Best Sex Writing 2010 Read online

  “We pushed the pedal to the metal,” Mercedes says, “and were going two hundred miles an hour. We knew where the other was fantasy-wise before we even got together.” Technology lubricated their relationship. What might have taken a month or two to develop twenty years earlier—maybe during a dozen dinners and two dozen late-night conversations as they edged deeper into their erotic jungle—happened almost instantly.

  “Watch people texting,” one orgiast says. “The constant tapping of keys, the rapt expression—it even looks like someone masturbating.”

  Unlike Larry—who sees himself as a sexual tourist—Mercedes is a sexual hobbyist. Larry indulges occasionally; for Mercedes, the Lifestyle is a lifestyle.

  She stumbled onto the scene fifteen years ago, when she was twenty-one. She used to go to a resort in Loreto, Mexico, called Diamond Eden, between Cabo and La Paz. She didn’t notice anything unusual about the place until she and her girlfriend went one Halloween.

  “Even on the plane it was kind of odd,” Mercedes says. “Ninety percent of the people were also going to the resort. A guy was walking around the plane with a clipboard, checking people off.”

  He asked Mercedes and her friend their names and scanned the list. Nope, they weren’t on the roster. He walked away. At the resort, they were sitting by the pool when Clipboard Guy came up to them and said, “You weren’t on my list.”

  “What list?” Mercedes asked.

  Clipboard Guy thought they were part of an organization that was meeting there, Lifestyles.

  What’s Lifestyles? Mercedes wondered.

  She began to pay more attention.

  There were, she noticed, a lot of people wandering around naked, being unusually affectionate.

  “I ended up dating a guy who was part of the organization,” Mercedes says. “A bodybuilder.”

  She still has friends she met on that weekend fifteen years ago.

  “There’s no division,” Mercedes explains, “between my life and the Life.”

  But that doesn’t mean she isn’t discreet, she says. She was in a restaurant with a dozen friends from the Lifestyle scene, and one couple was being obvious about their swinger association. Across the room was “a client of mine,” Mercedes explains. She started distancing herself from the obstreperous couple, but the woman in the couple said, at the top of her lungs, “I don’t give a shit who knows I’m a swinger.”

  “Needless to say,” Mercedes adds, “I got a call the next day from my client, who said, ‘I don’t want to be affiliated with that.’ I lost a one-thousand-two-hundred-dollar-a-month client.”

  The foursome in the rain was so successful Mercedes decided she wanted Larry to host a pussy party: Larry, Mercedes, Betty, Kathy—and four of Mercedes’s friends who are part of the scene, including Veronica, who came without Reggie on the condition that she could play with the other women but not with Larry. Seven women and one man.

  Since the foursome, Larry had played with Mercedes and Betty, but none of them considered that an orgy: three people doesn’t rise to their definition of what constitutes an orgy. If four is the lower limit of an orgy, what is the upper?

  Larry and Mercedes exchange glances. With more than a dozen, they agree, it becomes hard to keep track of people—although theoretically there is no upper limit.

  When she throws parties at her house, “I limit it to twenty or thirty couples,” Mercedes says. “And I have a wait list.” But she prefers smaller parties.

  “Two on two,” she says, “three on three…”

  Even with such a low number there’s “so much pressure,” Mercedes says. “Four people have to like one another. Hard to get that dynamic to work.” Think of it as dating: Even one-on-one it can be hard to find the right match. What about parties with other men?

  “If I had fifty women,” Larry admits, “I wouldn’t mind another guy—across the room.”

  Mercedes wanted to throw the pussy party at Larry’s primarily to give each woman a chance to act out a favorite fantasy “no matter what it was,” she says. “I wanted to do something just for the girls.” One wanted to hang out with her girlfriends. Another wanted to watch. Another, according to Mercedes, “just wanted strange.” Betty had “an intimate connection” with Larry, whom she considered her “imaginary boyfriend.” Mercedes wanted Larry to read aloud from her favorite book, the first volume of Anne Rice’s erotic trilogy The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. She told Larry, “This is who I am.” But Mercedes may also have been trying to draw Larry back in.

  Larry had been so busy with business—acting gigs, trips to New York—that Mercedes felt he was neglecting her. One of her many text messages read, I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE NOT HERE. I’M IN BED AT THE STANDARD WITH A DILDO UP MY ASS. WISH IT WAS YOUR COCK, BUT YOU’RE NOT HERE. YOU MADE YOUR CHOICE.

  Remember the old telephone ad, “Reach out and touch someone”? With the Internet, that’s more possible than ever before.

  A pussy party might get Larry’s attention. The only rule Mercedes gave Larry was no touching. He was there as a butler. A majordomo. A boy Friday. Serving only. Larry grew up in a household with his divorced mother and three sisters, two older, one younger, whom he raised. He explains, “Giving a woman a nice time when they don’t have to do shit pleases me.”

  “His role for the night was supposed to be like a page—to get things,” Mercedes explains. “It was never supposed to progress to where it did.”

  They timed it so that when the women arrived Larry had a bubble bath waiting, candles lit, wine poured, beer on ice. “It couldn’t have been a more diverse group of women,” Larry says. It was like having a harem made up of the Seven Dwarfs. Very sexy, lithe and lovely dwarfs: Sexy, Sleepy, Sleazy, Bashful…

  Larry got them drinks. A kiss here. A kiss there. Then he was in his underpants, leaning back against the headboard of his bed, with the women stretched out around him on the mattress. One of them cuddled up to his left, wearing white panties with pink stripes around the leg holes and a white shirt with a pink oval pattern. Another woman was to his right. A naked woman leaned faceup against his chest while Mercedes—wearing red-and-pink striped panties, a white short-sleeved shirt and a small-brimmed hat—lay facedown between her open legs.

  “Within ten minutes,” Larry says, one of the women, Dawn, “had my cock in her hand.”

  Things got rolling—or, as Mercedes thought, out of control. “I’d be fucking one,” Larry says. “Some would be watching. Some going down on me. Some going down on each other.”

  Three of the women ran to the bathroom and started making out in the bubble bath. More wine flowed.

  “The problem is the reality of these things,” Veronica says. “There’s always some catastrophe.”

  One of the three girls got out of the tub and grabbed a towel. Which was caught under a painting. Which fell. In the bedroom, when Larry heard the glass shattering, he thought, Great, the best night of my life, and I’m going to end up in the emergency room!

  In the bathroom “everyone froze,” Veronica says. “Three girls in the bath with broken glass and wine and.…” Larry ran in. Everyone was all right. But the bathroom—and the rest of the house—was a wreck. Larry started to clean up, but Mercedes said, “Get out of here. We’ll take care of it.”

  The women went into action, picking up the glass and putting salt and seltzer water on the wine-stained sheets. After they finished cleaning up, Mercedes corralled the others and told them, “You girls are going to fuck the shit out of him because you’re fucking up his place.”

  The story of the Seven Women Who Destroyed a Guy’s House has become legendary in the Los Angeles Lifestyle scene. For the rest of the night, until 6:30 the next morning, Larry remembers, “every orifice, every part of my body was being touched by a tongue, a pussy. I was fucking this girl. There was this girl going down on another girl. There were tits all over.” If this had been a movie, Larry thinks, the daisy chain would have made a great dolly shot. One of the women prided herself on g
iving the best blow jobs in L.A. Larry says, “She was going to town. Mercedes and Betty were watching, and they were like, ‘If you blow your load, we’re going to fucking kill you.’ And I didn’t. They loved that.”

  Was it the best blow job in L.A.? It was, Larry admitted, maybe a nine-point-three.

  Larry spent a good part of the night doing multiplication tables to “keep from putting myself out of business.”

  At one point all seven women were on their backs as Larry went from one to the other to the next. Licking. Like a vaudeville performer keeping seven plates spinning on seven poles. One, Larry says, tasted like a bold merlot, another like a light white wine, another like springwater…

  Unlike the swingers scene thirty or forty years ago, which was driven by men, the scene today is driven by women—which made the pussy party at Larry’s not at all unusual—at least not within the Lifestyle. Mercedes supplied the soundtrack for the party. “Women are responsible for their own orgasms and the soundtrack,” Larry says. “That’s going to be my platform when I run for president.”

  At their orgies, Veronica and Reggie like to play naked Jingo. “Or the name game,” she says. “All sorts of stupid games. We watch one another have fun and be silly and hang out and then go and have sex. It’s all sort of seamless.”

  People in the Lifestyle scene autosort: “Couples find their own niche,” Veronica says. “Just like in high school.”

  The people into kink hang together. The people into sexy outfits hang together. The people into drugs hang together, though there aren’t as many drugs as one may suppose. “Mostly ecstasy,” Mercedes says, “and Viagra and Cialis….”

  Harder drugs like coke or even softer drugs like pot make people dysfunctional—both sexually and socially. “And it’s more fun if you can have a conversation,” Veronica says.

  During the Night of the Seven Women, Larry recalls, “You’d think the conversation would have been very light. But I had deeper conversations than I would on my third or fourth date with somebody normal,” outside the scene. “Everything from child rearing to psychology. Most of the time when a guy asks a girl about where she grew up, et cetera, it’s about getting laid. I’m already getting laid, so if I ask a girl anything or if she asks me, it’s real. I realized an hour in, when they asked a simple question like ‘How many sisters do you have?’ they really wanted to know. There’s no bullshit.” The women at the orgy confirmed that Larry’s charm and authenticity made the evening work. Most guys available online are the same type: Arizona, buffed, chinos, short streaky blond hair, a little too tan, shirt a little too tight. Two generations ago it would have been George Hamilton. Just a tool.

  Some people seek anonymity in their orgies: anonymous bodies to rub against. In fact, for some the anonymity is what counts. But more often than not people in the scene describe that phenomenon as old-school, the way people approached orgies in the past. Today the orgiasts seem to be searching for the same thing the characters on “Friends” and “Seinfeld” search for: when we leave home and move to the big city, who will be our family?

  “The pure sex,” Larry says, “only lasts for so long.”

  Even for those just looking for a “tool,” it seems to be as hard to find a good date in the Lifestyle community as it is in the vanilla community and for some of the same reasons, especially the proportion of appropriate available males to available females. Over and over, women in the scene complain there aren’t that many men out there. Unless you get to know the other person as a person and have a relationship, Veronica thinks, it’s just friction.

  “It’s a lot more comfortable when you know the people,” Betty agrees. “You’re a lot more free to relax and enjoy it, to express yourself. Especially for a single woman.”

  “The more people involved,” Mercedes says, “the more inappropriate people are involved.”

  Which is the downside of the Internet. It has made hooking up too easy. And oddly, orgiasts do not like that kind of promiscuity, which encourages people who don’t get the rules to join in.

  “Eleven, twelve years ago, everyone just flocked together,” Mercedes explains. You’d go to a Lifestyle resort and see “a celebrity sitting next to a plumber in his fifties.” It was more democratic. But there’s a difference between erotic democracy and the erotic mob. Increasingly, “no didn’t mean no anymore,” Mercedes says. Men became more aggressive, expecting—demanding—sex from any woman at a party, whether or not the woman wanted to play. Mercedes noticed the change six years ago at a Halloween party.

  “Some guy just walked up behind me,” she says, “and I was like, I don’t know who the hell you are.”

  Rejected, the guy threatened Mercedes, who had to go to the party master and have the man ejected.

  At big parties, “people don’t screen anymore,” Mercedes says. “Safety has gone out the door, and you have to feel safe to feel sexy.” The big-party scene also became more and more commercial.

  “I resent paying two hundred dollars to go to a party that doesn’t have good music and you have to bring your own alcohol,” Mercedes says. For a lot less, she says, “I can get a group of my friends together and rent a house for the weekend.”

  Or use Larry’s house…

  Betty, Veronica and Reggie have also moved away from the big-party scene. That scene—like the weekly Bliss parties in Los Angeles—is about sex and profits. Their orgies are about sex and love. The three of them have been intimate for four years. Some marriages among their friends haven’t lasted that long. Most weekends, Betty comes into Los Angeles and stays and plays with Veronica and Reggie, who drop their kids off at their grandparents’ house. They have had Thanksgivings and birthdays together and met each other’s families.

  “I had no idea it was going to get as deep or intense as it got as fast as it got,” Veronica says. Taking Reggie’s arm protectively, she adds, Betty’s “our girlfriend.” How does that work? Does it work? Clearly, among the three of them, they are not—monogamous? Triogamous? “No, no,” Reggie says, “there’s always room for pretty women.”

  Pretty women. Unmentioned are handsome men. But the women—like the men—like women. The scene is a gynarchy, in which men like women who like women. “When we started being with Betty regularly,” Veronica says, “all of a sudden everything changed. The sex was exponentially better because of the emotional connection. We knew who she was, knew what made her…”

  “With someone you don’t know,” Betty says, “there are always concerns, issues.”

  “She’s seen us in our darkest hours,” Veronica says.

  “And you’ve seen me in mine,” Betty says, turning to Veronica and Reggie. “It just seems so natural.” Jealousy?

  “Communication,” Reggie says.

  “From my perspective,” Betty adds, “this is the most perfect relationship in the world. How could there be any jealousy? I’m in the easiest position, having nothing to lose.”

  But the best part, all three agree, is not the sex; it’s the cuddling after sex. The spooning. Adds Veronica, “And the pancakes the next morning.”

  Betty, Veronica and Reggie plan to buy a house together in Northern California and live together with Veronica’s and Reggie’s kids from their previous marriages. Will it work?

  Larry’s priorities are different. “I’m not so committed to the scene,” he says. He sees his foray into the Life ending in three different ways. “First,” he says, “in a Garry Marshall kind of way: Mercedes brings someone, we hit it off, she’s Ms. Right, and we walk off into the sunset. Second, I meet Ms. Right, but Mercedes freaks out and grabs a carving knife—the Basic Instinct ending. Third, the Big Love ending: ‘Honey, I’m home. Honey and Honey and Honey.’”

  On the night following the Domination Convention’s Fetish Ball, Larry, Betty, Veronica and Reggie jump into a limo and cruise through the Los Angeles night. They discuss what to do with the rest of the evening. Drop by the weekly Bliss party to hang with the couple hundred gawkers and stalke
rs? Drinks at the Sunset Marquis? Back to the Chateau Marmont, where they had started the night having dinner three tables over from Drew Barrymore, two tables over from Robert Downey Jr. and across from one of the Olsen twins?

  “What I want,” Veronica says, dismissing the fetishists at the ball, “is to go home and have some good old-fashioned hot sex.”

  Loving Lesbians

  William Georgiades

  A large woman with a teenage scruff of beard on her chin was swallowing fire as the band played. The lead singer, not to be outdone in getting attention, stripped to the waist to reveal a chain leading from one clamped nipple to the other. Protruding from her pelvis was a large, black strap-on dildo, which had been a great deal bigger before being cut in half to cheers from the audience. Forty or so women (and less than a handful of men) swayed to the thrashing sounds emanating from the foursome backing up this fearsome creature as she screeched out the lyrics: “Neanderthal dyke, Neanderthal dyke, feminist theory gets me uptight.” I had arrived.

  If to kiss and tell is considered less gentlemanly than to not kiss, to merely pine, then telling must be deemed less than manly. Or more poetic, along the lines of sorrowful Young Werther. I spent most of my twenties, that period that might be sleekly compartmentalized as the majority of my sex life, in the otherwise sleepy college town of Northampton, Massachusetts, a town that had the distinction of being dubbed the lesbian capital of America. The title had been bestowed by two different news mediums, the resolutely down-market weekly magazine, The National Enquirer, and the slightly more respected television show, “20/20.”

  In both stories women were shown to be cavorting down Main Street hand in hand, making out with wild abandon and, somewhat less excitingly, discussing the sociopolitical ramifications inherent in their sapphic Eden. Men were given short shrift. For the purpose of news we were either angry or docile, the latter example shown wearing a pin with the words: I’m a lesbian trapped inside a man’s body.