Bucket List of an Idiot Page 5

  ‘These are the anal hooks,’ she said.

  My terror could not be disguised. ‘FAAARK!’

  Dior carried on. ‘Those are cock cages. And these are speculums—doctors put them up your bits to open you up.’

  We slowly walked round the dungeon and I looked on in disbelief as she explained the purpose of the different tools.

  ‘Here’s a nice little gag that you’ll probably be wearing. Collars. All the masks. Strap-ons. Two fuck machines.’

  These machines looked hilarious. They were like Black & Decker dustbusters, but the nozzles had been modified and now, rather than sucking up small bits of rubbish, they ended in giant vibrating rubber penises—and, boy, did these things have some grunt!

  ‘Those are all my big boys,’ Mistress Dior said, pointing to a cabinet of dildos, including one that was moulded in the shape of a closed human fist. ‘And this is the area you probably don’t want to know about.’ She waved her hand towards a selection of maybe 200 canes, whips, paddles, horseriding crops and other corporal punishment tools.

  She was right. I did not want to know about this area. But then again, I wasn’t that fussed on any of the items on the menu she had mentioned so far.

  Next Dior showed me her rubber suit collection and a thing called the vac-bag. This thing looked like a duvet cover made from black latex with a PVC piping frame inside it.

  ‘The bag has a hole for a snorkel and a hole for a cock. You lie down in it on the floor and I attach the vacuum cleaner to it and suck all the air out. There are hundreds and hundreds of little holes throughout the frame and it vac-packs you so you can’t move. And it’s an amaaaaazing feeling! It feels like you’re being sucked out of an aeroplane.’

  Again, maybe this is just me being a boring old vanilla, but I have never been all that curious to know what it would feel like to be sucked from the open door of a Boeing! It sounds like a bloody miserable way to die!

  The cross-dressing area of the dungeon was something else—a curtained-off section with racks of women’s underwear and clothing, wedding dresses for men who like to dress up as brides, and a whole range of giant baby items.

  Then there was the ‘Queening chair’, quite possibly the sickest thing I’ve seen in my life. It was a chair with a hole cut out. The client lies underneath it and his head is locked into place. Mistress Dior then sits down and urinates onto the face of the customer. Still, I suppose in any business it is better to piss on rather than piss off your clients.

  With the grand tour over, Dior got down to business.

  ‘Right, now you’re going to go and have a shower and you’re going to clean out your bottom, because I’m going to put something in your bottom so you can feel it. Something very small, though.’

  ‘No. Definitely not. No, no insertions,’ I protested.

  ‘Well, okay, I’ll do it with your bottom not clean, then! But wouldn’t that be an even worse humiliation for you?’

  There was a pause in the conversation. I stood speechless, paralysed with fear.

  ‘I’m waiting for your answer! Or are you going to be that person who does a runner?’

  ‘Yeah, I think I’m going to have to be that person. I’ll pay you the $250, because I appreciate your time. But I think I may have to give it a miss.’

  ‘Really? Are you really that chicken?’ Mistress Dior was shocked that someone could fail to be excited by the prospect of having another person wee on their face.

  ‘Yes, I am that chicken. I’m terrified.’ This was no time for bravado. I had to be up-front and honest. I wanted out. And now.

  ‘What are you terrified of? Are you terrified I’ll hurt you or are you terrified you’ll have a good time?’

  ‘I’m definitely not terrified I’ll have a good time. This whole set-up is frightening!’

  Dior wasn’t giving up, though. ‘Okay, how about we do a tie-and-tease humiliation session? I’ll tie you up and pretend you’re a dirty little bitch. And then I’ll force you to do things like suck strap-ons and fuck rubber dolls.’

  Cue more of my nervous laughter, before I finally managed to string some words together. ‘No, listen, I’m going to have to go.’

  Dior finally started to realise there would be no turning this vanilla into any other flavour. Not a chance. We sat back down in the non-threatening lounge corner of the dungeon. She lit up a cigarette and offered me an apple juice, then left the dungeon to fetch the juice from the kitchen.

  When she returned, we sat and talked for a while. She offered to show me a Japanese rope technique she practises called kinbaku. I agreed to this.

  I removed my shirt and placed my hands behind my back and within a minute I was tied up and unable to move, imprisoned within an elaborate labyrinth of knots. And no amount of wriggling would make any difference. The ropes were tight, but not tight enough to strangle or leave marks . . . which I guess is important if you are a white-collar client who would have a hard time explaining to your wife how you ended up with rope burns over your wrists and shoulders after a day in the boardroom.

  Moments after Mistress Dior tied me up, my phone started ringing. I had great pleasure in truthfully telling my boss that I couldn’t talk because I was tied up.

  Dior untied me and asked me the time. She had another client arriving in twenty-five minutes who she needed to get set up for. I was too nervous to ask what exactly she had to set up.

  She saw me out and as the door opened I was stung for a few seconds by the brightness of the natural daylight.

  I felt like a different person. I hadn’t actually done anything, but I had seen everything. I reckon I can still tick this item off my bucket list, though—I experienced real pain at Mistress Dior’s dungeon when I had to hand over $250 for nothing!

  HIRE A GRANNY STRIPPER

  FOR MY BOSS

  In all my years in radio I’ve only worked at two different stations and have only had a handful of bosses. Some of them I’ve got on with better than others. If I had a dollar for every time a boss asked me, ‘What the hell were you thinking?’ I would have, at a conservative estimate, somewhere between three and four thousand dollars. And you could just about double that sum of money if I was given a dollar every time I answered that stupid question by saying, ‘I dunno. I thought it might be funny.’

  My boss at The Edge, Leon Wratt, would rate up there as one of my favourites. He lets me get away with a lot of stuff and then brushes it off as ‘being creative’. It’s funny, back when I was growing up the word they used for it was ‘misbehaving’. I now get paid a pretty good wage for the same antics that once earned me the cane, the strap, the belt, the hand, the wooden spoon and occasionally a mouthful of soap.

  Leon will tell me off from time to time, and that is never nice. When you have really pissed him off about something his office is a brutal place to be. On occasions I have been sitting there while he is yelling at me, most likely over something I deserved to be yelled at for. On these occasions I try to zone out and transport myself to a happier place—like Baghdad.

  Over the years I’ve become skilled at dealing with management conflict. Here’s the secret: your boss is the BOSS. In other words, whether you are in the right or the wrong, the boss is always going to win the argument, so you might as well just bend over and take it.

  For years before I finally cottoned onto this, I wasted hours of precious golf time sitting in closed-door meetings arguing my case until I had blood pressure higher than an overweight fifty-year-old who’s just run to the dairy to buy his pouch of Port Royal. These meetings always had the same outcome—the boss had the final word and I would leave the office feeling beaten up, like I’d lost the battle.

  Now, any closed-door telling-off never lasts more than two or three minutes.

  This is how it is done. Observe.

  Leon: Hey mate, there’s been a complaint from this woman. She was driving her kids to school at twenty past eight when you said something about rim-jobs and her seven-year-old daughter asked he
r what that meant.

  Me: Shit. Sorry, mate. Yeah, that was a bad judgement call on my part. I really dropped the ball.

  Leon: You sure did drop the ball, all right. She’s furious. So am I!

  Me: She should be. And you have every right to be too. I’m furious at myself. How could I have been so stupid?

  Leon: You just need to remember the time—between eight and eight-thirty parents and kids are in the car together, so anything to do with sex is off limits.

  Me: I wholeheartedly agree. In fact, we should just avoid sex talk altogether. There’s no need for us to go down that smutty road to try and gain listeners.

  Leon: Exactly.

  Me: I’m so embarrassed about this. Would you like me to call her and apologise?

  Leon: Nah, I can do that. As long as you know this is the sort of thing that could lose us audience share.

  Me: Yeah, I got it. God, I’m kicking myself. That’s Radio 101—I can’t believe I let you down so badly.

  Leon: Don’t beat yourself up about it too much, mate. I just wanted to bring it to your attention.

  Maybe ninety seconds all up for that hypothetical exchange and not only is the meeting done, but it almost ends with the boss telling me everything is okay. Sure, it doesn’t always go as smoothly as that. But it is always faster and less exhausting than standing up for yourself.

  In short, Leon and I have a great working relationship. I have a huge amount of respect for him, and if I may speak on his behalf, he not only has a huge amount of respect for me but he even has a crush on me. Bless him. After twelve years of working together we now have an informal agreement in place (which I haven’t told him about yet) whereby I just go ahead and do what I want without running it past him and he deals with any fallout afterwards. It’s a system that is working very well for one of us.

  Leon is New Zealand’s most respected radio programmer and he knows his stuff. He has a great sense of what will sound good on the radio and what the listeners will want to hear. What makes him fascinating to me is this contradiction—he loves it when his on-air presenters embarrass each other on air through pranks. He knows how much the audience love it when a well-executed prank is broadcast. BUT if he is the target of one of these potentially humiliating practical jokes, he spews. And the problem is, Leon is ridiculously easy to wind up. It might help to understand that Leon is not very tall. Actually, that last sentence is too politically correct. The man is tiny! Not tiny-tiny like a dwarf or a midget, but he does look like a teenage boy. Because of this he suffers from a severe condition known as ‘short man syndrome’, and when he’s the butt of a joke, his reaction is very predictable. It’s the same every time—silent fury. Leon knows the medium of radio so well that he knows just what to do. By not shouting or swearing, and in some cases not even speaking, he is essentially killing the joke—for us and for the listeners. No matter how good the prank is, without any reaction the conclusion is flat and the bit falls over.

  There have been occasions when Leon has been unable to disguise his fury, though. When this happens, the payoff is huge. But there is a day or two afterwards where we remain unsure if our employment is still safe!

  Here’s a few of my favourite Leon jokes that we have executed over the years.

  The famous undie fence of Remuera

  This was to be a tribute to the famous old Cardrona Bra Fence. This people-powered tourist attraction is, sadly, no more. The first bra was draped over this fence in 1999. By 2006, when the fence was up to 1000 bras, some mean-spirited locals had complained about it being an eyesore and the council tore the whole thing down.

  Leon had taken his whole family to Australia for a week-long holiday. I did some research (well, went through his emails) and found out that his lovely house in the leafy Auckland suburb of Remuera would be empty for that time. For some unexplainable reason he had foolishly gone against his better judgement and decided not to get a house-sitter in.

  A mistake he will never repeat!

  This gave us a large enough window of opportunity to transform his fence into something that could be considered either an eyesore or a tourist attraction, or perhaps even both!

  This joke required as many pairs of old underpants as we could get our hands on, so we had to broadcast our intentions. We were well aware that taking this to the airwaves could cause word of our master plan to filter back to Leon over in Aussie. This was of little concern to us. He was thousands of kilometres away. Even if one of his friends (assuming he had one) texted him to dob us in, there was nothing he could do to stop us. We all agreed that if he called, we would not answer and let it go to voicemail. This would allow us to avoid speaking to him, in case he attempted to intimidate us out of following through with our grand plan. Also it meant any voicemail messages he left could be played back on the air.

  So the plan was underway and the response was immediate! Within twenty-four hours courier bags started arriving. After opening a couple of these parcels myself, I delegated the job to one of the station interns. You assume these old underpants had been washed prior to being sent but there was no way of being certain.

  A sign-writer came to the party and offered to create a sign for the fence. Remuera was about to get its very first tourist attraction.

  The day before Leon was due to fly back we had well in excess of 100 pairs.

  Then, it happened.

  To save money, Leon had not been checking emails on his phone, trying to avoid costly data charges. But on his second-to-last day on holiday he went to a cafe with free wi-fi to check his inbox, and someone had given him the heads-up about what was going on back home.

  The timing was impeccable really—it meant only a day and a half of his holiday was ruined. Had he found out about this on the first day, he’d have spent the whole week in a nervous panic about what was going on back home.

  After reading his email he sent me a threatening text. In a nutshell, the text said that he would kill me if I touched his fence. I decided not to reply. If someone sends you a text saying they will kill you, I think sending a reply telling them to ‘chillax’ will probably just aggravate them.

  Anyway, retreat was simply not an option. It was too late for that.

  The famous undie fence of Remuera was all set up and immediately became a tourist attraction. Pedestrians were stopping for photos, motorists were slowing down to a crawl to read the sign, some locals even added their own undies to the fence.

  Jay-Jay, Mike and I got ourselves in position at 4.30 on the afternoon Leon was due to arrive home. Our hiding place was tucked in between bushes and behind a picket fence directly across the road from Leon’s house. From here we would see Leon and his family arrive home and we had a great vantage point to film their reaction.

  And yes, we did ask the neighbours’ permission first. That was an odd conversation to have with someone you have never met before—‘Hello, the man who lives across the road is our boss and we’ve covered his fence with used underwear. Can we hide in your garden and watch him arrive home?’

  Had they been listeners, it would have been fine, because they would have heard what we had been up to. They weren’t, but they were still okay about letting three tidily dressed thirty-somethings set up a stake-out on their property.

  5.15 pm: Leon pulled into his driveway.

  He did not so much as pause for a quick look out his car window as he turned into his drive. He parked up and seconds later his seven-year-old son came running back down the drive and onto the street for a good look. He started shouting at the rest of the family, ‘Eww, yuck. Guys, come and see this. There’s all these dirty gruts on our fence!’

  Moments later, and less than a minute after arriving home, Leon appeared armed with some gardening shears. Then, without hesitation, he started chopping down the display. He was expressionless, too—no laughter, no anger, nothing. Just a calm, calculated determination to get rid of our handiwork in the shortest time possible.

  We remained crouching out of sigh
t over the road, unsure when (or even if ) we should reveal ourselves.

  Another neighbour arrived home from work and yelled from her car window in a thuck and screechy Kiwi accent, ‘Aawwww, din’t be such a kulll-joy! Leave it up, ya miserable sod!’

  To which Leon, still hacking at the display, replied, ‘You can have it over at your place if you want!’ as he flung a teal-blue thong (good condition, one lady owner) in the direction of the car.

  We sensed a breakthrough in his demeanour. Leon was humiliated but in a good mood due to his week on the beach in Cairns. Come to think of it, his holiday tan combined with his short stature made him look very much like an Oompa-Loompa. All that was missing from his makeover were green hair and white eyebrows.

  We jumped out from the neighbours’ shrubs armed with video cameras and recording devices and revealed ourselves.

  Leon knew exactly why we were there.

  ‘Hey, guys! What are you doing here?’ he asked anyway.

  He then proceeded to give us NOTHING. All that work for no pay-off.

  We went back to the drawing board after that and came up with an alternative plan. IF Leon is brave enough to take annual leave in the future, we plan to create the famous undie fence of Remuera II. This time, instead of using real undies, we’ll recruit a sign-writer to paint them on. Granted, it probably won’t look as impressive, but it will last longer and irritate Leon a bit more and that’s the ultimate goal.

  Not sure what Leon did with the pants once he removed them. But I could swear I saw him in that little black G-string the following Monday.

  P. D. H. (Public Display of Humiliation)

  As a child Leon was a tap-dancing sensation—he took Blenheim by storm. He was a child prodigy in tap-dancing circles, a dancer destined for greatness, and he could have been a world champion, but he threw it all away too soon.