a love story in three acts and an overlong interlude

ACT I. You pussy!

“Hit me harder, you pussy,” she grunted, teeth her face twisted in a rictus of utter contempt. In the heat of the spank, she as submissive took on the demeanor of a Klingon warrior preparing to die in glorious battle (and pontificating endlessly on the pursuit of honor).

In other words, she wasn’t kidding.

This had been going on for the better part of an hour. There was Missy, my Worf-like warrior of the submissive arts, bound spread-eagle on the bed, her unblemished ass poofed up in the air like two sourdough boules. Well, two sourdough boules that had been spanked, whipped, cropped, paddled, strapped, caned, switched, stamped, stomped, and otherwise assaulted for approximately 51 minutes, yet betrayed absolutely no signs of either marking or proofing.

And then there was me. If Missy was a battle-tested Klingon warrior, I was Wesley Crusher. With a paddle. I was doing all the hitty stuff, yet I was the one who was dying. My arms felt like pipe cleaners that had been daisy-chained into a bad Shibari demo and then set on fire by the opportunistic pyro that inevitably crashes every BDSM munch at the local Denny’s. (You know that guy; the one with the wild eyes and an over-flicked Bic who’s dying to light the arms of all the girls aflame. Because Denny’s managers love watching their diners immolate.)

“Well?” she demanded (and she was quite the demanding little thing, even for a submissive). “Are you gonna hit me again or what?”

‘Or what’ was feeling like the better option. Once again I conducted a unilateral invasion of her toybox (Missy did not travel light; whence she went followed a coffin-sized trunk, a veritable hope-chest of dildos, dongs, vibrators, ass-smashers, and wet-naps) looking for WADs (Weapons of Ass Destruction), but finding only instruments to torture normal humanoids with.

“Are you sure you were born with nerve endings?” I asked, my chest sagging like the ass-end of an overweight cat trying to launch itself onto a higher surface.

“Bah,” she harrumphed.

It always wondered me that she used ‘bah’ so frequently as a term of dismissal. In all my life, I had only encountered two other people who employed this term. One of them was the Incredible Hulk, who ‘bah’ed his way through the Army, Air Force, Marines, and each state’s National Guard in the comics of my childhood. However, Missy hadn’t yet called me a ‘puny human’, so at least I still had that going for me. That and I have a strict ‘No Green Chicks’ dating policy.

I looked down at her. She wrinkled her nose at me and snorted. Missy was a lovely girl, part mutant, part munch-organizer (kinky munch organizers, by the way, are the only reason Denny’s is still in existence in many towns), and all cranky, all the time. Standing at a squat 5’2” in her regulation Starfleet mini-skirt (Missy really liked Star Trek), with beady little Hobbit eyes, she was the sort of girl who safeworded only for potty breaks and snacks. Otherwise she had a tendency to taunt her respective dominanta the way a drill sergeant dresses down his cadets. And for the record, it’s not bratting when it comes out sounding like R. Lee Ermey.

Missy didn’t top from the bottom; she bullied from the bottom.

To say that Missy was a pain-slut is to suggest that Missy actually felt pain. Which she did not. The term ‘leatherbutt’ comes to mind, but really, that is an insult both to leather and butts. What Missy had was some sort of indestructible organic metal alloy, like the stuff Wolverine’s claws were made of. Missy was the original Buns of Steel.

“So you’re not gonna hit me again,” she grumbled.

Fearing that my health insurance wouldn’t cover Tommy John surgery (a.k.a. Spanker’s Elbow), I thought it best to call an end to this particular beating, as I was the one soundly beaten.

“Um, no, I think I’m done.” I fashioned a thick leather strappy thing into a makeshift sling and collapsed onto the bed beside her as she finished gnawing her way through the restraints.

Missy regarded me with a disdainful eye, the way a cat gloats over a stray bit of lint that it has successfully hunted and killed. She rolled over, snatched up the remote, and flicked on Star Trek. It wasn’t the sexiest of BDSM rituals, but there it was. It’d beat her. She’d call me a pussy. I’d get tired. And then we’d watch Star Trek.

“Ooh, this is a good one. It’s got Ferengi in it.”

I gasped out my agreement that Ferengi were indeed the hallmark of any good Star Trek episode.

“Look at you,” she gloated, “you look like you just got beat with the ugly stick.”

At which point inspiration struck. It’s like finding the answer to ‘what do you get for the person who has everything?’ Gift cards? I was pretty confident that no amount of gift-card giving would sate Missy’s one true desire to feel a beating.

And I had the answer. The one that Rumsfeld and Cheney never imagined: if you can’t find the imaginary WMD/WADs, then you have to make them yourself.

I would build an ugly stick.

And Missy would be the one who got beat with it.

ACT II. The Lyin’, the Witch, and the Lack of Any Wardrobe Whatsoever

But first I needed some help. I I drove over to the house of my Wiccan priestess bondage queen friend Alethea, who herself built nearly every piece of furniture in the home she shared with her husband, her boyfriend, her girlfriend, his girlfriend, his boyfriend, and a gaggle of dirty naked hippy couch-surfers who seemingly were deposited on this earth to do nothing more than mooch cigarettes, lube, bondage rope, and the genitals of anyone passing by. These were the first polyamorists who had bumbled into my life, and I regarded them the same way Nixon regarded the Free Love set in the 60s. The only difference between the poly people and the Free Love movement seemed to be that, studying the newsreel, the hippies seemed a little less miserable. And they were all vegans, the lot of them, which lent Alethea’s house the unmistakably eye-watering aroma of rotting garlic. All in all, this house was both the wet dream of every sex-blogger ten years later, as well as the vividly realized fears of every jowly godbag.

Alethea was sort of the Home Depot of the local BDSM scene. Her garage was a veritable Acme of do-baddery, from the mundane (homemade floggers), to the slightly less-mundane (homemade catheters), to the not-at-all-mundane (her ‘magic circle’, where she retreated to summon the assistance of wind goddesses, friendly demons, and tofu recipes).

“What do you need to build?” Alethea asked while casting a moon-spell to dispel a little bit of the stink of a non-vegan.

“An ugly stick.”

“Ooh. You’re still dating Missy, aren’t you.”

Alethea lead me into her garage. She was a hippy in two senses; of course she was a filthy pot-smoking, indiscriminate sex-having hippy (which unfortunately did not include me); also she was extremely wide-hipped – she looked like an R. Crumb drawing brought to red-headed life, minus the hip street lingo.

It also didn’t hurt that she wore a tool-belt like no one else on earth. It was more like Batman’s tool belt, really; that is, if Batman was a weird Wiccan free-love chick. From her hippyness hung hammers, screwdrivers, vials of hair, semen, coke, throwing stars, and whatever pixie dust she had gathered from the latest Wiccan swap-meet. Judging by the irises of her squatters, I’d have to say that it was deeply narcotic, whatever it was.

The problem was that I had all the technological skill of a crackhead trying to fix a teleprompter with a box of Crystal Light mix. In seventh grade, I was forced to construct a bird feeder in shop class by a surly German named Mṻller, whose motivational technique consisted of approaching a boy, shrieking at him in the way that only Germans can, “BAH! I AM GOINK TO GIFF YOO A SCHOTT!” Yes, Mṻller was the other person in my life who employed ‘bah’.

This shrieking of disapproval immediately followed by the shot itself – a stiff jab to the arm which usually produced a bruise in the shape of the Fatherland. If nothing else, seventh grade is the beginning of the end of childhood, because a boy will learn the meaning of stress through the difficulty of operating a band-saw with an angry German screaming at him and punching him into sniffly-nosed conformity. It is because of Mṻller that I later memorized the opening speech from Patton. Needless to say, I abandoned a possible career in the woodworking arts as soon as the semester turned over.

Nonetheless, I had a few rudimentary ideas. I was already aware that neither wood, nor steel, nor plastic, nor leather had made any sort of impression on Missy’s invincible ass. But what if I combined these things into a single unit of pain-delivery?

“You’re going to need to reinforce it,” Alethea mused, scanning her reserves. “Steel-on-wood-on-leather.”

“Okay,” I nodded.

“Though that still might not be enough to make an impression on Missy. How about I invoke a demon and try to trap it inside the structure of the stick?”

And here I was afraid that I’d have to ask. Alethea was very sensitive about her magical abilities; she didn’t share them with just anyone. It probably helped that Missy owed her money.

So we set about constructing this technological terror. I was careful not to include any exhaust ports big enough for a womp-rat. We started with an endoskeleton of steel, which was then be-slatted with long planks of cherry wood spanning out in a fearsome semi-circle. If Hollywood ever decided to create a new horror film villain who dispatched his teenage victims with a modified rake, we had the perfect weapon for him. It looked like it was capable of multiple decapitations in a single stroke.

Before we set about covering and adorning it, Alethea pulled up her cloak (never attempt magic without a cloak) and pulled out a trusty wand-stick. A bit of pig-Latin later, and she assured me that she had indeed conjured a demon into the frame of the ugly stick. At which point her husband and several of his consorts arrived, and she excused herself to conjure up a pot of boiled tofu and sweatsocks.

In her absence, I did my usual half-assed routine of taking a perfect, near-elegant design, and making it look like it had been rolled in a dirty ashtray. Bits of leather were glued on and then triple-wrapped in a codicil of thick black electrical tape. Sort of like Brandon Lee in The Crow, without the looking-cool part. Seriously, a kid born without arms or legs could have done a better job using just his teeth and a little well-blown snot.

I two-fisted it like my own twisted take on Excalibur and lifted it up. It made a lot of noise – weird, otherworldly kind of noises. It was the sort of fucked-up voodoo thing you could see Tom Waits shaking onstage. I raised it up over my head, as if ready to part the skies so that I through the ugly stick may receive my power from the gods. It was a total ‘by the power of Grayskull’ kind of moment.

It weighed approximately 8lbs, and looked like something Death might carry if he forgot his scythe. It was a cross between a trident, a baseball bat, and Darth Vader’s penis, assuming it wasn’t burned off. I went inside to show it off to Alethea, whose initial reaction was that she’d invoked too strong a demon.

“Somebody’s gonna get hurt,” she said, shaking her head as she dropped the vegan approximation of an eye of newt into the boiling pot of tofu and sweatsocks.

Which was precisely what I wanted to hear. I said my goodbyes, careful to thank the goddesses, wind, moon, and stars, and then proceeded to trip over a pile of dirty naked people slithering all over each other like some sort of sex-positive Mayan death ritual.

And then I raced toward Missy’s.

To be continued…