You see, way before I met Noah Cohen, I was a young, struggling, single, black woman living alone in poverty in a one-room apartment in an rat-infested ghetto apartment in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn — a neighborhood where young boys, for entertainment, would pour gasoline on stray cats and light them on fire just to see them light up the street in the middle of a hot summer’s night. Now, I was working seventy hours a week, relying on ramen noodles for dinner. I was barely able to pay my rent. And even though I was working two jobs — the ad sales rep by day and the diner waitress gig at night — I just couldn’t keep up with my monthly bills, no matter how hard I tried. So when Dick Schnitzel calls me into his office and says menacingly, “A word to the wise: Either you sell $10,000 worth of ads by the end of this week or you had better find yourself a new job by Monday,” I figure it’s time to start thinking outside the box. Although I can’t stand this little twit, I figure I better crack the whip, especially since I’ll admit, I really haven’t made many sales all week. What better place to find some good leads than in all those raunchy ads in the back of our grimy paper. The truth is, I had kind of avoided that section, thinking it was a bit too raunchy for a lady like myself. So I circle a few ads. One that sprung at me was marked “Mistress O’s Role-Play.” It stood out because of its large ad size. In the newspaper business, large size equals large commissions. So I call the ad. “Mistress O’s place, how can I help you?.” After I set up the ad sales appointment, I’m out the door and on my way. On this particular Thursday afternoon, I take the 1 Broadway local train down to Varick Street in SOHO. Thanks to my ill-fitting black leather pumps purchased at the ten-dollar store, I wince in pain as I walk three long NYC concrete blocks toward the street address almost inscrutably scribbled on my yellow Post-it. I finally manage to find Mistress O’s place. It is a very old brownstone building that looks, quite literally, like a hole in the wall. Mistress O is a “female dominant” who has been placing full-page ads on the second-to-last page of our newspaper for as long as I can recall. I’m a little nervous since this is my first visit to a dominatrix’s dungeon. I take a full breath of courage and ring her building’s front bell. After a short while, I hear, “Yes?” as her voice echoes through the weathered, stained, white plastic intercom, crookedly screwed to the wall staring ominously at me. “It’s Melba, from the Weekly Press,” I speak up, my soprano voice warbling. She gives me strict, step-by-step orders on how to proceed to her door. “Watch your step down the hallway… we’re about to do major construction work in here,” she utters in her deep alto voice. I open the heavy brown door and begin walking down the dusty, dark staircase, which leads to the basement. After completing this obstacle course, through half-eaten, termite-ridden, rotting wooden hallways (which, by the way, I am certain will cave in on me at any moment), I finally arrive in one piece at her front door and ring the bell. Mistress O opens the door, and suddenly I find myself immersed in a sea of fetishistic black leather furniture and pink neon lights. I have never witnessed any scene like this before, and although I don’t know it at the time, this chance meeting will change my life forever.