier. She's very successful. She has a fantastic career. Her big thing for a while was really severe pain play. Being flogged. She told me that she'd never been broken. She's always lasted longer than any of the people who had 'topped' her."

I broke in -- "Does that mean she gets spanked and spanked and never says, 'Enough!'?"

"Yes. Basically. Topping is hard work. I told her I would be the one to break her," Mistress Payne recalled. "And I was, but it took a long time -- about an hour and half. It really was a test of wills between the two of us."

(At that moment, the background Muzak, which I hadn't been conscious of until then, suddenly became louder and a British woman's voice belted out, "Ah, wouldn't it be lov-er-lee?" from "My Fair Lady.")

"I'd probably been working on her for about an hour," Mistress Payne continued. "I had done some pretty painful things at that point. I have a flogger that's 32 inches long. Very, very hard thin leather. It hurts like a son of a bitch. No other way to describe it. You can't hit somebody softly with it. It hurts a lot. I put a riding crop in her mouth. And I said, 'I want you to listen to me. I am going to flog you now until you drop this crop. When the crop falls out of your mouth we are done.'

"I knew that she hated being gagged so she wasn't going to last too long. I continued. When she finally dropped it, it was funny. I had her hands tied over her head. She wanted to keep going and of course she couldn't because she couldn't bend over to pick it up. So she was sort of doing this karate kick. I said, 'No. That's enough. I told you that was going to be the end of it.' When you put somebody through something like that, they're getting a huge, huge release of endorphins -- it's like a runner's high. It's exactly the same kind of thing. The body is going through a lot at that point. I undid her arms and for the first couple of minutes they wouldn't come down. And she started to cry. And she cried and she cried and she cried, but it wasn't like a 'Oh, my god this hurts so bad.' It was like, 'I just won the Miss America Pageant' kind of crying."

I looked around. None of the tourists were eavesdropping. They were talking about Broadway shows. They were ordering hamburgers and Cobb salads. I looked back at the dominatrix. "What I'm going to say is judgmental," I said, "but that behavior doesn't sound sexual. It doesn't sound pleasurable. It just sounds nuts."

"I can tell you two things about that," Mistress Payne shot back. "My friend had about two or three orgasms." The mistress paused. "In all honesty, it's a weird mixture of sexuality and I don't know what else to call it. The phrase I was thinking about was [that I'm acting as a ] 'backyard shrink,' but that's not totally accurate. It's knowing what buttons to push with somebody. I can't imagine running into somebody who I would do that kind of scene with again. I don't want to give you the impression that that's my usual modus operandi -- it isn't."

Whew. It was quite a lunch. I paid our bill and tried to make eye contact with our waitress. She looked away. Oh well -- I left a good tip.

Outside HoJo, Mistress Payne generously offered to return to New York to personally accompany me to an S&M club so I could witness people "playing" firsthand. I thanked her, but politely declined. I'm no prude. I've been around the block, just not that particular block. The dominatrix and I shook hands -- her grip was feminine and light -- then we parted. I walked through the Times Square crowd understanding that at this particular moment, it was the most innocent spot in America.
salon.com | Dec. 16, 1999

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