KOI 01: Eight Arms to Hold You

Editor's Note: You Make My Wife! Rich and Becca's Early Adventures in Whitebread Swinging Along Highway 70

1970-1975

Rich and Rebecca Cratylus were born into the first generation of whitebread, conventionally middle-class Americans to assimilate into the post-Pill, media-celebrated "Sexual Revolution" of the Twentieth Century. Working from their experiences in the already-established, free-and-easy Post-War teen socio-sexual milieu (try typing all those hyphens fast!), by the simple virtue of not thinking too hard about it, they established an open, polyamorous marriage which danced awkwardly with both "swinging" and "hip" scenes "along the Interstate" as they followed Rich's academic career in the Midwest of the Seventies and early Eighties.

"Couples Off the Interstate" ("KOI") compiles a series of autobiographical sketches Rich wrote between 1988 and 1991, for a small set of ex-urban adventurers affiliated with an ailing evangelical pastor and small-town politician who had availed upon the Cratylus couple to serve, therapeutically, his shy but sex-starved wife. The editor toyed with the subtitle "Dank Erotic Memoirs" to better reflect the intent of the writing. Much of it is indeed dank: unpleasantly moist and humid; damp; often chilly. Not all of these reports are likely to "score" highly in Literotica rankings. Cratylus does not shy from depicting the disappointment of a dud encounter, or the sense of monotonous resignation that can accrue to a dedicated pursuit of pleasure. His patriarchal Boomer objectification can be infuriating. But a dedicated reader may appreciate the slow reveal of a unique character in a peculiar place and time.

The first section of KOI, You Make My Wife! (KOI 01 to 19) was mostly prepped for publication by Rich Cratylus, before he became discouraged by the poor prospects for literary "erotica" in the Space-Age VCR era. I have compiled the last two sections of the series, editing lightly for the sake of continuity. I have also tried to edit to conform to contemporary publication standards: All the characters are assuredly of "legal age" in your community, and the reader is advised to keep them that way.

Indeed, as I used Rich's background material to confirm in person the birth dates of most people mentioned, it was recommended to me by several people that we should confirm that This book is indeed a complete work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Also, nobody has ever even remotely heard of anyone named "Rich Cratylus."

Rich Cratylus died suddenly in 2015.

--Riickery Thorjhandar

Author's Apology

Amateur video must be incredibly frustrating to members of the professional porn community. Here are all these artists and craftspeople, expending budgets in the six figures. They stage formal exercises that try to push the envelope of sexual experience. They develop philosophical rationales for behavior and even make up plots in an effort to create Erotic Art. And then along comes a huge number of giggling, whitebread nonprofessionals, using equipment designed to record Christmas mornings and family vacations, and their thumping projects carve a deep hunk out of the market that was meant to belong to serious workers.

It would seem that a lot of consumers enjoy whitebread sex. Perhaps a lot of them are bored by formal exercises and philosophic rationalizations. They want to explore sex as performed by people like themselves, people whose instincts are not much different from those which have kept the human race burgeoning all down the eons. Normal, not far from mindless, instincts.

These memoirs are meant to be the semiliterary equivalent of amateur video. The chapters are episodic, largely self-contained, and generally they cut to the bed or the backseat as quickly as possible, after giving the reader some idea of the life situations and the erotic personalities of the nonprofessional participants who are involved. Like life itself, like sex in life itself, there is no exciting narrative to string together the events that are recounted. At the time, the events themselves were exciting enough.

You Make My Wife! recounts the early period of my connubial adventures with Becca. There are some additional chapters which should alert the reader that this volume is but the middle of my personal, Casanovian catalog of experience. That catalog opened in my teens, in the mid-Sixties. After twenty years of lazy couplings just within the outskirts of what the media and the sex commentators have chosen to call "the swinging community," my wife and I fell prone to age and domestic simplicity. In the course of our career we racked up no great numbers, met no spectacular personalities, developed no theories as to the deeper meaning of our recreational and social activities. We developed friendships along the lines of common interests, including sex among our interests. One such friendship has been maintained continuously for almost fifteen years, now, and it is the only one that remains sexually active to this day. The rest are memories, and we are content to hold them dear without adding to their store.

You Make My Wife! is an admittedly silly title that also acknowledges my failure to adequately reveal Becca's person and her motives in joining me on the chase for more and the same sexual experiences. My only excuse is that these memoirs are, quite explicitly, the memoirs of an unreflective male. Marriage is long, swinging's brief. I accept it as my prerogative as author to focus mainly on my partners in recreation, whether they be my wife in recreational mode or one of her friends. I'll leave it up to the reader to make my wife more fully than these writings attempt to do. Most male readers will doubtless accept her as she's found in primal erotic context.

In primal erotic context, Becca's always been happy to be made.

--Rich Cratylus, October 29, 1991

Eight Arms to Hold You in Belleville

1970-71

Okay, then, you make my wife.

Imagine the hottest-looking midsized more-or-less Caucasian brunette this side of friendly. Latina, Mediterranean, Semitic, NASCAR Circle, Dutch-Cherokee, ' don't matter. Be sure the looks are designed for durability and long life -- this is a wife you're making. Be sure there's minimal sag potential, and a clear tan complexion all over. Okay. Make her a sort of sporty motormouth -- ' can't have perfection, and what good's "perfection," anyway? And give her the sort of athletic hormonal mix that's, hell, almost male for its ability to get up to speed real quick.

And there you got Becca.

Becca's my Irish family's nickname for her, readily accepted by my Bavarian-Injun girlfriend. She will also answer to Becky, but she's "Rebecca" only on her tax forms or in her red "Mudhoney" wig.

Becca features in my sexual history from an early stage, in pretty straightforward ways that will show up in due course. She comes from a large family of rural Southern Illinois farm- and working-class Germans that's always carried its share of naughty uncles, but which really seemed to blossom (or bottom out) with Becky's generation. A whole lotta shakin's been going on along Highway 3 since the late Fifties, and there's usually a cousin or two of Becky's involved, mostly to no good account.

Becky's inherited the family's instincts. Though not usually the one to take the lead, Becca's erotic personality is upfront, and she shows an open, unforced appreciation of sexual varieties. Her speed of arousal is incredible, once the promise of consummation is evident. When she was younger, consummation was the usual focus of her activity... consummation, to the exclusion of almost everything else. She practically had to be taught the arts of foreplay. If there's a female equivalent of premature ejaculation, Becca was a proud, drippy owner of the condition... seldom a real big problem for her partners. Orgasm still comes wonderfully fast, and frequently, for Becca. Becca's been a godsend, forming a healthy, monogamic base on which we can both cook new and various erogenous gumbos. And frankly, looking at the careers of some of Becky's cousins, she'd have been ruined if she'd tried to adopt conventional patterns of social form and behavior with a more conventional hubby. Yup, we been good for each other.

I met Becca in the fall of 1970. She was "eighteen", I was nineteen. The two of us were doubledating blind with Becca's sister and my friend Danny. Before meeting Becca, I met the boyfriend she'd just split from. He informed me Becky was easy, but good looking. Um, I said. I met her at her door, introducing myself as a peddler of over-the-curb pharmaceuticals. Becca says it was lust at first sight. We were rather embarrassing our fellow daters by the end of the evening.

Commitment came a bit later. Well, I'll tell you how, maybe. It was kind of fun. Every other Friday or so, I commuted from the college town of Kaw Valley to St Louis, home, and Becca, and we'd take Becca's ancient Bonneville to the East Side Drive In for the triple feature. About the third or fourth Friday night commute, I was met at Becca's house by this Li'l Abner kind of guy, huge. Abner claimed, friendly like, that Becky had agreed to a date with him some weeks before. But seeing as I had come up that weekend she'd convinced him maybe a double date with her friend Connie would be okay. Okay?

Okay, Abner said, I'll flip you for which one of us goes with Connie tonight.

I won Connie.

Now, Connie was a pale blonde from a pretty gene pool. She'd dropped out of school to have her first kid, then the guy, you know, he run off. On the East Side, the folks have a set of strong family values that let young girls take this sort of occurrence more or less in stride.

Anyway, Connie wasn't much of a talker; we let Becca and Abner talk in the front seat of the Bonneville while communicating more quietly, we hoped, in the back. I was getting the satisfying feeling that maybe Ab was regretting the coin toss idea, but I realized during the last twenty minutes or so of A Man Called Horse that, though I'd gotten in some good licks at the start, Ab and I were coming even in the end.

As the last reel rolled off... ("Remember to Turn On Your Lights!")... Abner nuzzled up to Becca. "Can I see you again, sometime, hon?" he asked.

"No," said Becca, miserably.

As for Connie, she was just asleep next to lonesome me.

After that night, Becca and I knew we were in love. Mutual confessions were in order. Becca and I Talked, the next day. Connie made me do it, I insisted. Sure, said Becca, and my finish to A Man Called Horse was only my revenge.

I lied about Connie, I said.

I lied about the "only" part, Becca said.

Oh, What Was Wrong with Our Love?

*****

One of the great arguments against Contemporary Education is, it's made people unwilling to leave questions like the last one well enough alone. Talk, talk, talk, that's all they do, 'til they're so miserable they "act" on something just to back up all their talk, and wind up feeling worse than ever. Becca and I just followed our instincts, which were terribly unprogrammatic and basically monogamous until the time we watched Help! on teevee with Brad and Roxy the following spring.

Roxy worked with Becca at the office job she'd taken right after high school. Brad was in the last stages of some paramedic program at Belleville Area Junior College. They were our age and they'd shacked up together over the loud objections of Roxy's mother. Brad and Roxy shared this pretty nice bungalow in Belleville with some young peg-legged guy and his girlfriend.

Roxanne had a long blonde body, seemingly clad always in old blue jeans, old soft leather shoes, old blue plaid flannel shirt. She had a round cheerful face saved from plainness by a very luxurious mouth and by her general animation. Also, her bluegray eyes were characterized by a sort of sexy, lazily contemplative light. The comfortable eyes, lids touched lightly with shadow, created an inviting contrast to her otherwise lively expression and movement. The eye shadow, and occasionally some candylike scent, were Roxy's sole concessions to the cosmetic industry. Her round nose while not large was still prominent, given her small round chin. Her blonde hair was usually pulled casually back and tied at the nape of her neck, falling from there three-quarters of the way down her lean back.

Brad would have shared Roxy's after-work clothes with her, except for his height... about 6'3". I thought he was a pretty good looking guy. His face was long, with square bone structure, long straight nose, and a mouth that I'd call "cruel" if it wasn't misleading about the guy's character in fact. The color of his eyes and of his shoulder-length hair matched Roxy's.

By the winter of '71 I'd moved back to my parents' house to attend school in St Louis, and it was Becca's and my custom to spend an evening with Brad and Roxy every week or two. Sometimes Brad and Roxy's co-renters were there, sometimes not. Usually we just sat around killing time, the four of us, consuming jug wine, watching teevee, smoking weed when we had it, baking cookies, playing games and talking...

One Friday night in early spring Roxy and Brad and Becca and I did all of these things together, in moderation, preparing for a grand event: the first appearance of Help! on teevee. For our viewing comfort amid the clutter of furniture in the living room, Roxy had rolled out a light, wide homemade mattress, a sort of futon, in front of the teevee set.

As movietime neared, the waterpipe made another round, or two, around the kitchen table. As the little ritual was performed, the glances between the four of us were maybe a touch more lingering than usual. Roxy's eyes on me, and her lazy smile, were alluring. But the reason for the allure, of course, was right under my nose. I took a hit, and mooned back at her. We all laughed, and Becca caught my hand.

"Mygod! The movie's started!" We grabbed our little round undergraduate wine glasses and stumbled into the livingroom.

The futon, though long, was a tight squeeze for four people. We filled it, boy-girl-girl-boy, propping ourselves against the old sofa behind us. (Only someone my present age would ask why we all weren't sitting on the sofa.) Roxy produced a crocheted comforter that was almost the length of the futon, and we huddled inside it against the slight damp chill of the floor. Eventually, the furnace would kick in.

Although we'd missed the credits, we were soon engrossed in the film. But it became evident that something else was going on in the room. Strange to describe. My arm was around Becca's shoulders, the back of my hand against Roxy's arm. Through that slight contact, Roxy's presence registered troublingly, somewhere, uh, in the upper right rear corner of my cerebrum. Then Roxy's candy perfume was floating about the room, mingling with Becca's sharper workday scent. Roxy seemed to lean into me, or rather, into Becca. She pulled her legs up, cradling her knees in her arms. Becca spread her legs, probably touching Brad's foot, accidentally. Roxy was rocking slightly against me, or rather, against Becca, or rather, against Brad.

At the commercial, Brad jumped up with a little huff of irritation, or relief, or something, and ambled out to the kitchen to refill his glass. He came back into the living room with the jug, offering to fill our glasses. As he attended to Becca, he looked at her with a mixture of irritation and... something else. Becca gulped down her wine in one draw and followed Brad to the kitchen as he returned the jug. Roxy looked at me with her waterpipe smile, raised her eyebrows, paused, shrugged humorously as if to say...

The next ten minutes were restless ones. Each one of us tried various sprawls and flops upon the mattress. Nothing seemed to relieve the curious tension we each seemed to feel, individually. Everything seemed to amplify the presence of the others in the room. At the commercial, it was my turn to leave the room, headed for the bathroom.

"Next!" said Becca at the door as I left the bathroom and returned to the mattress. I sat down next to Roxy.

"Next!" said Brad in the hallway as Becca quit the bathroom.

Roxy and I were conversing or exchanging a long look or something. Becca entered the room and we both turned our gaze on her and smiled. Becca flicked an odd quick "polite" smile at us both and sat down on the other side of me. We heard Brad opening the bathroom door.

"Next!" yelled Roxy. But she didn't move.

Brad sat on the sofa on Roxy's side. From the floor, Roxy curled her arm around his right leg. Becca stood up to reseat herself in the other corner of the sofa. She drew up her legs to the cushions and reached down to find my hand. I moved to the center of the futon and rested my head on Becca's feet. Roxy and I were arm to arm on the futon. Hip to hip. Thigh to thigh. Playfully, we linked arms. I could feel Roxy's wonderful breathing! Becca squeezed my hand. Roxy and I let go of one another, and we both jumped to the sofa and attacked our real partners. Then Roxy and I jumped back down again. Brad and Becca moved closer together on the sofa. Roxy and I were on our backs, our heads propped up on the feet of our partners, just well enough to view the teevee screen.

The four of us drifted through the next commercial. The strange tension gradually returned. The movie was itself turning into an annoying distraction. But a distraction from what?

We watched teevee.

Roxy and I, lying so close together, naturally shifted our weight against one another from time to time. I could feel the slight pressure of her flesh easing along one part of her body, and then her muscles tightening, ever so slightly, somewhere else. From time to time, these little moves seemed to be sending a patterned message. Interested, I would try to return the pattern through my own flesh. Above us on the sofa, Brad and Becca were also making small, not-quite-comfortable moves. Roxy and I sensed their odd discomfort. And we watched teevee some more.

We watched more teevee.

More teevee.

Teevee.

"Oh hell," said Roxy. "It's obvious we all want one another, so why don't we just do it?"

A wave of relief filled the room. Three murmurs of assent.

"Wait," said Brad.

"Wait," he said, "I really like this part, where Ringo goes up to the old guy and ..."

Becky kneed Brad in the groin. Softly.

*****

I was to Roxy's lips without sensing the intervening moments. Brad and Becca had left the room in silence, shadows. Roxy's candy scent suddenly filled my head. Her plush, soft lips were suddenly the sweetest I'd ever kissed. I was lying prone beside her, supporting myself on my elbows and holding her by her rangy, flannel-clad shoulders. Roxy held onto me with a confidence I hadn't sensed in her before.

The television's sound had been turned off, but the picture still flickered, adding its light to the two votive candles on the low table next to our futon. The soft blue shimmer of teevee illuminated Roxy's white throat, her breasts, her midriff, her belly, as I unfastened each button of her blue plaid shirt. Even to me, this exercise seemed endless. I whiled away the time by kissing lightly and tasting whatever area I had just exposed. Roxy had already unbuttoned me, and lay gently massaging my shoulders, smiling down at me with languorous eyes. When I'd finished the job of unbuttoning, we both shifted ourselves and shrugged off our shirts. Then our pants, underwear; me my socks.