“Ever hear my dominatrix story?”
That’s how my good friend Lester, who I’ve known for about 15 years now, opened a conversation with me at a bar one Saturday morning.
“Um, no.”
“Are you sure? Because I can’t imagine I wouldn’t have told you it before”
“I think that is something I would remember.” I replied.
As the story goes, Lester was in the club formerly known as The Basement in the area of Cleveland formerly known as the Flats. The Flats have long since become a Scooby Doo ghost town, and the club has long since been demolished, but I’m sure more than one of you remember it in the peak of it’s vibrancy as the place to go on a weekday night in Cleveland. They “decorated” it very much like a single man would decorate his basement, complete with a washer and dryer on which women would dance luridly in the hopes of attracting a mate for the evening. Like baboons with the giant red thing on their ass, only entirely different.
So my friend is on top of one of the washing machines chatting with an amiable young lass, and inquires her profession. “Dominatrix.” For some, this would be a deal breaker and the conversation would end there. But not Lester. Lester studies humans like Dian Fossey studied gorillas, and his brain instantly told him “I gots to know”. So he wound up taking her number and calling her for a date.
Long story short, he picks her up and she lives with a much older man who was a hardcore badass Marine sniper. He was introduced as her slave, and she made him kiss her feet as she left on her date. On the date, it was revealed she was building some sort of torture dungeon in the basement with him, but Lester (who can rightfully be described as gimpy) was afraid to go and see. The relationship ended after two dates when the dominatrix got back together with a former girlfriend.
What makes a man capable of killing you sixteen different ways with a paperclip decide he needs to be someone’s bitch in his private life? How do you go about becoming a professional dominatrix anyway? And what the hell was in that basement? Our minds can only wonder.
In related news, the Cavs play seven of their next eight games against teams over .500.
Off to the questions.
When the Super Bowl ends sometime around 10 p.m. EDT this Sunday it will mark not just the end of a very curious but interesting football season. It is also will mark the beginning of the dullest period of the sports season.
In keeping with the trendy “Occupy (insert location here)” movement that began last year as a symbol of public protest and an attempt to attract attention to a cause, Columbus Blue Jackets fans hosted their own display of dissatisfaction last Saturday in the Arena District. A crowd of nearly 250 people gathered on the plaza in front of Nationwide Arena to demand change to the most inept franchise in the NHL.
It’s one of the rich images of baseball: a ten-year-old, listening to games on a transistor radio, during times when he should not be doing so. For example, during the school day, or in bed after lights-out. I was that youngster, back in the day. Only, during winter, I was likely to be hiding the radio under the pillow while listening to Steve Albert (brother of Marv and Kenny). My team: the Cleveland Crusaders.
