James Wolcott: "Dirk Diggler to the UN?"

[flpoljunkie]

The always amusing James Wolcott, Vanity Fair, on John Bolton and Plato's Retreat...

http://www.jameswolcott.com/

<>Next door to the Latham was the much nicer, pricier Hotel George, where squads of stewardesses (as they were called then) and pilots in their spiffy uniforms dragged their luggage carts down the sidewalk and up the steps with a jauntiness you seldom see now in the deregulated, demoralized era of aviation. But at some point the Hotel George went south too, and its banquet room became a swingers’ pad, where people paid admittance to have sex with strangers.

It was the heyday of Plato’s Retreat, and a few copycat establishments popped up here and there in the city to catch the overrun, but none had the high visibility and pagan rep of the original pile-on palace, which conjures up an entire lost realm of chest hair, gold medallions, platform shoes, bellbottoms, rubber mats, frizzy Afros on white people, and the birth of porn video. One of my colleagues then at the Village Voice, Michael Tolkin (who went on to become an accomplished, disturbing novelist and screenwriter—The Player is his best-known novel, but his film The Rapture may be his most relevant work today), wrote an inside-tour of Plato’s Retreat that drew a lot of attention. I remember him comparing the sight of swingers humping on the mats to the action of oil pumps in the Texas panhandle, but my memory may be embellishing.

I wonder if during his journalistic tour of duty Tolkin ever came across the now-familiar face and less familiar buttcheeks of Bush’s nominee to the United Nations, John Bolton.

According to a shock claim by Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine, trumpeted on the Raw Story site, Bolton was a paid visitor to Plato’s Retreat, which in the seventies brought together many people of differing viewpoints, penis and bra-cup sizes, much as the United Nations has done since its founding. Perhaps Bolton went (if he indeed went—we must preserve the benefit of doubt) for the excellent buffet, of which the owners of Plato’s Retreat always expressed pride. I understand the conversations in the buffet line could get quite racy. ("Hey, this salad dressing tastes funny...") Or perhaps it was the aromatic atmosphere he couldn’t resist as he padded around in a white towel and flipflops. According to one former enthusiast, "One of the things I'll never never never forget -I think it was Plato's Retreat - it was walking in and having a waft of red energy, but it had no thorns in it, everyone was there consenting to be there. Everyone was there for the same purpose. It was so hot and so heavy."

It doesn't matter now what his motives were as long as he kept his whistle clean and followed the punctilios of swingers’ etiquette (i.e., no climbing aboard without permission from whomever’s at the bottom of the pile). I just hope Bolton didn’t try to browbeat his wife into sharing his boogie-nights bacchanals, much as senatorial candidate Jack Ryan was alleged to have done to his former wife, the divine Jeri Ryan, whom many of us will always treasure as Star Trek: Voyager’s catsuitted 7 of 9.

[yellowcanine]

1. "swingers’ etiquette (i.e., no climbing aboard without permission from

whomever’s at the bottom of the pile). Heh.