Hammer Time, All the Time

Mandingo! producer Will Fairman (left) gets involved in the romance at the Shangri Lust party house.

I don’t know if any of you are planning on going to Florida for holidays, but I strongly advise against going to any of the places mentioned in this article unless you are of a certain proclivity. All will become clear soon.

I recently spent a week in the Sunshine State, sitting in an enormous American car next to an ex-marine called Art Hammer as he took me on a tour of sex hotels, bad restaurants and beach towns that would really benefit from a 12-foot rise in sea level.

Art is the leader of three groups with amazing names. They are The Dark Cavern Real Players Club, Hot Chocolate Parties Club and, best of all, The Florida Mandingo Society. For those of you not familiar with the term “mandingo”, it was popularised in the American plantations when black people were employed as slaves to pick rich white people’s cotton. If you were among the biggest and toughest of the slaves, then you were allegedly called a “mandingo” and you were supposed to have had a secret affair with the plantation owner’s trophy wife.

Art’s mandingos are a crew of black men who are becoming a big name in one of the American south’s fastest-growing fetishes, which is interracial swinging and cuckoldery. And so if you’re a white man living in Florida and desperate to see your wife gangbanged by up to 12 black men at once, then you need to have Art on your phone, your Facebook, Skype and G-chat, for that is the service he provides.

A view of the courtyard from the top floor of the Rooftop Motel swinger’s club in Hollywood Beach, Miami.

After introducing ourselves over the internet, Art agreed to let myself and a VBS camera crew spend a week with him, learning about the scene, meeting his crew, interviewing the couples, hitting swingers’ hotels and attending the “Hot Chocolate” parties he throws in hotel suites and private orgy houses all over Florida.

We met Art at his friend’s house in the suburbs of Fort Lauderdale, which is one of the stupidest cities I’ve ever been to. Nowhere this uncharismatic deserves as macho a preposition as “Fort”—it’s as bland and unpleasant as Brent Cross Shopping Centre on the hottest day in hell. It’s known as a “Spring break Mecca”, but as we approached Art’s temporary pad, down the endlessly curving suburban roads, it just looked like the place the living dead go to die.

Angel (right) is the CEO of Midnight Zone mandingo club and Art Hammer’s protege; this lady is his girlfriend.

When you’re in somewhere that dull, you suddenly understand why kids in the States go around smashing mailboxes and shooting everybody in the school cafeteria. Perhaps it’s the same reason swinging has embedded itself so successfully here as a thriving baby-boomer counter culture with an endless spirograph of subgenres.

Art’s mate wouldn’t let us film him because he was a shy swinging policeman, but he did let us hang out with Art in his sitting room. It was decorated straight from a catalogue (down to the fake fruit) and it had a wall-mounted TV the size of Wessex.

Art began the crew after he met his mentor, a legendary interracial gangbang party promoter called Doo-Rag Bob. From Doo-Rag he learned the secrets of how to run a successful interracial gangbang franchise.

Clockwise from top left: A sex chair in one of the Rooftop Motel playrooms; Larry and Charlotte from Shangri Lust; Cuckold Dave enjoys the action; the author with Art Hammer.

It seems to have worked. In the last two years Art’s mandingos have taken over Floridian swinging. They’re not prostitutes, but if you buy a ticket for a Dark Cavern Real Players Club party, you can pretty much guarantee that you’re going to be getting to know these guys quite intimately during the evening (women only, but guys can watch).

And so, over the course of the week, we hung out with Art every day while he told us about the lifestyle he lived and planned a 48-hour interracial gangbang at a private house in Fort Meyers, Florida.

During that week we travelled all around the Sunshine State meeting mandingos, swingers, sex therapists and a strip-bar owner who pointed a shotgun at us in a car park. We discovered exotic local cuisine at a place called Cheeseburger In Paradise, whose menu boldly declares: “Finally! The taste of our Buffalo Chicken Wings in the form of a cheeseburger”. (We licked the plate clean.)

Dave’s wife Jazzy makes use of Shangri Lust’s lapdancing pole, which is atop a white grand piano in the bar area, by the entrance to the orgy room and Caribbean buffet

One of the more notable locations we visited was in Hollywood Beach, Miami. It was a swingers’ hotel called The Rooftop, who gave us reduced rates for the night so we’ll be as polite about it as possible: it was like someone built a nursing home for perverts inside a rapist’s arsehole.

There were PVC beds and sex-swings and huge mirrors and TVs showing porn that was made in the early 90s playing all night long. Our room smelled of poppers and the doors didn’t lock. There were nude, fat 45-year-old men wandering the balconies at 3 AM.

We couldn’t sleep in there without getting drunk so we wandered into a nearby bar. A Mexican boy let Andy Capper ­­­­beat him at pool and then asked him if he fancied a walk on a beach. A Vietnam vet took a shine to me at the bar and wanted to take me outside to see his gun. It quickly became clear we were being cruised and/or being set up to be robbed at gunpoint, so we went back to our rooms with the single naked fat men wearing thongs standing outside our window.

The next day we drove five hours through biblical rain while the radio played “MC Hammer” by Rick Ross about 28 times. The 48-hour interracial gang bang was awaiting us and we couldn’t wait to get involved. Maybe they’d have some more weird-flavoured cheeseburgers or something.