Working Stiff (19 page)

I was walking to the cabin to change for dinner when Manflesh, Candy, and Malcolm appeared by the pool and started doing a scene about ten yards from where I was sitting. Malcolm was standing behind Candy, pulling her hair and biting her neck as Manflesh slapped her tits from the front. To my horror, Manflesh pulled out an ornate pocketknife that looked like a miniature scimitar. He crouched down, pulled up Candy's skirt, and ran the blade over her exposed vagina. Candy was
moaning and thrashing around; I couldn't tell if she was actually being cut or not and I was about to pass out.

Manflesh looked over at me and smiled. I fumbled for my cell phone and had a pretend conversation while looking hard into the woods in the other direction. There was no way I was going to get involved in this. When I pretended to hang up, Manflesh was striding toward me. “You can get a decent signal here?”

“Er, yeah,” I said unconvincingly.

“Who is your service provider?”

It seemed like an extremely normal conversation to be having while a knife-point rape was being played out five yards from us. “T-Mobile.”

“That's amazing. You must be the only one who can get service out here. May I borrow your phone for just a second?” I gave him my phone, thinking I had been truly caught out. My phone service was spotty in parts of Brooklyn. Miraculously, it worked, and after a brief conversation, Manflesh handed it back to me with a smile. “It's time for dinner,” he said. Shell-shocked, I followed him, Malcolm, and Candy to the dining hall. The dining hall was the only place on the campground where a dress code was enforced. Genitalia and breasts must be covered.

On the ride down, Manflesh had told me to keep my expectations low about the camp cuisine, but dinner was actually quite enjoyable: two different types of salad, gammon steak baked with pineapple, sautéed potatoes, mixed winter vegetables, and orange sherbet for dessert. I sat with Manflesh and the others I'd met outside his cabin. During dinner, camp announcements were made by one of the event's organizers, the charismatic Vincent.

Vincent had the best voice I'd ever heard. He sounded like a slightly deeper Lee Marvin. But announcements about general conduct depress the hell out of me, even when they're delivered with a sub-bass cowboy drawl. “Do not have any open flame within ten feet of your cabin. Please clean up after yourself. We are not your mother,” and so on. Then Vincent started talking about his giant dick. You see,
cabin decoration was one of the events at Leather Camp. A grand prize was offered at the end of the weekend. Vincent's cabin had been festooned with a four-foot inflatable penis that had disappeared, and the theme of its return had worked its way into Vincent's nightly dinner shtick. He reached into his pocket and counted some change. “A seventeen-cent reward for the return of my big dick,” he drawled. The diners erupted in laughter and applause.

I got up to leave and somehow got introduced to a couple in their forties. We shook hands, and in a Southern drawl the woman said, “I just love your accent! Bill, don't you just love his li'l accent? Say, where are Ginny and Todd now? Bris-bane?”

“Cranbara,” the man said.

“Mel-borne?” she continued.

“It's Cranbara.”

“Cairns?”

The couple went on to explain the finer points of the vacation on which they visited the Great Barrier Reef, Ayres Rock, Alice Springs, Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra, saw crocodiles in the wild and visited an aboriginal village. Before I could get a word in, the husband was trying his best to pull his wife away. “I'm sorry, mate, will you excuse us?” said the woman apologetically.

Not having the heart to tell them I wasn't, in fact, Australian, I offered them a hearty, “No worries, mate!” and made a break.

More and more people were arriving at camp, and the fervor was growing. I really got the feeling that people were grateful for the opportunity to come to Leather Camp. Old friends were being reunited all around me, catching up on subjects ranging from home improvement to the differences in the campsite from last year to this.

I snuck over to the pay phone and put in a call to my girlfriend. I missed her terribly. Some of the “I Did It for Science” assignments were contingent on having a significant other, some required an insignificant other, and a third grouping required me to be footloose and fancy-free. During Leather Camp I was in the death throes of dating Erica. During our tumultuous first five months, I had tried to induce
a female ejaculation from Erica, had sex with her under the influence of five different narcotics in the space of one wacky weekend, and even had her accompany me to a gay bar, where I made out with twelve strange men, all in the name of experiential journalism. Erica was a good sport. Now, she was my only lifeline to the normal world.

I went back to the cabin to find a sunburned baby boomer having himself a stiff drink on the soft bunk next to mine. “Name's Dan,” he said, extending his hand. “Havin' fun yet?”

“Oh, sure,” I said.

“Ready for some vodka and ice?” he asked.

“Yep!” I said. Dan filled up half a sixteen-ounce cup with Absolut and threw in a little ice.

“See, I come from a long line of skydivers who say, ‘If you've survived the day, drink your ass off.'” Dan told me that he was a 743-jump veteran, and that skydiving was “the biggest fucking rush imaginable.” His speech was slurred and he could hardly walk.

I submerged my lips in the vodka.

Later, it was
Fantasy Island
night down at the swimming pool. The area was decked out Hawaiian-style: tiki torches, leis, fake palm trees, attendees in hula skirts and coconut bras. To rapturous applause, Vincent and another staff member arrived on a golf cart dressed as Mr. Roarke and Tattoo. Vincent took a stick from his bag.

“What's this, Tattoo?”

“De cane, Boss! De cane!”

The crowd lost it.

When you're in the countryside, the setting sun is the harbinger of lonesomeness. By nine o'clock, dinner had come and gone. Manflesh and his friends were nowhere to be seen; I had no one to talk to. I looked out at the crowd and saw people laughing, hanging out, embracing. It was then that a cute blonde girl, early twenties, ran across the pool area to join in the limbo competition. Out of six hundred people, she was singular in her attractiveness. I decided that would be my chance to make a connection. The limbo music started, and in front of hundreds of onlookers, I and fifteen others got ready to compete.

The cute girl was destined to win; that was clear from the start. She had captured the hearts and minds of the audience the moment she decided to remove an item of clothing every time she went under the bar. After the rest of us had been eliminated, she battled it out with a six-foot-four woman for supremacy. At that point, the blonde girl was totally naked, and the crowd shifted position to get a better view of her vagina as she made the winning pass. I stood near her pile of discarded clothes, which facilitated our meeting. She came up and shook my hand.

“You were great out there!” I said. She was in no hurry to put her clothes back on, even in the chilly night air.

“Thanks so much!” she said. “I'm a performer, a huge exhibitionist, and I'm also very supple. Wanna beer?” She produced two Coronas from her book bag. Her name was Aimee; she was twenty. Still naked, she chatted with me for a while.

Aimee beckoned some friends over and introduced me to them. They were a coed group in their twenties and thirties who weren't scary at all.

“Oh oh oh!” said Aimee, flapping her arms around. “It's time for s'mores by the campfire!” We rushed down the hill to a small lake, where a roaring fire was under way.

 

I NOTICED THAT “VIRGIN”
was a word everyone liked to misuse and throw around there. The standard questions about what I was into identified me as a virgin. In fact, I was the virgin. Around the campfire, Aimee and her friends were conspiring.

“Are you into pain?” they asked me.

“Absolutely not,” I replied.

“How about some light bondage?”

Like lite cream and lite salad dressing, lite bondage sounded a lot less hazardous to my health. “Um, okay.”

“Goodie!” said Aimee, clapping.

“Why don't we take him to the dungeon now?” asked Claudia.

Resistance was futile. Arm in arm, they led me to their cabin, where they picked up some toys, then we jumped in a golf cart and
went to the dungeon. It was really chilly out, but I think my uncontrollable shivering was due more to nerves than anything else. Devirginizing people like me seemed to be a real treat for Aimee and Claudia. They could barely contain their excitement.

The dungeon was actually a gymnasium fitted with swings, suspension bars, stocks, and a contraption in the shape of an X that people could be tied to. As we entered, a woman screamed as her “play partner” used a lighter and aerosol can to send massive plumes of fire toward her body. Elsewhere, a man pressed a woman's feet back to her shoulders while another gent slapped her vagina. Aimee and Claudia brought me to a padded table at the back of the dungeon. They told me to strip down to my boxers, then put a blindfold on me and cuffed me securely to the table.

Screams were coming from all corners of the room. Being blindfolded, I could only vaguely guess what was causing them. For the next twenty minutes, the girls gently flogged me, ran their nails over my skin, and tickled me with an oversized feather. It was about this time that I heard a third female voice hovering somewhere above me. Then I felt a heat source near my face, and a vaguely familiar smell. A vagina! From the razor-thin strip of vision my skewed blindfold gave me, I could see that the vagina did not belong to Aimee or Claudia, who were slipping my underwear off inch by inch. I sealed my mouth and turned my head like a toddler, refusing to eat. The mystery vagina got the hint and disappeared. I could hear more and more people around me. Aimee uncuffed my right arm and told me to jerk off for her. Despite what I could sense was a growing audience, I found this particularly easy to do. Three minutes in, Claudia removed my blindfold. I was masturbating for a crowd of fifteen men and women. Aimee was on all fours above me, her head down by my ankles, and her ass inches from my face. Claudia was torturing Aimee's nipples with metal clamps. “You'd better come, Simon, or I'm going to pull blondie's nips off,” said Claudia. Aimee shrieked in pain and sounded like she was beginning to sob.

“Come, come, come, come.” One of the audience members began the low chant, which the others picked up.

I pumped my fist mercilessly, knowing full well that it would take a while and that I could be an accomplice in Aimee's disfigurement.

“Hurry up, Simon!” Aimee yelled.

The chanting got louder and faster. “Come, come, come, come!”

“I think that he wants to hurt you, bitch,” Claudia said to Aimee. “Do you like this?” she said, looking at me and slapping Aimee's pert ass.

“Yes,” I said.

“Would it speed things up if it was in your face?” she asked.

I nodded and Claudia backed Aimee up then gently rubbed my testicles. I'd never cheated on a girlfriend before now. Not so much as kissed another girl, and here I was with my tongue in the ass of a blonde debutante while masturbating in front of a growing crowd as another woman held my balls with an iron grip.

“Come, come, come, come!” yelled the crowd, sounding angry now.

Finally I was done. Rapturous applause echoed around the gymnasium.

Claudia slid a finger through the pool of semen I'd deposited on my chest and put it into my mouth before she allowed me to get offstage.

“Well, what did you think?” Claudia asked.

“I thought it was very interesting,” I said. I wasn't lying. After all that activity, I was bushed and ready for bed, but someone came up with the idea of going to the dungeon's group grope room, where there were two adjoining inflatable beds, with some disposable paper play sheets in a box beside them.

Two guys and a woman were finishing up their scene, dutifully getting dressed and throwing away the paper sheets. Aimee laid out some new ones, and everyone else started making out and stripping. It was cold, so Aimee left her socks on. Within a few seconds, limbs were entwined in an eight-person clusterfuck. The people involved were arguably the youngest, leanest, and most attractive at Leather Camp,
and within a few minutes a number of people put down their toys and piled into the room.

“Join in!” said Claudia, giving me a saucy wink and tugging at my penis. Mindful of my girlfriend, I inched to the back of the room to check out the scene with the other onlookers. I wasn't aroused, exactly; more grateful to be included in the scene. There was no slapping, flogging, hot wax, or anything of that nature, just a good old-fashioned orgy: eight people looking to put the right parts in the correct places. Fifteen minutes later, it downsized into something that looked more like a group grope. “Aftercare,” as it's known: following a scene, people reassure each other with cuddles and kisses. It kind of says, “Although I spent the past hour breaking your skin and calling you a filthy little whore, it was just pretend. We were just playing!”

I hardly slept a wink that night. Apparently I was assigned to the snorey cabin, where everybody else was at least twenty years my senior. I had finally gotten comfortable on the spiky, funny-smelling bedding when a bunch of people straggled in and flopped onto their beds, one by one. That, coupled with the numbing cold, meant that I was still awake by the time my cabinmates were getting up to greet the day. I was so cold and tired that I couldn't be bothered to get up and put on more clothing. Although they were more pierced and tattooed than conventional baby boomers, the campers still had a propensity for getting up at 6:30 on the dot. Noisily, they arose and went out onto the veranda for cigs and coffee, finally allowing me a couple of hours of shut-eye. I woke at midday feeling like hammered shit.