I’ve got a psychiatrist friend who has built a group-therapy empire. His hustle is that he gets other shrinks to refer their private patients to his “special groups.”
I Was a Victim of Zipless Sex
This friend runs about twenty “special group” sessions a week, each of whose members shares a particular sexual hang-up. He’s got one group of gay men who want to become bi, one of overweight women who are obsessed with being gang-raped, one of manic-depressives who have committed incest with siblings, one composed exclusively of former priests and nuns who are haunted by dreams of blasphemous sexual relations with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and so on ad phantasticus.
The groups wax and wane, depending on what hang-up is really hot. The theory is that if you can get a room full of people whose gears are loose in the same way, it’ll help each of them understand the nature of his hang-up, or at least let him have the comfort of knowing that there are other people who are out of the same tree. My friend has a selfless desire to help those in need, which is encouraged by the fact that each sucker shells out fifty clams for a fifty-minute hour. And with an average of at least six in each group and four daily group-meetings held five days a week, my friend helps over $6,000 worth of suckers every seven days. The bad news is that he has to split his fee fifty-fifty with the doctors who steer their marks to him. So he only nets about 150 grand a year. He spends the month of August with the two women he lives with on a sixty-foot yacht in the Aegean. Every time I think of this guy I eat my heart out. All he has to do to earn a living is nod and smile and look from one John to another — and, most important, not fall asleep.
One day I ran into the Emperor of Group on the street — he was coming out of Cartier, where he’d just bought two identical diamond brooches for his pair of pussies. He told me that I should really sit in on one of his “special groups.” I’d goof on it at the very least, but he bet I could get some material for an article out of it. That evening, he explained, he’d be having the first session of what he was calling the “zipless sex” group.
“These are people who’ve balled with a perfect stranger,” he explained. “Someone they barely speak to, whose name they don’t know, whom they’ve never seen before and will never see again. We’ve been getting a lot of these since Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying came out. At the beginning of the book she tells how she has this fantasy of the zipless fuck.”
“‘The zipless fuck was more than a fuck,’ Ms. Jong maintained. ‘It was a Platonic ideal. Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff.’ She said this was only possible with an anonymous partner, and gave an example of a young Italian soldier screwing a young Italian woman on an old Italian train. Pretty tawdry, if you ask me. But Erica said the zipless fuck was the ultimate. ‘Because the incident has all the swift compression of a dream and is seemingly free of all remorse and guilt.’ Said she. ‘Because there is no rationalizing, because there is no talk at all.’”
“Seemingly free of remorse and guilt, she said. But, in fact, when scripts like that play, there can be great gooey gobs of guilt galore. Now that Fear has made it respectable to talk about such things, zipless fuckers have been lining up at our offices to tell us about it ‘Tell me about it.’ we say, crossing our legs to keep our hard-ons within discreet bounds. Oh well, another obsession, another dollar. The girls seem to make a better show of it than the boys.”
“It’s really rather a common fantasy among women. Read Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden and just look how many women fantasize about having their level checked by an anonymous dipstick. But the men we see, what a bunch of nudniks! They all think of themselves as either quasi rapists or quasi rapees! I guess all the well-balanced zip less males have got better things to do than lie on couches with the meter running.”
“But why don’t you come and see for yourself? If you do, you’ve got to promise not to embarrass me by letting on that you’re a writer. These people are my bread and caviar! You’ve got to come on like a patient — you know, tell a suitably kinky tale when it’s your turn. Okay?”
That evening I reported to my pal’s “ego-massage parlor” in one of those huge old West Side New York apartment buildings that you can drive your car into. It was all oak-paneled and oriental-carpeted and chandeliered. Counting me, there were five suckers, plus the MD, or should I say, the MC. We sat in a group around the fire, sipped ruby port and nibbled camembert cheese while listening to each other’s tales of zipless lovemaking with prurient interest.
LORI
Lori was a twenty-eight-year-old product manager in the fragrance division of a major cosmetic house. She had amber hair and pale translucent skin and the kind of chest and ass that’s enough to make a grown man cry.
She told how she’d gone to Chicago to meet with the merchandise manager for cosmetics at Marshall Field and had taken a suite at the Ambassador East. She wanted to try a new perfume on this guy, one of the most influential buyers in the industry. The meeting was the following morning, and that night she met a classmate from Boston University for a late drink.
“In the middle of our conversation I had to go to the girls’ room,” she said. “I came back and we had a few more drinks and then around midnight we got up to leave and my bag was gone! I’d put it underneath the table and it was just nowhere to be found.”
The vial with the fragrance sample had been inside so she could try it on her classmate. And, of course, some booster now had her plane ticket, all her credit cards, her driver’s License, her registration, about $400 in cash, plus her passport, which she always carried with her in case she had to run to Paris or Rome or wherever without passing go. It meant she’d have to try to get the office to send another sample by plane first thing in the morning.
So she kissed Katie good night and went upstairs and — whamo! “Of course I’d also had my room key in my bag so the schmuck had run upstairs and cleaned out the room. My new Gucci suitcase, all my clothes and jewelry, even my fucking toothbrush.”
Lori called the police on the theory that maybe whoever it was would abandon the bag nearby with the sample still in it. That way she could at least salvage the morning. And, of course, she had to report everything else that was missing so her insurance would pay off.
“Two cops responded to my call. One was about fifty with acne pits and a nose that looked like it had been marinated in Old Grandad. If he’d been a chick I’d have said he was six-months pregnant. The other was about twenty-three, big and muscular, with twinkly eyes and curly black hair and a mustache like a model in a tequila ad. He was really adorable. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He kept thumbing his nose behind the back of the other guy, who kept asking me if I could ‘describe the perpetrator’ and telling me ‘you wouldn’t believe how unbelievably common this type of rip-off is.’ When I told him about the fragrance sample, Officer Pits said they’d go downstairs and check wastebaskets for a block around the hotel just in case.”
“About five minutes later, there was a knock on the door. It was Officer Tequila. ‘I guess you didn’t find anything that belongs to me.’” I said.
“He stepped toward me and started to unbutton his jacket. ‘I think it’s time we stopped coddling criminals and did something for the victim,’ he said in this real low voice. I felt a wave of hot needles go through me. ‘What about your partner,’” I said.“He stepped toward me and started to unbutton his jacket. ‘I think it’s time we stopped coddling criminals and did something for the victim,’ he said in this real low voice. I felt a wave of hot needles go through me. ‘What about your partner,’” I said.
“‘We split up to look for your bag and then he’s going for coffee. He won’t be back for at least fifteen minutes. There’s no use me looking. I’ve got something on my mind that wouldn’t let me concentrate on anything else.’”
“He reached out one tattooed hand, unbuttoned my blouse, pulled my tit out, and all of a sudden lowered his face to it and sucked hard on my nipple. If it had been an old movie I would have slapped him, but it’s 1976 and one to a bed in a hotel room in Chicago isn’t the most electrifying way I can imagine spending an evening.”
“The next thing I knew we were on the bed and he stripped me like he must have done this a hundred times before. Then all his clothes came off and I’ve never seen a body like that in my life. Every muscle group stood out and was covered with firm tan flesh and his chest was a perfect vee and you’ve never seen such a cute white tush.”
[Details deleted. –Ed.]
“No sooner did I get my clothes on and smooth down the bed than there was a knock on the door. It was Officer Pits and what do you know, he had my bag! It had been thrown in a basket a block away, and the money and credit cards were gone, but my passport — and my precious sample — were still inside.”
“‘Glad I could help,’ Pits said.”
“‘All our poking around paid off, I guess,’ said Tequila with an eensy wink that if I hadn’t known, I’d have thought was a twitch.”
“I could still feel the juice running out of me as the two of them walked and Tequila stuck his hand behind him and wiggled his fingers good-bye.”
“My zipless affair with Officer Tequila was actually one of the most satisfying sexual experiences I’ve ever had. I masturbate over it just about every day. And I go out of my way to try to put myself in situations where something like it might happen again. So far, no action. I’m beginning to get a little squirrely, to tell you the truth. I’m afraid I may be getting fixated on zipless sex. When I ball with men I know now it seems so — normal, so ordinary. I don’t know what I should do. Start checking into hotels and leaving my pocketbook where it can be stolen?”
MARTY
Marty was a graduate student in public administration who vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard last summer. He described how one night he had been helping an artist friend stretch canvases. He was through at midnight and started to walk home. He had walked about a mile when a station wagon pulled up beside him. A woman was at the wheel.
“Would you like a lift?” she said. It was too dark to see her face. She sounded like she was in her mid-thirties.
Marty hesitated for a moment — it was hard enough hitchhiking on the island. To be picked up when he was just walking down the road — at midnight — was pretty unusual. But he couldn’t believe a woman would be looking to rip him off so he got in. The dome light didn’t work: pitch black inside the car.
“Where do you want to go?” she said.
He gave her his address again — he’d thought she’d caught it the first time.
“No,” she said sourly. “I mean, where do you want to go.”
Suddenly he got the picture. She meant where did he want to go to fuck. Which presupposed that he wanted to fuck — and that he wanted to fuck her. But how could he pass this up? If he did, wouldn’t he always wonder what it would have been like? He told her to turn down the dirt road to a secluded beach he knew. They parked on the deserted beach and walked to the water’s edge.
She undressed.
He undressed.
Suddenly she threw herself at him — wrestled him to the sand. She started biting and scratching him — hard.
“Hey!” Marty said. “Hey! Come on!”
[Details deleted. –Ed.]
“What’d you have to make such a mess for? Asshole.”
“I’m sorry,” Marty mouthed.
“Apology not accepted, you slob,” she said, and got up and stalked to the car. She reached inside and tore out a wad of Kleenex and wiped her stomach and threw the tissues away as if they were disgusting. She picked up her clothes and threw them into the car. She reached in the backseat and pulled out a robe. She put on the robe and got in the car. Marty had one leg in his pants when she started the car, backed it around. and tore away, leaving a rooster-tail of sand.
“Hey, goddamn it!” he yelled, but, of course, it was no use. The half-mile back to the highway was desolate.
“That woman used me,” Marty told the group. “I felt dirty for weeks. It wasn’t like I’d fucked a woman at all. It was like I’d had sexual relations with a phantom — someone who didn’t even exist! And it was like I’d given up part of my being to that non-being. It was really awful. Until tonight I thought I felt that way because I had allowed myself to be intimate with someone I didn’t know at all. But listening to Lori I can see that everything depends on the circumstances — it depends on whether that person you don’t know is a positive personality or a negative one. But I know one thing for certain — no way am I going to put part of myself inside a woman again if I haven’t even had the opportunity to look into her eyes!”
MICKI
“This was the most incredible experience I ever had in my life,” said Micki, a twenty-eight-year-old documentary producer for public television. “I’m a mountain-climbing nut and last summer I was soloing on Mt. Elbert, near Aspen. Colorado, which is the highest peak in the state. It’s very quiet up there and for about an hour I could hear someone above me knocking in pitons — the little hooks we hammer into the rock to fasten our ropes to. Ping, ping, ping, echoing louder and louder. Finally I came to a wide ledge and sat down and made myself a cup of bouillon over my Sierra pocket stove. I’m sitting there sipping and I look up and there’s a climber rappelling down to where I am.”
“He was deeply sunburned and windburned and had a tangle of blond hair that was bleached white in places from the sun. He was wearing mirrored shades and a deep blue sweater over a white turtleneck. He sat on his haunches for a few moments to rest and to try to catch his breath, not looking at me, just squinting out over the land below.”
“I asked him if he’d like some soup and he nodded. I was about to warn him that it was hot when he just drank it down, said thank you, and handed me back the cup. Then he turned to me and wet his chapped lips. I couldn’t believe what I heard next:
– ‘Wanna fuck?’
– ‘What?’
– ‘Fuck. You know — make love.’
– ‘Here? Now?’
– ‘Why not?’”
“And you know, I couldn’t think of a single reason?”
“It was really warm on the ledge, what with the sun shining on it and all. We both took off our clothes and stuffed them in our packs.”
[Details deleted. –Ed.]
We fell apart and dressed, and I made another cup of bouillon, which we shared. Then, silently, he knocked in a piton, hooked on, and lowered himself carefully over the ledge.”
“I started up again and made another fifteen hundred feet before I decided it was time to come back to earth. Contrary to popular opinion, mountain climbers don’t always try to reach the summit. Sometimes their experiences far below are more important to them.”
SAL
Sal was a successful life insurance agent in his early thirties. He worked mostly in the evenings, visiting families at home. Despite the fact that he earned excellent commissions, he sold encyclopedias from door to door during the day. He explained that though he made hardly any money this way, he did it because it generated an absolutely unlimited opportunity for zipless sex.
“I usually start knocking on doors around noon,” he said. “If the door opens and it’s an ugly or an oldie, I ask if it’s the Korzybski residence. She says no, I say I must have the wrong address, apologize, and split. But once in about ten houses I get an attractive girl. I give them a line about recruiting educational consultants to earn money at home in their spare time. Actually the deal is, if they sign up for this encyclopedia that costs $695 on the installment plan, and they give me the name of a prospect who also signs up, they get five dollars credit on their account. Big deal.”
“But it’s a door-opener. I get invited in, let them give me a cup of Sanka, and start the spiel. All of a sudden I shut the book and look her right in the eye and say, ‘Do you know something? I’m having trouble giving this presentation — because you’re just so lovely that it’s distracting the hell out of me.’ The girl blushes and laughs nervously and tells me to go on. But almost invariably, after that point, I can feel her looking me up and down. So I put the book on my lap again and say, ‘I don’t think I can go on. To be frank with you, you remind me of my late wife. She passed away a year ago. A brain tumor. She was in so much pain. I’m still not over it I guess. Please excuse me.’ And I get up and start to leave.”
“I’ve never been married in my life, mind you. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the girl puts her hand on my arm and gives me a great big, ‘I understand’ look. Then I draw her to me and kiss her like I just can’t help myself. There’s always a moment of surprise when the girl is saying to herself. ‘Oh my God, I’m being kissed by an encyclopedia salesman!’ But then she loosens up and realizes that this is what she’s been waiting for, ironing in front of the television set for the last five years while hubby’s at the plant. ‘Love of Life!’ ‘The Secret Storm!’ Right there in her own living room!”
[Details deleted. –Ed.]
“Anyway, once they’ve had their cry or finished saying, ‘God, God, God, God, God,’ five hundred times, I get up, get dressed, pack my bags, bid my adieus, and move on to find my next ‘customer.’ By the time I’ve gotten past the next statistically inevitable allotment of uglies and oldies, I’m Ready Teddy again and the soap opera starts all over. ‘Good afternoon. If I might have a moment of your time.…’”
“I do this five days a week, and on a good day I might ball three suburbanites and sell one encyclopedia. I knock off at five so I don’t end up running into daddies, and I don’t start at my real job until after insurance prospects are through with dinner — about 7:30.”
“After about six months of this, however, I began to feel like it was just getting too heavy. I mean, all the acting I had to do! Jenny! Poor, poor Jenny! I began to realize it was taking its toll. For one thing, I was no longer interested in meaningful relationships with women. How could a meaningful relationship compete with fifteen new faces a week? So I decided to quit.”
“Fat chance. The moment I stopped and started going out with women seriously I became impotent! I couldn’t get it up at all. So I went back to my educational consultants and I’ve been at it ever since — two years now. The whole thing has become mechanical — unsatisfying, repetitive, boring, tacky — but it’s a habit. Just like booze or dope or pills — I’ve got to have three fixes of zipless sex a day or I go positively cold turkey!”
“You people are all lucky. You’ve all had one anonymous fuck, and either it was a positive experience or a negative experience. But at least it was an experience! To me, it’s become no more exciting than blowing my nose or wiping my ass — it’s just something I do.”
CRAIG
Finally it was my turn. The men present were sort of down in the dumps about zipless sex; so I decided to tell an upbeat story. I explained that I was in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula earlier in the year, visiting ancient Aztec sites, and that while I was there I had the most remarkable experience. I was at the ruined Aztec temple city of Chichen ltaza, and began to feel drawn toward a grove of scrub at the edge of the site. When I got that I heard a faint, high-pitched whine, and I followed it down an incline until, there in front of me, was something that looked like a gigantic golden frisbee. It was about sixty feet in diameter and ten feet high and looked like it was made of beaten gold. There was an oval door on its edge, and it opened as I approached.
I walked inside. It was cool and dimly lit. Out of a shadow stepped the most striking woman I had ever seen. She was about six feet tall, with full hips, narrow waist, and heavy breasts. She was naked from the waist up and wore a short skirt of iridescent feathers. Her headdress was nearly two feet high and was made of gold and silver encrusted with jewels and tufted with the dazzling tail feathers of the quetzal. She wore necklaces of gold and jade and huge hoop earrings that looked like golden serpents with their tails in their mouths. Her skin was chestnut-colored and anointed with perfumed oil. She seemed to be looking through me. Suddenly I felt that we were in telepathic contact. She explained without needing to speak that she was a traveler from the planet I call Venus, and that she had come to Chichen ltza to take a look at the ruins. I asked her — without needing to speak — why she looked like an Aztec woman. She said it was the other way around — Venusians had been visiting Central America for 2,000 years, and it was the Aztecs who tried to look like her, not vice versa.
I asked her what the real name of the planet we call Venus is. She said it was Venus. I said I thought Venus was named after the Roman goddess of love. She said the reverse was the case — the Roman goddess of love was named after Venus. She said the ancients knew that Venus was populated with creatures very similar to humans, only much more highly evolved, to the point where Venusians were able to love everyone and everything absolutely and without reservation — even suffering and death. I asked her if she loved me absolutely and without reservation.
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
[Details deleted. –Ed.]
That was all there was until in the midst of the light I could see an image of what looked like an aerial view of Chichen ltza. It hurled toward me larger and larger and larger until I could see myself standing on the slope where I first saw the golden frisbee. Then my consciousness collided with and penetrated the image of me standing there and I realized that my embrace with the Venusian was over and the golden frisbee was gone. I walked back to the pyramids, fighting my way through knots of extremely aggressive young boys who insisted that the cheap pottery they were selling was “pre-Columbian.” I caught a cab back to Merida and had to rest at my hotel for three days without getting out of bed to get my over-amped nervous system back to normal.
I told the group that this episode was one of the peak sexual experiences of my life and that just because someone had an unpleasant experience with zipless sex, he shouldn’t rule it out completely. I said they should leave themselves open to these kinds of experiences because under the right circumstances, zipless sex offers the possibility of attaining higher sexual consciousness.
That night I left with the others so I wouldn’t blow my cover. About ten days later I ran into Dr. Feelbad on Fifth Avenue. He was coming out of Gucci carrying two identical ladies makeup cases. I thanked him for the peep show and invited him along on one of my freak scenes. Like, if he wanted a few laughs he could tag along with me while I interviewed an MIT urban economist on New York City’s fiscal crisis. I asked him if my story had been okay.
“Okay? It was a disaster! You stupid son of a bitch — not one of them came back for another session! They all called me up and thanked me profusely — said they felt so much better that they were quitting the group. Said that guy who thinks he had a zipless fuck with the Queen of the Venusians was really a loon — made them realize how comparatively sane they were. Thanks much, amigo. That’s the last time I let you into any of my special groups. Unless — hmm — maybe you’d like to join one on a paying basis. I’ve got one for oversexed young men who claim to have been on flying saucers.”
Later for that, Doc. I’ve got a heavy date with a six-foot lady with antennas coming out of her head, looks like a cross between Labelle’s Nona and a Zenith Chromacolor, and not a zipper in sight.
As you probably noticed, we had to edit out a few of the more “Penthouse Forum” details to publish this out in the free area of the site, but you can get the drift, we’re sure. We cannot even in good conscience nudge you toward the new Historic Library site we have building every day because as of this very moment, those folks have not yet published June of 1976 where this article originated, so you will not as of yet be able to fill in those “details deleted” until the team remedies that oversight. Ending such a fine and clearly 100% true story with a sale pitch would be a tad crass anyway, so we would never do that. We try to draw the line at irreverent around here. … Should you join regardless and await that fateful week when 1976 appears, it will, of course, be your call as to whether you should peruse zipless or not.
