I i Orgy Palace relatively few lovers, with long spaces in between, and she went to an analyst because she felt shitty । cbout herself. “ But this is better than any analyst. I wanna do more than just learn how to survive. I want to live. After Plato's, I feel I have s lived.’ ’ j So many happy people at Plato’s, I > despaired of turning up a single wretched soul. As the night wore on, however, I became increasingly aware of something hostile, indeed, J of a near-pervasive anger hidden in i the atmosphere of Plato’s Retreat. | That.it should have eluded me for hours is not surprising. When you 1 first descend into the Plato’ s den, the visual impact is at once overwhelming and acutely frustrating. । Your eyes bounce around like pint balls, racking up a score of sex > scenes. But you can’t really take anything in. Your senses have jammed. Your instantly numb eyes register the startling images in an । exasperatingly superficial, abstrac- [ ted way. Reality like this is very I intangible. Its like hearing a hit song performed live; the familiar sounds seem to dissolve into a strange nothingness somewhere between ( 1 your ear and brain, somehow experienced as less real than the record. These living fantasy scenes likewise elude sensory acquisition. The whole array goes by you with less grab and i depth than a porno flick. Indeed, it’s > only after you make the curious adjustment of accepting Plato’s as a kind of 3D walk-around movie that you can begin to focus and absorb. The adjustment comes easily, l almost naturally, as P lato ’ s approaches its sprawling, earlymorning climax. As both the lovemakers and I grew more brazen, it became apparent that most of the i blatantly public fucking, the mat- > room, swimming-pool, and dancei floor screwing had a “ fuck you’ ’ edge to it, a hostility directed toward the very audience that had been deliberately engaged. It’s not that these loving couples would have preferred a bit of privacy. They resented being watched, but that resentment was a kind of turn-on, their lovemaking a kinetic scream of defiance. In many of the display couplings one could detect a turning point, a blast-off, when the selfconscious awareness of audience would suddenly shift into a decisive, fiercely aphrodisiac transcendence, a discounting of other people, of the intimidating real world master of public opinion. The presence of watchers isn’t really dissolved by a surrender to ardor. That presence is willfully left behind. Indeed, the tum-on is to continuously be leaving it behind, to explode inhibition in the: face of the inhibitors. The most mind-blowing scene of this kind that I witnessed took place, not in the sauna or pool or orgy room, but, surprisingly, on the dance floor. Two women wen. on the floor, going through some electrifying motions. The glistening, arching bodies, one head buried, the other thrust back, throat taut with pleasure — the sudden body clutches, mouth sweeps, and breast massaging, all executed with expert, inspired technique, had an absorbing, a devouring effect. It was like being drawn, sucked forward by an erotic force field. “ I bet they didn’t even do this in Fifties Cuba," a man next to me marveled through his trance. The women’s energy was ind sputably real, though it had non: of the surrender of passion. These women weren’t caught up in a tornado of love or lust, oblivious to all else. If we hadn’t been there watching they wouldn’t have been on the floor. But it wasn’t mere exhibitionism or theatrics. The women were definitely showing us something, but in both senses of the word, as performance and personal revelation. In an almost frightful way, the theatre was making it more real. You could practically see the public turn-on excite the women to rising pitches of intensity. But the energy had a defiant, almost malignant edge. It was as if the women were getting off on space sculpting a brilliant holograph of that energy, not as something to be joined with and shared, but as a flaming, spiteful statement of fact, a banner in which they wrapped themselves and marked their fiercely private ground. They both required and scorned their audience. As if sensing this, the dancers on the floor discoed with near perfect aloofness around the stretching, rolling, suddenly exploding couple. “ And you want to convey this to the folks in Boston?’ ’ the guy next to me asked, chuckling and shaking his head. Anger was not the only unhappy emotion emanating from many of the Plato love scenes. Along with an intent klatch of onlookers, I watched a black man and white woman execute a tortured essay on racialsexual stereotypes, the woman and the audience pressing for a stud performance, the man straining to meet their expectations. But in the face of his very “ white,” stiff, choppy thrust, you could feel the mutual disappointment, frustration, anxiety, blame, and helplessness take over. Perhaps the least comfortable men were those getting blown. Sitting on lounge chairs, against walls, or simply standing, they would try to channel their self-consciousness into absurd, impassive TV-like stares. They’d never admit it, but these fellows were not having a good time. Nearly as strained and bleak were the scenes precipitated by dawn and the closing time announcement. Hesitant couples, seated for hours, would suddenly decide, almost angrily, to get their money’s worth and fuck. And I watched one woman push herself off a sofa and step out of her panties in a coldly hurried manner that all too clearly read, “ C ’mon, let ’s do it and get it over with.” Ironically, one of the most private and lonely spots in Plato’s is the mat, or “ orgy” room. From a distance, and taken as a whole, the hundredplus bodies look like a complex organism of writhing, shadowy limbs. But take a closer look. It’s not really a single body, but a crisscross of atmospherically discrete twosomes. I had almost hoped for more of an orgy, for the apocalyptic and communal decadence of Sodom and Gomorrah. But if Plato’s marks the American Decline and Fall, it’s only the earliest, most tentative, beginning of the end. It’s more than a matter of isolated twosomes. So many of the people in the mat room, especially those who have just climaxed, lie about with distant, lost, dreadfully thinking faces. They look as if their actions, for the moment at least, have evaporated an entire world. This fantasy-fulfillment business is not to be toyed with. It’s kind of rough on beginners. In a sense, you either have to go all the way, be willing to endlessly conjure and act out your own fantasy realities, or settle for the steady reality of name and place. To go halvsies is to constantly undermine yourself. The only way you can hope to manage it is to utterly dissociate what happens at Plato’s from the life to be lived outside. Nothing must carry over. “ When you leave here,” Larry Levenson stressed, “ you go back to society, you go back to the PTA, the churches, and you forget this place. You have to.” Maybe not forgetting is the next stage, the final, insane decadence, when Plato’s spills out into the street, self and reality fully released in favor of fantasy and the void. For many of today’s mat-room revelers, however, that void is a terrible, scary place. Almost all Platoites strike an * everything is cool” pose when asked how they feel about Plato’s. But on the mats, in that post-orgasm stillness, you can see them suffering the complexities of the scene and their participation in it, mutely worrying, like forlorn souls about to go up in smoke. Levenson’ s injunction notwithstanding, it is virtually impossible to annul one’s experience of plato’s, to leave it behind and reenter the same old world. Indeed, the full impact of the place doesn’t hit you until you’ve left it. You’ve only been gone nine or ten hours, but you’ve gone so far, light years beyond the furthest reaches of customary, surface behavior, that when you come back, step out into New York’s Broadway dawn, it is not the same old world. The first strange jolts are supplied by people. Such is the cross-section at Plato’s, that virtually every face you see can be visualized there. The women who stride past on the street seem curiously absurd, their sexuality at once flaunted and withheld like an advantage, a secret to be hinted at but never fully seen by the likes of you and you and you. You want to say, “ Drop it babe, you have been seen, and not against your will be a Peeping Tom, but by your own hungry consent.” But it’s not just women and it’s not just sex. Everyone seems to carry a transparent public posture: head cocked against the world, protectively aloof, warily disdainful, unwilling to disclose a nuance of anything besides a together self-sufficiency. Laughable pretenders, all of them. You’ve seen them too, without the veil, grasping frenetically after a fantasy release, going down under the slipping sands of identity. But it’s not just people either, or rather, it’s all the things that people have built, everything disclosing a different quality after Plato’s — the ancient, iortresslike jail on 73rd, the sleek, forbidding Chemical Bank a block away, even the Bagel Factory on 79th. It’s hard to pinpoint but they all seemed to balance on a different foundation, an energy at once churning and vaporous: cars, horns, lights especially, the clamorous electric brilliance of New York, everything blinking forth the same neural impulse — America — the song of that name; a new world, unweighted by culture and tradition and known life — what else if not a fantasy of lightness and space, and absolute indulgence? We’ve all been hooked by that bottomless promise. Cinderella and Frankenstein, both of them dreams of fresh life, are the true national myths, the inspiration behind Woodstock, beaten into a look-butdon’t-touch disco integrity in the Seventies, and now, perhaps, about to explode into a be-and-doanything-nothing perversion in the Eighties? Plato’s Retreat may be the deepest advance yet toward Orwell’s vision. But, if so, it’ll be an inverse 1984, a social and cultural control that keeps everyone in line by letting everyone jump about to their heart’s content. A “ liberation” that drugs a deeper repression and capitulation. “ Where else can I fuck the boss’ wife?” one gleemy-eyed Platoite challenged. “ Maybe even the boss himself?” Indeed. But with this kind of fantasy fulfillment everything is won and lost. Already the success of Plato’s has inspired a dozen imitators in New York alone. And, as of last month, Plato’s Retreat franchises were being cloned for national distribution in L.A., Detroit and Miami. Odds are, w e ’ ll all be confronted by one sooner or later. Only remember, at Plato’s, you don the mask at the risk of losing your face. reprinted by permission Henry Schipper. KVAn SUIT€ 3231 d= 1 3 0 0 S.W. STH PORTLAAD. ORGGOA 97201 22 3 -6 320 1400 Am VAACOUVGR 8
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