Best Gay Bondage Erotica, page 16
“During a thirty-six-hour scene,” he says, “the bondage master must exercise enough sensitivity to know what light, to medium, to severe restraint his bondage slave can handle.”
“You’re like a professor of bondage.”
“I’m more like a tour guide.”
“Of rope tricks.”
“Of the windmills of your mind.”
I uncross my legs and cross them again. “Some guys,” I say, “have some idea how much bondage they can take; maybe restraint as simple as handcuffs; as medium as a spread-eagle stretch, ankles and wrists, standing up or lying down; as severe as a total body-harness suspension, hooded, blindfolded, gagged, and covered with a gas mask.”
He looks at me. “Some men prefer total mummification.” He opens a drawer. “Wrapped completely in Ace bandages or leather or rubber. Tied into a straightjacket, then rolled into wet sheets, and strapped down with leather belts. Tied into a ball, hooded, dropped in a canvas sack, nailed into a wooden crate, buried in a ventilated hole in the cellar.”
I touch my crotch. “Is this supposed to be making me hard?”
“That’s one of the seductions of bondage. A man has some idea of how far under he’d like to go; and as I take him there, he finds that he wants to go farther, heavier, than he first believed.”
“Bondage is addictive?”
“What fetish isn’t addictive? Bondage is a kind of wonderful downer. A relaxant from the world’s fast pace. Bondage is by its nature meditative. Once a guy acquires a taste for restraint, he automatically moves into a higher level of sensual sophistication.”
“Do you mind if I hit my popper?”
“Why not? If a guy needs a joint to calm down on arrival or to swallow something before he arrives, that’s his business. Once I put the first restraint on him, the slave has no movement he can call his own. As his bondage master, I control what goes into his body. I’m no prohibitionist, but I don’t use drugs. I need to be clear enough to monitor my immobile slave’s condition.”
“What if a guy needs poppers for pain?”
“That’s a variation on a theme. Like adding a suffocation trip into the bondage, putting his breathing into bondage in a Gas Mask Scene. I can fill the rubber gas mask tube with whatever I want my slave to breathe or re-breathe. Popper. Cigar smoke.”
“Shit!”
“If it’s on the menu.”
“What if a guy chickens out because he’s being coiled and wrapped and bound more completely than he bargained for?”
“Bondage is not necessarily the S/M of sadism and masochism. I subscribe to the definition of S/M as sensuality and mutuality. I have a printed contract. My bondage bottom signs it before the scene: ‘From such-a-time to such-a-time, so-and-so is the property of so-and-so,’ namely me, ‘who has my uncoerced adult consent to do the following’ and then we spell it all out: thick ropes, thin ropes, heavy chain, dental floss bondage of every single tooth in his head, hand and foot bondage, barbed wire around his chest and dick. Whatever is his fantasy. Whatever is our pleasure.”
“Sounds like a prenuptial agreement,” I say. “Very civilized.”
“To my bondage-top mind, the bondage slave presents himself as a gift to be wrapped by the bondage master.” He smiles a smile that makes me want to blow him. “To many men, just beginning bondage, to some intermediate rope-freaks, and even to heavy restraint addicts there comes a surprise.”
“The best surprise is a thrill.”
“The gift gets a gift.”
“Silver threads? Golden needles? What?” I try not to show how much I appreciate any man who has his trip together not only physically, but also has scoped his fetish out analytically. A lot of guys can get at a man’s body but lack the head to take over his mind.
And isn’t that what guys stand around bars for until last call?
Just waiting, not for the Perfect Body to walk in, but the Perfect combination of Head and Body that can sweep them away, even for just a night, toward an unusual destiny.
Just to let go of your head and body.
Just to know a force outside you has taken over the responsibility of your body so totally that he restrains your brains.
Just a need to let go. Just a need to surrender control.
At least to glide into a space of trust for a while.
“Men have a need to give.”
“Especially in a world with a shortage of takers, of guys who have a talent to take—in the best sense of the word.”
He knots a perfect noose.
Signs and omens are everywhere.
“Bondage is not just sexual stimulation,” he says. “The bondage top is father, teacher, lover, disciplinarian. He takes control in a world that seems out of control. The slave gives his very being. To be tied up is to be totally helpless.”
A kind of sweet claustrophobia runs down my spine. Would a good gonzo writer allow himself to get tied up at this point for the sake of journalism?
“To be tied up is to be totally helpless, totally dependent. Lots of adult American males really ought to get themselves into this space: to physically and mentally surrender to somebody. By being a slave, a man finds out that there is a master. By giving up control, he finds a controller. By letting go, he finds ways of hanging on.”
“There are holes in your logic,” I say. “Maybe existential holes.”
“Why?” He loops the rope into knots no sailor ever knew.
“Because I want there to be holes in your logic.”
“Are you afraid I sound like I want to tie you up?”
“Yeah. You sound like you want to tie me up.”
“There’s not a body on earth that doesn’t look better when tied into bondage sculpture.”
“The strain on the muscles? The chest heaving deep for breath?” Am I leading him on?
“You don’t like that?” He caresses the ropes.
“My head is afraid of it.”
“What about your cock?” He smiles. He looks awful good.
“It’s hard.”
“You let your head do all your thinking?”
“I should maybe just follow my cock around?”
“Sometimes,” he says, “maybe you have to trust not your head, but your cock.”
“Maybe I’m just outside your fetish area. Maybe I’m like most guys who are afraid of the sexual activity that seems far out to them. Maybe a guy has to be a natural-born bondage freak.”
“Any man can learn the sensuality of bondage. Just like guys learn the erotic sensuality of their earlobes, assholes, tits. A lot of sexual things, high sexual things, not just garden-variety blow-job sex, are the result of working at something to learn it, to acquire a taste for it.”
“So,” I say, “a guy who never thought much about bondage maybe ought to play out a scene to see how his taste might develop?”
“I look for that kind of guy. A man willing to learn something new. I like to work with, work on, seduce a man into enjoying something he never thought he’d like. Take Lawrence of Arabia getting tied down, whipped, and fucked. That had never happened to Lawrence before. The Arabs thought Lawrence would hate it. Lawrence thought Lawrence would hate it. Lawrence got a surprise. He liked it!”
“What about the American POWs in ’Nam? The Viet Cong used heavy and prolonged bondage on a lot of them. What do you think of that situation?”
“I think,” he hesitates. “No. I know that out of all those tied up young fliers, sheer percentages mean that at least a few got off in their heads and their cocks on the bondage despite what their straight patriotic programming was.”
“You think a lot of men need restraint, want bondage, and don’t fully realize what it is they’re looking for. You think bondage would directly relieve the tension of the lives they’re living?”
He looks hard at me. “How do you spell real security?” he asks.
“B-o-n-d-a-g-e is the answer you want.”
“Men need to know the limits. Especially in a totally permissive society. Bondage is a very physical means of limiting a man’s activity. Some criminoid types are criminal for a main subconscious reason: deep down they really like, and need, to get handcuffed by a couple Big-Daddy cops who tell them they’ve gone too far and who toss them naked into a dark isolation cell in solitary.”
“Madness takes its toll.”
“Think about it,” he says. “Think about those cops. Anybody who is a cop gets off on it. Cops like bondage. They study restraint techniques. They practice handcuffing each other. They get off on steel-mesh cages. Guys don’t do jobs like that unless they’re getting off on it at some level.”
“I’ve read about military bondage in Navy SERE training.”
“Then you’ll like this. At the USMC brig at Camp Pendleton, the guards hog-tie the military prisoners, hands behind the back, wrists tied together and pulled down, then tied to the ankles pulled up behind the butt. Then they wrap the prisoner’s head with white adhesive tape. Think about it: a young Marine, stripped to his skivvies and boots, with his head mummified completely except for his nostrils. He can’t see. He can’t yell. He can’t move. He’s left in an isolation box. What’s he gonna do? Go crazy with claustrophobia, or, when he can’t beat it, join it and get off on it? You think those MPs don’t get off on doing that surgical-tape number? Hell, they don’t do what they don’t like. They just wrap their activity in God and Flag and anything goes. Overt sex may be very subliminal, but it’s there just the same.”
“Last summer,” I say, “it wasn’t so subliminal. Seven USMC officers were court-martialed for bringing Marine recruits into L.A. for sex acts and to make sex movies.”
“Not much has changed since I was an MP.”
“So what kind of guy do you prefer to tie up?”
“A decent body. A good head. A willingness to be sensual. An ability to trust. Mostly, I look for a sense of vulnerability.”
“Vulnerability?”
“Vulnerability. That’s what most bondage masters want, because the master is going to make the guy even more vulnerable. Bondage is not just a bedroom game. Bondage is an actualizing of fantasy. Bondage is living a lifestyle. It is living. It is the reality for the time the slave is in service. It is a symbol of man’s real place in the whole universe.”
“A friend of mine says bondage is unnatural,” I say. “He says movement is the essence of life.”
“A typical American attitude: movement for the sake of moving. Of course, he’s right—if gross movements of arms and legs and running around is what he means. Jesus! Today’s religion is jogging. What’s everybody running to or from? A little more contemplative restraint, a little more bondage, and people might find out a bit more about themselves.”
He wears full leather and sits like a man who knows his way around certain nighttime worlds.
“Your friend is right,” he says, “if he defines life’s essential movement as the flow of blood inside the body, as the run of electrical impulses through the nervous system. Bondage restrains the arms and the legs, slows down a guy’s run-around attitude, so he can tune in to the more subtle aspects of his being.”
“What is this?” I ask. “Zen and the Art of Bondage Maintenance ?”
“Close to it. The Orientals are masters of bondage.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I lie. “I’ve never been a rice queen.”
“Our mutual friend said you spent part of last year in Japan.”
“He spilled the egg rolls, huh?”
“Everything.” He coils the rope around his big hand.
“Everything.” I consider that a minute. “I spent a night at a Samurai House of Bondage outside Tokyo.”
“Then you know.”
“I just pinned on my Downed-American-Flier fantasy and let the Samurai bondage master do his trip for the assembled group.” I’m gaining his interest by the minute.
“You liked the quality of the Japanese bondage?”
“I liked the exhibitionism of being a six-foot-one hundred-sixty-pound American male displayed immobile in a roomful of Asian men.” I look at him. I try to read his face. “How’s that,” I ask, “for a true confession?”
“Did you cum?”
“What kind of question is that?” I get indignant fast when the answer is yes.
“A revealing one. The answer will tell me where you head is.”
“Where my head was—for the appropriate occasion.”
“Did you cum?” Insistence shines in his dark eyes.
“Yes,” I surrender. “I came. Yeah. The bondage master ordered one of the other men, a very young well-muscled Yakuza type…”
“What,” he interrupts, “is a Yakuza?”
“A Yakuza is a member of the Japanese Mafia. The guys have tattoos on both shoulders down past the biceps, down the sides of the torso, and around both thighs. Hot.”
“Very hot.”
“This Yakuza with the ritual tattoos held a vibrator against my fundoshi.”
“Fundoshi?”
“The Japanese underwear, about six feet long, that wraps tight around your crotch like a jockstrap. The bondage master wanted the Yakuza to make me cum.”
“You didn’t want to?”
“The Japanese are very polite. The bondage master would have been insulted if I hadn’t shot.”
“Are you polite enough to allow me to restrain you completely, supposing I wanted to?”
“I came to Los Angeles to run around and see the sights and meet a lot of guys and go to the bars; thirty-six hours is a long time out of a week’s visit.”
“I’ll bet you went to run around Tokyo, too. If you let me tie you up, you might slow down enough to figure out that a long intense scene with one guy is better than superficial nuptials with one hundred guys.”
“Bondage scares some guys. Bondage has a lot of implications: trust, betrayal, gagging, panic. Implications have consequences. Some guys could get scared and freak out. Maybe I’m too claustrophobic to share your trip.”
“I guarantee you’d feel good.”
“What if the building catches fire? What if you have a heart attack?”
“What if the sky falls?” In the corner, a complete suspension harness hangs waiting.
“So I’m playing Devil’s Advocate against bondage. I mean most guys don’t understand it. Explain it if you can. I’m a quick study. I like to think I’m a sensualist. But frankly, if you tied me up—hysteria.”
“Really?”
“Maybe.”
“Hysteria is an honest bondage stage to pass through. When the body is restrained, the mind starts doing a number on itself. That’s why druglessness is really a part of the sensitivity of the prolonged bondage trip. As you pass with full awareness through the bondage steps, you discover that the confining experience becomes an expanding experience. Since the bondage scene, immobile, gagged, and hooded, is essentially an external sense-deprivation trip, I find that not only bondage itself, but the longer bondage trip especially, appeals to guys who are more sensitive and aware of themselves. When you are tied three to four hours in one position, unable to hear, see, speak, or touch, and are touched only to be manipulated into a new position, your mind floats back into an almost womb-remembered state.”
“I’ve read John Lilly’s Center of the Cyclone about sensory-deprivation tanks and Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, which is about death—which is what my doctor told me to avoid at all costs.”
“Maybe you read too much.”
“They’re both good books. They say almost exactly what you say. They say about life in general what you say about bondage in particular.”
“No shit,” he says.
“There’s a life-lesson to unravel here in bondage.”
“I’ll tell you a life lesson. A sperm shot down a narrow penis canal gets caught in an ovum bound to the wall of a womb. Life starts in bondage. We’re locked down in bondage by the gravity of this planet. We’re buried in bondage.”
“If you saw the movie Coma,” he continues, “you saw real Medical Bondage. In Washington, D.C., some years back, an Army mathematician by the name of Stan Wilks spent seventy-two days in suspended animation. Doctors at George Washington University Hospital intentionally paralyzed him with his consent. They used curare, the drug Brazilian Indians use on blowgun darts. For seventy-two fucking days, Wilks was totally conscious, but he couldn’t move an eye, blink, utter a single sound, move a muscle, or even breathe without a respirator.”
“Doctors are very kinky,” I say. “If we’re going to play ‘Can You Top This,’ I know of this straight bodybuilder in San Francisco. His father’s a cop. Ever since this kid—his name’s Mike Dayton—was twelve or so, his father’s been coaching his workouts: bodybuilding, tai chi. His dad, the cop, has been hanging him by the neck in the garage since he was a teenager. Mike’s the only guy alive strong enough to break a pair of regulation police handcuffs. A couple summers ago, when he was about twenty-four, Mike was scheduled to be hanged by the neck at the Concord Pavilion. I was going to take the BART train, but Mike wasn’t allowed to be hanged in public because all those Bay Area suburban parents feared their kids might try it.”
“Bondage is as American as stocks in colonial Salem, and as contemporary as flogging teenage delinquents in Delaware. Bondage is necessary for a good whipping.” He pulls out a recent news photo of some foreign cop convicted of taking bribes, stripped, and being flogged by another heavyweight cop in a courtyard. The bondage rack, to hold the man secure for the beating, shows frequent use.
In turn, I pull out my scrapbook and show him the following items.
• Police found a man bound to a tree in the woods early yesterday. He told the officers he had been tied for more than twelve hours. When police attempted to cut the chains, he refused their aid, saying that the men who had bound him were coming back, but had been scared off by the arrival of the squad cars.
• On Hampstead Heath, outside London, men are frequently found tied to trees or staked out. One man, found crucified by police after midnight, refused their aid and they left him, since they knew the nature of the Heath after dark.
