2. “Can a girl turn you down?”

Of course, anyone can reject anyone. But you have to remember the odd circumstances you are in: a room filled with people, fifty percent of whom are female, all of whom have chosen to be fucked one after another by strangers, so being discriminate is not the operative mood at that moment.

This is true for private parties more than on-premises swingatoriums like Plato’s Retreat (I always wondered why they named that place after one of history’s least sexy people) where the rejection rate was definitely higher since it was an “open” rather than an “invitational.”

These public places to fuck that had a very low bar of admission—usually the door money and something that vaguely reminded the doorman of a woman—didn’t benefit from prequalification. Private parties were by invitation and the hosts/ hostesses performed triage before you got through their door.

I went to Plato’s and Le Trapeze, the second of which I preferred, two-dozen times but I never loved them. Too much bok choy in the Moo Goo Gai Pan.

I would say that at the approximately 250 or so private orgies I attended and the five to seven couplings and/ or groupings I entered at each one—which would be roughly 1,400 plus chances to be rejected—I must have experienced just over a dozen rejections, which is just somewhere over one half of one percent, the standard minimum necessary for statistical significance.

Probably six were outright rejections from females who, erroneously, found me repulsive and would rather be poked in the eye with a fork than have sex with me. Another six were just from exhaustion. Some of these women I would conjugate with at a later date, some never. Only one I ever remember going, “Oh No! Not You!” which did sting momentarily.

I have left out the three dozen “Oh, no, not agains” and “Oh, no, not nows” I got from females that I had had before and would have again but were either ready to go home, had their momentary fill, were just beginning a rest period, or were too hungry to be thinking about sex—logistical differences not rejections.           

My first real refusal didn’t happen until at least the fortieth orgy so by then it was emotionally a non-event. I have been and still am insecure about a variety of subjects but never about my intelligence or sexuality. Thank God for small favors.

During the Orgy Wonder Years and being then a twenty-three- to twenty-six-year-old not unattractive taller than average male in decent physical shape with a slightly bigger than average penis, my rejection rate was probably a bit lower than normal. This is due mostly to the fact, I believe, that I smile a lot, had an attractive girlfriend, and manifested considerable wit. Never underestimate the value of a sense of humor. If you have the right timing and know when not to be funny.

Rejections, which were never rampant at the parties I attended, could happen for all kinds of reasons. One fellow I knew who was strikingly handsome got rejected way more than average because, I think, he was very quiet and women thought he was conceited which he wasn’t. He was just shy, which was also not in his favor because the people at orgies tend to be the ones that have more than the average amount of whatever it is that men and women usually have so they tend to be exaggerated versions with the males being on the dominant masculine side and the women being on the more feminine submissive side. Like I’ve said, The Perfect Place for me.

There were usually one or two double penetrations at each party and a girl’s first time was celebrated like crossing the equator.

This is not to say that the selection process was all one-sided. There were always some females who aggressively seduced males and frequently other females. I was asked often by ladies and only a very few times I begged off. Usually, it was because she was esthetically challenged but sometimes just because she scared me.

A note about humor at orgies:

With Funny you must be very, very careful. It’s not something amateurs should fool around with at orgies. Funny has to go in the spaces between sex. Funny is good foreplay but is the anti-hard-on incarnate during sex. It will turn women off too. You can’t make jokes near another guy fucking because the anti-hard-on penumbra is not easy to calculate.

It can work wonders in small doses in the living room at the beginning of a party or in tiny discrete one line remarks during a break but can spell ruin in the bedroom and disaster in the middle of a clusterfuck. I’ve seen more than one clusteroid dissolve in a matter of minutes with an ill-timed joke.

If you are too funny, it might lead to rejection even when you aren’t being funny. This I witnessed and quickly learned to meter my mirth. However, with the lesson learned, a new party would be tabla rasa and redemption is still attainable.

One last note about anal sex:

At orgies where you really did have license to fuck, anal sex was a privilege. Some women only shared that with their mates. Some never liked it with anyone. Some loved it equally to fucking and some, God Bless them, preferred it.

I would say that anal sex was available from less than one third the women, maybe only twenty percent. A gentleman never pushed the issue past a little cajoling. If you really wanted it you could find it at just about every medium-sized or larger party. Andrea liked it, selectively but frequently, which, along with our other attributes, I’m sure helped insure my/our being invited back.

There were usually one or two double penetrations (a penis in each hole) at each party and a girl’s first time was celebrated like crossing the equator.

In retrospect, the vast majority of the sex I had and saw at the hundreds of orgies I went to in the early ’70s was pretty vanilla. Lots of fucking and sucking and a healthy sprinkling of anal. I never saw a whip or even handcuffs. We were a randy bunch but not really eccentric, once you got past the part about having sex with strangers in groups.

That’s the way the ’70s were. The really weird shit didn’t find me till the ’80s.

3. “What about being so close to other naked guys and do they ever touch you sexually?”

Nearly every orgy I ever went to, except the few stupid ones I went to that were run by the Artists Crowd were mostly run by average Hardcore Masturbator Guys or their girlfriends, who are generally submissive apparachicks to their boyfriend’s Party Line.       

These orgies were the living manifestations of our (The Hardcore Masturbators’) dream world and were almost as homophobic as a gang of tough Italians.

Bisexuality was not just tolerated but encouraged for women but was the tacit taboo for men. Just the way we wanted it. Nearly every straight guy likes to watch two women have sex with each other, but guy/guy sex is a definite no-no.

I don’t know the psychobabble reasons why girl/girl is OK and guy/guy stuff isn’t, but since nearly all of us Hardcore Masturbator Guys feel the same way, I guess it must come bundled with our original operating system.

Touching a guy nonsexually happened all the time and was as accepted as it would be when playing basketball. It was impossible not to touch each other as you crawled over a clusterfuck which could sometimes grow into giant ten- or twelve-people sex molecules.

If you were part of a threesome or moresome, guys would balance themselves, without even an awkward grimace, by holding each other. But, we were all excessively butch about it.

Occasionally, some guy would be playing near or around some female orifice you were already involved with, like a husband putting a finger up the ass of a wife you were screwing or maybe some guy was eating the pussy connected to the anus you had entered and your Johnson or cojones might be sideswiped or even fondled. I never minded it as long as it felt good and didn’t impede my motion or pleasure. I only ever heard a very few true homophobes complain of these Class C Misdemeanor Bisexual Encounters.

Once or twice in the middle of a clusteroid I looked down to see who was sucking me and it was a guy or a guy and a girl and I just let it continue, especially if it were a guy and girl.

 Once at a huge orgython at a Holiday Inn in New Jersey I was fucking this lovely lady and felt my balls being played with and sucked and I thought it was probably my friend Tina who often did that for me and turned around and saw this tiny Japanese man there and it felt so good I just kept pumping.

It got a bit strange, however, because he kept following me around providing the same ancillary benefit with each new copulation. The third time I said thank you but no more please. I don’t think he spoke English, but he understood the International Body Language for “Go away or I’ll deck you.”

4. “What about VD?”

This is what we worried about before we knew enough to worry about the “You’ll Never Get Rid Of It!” Ogre—Herpes—and then the “You’ll Die Of It!” Big Casino Godzilla—AIDS.

I suppose it was the feelings of immortality the old always accuse the young of having, but we never used rubbers and I never heard of anyone getting anything at an orgy. I never caught anything, anywhere, even when I should have.

Let me explain. Once, ten years later, when I was with Laura, in the early 1980s, we went to the Island of Curaçao as the guest of an old boyfriend of hers we called Smooth. He had sold a store there some new fixtures and needed help installing them. He asked us whether we wanted a free trip in exchange for a few days labor. We did the work and had a wonderful time. Laura had to leave early to attend to something or other and Smooth and I stayed on. On our last night we picked up two Dominican hookers and we each fucked them both.

A week later Smooth called and said he had gotten the clap so I went to a doctor and got checked but was clean. I even went back two more times. Clean. Clean. They said I might be either naturally resistant or just plain lucky....

There was a single moment when I felt the fear. It happened at the end of 1982, but I’ll include it now.

I saw a copy of Time magazine with the huge “Herpes” headline on its cover. I read the article and it shook me to my bones. Here was something you couldn’t get rid of. I felt like the Christopher Walken character in The Deer Hunter, who was invincible at Russian Roulette till that moment when through the heroin he recognizes Robert DeNiro and says “one more” and BAM! SPLAT! he’s dead! All day I carried that image with me. The next strange vagina had my bullet.

I had gone from zero worry to obsessed just from seeing Herpes on that magazine cover. The very idea of getting something you couldn’t get rid of crumpled my immortality shield and scared the shit out of me.

That night I was at the Hellfire Club. I was talking to Jerzy Kosinski, the writer, a surprisingly good actor and a more bizarre partaker than even me in these kinds of amusements. I had met Jerzy several times and although he was so sadistic as to be in that class of men I didn’t admire, he was a great raconteur.

            “Did you see the Time magazine cover, Jerzy?”

            “Yes. It gave me pause,” he replied in his cultured mildly Polish accent.

            “I think my number is up,” I said. “I have never been touched by anything, so far. But I no longer think I’m immune.”

            “Then you are probably not immune anymore.”

            “And you?”

            “I admit I had a similar thought today also after reading that story. You may be right. It might be too dangerous to play these games.”

From that moment on I began carrying rubbers.