Epilogue: Everyone Wants to Be Naked (and Famous)

Posted by Lex Konrad in Dispatches | Mar 31, 2007

I get the news I need on the weather report
Oh, I can gather all the news I need on the weather report
Hey, I’ve got nothing to do today but smile
And here I am
The only living boy in New York

-Simon and Garfunkel, “The Only Living Boy in New York”

The morning is bright and beautiful, the sky spattered with benign white clouds. Les and I climb the stairs to the rooftop, where we snap nude portraits of each other. An employee is kind enough to take a few shots of the two of us together. My girl giggles. We won’t be naked again for a long time — at least not like this.

We swim in the ocean and then take our last tour of the grounds, happening upon the Oklahomans by the pool. I tell them I’m surprised they didn’t sleep in after last night’s drunken debauchery. We say our goodbyes. Before turning away, I leave them with a final thought: “It’s up to you to keep things interesting around here.”

***

I step out of the hired car, tossing an empty beer can into the trash and squinting at my surroundings — this is our first contact with the civilian world in eight days. Only now, at the airport, do I appreciate the state of preternatural relaxation that came over me that first night in the jacuzzi and never left. I don’t bother putting my shoes back on after walking through the metal detector. Instead I stand in the terminal and smile as a Mariachi band plays.

I cannot get over the feeling that people must be able to sense there is something different about us. As we meander toward our gate Leslie and I play a little game, picking attractive couples out of the crowd and imagining how they’d fare if they spent a night or two in paradise.

I wonder whether there is such a thing as gaydar for swingers.

***

Overhead, multiple LCD screens unfold, the servomotors emitting a high-pitched mechanical whir. I am strapped in, unable to escape. This is unfair: I’ve felt so much better since I went on a media diet. A music video plays. Porn lite. It is a sad reminder that I am returning to a nation of voyeurs — to a land of people who are obsessed with sex and repulsed by it in equal measure.

***

New York. You can’t come home again — I never thought about what this meant until now. We may as well be returning from Mars, and if that Mexico feeling stays with us I’m quite sure we’ll frighten the natives. Drifting over the Triborough, my eyes fixed upon the gleaming lights of Spaceship Manhattan, I almost feel ashamed, as if I’ve cheated on my first love and the day of reckoning is upon me.

***

No sooner do we step over the threshold than my fiancée asks, “Do you want to get a drink?”

“Mos def,” is my reply.

A yellow cab takes us to Morningside Heights, where we claim a couple of stools at one of our regular bars. We run into a few people we know and regale them with tales of our adventures in paradise. I hear my own words tumble out and I barely believe them. Standing here, in a small watering hole in Manhattan, it is hard for me to believe a place like Desire even exists.

Overhearing us, a comely young woman approaches. When she smiles I see that she has lopsided dimples. The three of us talk for awhile. “Here, let me give you my number,” she insists.

I turn to Leslie. “The more things change the more they stay the same, eh?”

“Yeah. Too bad there’s no jacuzzi here.”

More: The Mexico Diaries | Travel | Mexico | Swingers

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