The Lifestyle

by Terry Gould

  He meant the one in the Star. “Top Dole Aide in Sex-Orgies Scandal.”

  And the National Enquirer: “Top Dole Aide Caught in Group-Sex Ring.”

  And from Associated Press: “Dole Aide Quits in Sex Scandal.”

  And Newsweek. “Private Lives, Political Ends.”

  But those headlines would appear two weeks hence.

  Now a passing young waitress guessed correctly at the union boys’ bewilderment in the face of this shindig, and leaned down over her platter of beers. “How you guys doin’?”

  “Who are these people?” one of them asked, with heartbreaking sincerity.

  “If you can believe it, they’re swingers, they’re all married” she shouted above the roar. “It’s their convention. They take over the hotel every year. Nice people, but re-E-E-ally friendly—so you guys watch yourselves!” she said protectively.

  Swingers? the Teamsters wondered in unison. Didn’t that go out with the sixties? Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice? Free love, open marriage, naked orgies? Since when did they hold conventions? Where the hell were we when it came back?

  “We love you! We love you! You are already booked until 1999, and furthermore, we are going into the next century with you! Long live the lifestyle!” the vice-president of the Town and Country, Felipe Ortiz, declared to the full house of long-married Care Team couples assembled in the Tiki Hut halfway across the grounds. Loud cheers and applause erupted from the hundred teachers and physicians, construction workers and computer programmers—most of whom were wearing nothing more daring than green Lifestyles golf shirts and jeans. Among them were George and C.J., Cathy and Dan Gardner, plus the whole LSO staff, including Joyce and Richard, who would be heading the Care Team from Wednesday night to Sunday afternoon. Leslie had flown down that afternoon and I’d introduced her all around. (“He’s so ugly and you’re so beautiful,” old George had said.)

  “Okay, guys, we have a fair amount of material to cover here,” McGinley announced, mounting the podium with the high-headed posture of a small general in charge of giant matters, “but first I want to take a moment to say that this convention wouldn’t take place if it wasn’t for you people. You guys are out there really making this place function. Not only are you helping to make this a great convention but, when you think about it, you’re also affecting the lives of thousands of people. And that’s part of what we’re all about—to give people more joy in their relationships, more joy out of what they’re doing, more joy out of life itself! I just want to thank you very, very much.”

  “And thank-yow, Bob!” Joyce called. “Thank everybody!”

  The Care Team couples applauded, perhaps feeling a warm sense of community. For years they had read the published reports that labeled them banal fornicators who hadn’t a clue about the difference between joy and pleasure. But they themselves believed they had a handle on the total picture, and that if the world viewed them in disbelief, confusion, and irritation it was only because they were threateningly normal.

  “I want to introduce to you our head of security, Jerry Baker,” McGinley continued, holding his hand out to the well-muscled African American who was the manager of Alternative Security Concepts, which would have a dozen equally well-muscled agents wandering the forty-six acres for the next four days. “Jerry is a symbol of our success because Jerry is kind of the reverse of a prison guard. A prison guard keeps people in, Jerry keeps people out.”

  “And Dr. McGinley is not joking,” Jerry said, taking the mike. “And thank-you for allowing me to do that job for you. I can’t tell you how many people try to sneak into this convention every year—and more often than not, they’re the ones who cause the very few problems that we’ve ever had, not the guests. But with that in mind, I can tell you that members of the vice squad of San Diego will be attending as couples, undercover, making sure all people are obeying the laws of San Diego and California. All I can ask is for your help in discouraging activity that you know in your gut would make a police officer unhappy.”

  “You mean happy!” someone called.

  “I know how to make a cop happy. Haven’t had a ticket in five years.”

  “Hey! We got two cops right here!”

  Two fellows stood up and bowed. “Go ahead, make us happy!”

  A blond woman in her early sixties ran up and embraced both.

  “No, no—joking aside, this is a point that can’t be overemphasized,” McGinley said. “As you know, beginning tomorrow we have this whole resort at our disposal, but that does not mean we own the resort or that the resort is considered a private party in the eyes of the laws of the State of California. There are people from the outside working here—they are considered the public. As a consequence, we will permit no public nudity, no sex in public, no doors left open while sex is taking place within the rooms.”

  There were moans and groans from the audience, even hisses.

  “I might add, however, that when the doors are closed, all the rooms are clothing optional, and private parties are private parties!”

  To this, the Care Team couples offered hosannas.

  “Well, with that, I’m going to give the podium over to Joyce now,” McGinley said. “This convention is also a lot of work, it’s a fun kind of work, but it’s got to be organized: we have three big dances, forty or so seminars, a luncheon, costume judging, the Erotic Arts show—you name it—and we want to make sure that everybody knows what everybody else is doing. As you know, we have Care Team captains, and each captain is responsible for a particular area and for the groups of you who’ll work with them. So I’m going to ask Joyce to discuss your roles. Then, afterwards, if you haven’t already been over there, the hotel has set up a tent and made other arrangements for us at Charlie’s—just to make it a very social place for people to meet and talk and have drinks and whatever else, so you’re all invited over there after this.”

  A big round of applause greeted General Joyce as she skipped to the podium.

  “Okay, first,” she said, “I think what I’d like to do is have everybody introduce themselves. A lot of people in this room don’t know each other, many of you are from different parts of the country—so the first thing I want is for all you guys to stand up and show us who you’re with and tell us where you’re from.”

  This sparked a near riot of protest from the women, who gave Joyce the good-natured raspberry.

  “Whaddya mean, the guys?”

  “Let the gals stand up and show themselves!!”

  “We dragged them here!” a popular Lifestyles employee by the name of Juanita shouted above the rest, to thunderous applause, leaving the female members of an HBO TV crew, who were here to do a ten-minute segment for Real Sex, feeling as if they had passed through Alice’s mirror into a swinger’s version of Wonderland.

  After their first vision of high-octane swingers, the four Teamsters decided a few more beers were in order. Seven hours later two of them were still at the same table while their buddies played pool with the partygoers. By then they’d spoken with a good sampling of the marrieds who’d crammed into Charlie’s for the Early Arrivals Social. “I gotta tell you, I’m amazed, but they’re really great people,” remarked Tyler, a specialist in uniting Teamsters locals of different cultures under one contract. The raucous ladies performing their poly-amorous acts around him kept inviting themselves to his table for a chat—Tyler being as dark and handsome as Omar Sharif in his Dr. Zhivago days—but as soon as they realized he was a straight Joe married to a straight Jane for umpteen years, they relaxed and answered his queries without reservation. “The things they’ve been telling me and the way they talk—it’s a whole other world I didn’t even know existed. Like they love their husbands, but—.” He furrowed his dark brows and laughed. “Well, they say they’re monogamous: they don’t have sex with someone without him being there. It’s definitely not for me, but I can’t get over there’s no jealousy. No games, no pretension—”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” s
aid his squinting colleague, Stuart, who moonlighted as a clinical psychologist for trial lawyers when they needed jurors’ minds assessed. “There’s something else just below that surface. How do I know these people aren’t acting out? Why would a normal woman—”

  “I didn’t say it was normal” Tyler laughed. “But my preconception would be that it’s a man’s thing. But they’re saying, ‘Yeah, maybe my husband got me into it, but now that I’m into it I’m more enthusiastic than he is.’ So you just sit back and question why a normal wife would behave like this—even if her husband said, ‘Okay, let’s spice up our marriage.’”

  Stuart looked sourly on that. “For who?” he asked. “For him—not for her.” He was certain these women weren’t here for the sex. The difference between a man’s sex drive and a woman’s was the same as the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing a bullet. Maybe these women were deeply distressed.

  Stuart looked sideways at a passing redhead, youngish for this crowd—no more than her late twenties—in a sweetheart dress and garter get-up that stretched taut her French-seamed stockings. Stuart swiveled his head to follow her image on his other side and inadvertently caught her backward glance. She turned, her hands fluttering down upon his shoulders, violating the swing-club etiquette of no-invite, no-touch.

  “Uh, oh,” Tyler laughed, then called me and my wife confidentially close, since Steely Dan was loud on the jukebox. “I think he’s threatened by the whole thing,” Tyler told us while Stuart archly questioned the intruder. “The flirting’s going in the wrong direction; he can’t get his mind around it.”

  “True, it is a different way of thinking,” the woman was saying. “But if you look at these different cultures—”

  “Okay, fine, fine: what I’m saying is that from where I’m sitting you’re making yourselves into objects,” Stuart enunciated. “Not my object, but every other guy’s.”

  “Gee, we probably never thought of that,” she said.

  “So the simple question is, Why is it necessary to do that?”

  “We’re making ourselves into objects for ourselves” she shot back, as if she’d debated the point before. “Women always look at magazines and think, That’s what I should look like, a sexual object. And what they’re doing here is ultra indulging it, and feeling it’s natural—as a group, not like I’m going to steal a husband. It’s a game.”

  “Oh, I see,” Stuart said. “Perfectly natural.”

  “Well—one thing—we don’t cheat on each other like everyone else,” she replied; then—petulantly: “Huh?”

  “Hey,” he said, putting his hands up. “Don’t get personal. I just wandered in here.”

  She shook her head at this hopeless case and walked away. “I guess I questioned a few of her assumptions. Presumptions,” he laughed.

  The collegiate young waitress leaned a long way down and asked Stuart if he’d like another beer. “Well-1-1 now, I don’t know,” he said, looking sidelong at her, suddenly suave as James Bond. “Do you think it’ll ease the tension?”

  “Oh, that he can handle!” Tyler said to Leslie. “Now that it’s on his terms!”

  It was about half an hour later, perhaps one-thirty in the morning, that someone on one of the high balconies of the West Tower that overlooked the entire resort sent up a rocket. It whistle-screamed into the black sky trailing silver sparks, and everyone in front of Charlie’s turned and peered through the palms to follow its arc. Its light went out, there was a quarter second of silence, and then it exploded in a shower of silver balls, like the Big Bang spraying galaxies in the eyes of the swingers and on the calm, blue pool below. “Eeee-haaa!”

  “Something tells me that we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto!”

  So began the 1996 Lifestyles convention: it had taken a year to put together but it had really been “23 years in the making.” After the congestion of Los Angeles, the stuffiness of Dublin and Bonn, the isolation of New South Wales, or the insufferable political correctness of Toronto, Lifestyles ’96 came as an enormous release for these thousands. It had always been this way at conventions, and no matter how big it had grown, Lifestyles remained vastly unpretentious, spectacularly intimate, with the vernacular transactions of the swing world available to all.

  You registered and you were in, but you never disappeared, for your playcouple spouse was by definition always on your arm. Around the pools the convention was a sunlit party; at the dances it was a dark, rowdy, and electric disco; at the seminars and art show it was high-minded and studious; at the adult marketplace it was plain tasteless; at the big luncheon it was archly political, First Amendment stuff; and—day and night in the rooms—it was tender in threesomes and purely “orgastic” in groups. In other words, the convention was constantly in flux. You wandered from college class to Mardi Gras to porno booths to pajama parties to group-sex passion. When you heard the laughter of more than four or five behind closed doors, you knew what was going on; you could knock and you would probably not be refused a place of witness. You were surrounded by those who were intolerant of smugness, but kind to both the timid voyeur and the cackling exhibitionist.

  To take up residence in the Town and Country between August 21 and 24 was to install oneself on a merry-go-round in a marital amusement park. “Lifestyles ’96 is a time of liberation and enchantment,” McGinley had bannered his ethos on the back of his beige convention booklet, this one with another nakedly embracing couple airbrushed on the front. “A time to rekindle the passion and to enhance the romance in your relationship. The PlayCouple Philosophy is alive and well at Lifestyles ’96.”

  At noon Thursday, the best and worst opened simultaneously. Behind the pool, on the far side of the Rose Garden, Luis welcomed the public to his gallery in what was called the Council Rooms. He stood with a shy young artist named Karen Swildens before a dozen bronze sculptures, one of a headless female riding a stiff phallus, named Passion, another of a body with a phallus-head and arms reaching up and holding its testicles, called Ecstasy, a third called Battle of the Sexes—that is, phalluses dressed as knights and doing battle with sword and mace. “You have to get on a level between the thought and your response to the thought—art’s the original response,” Karen told the bikinied couples who were at the convention precisely in order to cultivate original response. “Art is communicating on that level.”

  “I actually call art the shorthand of language,” Luis said. “It goes right past that mental rhetoric, right past the definitions, occurring before the words about the thing itself come to mind. In Ms. Swilden’s work we see the juxtaposition of fantasies—the male-female style of the critical creature….”

  What was most fascinating about Luis’s long-handed hour’s talk was that fifty swinging couples listened raptly to it all, strolling from canvas to collage to sculpture with elbows resting upon fists and eyeglass-stems held to their mouths. “What is the challenge here?” Luis asked before some graphically homoerotic works that he always included in his shows to emphasize the plurality in the name Lifestyles. “Quite simply, it is the challenge of Goya. He too fought against the dogma of denial.”

  The Good. The Bad. The Ugly. The art show was the good. The alleged bad went on in the rooms. What about the ugly?

  If you walked left from the Council Rooms, crossed the solar furnace of the Mission Patio into the cool convention center where registration was proceeding furiously, then turned right into the Mission Ballroom, you entered the warehouse world of commercial porn and erotica, done up in feathers and boas, a suburban whorehouse trade show. This was what Jennifer Lomas referred to as X-Town, tempered every third or fourth booth by some redeeming concept like Lifestyles Travel, or the Tom of Finland Foundation—a charity for gay artists with AIDS—but otherwise flaunting kinks sold by Leather Masters, Pleasure Piercing, and Silverscreen Video. Still, it was also a place to buy the outfits worn as a matter of course at the dances, offered at bargain-basement prices by companies like Desire Fashions, Tanya’s Clothing &am
p; Shoes for Brave Women, The Lingerie Lady. “Dressing rooms to try on clothes are located in each corner of the exhibit hall”—and, just for fun, some of those changing let their new friends watch.

  Outside, at two o’clock that day, a reggae band named Fried Bananas jumped up and the barefoot guys and dolls in their American-flag bikinis jumped with it. A blind woman reggaed with her Seeing Eye Dog; a one-legged man did so on a roller skate. “Are you in the lifestyle?” I asked the blind woman. She reached out and felt my face and chest. “Now am.

  With the rest of the world locked out, the couples knew that everyone here was a swinger, or sympathetic to swinging—they were playcouples, at least. Heterosexual wives oiled other wives while their husbands oiled them. Shapely toes extended to shore from air mattresses, offered as sucking candies, and complementary remarks were made on bottoms you could have rested tea cups upon as they passed. Hundreds sunned and gossiped and cracked lewd farmer’s jokes and then looked up through the laughter and music and tall, spindly cabbage palms to the green San Diego hills. Everything seemed yellow and beige, white and green, cut sharply by black shadows. “This is paradise,” said a woman from Saint John, New Brunswick, for whom Lifestyles ’96 was her first convention. “It must be what gays feel like when they come out.”