Flapjack Gets Stuck in the Closet of a Dominatrix

Flapjack Gets Stuck in the Closet of a Dominatrix

“Oft when on my couch I lie”

Well, if Flapjack had lain … or is that laid?…maybe it’s lied? … no it’s lain –  if she had lain on that couch before moving in, she would never have moved in.

She stared at the wood planks on the ceiling, which made it look more like a floor, and said to no-one since no-one was there, “Is this an upside down house or what?”

So, if she had lain on that couch instead of idly chatting and sipping Chardonnay and falling in love with him, she would have seen things differently. She would have seen the room’s lack of proportion, the mismatch of the blocky furniture and the room’s tininess. She would have seen that the statuettes on the narrow mantle were beasts of prey and that the pictures on the tiny bits of wall space were sparrows, tiny, fragile creatures with frightened eyes. “I should have noticed these as omens when I first came here but I was blinded. I was blinded by love.”

It was Thunder who had blinded her.  Here he is in a nutshell:

Flapjack’s second and last ex-husband
AKA bipolar giant with glasses
Athletic body, face scarred by adolescent acne
More intelligent than Flapjack
Retired government policy maker

It wasn’t like Thunder’s issues weren’t obvious. “What are you doing with a man like that?” her own mother (RIP) had said. The night she had introduced them he had been dressed to kill,with a leather cowboy hat atop his dirty-blonde longish hair, blood-red cowboy boots making him  seem even taller (about 6’6″), rings on every finger and pins of a Lancaster bomber, Superman and Tinker Bell on his jacket’s lapel, linked by the theme of flying, which he obviously was.  “He’s mad,” Flapjack’s mom had warned her. “Get out while you can.”

But it was too late. Thunder had woken her up from the doldrums of her life at mid-point, which is not to say that she wasn’t wary.  “Turn your fear into excitement,” he’d said to her at a Yorkville bar. He had been wearing a Safari hat that night, bearing gifts of junk jewellery and a pink silk kimono for her. “Come on, get out of your comfort zone … this will be the biggest adventure of your life.”

Thunder’s highs were so high that they were contagious. She felt LIKE SHE HAD SLIPPED THE SURLY BONDS OF EARTH when she was with him. She felt LIKE HER SOUL SOARED ABOVE HER BODY when he held her. He was so macho and wacky it cracked her up. Like I just said, he wore cowboy hats and cowboy boots, he wore pins of power symbols … Lancaster bombers, Superman, Tinker Bell, lightning bolts, lions and eagles, and he wore lots of bling on his fingers and wrists that captured the light and sparkled like diamonds. He had IDEAS and he told JOKES and he thought Coconut was a genius and that she Flapjack in her prime was a prize and he was more appealing than any man Flapjack had ever met.

She fell so badly (or is that madly?) in love with Thunder that full steam ahead she:

  1. sold her her own house so she could give him her last 20 G (he being bankrupt and all),
  2. took over the mortgage on his house  (he being bankrupt and all),
  3. moved her and Coconut and Cloudy the Cat in with him (since they now had no place to live), and
  4. helplessly watched him fall from high above THE SURLY BONDS OF EARTH to a prone position on this very couch (since he was helplessly manic depressive).

man crashed out on couchAnd once focused and inert upon this very couch, immune to all manner of remedy (remember this word), it was Thunder who could not be woken up, no matter what Flapjack did. He stopped talking. He stopped laughing. He wore the same clothes for days on end and barely moved except when he went out for his late night snack. Retreating to his couch, he hung onto the remote, his only apparent conduit to life outside his own head. Flapjack tried to bring Thunder back to life and to their love affair. She tried to seduce him, she begged him, she yelled at him, she was kind to him, she was mean to him, she bribed and threatened him, a roller coaster of so-called strategies that pretty much cancelled one another out. She even tried an intervention, which only made things worse.

Flapjack sighed at the mess they were all in and fixated on the epicenter of the room, the gargantuan TV set. “Damn, did he hide the remote?” She routed through the cushions for it and found instead a key with a little chain and a tag on it.

The tag read:

Miss Remedy
666 Bad Vibes Avenue| (just kidding – it was 172 Lakeshore Avenue)
Suite 69 (not kidding about that!)

Oh, Oh. Oh.

“I’m torn in two but I will conquer myself”

So, as I just said, while laying (or is that lying? no, I think it’s laying), so while laying on the couch, Flapjack had come upon a dark discovery, a key with a tag to a certain Miss Remedy’s apartment. The discovery added a layer of great anxiety (and understandably curiosity) to her gloomy state. She picked up the phone and called Grapes, the best confidante she had ever had in her life to date, who BTW had been MIA since the canoe trip.

Who knows what in the end drives the human heart, but Grapes was more than willing to speculate with Flapjack on whom Miss Remedy might be. As an overwhelming curiosity lessened Flapjack’s anxiety and indeed overtook them both, they let their bygones be bygones. “I’m sorry I left you and Intellectus spinning in the lake,” said Flapjack. “I’m sorry about inviting that guy for breakfast who ended up jumping you,” said Grapes. Apologies mutually accepted, they hatched a plan to: 1) ensconce the girls at the Sheraton with the indoor mini-golf and swimming pool, and 2) while pretending to all and sundry that they were having a Flapjackian-Grapian adventure, do some reconnaissance of what Thunder was up to.

And so it was that one dark and stormy night in mid-November, the two women found themselves stationed across from a Denny’s in a sketchy part of town near the bus terminal, waiting for Thunder to show up for his late night snack. They were in Flapjack’s old Chevy, with the gold hub caps, wearing baseball caps and sun glasses. Flapjack’s cap said “RCMP,” Grapes’ cap said, “Vote NDP,” and their sunglasses called to mind the Blue Brothers. They were slouched low in the front street, on the look-out for Thunder.

Being literary types at heart, and not just voyeurs on a dark adventure, they were discussing a poem by Anne Sexton, which went like this:

I am torn in two
but I will conquer myself.
I will dig up the pride.
I will take scissors
and cut out the beggar.
I will take a crowbar
and pry out the broken
pieces of God in me.

“I like it when Sexton says I’m torn in two but I will conquer myself. I can relate to that, “Flapjack said. “Like if I weren’t so torn in two, I wouldn’t have married a short chubby ill-tempered Latino, then flipped myself like a big pancake to a tall skinny bipolar Scotsman…”

“Maybe you just have the courage to pursue extremes,” Grapes hopefully suggested (she was being super-solicitous of Flapjack that night). “Everything sits on continuum. Anyways, you seem to go there, from one extreme to the other.”

“Thanks for saying that,” Flapjack said it and she really meant it. “She says she’s broken but they’re little bits of God in her, and that she needs to pry them out, I relate to that.” They meandered on like that for a while.

“Lets hope they’re just having drinks …”

It was Grapes who spotted him first. “Look, he’s making a phone call in the lobby!”  They turned their heads sideways to look out the side window. “Duck,” ordered Grapes, and they slid down in their seats so that only the tops of their baseball caps could be seen by passers-by. “We’ll wait in the alley over there until he comes out. I’m sure he’ll catch a cab and then we’ll follow him.”

Flapjack steered the car over to the alley slouched down as low in her seat as she could and still see out the window to drive. She  and Grapes dropped the Anne Sexton discussion like a hot potato.

“Now!” Grapes was really getting into it. “He’s just gotten into a cab. Follow it.”

Flapjack put the pedal to the floor and still crouched down in her seat took off after him. Grapes peeked out from her hiding place as they sped along the dark, twisting downtown streets following him. It didn’t take too long to catch up to him. He got out at Sotto Sotto’s and  his previously leaden arms were no longer so leaden. He lifted them up, still a bit zombie-like, to embrace the woman who came out to meet him. She wore a bejeweled mini-skirt which showed off lithe, muscly legs. Her stiletto thigh-high boots gave her height, making her almost as tall as Thunder who was 6’4.” She wasn’t beautiful but she was sure good-looking and she exuded a lot of physical confidence.

“Shit, Grapes,” Flapjack mumbled. “She’s at least a foot taller than I am.” Before she could get a better look, Thunder and his date disappeared into the cavern of the restaurant.

“Let’s hope they’re just having drinks,” Grapes said. “Or this is going to be a long, long night.” They resumed their discussion of Anne Sexton for a bit.

Then Flapjack had a brain wave. “Let’s get to the apartment ahead of them. Let’s go now!”

building on an angle“It’s hard to describe a sensation so muddled” …

They had to drive around a bit before they found the building on 666 Bad Vibes Avenue| (just kidding – it was 172 Lakeshore Avenue). The building angled on its side like the Tower of Pisa, although other than that it looked half-decent. Flapjack got Grapes to park down the street, then went ahead solo to do her investigation. She had wanted to say to Grapes, “I believe in the unfettered right to privacy.” And not say it. And “I will do whatever I can to find out what’s going on.” And not say it. And “I’m going too far.” And not say it. And while equivocating, she had lurched off into the unknown, arriving soon enough at a point of no return. She took the stairs up to the penthouse apartments on the sixth floor and put the key in the lock to Apartment 69.

When the key clicked open the door, she tip-toed down a leopard carpeted hallway to a living room. The air smelled of cigarette smoke and perfume. A little gold lamp, with sparkly tassels, sitting on a Louis the XIV style table, cast the only light there was in the darkened room. Flapjack recognized the lamp from Canadian Tire, and had just recently shared that with a friend at work — yes, Flapjack did work, in fact 9 to 5, in a relatively respectable position. She had said to her friend, “Think about the genius it takes to go from tires and car parts to imitation bordello furniture,” a comment that was prescient in a weird way, or maybe not prescient, but certainly ominous, because that was that very lamp that sat in Miss Remedy’s living room. “The far reach of corporations,” she said to herself somewhat academically, trying to externalize her feelings and gain some distance from the situation. Yet it was hopeless. Her heart refused to stop racing and her hands refused to stop shaking.

And still Flapjack carried on.

She opened o pen a door to the left of a huge black pleather couch, decorated with zebra and giraffe pillows, and discovered not a room per se but a room-sized closet, jam-packed with Cat Woman lingerie, mostly black, with the devil in the details of the straps, from sparkly diamond to red silk, plus an array of corsets, in black and blue and lavender and blood red. On the closet’s first shelf were stilettos, from blingy sandals to thigh-high patent leather boots, mostly black but with a stunning pair of blue suede ones thrown into the mix.  On the next shelf, freakishly out of place, were a collection of teddy bears and a few boxes of Oreo cookies. And on the top shelf were hair pieces – platinum, black, brown, short, long, straight, curly, sitting on faceless Styrofoam heads.  Leaning against the closet’s right wall was a collection of paddles and whips, of all sizes; against the left wall was a black coffin, with gold finishing.

It’s hard to describe what Flapjack felt for it was a sensation so muddled, of repulsion and compulsion, of the instinct to flee cancelled out by the instinct to stay, that minds far greater that mine would be hard pressed to put it into words. But one thing was certain. Flapjack gave into the compulsion side of  things. Being so short and all, she just could not resist. She stood high on her tippy toes and pulled down the pair of blue suede stilettos. Her heart near bursting, she unlaced a running shoe, pulled off a sock and put on the right stiletto, then did the same with the left. And while standing there, stretched taller than she had ever been in her life, her calf muscles straining, she inched towards the corsets beside the Cat Woman lingerie. What would she look like with a tiny, cinched-in waist? A black lacy corset with silky white drawstrings caught her eye.  She took off her jacket and put the corset on, tying the laces tight around her torso, creating an hour-glass effect over her black t-shirt. “Hmm. Hmm. Dare I? Well, why not?” The piece de resistance. She took a shoulder length platinum wig off its bald Styrofoam head and tucked in dirty blonde curly her hair. Grabbing a whip, just for effect, she tiptoed out of the closet to examine herself in the wall-to-wall mirror.

Flapjack had to slow down her breathing “Me, it’s me, God damn it, it’s me!” She had never seen herself look so wildly sexy and it threw her into a bizarre reverie of compelling all kinds of men, but most of all Thunder, to do her bidding, and most of all what she wanted Thunder to do was to wake up from his slumber and love her again like he had at the start. “Why did he have to have such horrible mood swings?” “Why couldn’t he be just slightly manic from time to time?” “Why couldn’t he take some medication? Lots of people did. Why couldn’t Thunder?” “Why couldn’t he do that for her and Coconut?” “WhyWhyWhy?” And then she heard the sound of not-too distant laughter and the jangly sound of someone digging into a purse for keys. “Fuck, oh fuck. Oh double, triple, quadruple fuck.” She heard the lock turn in the apartment door and quickly returned to the closet, burying herself in the back under an old threadbare blanket, stilettos and corset and wig still on.

The woman had a lovely, calming voice. In fact, she sounded like a therapist, like someone who worked with broken, wounded people (uh, was the Anne Sexton discussion prescient, too?). In fact, there was as much gentleness as seduction in her question, “Have you been a naughty boy?”

Thunder answered in his soft Scottish lilt. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” He sounded little and afraid.

Flapjack held her breath while she heard the closet door opening. And again it’s not possible to describe the mush of her emotions, though one thing was certain. Fear had become her modus operandi. “Lord, Lord, do not let me move or breathe or sneeze or cough or make any kind of bodily noise,” she muttered inside her own head. She made a vow to stop hating the BIPOLAR GIANT WITH GLASSES, to no longer even call him that, but instead to see him through the lens of first love when the very sight of him made her happy. “No, no, no, that’s too selfish,” she pleaded with her own mind parading before God’s for mercy. “I need to befriend him as a fellow flawed human being in dire need of something – but what? Oh poor Thunder. He has an illness. It’s not his fault.” Inside that closet, a short and somewhat ordinary woman in dominatrix clothing, made an outright commitment to place herself second to Thunder’s needs and not only that, to place herself second to whoever she knew in need, a ridiculous notion, she reflected and swallowed a gulp. “Am I promising to become Mother Theresa just so I won’t fart in the closet of a dominatrix?”

“Thank you, Miss Remedy” …

Peeking through the threadbare blanket that covered her head, she saw the outlines of very big hair and a creamy-coloured bejeweled hand clacking the hangers, in search of an outfit. “You better be still,” the hand’s voice said sweetly, while grabbing a black silk slip with blood-red straps. “Here’s your teddy,” she murmured, throwing Thunder a small green bear which she grabbed from the top shelf.

“Thank you, Miss Remedy,” Thunder said. Flapjack couldn’t see if he was clutching the bear or not.

Meanwhile, the bejeweled hand began routing around again. “I’ll be right with you,” she called out sweetly.

“Yes, Miss Remedy,” Thunder said. “I’ll wait.”

Next she wheeled the coffin out. “I want you to get inside and wait for me while I change into something very, very special. No peeking,” she said in a voice that commanded the opposite. Then she closed the closet door and opened the door to another room, probably the bedroom, wheeling the coffin along with her.

While listening to Thunder get out of the coffin and the sound of the whip and the muffled cries, Flapjack crawled to the front of the closet and peeked through a crack in the door. Seeing nothing but the light and shadow cast by the Canadian Tire lamp, she decided to make her get-away, retracing her steps along the leopard-carpeted hallway to the door, down the stairs of the lopsided building to the front door, out the door to her white Chevy where Grapes sat waiting in the passenger seat.

Grapes was aghast when she saw Flapjack. “What on earth are you wearing?” she whispered.

“It’s going to take some explaining,” Flapjack responded. “Oh my God, I left my running shoes in the closet. Oh my God, Oh my God. “Let’s get to the hotel.” She tore off the platinum wig, but the rest of the stuff was too hard to take off, so she drove corseted, still wearing the stilettos which made it hard to drive. “We’ll check on the girls, then debrief in the bar.”

Flapjack put her key in the ignition and stepped on the gas as best she could.

And that, my friends, is the story of GETTING STUCK IN THE CLOSET OF A DOMINATRIX. Next: FLAPJACK ALMOST GETS ARRESTED.