Susie Bright

On top of all this, the “rock classics” radio stations are playing the exact same music that was at the top of the charts when I last lived here. KLOS is cranking out “Stairway to Heaven,” and my way-back machine dials me straight back to 1974. I’m lying under the stars on Venice Beach, with my fingers tangled in my lover’s hair and the phosphorescent foam of a red tide breaking a few feet away. I’ve got my own map of the stars to chart my dreams during this vacation, and it’s a private pantheon of great moments, my sexual history writ large like the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Yesterday, I drove my new friend Shelley up into the Santa Monica Mountains canyon where I spent my high school years, explaining to her how my first girlfriend, Karen, and I had cornered the groovy baby-sitting circuit by the time I was in the 10th grade. People wanted you to put their kids to bed at 8 p.m., and then clean a key of dope for them. They didn’t care how much you dipped into it, it was like the tip on top of the dollar an hour you got for watching their kids.

Housecleaning paid better, and that was how Karen and I met a handsome unemployed actor subletting the basement right downstairs from a little boy I was tutoring in spelling and fractions. Richard — who went on to get a role in a prime-time series — was the first person I ever met who thought that grinding up huge quantities of carrots in his Oster juicer was the key to everlasting youth and freshness. “Richard, you’re turning orange,” we taunted him, and indeed, his perfect tan was taking on a peachy tone. He was so secretive about his age (28 at the time) that on one occasion we confiscated his driver’s license, threw it into his landlord’s swimming pool, then took all our clothes off and jumped in ourselves. We taunted him to come in and fish it out. He ignored weeks and weeks of these shenanigans. Now, when I think about it, he actually held up remarkably well under the pressure of two teenage “housecleaners” who were determined to lose their virginity to him.

“This is where it finally happened,” I said to Shelley, pointing to a bedroom window that we could barely see behind a high hedge and fence. None of these obstructions were here in the ’70s. This was the hippie canyon, where you could walk onto anyone’s property and chase the coyotes in circles for all anyone cared. The ivy-covered wall next to Richard’s apartment used to have a graffito reading, “Free George Jackson,” its letters slightly faded by the years after his death in an alleged prison escape attempt.

One time, Karen climbed up the George wall and jumped off, just to see how it felt to fly for a moment. She was a year younger than I, but she had all the balls. Her bedroom was a freestanding tree house in the eucalyptus trees adjacent to her granny’s home, and she treated me to my first dose of peyote by bringing the buttons to me in a bowl filled with rose petals. Like a priestess, she set down her record needle on “Sister Morphine” and told me to start chewing.

Richard would observe the two of us carefully while we sponged up the carrot pulp in his kitchen and ran the vacuum. “You have a better figure, Sue” he said once, comparing the two of us much as I imagined he himself was sized up daily at casting calls.

“But you,” he said to Karen, “You have something special that makes you sexier than the rest.” I was slightly insulted by this, but also so titillated to hear anyone talking about me having a “figure” that it made me want to run and find a mirror.

Karen’s “something special” was that she was unobtainable emotionally. She did not give an inch of intimacy when it came to sex. She’d fuck you, but she wouldn’t sleep with you, she wouldn’t whisper in your ear. No, Karen’s way of being intimate was to offer you a risk, whether it was a bowl of petals and hallucinogens or a dare to climb into the hills with her after dark, to slip neighbors’ horses out of their corral and gallop down into a creek bed.

I was euphoric when we finally seduced Richard a week before my 16th birthday. That day, like the others that followed, I appreciated that he didn’t mind me showing up at his door with no more explanation than an “Are you busy?”

If he wasn’t going to an audition, we would get it on. He would reassure me that I was doing everything fine — which pleased me as much as getting straight A’s — and then he would fret that I shouldn’t be shtupping any of the other men in the canyon because they were all just exploiting us and really ought to be turned into the police. Of course I had to laugh at him. We had birth control pills, STDs were nothing more than a minor inconvenience and we weren’t looking for “boyfriends” either.

I was in love with my new sexual powers, and intensely curious about the magic of knowing someone else’s body. I didn’t want anything from Richard except his encouragement — and to find out what he knew about sex. I hoped he didn’t feel used by my determination to soak it all up. He was friendly and gentle with me, and when I look back on it, I guess I was lucky because everyone I went to bed with was friendly and gentle. I’d be a virgin to plain ol’ heartbreak for a long time to come.

That spring and summer, Karen and I typically had sex as a team. It was part of our adventure story, and it was the ultimate buddy system. The two of us together were more than a match for anyone, and so we approached whomever we pleased. To me, it was like applying a page from the Girl Scout manual to my sex life. I remember one long-haired blond biker we picked up at Topanga Canyon beach, back when that spot was a bohemian public space with no bathing suits required and a giant trampoline propped up in the shore break. The biker boy was pretty, with his buttery, long Jesus locks, and we must have been very pretty as well. That and a smile were the perfect introduction.

When we got to Karen’s treehouse, he sputtered a bit that he hated to choose between us.

“What’s to choose?” we asked.

“Well, one of you has gotta leave, right?” he said, and we just shook our heads solemnly. No way were we going to separate. I could see this awful pleading in his eyes. I understand now — he knew that a three-way was supposed to be every man’s fantasy, but he was really a one-gal-at-a-time kinda guy. At the time, I only understood that we frightened him. We had to be extra gentle with him, and whether it was our constant reassurances, or his sense of the horny inevitable, he finally moved his body over Karen and began rocking their bodies into the waterbed. I spooned next to them, squeezing Karen’s hand, making faces and mouthing questions at her that he couldn’t see. She mouthed back at me, “Shut up,” but her eyes said something else. She unfolded her hand from mine, turned my palm over, and started drawing letters in it: L-O-V-E U.

It’s funny, I don’t remember anything about him after that, although I wouldn’t be surprised if his name, address and more of his story come back to me before I leave L.A. this time. Perhaps it will be just as I step off the curb on Westminster Avenue, halfway back to my beach parking space. I’ll set down my bare foot, and another memory will roll in. We had the most fun ever back then — why am I so certain of that now? Because I haven’t felt anything like it since? I have to admit, I also cried a lot more in those days, too. But now, my nostalgia has turned those wet pillows into a cool sheet to wrap my romantic reverie in. It doesn’t matter whether it was the horses or the motorcycles, the buttons or buds, the incandescent Rolling Stones or rolling waves flashing like silver. I realize it now: They just don’t make teenage sex lives like they used to.

A Garden of Sand by Earl Thompson
Another book placed directly in my lap by a girlfriend who said, “I don’t like that prissy erotica stuff — this is something that actually gets you off.” While “The Godfather” was violent, it didn’t mix violence with sex. “Garden of Sand” had anger, guilt, violence and sex all mixed in one pot and sometimes in a few brutal paragraphs. Two characters really shocked me — a mother who has an incestuous relationship with her son and a furious dwarf who wreaks revenge on a prostitute — but I couldn’t get those scenes out of my head. This time, I didn’t like having my friend know that I was turned on by the same things she was. I refused to talk to her about the book afterward. I was ashamed of myself for enjoying it and pissed at her for knowing I would.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski
Is this what men really think about women? I found this on my father’s bookshelf, at the height of Bukowski’s reign as the drunken bard of the L.A. Free Press. I’d never heard someone be such a bastard in print before, but he was so damn eloquent about it. Made me wonder how the women in his life would tell the same story.

Don Juan in the Village by Jane DeLynn
These were the notes of a dirty old dyke and one of the first unrepentant ones at that. Jane De Lynn wrote about what it’s like to love ugly, to love reckless, to be absolutely hateful and sopping wet all at the same time. I cheered because she’d broken the dreadful lesbian romance canon, and then later I realized that there just weren’t any women authors talking about sex hunger like this, and precious few men, either.

Goin’ Down With Janis by Peggy Caserta
I love Janis Joplin and I love trashy celebrity biographies, but it’s rare to find a lesbian love affair that can tie the two together. This book was ghost-written to be grotesque, yet I was touched by the tenderness that escaped the editor’s cheese machine. Peggy and Janis loved each other, and that made me listen to Janis’ blues with a new understanding.

Let me speak from experience — if it wasn’t for road-weary travelers (one or two of them authors!) staying at the hotel, I’d have had no sex life for most of my early 20s. As it was, I saw more action than a Bruce Willis flick. If you get frisky and can’t bear to face those terrifyingly sterile hotel sheets solo, call the concierge fer chrissake!

Adrian Ryan

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Dear Mr. Ryan,

Believe me, I’ve had my eye on the concierge before. What exactly do I say to them when they pick up the phone? I need to know the four-star etiquette!

Susie

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Silly! You don’t call and ask for sex … you call and ask for an IRON or a NEW REMOTE CONTROL or ROOM SERVICE. Then you answer the door in a towel. Voil`! That is, if you can find a female or heterosexual male hotel employee. That’ll be a challenge.

xo,
A.

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OK, you’re going to need to go gentle and slow with me. I have opened the door in my towel, and the staff person has behaved very modestly toward me. Of course they are not about to throw me on the bed, as they could be fired for that. Do I just give them eye contact and refuse to look away? Whisper “Open Sesame”? Something Mae West-ish? Please tell me exactly how this transpired in your experience.

S.

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Good heavens! This is quickly becoming “Adrian’s Online Correspondence College of the Art and Science of Schtupping the Housekeeping Staff.”

As well you know, EVERYONE is a horndog deep down, and there are few, if any, who would turn down a luscious and furtive shag with a willing babe. So, the trick lies in the fine, lost art of seduction. Hotel employees are very timid and will be painfully wary of diving in, dropping their britches and going to town without firm assurance that there will be no hysterical calls to the front desk should their southward parts be suddenly exposed. They must be coaxed! You need to make the fact that your pants are pounding crystal clear. This requires a bit of bravery and a momentary abandonment of one’s dignity. How bad are you jonesing anyway?

Wait until after 11 p.m. when the graveyard staff comes on shift. They always have time and freedom to play. First go downstairs and check out who’s working. The guy or gal parking your car will probably be the one to spirit any late night requests up to your room, so a little window shopping is a wise play. I mean, you don’t want to get all gussied up (or down) to discover Jabba the Hut in a bellman’s cap drooling in your doorway with the extra towels you just ordered, do you?

This is also a great time, if the goods are fresh, to make a little flirtatious small talk. You know, “Nice night, when do you get off, does your cock curve to the left or the right?”-type stuff. Discreetly reveal your room number (easy these days since most hotel keys are coded for security — you can feign a bad memory and have Mr. Bell-Stud decode it for you). Then when he/she gets the call to your room later, the soil will be tilled, as it were.

When he/she arrives, fake trouble with the television or getting the window open. Invite them in to “take a look” at the problem. (We are assuming at this point you are in a towel or other scanty, promising apparel.) Then keep him/her around with idle, mindless chit-chat, all the while — this is important! — staring at his/her crotch. A minute or two of polite conversation while your gaze is fixed, basilisk-style, upon their bulging nether regions, and voil`! You’re as good as laid!

If at first you don’t succeed, call them back up demanding menial things until they get fed up and put out for the sake of peace and quiet. Or you can get really bold and just have some of that cheesy softcore hotel porn playing when they arrive. Don’t be shy!

The wage slaves of the better hotels are used to being hit on, and the worst that could happen is they could say no. Or you could wind up with some skinny fairy (like me) and wind up braiding each other’s hair. What do you have to lose? Go, baby, go!

A.

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Dear Addy:

I arrived at the Cambridge Marriott at 1 a.m. last night, with all your instructions in mind. As you recommended, I scanned who was on the skeletal graveyard staff, and to my dismay, there was only one old coot who looked like he needed a walker just to get my hotel key for me. (Yes, I know, some old coots are fine stuff, but believe me, this one was close to nodding.) I offered to carry the bags myself, and he gratefully acquiesced.

Upon reaching my room, seventh floor in the back, with two heavy bags in hand, I realized I was too tired for hanky-panky anyway. It was just as well that there were no temptations on the night shift to distract me. I flipped on the room’s light switch as I considered whether it was really necessary to take my clothes off at all, since I was going to fall asleep right away and get a wake up call at 6. But there was just one little problem.

I picked up the phone and called downstairs. “I need a different room,” I said. “There’s no bed in here.”

“No bed?” Mr. Coot didn’t trust his hearing.

“Well, there is an unmade hospital gurney, but I’m not quite ready for that yet. Maybe next week.”

I lay down on the shag carpet and waited for my prince to arrive with a new key. I knew it would only take a half- hour or so.

So you see, Adrian, I’m ready for action, win or lose, but I need the right furniture, and I need my beauty rest!

Susie

But I didn’t get the chance to answer her. Another woman, the same age and with the same dewy freshness as the first, popped up in the front row and recited a full-length public service message trumpeting the benefits and principles of polyamory. Then another voice interrupted hers, a middle-aged, self-described mom of three, who said she’d been in a polyamorous relationship for nine years. A couple in the back yelled, “We’ve been doing it for 15!” At which point the audience of 500 broke into wild applause.

Wow, what is up in Portland? “Is anyone here not in a polyamorous relationship?” I asked the crowd, and they laughed uproariously at the very thought. If you were wondering where the polyamory capital of North America might be, your search is over.

And that’s “polyAMORY,” not “polyGAMY,” for those jargon neophytes like me who may be feeling that the song sounds familiar, although the words have changed. The polyamory crowd has nothing to do with the Mormon Church — they don’t even mess around with marriage vows.

These folks are committed to relationships that aren’t defined by possession or jealousy. Such relationships could include threesomes, quads or a “V” (a triangle in which two of the lovers relate to the third, but not to each other). It also includes primary relationships in which secondary lovers play a long-distance or more occasional role. It doesn’t have anything to do with being married, although some poly folks do sport wedding bands. Some are suburban and some are the original urban outlaws. Sometimes they’re bisexual, but they’re not necessarily so. In fact, nothing is required in current poly-thought, except that you reject — even if it’s only in your mind — the idea that monogamy and couple-centrism are natural.

These beliefs used to be called, in early American sexual liberation movements, “free love.” Feminist/spiritualist Victoria Woodhull was a such an activist in the late-1800s, and so was anarchist Emma Goldman. I love to read their fiery declarations of erotic independence, and their term, “free love,” is still my favorite, with its unfettered focus on passion. Goldman said that it wasn’t a revolution in her book if she couldn’t dance, and I’ve always been sure in my heart that dancing was her euphemism for fucking.

I came of age in Southern California in the mid-’70s, a time when it was simply uncool to even think about “going steady” or to exact promises of monogamy from your boyfriends and girlfriends. I didn’t go on dates when I was a teenager, or exchange any vows other than to smash the state. Marriage and monogamy were for square, stale, old people — people who were afraid to live, to be themselves, to Be Here Now. “Why let the state be your pimp?” my friend Spain always said, and that pretty much summed up my peers’ attitude toward wedding vows and similar engagements. From the feminist point of view, women’s bodies had been the property of men for too long to even imagine putting your pussy under anyone’s lock and key, even if it was a girlfriend this time instead of a guy.

Fortunately for me, this brand of radicalism suited my character splendidly. I’m just not wired for one-on-one fidelity, and I never have been. I could easily love two, three and four people at once, and I honestly did not suffer from the reflexive jealous reactions that I witnessed in those among my friends who yearned to be cool but were eaten up inside by all this “love-the-one-you’re-with” bravado. Getting caught in such an emotional maelstrom made them anxious, too.

One year I lived in a commune where I loved and slept with two men, both Teamsters, one of whom worked the day shift while the other worked nights. I canoodled with Cary on the sofa for a couple hours in the afternoon, and with Marcus during the night. I loved them both, and I know they loved each other like brothers. But unlike the well-processed V’s that polyfolk talk about today, we barely spoke of our set-up together beyond working out the bare practicalities.

I knew that neither of them liked our triangle, much to my disappointment. Each one felt like he couldn’t pitch a fit over it because that would be so “bourgeois,” the reaction of a patriarchal, jealous fool. I, on the other hand, agreed with this rhetoric in spirit as well as word, and I confess I did use counterculture peer pressure to keep our trio going because, frankly, I did like it!

I liked everything about being with two men I was crazy about — everything except the tension between them. Each one feared that I liked the other more than him. I would linger with each one in bed (or on the sofa), telling him how much I loved him and how lucky I felt to be living with them both. But I could see the pain in their eyes, the suggestion that I was mouthing what, to them, seemed like just so much feel-good malarkey.

Once, I took the risk of suggesting that if we all went to bed together (during a swing shift) things might mellow out considerably. Cary surprised me by saying that he was up for it, but that Marcus would freak — and he was right. I was too naive to understand that there was another source for his tension beyond the competition over who was fucking me the best. Marcus was so uncomfortable at the idea of our creeping bisexuality that he started avoiding us both. One night he left his cigar burning in our communal 1964 Chevy Nova II, right in the middle of the UPS employee parking lot. A fire ensued, and after the car burned up our wobbly V was never the same.

I’m sure today’s polyamorous community, which extends way beyond Portland and is fueled by thriving Web sites, could have offered plenty of tips to our un-negotiated free-love-for-all. The poly scene today is very different from the scene during the first sexual revolution. As one woman wrote to me last week, “I’m sure you’re familiar with the poly motto, ‘Go as slow as the slowest person wants, and then a little bit slower than that.’” Man, I couldn’t have imagined doing anything that slow when I was a teenage revolutionary commune member! But I can see via hindsight how her philosophy might have kept a perfectly good relationship — or at least a perfectly good Chevy — from going up in flames.

In your recent travels from sea to shining sea, what are the latest sex trends you see either in the underground or in the mainstream? Could there be anything new under the sun?

I detect that you share my exasperation when people talk about sex trends, as opposed to actual sex lives. Many of the wildest erotic controversies of the moment will doubtless seem rather shallow in several years. I’ve know more than a few sexual fashion victims who pierced themselves one month, took hormones the next and now they don’t know whether to invest in Depends (infantilism might just be the next big thing) or shake their Kabballah-maker.

A few years ago, S/M sex play was considered pathological at best, and yet today, for many, it’s simply a foxy maneuver in black leather. Have we approached the zenith of erotic acceptance, or is this the prelude to ennui?

Personally, I will always be a serious erotic trend-watcher — I don’t dismiss any of it easily. I don’t believe you can call yourself a cultural maven unless you’re thinking about how people feel about such issues, publicly and privately.

I’ve encountered two big, and fairly new, topics in my current travels. Everywhere I went, people asked me about the sexual aspect of raising kids, and they also asked me my thoughts on polyamory. I’ll discuss the kid part in this column, and poly-sex in the next.

The most affecting image of my entire tour this year was seeing parents bring their children, or the young people in their lives, to hear me speak. One teenage girl said to me, “My mom gave me all your books when I was 15, and she said, ‘This is your sexual survival kit.’ At first, I was, like, ‘Ma, I don’t think I need to read all this right now,’ but a year later, I’m all, ‘thanks, Mom!’”

I didn’t ask exactly which story of mine inspired her (“Story of O Birthday Party”? “Pregnancy Sex Tips”?), but I do remember that one year might as well have been a century in my sexual development when I was 15.

I was a little puzzled at this parental endorsement because, after all, my accumulated writings are not technique manuals, and they’re not illustrated. If I had to categorize them, I’d say they espouse an open, thoughtful and joyful attitude about sex, and it ‘s true that joy is a sentiment that is completely absent in today’s public policies regarding sex.

I have recently been very pessimistic about the vilification of young people’s sexuality. I was overcome to see that there are, indeed, lots of parents who don’t want their kids growing up to think that sex is sick or stupid. Not everyone is buying the public service messages that tell young people that sex is an impediment to a successful career or a fatal blow to any future marital happiness. I discovered that there are families other than mine who are terrified of the “abstinence” agenda, and the constant adult use of teenagers’ images as sex objects we must either regulate or fetishize. I’m not the only one who wonders what the plan is for coping with the next generation of adults who have been “scared straight” about sexual desire. I don’t want to meet those nut cases in a dark alley — or the state legislature.

Everyone on the road asked me, “So are you going to write a book about sex for parents or young people?” The answer is yes. It’s obvious that there’s a passionate audience seeking support, advice and inspiration on how to raise a family that isn’t sexually dysfunctional. Yes, we’ve all heard the joke about putting the fun back into dysfunctionality, but the truth is that the real fun and pleasure of sexual health only comes when you aren’t lying your head off, keeping secrets or brutalizing your sexual feelings. If I hear one more story about kids who are beaten for masturbating, or electric-shocked every time they wet the bed, or humiliated for hiding an erotic fantasy image under a mattress … I’ll want to do something more than just cry again, and that’s where writing a sex-positive book for families begins for me.

The number of people who have been physically abused, and/or mentally destroyed because their families couldn’t cope with sexual feelings is just incredible. Then, you have those who feel that becoming the parental unit has made having an adult sex life impossible. Last but not least, there are the young people who, on one hand, want some sexual privacy, but on the other would also like to have some basic sex-positive information and nonhypocritical advice. There is no such book at present that addresses their feelings, and there is no public advocacy for young people’s sexual rights or support for families who don’t want to kowtow to sexual ignorance.

I intend to write a book to take this on, and now all I have to do is organize it. Should it be addressed to parents, or to kids? Should it start with pregnancy and end at adolescence, a sort of “What to Expect When You’re Horny”? Or should it be more direct, hitting the basic, natural issues of sexual desire — the erotic parallel of “Everybody Poops”? What questions would you like to see addressed in such a book? I’m so glad there are plenty of people who aren’t buying the sex-is-bad dogma. (Thank you, “South Park,” for calling this trend early!) Maybe the reverse slogan ought to be my new title: “Sex Is Good: A Guide to Growing Up.” That’s an idea that will never go out of style.

I have a new book and audiotape out — “Full Exposure: Opening Up to Your Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression” — and I’ll be touring all over the U.S. through November. I hope I get to meet some of you in person, and connect with old friends. “Full Exposure” includes my stories about what I think it takes to make, admit and live out your own sexual philosophy. Interested? You can read the first chapter here. And when you do read my new book, write and tell me what you think of it.