Boom
By: Michael Salkind
Tags: Friendship, Boomers, Orgy, Aging

1. Youth.

There’s no such thing as free love. Sometimes it’s on the time payment plan, and sometimes it gets taken away like so much overdue rental furniture.

There were six of us, the Crew. In the late sixties and early seventies, we were in our late twenties and early thirties. Now we’re in our late sixties and early seventies. Except Ted.

We met in College in Madison, and we fell in love, the six of us. We shared a three-room rental house, me and Alice; Bob, there on the GI Bill after serving in Nam and hitting it off with Bev; Ted shacking up with Carol. Everywhere was music, incense, revolution. We got caught up in the anti-war and sexual tide. We refused to admit that our parents had engaged in sex as free of hang-ups as us, though our presence was proof that something had been going on back then.

We rutted like animals, fucking and fucking, sweaty and earthy, sometimes in our respective rooms, or the common areas, or our old and worn cars, or the school library. We felt like we were so good at it, hormonally exploring our bodies, passion and sincerity flowing. In retrospect, I think our love-making was pedestrian at best, limited to that of the missionaries and canines.

Oral sex was out of the question, from our inexperience, but also because there was some pride to be taken then in not practicing traditional hygiene. That was for old people, not revolutionaries like us. The free-flowing hormones, the pride of the coupling (like most kids, we had mostly felt left out in high school, and were thrilled to be part of the club now), and the copious incense made us feel that we had transcended the many generations that had preceded us.

We were beautiful, to the person, or so we felt. Hard dicks, taut muscles, smooth untouched (but by us) skin, gravity defying breasts, flowing hair. We men were slightly muscular even with a modicum of physical activity. We felt we were part of something bigger, a movement, that revolved around sexual acts, like the Earth revolving around the sun.

The sixties ended on April 20, 1975, the day the War ended. By then, we three couples had moved on, had gotten jobs, careers, some with families of their own making. I was teaching in Manhattan, as was Alice, different schools, different literature. We lived in a New-York-spacious loft, i.e., tiny. Our baby, Ian, was light and center of our life.

2. Throw your ring into the hat

As years passed, we became bored and unsatisfied, itching for new experiences. We needed more. In the eighties, swinging became more widespread. The six of us had moved to Connecticut, a good place to raise kids. We all had jobs in academia and high tech. Carol stayed home with the kids, as did I, still just the one, Ian. When he calmed down or engaged in Lego creation, I had time to do some writing. Some of my stuff was published, which only served to encourage me.

We began talking and planning. We still loved each other, and were taken with the idea of the key party. We decided we’d try it, but with wedding rings. We would send the kids to baby-sitters and grandparents, and get together, eating nice dinners and then driving to some couple’s house. Two hats would then house the respective women’s and men’s rings, and we would draw.

If you got your own spouse, that was fine. We would start with the chosen partner, and slowly all come together. Group sex was just what we’d been missing. By now, several years after our initial sexual experimentation, we had all become more open and more skilled. And our hygiene was impeccable. This was before the need for safe sex, and our interactions became far from that.

All of us worked out, and were in great shape. Rather than the taut smoothness of our youth, we had muscles and sinew. Few tragedies had happened to our bodies. Well, a couple scars here and there from doing things like mountain climbing and mountain biking. Bev had a sweet butterfly tattooed on her lower back, and I’m fairly certain it was the first Tramp Stamp. The rest of our group’s tattoos didn’t come until the nineties.

Our swinger’s club, the Crew, began in Ernest. I’m kidding. No one’s name was Ernest. We copulated, at first as couples in the same room, and eventually with each other. There were no physical boundaries, no limiting oneself to He and She. Our sexual sessions became orgies. All orifices got suitable attention. We worked in such sync that I imagine we resembled a den of rattlers. When everyone was satisfied, we drank and snorted coke and laughed and laughed, declaring, again, our love for each other. We were committed to each other, loyal, like a monogamous relationship with a lot more participants.

We did this for months, and then began to tire of the sameness of merely naked fornication. We became more creative, adding toys and costumes to the mix. Leashes, chains, collars, masks, plungers, whips, needle-nose pliers, diapers, pacifiers, cuffs, tiaras, boots, gloves, a weed-whacker, tubes, catheters, chaps, aprons, doilies, twine, jump ropes, jumper cables, prosthetic limbs. A sex swing and a sex see-saw. Beads, dildos and other orifice widening and vibrating devices. Our experiments went from T&A to B&D and S&M and B&E and LAPD. Our costumes were made of leather, rubber, latex, canvas and grocery bags, paper and plastic. We filmed it all and played it in the background, fucking in stereo. Later, we’d watch the films with the studied eyes of football coaches planning plays.

Eventually, there came a sameness to what we did, and we started to grow apart. Then, Ted died, a cardiac event. And we dispersed and moved on.

3. Mothballs

Our college reunion brought us back to Madison and back together. The six of us. Well, Ted was long gone. I always though a cardiac event was falling in love. Carol brought her boyfriend du mois, Joseph, a beautiful young man in his thirties. Carol’s inheritance from Ted, as well as from her parents, gave her a lavish, comfortable life, attractive to boys of all ages. Regardless, Joseph seemed terrific, not to mention game.

We had all succeeded in life and felt no real need to impress our former classmates, and no real interest in seeing any of them. We decided to skip the evening of the reunion dinner, and really do it up right. Our clothes were beautiful, suits from Armani and Brioni, dresses from Oscar De Le Renta and other designers, Bob and I, our silver hair perfectly coifed. Joseph’s hair was yet to age. The women all had hair the color of their youth and even better, streaks attracting us like shiny objects.

Heavy makeup flourished, the women as attractive as possible, topped by expensive perfumes. The result was wealthy and famous, though none of us had achieved fame.

We went to the most lavish dinner at L’Etoile, a multi-course meal commissioned to my old friend Chef Pete. The idea was to bring courses of his own creation until we cried uncle, and then dessert. Each course was paired with a fine and perfect wine. We had courses that featured vegetables, seafood, beef, pork, lamb, and any number of unusual ingredients, all of which somehow worked perfectly. Pete is a genius, combining things that should in no way work together. My favorite is the sea scallops on greens with a variety of reductions.

So we ate and talked and laughed and felt close as if no time had passed. Sure we were older, but we had traded youth for sophistication and some sense of arrival.

Satiated, we decided to go back to Alice’s and my house. Having a full professorship at Madison, and being the best-selling author Elliott Good — not a nom de plume — had provided us a lavish lifestyle, in a gorgeous modern house just off campus. It dwarfed our first loft, and was so much nicer, especially the sunken living room, with high ceilings, a huge skylight, and the plushest of couches.

The old instincts, the years of self-knowledge in the group, brought forth the seemingly inevitable idea of a return to group sex. Not a bad idea. We were intoxicated with alcohol and perfume, and all looked our best, just beautiful.

As if on cue, we stripped away our finery, and stood in the candlelight, revealed to each other for the first time in years. I’m not sure that what happened next should have been a surprise. We all could well afford mirrors at home. But sexual memory is stronger than vision.

The first thing everyone noticed was Bev’s colostomy bag, hanging by her side like a fashionable fecal handbag. We stared at the ancient creatures staring back at us (not Joseph, still in his thirties and quite a specimen). It was funhouse mirrors with none of the fun.

The scales fell from our eyes, but then appeared everywhere else, like that of fish and reptiles, without the uniformity.

Man makes the clothes, and clothes make the man. Fully exposed, our naked skin had us looking like plucked birds. Our skin had gone from smooth to looking like wallpaper slowly receding in an old room. Pieces of skin did not know whether they were staying or going, but all shared a uniform greyness. Bob’s and my chests, which had been so well-formed for so long, were like waves close to shore on an overcast day, the ripples somewhat aligned but with white caps. The ghostly white was that of a formerly dyed cherry, leeched from being left on the side of a restaurant sink.

Our bodies, reverse constellations, were riddled with sores, ulcers and pustules, a wide variety of spots, boils, liver marks, cancers, misshapen bumps pushing upwards like rodents surfacing in a field. Broken bones had healed poorly, and tumors had been removed. Arthritis gave us hands like trees in a haunted forest. A relief map of surgery scars and body mining crossed several of our torsos, with vast deserts of dry skin. Varicose veins intertwined like blue Medusa snakes. Carol had an array of small round bandages, like octopus sucker marks. Formerly lovely tattoos, or so we thought, looked like the shit-brown palettes of paint at the end of a painting. Makeup cracked and flaked, faces looking as if from a wax museum fire.

Many of us stooped, our shoulders and necks headed downward, the results of crushing years of gravity, such that we looked like one step behind on the evolutionary chart. There was no form to our bodies. We looked like figures of slimy wet clay, unfinished. Dicks, testicles and breasts went straight down like icicles. Thatches of grey pubic hair seemed harvested from a Dr. Seuss landscape. The nicest breast, man or woman, was Carol’s reconstructed breast, the result of a single mastectomy. All of us looked heavy with child. Each part that had been beautiful was now simply nauseating.

A slight yet pervasive smell of rot, stale perfume, wine breath and mothballs filled the room. Bob released a long fart, adding to the atmospheric tragedy. Several of us giggled.

For I don’t know how long we stared at each other. I forgot where I was and the identity of these naked old strangers. Eventually, still in a certain sync, we redressed, kissed each other, and went off into the refreshing night. All but me and Alice. We sat next to each other and stared into eternity.