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Angel of Mercy Injury holds up local dom, but it's all in a day's flogging. By Jim Rendon LAURIE TEHANEY, a.k.a. "Mistress Laurie," took a lot of time off work to recuperate this fall. In October, she suffered a severe repetitive-motion injury. Costumed in glitter-covered fishnets and leather shorts, she pulled all the muscles in her biceps while energetically flogging a client. The client, who shall remain nameless, asked her to hit him harder and harder with a 3-foot-long tasseled whip. Mistress Laurie, as her clients know her, berates herself for being too nice, too much of what she calls "a giver." "He was telling me what to do," she recalls, getting a little annoyed at the situation all over again. "I'm the dom. I should have gagged the idiot." But those are the rigors of practicing her trade in a town filled with novices, she explains. If someone is new to the domination game, as most of her clients are, she prefers not to gag them so there can be communication. No one should get hurt, she emphasizes. Domination and submission is about fantasy and pain and pleasure. Unlike San Francisco, New York or other major metropolitan areas where B and D (bondage and discipline) are more fashionable, this valley is kind of a bullwhip-and-handcuff backwater. But Mistress Laurie still does pretty well for herself. On a Friday afternoon, she is lounging around her one-bedroom Campbell apartment, watching One Life to Live with the blinds closed. In front of her large, black leather couch is a massage table covered in sheepskin. On top is a collection of whips, restraints, gags, a G-string and a pair of denture-shaped nipple clips. Unlike more upscale dominatrices, Mistress Laurie does not have a dungeon equipped with a cross for tying up clients, so she has to make do with her living room. Every client has a fantasy, she says. Some want her to impersonate a particularly strict relative from childhood; others want to be scolded for a more recent offense. Mistress Laurie gets particularly upset when men disrespect women, and that has been a recurring theme in some of her sessions. "What have you done wrong?" she will ask a client. "Did you not hold a door open for a woman? Was that right? You look up women's dresses at work? I'll whoop your butt. You need to keep your business separate from your pleasure," she says, reminding her client of sexual-harassment laws before she ties him up and flogs him. Most of her clients are engineers, people who spend their days working with numbers and computers and code, who are far removed from sensual physicality, Laurie says. They also happen to be people who can afford her $200-per-hour fee. "These are people that are tired of being the boss, tired of telling people what to do," she says. "They want me to tell them what to do, to give them the orders. I tell them to get on their knees, and they say, 'Please hit me--harder.'" But Mistress Laurie does not see herself as mean or cruel. In fact, she smiles a lot. "I actually don't like pain," she says. And her one experience as a submissive, or sub, was miserable. She likes to be in control and have people pay her to be so. "Men who submit to me worship me like the goddess that I am," she says with a smile. Ninety-five percent of all subs are men, she points out. Although many of her clients orgasm during the experience, she is clear that she does not sexually service anyone: She merely dominates while they experience. She is fulfilling a fantasy, and that is consistent with her own spiritual vision of herself. "Do you believe in angels?" she asks, sitting on the couch flanked by a bondage-clad teddy bear and a painting of a tiger, an important personal symbol. "I have God in me. I am a real angel," she says. Tying up and beating high-tech executives may not be just the job for an angel (but I imagine a lot of people would sign up if they could). Unfortunately, this angel is out of business until the new millennium, when she says her arm will be healed. She has shifted most of her work from domination to massage. She performs Swedish massage with oils, deep muscle massage and what she calls powder massage, done with powder and very light fingertip contact. It brings the nerves to life, she says. And she has learned her lesson. Powerful flogging sessions are off the list for the next century. But with the holidays just around the corner, she is quick to add that a massage, or one of her other services would make a great Christmas gift. [ San Jose | Metroactive Central | Archives ]