The Lifestyle (43 page)

“You see, I knew who was the enemy,” she went on with utter gravity, “so I became very, very involved in the area of how a person can be a survivor, rather than a victim, of any circumstance. This afternoon I’d like to take from you any form of victimization in order that you can feel empowered, and be able to enjoy every moment of your life.

“I must tell you,” she said, “I was lying among the dead in 1945 when a young GI, maybe your father or grandfather, found me, and my hand was moving. So my life is postmortem every moment, it’s precious—and, of course, freedom and health are things we don’t seem to appreciate until we lose them. I like very much the humor, the love, the laughter, the permission to have all the pleasures in the world which you can enjoy. I really feel that your love is very contagious, so that I know that when I go home I’m going to bring with me the celebration of life. I think that you are able to have freedom of expression. Thomas Jefferson said all men are created equal—he did not say that all men are created the same. The same is not equality. I think all of us have the equal right to be treated with dignity. And, with that in mind, I honor you for your self-expression, and if I can be me, and you can be you, together we’re going to be much stronger than me alone and you alone. God bless you, thank-you.”

Afterward McGinley was ecstatic. “They got the message!”

Four hours later, the three-hundred-couple “Evening Of Caressive Intimacy” took place on the floor of the pink Regency Ballroom. It was led by a hypnotherapist, Rick Brown, a huge, shaven-headed man with an Amish beard, accompanied by a gorgeous stripper-model from Toronto named Jesse Hill, who would lie on a big table as he demonstrated his techniques upon her. Rick stated up-front what everybody at the convention acknowledged to be the case: for all its fame and notoriety as a public-sex convention, actual coitus and genital fondling happened behind the closed doors of rooms. Therefore: “The goal of this evening is caressive intimacy. No sexual contact, no penetration—we’ll have none of that. It has to do with touching and expressing the feelings of the person you are with. This is not a sexual event, but it’s very close to it. If you leave here and you’re not turned on, I didn’t do my job.”

Nine-tenths of the affair consisted of nothing more than
soft music, hypnotically relaxing talk by Rick, and the oily caressing of toes, breasts, backs, and foreheads by six hundred naked partners sprawled upon the rug. Nevertheless, this one-hour massage workshop always concluded with a happening whose name was as notorious as its modus operandi. It was the “Car Wash,” and it was so scorned and condemned by the media that magazines almost always felt it necessary to include double-page photographs of the naked participants so that readers could fully comprehend how terrible the experience was. Essentially it was this: the ballroom was separated into quadrants of about seventy-five couples each. Men and women then divided and formed two lines facing each other inches apart. These lines of facing people kept their hands at their sides—“This is not a group grope; anyone in line who raises their arms will be asked to leave”—and the couple at the end of the line raised
their
arms and twirled their way up the line between bodies, slithering against bellies and breasts like they were moving past brushes of a car wash. Then the next couple in line followed on up until everybody had a turn. I personally could never appreciate its sensual appeal—but it was definitely not, as
GQ
had called it, reminiscent “of those fine Tailhook parties,” the abusive gauntlet female naval cadets had been made to go through as part of their hazing ritual some years ago. It was just harmless and silly swinger fun.

After these couples had danced their heels off till three in the morning at the Sci Fi Costume Ball, many of them again managed to wake up and attend yet another 9:30 A.M. spiritual seminar booked by Jenny Friend—this one a “Dynamic Meditation” service led by one Dr. Carlos Penafiel. There they sat in their loud shorts and shirts, hands upturned in their laps and picturing the light at their third eye, watching their breath while Dr. Penafiel reminded them that the God in that light was the same for all—friend or enemy, relative or stranger. They may have been thinking about afterward attending Jack
Lambie’s seminar on “The Three-Way Experience,” or a live demonstration of female ejaculation conducted by a porn star named Kerri Downs, or even Mistress Delilah’s “The Loving Art of Domination.” But these taxpayers constantly reminded you by either their giggles or straining sincerity that they were not inhabitants of a demimonde of sordid sexuality. They were just folks putting the icing on a cake they thought tasted pretty neat.

For all those who came to Lifestyles, however, there was one event that was really the top of the cake: the height from which all the other layers would be surveyed in memory. The seminars, luncheons, dances, poolside flirtations, and room parties were sweet steps to this most important night of Lifestyles each year—one for which some couples literally worked months preparing: the Erotic Masquerade Ball. You can go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Fasching in Munich. You can participate in the Gay Pride Day parade in San Francisco and the Dinah Shore golf tournament—the annual gathering of lesbians in Palm Springs. Nothing you experience there will match the Erotic Masquerade Ball at a Lifestyles convention. It is not that the peacock costumes playing peekaboo with sexual flags are any more gaudy at Lifestyles than at the other events. It is that the people wearing these costumes are models of heterosexual parenthood and middle-aged modesty back home.

Two hours before the official start of this glitzy sabbath Leslie and I were surprised to find ourselves placed at a table of honor at a full-attendance sit-down dinner—along with Luis and Theresa, Cathy and Dan, and the porn star Ona Zee and her boyfriend Frank Wiegers. About half the people in the room were in costume at this point, the other half in tuxes and just plain sexy outfits—which would have been costumes at
any other party. “This is food foreplay,” Ona told me. At McGinley’s table sat Frank and Jennifer, Jan, and the Eden Resort’s Pascal Pellegrino. Bob jumped up to greet a costumed couple who looked like they were getting on to eighty. He called me over.

“I want you to meet some swell folks,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder when I got to his table. “Terry, this is Carmen and John Major—they just celebrated their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.”

John was dressed like Wyatt Erp, with dildos for guns, and Carmen was wearing a skintight, silver-spangled, cowgirl outfit with her breasts poking through, fluorescent bangles hanging from her nipples. A woman in a see-through sari with a
bindi
on her forehead grabbed John around the waist and pulled him backward to the dance floor. “How long you guys been in the lifestyle?” I asked.

“We’re newcomers!” Carmen replied. “Only about ten years!” They’d both worked for the airlines, John as a mechanic, Carmen as a booking agent, she said. “What happened was, after we retired we both became real cranky, our sex life went from good to terrible. So two of our friends who were swingers—we didn’t even know—they suggested a club. Took us about six months to get used to the dos and don’ts, then it became all dos!”

“Do you come to the convention every year?”

“Oh yeah; we just missed last year. The first time. My God! The people were wondering what the hell was going on we didn’t make it.”

“Your costume is spectacular—you’ve got a body like a young woman. Do you guys actually swing here?”

“Oh yeah, we always party. Every weekend. People always ask us, what keeps us young. I say, ‘Swinging.’ It’s this kind of atmosphere that keeps us young. I said, ‘Without this, I could see me getting old.’ I will never get old. It takes sex to keep us
young. No way will I ever give this up—the Lord gives me my health, and the Lord gives me my pleasure.”

“Terry’s writing a book about all this for Random House,” Bob said.

“Ohh, about time someone did.”

Amid the uproar of thousands talking at once a bare-breasted Cleopatra and G-stringed Pharaoh came up to Carmen.

“Oh, you look gorgeous, Carmen!”

“Well, you know me. This young fellow saw me on the dance floor, he came up to me, and said, ‘I’d love to have you as my mother.’ I said, ‘No way! I’m the sexiest lady you’ll meet here tonight. I’m not sitting on a porch sipping tea being your mother.’”

“Oh, you’re bad, Carmen!”

“You better believe it! Sex keeps me young. ‘No way in hell am I being your mother!’ He asks me, ‘How do you keep your shape?’ So I said, ‘I’m very active where and when it counts!’ Without sex, what’s life all about?”

“Some of the women here are going through menopause and are wondering whether their urge to be in the lifestyle will be lowered. Did you find that?” I asked.

“No. I’ll tell you what. I got into it past menopause. It’s like any game—if you still like to play, you play. So as far as that’s concerned, I never worried about it.”

“Do you have men your age?”

“Hell, I wouldn’t go with older men. No! The young ones come to me. Young thirties. Yeah! You know why, they like older women because they’re more experienced—they think it’s our last hoorah, you know, it’s like the virgin in reverse—they think, instead of it’s her first time, it’s her last time. And you know what happens—I wear
them
out! They go, ‘Holy shit! Where do you get all the energy?’ I mean, I wear them right out, they go, ‘Oh God, I can’t believe this woman!’ I’m
not one to bang! bang! bang!—no, no, I like to, you know, make
love!
Well, I gotta go to my table! Nice talkin’ to you.”

When I got back to my own table Cathy was telling a story to Leslie about somebody surprising her and Dan that morning with a gift of a sensual foot masseur. “He bit my toes, bit my ankle, bit the arches on my feet—I was so stimulated I didn’t know how to cover it up! I never had anybody massage my feet and suck it up. That’s supposed to wake you up. I was awake, all right.”

“It sounds like sexual reflexology,” Leslie laughed.

“Yeah, no kidding—I said to Dan, ‘Women don’t need to pay for it, but I bet this guy could make a living at this by calling it something else.’ It was too fun.”

“I want that,” Ona the porn star said. “Did he bring any paraphernalia?”

“No, just one helluva pair of hands.”

It was then I got the news from Joyce.

Every year the selecting of finalists in the Best Man’s, Best Woman’s, and Best Couple’s categories was made by a panel of three or four judges in the immense, chandeliered lobby of the hotel. The judges assessed those people in each category who were willing to put themselves on active display for TV crews like HBO’s. Joyce was in charge of choosing the judges and she usually balanced the panel with a straight-world intellectual, a porn star, an LSO volunteer, and someone connected to some aspect of the playcouple lifestyle. Last year the judges had included author David Alexander, a cop turned call girl named Norma Jean Almovadar, and the porn star Nina Hartley—who portrayed the publicly promiscuous blond wife who is shot dead by her husband in the film
Boogie Nights
. This year Joyce chose Pascal Pellegrino, Kerri Downs, LSO publicity director Steve Mason’s wife Sheilah—and me.

“You’ll do a good job,” Bob told me. “Assess the costume, not necessarily the figure. Time, effort, originality are the criteria.”

“Thanks for the privilege,” I said. “I’ll bear the weight with aplomb.”

Around ten-thirty we four judges took our chairs at a table on a high platform just outside the doors to the ballroom, opposite a floodlit stage decorated in Day-Glo silk masks pinned to a shimmering metallic curtain. Back in the ball-room McGinley mounted the stage and interrupted the music, informing the thirty-five hundred dancers that the show would be starting shortly. “If you want to be in this judging and on television, please proceed to the lobby immediately.”

It took the colorfully costumed conventioneers another half an hour or so to get in order around the stage for the judging. We finally got started sometime after eleven, about the time a car on official state busines pulled into the breezeway by the resort’s grand entrance on the other side of the grounds. Two plainclothes agents, a male and a female from the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, stepped out. As they made their way to the Atlas Ballroom lobby, we began judging the women. Only four men had come forward in costume: a bare-assed motorcycle cop, a drag queen, a hooded executioner, and a bonobo chimpanzee.

“We got a ton of females,” Sheilah Mason said to me. “They’ve been asking me all night, lining up for half an hour.” They came on stage four at a time, pretty tame at first, as if the ones in commercially bought, mix-and-match attire had bunched together socially the way the least talented kids on a softball team congregate. There was a young woman I’d met at the pool, a hydrologist now dressed as a harem lady in gold lame bra and belt, a red silk scarf trailing between her legs. She lifted the scarf for our benefit, turned around, bent over, and graced her hands between her legs and over her thong-bikinied rump. The others had their nakedness adorned in one Mardi Gras way or another, one with little battery-powered lights and roses. A lady on the left wore a leather bustier top, black army boots, and
sheer beige stockings with no gusset; she carried a riding crop that she moved back and forth between her legs. A woman in her sixties was dressed in just white feathers and bananas, like Josephine Baker, posturing and voguing for favorable judgment. We had to pick the best two; later on we would winnow down the winners in each category to four finalists, which the audience would judge by an “applause-o-meter.”