The first time I saw Reddog—a lean, Pit Bull mix—I peered through the haze of anxiety and heroin hangover that I then lived in, and thought: now that is a sexy dog. Beauty like his, the kind we call sexy, it pleases some aesthetic instinct, softens something in us, makes us want to look longer, to memorize its implicit promise that there is ease in the world, that some things accord.
Nola squints in the sunlight that has just spilled over the rooftops and illuminated Williamsburg’s McCarren Park in all its dewy spring splendor. Slipping her Chanel sunglasses down over her eyes, she sips her latte and makes a sweeping gesture toward the jogger-strewn park, its busy dog run, and the new high-rise condos that have sprung up along its borders.
“There is no way I’d be living here without my nurse hat, if you know what I mean. This place is going to look like Park Slope in a few years. They might dress like hipsters, but they’re just yuppies with vintage wardrobes.”
Dear America,
Baby, I love your particular strain of capitalism, how its muscular hand caresses every part of me, everything in sight–I have always loved a firm hand, baby.
I love how it has turned everything into a product, one that looks suspiciously like my own body.
I love how this has made me hate myself, and hawk myself, and fostered an extreme poverty of imagination in my young self, and in everyone I have ever known.
I love how this has forced my imagination to grow bigger…
Melissa Febos is author of the memoir Whip Smart (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press), which recalls her four years working at a midtown dungeon as a dominatrix. Her writing has been featured in The Southeast Review, Redivider, The Rambler, Storyscape Journal, and Bitch Magazine, among others. She co-curates and hosts the Mixer Reading and Music Series at Cake Shop, teaches at SUNY Purchase College, The Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and New York University, and hangs her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in Brooklyn.
Most relationships after a certain age begin with a body or two under the bed. Usually these are ex-lovers, whose legacy manifests tangibly in shoe boxes of old letters and photos, those morbid and sentimental curations that pulse faintly from the closet shelf. In my case, it took the form of a garbage bag full of S&M equipment.
February, at least according to Hallmark, is the month of love. At BrooklynTheBorough.com, we’re willing to buy that, but we’re going to take a slightly more adult look at affairs of the heart. Enter Melissa Febos, author of the memoir Whip Smart (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press) out on March 2, which recalls her four years working at a midtown dungeon as a dominatrix. Publishers Weekly called it an “emotionally stark, excoriating work, [in which] Febos mines the darkest, most troubling aspects of human interaction.” Catch her reading, live, at the Franklin Park Reading Series on Monday, February 8, 2010 in Crown Heights.
