TIE ME UP, TIE ME DOWN

"I like to be tied up," my boyfriend said under the flickering neon lights of a bar in Cambridge that the owners wished was in Texas. Coyotes and cowboys was the decor and the waitresses wore mini skirts and cowboy boots with their permed, bleached hair.

Jesse (a good cowboy name, but this Jesse was no bank robber from the Gold Rush Days but a northeast city boy of the nineties into high-tech and handcuffs) and I were discussing bondage seriously for the first time in our sixteen months of knowing each other. (I guess in this day and age it's just one of those things that inevitably comes up in a relationship along with "Do you want kids" and "What kind of retirement plan should we get.") Jesse had real handcuffs that were used on a real felon as well as on many hot babes and on Jesse himself. They dangled from the rear view mirror of his red sports car where normal people hang bronzed baby shoes and where taxi drivers who sit on beaded seat covers often drape rosary beads and Madonna statues, presumably to ward off road kill.

I had assumed it was just an image device that went along with owning a red sports car with personalized plates. How did ropes and handcuffs come up in the normal course of frolicking under the covers? "Excuse me while I get the handcuffs from my car," he moaned while kissing her deeply. It's not that I have a lack of imagination, I fantasize and role play in my mind alone and with partners; it was just an alien concept to me to introduce into the space of two commingling natural beings, a tangible object from the outside world, be it Frisbees, butter or rope.

"It's a power thing," said my anorexic, pretty, pale, blonde British friend. Tanya could easily have played a heroin addict in an Andy Warhol film had she not been a toddler in the sixties. She wasn't charismatic, but had a certain je ne sais quoi and seemed to teeter between the daylight world of the living and the cool night urban chic territory where one can down a fifth of straight vodka and still be coherent. Jesse, of course, fantasized about her endlessly.

"But it's the person who is tied up who has the power," Jesse chimed us from his IBM in another state as he imagined being tied up.

"I don't know," typed Tanya. "It doesn't seem that way to me when I could tie you up and leave you there for your roommate to discover in two days."

"Why would one do that?," asked Jesse, "The game would be over. The point is I have the power to come, to make you come, without having to do anything."

"But if you're all tied up, you can't DO anything," responded Tanya.

"Well, that's right, and that's how I make you do everything."

"And what if you're gagged and blindfolded?"

"Then I don't have to speak or even look at you, and I can still get you to do everything I want. I have the power while tied up, by giving you the power to do whatever you want to me."

Tanya missed the point. In the nine-day interim before I was to see Jesse again, I amuse myself thinking of various scenarios involving knots and naked wrists.

I make a note on my Powerbook to go to the hardware store for six-inch hooks.