In April 1989, I was working at a corporation with so many layers that I couldn’t precisely say who my actual employer was. At the top was a conglomerate that had started out as an auto parts manufacturer. As it added and shed many lines of business over the decades it needed a new identity. Eventually, it had purchased an old-line Hollywood studio called Apex and it had glamorously renamed itself Apex Communications.
Apex must have been doing well because it built itself a skyscraper headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York. Four corporate layers down and a dozen miles to the northwest, I labored for Todd-Hackett Legal Works, which published books for attorneys.
This corporate outpost for about eighty white-collar drones had rented space in a two-story concrete pillbox in deepest New Jersey suburbia. At times I had fantasies of the building being used as a fortress and an attacking army needing flamethrowers to finally drive out the defenders. I supposed that if I imagined the place sprayed with napalm in some future Civil War, I was somewhat ambivalent about my job and being there at all.
My whole life was in the doldrums, actually, although I couldn’t pinpoint the exact reasons. In 1987 Johnny Cougar’s song “Check It Out” had been released and that had struck a nerve with me. I felt I was indeed soaring with the eagles – and the turkeys – all week long and that was all I knew about living.
Beyond my dissatisfaction with my career or lack of one, I was experiencing a sexual malaise too. At that point, I had known my wife Janey for fourteen years and we had been married, without kids, for eleven. I never spoke to anyone about my now “Velveeta Cheese” marriage. As Erica Jong put it, it was: “filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the taste buds, no bittersweet edge.” I had trouble even admitting this to myself. But a symptom had appeared the previous year right after I had started working at the place. I began masturbating fairly regularly during the workday.
It was easy to find a place; the northern half of my floor was an unrented space that mirrored the one occupied by my company. The door was never locked, so I went in there once and found a large empty space without cubicles and offices lining the outside walls.
Those empty offices were where I found the release for my sexual discontent. I would kneel or stand in one with my tube of Vaseline or hand cream, and imagine all the experiences I figured I had missed along the way. As I was approaching my thirty-third birthday I assumed that had been a lot. My co-workers, celebrities, and various girls I had known in high school or college but never dated provided me with the material. In those pre-Internet days, my supply of porn was limited to a few stray Hustler and Penthouse magazines people had passed on to me.
Even Janey was in a few fantasies; sometimes those were about acts I wanted but had never done with her. One of these was giving her an over-the-knee, bare-assed spanking when she got uppity or did some misdeed like bouncing a check. In any case, I didn’t have to take a magazine into one of those empty offices; my own overactive imagination was sufficient.
~~~~
During the spring of ’89, I started getting a lot of unpaid overtime. Being an “exempt” employee, supposedly a “professional,” all I was entitled to was a dinner allowance. That wasn’t much compensation for being there past midnight at times or having to come in on weekends.
Sometimes a few of my co-workers got stuck there with me because of their own troubled projects, but at other times I was alone. The big-firm law partners who wrote our books often sent their manuscripts or proofs in late and it was our job to deal with however they handled things. Sometimes these guys (and they were usually males) would virtually rewrite the book in the proof stages. No one was going to tell them that they couldn’t.
I expressed some of my frustration with these maddening schedules by moving my masturbation sessions, if it was an odd hour, to my company’s suite of offices. Usually, I would go into one of the rooms along the outer wall and shut the door. I invariably picked an office assigned to a female staffer. I noted the creepiness of that to myself, but using a man’s space would have seemed even weirder. One night after 9:30 I was so fed-up that I went into the corner office of the division’s director, a woman named Lynn Fortier.
Behind her back, some of us referred to Lynn as “Red” or “Big Red,” because of her hair color. She was about five-foot-nine, but the “big” in her nickname was not because of her physical size. It had more to do with the air of authority she projected. She was in her early forties and what little we knew about her was that she was divorced and had two kids in high school.
People didn’t dislike her, but there was something intimidating about her that even I, who didn’t report directly to her, noticed. She seemed to be in all-business mode all the time, and she made no attempt at humor or to chat with people informally.
Her clothes and make-up were always stylish and tasteful; I never saw her dressed casually. Objectively I thought she was attractive but I had yet to have a fantasy about her. Perhaps I would have gotten around to her eventually, but there was a long line of prospects ahead of her.
I borrowed a tube of hand lotion from someone’s desk drawer and went into Lynn’s darkened office. The sightlines in the room were such that there was no place that was not visible from the doorway. I figured that at this hour there was no chance of anyone arriving at the office; there seemed to be no point in even closing the door. I knelt in a corner next to a bookcase, opened up my pants, and started stroking my cock with the hand lotion.
I needed a fantasy to help me along, so I thought of my co-worker Audrey. She was a trim, leggy young blonde wife who sat in the cubicle on the other side of the partition from me. She had been my go-to girl for several other jerk-off scenarios.
I developed a plot in which Audrey sat on the couch on the other side of this room. She was giving me a blowjob while I stood in front of her. Audrey had stripped down to just her pantyhose and high heels and her red-lipsticked mouth eagerly sucked on my erect penis. I ran my hands through her cute bobbed hairdo as I gazed at her perky bare breasts.
“Oh, Audrey, suck on my huge cock, get me off, please.” It wasn’t clever patter but I suspected few guys had much original to say as they jerked themselves into a climax. Why she would cheat on her husband with the likes of me went unexplained. I did however feel some satisfaction that my wife Janey was being deceived. I had the unjustified yet intense feeling that my cock deserved to be inserted into some fresh place like Audrey’s willing mouth.
I knew I’d just spurt all over the floor and then I’d dab it up with my handkerchief. I assumed that no one was going to carefully examine that little patch of carpet tomorrow or any other day. Eventually, it would be cleaned and that would be the end of it.
Then the lights overhead suddenly went on and I couldn’t process my surprise. For a moment I stupidly thought, how did that happen? Then I turned my head and saw the light glinting off Lynn’s glasses.
Panic took over and I tried to both stand up and pull my clothes together, as if that could be done that before she noticed anything. That still didn’t explain why I was in her office in the first place. Let’s face it: I’m dead, or rather my job is. I also had a bit of resentment mixed in: What is she doing back here at this hour?
Then as she passed in front of me she said calmly but firmly, “Please don’t leave; stay where you are. And don’t apologize, don’t say anything.”
I wondered if perhaps she would call the police too. Was it public lewdness if I was inside an office? Maybe the cops in this New Jersey town would laugh it off, or maybe they’d like spicing up their night-shift routine with an interesting arrest. Maybe Lynn would exaggerate the story a bit.
She had on the same white blouse and red jacket and skirt combination that I had seen earlier that day. The red went well with her hair color, but I assumed she didn’t want fashion compliments right now.
She sat down behind her desk and beckoned me over. I had just gotten my pants zipped and buckled, so I went over to wait for whatever fate she had for me. As I stood in front of her desk, an option went through my mind. Maybe she’d be merciful and ask me to resign rather than going through Human Resources to get me fired. I’d still have some explaining to do to my wife and any possible future employers, but at least I’d have a chance of spinning it in my favor.
After a few seconds, she said, “All right, I decided you can keep your job, but there are two conditions I’d like to set.” That was a relief, although maybe I’d always feel uncomfortable when seeing Lynn again. Probably that didn’t matter; in a few weeks we would have moved on.
I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t imagine what the conditions were. Lynn spoke first and got to the point. I knew she was not a person who went in for excess verbiage.
“The first condition is that you need to be punished by me.”
What was she talking about? She could cut my pay, but I guessed she’d need a pretext for that. Or maybe she didn’t.
“Now the second condition . . .”
I said something like, “Okay, yes?”
She smiled a bit. “We’ll get to that pretty soon. First . . .”
She opened two of her desk drawers and took out two seemingly unrelated items: a towel and a wooden ruler.
“Now this is going to be a corporal punishment. I’m going take you over my knees and paddle your behind with this ruler, first on the seat of your pants, and then on your bare rear end.”
I instantly knew that this had nothing to do with corporate policy, or my job, or even her opinion of me. She was expressing her own kinky needs.
Back in that era before Internet porn, it was hard to know the detailed mechanics and protocols for more unusual – or they seemed unusual to me – practices like BDSM. I remembered reading parts of Robert Coover’s novel Spanking the Maid in a bookstore. I also knew that some men liked being beaten by women, but I was less sure – at least until now – if there were any women who liked inflicting it.
I was distracted trying to consider all of this when she said, “Have you ever been spanked before, even by your parents?”