Sex in the Title - a Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (back when phones weren't so smart)
Page 38
“We caught up by phone today. He and Luigi are completely in love,” Evan replied. “Luigi introduced him to all of his gay friends, and now Trevor feels much more comfortable in that community.”
“But he could still join you once a month for a few hours, no?”
“Heeb, the guy’s totally whipped. He and Luigi are taking yoga lessons together, for God’s sake. And some weekly night course on African art. And they take off on these weekend getaways. Forget it. He’s totally out. Might as well be married.”
“What about Carlos?”
“He is married.”
“Right,” Heeb replied. “Speaking of which, he may be having kids in the next year or so.”
“What?!”
“Yeah, we spoke a few days ago. I think the posse was really good for his marriage.”
“What do you mean?” asked Evan.
“Meeting all of these other women when he was out with us just reminded him how special and irreplaceable Carolina is. And the jealousy it caused in her made them both realize how much they care for each other. They’ve done a lot talking since then, and it looks like they reached a compromise on the kids issue.”
“Wow…I can’t believe it! Carlos is definitely out now.”
“What about Narc?” Heeb ventured.
“You didn’t hear what happened to Narc?” Evan asked.
“No. I haven’t spoken to anyone other than Carlos in about a week.”
“So I guess Carlos hasn’t heard yet either.”
“Heard what?” Heeb asked.
“Trevor told me that Narc moved up to that ashram where Trevor had spent eight months meditating,” Evan said.
“What?!”
“So get this. Narc goes over to Jersey to help his folks with their laundry business, and then, in the middle of the day, Mr. Wang calls his son into his office for one of those you’re-in-really-deep-shit kinda talks. Turns out that his parents had seen him in that ‘Sushi Love’ porn flick he did.”
“What?!” Heeb was dumbstruck. “Narc’s parents saw their own son in a porno?”
“Isn’t that insane?! Can you imagine the shame and humiliation?”
“Not in my worst nightmare.”
“Well shortly after that awful chit chat with pops, Narc called Trevor to talk, because he was pretty shaken up by the whole thing. He had apparently even thrown up at his parent’s place. According to Trevor, Narc was traumatized on several levels. First of all, he didn’t even know that his parents actually had sex. Apparently, he had the wrong idea about their 11 p.m. rule, when their bedroom door was locked and they were not to be disturbed unless there was a major emergency in the house.”
“What do you mean?”
“Narc always just assumed that after 11 p.m. his parents wanted privacy to take care of family matters or stuff related to their laundry business. He never imagined that his parents were actually having sex. That thought alone completely freaked him out.”
“That’s a little extreme, don’t you think? I mean parents are people too.”
“Narc’s an extreme kind of guy in his own extreme ways. But it gets crazier.”
“It does?”
“Yeah. Apparently, Narc’s father started off by excoriating his son for leaving his prestigious law job in exchange for work that would bring shame to the entire Wang family. But after he was done berating poor little Yi, his dad began critiquing his son’s sexual technique, saying things like ‘Didn’t anyone teach you how to have sex with a woman? I just assumed they covered that stuff in school or I would have sat down and taught you when you were entering manhood.’”
“That is crazy.”
“So, in one fell swoop, Narc discovers that his parents still have regular sex, that they sometimes watch pornographic films to spice things up, and that they watched a porno that he starred in. And to top it all off, he discovers that his father thinks he’s got terrible technique in bed and that all of those women that Narc was fucking in the movie were just faking their orgasms.”
“Wow…That’s a lot to discover in one sitting,” he agreed. “I’d definitely be heading for the ashram.”
“Yeah, Trevor thinks the posse should go back for him in about half a year. He recommended six months to Narc as a minimum cleansing period. Trevor could totally relate, I think. In a strange way, they were both confronted with very dramatic discoveries that shook them up, even if they were totally different revelations.”
“What a crazy nine months this has been,” Heeb said.
“It really has been,” Evan agreed.
They reflected for a moment on everything that had happened since they first met in the hospital.
Evan returned to the more pressing issue at hand. “So you see, you’re really my last hope for the posse at this point.”
“I’ve finally found true love at first sight, and you want to make me risk it all so that you can go out and find a replacement for the dream girl you stupidly lost? Clearly you have no idea what real love is, Evan.”
“That’s not true!” Heeb’s accusation animated Evan into an impassioned defense. “Look at where I’ve been, Heeb. I used to be a complete womanizer – always hounding about insatiably for the next woman. Whiplash Libido, as Narc used to call me. And ever since I ran into Delilah Nakova, no other woman has really mattered to me. To feel true love, even the inveterate womanizer must be willing to forget all other women for the sake of the one he can’t betray.”
Heeb looked unimpressed with Evan’s histrionics, which only goaded Evan into more of an emotional outpouring.
“Love has only the sacredness, meaning, and intensity that you give it. And the more you forfeit for love – including other women, or particular personal freedoms – the more you have invested in that love, and the more subjective meaning that love will possess. And ever since I ran into Delilah Nakova on May 5, 1999, she has occupied my mind and heart more than anything else. There isn’t a thing that I wouldn’t do for her – just like with you and Hila.”
“OK. Fine. So I misspoke,” Heeb conceded. “You are in love with her. But you didn’t have the courage to keep that love.”
Evan’s eyes watered a little.
Heeb continued: “You failed to communicate your deepest feelings to the person you wanted to get closest to. You were so in love that you were afraid to have your heart broken. But that fear cost you the very love you so passionately wanted to possess.”
Evan was silent for a minute, as he looked at the empty beer can in his hand. He finally looked up. “You’re absolutely right! I was a coward. And I let myself worship Delilah to the point where I couldn’t even communicate with her properly. How the hell did I forget that she’s as human as you and me?”
“Well, she is Delilah Nakova, Evan.”
“So what? I was living in her loft, for God’s sake. She had invited me to come into her world. And I was too afraid to enter it with anything but half steps. I’m such a fool!”
“Somehow I doubt my performance would have been any better.”
“I should have just been honest with her about my fears. Even if she dumped me afterwards, at least I’d know that my love was based on illusion.”
“It’s such a shame that you’re not saying all of this to her instead of me.”
“I know. But she won’t call me back now. And why should she, after the way I behaved?”
“Evan, you’re just going to have to wait this out, and have enough confidence in yourself to try again. She obviously really cared for you, so she’ll eventually call, once she gets over herself.”
“I don’t know…I think it’ll take more than that...”
Heeb felt genuinely sorry for Evan. He wished that he had some easy cure for his friend’s ills. Now that Sammy had found love, he wanted the same for Evan.
Then an idea suddenly occurred to Heeb. “There is one way you could probably get her to talk to you again.”
“How?” Evan asked, his eyes tired but still hopeful.
“I mean, it’s not the easiest solution, but it’s the only one that comes to mind.”
“What is it?”
“Write her another novel.”
“Another novel?” Evan asked, full of dread.
“Yeah.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know, but I have the perfect title for it.”
“What?”
“Sex in the Sequel.”
THE END
About the Author
Zack Love graduated from Harvard College, where he tried to create a bachelor’s degree in Women. With the bachelor portion of that degree in hand, he settled in New York City but – to afford renting his bed-sized studio – found himself flirting mostly with a computer screen and stacks of documents. Determined not to die a corporate drone, Zack decided to sacrifice sleep for screenwriting, an active social life, and Internet startups offering temporary billion-dollar fantasies.
To feed his steady diet of NYC nightlife, he regularly crashed VIP parties in the early 2000s and twice bumped into his burgeoning crush, a Hollywood starlet. But – much to Zack’s surprise – neither of those awkward conversations led to marriage with the A-list actress. Zack eventually consoled himself by imagining fiascoes far worse than those involving his celebrity crush. In the process, he dreamed up a motley gang of five men inspired by some of his college friends and quirky work colleagues. And thus was born Sex in the Title. But the novel is not autobiographical: Zack never had his third leg attacked by any mammal (nor by any plant, for that matter). In fact, keeping his member safe has been one of Zack’s lifelong goals – and one of the few that he’s managed to accomplish.
Some Shameless Self-Promotion
(hey, if not here, then where?)
First of all, thanks for making it this far. You’ve got stamina. Hopefully you enjoyed the ride. If so, please take a moment to give this novel an awesome review on Amazon and – if you’re feeling extra supportive – on Goodreads.
Maybe (and especially if you got the book for free!) you can even buy the novel as a fun gift for someone you may know in one of the following categories:
1) disgruntled lawyers
2) Asian men with a bad-boy side
3) funny bald men
4) writers
5) basketball players who read fiction
6) men trying to trying to understand or laugh at themselves
7) women trying to understand or laugh at men
8) New Yorkers
9) oversexed men (i.e., men)
10) anyone else who could use the same laughs and nonsense you just enjoyed.
In case you needed any more encouragement, if this novel does well enough, I will write a sequel.
In the meantime, feel free to connect with me on Facebook or through my web site, where you can also sign up for my newsletter (to receive my latest blogs/musings and news about other releases).
[←1]
About ten years later, the financial cost of a law degree from a top school has approximately doubled.
[←2]
Suppose for a moment that Melody had come from a Kurdish dissident family in Northern Iraq, and Sammy had been a leading Kurdish activist in Eastern Turkey, and the two had never met before their random encounter on a New York City bus. Upon correctly intuiting that Melody was also a Kurd, Sammy could utter a few sentences in Kurdish in which he praised the beauties of a town that happened to be Melody’s village, which Sammy had visited in 1999 while on a political mission to negotiate the release from an Iraqi prison of a famous dissident, Mahmoud Ahmet – a man who, unbeknownst to Sammy, happened to be her father. These highly specific and personally significant sentences would effectively constitute a password that would instantly convert complete strangers into potential lovers. This password would have the same power to create intimacy as would an eight-month courtship between two strangers who have almost nothing in common. In reality, Sammy and Melody had far less in common than the Kurds on the New York City bus, but the specificity of Heeb’s apparent knowledge about Melody produced the same net effect.
[←3]
The reported results were based on Google searches performed in 2003. Ten years later, a search for “penis” produces 226 million results, and “vagina” produces 148 million results, indicating just how much the Internet has grown in the last decade. The exponential increase in web content dedicated to the penis and the vagina is another testament to how much these things matter to humanity. Also noteworthy is how the vagina seems to be catching up to the penis: whereas in 2003, there were only fifty percent as many web pages dedicated to the vagina as to the penis, ten years later the ratio has increased to about sixty-five percent.
[←4]
Back in 2003, there was no hint that e-book readers would soon arrive and help to produce a whole new generation of enthusiastic readers!
[←5]
While all of these magazines existed when this novel was first written, Wikipedia indicates that Gear expired in 2003 and Stuff merged with Maxim in 2007.
[←6]
Ten years later, Google search results for “sex” grew from 90 million to 2.75 billion. “Love” skyrocketed from 63 million to 6.49 billion. “Soul” went from 12 million to 824 million, and “friendship” increased from 4 million to 310 million. So maybe Evan’s frustrations were related to an earlier zeitgeist, when the Internet was still in its infancy and “sex” dramatically prevailed over “love.” If only Evan had known that a decade later, “love” would emerge victorious on Google.
[←7]
The world population in 2003 was six billion. A decade later, it is over seven billion.
[←8]
The percentage of Nobel Laureates who are Jewish rose from about seventeen percent in 2003 to about twenty-two percent in 2012.
[←9]
The term is short for “Whiplash Libido” and Narc first applied it to Evan when they were college roommates and Narc tried to claim that Zoe dumped Evan because of his Whiplash Libido (and not because of Narc’s porn-watching habits).
[←10]
In 2003, there were about 3 billion women. Ten years later, women have increased their numbers by about half a billion (much to the relief of the roughly 500 million men who also joined the world).