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

by Lawrence Block

  JWW: How did you react?

  MOIRA: I thought, oh, good, they’re doing it too, and that means it’s all right. But it didn’t matter what I thought or felt because I was going to do whatever Lennie wanted me to do. He had his hand on my arm and he was leading me across the room. He took me to the bedroom where he had been sleeping with Pam. We just tore our clothes off. The zipper on my ski pants stuck and he ripped it apart and threw me down on the bed and fell on me and got inside me immediately. And he fucked me like a stallion, like a bull, in and out as hard as he could. It seemed as though it lasted an hour but it might have been over in minutes, I don’t know. I came over and over, it was like one endless series of climaxes and then a final massive one when he finished. I passed out cold and didn’t wake up until the following morning.

  EDMUND: It was equally intense for Pam and me, but not quite so blunt. More slow-moving. I undressed her there on the couch and she made wild little sounds every time I touched her. I was sucking her big breasts and fingering her and she had her hands full, and we just went on like that until we both climaxed.

  That brought a little reality back. I suddenly remembered that Moira and Lennie were around some place. Pam said they must be in another room screwing and that she had been wanting me to screw her for ages and that we should do it on the rug in front of the fire. We went from the couch to the rug and she stretched out with her blonde hair spread out behind her and her back arched. I was still erect, it hadn’t gone away, and I got on top of her and we went at it slow and lazy for a long time. She had orgasms that made her cry out at the top of her lungs but I couldn’t finish and finally stopped. She said she wanted me to come. I told her I couldn’t, that I evidently didn’t have anything left from the first time. She made me lie on my back and told me she was going to do something wonderful for me so I would know how much she loved me. Then she knelt beside me and her hair brushed my thighs and stomach as she took me in her mouth.

  She asked me if Moira did this for me. I couldn’t answer. She said she was sure Moira couldn’t do it as well as she could, and I watched her face as her mouth worked on me, and then I couldn’t watch any more because I had to lie back and close my eyes and just enjoy it, and then there was just a wild blur of unbelievable sensation. The last thought I had was that we couldn’t pass out in the middle of the room like that, that it wasn’t proper, and then I did pass out.

  MOIRA: I was the first one awake the next morning. I thought it was a dream and then I saw Lennie in bed beside me and my head spun. I slipped out of bed and headed for our own room, and on the way I saw Edmund and Pam sound asleep, all tangled in each other’s arms in front of the fireplace. I ran to the john and threw up, but I don’t know whether it was the sight of them or all the liquor I drank the night before, or just the general emotional impact of everything. I hid in the room, got into bed and pulled the covers over my head and prayed the world would end before the rest of them got up. But it didn’t.

  EDMUND: The remarkable thing is that the world didn’t end after we got up. I hope I never have to live through a morning like that one again. You know how time crawls when you have a hangover? Well, magnify that a few thousand times and you’ll get some idea of what those hours were like. Each and every one of us felt consumed by guilt and unable to face any of the others. At first we tried not to talk about it, and then we tried to talk about it, and it was just plain impossible. Finally the four of us sat down together and forced ourselves to face what had happened. We began with the idea that everything was finished, dead—Pam and Lennie would break up, Moira and I would break up, and that would be that.

  MOIRA: But the more we talked the saner we became, which is a damn good thing, because for one I was pretty close to a nervous collapse for a while there. We came to see that what had happened didn’t change the way Pam and Lennie loved each other, or the way Edmund and I did. Then we decided that we could never see each other as couples, but a little more open discussion showed us that that didn’t make sense either. We all agreed that what had happened had been brought on by too much liquor and the special nature of the environment, and that of course we had a strong sexual attraction for each other and were emotionally close, and that something of this sort had lain dormant in all our minds for some time.

  EDMUND: So what we came up with was that it was just one of those things, and it didn’t change any of the aspects of our relationship at all. But one thing we did decide was that it was an isolated incident, that it would have been better if it had never happened, and that it would never be repeated. And I guess all of us honestly believed this at the time.

  MOIRA: I know I did.

  EDMUND: This last attitude was a long time changing. Over a month. During that time Moira and I talked it all out at great length and found ourselves reexamining our whole feelings toward sex and love. I think each of us was surprised and delighted to discover that the other wasn’t jealous. We felt a lot of personal guilt but no jealousy, and we worked it out more profoundly in our minds and the guilt went away, too. I found myself pleased that she had enjoyed herself with Lennie, and found myself thinking back with increasing pleasure at the time I had had with Pam. I began wishing I could live through it again, or have a repeat performance.

  MOIRA: The two of them were going through the same thing, and I had a couple of heart-to-hearts with Pam, and Edmund and Lennie did some talking on their own. The final realization was that all four of us wanted to try some more switching, but with the whole thing open and above board this time. Before we actually did anything, we did some reading on wife-swapping, not to find out what the people did as much as to understand what effect it had on their relationships and whether it could really be constructive over a long period of time. Finally I went to Lennie’s apartment and Pam went to Edmund’s, and it was just really great for everybody and that’s all.

  • • •

  The two couples began swapping on a regular basis several months before they were married, and continued on this basis with no discernible guilt feelings in any quarter. Partners were exchanged regularly one night a week. All of the “swinging” engaged in was of the most ordinary sort, with none of the more bizarre refinements—sexual relations occurred in privacy, photographs were never taken, and sex acts were substantially identical to those with their original partners.

  There was never any doubt that this pattern would continue after marriage. The unanimous feeling was that such a source of mutual pleasure ought not to be given up for no reason. Because all four parties were intimately involved on an emotional level long before wife-swapping entered the picture, they seem to have developed a genuine four-way love relationship which Edmund characterized as “more like a double marriage than like adultery.” While there was a certain amount of joking about the idea of bringing other couples into the circle, this was never really planned. In June, both couples were married, with each standing up for the other, which they discovered “that it was just as much fun when it was legal” and that, while they did not feel the absence of the other couple during the two months before they were together again, they did look forward to a reunion.

  • • •

  EDMUND: I think we might have confined ourselves to a meeting a week with Pam and Lennie for a long time. Years, perhaps. But after just a couple of months the inevitable happened and we wound up almost two thousand miles apart. When we learned we were moving we all got together and talked things out. They told us they intended to look for another couple or couples. They said they never expected to find anyone like us, and that we would get together whenever possible and hopefully wind up in the same town permanently before too long, but that in the meantime they felt that swapping was just too much real pleasure to abandon. We had already had the same thoughts ourselves.

  MOIRA: Once we got settled here, we tried answering some of the club ads. We were a little hesitant and only sent out a few letters, and none of the replies we got interested us. A lot of the people who wrote us ha
d pretty far-out ideas sexually from our point of view. More important, they weren’t our type. We didn’t just want sex with strangers but hoped to find something close to what we had with Pam and Lennie.

  EDMUND: To make a long story short, we never did get together with any of the people we wrote to, but we had a letter from Pam and Lennie who had had better luck, or who had been a little more outgoing, I don’t know which. They had met two couples and were really getting in the swim of things, and one of the couples knew some swingers where we lived and thought we might enjoy getting together with them. We were enthusiastic and Lennie had the couple get in touch with us.

  MOIRA: The first time was kind of strange. Although we were intellectually able to accept it all, we still had no prior experience to prepare us emotionally for the idea of going over to a strange house and winding up in bed with the host and hostess. Fortunately they were real simpatico types and spent a few hours in conversation with us first. An awkward situation turned into a comfortable one. I tensed up again when Noreen took Edmund upstairs, waiting for Hank to make a pass at me, but the minute he touched me all of the tension was gone and I was wildly passionate.

  EDMUND: After we had swung with them a few times we thought of ourselves as veteran swappers. Then they started to show us the ropes—making it in front of one another, adding a few refinements and so on. Nothing very far out, though. We liked what they showed us, and finally they decided to tell us about their group. It’s the one we belong to now.

  MOIRA: So do Pam and Lennie, as it happens. They managed to move here just a few weeks ago and joined right away, so that particular story had a happy ending.

  • • •

  We need not devote much attention to the particular composition of the group to which Moira and Edmund belong. It is one of the more conservative of such swap groups, with sexual relations between members limited to meeting nights and a minimum of group sex; meetings generally consist of mutual petting, the viewing of a stag film, and systematic pairing of couples for sexual relations in private. Now and then two or more members may stage a live exhibition as a special treat, but otherwise the group is a basic swap club of the sort most freewheeling swingers regard as old-fashioned. Moira and Edmund have little appetite for the more exotic forms of swinging but do enjoy an occasional venture with another couple, in which troilistic activity and other varieties of group sex play a part. However, they prefer to have these “couple orgies” not with close friends but with relative strangers, feeling that the genuine friendships they have formed with fellow club members, and especially with Lennie and Pam, would inhibit them in such actions.

  Here then is a marriage which did not evolve toward wife-swapping but which was almost based on swapping. I find it particularly interesting and enlightening in view of the fact that Edmund and Moira, two highly introspective and articulate individuals, displayed throughout an absorption in morality (albeit unconventional) and in the subtleties of interpersonal relationships which are not generally such important factors to the standard swinger.

  I would tend to agree with their conclusion that their relationship with Pam and Lennie would have led in time to sexual relations, perhaps in the form of clandestine affairs rather than the simultaneous changing of partners. But the incident at the ski lodge probably had a great deal to do with the nature of their eventual rapprochement with wife-swapping.

  Barring a radical change in the whole pattern and direction of contemporary sexual mores, I can only suspect that more and more young couples will approach matrimony either with experiences as swingers or with the conviction, voiced or not, that swinging will play a role in their sex life.

  Nine:

  Like A Supermarket Of Sex

  The orgy has played a significant role in western civilization for ages. From the Roman saturnalia to Munich’s Fasching and New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, various cultures have established methods of working off steam by setting aside a certain specified period of time in which the traditional rules of morality and decorum are suspended. The psychic alimentary canal is purged, flooded with a heady high colonic that flushes away the tension and repression of day-to-day living. Afterward, drained and exhausted and yet fulfilled, the participant returns once again to normal life.

  In the new sexual underground, however, the orgy plays a somewhat different role. It is no longer the annual escape of repressed individuals but the special pleasure of certain swingers who can hardly be described as sexually deprived. For some it is the main underground outlet in a life that is otherwise limited pretty much to the more ordinary forms of heterosexual copulation. For others, all-out swingers, the sex orgy represents the ultimate in abandoned merriment, a madcap sexual lark a cut above the swap sessions and threesomes and couple games that sustain them between orgies. A majority of the swingers with whom I have become acquainted have attended at least one party or gathering which could be properly designated as an orgy. For many of them, once was enough, but for quite a few others orgies have become, if not a frequent part of their swinging lives, at least an occasional treat. And of those swingers I have known who had never attended such a party, almost all expressed the desire to try it once if only to find out what it is like.

  Throughout this book and others, I have specifically endeavored to avoid any discussion of my own personal experiences in the sexual underground. I did mention in the introduction to The Taboo Breakers that for a period of time after the termination of my marriage my personal relationship with the world of the swingers transcended that of researcher. It was during this period of time that a female friend took me to a full-scale orgy in the Los Angeles area. The following day I filled a reel of tape with my recollections and impressions of the previous night’s entertainment. I filed the tape away, much as I filed my memory of the orgy in my mind.

  While reviewing my records in the course of the preparation of this present chapter, I studied several interviews I had had with individuals and couples whose major interest in swinging centers upon this sort of group sex. I was continually impressed with the difficulty of conveying the sense of the orgy from these interviews. Most of my subjects spoke subjectively, with the bulk of their observations relating to their own particular activity during the course of the orgy, along with whatever other incidents were of special interest to them. Thus their impressions told more about them than about the overall pattern and milieu of the modern day orgy.

  I then recalled the tape I had dictated after attending an orgy, and a quick playback showed that it would be eminently useful for my purposes. It was my original intention to present it verbatim in the guise of an interview with an anonymous subject. After further thought, I decided against this approach. Instead I have edited the tape to delete certain personal items which I would prefer to keep to myself, and have thus avoided concealing the nature of the source of the observations which follow.

  Whether or not the orgy which I attended was typical is a difficult question to answer. It might be said that “typical” orgy is a contradiction in terms, that to be deemed successful by its participants a sex orgy implies genuine novelty. Several swingers have reported three- and four-day orgies, and there has been at least one well-attended swingers’ cruise to the Caribbean which lasted ten days and consisted of an endless shipboard frolic beyond the average travel agent’s wildest dreams. (A hell of an occasion to be seasick and confined to one’s cabin, I would imagine.) Other swingers have mentioned the “instant orgy” usually used as a highlight of a swap club meeting, in which utter abandon is permitted for a specified brief period of time, usually an hour.

  Insofar as orgies run to type, we might say that the one described below is typical. It lasted the average length of time—about four hours—and an average number of people (eighteen couples) were in attendance. No singles, male or female, were allowed to attend. None of the contests or similar scheduled activities which occasionally grace orgies were arranged. And, while sadomasochism was not an ingredient if only because none o
f those present swung that way, it was the general understanding that no holds were barred, no sex acts were beyond the pale.

  • • •

  I call for Evelyn at eight o’clock. She looks quite splendid and is wearing a dress I have not seen before, an unadorned but exquisite black evening gown with considerable décolletage. I compliment her on it, and she says it is all for my benefit. “It’s a waste of time dressing for these parties, you take off your clothes the moment you’re inside the door.”

  Before we leave her apartment, we both take several capsules of dextroamphetamine, a central nervous system stimulant commonly prescribed in a smaller dosage for weight reduction or to overcome fatigue. “A little speed never hurts,” Evelyn tells me. “The one thing you don’t want to do is run out of gas at an orgy. Sometimes one really good climax can leave a person so languid that more sex seems superfluous. If you’re on speed, dex or bennies or meth, you just keep going. It’s not a sex stimulant, it doesn’t make you stronger or more passionate, but it keeps you awake and alert and the rest is up to you.”

  I take the pills, wishing as I do so that they actually were a super sex drug. I feel briefly like a young man taken by his fraternity brothers to a brothel for his first essay at coitus. I am at once excited and apprehensive at the evening’s prospects. I feel that it is a test of virility and envision myself struck suddenly impotent, the butt of a thousand jokes.

  Evelyn, veteran of half a dozen of these parties, reassures me. “Don’t be uptight, you’ve been on swinging dates before. Everybody feels threatened the first time. It’s only natural. The thing is not to feel that you have to prove yourself. You just do your thing, whatever strikes you. You tune into the general vibrations of the group and go the way you want to go.”

  Before we leave, we embrace. I feel the familiar growth of excitement and reject the idea of making love to Evelyn before we leave. An old joke comes to mind, the ancient English lord calling for a pair of baggy pants so that he can smuggle his phallic treasure into London . . .