The Lifestyle (20 page)

“There’ll be three couples at every table,” Jodie said. “We’ll probably have about a hundred couples tonight, a hundred and fifty tomorrow, and by Saturday things will be really ripping with maybe two hundred couples. They pretty much come
from all over the country and from up where you are in Canada. Everybody just relaxes and eats and dances and then gradually they filter on back to what we call the Annex. The ‘Inhibition-Inhibitor Wing,’ I call it.”

“Are most of the couples married?” my wife of a quarter-century asked, her arms folded against her chest as if she were chilled.

“Oh yeah—I’d say practically all. Some get married here. They like romantic ceremonies.”

“Interesting,” Dr. Skala said.

“Of course, some of them decide to have two ceremonies: one regular in church and then one here. Well, why don’t we walk outside first, then I’ll take you over to the main part,” Jodie said, leading us across the dance floor and up the wrought-iron stairs into the sunny garden. “I meant to tell you, I was very impressed with your credentials, Dr. Skala.”

Skala, Josef P., MD, Ph.D., FRCP(C)—as I’d mentioned over the phone to Connie, the youngish matron of New Horizons—was a senior teaching professor and cancer researcher on the faculty of medicine at the University of British Columbia. He was one of those Nobel-prize-contender types who accumulated “credentials” in his spare time. He had specialties in gynecology, obstetrics, physiology, and pediatrics and was the first to grow lymphoblastic leukemia cells outside the human body. He was also a visiting professor of medicine at Charles University in Prague, where he headed up projects in the Czech Republic’s pediatric cancer research program. I’d invited him to accompany me to this convention partly because he was the medical advisor to this book and partly because I wanted to show him evidence for what I thought might be the complementary reasons husbands and wives could be enjoying the fastlane lifestyle. He brought a notepad, and, as I would be on the road for the next couple of months, I packed a small library, including Mary Jane Sherfey’s
The Nature and
Evolution of Female Sexuality
, which hypothesized that the “extremes of an impelling, aggressive eroticism” exhibited by women at “orgastic parties” was a manifestation of our evolutionary heritage, suppressed for thousands of years. Skala had read the psychiatrist’s once heterodox views on female “sexual insatiability” and was intrigued that they were now being given weight by evolutionary biologists who claimed women possessed the drive to fill their vaginas with the “sperm of two (or more) men at the same time” to promote sperm competition, while men were programmed to cope with that drive. A husband suspicious of his wife orgasmed more forcefully and pleasurably and ejaculated three times the number of sperm cells as during routine sex, with his “army” following commands to seek out and destroy the sperm of his rivals. Sherfey’s evolutionary explanations for extravagant female promiscuity and the “sperm wars” theory, now all the rage in academia, shook hands in the lifestyle. In fact, they were the only biological explanations I’d ever heard offered for why the kind of orgiastic sex favored by fastlane lifestylers kept cropping up throughout history among everyday segments of remarkably different populations.

“This is all owned by Connie and her dad and the whole family,” Jodie said as we came out to the manicured lawn. “They started out small in 1979 and then gradually they kept expanding the buildings and making the grounds into a park. Here’s the volleyball court. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to play. Most of the people play nude. It’s completely private.”

Indeed it was. To get to New Horizons you had to find your way through a strip-mall town outside Seattle, then along a tertiary road that snaked up chip and down dale through the rainforest, watching all the time for two anonymous brick pillars that looked like the entrance to a cemetery. A five-hundred-foot gravel driveway ended in front of an ugly metal warehouse. This was where Connie’s father, founder and architect of the
resort, ran a manufacturing business. Getting out of your car you hadn’t a clue that you were within a hundred yards of the largest swing club in North America, second only in the world to the German Club Maihof. There was no sign that told you to cross the Japanese bridge that spanned a running brook, no arrow that told you to follow the narrow dirt path through the thick, cedar forest, no letters on the huge brick wall that you came upon all of a sudden, nor on the heavy, varnished, Spanish oak doors to the mansion. You had to have either read about New Horizons in its listings in swing-club directories or heard about it from one of the tens of thousands of people who had visited it in the last seventeen years. You had to have called, booked a reservation, and then received directions from Connie, who was no garish-looking madame, but an unassuming intellectual with a couple of postgraduate degrees.

“It’s amazing a huge club like this sits in a little town and nobody knows about it,” I said to Jodie as I looked back through the glaring sunlight at the connected tiers of brown wood buildings that zigzagged across the lawn and into the forest. Manicured rhododendron bushes, tall, pink sprays of orchids, rosebushes, and lobelias almost completely hid the first floor.

“Well,” Jodie said. “It depends who you ask. Most weekends they have the nurse out here from the health department giving her talk on safe sex to everybody, so the health department knows. The fire department knows because they inspect the place. The town council knows because it’s legally zoned as a private recreation club and they’re always checking that it’s in compliance with business and alcohol regs. So the right people
know
. And there are a lot of famous people you’d never expect who come here to inspect it unofficially, so to speak.”

“Interesting,” Skala said.

“This is the yurt where couples who want economy accommodation can stay,” Jodie said, leading us into a windowed tent
in a clearing beneath the trees, with about twenty sleeping bags in a circle around the walls. “Mostly the young people stay out here. There’s a shower in here too, and they tend to shower together. Actually, this area does not allow sex, just out of respect to those who want to sleep—there’s plenty of rooms I’ll take you where you can have plenty of loud and screaming sex. My opinion is a swing club is a place where a woman can be
totally
satisfied,
if she
loses all her inhibitions. And you can’t in here.”

“Interesting,” Skala said.

“Here’s the start of very romantic trails, they go all the way back, and there’s mosquito lights so you don’t get bit by bugs—but you can be bit by anything else you want. It’s very lovely back there.”

We crossed the lawn again and returned to the building complex via a cement walkway that led over another Japanese bridge. “There’s carp in there, big goldfish—see?” Jodie said. “An-n-n-d, on that platform up above, there’s a hot tub—there’s several Jacuzzis on the property.” She held a door for us and we walked up a flight of stairs into a glass-walled walk-way between the main building, with its swimming pool and banquet hall now on our left, and the mysterious club proper down the hallway to our right.

“Just come this way. One more door and—” She pulled open two heavy wooden doors, the kind used to seal saunas. “Ta dah-ah-AH!”

“Holy shit!” I said.

“My God!” my wife said.

“In-ter-esting!”
Skala said.

The Annex, or, as I would hear it referred to by some astronomy-minded swingers, the “Satellite,” towered very much like an extraterrestrial craft almost three stories above us and stretched sixty feet from where we stood to the opposite wall, colorfully enlivened by a mystical, airbrushed mural
of naked men and women in carnal ecstasy. The sheer breadth, height, and variety of the layout had us looking upward and turning around with our eyes and mouths agape, since, by design, any visitor could take in from the door a lot of what the club had to offer sexually and (just as certainly by design) many of the couples partaking. Yet, open to the rafters though it was, in its ranch-style construction the vast Annex strived for the warmth of a north woods lodge, built post and beam in the shape of a six-sided tower around a sunken brick hearth, with many surrounding walls containing doorless theme rooms, making for at least a dozen fantasy chambers. Some rooms glowed brightly from their mirrored ceilings and walls; others were softly lit and decorated variously like a sultan’s tent, a Victorian drawing room, a railway car with facing passenger seats, and a Harlequin Romance room replete with period couches. Rustic stairways connected the levels; banistered gangways crossed the air; and miniplayhouses—cantilevered out over space—gave guests a high vantage point from which to privately peep at the activities taking place below. Presumably there would be an array of postures worthy of a Tantric temple to peep at, since lining the walls were suggestive arrangements of swivel chairs and attached stools of different heights called “Eros Seats,” plus waterbeds, red-plush couches, massage tables, and bunk beds with translucent draw-curtains. At two of the corners on the first floor, alleys curved away beneath red lights that seemed to signal entrances to dark fun houses, and above us a wooden prison door stood slightly ajar to a chamber whose motif I could easily guess. All was cozily quiet save for the crackle and hiss of the central fireplace around which there was room for ten couples to sit below floor level on built-in couches and make love in the light of flames leaping into a black flue hung by heavy chains from log posts that also supported a wrap-around walkway. There was a big sign on the varnished
log facing us: “No outside clothing. Partners only beyond this point.”

“So this entire environment will be, shall we say, ‘occupied’ with numerous people on this weekend?” Skala asked in his orotund Bohemian lecturer’s voice.

“Sure,” Jodie said, “plus the Carebears who roam around to make sure women aren’t having any problems. They’re almost never needed but it makes everyone feel safe and secure. They all have Carebear badges. Ron—you’ll meet Ron—he’s in charge of the Carebears. He’s a Vietnam vet, a terrific guy.

“But, anyway, isn’t it another
world
in here?” Jodie asked, twirling around by the fireplace. “There’s no limit. How can you
not
want to feel like this? It’s not reality, it’s just pure fun, a comfy place where you can come with your partner, where you can have your fantasies, and then you can go back to your real life and your inhibitions.” She waved her hand at a wall of pigeonhole lockers lining a cedar passage that led into a room of showers, sinks, and toilets. “And
that
is where you put your inhibitions! There’s a bidet in there, a good, powerful one that almost lifts you off the seat,” she told my wife. “Now, you guys don’t
have
to walk around naked—you can wear a towel or a bathing suit or a nightie or kimono—but they want to prevent fully dressed people from coming in and gawking. And speaking of kimonos, here’s the Japanese room.” She took off her heels, pointed to our shoes for us to do the same, and led the way into a bright red, velvet-walled room whose floor was completely covered in flowered futons. Stylized drawings of couples with satirically enlarged genitalia were hung on the walls and in one corner there was a stack of pamphlets from the community health office: “Straight Talk for Safe Sex” and “As Safe as You Wanna Be.”

“This room’s kind of simple and intellectual and sophisticated,” she told us. “What I like about it is that everyone’s on
one level. Actually, all these open rooms, if you come in and make love don’t be surprised if a couple asks if they can join you. So if you don’t want to be near another woman, don’t want to be near another man, this isn’t the place to lie down. For me it’s kind of an all-encompassing, enjoyable sort of thing. You stretch out and look up in a mirror and it’s like a fantasy-dream watching all these men adore you. But whatever your boundaries are,” Jodie said to my wife, “it’s to be respected. And if people hear of someone not respecting your boundary, they’ll say something to the Carebears and that person will be asked to leave.” She turned to me and Skala. “There are top-of-the-line condoms in each room in these wicker baskets and they’re always being refilled. And I suggest that that is a very important step you take before engaging in any activities. And then deposit them afterwards in these metal canisters.”

She worked the foot pedal up and down with a clank and led us back to our shoes, around the fireplace, and along one of the red-lit corridors that turned sharply and then opened into an amphitheatre with broad, ascending tiers of beds and form-fitting couches that faced a giant, black TV screen. “This is the video room,” she said. “They have pornos playing throughout the evening and you might have twenty couples coming and going in here, so to speak. Myself, I prefer to sit over here and watch the people. Who needs a video?”

As we returned to the central area, she pointed to an electric socket beside a set of five Eros Seats and said to my wife, “If you like power toys, there’s outlets all over. They have a woman coming in this weekend, Dr. Ruthless, she sells them if you didn’t bring yours.” She patted a furry massage table by the stairway. “Also, they have a very handsome Jamaican who comes and does Swedish erotic massage for free. Nothing penetrative,” she said, leading us upstairs, “but he works the sciatic nerve in the thigh and buttocks and brings you to orgasm after
orgasm—which is an
amazing
experience, honey, so there’s a real lineup for him. Okay, these are what we call the condos.” She pointed to the dollhouses I’d seen from below, plus several other criblike cubicles built into the landing and overlooking the downstairs. “They’re really private, and you can crawl in here and be with your partner and look over the action through the windows. A lot of new younger couples wind up in here and have their private fantasies. You can hear all the moans and groans of everybody around you but nobody can see you. There’s condom baskets in here, too—see? Also, you find a lot of the husbands come in here on the sly just to watch their wives without them. It’s like a man’s fly-on-the-wall fantasy—you know,
what is she really like without me?”