Laura Meets Jeffrey

by Jeffrey Michelson

  1971–81

  Laura asks me if I can arrange for three cocks at once, or better yet if we can we go to an orgy where a whole herd of men can satisfy her. She wants to know what it’s like to have “too much sex.” For weeks she quizzes me almost every day about orgies. Are all orgies the same? Are there rules? What kinds of people go to orgies? Laura wants to know every single detail.

  In response, my oral history of orgies goes on for days and days. My monologues are not foreplay. We don’t end up fucking. It’s like giving an oral defense for a doctorate.

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, group sex in the U.S. came out of the closet, gained popularity and touched, or groped, mainstream culture for the first time. Before this proletarian and bourgeois entry into group sex, orgies were mostly an upper class event. At last, in the second half of the twentieth century, orgies became egalitarian. Because of the triad of the pill, the critical mass of baby boomer hormone production, and the flexing of sexual freedom and expression, sex expanded in every direction: reality, movies, art, music, print, gay, straight, younger and older. Sexuality got as much press and chatter as sports, politics or the stock market. It was the medium of the moment. Women were discussing their orgasms at the hairdresser.

  In the early ’70s Andrea and I migrated from the small circle we knew from the few parties we attended to newly discovered clans to larger developing tribes. The orgy scene grew out of small private networks, and by the early ’70s, there were public gathering places such as Captain Kidd’s, an ordinary neighborhood bar at 23rd Street and Third Avenue where, on Friday nights, a larger, cross-cultural collection of like-minded people called “swingers” could cruise and choose. No sex happened at Captain Kidd’s, just talking, dancing, exchanging of phone numbers and party invitations, most for that night and most in Manhattan but some for a later date and some farther out in the burbs. This was before this kind of casual hooking up was called “the lifestyle,” and just after “swingers” still meant cool people who hung out with Frank Sinatra.

  The Captain Kidd’s crowd was predominantly thirty-something middle-class married couples, which seemed old to twenty-three-year-olds like Andrea and myself. There were a few blacks, a handful of hippies, a smattering of tall thin patricians and lots of Jews and Italians from Lorng Oyland and the New Joisey suburbs who had converted their spare bedrooms and dens into specially designed flocked wallpapered orgy rooms carpeted with mattresses. Then they would send the kids away for the night or weekend.

  Andrea and I got invited to lots of parties. Her slinky body, pretty face and almond eyes opened the door, and her great ass, great skin, and her love of sex got us invited back. I had value because of my lust and stamina, and as a couple, we would still be up for more sex late into the morning when lesser specimens had fallen asleep. For all these reasons we were on many swingers’ “A” lists. We went to one or two or three orgies a week for the next three years before we moved out to the country where our swinger life slowed way down.

  The first twenty-two women in my life I had sex with one at a time. This represents a success rate of about one per 1,400 attempts. When I started going to orgies I continued to count but I stopped at 1,000, which is like two weekends for Wilt Chamberlain.

  While swingers shared psychographics (personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles) more than demographics, the parties we went to did reflect the hosts’ socio-economics. It wasn’t until the late ’70s that the scene grew to include on-premises swing palaces like Plato’s Retreat and Trapeze, where masses of kindred spirits could do it right there on the spot.

  MIDDLE CLASS SUBURBAN COUPLES

  These people, who otherwise were regular folk; car salesmen, insurance agents, firemen, social workers, nurses and teachers, could be counted on for excellent dirty sex. They believed, nay, loved, the fact that what they were doing was “baaad!” This was in contrast to us hippies, to whom shamelessness was second nature. We saw orgies as “the way it should be.”

  While I was shameless, I adored sex with women who thought it was shameful. Lapsed Catholic residual guilt is one of world’s strongest strains of shame and was well represented. The fact that they were doing something dirty made me the dirty guy. I liked being the dirty guy, which being shameless, was not so easy to achieve.

  Middle-class couples always served tons of food, usually great deli, but if they were white, the music was usually lame. Have you ever tried getting an erection to Tom Jones, Mantovani, or Engelbert Humperdinck? It’s do-able, but in spite of, not because of.

  The hottest thing about these parties, for me, was that the women had hairdos. The arty hippie women I hung out with never had hairdos, at least not like these suburban women had, the kind you have to assemble and erect.

  Along with hairdos, these women wore too much make-up. I love too much make-up as long as the pancake isn’t caked. Unlike hippie girls, these painted women wore lipstick, eyeliner and eye shadow (and rouge on their cheeks to accentuate their lack of cheekbones) and if you fucked them long and hard enough it would all melt. If you were a twenty-three-year-old horny hippie like me, fucking attractive women with runny make-up and destroyed hairdos was a wet dream come true.

  ARTISTS & WRITERS CROWD

  At first I was happy to be invited into this clique; I thought I would be able to party with My Own Kind. But they proved a big disappointment to me, really the only disappointment of the entire orgy oeuvre.

  Tina, who brought me into this fold, was compact, foxy, clever, sexy, and the best graphic designer I knew. I had hired her more than once when a project I landed was too big for me alone. She was a terrific eager fuck, wore the most wonderfully inventive clothes, was great fun at orgies and had the loveliest habit of enhancing my sex experience by squeezing my balls and playing with my asshole while I was fucking another girl. Now there’s a buddy.

  I thought I would meet a room full of sexy Tina-esque arty types. There were a few Beautiful People but very few. On the average, this group had the least attractive people, no hairdos and, worse yet, the most fraught, self-conscious sex of the lot. These people were too intellectual for their own good. They were watching themselves having an orgy instead of having an orgy.

  The conversations were way too heavy, often about sexual politics. This was that horrible period when some women felt compelled to discuss with every man they encountered Women’s Lib and the roles of the sexes, the burning of bras and the structural dynamics and general semantics of Feminism as contextualized within American society. This was lousy foreplay. This was during the infancy of Political Correctness. Instead of just having a grand old sexfest these people were determined to justify their lust with its socio-political implications. All I wanted to do was fuck.

  Half of these “arty” orgies I went to were hosted by a woman artist. She was lovely, warm and very political. Her paintings and drawings were skillfully rendered life studies of copulations and masturbations, mostly females, with brilliantly executed anatomies, yet some of her faces looked as if they were in pain. If you just saw the faces and not the rest of the paintings you would have thought they were created by a survivor of South American prison torture.

  In just a few parties I was exposed to all kinds of dogma, some institutionalized like “Mandatory Male Bisexuality Tonight” (Andrea and I left early) and “This Room For Lesbians Only.” Plus, there were personality boobytraps you could step on, like the buxom poet who declared to me, “I don’t allow men to be on top.” I got a hard-off immediately with that one. And the one who said, “No sex. I’m just into mutual masturbation.” Right, just what I came here for, a pack of rules.

  There was also too much cigarette smoking. The passing of lit cigarettes in a room full of naked people is as dangerous, non-carcinogenically, as in an oil refinery. Every once in a while a flesh-searing mistake would happen. It happened to me once, thankfully only to a leg, but my cigarette radar went up from that moment on and I would stop whatever I was doing, no matter how i
nvolved I was, to point out to the person with a cigarette near me that they were a hazard and a schmuck or a shmuckess.

  Often, this crowd served only vegetarian slop of the lowest order and their music was too often weird avant-garde jazz in bizarre hard to follow time signatures, with only a smattering of rock or R&B.

  To be fair, fun things did happen. I saw my first arty hard-core film when filmmaker Ed Seeman (a.k.a Edwardo Cimano, to protect his career in children’s cartoon animation) came one night with a 16mm sound projector and screened his latest work, Millie’s Homecoming. It launched the genre of One Day Wonders; feature length porn movies, all hand held, shot on film, totally improvised, with at least six hard core sex scenes and shot in one day. With Cassavetes cinéma vérité immediacy, close-up heat and raw blue humor, it established Ed as one of porn’s great pioneers. Another night a celebrated hairstylist with scissors gave each girl a pubic hairstyle. Also, I got to meet an assortment of famous people, showbiz notables, horny presidential speechwriters and the man who will always be connected with the Pentagon Papers.

  My favorite thing about these parties was that a frequent guest, a famous black badass film director, always showed up with a tasty date, and since he had a thing for Andrea, I always began the party by tasting his date.

  I wanted to be accepted by my peers. After all, I was “creative” and all the other swingers I knew had normal jobs and careers and here was a gathering of designers, art directors, painters, writers, film makers, poets and artists.

  But I didn’t last long. They threw me out for being, ironically, an “anarchist” for not following some rules I can’t even remember and mostly for asking two women arguing with a man about women’s lib who were next to me while I was fucking to please take their fucking conversation to another room and away from those who actually enjoyed sex.

  NOUVEAU RICHE

  Au courant and tres chic! Ultra hip with big flashy Upper East Side arriviste apartments with spectacular views that always looked like they were styled by color-blind interior decorators who got off mocking people with too much money. These stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, surgeons and big deal lawyers always kept the majority of their jewelry on when naked. I never before saw a room full of nude folk still wearing diamonds, pearls, and expensive watches. There were more complications on their wrists than even in their personalities.

  On more than one night, Marcus, one of the more fashion-conscious participants would take me on a guided tour of accessories on the bodies or on the floor. He pointed out Rolex Presidents, Movado Museum Pieces or Blue Lizard Summer Watches (in season), Cartier Tanks, Patek Philippe Calatravas, Miss Pasha Cartiers and an assortment from Breitling, Tag Heuer and even a few from Tiffany for those he considered horologically uninspired.

  On the sidelines the shoe festival included Geppetto, Gucci, Casadei, Bally, Chanel and Aigner for women, and Cole Haan, Florsheim, Gucci, Bally, Nunn Bush, French Shriner and Edmunds for men. Marcus, metrosexual before that classification was coined, was married to a purse collector and knew his brands. He pointed out Gucci, Coach, Dooney & Bourke and his wife’s Judith Leiber.

  They were, it must be said, mostly a good-looking group. At least the women. The men were all over the handsome map and were there because of their guile, cunning, talent and facilities. The women were there because they were trophies. They were the best pussy that money could buy. Where the fuck in the whole world could I go and fuck not just one but half a dozen trophy wives on the same night?

  This group liked sex, but the men were not, it seemed, into sex as much as money. They cared too much about what you thought of the artwork on their walls, and the quality of their grass and coke and lavish catering. To their credit, they usually had high-end nouvelle cuisine that Andrea and I could never afford in our real lives. The sex was usually vanilla but the women were eager. Here was their one chance to fuck men other than the rich troll they married and not fall victim to their pre-nup.

  SLUMMING BRAHMINS

  These old money people owned enormous brownstones and penthouses, some with indoor pools and saunas. The sex, to my surprise, was terrific and the food was lousy. Lots of tall thin Protestants who delighted in being kinky with a flair for the visually dramatic; a bit of gangbanging here and there, a double penetration or two and guys jerking off on their friends’ wives faces. They were not motivated by guilt but by the privilege of their class. They were sort of like us hippies but with more attitude, less innocence, better drugs, more stuff, and chauffeurs.

  Early on I got tired of the Lipton onion dip. The Kinky Blue Bloods, I think, saw their evenings as either sex or food and never saw, as Jews and Blacks and Italians did, that both could coexist.

  RICH BLACK DRUG DEALERS AND/OR PIMPS

  These were the very cream of the scene. Black players always had, at least to my tastes, the best parties. These orgies had the hottest women—all shades but mostly white––including some working girls; call girls, not street hookers, who, pro bono, would come and go in gently changing shifts. This was a thrill in itself, like getting the keys to the candy store.

  There were lots of black tough guys, a smattering of some wise guy business associates with a taste for “melanzane” (for some reason Italians either love blacks or hate them; I don’t think they can be neutral) and those like Andrea and I, the invited.

  I got invited to my first orgy with this group because a female friend of mine, a doe-eyed vixen of a Jewish girl, a bit pushy but quite sexy, was the girlfriend and top call girl of Bob—pimp, dealer, and party-giver. Bob liked fucking Andrea who especially liked fucking him, so we were always re-invited.

  Black outlaw parties, and I went to at least seventy-five, mostly in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, featured the wildest sex, including a little bondage and mild PG13 S&M. Most of the girls at these parties liked bad boys and girls that like bad boys are usually submissive.

  More intense than the joy of hippie innocence, stronger than the erotic edge derived from shame and guilt, more powerful than the power of class privilege, is the gusto of pure, knowing, shove-it-in-your-face hedonism of those who live outside the law.

  These bacchanals were incredible feasts. Not the gourmand-inspired huge deli trays of the middle-class, but spectacular gastronomic festivals of lobster, shrimp, crudités, homemade fried chicken Southern-style cooked in bacon grease, prime rib, expensive nouvelle cuisine every bit as good as the nouveau riche served, plus take-out Northern and Southern Italian from the best restaurants in Little Italy when wise guys dropped by. We were routinely indulged with delicate sauces, gorgeous presentations, the finest china, crystal, silver, and even goldware.

  Not one piece of goldware was ever missing I’m sure. There’s a sign in a martial arts store in Soho, London, that says, “We Dare You To Shoplift.” No such unsubtle reminder was needed here.

  Sometimes, if fewer than the normal thirty people were invited and there was enough room around the dining table, we ate together before the orgy and had a chance to show off our clothes and wit. More often we ate in shifts. Couples and groups would gravitate between fuckings toward the dining room and the food.

  The conversations, clothed or unclothed, were no different from any group of hip twenty-somethings having a private dinner in the back room of a restaurant; sports, movies, books, TV, or something that you read about in the papers. Rarely something sexual. Lots of laughing and lightness.

  Naturally, drug-dealer orgies always featured vast supplies of the best-quality pot and occasionally small amounts of cocaine. Cocaine didn’t hit the big time till the late ’70s and too much of it, even a smidgeon too much, can make men lose their erections so it was never that popular with orgy crowds.

  Marijuana is a homeopathic dose of schizophrenia. It complements an overabundance of sex with strangers. It also enhances all your senses and appetites, which is why it has medical applications. It’s the perfect orgy drug.

  Bob often peppered his parties with delightfully sleazy, swinging Eurotr
ash he and his Jewish girlfriend would meet during their frequent two-week binges blowing money in Europe. I’d get to fuck fast-talking, dark-haired, skinny Italian girls who would shout in melodic Italian when they came, and tall Scandinavians, the kind that darker Jewish boys are genetically encoded to lust after, the girls of Aryan propaganda, the kind Hitler wanted for breeding stock. At one of Bob’s parties I once fucked a ravishing Czechoslovakian TV star who was so wild that while coming she bit the foot of the girl next to her, who just happened to be Andrea.

  Blacks, as they liked to be called then, who were into orgies always had the right music. At that time I loved the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Kinks, Jeff Beck and ZZ Top, and you can fuck to these white boys, especially if you are into quickies, but they just don’t work at an all-night orgy when slow and long is the name of the game.

  Black-sponsored orgies always had the right groove for sex. No music befits humping sweaty carnality like Isaac Hayes, Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown, Otis Redding, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Curtis Mayfield, Barry White, Brook Benton, The Spinners, Lou Rawls, Eddie Kendricks, David Ruffin, and the Godfather of Orgy Music—Marvin Gaye, whose “What’s Going On,” “Mercy Mercy Me,” and “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” so permeated my brain after hearing them during several hundred fucks with a hundred different women that even today, decades later, every time I hear these Marvin Gaye songs, they set off an electro-biochemical chain reaction way back in my dorsal cerebellum where an entire wing of retired neurons and worn-out dendrites line up to create synapses and I feel the ghost of hard-ons past.

  GATHERING OF THE TRIBES

  Tribes would sometimes meet for interdenominational councils. I attended a huge multiple clan swing night at a Holiday Inn in New Jersey. The banquet hall had a hundred mattresses on the floor, private security and live bands. You entered blindfolded through a gauntlet of mouths and hands and feathers and whipped cream.