Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

that was not astounding, and I can’t help wondering how my life might have

but if I’m to be God’s little joke then I don’t want it to be any crueler than the sport of it calls for. And then I don’t see him at all awhile, perhaps another week, and then he’s there one night on the grotto steps again not with flowers, not delivering anything except himself. He’s there as a client.

By now I’ve really got the business going. Twenty or thirty steady regulars, more than I can handle really, and then all the semi’s who drop in and out of the picture, and new ones showing up fairly often and a lot of them come back. From the short time I’ve been here already it seems to me nothing in L.A. ever quite fits any sort of real pattern anyway, and this sort of work is volatile by nature; sometimes when the fighting up north gets worse or there’s especially ominous news from back east you can almost predict an upturn in traffic, men wanting to explore their dark sides before the end. More often than not these are men of some power or influence, men in control of others, men in positions of responsibility who long to be free for an hour or two of power, control, responsibility, free of themselves — men who want to turn power and control and the Self over to someone else. Perhaps they feel guilty about the way they fuck over other people all the time and want to be fucked over by me in return as a sort of penance — every client is different isn’t he. Some have lives they need to escape from and others have no lives at all, that is no lives of emotional connection or intimacy, and they’re the problem-ones because then they want me to be their life, and I can’t, can I. I just can’t. Those are the ones who start hounding me till I have to cut them loose. You probably think they’re all creeps and losers in which case you would be in for the surprise of your life, I won’t say most of them are nice normal men because, take it from me, there are no nice normal men — nice perhaps but not normal. But some of them are actually a bit sweet — sad and messed up yes but a bit sweet and like I told the Mistress that very first day it’s not

been different had I known, how far I might have gone with him to unlock the

like I don’t like men, sometimes they actually can be easier to deal with than women because everything’s so straightforward in terms of what they want. So don’t get the idea I do this because I hate men. Perhaps back somewhere in my mystery past before I came up out of the lake I was a cliche, you know, the molested daughter or whatever — but I just don’t think so. So before I take on a client we’ll usually talk awhile and I’ll try to figure out what his story is and why he’s there and whether what he wants is something I can give him, and I make it clear then that there are things I don’t do and I don’t need to go into those here, just things that cross my own line of dignity if not the client’s. There’s humiliation and then there’s humiliation. Like I said before, there’s a line drawn on the discipline I’ll inflict, because while it’s all very amusing to blindfold and harness a naked man by his ankles and wrists and beat him awhile, it’s not like I’m a sadist or something. Erotoasphyxiation, electrocution, cattle prods, I don’t go in for any of that. It’s all about limits isn’t it, the ones you test and the ones you observe. There’s a code word the client and I agree on that he’ll say if things are going farther than he wants or he changes his mind about something, something besides “no” or “stop” because in such situations people say no or stop all the time without meaning it. For a while I was coming up with a different word for each client but that became confusing and I was always afraid I might forget, though I imagine I would have remembered when I heard it, but anyway now I have a one-code-fits-all policy and the word is zed.

But no one’s said it yet.

There’s no sex. Not with me, anyway. Do you get that? I’m not a hooker. The need and situation may be sexual to the client and I understand that in the submissive’s own weird way I’m an object of sexual interest. At the end of the session, before releasing him, if he’s been obedient and I feel he’s done well in his

riddle of how every life is a millennium unto itself, of how the single smallest

training, I’ll give him permission to pleasure himself if he chooses. But that’s up to him, he does it without any help at all from me, though if he wants to do it in front of me I may allow him, depending. A female client, she’s different, to the extent I’ve had any and can really tell. I confess I wouldn’t mind more female clients. For a while I was a bit surprised I didn’t have more but that was me being naive, women just aren’t wired that way are they. Someone else will have to explain that, I can’t. Perhaps for women submission has been such a fact of life for so long that they don’t have the luxury of making a game of it. I’ve had two female submissives but I’m not sure they count, the first was part of a couple, she and I performing for her man and while I think perhaps she liked it more than he did or more than he wanted her to, she wasn’t really my type; the second wasn’t really one client but several thousand, the all-female Freek Recherche that’s the most famous of the movable lunatiques that take place clandestinely night to night in one canyon or the other ’round here. Which in a strange way doesn’t count either. By then I had a reputation and while I usually don’t like doing outcall I confess I was flattered that they came looking for me, a couple of the women putting on the fete sailing out to the Chateau and offering me the job. It would be an honor, one says to me — how do you resist that? Flattery or not I’m not sure I could have anyway.

This was the night I found out something interesting about myself. After all the days and weeks and months of wondering about my past, of wondering who I was before I came up out of the lake, this was when I found out perhaps I don’t really want to know. The night of the Freek Recherche the two women come back for me and sail me over to shore and drive me in a beat-up thirty-year-old Jag through the pass in the hills to Nichols Canyon and I think I’ll remember till the day I die the sight of all those women there by Nichols Pond that looked like it was on fire from

human experience like losing a child can be a universe of meaning unto

the melody-snakes imported and dumped in, flashing and singing. How did they get all those snakes? Where did all those women come from? I didn’t know there were that many women still in L.A., they had to have traveled from all the far reaches of the lagoon thousands of them, a vast memory-carnival of women dancing to the music of the snakes and drinking lapsinthe like there’s no yesterday. My job is to stand on this little platform and crack my whip at the girls dancing ’round me as well as the blindfolded man fastened naked to the spinning wheel behind me ’sinthed out of his mind voluntarily or not — I don’t know and don’t want to — erection subject to the whims of centrifuge and the object of much collective amusement. At some point in all this someone presses into my hand a shot of ’sinthe and instead of drinking it down right away I stand there looking at the shot glass in my hand thinking about it and considering whether to drink it — that is, do I want to remember, after all? Face to face with the prospect of actually knowing what came before, I balk. What if it’s something terrible? What if there’s a very good reason I’m not remembering? So I just set it there on the small table next to me trying to decide, and it’s very distracting. In a lot of ways it’s the best time I’ve ever had, the best time of my life, well the best I know of anyway, cracking the whip and dancing with the women like I’m Queen of the Zed Night like they used to call the Mistress, all of them worshipping me and cheering and wanting to touch me as I stand over them on the platform and getting paid for it on top of it, what can be better, except the whole time all I can think about is whether to drink that little shot of the sepia-colored liqueur.