We only stay awhile, just long enough to realize that the people being pleased at the moment are white men who really should have the good sense to remain fully clothed in public. One being teased with hot irons has so much hair on his body, it’s amazing that he doesn’t go up like an old Christmas tree and the gentleman being flogged rolls like a bowl full of jelly with each lash.

The next room is a recreation room decorated like a Fifties diner. I step to the counter and order beers for my co-worker and I and am told that the club doesn’t serve alcohol. I get a couple of Cokes instead. The woman behind the counter once again is really a brown man, only his features are quite small so he actually makes an attractive woman. He wears a poodle skirt and a cheerleader sweater. After giving me my change, he goes back over to the young brown boy sitting on one of the stools and kisses him.

This room has a small dance floor with a silver pole extending from its floor into the ceiling and two pool tables. My co-worker and I sit near the dance floor sipping our Cokes, waiting for the two Loner girls we picked out in line to find us and say hello. Eventually we get tired of waiting and having all the gay guys looking us, over so we decide to see what else there is to see.

The last room on this floor is a hall of mirrors and we walk through it and only encounter paired white couples and the occasional Loner. No sign of either of our chickies. We venture to the basement.

It is a dungeon. There are a lot of people crowded around the folks taking their licks. The oddest looking fellow is a white man, who is naked except for a leather hood with zippers for his eyes and mouth, strapped by the ankles and wrists to a leather footstool. He has his lips zipped, but not his eyes. I can see him looking around at his audience.

For some reason, he reminds me of a gopher or prairie dog sitting up alert and looking out the hole of his soul with an intense mental alertness that is so vivid to me, it seems almost to have color, a kind of orange.

An average shaped young white woman with long black hair and tall black boots, a leather bodice, and black paper mask that covers just her cheekbones and forehead, drags the fringe of a short leather whip gently across his back and thighs. I guess the torture is in the not receiving of punishment. The tease of torture.

Another masked white man, who shouldn’t really be naked because of what he looks like without his clothes on, is crouched to the side of the crowd, holding a video camcorder.

He is filming another white man stretched out on a rack, who is taking a severe beating from a large black woman attired very similar to the woman teasing the hooded gopher man. She brings her whip down hard across her client’s back, landing it with a snap that pierces the room. Her client thanks her and asks for another, and my co-worker and I walk closer and get a good look at the welts on his back.

I’m not quite sure where the thrill in this lies, but the guy does seem to be enjoying himself and getting his money’s worth, which is more than I can say for my co-worker and me. Neither of us has seen either of the Loner girls that we spotted in line while we were waiting to get in since we stepped inside. I guess that is our torture for the evening.