shyguy92 wrote: ↑5 years ago
Cops and robbers, crappy plastic toy handcuffs.
I was the robber. About 5 or 6 years old, I think. It's one of my first clear memories for some reason.
Ah yes. Plastic toy handcuffs. They were at the center of the most exalted moment of my prepubescent life.
I'd played some TUGs with a friend and a neighbor before, tied up in various ways (some very fun, some very harrowing), but very early on, I'd been snared by the thought of girls tied up; maybe it was the
Scooby-Doo (I'm old enough that I saw them first-run) that did it to me, and most definitely the Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books my two older sisters liked to read. Even to this day,
The Mystery at Lilac Inn and
Mystery on the Mississippi are favorites. Then, about age nine, came the final ingredient; a girl classmate of mine I fell into my first deep crush over.
Let's call her Laurel (no, not her real name). She was lean and willowy, with long, light-brown hair, and a very pretty oval face spattered over with freckles. She was a very bright lass, too, was Laurel, the best student in our class at math while I was the best at language arts. And she lived only five houses down the street in the moldering little town we called home, which made matters even more perfect. We could be tempestuous friends, though, fighting one minute and making up the next, almost as if we were anticipating a romance that never, in the event, happened because her family moved only a couple years after that highlight of my life. I still wonder at odd moments what might have become of me had she not moved away, and I still feel that loss from time to time.
But that would come later. The great moment of my life to that point was her tenth birthday; her parents threw her a birthday party and invited all us kids in her class. The party itself was the usual birthday-party thing, with balloons and cake and ice cream and games in the relatively spacious back yard. Laurel herself wore a white sleeveless sundress with big red, blue, and green polka dots all over it, and her hair held back with a little pastic headband. To my feverish little eyes, she was an utter goddess. But as with all good things, the party started to break up in the late afternoon after Laurel opened her birthday presents (and to this day I can't remember what present I got her!), until presently, with the sun in the west over the hills and her mother in the house cleaning up, only Laurel and I were left; my goddess and me, the neighbor boy who lived five houses up the street.
And somehow, from where I had no idea except maybe Laurel's pest of a little brother, that pair of gray plastic toy handcuffs. I declared myself the villain, and she was the heroine I was going to capture and tie to the railroad tracks. My venture had better luck than it deserved, for she giggled and said I'd have to catch her first, and proceeded to test my running legs by eluding me for many long minutes of chase around her backyard. Then, finally, the golden moment; I caught up to her when she stumbled over a patch of uneven ground. She had fallen to her knees, and I asked if she was all right, getting her assurance that she was fine and that she was my prisoner. For some reason I've never divined and never asked her about, she lay herself face-down on the ground before me, and I straddled her back with toy handcuffs in hand. She was quiet and complaisant as I took her wrists and put them behind her back, and all the world was perfect as I clicked the handcuffs on her wrists. The goldern moment of my almost-decade of life was upon me--
Until her mother called out very anxiously from their back porch for her to go into the house and sent me home. That was the end of the golden moment; I didn't yet understand what had made her mother so anxious, but it was that moment that suggested to me that tying up a girl was something bad, something naughty or dirty. Laurel of course went into the house, and it was many days before she was allowed to have me back to her place, and the subject of the toy handcuffs was never brought up again. When she moved away, all hope for a repeat of the golden moment was lost. I would later have a few other pre-adolescent moments of bliss, like the moment I got to tie another classmate of mine--let's call her Lois--to her aunt's clothesline post next door, and one momentous game of cowboys-and-Indians played with my buddy's little sister and her friend, but none was quite the same as the golden moment with Laurel and the toy handcuffs, either in simple bliss or in hard lessons learned. And even to this day, I'm a sucker for freckles and sundresses.