“Every once in a while I’d have to take a beating. But by then, I didn’t care. The way I saw it…everybody takes a beating sometime.”
–Goodfellas
I have to wonder how my readiness to leap into masochism stems from my adolescence. If my view of masochism — that a man stands up and takes his beating — comes from growing up and having the misadventures I did. I hate pain. I’m miserable when I’m sick, or I’m hurting. But I’m not really afraid of anything but severe, debilitating pain. My family never beat me — I can vaguely remember two spankings my whole life, and one smack in the face when I was 16 or so. But between the ages of 10-21, due to my own dumb antics, I was stabbed, set on fire, hit by two cars, blew out both kneecaps at least twice, cracked a rib, got chemical burns in my eyes, got tased, and suffered more bloody scalp wounds than I care to remember. I was also involved in a handful of fights, some of which were as short as me hitting the other guy once, and some of which were as long as it took for the other guy to beat the living shit out of me over a period of ten minutes.
In some cases, the “other guy” was my sister, who is probably the best fighter I know. She’s lost teeth and gotten them fixed so often, as Hunter S. Thompson put it in “The Hell’s Angels,” she’s simply not afraid of fighting like your average person. She’s not afraid of being ugly for a while after a fight, whereas me, I hate walking around with a wound or a black eye, and I find it impossible to raise a hand at a woman in anything but total self-defense — when she’s just really beating me within an inch of my life, and even then I limit myself to grabbing her arms, which basically means that in the end she wins. I have a divot in my scalp the size of a quarter that you can see when I shave my head from her hitting me with a foreign object and knocking me out once, whereupon she proceeded to kick me in the ribs and head while I was down.
I like to say that I can’t fight so good, but I can take a beating like nobody else I know. I remember I fought one guy when I was younger, and he proceeded to just beat the living tar out of me. But I stayed in there, and by the end of it he didn’t fuck with me ever again. It was too much like work to kick my ass, and while he’s doing all that work, I’m occasionally getting a shot in myself. As my grandfather used to say, “They may get a lunch out of it, but you damn well better get a sandwich.”
So, all this means that I’m okay with a bit of pain. I’m not stupid about it, and I’m the last person to look for fights — but pain has been kind of a fact of life, if we’re talking about the bruises and gashes kind of pain. I don’t know if, at my advanced age, I’d ever want to be in another fight, and a pratfall down a set of stairs a couple years back proved to me that I don’t heal like a 20-year old anymore, but I’m okay with taking a beating from life once in a while. It happens. In a way, I’m stoic about pain normally, and aroused by it when it’s in a sexual context, and deathly afraid of it when it’s in a kind of helpless, sick-in-my-bed context. (I’ve had pneumonia twice, once nearly dying from it, and that’s my fear — when the pain is internal, coming out from under your skin, where you can’t bandage it. I get crazy fearful thinking about that.)
So, now that I’m older and more mature and not living my life like an episode of “Jackass,” I’m not afraid of the normal shit that goes along with S&M. The progression from spanking and slapping to belts to floggers to a crop to a switch has been a fairly smooth, easy progression. (I’m thinking about buying a paddle for my wife.) I’m not too nervous when my wife brings out a new toy. I don’t get squirrelly at the sight of my own blood (from experience — we haven’t actually drawn any yet in play.) So that’s why I’m looking forward to having some pins stuck in me this next trip, maybe have the wife play with a knife, very, very carefully. (After being stabbed, a very shallow cut doesn’t bother me so much.)
The problem is, I have no clue what we’re doing, and I know my wife doesn’t either. We’ve talked about play with a dulled knife, or her poking me in the ass, back or thighs, with pins and needles. And so I need to find resources on needle play for beginners — good ones, and hopefully some recommendations on where to buy needles.
Can anybody help?
