The Taboo Breakers: Shock Troops of the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  Her technique was incredible. Somehow she knew exactly what I felt and exactly how I was responding, so that she could build up my excitement and slow it down at will. She used her lips and her tongue and the inside of her mouth and drove me absolutely crazy. I wanted to tell her to stop because I couldn’t control myself and I thought she would hate it if I let go like that, but she had no intention of stopping and I had no will at all.

  I had the most extraordinary orgasm of my life. It lasted forever, and time absolutely stopped. It was the sun and the moon and the stars, the whole bit. I didn’t think of Greg or Barb. I didn’t think of anything. I was in heaven . . .

  • • •

  BARBARA: I wish I could have watched. I know the effect Sue can have on a man when she speaks French to him, and I can imagine what it must have been like for Roy. But if I had walked in on them then I probably would have dropped dead on the spot.

  Fortunately Greg had other plans for me. The bathroom was on the first floor, and so was the kitchen where he was making the fresh drinks. When I opened the door, he just happened to be standing in front of it. I suppose he’d been waiting there for awhile, but I didn’t know that.

  He said, “Hello, lovely lady. Can you give me a hand in the kitchen?”

  That was an innocent enough remark, but I blushed instantly. All I could think of was his erection so I read a double meaning into the line and thought of just how I could give him a hand. I found myself staring at his crotch, at the little bulge there. Then he turned away, and of course I followed him into the kitchen.

  He pointed to some glasses on the cupboard and asked me if I could carry them. I went to pick them up and before I even realized he was behind me, his hands were on my breasts. It was the most extraordinary shock in the world. It was like an electrical charge hitting me right in both breasts and shooting through every part of my body.

  His mouth was at my ear and he talked and talked and talked. “You’re beautiful, Barbara. You’re the most beautiful woman in the world. I love you. You have a beautiful body.” On and on like that. The words hardly mattered. He moved against me and I felt his organ pressing against my bottom. It was hard as a rock again and that thrilled me, the effect I was having on him.

  Then he took me by the shoulders and turned me around. He told me he wanted me and he was going to make love to me. I couldn’t speak. He lifted me in his arms and carried me straight into the bedroom.

  From that point on he didn’t say a word. He undressed me, practically tore my clothes off. Then he took off his own clothes. It was the first time I had ever seen a naked man other than Roy. I was a virgin when I met Roy and he was the only man who had ever had me. I was enormously excited. I stared at his organ and couldn’t wait for him to put it in me.

  He sensed my mood perfectly. No kissing, no foreplay, none of that. The way I felt just then, anything but the act itself would have cooled me off. So he got right to the business at hand. When you come right down to it, it was a lot like rape—except that I could hardly have been more willing. He put a pillow in the center of the bed and set me down on the bed with my bottom on the pillow, and then he threw himself on top of me and shoved himself into me all the way to the hilt.

  I came instantly.

  Then, before I could recover from the force of the orgasm, he was moving on me. He did it very slowly at first, all the way in and all the way out, slowly, and it was just the right rhythm for me, just right, so that passion started building up all over again, and he thrust faster and faster and harder and harder and this time we got there together.

  I can’t describe it except to say that it was literally too good—I passed out.

  I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds. I came to with Greg holding me in his arms and stroking me and kissing my face and telling me I was his angel. The enormity of what we had done hit me all at once and I started to cry. I bawled like a baby and he held me and stroked me and told me everything was all right.

  “Oh God,” I said. “Roy and Sue, Roy and Sue—” He grinned. “Don’t worry your head about those two,” he said.

  “Roy and Sue—”

  His grin grew wider. “They’re downstairs,” he said. “They’re downstairs screwing.”

  • • •

  ROY: Greg was right—we were doing just that. I really did forget all about Greg and Barb from the moment Sue began going down on me. I told you it was like a dream, and that’s the only way I can describe it. It was living fantasy.

  Afterward, we got up and transformed the couch into a bed. Then we lay down together and began making love all over again. I couldn’t get enough of Sue. It was slow and lazy. We explored every part of each other’s body, kissing and touching, completely absorbed in the excitement we generated together. I became aroused again almost at once, but there was no urgency to it. We went on petting and stroking each other.

  Finally, she lay on her side with her back toward me and I took her that way. Not Greek style—to tell the truth I didn’t even know that men and women made love that way, not at that time. But regular coitus from the rear. I had my arms around her and caressed her breasts with one hand and her loins with the other while we made this slow lazy love.

  And, while this was going on, she began talking. She told me that Greg and Barb were upstairs making love. Her tone was very matter-of-fact, as though it was perfectly logical that they should be making love and that we should be doing the same. “Think about it,” she said. “Think about Greg and Barb together. Picture them in your mind. Picture his penis slipping in and out of her, think about what they’re doing.”

  Her words combined with our own actions had a curious effect on me. It made the whole idea of Barb being with another man a very erotic notion for me. I’ve thought about it since, and I’ve discussed it with Barb, and we feel that it’s perfectly natural to be excited by that sort of image. After all, love is to a large extent a matter of identification with another person. And if you identify with another person, if you are a part of them and they are a part of you, naturally their excitement is exciting to you. I don’t know if I’m making this clear—

  JWW: I think you are.

  ROY: I hope so. I think it’s relevant to any understanding of the way we approach sex and love. But the point is that we’re conditioned to respond in a completely negative way, and Sue’s talking about it while she and I were making love had the effect of breaking down that conditioning. Greg did more or less the same thing with Barb, so I guess the two of them had planned the whole approach at some length.

  BARBARA: I’m sure they did. When Greg told me, it didn’t just turn me on. It also washed all the guilt away. It was as if Roy was giving me permission to do what I wanted with Greg, and I wanted to do everything in the book. I think I would have stayed with him forever, but finally he suggested that we get dressed and go downstairs and join them. That should have been a very embarrassing moment, but I was still in too much of a glow to be embarrassed about anything.

  ROY: We were still naked when they walked in, and I must admit I had a bad moment when I saw Greg walk into the room. I was sure he would be ready to kill me. But he just grinned and said he hoped we had had as much fun as he and Barb had, and Sue was obviously completely at ease, and I looked at Barb and all I could notice was that she had never looked more genuinely beautiful to me than she did that moment.

  BARBARA: From then on it was all downhill. No pains, no problems. We sat talking for hours. They told us all about the swinging scene, the effect it had had on them, the way it brought them closer together than they had ever thought possible. They said that any sexual relationship has to get boring without variety, and that everyone has the urge for sex with a new partner, and—oh, all the usual arguments, but they were quite new to us. Roy had read articles about wife-swapping, but all I knew was that there were people who did that sort of thing. I had really never even thought about it, much less considered doing it myself. It was—well, the express
ion is pure corn, but it fits—it was whole new worlds opening up.

  ROY: Then they told us about the club—

  BARBARA: No, that was the next night.

  ROY: You’re right, it was. They did give us the impression that this was something they did frequently, but the group wasn’t mentioned that night. Instead we just sat around talking and drinking coffee for awhile, and finally Sue suggested that we would probably want to get home and talk everything over among ourselves. “You’ll have some second thoughts,” she said. “It’s inevitable. No one throws off years of conditioning overnight. The first time we swung with another couple I got positively suicidal. Go on home and talk everything out. Everything. It helps. And I’ll tell you something else, kids. The two of you are going to make love tonight, and it’s going to be better than it’s been in years.”

  BARBARA: I didn’t believe that for a minute.

  ROY: Neither did I. But she was right, of course. We went home, and at first we had a lot of trouble talking. We’d been relaxed while we were with the Metzgers, but once we were alone with each other the usual walls went up. Then we did start talking, and we had a couple drinks to loosen up, and I suggested we compare notes. So we told each other just what we did.

  BARBARA: In detail. It worked, all right. You should have seen him—when he described the Frenching she gave him he was positively drooling, and his excitement transferred to me at once. And I told him what Greg and I had done, and, well, the whole thing was more exciting in memory than it had been in fact. It goes without saying that we wound up balling, and I surprised myself by getting an uncontrollable urge to give him the same treat Sue had given him. Of course I didn’t really know how to do it properly—

  ROY: You’ve come a long way since then.

  BARBARA: Thanks for the endorsement. All I know was that I wanted to do it, and that I wanted to thrill him as much as Sue had. This was an act that had really sickened me beforehand, and here I was doing it and finding it very exciting and enjoyable. Well, without going into detail, we did just as Sue said. We made love, and it was better than it had ever been.

  • • •

  The following night, the Hallidays entertained the Metzgers. It was then that Roy and Barbara learned of the existence of the club, an informal group composed of the Metzgers and four other couples in the same age bracket. While no offer was actually made, the implication was that Roy and Sue could join the group if they desired.

  ROY: It was hard to think about the group as such. The conversation was so sex-oriented, and we were all so hot for each other, that in a sense the world did not exist outside of our living room. All I knew was that in a little while I would be making love to Sue again while Barb enjoyed herself with Greg.

  I think it was Greg who suggested that we all get undressed. He said it seemed fairly silly for us to wear clothes, since we all knew each other well enough for them to be superfluous. Sue promptly took her dress off, and there was nothing under it but Sue, and at that point everybody got naked in a hurry.

  BARBARA: Then I got very bold and said that dancing had been so much fun the night before that we ought to try it again. I put on a stack of slow and dreamy records. It never occurred to me that we would all wind up making love in the same room. I thought we would dance for awhile and then I would take Greg to the bedroom. Only it didn’t work out that way.

  ROY: I don’t see how it could have. When you’re naked, and dancing with a beautiful naked girl, and watching your own naked wife dancing with another naked man, you don’t feel like climbing a flight of stairs. At least I didn’t.

  BARBARA: Neither did I, of course. Greg got hard instantly, and I felt myself get as wet and wild as a Seven Up commercial. I looked over at Sue and Roy. They were kissing and he had her breasts in his hands. That did it. I stood there watching them make love on the floor. I just stood and watched, and Greg started kissing and licking me all the way down my body. He spent ages of time on my breasts, running his tongue all over them and sucking hard on my nipples. Then he wound up kneeling on the floor in front of me and using his mouth on me, and I just gave myself up completely to the sensation while I watched Roy and Sue. They were head over heels in love—you know, sixty-nine.

  ROY: You don’t have to draw pictures, baby.

  BARBARA: I just remember it so vividly . . .

  • • •

  During the next week the two couples had no sexual contacts with one another. Roy and Barbara made love together every night, and found their relations infinitely more satisfying than they had ever been in the past. Roy, who had begun to worry that he was losing his potency, was now pleasantly surprised to discover himself far more capable of sexual performance than he had ever known. The new techniques they had learned, along with their altered mental attitude, improved all aspects of their performance.

  Barbara did experience occasional doubts and guilt feelings in the course of the week, but she saw Sue frequently and managed to overcome her moods. Friday night the two couples met again and changed partners for several hours of lovemaking. The next night, Saturday, the Hallidays joined the Youngstown wife-swapping group. This particular club was comparatively conservative.

  There were no orgies, no sexual exhibitions. The usual format was rather simple. The five couples—six, with the addition of the Hallidays—would meet at the home of one of the members for an hour or two of drinks and conversation. Occasionally a host would show a stag film or provide a similar form of entertainment, but this was by no means a standard feature.

  ROY: There’s always a lot of necking and petting, but nothing approaching what swingers mean when they talk about a group grope. Everybody kisses everybody, of course, and there’s a lot of touching and breast stroking and that sort of thing. It’s damned erotic, that’s the whole point, but nobody gets down to brass tacks at the meeting. No disrobing, for example. Once or twice we’ve played a variety of strip poker, and one night Marilyn Klein introduced a swinger’s version of Blind Man’s Bluff she’d read about, but it frankly went over like a lead balloon.

  BARBARA: Because the whole idea of the club is that it should be a refined and pleasant way for all of us to be very close friends and to share sex with one another. And the whole purpose is defeated if you wind up acting like kids playing post office, or as if it’s just fun because it’s forbidden. That plays a part, or course; we’re all of us rebelling against Puritanism to a certain extent. But we like to keep things on a mature level. Then, when we pair off and go home, then we make love. And it’s never anticlimactic that way. It’s always the high point of the evening.

  JWW: What sort of pairing ritual do you use?

  BARBARA: We’re traditional enough to use car keys, and if the husband draws his own key he throws it back and tries again. The wife takes her partner to her home in her car—that way the neighbors don’t have any clue to what’s happening, and the wife is there to take care of the children if they wake up.

  JWW: What sort of people do you have in the group?

  BARBARA: People like ourselves, really. Our friends. That’s really what it comes down to. We have no close friends outside of the group, and I couldn’t feel closer to the people in it. Every girl in the group is like a sister of mine, and every man—

  ROY: Is like a brother, if you incest.

  BARBARA: You couldn’t resist that one, could you? It’s true, though. As far as what they’re like, well, we’re all between 28 and 37—

  ROY: 29 and 37. Mimi had a birthday last week.

  BARBARA: I stand corrected. So we’re all about the same age, and all the men are making about the same amount of money. All of us have children. Everybody has had some college, and most of us are college graduates.

  ROY: And we’re all white.

  BARBARA: Right. Lately we’ve talked a lot about the idea of getting a colored couple into the group. Everybody’s in favor of the idea, but the problem is that we really don’t know any Negroes well enough. It sounds like a bad joke, but i
t’s true. If it weren’t that we think it’s so very important to keep this amongst friends, we might try contacting a colored couple through one of the correspondence clubs. That’s been suggested, and I think Mimi and Frank may try it and see what happens. They have occasional contacts away from the group—

  JWW: And the rest of you don’t?

  ROY: We did once, and never again, thank you. We drove all the way to Toledo to meet a pair of sub-literate degenerates and we couldn’t get the hell away from them fast enough. Frank and Mimi are the only ones from our crowd who swing with strangers fairly regularly, so if they turn up a suitable colored couple in the area, and if things work out, well, we might try to add them to the group.

  BARBARA: I’d love to have a colored man.

  ROY: I’ll just bet you would, honey chile.

  BARBARA: His current fixation is oriental girls, but I’m afraid there’s a shortage of them in Youngstown. I told him we could go to New York for his birthday and I’d treat him to a night with a Japanese call girl.

  ROY: Treat us both—we’ll share her.

  BARBARA: Now you’re tempting me.

  JWW: You are joking, aren’t you? Or do you also go in for lesbianism?

  BARBARA: That’s an awfully clinical word, isn’t it? If you mean do I like to make love with the other girls now and then, the answer is yes. Mostly with Sue, but with some of the others as well. That’s pretty standard, you know. From what I’ve heard, the swinger who doesn’t dig girl-girl stuff is in the minority.

  JWW: No question about it, but I seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere. The way I understood it, there’s no group sex at the group meetings, just man-woman coupling off, and—

  ROY: Oh, you did take a wrong turn, and I think it’s our fault. That’s how it works at the group, but what we do on our own is something else again. At least once and sometimes twice a week we’ll get together with another couple from the group, and then anything goes. Sex in the same room, four in a bed, whatever everybody wants to do.