I was proud of myself for asking what Dennis considered an “interesting question.” I thought perhaps they simply hadn’t thought about the risk to Rachel’s reputation. I was wrong, obviously.
“Brian, my family, enjoys what is called predicament bondage,” Doris began. “It isn’t for everyone, but it has an element of danger and risk to it. She went on to explain that it involved being brought to physical exhaustion through cages or having heavy weights attached to their bodies. There is a visceral reaction to being brought to the point of exhaustion through restraints. There is also an element of excitement to being caught or humiliated which creates powerful emotions and sexual responses”
“Did you understand any of that?” Lori asked rhetorically. “Did you watch Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the Thirteenth?”
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Did you like it?”
“Yes!”
“Were you scared?
“Yes!”
“Did you watch the movie and identify with the chainsaw wielding maniac chasing the pretty girls around the showers or did you identify with the people scared for their lives who were trying to survive to the end?”
“The survivors,” I assumed everyone identified with the plucky college kids just trying to find a way to safety.
“Did you think any of it was really real and that anyone actually died on the set?”
“No, obviously not,” I thought that WAS a dumb question. It was just play-acting.
“Okay, we like being scared too. We get off on it. We don’t just like to be scared. We liked to be terrified. A little scare isn’t enough. Daddy, likes being scary. It lets him blow off steam. This weekend is like living in a movie. You know it’s not real, and at the end of the movie you are going to leave the theater safe and sound, but you get to have an adventure. We can’t just do this all the time though. I have a job now. Once a month is enough, just like a period.”
“I am so glad, I could be your fantasy tampon to be used once a month, Lori,” Dennis chuckled.
“You are appreciated, Daddy,” she teased back.
Wow, suddenly a light bulb went off over my head. I was getting it but I still didn’t fully understand. “Okay, but do you really want to wear that sweater?”
“No, but I’ll get arrested if I take it off,” she smiled and popped some gum.
“Okay, but if you want to dress slutty then wouldn’t you rather just choose your own outfit?”
“I can do that any night of the week, Brian.”
“You do DO that,” Doris reminded her daughter with a half-laugh.
“This is just for fun, don’t read too much into it,” Lori summarized her mother’s point. Then she laughed about how it sounded like Doris said “Doo-Doo.”
I couldn’t help trying to make sense of this and read into it. This was the single most bizarre and interesting thing that I had ever seen in my relatively short life. I still had a nearly infinite number of questions without any answers. The ones that were answered created even more questions to follow up with.
“That still doesn’t explain why you would make Rachel dress like that at the game if you are concerned about her reputation?”
Lori blew a bubble and thought about it. “I fucked anybody I wanted in school. If they didn’t want me, that made me want them more. I liked to go to a party and BE the party. I had no fear and I still have no fear. I don’t have any regrets, and I’d probably do everything the same fucked up way if I had it to do over again, Brian.”
I listened as she thought about what she was saying. She kicked the back of my chair with her heels nervously. “Bending over and pretending you didn’t realize you forgot your panties at the food court is probably going to get somebody to crack a smile. Dressing a little trashy or do something a little daring isn’t that big of a deal, Brian. You should try it some time, be a little less uptight.”
We rode in silence for a little while. The song Strut came on the radio in the background. I smiled because it was my new favorite song.
“You could probably tell your best friend in the whole world what you saw us do today in the backyard. He’s never going to believe it anyway.”
“I’d rather you not tell anyone,” Dennis corrected.
“Yeah, but even if you did, he’s going to say that you are making it up. You saw my asshole. You heard me sing the poopy-poopy song and I begged you to press my bellybutton to let me take a shit. So what?”
“Where did that idea come from anyway?” I changed the subject.
“When Lori was little, she used to sing all these dirty little rhymes,” Doris sounded proud as she reminisced. “She’d make her little brother beg to go poopy. “Soon, I was making Brad sing Poopy, Poopy, Coco Pops, Lemonade, push my button before fudge is made! He loved to please and he wasn’t shy. I’d press his belly button and he’d giggle like the Hamburger Helper glove. It was adorable.”
I couldn’t picture that mountain of a boy ever being a baby.
“We just sort of fell into the habit. If anyone sneezed they had to sing ‘Easy-Peasy, Lemon-Squeezy, if I sneeze, grab my booby’ or she’d grab their boob and twist their nipple.”
“Itsy-bitsy titty twistee,” Lori giggled.
“Do you have others?” I asked.
“These amuse you, don’t they?” she giggled impishly. It seemed like the songs amused her as well.
“Yeah,” I had to admit they did.
“You could have made us use baby voices, or talk like Donald Duck,” she told me that I could have specified that when I was pressing their belly buttons.
“Could I have made you talk like Darth Vader,” I held my hand over my mouth, and breathed heavily into my hand with an ominous tone like Vader did in Star Wars.
“Who the fuck is that? He sounds like he has asthma. Yeah, you could.”
“Do it now,” I said.
“I don’t have to take a crap,” she assured me that she wouldn’t for a long time and that her ass was entirely cleaned out.
“Don’t let Lori kid you,” Dennis said that his daughter was always full of shit and always would be no matter how many enemas she got. That was the first time I heard that word. I assumed (correctly) that it had something to do with the bottle of water up their asses and the act of holding the water in.
They told me what they were singing to Dennis at the other end of the yard. I didn’t know until that moment. It sounded really hot.
Lori told me another one that she uses. “If I beg Daddy to let me shit and he wants to walk me out on the lawn like a dog, he’ll make me say stinky pinky has a fat ass, Please let Stinky Pinky pass! if I beg, if I plead, if I crawl, will you lead?”
“What about Wibble wobble, black bobble, wibble wobble out! Turn my filthy pussy inside and out, one of its dirty, twice if its clean, Wibble wobble, black bobble, wibble wobble out!” Rachel asked as she enunciated the tongue twister expertly.
“Oh, we haven’t done that one in years. Can we use that this weekend, Dennis?” Doris sounded delighted.
“It’s too long. I like to hear you repeat it,” Dennis decided.
“I still don’t understand why you like it when he makes you do something embarrassing?” I asked.
“Do you want to try it?” Lori asked.
“No!”
“Chicken?” Rachel asked.
I was really shy about it. I just wanted to understand it.
“Brian, imagine that I am blind,” Doris said. “I’ve been blind since birth. Describe the color green to me.”
I couldn’t do it. I tried to bring up things that were green but obviously someone who had never seen a tree or the color green would have no frame of reference for comparison. I tried to use word pictures but I couldn’t.
“Now, imagine that three blind people are feeling up a woman,” Dennis said that they’ve never seen a woman. “They try to describe what a woman is like but since each one has a different body part, and their experiences are limited to only that part then they have only a limited understanding.
“One blind man had his hands on her tits. He describes women as having jugs swollen with milk and says that you can turn them on by playing with their nipple. The next man disagrees. He has his fist in her cunt. He says that women smell like tuna fish, and they get turned on when you twist your hand around inside of them. The third man says that he doesn’t know where they got this from. He sniffs his finger and says that women smell and taste exactly like shit because his finger has been up her ass.”
I thought Dennis might be joking. Everyone groaned because they had heard Dennis joke before.
“It gets better every time I tell it,” Dennis assured me to wait a month and he’d tell it again and that time I’d laugh for certain
“It’s a corny joke about a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions. It’s meant to remind you that until you have felt the ENTIRE elephant you won’t know what part you like best. As a blind person, you don’t even know what parts you are still out there haven’t even touched yet. I’ve touched a whole lot of parts and I know that I like to be humiliated. It’s fun, and it is terrifying and perfectly safe.”
Things were making more sense to me, but I had a lot to learn. When we arrived at Lely High School it was dark out. The parking lot was already full as so many people had arrived ahead of us.
I walked with them to the big game. I could already hear the fans cheering in the stands. It was very busy out. There were lots of cars and honking in the school parking lot. Many people were just riding around the parking lot to be seen and look for friends or pretty girls.
Teachers that I had seen during the day at school were standing around directing people to the ticket office and the concessions.
“Are you going to remove our handcuffs, Daddy?” Rachel asked as she walked with her sister. She kept her hands discreetly behind her back.
“Oh, did I forget?” Dennis smirked as he stepped up to the ticket booth.
“You guys would really let me try things out?”
“Sure, do you want to grab the elephant’s nuts, or his mouth first?” Dennis laughed at his own joke. “I don’t have an extra set of handcuffs with me, but you could walk with your hands behind your back for a start.”
“I was thinking I would like to do the bad guy stuff?”
The girls looked at me with churlish grins on their faces. I think they saw me as somewhat harmless and a bit too nice for that.
Dennis ignored me while he pulled out his billfold and paid for the tickets, including mine. The awkward silence was killing me. “I don’t know how much you are making babysitting this kid, but his ticket just came out of it,” he addressed Rachel as if he hadn’t even heard what I said.
I was feeling very dejected. I guess I expected a triumphant four-piece band to give me a big huzzah in the background while Dennis handed me the keys to the handcuffs and told me the secrets of being the boss. That was probably pretty unrealistic.
The football field was around the side of the building. It was just a simple outdoor football field. It wasn’t particularly much but there was a lot of activity out front. It was dark outside and there was a throng of people outside.
I recognized some of them. They were students from my school. Many of them were there to be seen or to see everybody else. They had no interest in going into the game. It was just a social hour for them.
There were girls with big hair, all teased out in denim jackets and stonewashed jeans. There were boys in Polo shirts and khakis. There were all sorts of cliques in my school. Everyone was obsessed with maintaining some identity.
There were the rich kids from Marco Island that everyone called “Preppy”. The handsome boys and pretty girls dressed up in Cavaricci jeans from the Chess King. They were the most popular ones.
The jocks and their girlfriends were inside at the game on the field as players or cheerleaders.
The surfers were the ones with OP shirts and Sun Britches (shorts) wearing sunglasses at night. Naples is on the west coast of Florida, so there really are no waves to surf, but there was no shortage of boys that wanted to wear checkerboard shoes and listen to the Violent Femmes at the Naples Pier looking for pretty girls from somewhere else that were visiting with their parents. They were also the skateboard kids that hung around 5th avenue and the Dairy Queen on U.S. 41.
The burnouts wore their Motley Crue and Iron Maiden t-shirts. They were hanging under the bleachers getting high.
There were a few rednecks in full camouflage. They had what appeared to be flasks they were drinking from. They were clearly trying to make them conspicuous so people would think they were cool, while at the same time pretending they were being sneaky. One of them, was a boy they called “Rooster”. He had wrapped himself in a confederate flag and he was marching around singing an old Hank William’s Junior song.
“Now, THAT is public humiliation. I remember him when he was a freshman. What a dweeb,” Lori commented that acting like a redneck would be total embarrassment. It was funny coming from her. Dennis had a slightly southern demeanor and I think she was just winding her father up.
It was dark and the ladies had their hands behind their backs so nobody noticed their handcuffs. We were walking too briskly for anyone to get a really good look at how they were dressed either.
There were also adults outside of the stands. They ranged in age, but a lot of them were Lori’s age or a little older. There were a lot of guys that were 19 or 20 that seemed to be there specifically to hit on high school girls. They were wearing tank-tops and tight jeans. They still wore the styles that were popular in the late 1970s, and for whatever reason that still got the girls.
There were parents whose kids had begged them to let them hang out with their friends and ditched them at the game. They were talking to each other (this was way before cell phones made that obsolete and entire families just stared at their phones instead of talking). A lot of them seemed to be looking around at the behavior of the teenagers and saying things like “You wouldn’t have seen that back in MY day. These kids today! I tell you! These kids just have no respect! What would her mom say if she saw her dressed like that? I worry about this generation. Would you look at how she is dressed? Can you believe that boy is smoking?”
There were also plenty of regular kids like that didn’t fit in with any particular clique and we were probably the largest group of them all.
I didn’t see myself as one of those. I saw myself as one of the nerds. I didn’t take any computer classes but I owned floppy disks. At lunch time, I would bring them to the computer lab and boot up an Apple IIe and start mucking around with a video game.
The teacher never gave me a hard time or asked what I was doing. I think I just “looked” like the kind of kid that should be in there/knew what he was doing with a computer, and I got away with it.
“So, when are you going to start?” Dennis asked as we passed through the throng of kids and reached the concession stand line. I didn’t even realize that he was talking to me. “You said you wanted to do the bad guy stuff?”
“I didn’t know you were going to let me,” I assured him. I gasped in surprise and blushed a little. I was excited but suddenly felt put on the spot.
“I didn’t know you needed my permission. If you tell the girls to do something and they do it, then I guess that’s bad guy stuff, right?”
“Rachel said you MADE her play that game today,” I countered.
“Made her play what game? Monopoly?”
“The game outside,” I said.
“The fun cunt run? You won’t even say the name of the game,” Dennis scoffed at me. My confidence collapsed like a sandcastle under the Naples Pier at high tide. “If you can’t even SAY cunt, you definitely aren’t ready to touch one!”
I hope you appreciate that was the perfect metaphor because my confidence was built on sand and dreams just like any sandcastle.
“Okay, fine. I am giving you permission to be the bad guy. What will you do first?”
Doris, Rachel and Lori stood around me and looked at me. I realized they were ALL taller than I was. Doris wasn’t taller by much but in heels she seemed like a giantess.
“I don’t know,” I admitted in frustration. I blanked out. I had a few impossible scenarios like the girls had to get naked or do something outrageous like suck off all the burnouts under the bleachers, but it all sounded so fantastical that I realized I was out of my depth.
“You want to do something, but you have no idea where to begin or what to do. Let me ask you a question, Brian. You’ve never driven a car?”
“No,” I admitted. I had driven a video game on the Atari 2600. I knew it wasn’t the same thing. I didn’t even break a sweat on the first day of the race passing 200 cars. I could go for days without wrecking.
“You think the best way to learn to drive would be to get in my jeep, turn the key and just start driving?”
“Yes,” I said. I realized that was wrong right away by the expression on his face.
“What’s third gear?”
I had no idea what a stick shift even was. “You don’t even know how to start an engine or which pedals to press to get that jeep to stop, start or change gears.”
I didn’t know there were three pedals on a stick shift.
“Let’s say somehow you manage to get my jeep on the road without tearing off my garage door. There are two possible outcomes,” he said.
He paused to tell the woman in the window that he wanted four plain footlongs and a beer. He asked me if I wanted anything. I was too nervous to say that I did. I knew I’d probably be hungry later, but in that moment, I was not feeling like eating. He decided that he wanted a large popcorn as well.
“The two outcomes are you get it to where you are going. You’d need-blind chance and luck because you haven’t studied the rules of the road or how the car operates. The other outcome is more likely and that’s you put it in a ditch out on 951 and I come kick your ass because you fucked up my jeep.”
He paid for the food and thanked the woman politely. He wasn’t a total ogre to everyone. He carried the tray of food since the women were cuffed.
The women didn’t argue my side at all. I was hoping Doris would stop him from lecturing me any further. I already felt like finding the smallest hole and climbing in.
We found a seat in the bleachers. We had to walk past a bunch of people. It was VERY well lit in the stands. They were simple aluminum bleachers that get super-hot during the day from the Florida sun. (I know because I have gym class). People definitely noticed the handcuffs, and how Lori and Rachel were dressed. I think a few people who were on the row below us even got a crotch shot when Lori walked past.
Dennis led because he was looking for something high up, a little remote but not too remote. “That’s my son!” he sat down and began eating popcorn.
Doris sat next to him. Lori sat in the middle. Rachel sat on the end, and I sat next to Rachel. Rachel looked straight ahead and ignored me.
I wanted to apologize to her. I didn’t even know what to say. I had no interest in watching the game. The score was 7-0 in the 1st quarter. There were downs and yards listed upon a scoreboard, but there was no announcer explaining any of it. I assumed there would be like there was on television.
I couldn’t even tell which one was Brad. They all looked the same to me from where I was sitting. The Trojans were orange and black. They were playing against the Eagles. They were wearing white. I thought it was odd that their school colors were white. I kept that to myself (good thing too because their colors were actually blue and gold. I just didn’t know that visiting teams wore white).
“I am sorry if I overstepped my bounds with your dad,” I whispered an apology to Rachel. I felt badly about how that last conversation went. I felt like I understood what he was trying to tell me but that I may have left a bad impression with everyone.
She looked straight ahead. “I am trying to watch the game.”
We sat for a long time in silence. Well, I sat in silence. They yelled whenever it appeared that someone did something good like kick a field goal or make a touchdown. It wasn’t easy to tell. They yelled whenever someone made a really good tackle as well. The Wagners stood up and cheered enthusiastically and really seemed to be getting into the game.
I didn’t. It wasn’t just because I was as interested in Football as I am interested in crotchet (which is to say not at all). It was that their cheers were very contextual to what just happened. I could imagine standing up and cheering “Touch Down” and that wasn’t what they were cheering about at all.
I began to imagine that Football was a lot like predicament bondage. The game was played during a set time that they all agreed upon.
The players knew the rules. They knew the plays. They knew who called the plays. They acted as a coordinated team. There were people who passed and people who received.
There was necessary roughness that seemed pretty brutal. I’ve often heard players say they love football. Yet, here they were running themselves to exhaustion, getting knocked down and tackled and yet they showed up at the line for more.
There were probably getting an adrenaline rush from it all. They were “getting off on it” as Lori said.
“Anyone want a Footlong?” Dennis asked when there was a break in the game.
The girls gave him a “Hardee harr-harr” and ignored him. Their hands were cuffed behind them and they had to sit on them in order to keep anyone from seeing them. Doris did too but the way she was dressed made her look a little less conspicuous.
It was going to be the second quarter soon. I didn’t even understand how timekeeping worked in high school football. It seemed like the quarter was only 12 minutes long and not 15 minutes.
My instinct was to say something to the Wagners about the missing three minutes but they would have probably laughed at me. They all looked so serious now and no one was talking to me. Dennis’s lecture had been brutally honest. It had really left me feeling sensitive and ashamed of myself for thinking that I was ready to handle being a “bad guy”.
All the wild stuff they were doing earlier, seemed to have come to a stop. I had the distinct feeling that my request to participate had put a damper on their family weekend.
I was wrong.
(Are there other stories like this? would anyone be inspired to write a spin off?)