Sex in the Title (30 page)

“This is really depressing.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Can’t you come up with a more plausible or classy way to restore my literary dreams?”

Sammy put his Snickers bar down. It was clear by now that he wouldn’t be able to savor the chocolate, caramel, and nuts properly until this particular conversation was concluded.

“I’m being totally serious, Evan. The word ‘sex’ sells. Just look at ninety percent of the glossy covered magazines on any newsstand…You know what I’m talking about – those trashy frat boy magazines flaunting scantily clad women and tasteless jokes all over the nation’s newsstands.”

“You mean like
Maxim
,
FHM
,
Stuff
, and
Gear
?”
^[5]

“Yeah, those,” Heeb replied, somewhat amused and impressed. “How can you rattle off their names so quickly?

“I subscribe to all of them.”

“You’re a writer and you read that crap?”

“Sure. There’s some good stuff in there.”

“You see what I mean? Sex sells.”

“No, I read them for the articles and the pop culture reviews.”

“Yeah, that line is as old as
Playboy
itself,” Heeb quipped dismissively. “Let’s face it, Evan: sex sells. Period. And it even sells to guys like you who are writers and presumably care about intelligent content.”

Evan just shook his head and frowned, as if he refused to acknowledge the terrible truth that Heeb was now determined to expose for all of its ugliness.

“And you’ll find sex on the covers of classier, more respectable publications too. Like the stuff that hospitals include in waiting areas and patient rooms. Look on your bed there!” Heeb ordered, pointing to the
Entertainment Weekly
by Evan’s side.

Evan picked up the magazine on his bed and looked over the titles on the cover until his eyes stopped at the third one from the top: “Sex symbols of cinema.”

“Look at this
Vogue
here,” Heeb continued, taking the
Vogue
magazine off the stack of publications lying on the table between their beds. “Twenty-three ways to make sex with him better.” He put it down and picked up another magazine from the stack. “Or this
Time Magazine
. The politics of sex.” He dropped it back on the table and took another one. “Or this
People Magazine
. Sexiest stars of summer.” Sammy returned it and picked up yet another magazine. “Or this
Esquire
. What every man should know about sex.” Heeb tossed it back on top of the pile. “Look! Even
Scientific American
has sex on the cover sometimes.” Heeb read the title aloud in a serious, scientific sounding voice: “Sex in Space? Eager to understand human behavior in space, NASA mulls future studies.”

“All right, already. I get the point,” Evan replied.

“It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Putting sex in the title just helps your novel to compete with all of the other entertainment options out there…You have to entice people with some of the pleasure they expect to get out of films and the Internet or your novel won’t stand a chance.”

“I just always thought of a novel as being more substantial than that…I can’t approach literature as an exercise in marketing to the lowest common denominator...”

“Didn’t Shakespeare write for the masses? I seem to recall that piece of literary trivia from my college days.”

“He did. But he did it brilliantly, in his own way…And I guess today it just seems so much more crass…”

“But maybe at the time it seemed crass to Shakespeare too,” Heeb rejoined.

“But I’ll never be Shakespeare, so how can I justify my crassness when I don’t have the genius he had to make up for it?”

“Lighten up, Evan. It’s just entertainment.”

“I guess you’re right. It’s just entertainment.”

“And sex is entertaining.”

“It’s true,” Evan finally agreed, in resignation. “Whether you’re in the sixteenth century or the twenty-first century, sex has always been entertaining…Why is that?” he asked rhetorically, as if he had never before thought about the issue. “Maybe it’s because dramatic events usually precede sex – and there’s usually lots of drama after sex,” he speculated.

“I think it’s more basic than that,” Heeb replied. “We’re just hard-wired as a species to pay lots of attention to sex, because sex is part of reproduction – or at least it used to be. And what could be more important to a species – more worthy of its attention – than its own reproduction?”

“So entertainment is just a function of our evolutionary programming?”

“Probably.”

This answer didn’t sit well with Evan. It violated all of his idyllic and lofty notions about literature, the way that natural selection might upset the perfect worldview of a creationist.

Heeb had no romantic notions about literature and didn’t want their conversation to stray too far from his original recommendation.

“Look,” he said, “sex is entertaining. It’s just a brute fact that you should accept – particularly since you subscribe to all of those trashy sex magazines.”

“I never denied that sex is entertaining. I’m just not thrilled about that fact.”

“You don’t have to be. You just have to put some sex in your work. Or at least in the title. Look, if sex is entertaining, and entertainment sells, then sex sells. QED, as we math geeks say.”

“But when Shakespeare used sex to entertain, it was just a minor element of a very complex work. Today sex is the whole show. It upstages everything else.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s true. You know, a few days ago, I was a little bored and – out of curiosity – I decided to run some Google searches on various words.”

“You’re really into these Google searches, aren’t you? So let me guess: sex had the greatest number of hits?” Heeb ventured.

“Ninety million,” Evan continued, eager to get this off his mind. “Then I tried ‘love’ and got only Sixty-three million hits. The word ‘soul’ got twelve million hits. And – get this – ‘friendship’ got only four million hits.
^[6]

“Sex is definitely more common than love, soul, or friendship,” Sammy observed.

“And look at music. In the 1950s, Jazz was considered this sexually subversive musical revolution. But by today’s standards, the lyrics couldn’t seem more innocent.”

“Very true.”

“When we were in college the top musical hits were about sodomizing your sister’s best friend. And it only gets worse each year. Just look at 2 Live Crew’s lyrics. So when we go to our twenty-year college reunions, that’s what we’ll all be singing about – sodomizing our sister’s best friend – as we do the white man’s shuffle in front of our old college sweetheart, or try to network with our various classmates.”

“So?”

“So what do you mean, ‘so?’”

“So hip-hop proved that you can get people to chant really obscene things if you just give them a good rhythm to chant to…So what?”

“How can you say ‘so what’ about that?”

“Evan, at the end of the day, it doesn’t make us who we are. It’s just music. It just reflects who we are.”

“Just music? Reflecting who we are? Our oldies are going to be about sodomizing your sister’s best friend for God’s sake! If that’s what our oldies are, can you imagine what they’ll be singing about fifty years from now? What’s left to get explicit about?”

“I’m sure they’ll come up with something.”

“That’s what scares me. I mean, if it’s just music reflecting who we are, then who the hell are we? What are we becoming as a species, Sammy?”

“A bunch of psychotically violent, sex-crazed automatons with advanced technology to help us finish the job of global self-destruction,” Heeb replied.

“Great…I thought you were a half-full-glass kind of guy.”

“I am. I give us another eighty years before we self-destruct as a species.”

“So what would be half empty?”

“Half empty would be estimating only forty years before we self-destruct.”

“Oh. I see. Thanks for clarifying that one,” Evan replied.

“Besides, what ever gave you the impression that I’m an optimist?”

“When you were trying to tell me that I won’t end up with HIV.”

“I was just trying to cheer you up.”

“So you’re really a half-empty-glass kind of guy, Sammy?”

“Usually.”

“When are you a half-full-glass kind of guy?”

“When I’m getting laid.”

“Right…I should have figured.”

“So you’re not gonna put sex in the title?” Heeb asked.

“I don’t know. First I have to finish writing the damn thing.”

“Well, at least your penis won’t get in the way for a while.”

“That’s looking at the bright side of things.”

Chapter 21
Love at First Sight

By their fourth night together in the hospital, Heeb and Evan’s wounds felt significantly better. The cleanings stung less intensely, and the two had grown somewhat accustomed to the smarting sensation. They were also rather adept at making each other laugh through the worst moments.

The two had spent seventy-two continuous hours in the same room, learning everything about each other, laughing with and at each other, and supporting one another through medical care that was at times painful and embarrassing. Heeb explained to Evan the concept of “Kojakness” and how it sometimes helped him to deal with his insecurities about being bald, and his insecurities with women generally. Evan told Heeb about how he was a late bloomer because his parents had never let him date anyone as a high school student. Evan admitted that this upbringing had made him insecure about his skills with the opposite sex – an insecurity that turned him into a player who was always trying to prove something to himself when it came to women.

Evan couldn’t bring himself to understand how anyone could actually love being an actuary the way Heeb professed to love it, and Heeb couldn’t understand why Evan felt the need to make it as a writer when he had a perfectly interesting and lucrative career as a computer programmer. But despite these and many other differences, Evan and Heeb had become close friends – an improbability that could have been produced only by the even greater improbabilities that brought them together.

*****

The nurse came in to drop off their lunch trays and then left. Evan and Heeb began sampling their meal of refried beans, yellowish chicken breast, and suspicious-looking, steamed vegetables.

The offensive hospital food had become a regular target of their jokes, although by now Evan and Heeb had grown accustomed to blithely sucking up the slop, as if it were just another unpleasant fact to be accepted as cheerfully as possible alongside their general misfortune.

Two bites into his rubbery chicken breast, Evan blurted out a question to distract them from the taste of their lunch: “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

“I believe in love at first bite,” he replied, looking up from his overly salty beans.

“Tell me about it,” Evan replied wryly. “As if being injured weren’t enough of a punishment…”

“It’s not about punishment…It’s really about hospitals encouraging the body to heal faster by encouraging rapid departures – it’s a way to stimulate the body’s natural healing mechanisms.”

Evan chuckled.

Heeb cautiously tried his vegetables and then gave his review: “You know these have the shape, taste and consistency…” He paused to finish chewing and tasting. “…Of frozen food that shouldn’t be eaten until all other comestibles in the nuclear shelter have been depleted.”

Evan laughed in agreement. “But putting the gourmet food aside for a second, do you believe in love at first sight?” he persisted.

“I’m not sure,” Sammy replied.

“I’m totally convinced of it.”

“You are?”

“Absolutely.”

“Hmm…” Heeb thought about something in amusement, as he chewed on his refried beans. “So if there is love at first sight, and I’m a little nearsighted, does that mean that I jump into things too quickly?” he asked.

“You definitely did with Melody,” Evan replied, between bites of chicken.

“Hmm…And what about Yumi?” Heeb asked.

“I’m not sure about Yumi. I think most guys would have been blindsided by that one.”

“I think you’re probably right,” Sammy replied, with a pinch of self-pity in his voice. “So what makes you so sure about love at first sight?”

“I’ve experienced it…” Evan tried some of the block-cut vegetables and was appalled. “You know, this food is worse than eating out a woman with really bad hygiene.”

“Much worse. There’s no reciprocity – no sexual prize or even praise – waiting for you at the end of the tunnel, to help you get through it.”

“It takes talent to make something taste this bad and still have it look like food,” Evan added.

“And I doubt there’s any nutritional value to this crap,” Heeb opined.

“Let’s just scarf it down and get the eating over with,” Evan suggested. “Think of it as a sports challenge. How fast can you eat really bad-tasting food?”

“You mean, how fast can you join the vomitorium?”

And with that, the two proceeded to eat their food, for the next thirty seconds, as quickly as possible, without taking a bite more than necessary to feel as though they had eaten something for lunch. They looked up at each other, with convoluted brows of disgust and amusement, and then washed the remains in their mouth with some hospital water.

“Uh. I feel like my taste buds were brutally violated,” Evan said, with a sour face.

“Yeah, like I need to make it up to them with seven weeks of daily Ben & Jerry’s binges,” Heeb added.

“So…Now that we got that over with, let’s get back to love at first sight,” Evan said. “Not infatuation at first sight…Love. With a capital L,” he clarified.

“Love?” Heeb asked, playfully pretending not to know the concept.

“Yeah. The real thing. The conviction that if you had this one woman, all other women would become irrelevant. You’d never again be unhappy. And you’d give up anything to have her and keep her.”

“You’ve experienced that?”