Honeymoon Hotels

I think, hey, that can't just be mist rising over the Pocono Mountains this a.m. Uhuh. That is a sexual greenhouse effect, I bet: the steamy residue, the hot-air slag from 5000 passionate groin encounters last night. There is a sheet-lightning flash. And I say to Moompsie, my wife, "See? The atmosphere itself just discharged static build-up from what must be a higher concentration of orgasms per capita than any where else in America." You've heard about hitting your sexual peak? It's in northeastern Pennsylvania. That green, that fertileness is caused by enriching, hymeneal virgin blood.

Each year, more than 200,000 people honeymoon between East Stroudsburg and Equinunk, Pennsylvania. As the Pocono Mountain Vacations Bureau will tell you--often--ten main resorts gross more than $100,000,000 per annum. Solid, predictable commerce: After all, at any moment, one percent of our national population is being led to an altar somewhere. There are more than 1550 resort beds--heart-shaped, round, king-sized, canopied. Each is grinding out bridal jelly day after day. And, incredible as it may sound, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University has reported (continued on page 124)Honeymoon Hotels(continued from page 118) that 50 percent of newlywed folk have not slept together before marriage.

It is tender time. A time of love and commitment and pet names for his big cherry picker. Of shyness and sweet new sensation and rice found in her moist bud vase. Of, yes, awkwardness, ignorance and mucho macho pressure. A night that'll take the crease from anyone's performance underwear. Not to mention occasional danger. Let me tell you Moompsie and Pumpsie's favorite Pocono Mountains wedding-night tale. This is certified true.

Couple comes down to breakfast after their sexual Kickoff Classic at Paradise Stream. They look like funerary sculpture. He doesn't speak. She won't pass the apple butter. There is serious grudgework going on. So one lady social director draws the bride out.

What happened was.... See, at the best Pocono resorts, you can have a swimming pool right in your very room. Beside the bed. He and she, as one might guess, were malking love there. Picture this: She is floating out supine--hands behind head to support her upper-body weight on the pool ladder. He is rummaging away down below. All of a once, he gets so passionate, so banzai berserk that he yanks her off the ladder--yoik! She has gone under, head and torso-- and he doesn't stop. This woman is not waving but drowing, and her groom wont't lay off the piston pleasure. He thinks those wild fingers are thrashing through the chlorine because she has caught a monster orgasm. In fact, she is about to inhale half their heart-shaped pool. Aaargh. Was it good for you, too, dear?

Dear?

Glub.

You can imagine how a bride might react, confronted by such muderous urgency. The case is pretty extreme, of course. Nonetheless, it serves as an emblem. Male sexual appetence, monotonous and warlike, and be enough to make any unprepared young wife major in menstruation for life. Pocono-resort people know that. They set out to mitigate and feminize sexuality. This is managed in three ways: (1) They distract the clientele from sex; (2) they refurbish sex, making it plush, irresistible and unthreatening; (3) they laugh at it a whole lot.

1. Distracting his or her libido. The Pocono Mountains resort ambience may recall the ambience of Camp Taka-Wee-Wee--back when Mom was telling me that children came from a giant dust ball under her bed. At that magic moment of husband-wife consummation, the Pocono resort will return you to safe prepubescence--games, social activity and organization. Not that this is ever enforced. You can hand out a Do Not Disturb, We Are Still In Bed sign and play two-man petting zoo all day. But Pocono games are so attractive (and part of your expensive prepaid package) that even the raunchiest groom will want to shoot baskets and pool as well as beaver.

Remember, also, that newlywed kids have often never been alone before. Even if you warm her scallops every hour on the hour, there will still be time to kill. Boredom can override love: It is seditious and scary. She stares at him while thinking. Why doesn't this interloper leave so I can call my mother? Or, on his part, If only she'd take a nap and let me watch The N.F.L. Today. These "pups," as they are referred to, often don't have great conversational grist or imagination. They need structure. The Pocono resort provides lush intimacy--mixed with as little familiarity as possible.

For a similar reason, all meals are taken in common. Eating with your spouse my be too much like, um, marriage. The social and occupational diversity is provocative of talk. We shared one four-couple table with a banker, a Shop Rite manager and a West Virginia coal miner. These people were as shy as bandicoots at first. But Pumpsie caught on how to crack ice. Just mention the Pocono Mountain room fly. The room fly is small, MiGevasive, and can produce a tiny chuckling noice--"Heh, heh, heh." As in, "Heh,heh,heh, he's about to come. I'll land on his scrotum." Zang--did anyone see an erection around here? I know I put it down someplace. The only luggage you need take to northeastern Pennsylvania is a number-six rubber band.

As one social director remarked, "Games and activities are fun. But they also help you find out things about your partner that you never knew before," I never knew that Moompsie played ping-pong like a gym snake. Or tennis like some kind of court pirate. Moompsie never knew that Pumpsie was such a bad sport. This, in fact, is the down side of gamesmanship. Competition can get sour-spirited. Victory on the golf course may lead to reprisals in bed. Your lust may be taken hostage--and held for her missed backhand. I heard a woman say on the miniature-golf course, "Well, gosh, honey, at least you got it in one hole this weekend."

2. Plush, irresistible and unthreatening, or furniture can be an aphrodisiac. Moompsie and Pumpsie stayed first at the Summit Resort, then at Caesars Cove Have. Our Fantasia suite was near Caligulan (pool, sauna, heart-shaped tub--which, unfortunately, took so long to fill that we fell asleep before we could climb into the His-and-Her ventricles). But, oh, our Champagne Tower Suite at Cove Haven came right from moom pitchers. I felt like throwing my childhood sled into the fireplace. I mean, sheesh, what a toy. Half brothel cloud chamber, half Houston mission control. Thing should've had a dashboard. It played "Feelings, doo-wah-wah, fellings" on every part of the old sensorium.

For just $336 per night, you get indoor heart-shaped pool, sauna massage table, steam shower, refrigerator, fireplace, round and mirrored bed, no reading lamp and--tah-daah!--the preposterous and spectacular whirlpool bath set in a seven-foot-tall champagne glass (patented). This concept is so laughable so late-American megalomaniac that it is flabbergastingly effective. Marriages go downhill fast after Cove Haven. The place, in fact, makes a cinematic statement; it says, "Scream out that orgasm; sex is big; this entire two-story room will be nothing less than amplification for your pleasure," It functions both as bed partner and as co-conspirator; it is like a stroll through one of your own sexual organs, particularly the female--moist, dark and enclosing. And your Champagne Tower Suite has been engineered with brilliance. Hell, there are--in one area--so many temperatures and moisture levels, I was surprised the whole dang thing didn't shatter when I opened the refrigerator door.

Romancing seven feet up in our transparent whirlpool made us feel like, ah, like two roaches in a flush toilet. You bark the odd shin, snort foam, achieve B-plus gratification and probably do it just once there. But this once may be one you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. And that, after all, is the rationale behind sexual gimmickry--from absurd to high tech--it can serve as pretext for some extra touching.

Circular beds are de rigueur. Now, I can think of no reason--pure novelty side--why roundness should be more voluptuous than squareness. And, in fact, it isn't. Worse, thus far, at least, no one has managed to invent a round sheet. All bed linen, threfore, molts one minute after you get in, and you spend (continued on page 151)Honeymoon Hotels(continued form page 124) the night on a clammy rubber pad, just as you did in childhood. But mirrors, believe me, are still erotic. There will be 12 of you at any given moment in any Pocono resort. This induces a sly, lubricious ménage à trois sensatin. I mean, you and that guy with boils on his behind are both turf building the missis. Subjectivity and objectivity interpenetrate. There may even be a homosexual twinge. Making love with Moompsie is so glorious, so dreamlike that I find it reassuring to wave at myself just before completion, to make sure I'm really there.

With the spotlights on here and there, our room looked rather like a natural history-museum diorama: Homo Sapiens In Mating Posture, maybe. With lights out, you could cripple yourself trying to find a leak. Open one wrong door and you could step out through your Champagne Tower--aieeeee--goombye. But they'd bury you in tasteful decor: plum and rose, Erté art deco. Are the Champagne Tower suites a success? you ask. Well, each cost $100,000. They started with 16 at Cove Haven. Now they have 136 at all four resorts. Guess.

There has been amicable but piss-expensive competition among resorts. It is the most American sort of war--a war over plumbing. Pocono Gardens Lodge people threw down the gasket when they began to install their Roman-style sunken tub. Then came Morris Wilkins, inventor of the heart-shaped tub in 1963. Around 1973, /wilkins struck again: He invented the in-room swimming pool. Everyone had to take that plunge. By 1982, the Summit has retaliated. It put both a Jacuzzi and a swimming pool in its priciest room. But Wilkins wasn't through. He saw the Jacuzzi and raised it seven feet up.

"Most of us now call ourselves couples resorts rather than honeymoon resorts," Tony Farda, manager of the Summit, said. "The vacation couple has become more important to us. But we still have honeymooners, and that's our mainstay, because it's midweek." No one would mistake Tuesday for Saturday at a Pocono resort. Midweek, there is this foolish glaze of love around--the kind you see in a beagle puppy's eyes. Tuesday, people hug. They share the same wad of chewing gum. They feel each other up at dinner. Saturday, people drink a lot and heckle the comedian.

Michael Wilkins, Morris' son, said, "Now probably less than half our business is honeymoon."

And that half has changed. "They've gotten much older," Farda said. The groom in a prototypical first marriage is 25; his wife, 23. They've traveled. They've seen a Jacuzzi before. Average combined income is around $30,000; about 45 percent have a college degree. Only 20 percent of the women are "housewives." Are they venturesome sexually? Just check out the gift shop at Cove Haven. You have a sex-toy department right out of Peep-O-Rama on 42nd Street. Joy Jell. Motion Lotion. Dildos. Fart, the Game. Even, I was perplexed to see, an inflatable-sex-doll collection.

On that rococo note, I'll flip to:

3. Laughing at sex. This is the debatable and threatening aspect of Pocono love. Mind, now, ribald, exaggerative humor has a hallowed place in our sexual canon; I realize that. But it has always been primarily male stag-show stuff. Often during our vicarious honeymoon, we were nudged to the hem of puerile tastelessness--and even cruelty. It was as if, in the midst of all that mountain green deer and raccoons, ragweed pollen and insect life, we had come across a jaded urban burlesque house. Moompsie and Pumpsie were never at ease withw this. It gave us an ambivalent pleasure, the kind you get, say, eating sunburn peel from some beautiful woman's shoulder blade--sensuous, infantile, vaguely cannibalistic. We could surmise potential for damage: After all, the sexuality here was frail, just nubile, not hardened. Laughter can be freeing; there is catharsis in it. Recognizing part of yourself in the gross and absurd may be healthy--as long s it is not too large a part of you, For, in fact, laughter has forever been the natural foe of hard-ons and dignity.

The game program is dangerous and childish. And, yes, I admit, popular Moompsie and Pumpsie sat in on the snide, tattletale newlywed games. The room was full; everyone seemed eager to achieve victim status. There is a sort of foolish bravado in this, as well as good sportsmanship. Because, under lewd cross-questioning, serviceable illusions are exploded. Her fake orgasm, for instance, may have been a loveful performance. In sex, as in most human enterprises, honesty is an overrated virtue.

We learned--not that it was nay of our business--the following dirt:

Which women had on what color underpants (most wore vanilla).

The pet name for his yang (Enormous Heat-seeking Moisture Missile, Robodick and Fred) and for her love glove (Alice, Gertrude and One Size Fits All).

The most interesting place they had made love (bed, bed, bed and in their student lounge at school).

How many times they'd made love since Sunday--and this was Thursday (20 eight, four and, yes, one. "Well," she told us, "he's been drunk every night but Tuesday." The record, since you ask, for a week at Cove Haven is 69, or once every two and a half hours, night and day).

There are cross-cultural equivalents to this group experience. It is, first and obviously, a rite of passage. Certain humiliations are essential, as they are, for instance, when one has just traversed the equator. But that is a general correspondence. More to the point, our Pocono week reminded me of some tribal marriage ceremony. In Africa, columns of nubile women dance, with provocative accent, "against" their husbands-to-be. sensuous display will occur. But there is derision and humorous challenge, as well. It all announces an end to male promiscuity and the harnessing of his dangerous, disruptive libido. Pocono prurience--obscene joke and voyeuristic behavior--is, in fact, sublimation. Language has taken the place of performance, all symbolized neatly later when, on Hawaiian Night at Cove Haven, Honest Phil put his men in effeminate grass skirts and made them hula of their women.

Honest Phil Policaire, social director at Cove Haven since 1972, is the Great God Hymen himself. Honest Phil looks like an extremely intelligent horse or the bastard child of Huntz Hall and your coatrack. Vulgar beyond belief, sentimental beyond belief, energetic, wily, vain and unassuming, sly and innocent--that is to say, an American of the most attractive sort. You sense that no womb at Cove Haven is hospitable to conception, no sperm fertile until it has been blessed by Phil.

Honest Phil lives in the shadowland between good dirty fun and fighting words. It is a matter, ultimately, of tone and timing--as it shitté, his leitmotiv, his refrain. "The word was 'Oh, shit.' But people wrote to management and said, 'Oh, shit' was very vulgar for a Caesars honeymoon resort. S we made it shitté [pronounced 'shittay']. It means the same thing, but it sounds foreign. I haven't had a complaint yet."

I said to Phil, as he opened his third pack of cigarettes that day, "So, what's the funniest thing you've ever seen an heard around here?"

"Well"--he thought a bit--"well, there was this real young couple. I was having breakfast and I heard someone ask them if they'd enjoyed their in-room pool. And the guy said, 'Darn it, no. We forgot to bring our bathing suits.' Spit my food out, I laughed so hard."

But reconsider for one moment, as Phil and I did them. See instead two young children, not stupid but shy. Two who, overmodest about their bodies, have just made love for the first time without any light on., See their beautiful and expensive pool--because they are too bashful for a skinny-dip together.

The sweetness of newlywed love. Oh, we could weep.

"Romancing seven feet up in our whirlpool made us feel like, ah, like two roaches in a flush toilet."

"Tuesday, people hug, share the same wad of chewing gum. Saturday, people drink and heckle the comedian."