Advice From Tommy Lee

I had the fantasy for years: mind blowing sex with two women over the course of hours that transcends the physical plane and opens doors that an LSD trip could only rattle. I reasoned that my fantasy was seared into my neural networks by the evolutionary imperative to procreate with as many women as possible and I could not ignore it any more than a salmon could resist the urge to spawn.

I was patient in my quest for multiplicity. Imagination, self-pleasure and the looping pornographic tape in my head allowed me to bide my time. There is a surfeit of sexual images, words and ideas in Western society and I used them to sculpt my fantasy. The Internet provided details in a way that Havelock Ellis, Kinsey and The Valley of the Dolls could not. I created a template for my threesome: a blond and a brunette, both of them petite, uninhibited and prolific kissers. I deigned that they should be mildly submissive, more likely to take direction than to independently create configurations. I wanted to choreograph our lovemaking, conduct the tempo of our lingual exhalations and direct the final scene. I had a vision that my life would change and I would become a man who saw more deeply, who felt more acutely. A threesome would enlighten me, and give repose to my soul as well as pleasure for my body. I would play, indulge, and experience physical sensations that God offered but that few men enjoyed. I wanted to be part of a fraternity into which membership was awarded by a committee of two women, and then flaunt that membership, trumping boasts of sexual conquest and bravado from my friends with a simple exhortation: threesome.

Why do most men (almost ninety-five percent according to one survey) pursue this fantasy as the Holy Grail of sexual experience? Almost every man I have known—good old boys in Ford F150s, fashion aficionados who wear smarty- pants glasses, bureaucrats who bike to work—has dreamed about two female supplicants. Although the imperative to procreate partly explains male infidelity, it doesn’t fit the context of threesomes or swinging, where safe sex is appreciated and expected and progeny do not arrive nine months after the hotel party. Sex columnists teach the etiquette and techniques appropriate to group sex and endorse sensation dulled by latex membranes (even Alex Comfort, in his revised Joy of Sex, retreats from the carnival hedonism of the 1970s and advises couples to make love in one another’s presence, but not share partners). The men who participate in group sex do so for sensual and sensory overload and have no desire to engender offspring.

I realize that my desire to have two women is not a complicated idea. Lust, not love, is the emotion associated with this desire. I am not interested in a ménage-a-trois (the classic love triangle often seen in the lives of writers, musicians and actors, whose creativity extends into sex and love). The idea of a committed love affair with two women is exhausting to contemplate. A ménage-a-trois is responsibility—times two – an endeavor that is simply baby steps to parsimonious polygamy, sex for purpose, not for fun. In a ménage, emotions are primary and sex, the wild frolicking sex afforded when one party to the party is an outsider, is intimately tied to maintaining emotional equilibrium between members of the triad.

My partner in love and lust, whom I shall call N, the woman who brings me immeasurable happiness that I resist (we met on an internet dating service, where my nickname was Happy Eeyore), is blessed with libido, an exquisitely tapered torso, and wanton desire. When we first started e-mailing, we played a game of twenty questions and the basic rule was that anything could be asked and answers had to be honest. I asked questions in a pattern, which I’m sure she picked up on, but did not acknowledge: three questions at a time, two rather normal queries that book-ended a sexual one. I asked about choice in lingerie (do you wear a thong?), preferred positions (rear entry?) , level of sex drive ( on a scale of one to ten) and in a bold move, asked if she would consider having a threesome. I was disappointed, titillated and envious to learn that she’d already done it while a student in university.

I saw no reason why her fifteen years of subsequent sexual experience could not be brought to bear on another encounter, so long as I was present and accounted for. I argued my case, talked about it while we made love, and many times, when scenes and dialogue were vividly rendered, we practically had sex with another woman, or another couple. I pursued the fantasy, not only because I wanted to see my partner with another woman, and enjoy the ministrations of two luscious bodies, but because I was jealous of her previous engagement and needed to restore the equilibrium between myself and her former lover

The dirty talk emboldened us and we both expressed desires that could not be satisfied by adult play. Propriety, though, slowed the transition from fantasy to reality. We were approaching an age where we should already have dined on a buffet of flesh (she of course, had already made one trip to the buffet) and it seemed indecorous for us to be thinking about it. We are middle class, professionally employed, divorced with kids, and madly in love. Our sex life is unrestrained and, according to the folks who keep these statistics, way out on the edge of the bell curve for frequency. We are like teenagers, despite settling into cohabitation with the attendant needs of children, jobs and home.

We catapulted our incipient desire right onto the back pages of Now Magazine, a local “edgy” newspaper. Sitting on our front porch one languid fall day, saying hello to neighbors walking past in a caravan of dogs and strollers that define suburbia, we sipped martinis and read the escort ads. It was like a high school yearbook of the graduating class, except these were photos of hookers and the captions did not thank Mom and Dad for their support during the tough years of calculus and cheerleading tryouts. “Buxom blond loves Greek, offers GFE and MSOG. Pearl necklaces are a girl’s best friend.” The ads were dense with acronyms that we could not decipher. Most of the escorts did not have photos but the text sexually charged us. Here were women selling sexual services with explicit details only barley hidden beneath the veneer of code. I went online and found a site that listed over three hundred escorts. We found one that looked like Jan Arden, one of N’s favorite singers. Her web site was encyclopedic (many escorts have professionally designed sites that entice readers to fantasize by offering photo galleries, testimonials from happy clients, FAQs, rates and schedules.) and I learned the arcane language of modern prostitution.

Her name was Alyssa, a stage name of course. We arranged through e-mail to meet at a hotel in two weeks. Rules were established, rates negotiated and appropriate attire requested. We wanted Alyssa to present herself in conservative style, both to attract less attention in the hotel and to juxtapose her outer drapery with her inner motives. We wanted to unwrap her and the allure of skirt and blouse, heels and subtle makeup, exceeded the attraction of fishnet and cleavage. We didn’t want the cliché of downtown hooker or a Pretty Woman. Both of us prepared for our rendezvous with Alyssa as if she were a secret lover. New clothes, new lingerie, hair cut and colored, freshly decanted cologne, and props for the hotel room (tea lights in blue glass circles, a bottle of wine tilted at a perceptible angle in its bucket, bed sheets turned down) awaited our lover.

Alyssa did not come. A misplaced hotel address, our forgotten cell phone, and poor business practices conspired to end our fantasy at nine thirty, ninety minutes after our appointed meeting time. We left the hotel and ate a late dinner at a chain restaurant. We were taut, wound up by sexual frustration. “Do you want to go to a massage parlor?” N asked. “I could watch.” We returned to our hotel and made love to the idea of Alyssa.

I wondered if N would become satisfied with a facsimile of Alyssa—the photos and promises, the lingerie and dirty talk. Once, on a vacation to the Rockies, we sat at an outdoor terrace enjoying a glass of wine. We had arrived in the mountains only an hour earlier. Although it was July, the shadow from the mountains chilled the valley and we wore spring coats. I couldn’t stop looking at the mountains while she, on the other hand, was reading a brochure about local attractions and looking at pictures of the same mountains in front of us. I angrily denounced her apparent incapacity to enjoy reality. Now I worried that she would be content with the image of Alyssa.

Sexual imagination is no longer constrained by a limited palette of ideas or images. One can start on the Internet with an idea, a rumbling inside our reptilian brain, and cater to the inchoate desire by delving into a global obsession with sex. Want to know the multifarious ways to give “brain”? Looking for an orgy? The Net is just one big boys’ night out, or girls’ night in, a boozy gathering of tribes boasting of sexual prowess.

The Net is a clearing house of information and perfectly attuned to the needs of consumers. Escort sells their services in an industry that is self-regulated with third-party evaluation. Any North American city will have sites on which women, some transsexuals, and a few men, sell sexual services a la carte with prices appended. There are links to testimonials in which customers praise the experience without giving away details. Photo galleries prey on men’s capacity for visual stimulation; lingerie, swimsuits, schoolgirl uniforms and bubbly bath scenes incite men who realize that this flesh is available for less than the price of a swanky dinner for two.

It’s easy to become Walter Mitty in these circumstances. I scroll through a hundred escort ads and conjure an equal number of fantastical scenes that involve me and N. There we are with “Alexa”, kissing and undressing at the edge of her four-poster bed with Ikea netting (upon which she is spread legged in photo gallery number 2, image 16), then engaging in the full GFE, Russian, Greek and French services offered. Here we are, now, with Carmen the Fox, playing with her selection of toys like we are at a Tupperware party, unsheathing her garters and heaving breasts. Later, I imagine us sipping wine with Gabrielle, my naked body draped along the edge of her soaker tub, while she gathers soap onto N’s breasts and I contain my desire to dive into the water and glide between them.

It was Gabrielle that we chose to consummate our fantasy. In her early forties, she offered maturity and experience, and we thought she might actually like sex. My impression of young escorts is that they are less about sex and sensuality, than they are about money and possession. I suspect that most do not enjoy sex that much, in the same way that real estate agents are careless about their own homes and find no joy in renovations or decorating. I see the same insouciance in exotic dancers, who are neither dancers nor exotic. They parody, unintentionally, the sensuality of a great striptease by teetering onstage in high stiletto boots, writhing on all fours in a way that no truly erotically charged human ever would, and grimacing as if they had eaten sour beets rather than had a shattering orgasm. Almost every one of them looks like the popular fashion doll for modern girls--Bratz-- and are about as sexy as the plastic miniature tramps.

For three hundred and fifty dollars, Gabrielle would have sex with us for an hour. Never in our e-mails did she say exactly what might happen in that time, but she declared her love of women and how she was excited about our conspired tryst. Her friendly confirmation e-mail ended with “send my love to N”, as if they were great friends rather than paid lovers. N and I were almost resigned to getting this over with. Our incredible anticipation to meet Alyssa was gone; so powerful is imagination that we felt as if we’d already made love with Alyssa. An hour before meeting Gabrielle at her downtown, upscale condo, we sat in a pub, calming N’s jitters with two exceedingly dry martinis. Even a Methuselah of Pinot Grigio would not have diminished her nervousness. I, on the other hand, was preternaturally calm, confident, an incipient puppet master.

Gabrielle met us at the door with dinner-party casualness and within minutes we were standing in her kitchen where I popped the cork on a small bottle of champagne. We chatted for a few minutes. N reclined on the sofa, toasty now from multiple libations, and I perched on an arm, trying to maintain physical and mental composure. “Shall we go to the bedroom?” was Gabrielle’s invitation to begin sixty minutes of capricious sexual romping.

I stood before the two women, binate femininity; mouths, hair, legs, breasts, everything that I wanted to hold , kiss, lick and stroke multiplied by two, the sum of the parts greater than the whole. Gabrielle kissed N and began shifting the line between fantasy and reality. I watched, transfixed by the sheer improbability of the vision and them, when I should have taken my rightful place, when two become three, I felt the first pangs of what would limit my tumescence: jealousy. N was enjoying herself, imbibing Gabrielle’s kisses, and then Gabrielle began to minister to N in ways that I felt uniquely qualified to, convinced that my gifts as a lover were bestowed upon me by the Greek gods themselves.

There were moments in the sixty that I enjoyed, but the gap between reality and fantasy widened as the minutes expired. Threesomes are awkward and, as an advice columnist at ScarletLetters.com states, “three bodies on a bed means that things aren’t always going to be graceful”. I was always wondering where I should be, what I should be doing. Every source of dissonance registered with me and my performance sputtered. The condo was too hot, the music too loud, the bed bounced like a skiff in an ocean swell, and the sex toys were outside my skill set. At one point Gabrielle brought out something that I thought was an enlarged Waterpik. She used it to pleasure herself and the tight triangle between her legs produced a flume of liquid. It was my first experience with female ejaculation.

When we are young we seek sex to possess the momentary physical high of orgasm. But orgasms are transitory, like subatomic particles that exist for mere instants. I wanted sex with two women to last for days, I wanted to be set adrift in an ocean of sensation, to cocoon in the antithesis of a sensory-deprivation tank. I wanted the sounds, smells and sights to overwhelm me, to forever subsume my impending orgasm into lasting karma.

As our last minute with Gabrielle expired, I watched her smother N with kisses, her body splayed above N’s, like predator to prey. I had just washed the sweat from my brow and now stood at the foot of the bed. Since I was no longer part of the action (I finished by ingloriously masturbating on Gabrielle’s breasts) I resented the free time N was enjoying (about six dollars a minute I calculated). I had paid for dinner, bought drinks and left the money- in a folded wad on the kitchen counter- that had purchased Gabrielle’s body. I flicked the wet white towel at Ns foot. “Sorry, girls, but time’s up.” I was the party pooper who tells the kids to clean up the beer bottles and go home. Gabrielle escorted us to her bathroom where N and I showered and dressed. The three of us chatted in the kitchen, then Gabrielle gave N two long deep kisses, a peck on my cheek, and we left.

A month later N and I were in bed, enjoying a post-coital glow, when I mentioned that we should reprise our threesome, except now as a foursome: three women and me. The experience with Gabrielle was not what I’d imagined and I felt relatively impoverished. I wanted to slay the green-eyed monster and if it took the help of three women, so be it.

“You know that book by Tommy Lee? He has suggestions about group sex.” I’d rehearsed this moment for as many moments as we’d spent with Gabrielle. N looked at me as if I were one of our kids, well into a lie and fast about to be caught.

“He said you should have three chicks, because ‘everyone’s happy, everyone’s playing and everyone has something to do.’”

N smiled and then trounced on my new fantasy. “Never. Tommy Lee is the best you can do?”

She rolled over and took my hand around her waist and we became two spoons. “That’s what you said at the beginning of it all,” I whispered. Acetylcholine arced across the synapses in my reptilian brain and I held my breath, waiting for her acquiescence. I am still waiting.

The End.