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

by Lawrence Block

  All of them . . .

  The only thing that almost stopped me was the woman thing.

  JWW: Lesbianism?

  LAUREN: Well, you know, I wouldn’t exactly call it lesbianism when two girls get together at a session. Lesbianism or homosexuality or whatever you want to call it, it implies more to me than that. You know what I mean? It’s a whole way of life, the attitudes you form and everything. I have known some lesbians, and they are in a different bag entirely. Whereas on the other hand it’s hard to find a woman involved in swinging to any real extent who doesn’t make the scene with another girl from time to time. Not in private, but at a party.

  JWW: Yes, that seems to be true.

  LAUREN: So I wouldn’t call it lesbianism. Just a part of swinging. In the same way, there are quite a few guys nowadays who will have sex with other men at a swinging session, and yet you would never think to call any of these guys a fairy, or homosexual in any sense.

  JWW: That’s a good deal less common than the other side of the coin, female homosexuality.

  LAUREN: It is, but it’s getting more common, I think. Or maybe I’m just moving with a wilder crowd lately, but I think more men are coming out of their shells. Maybe they used to be worried about latent homosexuality, or about other people thinking that they were queer, and now they aren’t worried anymore. I don’t know.

  That first night, though, I was hip enough from what I had read to know that lesbian stuff was apt to happen at swinging parties. In fact I found myself thinking about it from the beginning, wondering if it would happen. I had more or less decided that I would try to find a cool way to let them know that it wasn’t my scene. But at the same time I’m sure I had a strong urge to try it.

  I said before that I wasn’t at all inhibited. Well, scratch that. I was inhibited about the girl-girl scene. Not enormously uptight about it, but let’s say a little bit inhibited.

  JWW: How did it get started?

  LAUREN: It got started with me left out of it, as a matter of fact.

  JWW: How do you mean?

  LAUREN: The two other girls, the wives. We had gone through a sort of five-way scene which was wild, and everybody was sort of cooling off, sipping drinks and sprawled out and talking, and one of the husbands suggested to the redhead that she put on a show with the other wife. And the two women talked back and forth about it. One said she had almost forgotten what the other tasted like, and talk like that. The talk was almost as erotic as the act itself. Then they petted with each other, and finished with a sixty-nine. Their husbands watched but didn’t join in. They watched until both girls got their jollies.

  JWW: And you watched as well?

  LAUREN: Of course. What else was I going to do? Look at the television set?

  JWW: I suppose not.

  LAUREN: Afterward my hostess, the redhead, just turned and looked at me. And then they were all looking at me, and I didn’t know what to do or say. It was a very strange moment.

  And I just realized that I had to find out what it was like. What it felt like. And you know, it was great. At first I thought that I just wanted to have it done to me, to be eaten by one of them, and then I realized that that was a lot of crap. I actually wanted the complete trip, dig, and we wound up in a three-way tangle, and it was a mindblower. It really was. I hadn’t expected to dig it that much, but I did.

  In a sense it was the high point of the evening, because, you know, this was a really far-out thing for me and a scene I hadn’t expected to make, let alone enjoy that much. But really, the whole evening was one big high point.

  • • •

  That evening with the two couples represented the crossing of a sexual Rubicon for Lauren. From that point on, she considered herself a member of the Swinging Generation and conducted her social life accordingly. She developed contacts supplied by the Denver couple, added new contacts of her own, and became increasingly involved in group sexual activities throughout the country.

  “For a person who travels,” she explained, “the swinging scene is really ideal. When you spend your life bouncing from one city to another, you honestly don’t have the time to develop long-term relationships. And assuming that what you want is to have sex on the run and enjoy it, well, the problem is that with most people it takes a long time to develop a really good sexual relationship. You have to learn each other’s bodies, you know. You have to get the feel of the whole thing, and this takes time that you just don’t have available when you have to fly to Omaha first thing in the morning.

  “But with swingers, there’s this immediate rapport. It starts with rapport on an emotional level. There’s none of this business of feeling each other out conversationally. Swingers don’t have to go through that shit, any more than you have to worry about your wardrobe at a nudist camp. You know, it really amounts to pretty much the same thing, doesn’t it? Swingers are like nudists. They don’t worry about putting clothes on their minds and hiding their desires. Putting clothes on their minds—that sounds almost precious enough to be from a Jim Webb song, but you dig what I mean. There’s this immediate honesty, because you’re all swingers and you all know what you’re there for, so why bother coming on strong with each other?

  “But at the same time, even though they don’t try to falsify things, swingers are very intent upon making a good impression. They work hard to put you at your ease and make you feel at home. And all of this makes for a much better scene when you hit a strange city than you would get sitting around some creepy nightclub with some clown who keeps putting his hand on your leg and pretending it’s an accident.

  “I don’t want to give you the idea that my entire bag is group sex. I would say that I like that the most not just because I’m kinky but because frankly that’s usually the most fun for all concerned. When there are just two people in a room there are just so many things they can do, and they can only do it for so long before one or both of them gets too tired or too bored or plain worn out. With a group, everybody gets turned on by everybody else and the whole level of excitement is much higher. And lasts much longer. And in a strange way there’s a lot more individual leeway in a group scene. For instance, if a guy and a gal are together, and if he can’t get it up for the moment, it can be a very tense and unhappy scene all around. He feels compelled to do her some good, and she is brought down by the fact that he’s not hard and therefore she figures she must be turning him off, and you know, one thing leads to another and nobody is exactly happy.

  “But if the same thing happens at a group thing and it does, incidentally, because anybody is apt to be turned off at any particular moment, you know—well, then, the party goes on around the guy. If he feels like participating he can always go down on somebody or finger somebody and the chances are that no one will even notice that he isn’t physically excited. Or he can just sit around and watch if that’s what he would rather do. You know the saying, whatever turns you on, well, that’s what it’s all about.

  “I have a particular advantage as far as swinging is concerned. Well, you could even say it’s an advantage as far as sex in general is concerned, but especially in terms of the swinging scene. And that’s that I’m a girl

  “See, extra girls are always in big demand. You know the way it works. The whole scene is up to here with extra guys who want to go to orgies or have parties with couples. I’ve been to parties advertised in the underground newspapers where they will specify that only couples will be admitted, and in the course of the evening maybe fifty dateless guys will try to talk their way in, and it’s an odd thing if one girl shows up unescorted. So an extra girl will always be in demand if only to balance out the extra men who are always available.

  “But on top of that, every group would rather have more girls on hand. I’m not exactly sure why this is. Maybe it’s because every man has this dream of himself as the sultan of his own private harem, and wants to have extra women all over the place. Or maybe it’s this big lesbian element in the swinging scene. I suppose that’s po
ssible. Of course I don’t have to tell you that the whole idea of the threesome is very big right now. In the club bulletins, I would say that a quarter to a third of them are just for that purpose—married couples who want an extra girl for a threesome. Sometimes these people are just looking for casual sex and sometimes they really want a permanent three-way living agreement . . .”

  Did she expect to go on living this way indefinitely? Or did she have a different sort of future in mind?

  “I would hate to give up swinging. I’m sure I wouldn’t want to do that. But I know I’ll want to get married sooner or later. If I met the right man now, I think I might almost be ready to start wearing a ring.”

  What sort of man would she want?

  “A swinger,” she answered, without hesitation. “No question about it. I think it would be good to be married because otherwise sooner or later a person winds up lonely. You look at your life after a certain age and if you don’t have memories to share with some other person, it is just an empty life. I haven’t felt this way myself yet, I’m too young, I think. But I have heard people talk, and I can understand what it must be like.

  “But if marriage meant turning square, I don’t think I could make it. Not for any length of time. Oh, people talk about love and the way it changes a person, but I don’t know. Maybe some day I’ll understand that kind of love, maybe I’ll believe it, but for the time being I can only say that, like, I don’t believe that kind of love exists. Or that it exists for me.

  “See, I know about sex. I know all about sex. Maybe that’s putting it a little heavy, but, oh, I’ve been making the scene for a long time now, and it’s a fairly crazy scene at that, and I know it pretty well. And one thing I don’t know much of anything about is love.

  “You know, like what is it? What’s it all about? Dig, John, I would almost like to be very cool about this now, very sophisticated, but you know, what am I trying to prove? I’ll admit it—there’s this thing that people call love and I don’t know what it feels like.

  “I’ve never really cared about anybody but myself. Not the way people do when they’re in love . . .

  “So screw it. I mean, I’m a happy kid, I have a good time. Right? I enjoy myself. I know how to swing and I know how to let myself go and have a really good time. I can walk into a party and not know anybody and a couple of hours later I’ve copped every joint in the room and I’ve come all over the place and I don’t know much about love, but like the old joke, I know what I like. Right?

  “If I meet a man, and if he’s a nice guy and bright to talk to and comfortable to be with and good in the hay, I mean really he would have to be very damned good in the hay or I would probably be very conscious of what was wrong with his style. But if he was all those things, and I dug him and he dug me, you know, to be with. And if he was a swinger and if we both liked to make the same kind of scenes. And if he made a good enough living so that we could live a decent life, but at the same time he had enough time off so that we could cut loose and swing together.

  “Well, if we had all of that going for each other, I don’t guess I would ask too many questions about love. And in that case I’d be glad to give up stewing and all and get married. I would do it. I guess anybody would.”

  Rona—The Freak-Out

  “I feel sometimes like a character in one of those World War II movies, I don’t know if you know the sort I mean. Those pictures—there was always a cross-section of types. There would be maybe eight or ten soldiers that the movie focused on, and of them there was always one boy from Brooklyn, and one married soldier with pictures of his kid that he had never seen, and he always got killed near the end. And one hillbilly who kept taking off his boots because he wasn’t used to having anything on his feet, and one pink-cheeked kid off a farm, and one hoodlum type who developed a social conscience somewhere around the middle of the fourth reel. And one officer, who was either sleeping with the army nurse or hung up because his wife had left him or tortured by the inhumanity of war. I shouldn’t let myself get going like this. I’m a nut for old movies. The cornier they are the more I like them—

  “But if the movie was about stewardesses instead of soldiers, one of the girls would be a tramp and one secretly married and maybe one lesbian and one getting over the boy back home and so on, and there would also be one who was a virgin, and that would be me.

  “Except in real life there wouldn’t be a virgin. There aren’t any atheists in foxholes and there aren’t any virgins in stew uniforms.

  “I feel like a freak.”

  • • •

  If Rona looked any more wholesome she would be doing Ivory Snow commercials instead of flying the Chicago-St. Louis run on a Midwestern trunk line. A short, vibrant brunette with a tendency toward plumpness which she controls by frantic calorie-counting, she has been a stewardess for a little over two years. She went to stew school immediately after graduating from a large university in her home state. Now, at twenty-four, she still looks very much like the cheerleader she was in both high school and college.

  • • •

  RONA: Sometimes, you know, I wonder if it’s all just an act that I’m putting on. I feel very Peter Pan. You know: If you grow up you can’t fly. I like to fly, but sometimes I wonder if it might not be worth it to grow up.

  Especially, well, when I go back home for a visit. In this life, you know, you lose your points of reference. I suppose the same thing would happen to someone who spent his life in the military, or in a religious order, or anything like that. You get completely away from your home and family and the people you grew up with, and you lose the sense of how your life has grown completely apart from the way theirs have.

  But when I do go home for a visit, and when I see the girls I knew in high school—oh, it’s just strange, it really is. My best friend all through high school, she’s married with two children and another on the way, and she and her husband have a house and a station wagon, and, I don’t know, they’re old! Really old. But then if I think about it, I think that it’s me who is young, really.

  And nobody looks at it that way, not there. They all think I’m the one who’s been everywhere and done everything.

  JWW: Because you’re a stew?

  RONA: Right. I’m a stew, and everyone knows the lowdown on stews. That we’re all easy, and that we ball the pilots in the cockpits, and that we’re so mature and hip and sophisticated. Sometimes I almost find myself playing a part with old friends, named-dropping and place-dropping like mad, and while I won’t exactly say anything I’ll do what I can to give the impression that I’ve done certain wild things. That I dated a certain actor and went to bed with him, that I’ve been on wild parties with the jet set. It’s the easiest thing in the world to let people believe the things they wanted to believe about you in the first place, so I don’t actually tell lies, but I might as well. It comes down to the same thing.

  JWW: I suppose every stew goes through this to one extent or another. That special confusion that comes from returning to the home environment and encountering old friends who seem to have grown much older than oneself without extending their horizons at all. It does make one wonder just what constitutes maturity, but—

  RONA: But it’s different for me, you see. Because I feel like such a child. And not only when I go back home, but all the time, and it’s—oh, I don’t understand myself, I swear I don’t.

  This virginity business is crazy. I honestly don’t think it started out as a hang-up, but it turned into one.

  JWW: How do you mean?

  RONA: Well, you know, you don’t become a virgin. It’s not something that happens to you.

  JWW: It’s something that doesn’t happen to you.

  RONA: That’s it exactly. Something that doesn’t happen to you. And that’s the whole story, really. It didn’t happen to me. For the longest time it was perfectly natural that it didn’t happen to me. I mean, oh, there was nothing unusual in a girl’s not losing her virginity in my high school. Those who
did were in the minority. Some of them did, of course, and it wasn’t unusual for this to happen, especially if they were engaged or going steady, and there were a couple of girls in every class who were fairly promiscuous, but virginity was the general order of the day. I guess things move faster in the big cities, and in Florida and California, and in the plush suburbs and slums and all the fast places you hear about, but I grew up in a good old-fashioned American small town, straight out of a television situation comedy. Everybody was middleclass and white and Protestant and with an English surname. Not quite, but just about . . .

  In college, that was where most girls crossed the bridge. The majority of the freshman class was always composed of virgins, and the majority of the senior class wasn’t. Even so, I don’t believe that it was as impossible for a girl to graduate as a virgin as some people would have you believe. We had the usual campus legend. About the statue?

  JWW: If a virgin passed the statue, he would draw his sword?

  RONA: Our statue didn’t have a sword. He was supposed to tip his hat if a virgin passed. But virgins were by no means that rare there. It was nice propaganda for guys who wanted to get you to do what everyone else was doing, but there wasn’t much of a factual basis to it. The idea that if you weren’t sleeping with some boy then you must be either a lesbian or a freak or just too ugly to interest anyone, well, that wasn’t true.

  JWW: And yet virginity became a hang-up for you?

  RONA: I guess it did. Yes, of course it did.

  The trouble is figuring out how it happened—

  Well, I suppose I can answer that easily enough, really. If I put my mind to it. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to talk about it.

  And, as they say on “Laugh-In,” I’ll be a much better person for it . . .

  What happened, essentially, is that during the second half of my freshman year in college I started going out with a boy. Greg was a very sweet, very sensitive guy, a music major, very tall and thin and blond with a sort of haunted look about him. He was a year ahead of me but only a month older. Very brilliant and all, and very good-looking, and I fell pretty hard. I really loved him.