Sex and the Stewardess (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  I turned and looked at her.

  She was lying on her side sort of drinking me in with those deep sensitive eyes. And the moment our eyes caught I got the strangest feeling. It went all through me.

  You could call it the moment of truth.

  I could talk about it all dawning gradually, but I don’t really think it happened that way. I think it came all at once, one brilliant intuitive flash, and I got the complete message that quickly. I knew what she was and I knew what she wanted and I knew I was going to go along with it and I knew it would change my whole life and I knew that I wanted it. Just all at once I knew all of these things. All at once.

  She took me in her arms and kissed me. It was the strangest feeling. Girls and women kiss each other all the time, you know, but obviously this was worlds removed from a little peck on the cheek from somebody’s maiden aunt. Her mouth was soft and warm and fresh and, oh, I don’t know. It was all so strange.

  I just let her make love to me. I might as well have been a doll. A Chatty Cathy doll who had done all her talking in the early part of the evening . . . It wasn’t what she did to me that was unusual. I wasn’t exactly a virgin, you know, nor had my experience been limited to the more ordinary ways of getting there. So there was really nothing physical that Margot did to me that I hadn’t had done to me before, by men. Oh, not to mince words, I had been touched and kissed everywhere before, I had been eaten before, and I had liked it before, but this was different.

  Partly it was different physically. This was a part of it, I have to admit it. You must have heard it said a few thousand times that no man can perform cunnilingus the way a woman can. That only another woman can really know how to bring delight to a woman’s body. Well one of the reasons everybody says this is that it happens to be the truth. Really. This doesn’t mean that every man is a boor at going down on a girl, or that every dyke is an utter genius in the lips and tongue department, but as a general rule girls can get you places men can’t, and Margot was particularly wonderful at this, and that was part of the reason the whole experience was so perfect.

  But more than that, I think, was the simple fact that she was a woman. And that none of my bad feelings for men could get in the way. And that Margot and I had been talking, really talking, and I felt genuinely close to her, and, oh, I don’t know exactly. Maybe a part of it was that I had actually been waiting for months or years for a woman to make love to me, and that now that it was happening I was enjoying it to the hilt.

  Afterward, I returned the favor. Did unto her as she had done unto me. I didn’t really know what she would like or anything, but I figured that I would simply do to her what she had done to me, and I guess I had a feeling for it. We were very good together.

  Best of all, there was none of that empty feeling that I always had after I made it with a man. Even if I had an orgasm with a man—and I frequently did—I was still sad and empty and, oh, so utterly alone after it was over. With Margot all I felt was close and warm and together.

  She talked to me for hours. About what it was like to be gay, and all of the things I would have to know in order to survive as a flying lesbian. She told me the names of some girls who were gay and some who swung both ways. I was surprised to learn that some rather good friends of mine were that way. I had never suspected it, and they had never given me any indication.

  After that, I went with men a couple of times. I think most gay girls feel compelled to test themselves from time to time if just to prove to themselves that they really do like it better with other girls. Just a couple of times over the years, though, and it was never good. I think it could have been but my earlier experiences had spoiled it for me, probably forever. Although you can never tell about that. You can really never tell. I’ve known girls who were gay all their lives and who suddenly got married and left the life completely, and whether they did this as a way of retiring to what the world considers a normal life or whether the men really did turn them on, well, that’s something to speculate about, but it does show that people can never be sure what’s coming up next, what changes they’re about to go through. As for me, I would guess that I’m going to stay this way forever, and that’s fine with me, but I have to admit that you can never know for sure

  • • •

  Like Margot, the girl who initiated her into lesbianism, Shirl has learned to keep her sexual predilections under wraps insofar as her colleagues in the skies are concerned. However, they know she doesn’t date, that she has no interest in men, and she suspects many of them have guessed that she is homosexual.

  “But this doesn’t get in the way,” she told me. “There’s a very big difference for most people between being pretty sure of something and having it thrown in your face. There are girls I work with, girls I fly with frequently and often share a room with, and I’m sure they have a pretty good idea that I’m homosexual. But I never make a pass, or even drop a hint in conversation, and thus it never makes it difficult for us to get along well and even to have an open and uncomplicated friendship with no sexual aspect to it on either side.

  “You know, people always worry about homosexuals, they worry that we’re all out to seduce them. I frankly have no interest in the seduction of the innocent. I couldn’t be less interested. It’s not just a matter of fear on my part, but that I would absolutely despise myself for forcing myself upon someone who didn’t want me in the first place. Call it insecurity if you want, but it’s the way I am, and I personally feel it’s a good way to be, a healthy way. Oh, I’ll know straight girls who appeal to me tremendously, and for whom I have strong feelings, and I’ll go so far as to think that it would be really groovy if so-and-so were gay, but I’ll also have the balance and perspective to realize that she isn’t and that there’s no point trying to get involved with her. So I may get turned on by a straight girl, but I’ll always manage to turn myself off without any great trouble.”

  Her own sexual outlets consist largely of non-stews.

  “It’s safer that way. In all respects. I have made it with several gay stews, and it’s good that way, but it can screw you up. Some girls will have these long-term affairs and the worst thing possible is to get involved in something like that. Not that I want casual sex, I had enough of that with men and I want to be able to talk to the person and feel something for her, but when you mix up long-term love together with your job, well, it can get messy. I know three stews with whom I’ll get together now and then. They all have the same general attitude I do and it works out nicely with them. But I wouldn’t want a big emotional scene, and on the other hand I wouldn’t want to get involved with a stew who was just looking for some new thrill to write up in her diary. That type of completely casual experimentation is a lot of fun under the right set of circumstances, but it’s the sort of thing I would rather indulge in with a stranger, a civilian, than with someone in my own line of work. Just a personal preference, perhaps, but I think it makes sense. At least it does for me.

  “One thing that you learn, that male and female homosexuals always learn, is how to connect in a strange city. That’s really a tremendous advantage of being gay, you know. It’s so much easier to find sexual partners. Normally if you fly into a city where you don’t know a soul you are pretty much doomed to sleep alone. This is especially true for men unless they want to hire professional companionship. Remember, for the one guy who manages to date and bed a stew, there are maybe fifty who wanted to and couldn’t manage it. But it’s true for straight girls, too. If they get picked up they’re tramps, and if they don’t they sleep alone. While if you’re gay, you just go to a gay bar and meet someone who’s there for the same reason you are, and the two of you are on a perfectly equal footing from the start, and it works out very well, all things considered.

  “Admittedly, the bars are inclined to be a bit depressing sometimes. But you only have to use them to get started, to get connected with the right people, or on occasional nights when nothing’s doing or you have the urge for someone new
. Generally, though, I’ll know a few gay girls in every city I fly into. I just get off the plane and check into my room and get on the phone, and there will be a party if I want or some company for dinner or almost any sort of scene I might be looking for, with as much or as little love and sex to go with it as I’m in the mood for. It really couldn’t be more convenient, and it fits in neatly with the life of a stewardess, because in the morning I’m on the plane and away to another scene entirely, with warmth on either side and good feelings and no regrets.”

  Lauren—The Swinger

  “I think a lot of girls cop out on the whole stewardess scene. You hear them all the time going on about how being a stew has made a whore out of this girl or a tramp out of this one or an emotional wreck out of that one, and I suppose it must happen that way from time to time, but I think, oh, you know, I think it’s a lot like psychoanalysis. It was something somebody on television said about it once, I think it was Johnny Carson. He said it seemed like an expensive way to cop out on your parents. You know, figuring out all the ways that they’re responsible for the fact that you fucked up your own life.”

  She drew on a cigarette, blew out smoke, studied the end of the cigarette thoughtfully. “I have a theory that people make their own messes in life. Maybe that’s not something you would go so far as to call a theory. just a way of looking at things, maybe. “But I believe this. And I also believe, I really do, that for most girls their character and all is pretty well formed by the time they’re in high school. Their moral position and how they are going to think about things and react to things. I know there are what you call late bloomers or late developers, you know, who don’t get started the same time as everybody else. Girls who hide their light under a bushel for years just conforming and living quietly, and then all of a sudden they open up to themselves and start swinging harder than anyone else. But even so I would think that the potential was all there and it would have come out sooner or later and nothing would change it at all.

  “Sometimes I think, oh, that it’s all locked up inside us from the moment we’re born. From the moment we’re conceived, even. All locked up within us and waiting to come out. All in the genes, all of it, what we’re going to look like and act like and feel like. And it doesn’t matter how often you get your diaper changed or whether your mother loves you or if you get into the right sorority or anything else, because no matter how it goes it all comes out the same in the end.

  “People tell me that this is completely crazy, and I suppose you think so yourself, and maybe you’re right, but I see things this way and it’s honestly the way I look at things and what I believe . . .

  “Now in my own case, if you just looked at the obvious facts you might say, well, Lauren led a fairly quiet life until she became a stewardess, and now, zowie, she’s an all-out swinger. And you might put two and two together and come up with the theory that being a stew was what turned me into a swinger.

  “Not true. See, I was like this all the time, all primed and ready to go. It was just a question of time and place. I even let myself go a little in high school, and not just to the point that I wasn’t a virgin by graduation, but that I got into some fairly kinky scenes. But, see, nobody really knew. Not my parents, not the school authorities, and not the majority of the other kids. I was either lucky or I had a pretty good feeling for who would keep it to themselves and who would spread the word around; so, not to get into specifics now, whatever I did in high school it was boss kicks for me and no blot on the old reputation.

  “If anything, I would say that I became a stewardess because I wanted to swing. It was more to it than just that, sure. Anything to get out of Chillicothe, like. But other girls would come into it, some of them, with this really holy air about them, as if being a stew was like going into holy orders or becoming an army nurse. You know the attitude. And a very large number were hot to get married. They had heard how the average stew can marry a successful man after a few months in the air, and that was what they were there for . . .

  “Me, I wanted to get creatively laid. To cut loose and really ball. And really, where could you find a better situation? No one really cares what you do. As long as you handle your job properly and don’t let the late hours show in your face, and as long as you don’t disgrace the good name of the airline, nobody really gives a damn. The pilot isn’t your father.

  “Also, it’s a great way to meet swingers. In my eyes, people who fly a lot of the time are a world removed from people who stay home. There’s a tremendous difference. People who fly are open to new experiences, new places, new people. They’re sharper and hipper. They’re also generally on the make. All of this I appreciate.

  “Not that I’m a walking-flying-nymphomaniac who wants nothing but constant sex sex sex. But I do have to admit that it’s a major interest of mine, and that I like way-out scenes and all of that. To me it’s all part of having an exciting time, and having an exciting time is what I figure I was put on earth to do.

  “See?”

  Lauren is bright and buoyant and bubbly, with short blonde hair and a pixyish face and figure. Her eyes vary from green to brown. “I guess they change with my moods,” she told me impishly. “They become a very bright green when I have an orgasm. Someone told me this, and you know me, I had to see for myself, right? Typical, right? So it was really crazy. I had this little mirror, and I sprawled out there and held onto the mirror and like stared at myself, and this fellow went down on me. It was really weird. It felt almost scientific, like an experiment. Human Sexual Response. Did you read it? The book? Out of sight, right—with wires attached to everything and all? I felt a little like that. ‘Und now, chentlemen, ve vill determine vezzer or not ziss girl’s eyes change color ven she pops her tube.’ Lauren the Mad Scientist. It was hard to get quite into the mood at first, but one makes sacrifices for science, and this fellow ate me like a starving man, and I got there, I’m happy to say. And they do. My eyes, that is. A very brilliant shade of green.

  “You’ll have to see for yourself some time—”

  Lauren at twenty-three has been flying for almost three years. While it is generally true that neither the airlines nor one’s colleagues are apt to attempt the role of moral arbiters, and while one would be hard pressed to find a more permissive vocational environment, Lauren is nevertheless regarded by many of those who know her as unusually wild. “I suppose a lot of us do some of the wacky things she does,” one girl told me, “but if we do, we tend to keep them to ourselves. I went to a party that you would have to call an orgy, for example. But I didn’t broadcast the news. Lauren, though, is an utter case. When she goes to an orgy she does everything but show around pictures of herself. She has told me more about some of her experiences than I really care to know.”

  “I don’t care who knows,” Lauren has said in return.

  “I’m, you know, like a long way from Chillicothe. I’ve had it with the don’t-disgrace-your-family bit. That sucks, it really does. Why hide what you do? I’m not ashamed of what I do . . . look, I’ve read a couple of your books on swingers. I don’t have to tell you. You know what’s happening. Everything’s changing, right? Everybody’s coming alive and opening up. The sexual revolution and all that jazz.

  “I mean, the sexual revolution to some girls is an expression to explain to themselves how come they aren’t virgins anymore. To me it’s a lot more than that. I really believe what the Bob Dylan song says. The times they are a-changing, baby. Truth.

  “I like to tell the other girls about it when I come back from a really crazy scene. I like to watch their reactions, part uptight but always part excited. I really dig blowing their minds that way. And that’s what it takes to make a revolution, you know. Not doing it and keeping it to yourself. That’s the Victorian scene all over again, with everybody going off in private for his juicy little jollies, and everybody being straight as an arrow on the surface, so that all you would wind up with was guilt. But doing it and talking about it, letting everybody know,
that opens things up and opens people up. I don’t mean to say that I’m accomplishing anything all by myself, you know, but my attitude, the way I see it, is that at least I’m doing my thing, and I’m on the right side.”

  • • •

  LAUREN: I don’t know when it all started. In the books the girls always start at the beginning, somewhere deep in the bowels of their childhood, and tell about the first time they fingered themselves or kissed a boy or got laid or how they wanted to ball their fathers. That’s such a massive bring-down, all of that.

  JWW: It helps develop a sense of a person, and perhaps shows how one thing leads to another.

  LAUREN: If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon skip it.

  JWW: All right.

  LAUREN: I don’t like all that digging in the past. Maybe that’s part of my thing, that I’ve got something tucked away back there that I don’t want to think about. Well, fine. Solid. If there’s something I don’t want to think about, I would just as soon leave it buried and not think about it.

  So as far as how I got the way I am, well, the hell with all that. But as for how I started to swing after I became a stewardess, that’s something else. I’d dig talking about that.

  JWW: Fine.

  LAUREN: As a matter of fact, I think that would be more interesting to read about anyway, don’t you? And more valuable to the people who read the book. I’m hip that most of the readers, that probably a majority of them, are cats who want something horny to read while they’re beating off. I like to read horny books myself from time to time. But I also read a great many sex books—and this is why I read your books, John—so that I can learn something. A person can learn a lot that way. And it would stand to reason, wouldn’t it, that some of your readers will be girls who are interested in becoming stews, and maybe some of them will be interested for the same reason I was . . .