Of all the single swingers, however, the one who has the most difficult time is the secret swinger of this chapter’s title, the married man whose wife is unwilling to participate in swapping, and who is thus forced to go it alone. His problem is not a simple one by any means. Almost invariably he must live several lives at once. On the one hand, he must hide his extramarital activities from his wife, who would presumably be less than thrilled to learn of them. At the same time, he must keep his swinging colleagues from discovering that he is married.
It is interesting, I feel, that when partners have different attitudes toward swinging, it is most often the husband who is anxious to join in the fun and the wife who finds the whole idea unpleasant. It has long been a truism that husbands are more apt to be jealous, that wives can more readily overlook or even tolerate the infidelity of their mates. A possible explanation may lie in the fact that some of these secret swingers may really want to enjoy extramarital sex but do not want to let their wives reciprocate, and thus never attempt to convert their wives to swingers. And yet this cannot explain all of these cases.
Whatever their precise circumstances and motivations, the secret swingers have a difficult situation and approach it in any of several ways. One very common tactic, and one which is much despised by other swingers, is the ploy of posing as a couple, sending photos of some attractive stranger who is purported to be one’s wife, and ultimately arranging dates with a couple for a swap session.
“You wouldn’t believe the number of guys who do this,” a veteran swinger told me. “They’ve gotten to be a running gag in some circles, but they’re really a pain in the neck. You’ll have this solid correspondence going with some clown, and he’ll send along a picture of himself and another of his ‘wife,’ and of course the wife is always a pretty gal built like a brick shithouse—and why not, since nude pics of pretty girls are sold all over the place.
“So you go to the trouble of setting up a meeting with him. You set aside an evening and lick your lips over the picture of the wife, and zero hour rolls around and the doorbell rings and there’s good old whatchamacallit all by himself, no wife at all.
“Some of the time they come right out and admit it was a load of crap and ask if they can knock off a piece with your wife just for auld lang syne or whatever. But most of them have a hell of a good story ready. Mary just happened to rush off to her sick aunt’s bedside, or Mary’s down with terminal dandruff and has to spend the next six months in an oxygen tent, or Mary suddenly got her monthlies, or missed her plane, or whatever else they can dream up. Some of them are dillies. There was one slick son of a bitch with a hell of a nerve. He would show up on your doorstep crying his eyes out—poor old Mary was dead, God rest her soul, and he hadn’t wanted to leave the house at all but he was just so shaken emotionally that he needed to be with people. Well, hell, a guy hands you a story like that, you can’t kick him out on his ass. You have to drag him inside and set him down next to the fireplace with a drink in his hand, and the chances are maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred that he’s going to screw your wife before he leaves, because how can you say no to the poor broken-hearted bastard? This one guy ran up a hell of a score before the word got around.
“It’s gotten to the point where there are so many married men with square wives pulling this sort of routine that you have to be very careful who you set up dates with. Granted, most of the time all you’re wasting is time, but time is too valuable to waste that way. We have learned to take certain precautions. On pictures, we prefer it if the husband and wife both appear in the same photo—that makes it a little harder to fake, at least. And we insist on telephone contact in advance, and if we don’t get to talk to both a man and a woman we scrub the whole project, just wash it out and find somebody else.
“And I don’t know which is worse—the guys who play this game or their hopeless frozen-assed wives who would rather sit home with their legs crossed than help their husbands develop a swinging marriage for the both of them. I guess it’s a toss-up—I can work up a lot more sympathy for those husbands, but at least the wives don’t make such godawful pests of themselves.”
• • •
Jack Gebhardt has never worked what swingers call the Missing-Mary trick, but he has often considered it. An attractive and financially successful executive in his early forties, he has been swinging as well as he can for almost three years now. He would probably have all the sex he could handle were it not for the fact that his wife will have nothing to do with the swinging life.
• • •
JACK: Not that Ruth would have them lining up in the street for her anyway, understand. She’s by no means a bad-looking woman, but about ten years ago she stopped taking care of herself and started putting on weight and dressing like a prosperous version of Mother Hubbard. I don’t know how she does it, but she’ll spend two or three hundred dollars on a dress and manage to pick out one that looks like something Mrs. Khrushchev would wear to do her housecleaning in.
And the woman just doesn’t care about sex any more. It isn’t just that the whole idea of swinging leaves her cold. But cold has been a full-time temperature for her for five or six years now. She’ll let me make love to her if I insist, but why in the hell should I insist? Who wants her? She’d just as soon go the rest of her life without sex, and as far as I’m concerned she’s entitled.
JWW: Does she have any idea of your own involvement in swinging?
JACK: She knows I run around. I’ve had all kinds of affairs over the years, although I must say that I never once stepped out on her until she turned into a one-woman cure for summer. But she knew I was having affairs, and one time she told me that I could have all the nasty little flings I wanted just so long as I didn’t throw them in her face. I wanted to tell her just what I’d like to throw in her face, you better believe it. Anyway, that’s her attitude.
So the upshot of it is that I have to get my sex away from the house, but I have to do it discreetly. That more or less makes it impossible for me to get anything going with a single woman the way a bachelor might. I can’t take a girl out and show her a good time because I might be seen in public, and that wouldn’t do. And I didn’t want to develop a real relationship, either. I’ve known guys who let little affairs get out of hand. They wind up breaking up their homes. I may not give a damn about Ruth, but I’ve got kids and I know the effect of divorce on children. Say what you will, you can’t get away from the fact that kids from a broken home are in for a hard time.
Besides, the way the alimony laws work I’d be lucky to have pockets in my pants after a divorce. So I didn’t want to get involved, and at the same time I wanted a normal sex life. Hell, let’s not kid around—I wanted a lot better than a normal sex life. I wanted a swinging sex life, When I first started playing around, about the only safe and convenient way was hookers. I’d pay some frigid call girl twenty-five or fifty dollars for an hour of sex. They were pretty girls and they’d do anything I wanted, but I wanted them to enjoy it, and that’s not something you can buy. And the whole idea of paying for it, putting down the dollars and getting the tail in return, it’s not for me. Not that the cost makes any difference. The hell, I figured it out once, and counting all expenses it costs a lot more to make it with a swinger than it does to score with the most expensive call girl in town, when you average out the ads and the post office box rental and all.
It’s not the cost. It’s what you get for it. With a hooker, any hooker, what you get is a fancy jerk-off. That’s all it is, masturbation. The only difference is it costs more and you use a twat instead of your hand, but otherwise it’s the same thing, and it’s not for me.
Then I read a few books on wife-swapping and I got terribly excited at the thought of it. The whole idea was just what I wanted—real passionate sex with no secrets, everything out in the open and all. I tried the idea on Ruth just to see if there was a chance she’d go for it, and there’s a better chance of water running uphill, so I never brought up the s
ubject again. Why knock my head against the wall? No percentage in it.
So I figured I was in a bind. This whole notion of wife-swapping was just what I wanted, and there I was with nothing to swap.
• • •
Like many married men, Jack began answering a variety of advertisements by posing as a couple. He never continued the deception, but in several instances he wrote follow-up letters to swinging wives, using a different false name and suggesting a private meeting without their husband during an afternoon.
“I didn’t get a single reply,” he said. “It seemed like a good idea, but I learned that those girls just won’t play that way.”
His next method was more discreet. He began writing to couples who advertised to meet with other couples, explaining that he himself was married to a non-swinger but had her permission to do as he pleased. This was a slight exaggeration but not far from the truth. He went on to say that he was both sincere and discreet, and that he was available for couple sessions if they could locate an extra girl or would be glad to participate in threesomes if they liked, or would meet privately with the wife if the husband had no objection.
“Swingers are basically thoughtful people,” he told me. “I had to write a hell of a lot of letters to get any action, but a good number of couples did appreciate sincerity and would take the trouble to reply even if only to tell me that they weren’t interested. They did say, most of them, that they would be glad to swing with me any time if I could round up a girl as a partner. And a few men wrote offering to try to help me convince my wife, and there was one really sweet girl who sent along a letter for me to show my wife, a really sincere letter telling my wife why she should swing along with me instead of being a frigid bitch for the rest of her life. But I knew it wasn’t worth the trouble of showing it to Ruth. It would make her mad and it wouldn’t do any good.”
Finally, however, he began to get a few favorable responses. One husband agreed to Jack’s meeting his wife for a private session, and several couples told him they were interested in threesomes.
• • •
JACK: Naturally I thought a meeting with the solo wife would be the best way to start things off. We had exchanged photographs and all, and finally one morning I got my nerve up and gave her a call on the phone. I’m used to meeting people and breaking the ice with strangers, but it takes a special knack to call a woman on the telephone, a total stranger, and arrange to meet her at a motel. She was very charming over the phone, though. She had a husky Lauren Bacall voice. We made all the arrangements, and just as I was getting ready to hang up she dropped her voice even lower and told me she hoped I liked getting a blow job because people told her she was a real artist at it.
I practically came in my pants. I needed a drink in the worst way, but I figured it might be a bad idea to start drinking because I didn’t want anything to cramp my style at that motel. That’s another thing, see—I really worried about being sexually adequate. Swingers aren’t like ordinary people. They have a hell of a lot more sex and take the trouble to learn how to be good at it. So I was a little bit terrified that I would get there with this gal and not be able to give her a good time. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to get it up, or that I wouldn’t last long enough, or I don’t know what.
Well, as it turned out I didn’t have a thing to worry about. I took the motel room as planned, and five minutes after I checked in there was a knock on the door and this stacked blonde came in and gave me a kiss that had my ears ringing. “Hi, Jack,” she said. “You’re better than your picture. As a matter of fact you look good enough to eat, and I think I’ll do just that. I bet my husband ten dollars that I’d make you pop four times this afternoon, and I certainly hope you’ll see to it that I win the bet.”
It was the kind of afternoon I’d spent years dreaming about. She wasn’t beautiful by any means, but she had one hell of a body and she knew some wild things to do with it. Best of all, I was able to show her a damn good time myself. She won her bet with room to spare. I got my rocks off five times in the space of three hours, believe it or not. Up till then I was strictly a one-a-day man—one good screw and I was finished. But a scene like this was something brand new to me. It was as though I was discovering for the first time what a good lover I could be. And she knew more tricks than any of the hookers I’d ever been with. But she was totally different from hookers, because she was there for exactly the same thing I was—good clean sex. There was no crap about love or any of that, just straightforward screwing with each of us intent upon making the other one have the best time ever. And with both of us succeeding, too.
I wanted to see more of her, but she was cool to that. She said that she and her husband rarely repeated with couples, and she knew he wouldn’t want her to repeat with singles. They believed in complete sexual freedom but wanted to make sure they didn’t get emotionally involved with any of their contacts. I was sorry I wouldn’t get to her again. Still, I had to agree that there was a certain amount of sense in what she said.
• • •
Shortly thereafter, Jack managed to make contact with several husband-and-wife teams interested in threesome activities with a single male. While such activity was his chief involvement in swinging for a short stretch of time, he had several disagreeable experiences with it and realized before long that it was ill-suited to his needs.
• • •
JACK: It’s a strange thing, but relatively few couples want to go for threesomes with single men, and on the other hand almost any couple is very anxious for threesomes with girls. The ones that do go for it, there’s usually something a little screwy about them. They don’t fit into any particular bag, but I would say that three out of four of them will have ideas that I would call nutty.
One seemed normal enough at the time. This fellow and I took turns making it with his wife in their bed. It was kind of odd to be involved in that kind of deal, but the woman was extremely good-looking and hot stuff in the hay, so I didn’t let the oddness of it get to me. Then a week later I got a letter in the mail, a picture of me going down on the wife and a hand-printed note demanding five hundred dollars for the negative or the photo would be sold to my wife.
I can’t imagine anybody being enough of a schmuck to fall for it, but there are some pretty stupid people in the world. As far as I was concerned it was about the weakest version of the badger game that I ever heard of. I got mad at first, but then all I could do was laugh. I wrote the guy back saying that I didn’t want to buy the negative so he might as well try to sell it to my wife, but that I could use a nice 8” x 10” enlargement to put on my desk, and I would pay five bucks for that if he was interested. And I enclosed five bucks. The really hysterical part is that he sent me the enlargement; I guess he took me seriously. I filed it away somewhere because I’ve never been able to figure out what the hell else to do with it. If you’ve got any use for an 8” x 10” glossy of a guy giving some head to a broad, you’re welcome to it.
Then there were quite a few guys who would want me to make it with their wives while they watched. I don’t know whether they were impotent or fags or what exactly, and once the novelty wore off I decided there had to be a better way for me to swing than to put on a show for these creeps.
With others, they wanted threesome activity of one sort or another, either the two of us taking turns with the wife or both of us putting it to her at once. This was very enjoyable, but I learned to be careful not to get involved with couples who figured that homo action should be part of the program. The first time that happened it was the shock of my life. This doll was kneeling on the bed and I was giving it to her dog style, and there was certainly nothing wrong with that as far as I was concerned, and it seemed to be fine with her, too. Then the next thing I knew her nut of a husband was spreading my cheeks and trying to give me an enema in a brand new way. They were both sorer than hell when I let them know I wouldn’t go that way, and it put a damper on the whole affair.
What I really
wanted was one of two things. Either I wanted to meet female swingers alone, or else I wanted to have a girl of my own to join me for swinging sessions with other couples. So I saw that I’d have to go about things in a different way.
JWW: What course did you take?
JACK: First off, I began running ads of my own all over the place. I spent a fortune on advertising, and to make the ads more attractive I guaranteed to refund the dollar forwarding fee to anyone who answered my ad and enclosed a photo and phone number. I didn’t get tons of mail at first but I kept tabs on all the ads and gradually learned which ones pulled the right kind of responses and which ones were relatively stiff.
At first my pitch was to single girls, and I found out that this was not productive at all. I got occasional replies from prostitutes. At least I assume they were prostitutes because they offered to go with me for money, but now that I think about it I can’t imagine any professional hooker wasting her time answering ads. Some of the pros run ads of their own, however. What I think these women were is amateurs, swinging wives who liked to turn an occasional trick for extra money and also for the thrill of pretending to be prostitutes. I never found out for certain because I never replied to any of them. I had had enough of a taste of real swinging so that I couldn’t get any thrill at all out of the idea of paying for it. Swinging really spoils you that way.
JWW: Did you get any bona fide replies from single girls?
JACK: Oh, a few. Some of them got their kicks out of reading and writing letters. They’d write the filthiest letters you can imagine, all full of stories about how they wanted to do this and that, and they’d beg me to write back and tell them about my own sex experiences and what I would like to do to them, and to describe everything in detail. And of course they never committed themselves to a meeting. They kept stalling. Finally I learned the score and stop answering that kind of letter.
The Taboo Breakers: Shock Troops of the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 17