Sex in the Title (32 page)

Suddenly everything that he could have said to Delilah began to occur to him, much of it in the Czech language. He could have told her how his great grandfather was born in Brno. He could have said that he really loves Czech culture, from its great writers like Jaroslav Seifert and Milan Kundera, to composer Antonin Dvorak and filmmaker Milos Forman. He could have mentioned how much he loved the architecture of Prague, which he had visited during the summer right after college. He could have asked her if she was taking any political science courses with any of the professors he had studied under at Brown College. He could have told her how Murphy’s Law had governed his entire interaction with her, including the fact that she showed up just in time to overhear him belittling the utility of speaking Czech, when, in fact, he was really just trying to make the woman next to him feel better about not having studied any languages, and would actually love it if he found someone with whom he could regularly practice his Czech. And if she could hear him at this moment he would tell her how the proof that Murphy’s Law was dictating the night consisted in the fact that all of these thoughts were streaming through his head with perfect clarity only now, as he recited them to the taco he was holding in his hand.

About twenty minutes later, Evan noticed the cumulative effect of all of the tequilas and Mexican snacks stirring in his stomach and felt a sudden urge to relieve himself. He made his way to the unisex bathroom and was pleased to see that, while both toilet stalls were occupied, there was no one else waiting in front of him.

The scatological sounds coming out of one of the stalls were disgustingly loud and explosive – discordant with the swanky style that marked even the bathroom of the high-end club. He began to wonder whether there was something in the food, or the way it was digested with alcohol that caused the person in the stall to have such bowel movements. As he heard the grunts and moans of hard work, he began to wonder whether the same problems awaited him.

After about five minutes, the person who had made all of those offensive noises emerged from the stall. It was a stunning, five-nine, cover girl model. The moment seemed amusingly surreal as she tried to smile politely at Evan for the brief moment between when she opened the stall door and when she moved to the faucet to wash her hands. As Evan moved towards the now available stall, he thought to himself, “Wow…Beautiful women also make those noises…But I’d really rather not know about it…I never did like unisex bathrooms…”

And seconds later Evan was producing the same revolting sounds and noisome odors, as his body discarded much of what he had been feeding it over the last few hours. As Evan sat there, occasionally groaning to ease the process and trying to ignore the bustle and babble of a fast growing toilet queue, he decided that his next move after the bathroom was to survey the club for Delilah Nakova. Now that he knew what to say to her, he would figure out some way to break through the large entourage around her so that he could talk to her.

But just as he thought he was finished with his bathroom business, another embarrassingly loud volley of farts and their solid accompaniments was emitted from below him, followed by a sigh of relief that he couldn’t contain. In immediate response to what he had just thunderously accomplished, the large crowd in line erupted into a series of giggles and outbursts like “nasty!” and “ewww!” and Evan felt quite mortified at the fact that he now had a rather large and responsive audience.

Eager to escape the scene, Evan quickly finished up, wiped, flushed, and opened the stall door, only to find Delilah Nakova standing right in front of him, waiting to use his stall. She was looking right at him as he exited the stall, and all around her were the members of her entourage, each of whom looked amused to put a face to the record-breaking sounds that they had just heard.

Trying to avoid eye contact with anyone, Evan wasn’t sure whether it would be worse to wash his hands while Delilah’s ten friends stared at him, or to walk out right away and leave everyone thinking that he doesn’t maintain proper hygiene. He opted for a desperate charm offensive while washing his hands.

“I’m really sorry about that,” he said to Delilah and her crowd as he moved towards the faucet. “I think that Mexican food didn’t go so well with all of those tequilas.”

Delilah took one step closer to the stall to see if it could be used and was immediately repelled by the stench. One of the guys in her entourage yelled out, “You nuked the place, dude!”

“I know…I’m sorry, you guys may want to evacuate the area for a few minutes,” Evan said, as he finished washing his hands and headed towards the exit. He felt oddly guilty about leaving them there in the newsworthy fetor of his making, but he would have felt even stranger lingering there any longer. He tried to walk out as nonchalantly as possible, even though all eyes were on him, and the second he was out of the bathroom he heard the crowd urgently fleeing behind him.

******

Heeb was sitting at the edge of his bed, wide-eyed and completely engrossed, as Evan finished telling the story about his brief encounter with Delilah Nakova.

“That’s it? You didn’t go up to her again later that night?” Heeb asked, feeling as frustrated and disappointed as if it had all happened to him. “Maybe an hour or so later?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“What did you want me to do? Go up to her and say, ‘Hi. I’m that guy from the bathroom. Remember me? Did you find a safer place to crap after I left?’”

“Couldn’t you try to joke around with one of her friends and get into her circle somehow?”

“Oh, you mean go up to the guy who accused me of nuking the bathroom and be like, ‘Hey, that was a pretty funny joke you made about my bowel movements. This Mexican food sure is rough on the stomach, isn’t it?’”

“I’m sure you could have come up with something.”

“They’d probably be thinking: ‘Who is this freak? First he drops the mother of all shit bombs on the bathroom and then he thinks he can turn our collective trauma into a friendship.’”

“That really sucks, Evan.”

“It was a fucking disaster, Sammy. A total fucking disaster. And I’ve been mourning that night ever since.”

Chapter 23
SQ and the Fellowship of the Schlong

A few hours after Evan finished recounting his Delilah debacle, Doctor Clayton returned to inspect both patients. Evan would be able to leave the next morning, but Heeb would have to stay for another forty-eight hours after Evan’s release. The brief examination and Evan’s pending departure made Heeb insecure about his injury again. After the doctor left, Heeb shared some of his troubled thoughts.

“I can’t afford to date randomly for another year before looking for a Jewish wife. That would leave me with only two years for my search, and right now I’m not sure if even three years would be enough,” Heeb worried. By now, Evan was well aware of Heeb’s plan for a kosher marriage by age thirty. “This dick disaster completely destroyed whatever was left of my SQ.”

“What’s SQ?” asked Evan.

“Sexual Quotient.”

“What’s that?”

“Basically, it’s your odds of getting laid. Everyone has an SQ. Just like everyone has an IQ.”

“I’ve never heard that term before.”

“That’s because I made it up.”

“That figures. Finally applying your actuarial skills to what really matters, eh?”

“Yeah…It’s an idea I had always sort of toyed with, but after I lost Yumi to my boss, I really began to develop and refine it.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I started obsessing over why she suddenly dumped me for him. And in the process of figuring that out, I developed the concept of SQ.”

“So how does it work?”

“Your Sexual Quotient is really just an attempt to quantify, on some absolute scale, how attractive you are to the opposite sex. In general, the higher your SQ, the more desirable you are.”

“So the higher your SQ, the easier it is for you to get laid.”

“Right. But your SQ determines a lot more; it effectively defines your bargaining position in a relationship. The lower your SQ, the more likely you are to be dominated by the person you’re with,” Heeb explained.

“You really think so?”

“Look at me. I always end up being the doormat because of my SQ. But if you look at models – male or female – they generally get away with demanding more and giving less.”

“So how do you figure out your SQ?” Evan asked, suddenly eager to compute his own Sexual Quotient.

“Well, your subjective SQ is how attractive you are to a particular person. And your objective SQ is just the average of all the scores you got for all of the people out there.”

“So how do I calculate my SQ for a particular woman?”

“It’s calculated the way you would calculate your personal income taxes.”

“How’s that?”

“Various facts cause you to take deductions from the total, although with taxes you want the deductions and with your SQ you obviously don’t. Because the lower your objective SQ is, the fewer women you attract, and the less picky you can be. And that’s a bad thing. And for anyone who wants to marry a Jew, it’s a disaster.”

“Why?”

“Because there are only about fourteen million Jews in the whole world, which leaves about seven million for each gender. So let’s say I’m willing to date any Jewish woman who’s twenty to forty years old. That leaves me with a choice of about two million women in the world. And if we assume that half of those women are already taken, I’m left with a million eligible women roaming about six billion people.
^[7]

“A million?”

“Yeah. And if you want to get really precise, we need to shave off at least another three hundred thousand, because I can’t date any Chasidic, Orthodox or even Conservative Jews.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I’m compatible only with bagel Jews.”

“Bagel Jews?”

“The ones who are Jewish culturally but not religiously. Which leaves about seven hundred thousand.”

“That’s pretty bad.”

“Tell me about it. I lower my standards by at least twenty percent the minute a woman tells me she’s Jewish.”

“So why do you limit yourself like that?”

“I’m not really sure…It’s complicated…Part of it is pressure from my family. Part of it is thinking that cultural familiarity makes it easier to get along with someone.”

“But you’re not even religious. So what are you talking about? The fact that you can enjoy bagels with your wife?”

“Don’t underestimate the importance of bagels,” Heeb rejoined.

“OK.”

“But it’s more than that. It’s a shared history. A value system. A kind of humor. And there’s also this idea of cultural survival.”

“What do you mean?”

“After genocide eliminates one third of a community, the remaining two thirds feels somewhat obligated to replenish the population.”

“I guess I never thought about it like that.”

“And even if I know very little about my own religion – embarrassingly little – I can confidently say that we must be doing something right.”

“Why is that?”

“Because we’ve survived three thousand years of persecution, and along the way we still managed to spit out Einstein, Freud, Marx, and seventeen percent of all Nobel Laureates.”
^[8]

“Well, you’re definitely not a group of slackers.”

“Yeah. But I still have my doubts about sticking to Jewish women, given how few of them there are. Especially when I’m competing with all of the other men out there and have to take my deductions.”

“What deductions?” Evan asked.

“A man’s SQ is derived using a composite formula, based on seven key factors: wealth, social power, age, handsomeness, height, weight, personality, and hair.”

“Is that in order of importance?”

“Basically. Although wealth and social power are probably tied in terms of importance, and hair can sometimes outweigh personality, if you’re dealing with a shallow hottie.”

“And how do these factors combine?”

“It’s pretty obvious if you just compare scenarios. For example, between a seventy-nine-year old billionaire and a nineteen-year old billionaire, the vast majority of women would prefer the nineteen-year old, unless of course they’re hoping to inherit quickly, in which case you wouldn’t want them anyway.”

“Very true.”

“And if you have two millionaires of the same age, but one has hair and the other doesn’t, the one with the hair wins.”

“So this is how you deduct?”

“Essentially. You start with one hundred percentage points, which represents a guaranteed lay with any female you approach. One hundred is, of course, a theoretical ideal. No man actually has a one hundred SQ because no man could really have sex with absolutely any woman of his choice.”

“Why not?”

“Because there’s always this random component to sexual taste.”

“What do you mean?”

“Even the hottest, tallest, wealthiest hunk with a full head of hair and the best personality, might still strike out with some female who, for some random reason, would never want to sleep with him.”

“Why?”

“Maybe he reminds the woman of her evil stepdad, or some psycho ex-boyfriend.”

“Or maybe she just became a nun,” Evan offered.

“Right. Or she might have some deep medical or emotional reason to remain celibate. You never know. So you have to account for this possibility with a standard deduction of ten percent. Just like there’s a standard deduction for every taxpayer.”

“OK…So really, the highest possible SQ is ninety.”

“Right. But after the standard deduction you need to apply the itemized deductions for the seven key factors of wealth, social power, age, handsomeness, height, weight, personality, and hair.”

“So give me an example of an itemized deduction.”

“OK. Take the all-important factor of age. Just like your tax rate depends on which income bracket you fall into, the size of your age deduction depends on what age range you’re in.”

“So what’s the first age range?”