As we stood at the entrance to the headquarters of Kink.com on Mission Street in San Francisco awaiting the free, monthly, one night tour, my friend Rick, his work friend Natalie and I imagined being greeted by a host resembling Willie Wonka crossed with Marilyn Manson..some eccentric, cross dressing deviant in a top hat and women's lingerie wearing fishnet stockings. Rick joked about the sights we'd see on this most magical tour, announcing, in his best tour guide voice, "Now if you'll just step this way, here we have "The Gimp Room". Oh how we laughed and tittered and chuckled and guffawed, imagining the phantasmagorical and perverse adventure that awaited us within the foreboding building that used to be an armory housing the National Guard in the early 1900's. The building had been neglected for several years until the founder of the Kink.com S&M porn website purchased it for a song 3 years ago.
The building itself resembles a castle straight out of an old Hammer horror film and seems a bit lonely not being surrounded by angry villagers waving pitch forks and torches at its base. The main difference now being that I doubt Dr. Frankenstein would have proudly raised a rainbow flag above his castle....even if he was being directed by James Whale. We went there thinking we might be able to talk someone into letting us possibly shoot inside the building...you know, kinky location scouting.
Weelllll...our host wasn't exactly a cross-dressing Willie Wonka, just a very business-like young woman who ignored the boisterous laughter during certain parts of the tour with a very straight face.
The interior was not the labyrinthine Frankenstein set I had imagined...it was simply a massive structure converted into a sort of movie studio with some rather impressive sets...but mostly it was just an old, neglected military building that had now been fashioned to suit the bondage-driven content of Kink.com, with sets fashioned around the old structure and now adorned with plenty of chains and beds and rather simple set dressings. Impressive, but not the mind-blowing burst of hilarity I'd half expected. There was a padded cell set with an adjoining one-way mirror observation room...outside of which sat a prop table displaying numerous, rather sinister-looking bits of bondage gear.
One set had a hole fashioned in the floor with a closing metal frame which, we were told, was for placing an actress' head in so that her rear end stood up in the air in the opposite direction...hmmmmm. Whatever floats yer boat, Jimmy!
To our delight, following Rick's impromptu tour guide ad-libs before we began, we entered a room that resembled something out of Clive Barker's film "Hellraiser", which the tour guide informed us was actually known as "The Gimp Room"...which prompted me to laugh out loud before anyone else did, which somehow felt slightly inappropriate and embarrassing, as Rick hadn't yet entered and was outside in the hall snapping pictures of some kind of horrifically-perverse torture device, fashioned to cage a person on all fours for God knows what nefarious purpose.
The highpoint of this Wednesday night excursion was hearing the tour guide actually say these words: "We ask that no one touch any of the machines in the "Fuck Machine Room" because they've all been sanitized". Hey...no argument there. After being introduced to a robot called "Fuckzilla" and its new appendage the "Chick Lick"...a chainsaw blade re-fashioned and now adorned with soft rubber tongues...I had really no desire to touch anything in the "Fuck Machine Room"...but I was thankful I had hand sanitizer in my coat pocket....as I felt I too might need to be sanitized after the tour.
1 comment:
Interesting. . . :-)
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