Sex in the Title (22 page)

“No. No. It’s me. I promise. You know, the math guy who studies photography and acting, and enjoys inline skating and hip-hop dancing?” Heeb busted a few imaginary and poorly executed hip-hop moves while clicking an imaginary camera and then pretending to inline skate around in a little circle near her.

“This is a joke, right?” she asked, dismayed by the absurd confusion unraveling itself before her. “Sammy must have sent you as a joke…You’re his friend, right?”

“No, I’m Sammy. Really. I swear. It’s me.”

“He does have a clever sense of humor.”

“I promise you. It’s no joke. This is the real Sammy talking to you.”

“No, it can’t be. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I would never agree to go on a date with someone like you. I mean, you seem nice, but – again, don’t take this the wrong way – you’re not exactly my type.”

“But you were so much more open-minded online. What happened?”

“Well, I’m still very open-minded when it comes to Sammy. But not his friends.”

Sammy decided it was time to pull out some official identification. He whipped out his Philadelphia driver’s license and showed it to her.

She was impressed to see that his identity was, in fact, Sammy Laffowitz, and that he was from the same city as the Sammy she had been chatting with online, but she still couldn’t accept the reality of the situation.

“Look, maybe he lied to me about his name and his background so that he could set me up with one of his single guy friends, but the man I chatted with used to work as a model.”

“I did used to work as a model. In fact, I quit just a few weeks ago.”

“You quit a few weeks ago?” she asked, with dismissive skepticism.

“I was sick of being objectified. Just like I mentioned to you in our chat. Don’t you remember our whole discussion about that issue?”

“I didn’t have that chat with you. I had it with your friend.”

“No, you had it with me. I thought we really bonded over the evils of modeling and how you can get objectified as a model.”

“Listen, I’m sick of this game. I’ve been stood up by this guy – and I don’t like his sense of humor anymore. If he shows up late, you can have my date with him. And if he stands you up too – well, you can kindly tell him to fuck off from both of us.” And with that, she stormed off, fuming over how the real Sammy had failed to show up.

Heeb observed that an online date’s tolerance for his model ruse was inversely proportional to her physical beauty and to how conservative her humor was. Hence, after his experience with the Scandinavian ex-model, he decided that he needed to focus on women who were a bit closer to his own category of looks and who demonstrated an offbeat sense of humor.

A few days later, he knew he had found a promising candidate when he noticed this profile headline: “Cute, normal chick into fecal fetishes and threesomes involving pet animals.” He clicked on her profile and saw some photos of a punk rocking goth-girl with purplish hair, braided on the sides like Pippi-Longstocking pigtails. As he clicked through her photos, Heeb was overwhelmed by so many distinctive details: dark mascara on her intense, beautiful brown eyes; cobalt lipstick on her thin lips; several piercings up and down her ears; dark blue jeans that still displayed a feminine figure; and a white, roughed up t-shirt saying, “If it’s a law, I broke it.”

He decided to send her an instant message – with a curiosity not unlike that of a zoologist exploring an unfamiliar species.

He knew he had to start with something sarcastic or quirky to engage her, so he commented on her headline: “That’s always been my notion of a cute normal chick,” he wrote to her. “But the real test of normalcy is whether you put on gloves when indulging your fecal fetishes. I’ve found that the most normal chicks have a preference for using their bare hands.”

“LOL,” she replied.

“LOL??? LOL has a lot of potential meanings…Losing Out Loud. Love Or Leave. Lots Of Laughter,” he replied.

“LOLLOL,” she wrote back.

“Now you’ve got me really confused.”

“Laughing Out Loud at Losers Of Lust,” she typed back.

“How did I become a loser of lust?”

“Cuz if you were a winner of lust, you wouldn’t be here typing to me. You’d be indulging the lust.”

“Laughing Out Loud at the good point. Hmmm…But it’s a point that makes you a Loser Of Lust too.”

“LOLs of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your Internet connection!”

“The cute normal chick with a fecal fetish can quote Marx!!! ” Heeb replied; now he was having fun.

“Let me say it again,” she wrote back. “Because this is what Marx would be saying right now, if he were still alive and single in NYC: LOLs of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your Internet connection!”

“Hmm…But what if it was that very Internet connection that provided him with the conduit for the lust?”

“You mean if Marx and all the other Losers Of Lust were using chat rooms to have cybersex?”

“Yup.”

“It’s a notch better, but it can’t compare to the real thing.”

“So why are we still chatting online? Let’s get to the real thing.”

“Because I don’t know anything about you.”

“Oh right. I forgot about that detail…LOL…Well, I’m about five-seven, and – like you – I’m really into threesomes with pet animals.”

“All right, so you’re still buggin’ out about the headline above my profile.”

“It’s certainly original.”

“Look, it used to be ‘Cute normal chick,’ but then my inbox got flooded with emails from guys who claimed to be ‘Cute normal guys.’ Fifty emails a day from cute normal guys. That’s just not cool. Especially when they were from fifty not so cute boring guys.”

“You certainly figured out how to cut down on the fan mail.”

“Yeah. Now I only get about ten emails a day…But they’re all from guys with pierced peckers who work in an animal shelter.”

“Ohhh….Ewww….You’ve ruined my computer!”

“Why?”

“You just made me throw up all over it.”

“LOL…Because this is like the grossest exchange you’ve ever had with anyone.”

“It’s not LIKE the grossest exchange I’ve ever had. It IS the grossest. Period.”

“Well. I’ll take that as a compliment. I think.”

“It was…because this gross exchange is also very very VeRy VERY funny.”

“I’m glad to hear that someone’s laughing about it…I guess you passed.”

“Passed?”

“I’m screening out the boring, uptight guys.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. I think.”

“My, you’re original.”

“My, you’re normal.”

“You could say that. I guess. If you really wanted to insult me.”

“All right, you’re abnormal.”

“That’s more like it. Look, I’m just trying to liven up this online shit a bit, OK? (No pun intended). There are just way too many uptight geeks crowding my digital world.”

“So why do you come to this digital world?”

“LOL.”

“But of course! LOL. How could I forget?”

“And there’s actually some truth to my gross headline. The dude who’s clever enough to figure it out gets sex with me on the first night.”

“Even if he’s bald and short and named Sammy Laffowitz?”

“Especially if. That means he’s getting dissed by a world that doesn’t get his cleverness. And yes, I realize that I just complimented myself, but that’s one of the privileges of being Melody.”

“But arrogance is a malady, Melody.”

“Do you like Oscar Wilde?”

“I just like being wild.”

“Crack my riddle, and I’ll let you play my fiddle.”

Heeb was enthralled by their witty repartee, and now he was determined to wrack his brain all night if he had to, to solve the true meaning of her headline.

“Give me a hint. Just one hint. Pretty please…with dung on top?”

“LOL…OK, you’ve earned it. But the hint is another riddle about the same truth.”

“I’ll take whatever I can get.”

“It’s the same hint I give to everyone who earns it: Web designer chick gets laid off by a bizarre and failing company. Now she needs company. Or companies with cash flow. Because instead of an odd job, she has odd jobs.”

“Ahhh. So now that you got laid off, you’re hopping online to see if you can just get laid.”

“LOL.”

“Laughing Out Loud or Loser Of Lust?”

“Both!”

“That’s what I figured.”

“But if you solve my riddle then we’ll both become winners of lust.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you’re just a loser like everyone before you who’s tried and failed. And I’ll remain an LOL, waiting for the real man…The dude who can crack my code.”

This only goaded Heeb on more, because he was now invited to compete with all of the other men in an area where he actually had a significant competitive advantage: intelligence.

“Hold on. I need to cogitate,” he wrote. Heeb furrowed his brow a bit, as he repeated both riddles to himself a few times, and then the facts that they might imply.

“She’s a web designer chick who got laid off by a bizarre and failing company,” he began. “And now she needs company. Or companies with cash flow. Because instead of an odd job, she has odd jobs…Odd jobs…Hmm…And she’s a cute, normal chick who’s into fecal fetishes and threesomes involving pet animals…Pet animals…Threesomes…Company…Fecal…Odd job…”

Then all of the sudden he looked up in delight with an ecstatic sense of pride at his own sharpness. “I got it! Kojak got it!” he screamed spastically in his one-bedroom apartment, as if the computer in front of him could congratulate him. “Kojak Bay-Bee! Kojak got it!” Heeb got up and busted a few hip-hop moves to round out his victory celebration.

He finally sat back down in front of his computer and saw that Melody had written him several instant messages: “Welllllll????????” followed by “If I could sing, I’d be singing that annoying Jeopardy music they play when the contestants are stumped.” The line below that read: “Helllllooooo????”

In a fit of excitement, Heeb sat down and typed her back a message: “I’m not stumped. Because….I got it!”

“Let me see.”

“Until a company with cash flow can hire you for a regular, full-time job, you’d like some company during some of your odds jobs…One of your odd jobs is being a dog-walker. And you want a guy to walk you while you walk the dog. That’s the threesome involving pet animals. And you want a guy who will happily pick up the dog crap for you. That’s the fecal fetish part.”

“Holy dogshit!!!!!!”

“Am I right?”

“I’m speechless…I’m…I’m in psychedelic awe right now.”

“So am I right?”

“Where do you live?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m yours.”

“But you haven’t even seen a picture of me…”

“I’m yours. Even though I’m not worthy of you.”

“Are you serious?”

“Tell me where you live. It’s time for me to worship you in person.”

Chapter 16
Sammy Meets Melody

As Heeb waited for Melody to arrive at his place on East Eighty-sixth Street, he began to worry a little about having invited her over to his apartment. What if she had posted fake pictures and was heinous-looking in reality? Or even worse, what if she was actually a man?

He should have at least called her and checked out her voice first, he thought to himself. But then he realized that in a phone call the spontaneous momentum they had built up might have been ruined as soon as someone felt awkwardly self-conscious or impulsively insecure about the whole thing. “Closing the deal” over the Internet created an implicit inevitability to their coitus: they had agreed to sleep together in honor of Heeb’s genius and that was that. No further comment or discussion was needed or allowed. He just had to accept the concomitant risks of being so adventurous with online dating (as did she, he figured). And his gut told him that the Melody scheduled to show up at his apartment in forty-five minutes would be the same female Melody with whom he had chatted online. There was something disarmingly honest about her overall style that seemed inconsistent with the tactic of using a false identity.

In the time left before his doorbell rang, Heeb opened his CD collection and looked for the closest thing he had to punk music (The Cure). He cranked the music up as he ran about cleaning his bachelor pad, dimming the lights, taking out the garbage, putting away laundry, and – most importantly – fixing up the bathroom. He also combed the hair on the sides of his head, and applied some cologne and deodorant.

Melody made almost no effort to improve her appearance for the occasion, since – as far as she was concerned – their non-physical connection was so good that the rest would be irrelevant to the two of them (with the exception of offensive odors, to which she was quite sensitive). She wore no bra, so that her petite breasts culminated in two small, marbles under the white cloth of her T-shirt. Her rugged blue jean jacket gave her a sexy tomboy look and her baggy camouflage cargo pants obscured the shape of her long, spare legs. Melody’s dark makeup, purple, hurricane-styled hair, and numerous ear piercings were true to her photo.

When the doorbell rang and Heeb opened the door, he felt a variety of intense emotions stirring within him: relief that it was, in fact, a female who looked substantially like the online photos he had seen; insecurity about being at least an inch shorter than her; nervousness about their plan to have sex that night; embarrassment at any regrets Melody might be feeling upon seeing what he actually looked like; excitement and intrigue about being with a goth-punk-looking woman for the first time; and uncertainty about what, if anything, to say.

Melody also felt a variety of emotions within her: nervous excitement about having finally found her soul mate, uncertainty about whether her breath still smelled like the falafel she had eaten a few hours before her online chat with Heeb, and restlessness originating in a strong desire to consummate their sexual bond and officially enter a deeply connected relationship.

“Nice place,” she said, as she timidly stepped inside.

“Thanks.”

“Can I use your bathroom?”

“Sure,” Heeb replied nervously.

“Thanks,” she said with an anxious smile, as she closed the door. In the bathroom, she scoured the medicine cabinet until she found some toothpaste. She put a gob on her index finger, which she planned to use as a toothbrush, but it fell off before she could raise her hand to her mouth.