by Zack Love
As he stood there exposed, Evan became acutely aware of the many people in the immediate vicinity who – up until that moment – had seemed oblivious to him. Evan noticed the thirty-something barman in black trying to sneak in peeks while serving some customers at the bar. He noticed an attractive young couple that had stopped making out by the bar to watch. He looked at them for a moment, and they laughed self-consciously, returning to their tongue lock but occasionally angling themselves for another view. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed four slick-looking guys in their mid-twenties, joking amongst themselves about this guy just twenty feet away whose pants were dropped in front of this babe. “Now that’s what I call balls at the Bowery Bar!” one of them yelled. Evan pretended not to notice this group or hear its heckles only because there were too many of them for a threatening stare to do anything but goad them into even more obnoxious behavior. The only thing to do now was get it over with as quickly as possible, and walk out with the gorgeous prize that would vindicate virtually anything he had done in public. Who could argue with his manliness or his judgment if, after he pulled his pants back up, Tina gave him one of those triumphant, Hollywood French kisses, and then took his arm and walked out of the bar with him?
As he stood there with all of his manhood dangling in the cool, smoky air, he thought only of that glorious moment. He didn’t see all of the people watching him with a mixture of fascination and repugnance. He focused only on Tina. He waited for her to acknowledge his courageously stupid act with some look of impressed gratitude and/or validation of his size. He waited for her to signal in some way that he had gone well beyond the call of duty, and that he could now pull his pants back up and receive his reward. But he saw none of this in Tina’s face, which just looked slightly amazed that he had actually gone through with the whole thing.
So Evan ended up holding his pants down for longer than he had originally planned to, and lifted everything back up only after realizing that he would receive no instruction from Tina to do so. As he zipped his pants back up, he heard some ornery howls from the crowd of guys, and saw the couple quickly resume their kissing with another you-caught-us-staring blush. He couldn’t tell how much the barman had seen.
“So?” Evan asked, looking expectantly at Tina. “Did I pass your test?”
Tina looked unmoved by Evan’s Bowery Bar boldness. Somewhat reluctant to answer his question, she replied, “Well…To tell you the truth…I don’t think you did.”
“Really?” Evan felt a devastating humiliation barreling his way, but – in what was to become a pathetic pattern that night – he felt perversely determined to confront it head on. “Why not? I’m not hung enough for you?” he asked, preparing himself for the worst.
“No. I actually think you’re probably hung enough.”
Upon hearing this confirmation, Evan exhaled a small sigh of relief, but was still waiting for the bad news.
“So what is it? I mean, I’m obviously uninhibited, right? I mean, you weren’t expecting me to dance on the bar naked, were you?”
“No, please. Spare us.”
“So what is it? Why didn’t I pass your test?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Do you really think I would take home someone who drops his pants in public just because I asked him to? I need a man with a little more self-respect than that.”
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely.”
“But you get naked in public all the time. Hell, you even simulate sex for the public.”
“No, I don’t.”
“What do you think being a soft porn actress is?”
“It’s definitely getting naked and simulating sex in public, but I’m not a soft porn actress.”
“What do you mean?” Evan asked in dismay.
“I develop swaptions, derivatives, and other hedge instruments for the futures markets at Morgan Stanley. Princeton grads generally don’t go into soft porn.”
“But…But you…”
“I know that’s what I told you. But that’s just my screener. I get hit on by a lot of guys, so I like to filter out anyone who’s really promiscuous, bisexual, infected with an STD, or willing to drop his pants in public…I’m too busy to waste a bunch of dates finding out deal-breaking data that I could have uncovered from the get-go…Life’s too short not to cut to the chase, right?”
And when Tina finished that reply, 104 anvils, each carefully crafted and weighed in the best metal workshops of the American heartland, came crashing down onto Evan’s head.
Chapter 3
Desperately Seeking a Rebound
Escape. That was the only thing that Evan could think of. What was the quickest way out of the Bowery Bar? He saw an opening and navigated a focused path to the door, blurring out of his mind the obnoxious jokes and comments trailing from various areas near Tina. He shuffled past the glam squad and various hotties piling in, and didn’t say goodbye to the doorman or bouncers as he usually did, hoping that if he looked down and moved quickly enough, they wouldn’t notice his emergency evacuation.
He jumped into the nearest taxi and said “Just drive!” – as if he were in the midst of some dramatic, high-speed getaway. As he sailed away from the disaster area, with the soft, summer night breeze blowing against his face through the open window, he slowly began deliberating about his options. “I should just quit while I’m ahead,” he thought.
Ignoring his own advice, he pulled out his cell phone and a printed list of phone numbers.
Back in autopilot mode, he called a cell phone number off the list.
“Can I speak to Sayvyer, please?”
“Who the fuck is calling here after one in the morning?”
“I’m returning a wallet that she lost.”
“You have the wrong number.”
He tried the next number on the list.
“Can I speak to Sayvyer, please?”
“You’re looking for the savior? At 1:15 a.m.?”
“No. Her name’s Sayvyer.”
“There is no savior here. Especially not at 1:15 a.m.”
Evan shook his head in frustration and wondered for a moment whether the comely brunette had given her real name to Evan. “It had to be her real name...She knew way too many jokes off the top of her head that involved her name,” he recalled. “And she told me how – when she was young – she thought her hippy parents were cruel for giving her such a weird name and how later she thought the name made her hip and distinctive…And two of her friends called her ‘Sayvyer’ that night…So it’s definitely her name…” Evan crossed out the two numbers he had just dialed and shook his head in frustration. “But why couldn’t she have had a more normal name?” he thought.
In Evan’s world, Sayvyer was an “8.5 hottie,” which would be more than enough of a consolation prize at this particularly low-spirited moment. Unfortunately, there were four digits separating Evan from his savior. He thought about how cruel and absurd it was that something as trivial as the knowledge of four particular numbers could keep him from a potentially delightful encounter with a woman who could salvage his miserable night.
He had met her six weeks ago at Au Bar. The posh nightclub on East Fifty-eighth Street drew “Euro-trash,” cigar-smoking bankers, and attractive women vying for trophy-wife status. After his fifth drink, Evan had shared all of his woes with Sayvyer at the bar. “Do you have any idea how much talent it takes to lose a job and a girlfriend in just two days, and all via email?” he began. “It’s really pretty difficult, and I’m thinking of starting an evening workshop for people who aren’t as talented as I am in that regard.”
Evan’s charm and sympathetic misfortunes grew on Sayvyer during their thirty-minute chat, and she tried her best to lift his spirits. “I think it’s great that that asshole boss fired you,” she said. “You needed to get out of there. You’re way too good for a place like that.”
“I heard they’re about to go bankrupt s
oon anyway.”
“You had no business working there in the first place.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re one of those guys who’s too smart to be working for someone else.”
“Do I really seem that geeky?”
“You’re a total geek.”
“Oh great.”
“But you’re a hip and handsome geek. I mean, how many computer programmers out there look like you and write novels and screenplays on the side?”
Evan felt truly lifted for a moment. He was starved for this kind of validation. After some good laughs and playful conversation, the two ended up dancing, and eventually grinding, on the dance floor, where they made out briefly among a room full of swaying, tightly pressed bodies.
But their momentum was interrupted when Sayvyer’s friends came up to her and insisted that she come with them to an exclusive party in the VIP section of another club. She couldn’t refuse the gorgeous group or convince them to let Evan tag along. But she did stall them long enough to explain her departure to Evan and give him her phone number.
“Why was I such a bonehead?” he thought, as he recalled their concluding banter, and how he had foolishly tried to show off his memory and knowledge of psychology.
“Now I’m giving you my number only if you absolutely promise to use it,” she said. “I’m sick of guys not calling when they say they’ll call…”
“There are actually guys out there who promise they’ll call you and then don’t?”
“Yeah. And some think that email is just as good. But it’s a very bad sign…I mean, if the guy doesn’t call you before you’ve slept with him, he sure as hell won’t call after.”
“Well, I hereby unconditionally and absolutely promise to call you if you give me your phone number. And I do this on behalf of every negligent male, in every mammalian species,” Evan said, in the geekiest tongue-in-cheek he could muster.
“So you’re now representing every non-calling male in every species?”
“Even the he-goats that didn’t call the she-goats. And the dogs that didn’t dial the digits of bitches…”
“So if you break this promise, I can truly write off all males, and just become a lesbian?”
“Yes. But if I keep my promise to call, then you have to forgive all of these males, and start giving them all the benefit of the doubt – from the dogs to the dudes.”
“And why is that?”
“Because – contrary to all appearances – I’m as bad as they get, and if I call when I say I will, then there really is hope for all the other males out there.”
“Well that’s very reassuring to hear,” she replied. “So are you going to get something to write down my number with?” she asked, as her friends waited impatiently for the two to end their encounter.
Evan drew nearer to her and whispered into her ear, “Just tell it to me…A dog like me doesn’t need to write it down…”
“Why not?” she asked, resting her hand on Evan’s lower back.
“I can remember it. Trust me,” he replied, letting his hands find their way to her firm and round behind.
“Why are you so sure?” she said, placing her lips just above his neck and below his ear.
“Because I can. Most people can…You know, phone numbers have seven digits in them because memory experiments showed that this was the maximum number of digits that most people can retain.”
“You are a geek, aren’t you? A yummy-looking geek,” she said flirtatiously, as she slid her waist between his legs a little.
“A geek who will definitely call,” he replied, emboldened and aroused by the physical contact.
At this point, Evan felt so good about his odds with Sayvyer that he suddenly wanted to avoid taking any chances with his memory – particularly because he had imbibed one too many vodka cranberries and had already crammed his head with four other names and numbers from earlier that night.
“Well, geeks run the world…And that’s sexy,” she replied, grabbing Evan’s butt and grinding into him until she could feel something harden a little more. And with that statement, she made it impossible for Evan to backtrack on his offer to memorize her phone number, because resorting to the safer pen and paper approach after that statement would defrock Evan of his geeky godliness. He also feared that Sayvyer’s increasingly impatient friends might drag her off while he foraged about for a paper and pen.
Fortunately for Evan, when Sayvyer whispered her 212-phone number to him, while continuing to arouse him on the dance floor, he did manage to notice that there was a sixty-nine in the last four digits – a mnemonic fact for which he was quite grateful.
“See that? There’s a sixty-nine in your number, so there’s no way I can forget it now!” he pointed out.
“True. But that number won’t mean anything to us if you can’t remember the rest,” she replied suggestively.
“Don’t worry. I’m more likely to forget my name,” he said, just as Sayvyer was pulled away by her friends. He caught one last wink from her as she moved towards the exit with her gang and then disappeared behind a large crowd.
The next morning, as his Saturday afternoon hangover subsided, he realized that he could perfectly recall only two of the four numbers he had taken before meeting Sayvyer, and – worst of all – he could recall only that the first two digits of Sayvyer’s phone number were ninety-four and that there was a sixty-nine somewhere among the last four digits. No matter how many times he replayed his dialogue with Sayvyer, Evan couldn’t remember what the third digit was, or even where among the last four digits the number sixty-nine appeared.
He thought about his monumental misstep from the previous night while shaving, which was in itself a mistake because each time he thought about his error, a spontaneous, self-flagellating headshake occurred that produced a minor shaving cut. But a little later, as he popped two frozen waffles into a toaster and heated up some coffee, it dawned on him that his sexy geekiness could still save the day.
Given the facts of which he was sure – a seven-digit number beginning with ninety-four and containing sixty-nine among the last four digits – Evan calculated that there were exactly three thousand permutations of possible phone numbers for Sayvyer. He quickly wrote a computer program that generated for him a print out of all three thousand permutations.
He figured that if he tried one phone number permutation per day it would take him a maximum of roughly eight years to get the correct number. He then thought about what it would take to call Sayvyer within the optimal wait period, as most women he knew defined it (i.e., no more than two days later). To conduct some ballpark research, Evan timed a random call and realized that it took fifteen seconds to dial one phone number and let it ring at least three times. Assuming a conversation that lasted only long enough to establish that the number dialed was incorrect, Evan concluded that it would take approximately thirty seconds per phone number. He calculated that if he worked assiduously for twelve and a half hours per day, which still gave him some rest time between calls, he could cover one thousand five hundred numbers per day. At that rate, working for two days, he could call her in no more than two days after she gave him her number.
Satisfied that it was actually feasible to reach her within the optimal two-day period, he set about trying to dial every permutation on his print out, crossing out wrong numbers as he worked his way down the list. He applied himself to the task rather diligently for about five hours, and eliminated six hundred incorrect numbers. At that point, however, his fingers were tired, his ear was sore, his neck was stiff, and he was wondering whether the tedium and physical fatigue of nonstop cold calling were really worth the brownie points of calling within two days.
He took a dinner break – consisting of leftover Chinese food – and settled on a compromise solution that struck him as far more reasonable. There were now two thousand four hundred permutations left, and he would try forty per day on average, so that it would take him no more than about two m
onths to dial the correct number for Sayvyer. This meant that he would have to spend only about twenty minutes per day dialing numbers, and if bad luck brought him to Sayvyer’s number only in month two (rather than, say, in a week or two), then he would just need to invent a good excuse for waiting so long to call her.
“If only Sayvyer could know how committed I’ve been to meeting my obligations to the female gender,” Evan thought to himself, as he sat in the back of the taxi, that last Thursday night of August 2000, where he reflected for a moment on how he had voluntarily exceeded his quota of forty phone number permutations for that day. But then he admitted to himself that – after what had just happened to him at the Bowery Bar – he was prepared to do almost anything to save the night, or at least soften its sting.
But Evan needed a quick fix now, and dialing more random phone numbers from a list of seven hundred remaining possibilities in the hope of reaching a woman he had met about six weeks ago at Au Bar was hardly going to help. A better solution suddenly dawned on him. He would call up Alexandra, who had returned from Australia four weeks ago.
Evan leaned forward and finally gave his getaway cab driver a more specific destination: “Can you head to the Upper East Side?” The Pakistani cabbie shook his head a little, slightly annoyed, as he turned the next corner to drive in the opposite direction.
Evan had seen Alexandra each day of her first week back in New York, and had tried in vain to get back together with her. But she had made it clear that they were through. On her tenth day back, when Evan showed up with a bouquet and dinner from her favorite Thai takeout, she gave him what she sarcastically dubbed “your last charity fuck.” A few days later, Evan decided to check in with her on another whim, at around midnight, just to see if she still hadn’t met another guy and might therefore be ready and willing to indulge one more spur-of-the-moment tryst, if not a fuller restoration of their relationship. She invited him up.
