Doms and Subs

Jesus fucking Christ, thought Emily Twiggs, though she wasn’t thinking about someone named Jesus fucking someone named Christ so much as she was thinking about how life sucked. Let’s be crystal clear on that point, shall we?

Jesus fucking Christ, thought Emily Twiggs, is every guy here on Fetishfinder.com a “dom?”1 They were, of course: “doms” of all shapes and sizes, mostly oblong shapes and distended or deflated sizes, who were raisin-overripe for the picking. Each promised that he would put Emily Twiggs in her place, which was likely at his corn-encrusted flat feet or waxing his 1989 Geo Tracker or going to Wal-Mart to acquire a digital receiver so that he could finally watch antenna television again.

Emily Twiggs, who like 750 million other red-blooded Americans had just seen Fifty Shades of Grey, was hot for a real Christian Grey-type asskicker, a once-in-a-lifetime ubermensch who deserved to be worshipped and obeyed because he was nigh-on perfect. But instead she found aged shut-ins highlighting their “massive man meat” (4.5 inches semi-hard, but semi-hard was as hard as it got these days) or an ability to tie elaborate restraint knots developed over the course of many grueling years in the Boy Scouts.

The last guy she met had seemed promising. He was a handsome, well-built college professor who taught courses on the history of sex and sexuality. He claimed to have vast experience with threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes, as well as a “firm hand” when it came to spankings and chokings. On top of that, he hadn’t wasted any time, inviting her right back to his studio apartment.

"Just me, the flip & fuck2, and a coffee maker,” he’d texted her. “Gonna be a loooooooooooong night.”

And it was, with just that many o’s. Only the o’s didn’t correspond to orgasms experienced by the parties, but rather to the train of “oooooooooh gods” delivered by the professor, whose last name was Berkman, as he cried himself to sleep.

"Are you okay?" Emily eventually asked him. She didn’t give a shit, of course, but one had to say these things. She wasn’t a psychopath, after all.

Upon hearing this question, he brightened. “Oh, I’m such a pathetic fraud,” he said, launching into the woe-is-me sob story he’d prepared for such an occasion. “I claim to be dominant, because everybody thinks I’m so powerful and great and sexy, but what I want more than anything is to be…” He trailed off.

Emily, noticing he’d fallen silent in an extremely contrived and dramatic manner, again did the polite thing. “Is to be what?”

"I just…I don’t know what you’d say to it. I haven’t ever told anyone about it. I guess what I’d like more than anything else is to experience—"

"You want me to fuck you with a strap-on," she said, heaving a sigh after he nodded his assent. "Damn it, what is with you guys? All of you powerful Christian Grey types, you’re all just pussies and losers. You want me to do the work? Don’t I deserve to be dragged through the mud in the service of something greater? Aren’t you the perfect man who will save me from my mundane life of being dragged through fifty miles of shit by, uh, dragging me through 50 miles of shit?"

"Don’t you go quoting Smiths lyrics3 at me, young lady,” Berkman replied. “I was pretending I liked them back when you were still learning basic anatomy by playing nurse with your guinea pigs. Now we can just stop here and let bygones be bygones or you can go ahead and get the hell gone.”4

Emily, who was half-naked and seated right next to Berkman on his flip & fuck, began hastily assembling the pieces of her wardrobe she’d strewn about the 200 square feet of the apartment during the sultry sixty seconds5 when she had assumed some real hardcore sex was imminent.

"Just like that, huh?" Berkman continued. "Don’t you feel the pain that I feel? Does it always have to be about you, you bitch? I bared my soul to you, and you—you disport with me as cruelly as a schoolboy who pulls the wings off flies!"6

Emily shrugged. “Whatever, man. We just met. All you had to be was not an asshole.”

Berkman, sensing another opening, launched into his second monologue. “All I had to be was not an asshole, huh? It’s just that easy, is it? Maybe it’s easy for you. Emma—”

"Emily," corrected Emily.

"Maybe it’s easy for you, Emme, but it’s not so fashul, fashool…uh, facile for me. I’m all alone here in this rat hole of an apartment with no one to talk to. Can you imagine how much I’ve suffered?"

"No, of course not," said Emily. "We exchanged one e-mail and a couple of texts. Look, I have to go. It’s nearly 7 p.m. and I have a lot to do tomorrow."

"Oh, go ahead and leave me. They all leave. Everyone leaves. Life is about endings, because life itself ends. What else could it be about? There is no success. There is no happiness. There is no…"

She didn’t hear the rest because she was already down the steps and in the lobby. Even the vaunted Doppler shift failed to deliver the remaining words.

"He was a nice enough guy," she had told her friend Camden when the pair met for coffee the next day. "And it wasn’t that he was pretending to be sad; I’m sure he was sad. I just couldn’t bring myself to give a shit."

Camden Camden, whose Botox-enhanced countenance seemed to register a look of permament surprise, looked surprised because, well, Botox. “Oh Em, I never give a shit. Like ever.”

Emily sipped her $7.99 caramel apple nutelliato frappécinita, two-thirds of which was cane sugar and the remainder little more than heartbreak and thin air. “Then what’s the point of online dating, Cammy?”

"I don’t know. You can’t just stay in forever. Sometimes you have to go out. And it’s nice to know you can, even if it’s awful, because then you can come back in and it’s not quite as awful, though it still is. When I was married it was worse: it was like living alone except someone besides you is always angry at or deeply disappointed by what you’ve done wrong, and what you’ve done wrong is everything." Camden’s explanation, much like the rest of her, came as something of a surprise. She was full of surprises, or at least full of a substance that caused her to appear surprised.

"So should I give up trying to find a dom?" Emily asked.

"Dom as in Dominic? I know a Dominic, but he goes by Nicky.7 Total douchebag roidhead guido,” replied an ever-startled Camden.

Emily stirred her drink, which was supposed to be lukewarm. Was it lukewarm? It seemed slightly on the chilly side. Ah whatever. “Dom as in…I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. Maybe Oscar Berkman was the guy for me.”

Camden seemed surprised to hear this. “Maybe he was, Em. But I can assure you that there’s someone out there for everyone. You’ll know it when you see it. Just keep your eyes open. I know I always do, but then again, my lids don’t shut the way they used to before all the treatments.”

"So I’ll find somebody?"

"If true love didn’t exist, why would we always be reading about it in magazines and seeing it in movies and dreaming about it at night? You tell me that, Em. If somebody believes in something, or a lot of somebodies, that something has to be real."

So what I’m trying to say is that I’m super duper double-dog sorry for everything, Emily. You were a hot tomato and here I went and dropped you like a hot potato. If life8 were a life-size game of Simon Says™, I’d have been eliminated after the third or fourth color pattern. Maybe we’ll hang out again one day. I’ll hold your hand and we can sit on an old-timey swing eating homemade fudge and thinking about how good it once was or could have been if I hadn’t been such an asshole and you hadn’t had such a low tolerance for assholes. Perhaps with the passage of time you’ll remember me more kindly than I deserve, and we’ll put everything past us—not that there was anything there in the first place, of course. You’ll wear that dress I like, which is the dress you wore on our first and only date, and I’ll wear my t-shirt that says “GRANDPA: THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND” because I’m ironical and silly like that.

love always,

Oscar Levi Berkman

n. Short for “Dominant.” The dominant person in a BDSM relationship or encounter.
n. One of those chairs that is made of a long rectangular body pillow with some fold points stitched into it. Usually the chair is uncomfortably short to sit on, a bit too narrow for easy sleeping, and has a very wimpy “backrest” that doubles as a neck roll.
She’s actually referencing a Morrissey song. The lyrics in question are: “I’ve had my face dragged in fifteen miles of shit/And I do not, and I do not, and I do not like it/So how can anybody say they know how I feel/When they are they and only I am I.” Hella profound, huh?
There’s absolutely no way for you to know this, but Oscar Berkman, who is really just a stand-in for the actual author of the piece (Oliver Bimmin), was obsessed with the rap group OutKast. The lyrics he’s referencing (and botching) are: “So who you placing the blame on, you keep on singing the same song/Let bygones be bygones, you can go on and get the hell on.”
Awkward adjective but…alliteration!
"As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport." King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1
Not that you’d care, but this is a reference to a story written years earlier by the l8, gr8 Ryan Powell. In it, two Dominics start fighting to the death over the proper diminutive of that Christian name, only to be stopped by a third man also named Dominic who goes by “Minnie.”
Actual life, as in life itself (referenced earlier by Berkman; were you paying attention?), and not the board game Life™. But can you imagine crossing Life™ with Simon Says™? I bet that would be akin to crossing the same stream twice, pace Heraclitus, or just crossing the streams period, pace Ghostbusters.

—Oliver Lee