California Reaming - A Woman's Adventures In Polyamory

We discover that the pull-out bed Dave and I are lying on has a rather iffy mattress. How could they even use this in a proper hotel? But they do, somehow. Hey, there's a real bed in the bedroom, but most of the partygoers are already in the living room, so here we be too. We feel like we are playing around on the back of a camel. You can feel the springs just below the surface.

Dave and I decide we'll test out this alleged bed. No sooner do we plant our cute little butts when we are joined by a youngish Asian guy, completely erect already. He half sits, half lies across from us, smiling expectantly. You just keep smiling, baby. Dave sends a no-no signal immediately by getting up from the bed. The guy takes the hint and goes. I ask Dave later, what he would
have done if the guy had not gotten up. "Well I would have said something," so he was glad the message got through instead.

Our friend A comes over and we lie as a trio, me in the middle, a guy on each side. A recalls how I have been pining for a sandwich. Only A does not seem all that interested in playing. Dave puts A's hand on his dick, but A moves the hand away and starts rubbing Dave's back instead. Was this too soon? A really likes the touchy-feely stuff, whereas we are more likely to reve up sooner and want to "get on with it."

Both guys start stroking and touching me, and it feels very nice. I wish we had a camera, because all of us look pretty good physically lying there. I have no idea what the other people are up to. The room is full of talk and a mix of music that is pretty damn good, spun out by the wife B. Dave starts performing oral sex on me but I am feeling so distracted by the talk and noise around that I don't think I can get off at this point. I was not focused, so I stopped Dave and thought we would come back to it later.

In the meantime after breaking off with me, Dave reaches for A's cock and starts to suck it, then finds out it needs a bit of a cleaning. With all his bath house experiences, one would think Dave would encounter one or two uncleaned dicks along the way, but such has not been the case. They have a ton of showers and water galore at a bath house, and the guys avail themselves of that routinely. So what's the deal with A that he can't clean himself before a sex party, for heaven's sake? Dave ceases and desists with this operation. He is quite surprised at what he finds.

We shifted positions, and then Dave plays with me with his fingers, one finger inside, then two, licking my clit along with the finger play. Because of our positioning, Dave found this angle a strain on his neck, so we shifted again so Dave can focus his mouth on my clit. He's trying to find my G-spot with his fingers, and comes close, but that is too intense for me. He removes his index finger and leaves the middle one inside me.

P, a friend of A's that we have met once or twice, is also seated on the bed with his drink, watching the proceedings calmly, without feeling a need to play. P is also into massage work. He is a tall, thinnish guy in his forties with a small neatly trimmed beard. Low key.

I am finally able to focus and overcome the effects of the pot. Dave and I realized it had been a while since we have had sex while we are stoned, or at least I am stoned. It takes a while to fit yourself back into that head space.

Success comes pretty soon this time, now I am in the mood and not distracted and I am focused now. It's a very pleasant come.

TO BE CONTINUED

So Dave and I end up going to the birthday orgy after all, after a bit of a debate first.

The party is given by the wife, B, of the guy whose birthday it is, E. Last time I saw him he had major amounts of hair on him. Now he was nearly bald, and gone was most of the moustache. He had a stubble too and looked like he just recently fell out of bed. A weird looking guy that I definitely do not want anything to do with, so this is why I was a bit uptight about attending. What to do about E.

How did he get this woman, B? She is not bad looking, probably the nicest looking woman there besides me. This is the runner woman I have heard about but not yet met. She is probably late 40s, good legs as you might expect, a rough sort of face but attractive, and short curly brown hair. She's heard about me too.

"You're the runner," she says to me initially, then I explain that actually I am more shaped by cycling. We fall into instant conversation on certain pro cyclists and their doping problems. These days, that can be a lengthy conversation. Throw a rock somewhere, anywhere, and you can knock a drugging cyclist out of a tree.

I look at her and I look at her husband E, and I shake my head. Maybe that's why they party. She may no longer be sexually attracted or involved with him, but they can party together. I like that. It has a very French feel to it; they're good at that.

The party is in a suite at a big chain hotel in San Francisco. A handful of people are already present when we arrive, most of them in some degree of nakedness already. The suite is booked from 8 til 2. Let's get crackin' I say.

Dave and I have had a couple of hits in the rental car before we walk in, so I suddenly get the munchies and head for the food. It looks alarmingly good to me. Little finger foods along with fruits and veggies, dips. Champagne that has to be diluted with juices to stretch it.

About thirty people are expected, and it seems most of them arrive at various points. This is an older crowd, an offshoot of the famous Black Sheets party crowd which recently closed down their parties. But not a very attractive crowd at all, as Dave and I realize nearly immediately. Now, I am not saying that because they are older; older has nothing to do with it. There are a lot of hot-looking older types, men and women, running around now; they're just not here at this party.

Our friend A is there. He gives his own private little massage and sex parties over near the Haight-Ashbury district. He is nearly the only other attractive person there male-wise. You can get a closer look at A here.

He seems to realize we are about the most attractive people there. He has seen us at several parties now, and he was involved in an afternoon's aborted play we had together. So he knows a bit about how we are sexually as a couple. He came over to us after we had said our hellos, gotten naked basically and then settled in on the pull-out bed in the living room of the suite.

Dave and I have been in this position before. Someone has to kick these cretins into action, it might as well be us. Our friend A wants to help us out.

TO BE CONTINUED

So my partner Dave and I are debating whether we should go to a play party up in the city this Saturday night. It's been a while since we have been to one. Why? Well, since the Black Sheets crowd closed down, there hasn't been a thrilling abundance of sex parties. A few people have tried to step into the breech, with mixed results. Maybe we are just getting wised up - we have found that the people we were running into were not the sorts we would go back for.

Who wants to go to a party where you see basically out of shape men and women? Sometimes we wish we were back in L.A. There is definitely a better look among that crowd. We were not finding what we wanted, so we have backed off.

Anyways, the party we are thinking of attending is actually a birthday party being hosted by the guy himself, and his wife. I wrote about them briefly a ways back in this column. They are throwing the whole thing in a suite in a hotel, with finger food and about thirty five people attending. All gratis. So that's the good part.

The bad part is, I am not at all attracted to the host. In fact, I find him rather ugly and swarthy and hairy. I never met his wife, but I have been hearing about her for a while now. She was usually gone out of town running marathons somewhere. So I deduced she probably is the hot-looking member of the family.

But do I want to deal with him as part of the process of meeting her? Another factor is that someone else will be there who really coveted me and Dave, we tried to set a date once for a threesome, then we backed out. Because on further review we felt we were not that attracted after all, and decided not to go further down the road with him. He was probably rather miffed, I would be. We wrote and told him in plenty of time that we were having second thoughts. We never heard from him again.

We know he will be here at this party. He will probably avoid us, and we him, but still. Would you put yourself through this?

So we are debating the matter. The party is free, but we still need to reserve a car. Ours is on life support and we try not to extend it beyond our usual daily errands around town, and Dave getting to work locally at the shop when he works here in town.

At this point we are leaning towards going. I think it is important that I learn more about saying "no" in certain situations like this. I visualize having certain discussions with people at the party....what if a guy said, "Can I eat you out?" That I am ready for. Most men are not all that good at that, sorry to say. I would reply, "No thanks, I want 'the main course' instead; or, "No thanks you're not my type;" or, "No thanks you're not my type and I'm looking for something else tonight."

Or, what happens if I really like the wife of our host? I don't want to feel obligated to deal with him too as a way of going to her.

You catch my drift. Sticky wickets, these. Nancy Pelosi should have this can of worms to deal with on her desk!

But Nancy doesn't, and I do. I think we are going to go to the party.

Expect a full and hopefully juicy report next week!

- - - - -

So my attempts to date this woman Edy end up going nowhere. I am left wondering why my current lover Gerrie made that comment, "You could have her if you wanted her" sort of thing. Because it wasn't true. Maybe she was miffed and decided to get back at me for having flirted with Edy in the girlie bar. Maybe she said it knowing full well I would work up a good head of steam going after Edy. And all for naught. I don't think Edy was ever really interested. Women often give out vibes of touchy-feely when they haven't any intention at all of going there. Beats me.

It took me a while to back away from her though. Until that point arrived, I spent lots of nights in the bar hoping to speak to Edy again. I noticed most of the other women paid me no heed. I was puzzled about that, and when I inquired of one older woman that I sort of knew she replied, "Well they think you're not really a lesbian," she said. "They think you go out with men."

Hrumph. My secret was out. I identified myself as a girlie girl back then, but along the way I realized that it was more likely to be men that I had sex with. Women were just too much trouble, even way back then. Like it or not, my love life was settling in to something I could more easily manage to do. That did not seem to include a lot of women. These women in the bar picked up on that, obviously.

They were all somewhat cool to me. Some of them even made jokes about the People's Park riots going on in Berkeley back then. "Awwwh, poor girl, they took away your park," I would hear. Or some such thing. Dykes can be really snotty, and very inbred. Thank God I liked playing pool, because otherwise there was just no point in my being there.

Eventually I wandered away from the bar, I finished school and started working in hospitals. One night on my swing shift I happened to read the local newspaper, and that was when I found out what happened to Edy.

Do you know how you can pick up a newspaper and casually scan it and then for some reason your eye falls on something, something rather obscure, and you suddenly recognize a name? I have had that experience several times already in my life, and it is scary in its uncanniness.

My eye fell on a small news story tucked away on an inside page. About a robbery attempt and a shooting in a local bar. I was horrified. It was all about Edy. Edy was dead. Several guys came into the bar, probably knowing it was a dyke bar, and tried to rob the place. Edy tried to grab the gun away from one of the guys and it went off, mortally wounding her. She was brought to Highland Hospital, where I worked. Thank God I was not on duty that night. I might have had to go over and do admitting papers on her.

But Edy did not make it. She died in the O.R. You were so hot-tempered, I thought, what are you doing trying to grab a gun away from a guy bent on robbing you? I thought of her little boy. Who was going to raise him. I thought of Betty, the bar owner. No longer Edy's lover but the pain must have been great for her.

I put the paper down and burst into tears.

- - - - -

So I've met Edy in a local Oakland girlie bar, and I definitely feel smitten and interested in knowing more. I find out she is something of a free woman, whatever male was in her life long enough to give her a little boy is no longer in her life. Her female lover seems to be mostly just a friend. Betty was her name, and she owned the girlie bar where we met.

Betty was kind of an interesting woman in herself. Reminds me lots of my friend N in L.A. Older, slim, salt and pepper short hair, definitely butch but not oppressively so. I can feel sort of the attraction but at this point in my life I really don't recognize how certain butch women attract me very much. With some of them, there is just a little space where I can insert my own often butch little idiosyncracies. Without it threatening them. I would never call myself a femme with an edge. But I can't call myself a butch either. I used to think I was, but not really.

My then lover Gerrie referred to me as a "naive butch." I guess that is the best-fitting label at this point in time. It is Gerrie's comments about Edy that fuel my desire to try and go out with her.

But Edy ends up being all tease and no tonnage, as it were. Now I would recognize the signs immediately. It was a flirtation for one night in a bar over pool, period. It took me a bit to wake up to that fact.

In the meantime I tried calling her, I got a haircut, I met her little boy, who does look quite Indian. Edy is part Cherokee, although you would be hard-pressed to wonder which part. Turned out she had quite a temper, but I don't want to give away my ending just yet.

But I can never get her to say yes to a date. I feel like a klutz. Often I have gotten myself enamoured of women who are either not available to me (mostly) or are not going to be appropriate for me (less often, I like to think everyone I pursue is appropriate for me). This is at the heart of my attraction for females. This neediness.

What is the point of this neediness, I wonder? It gets me nowhere. I need to learn how and where to jettison it when it first starts rearing its ever so attractive but ultimately ugly head.

I try to busy myself with my classes at the university, which have now begun in earnest. We're in the middle of the People's Park riots which occurred on campus as part of the late 60s political melee that went on in Berkeley back then.

Makes you wonder how I found time and inclination to moon over a girl. But mooning over women was something I did well back then. Too well.

- - - - -

There was a certain relentless quality in how I perceived my agenda and carried it out in the late summer of 1968. I had moved up to Berkeley from L.A., after having lived and worked and travelled in Europe and the Middle East for two years.

Life at home in L.A. seemed intolerable to me after the freedom I had found in Europe. I lost my virginity, such as it was, to both a man and later a woman. Living at home with mom and dad and two younger sisters was not going to hold me. I gave up the idea of going to film school at UCLA, where I had already been accepted, and applied to Berkeley for English literature.

Berkeley in September 1968 had already been, and was about to become again, the hotbed of radical activity we knew it to be. Somehow I was aware of all that, but it moved on a different plane from where I was. I had three months before my classes began at Cal, and I was going to make the most of the time. I was going to meet as many gay women as I could lay my hands on, or their hands on me.

So I settled into my cheap digs ($50 a month)at a Chinese women's rooming house on Channing Way, and proceeded to have fun. First off, I placed an ad in the local rag, the Berkeley Barb. I met my first lover in America, Ingrid, who lived down the coast in Pacific Grove. And Jerrie, who was a divorced mom living in Berkeley with her young daughter.

One night when I was dating Jerrie we went out with some friends to catch the opening of Easy Rider. We stood in line and kibbutzed with hordes of other patrons, eager to see the hot new movie of the fall season.

Afterwards we headed over to the local girlie bar in Oakland. That's where I met Edy. At the time she must have been around early 30s. Edy was slim and fetching, with streaked and dyed silver/blonde hair swept up. Edy could do things like that, she was a hairdresser by trade. Do you remember how Janet Leigh looked in Psycho? Well that was pretty close to Edy.

On that night Edy was holding forth on the bar's sole pool table. The woman could play pool. That's how she and I met. I plopped my quarter down on the edge of the table and waited my turn to enter the fray.

Our first match was a close one, and Edy won it. But it was one of the few times in my life at pool that I was not sorry I lost. Because she and I became acquainted. Edy in fact flirted with me nonstop over the pretty colored pool balls. It had a touch of the sarcastic to it, which I always appreciate. where there is sarcasm there is wit, where there is wit there is intelligence. And the absense of boredom.

Jerrie looked on, and was not amused. She knew exactly what was going on, and what Edy was up to.

"She likes naive butches," Jerrie said to me. "She likes you, you could have her if you wanted her."

It was a comment that, looking back on that night, seemed calculated to stir up trouble. I probably would not have gone ahead with what I did had Jerrie not said that.

TO BE CONTINUED