Inside the Clothing-Optional Resort of Your Swinging Dreams pt.2

 BY DAVY ROTHBART  July 18, 2017

My friends from the Jacuzzi, Rob and Laura, are definitely not here for senseless rabbit fucking. They're not even swingers—not yet—but they're…intrigued by the idea. They've poked around on the Internet, they've even posted a profile on a swingers site, but nothing much had come of it. They figured Desire Pearl, a resort far from home and stocked with other frisky couples, might be a fine, low-risk place to indulge some of that curiosity.

After dinner, I milled about with them at the bar in the lobby. The evening's sartorial theme—a nightly ritual that seemed a little surprising at a nude resort—was "Animal Print." This meant that women donned sexy animal-print tops and high-cut animal-print skirts, while the men, evidently immune to the notion of theme nights, wore their standard dress shirts and slacks. The lobby bar had the same cheesy feel of any upscale South Beach hotel. But there was a powerful, illicit charge in the air.

Pretty soon, a guy started talking to Rob while sneaking glances at Laura, sizing her up. Then he pointed over to his own wife at the other end of the bar. This is how the flirting and mingling generally goes, keeping to a strange, if logical, rhythm. While the men seem to handle any initial negotiations, according to the people I talked to, it's the women who ultimately call most of the shots. Finding a match isn't as easy as it might seem. The quadrangle of chemistry—known as "double double-dating"—requires everybody to reach agreement. Which may explain why there seemed to be more talking going on than fucking.

By ten, everyone had moved through a leather door into the dance club, where, up on stage, I spotted a dead ringer for Rivers Cuomo, the Weezer frontman, naked save for a leopard-print loincloth, freaking his scrawny girlfriend. The DJ, who told me his name was Lorenzo, seemed to have been directed to play the lamest string of global hits imaginable—which spoke more, I think, to the tastes of the resort's guests than to any deficit of Lorenzo's. When I asked him for some hip-hop, he played the Black Eyed Peas, and the dance floor cleared. "This is not a rap crowd," he explained.

Before long, I fell into conversation with a friendly doctor from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and his cheerful dark-haired wife. To the side of the room, he motioned toward a set of red curtains that I hadn't seen before. Through the gauzy fabric, I could see two bodies in motion, gently writhing. "That's the Sin Room. Have a look-see!" the doctor shouted in my ear, in his robust Canadian accent. "Go oon!" 

​I slid my way in. The space was no larger than a living room, hot and dark, lit by a pair of dim red bulbs. Futon mattresses bound in white canvas and pocked with dubious stains curved on three walls; in the middle of the room, from the ceiling, a sex swing dangled. And there, on one mattress, less than ten feet from me, was Weezer—naked like a newborn, except for his stylish horn-rimmed glasses. He reclined on his back, his dick stiff as a zucchini, as his skinny girlfriend straddled him, grinding away. "Say It Ain't So," indeed!

A tingle of uneasy titillation brought me back to the moment when, at 8 years old, I walked in on my parents having sex. It was the briefest of glimpses—just bodies under the covers—but my dad came down to my room 20 minutes later to have a talk with me. (Thanks, Dad.) More than 30 years had passed, and until today I'd never seen another couple have sex in real life, right in front of me. It was raw, nasty, animalistic, and strangely, utterly captivating.

Only after a minute did I realize that there was another couple in the room "sinning" as well, an older Mexican guy gratifying his lady in the oral fashion, working at her from an odd sideways angle, as though frozen in a perverse game of Twister. How could that feel right for either one of them? As if aware of the passions afire in this curtained sex chamber, the DJ slyly changed the track to Boyz II Men's "I'll Make Love to You." Props, Lorenzo.

Before the song ended, I escaped, back through the curtains, suddenly desperate to unsee all that I'd just witnessed. The bartender spotted me and flashed me a look that said he'd seen bewilderment like mine before. "Tequila?" he asked. I nodded vigorously, and he poured me two quick shots.

​Laura and Rob were sprawled naked on a pair of deck chairs, reading by the pool when I found them the next day. Close by, dozens of other naked bodies tanned in the sun and bobbed in the shallow water. A few guests knocked a volleyball around. Others held spots at a swim-up bar.

​It took a few days, but I noticed something odd about the nocturnal rhythms of the resort. Every night around ten, the dance club would open up and quickly grow packed. Lorenzo would do his thing, and then, within an hour, the place would empty out. Where had everyone gone? One night, I resolved to find out.

I made my way from the club and heard the murmur of laughter from beyond a row of tropical hedges. I veered down a narrow path, following the sounds, and slid around a high wall, emerging beside the mammoth Jacuzzi on the edge of Desire's campus. Instantly, I absorbed the wild scene: All six cabana beds were filled with naked couples, everybody fornicating in various permutations, while the hot tub was packed with 80 or 90 nude men and women, cast in the eerie glow of submerged lights, lustily slamming drinks. If Happy Hour had seemed lively, this was utterly bacchanalian.

Everyone was drunkenly chatting, laughing, flirting, and making out. It felt strange to be lingering there, watching from the fringes, so without a second thought, I grabbed a whiskey from the bartender, dumped off my clothes, and hopped right in. Being totally naked, which just a few days before had made me squirm, now felt completely natural.

The scene was like a Mardi Gras melee on Bourbon Street—except everyone was showing everyone else their tits. I met a couple from West Virginia here on their honeymoon (what?!)and a doctor and his wife from small-town Idaho, with eight kids, who said they weren't swingers, only nudists who enjoy the anything-goes atmosphere at Desire.

Although hookups are technically meant to happen only on the cabana beds and not in the Jacuzzi, we were well past midnight and the rules had started to bend. I watched a man sitting on the edge of the tub receive the most peculiar hand job imaginable from a woman he'd just met while their spouses monitored the action close by, laughing. Rather than stroke his dick up and down in the classic style, the woman was beating her palm across the head of his penis—rubbing it back and forth—like someone slapping the control ball on the vintage golf arcade game Golden Tee. As the guy struggled to maintain a boner, his wife offered the woman encouragement: "Maybe…more gentle?"

This was little help. Soon she was rubbing one side of the guy's penis, as though sanding an irksome spot on an old wooden chair leg. She seemed puzzled that the guy's hard-on continued to wilt. "I don't get it," she said. "My husband loves it like this! Right, Randy?"

I kept drinking, making friends and marveling at all the wonderful weirdos around me, until I realized I'd closed down the party and was guzzling pink margaritas in the world's largest hot tub, all by myself. Back in my room, I pounded some water and descended into a string of Google wormholes: What is the weirdest HJ technique that actually feels good? Can you catch STDs from a hot tub?

​The next afternoon, Rob and Laura listened with deep interest to my stories of the late-night Jacuzzi scene. Their own longing for a spirited hookup had so far led to nothing. "We'll have to check it out," Rob said. Earlier, they'd stepped out onto the patio of their suite and had sex. It didn't cause much of a stir, but the thought of passing strangers' gazes tickled their skin and gave them an exhibitionist's thrill, all the same. "Not like a big crowd was watching," Rob laughed. "We're not the hottest folks here."

​A few weeks later, with Rob and Laura back home in Wisconsin, I gave them a call. They told me that, for now at least, they've put their swinging days behind them. With work and family, they really don't have the time for trolling swingers' forums or trying to organize dates with strangers. But their trip to Desire had, despite the hefty price tag, scratched a certain itch. Almost daily, one of them will make a reference to Mexico—speaking in code—and they'll wink, trading a naughty smile.