The Curse of the Bag.

by Daniel guy

When Carl was eight, he was still terrified of the dark. He never admitted this to his older brother or his friends and certainly not his parents.  No one would have suspected that this lad, with his jet black hair, deep brown eyes, and confident smile was troubled by anything. 

But each night Carl would find it very hard to end the day and go to bed, because he was afraid of not going to sleep at once, of lying curled up and alone, terrified of the darkness, waiting for the demons to appear from the shadows and attack.

Years later, when he tried to discover why everything had turned out for him the way it did, he thought hard about his childhood fear of the dark, and assumed that on a conscious level it must have been impossible for anyone to live with this terror indefinitely.  He guessed that as a boy he must have subconsciously eroticized his fear and transformed it into a wish.  The logic was that if he were to somehow enjoy the terrible and violent things that the demons would do to him, then he would no longer fear their arrival and instead welcome them. 

One Saturday afternoon, he watched a film set in ancient Egyptian times, and one particular scene made a lasting impression.  A young prince is caught by his evil enemy, and after being mummified in bandages, is incarcerated alive in a burial tomb. As Carl watched he found himself wishing that the Egyptian prince was him and the idea seemed to excite him in a strange and unfamiliar way.  He didn't understand why he was aroused by the idea of being caught and tied up. He had been told nothing about sex or masturbation or why each time he created the scenario in his head, his cock grew hard.  Now his nighttime ordeal became bearable because he found he could imagine the mysterious demonic figures finally appearing from the darkness and mummifying him in tight bandages and this became a pleasant distraction.

When the first spunk shot out from his cock he was very frightened, convinced that he must have a serious illness. He felt guilt. He didn't know what was happening to him or what made him release this gooey milk. He said nothing to anyone.

He loved reading and acting and with his active imagination it was inevitable that each night he would elaborate the scenario in his head before he went to sleep.  Each time he masturbated, the shame troubled him less. Soon became a nightly ritual.  One night, the story changed and instead of being wrapped in bandages, Carl’s evil captors slipped a plastic bag over his head. Instantly he came. The sensation was so powerful it shook him up for days. 

After that the idea of trying it out for real became irresistible.  The house was always empty when he came home from school and he knew that he had about an hour and a half before his mother would return from work.  Rummaging around the drawers in the kitchen he eventually found a clear plastic food bag large enough for his head and took it into the bathroom.  He locked the door and slipped it over his head, studying himself in the mirror.  It was instantly a shocking and at the same time intensely erotic sensation, so much so that he came before he had a chance to undo his school trousers.  After that he was hooked.  Nothing else seemed to fascinate him more.  In the weeks following he tried many plastic bags. He tried tying himself up in whatever he could. Once he managed to wrap himself up completely in his mother's stockings and pretended to be the victim of a bank robbery. Once, in the middle of the night, his mother heard his muffled moans and came into the room. She was horrified to see the pillow tied over his face with his school tie and told him that he must never do it again.  He felt guilty again, but it didn't last long and within a couple of days he was searching the house and garage again for materials in which to smother himself.

Carl’s parents were dull and middle class and a poor source of inspiration and knowledge for him. They told him nothing about girls and sex and how his body worked.  Though he was popular at school, he seemed too absorbed in books and music to realize that his mates were slowly discovering the pleasures of girls and dirty sex talk. 

Once, on a search for plastic bags around the house, he found a briefcase at the back of his father’s wardrobe and in it was a collection of bondage magazines.  This confused him. It was hard for a thirteen year old to get to the truth about girls and sex and babies, particularly if no one with any authority seemed to want to tell him anything.  When he looked at the images of women dressed in shiny black latex and shackled to steel beds with their huge breasts and legs wide apart, nothing made any sense and he couldn’t imagine what his father was doing with them.

As a teenager he dated girls but without much enthusiasm.   His secret plastic fantasies evolved each night as he lay in his bed and in those precious moments alone in the house after school.   At eighteen he met a woman ten years older, who fancied having fun with a young good-looking stud. She took him abroad for a dirty week-end, taught him how to satisfy a woman and threw his virginity out of the bedroom window of a cheap Parisian hotel.  The relationship didn’t last long, but afterwards he was grateful, for at least he knew how to please a woman in bed.

Though bright, Carl didn’t do well at exams.  He studied music at a college for a year but didn’t finish the course and drifted into relatively dull jobs.   He liked the parties and the bars and when he left home he enjoyed the freedom to do what wanted whenever he liked.  He appeared to his friends to be a very sociable, likeable, charming young man.  He played bass guitar in a band and lived in a flat in London with three other guys and his strange plastic fetish remained private, enjoyed at night, alone in the dark in his bedroom.  No one suspected.

At that changed when Carl discovered a website and contact group called ‘Asphyxionados’  with a membership of men who shared precisely the same obsession with plastic and breath control.  It was a relief it was for him to discover that he wasn’t the only freak, and he began to spend many hours each day, chatting to other ‘asphyxionados,’ and gazing open mouthed an incredulous at the pictures of men around the globe,  choking themselves and their playmates in amazingly different ways.

He continued to date women but a pattern was emerging. The first few months would be fine. He would charm and entertain until he had won their hearts, and then he would get bored. He was able to have conventional sex and quite enjoy it too, but as the relationship developed the novelty would wear off and he would find himself making love to them wishing he was the passive one, wishing the girl would smother him. He would find himself distracted by masochistic thoughts and images in his head for these would be the things that were really turning him on.  He had convinced himself that ordinary sex resulted in ordinary orgasms but when he denied himself air, and felt the soft smooth texture of plastic against his face, the climax was infinitely more intense and overpowering.  The more the girls fell in love with him, the less attractive they seemed. It was almost as if he despised them for being so gullible.

At times he still felt guilty and confused, wondering why his sexual desires needed to be so bizarre and dangerous.  But as he discovered more of what other ‘asphyxionados’ got up to, he began to realise that his deviancy marked him out from ordinary people and made him special.  There was camaraderie amongst the cyber group, an unashamed celebration of their particular perversion.

Carl overcame his fear of sex with men when he realised that men were easier.  

Men, or at least those he chatted to on line, wanted nothing more than gratification and pleasure for its own sake, not promises, commitment or expressions of love. He made contact with a guy called Barry, who shared his fantasy precisely.  Barry seemed experienced and unashamed and they kept in touch every day.  At last Carl found someone who wanted to see him with a bag over his head.  

Naturally Carl was very nervous when he arrived at Barry’s tiny terraced house out in the city suburbs.  Barry was slightly overweight and balding, nothing like his profile image but Carl was used to that.   They chatted over a beer until Barry suggested they begin and Carl followed him upstairs to a small cluttered bedroom at the back of the house.  Carl brought with him a good supply of garbage bags, cling film and thick black tape.  Barry laid them out on the bed as Carl took off his clothes.  As he stood there, Carl noticed Barry’s black cat jump up from the floor and onto what looked like its favourite spot on top of a chest of drawers.  It settled down and curled up snug to watch the naked stranger standing by its master’s bed.  After a while the noise of the tape being pulled off its roll seemed to frighten it and the cat jumped back down and waited by the door. Barry finished strapping Carl’s wrists tight behind his back and got up from his knees to let the cat out. He returned to bind together Carl’s ankles with more thick black tape. Carl groaned with pleasure as he was slipped, legs first inside a huge black plastic bag, and felt the soft smooth plastic being strapped tight around his body with more tape. At last he was the Egyptian Prince being mummified. He was wrapped in more large black bags until only his head was free. Carl’s body was stiff inside his tight black plastic cocoon and he was gently lowered onto his back onto the bed face up. He watched Barry reach over for a small clear plastic food bag and open it up above his head. He felt the smooth warm plastic bag slip over his head and down his face. He lifted his head to let Barry strap the bag tight around his neck with more thick tape. He lay his head back down and began to savour the wonderful sensation of the bag sealed tight around his head, billowing out like a balloon as he exhaled, and then sticking tight and close to his face as he sucked the hot trapped air inside his lungs. He writhed in pleasure on the bed, his thick hard cock rubbing against the smooth black plastic strapped tight around his groin. He felt his head begin to spin. His breathing quickened. The hot plastic stuck tight around his mouth as he tried to suck in more air than the bag around his head could hold. He breathed out once again to feel the bag expand and the pressure of the air inside it pushing against his face. His head began to hurt. His heart began to beat too fast. He squirmed and wriggled inside his tight plastic cocoon, moving ever closer to that sublime moment when fear and arousal can go no further. Barry stood by the bed and watched, and masturbated, smiling down at Carl's frightened face inside the clear plastic mask.  Moments after he came, Barry reached over and ripped the bag off Carl’s head, but for Carl it was too early and immediately he felt disappointed at being released.  It was good but it wasn’t enough. He wanted more. Within a day he was back on the internet, hunting down others who he hoped would take him further.  

In the years that followed, Carl met many men and had extraordinary experiences.  Till one night, a week before his twenty-fifth birthday, his luck ran out.  He’d been sitting alone in his room waiting on the net. It was 1am and he had been on line all evening but had not been able to fix a meet. He was stoned and horny. You get what you want and maybe that night there was a bit of Carl that had experienced enough of this bizarre game, or was bored. Maybe he was becoming too choosy, or a part of him was wondering if he really wanted to become like these guys he was chatting to on line.  That’s why he couldn’t find a stranger to visit.  So he went to bed to play alone, with a bottle of poppers and a plastic bag.  He was never troubled by his demon again. 

The discovery of the body is particularly traumatic for friends and family, as is the subsequent discovery of the victim’s private life that invariably follows. Dead or alive, the activities of this particular group of sexual deviants provoke horror and disgust from the media and there is never any attempt to understand the phenomenon from the victim’s perspective.

Mixing truth with fiction, this story attempts to shed light on the psychology of men who are aroused by asphyxia, in the sincere hope of provoking much needed debate about the subject and serious psychological research.

It is understandable that one would wish to protect the young and immature, but a fear of corrupting innocent minds should never be a reason to prohibit open discussion about this strange and disturbing sexual behaviour. If the subject remains taboo, thousands more will die in strange and uncomfortable circumstances and the real tragedy of their deaths will continue to be tarnished by public shame, disgust and embarrassment.