When I worked in a dungeon a thousand years ago, there was this client that all the girls called Pony Brad. Pony Brad was weird, even by our standards.
At first, everything seemed normal. When booking, Pony Brad would request what seemed to be a regular incest roleplay (usually with two providers, though he often had walk-ons, too). Pony Brad was back-of-house, of course. When booking, this client used the simple, whitewashed Brad, which of course was not his real name. Pretty workaday stuff, pretty unremarkable. Since I was, and still am, compelled by incest fantasies, Pony Brad could select me from among the girls who included this activity on their yes list.
When Pony Brad arrived for our first session, the other girl and I took care of business, then brought him to the Green Room. Pony Brad pointed at me and said, “You’re my aunt,” and at the other girl and said, “and you’re my sister.” Straightforward enough. So far, so good. Time to put on the old razzle-dazzle and make out with a bitch I lowkey despised while pretending that we were all related.
But not three minutes passed before Pony Brad suddenly made a Martin Luther-worthy volte-face. “Now I’m the dad! And you’re the daughter! And you’re the mom!” (Avengers, reassemble!) He did this over and over again, without allowing for any time to inhabit the characters he’d given us, preventing any fidelity to the fantasy as we understood it. All the other girl and I could do was giggle and try to keep up. Pony Brad was an improv exercise—a stone-cold sober one, at that—which meant Yes, anding our way through a series of scenarios that soon led the reason why everyone called him Pony Brad.
Sometimes when the pony entered the chat, it manifested as Brad himself. Sometimes it was assigned to you and/or your coworker. Sometimes everyone was the pony, all three (or more) of us. Other than decreeing pony as your (or his) new identity, Brad did not offer any other explanation as to the creature’s function, or character, or origins. Pony play? Sorry, that would be too legible. Other than a little winnying, Brad’s pony was as divorced from kinky conceptions of the equine as it was from reality. It could speak. It could walk on two feet. It sucked on Brad’s nipples. It sucked on the other girl’s nipples. It snuck into Brad’s house through the window late at night (to suck his nipples). It often rode Brad like a pony (no one knows why Brad didn’t ride the pony, as nature intended). The pony seemed capable of everything that was not ponylike, especially breaking and entering. It was like Lassie or Flipper or, yes, Mr. Ed, an outrage against god repackaged as the normal, delivered to us as providers with the expectation of coherence that would have made us feel gaslit if we didn’t also get the feeling that Brad really did think that everyone else followed his erotic logic. I was desperate to find out what he would do if he encountered a real pony1.
The climax of Pony Brad’s scenes was not his orgasm, but rather the moment when the pony revealed itself2. Its entrance was the heart of the fantasy that brought him to the dungeon where me and my friends fried eggs, smoked weed, and did homework between sessions. He wasn’t trying to destabilize us, to find our weak spots, as clients often did. Pony Brad was just a genuine weirdo with a mutilated attention span.
After our sessions, every girl was expected to fill out a 3x5 with notes about their client, all of which were stored in a card catalog in the office (a mechanism you’ll recognize if you’re a Millennial or older)3. On the card, you’d list the client’s interests, usually in acronym form (r/p for roleplay, s/o for strapon, etc.), how long he booked, what room you used. Now you or another girl could pull the card the next time the client tried to book and get the CliffsNotes on what he liked, what he didn’t, if he tipped, whether he knew how to clean his asshole. You could learn if a guy was annoying, or the type who only went for new girls because he was a predator, and a cheap one at that, or even 86’d, as they sometimes were.
Pony Brad had a lot of cards. I wish I could go back and read what I wrote about him.
“We’re not looking at mere fantasy, here,” I wrote in Part 1 of this series, “but fantasy remembered, refracted, even regretted…The memory of a fantasy, after all, is its own fantasy.”
If we were to attempt to understand the desires of Pony Brad with only the acronyms written on his 3x5 card—and without the rest of the card for context—we would fail. His fantasy would be incommunicable, a hermetic vision that couldn’t be shared and enjoyed with (or profited on by) other people. Even having heard rumors from girls who’d seen him before, I walked into my first session with Pony Brad with a specific idea of what an incest fantasy should be. The problem was that it looked and felt and manifested differently for Pony Brad than it did for most other people.
Is this a problem, as I’ve just put it? Well, no, not among adults communicating their desires to each other freely, whether as a recreational pursuit or a transactional one. But it becomes problem when fantasies like Pony Brad’s need to be expressed in ways that evade censure on certain platforms or in certain spaces, where it has been decided—by the state, the church, the family, the pigs, the credit card company—that some desires are inherently unsafe or obscene, even when being shared by and among consenting adults. Pony Brad’s pony (and what a beautifully protean pony it is!) illuminates the difference between fantasy as our own unique yet shareable pleasure engines and fantasy as an avenue for disciplining, regulating, and ultimately capitalizing on the individual’s desires—natural healthy normal beautiful sensations of which all have been blessed, but so many are deprived4.
In leather and its subcultures, we refer to the action of BDSM as play, and Pony Brad’s (only some of which was actively sexual) really did remind me of a hyperactive kid at recess, tyrannizing the make-believe of his friends with a game that no one else understood. His play was not to my taste, but I don’t remember him as a difficult client. He certainly wasn’t dangerous, though he was annoying; following the session, he did what a lot of tricks inexplicably do and pulled out his phone to show us photos of his parents, who were back in India arranging a marriage for him that he didn’t want.
I worried for the future Mrs. Pony Brad, less because of her husband’s fantasies than for his refusal to cope with real life. Like many clients—like many straight men—he was a victim of his own magical thinking: maybe, someday, one of us hookers would take him away from his dreadful obligations, saving him from the middle-class family life that rejected us without a second thought.
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Why a pony and not a horse??
He may have cum and he may not have, I can’t recall. This was a thousand years ago, remember?
Tina Horn, a fellow alumnus of the dungeon in question, has written or podcasted about this card catalog somewhere before…
I’m not making the claim that all of these are sexual, though they very often are!
this was so soothing to read. for various reasons, i’ve lost access to the ol’ razzle-dazzle atm, but today i learned it’s still nice to read the narrative. especially in your voice.