The Lifestyle (19 page)

“Sounds like you got it worked out real good,” Ed said, putting his arm around Chuck.

“Extraordinarily simple and sensual,” Chuck replied. He put his bottle down on the stone, turned and embraced Carla. “Summer, love, wine, sex!” he called out with his head against her cheek. “Pagan joy in
divine ecstasy!”

“Why Chuck!” Carla said. “You’re takin’ my breath!”

He grasped the Oklahoman’s hand and kissed it. “‘Your beautiful face makes me weep a thousand times,’” he shouted, kneeling, looking up into her eyes then pressing his face against her belly.

“Oh, Chuck,” Carla said, “you gonna make me cry. Damned if you ain’t.” She lowered herself in a billow of diaphanous cotton to the flagstones, took Chuck in her arms, and kissed him passionately.

“Conga line! Conga line!” Leah called, embracing Carla from behind.

Bill and Ed ran up to the feather brush plants lining the driveway, ripped up handfuls of stems, and came back twisting them into wreaths with which they crowned their wives and then themselves, handing out the rest. “Conga line! Conga line!” Bill shouted.

“Behold the pleasant!” Chuck called, getting to the head of the line, with Carla hugging him tightly from behind. “‘I am eager for the pleasures of the flesh more than salvation!’”

As if connected by snapping wires the couples began an
exhibitionist, bouncy march up the alley. The optometrists and lawyers and teachers and housewives on their straight vacation packages turned from the lineup at the disco to behold the hedonists rocking and snaking in their direction.

“You’re requested not to disrobe until you’re inside.” Harvey yelled.

“Now you’re putting me at a disadvantage,” Ed replied. “My ass looks better’n my face.”

“Now, now,” Leah said, “you’re only old when you start being proud of the shape you’re in.”

“That’s alright,” Carla called back over her shoulder. “He likes to concentrate less on his brains and more on his butt anyways!”

“Ba-ta-ba-ta-boom-BOOM! Ba-ta-ba-ta-boom-BOOM!” they chanted as they congaed into the crowd, most of whom caught their lawless spirit and pushed past the doorman, heedless of his calls to check their wristbands.

It was absolutely freezing in the disco, at least after the sweaty dance across the atrium in heat that couldn’t have been below 95 degrees. The weightless togas of the swingers were knotted in a dozen different ways, none of which provided warmth or minimal cover when the glacial air bathed their nakedness. The women with great physiques, like Carla, Greer, Leah, and Linda, had fashioned their cotton as G-strings then twirled it in a rope about their waists, from there letting it rise as a loose blouse knotted around their necks. Others wore the fabric as standard Greek skirts over Fashion Fantasy underwear—straps pulling French nylon tops taut about the thighs, and panty triangles floating in and out of focus beneath the white film. The men, advertising tight or fallen buttocks, Herculean pectorals or breasts as big as a woman’s, sported their muslin as jockstraps and cross-blankets, gladiator kilts or diapers belted round by blue silk. Bellies were mostly flat, but some were big and hairy, which you noticed more when they
were partly dressed than when they were completely naked. Many of the swingers were barefoot, with the women, some of them, wearing Fatima jangles on their ankles and insteps, rings on their toes. Others wore four-inch, dangerously spiked heels.

Joyce ran to the DJ. who promptly announced: “The Eden welcomes the Lifestyle!”

At her urging, to warm her group up, he slipped on their theme song of the season, Prince’s “Erotic City.” Immediately the lifestylers hit the dance floor as one and commenced the Electric Slide.

Watching sixty outlaw swingers power into the Slide is a little like watching sixty Hell’s Angels start up their bikes and roar onto the highway. It’s their dance, their stage, their expression. It’s no more than a step-turn-clap Texas line dance, but they performed it like a school of fish moved by a single mind. From scores of cities and as many professions, with IQs that spanned the spectrum from adequate to genius, with passable grace or professional rhythm, they fell into line—one culture, one body, hands twirling, eyes on the walls, eyes on the floor, sometimes with hyperbolic nonchalance. The most intimate grinds and grasps were executed with a sort of hypnotic efficiency. From Club Eros in Toronto to the Wild Wyoming in Caspar, they knew it that summer. Proud as Masai warriors, they did it. It was the dance of the lifestyle for 1996.

Even Joe and Doris were out there on the black stone floor under the green and red spinning floodlights, picking up the step, trying to stay in line, watching their feet and hands. It was too cold not to be doing something. Meanwhile, the fully clothed straight guests, encountering the sixty swingers en masse for the first time, in action and in sync, sipped their drinks at their tables surrounding the floor, smiling ear to ear. Doris seemed to fit right in. It seemed part of the chaste routine of dance for her to accept the male body parts pressed
against her bottom at each turn. But Joe looked downright embarrassed when the sheerly covered bosoms, pointy nipples, and pillow flesh brushed solidly against his bare back. He looked as if he were smelling these strange bodies and not liking it. It wasn’t the smell of sport, definitely not the smell of Doris. As the bodies heated, the cold air did in fact become filled with an oversweet vapor you could feel on your nostril hairs. He seemed grateful when the dance was over.

I fell back into a leatherette booth with them. “Well, do you think you guys could ever become involved?” I asked—or rather shouted.

“Even if I were single and horny as a goat I could never be attracted to a woman who’ll take any man whatsoever,” Joe said. “Never.”

“I only think a few of them are like that, Joe,” Doris said. “I quite like Leah, and Carla, and certainly Chuck. They’re very entertaining. I could see, if someone were to ask me now, ‘So whaddya think of these lowlife swingers?’—I could see saying, ‘Well, ya know, I went on this crazy holiday, and there were some people there I could probably be friends with—just friends.’ Because the way they pour their hearts out, it’s really touching in a way. Don’t you think, Joe?”

“I would never be able to relax; I’d know
exactly
what was on their minds,” Joe said. “Like I know for a fact Julia’s bisexual—
look
at her.” She was out on the floor with two of the gals from the hot tub, plus the Catholic nurse, Evie. They were posing in blunt body statements, with hand gestures that stroked and teased. “Which is great, fine, this is her outlet,” Joe said. “But she’s got her eye on you, I saw.” He looked over at Doris, appraising her toga with a gawking figure-eight movement of his head. “And I’m thinking, Oh great!”

“You want to hear something interesting?” Doris said. “The guys aren’t allowed to be bi at all. They call it ‘bearing,’ like if one guy makes a mistake and touches another guy in
bed. Like they say, ‘Hey, don’t bear me.’” She snorted beer through her nose. “Excuse me—Bill told me that gem.”

I asked them if any of this was having an affect on their lovemaking.

“Oh, come on,” Doris said, giving me a shove. “Everyone’s a voyeur. We’re having a good time.”

“At some level any person would find this entertaining, sure,” Joe said. “But I could really see worrying about them if they were friends. Like some of them are pretty high up in society. Suppose they did get exposed? They’re all talking how they make business contacts in clubs and how they can really trust people after they have sex. I don’t think I’d want to do business with a swinger guy. You could wind up getting sucked into a scandal. No pun intended.”

“I guess that’s why they say they’re
in
the lifestyle—they think of it as being in a community,” Doris said, looking at our tourmates out there becoming progressively more obvious in their embraces, several at a time entwined and cooperating. I raised my camera and took a picture of Carla sprawled on the dance floor with Bill on top of her. Leah was pulling at Bill’s hair, Linda was pulling at Leah’s toga, Ed was dancing the lindy with a barely clad Julia, and Greer was leading Chuck by the hand to join Bill and Carla on the floor. “It really is another world,” Doris said. “I can’t get over it. It’s not like they’re misfits in any other way. Except for this, they’re just everyday people.”

“That’s a big except,” Joe said.

As the disco heated up in physical temperature, toga tops came undone beyond caring. By one in the morning the older straight guests had gravitated over to the swinger side of the bar, talking shop and talking sex. Most of the younger ones, however, stayed where they were, rolling their eyes. A physical and psychic divide between baby boomers and twentysome-things formed, which became more pronounced when the
swingers began their musical-chair party games on the dance floor: “Pass the Stick Stuck Between Your Legs;” “Pass the Orange Held Between Your Neck and Chin.” Two in the morning found them playing a favorite swing-club game, “Find the Fruit on the Person on the Table With Your Mouth While You’re Blindfolded.” Good sports, just before heading off to sleep Doris found a papaya slice on Joe’s chest and Joe found a mango on her tummy.

By three in the morning the disco was quiet and empty save for the booth where I was sitting beside Chuck and Leah. Leah’s bare legs were thrown casually over Elliot’s lap, while Elliot was leaning over and kneading her shins below the knee. Linda was embracing her husband from behind, biting at his ear, while Ed was working at her wings with twisting thumbs and kisses. Down the line, Chuck was smooching with Carla, and Bill was sitting yoga-style on the floor, accepting the tickling of Carla’s painted toes. Like all the others, Bill’s wife, Greer, had found some friends and, I supposed, gone back to the rooms or the hot tub.

“Young men and women are rightly coupled!” Chuck said to me, turning from Carla and giving me a manly hug. “Hail, light of the world, Hail, rose of the world—noble Venus!”

“You got that whole libretto memorized, Chuck?” I asked.

“‘The soul of man is urged toward love,’” he intoned, clunking his head down on my shoulder. ‘“All joys are governed by the gods.’”

“Chuck,” I said.

He raised his head. “Huh?”

“You’re
bearing
me!”

Nonplussed by my tone, the whole crew looked over at us—then tittered in satyric approval at how quickly I was catching on to their world.

“Where I’m headed,” I said, “anybody that bears me dies!”

T
he woman who volunteered to take my medical advisor, my wife, and me on the orientation tour of New Horizons was a former military officer who now had a degree in health science. Every weekend she drove across Washington State to this thirteen-acre “Disneyland of swing clubs.” Sometimes she showed up with her boyfriend and sometimes she came alone. It was a little over a week after I’d got back from the Baja, which had given me just enough time to attend the Eleventh International AIDS Conference in Vancouver before driving south for this four-day convention that because of its elaborate setting attracted a clientele sometimes referred to by sociologists as “hard-core” swingers. In most of the literature I’d read, hard-core swingers were said to account for about one-quarter of the lifestyle—which argued for about 750,000 of them—and even within the subculture they were judged “fastlane,” that is, more promiscuous than the rest and more willing to participate in a group-sex encounter. They were the ones you usually read about in the press, rather than the other three-quarters who behaved similarly to the discreet partner sharers I’d vacationed with at the Eden Resort. Nevertheless, the fastlane swingers came from the same staid ranks of the white-collar middle class as did Chuck and Leah, and it was my belief that if I could explain the behavior of this quarter of the lifestyle biologically, I could explain the central mystery of the overall culture. The sociologist Dr. Brian Gilmartin had posed that mystery in 1978: “To most Americans it is inconceivable that a person could allow his or her own spouse
to engage in casual sexual intercourse with another partner in his or her own house. To the swinger, on the other hand, to do so is most often seen as an aphrodisiac.” Eager to see the club that was famous for drawing fastlane lifestylers in greater proportion than might be seen elsewhere, I made sure my wife, Dr. Josef Skala, and I arrived early on that cool Thursday afternoon. I’d warned them both, however: “Fast means fast.” The convention was called “Northwest Celebration: A Celebration of Intimacy Among Friends.”

“The first time I came here a year ago, I said to myself,
I have found what I have been looking for all my life!”
the chipper, forty-year-old Jodie told us in the empty banquet room that could hold hundreds. “By the way, I went ahead and put tags out so that you’d get good seats.” She pointed with scarlet nails to our first names, which she’d placed on plates. Jodie was such a regular visitor to the club that she often worked closely with the management in attending to guests. “There’s another dining room upstairs and unless you claim a table early, you wind up there. You get to see everything better from here,” she added, indicating the dance floor, the bandstand, the chandeliers, the hardwood paneling, the glass wall behind us that overlooked an Olympic-size indoor swimming pool, and the tall windows that gave a great view of a gold-green garden bordered by tall cedars with little lamps that marked the start of Hansel-and-Gretel trails. Just to the right of the windows, leaning against one wall, was a six-by-ten-foot stage prop, with white puffy clouds painted on a sky-blue background. Five squares of paper showing red numerals were pasted on the board above waist-high little doors. Written across the top of the board were the words “Blind Fondle Wall.”