PART THREE

All,
So I was about to walk up to the cabin and change for dinner when Manflesh, Candy and Malcolm appeared by the pool and started doing a scene about ten yards from where I was sitting. Malcolm was standing behind Candy, pulling her hair and biting her neck as Manflesh slapped her tits from the front. To my horror, Manflesh pulled out an ornate pocketknife that looked like a miniature scimitar. He crouched down, pulled up Candy's skirt and ran the blade over her exposed vagina. Candy was moaning and thrashing around; for a second, I couldn't tell if she was actually being cut or not. I was about to pass out. Manflesh looked over at me and smiled. I fumbled for my cellphone and had a pretend conversation while looking hard into the woods in the other direction. There was no way I was going to get involved in this scene. When I pretended to hang up, Manflesh was striding toward me. "You can get a decent signal here?" "Er, yeah," I said unconvincingly. "That's amazing — you must be the only one who can. May I borrow your phone for just a second?" I gave him my phone, thinking that I had been caught out. Miraculously, it worked, and Manflesh handed it back to me with a smile. Phew! "It's time for dinner," he said. Shellshocked, I followed him, Malcolm and Candy to the dining hall.
    On the ride down, Manflesh had told me to keep my expectations low about the camp cuisine. But dinner was actually quite enjoyable: two different types of salad, gammon steak baked with pineapple, sauteéd potatoes, mixed winter vegetables and orange sherbet for dessert. I sat with Manflesh and the others I'd met outside his cabin. During dinner, camp announcements are made by one of the event's organizers, the extremely charismatic Vincent.
    Vincent has the best voice I've ever heard. He sounds like a slightly lower Lee Marvin. But announcements about general conduct depress the hell out of me, even when they're delivered with a sub-bass cowboy drawl. "Do not have any open flame within ten feet of your cabin. Please clean up after yourself. We are not your mother," etc. Then Vincent started talking about his giant dick. You see, cabin decoration is one of the events at leather camp. A grand prize is offered at the end of the weekend. Vincent's cabin had been festooned with a four-foot inflatable penis that disappeared on the first night, and the the theme of its return has worked its way into Vincent's nightly dinner shtick. "A seventeen-cent reward for the return of my big dick," he drawls. The diners erupted in laughter and applause.
    I got up to leave and somehow got introduced to a couple in their forties. We shook hands, and in a Southern drawl the woman said, "I just love your accent! Bill, don't you just love his lil' accent? Say where are Ginny and Todd now? Bris-bane?"
    "Cranbara," the man replies.
    "Mel-borne?" she continues.
    "It's Cranbara."
    "Cairns?" the couple went on to explain the finer points of the vacation on which they visited the Great Barrier Reef, Ayres Rock, Alice Springs, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, saw crocodiles in the wild and visited an aboriginal village. Before I could get a word in, the husband was trying his best to pull his wife away. "I'm sorry, Greg, will you excuse us?" said the woman apologetically. Not having the heart to tell them I wasn't, in fact, Australian, I offered them a hearty, "No worries, mate!" and made a break.
    More and more people are arriving at camp, and the fervor is growing. I really got the feeling that people were grateful for the opportunity to come to leather camp. Old friends were being reunited all around me, catching up on subjects ranging from home improvement to the differences in the campsite from last year to this.
    I snuck back to the cabin to put in a call to my girlfriend. A gent I recognized from the pool was pouring himself a stiff drink on the bed next to mine. "Name's Dan," he said, extending his hand. "Havin' fun yet?"
    "Oh sure." I said.
    "Ready for some vodka and ice?" he asked.
    "Yep!" I said. Dan filled up half a sixteen-ounce cup with Absolut and threw in a little ice. "See, I come from a long line of white-water rafters who say, "If you've survived the day, drink your ass off." Dan told me that he was an 743-trip veteran, rafting was "the biggest fucking rush imaginable."
    I submerged my lips in the vodka.
    Later, it was Fantasy Island night down at the swimming pool. The area was decked out Hawaiian-style: tiki torches, leis, fake palm trees, attendees in hula skirts and coconut bras. To rapturous applause, Vincent and another staff member arrived on a golf cart dressed as Mr. Roark and Tattoo. Vincent took a stick from his bag. "What's this, Tattoo?"
    "De cane, Boss! De cane!"
    The crowd lost it.
    When you're in the countryside, the setting sun is the harbinger of lonesomeness. By nine o'clock, dinner had come and gone. Manflesh and his friends were nowhere to be seen; I had no one to talk to. I looked out at the crowd and saw people laughing, hanging out, embracing. What's wrong with me? I thought. Why don't I fit in? Leaving camp was expressly forbidden. I started thinking about what all you guys were up to, back home. It was at this point that I left those long, rambling voicemails. Sorry about that. I couldn't get Arthur's Theme and the opening credits from Taxi out of my head. Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but in less than twelve hours I had become terribly homesick.
    It was then that a cute blonde girl, early twenties, ran across the pool area to join in the limbo competition. I decided this would be my chance to make a connection. The limbo music started, and in front of 200 onlookers, me and fifteen others got ready to compete.
    The cute girl was destined to win; that was clear from the start. She had captured the hearts and minds of the audience the moment she decided to remove an item of clothing every time she went under the bar. After the rest of us had been eliminated, she battled it out with a six-foot-four woman for supremacy. At that point, the blonde girl was totally naked, and the crowd shifted position to get a better view of her coochie as she made the winning pass. I stood near her pile of discarded clothes, which facilitated our meeting. She came up and shook my hand. "You were great out there!" I said. She was in no hurry to put her clothes back on, even in the chilly night air. "Thanks so much!" she said. "I'm a performer, a huge exhibitionist and I'm also very supple. Wanna beer?" She produced two Coronas from her book bag. Her name was Amanda; she was twenty. Still naked, she chatted with me for a while.
    Amanda beckoned some friends over and introduced me to them. They were a coed group in their twenties and thirties who weren't scary at all. "Oh oh oh!" said Amanda, flapping her arms around. "It's time for S'mores by the campfire!" We rushed down the hill to a small lake, where a roaring fire was under way.
    I've noticed that "virgin" is a word everyone likes to throw around here. The standard questions about what I was into identified me as a virgin. In fact, I was the virgin. Around the campfire, Amanda and her friends were conspiring.
    "Are you into pain?" they asked me.
    "Absolutely not," I replied.
    "How about some light bondage?"
    Like lite cream and lite salad dressing, lite bondage sounded a lot less hazardous to my health. "Um, okay."
    "Goodie!" said Amanda, clapping.
    "Why don't we take him to the dungeon?" asked Sandra.
    Resistance was futile. Arm in arm, they led me to their cabin, where they picked up some toys, then we jumped in a golf cart and went to the dungeon. It was really chilly out, but I think my uncontrollable shivering was due more to nerves than anything else. De-virginizing people like me seemed to be a real treat for Amanda and Sandra. They could barely contain their excitement.
    The dungeon was actually a gymnasium fitted with swings, suspension bars, stocks and a contraption in the shape of an X that people can be tied to. As we entered, a woman screamed as her "play partner" used a lighter and aerosol can to send massive plumes of fire toward her body. Elsewhere, a man pressed a woman's feet back to her shoulders while another gent slapped her vagina. Amanda and Sandra brought me to a padded table at the back of the dungeon. They told me to strip down to my boxers, then put a blindfold on me and cuffed me securely to the table.
    Screams were coming from all corners of the room. Being blindfolded, I could only vaguely guess what was causing them. For the next twenty minutes, the girls gently flogged me, ran their nails over my skin and tickled me with an oversized feather. It was about this time that I heard a third female voice hovering somewhere above me. One of my arms was cut loose, and I removed the blindfold. It was one of the girls from Amanda's crew. She started "topping" Amanda, putting nipple clamps on her and spanking her bare bum with a paddle. At the end of the scene, i.e., when Amanda couldn't take any more punishment — she was kind of crying and her butt was red raw — we went outside so everyone could have a post-scene cig.
    "Well, what did you think?" Stacy asked.
    "I thought it was very interesting," I said. I wasn't lying. The thing is, that tickling-and-slapping stuff doesn't really do much for me. I'm a hands-firmly-on-the-junk kind of guy. A Luddite, I know.
    After all that activity, I was bushed and ready for bed, but someone came up with the idea of going to the dungeon's group grope room. Basically, it's two adjoining aero beds with some disposable paper play sheets in a box beside. Two guys and a woman were finishing up their scene, dutifully getting dressed and throwing away the paper sheets. Amanda laid out some new ones, and everyone else started making out and stripping off. It was cold, so Amanda left her socks on. Within a few seconds, limbs were entwined in an eight-person clusterfuck. The people involved were arguably the youngest, leanest and most attractive at Leather Camp, and within a few minutes a number of people put down their toys and piled into the room.
    "Join in!" said Stacy, giving me a saucy wink and tugging at my pant leg. Mindful of my girlfriend, I inched to the back of the room to check out the scene with the other onlookers. I wasn't aroused, exactly; more grateful to be included in the scene. There was no slapping, flogging, hot wax or anything of that nature, just a good, old-fashioned orgy: eight people looking to put the right parts in the correct places. Fifteen minutes later, it downsized into something that looked more like a group grope. "Aftercare," as it's known: following a scene, people reassure each other with cuddles and kisses. It kind of says, "Although I spent the past hour breaking your skin and calling you a filthy little whore, it was just pretend. We were just playing!"
    I said goodbye to the rest of the group and headed back to my cabin. A few of the beds are occupied, but some of my cabin mates are still out doing scenes. It's about 1:30, and I've been told to turn the light out.

More tomorrow,
Grant.