It’s last Tuesday, I’m sitting in my office, and the scene outside my window is dazzling white. I’m working on the computer, being happy that I don’t have to leave my house today, when the phone rings…

Ring ring!

I weigh the wisdom of answering it at all, but it might be someone I actually want to talk to, so…

Me: Hello?
Caller: Mistress Matisse?
Me: Yes, this is she.
Caller: Yeah, how soon could you be at the Westin?

Now, that’s a question with many different answers. If I could tell Scotty to beam me there, I could arrive instantly. If I had wings and could fly, I bet I could be there in ten minutes. If my mother was there on her deathbed, I would get there very quickly even if I had to steal the neighbor’s Jeep.
But as it is, the answer for this caller is: never. Never, ever, in this lifetime, as far as you’re concerned, pal.

(Long-term readers and real-life clients will know already how outrageously rude I find it when strangers start out by just assuming I’m going to grace them with my presence merely because they wish it, and that the only point to be negotiated is when and where. Ha. There are qualifications to meeting me that go beyond the possession of a phone and a copy of The Stranger’s back pages. Mainly: I have to think I’d like you. I don’t think I’d like this man.)

And I’m not really interested in discussing this at length.

Me: No.
Caller: What?
Me: I said no.
Caller: Well, when could you be here?

Excuse me, are we having the same conversation?

Me: (very slowly) No. I am not coming to the Westin.

There’s a long pause, like he’s waiting for me to explain myself further. I don’t. With this caller’s apparent lack of listening skills, I think less is definitely more.

Caller: So you can’t come down here?

I don’t believe I used the word “can’t”. That word subtly implies a sense of constraint, and I feel perfectly at ease about not going to Westin to meet this caller. But let’s not quibble.

Me: That’s correct.

Click. He hangs up.

I go back to my work. I need to get a separate line for my good boys…

The Mistress is a busy girl today.... so entertain yourself with the new column.

Prompted by a reader comment yesterday, here is a snippet from a type of email I get occasionally…

Why don’t you write about what you really think about your work/clients?…Your fears and dark moods? You’re always so artificially upbeat and perky, you’re not a spooky mistress, you’re like a cheerleader!

Spooky? I think this particular person has confused BDSM with Goth. No, I am not spooky. I am kinky.

And I am always mildly surprised when random people tell me that I should be writing this blog to suit their specifications. (Especially when you consider that hey folks, you ain’t paying me for this. If you want to hire me to write something, you just speak right up and we’ll talk about that.)

I don’t write about my sex-worker angst because I don’t have any. Bear in mind, I’ve been in the industry since I was nineteen. I’ve worked through a lot of the beginner issues and I’m in a really good place with my career now. Sure, I get stressed and cranky sometimes. That power outage last month? I had to cancel appointments, I lost money, and I was so cranky about that. I was the newly-elected Mayor Of Crankyville during those few days. Believe me.

But huge, sweeping bouts of work-related emotional trauma that encompass my whole being? Nah. Doesn’t happen. I’m a boringly even-keeled kinda girl. I hear that I’m messing with your ideas of what a sex worker thinks and feels, but – deal.

And – as I say this for perhaps the ten thousandth time – questions like this presuppose that I have an adversarial relationship with my clients. That's way off base. I’ve met a few genuine assholes in the course of my career – although not as many as you’d think. Most guys I’ve met had good intentions. Sometimes they just need to be schooled a bit in the fine points.

Far more than assholes, I’ve met guys who didn’t mean any harm, exactly, but who had a lot of intense issues about their own sexuality. I can help with that in some cases, but some guys bring so much negative energy to the session that I simply can’t deal with them. It’s too bad, but the amount of work it takes to stay centered and keep good boundaries with someone like that – it’s exhausting. I’d rather spend the time with someone with whom I can relax.

So I’ve phased out all the guys that I didn’t like playing with, and I’ve learned how to pick new clients that I will like. And I have worked my way to a place where I do get to pick and choose. I hardly see anyone new anymore, it’s almost all guys I know. They treat me extremely well, and I try to treat them just as well in return. To include: protecting their privacy. I take that very seriously.

True, some guys tell me, “You can write about me, I’m okay with that.” But there are still problems with that, as I talked about here. I don’t want my guys to feel jealous and competitive, so I don’t write much about clients at all.

Sex work is not something I do in order to have something interesting to write about. This is my career. I have a lot of clients say to me, “Please don’t quit or move anywhere, don’t retire.” I find that very sweet – and I’m not going anywhere. This is what I do, I like it, and I’ll be doing it until I’m quite old and the phone doesn’t ring anymore. And after that happens, then I will write a book all about how I did it, and there will be some stories there that I haven’t told before.

But that’s a long way away. And you’ll have to buy the book!

Writing a column, and downloading from iTunes…

Ship of Fools, World Party. Loved this song when it came out in the eighties, and I used it have it on vinyl. I was delighted to find it on iTunes.

Tall Cool One, Robert Plant.

Little by Little, Robert Plant. Love the lyric hooks with the Zepplin-y riffs.

Who Do You Want To Be, Oingo Boing. I remember dancing to this one the first time I ever snuck into a bar underage. It's another oldie-goldie I had on vinyl. I say I had it, although actually, I think there’s still a dusty crate of old albums sitting in the back of a closet somewhere. And I still have a turntable, too - although I’m not sure I have a needle.

The Rockafella Skank, Fatboy Slim.

Cherry Bomb, The Runaways.

Brother of The Mayor of Bridegwater, The World/Inferno Friendship Society. I don’t know why I like this song. It’s just…strangely catchy.

Let Love In, Goo Goo Dolls.

She’s Crafty, Beastie Boys. Because I am. (Even though the Beastie Boys don’t seem to mean that in an entirely complimentary way here, heh.) This song was on the jukebox at The Lusty Lady when I danced there, so I have shaken my naked behind to it a lot.

Sex And Candy, Marcy Playground.

Red Right Hand, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. I have a fantasy about having sex with Nick Cave while he sings in my ear the whole time. And there’s another version of the fantasy where I do a threesome with him and Tom Waits. And they both sing. (Tom would sing something from Bone Machine, of course.) I think we'd all have to drink whisky and smoke cigarettes for it to really work, though.

Okay, back to work…

I had an amazingly nice weekend. I love my whirlwind social life, but it’s very nice to get to spend relaxed time alone with Monk. Sunday I slept late  – yay – and then Monk and I went to Banya 5. This is so the weather for hot tubs and steam rooms. I swear I could feel all the molecules in my body, which had sort of shrunk down lately with dry cold, get all warm and lubricated and say, “Ahhh….”

And I booked both of us a salt scrub. Now, a salt scrub, if you haven’t had one, is one of life’s great pleasure/pain experiences. It is just what it sounds like: they put you on something like a massage table, take handfuls of coarse sea salt, and scrub your body with it. It exfoliates all the dead skin off you. My general experience with spa scrubs is that the first so-many strokes feel good, and then it starts to be a little intense, and then right before you’re about to say, “Whoa, ease up a little,” the scrubber moves to a different part of your body. Sort of like being taken right up to your safeword, over and over.

At most spas it’s done like this: you lay under a drape, they scrub one small area at a time, wipe all the salt off, and then cover it up again. Very chaste and discreet.

This one was different because of the setup: the whole room is a wet room, all tile and concrete, with a drain in the floor, and lots of hoses and buckets around. The girl giving me the scrub offered me the option of drape or no drape, and I chose none, of course. I took off my swimsuit and lay down naked on the black vinyl-covered table. (It looks a lot like the table I have in my dungeon, actually.)

She tied on a black rubber apron and started off by pouring buckets of warm water all over me. Big buckets. It’s interesting to lie on a table and get totally drenched like that, and just see and hear the water going everywhere.

Then she rubbed me down with some honey-something-or-other mixture, just kinda slopping it anywhere in a charming fashion, and then poured more water over me to rinse me. And then she scrubbed me - very thoroughly. I think I’m now an eighth of an inch smaller in circumference, she scrubbed me so hard. Yow. But my skin is all soft and gleam-y, like a pearl.

So while there was nothing whatsoever sexual about this treatment, I did look around the room – and around the whole spa in general – and think about what kind of wet room I’d like to build into my house. I don’t do scat scenes, so I don’t need such a room for that. But I do other wet, messy things, and plus, tiles and hoses can just be very sexy all by themselves. I want to do some remodeling on the house this year, and while I don’t know for sure if a big bathroom redesign is in the cards, it’s definitely something I want to get some bids on. I’m a big fan of warm and lubricated.