Laura Meets Jeffrey (15 page)

Sometimes Dylan passes us on the street. We give a tiny nod. Sometimes, the ultimate reward, he nods back. We spend hours pondering, arguing and drinking at the Limelight or the Buffalo Road House with an informal salon of writers, artists, and the occasional rock star.

Three weeks after my first orgy George calls and invites us to another. I suspect it's because he wants to fuck Andrea again and also to show us he's a good sport. I'm perplexed. I want to go to another orgy, but Andrea isn't just a ticket. She is now my girlfriend! What do I do?

I decide to go and risk a psychotic episode.

22

My second orgy

Three weeks later in May 1971

My second orgy happens in late May 1971. Andrea and I arrive at an East Side walk-up in the lower 80s. The apartment is smaller and more intimate than my first orgy and there are fewer people. This time we are on time and everybody is still dressed and lighting up joints and kibitzing like any group of dope-smoking New York City couples in their early twenties.

I'm blind-sided and hugged by Barb, the treat from my first orgy, and we start talking. Having been that intimate doesn't make us lovers or good friends, but it certainly makes us more than mere acquaintances. I notice that Andrea is missing. People are losing their clothes and filtering toward what I guess is a bedroom. Barb takes my arm and I walk around the corner and there in the tiny hall is Andrea, naked, on her knees, busy with another man's cock. I stop dead in my tracks. My heart stops.

I am not programmed to look at my woman with another man's machinery in her mouth as a good thing. I am enraged. Fifty thousand years of possessive hormonal programming take over. I am flushing with fight or flight. I want to kill him. I want to kill her.

Barb, still on my arm, senses all is not well.

“Are you all right?”

I say nothing, but think,
“No! I am not all right.”

Barb starts rubbing my back and a cosmic wave flows over me leaving me an epiphany. First, it would definitely be wrong to kill him. It also would probably be wrong to kill her. And if I kill either of them, I will have to spend at least that night in jail, so I won't get to fuck Barb, whom I definitely want to fuck again. Plus even if I don't kill them—and I have pretty much decided I won't—if I don't psycho-cybernetically reprogram myself right then and there, and change my head, I won't get a hard-on, I won't be able to fuck Barb and I won't be able to go to more orgies with Andrea.

I hear the guy Andrea's blowing making noises as he starts to come in her mouth. Fuck it! I definitely want to kill him and I take a baby step forward to do just that. Then one of those miracle moments occurs.

Well, maybe it's not a miracle. Maybe it's some kind of Hormonal Big Bang or maybe it's on a much more pragmatic level, like a “sit down” between the Young Turk Capos Who Run The Orgasm Machine, and just love this whole new orgy thing I'm into—and the Old Bosses Who Run The Progeny Protection Racket, the original crew I inherited from both The Bible and Darwin.

The Young Turks must have won because all of a sudden instead of wanting to kill that unfaithful bitch and the cuckolding stranger, I'm now enjoying what I'm seeing! I never switched sides so fast in my whole life before or since but right there inside me a sea change happens. Infidelity is the new sacrament. Watching the woman I love having sex with another guy goes from being the worst thing in the world to the hottest porn ever. Maybe some of it is just rationalization to allow my access to all that sweet pussy that goes to orgies, or maybe there is a tectonic shift, a cosmic warp, a subspace power transformation, but whatever it is, it's now a new ball game and I could watch my lover/girlfriend/wife get gang-banged and it's horny, not horrible.

At that moment I see Andrea differently. She is no longer a cheating girlfriend who needs to be strangled; now she is my teammate! And if she's doing great so am I. She is “Superpussy,” and I am “Supercock.” Instead of anger I'm filled with pride. “That's my girl taking that load. Atta girl Andrea!! Way to go!”

I'm proud she gives such great head. Like a Jewish grandmother watching her granddaughter graduate from college, I'm filled with naches. I'm kvelling.

I continue to enjoy, more and more, watching Andrea fuck and suck her way, and the men she pleasures, to ecstasy. Andrea and I spend the next three years going to maybe 300 orgies without jealousy.

The seismic change I experienced with Andrea at my second orgy was the exact moment of change that allowed me to love Laura fucking and sucking and coming with three, four, five, or more men every working day. I did not just tolerate or become inured to this seeming perversity, I relished it.

I knew other guys who went through this so I didn't feel completely peculiar. When Andrea and I were knee deep in orgies, it wasn't uncommon for some respectable middle class wives and girlfriends to become high-class call girls or work in posh brothels. It just made sense. They were going to several orgies a week, loved fucking strangers, most could make more money fucking than at their day job, and their husbands and boyfriends were already guys who enjoyed that other men pounded their lady.

I do not expect everyone to accept this behavior and morality as normal. However, really horny guys and most swingers can empathize. As a really horny guy who became a swinger that's the way it happened to me. It was only a short jump from enjoying watching other men pound my lady to being the whore's boyfriend.

23

A history of the New York orgy

1971–81

Laura asks me if I can arrange for three cocks at once, or better yet if we can we go to an orgy where a whole herd of men can satisfy her. She wants to know what it's like to have “too much sex.” For weeks she quizzes me almost every day about orgies. Are all orgies the same? Are there rules? What kinds of people go to orgies? Laura wants to know every single detail.

In response, my oral history of orgies goes on for days and days. My monologues are not foreplay. We don't end up fucking. It's like giving an oral defense for a doctorate.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, group sex in the U.S. came out of the closet, gained popularity and touched, or groped, mainstream culture for the first time. Before this proletarian and bourgeois entry into group sex, orgies were mostly an upper class event. At last, in the second half of the twentieth century, orgies became egalitarian. Because of the triad of the pill, the critical mass of baby boomer hormone production, and the flexing of sexual freedom and expression, sex expanded in every direction: reality, movies, art, music, print, gay, straight, younger and older. Sexuality got as much press and chatter as sports, politics or the stock market. It was the medium of the moment. Women were discussing their orgasms at the hairdresser.

In the early '70s Andrea and I migrated from the small circle we knew from the few parties we attended to newly discovered clans to larger developing tribes. The orgy scene grew out of small private networks, and by the early '70s, there were public gathering places such as Captain Kidd's, an ordinary neighborhood bar at 23rd Street and Third Avenue where, on Friday nights, a larger, cross-cultural collection of like-minded people called “swingers” could cruise and choose. No sex happened at Captain Kidd's, just talking, dancing, exchanging of phone numbers and party invitations, most for that night and most in Manhattan but some for a later date and some farther out in the burbs. This was before this kind of casual hooking up was called “the lifestyle,” and just after “swingers” still meant cool people who hung out with Frank Sinatra.

The Captain Kidd's crowd was predominantly thirty-something middle-class married couples, which seemed old to twenty-three-year-olds like Andrea and myself. There were a few blacks, a handful of hippies, a smattering of tall thin patricians and lots of Jews and Italians from Lorng Oyland and the New Joisey suburbs who had converted their spare bedrooms and dens into specially designed flocked wallpapered orgy rooms carpeted with mattresses. Then they would send the kids away for the night or weekend.

Andrea and I got invited to lots of parties. Her slinky body, pretty face and almond eyes opened the door, and her great ass, great skin, and her love of sex got us invited back. I had value because of my lust and stamina, and as a couple, we would still be up for more sex late into the morning when lesser specimens had fallen asleep. For all these reasons we were on many swingers' “A” lists. We went to one or two or three orgies a week for the next three years before we moved out to the country where our swinger life slowed way down.

The first twenty-two women in my life I had sex with one at a time. This represents a success rate of about one per 1,400 attempts. When I started going to orgies I continued to count but I stopped at 1,000, which is like two weekends for Wilt Chamberlain.

While swingers shared psychographics (personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles) more than demographics, the parties we went to did reflect the hosts' socio-economics. It wasn't until the late '70s that the scene grew to include on-premises swing palaces like Plato's Retreat and Trapeze, where masses of kindred spirits could do it right there on the spot.

MIDDLE CLASS SUBURBAN COUPLES

These people, who otherwise were regular folk; car salesmen, insurance agents, firemen, social workers, nurses and teachers, could be counted on for excellent dirty sex. They believed, nay, loved, the fact that what they were doing was “baaad!” This was in contrast to us hippies, to whom shamelessness was second nature. We saw orgies as “the way it should be.”

While I was shameless, I adored sex with women who thought it was shameful. Lapsed Catholic residual guilt is one of world's strongest strains of shame and was well represented. The fact that they were doing something dirty made me the dirty guy. I liked being the dirty guy, which being shameless, was not so easy to achieve.

Middle-class couples always served tons of food, usually great deli, but if they were white, the music was usually lame. Have you ever tried getting an erection to Tom Jones, Mantovani, or Engelbert Humperdinck? It's do-able, but in spite of, not because of.

The hottest thing about these parties, for me, was that the women had hairdos. The arty hippie women I hung out with never had hairdos, at least not like these suburban women had, the kind you have to assemble and erect.

Along with hairdos, these women wore too much make-up. I love too much make-up as long as the pancake isn't caked. Unlike hippie girls, these painted women wore lipstick, eyeliner and eye shadow (and rouge on their cheeks to accentuate their lack of cheekbones) and if you fucked them long and hard enough it would all melt. If you were a twenty-three-year-old horny hippie like me, fucking attractive women with runny make-up and destroyed hairdos was a wet dream come true.

ARTISTS & WRITERS CROWD

At first I was happy to be invited into this clique; I thought I would be able to party with My Own Kind. But they proved a big disappointment to me, really the only disappointment of the entire orgy oeuvre.

Tina, who brought me into this fold, was compact, foxy, clever, sexy, and the best graphic designer I knew. I had hired her more than once when a project I landed was too big for me alone. She was a terrific eager fuck, wore the most wonderfully inventive clothes, was great fun at orgies and had the loveliest habit of enhancing my sex experience by squeezing my balls and playing with my asshole while I was fucking another girl. Now there's a buddy.

I thought I would meet a room full of sexy Tina-esque arty types. There were a few Beautiful People but very few. On the average, this group had the least attractive people, no hairdos and, worse yet, the most fraught, self-conscious sex of the lot. These people were too intellectual for their own good. They were watching themselves having an orgy instead of having an orgy.

The conversations were way too heavy, often about sexual politics. This was that horrible period when some women felt compelled to discuss with every man they encountered Women's Lib and the roles of the sexes, the burning of bras and the structural dynamics and general semantics of Feminism as contextualized within American society. This was lousy foreplay. This was during the infancy of Political Correctness. Instead of just having a grand old sexfest these people were determined to justify their lust with its socio-political implications. All I wanted to do was fuck.

Half of these “arty” orgies I went to were hosted by a woman artist. She was lovely, warm and very political. Her paintings and drawings were skillfully rendered life studies of copulations and masturbations, mostly females, with brilliantly executed anatomies, yet some of her faces looked as if they were in pain. If you just saw the faces and not the rest of the paintings you would have thought they were created by a survivor of South American prison torture.

In just a few parties I was exposed to all kinds of dogma, some institutionalized like “Mandatory Male Bisexuality Tonight” (Andrea and I left early) and “This Room For Lesbians Only.” Plus, there were personality boobytraps you could step on, like the buxom poet who declared to me, “I don't allow men to be on top.” I got a hard-off immediately with that one. And the one who said, “No sex. I'm just into mutual masturbation.” Right, just what I came here for, a pack of rules.

There was also too much cigarette smoking. The passing of lit cigarettes in a room full of naked people is as dangerous, non-carcinogenically, as in an oil refinery. Every once in a while a flesh-searing mistake would happen. It happened to me once, thankfully only to a leg, but my cigarette radar went up from that moment on and I would stop whatever I was doing, no matter how involved I was, to point out to the person with a cigarette near me that they were a hazard and a schmuck or a shmuckess.

Often, this crowd served only vegetarian slop of the lowest order and their music was too often weird avant-garde jazz in bizarre hard to follow time signatures, with only a smattering of rock or R&B.

To be fair, fun things did happen. I saw my first arty hard-core film when filmmaker Ed Seeman (a.k.a Edwardo Cimano, to protect his career in children's cartoon animation) came one night with a 16mm sound projector and screened his latest work,
Millie's Homecoming.
It launched the genre of One Day Wonders; feature length porn movies, all hand held, shot on film, totally improvised, with at least six hard core sex scenes and shot in one day. With Cassavetes cinéma vérité immediacy, close-up heat and raw blue humor, it established Ed as one of porn's great pioneers. Another night a celebrated hairstylist with scissors gave each girl a pubic hairstyle. Also, I got to meet an assortment of famous people, showbiz notables, horny presidential speechwriters and the man who will always be connected with the Pentagon Papers.

My favorite thing about these parties was that a frequent guest, a famous black badass film director, always showed up with a tasty date, and since he had a thing for Andrea, I always began the party by tasting his date.

I wanted to be accepted by my peers. After all, I was “creative” and all the other swingers I knew had normal jobs and careers and here was a gathering of designers, art directors, painters, writers, film makers, poets and artists.

But I didn't last long. They threw me out for being, ironically, an “anarchist” for not following some rules I can't even remember and mostly for asking two women arguing with a man about women's lib who were next to me while I was fucking to please take their fucking conversation to another room and away from those who actually enjoyed sex.

NOUVEAU RICHE

Au courant and tres chic! Ultra hip with big flashy Upper East Side arriviste apartments with spectacular views that always looked like they were styled by color-blind interior decorators who got off mocking people with too much money. These stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, surgeons and big deal lawyers always kept the majority of their jewelry on when naked. I never before saw a room full of nude folk still wearing diamonds, pearls, and expensive watches. There were more complications on their wrists than even in their personalities.

On more than one night, Marcus, one of the more fashion-conscious participants would take me on a guided tour of accessories on the bodies or on the floor. He pointed out Rolex Presidents, Movado Museum Pieces or Blue Lizard Summer Watches (in season), Cartier Tanks, Patek Philippe Calatravas, Miss Pasha Cartiers and an assortment from Breitling, Tag Heuer and even a few from Tiffany for those he considered horologically
uninspired.

On the sidelines the shoe festival included Geppetto, Gucci, Casadei, Bally, Chanel and Aigner for women, and Cole Haan, Florsheim, Gucci, Bally, Nunn Bush, French Shriner and Edmunds for men. Marcus, metrosexual before that classification was coined, was married to a purse collector and knew his brands. He pointed out Gucci, Coach, Dooney & Bourke and his wife's Judith Leiber.

They were, it must be said, mostly a good-looking group. At least the women. The men were all over the handsome map and were there because of their guile, cunning, talent and facilities. The women were there because they were trophies. They were the best pussy that money could buy. Where the fuck in the whole world could I go and fuck not just one but half a dozen trophy wives on the same night?

This group liked sex, but the men were not, it seemed, into sex as much as money. They cared too much about what you thought of the artwork on their walls, and the quality of their grass and coke and lavish catering. To their credit, they usually had high-end nouvelle cuisine that Andrea and I could never afford in our real lives. The sex was usually vanilla but the women were eager. Here was their one chance to fuck men other than the rich troll they married and not fall victim to their pre-nup.

SLUMMING BRAHMINS

These old money people owned enormous brownstones and penthouses, some with indoor pools and saunas. The sex, to my surprise, was terrific and the food was lousy. Lots of tall thin Protestants who delighted in being kinky with a flair for the visually dramatic; a bit of gangbanging here and there, a double penetration or two and guys jerking off on their friends' wives faces. They were not motivated by guilt but by the privilege of their class. They were sort of like us hippies but with more attitude, less innocence, better drugs, more stuff, and chauffeurs.

Early on I got tired of the Lipton onion dip. The Kinky Blue Bloods, I think, saw their evenings as either sex or food and never saw, as Jews and Blacks and Italians did, that both could coexist.

RICH BLACK DRUG DEALERS AND/OR PIMPS

These were the very cream of the scene. Black players always had, at least to my tastes, the best parties. These orgies had the hottest women—all shades but mostly white­­––including some working girls; call girls, not street hookers, who, pro bono, would come and go in gently changing shifts. This was a thrill in itself, like getting the keys to the candy store.