When Lady of Pain receives the text she's been waiting for, her patience has worn a bit thin, as it's nearing 9:30 p.m. 

"Some submissives want you to be mean — yet seductive," Pain says, finishing her sentence with the reverb of a phone-sex operator. "Either that or — drill sergeant." This time her voice carries palpable cruelty. "It's all psychodrama; I have to be a chameleon. Tonight I'm going to be mean, but fun. It's been a long week and it's only Wednesday." 

 

Pain is a daunting chameleon. 

Around 6 feet tall, her posture is vertically intense, as if rebar has been surgically grafted to her spine. With ponderous breasts swelling over the top of a magenta corset, her carriage is arresting and commanding. Her leather and metal studded biker cap hides a dirty blond head of hair. Leather boots rise to her knees, housing well-manicured size 10 feet, sweating in soft, wool socks. She's 36 but could pass for 30 as easily she could 42; a chameleon in form and function. Whatever you need her to be. 

S&M can be as hokey as it can be, well, pokey. The fetish shop Noir Leather puts on Hellbound parties, for instance, that are more about theatrics and fashion than orgies out of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. But that's not to say you won't find plenty of flesh being paddled. Events like those provide an opportunity for gawkers to test the waters. And Castratta Lady of Pain is a frequent performer. In more private settings, she's a more extreme and imaginative dominatrix. Public performance versus private is, for slaves and apprentices, the difference between acting and action. 

You might wonder what's in it for Castratta if slaves like Snake don't pay for sessions. The time doms and subs spend together can be viewed as an ongoing project of depraved self-betterment. "Slaves want shock and awe. That's just what Snake wants. But they want therapy too," Pain says.

And later in the evening, as Pain's latex-wrapped fist disappears inside of him, Snake will say as much. It's no secret some submissives are trying to work through violent histories.

"Growing up, I witnessed some serious abuse," he says, before going silent, with Lady Pain narrating like a tour guide: "There he goes. His eyes basically roll back into his head like he's on something — subspace." 

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. 

Still waiting for Snake, Pain explains that she recently had to dismiss one of her slaves, a Chaldean woman in her mid-20s who, Pain says, "Could take a beating better than most men I know, could take a two-by-four-to-her-back beating."

They'd met with each other for over a year and had gotten to a place very close to complete trust. "My slaves follow every single step that I lay out for them or else there's a consequence," says Pain. "Even for something like washing a plate, I'll write down a 20-step process for the plate to be cleaned the way I want it to be cleaned. She started fucking up on purpose to get a beating. And when we'd go to the dungeon, which is what she wanted in the first place, she'd shift her ass around to fight against the paddle, which she knew would result in a harder punishment. This is what you call a submissive smartass," Pain says. "I'd had enough of that shit. I'm not just going to have you walk in the door and beat you till you leave, that's not how this works."

Pain doesn't take shit — figuratively or literally.

For instance, there's no infantilism in her dungeon; she has no use for submissives who want to suck on bottles and wear (and use) diapers. "That's just a little too creepy for me," Pain says. "Too weirdly regressive. And no poop." 

With that, Pain slips a Virginia Slims cigarette into a practiced pout. 

She then admits that she's not opposed in principle to urinating on someone (a "golden shower"), but "this shy bladder of mine holds me back. Probably my only shy characteristic, really."

Snake is downstairs waiting to be let in. Pain knows it. She doesn't move. 

"That little fucker's going to get what's coming to him," she says with a grin. 

Instead of answering the door, she ruminates on popular fetishes: foot worship, medical play, electrostimulation and edgeplay, the last of which might include bloodletting or simulated rape. 

"No matter what you're doing, you gotta now what you're doing — the physiology of it," Pain says. "When I was just starting out, I'm pretty sure I broke a dick. I hit a guy's dick and he came back to me a few days later telling me he couldn't get it hard. I told him to go to a fucking doctor! What'd he think I was going to do? You make mistakes. You learn," she says. 

> Email Travis R. Wright

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