TW: Violent assault, violence against sex workers, PTSD, psychedelic drug use, familial abuse, familial estrangement
There are moments that trap you, despite your body moving onward you’re there. Stuck. I recently left New York City after nearly five years (two weeks off, round up) of living in the concrete and steel city. The sheer amount of experiences that occurred in my time in New York City are hard to grasp all at once, as all memory is. Every face, every momentary mishap, every street corner that reeks of past havoc. I am so grateful for New York for allowing me space to transform into myself, even if it often paralleled a slaughterhouse-wonderland. Becoming through your own self destruction and rebuild, time and time again, that is the beauty of New York City. I am tired of the self destruct, I am ready for the eternal build. Even so there is much to be grateful for and what might be the theme here is the bittersweet, so this thanks is to the Devil in Black.
The Devil in Black is an easy thing to call a horrific catalyst yet a fundamental one all the same. The devil is incredibly loaded, as is sin. I wouldn’t use it half-heartedly, coming from the Bible Belt, I do have some level of base respect for not interacting with religious symbolism too lightly. That being said, I do love sacrilege. This isn’t a sexy story even though it started in a sex dungeon. I was young and didn’t know what a lot of money was but I knew cold hard cash. To this day, I would love to be paid in cash. I prefer large piles over digits. He isn’t symbolic but literal, this Devil. It isn’t that in my life there haven’t been a handful of villains, even though all villains typically have some sort of explanatory backstory, but more that only one particularly haunts me. Only one finds me at night, especially as December speeds through the cold, frozen reality.
I write this in Los Angeles, it’s in the sixties, and if I walk down the street the Devil in Black would be nowhere to be found. He isn’t even a spot on the map yet even here in the delicate air I remember that it was in December that I met him. At that time, I was working as a dominatrix and due to the circumstances of where I worked, I didn’t have a lot of control over clients. The screening was subpar at best, based on the reputation of repeated customers; however, I later found that the establishment had no black-list. A black-list very obviously being an explanation of who is safe to session with. The Devil had sessioned with some before but never me.
He beat me over 150 times as I screamed, yelled, and found myself alone and helpless. I found myself witnessing my life as I went inward, reckoning with my childhood, my tumultuous college years (this happened within a year of me graduating), and more importantly, barely feeling anything at all. I didn’t know what to do after it happened, most of it was on my ass (I was unable to move), and the Devil’s precum touched my leg as he forcibly hugged me. He told me “You clearly have a lot of trauma, let’s meet outside of here.” and gave me his number.
With this number I discovered a lot about him. I discovered he was associated with a mob in the area. He had been arrested a few years previously for kidnapping and torturing a man. Nearly a year later a friend of mine from the dungeon spotted him at a bar in midtown. He seemed healthy, a fresh haircut, and was smiling. I was on the train when I received the picture, adjacent to the graveyard. I stared out the window and thought about what the year had been for me. After the Devil in Black beat me, I developed claustrophobia. I had to take the train back after it happened in the peopled rush hour traffic where every body that barely brushed mine led me to flinch. I was lucky to run into a friendly editor I had met at a few parties over the year, who took the train into Brooklyn with me. Afterwards though, my body would be paralyzed at the thought of entering a crowded Manhattan restaurant. Even before the pandemic, I found myself struggling to feel comfortable in place. I didn’t want to be anywhere I couldn’t escape.
I left the sex dungeon six months or so after the beating. I couldn’t afford to leave initially, and on the way out I ended up selling nudes off of my regular twitter to make my rent. I never ran into the Devil in Black but the Devil ran into me, and continues to. Having the Devil’s phone number allowed access for obsession, fascination, and even fantasy. The beating jarred me so much, I reckoned with being abused by my own father and cut him out a few months later. The beating led to me realizing how little I protected myself from harm, as well as how little I had the capacity to. It’s okay to admit there were periods of your life where you didn’t know how to protect yourself, care for yourself, that you didn’t know how to assert your own boundaries, and that there are some circumstances where it doesn’t matter how much you assert your boundaries. I was screaming as the Devil beat me but he had convinced himself beating me was what was best for me.
I had to take a large amount of shrooms to induce sobbing after it happened because I couldn’t. The Devil had told me it was so sexy when I cried because it wasn’t just my physical pain he got off to, it was the whole show. I had to own my own pain, and I have spent nearly four years learning how to own my own pain. I have spent twenty-seven years (I had a birthday between this post and my last) trying to show myself and everyone that I know what is best for me but ultimately I had to believe it. Now I know what is best for me but it took the Devil beating me to see the full picture. I didn’t understand how rooted the trauma was at the moment of the beating but the inevitable impact of having something to heal from set me in the direction I am now in. I am grateful in many ways to the Devil, as much as the obsession over wanting to have a wide and brutal revenge has ate me alive.
I had experienced violence before but the beating felt different. It was so early in my time in New York City, it forced me to reckon with how I deeply understood myself. I didn’t believe I deserved safety nor had I really expected it in life. In retrospect, I didn’t expect much out of life except to find a way out if I ever found myself in something that had gone too far. I left home at eighteen. I arrived in New York City a fresh child of the world in my early twenties and I left New York City this week in the beginning of my late twenties. I can tell now that I want to care for myself, that I see myself as something worth caring for. I can see now that the wave of grief after the beating had a lot more to do with losing my understanding of myself that was precious and dear to me: that I was undaunted by the realities of my own life.
There are certain periods of life that you operate on the perception that all is normal and okay alone, until suddenly your perception is shattered. It took years since leaving home to really reckon with the fact my childhood wasn’t ideal and the Devil beating me forced that because how was I there in the first place? The Devil forced me to face the fact that I had to take care of myself, and even more that I had no clue how to. Even worse suddenly I was wrecked with anger, an emotion that had been entirely wrecked within me and dulled to a stub.
Suddenly all that would find me in my solitude were thoughts of the beating, as if when I stopped thinking of it, it would be a denial. As if to think of anything else is just denial from the horrific reality that wore on me, and still does. I suppose that’s why I am writing this, to say it happened, and to update the Devil in Black wherever he is that because of him I taught myself how to write a screenplay, and because of him I live in Los Angeles, and because of him I am more suspicious, and because of him I am more inward, and because of him I understand why one can get trapped forever in a moment. I nearly did.
It is in the pandemic when I taught myself to write screenplays because it occurred to me that the same man I was googling was the same one who was a mobster. It occurred to me that I could never have a revenge without seriously putting myself in jeopardy, so suddenly with not much left to fantasize about except fantasy itself, I turned to script writing. I wrote two whole hour long pilots by myself, and then began developing a third show in collaboration with my new writing partner Ben Collins. I don’t think I would have considered screenwriting if I wasn’t forced to reckon with the fact reality wasn’t enough for all the stories I want to tell. Poetry wasn’t enough, just fermenting in the same bile of emotions. Therapy wasn’t enough but with scripts it’s active. I can make any world, any thing happen, and I feel the same in regards to fiction (even though my current fiction project is more auto-fiction, not much escape there). The Devil in Black has to exist out there and so all I can do is own what happened to me. All I can do is teach myself new skills that allow me to survive, to reckon with my own realities that don’t fit picture perfect into a life story.
I guess that’s why maybe I sometimes want to talk only about the Devil, and other times I assume it is known to everyone. I assume everyone knows because it was so fundamental to me. I started noticing myself in a full way after this experience and it was horrific, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. At the same time, as I am nearing the four year anniversary of the beating I can say that my life is different but I am not harmed entirely. I was able to survive, to leave the sex dungeon, and eventually I even was an editor (never something I expected for myself), I have a book of poetry, and now I am going to try and live other dreams. Dreams that formed and grew from this experience.
Being beaten taught me no one would heal me but myself, that no one would get me out of this but myself and yet learning to love and accept care, help, and support when offered has been equally healing. Finding the balance, and I think the Devil forced me to understand that in my younger years I didn’t know how to have it all be integrated. I didn’t know how to hold my own life because I refused to even look at it. So to the Devil, I thank you for beating me. I thank you for throwing a giant atomic bomb in my life. For shattering me. For destroying what was left of that perception. I know better now and I will never be you, I will never stoop so low but maybe someday you can see your own demise on a television set. Maybe you can see it in a theater. Maybe you’ll just see it in your dreams.
xoxo
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