Quiet Diet

The acronym IM is familiar to just about everyone, but to me, it’s my Inner Masochist, who suddenly introduced herself with a vengeance while I was dragging myself through puberty and hit on the brilliant idea of using Nair on my virgin pubic area. No fourteen-year-old ever reads instructions, so picture me bent over in agony, clasping my burning crotch and bawling while my sister beat her fists on the floor in a laughing fit. Fortunately, someone knew about EMLA Cream, which helped put out the fire, but after the initial sting was over I found the pain strangely addictive, like Arthur Denton, the patient and victim of the evil Orin Scrivello, DDS in Little Shop of Horrors. So there, I’ll admit it, I’m wired a little differently from most people. Later, there was an incident involving the infamous Trinidad Moruga Scorpion Chili Pepper Purée, which somehow came into contact with my nipples during a truth or dare session at a sleepover. I suspect that cheap malt liquor, the teen beverage of choice at the time, may have had something to do with it.

A few years later, a supposed nice guy I was dating in high school got me baked and talked me into letting him put me over his knee and spanked me with one of those nasty paddles with the holes. I cried and screamed and how-could-you’d to perfection, and threatened to blab it all to his mother and the principal, reminding him that I was under age and there would probably be serious consequences with the Authorities which would ruin his life if any of this ever got out, and unceremoniously dumped him. I should have earned an Academy nomination for that little performance, but at that stage in high school, reputation was everything and I wasn’t about to allow him bragging rights.

The trouble was that my IM wanted to keep on testing my limits, and did so with relish, outside my circle of friends, until it also came to a screaming halt when a psycho scumbag on a coke high totally laid into me with a flogger. I ended up in the ER, and as soon as my anxious mother arrived and they found out that I was only 17, they called the cops. Despite that little setback, to say nothing of the humiliation dealt me by my family, as soon as I was able to sit or even lie down again, I swore that I would choose my relationships with considerably more care. It all confirmed something I already knew: my mantra would never be no pain, no gain.

Away from home for the first time at college, and in a foreign country to boot, there always seemed to be someone around who was just dying to try something new on me. The trouble was, I already knew just about every kink they could imagine, but I played along regardless. I must have invited this kind of attention, and I can’t say I disliked most of it, and I soon perfected that invaluable party trick using a bobby pin to remove a pair of handcuffs with my eyes closed.

After grad school back in the good ‘ol US and richer food, I came home a few pounds heavier, and blew though all the fad diets, but the results never lasted. I was fortunate enough to be able to work at home, but unfortunate enough to be constantly within a stone’s throw of the fridge. Add that to social eating and drinking and general late night grazing, I didn’t stand a chance, and I came to the conclusion that if I just ate a small breakfast and a decent lunch, even a late one, and nothing else, I could pull it off. The trouble was willpower.

Alone in the dark with the Doritos late one night, I hit on a unique diet plan that would have gladden the heart of any BDSM aficionado, and one I knew for sure would never be advertised on TV. I found a guy in a city about four hundred miles north who made custom dungeon equipment and emailed him to ask if he could produce a single locking ankle cuff on a chain long enough to cover the distance between my bathroom and the far side of my bedroom. He called back. Go get yourself a Vernier Caliper, he said, and send me the measurements. A what? It’s a measuring tool, he said, I need to know the back-to-front and side-to-side measurements of whichever ankle you intend to discipline. So what do you want this little toy for? I told him, and he laughed, and said, that’s rich.

I’d asked the guy what he thought about release mechanisms, and he told me what I already knew about ice timers, that they worked fine, but weren’t all that accurate, and I might end up stuck longer than I wanted to be. He recommended an electronic safe with a timer, which he could also provide. He also said that if I was really serious, I should get some bolt cutters, and leave them and the spare key with someone I could trust, who’ll come if I called. Good advice, indeed, as I remembered another time when they would have come in very handy.

I went to the local Helpful Hardware Man, who pulled out the right caliper and also sold me a heavy-duty padlock, three feet of wide plastic tubing and the bolt cutters. I could tell he was dying to ask, but I wasn’t telling. I measured my ankle and the intended limit of my confinement very carefully, and emailed him the numbers. A while later a substantial little parcel showed up, and revealed the safe, along with an oval cuff made from polished stainless steel, sized perfectly for my left ankle and lined with neoprene. It had a heavy hinge and a locking Allen screw in a sleeve, and was firmly attached to fifty feet of chain. Looking at it made me shiver. I grabbed the free end of the chain, slipped the plastic tube over the first three feet and padlocked it around the base of the toilet; no point in punishing the porcelain, too, it was only an innocent collaborator. There was enough slack to get around the bed and over to the closet and the window, and I laid the business end down on the foot of my bed with the hinge open and stared at it for a while before putting it away.

On my next free afternoon, I pulled out the manual for the safe, deciphered the fractured English instructions, put in new batteries, and finally figured out how to program the timer I went for the late lunch, and around what would normally been dinner time, collected a few non-edible necessities, took a shower, put on my PJs, locked on the cuff, stashed the wrench and the padlock keys in the safe in my nightstand, arranged the chain so that it disappeared tidily under the comforter, and took a deep breath.

I’ll never forget the whirr of the mechanism as the bolt slid home, it was like a creepier version of the sound made by the one you find in your hotel closet, but this time it was more than my jewelry that I was locking up. A little frisson announced that I was now held prisoner in my own bedroom, hopelessly out of reach of not only the kitchen and temptation, but also my computer, my big TV downstairs and, horrors, the wine rack. I made a mental note to trade TVs in the morning. I strolled around to see how far I could actually get, with the chain jingling and catching on the leg of the bed, and just about everything else. It was just all too efficient, and as I lay down to watch TV, the hunger pains became a serious distraction, and to add to the fun, my Mexican lunch, probably not the wisest choice under the circumstances, was demanding liberation. I sat on the can and glared balefully at the hardware on my ankle. Back in bed, I pulled the comforter around me like a security blanket, but slept horribly, constantly waking up to look at the clock, afraid that I would be stuck, or that there would be a ‘quake, or that someone would try to break in and . . .

After a restless night the safe beeped right on time at 7am and allowed me to punch in the combination and escape. Viola! My IM was thrilled, and I decided that if I was going to worry about all that stuff, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this in the first place. The next day I called a locksmith to check all my doors and windows and install a bolt on the inside of my bedroom door. By the third night, I was exhausted and finally passed out in Lunesta assisted diet bondage for a solid eight hours. I stuck it out, and after a few weeks, I was down a whole dress size; each evening I looked forward to tightening that screw and confining myself with that highly effective little fetter.

About a month later, it was girls’ night out, and one of my friends was unusually quiet. Oh, it was explained, she got her tongue and her nips done a few days ago. Little Ms. Newly Pierced just kept on looking down at her drink and mumbled something about being on pain pills and a liquid diet. Lose any weight? I asked. She held up three fingers. Back home, as I lay awake, the little hamster wheel in my brain spun up dangerously out of control. The next afternoon found me in what we’ll be polite and call a less desirable part of town, introducing myself to a pleasant enough tattooed dude. I told him what I had in mind. "Does it hurt?" I asked. "Only for a while", he said.

His assistant, who looked like she probably wore a size zero, came over. She had a heavy septum ring and more facial piercings than I could quickly count. "Open your mouth, Miranda", he said. "She has two, see?"

Yep, they were twins, all right. "How easy is it to talk?" I asked her.

"Oh, she doesn’t say much", said the guy, grinning. She stuck out her tongue at him. Uh-huh, I thought, I bet she doesn’t. I could be like her; I talk way too much all the time; I could be the thin, silent type. I looked back at him. "They can always come out, can’t they?"

"Sure", he said, "you just unscrew them, but the holes will close up. For the first week or so there’s going to be swelling and you’ll be sucking a lot of ice. Don’t play with them, do lots of mouthwash and salt rinses, no kissing, oh, and no, um, you know, contact for a couple of months". I turned beet red and nodded. "Do it!", I said, "just like hers", and he handed me the release forms.

He checked under my tongue for blood vessels and marked two spots on the top with a pen. 'I can’t believe I’m really going to do this', I thought. He rinsed out my mouth and grabbed my tongue with some kind of forceps. "Are you sure you want them both?" It was over before I knew it and when he held up the mirror, behold! There were twin silver beads, twinkling on my lingual muscle. 'Too bad I’m not into men any more', I thought, 'they’d totally dig this'.

It was erotic, and my nipples started calling down below, so I thanked him and left to buy a case of mouthwash. That night, my fingers rummaged around in the basement more than usual and I kept clicking the beads on my teeth, but then got smart and fished out the night guards my dentist had made back when I was grinding in my sleep, and not in the good way. That helped right away. It was going to take quite a bit of self-control to get through this, but wasn’t that part of the plan? My IM thought so.

The next morning, the swelling set in with a vengeance and I discovered the reason why the barbells seemed too long the day before. Owww! Even brushing my teeth was a bitch! The payoff was that I was getting the kind of post-spanking rush I loved. I grabbed the mouthwash for the first of a dozen rinses that day. The bottom balls hung down below my tongue and caught on my bottom teeth and almost pulled the whole thing through, and I almost passed out. I had to learn to keep my tongue back there. I could hardly speak for the rest of the week. 'Holy cow', I thought. A couple more incidents followed, one in the car when I was admiring my new jewelry in the rear view mirror. Oww! Was about the limit of my speech that day. I distracted myself with work. I was getting a little sick of the mouthwash, but I could see a gradual improvement, and after about three weeks the swelling was down enough for the return visit.

"How ya doin’?" said Mr. Tattoo.

"Well", I mumbled, "it’s just hard to talk and I lost five pounds".

"Well", he said, "you insisted on two studs, we don’t usually do that". He changed out the barbells for a shorter version in a thicker gauge, with cute acrylic pink beads. Now I was more comfortable. "OK", he said, "if you need to go someplace where you don’t want anyone to see, we have these things called no-see-ums, you swap them out, they’re flesh colored, and this is a new kind that has a flat disc attached on top, and the balls screw on underneath as usual, and they’re practically invisible!" I stocked up.

The new combination of the nocturnal captive ankle and the tongue job kept my weight heading south, and my social conversations became confined to texting and email. I thought briefly about other, more intimate piercings, but decided that I was going to get enough grief from my dentist as it was, and I didn’t need my crotch doctor ganging up on me, too. As I got used to the hardware I was able to eat more solid food, and I developed what I thought was a cute lisp. The main thing was that I was loving my self-imposed restrictions, especially being made to keep quiet. Behavioral therapy at its best, I decided. But like a junkie, I craved more.

I had an idea. I remembered reading a long time ago about how when circus elephants are tethered to a wooden peg in the ground by a piece of rope, they don’t pull it out and walk away because they remembered the pain of the real band and chain from when they were babies. I had begun to miss my own ankle chain in the daytime and I had started locking it to the hall bathroom commode to cut down on snacking at my desk. I read that several hundred years ago, unruly women were supposedly put in some kind of metal thing that totally shut them up. Of course, some sadistic guy must have come up with it; now what was it called? There it was, a brank. Looking at the pictures, I thought, there’s no way. I dismissed the idea. But my IM started yelling, brank me, brank me!

A week later, I was, calling the guy up north. "Can I come up and see you?"

Sure! His workshop was BDSM heaven, conveniently tucked away in an industrial park near the airport. "Well, well", he said, "looking me up and down, nice to meet you in person, how was the cuff?"

"Great", I said, "I’m still using it, but I came to ask you about a brank, I want to stop myself from talking, totally".

He laughed. "Why?" I told him the whole story. "Oh, he said, that’s not that strange, people do much worse things to themselves". He was very matter-of-fact as he told me how he had just finished a real jail cell in a guy’s basement. My eyes got like saucers when he pulled out the pictures. He pointed to the heavy sliding door, the big lock, the regulation sink and toilet combo, concrete ledge for the bed, anchor rings everywhere and a surveillance system. "It’s loaded", he said, the client is going to make a fortune renting it out. "I can make what you want in a couple of weeks, it’s basically a lightweight cage for your head made out of surgical steel, with a tab that goes in your mouth and keeps your tongue down. I usually make them with round holes in the front like a ring gag, and you can guess what that’s for, but you don’t need that. I’ll make a holder for the tongue tab, which needs to come out so you can boil it, and all you’ll do is close the whole thing around your head and lock yourself in, and there you are. You’ll see." I sat down and looked though his photo album while he took a lot of measurements, and I wrote him a check.

Anticipation is a terrible thing. After an agonizing wait, it finally arrived. I tore open the box, spilling the styrofoam peanuts everywhere before I was holding a kind of skeletal football helmet with a collar, hinged on one side. I read the instructions, and went and washed the tongue piece before pushing it from the inside into a little slot in the front, which held it rigid. I immediately realized that it wasn’t going to work with the barbells; I had been using the no-see-ums a lot when I went out, and so I swapped out the barbells for them. I held the front up against my face as instructed, and the tab slid in a little way over my tongue, holding it down, but not enough to cause a gag reflex. I was immediately mute! The thing followed the contours of my head, around my nose, and forced my mouth closed around the tab as it curved under my chin. Now I understood the complex measuring process.

I swung the back half shut, and realized that I was going to have to learn how to swallow and control the drool in this thing. My IM woke up and my undies moistened as I gazed in the mirror and admired the craftsmanship and fished the twin locks through the hasp on the side of the collar, and then through the one higher up above my ear. They clicked against the cage as I moved. My tongue was now in solitary. Ecstatic, I lay on my bed and treated myself to an intense orgasm. I was now locked in a very wicked and efficient medieval device, but already I could see that there was going to be a problem with my teeth versus the metal plate, so I took it off and put my night guards in. Done! Still wearing it, I went to clean up the packing. There was another little bundle, which I yielded another tongue plate; there was a note. Here’s something extra, it said. Enjoy! This tab one was just like the first, except that it had about a dozen tiny sharp spikes on the underside. Enjoy? You bet, I thought to myself. I’m going to be enjoy being disciplined like there’s no tomorrow.

Later, after wearing the brank for about five minutes, my hair started to snag on the collar. I didn’t want to put it in a ponytail, which I knew from experience would definitely catch on something, and bring back memories of that bad, bad time when I had been dragged around by it, and there wasn’t enough room inside to put my hair up. I called the girl who usually cut it. The next day, I sat in her chair and told her to bob away. "OK", she said, "but it’s always been long".

"I know", I said, "change is good, and these days I have the cheekbones for it . . ."

Now the brank fitted nicely, with a little play in the collar. That evening was cooler than usual, and I was wearing a short sleeve hoodie. I pulled the thin hood up and locked the brank on over it. Now I was comfy! I made a mental note to shop for more hoodies. I took it off and swapped out the tabs, and my IM almost lost it. Now even the smallest movement of my imprisoned tongue was immediately rewarded. But for now, I took the spikes out. I was ready to wear this thing for real. I reprogrammed the safe for daytime hours, put the keys inside, clicked the lock, and became really quiet. I’m being punished, really punished! Yelled my IM as I tried to work at my desk. And I can’t take it off! I also couldn’t keep my hand out of my crotch. I needed to do something about that.

A couple of months of fairly regular brank training passed. There were a couple of near misses, like the time my BF decided to drop in without calling, and I simply took it off, and sat her down and told her the whole thing. "So that’s what the bolt cutter is for", she said. She was surprisingly cool about it. "You can’t wear it outside, though, can you?" she asked.

"No", I said, "more’s the pity".

A burka? she suggested.

"Interesting", I said, "but no way".

That night I remembered the elephant. I called Mr. Metal Genius and asked if I could come up again. Sure. This time, could he make me a plate just like the smooth one, which would be smaller to fit exactly over my tongue, with two holes for the barbells to hold it in place? Sure, no problem. I held my mouth open wide while he measured. "Go to lunch", he said, "it’ll be ready when you come back".

And it was, polished steel with rounded edges. I had brought the longer jewelry, and I pulled out the no-see-ums, unscrewed the bottom balls from each barbell, pushed them through the holes in the tab and into my tongue, then screwed the bottom balls back on. It was a little awkward, and I was going to have to learn to swallow with it, just like the first time, but the effect was like the brank without all the hardware. Now I was the elephant.

"I know you can’t talk", he said, as I pulled out my checkbook. "No, this one’s on me", and he kissed me on the cheek. I undid the plate, replaced the no-see-ums to keep the TSA at bay, thanked him profusely and floated out to the waiting cab and the airport. My IM was speechless, for a change. I was definitely going to be vewy vewy quiet, and vewy vewy thin, vewy soon.

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14.10.12