Best Sex Writing 2010 (17 page)

“We thought we were going to ruin him for straight girls,” Betty says, “which didn’t turn out to be the case.” Like many women in the Lifestyle, Betty refers to women as girls. “We were disappointed,” she says. “We wanted a little more shock and helplessness,” as though Larry had no idea this kind of thing—threesomes, foursomes, orgies—existed. “Instead,” Betty says, “he took the reins.”

Typically, Mercedes says, you put a guy who is not part of the Lifestyle scene “in that situation and he’s going to go for his comfort zone. He’s going to go for me,” the woman he knows. But Larry didn’t. “He grabbed my girlfriend Betty,” Mercedes says, “threw her on the couch and started eating her out. Kathy and I looked at each other. The party was on!”

Mercedes told Larry, “No fingers.”

“What do you mean?” Larry asked.

“No fingers,” Mercedes repeated. “What did I say? No fingers.”
Those were the rules Mercedes laid down. “You can suck only,” she explained.

Betty started laughing.

“We tell people what we want them to do,” Mercedes says, “so you don’t have to do the fishing expedition.”

“Next thing you knew,” Larry recalls, “I had Kathy sucking my cock. Mercedes was underneath me, licking my balls. I was like, fantastic! I’d never had a threesome or foursome before.”

It was, Larry decided, geometrically better: each added person multiplied possibilities. “There’s so much stimulus,” Larry explains, “everything gets sensitized.” It became hard to focus on any particular body part—his or his partners’. “You just join the aroma around you,” Larry says. As in a square dance, they changed partners—and positions. Although Kathy told Larry, “I’m sorry I can’t let you fuck me in the ass. I broke my tailbone the other day playing roller hockey.”

“Kathy’s great to play with,” Mercedes says. “Easy to play with. Never gets upset about anything.”

There was a lot of bending, but no breaking, of rules. “Three rounds,” Mercedes says. “Amazing fun. I set it up purely for me, the most selfish moment in my life.”

“You should be selfish more often,” Larry laughs.

That rainy night Larry also didn’t leave anyone out. “Whoever I was with at the time,” Larry says, “it was like she was the only one there, not like I was looking over her shoulder at who was next.” He shrugs. “I only have one cock!”

Mercedes thought Larry was special not just because he took control but because he didn’t assume this was his birthright. A guy who isn’t wired right will expect an orgy “every time he sees you, rather than understand this isn’t easy to pull off.”

Still, the instantaneous and ubiquitous communication
available because of the Internet and texting makes it easier than ever to pull off, as Larry would soon learn. After the women left, at 4:30 in the morning, Larry sat gazing into space, thinking,
I have a very good life…

 

Since the arrival of the Internet, the swingers scene Mercedes, Betty, Kathy, Veronica and Reggie—and now Larry—are part of has exploded both numerically and geographically. In the past, people interested in alternative sex had to find partners through ads in the back of specialty magazines like
Connections, Spectator
and
Select,
which were hard to find in some areas. They had to send letters and wait for responses. After a number of exchanges, when everyone felt safe and comfortable, people might make phone calls to get a sense of the others from the sound of their voice and the immediacy of the interchange. After enough phone calls, people might meet in bars or, if they lived in large enough cities, seek out swingers clubs. All that effort was shaded by a sense of potential ostracism.

Now, with the Internet, Craigslist, MySpace, Yahoo or any of the many adult-oriented sites like
LifestyleLounge.com
, Alt. com,
Blissparty.com
,
AdultPartyQuest.com
,
Fling.com
, Swap-pernet. com,
PrivateSoiree.com
,
SwingLifeStyle.com
and Adult-FriendFinder. com (which Peter Cook visited, according to his ex-wife Christie Brinkley), people can instantly be put in contact with hundreds, even thousands of potential swing partners, for either hard swinging (parties where it is assumed couples will trade partners) or soft swinging (parties where swapping is available but not assumed).

One typical site—
SwingersClubList.com
—advertises itself as “the most up-to-date free worldwide directory for the swinging lifestyle, with listings in the following categories: swingers clubs,
parties/groups, hotels/B&Bs, shops, online business and literature, easily sorted by name, location, reviews and ratings.” Its “Favorite Swinging Places Rated by Swingers” includes “personals, parties, gangbangs.…” “For those who want more than just one bite of the apple”—presumably the apple Eve offered to Adam—the North American Swing Club Association International, or NASCA, offers information about “on/off premises clubs, travel and resorts, publication listings, conventions and events, Internet services… breaking news, frequently asked questions… and swing club franchise opportunities.” This is no back-alley sneak-around community.

The Internet has turned swinging into a multimillion-dollar industry that is growing every year, involving—according to Dr. Robert McGinley, founder of NASCA—at least four hundred clubs in the United States with perhaps three million American participants.
AdultFriendFinder.com
claims to have 31,959,644 members. Even smaller and less metropolitan states boast sizable subscriber numbers, like Alabama, which allegedly has 226,661, and Utah, which allegedly has 135,219.

Alt.com
claims to be the “world’s largest BDSM and alternative lifestyle personals” site. It has, according to its own accounting, 2,932,224 members—again, not just in large cities. Even Guam has a membership of 716. American Samoa has 34. The Lifestyle scene changes from city to city. “It’s very geographical,” Veronica explains on the way to the Fetish Ball. “Some cities don’t have a scene.” Other cities have scenes that are specific to the particular erotic DNA of the local culture. Los Angeles, not surprisingly, tends to be into exhibitionism and voyeurism. New York, the financial capital of the country, tends to be more into S/M, BD and DS: power. Reggie dismisses New York. “Not happening,” he says. “From the neck down, nothing happening.” Too intellectual—although
that may betray his Los Angeles bias. Maybe in the suburbs. Westchester County. Connecticut. New Jersey.

San Francisco is “more artsy,” Veronica says. “Unusual. Eclectic.”

“Miami is very into drugs,” Reggie says. “Late nights. Ecstasy.”

Dallas?

“Very stratified,” Reggie says.

“Denver has a good scene,” Veronica says.

“Denver,” Betty agrees, “is a free-spirited, open-minded city.”

They circle back to New York and agree that Giuliani destroyed the scene.

 

From the moment Larry and Mercedes spotted each other on a music-video set—Larry was visiting a friend, Mercedes was training dancers—it was lust at first sight. If this had been one of Larry’s movies, everyone else would have faded into the background. The soundtrack would have become muffled, and they would have moved toward each other in slow motion as the camera made a 360-degree pan. Their relationship also developed quickly because Mercedes was ready for an adventure. “Three weeks earlier,” Mercedes says, “I’d been at a business meeting with a guy and his partner, who was ridiculously good-looking.” They were at the bar at the Standard, on Sunset Strip. The man Mercedes had met for business had an early call the next morning. “You guys keep talking,” he said—and left.

“I knew I wasn’t going to have any dealings with this guy again,” Mercedes explains, so she set out to bed the good-looking partner.

“So,” Mercedes asked, “you live around here?”

“As a matter of fact,” the partner said, “I live in a loft right down the street.”

Mercedes thought,
Hmmm…
“Are you married?” she asked him.

“No.”

“Do you have a live-in girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Do you want to go back to your place?” Mercedes asked.

“What?”

“I have a hall pass from my boyfriend,” Mercedes explained.

“He says I’m welcome to go home with you if I want to. And I want to.”

“Shouldn’t we do the responsible thing and get to know each other first?”

“Absolutely not,” Mercedes said. “I don’t want to know you.”

He ordered another drink. Mercedes said, “Check, please.”

This became a running joke between Mercedes and her boyfriend: I give you a hall pass, and you can’t close the deal! So when Mercedes met Larry, she thought,
I’m going to get this one done!
She was intrigued. She liked Larry. He didn’t seem needy. He was laid-back. Honest. Which, Mercedes says, is “very, very rare among single men. He never told me what he thought I wanted to hear. He never looked like he had an agenda.”

“So,” Mercedes asked Larry, “what do you do?”

“I’m an actor,” Larry said.

“You make a living as an actor?” Mercedes asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I was a bitch,” Mercedes later says.

She gave him a hard time, but she didn’t much care who or what he was. They went out three times before she thought to Google him and discovered, “Oh, he’s for real.” He was a successful
actor. As Mercedes left the shoot, she was already texting Larry: HOW SOON CAN WE GET TOGETHER?

WHAT ARE YOUR FANTASIES? she texted.

WHAT ARE YOUR FANTASIES? he texted.

“I’d tell him a story,” Mercedes says. “He’d add on. Then I’d add on. Then he would.” Through texting and email Mercedes almost instantly discovered Larry “liked the side of sex I liked.” Master-slave role-playing.

“I think people feel more free texting,” Mercedes says. “I definitely talk more freely in text. I don’t do phone sex so well. I change the subject.”

“When we first met,” Larry says, “I was out of town a lot. Texting kept the interest growing. We had a bet to see who could make the other masturbate first using email and text. So when we got together it was explosive.”

Texts flashed back and forth between them.

“We pushed the pedal to the metal,” Mercedes says, “and were going two hundred miles an hour. We knew where the other was fantasy-wise before we even got together.” Technology lubricated their relationship. What might have taken a month or two to develop twenty years earlier—maybe during a dozen dinners and two dozen late-night conversations as they edged deeper into their erotic jungle—happened almost instantly.

“Watch people texting,” one orgiast says. “The constant tapping of keys, the rapt expression—it even looks like someone masturbating.”

 

Unlike Larry—who sees himself as a sexual tourist—Mercedes is a sexual hobbyist. Larry indulges occasionally; for Mercedes, the Lifestyle is a lifestyle.

She stumbled onto the scene fifteen years ago, when she was
twenty-one. She used to go to a resort in Loreto, Mexico, called Diamond Eden, between Cabo and La Paz. She didn’t notice anything unusual about the place until she and her girlfriend went one Halloween.

“Even on the plane it was kind of odd,” Mercedes says. “Ninety percent of the people were also going to the resort. A guy was walking around the plane with a clipboard, checking people off.”

He asked Mercedes and her friend their names and scanned the list. Nope, they weren’t on the roster. He walked away. At the resort, they were sitting by the pool when Clipboard Guy came up to them and said, “You weren’t on my list.”

“What list?” Mercedes asked.

Clipboard Guy thought they were part of an organization that was meeting there, Lifestyles.

What’s Lifestyles?
Mercedes wondered.

She began to pay more attention.

There were, she noticed, a lot of people wandering around naked, being unusually affectionate.

“I ended up dating a guy who was part of the organization,” Mercedes says. “A bodybuilder.”

She still has friends she met on that weekend fifteen years ago.

“There’s no division,” Mercedes explains, “between my life and the Life.”

But that doesn’t mean she isn’t discreet, she says. She was in a restaurant with a dozen friends from the Lifestyle scene, and one couple was being obvious about their swinger association. Across the room was “a client of mine,” Mercedes explains. She started distancing herself from the obstreperous couple, but the woman in the couple said, at the top of her lungs, “I don’t give a shit who
knows I’m a swinger.”

“Needless to say,” Mercedes adds, “I got a call the next day from my client, who said, ‘I don’t want to be affiliated with that.’ I lost a one-thousand-two-hundred-dollar-a-month client.”

 

The foursome in the rain was so successful Mercedes decided she wanted Larry to host a pussy party: Larry, Mercedes, Betty, Kathy—and four of Mercedes’s friends who are part of the scene, including Veronica, who came without Reggie on the condition that she could play with the other women but not with Larry. Seven women and one man.

Since the foursome, Larry had played with Mercedes and Betty, but none of them considered that an orgy: three people doesn’t rise to their definition of what constitutes an orgy. If four is the lower limit of an orgy, what is the upper?

Larry and Mercedes exchange glances. With more than a dozen, they agree, it becomes hard to keep track of people—although theoretically there is no upper limit.

When she throws parties at her house, “I limit it to twenty or thirty couples,” Mercedes says. “And I have a wait list.” But she prefers smaller parties.

“Two on two,” she says, “three on three…”

Even with such a low number there’s “so much pressure,” Mercedes says. “Four people have to like one another. Hard to get that dynamic to work.” Think of it as dating: Even one-on-one it can be hard to find the right match. What about parties with other men?