Sex in the Title (13 page)

As if in deference to the ever-present possibility that they too, at some point, might end up like the unhappy people standing around them, Carolina asked Carlos, in an irresistibly childlike way, “Do you think we’ll always be in love, Carlos?”

“Yes,” he replied, with the resounding certainty of scientific fact.

“But…But what about the cigarettes?” she asked, smiling at how absurd the whole issue now seemed.

“We’ll work it out,” he replied, with the same self-conscious smile. “In fact, I figured out a whole compromise while running after you.”

“You did?”

“We’ll go on a two year plan.”

“What do you mean?”

“In two years, you won’t be smoking cigarettes and I won’t have mysophobia.”

“Really?” she asked, her face full of wonder and hope.

“Yeah. I’ll see a therapist. I can beat this thing if you can quit smoking.”

“You can?”

And with that, Carlos smiled at Carolina, and gave her another kiss. He then removed the anti-germ glove from his right hand, inserted his index finger into his mouth just enough to wet the tip. Carolina watched in awe as Carlos turned around and drew a small heart shape on the dirty, dusty subway train window behind them, and then, in the middle, wrote “C+C.”

She smiled dreamily, and the two kissed again as Carlos discreetly wiped his finger against his pants, trying to remove the dirt.

Chapter 8
Evan’s Bad Trip to the Hospital

From the moment Evan passed out to the moment he regained consciousness, his mind drifted like a lifesaver bobbing about on a stormy sea of surreal hallucinations. His strange and oneiric thoughts shifted about in this twilight zone of illusion with the same rhythm as the occasional bumps of the ambulance conveying him to the hospital.

First, he saw his parents sitting next to him in the ambulance. They looked very disappointed.

“Victoria, I told you we should have had another child. Just in case this one turned out to be a letdown.”

“Oh stop it, Frank. He’s a good boy…Aren’t you, Evan? If you would have just listened to us. We told you never to bring girls to the house. This is isn’t a playground. This is a respectable Upper West Side apartment, and we can’t have our neighbors getting the wrong idea about our family.”

“Victoria, that’s not the point. He shouldn’t be starting with girls in the first place. Not before college anyway. Evan, high school is the time to focus on getting into college. Girls are a waste of time right now. Just like all of that creative writing you do. You have to focus your energies on more practical things. Focus on finding yourself a solid career path. Like accounting or law or medicine.”

“Evan, you’re father’s right. Now look what’s happened to you.”

The ambulance slowed down as the cars in front of its whiny siren gradually cleared out.

“Frank, we have to get out of here because I’ve got some spaghetti on the stove.”

Evan’s parents moved to the back of the ambulance and his father opened the rear door for Evan’s mother. She stepped out and his father followed with these parting words: “Sorry to leave you like this, son. But dinner will get cold. We’ll come visit you in the hospital. Victoria, make sure you save some spaghetti for Evan. We’ll bring it to him in the Tupperware.”

As the ambulance began to move again, Evan saw himself surrounded in the back of the vehicle by all of the major characters of that disastrous night: Tina, Sayvyer, Alexandra, her giant Samoan boyfriend, and Brandy and Bonnie.

“Now do you see why I played you like that?” Tina said to him. She turned to the others and continued. “I have to screen guys carefully so that I don’t take home anyone like this.”

“Why didn’t you just write down my phone number, Evan?” Sayvyer asked. “We could have been happily dating by now, instead of sharing this ambulance ride.”

“Don’t be so hard on him, guys. I’m really the one responsible for this mess,” Alexandra began. “None of this would have happened to him, had I not dumped him…I’m so sorry for all of this, Evan. You’re really a great guy, but I just wasn’t feeling it…I needed a change…”

“You should have quit while you were ahead, Evan,” her Samoan boyfriend added. “She said no more charity fucks. That means go home and jerk off. And if you call her again, what happened to you tonight will feel like a bubble bath massage.”

“You shudda just paid fo’ yo’ blowjob, Sexy Evan,” Brandy said. “It wudda been so much better fo’ both of us…You think I liked bitin’ down on that shit?…I kept tryin’ tell you that you get what you pay fo’, but you wouldn’t listen…”

“Forget it, Brandy,” Bonnie said, flipping through Evan’s wallet. “In the end, we got paid with some fat-ass interest. Come on. Let’s get back to the car. I see a payin’ customer waiting for us.”

Bonnie led the way, followed by Brandy. The others filed out of the back of the ambulance, until everyone but Alexandra had exited from the back of the vehicle. She gave him one last word of advice.

“Evan, you really should make up with your buddy Narc. You let a good friendship end over something stupid. And if he had been with you tonight, none of this would have happened.”

She blew Evan a kiss goodbye and then left.

The vehicle remained empty for a few moments, until Delilah Nakova appeared, all alone, in front of Evan, with a bright halo around her.

Delilah Nakova was universally adored as a charming, intelligent, and stunning starlet. Born in Prague to a Czech father and an African-American mother, the exotic, green-eyed, mocha-skinned, five-foot-six actress was discovered at the age of thirteen in the luggage pick-up area of JFK airport, when the Nakova family had arrived in New York City for the first time that Delilah would call it home.

Given Delilah Nakova’s fame, much of her biography was common knowledge. But after randomly running into her at a party about a year and a half earlier, Evan fell obsessively in love with the celebrity and researched virtually every publicly available fact about her.

In the ambulance, floating in front of Delilah Nakova’s angelic face, a hologram-like film of her remarkable life story played for a few moments. Evan witnessed the moment when the female forty-something talent scout first found the teen actress while walking next to the Nakova family at JFK airport. The agent marveled at how charismatically and convincingly the little girl was imitating some of the rude airport personnel, and how easily Delilah slipped from Czech into perfect English. She followed Delilah and her parents to the taxi area, and then persuaded them to let her share their cab and pay for it. During the cab ride, she convinced Delilah’s parents to entrust their daughter to her professional management and to enroll the young girl in acting classes.

The hologram then displayed a montage of memorable performances by Delilah Nakova, showing her evolution as an actress taking on ever more important, challenging, and high-profile roles. The mini biopic concluded with a televised interview that had particularly struck Evan, in which the eighteen-year-old A-list actress was asked about her acting plans during college.

“I’ve decided to cut back on my production schedule so that I can get the most out of my time at Brown College…What good is fame and wealth without knowledge and perspective?”

The hologram flickered and then vanished. Delilah Nakova was still sitting in front of him, enveloped by the halo. She moved closer to Evan.

“I’m so sorry about everything that happened to you tonight, Evan. You really didn’t deserve any of this.”

“I know,” Evan replied. “And now there’s no way that you’ll ever be with me…I’m even more below your level than I was before…”

“Don’t say that, Evan,” she replied warmly.

The ambulance doors in the back of the vehicle swung open and some of Delilah’s college friends climbed in. “Come on, Delilah! We’re late. What are you still doing talking to that loser?”

“Wait…Let me just make sure he’s OK.”

Evan was dumbfounded by the goodness of her soul.

“Evan, are you OK?” Delilah asked.

The image of Delilah dissolved into an indistinguishable blur, and then materialized again into the face of the female ambulance staffer next to him.

“Are you OK?” the staffer asked again.

“Yeah, I think so,” Evan said, shaking his weary and confused head a little. “What a bad trip!”

“Nah. Traffic was nothing. If it was the middle of rush hour – that’s a bad trip,” she replied. “But we’re here now. We’ll wheelchair you over to the emergency room.”

Chapter 9
Narc

Narc, Evan’s freshman-year roommate at Brown College, was quite the “bad boy” compared to Evan. Yet even Narc could not have imagined what would one day happen to Evan in the back of an SUV. But because the two longtime friends stopped talking a few months before Evan’s fang-filled-fellatio, Narc wouldn’t find out the crazy details until the two reconciled, several months after the incident.

Narc embodied a complex composite of cultural contradictions. At home with his traditional Chinese parents, he was Yi Wang, the respectful, responsible, and disciplined eldest son who lent a hand around the house and helped his younger sisters with their homework. But outside of the home, his high school buddies nicknamed him “Narc” for always being the first to procure and consume whatever new narcotic constituted the dare du jour. At age fifteen, the exotically handsome and precociously smooth-talking Narc was also the first among them to lose his virginity.

While Narc was still a “model minority” whose grades consistently ranked among the top five percent of students in all of his classes, he had a wild edge to him that most of his fellow Asian classmates seemed to lack. He also felt physically different from them. At six-two, he always stood among the tallest students in his high school class, and he would grow another inch by graduation. He was in love with the NBA and hip-hop culture, and would much rather hang out with high school dropouts “from the ‘hood” who could match him in hoops or rhymes, than discuss the physics problem set or history reading with the other high achievers in his honors classes. He had hundreds of NBA trivia and scorecard statistics memorized and would regularly debate the virtues of various players and teams with anyone who challenged his predictions about any particular game. Narc was also the only non-black member of the basketball gang with whom he regularly played ball on the court near the Newark, New Jersey home where he grew up. Indeed, the other members fondly dubbed him the “Chinese Niggah,” which they soon shortened to “Chiggah.” Narc embraced the term as a token of respect and acceptance from his basketball “brothas.” Whenever the tall, gold-chain-sporting-gangsta athletes ran into him, they greeted him with a wide-armed, high-fiving, “’Sup Chiggah?” To which Narc would reply: “Jus bein’ cool, yo.”

“You catch that tight Nets game last night?” one of them might ask.

“It was off the hizzle for rizzle my nizzle,” Narc would reply with wild gesticulations, to indicate that the game was truly something to behold.

“Word,” they would say, in agreement, with a high five.

Yi Wang artfully lived what was essentially a double life. His parents knew nothing about “Narc,” his gangsta/hip-hop friends, his recreational drug use, or his promiscuous lifestyle (by age seventeen he had already slept with eight females in the area, including two from his high school). They knew that Yi loved basketball, since he was one of the star players on his high school team, and they knew that he didn’t have nearly as many Asian friends as they would have liked, but that was all they knew of his rebellious side. Likewise, Narc’s friends knew almost nothing of Yi Wang, his desire to go to a top college primarily to please his parents, or the dutifully serious person he became while helping with his family’s laundry business. Narc kept the laundry business secret to prevent his friends from showing up and meeting his parents or seeing how humble, soft-spoken, and respectful he was around his family.

As a result of his double life, Yi effectively spoke four languages. Whenever he was in the presence of family and other Cantonese speakers, he spoke Cantonese. If he was with family and non-Cantonese speakers, then he spoke polite and proper – even subdued – English. But on the street with his basketball buddies, or in his high school clique, Narc spoke a street English that combined hip-hop vernacular with copious profanity. If he was writing a term paper or an exam, or delivering some oral presentation to his class, then he switched to high academic English.

His friends did have the impression that Narc was strangely protective of his identity and his family. On one occasion, in the eleventh grade, one of Narc’s high school friends learned of Narc’s sexual exploits with a particularly attractive girl in their class, and jokingly exclaimed, “You wanged her?!”

“Don’t disrespect family,” Narc snapped back, with a seriousness that was not to be questioned. Narc was not at all amused by the pun, which he viewed as a sacrilegious defamation of his family heritage.

His sensitivity to the issue began at age twelve, when he was regularly harassed by some fifteen-year-old students in his junior high school. The four adolescents regularly addressed him with racial slurs and taunted him about his last name until he confronted them about it one day. Narc was on the school basketball court with two friends when three of the four members of the gang appeared and began their racist insults. Two of the three kids were bigger than Narc, so they were hardly deterred when Narc threw his basketball aside, walked straight up to the largest member of the group, and said, with a cool, angry voice, “That was the last time that you make fun of my name or my race.” Emboldened by his bravado, they just sneered and shoved him.

Narc’s two friends standing nearby were too afraid to jump into the fray but ran to notify a teacher. By the time an adult came to break up the fight, Narc was badly beaten up but the three older kids who had harassed him looked just as thrashed. The school principal suspended everyone, including Narc, for two days and called everyone’s parents with a stern warning. But it was the last time that anyone ever maliciously mocked Narc about his race or his last name.