A Cautionary Tale

Carl is a young jazz pianist, not long out of university, living recklessly in the big city. He has many girlfriends, all attracted to his frail, gentle beauty, his long messy jet-black hair, his brown eyes, cheeky grin, his musical talent and his love of life. He shares a house with other ex-students and with pub gigs and a bit of private teaching, he earns just about enough for rent, cheap food and ample class A drugs. 

Carl enjoys women and in a charmingly modest way makes the most of his good looks. He weaves his way deftly in and out of love and complex relationships, content to have these pretty young things competing for his smile, his attention, his bed, his smooth and slender body, his cock…

But behind the smile Carl keeps a secret. Since childhood, he has become sexually addicted to plastic bags and auto-asphyxia. Over the years, he has found this activity to be ever more arousing and now sometimes when he is making love to his girlfriends, the thoughts about plastic and the masochistic fantasies spring to mind and then he comes.  In the privacy of his tiny room, at the back of a crumbling Victorian house on the east side of the city, he finds cruising the net irresistible.  There are many others, mostly men who share in his deviant fantasies.

He finds the courage to meet other men, strangers who advertise their precise wishes on message boards and in secret asphyxia groups. The meetings become ever more frequent. This kind of sex feels more heightened and pleasurable than the conventional sex he has with women, which so often becomes complex and tied up with promises of love. One close girlfriend discovers his diaries and is freaked out by what she reads and he never sees her again.  One afternoon, when Carl is bored with sex with another girlfriend, he reaches for his leather belt and wraps it playfully around her neck.  She doesn’t like it. She is frightened.  They get dressed and she goes home.

Despite frequent searches, he has little success finding women who share his

love for asphyxia, other than those who require a fee. Gradually his interest in women fades as his attention begins to focus on the uncomplicated sex he has with men. Each meeting is an adventure. He delights in the danger and encounters some remarkable guys.  His friends in the various bands he plays in begin to resent Carl for his new habit of not drinking with them, and instead sliding off immediately after the gig has finished, without explanation.

In his search for ever more extreme experiences, he begins to exchange messages on line with a woman called Rachael who runs an asphyxia site, providing low grade suffocation videos to private paid up subscribers. She is on the hunt for men to take part in her next video, and Carl jumps at the chance. Rachael makes it clear to Carl that there is no need to attract male volunteers with fees.

Carl spends a day in some grubby warehouse south of the city, taking part in three very rough fifteen minute videos along with two attractive busty models, who spend almost the entire time blocking off his air with their breasts, their hands (gloved and ungloved), or with rubber or plastic. He enjoys it all, but it all feels staged and phoney and nothing is quite as intense as he had imagined it would be.  He doesn’t care about not getting paid, though he notes with a smile the fat envelopes he sees handed to the models at the end of the shoot. 

When the girls leave, Carl chats to Laurie, the cameraman, who is a wiry, grey and unshaved man. He asks about Rachael. Laurie tells him everything he knows, which he says isn’t much. But what he does say astonishes Carl. Laurie tells him that Rachael is young and very beautiful. She runs the website and several others and uses the profits from videos sold to finance a secret international organisation of women intent on world female domination. The group, known as Medea, has one objective: to remove the hundred most powerful men in business and politics and replace them with women in order to save mother earth from war and ecological disaster. Carl is fascinated by what he is told and cannot decide whether it is too incredible to be true. Carl asks more questions but Laurie says he’s nervous about giving away anything more.

Laurie packs his cameras and lights away and drives off smiling. None of what he said was true. Rachael is in fact his older brother Ron, who is bald and overweight and runs a dozen fetish sites, just for the money. 

In the weeks that follow, Carl can think of nothing else but Rachael. He creates an image of her in his head and fantasises about meeting her and discovering more about her. The videos are loaded onto the site, but he hears no more from either Laurie or Rachael. He emails Rachael with questions, telling her that he wants to meet her, and make more videos for her, but he gets no response.

Meanwhile Carl’s obsession with asphyxiation grows and his passion for music fades. Once he could amuse himself at his piano for hours. Now, there is dust on the keys and at gigs, he notices that his playing becomes less fluid, less imaginative. He no longer practices, no longer really cares.  He stops socialising; he misses gigs and finally his fellow band-members replace him with a more reliable pianist.

He starts to smoke huge amounts of weed and spends his days in his room, cruising the internet, chatting to fellow asphyxionados, and making arrangements to meet. At night he goes out to visit strangers all over the city, to bag and be bagged.

The adventures become more extreme. He becomes less discerning with the men.

At the beginning he selected pretty boys like him. Now he is happy to settle for anyone. Often he plays the dominant one, and finds almost as much pleasure suffocating men.

But in his private moments, he focuses on Rachael. He writes ever more elaborate love letters, which describe ever more outlandish and outrageous suffocation fantasies.

In one particular fantasy, Rachael becomes a beautiful dominatrix who has a particular fondness for asphyxionado slaves because they will stay aroused, erect and hard permanently as long as there’s plastic against their skin.  Carl becomes totally absorbed in this fantasy, convincing himself that being such a slave would surely be the most perfect thing on earth. For like everybody else, all Carl wants is to be happy.  He’s come to the conclusion that for him, happiness is sexual pleasure and nothing else.

Carls writes to Rachael every few days, this woman he has never seen, convinced that she can not ignore him forever. His friends and family cease to be of any importance to him. He ignores his phone when it rings until in the end it doesn’t ring any more. He stays in his room for days on end, either sitting at the computer, or lying on his bed, wrapped in soft clear polythene sheets, his hand around his cock, thinking of what else it might be like when he meets Rachael.

One afternoon, when his flat mates are all at work, he is lying stoned on his bed, when he comes up with a particularly intriguing and arousing idea. He immediately and goes over to his computer. He writes Rachael another email. He tells her he has an idea for her next suffocation video, convinced that she could not possibly resist it.   

He writes down the precise location of a spot in a quiet secluded wood, not far from the city. This is a place he used to visit with a girlfriend. He writes down a time and date and tells her that this is where and when he intends to strip naked, tie himself up and suffocate himself.  He tells Rachael that she has two simple choices.

The first would be for her to do nothing. He would enjoy a lonely but pleasurable death nonetheless, his naked body discovered probably a few days later by some guy walking his dog.  The second would be for her to arrive at the wood early, and find a good spot from which to film his death. This, proposes would make an excellent video for her site. She could hide behind a tree and film him approaching, undressing, securing a plastic bag over his head and then cuffing his wrists behind his back. If she came and filmed him, he was sure she wouldn’t let him die.  This act would, he decided, be proof that he loved her, trusted her and was prepared to do anything for her, even die.

He sends the email. Now he is quite aroused by the scenario and after smoking another large joint, and checking there’s no one else in the flat, he begins to undress. He knows that this afternoon he cannot resist playing alone. He goes to his wardrobe and fetches out a wooden box, and from it he fetches out his plastic bags, cuffs and rubber bands.

All the time his is imagining undressing in the secluded clearing in the wood, the orange beams of early evening sunshine streaming through the trees. He imagines Rachael as a black rubber clad mistress crouching nearby with a camcorder in her hand.

Carl lies on his bed and cuffs his feet together, thinking about what it would feel like to lie naked on the ground in a forest. He slips the plastic bag over his head and seals it tight around his neck with two thick rubber bands and imagines Rachael moving a little nearer for a close up. He manages to cuff his hands behind his back making sure that the tiny silver key is clearly visible on the pillow beside him.

As he holds his first breath, enjoying the sensation of the plastic tight against his face, his mind is racing, his heart is pumping, his cock hard. He sees Rachel in his minds eye moving towards him, watching him on the screen of her tiny camera. She walks slowly towards him till she is standing in front of him, camera in front of her face, filming, watching him on his back, lying naked in the lush bed of fern, struggling.  Now he’s breathing fast and the bag expands and contracts around his head and he very hard and near to coming. Not quite yet. His imagination still races. He imagines her watching him until she has had enough and then tears the bag off his head. She unties him and tells him to get dressed and follow her home. He goes back with her to a huge country hotel which she and her organisation of female supremacists own, and agrees without hesitation to be her own personal slave, to be used for sex by her and her guests 24 hours a day.

He imagines a blissful existence in the weeks and months that follow, where he is kept chained up in a stable and released when his mistress and her guests wish to take him to their rooms and fuck him till they are exhausted.

He squirms and writhes on the bed. With each new intake of stale air trapped inside the bag, Carl visualises a new scenario. He imagines the countless women taking him to their rooms one after the other, each one tying him up, marvelling at his beauty and the size and shape of his tool, marvelling at the fact that he is able to stay hard indefinitely, as long as there is plastic against his skin.

Another idea comes into his head.  He and other male sex slaves are hung naked and tied from ceilings in clear plastic sacks while rubber clad women pass by beneath, inspecting, selecting their next sex slave form the wide selection.

His imagination fired up by the weed, the danger, the lack of air, he imagines the world changing and women taking over, and thousands of men happy to give up all power, all worry and all responsibility to become slaves for their all powerful mistresses. As he writhes and wriggles on his bed, his head spinning and light with the lack of air, he finally comes and the sensation is as perfect as he would have wished.

With his spunk cooling on his belly, Carl sits up and through the misted plastic bag, looks over to the pillow, but sees that the keys have slipped off and dropped onto the floor behind the bed.  He is perfectly calm, for he has been in a similar situation before. He tells himself not to panic and tries to get up, knowing that all he has to do is somehow push the bed away from the wall.

His chest begins to ache and he starts to feel very dizzy as he drops heavily onto the floor and struggles desperately to move the bed.  The bed is stuck. He tries to lift it, but can’t. He pulls at the thick steel handcuffs until the pain around his wrists becomes unbearable.

Finally the panic kicks in when he finds he is too weak to push the bed any more. He has no choice but to call out for help. He calls out, knowing there is no one in, but hoping for a miracle. His shouting is soon inaudible as he flaps and writhes on the carpet beside his bed…

He looks up to his desk, at his computer screen flickering with the slideshow of images on his screen-saver of naked men and women suffocating.  He is working out where he had left his phone, but is too confused too think rationally. He tries to get on his feet, but cannot pull himself up. His energy fades, his brain ceases to function in conscious mode, his pale, thin body, glistening with sweat and spunk, finally sags to stillness on the floor beside his bed.

Some time later his flatmate Ian comes home unexpectedly, hoping to pick up something good to smoke from Carl.  He calls out from the landing and when he hears nothing he smiles and opens the door to Carl’s room. He rips off the bag and calls an ambulance. Carl is hooked to a dozen machines and taken away in an ambulance.

He lies in a coma in a corner of a large busy ward in an overcrowded city hospital for several days. Friends and family arrive in dribs and drabs when the news of his ‘accident’ spreads around. As they sit whispering and sniffling around his bed, none can quite believe or understand the things that have been discovered about Carl.  But no one talks about it, for everyone is far too embarrassed.

Then early one morning he regains consciousness. His eyes slowly flicker open and he sees three tall women in white coats staring down at his bed.  Rachael must have come, he thinks, and saved him and brought him back to her friends so he could be their obedient bag slave for as long as they liked. He smiles, and moves his hand slowly to his cock.

Daniel Guy.