I went to the orgy, the party, whatever you want to call it, and I enjoyed myself immensely. I found it an exhilarating experience and a very useful release.
There was something, I don’t know, say, an honesty to it that I found preferable to the basic hypocrisy of dating. When I took a girl out I had to pretend an interest in her that I rarely felt. I had to relate to her as a person, or at least give the appearance of relating to her as a person. Now I’ll be the first to say that a full relationship yields the best sort of sexual relationship, but how often are two people capable of that? And how many persons is one person capable of relating to in any substantial way?
In an orgy — or in the smaller swinging scenes, two or three couples — there’s no pretense. If you relate as good friends, that’s a bonus. If you don’t, if you just relate sexually, that after all is what you’re all there for. The sex is what it’s all about.
I found it very satisfying, for example, that I would tumble a girl at a party without knowing her name or her knowing mine, without either of us giving a damn. Or to carry it a step further, I remember one party where I saw a girl with long black hair and immense pear-shaped breasts kneeling on the floor, on her hands and knees actually, and going down on a fellow. This was aesthetically pleasing to begin with, the lines of her body, the way her breasts hung like ripe fruit, the way her hair flowed.
I went up behind her and took her from the rear, slipped right into her, and she went on giving full oral attention to her gentleman friend. She rotated her bottom in the nicest way. By the time I finished he had still not come, although she had, in a delicious shuddering spasm, so she went right on blowing him while I slipped out as easily as I had slipped in. And I went off to get a drink or something, and she never even knew who it was that had obliged her.
I got to talking to her later during a lull, and she was quite charming and said nothing to indicate that she knew I was her phantom lover. I almost told her but decided that I liked the idea of leaving things as they were, of having had her without her knowing it.
I could go on laying out reasons why I found orgies appealing, and they would all be true enough, but perhaps the basic one of all is the simplest and most obvious. I’m a kinky person, and when that’s what you are, group sex is sensational. It really is. It’s not just what you do or how much of it you can have, but there’s the whole sex-charged atmosphere of the scene, all those bodies, everything. When you’re not doing you can watch... It’s more fun than television, you know.
But the best part about orgies, as far as I’m concerned, is that but for attending an orgy I would not have met my beautiful and exciting wife.
GRACE: My life before I met Peter was drifting, really. That is what I did. I drifted. I never really made a decision or set out to do anything in particular. I put out for anybody who asked in high school, just did what I felt like, you know. I mean, I wasn’t much. I never thought of myself as very much at all.
PETER: You were much, baby.
GRACE: I never thought so. Nobody ever thought so. I was, you know, I was a cunt. A pair of tits and a cunt.
PETER: And so much more inside.
GRACE: I didn’t know this and neither did anybody else. And so as far as what I wanted to do with my life, well, I guess I didn’t think about it. I got through school and I drifted. The Coast, and then New York.
I was a pretty girl who put out. It’s very easy to drift when that’s what you are. There are always men around to do things for you. And it’s no hassle to make money. I was always lazy, you know, I had nothing in particular I was good at, no job I was interested in. No career, you know. And I don’t think it ever occurred to me that what I ought to do was go out and get a job. I mean, what for?
But for a girl who will do things there’s no need. Like pose for sex pictures. If you’ve got a fair face and figure you can make fifty dollars in a couple of hours of posing. You don’t even have to ball anybody. The photographer will generally make a pass if he’s straight, and I would ball him or not depending how I felt about him, but if you didn’t that didn’t mean you lost the work. It was optional — you do it if you want.
And you can get work in movies. I mean the sexploitation films, the nudies and “beavers” and like that. Let’s face it, I’m not an actress. I’m pretty pathetic, I can’t stand to see myself on the screen because of the way I deliver a line. Like completely wooden. But in these films it doesn’t make that much difference if you can act or not. The major parts, it helps, but there are always loads of minor parts for girls and they don’t expect Katharine Hepburn. You walk around with your clothes off, you pet, you pretend to be screwing—
WANDA: Don’t they ever really screw?
GRACE: Well, as a matter of fact, some of the sexploitation producers do insist that you actually screw, although they don’t show it on camera. There are certain things they can’t show, like a male with an erection, for example. They can show a penis but not if it’s erect.
PETER: Talk about castration complexes.
GRACE: The producers say this gives realism even if they don’t show it on screen. Now nobody believes this. Sometimes I think it’s easier to look as though you’re screwing if you’re not. But they get certain kicks this way. Watching, or some of them will act in their own films.
In the stag films, of course, anything goes. I’ve been in, I think, it’s six of them. What they call hardcore pornography. I have a print of one, I ought to run it for you sometime.
So this is what I did. I started off living with a guy in the city and when he split I kept the place myself. Just a couple of rooms in the East Village. The rent was like thirty dollars a month. Cheap. If I went a month without working it was no big deal. I would work for a couple of days and make a couple of hundred and that would last me a long time.
Sometimes I think that with my attitude it’s a wonder I didn’t start tricking. That I never became a whore. I did once go to bed with a man specifically for money. That was when I was living with a musician in L.A. and he said that this man had come on to him and wanted to ball me, that he would give me twenty dollars. I didn’t need the money but this man I was with, he wanted me to do it. He said he dug the whole idea, just that I should do it once. I did it to please him. It was no big deal to me one way or the other. Afterward he gave me the twenty and my man and I went right out to spend it. We spent the whole twenty on a tie for him and a scarf for me. I don’t know what happened to the scarf. I must have left it somewhere, I haven’t seen it in years.
The party scene, the orgies, it was natural that I would start getting involved with that. I was the type of girl you could invite to an orgy and figure she would probably go along with it. Just a typical stupid cunt without a thought in her head, and that nobody had to give a thought to.
PETER: The night we met. It was a small party, I think four couples and two extra girls. It’s so rare to find extra girls at those sets. That’s the way everybody I prefers it, but usually it winds up the other way around, with extra men. A man can’t get in without a girl — girls are called tickets in some circles — but sometimes a man will bring a girl who doesn’t know what kind of a party it’s going to be, and she leaves, and then you can’t really throw him out.