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THREESOMES, FOURSOMES AND MORESOMES ARE JUSfTAJEXT MESSAGE AWAY FOR REAL-LIFE SWINGERS INDULGING IN HIGH-SPEEd'jDOUNECTIONS

he man-or perhaps woman-dressed all in black and wearing a disturbingly realistic leather horse's head sits apparently

despondent (given the mask, it's hard to tell, but his or her body is slumped) on a bench across from the stage where three bare-reastad women with candles taped to their nipples pose holding...are they dildos? The lighting is dim, and they are obscured by Mfcnand half-naked dancing bodies. Through a doorway in the cavernous club-Passive Arts Studios near LAX in Los Angeles-Larry, wtlkknown actor, can see a man dressed like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean using an Indiana Jones bullwhip on a spread-^^f naked woman. When Larry maneuvers through the crowd of perhaps 200 at the annual DomCon-Domination Convention-. atish Ball, he glimpses your average six-and-a half-foot-tall transvestite dominatrix, as well as a bent-over young man being

sodomized by a woman wielding a butt plug the size of a sawed-off Louisville Slugger. A guy in his mid-70s-clearly the oldest in the group-in full leather regalia, handcuffs at his belt, whip under his arm. rocks his walker toward the unisex bathroom.

"Bet he's seen some things in his time," says a woman in a leather thong with studs through her nipples.

"You mean weirder than this?" asks a man in black slacks and a blue blazer.

"You have no idea." the woman says, grinning, and sashays away, headed into the labyrinth of rooms in the back of the club.

Two of the orgiasts who have joined Larry at the Fetish Ball come out of the bathroom. Betty, a blonde, and Veronica, a brunette, each take one of Larry's arms. Veronica's husband. Reggie, lags behind, scoping out a woman in a catsuit.

"Can you believe." says Betty, "someone in the bathroom line told us we didn't look like we belonged here?"

Both women are dressed for an evening at the Bar Marmont (casual cocktail dresses), though Veronica may pass muster at the Fetish Ball since she is wearing a long, not quite translucent white gown with nothing underneath.

But it isn't really their scene.

"No one's having any orgasms," Veronica says.

Larry takes a last look around the club and heads for the door, following Betty, Veronica and Reggie, who consider themselves a sexual trio. Betty comes to L.A. most weekends to play with Veronica and Reggie.

In the past few months, Larry has been involved in orgies with both Betty and Veronica, who are part of a vast sexual underground that's different from the erotic underground of the 1970s and 1980s, the era of Plato's Retreat and Sandstone. It's different in great part because of the influence of the Internet, which makes meeting easier and offers a larger pool of potential playmates.

On the way out Larry, Betty, Veronica and Reggie pass the smorgasbord, which is serving, among other dishes, meatballs in sauce.

"If there's a smorgasbord," a friend told Larry, "eat only prewrapped sandwiches-and avoid the mayonnaise."

A few months earlier, just before Christmas, at about 11:30 on a rainy winter Friday night in Los Angeles. Larry, in sweats and a T-shirt, got a phone call from Mercedes, a dancer he had recently met at a music-video shoot.

"What are you doing?" Mercedes asked.

"Nothing," Larry said. He'd just gotten home from a long day of working on a TV show. "You?"

"I'm at the Velvet Margarita," Mercedes said. "Can I come over?"

"Sure." Larry said. Why not?

They had dated a few times. Successfully.

"She's very sexual." Larry says about Mercedes. "She's 'All I want to do is fuck you. I don't want to cuddle. I don't want a boyfriend.' She has a boyfriend"-a minor celebrity-"and she's involved in a culture that is very sexually open." Larry grins. "Incredibly sexually open. Completely sexually open."

Mercedes is part of the Los Angeles Lifestyle, or swingers, scene. For her business she travels frequently and widely. She has contacts in the Lifestyle in most major cities. It's like being a member of a lodge, the Masons or the Elks: No matter where you go, all you have to do is signal your insider status and you're at home. If she visits a city where she doesn't know anyone, she can go on the Internet site she prefers. LifestyleLounge.com. and hook up with people who are into her scene: moderately kinky heterosexual and lesbian encounters.

Larry thought a night with Mercedes would be an uncomplicated way to unwind.

Uncomplicated?

Larry had no idea what he was in for.

"It was pouring rain," Larry says. "One of those five times a year it rains in L.A. A torrential downpour."

Larry lives in the hills, with a lot of cement

steps leading up to his front door. He heard clack clack clack...the sound of one...two... three sets of high heels approaching his place. Mercedes couldn't get the front door open.

"Larry." Mercedes explains, "is an obsessive door locker."

The worst rainstorm of the year. Mercedes pounded on the door. When Larry finally opened it, he saw Mercedes drenched, her blonde hair wet and pasted to her forehead and cheeks, in a black trench coat.

With another beautiful woman. Betty, also drenched, in a black trench coat and high heels.

And a beautiful Asian woman. Kathy, also drenched, in a black trench coat and high heels.

Their hair, before it was soaked, had been done up so they all looked like librarians.

Larry said, "Hi, hi, hi. Whatever is going on here?"

The three women came into his foyer, each pulling a rolling suitcase containing whatever she thought might come in handy during the night.

"Everyone came with her own toys." Larry explains. "Vibrators, dildos, this little vibrating handy thing. I don't know what it was. It looks like a computer mouse."

The Mouse, the Butterfly, the Rabbit, the Penguin-vibrators come with names that make them seem as innocuous as Disney cartoon characters.

Larry offered to take their coats.

"He was trying to be a gentleman," Mercedes explains.

She, Betty and Kathy got the giggles. They knew what the coats covered: Underneath they were wearing nothing but lingerie.

Larry says, "I was like. Why. I never! I do declare!"

But, Larry says, "I knew exactly what was going to happen." He grins. "Dreams do come true."

"Larry didn't miss a beat." Mercedes recalls.

His face registered no shock. No surprise.

"What did Bear Bryant say about scoring a touchdown?" Larry says. "Act like you've been there before."

Mercedes and her friends looked, Mercedes says. (continued on page m)

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(continued from page 40) "like drowned rats. It wasn't sexy at all."

Larry disagrees.

At dinner, before Mercedes called Larry, she had suggested to her two girlfriends that they surprise him with a spontaneous foursome. She told Betty and Kathy, "Let's ruin his life. We're going to ruin his life because once someone has a taste for this it's hard to go back."

"We thought we were going to ruin him for straight girls," Betty says, "which didn't turn out to be the case." Like many women in the Lifestyle, Betty refers to women as girls. "We were disappointed," she says. "We wanted a little more shock and helplessness," as though Larry had no idea this kind of

thing—threesomes, foursomes, orgies— existed. "Instead," Betty says, "he took the reins."

Typically, Mer­cedes says, you put a guy who is not part of the Lifestyle scene "in that situation and he's going to go for his comfort zone. He's going to go for me," the woman he knows. But Larry didn't.

"He grabbed my girlfriend Betty," Mercedes says, "threw her on the couch and started eating her out. Kathy and I looked at each other. The party was on!"

Mercedes told Larry, "No fingers."

"What do you mean?" Larry asked.

"No fingers," Mer­cedes repeated. "What did I say? No fingers." Those were the rules Mercedes laid down. "You can suck only," she explained.

Betty started laughing.

"We tell people what we want them to do,"

Mfrcedes says, "so you don't have to do the fishing expedition."

"Next thing you knew," Larry recalls, "1 had Kathy sucking my cock. Mercedes was underneath me, licking my balls. I was like. Fantastic! I'd never had a threesome or foursome before."

It was, Larry decided, geometrically better: Each added person multiplied possibilities.

"There's so much stimulus," Larry explains, "everything gets sensitized."

It became hard to focus on any particular body part—his or his partners'. "You just join the aroma around you," Larry says.

As in a square dance, they changed part­ners—and positions. Although Kathy told Larry, "I'm sorry I can't let you luck me in the ass. I broke my tailbone the other day playing roller hockey."

"Kathy's great to play with," Mercedes says. "Easy to play with. Never gets upset about anything."

There was a lot of bending, but no break­ing, of rules.

"Three rounds," Mercedes says. "Amaz­ing fun. I set it up purely for me, the most selfish moment in my life."

"You should be selfish more often," Larry laughs.

That rainy night Larry also didn't leave anyone out. "Whoever I was with at the time," Larry says, "it was like she was the only one there, not like I was looking over her shoulder at who was next." He shrugs. "I only have one cock!"

Mercedes thought Larry was special not just because he took control but because he didn't assume this was his birthright. A guy

who isn't wired right will expect an orgy "every time he sees you, rather than under­stand this isn't easy to pull off"

Still, the instantaneous and ubiquitous communication available because of the Internet and texting makes it easier than ever to pull off, as Larry would soon learn.

After the women left, at 4:30 in the morn­ing, Larry sat gazing into space, thinking, I have a very good life....

Since the arrival of the Internet, the swingers scene Mercedes, Betty, Kathy, Veronica and Reggie—and now Larry— are part of has exploded both numerically and geographically. In the past, people interested in alternative sex had to find partners through ads in the back of spe-

cialty magazines like Connections, Spectator and Select, which were hard to find in some areas. They had to send letters and wait for responses. After a number of exchanges, when everyone felt safe and comfortable, people might make phone calls to get a sense of the others from the sound of their voice and the immediacy of the inter­change. After enough phone calls, people might meet in bars or, if they lived in large enough cities, seek out swingers clubs. All that effort was shaded by a sense of poten­tial ostracism.

Now, with the Internet, Craigslist, MySpace, Yahoo or any of the many adult-oriented sites like LifestyleLounge.com, Alt .com, Blissparty.com, AduItPartyQuest.com, Fling.com, Swappernet.com, PrivateSoiree .com, SwingLifeStyle.com and AdultFriend

Finder.com (which Peter Cook visited, according to his ex-wife Christie Brinkley), people can instantly dc put in contact with hundreds, even thou­sands of potential swing partners, for either hard swing­ing (parties where it is assumed couples will trade partners) or soft swinging (par­ties where swapping is available but not assumed).

One typical site— SwingersClubList .com—advertises itself as "the most up-to-date free world­wide directory for the swinging lifestyle, with listings in the following categories: swingers clubs, par­ties/groups, hotels/ B&Bs, shops, online business and litera­ture, easily sorted by name, location, reviews and ratings." Its "Favorite Swing­ing Places Rated by Swingers" includes "personals, parties, gangbangs...."

"For those who want more than just one bite of the apple"—presumably the apple Eve offered to Adam—the North American Swing Club Association International, or NASCA, offers information about "on/off premises clubs, travel and resorts, publication listings, conventions and events, Internet services... breaking news, frequently asked questions... and swing club franchise opportunities."

This is no back-alley sneak-around com­munity. The Internet has turned swinging into a multimillion-dollar industry that is growing every year, involving—accord­ing to Dr. Robert McGinley, founder of NASCA—at least 400 clubs in the United States with perhaps 3 million American participants. AdultFriendFinder.com claims to have 31,959,644 members. Even smaller and less metropolitan states boast sizable

subscriber numbers, like Alabama, which allegedly has 226,661, and Utah, which allegedly has 135,219.

Alt.com claims to be the "world's largest BDSM and alternative lifestyle personals" site. It has, according to its own account­ing, 2,932,224 members—again, not just in large cities. Even Guam has a membership of 716. American Samoa has 34.

The Lifestyle scene changes from city to city. "It's very geographical," Veronica explains on the way to the Fetish Ball. "Some cities don't have a scene." Other cities have scenes that are specific to the particular erotic DNA of the local culture. Los Angeles, not surprisingly, tends to be into exhibitionism and voyeurism. New York, the financial capital of the country, tends to be more into S&M, BD and DS: power. Reggie dismisses New York. "Not happening," he says. "From the neck down, nothing happening." Too intellectual— although that may betray his Los Angeles bias. Maybe in the suburbs. Westchester County. Connecticut. New Jersey.

San Francisco is "more artsy," Veronica says. "Unusual. Eclectic."

"Miami is very into drugs," Reggie says. "Late nights. Ecstasy."

Dallas?

"Very stratified," Reggie says.

"Denver has a good scene," Veronica says.

"Denver," Betty agrees, "is a free-spirited, open-minded city."

They circle back to New York and agree that Giuliani destroyed the scene.

From the moment Larry and Mercedes spotted each other on a music-video set— Larry was visiting a friend, Mercedes was training dancers—it was lust at first sight. If this had been one of Larry's movies, everyone else would have faded into the background. The soundtrack would have become muffled, and they would have moved toward each other in slow motion as the camera made a 360-degree pan. Their relationship also developed quickly because Mercedes was ready for an adventure.

"Three weeks earlier," Mercedes says, "I'd been at a business meeting with a guy and his partner, who was ridiculously good-looking." They were at the bar at the Stan-

dard, on Sunset Strip. The man Mercedes had met for business had an early call the next morning. "You guys keep talking." he said—and left.

"I knew 1 wasn't going to have any dealings with this guy again," Mercedes explains, so she set out to bed the good-looking partner.

"So," Mercedes asked, "you live around here?"

"As a matter of fact," the partner said, "1 live in a loft right down the street."

Mercedes thought, Hmmm.... "Are you married?" she asked him.

"No."

"Do you have a live-in girlfriend?"

"No."

"Do you want to go back to your place?" Mercedes asked.

"What?"

"I have a hall pass from my boyfriend," Mercedes explained. "He says I'm wel­come to go home with you if 1 want to. And I want to."

"Shouldn't we do the responsible thing and get to know each other first?"

"Absolutely not," Mercedes said. "I don't want to know you."

He ordered another drink.

Mercedes said, "Check, please."

This became a running joke between Mercedes and her boyfriend: I give you a hall pass, and you can't close the deal!

So when Mercedes met Larry, she thought, I'm going to get this one done!

She was intrigued. She liked Larry. He didn't seem needy. He was laid-back. Hon­est. Which, Mercedes says, is "very, very rare among single men. He never told me what he thought I wanted to hear. He never looked like he had an agenda."

"So," Mercedes asked Larry, "what do you do?"

"I'm an actor," Larry said.

"You make a living as an actor?" Mer­cedes asked.

"Yeah," he said.

"I was a bitch," Mercedes later says.

She gave him a hard time, but she didn't much care who or what he was. They went out three times before she thought to Google him and discovered, "Oh, he's for real." He was a successful actor.

As Mercedes left the shoot, she was already texting Larry: how soon can \vk

GET TOGETHER?

WHAT ARE YOUR FANTASIES? she texted. WHAT ARE YOUR FANTASIES? he texted.

"I'd tell him a story," Mercedes says. "He'd add on. Then I'd add on. Then he would."

Through texting and e-mail Mercedes almost instantly discovered Larry "liked the side of sex I liked."

Master-slave role-playing.

"I think people feel more free texting," Mercedes says. "I definitely talk more freely in text. I don't do phone sex so well. I change the subject."

"When we first met," Larry says, "I was out of town a lot. Texting kept the interest growing. We had a bet to see who could make the other masturbate first using e-mail and text. So when we got together it was explosive."

Texts flashed back and forth between them.

"We pushed the pedal to the metal," Mercedes says, "and were going 200 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 20 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 15 years ago, when she was 21. 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 15 years ago.

"There's no division," Mercedes explains, "between my life and the Life."

But that doesn't mean she isn't discreel, 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 $l,200-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 20 or 30 couples," Mercedes says. "And I have a wait list."

But she prefers smaller parlies.

"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 1 had 50 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

CANT 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 major-domo. 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 gel 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 10 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 giving 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 9.3.

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 30 or 40 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 1 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, etc., 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, 12 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 50s." 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 $200 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 stalkers? 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."