Julian Shendelman: SUSPENSION POINTS • Cleaver Magazine

Julian Shendelman
SUSPENSION POINTS

“I suppose you could DM,” Marine said, staring into her clipboard.

“Direct message?”

“Dungeon monitor. You essentially walk around making sure people aren’t openly bleeding on the carpet. It’s a violation of our lease. Here.” She handed me a laminated double-sided list of rules. The first three—no fire, breath play, or unconfined fluids—seemed straightforward enough. But I couldn’t wrap my head around interrupting a scene in progress.

“Are you sure there isn’t, like, a clean-up shift I could take?”

The goth shrugged. “We’re booked up. It’s DM or full price.”

Forty dollars was a lot of sesame tofu.

Marine rose to her feet, towering in buckle-encrusted platform boots. The wings of her black eyeliner extended into her temples, bisecting her face. Her teeth were small and crooked, brown behind purple lipstick. She handed off door duties to another volunteer, a nasally man in a snug, black neoprene button-up and matching sailor’s cap. Fleeting, uncomfortable recognition. I eyed the exit, debated running.

This was the biggest hazard of working reception at the queer clinic for a decade straight: bumping into patients everywhere and anywhere. For years, I’d exclusively socialized in private homes with my ex and her HIPAA-compliant circle of therapist pals. Post-divorce, to my old friend Ash’s dismay, I’d stopped going out altogether.

I blamed my work; I had no business rolling up to a potluck with access to the medical records of every queer within a ten-mile radius of the clinic. “I bet the doctors and nurses go out all the time,” Ash had said, during one of our weekly pep talks. I couldn’t argue with that, though I tried, nonetheless.

Marine waved me through the curtain and into a cavernous space with exposed brick along one wall. It was still early—most players arrived closer to ten, she said. A lone fat butch-femme couple on a sofa took turns dangling a clump of feathers strung from a plastic fishing rod over a queer in cat ears. The queer waggled their bare ass like they were about to pounce, then clawed up at the feathers, yowling. Across from the seating area was an empty patch of carpet, where Marine said there’d be a suspension bondage demo later on. There was a small, partially enclosed kitchen, an unoccupied Saint Andrew’s Cross, and then a staircase that led to the basement. “People don’t get into too much trouble upstairs,” Marine said, carefully clomping down the steps. “I think it’s the fluorescent lighting.”

The basement was dim and deserted. Various pieces of vinyl upholstered furniture had been staged along each side of the narrow aisle: benches that looked like a cross between a sawhorse and a straitjacket, a couple massage tables, a steel cage with a padded floor, a mattress with a waterproof sheet, and what must have been a church pew with a kneeling board in a former life.

In the back of the basement, a smaller room held a gynecologist’s table, stirrups and all, flanked by steel implement trays and posters with diagrams of the human body—the throat, the lungs, the nervous system. Just a few pamphlets short of a real exam room. The medical fetish zone, according to Marine. I nodded, trying to extinguish my disgust. When had I gotten so conservative? What had my medical receptionist job done to me? It was all wrong; I was supposed to be running some kind of artists’ residency out of a Park Slope brownstone or living on a radical faerie commune in rural Tennessee. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I’d veered off-track.

As we looped back around to the staircase, Marine pointed out a supply station: a fire extinguisher, sharps containers, spray bottles of alcohol, and industrial rolls of paper towels. Puppy training pads, a first aid kit, boxes of nitrile gloves in every size, condoms, dental dams, packets of water-based lubricant. Safety scissors and bottled water. Some kind of kit for dealing with vomit. “You never know,” said Marine. I must have looked uneasy, simultaneously too old to be new and too late for initiation. “Don’t worry,” she promised, “your job is just to point people to the supplies. And to grab me if something goes wonky.”

Back upstairs, she handed me a red glow stick. “Your shift lasts one hour and starts at nine-thirty,” she said. I sank into the couch across from the cat trainers, studying the laminated guide. On the topic of ensuring consent, the guide recommended I introduce myself to players who appeared to be in the early stages of a scene, reminding them of the rules, pointing out the available supplies, and telling them to flag me down if they needed something. If something nonconsensual happened, I was supposed to run and get Marine. I was glad I wouldn’t have to personally intervene. Determining what was and wasn’t consensual seemed more complicated than the guide had implied. How was I supposed to know a good beating from a bad one?

“First time?” asked the butch. She said her name was Sharon, and introduced her wife, Sabrina, and their “kitten,” Amethyst.

“You can give ‘em a treat if you want,” Sabrina said, reaching into the drawstring pouch dangling from the side of her stiff corset. She handed me an Oreo and Amethyst’s head swiveled in my direction. The kitten scrambled over, lifting their front paws to beg. I extended the Oreo, and they gave it a skeptical sniff before chomping it out of my hand and skittering back to the safety of their owners’ feet.

I wondered what my own untrainable cats were up to in my absence, a pair of matching strays that had shown up on my front porch several months ago, just weeks after my ex had moved out. She was allergic, or so she said. A year prior, our normie neighbors invited us over for dinner, failing to mention their cat. Halfway through the meal, a gray tabby sauntered through the room and my ex began scratching wildly at herself, claiming we had to go, that her throat was closing up. I was crushed. I was just starting to let my actual personality out of the highly curated safe I stored it in at work and most parties; I’d even made a risky innuendo about the sausages they’d served us, and the neighbors had genuinely laughed. The evening was abruptly cut short, and the neighbors never asked us back. I couldn’t decide if it was my ex’s performance or my blue joke that had severed the nascent bond, but I preferred not knowing. Schrodinger’s social anxiety.

Anyway, after three days of watching the malnourished calicos blinking at me from the porch, I began putting out dishes of water. Then, cans of tuna. After a week of feedings, they slipped past me into the house. Apart from a hard-won trip to the vet for check-ups, chip scans, and neutering, the twins hadn’t left home since. They filled my home with a sense of duty I’d feared was irreplaceable, despite being too feral to be touched. I belonged to them more than they belonged to me. Before I’d left for the play party, I’d explained that I would return in time to dish out their daily allotment of paté.

Sharon and Sabrina’s kitten, Amethyst, licked the back of their hairless wrist, then wiped the Oreo crumbs from their lips. They trilled at the entryway curtain as new arrivals trickled in, giddy partygoers wearing outfits that ranged from industrial goth clubwear to khakis and polos. The latter changed into technicolor Lolita dresses, rubber wrestling singlets, strappy lingerie, or military garb before drifting over to the snack table for a few cubes of cheese.

I caught myself biting my nails. “You’ll be okay,” said Sabrina. “DM-ing is easy. The community mostly keeps itself in check.”

Sharon offered an encouraging smile. “Don’t think about it as being the fun police. Just think of yourself as a helper.”

At nine-thirty, I cracked the glow stick and fastened it around my neck, then bid adieu to the couch crew. Downstairs, a woman dressed like an aging Joan Crawford fastened a pair of patent leather shoes onto the feet of a giggling sissy seated on a massage table. A billowing, super short petticoat, à la Shirley Temple, fanned out over the vinyl cushion. Joan rose and cupped her sub’s chin, long red nails pressing into the stubbled, blushing flesh.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” I whispered, “but I just wanted to introduce myself. I’ll be the dungeon master—sorry, monitor—for the next hour.” I pointed out the supply station.

“Be a darling and bring us a sharps container, and some small gloves, rubbing alcohol, and puppy pads?” Joan Crawford asked. I hesitated, trying to remember if the laminated guide had said anything about ferrying supplies back and forth like a kinky waiter, then nodded. “Thank you dear,” said Joan. “My girl’s a bleeder.”

“Just like mommy!” said Shirley.

We had always said we didn’t want kids. Piled in the back of an ancient minivan in the middle of the night with other plastered classmates, Ash and my ex and I declared ourselves immune from reproduction, irrevocably queer, unbound from the trappings of heterosexual life: the wedding, the starter home, the baby shower. We’d already made a family—here with our gender-deviant friends, careening down vacant freeways back toward campus. Why get the government involved in love? Why wound a new generation with the horrors of our adolescent years? Why extend a hand toward uncertainty when the present was guaranteed and in dire need of attention?

All the same, the radical corners of our lives were sanded down by time. Full-time jobs. Homeownership. Monogamy. And in Ash’s case, children. I couldn’t understand his lifestyle. I couldn’t understand mine either.

A pair of young transmascs in singlets had shown up and were grappling on the mattress, white undershirts riding up to reveal elastic compression garments and newly fuzzy bellies. I stood beside them, unsure of how to interrupt, until the one with short, freshly twisted locs glared over at me, perhaps expecting to find an uninvited voyeur. He glanced at my glow stick, then my face. “We good here?” he asked, as his crew-cut companion attempted to wriggle loose from a half-nelson.

“All good,” I said, introducing myself.

As I turned to leave, the pinned masc called out to me. “When does your shift end?”

“Ten-thirty,” I said.

“Got plans for after?” I didn’t. “Well, if you’re looking to wrestle…”

I said I’d think it over, knowing full well I wouldn’t. After all, I was the dungeon monitor. I’d been assigned a role with responsibilities—I knew what to do with those. It was like all the best parts of being married all over again: folding her clothes, watering her orchids, brewing her coffee.

The DM job grew on me. I gained confidence as each new cluster of players trickled into the dungeon, introducing myself with an increasingly well-rehearsed spiel, preemptively offering up various hygiene amenities. A miniature leather daddy with a red hankie in his left pocket laughed with surprise when I offered to bring over some elbow length nitrile gloves for his scene. “Service bottoms make the best DMs,” he said. His bare-bottomed playmate nodded from behind stirruped heels. I tried not to stare at the bulging flesh inside his chastity cage.

A service bottom. I returned to my folding chair and considered the label’s potential. I’d joined a fetish-oriented social network earlier in the week at Ash’s insistence and had gotten as far as creating a screen name and plugging in my birthdate before running into a problem. A drop-down menu offered a plethora of roles to choose from, most of which I’d never heard of. Everyone knows what a bottom or a top is, but what’s a brat wrangler, hucow, pincushion, or cuckcake? I certainly wasn’t a “painslut.” And while I wasn’t categorically opposed to tickling, I couldn’t imagine centering my entire erotic life on the act by choosing “tickler” as my identity. Tickling. Wrestling. Whipping. Beating. Piercing. All that body on the line. I’d settled on “pervert.” I knew that much was true; my ex had made sure of it. I’d only had to ask once about a spanking fantasy to know exactly where she stood on the matter, her face, repulsed, folding in on itself like a sinkhole.

By ten, every station was occupied, and yelps of pain and delight filled the basement. The sound of leather ricocheting off bare skin, grunts and groans, unfettered laughter, lurid whispers, jingling chains, rattling bars. Shirley Temple accidentally kicked over a water bottle with a loose lid. The rough, low-pile carpet dug into my knees as I pressed paper towel after paper towel into the dark splotch. Joan Crawford thanked me for my help, and I was flooded with warmth and purpose.

At ten-thirty, a bony, corseted man with a braided beard and a red glow stick around his neck tapped my shoulder. I began to recite Marine’s instructions, but he cut me off, grinning through rubber-banded braces. “Oh, I do this every month,” he said. “It’s a great way to scope out potential dommes in action.” He winked, as though he’d let me in on a priceless secret. I glanced over at the wrestlers, who were writhing passionately on each other’s thighs, far off in a fictional gymnasium.

Back upstairs, the suspension bondage demo was underway. A squat, familiar woman in a pinstripe vest and linen slacks coiled lengths of hemp rope around her model’s chest and ribcage, then more around her thighs and calves. Amethyst and a dozen others watched as the rigger shoved a pair of fingers beneath each knot, making sure there was still enough space for blood flow. The rigger’s salt and pepper hair was thinning at the scalp. I finally realized where I recognized her from: not the clinic, but a rope bondage handbook I’d bought freshman year, before I’d moved in with my ex and lost Ash to adulthood. Before my life had snapped into a legible shape.

Marine came and stood beside me, watching as the rigger yanked a heavy chain, hoisting the demo bottom into the air by her torso. “See how she’s using multiple ties to evenly distribute the pressure?” Marine whispered, mouth half-full of cheese. “If she’d put all the model’s weight on just one point—the wrists, let’s say—it could cause serious nerve or joint damage.” The demo bottom swayed back and forth, face glazed over with serenity, flesh stabilized by strong rope. I touched my neck, which felt unexpectedly bare without the glow stick now that my shift had ended. I debated leaving, unable to remember why I’d come in the first place. To get Ash off my case, sure, but why else?

Stale tobacco wafted off Marine’s skin. I was grateful to not be the only transsexual in the building. Ash, meanwhile, was hundreds of miles from the nearest gender clinic. If you’d asked my freshman self what we’d be doing in twenty years, I never would’ve guessed that Ash would be co-parenting a trio of foster kids in the middle of nowhere, that my ex would be in some undisclosed location, and that I’d be here alone, flanked by a club kid and a human cat, watching my former idol string up a sentient piñata. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could end up at a play party. Just that I’d hoped we’d all be here together.

After my divorce, Ash had insisted we set weekly phone dates to “keep in touch.” I think he was afraid I’d stop talking to anyone outside of work. He was right to be concerned—my ex, ever the extrovert, had won custody of all the local friends she’d introduced me to, a sweet but bland clique I’d once considered queer family. Calls with Ash, though nourishing, were brief, and usually disrupted by a hysterical child, a blown-out diaper, an overflowing washer. If there wasn’t an emergency, he’d end the call by asking if I’d clicked on any of the links he’d sent that week. I had, only ever reading enough to invent a reason why I wasn’t going to Queer Soup Night or Trans Networking Happy Hour or FTM CrossFit or Postcolonial Feminist Book Club. I could never be sure if he’d picked the events for me or himself. I kept telling him I wasn’t lonely, that the twins made good company, even if they weren’t much for conversation.

“Besides,” I’d say, “I don’t need more friends. I have you.” I willfully ignored the silence that followed. Begrudging or not, his calls meant everything to me, even if they sounded more and more like life coaching sessions than mutual companionship. I’d hoped that if I agreed to try this party, we could go back to our old conversations about Foucault or decriminalizing weed or god knows what else we blabbered on about in college, before everything had gotten irreparably adult.

I spent the rest of the evening making awkward small talk on the couches, waiting to see if the wrestlers would come back upstairs and ask me to join them. At one o’clock, the industrial music soundtrack turned off and players began packing up their toys and wandering toward the exit. The wrestlers resurfaced and started emptying the trash cans. I asked Marine if I could help.

“You already DM’d, don’t worry about it.”

“I want to,” I said.

The other volunteers and I made quick work of the closing shift, washing platters in the kitchenette, sanitizing all the vinyl surfaces, restocking the supply stations, and vacuuming the carpet. Maybe it was all the self-appointed mommies and daddies, but there was something familial about the whole thing, the tidying of the playroom.

Before long, the space looked as if the party had never happened, save for a few drawstring garbage bags piled by the entry. I bummed a cigarette off Marine. Out front, I borrowed a lighter from a couple of drunk girls and took a few cautious drags to refamiliarize myself with the taste.

The wrestlers emerged in plainclothes, arms linked. They looked older somehow, nearly my age, but probably in their first year of hormones. Patients, no doubt. “I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to play,” one said. “I’m Oli. And this is my boy, Pax.”

“Next month?” Pax suggested.

“Definitely.” A lie.

I wished they hadn’t told me their names, wished I wasn’t going to pull up their charts first thing Monday morning. I wanted to yell at Ash for convincing me to come to this stupid party, and at my ex for relegating me to the underground realm of sex dorks. I hated them both, and I wanted them back. Exhaling into the yellow streetlight above, I longed for another windless night behind the dorms with Ash and my ex, the possibilities branching out before us like curling smoke. I wanted to undo it all. I wanted us to squeeze into my dorm room’s creaky twin bed once more, the future blissfully out of sight.

The cigarette I’d craved was making me nauseous. It crushed easily, enviably, beneath the sole of my boot.

Julian Shendelman lives with his husband and dogs near Philadelphia. After pursuing—and ultimately abandoning—an academic career as a queer/trans theorist, Julian turned his attention to re-establishing his writing practice and community. His poetry chapbook, “Dead Dad Club,” was published by Nomadic Press in 2017 and his creative nonfiction has appeared in Philadelphia Stories and Bat City Review. He’s been a fellow at the Lambda Lit Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ+ Writers (2012) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2022). When he’s not freelancing, he’s running Collective Lit.