The New Sexual Underground: Crossing the Last Boundaries (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 10)

by Lawrence Block

  Other interviewees told me of various swingers they had known or heard of who practiced incest of one sort or another. It became obvious to me that material on this subject belonged in the book, and extended my research until I was successful in interviewing several persons who have graciously provided me with the material for this present chapter.

  • • •

  Penny Harding might be loosely described as a hippie, although she herself does not feel the label is applicable. She fits the type physically. A willowy nineteen-year-old college dropout with long straight blonde hair, she dresses casually and sprinkles her conversation with the current hippie argot. She smokes marijuana frequently, uses amphetamines and barbiturates occasionally, and at the time of our interview had had four LSD experiences, the last of which was sufficiently unpleasant to discourage her from further trips for the time being.

  On the other hand, Penny dresses well, lives in an attractive apartment on a good block in the West Sixties, and earns a comfortable living by acting in “sexploitation” films—the sort of low-budget quickies which bear an equivalent relationship to pornographic stag films as do paperback sex novels to hardcore pornography. She also models occasionally at a figure model studio catering to voyeurs; for an hourly fee men can have her pose and snap pictures of her. The studio supplies cameras to those who want them. Most of the men, she advised me, don’t even bother to put film in the camera. They simply ogle her and surreptitiously handle their own genitals.

  Hippie or not, Penny shares the hippie disdain for conventional sexual morality. She enjoys swinging with both single men and couples, and enjoys occasional lesbianism as a change of pace. She has attended several orgiastic nude parties and enjoys them, saying that an orgy every once in a while gives a person a chance to let off steam,

  Her favorite sexual partner is the person with whom she first engaged in sex play seven years ago, and to whom she lost her virginity two years later at the ripe old age of fourteen. Her partner, thirteen himself on that occasion, was her brother Dale.

  I was not able to interview Dale, who was in San Francisco when I saw Penny. I had been assured by other swingers who knew Penny and Dale that the two were in fact brother and sister, and that Penny’s story was not fantasy. Penny herself provided weightier proof by showing me a picture of herself and Dale having sexual relations, and then showed me Dale Harding’s picture in his high school yearbook so that I could assure myself that Dale was really Dale. “I don’t mind proving it,” she told me. “When we introduce ourselves as brother and sister people always think it’s a put on, so I’m used to it.”

  The element of incest excepted, Penny’s interview is the unexceptional story of a typical sort of unattached young female swinger. Briefly, then, let us refer to the interview to see the role incest has played in Penny’s life.

  • • •

  PENNY: The idea of us being brother and sister really gets to people. It either turns them on or turns their stomachs. I don’t get it. The only thing really out of sight about it is that we’re still swinging together and that we don’t pull the blinds on who we are. Face it—when you have a brother and sister who are close in age and who dig each other, and if they’re a couple of sexy kids to begin with, then you’re going to have some kind of scene going on. Maybe with some people it never gets past the Show-me-your-banana-and-I’ll-show-you-my-fig routine, and probably a lot of the time there’s no actual screwing, but if people don’t think a lot of grooving goes on between brothers and sisters then they just don’t know where it’s all happening.

  JWW: Is this just a supposition on your part, or have you known many girls with similar experiences?

  PENNY: Well, most chicks don’t generally discuss it. Or guys either, but if Dale and I swing with a couple a lot of the time the husband will say that he used to fool around with his sister, or the girl will admit she and her brother used to give each other hand jobs or maybe that they balled once or twice. And it’s the sort of thing that people don’t want to admit because it’s such a forbidden scene, like, so for every one who says so you have to figure there are a lot who don’t talk about it.

  JWW: How did you and Dale first come to have sex?

  PENNY: Before anything happened, he used to peep at me a lot. I was I guess eleven and developed early, both getting my period and my breasts growing, and he was a year younger and very curious about the whole bit. He would like accidentally walk in on me while I was in the tub or on the toilet or getting dressed. I made out as though I was angry, but I was about as angry as he was doing this accidentally.

  JWW: You enjoyed having him see you?

  PENNY: Oh, sure. I was real proud, like look what I got, you dig? And at the same time I was interested in having a look at him. Then I walked in on him one time and he was playing with himself. He got all red and pulled the blankets over himself and yelled at me to get out. I told him I wanted to see him. He shook his head, and then I told him if he didn’t show me I would tell mother what he was doing. As a matter of fact I didn’t know what he was doing. I hadn’t managed to hit on masturbation myself and all I knew was that he was ashamed of what he’d been doing, so I said that. He said he’d show me if I’d let him see me naked. I agreed, and he pulled the covers down again and let me look at his little penis and testicles. I think that must be the prettiest thing in the world, a little boy’s genitals. I looked at them and touched them, and then he wanted to see me so I took off my pajamas and let him feel my breasts and my vulva. He was very excited about my breasts because of their size, and he was very interested in my pussy. I was just beginning to get a few pubic hairs.

  He touched me all over and I got to feeling very funny. Like I was excited but didn’t know what it was all about. When I looked at his penis again I was surprised because it was much bigger than before and all straight and hard. I asked him what had happened to it. I knew what screwing was but didn’t know anything about how it worked, that men got erections. I had a strange idea that it was connected with urination, that they put their prick in a girl and peed and got her pregnant.

  Dale knew a lot more about the whole thing than I did and explained everything to me. I asked him to show me what he had been doing when I came in, and he wrapped his hand around his penis and moved it up and down. I thought this was really groovy and asked him to let me do it. At first he complained that I was holding him too tight, but then I got the hang of it. I was kneeling over him with my face right over it, staring at the tip of it while I used my hand on him, and honestly I didn’t know that he was going to ejaculate. All of sudden he did and I got a face full.

  JWW: How did you react to this?

  PENNY: I just burst out laughing. I remember thinking that you couldn’t get that good a show on television, which if you think about it is a pretty far-out line for a twelve-year-old. I wanted him to do it again right away. First, though, he wanted to try playing with me. He tried different things until we figured out what spots would get me hot. I didn’t have an orgasm that night, but afterwards we got together every chance we got and fooled around with each other, and after a couple of weeks of this I came. Oh, wow, that was the wildest thing in the world! Because like we neither of us had any idea that something like that could happen, do you dig it? I didn’t know that girls came or anything. And to have it like that, your first orgasm when you aren’t even expecting anything, oh, it was out of sight, I tell you.

  JWW: Did either of you feel guilty about what you were doing?

  PENNY: We were having such a ball we didn’t have time to feel guilty. Another thing, we were too young at the time to realize how fucking wrong it was, what we were doing. We knew it was something we shouldn’t get caught doing, the same as we shouldn’t go to bed without brushing our teeth or talking in class. As far as what was really right or wrong about sex, no one had told us anything. Like the story about the girl who put beans up her nose because her mother never told her not to, you dig? Like my old lady never told me not to jerk off
my brother. The only advice she gave me was not to get in cars with strangers. I used to have nightmares about strangers taking me for rides and cutting off my arms and legs and head. No joke. So it was just a big secret with Dale and me, something we never told anybody about, but we didn’t worry whether it was bad or not.

  JWW: How did your relationship progress?

  PENNY: It seems a little ridiculous to put it in those words. How did your relationship progress? I mean, he was my brother, we got together when we had the chance and fooled around. It wasn’t a relationship. It was the two of us having fun.

  JWW: Well—

  PENNY: The next few months, though, we both learned a lot about sex. I don’t mean what we learned together but the factual information we both picked up. It’s a funny thing, but kids that age start getting interested in sex all in a rush. It was as if one morning every girl in the school wanted to talk about sex. From what I’ve heard it happens like that everywhere, but the age isn’t the same every place. Here in New York now the kids learn things a lot younger. We were in Milwaukee, and kids generally seem to get hipper more slowly out there. I learned a lot in hurry. I learned what people did, all the different things, and learned that there were two girls in the eighth grade who would let boys fuck them. I never said anything about Dale, though, and he was having the same kind of conversations with the boys and never let on about me. One thing we both heard, though, and it scared the shit out of us, was that if a sister and brother happened to screw the sister would get pregnant and have a baby with two heads, and you would have to have the baby killed.

  JWW: That rumor seems to be part of American childhood folklore. Of course incest frequently leads to some sort of genetic mistake, but almost every child at one time or another hears that specific story, about a two-headed baby resulting from the union of a brother and sister.

  PENNY: And that you have to have the baby killed?

  JWW: Yes, that’s usually part of it.

  PENNY: It was that groovy little part of American childhood folklore that kept us from screwing for two years. We would have gone ahead otherwise but we were scared by the image of this dead two-headed baby. Oh, wow! So what we did was we got into this star-crossed lovers bag. We had it all taped that we would get married when we grew up and adopt children and not screw. We played husband and wife, kissing and petting and all, and Dale would get on top of me and go through all the motions of screwing without getting inside of me. And we also figured out fellatio and cunnilingus. Oh, that was a funny bit! Oh, that was too much!

  JWW: What was?

  PENNY: We heard this expression, blow job, but we didn’t know exactly how it worked. We managed to work out that it was something a girl did to a boy with her mouth, and figured, well, they call it a blow job, after all, so I popped it into my mouth and blew like blowing up a balloon, and—

  JWW: Good grief!

  PENNY: It didn’t work out too well.

  JWW: No, I don’t imagine it did.

  PENNY: Anyway, we found things to do. Then by the time I was fourteen it wasn’t such a far-out thing for a girl to be putting out. An awful lot of the girls were doing it, and if you wanted you could get the pills, the oral contraceptives. Some of the girls were dating boys who worked in drugstores who would steal big bottles of them, and other girls stole them from their mothers. I got some pills because if nothing else was I still hyped over this idea of the goddamn two-headed dead baby, and started taking the pills and Dale and I started balling.

  JWW: And enjoyed it?

  PENNY: Oh, yeah. We weren’t very good at it at first. No pain, though. He’d had his finger up me so many times that it wasn’t any problem fitting his cock in there. And whatever we lacked in skill we made up in enthusiasm. I suppose we must have been the horniest kids in the state of Wisconsin.

  JWW: By this time, though, I suppose you knew the force of the taboo against incest.

  PENNY: Sure.

  JWW: Did it bother you?

  PENNY: No. I don’t think so. Well, sure, I guess it did. Not until we actually started screwing, though. Before then it was still a game, dig, and we would say that we were just fooling around. But taking the pills and actually making it was something else. We would have scenes where we would decide to stop. But sooner or later we would start in again because we both wanted to. I suppose it was a miracle that no one ever caught on to us. Wait, I take it back, Dale had a friend of his stay over one night, and when the friend was asleep he came into my room and we had a quickie. But the friend woke up and caught us at it.

  JWW: What happened?

  PENNY: I think we could have put him back to bed and in the morning he would have thought it was dream. Feature walking in on a brother and sister and they’re fucking! But we panicked, and he was really shook up, and we made a bargain. I would make it with him if he promised not to tell anyone. He promised, and I gave him the first lay of his life, and even so we were sure he would talk. But a week to the day after that both of his parents were wiped out in an auto wreck and he went to live with his aunt halfway across the country, so that cooled it.

  JWW: Was this the first contact you had had with anyone besides your brother?

  PENNY: Right. I went out on dates and petted but hadn’t let anybody else ball me up to then. After that if I went out on a date and liked a boy and wanted to make it with him I would go ahead.

  JWW: How old were you at the time?

  PENNY: I guess fifteen or sixteen. Then I graduated and went to U.W. at Madison, and like from the first day there I came completely unglued. I think it maybe was being away from Dale that did it. You’ve got to realize that we were a lot closer than the usual brother and sister.

  JWW: I’d say so, yes.

  PENNY: Right, solid, but not just that. I mean that was the whole thing. There was this double closeness, we were brother and sister and at the same time we were also lovers. I would make it with other guys and all and he would do the same with other girls, but it was like none of that counted, it didn’t change what we had between us. Like I hardly talked to anyone else. I mean I talked but there was no communication, I never really rapped with anyone else, like rapport. So I came unglued and never went to classes and smoked tons of grass, which we had never had any contact with at my high school. I would stay up for days on end on pills and ball just about anyone. Guys and girls and gangbangs, anything. That was my wild period, and after a semester of that they threw me out on my ass. And I came here.

  JWW: You didn’t return home?

  PENNY: My parents and I couldn’t talk any more. I mean we never talked, but it was a very bad scene between us since before college started. Dale flew down to see me and stayed for about a week, maybe two weeks, and then went back to Milwaukee and managed to hang on until he graduated. Then he came back here and we’ve been on the scene ever since.

  JWW: The two of you share this apartment?

  PENNY: Right. I can make money easy with the movies and the modeling, and Dale gets work in the sexploitation films now and then and picks up odd jobs. And we swing, as you know, sometimes separately and sometimes together, and our folks don’t even know the address of this place and we couldn’t care less anyway, and it’s very groovy.

  JWW: What sort of future plans do you have?

  PENNY: To get out of the fucking country in a month or so unless Dale can figure out a way to beat the draft. Getting your balls shot off in Vietnam is a bad scene.

  JWW: I mean long range personal plans.

  PENNY: Oh, I see. You get in the habit, you know, of not thinking too far ahead of anything. I don’t know. Just to keep on keeping on, I suppose. You’re getting at do I think Dale and I will keep grooving with each other, aren’t you? When we get asked that we have a stock answer. We both say we’ll give each other up the day either of us meets somebody who’s better in bed. It hasn’t happened yet.

  JWW: I see.

  PENNY: I don’t know. I can see us getting older and getting so we don’t dig the fre
nzy of this scene, you know? Like this swinging is great when you’re young, but it must get very draggy after a while. And sometimes we’ll be talking, just verbal dreams like, of how we could go somewhere, maybe in Europe, I don’t know, or someplace out in the country, and just live together. Even adopt kids, or even take a chance having our own. What a topper if we actually had a kid with two heads! Better than one, though, can you dig it?

  But, well, I can see how we might do that some day. Just take a house and say you’re married and who would know the difference? We already have the same last name and nobody ever asks to see a marriage license. You know something? I bet a lot of people have done just that. I’m serious, I really bet they have. I know a lot of girls do it with their brothers, and I’ll bet scattered all over the country there are brothers and sisters living together as man and wife and nobody knows the difference. How would anybody know?

  • • •

  While there is little doubt that Penny Harding exaggerates the incidence of brother-sister incest, her last words nevertheless ring a true note. Even in this present age of records and filing cabinets, it is easy enough for an individual to move to a new location and establish a new identity for himself. And as Penny suggests it would be a very simple matter for a brother and sister to change their names, marry, and live together permanently as man and wife. That just this sort of thing does happen now and then seems highly likely.

  In Peggy and Dale’s case, the incestuous relationship developed as it most often does between brother and sister, through generally ignorant exploration and discovery during very early adolescence. Brother-sister contacts almost invariably are limited to situations in which one or both of the parties is a sexual innocent at the time of initial contact. In this case both were innocent; in other cases, when there is a discrepancy in ages and the older and experienced sibling seduced the younger one, it is usually a case of an older sister seducing a younger brother. The reader may formulate his own theories to explain this phenomenon.