DAVID: Members only (unlocked)

on going under

I’m taking the month off from thinking, so this essay—written but never published for the dear, departed Astra—is now unlocked. Don’t worry, paid subscribers! I’ll be making it up to you, likely with blood. Stay cool out there.

Though it offers a steam room, a sauna, and bodywork services, Oakland’s Piedmont Springs is best known (among my old milieu of Millennial punks and queers, anyway) for its private outdoor hot tubs.

Wedged between a garden store and a bookshop, the spa’s shabby foyer leads to a wood-paneled corridor, beyond which are the patios that are so popular you should aim to book a week in advance. Hang your bag on one of the wall hooks and, once your escort closes the door behind you, strip down and surrender yourself to the caldera. If clouds bruise the square of sky above, it’s easy to imagine that you’re cloistered in the core of a Pescadero yurt, the air piquant with sequoias and sea salt. 

From Berkeley’s women-only backyard nude tub with the hottest temps I’ve ever braved; to gay bathhouses like Steamworks and Eros; to the geothermal pools scattered throughout the Bay Area, there are plenty of local institutions distinguished by their potential for sweat and anonymity, but Piedmont Springs is probably my favorite. You can go with your friends to shvitz. You can go with your dates to fuck. You can go with your regular because, for the price of $27 per person per hour (though I think it was cheaper, back in my day), it’s one of the most convenient places for professional piss play outside of a private residence.

Discreet, relatively inexpensive, and requiring minimal cleanup—there’s a shower in the corner and drains in the concrete floor—at Piedmont Springs, you can work with the sun on your shoulders and a jet massage as consolation prize if your client no-shows. Not that G ever did. 

I first started seeing G at my old dungeon, and when I went independent, he came with me. When we met, he described himself as a normal guy into vanilla sex, with one interest niche enough that he was obliged to outsource its fulfillment: the desire to slide under a pretty girl and drown, for a few precious moments, in her sharp and silky warmth. G was covered in traditional tattoos and restored muscle cars for fun, but he went schoolboy when he talked about what he wanted from me.

It’s so sexy, he said. G loved sexy things. And it tastes amazing.

He struggled to convey what it was about golden showers that he liked so much, and why they brought him to what was essentially a brothel, rather than to the feet of an open-minded girlfriend. This mystifying urge left him both verbose and inarticulate, as our deepest erotic desires do for most of us; though he was no poet, G’s passion, which he was happy to leave more or less unexamined, felt poetic to me. 

A couple times a month, G drove down from Sacramento to meet me at Piedmont Springs, which both of us preferred to the dungeon bathroom where we first spent time together. Granted an additional layer of privacy by the roar of the jets, it was easy to relax in our moisture-slick cubicle, where the air is keen with chlorine yet soft with mildew. In the daylight, our sessions felt casual, even like happenstance—preferable for G, who tended to date the girls he hired, grimly trusting that the strippers and pro-dommes that were twenty-five years his junior shared his belief in a connection that was more than transactional. And maybe it was for some of them. G was a nice enough guy with a good job, and not at all bad-looking, though admittedly I can’t remember a single thing about his dick.

Timing is essential with piss guys, which meant that, nice though G was, our dates were unpleasant for me. He usually booked for an hour, which meant I had to hold it for 60 minutes at minimum, not including however long it took to work up a reserve before the session began (and god forbid he ask to extend!). To give a professional golden shower, you must be well-hydrated overall, not just for the sake of volume—like a dog on a walk, quantity matters—but because most people of G’s sort have strong opinions about their ambrosia’s flavor, smell, even texture (in a transactional situation, these opinions can veer into micromanagement, but that’s fetishists for you). 

What’s more, I couldn’t relieve myself until G was ready to cum, which only happened when he’d had his hour’s worth of fooling around and talking about himself. It’s one thing to sit on a full bladder while hunting for a place to pull over. It’s another to do it while flirting or even fucking, usually in heels and uncomfortable lingerie, all while trying to maintain the illusion of a sudden, surprising need to let loose a gallon of crystal-clear nectar all over the nearest man’s unwitting pate. Whereas gay men seem to prefer to use “watersports” for their piss play, a term communicating a jocular, messy, and even egalitarian exchange of fluids, the more straight-inflected “golden shower” suggests a top-down phenomenon not found in nature unless by way of divine circumstance, like Zeus’ nocturnal visit to Danaë’s bronze prison. 

Was it the sense of being anointed that got G’s dick hard? Maybe I’m overthinking it. It’s easy enough to compare the golden shower to orgasm—or, these days, to the internet porn-popularized phenomenon of female ejaculation. As with orgasm, a golden shower begins with pressure, building as you approach an intuited but unknown limit, tantalized by a pleasure that promises its own annihilation. The animating liquids in your body boil, preparing to burst from one of your rare natural apertures. Sensation races through your nerves, nearing an obscure destination, an irresistible nexus that hits like a flipped switch, like jets screaming awake in quiet water. Boom. Nut. The little death, all over someone else’s face. 

Inevitable though it may feel, this release can’t always be taken for granted. It didn’t take long for me to develop a comfort with golden showers, but that didn’t mean they came easily every time, even with G, one of my best clients. There were days that I realized, with his eyes locked on my cunt and his muscles tensed, that I was unable to perform—but the show must go on. While I waited out the freeze, I pretended it was all a part of our naughty little game, a withholding rather than a malfunctioning. This was the part of the job where personality was clutch, and where an injection of dominance came in handy, even for someone as vanilla as G professed to be.

It’s going to feel so good, baby, I would say. It’s coming all over your face. Is that what you want? Shit like that.

The trick was to build tension, playing on his anticipation, hypnotizing him with the threat of attaining his fantasy. And what was that, exactly? To break the rules? To feel special? To go under for good?

Before I started working at that dungeon, I never would have thought that I’d come to enjoy pissing on anyone. At best, I figured while waiting in the hallway for my first-ever $30 walk-on, it would be another thing to grudgingly do for money, like mop floors or organize spreadsheets. I think I can be forgiven for once believing this kind of scene was always straightforward, all about the piss. But then sometimes, while perched above G’s handsome nose, the need for relief so strong I wasn’t sure I could have made it to the toilet three feet away, I watched him watching me—desperate yet focused, nowhere else but here, and yet totally gone—and realized I could feel it, too. 

Earlier this year, when I watched Ken Russell’s campy horror comedy, The Lair of The White Worm, I was reminded of G, by now almost a decade in my past. Amanda Donohue stars as the film’s villain, the sylphy Lady Sylvia, an immortal priestess posing as an aristocratic nympho who kidnaps people to feed the medieval monster roaming the caves under her estate. Stumbling across a custardy young man hitching for a ride in a rainstorm, she lures him back to her manor, where she convinces him to take a hot bath in a tub even bigger than the ones you’ll find at Piedmont Springs. Lulled by Lady Sylvia to horny compliance, the young man dutifully stands to be soaped down, only to watch her sink her fangs into his cock. Paralyzed by her poison, he can’t resist as she pushes him under with her latex boot, his dying breath joining the bubbles like so much foam on the sea.

Though the young man is drowned, he does not meet his doom in Lady Sylvia’s cauldron. He was lost the moment he came across her ominous little sportster, her garter belt flashing from the British side of the car. Though he has his reservations—her absurd negligee, her brioche-thick double entendre, her canines winsome against her lipstick—he doesn’t feel unsafe until it’s too late. He knows he is being naughty, staying out longer than he’d intended when he left the hostel this morning. 

“To die so that the god may live is a privilege,” Lady Sylvia reassures him, moments before he goes under for good.

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