CHAPTER SIX

Joanie was right about the weather. It was quite brisk by dinnertime. Feeling somewhat foolish, I went up to the mess hall wearing a polo shirt and nothing else. Joanie had donned her sweater again. A couple of the thinner-blooded ones were more fully dressed. Nearly everyone had something on, and generally the effect was a startling and interesting one.

The program for that evening was, Joanie announced, Twenty Questions. Everyone who was interested was to gather in the Social Hall about half past seven.

I went over, but I didn't stay long. It's been a long time since party games of that sort have held the slightest appeal for me. Not even the interest added to the gathering by the semi-nudity of the players could keep me from getting hopelessly bored. Bonnie was there, besides, and she kept looking longingly in my direction, her expression alternating between black hatred and hopeful pleading.

I waited until she became a member of the panel, and took advantage of the moment to slip out of the Social Hall. Bonnie couldn't very well leave the game and follow me.

I stood on the back porch of the building for a moment, shivering slightly in the evening breeze. Night had fallen, but the moon was out and lit the place up somewhat. The sky was clear and dark, with sharp stars glinting away. I was pleased to see a shooting star. You don't see them much in the Chicago sky.

Meehan had disappeared right after supper with a girl named Margaret something, a skittish and plump spinster just on the wrong side of thirty. Meehan, a smart operator if there ever was one, had probably spotted Margaret for an easy lay without complications, and was off making hay with her at the moment. I knew he was really leching after Joanie Baker—what man with two eyes in his head wouldn't be?—but Jack was enough of a realist to know that Joanie wasn't likely to come across. So he was off with Margaret. I thought for a few moments about the mores of the nudist camp. People were touchy, in some respects, of course. But in others, I saw, sex was a lot freer and easier here, as you might expect.

For one thing, the absence of clothes made a spontaneous act a lot simpler. Ordinarily you can be with a girl and start petting a little and getting her warmed up, but then you start digging down through blouses and bras and skirts and slips and corsets and whatnot, and by the time you finish getting the armor off she's had time for a few second thoughts and you don't score. But that obstruction was no problem here. Once you could get a girl interested in you here, all the intervening barriers of cloth did not trouble you. You could get your hand on her bare skin and start working her up, and then it was the simplest thing in the world to make love to her before she had a chance to think things over.

With that big barrier out of the way—clothes—life was a lot simpler. A lot of girls will give you a "No" because they're afraid you'll find out about the birthmark they've got on their hip, or because they don't want you to find out they wear falsies. But there was nothing to hide here. Modesty was no longer a drawback to making out.

On the other hand, you had to consider that constant exposure to nudity took away a lot of novelty and suspense. On at least four occasions in my life I had seduced women for the prime purpose of finding out whether they looked as good without their clothes as with them. (In three out of the four, they didn't.) That motive was absent here. You didn't have to make a girl in order to find out whether the stuff in her bra was real or rubber. All you had to do was take a look the next time you met her.

And so—they told me—after a few weeks a naked girl becomes a boring thing, and what really lights you up is one with clothes on. I was willing to believe that. But so far I hadn't noticed myself growing jaded. No doubt Joanie Baker would have looked fascinating fully dressed, but she looked plenty good the way she was.

End of philosophical disquisition. There's nothing like making a drastic change in your environment for setting yourself reflecting about the basic matters of your personality. Such as your reactions to naked women.

But right now I found myself wondering about Harriet.

The waitresses were supposed to help clean up the mess hall after dinner. But that took only about forty minutes, and more than an hour had gone by since the end of the meal. I wondered where she was. I surprised myself by feeling a pang of jealousy, and I discovered that I was beginning to think possessively of Harriet already. I wanted to know where she was, and I was subconsciously annoyed at the idea of her walking around naked.

I went into the mess hall. The lights were out in front, but I went around back and into the kitchen. The scene in there was strange. A potbellied man wearing only a chef's tall hat was bustling around tidying things up. Nick Riccio, completely naked, was helping him. Two fellows in polo shirts were scrubbing dishes, and Lorraine, the brunette waitress, was helping them. She was naked. Everyone turned around and looked rather coldly at me as I walked in.

I felt flustered. But I kept control and said, "I'm looking for Harriet."

Lorraine said, "She just finished here. She went over to the Social Hall to look for you."

Thanking her, I beat a quick retreat. I didn't want to be around Riccio any more than I had to, after our little set-to in the morning. I hurried back to the Social Hall, where Twenty Questions was still going strong, and I found Harriet standing on the front porch, peering in puzzledly. I tiptoed up behind her and slipped my hands over her breasts.

She whirled. "Oh—Al!"

"Who did you think?"

"You mustn't do that. There are rules about intimate caresses in public."

"Let's caress in private, then."

She grinned at me. Taking me by the hand, she led me away from the Social Hall. We walked hand-in-hand past the mess hall and I found myself on a road that was new to me.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Staff quarters." She pointed ahead, to three or four cabins nestling at the edge of the woods behind the mess hall. "That's pretty private. Lorraine and I share a cabin. But she usually spends the night with Nick at his place. That's where the cooks sleep, over there."

My heart was pounding. Back in the real world, when you want to go to bed with a girl you have to wine her and dine her for a while, usually. You have to take her to a couple of shows, and you have to feed her the line about how the bomb may drop any week and why not grab some fun while you can? Then, and only then, she lets you score. But that was the real world. Here in the fantasy dreamland of the Sunland Health Colony, the pretenses and conventions of society didn't seem to matter so much. If you met a girl and she liked you, she took you off to her cabin or she came to yours. And since neither of you had any clothing on anyway, it was a perfectly expectable thing for matters to go on to what they call completion.

We entered her cabin. It was built exactly like the one Meehan and I shared. Harriet took me into her room and locked the door. She was wearing a pair of shorts, and she took them off. She was naked now. I wriggled out of my shirt.

I saw the look in her eyes again, the smouldering, sensuous look she had given me on the tennis court. She flattened herself against me, thrusting her knee between my thighs, while my hands squeezed the flesh of her buttocks. I felt her small but finely shaped breasts going stiff and hard, pressing against my chest.

Her tongue darted into my mouth and her knee brought me to a flaming pitch of excitement and my hands went up from her buttocks and forced themselves between our bodies, reaching upward until I was cupping her breasts. They weren't big swinging breasts like Bonnie's, and they weren't monumental statuesque ones like Joanie's. They were—well, they filled my hands nicely, and I squeezed the stiff little berries at the tips, and I heard Harriet gasp with delight and I told myself that the Sunland Health Colony was the nearest thing to utopia on earth that had yet been invented.

Then Harriet pulled herself away from me and while I stood blinking and recovering from the intensity of the kiss she went to her dresser and opened a drawer. When she turned around again she was holding—this is God's own truth—a ping-pong paddle!

It was one just like the ones they had in the back of the Social Hall, covered with a flat oval of red rubber raised up in little puckers. She thrust the paddle into my hand and I stood there staring at it stupidly while she whispered, "Hit me, Al! Hit me!"

I didn't get it at first. Call me stupid or something. But Harriet pushed me down on the bed and dove across my knees, face down, with her pretty little butt facing upward so I could still make out the imprint my tennis racquet had left this afternoon.

And all of a sudden I understood Harriet a whole lot better.

I knew now why she had given me that look of pure three hundred proof s-e-x after I had whammed her with my racquet.

She was a girl who liked to be hurt.

That was the way she got her kicks.

All at once my image of her as a nice cleancut college girl who worked at a nudist colony because she enjoyed the outdoor life went up in smoke. I felt faintly queasy. I'm not really as puritanical as this account is probably painting me, but still and all. I've always had a preference for girls who went for the straight stuff instead of sidelines and specialties.

I didn't have any choice, though. There I was with the ping-pong paddle in my hand and a naked girl spread out across my lap with her backside waiting to be paddled, and myself in a state of advanced excitement anyway. So—feeling somewhat guilty about the whole thing—I lifted the paddle and brought it down smartly across Harriet's tender rump.

She let out a squeal of delight. I saw the skin almost tingle. I paddled her again, making a nice loud sound, and she kicked her legs and began to pant hysterically, and I found myself getting into the spirit of the thing myself. I brought the paddle down four or five more times across her bare bottom, and every time the paddle landed she let out another cry of mixed pleasure and pain. Whack! Whack! Whack! And Harriet getting hotter with each descent of the paddle across her bare bottom.

She sat up suddenly, and her eyes were wild. She looked like she was a madwoman. "Hit me," she moaned. "Slap me, punch me, bite me!" She wriggled up until she was sitting on my lap, and in one sudden thrust of her loins she imprisoned me with her body, and she pulled my head to her bosom and shoved one of her breasts into my mouth and murmured, "Bite me, bite me...."

I was carried away by it all. I took care not to break the skin, but I gave her what she wanted. She moaned and bucked and whimpered, and sweat bathed our bodies, and it went on and on, seemingly for hours. She was really the wildest.

And then she was digging her nails into my back and moving with frantic energy, and I felt the trip-hammer pounding in my loins and I let my breath out in a long hoarse sigh and it was all over. I opened my eyes. Harriet still sat astride me, but she looked completely exhausted. She tumbled off, landing in a little heap on the floor. I picked her up. She was limp, drained, through. I put her on the bed. She gave a kittenish smile of contentment.

She said in a low voice, "Thanks, Al."

I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at my toes. It had been one hell of a weird day. I had had a woman ask me what time it was two minutes after making love to her, and now a girl had thanked me for giving her the sort of perverse thrills she craved. The ping-pong paddle lay on the floor. I scowled at it.

Harriet opened her eyes. They were wet with tears, tears of mingled pleasure and pain. I got up, found a pack of cigarettes on her dresser, took one out and lit it up.

She said, "What's wrong, Al?"

I shrugged. "Nothing."

"You're upset."

"Maybe I am."

"I'm sorry, Al. I can't help myself. It's ... it's the way I am. I have to be in pain or I can't enjoy it. I don't know why. But I need the paddling. Otherwise it's no good for me." There was a pathetic quavery note in her voice. I looked at her—twenty-two and already loused up with some creepy kind of perversion—and I felt deep pity, and a bit of disgust too.

"How long have you been this way?" I asked.

She shrugged. "I don't know. It was sort of an accident." She sprawled out facing the wall. I saw the angry redness of her buttocks and felt guilt for having contributed to her strange lust. In a low voice she said, "I was eighteen the first time I slept with a boy. It was the usual story—too much to drink, and a fellow with a fast line. Well, at least it didn't hurt any. I didn't feel a thing. Not a thing. He took my panties down and did it to me, and then when he was through he zipped up his trousers and that was it. I was disappointed. I went out with him a few more times and I let him do it again, and each time it was the same thing. I didn't feel a thing. He told me I was just nervous, that pretty soon I'd start enjoying it."

I puffed on my cigarette. I couldn't take my eyes off her reddened buttocks.

She went on, "I guess I slept around a lot in the next couple of years. Almost the same story. Frigid, that's what I was. And then I met this guy. He was maybe thirty, and he had a lot of money, and he took me to fancy places. He wanted to make love, and I figured it was the least I could give him in return for all the money he was spending on me. It didn't mean anything to me, you see, and if it made him happy—well, we went to his place, and we got undressed, and we made it. Nothing. Cold as a fish, like always. I broke down and spilled out my whole long sad story. He listened to the whole thing and then all of a sudden he slapped me, out of nowhere, right across my breasts. I thought he was out of his mind. Then he turned me over his knee and started spanking me. I kicked and screamed and tried to get loose, but he held me tight, and then I felt something happening inside me. My heart started racing and I felt hot all over and he took me in his arms and we did it again and this time I felt it. So that's how it was. He got through to me."

"And you're only satisfied when you get hurt?" I asked, fascinated and appalled at the same time.

She nodded miserably. "Yes. He—stopped seeing me after a while. He married someone else. I went with other fellows, and when I slept with them nothing happened unless I could get them to smack me. Today—when you hit me with the racquet—you came practically near blowing all my fuses. I wanted you, Al. Right there on the tennis court. Only they would have thrown us both out of here if we did anything like that."

I stubbed out my cigarette. "You poor kid."

She swung around to face me. "Al, what am I going to do? I want to be normal! I don't want to bring men to my room and give them a ping-pong paddle to use!"

"Have you been to a psychiatrist?"

"Yes. It didn't do any good." She began to sob. I went over to her and slipped my arms around her, and she cried it all out.

A hell of a crazy place, I thought. Despite all Dr. Richards' propaganda about nudists being saner than other people, I wasn't impressed. One day in Sunland Health Colony and I had become involved with a nympho and a masochist. And there was the enigma of the apparently sexless Joanie Baker besides.

A nice bunch of people....

I comforted Harriet for a while, telling her everything was going to turn out all right for her, that someday a fellow would come along who could ring the bell for her without the violent preliminaries. I didn't believe it, and I don't think she did either, but at least my talking that way made us both feel better.

Around eleven I decided it was time to get back to my cabin. Harriet held me tight at the door, and we hugged, our naked bodies pressing together.

"I hope we'll be together again soon," she said.

"I hope so."

"You don't want to," she said. "You're not happy about it."

"It takes a while to get used to," I said. I stroked her satiny buttocks affectionately. "Good night, Harriet. Sleep well."

"'Night, Al."

I unlocked the door and stepped outside, my shirt over my arm. Once again I was obsessed with the unreality of the nudist camp environment. To go into a girl's bedroom and make love with her, and then to walk out stark naked and stroll home—that was grotesque, almost nightmarish.

I walked along. Glancing to my left, I saw two figures on the porch of the cook's cabin. Riccio and Lorraine. He was sitting on the top step, and she was sitting a step below him, leaning back, and his hands were on her breasts. I looked away quickly and kept walking.

In a few minutes I was out of the staff area and past the mess hall, on my way back down below to the cabins. The camp was quiet. Early to bed, early to rise was the rule here. I came down the road and stood for a moment in the middle of everything, in the calm, quiet night. Lights were on in three or four of the cabins. To my right, in Cabin Four, I heard the creak of bedsprings, and thought that healthy, clean-cut Ernie Bryan was having a healthy, cleancut time in bed with his wife. A light was on in Cabin Two, Joanie Baker's cabin, as well. I walked quickly down to my own cabin.

Meehan's door was open, and the light was on. He was sitting up in bed, scribbling shorthand notes in his book. He nodded as I came in.

"Have a good evening?" I asked.

"I scored," he said. "One for one is par for the course."

"Margaret?"

"Naturally. She was so damn pathetically grateful. How'd you spend your evening?"

I told him, in some detail. He listened with a growing frown. When I finished I said, "How'd you pick this place out, anyway?"

"Friend of mine told me."

"It's really Bugsville, isn't it?"

He shrugged. "Just because one funloving sun-lover is a nympho and another a masochist?"

"Jack, all these people are screwy."

"Sure they are. They wouldn't be running around in their birthday suits if they were ordinary people."

"It's going to be a long three months," I said.

"Not for you. I figure you'll be in a rest home inside of a month, Al. One before lunch and one after supper is fun for a while. But you gotta show moderation, man. Don't run hog-wild just because there's a lot of bare tail floating around."

I shrugged. "I never did learn how to say no to a girl who wanted to go to bed with me," I said. "Guess I'd better start practicing."

"Guess you'd better."

"Goodnight," I said.

"Goodnight, kid. Sleep tight."

I didn't have to worry about that. I staggered off toward my pad and dropped wearily into bed. It had been quite a day. Quite. It seemed to be at least fifty hours long. I shut my eyes and sleep descended like a closing window.