America Unzipped (21 page)

All the sessions Don sends end with magnificent eruptions of bodily fluids jetting across rooms, shattering orgasms, quivering sighs. “It can be a beautiful experience,” he types to me. “Romantic, bubble bath scenes or showers where you mentally wash each other with lots of soapy water and then go down on each other….…. Some like it rough and want to watch you moaning and stroking your cock….……. they long to see you shoot a stream across the screen to make them lose control themselves….. the best is when you have cam to cam sex and can see how hot you are making them…. that really turns me on.”

I am a little afraid to ask what the long ellipses signify and to think of what he is doing while one finger is hitting the period button over and over.

At forty-nine, Don believes he is much more sexual than he was at nineteen or twenty-nine. With age comes a dropping of pretense, a greater willingness to experiment. Fantasies and scary thoughts that went unexpressed rise from the molten center of the mind to the crust, where in the past they might have stayed. Now, though, the Internet provides the vent. As a younger man, for example, Don never realized there were women out there who “wanted it and were actively seeking raw, hard action.” Women would claim to “be ‘shy' or delicate,” but thanks to the Internet, he has discovered that “like me, they had a private, hard core lover hidden inside an outwardly conservative, intelligent, but obviously sexual being.”

Age has had another effect on Don, though, that is not so salubrious. Accumulating experience has taught him that life sucks sometimes. His wife doesn't want sex as much as she used to want sex. She doesn't like to experiment. Life never seems to behave according to your fondest imaginations. Over time you rack up disappointments and then you are forty-nine years old and beginning the downhill slide.

Escaping into his virtual sex world is a way he can live the erotic life he dreams about living, but lately Don has been allowing the virtual to seep into fleshy reality. If he happens to be in a town where one of his viewers or chat partners lives, he might arrange a personal encounter. Don believes in sin and he thinks he is sinning every time he does this, but he has set himself on some sort of sexual journey and can't seem to stop traveling. “Not claiming sainthood, here…I am basically a moral person, but flawed major league when it comes to sex.”

What does Don want? He can't tell me. Whatever it is, he is unable to type it into words that make any sense. He uses high-flown language about satisfaction and fulfillment and even happiness, but he just keeps describing all the thrilling sex without explaining what he is hoping to obtain from it that justifies his sin. “I love my family, and yet there is this secret side to me that must be satisfied.” So he keeps looking.

Recently, he has discovered that he may be a submissive bisexual. He says he found out when he stopped kicking men out of his cam sessions. What the hell? he thought. Let 'em watch. One day he struck up a dialogue with a man and found himself excited. “For a dozen or so sessions I watched him cum as he ordered me into different acts and positions. He asked when I was coming to a town near him, and [I] don't know why, but I told him. The date came and I was on my computer when I saw a message to call him:
NOW
! he said. I hesitated, but then called and set up a meeting.”

Don launches into a vivid description of their sexual encounter, typing so fast I can't slip in a word. “Hey Don! How about…” He ignores every attempt. I realize I am just going to have to wait him out, that he is using me as his foil, either trying to get me worked up or that he just needs an audience to get himself worked up, but either way, there is no stopping him now, so I sit back in my chair and watch the words come across the screen and wonder at the power of virtual reality to overcome what we used to think of as real reality. It is a power that Don wonders at, too.

“There I was, on all fours, leaning into it and taking [it] into my mouth…sucking his cock and feeling it grow. How did that happen? I thought. How did I end up sucking cock in a Marriott?!”

 

S
usan does not allow her son to have a MySpace page or even to use the Internet unless she is perfectly aware of where he's going inside it. Likewise, Michael will not allow his daughter to have a MySpace page. She did have one for a little while, but then one of her preteen friends was discovered posing in her underwear on MySpace and linking to sexy sites and that pretty much ended computer privileges all around.

This is probably just as well. This way, Susan's son, like the other students in her grad-school classes, the other nurses in the hospital where she works, the members of her mainline church, will never know that she enjoys using her computer to trade digital photos of herself like the one of her sucking a man's penis that she is showing me as we sit in a nearby diner where we have gone for breakfast. In this one, she's bent over a bed, the guy is lying on a floor, his erection in her mouth, though, truth be told, all that can be a little tough to decipher because when you make photographs while having sex in contorted positions, the images come out looking a lot like an ultrasound.

I am having trouble seeing it anyway because glare is flaring off the screen of her laptop, which is sitting on the table between our breakfast dishes. I am also trying to prevent the people in the next booth from hearing our conversation and wondering if ordering the scrapple and eggs—scrapple being parts of a pig you wouldn't eat if scrapple weren't Americana—was a good idea. I hadn't counted on fellatio with my toast. Susan, though, seems oblivious to the neighbors and the food. She's eager to show more, like those she received from one of her male correspondents.

Hello! I won't be finishing the scrapple.

Susan enjoys displaying herself to the digital diaspora because she knows she doesn't fit the usual image of Internet babe. No firm-as-an-unripe-avocado twenty-year-old here. No sir. At forty-seven, Susan is ripe and plump with wild red hair. But her correspondents tell her she is very sexy and that's the point. When you get to be forty-seven, a little positive reinforcement can be a powerful incentive.

“One thing I am
not
interested in losing is my sexuality,” she says. “For a woman, that is more of a fight.” So she spends a lot of time on her computer, surrounded by her books, inside a charming house built around the time of the Great Depression, on a neat little street in a charming community near Baltimore. She watches other people perform sex acts in front of their Web cameras and sometimes masturbates along with them.

Still, this is no replacement for what Susan calls “skin on skin” with one, or two, or three other people. Men or women. Doesn't really matter as long as they're nice and can give her some direction. Susan, you see, loves “being in service.” She enjoys a little light bondage occasionally and being spanked, and the one sure way to find willing partners who can do that is by placing ads on the Internet.

Susan has stopped expecting any connection between love and sex. A divorce, some friction with her family, disappointments from people who do not share her unvarnished honesty, have left her feeling that trust is a rare commodity, perhaps too much to ask. Sex, though, is something you can feel intensely if only for a time, but that's better than not feeling at all.

After her most recent breakup, she took some time to mourn and then placed profiles on AdultFriendFinder, a Maryland Craig's List, and one or two other websites. Interesting responders from anywhere around the Chesapeake Bay region—a man or a couple—were welcome. If a fellow didn't want a commitment, well, that was okay. Maybe they would have fun. She's not into pressure. Recently, a man, Michael, answered her ad. He's a professional, a tech guy of some sort, who sounded sensitive, caring, intelligent, and best of all, adventurous.

Michael is a tall, thin man with salt-and-pepper hair and glasses, a fit fifty-two. Like Susan, he is divorced.

Looking back, it was the divorce that set him off. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was the financial meltdown before the divorce or the increasing sexual frustration he began feeling or any of a number of other things that have melded into a unit of trouble in Michael's mind so that teasing out just what was the precipitating moment is impossible. But Michael clearly remembers a point when his course changed.

Michael was a service brat in a conservative household that, like many service households, led a gypsy life. (I have to be vague about some details of Michael's story—his name isn't Michael—because he has a reputation in certain circles, top-secret clearance through his work for a defense contractor, and children he would rather not inform about this part of his life. He is not ashamed of what I am about to tell you.) Mostly, though, he grew up in this region. He and his dad used to enjoy putting things together, kit television sets, old hot rods, technical stuff, because Michael has always been a technical fellow. In college he started out as a design major in an arty but technical field. This was the mid-1970s, though, when digital electronics were beginning to seep out from labs and into the hands of the rest of us, and Michael was fascinated.

“I got my first calculator and did trig functions on it and it cost me a hundred bucks,” he recalls with a laugh when telling me the story. Then he thinks a moment and says “I had a watch
this
big,” making a gesture with his fist.

Michael is older than I am, but I remember when my high school took delivery of its first computer, a big typewriter affair that spewed paper tape, like an adding machine. Only the really smart math whizzes were allowed to go near it. One of my best friends was a smart math whiz and so one day he let me watch as he typed in a bunch of numbers and symbols and said, “Watch this!” and then the machine spit tape for a full minute figuring out his equation as we both stood there, dumbfounded and amazed and a little in love with the machine that could think. Like Michael, I remember thinking how good life was going to be.

Michael married his high-school sweetheart. They met when she was sixteen and he was seventeen, then they lived together, and then they got married and had children. He had good jobs because he was a tech guy and everybody who was any good at technical stuff had a good job and Michael was good at technical stuff. This is exactly the way it's supposed to work, isn't it? You get married to the woman you love and work in the field you know and raise strong, healthy children.

In Michael's case, as in the cases of millions of others, the river of life eroded the banks.

“We did not have the opportunity to explore when we were young,” he says of his wife. Ostensibly, Michael is talking about sex, but I do not think that's all he is talking about. “When we were young we seemed to agree, but we began to diverge in our sexual outlook. Over time she became much more conservative. You know, hormonal changes go on, she had the kids. Anyway, it caused us to drift apart in that realm.”

This is something I have been noticing on my journey, the way people refer to sex as “that realm,” a place apart from their regular lives. They make it sound like the old conception of Limbo I picked up in Catholic school, the place where unbaptized babies went, a place I always imagined was located on a Pacific island. There were beach towels. Or, more positively, they make “that realm” sound like a Club Med where you get to behave the way you want to behave but are not allowed to behave when you are home. I wonder if the stories people tell me would be any different if they thought of sex the way they thought of playing golf or a night out eating seared ahi while wearing smart clothes, something fun, but a regular part of life.

Anyway, for Michael sex was an escape. His mind was a logic machine and he lived and worked among others whose minds were logic machines, all highly talented people. Sex allowed him to shut the machine down and think about something else other than calculations and data. By tapping a primal instinct, he could chase away the discipline of logic and lose control. But when sex with his wife became rare and mundane, he had nowhere to go.

The millennial technology financial meltdown took Michael with it. Suddenly it didn't matter how good he was at his job because his job no longer existed. Then his marriage folded. Michael could have absorbed the financial strain, the family frictions, if only the sex was there to provide his escape. “But it wasn't. So there I was, forty-something, which was young to me, feeling virile, and nothing to do. That led to fights. And that led to my ex saying to me one day, ‘If you do not like it here, get the fuck out!' ‘If you think somebody else is better for you, go!' At that point I said, ‘Okay.' I am sitting out on the curb saying to myself, ‘What next?' And that is when it began for me, this period of exploration.”

Before the Internet, a man going through a midlife crisis had options, but not many and they weren't very practical. There were “swinger parties,” and “key parties,” those suburban wife-swapping soirees that were supposed to be rampant among the sophisticated and aspiring junior executives of the 1960s and 1970s. But they were far more common in pulp fiction than in real life, and even back then Michael would never have been a suburban, leisure-suited party boy with a too-quick laugh and a martini. He didn't know any swingers anyway, and he is not the kind of guy to walk up to a couple and ask if they would be interested in a three-way. Swinger magazines have been around for a long time, too, but placing an ad, renting a post-office box to receive the responses, was cumbersome and limited and, again, not for Michael.

“Now you can sit down with a computer, and in the anonymous setting of your basement, lie in your bed with your WiFi and with any digital savvy at all, within ten minutes post an ad on something like Craig's List and away you go.”

So away he went.

 

S
usan has a bit of New Age about her—she is always entering a “good space” or leaving a “bad space”—and yet she can sound supremely practical. She calls me “hon” without irony nor a hint of flirtatiousness like some crusty diner waitress on a road bypassed by the interstate, a habit she has picked up working as a nurse. When you are sliding a rubber catheter tube up a guy's urethra, it helps if he knows that you know exactly what you are doing, that you won't put up with fussiness, but that you sympathize.