California Reaming - A Woman's Adventures In Polyamory

The first thing you'll notice about this funky little hotel in lower Manhattan is the art work, especially in the rooms.

The rooms are brightly decorated by artists of various genders, ilks and skill levels. One thing they all seem to have shared in common though, they must have ingested some damn good drugs somewhere before they were let loose to paint the walls of this place.

"Wild" barely begins to describe these rooms. There was a brilliant red room of such intense color you wonder if you're watching the burning of a great city or the rise of some supernatural sun. Another one shows a giant tortoise suspended in a sea of vast blue.

Our room had flying pelicans in one panel, in another was a beautiful leopard hanging over a tree limb, his very man-like legs trailing down. A donkey cavorted next to him, dressed up as a zebra. With a cigar tucked in a corner of his mouth and a bright purple fedora on his head. His ladyfriend actually is a zebra. Cross dressing with a vengeance, I guess we can call this. Other various animal motifs complete the decoration.

But the piece de resistance of this room are the fucking pandas. Yes, you heard right. Going at it in full bloom and living color. Such a nice changeup from the usual cuddly images we're exposed to about pandas.

It must have been the pandas that inspired us, because we had a number of sexual encounters there underneath their lustful gazes. And that was just the first day and a half. The animal motifs and the zebra lines painted between the panels seem to glow vividly when the light hits the room just right.

What tropical island have we landed on? They call it the Carlton Arms, and it is an island of funk on the other, larger island called Manhattan. Actually, the sign out front now proclaims it to be, "Ye Olde Carlton Arms."

D and I have managed to plot ourselves a long weekend together in New York City, benefits of his company. They flew me in from the San Francisco Bay area, while he trained down from his worksite in Hartford.

D has often stayed at the Carlton, it's colorful, and you can't beat the prices. $85 for a double in lower Manhattan? That is unheard of, apparently. It's on E. 25th Street at Third Avenue, in the Gramercy Park section. An interesting working class neighborhood with lots of reasonable food places, a number of good local bars, and an endless supply of people to look at.

Lots of interesting looking women, THIN women, who walk a lot, in clamdiggers and flipflops, the ubiquitous cellphone pressed to their ears. My kind of women. Intense, neurotic, thin. Especially thin.

From here we did lots and lots of walking, up to Central Park and then up the east side to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A Diane Arbus exhibit was in its last weekend there, and a huge retrospective of Max Ernst was still ongoing.

Was Max Ernst a polyamorist? Part of his bio states that he had a number of wives. Trouble with the pussy, as my friend M liked to say. It was also mentioned that he moved in as a younger man with another artsy couple. My eyebrows went up at that one, especially since it came after a sentence proclaiming how handsome the young painter was, with strikingly blue eyes. If you read between the lines of stuff like this, as I tend to, it translates out, the boy was hot, and everybody wanted his ass.

The scope of his artistic output was indeed tremendous. He took on the challenges of different styles of creating art. At one point he embarked upon landscapes, painted in dense strokes with mysterious, almost supernatural overtunes. Strange animals peer out from his forests and settings. He could have been one of the muralists at the Carlton, who knows. This was in Europe in the early part of the last century. But his life spanned most of the century, he passed away in the early 70s.

Later in his life he moved to Sedona, Arizona, where he encountered those same landscapes in the southwestern desert. That tidbit I found fascinating. Perhaps our individual psychic "landscapes" follow us about throughout our lives, manifesting in the external world when we may least expect it. There are clearly times when inner and outer worlds blend together with amazing intricacy.

Part of the landscape D and I are working to create is how we manage the polyamorous aspects in our relationship. When we first hooked up nearly 15 years ago, we did not consciously sit down ever and debate how and whether we were going to be polyamorous together. But one of the unwritten rules that evolved over time was that I would not play with other men, he would not play with other women. But our own sexes were perfectly fine.

He was clearly bisexual and an avid practitioner. I was not about to tamper with that. I was too busy admiring it. And being a little jealous at times. I was more of a closet bisexual when we met, I felt the "girlie thing" had worked its way out of my system. But being with a guy like D kept that thread alive these years in me, and now it has started forth again.

In the past two years or so, that mostly unspoken arrangement has undergone changes. D has been working a lot on the road, I am now at home blogging away about sex. I think about it, I write about it. It percolates through my brain pretty much nonstop.

I am at a point now, on the eve of my 60th birthday, of wanting to incorporate more play in my life, still always trying to hook up with the women first, but if that option doesn't play out successfully, I have felt a yen to play with other guys.

I have brought up the subject of my desire to go to sex parties on my own when D is out of town, and try and hook up with women, and with men. I wanted his blessing in this endeavor.

D and I have debated this intensely over recent times. He has not always been comfortable with my feelings. He fears, even after 15 years, that my feelings may run amuck with me, I might find another guy and abandon him.

What is with this Guy Thing? They imagine there are always better hung boys around the corner, better cut, with bigger wallets, whatever, who will wander along and turn their girlfriends' heads.

My answer to D is always the same. Men aren't likely to do that with me, my interest in other men is mainly sexual and ephemeral. I think a lot like they do, it seems, which is why a number of them find me endearing and quite refreshing from most women. I can not only talk sports with them, I know what I'm talking about. I like sex with them and I don't require a Uhaul at my front door. I can have fun, and then pat their little butts affectionately on the way out the door myself.

One of our 3some boys, D in L.A., asked my partner, "Where did you find her?" A bi woman who likes to see men play together is kind of a novelty for most guys. Where can I find a woman like this, he wondered outloud.

I would never find another man I like as much who is as truly bisexual as D. That is a great bond between us, and attaches me to him more than anything else in our relationship. And I do like him personally, he is my friend, he is one of the rare people I can deal with day-to-day over a long period of time. Everything has always seemed so damn easy with D.

He mirrors me like few other men would be capable of doing, so I ain't going anywhere, really. He is it for me.

But women are likely to turn my head. Emotionally I feel more plugged into something in women. I could see kicking over my traces and running off with some woman I was enamored with. Chances are overwhelmingly clear that this won't happen, but my mind set has always been that it lurks as a possibility.

My jealousies don't run to D and other women. What would press my buttons is falling for a woman who then wants to take up with another woman. I can already see the blood-spatters on that wall. It might look like the Carlton.


TO BE CONTINUED