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
