An old couple is nearby in a stall, experimenting with dildos and a battery-operated vibrator. The lady is shriveled and covered with warts and she sits with legs apart while her honey rams her with a variety of objects. "It's ticklish," she complains in a slow drawl. She looks bored, and her man looks aggrieved.

At 5 a.m., Fidel carefully packs his toys into a Tommy Hilfiger sports bag and pulls on black jeans, a black polo shirt and black leather loafers. As he walks briskly to his car, a handsome garbage collector hands two big bunches of rhododendrons to a waitress just off her shift from a fashionable restaurant across the street. Fidel revs his 10-year-old BMW, gray with gray interior, and drives home for a change of clothes, and onward to his day job as a masseuse in clean-cut corporate America.

Just as night life is not relegated to nighttime, clean-cut is not necessarily squeaky-clean. Along with the five o'clock shadow comes other werewolf phenomena. Hellfire is only open from 10 p.m. until dawn Thursday through Saturday and it is always filled to the brim, masturbators elbowing one another in the ribs. Manhattan is host to plenty more pleasure dens, all of them bursting with bursting customers.

David, a regular, says: "There are clubs in a few major cities; elsewhere private parties, and associations as well as a frontier-town welcome on the Web." Chicago boasts a Hellfire Club, as does London, fabled home of the original Hellfire. According to Fidel the slave, "The scene in England is much better than here. More sophisticated, more experimental."

Patty Kaplan, creator of the 10-year-old show "Real Sex" for HBO, says that sex as entertainment is "very here to stay." Kaplan has a new show premiering this month called "G-String Divas." For one full year, video cameras were embedded in the walls of a Philadelphia strip club. The results will be segmented into 13 half-hour episodes.

Kaplan says, "Ever since AIDS, people have needed to find other ways to get off, besides penetration. That is not to say that 'G-String Divas' is a show to whack off to. It's more of an educational-titillating-docu-soap."

With the shedding of values along with newfound freedoms, sex as leisure sport is more commonplace than ever. Everywhere, demand far exceeds supply. As the trend grows, one has to ask: What is next? Gravity-free sex? Penetrating the atmospheric black hole?

George, a husband who patronizes fetish clubs, says, "People assume this is a male trip. That's simply not right. Myths are sprung by women's magazines with stories on how to handle it when your man says he wants to try handcuffs. This is tired and false." His wife says, "Sometimes I go with him. I always know where he is and what he's doing, so why should I worry?"

At Hellfire men pay $30 to enter. Women are welcome free. George says, "Everybody knows women can get sex for free anytime." On certain nights, a man can enter for free if his female companion is willing to shave her beaver, and flash the ticket lady at the front door. Nights when slave auctions are held, men buy women and take them to the Heaven section for fun. "But you can't take your slave home for keeps," George says. "It's just a game."

Part of a normal life routine except it's S/M. Pure entertainment. George says, "The only thing to be afraid of is who you'll see. For example, one's shrink, that would be disturbing." Sex expert psychotherapist H. says, "It would be worse to run into a patient."

H. (who prefers to remain anonymous) says it's "all perfectly normal. People are bored and lonely, and at the same time the thrill threshold is always going up. And rather than spend the evening home alone in tighty-whities, jerking off to the Playboy Channel, it's more exciting to go where the action is. It's stimulation. Meanwhile, I can never get anyone to go swing dancing with me."

He continues: "These men are not perverts, they're just regular guys. Men being men. Men with enough awareness to know what they need."

George, sounding indignant, responds. "The inclination to pathologize this behavior makes me sad. We don't ask shrinks to explain why we're writers. Why should they be expected to be heard from here?"

What to do with an empty evening, a tossup between a dance class or a visit to Hellfire? David says, "I've been going to these places for years, all over the world. What I'm looking for is the potential to 'trip,' to merge with this other way of being. To experience more of myself. More of life. If I get nothing else, at least I'm out of my head for a few hours. Furthermore, after a long hard day I don't want to swing dance."

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk