Free The Lifestyle by Terry Gould Page A

you’ll experience at this convention next month. And nothing’s going to stop it. We’re organized.”

CHAPTER THREE
The Unmentionable
    Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
    GENESIS 3:11
    Humanity has been playing a little game and its cardinal rule is:
Do it if you have to, but make sure you feel bad about it and make sure you don’t tell anyone.
    LIFESTYLES ORGANIZATION EROTIC ARTS EXHIBITION BROCHURE
     
    M y experience in Mexico in June of 1996 marked the beginning of my year in the lifestyle, or what a writing colleague called my “year of living flagrantly.” I joined thirty married pairs on a long weekend to the Lifestyles Organization’s “newest, all-inclusive, adults only travel destination!”—the Eden Resort in the Lower Baja. The Eden sat by itself on the blue-green Sea of Cortes, five miles south of the colonial town of Loreto. It was a Club Med-style, twenty-five-acre development of pools, palms, and pink adobe buildings, surrounded by desert and walled on the west by the towering Sierra de la Giganta mountains. Over ninety tourists were on Aero California’s DC-9 flying above the emerald square on that scorching off-season weekend, and, as the plane landed, the outnumbered straights still had no idea they’d just spent two hours sitting beside spouse sharers and open eroticists.
    That, of course, was the playcouple point. Not until all the gringos had plodded patiently through the customs hut in the killing heat and then taken the airport mini-buses to register in the Eden’s lobby did the crowd separate into identifiable groups. The straight couples on their vacation packages were given blue wristbands and assigned to rooms that fronted the part of the beach where bathing suits were required. The Lifestyles Tours and Travel tourists were fitted with pink bands, and headed off in a different direction.
    In age the LTT tourists ranged from early thirties to late fifties and in physique they spanned the spectrum from the aerobically fit to the droopy—though there were none youwould call portly. They wore golf shirts and halter tops, tennis shoes and sandals, and chatted with unexpected reserve in their drawled Western vowels and nasalized Eastern diphthongs as they followed tour leaders General Joyce and her husband Richard to the Optional Clothing Club—the nude beach—where McGinley had reserved a three-storey block of rooms for their exclusive use. Almost all were white-collar professionals, including a nuclear-power-plant manager and a third-grade teacher; a school principal and a counselor; an advertising executive and a physician. The group was, according to Joyce, “exactly typical of who take our tours these days.”
    It was Joyce’s job to ease these staid souls into the holiday frame of mind and so, at the hot tub patio in front of their adobe quarters, she festively announced that the orientation would begin in half an hour beside the thatch-roofed beach bar, ten steps away.
“Don’t
miss it, guys! We’ve got a surprise for you!”
    The surprise was sixty “oral sex drinks”—a thick white -rum-and-punch concoction with a banana stuck in it and a pink straw barely rising above the tip. To draw the drink, you had to mouth the banana sculpted in the shape of a penis. “Well, I’ve been sexually active since eighteen and eatingly active since conception,” said one woman, laughing, to Joyce by the bar. “Might as well put them together.”
    A handsome man in sporty whites, Pascal Pellegrino, the resort’s Italian general manager, moved to the edge of the cabana to face the crowd. Before I’d left Vancouver McGinley had told me that he’d become good friends with Pascal on an LTT tour to the Eden. “He’s totally accepting of the lifestyle, to the point where he wants our tours every month—every
week
if we could get the customers.”
    “Welcome to the Eden and we wish you happy days and most romantic nights—surrender to