All my girlfriends on the apps say that if they see one more guy with poly in their profile, they’re going to kill themselves. But I’m not really ready to die yet so I figure, why not. I meet David, a polyamorous product manager, in a sex dungeon off Mission Street. This is our third date and aside from the sex dungeon and polyamory and the fact that he wears an Oura ring on his middle finger, David is a normal guy. I think that the older I get, the less I should have opinions about things like men’s jewelry and hair. David is recently bald, but his beard is luscious. Golden with slight hints of amber. He uses beard oil and a specific comb on a daily basis which I find attractive. I like how much care he takes of the hair he has left.
I arrive before him. A woman with two gray streaks framing her face welcomes me and walks me down into a basement. Red lights line the stairs and the smell is a mixture of water-based lube and incense. David bought our $100 tickets due to the unspoken recognition that he makes more than me, and that makes me think about how expensive polyamory is. The gray haired woman, who I think is named Felix, leads me through the dungeon first before we get to the playroom. The dungeon is a room but also a hallway; it feels long. There are several stations on either side. One with different sized whips and another with a swing hanging from the ceiling. A woman is in the swing and her legs are spread but she still has her underwear on and I want to ask her if she’s comfortable, or if this position reminds her of being at the gynecologist’s office. I make a joke and tell Felix that walking through the dungeon is like riding Expedition Everest at Disney where you wait in line for the ride and there’s all these posters about the giant Yeti monster lurking in the forest. She turns around and says what? because she can’t hear me over the instrumental house music, and I don’t repeat myself, I just say that the lighting is great in here. The last station I see is a giant cage on the ground with a naked man inside of it. He is smiling on all fours. Then he just sits cross-legged and closes his eyes and I wonder if this is the first time all day where he has felt a sense of calm. He is terrifyingly calm.
At the end of the hallway is another room: the playroom. It’s not as narrow, less rectangular shaped, maybe can fit twenty people comfortably. The playroom is a place to socialize, Felix says, and she leads me towards a table of snacks–pretzels and tortilla chips—no salsa—and a basket of candy. I ask why there are snacks. Felix looks at me in the eyes and says sex makes you hungry, then winks and leaves. I pick up a Twizzler so I can do something with my hands. There’s no alcohol at this party, David had told me before, which I thought I could handle, but I’ve never been in a social situation before where there is both food and exposed genitalia in the span of six feet. I’m not mad about it, I’ve watched BDSM porn like everyone else, had sex with a guy once who was into cock cages which I didn’t like, but his parents owned a house in wine country with a hot tub and I was young and poorer then than I am now. David arrives finally and kisses me on the mouth. His beard smells clean. He has brought a duffle bag for what he says is his second outfit.
You didn’t tell me about another outfit.
He asks me if I read the dress code on the invite? The second email I forwarded you after the consent form? He tells me that it called for sensual or sexy lingerie for later. He shrugs and says, worst case you can just wear your underwear if that feels right to you.
I think about what underwear I’m wearing. Is it the full bottom boy shorts from Amazon that make me itch or the thong that rides up my asshole and not in a good way?
About fifteen clothed people start to gather in the playroom. There are more older people than I anticipated and that brings me a little joy, knowing that they are still into doing weird things and potentially having weird fucks. David told me beforehand that the sex dungeons are less crowd controlled than other play parties. The majority are men, but I see some women–some who look to be together, some single. Felix comes back. She stands in the center of the room and tells us that they’re going to lead us through some warmup exercises, very PG13 she says, and winks again.
This woman’s so good at winking I whisper to David, like I’ve been here a million times.
The first exercise is to walk around the room and make eye contact with strangers. We walk. Next is to brush ears against each other. When I brush against David’s, our cartilage piercings clink. I think about whether this is considered playing and whether I’m having fun. I’m not not having fun. Felix tells us to find a person in the room that you simply can’t say no to, then she follows the prompt up with some guidance–if a person tells you they would not like to engage with you, please thank them for taking care of themselves. David has gone up to a woman in a spaghetti strapped shirt with shiny hair. I roam around in the circle. A shorter man approaches me and I could probably say no to him, but since he’s approaching, he can’t say no to me and my mom always said that it’s safer to be with someone who loves you more than you love them. Felix tells us to start mirroring each other. The stranger’s name is Chet and if I wanted to work harder, I’m sure I could find something interesting about him–an endearing mole on his left cheek or cute, webbed toes. He puts up his hands and I put up mine, an inch away from his, and we shift left and right. A couple of sex dungeon mimes. I laugh to myself and he asks what’s so funny and I say nothing. I look over to David and think about how we got to this point where we want to mirror strangers in dungeons.
Felix tells us to touch our partners but only where they say green light. I touch Chet on his shoulders and then his knees, his fingernail. Find the yellow light spots, she says. He touches my elbow, my calf. Now red light. I have no red light spots, Chet says and I want to roll my eyes but it’s so dark in here that I’d doubt he’d even notice. He touches my face, I say red. Goes for the upper ribs, red. Places his palm on my chest and I hesitate for a minute, wanting to say red but feeling green. His palm is so warm. I say red.
Find a group of four, Felix says, and I’m pining to get back to a familiar face so Chet and I find David and shiny hair, whose name is Carolina. She not only has shiny hair but huge, almost translucent blue eyes, her lids covered in flakes of gold. Felix tells us to share our deepest fantasies and see if the group can help make it come true. Carolina says that she’d really love a massage train, and we all nod, very encouraging. David says that he fantasizes about a four-way makeout and we all start laughing.
What are you, thirteen? says Carolina and I’m jealous that she already feels comfortable enough to tease him.
I try to remember what David said about jealousy before, that it’s an emotion, and that emotions are neither good nor bad, like drugs, but rather “reflect internal feedback of primal drives.” Do I want to own David? Or do I want to be Carolina? Chet and I say massage train too, so we all sit on the ground and rub each other’s shoulders. David is in front of Carolina, I’m behind her and Chet is behind me. I think I like seeing someone else’s hands on David and I wonder if this is the primal drive he was talking about. The feeling of something you like not belonging to you. I run my hand through Carolina’s hair and I let Chet touch my lower back. It’s easier if I can’t see his face. His hands are strong and I can pretend he looks like someone else. Carolina leans forward and starts kissing David’s neck and I hope Chet doesn’t think he can model that behavior. David reaches behind, longest arm ever, and finds my knee, starts rubbing it with his soft computer hands. Carolina lightly scratches his arm using her nails. Felix lowers her voice half an octave and starts touching her own body, hands in her hair, lifting the strands from her scalp. She starts to ask the room rhetorical questions:
How can we love all parts of ourselves and align our hearts, bodies and souls?
How can you transform patterns such as unworthiness, jealousy and judgment and awaken as a co-creator in our reality?
How can you love more freely?
David has started to lean back into Carolina which forces her to lean back onto me which forces me to lean back onto Chet’s stomach. His belly button at the back of my head. Sex dungeon dominoes. Felix tells us that this is the point in the night where people can start changing clothes. Chet exchanges his brown crew neck t-shirt for a long sleeve fishnet shirt. His chest hair pokes through the fabric’s tiny diamonds. He is more interesting in the fishnet. Carolina strips down to a leather leotard and pulls out a riding crop from a bag with a logo of what I assume is the tech company she works for. I ask her if she’s ever run into anyone from work at these things. She says, no, no one really knows who I am.
David changes into mesh boxer shorts that are much shorter and tighter than the ones he usually wears. His dick is pressed up against the fabric like a serpent trapped in a mason jar. I look around and see that everyone is wearing tight-fitting clothes–black lace skirts that sweep the floor, leather straps across nipples and down the sides of the body that look like gun holsters. I remove my clothing too and notice how held my body is by material. How much more attuned I am to wires underneath breasts and elastic around waists.
We are now going to play in the dungeon, Felix says, it’s an open floor. If you’ve brought your own lube or massage oil, great, if not, they say, we’ve provided some at each station. We also have other helpful things like feathers, blindfolds, massagers and shibari ropes.
She didn’t hesitate throughout that short monologue which makes me think she has committed it to memory, the same way David was forced to memorize the Namaste closing in his yoga teacher training which he recited to me on our first date: I honor the place in you where the entire universe dwells. Where, when I am in that place in me, and you are in that place in you, we are one.
Someone has brought a yoga mat into the dungeon. When we are walking into the dungeon, an older man lays the thick mat down and starts squirting massage oil onto it, using his hand to spread it around. He leads his partner, a woman, also older, onto the mat and she slips a little trying to lie down but he grabs her and helps her and they are laughing the whole time. I want to cry. Is that love? Chet leans over and says, it would be crazy if they died having sex in a dungeon but would also be kind of a sick way to go.
We stay in our foursome and stop at the whipping station. There are two women there who appear to be together, each holding different kinds of whips. One has lots of tassels at the end, the other similar to the riding crop Carolina has. Carolina starts talking to the woman holding the riding crop and they compare purchases, whether the crops really “deliver.” The old man and old woman are now having missionary-style sex on the yoga mat and the old man is holding the old woman’s silver hair in a bun at the top of her head so the lube doesn’t grease it up too much. The other woman, named Larkin, stands behind me and teaches me how to hold the tasseled whip, lightly but with confidence. With force. She tells me to practice on my forearm. I run my fingers through the red tassels and let them drip over my palm. For some reason, I bring the tassels up to my nose and smell then bite the leather. I whip once and watch my skin redden. I do it again. Larkin asks me how it feels and I say great, that my skin has come alive.
I am playing, I think. David asks to try and he and Chet take turns whipping their thighs, arms. Carolina asks me to whip her with her rod and as she hands it to me, she says, doesn’t it feel like you’re a child again? It’s like when you found a creek in your backyard and it was so magical and now you are finding that creek within yourself, you know? It’s a different kind of aliveness, yet the same kind of aliveness? Do you know what I mean?
I grew up in a city, far away from creeks, but I sense the aliveness she’s talking about. I am attracted to that. My hand gripping an instrument it has never held before. The way we behave in the marginalia of society, underneath the earth, inflicting love, falling into pain. The rod is less exciting than the tassels but Carolina likes it. I lightly whip her right butt cheek. Even though her thighs are muscular and her face very symmetrical, I feel no sexual attraction towards her. I’m not even sure if I feel an attraction to David anymore.
After David whips Chet and Chet whips David and I whip Carolina, Larkin tells us great job taking care of each other, and sends us on our way deeper into the dungeon. No one has noticed that I haven’t been whipped and I don’t bring it up. David comes over to me, holds both of my hands and asks if it’s okay that he gets tied to Carolina at the rope station.
Just limbs, he says, her thigh to my arm or something.
I ask him if I can watch. The person tying them is an ex boy scout and jokingly holds up three fingers and keeps saying Scout’s honor: Scout’s honor I know what I’m doing! Scout’s honor you’ll be tied here forever! Scout’s honor I’m kidding! David looks so happy tied to someone that isn’t me and it’s hard not to be happy for him. Maybe everyone holds paradoxes within themselves. A person who never wants to be tied down emotionally requires being tied down physically. Maybe mine is that I hate being alone but that I may be the only person I can love.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the cage from earlier. It’s the size of a large dog kennel, not long enough to lie down in but close. The naked man is no longer inside–he could be in the bathroom or eating dry tortilla chips from the snack bar or maybe he left after his meditation session. A different body has replaced him. The old woman who was having sex on the yoga mat is now inside the cage, the old man locking her in from the outside. She has put on a sheer bra and underwear and her skin is tight in some places like her chest and lower back and loose in the others like her stomach and thighs. She is on her knees and I don’t realize how long I’m staring at the soles of her feet until I glance up and see her hand beckoning me to come closer. I walk over and crouch down. The view of her face is cut up into squares by the grates. Her eye in one hole, the left corner of her lips in another.
You look like you might want to come in here, she says.
I’ve never been inside of a cage, I say.
I hear a voice from behind me, it’s the man. He says, a cage serves the purpose created by its users. I turn to him and he crouches down and wraps his fingers around the woman’s fingers through the grates. They smile.
I saw you guys earlier, I say, very cute, how long have you been together? I think about her lube bun, slipping earlier, being caught by him.
Us? the woman says, oh, no, we met tonight. She smiles at the man.
Tonight? Like this night? I repeat because I swear I didn’t hear it right.
Yes, tonight! So the thing about cage play, she goes on, is exactly as he says. She looks at the man, I’m so sorry, she says, remind me of your name again?
Randy.
Yes, Randy! Randy said it perfectly–cage play is what you make of it. It can be an extremely intimate place if you allow it to be. Intimate on the inside and the outside. Would you like to come inside? she asks.
There is a harsh light above the cage, harsher than any of the other lights in the dungeon. As I climb in, I need to hinge my body forward almost ninety degrees. The light is so bright I can see the scalp underneath the woman’s wispy silver hair. There is no padding in the cage and I wince when my knees touch the metal bottom, so I sit on my butt. Randy asks if I’m okay and when I nod, he closes and latches the door, holds onto the key. The woman, who tells me her name is Clara, asks if she can place her palms on my thighs. I say yes. My heart rate has begun to pick up and I don’t know why. I think it’s because I’m relying on someone to get out of here or that I have no choice but to be in here. I am choiceless. Like dying, maybe. Freedom is dying. I place my sweaty hands on top of Clara’s, which are soft and sun spot speckled.
What are you feeling? Clara asks.
Like only a quarter of my lungs are working and that my neck is breathing, I say. I dart my eyes to the lock.
Look at me, Clara says, stay here.
I stay. I breathe. I breathe. I close my eyes. Clara has moved her palm up to my chest and I think about Chet, how I still feel green there. I understand what she meant by intimate on the inside. I see warm hues, oranges and reds underneath my eyelids, the circular shape of my pupil imprinted on the skin as I tilt my head up to face the light. Clara grabs my face, takes her thumbs and presses them above my eyebrows and the pressure feels too good. It has relieved a tension I didn’t even know I was holding in my face. I open my eyes and catch my reflection in her gray iris. It seems I am seeing everything more clearly. The details of a whole world are being opened to me. An entire universe dwelling. She seems so at home in her body, and I want to be at home too. Suddenly, her fingers stop touching my brow bones and I start hearing voices over the music, but I can’t see any faces clearly because of the light beam, but I gather from the franticness that Randy is on the ground outside of the cage. He has fainted. Someone yells to turn off the music and to give him space and Clara and I are yelling from the cage, asking if he’s okay, but no one realizes that we are there. No one notices that we have no choice but to look out onto the room, the world, from inside our locked cage. Helpless but present. Clara tells me that there’s nothing we can do but wait for him to come to. Two lives reliant on one stranger. My eyes adjust slightly and I can tell people are shaking him and using their hands to fan his face. Someone that sounds like David says that he’s blinking and then asks if anyone has a lollipop handy because his blood sugar may be low. A blow-pop makes its way to him on the ground and I can hear Randy apologizing, saying he should have eaten some of the snacks at the start. Everyone laughs. The people sit him up slowly, and then bring him up to his feet even more slowly, walk him over to a bench back where the snack bar is. Everyone follows behind, making sure Randy stays alive. David passes right by the cage. The voices become farther and farther, fainter and fainter. Clara and I sit back down. Neither of us speaks because if we did, it would be into the void.
We stay still, still haloed by light, and we wait.