SHEILA: And then we began to narrow it down. If there was no photo — some magazines would print a photograph of the wife, although that was less common then than it is now — if there was a photograph, and if the girl didn’t look appealing, we passed up that ad. If the things the couples liked to do sounded excessively perverted, we crossed them off.
PAUL: Or if we didn’t know what their code meant.
SHEILA: Right. I remember that some of the ads specified an interest in English culture. We didn’t know what this was because the expression was just beginning to come into the swinging lexicon. French culture meant oral and Greek culture meant anal and Prussian culture meant discipline and Roman meant orgies, and what was Egyptian? I think miscegenation. That was in use for a while and then disappeared. I don’t know how some slang terms gain acceptance among swingers and others don’t. Who decides what euphemisms swing?
PAUL: English culture means flagellation, of course.
SHEILA: So we wouldn’t have been interested anyway, as it turns out. There were other things, animal training for bestiality, the usual kinky things. And one couple I remember who described themselves as gourmets. I remember the phrasing: “not gourmands but gourmets.” We crossed them out. We assumed that they were Francophiles, but there was something about the phrasing that left room for doubt, so we decided the hell with them. I’m still not sure whether they were just fond of oral sex or whether they had something else going for them.
PAUL: When we finally made our selections, we almost changed our mind and didn’t write at all.
JWW: You thought of giving up swinging?
SHEILA: No, never that! Quite the reverse.
PAUL: We were going to run an ad of our own.
SHEILA: And for the silliest possible reason. You’ll love this. We were literally terrified that we would write to someone at random and it would turn out to he someone we knew! As if there was any real likelihood of that, when we knew so few people in the area who weren’t actually in Kansas City.
PAUL: Well, that wasn’t the really ridiculous part. The stupid thing was our feeling that this would be terrible for a friend of ours to get that sort of letter from us. We completely ignored the fact that anybody who placed such an ad would be in the very same boat with us, and hardly in the position to cast the first stone.
SHEILA: People in the same boat shouldn’t cast the first stone — is that what you’re trying to say?
PAUL: Ouch! Sorry about that. But I think you get the point. As a matter of fact, sooner or later quite a few swingers will have that weird experience of getting a contact through the mails from another couple they never thought of as swingers. There are just so many people involved in swapping that it has to happen now and then.
JWW: Has it happened to you?
PAUL: Twice, both times when we had an ad of ours answered by casual acquaintances. One time we met the couple and swung with them, and the other time they were people who didn’t appeal to us and we never answered the letter. So it’s possible that it happened more than once — we could have answered ads and had acquaintances of ours fail to answer.
SHEILA: But we appeal to everybody, sweets.
PAUL: Be that as it may.
SHEILA: To get back to where we were, we finally decided that we were being stupid, but we felt it still might be a good idea to be somewhat indirect about getting acquainted. If nothing else, there was still the problem of entrapment by the Post Office finks. There was also a certain amount of danger in writing to a professional associate of Paul’s. Even if somebody else would have as much to lose from that sort of exposure, we felt nervous about giving anyone that kind of power over Paul’s career. Sending out a photograph of me was all right — not that many of Paul’s business friends had even met me. And Paul could be in the picture, too, just by turning his head so his face wouldn’t be recognizable. But we wanted to avoid putting our names on line, or our addresses.
PAUL: We thought about a Post Office box under a phony name, until we realized how completely insane that would be if there were Post Office inspectors involved. And we also considered using a false name and giving no address, just our phone number. In fact we wrote out a few letters with that in mind but didn’t mail them. For one thing, we would be letting people about whom we knew nothing have a chance to call us up any time they wanted to. You can’t tell anything from an ad, and the last thing you would want to do is turn your telephone number over to a telephone pervert. Also, we weren’t all that sure that somebody couldn’t find out who we were from our telephone number. Information won’t give out that data, and they’ll tell you they don’t have it filed that way, but that’s nonsense. The police can always get it. As a matter of fact, it would be virtually impossible for the telephone company to establish any sort of data-processing system without listing customers by their phone numbers. And if the information exists, then the Post Office people could get it if they wanted to, and we were really leery of that.
SHEILA: You wouldn’t believe the things we worried about it. And the precautions we took.
PAUL: Imagine a couple where the wife wears a diaphragm and jelly and takes the Pill, and the husband wears three condoms, and then they sleep in separate beds and don’t screw. That’s how careful we tried to be about the damned thing.
SHEILA: All the tabloids had ads from secret mail-forwarding services. For so much a week or so much a letter they would forward your mail. But we didn’t see any reason to trust them, either. I have a criminal mind, as you may have noticed, and it occurred to me that if I wanted a very simple way to get into the blackmailing business for fun and profit, why all I would have to do was open a mail-forwarding operation and read the mail before forwarding it. I don’t suppose the average person in that racket even bothers, actually, but it was enough to scare us off.
PAUL: After all this buildup, what we did is going to sound anticlimactic. I used an alias, and as an address I gave the street address of a third-rate downtown hotel. After the letters were in the mail, I stopped at the hotel one afternoon, gave my false name to the clerk, and slipped him a couple of bucks to look out for any mail that came for me. Of course I started dropping by too soon. The clubs have to forward your letters, and sometimes they take their sweet time, and the mails are often slow, and the people who place the ads are sometimes simply deluged with correspondence, and even if they intend to answer a certain letter it may be some time before they get around to it. Once you get into the swim of things these delays don’t bother you. You have enough letters out at any given time so that you are constantly getting answers and establishing new contacts. We were just beginning and we were impatient to get with it, and so I began checking for my mail a couple of weeks before the first letters trickled in.
SHEILA: We sent out ten letters, each with a photograph enclosed. The pictures were fairly revealing but not obscene in any sense of the word, and we were also careful not to be too outspoken in our letters. We knew that much at least from what we had read. There was not only the legal problem, but we had read that a very frank letter was unlikely to get a reply. It scared off the true swingers.
PAUL: Because they suspected it was from a postal inspector. The Post Office finks are notorious for writing the really raunchy letters.
SHEILA: And also because most swingers, the greater proportion of them, are not interested in meeting really crude people. And anyone who gets too intimate in correspondence with a stranger is either a barbarian or a verbal exhibitionist, and neither is much fun to have around. Incidentally, occasional correspondents will urge us to be more candid in our letters, emphasizing that nothing shocks them and giving an example of their own ability to send original pornography through the mails.