“You’re new,” he observed.
“Yeah, Ginnie said I should check out the scene.” Here she gestured to the room. “It’s pretty cool. So, have you seen her?”
“She’s around. What about you? Top or bottom?”
“Oh, top, definitely,” said Marlene. The bartender seemed to lose interest. She attempted to rekindle it by twitching one of her five-dollar bills. “I’d appreciate knowing where to find her.”
The bartender took the bill and put it in a pocket of his vest. “You try upstairs yet?”
“No.” Marlene had not been aware that the place had more than one floor.
“Private club,” said the man, turning away. “See the guy, Melvin. On the stool there.”
Back in the corner, to one side of the bandstand, nearly obscured by the huge speakers, was a door, lit by the red of an exit sign, and by the door they found the stool and on the stool was Melvin. This person weighed at least three hundred pounds and was naked to the waist except for several dozen chains around his neck, Mr. T fashion, and a black executioner’s mask.
“Ten bucks lifetime membership,” said Melvin when Marlene and Wolfe made inquiries, and to Marlene, “I like your outfit.” He had a surprisingly light voice for such a large man.
“Thanks,” said Marlene. “Membership in what?”
“The Asperians. We’re an umbrella group, you know? Affiliations with the Til Eulenspiegels, Samois, Gemini, the S-M Church. We take anyone-male dominant, female dominant, gay, the whole nine yards. We rent the rooms upstairs.”
They paid their money, and Melvin recorded their names and addresses in a ledger, and handed over a pair of membership cards.
“There’s equipment for borrowing upstairs if you haven’t brought your own. The only rule is have fun and don’t get hurt,” advised Melvin cheerfully, and nudged open the nearby door with his foot.
They ascended a narrow stairway lit by weak red bulbs, and at the top of it came to a room about half the size of the one below. It was carpeted in some industrial material, and its windows were covered with the metal sheeting they had seen from the street. There were perhaps a dozen people in the room, largely coupled off, most of the women in dominatrix gear and most of the men in a variety of costumes designed for ritual humiliation-petticoats, sheer negligees, diapers-or nude except for complicated-looking leather straps, both jock and restraining. Many were attached to their mistresses by chains or leashes. The room was lit by several photographic spots directed at its center, and in this pool of light a woman was shouting insults at her partner, a man dressed only in a diaper, who was cringing in ecstasy at her feet. She kicked him lightly with her pointed boot and called him a naughty, dirty little boy. It went on for quite a while. Some of the spectators watched with interest; others, the dominants, chatted. It was like being at a big dog show, Marlene thought, except that here the dogs were people. She looked at the faces in the group. Allowing for the peculiar qualities of the lighting and the odd makeup many of the women favored, they looked like quite ordinary people: supermarket rather than horror-movie faces, and Marlene concluded that Professor Malkin’s assessment was correct, just plain folks having odd fun. The diapered man was led off by his mistress, crawling, through a door Marlene had not noticed. Shortly, through the same door issued a woman dressed all in white, a startling sight in the circumstances, drawing an appreciative murmur from the group. She was clearly posing as a little girl going to first communion, in a white dress, tied with a sash, white stockings, a white patent leather purse, and white patent mary-janes on her feet. Her face was made up to look not made up, and she wore a white ribbon in her straw-colored hair. She walked into the spotlight and waited, twisting her toes girlishly.
Marlene looked around for Wolfe, who had, however, wandered away. “What’s going on?” Marlene asked the man next to her, a beefy fellow wearing a dog dollar, red corset, and panty hose. He started to answer reflexively, but the woman he was with cut him off violently by yanking on his collar.
“You dare to speak without my permission!” she hissed. “You dare! You filthy, disgusting worm! Get down! Lower!”
He groveled, his face in the carpet, while she put her booted foot on his neck and ground his face, while giving him a couple of good ones across the bottom with a little cat-o’-nine-tails she carried.
Marlene was about to apologize and then realized that the rules of courtesy were different here. She smiled at the woman, who was thin and pretty and younger than Marlene, and dressed in a formal black-silk suit, velvet hat, and veil, like Marlene’s grandmother. She got a bland smile in return, of the sort you get in the laundromat when you’ve handed someone a quarter.
Another stir in the crowd. A man in a long raincoat had come out of the door and approached the faux little girl. He was dirty and unshaven and wore a slouch fedora that shadowed his face. He was breathing hard; the rasping noise he made seemed to drown out the faint throb of the music coming from the room below. In a violent motion he flung his raincoat open to reveal that the crotch had been cut out of his trousers and that his penis was rigidly erect. There was a moment of frozen silence. Then the girl-woman let out a piercing shriek and attacked the man, kicking him in the knees and shins and shouting, “Filthy, dirty old man!” over and over. She reached into her purse and brought out some kind of flail and swung it at the man’s head. No, Marlene saw, not a flail, a heavy rosary, of the type borne by old-fashioned nuns. The man’s hat flew off. He was Felix Evarti.
The white-clad woman kept up her frenzy of beating and kicking, shouting all the while (“Dirty! Filthy!”). Evarti made ineffective shielding motions, and went down on his knees and then his back. Marlene knew enough about serious fights to realize that for all her extravagant motion, Mary-Jane was pulling her blows. The others were closing around the scene in a circle, avid. With Evarti down, the woman could now concentrate her fury on the peccant member, which remained upright and twitching. She beat at it with the rosary, and Marlene wondered how she kept from doing him damage. The vituperation reached a crescendo. The woman leaped upon Evarti’s naked belly and ground her white mary-janes into his genitals, grinding the penis underfoot as if squashing a cockroach. Evarti was making incomprehensible noises, groaning, thrashing from side to side. He arched his back and shouted something in another language, Romanian, Marlene supposed, and then came in a thick gush over the woman’s white shoes.
“Euugh! You disgusting man!” cried the woman. “You dirtied me with your filth! Clean it up! Clean it up this minute.” Evarti started to dab the shoes with the edge of his raincoat, but this was clearly not satisfactory. After a few especially vigorous lashes, the woman shouted, “Lick it! Get it all off, you foul man!” Evarti prostrated himself before the woman and licked the semen off her shoes. She made sure he got it all and then, straightening her dress and replacing her rosary in the little purse, she skipped off. She actually skipped. Evarti rose shakily, clutched his coat around him, picked up his hat, and shuffled away. There was a collective release of breath around the circle.
Marlene was again conscious of Wolfe standing close by. In a low voice she remarked, “Gosh, and I thought I had some weird relationships. What did you think of that, Wolfe?”
Wolfe shook his head. “Un-fucking-believable. I checked the place. He’s here.”