Free The Other Side of Desire by Daniel Bergner Page B

tied to a pair of freestanding poles, which were held upright, one by her husband and the other by the car salesman. They leaned the poles backward slightly; if they let go she would crash to the floor, her skull cracking against the cement. A woman who’d just arrived in a diaphanous skirt put her mouth to the administrator’s crotch. The administrator floated on air and trust as the woman began to lick.
    Released by Master R, the transsexual told me that as a man she’d been a neo-Nazi skinhead with a wife, a five-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son, and a job as a computer specialist at a law firm. Her kids still called her Dadda, though she had injected spectacular doses of estrogen into her body, dropped from two hundred and fifteen to one hundred pounds, and had only the shrunken vestige of male genitalia, which would soon be surgically removed. “They’ll always call me Dadda or Dad,” she said. She wore a slender silver ring on each hand, one for each child. “They’ll never come off.”
    As a male she’d been walking alone on a beach one afternoon, flooded with anti-depressants but sobbing and saying aloud, “God help me.” She’d known for years she simply wasn’t meant to be what she was. “That guy died that afternoon. When I was a neo-Nazi, I didn’t hate people, I hated myself.” She paused, contemplative, tranquil after the violence that had just enveloped her. “The beating here pulls out my inner female; it goes so deep; I want to receive. It’s like heroin. It takes me from a high head space, down through all the levels, down to someplace at my core. Everything gets brighter. Everything gets amplified. This is where I learn the whole. I stay with Master R for the weekends. Leaving is agony. The other world is agony. I have a hard time coming down. I’m jonesing. The law firm was good enough to keep me on after the sex change, but this is where I belong. It’s two different worlds, this and the vanilla. This one is totally alive. That one is dead.”
    Master R handed me his unpublished autobiography, and I went upstairs where there was enough light to read. Much was about the obliteration of boundaries, the annihilation of identity, the finding of a new, undelineated being through the giving and receiving of pain: “I slipped the ropes around her waist, pulled them tight, took the working end and ran it between her legs. I could almost see her lips engorge as the rope cut deeply into her labia. I felt my own cock swell in communication with her lust. Slipping my hand down I felt the wetness. My own pussy sighed in joyous communication and her cock hardened in my hand. I felt my nipples turn to hard little berries as the cock in my hand became rigid.” And as twine stitched through her labia was pulled taut: “I rubbed my wetness against him and moaned in return, as I stroked my cock and rubbed my clit. We were both lost in the intensity of our metamorphosis.”
    No one had an easy time leaving at the end of their stays, he claimed. He talked of a young corporate lawyer’s adjustment each time he walked out the bungalow’s peeling front door and drove back to his life in Manhattan. “How can you go out into the world afterward? People are trembling physically.”
    The Baroness was not trembling. But she recalled the day with Elvis. They’d agreed that she would roast him, and she’d called Master R for assistance. One of his slaves, a welder, built a massive spit: huge bases supporting a metal pole that was about ten feet long, a wheel at one end and spoke handles at the other. It joined a vegetable garden behind the bungalow. Maple and birch trees rose around it, leaves in brilliant color on that bright autumn afternoon. Slaves spread coals onto the bed. Elvis, naked except for a leather jock, was led from the house blindfolded, strapped to the pole, basted with honey and ginger. The coals glowed; the spit was a foot or so above them.
    Skin turned red, on the verge of