A Peasant And A Stripper

Dara came over last night. It had been about a week or so since I bumped into her on the street downtown. I called her up a few days after our chance meeting and we made plans to hang out at my place after I came home from work. She didn't seem to mind the late hour and she said she would bring some stuff to listen to, which she did. I had a bottle of good red wine and a box of clove cigarettes ready to go. She brought two CDs with her, something from a band called Apoptygma Berzerk, and another band called Malign. I put both of them in the stereo and we settled in for a night of conversation.

Dara ended up living in the city working in strip clubs. That's pretty much the long and short of it. She had been ripped off numerous times by some club managers and or owners for her night's take and in one case she told me about, she had worked for weeks at a joint only to find out that the strip club had gone out of business. She never got paid. During those strip club years, she was attacked once. Riding her bicycle down the street where she lived one day someone clocked her upside the head with a metal pipe or something. It ended up crushing her skull badly and she's got a metal plate in her noggin now. She let me check it out by placing my hand on her head. I could feel it under her skin. Kinda weird but not in an icky way or anything. Just weird.

When she was able to work again she shifted gears from the strip club scene to working in fetish clubs and dungeons as a dominatrix. That raised my eyebrows a bit. I've heard of some of these establishments in the city but I never worked up the interest or courage to actually go check any of them out. Figuring I might get some crazy stories from Dara about these places I asked her a bunch of questions. What were the dungeon customers like? What was some of the strangest stuff you had to do to them? Did you have any clients that really were off the hook insane? That sort of stuff.

She said, "When I first started working at this one place, I was told about a regular client that was from Marin and he would visit once a week. He was very specific about how he was to be disciplined. He preferred to be kicked really hard in the nuts while he was wearing his wife's horse riding boots. He had an arrangement with his wife that it was okay for him to do this. The Mistress told me to kick him in the balls as hard as I could and if it wasn't powerful enough, if it wasn't to his satisfaction, he would complain about it and try to have me fired. I didn't want to hurt him but they said he liked it best when it would almost lift him off the ground".

"So did you do it? Did you kick him hard enough"?

"I was wearing what I call my 'bitch boots'. They're shiny black stilletto spiked heels that lace all the way up my legs. I kicked him. Alot. Then he would lie on his back on the floor with his legs spread out and we had to kick him while he was like that, too."

Holy shit. I couldn't imagine anybody wanting that. Especially working out some deal with his wife to get permission for the beating and be allowed to borrow her footwear for the occassion. What a kook.

Hours passed as we talked. The wine was good, the cloves were perfect, and I was getting drunk. I decided I didn't like Apoptygma Berzerk much but the Malign disc was killer. It's some of the best gothic material I've heard since Rozz Williams was still with Christian Death, and that was many years ago. I have to get a copy of Malign. That's all there is to it. When the wine bottle was empty and both of us were too tired to think of anything else to say, Dara went home. Before she left though, we made plans to do something together next week.