Tender La Cama

How to Treat Your Bed the Way Crocket Treated Isabella

I changed the sheets and made the bed because it’s Monday. 

Tender la cama in Spanish means “to make the bed.” Ever since I learned this phrase in my Spanish class, I experience making the bed differently than when I was monolingual. 

Tender la cama gets to the soul of it all. 

We tend to the bed. 

Like a child or a lover. 

Like our dreams or our gardens. 

Don’t just make the bed but tend to the bed, as the bed tends to us. Beyond those born in the back of cabs, many of us are born in beds. We masturbate, sleep, dream, make love, fuck, and even sometimes pee in our beds. 

We begin and end in bed. 

People once died in their own beds among family, and now they often pass in the beds of other people’s Dying.

Beds deserves respect but are fed to fat dumpsters instead. Even Goodwill won’t take our mattresses any longer. Blood- and cum-soaked tho they may be, the stains are a patina of years-well-lived. 

A friend of mine used to scavenge old mattresses from alleys and then cut them up and glue them onto star-shaped scraps of plywood. He imbued the beds with their celestial worth, images so poignant that I sill consider them 15 years on.

So now I make our bed differently. No longer a distracted habit of chore, I tend to it like a lover or an aged one.

The difference between just making the bed and tending to the bed is the difference between fucking and making love. Sometimes we fuck, wild and sloppy, slamming our bodies together to get deeper and wetter, raging toward an orgasmic endpoint. 

And sometimes we tend to every forgotten part of a person’s body. The pace evaporates; breathing and touch slowed. Spine alive from fingertips unzipping our dresses of flesh. And then fistfuls of fat and ass gripped in sweaty palms. And so it goes with the bed as well. From the deft delicacy of a finger pulling a fitted sheet to the swell of a corner, to the shoving struggle of filling a pillowcase with a pillow; the movements are variable. 

I just watched Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006) a few days ago, and the first love scene between the characters Sonny and Isabella seems an apt example of what I’m thinking when I say “tending to a bed is like making love.” 

The chiaroscuro lighting heightens the eroticism of not really seeing anything beyond forearm, face, calf, and a bit of side-boob.

I parachute the sheets to hover above the bed, as he gently positions her limbs around him, their pelvises curtaining the daylight.

I snug and tuck the flat sheet against the fitted sheet, as their bodies pack closer together for warmth, like people freezing.

Every movement in the love scene is meaningful, deliberate and gentle.

And maybe that’s what tending to the bed should be. . . meaningful, deliberate and gentle.