Sex in the Title - a Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (back when phones weren't so smart)

by Zack Love

  Somewhat pained by the social obligation of having to offer some of this heavenly treat to his neighbor, Heeb extended the bar out to Evan while hoping that Evan would decline. To Heeb’s substantial relief, Evan quickly shook his head, almost irritated with such a frivolous interruption of their all-important discussion.

  “You’ve got interactive games, DVDs, Internet, 3D films, and an ever shrinking attention span,” Evan continued, as Heeb proceeded to take an enormous bite of his chocolate bar. “Novels don’t stand a chance against such easy and immediate gratification. These days, people just consume whatever gives them the fastest form of amusement, without any concern for the long-term effects that these empty pleasures may have on their constitution.”

  Heeb blissfully focused for a moment on the easy and immediate gratification of his Snickers bar, as he methodically chewed on the large chunk of candy bar that filled most of his mouth. He wasn’t at all concerned about its long-term effects on his constitution.

  “Are you listening to me?” snapped Evan, somewhat irked that his neighbor seemed so untroubled by the social and technological trends that would doom literature.[4]

  Heeb’s mouth was obviously stuffed, but it was clear that Evan wanted an immediate answer.

  “You gotta have sex on the cover,” Heeb blurted out, rather unclearly, with his mouth full.

  “Sex under the covers?” Evan asked, trying to make out what Heeb said.

  “No. Sex on the cover,” Heeb replied, with his words just as garbled by his glutted mouth.

  “Sex undercover? As in, undercover sex?” Evan asked, trying again to decipher what Heeb said, and now impatiently convinced that whatever Heeb was trying to say was going to be an annoyingly irrelevant, inappropriate, or unsatisfying response.

  “No.” Heeb shook his head and took a few more bites before trying to speak this time. “You just have to have the word ‘sex’ on the cover.”

  “What do you mean?” Evan asked, still not sure that he was hearing Sammy correctly. By now, Sammy had finished most of his chewing and could enunciate properly.

  “I mean, the book can be about sex on the covers, sex under the covers, or undercover sex. Or anything else really. It doesn’t matter, as long as you’ve got the word ‘sex’ on the cover.”

  “You mean the cover of the book?”

  “Yeah. Even better: make sex the first word in the title. Like Sex and the City did.”

  “But that was television.”

  “It doesn’t matter. If it’s a novel about racecar drivers, call it ‘Sex and Speed.’ Or if it’s a work of historical fiction set in antebellum Texas; call it ‘Sex in the South.’”

  Evan looked like a priest hearing sacrilege from a proud atheist for the first time in his pious career.

  But the appalled expression on Evan’s face only goaded Heeb on more: “Suppose you’ve written a mystery thriller about an evil scientist who changed his identity into someone totally unknown. Don’t just call it ‘Unknown’; call it ‘Sexual Unknown.’”

  “Sexual Unknown?” Evan repeated, incredulously.

  “Yeah, that still works.”

  “How could that possibly make sense as a title?”

  “Look, if the disguised scientist is now generally unknown to people, then he’s probably also sexually unknown to them.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  “OK, maybe that’s not a good example,” Heeb conceded, before continuing, undeterred. “Take a novel about a man’s self-discovery. A good title for it would be something like ‘Sexually Searching Self.’ You get the idea. Just have the word sex in there, and make it prominent enough so that it’s the first thing that people see when they see your book.”

  “Sammy, you’re more full of bullshit than a Texas ranch!” Evan exclaimed, in an agitated, high-volume reaction.

  “All right, maybe I’m overstating things a little. Look, I’m a math guy, not a literature guy. So I’m looking at this from a purely statistical perspective: all else being equal, your novel is more likely to sell if it has the word ‘sex’ in the title than if it doesn’t. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “You just stated the same bullshit in slightly modified form…But that doesn’t change the fact that what you’re saying is still basically bullshit.”

  “Trust me on this, Evan. I’m telling you that if you have sex in the title, publishers can market your book much more effectively, and people will buy it.”

  “Please, Sammy!”

  “I mean it. Even if you write a novel that has nothing to do with sex and has no sex in it – I’ll bet you could still sell more of it by putting sex in the title.”

  “But that would make no sense. How could you put the word ‘sex’ in the title of an asexual novel?”

  “Easy. How about ‘Sex only in the Title?’”

  “So a story about a man who escapes from prison but never has sex in the process could be called ‘Sex only in the Title?’ You can’t be serious.”

  “OK, you’re right. There are limits. But if your novel has at least some sex in it, then it can be somehow mentioned in the title, and – ”

  “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 peo
ple 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.”