Sex in the Title (28 page)

“All right, I’m sorry about the cat comment,” he finally said. “You were still attacked by a pussy, like me. And I’m not gonna lie to you. I probably wouldn’t be talking to you if we weren’t both here right now. But we are both here right now.”

Heeb was still silently pretending to read his
Scientific American
.

“And maybe I need to learn from all of this…Expand my social horizons a little. Question some of my knee-jerk judgments about people…Maybe my people skills need some work… I certainly didn’t deal with that prostitute well.”

Heeb was still silent.

“Hey come on. Lighten up, man. I said I’m sorry. We’re not just gonna sit here in silence for the next few days, are we?”

Evan’s repentant self-flagellation finally satisfied Heeb’s pride. Heeb put down his
Scientific American
, and moved his head in Evan’s direction without making full eye contact with him.

“I’m going to have five scars on my dick forever,” Heeb said sullenly.

Then, like a toddler who’s been smarting from a bad fall but holding back his tears until a sufficiently private moment presents itself, Heeb suddenly began to cry.

Evan wanted to get off his bed, walk over to Heeb, and comfort him, but the doctor told him to stay put as much as possible for the first twenty-four hours.

“Hey now…It’s gonna be all right. I promise,” Evan started. “We’ll both get over this. I promise…”

“All right?!” Heeb replied, between sobs. “I don’t see anything all right about this…Penis…Penis pain for weeks to come…No…No sex for three months….S-S-Scars for the rest of my life…Where’s the all right part?”

“Well, the penis pain could have been for months instead of weeks. And you might have lost the whole thing completely. Then you’d have no penis and no sex for the rest of your life.”

“Yeah. Things could always be worse. My ambulance could have gotten into an accident that left me a quadriplegic. So you want me to rejoice about that now?”

“I’m just trying to help you look at the bright side.”

“You’re not doing a very good job.”

“Look, we have the same challenge. Let’s just be glad we’re in this together…It’d be a lot harder if there were no one I could talk to about the whole thing.”

“But are you going to have scars too?”

“Probably.”

Heeb wiped away his tears and began to feel genuinely reassured by the possibility that he and Evan were going to be a team that together confronts the same bizarre set of issues.

“What about the scars? How will we ever be attractive to women again?”

“I’m not so worried about that for some reason.”

“Probably because your scarring won’t be so bad.”

“I won’t know for a few months. But even if it’s bad, I think that by the time any woman is looking at your dick, you’ve already won her over.”

“You really think that?” asked Heeb, desperately clinging to the hope that Evan might be right about this.

“Yeah. Besides, most women prefer to do it in the dark. It’s sexier. And they often have their own imperfections that they want hidden…So chances are it’ll be too dark for anyone to notice – especially with a condom on…And I’m never doing anything again without a condom.”

“But what if she prefers to do it in the light?”

“Well, you’ll insist on doing it in the dark. You’ll make up some tender, psychological reason why you need to do it in the dark. You’ll promise to please her in just that way she loves, and eventually she’ll be cool about it doing it in the dark. And after a few months, you’ll feel comfortable enough to show her your scars, if she gets too curious on you. At that point, she’s not going to leave you. Trust me. And if she does, then you wouldn’t want to keep her anyway.”

Heeb was reassured by Evan’s surprisingly rational analysis of the situation. “Have you been through this kind of thing before?” Sammy asked.

“Definitely not.”

“So why do you seem so calm about the whole thing?”

“Probably because the reality hasn’t hit me yet.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I think.”

“Reality sure takes a long time to hit you, Evan.”

*****

The two exchanged detailed reports of their respective medical conditions, and then drifted to other topics. They spent several hours exchanging life stories, when suddenly, in the middle of Heeb’s summary of his early childhood, Evan burst into tears.

“What’s wrong?” Heeb said, confused by the timing of Evan’s crying.

The reality finally hit Evan too.

“You…You got me thinking about childhood,” Evan began, wiping away some tears, “And how we each get a fresh…A fresh start…And what if…What if I have HIV now? What have I done?” he burst into fresh tears again. No longer the cocksure man confronting bad news, Evan now looked like a little boy who had accidentally broken his favorite toy.

“It’ll be all right, Evan.”

“We don’t know that!” Evan said, pessimistically between tears.

“Don’t deal with bad news until you have to,” Heeb counseled.

“But what if there’s bad news? How will I deal with HIV?”

“Magic Johnson does.”

“I’m not Magic Johnson,” Evan said, with a detached sobriety that accompanied the end of his teary outpouring.

“I’m just saying that it’s not a death sentence any more…I mean, you’ve gotta see the cup as half full.”

“It’s looking very half empty from here, Sammy.”

“We’ll get through this, Evan…I know we will…”

“And even if I come out clean, what am I going to tell my future wife if she asks me some day whether I’ve ever been with a prostitute?”

“I think you can honestly tell her that you never paid for sex,” Heeb suggested, putting the best spin he could think of on Evan’s story.

“But I was technically with a prostitute…That’s lower than low!”

And with that, Evan burst into a new volley of tears. His male pride couldn’t bear such a humiliating blemish on his sexual record.

“Well, it was just an experience. You can chalk it up to your experimental youth.”

“But I just turned twenty-nine a few months ago.”

“So call it your ‘experimental twenties.’ Besides, everyone’s got some skeletons in the closet. Including your future wife. So the two of you will just have to accept each other as is.”

“My wife won’t have any skeletons!”

“How do you know?”

“Because she’ll be perfect,” he said, thinking wishfully of Delilah Nakova.

“There’s no such thing.”

“She’ll be perfect I tell you,” Evan said, with conviction, wiping away his tears.

“Well if she’s perfect, why would she choose to be with anyone less perfect than her?”

“Because she’ll have compassion for imperfect fools like me. That’ll be part of her perfection.”

Chapter 20
Penilosophy

At 8 a.m. the next morning, over a hospital breakfast of saccharin cereal and salty scrambled eggs, Evan and Sammy began discussing life and women again, but in a much more jocular spirit. They exchanged funny anecdotes of female flubs and follies: from the long list – still in Evan’s back pocket – of untried permutations for Sayvyer’s forgotten phone number to Heeb’s brief foray into nude modeling for art classes.

They continued talking and laughing for a few hours and almost forgot where they were until their light mood was cut short by the arrival of a nurse in her late fifties. It was time for a cleaning. They looked at each other with the same expression of terrified anxiety, exhaled heavily, and took some painkillers.

Despite the analgesics, they both felt occasional flare-ups of soreness that led them to shake their legs involuntarily. In fact, the only thing that made those stinging moments tolerable was humor. They had grown comfortable enough with each other to laugh freely at how ridiculous they each looked in their respective beds, wearing just the baggy, grey hospital gown, with their naked legs shaking and their groin areas covered by loose gauze.

Although the flare-ups didn’t usually occur to Evan and Heeb at the same time, the worst incident of that morning was relatively simultaneous.

Evan desperately searched for some levity to relieve their pangs.

“You know the United Negro College Fund?” Evan began, between groans.

“You’re thinking of civil rights now?!” Heeb replied in a gasp.

“No…” Evan replied, as he began to moan.

“As long as it’s…” Heeb began, breathing through some burning sensation. “As long as it’s not animal rights,” he continued, to Evan’s amusement. “Because the animals…The animals violated my fuckin’ civil rights…My prick feels like it’s been pricked,” Heeb said, gasping for relief. “Like someone put pepper on my peter…”

Evan blurted out a squeal that combined laughter with an achy howl.

Heeb involuntarily gnarled up his face into a comical, exaggerated expression as he tried to contain the smarting sensation. “Damned cat turned my penis into a pain-is.”

Evan emitted some more spastic laughs between his wailing. “Painis…That’s a good one…I’ve got a painis now too…” The two switched between laughing and yelping.

“So like I was saying…The United Negro College Fund has a great quote,” Evan began again, trying to get the words out faster, to avoid laughing at Heeb’s joke again. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

“I know there’s a relevant connection here somewhere,” Heeb replied sarcastically through gritted teeth.

“There is,” Evan stammered, between chuckles. “There is…If you’ll let me finish.”

“Just a sec,” Heeb said, taking some more painkillers.

“Good idea,” Evan replied, doing the same.

“I used to live by,” Evan started and then exhaled some pain away. “By…by the Hugh Hefner version of that quote.”

“You mean: a penis is a terrible thing to waste?”

“Yeah,” Evan replied, in a moan. “But these days I’ve got a new version of that quote…A penis is a terrible thing. Period,” Evan said, gasping.

“Yes…It really is,” Heeb said, in strained agreement. “But the sad irony is that, without it, we’d have no motivation to do anything.”

Evan struggled some more with the intense discomfort and then added, “You’re so right…”

And as their penile pain began to subside, the two men were able to form more complex thoughts, resulting in a collaborative work: the development of a worldview that might be described as “penilosophy.” This reductionist metaphysics posited that the penis is the source of all significant acts – good and bad – produced by men. From the Trojan Wars prompted by Helen eloping with Paris, to the muse that Beatrice was to Dante, to the castration suffered by Abelard for his love of Heloise, Heeb and Evan came up with various examples of how the course of a man’s life is determined by the compass of his penis.

Any psychologist would have taken their speculative philosophical foray as evidence that Heeb and Evan had developed a penile fixation in response to their injuries, but the two men were increasingly convinced and excited by the depth of their insight. They concluded that virtually everything done or made by men could be explained in terms of Darwinian survival strategies to perpetuate sperm.

“Even pavement, for God’s sake!” blurted out Evan. “Even pavement is there because of the penis.”

“Of course it is!” replied Heeb. “There were a lot of penises performing lots of hard labor to create the pavement. And the pavement itself enables a more efficient society, in which penises can more readily travel to vaginas, and vice-versa.”

“Good point,” said Evan. “And did you know that if you put the word ‘penis’ into a Google search you’ll get six million hits, but if you put in the word ‘vagina’ you’ll get only three million hits?”
^[3]

“That’s probably because there are more men than women surfing the Internet,” Heeb conjectured.

“But those men are mostly straight, so why would the websites be about penises?” Evan asked.

“True. But even straight men obsess about the penis. After all, we’ve established that it’s the moving force behind everything.”

“But what about the Pet Rock,” Evan began, worried that he might have found a powerful counter-example to refute their carefully crafted theory. “I don’t see the penis there.”

“That’s just like bubble gum,” Heeb said, without the slightest concern about the soundness of their new philosophy. “The product itself is of no real utility to evolutionary survival, but a penis out there realized that – with some shrewd marketing – the idea could make money. And money is always a great way for one penis to outdo all the other penises, in its competition for the best vaginas out there.”

“You have a point there,” Evan replied, somewhat relieved. “But what if the Pet Rock was invented by a vagina?”

“I don’t think Gary Dahl had a vagina. But that’s irrelevant,” Sammy concluded.

“Why is it irrelevant?”

“Because these days vaginas also make money to compete for penises. Look at all of the female multi-millionaires out there today.”

“You mean to tell me that the Oprahs of the world are pursuing success so they can choose from a better selection of penises?” Evan asked.

“You don’t see them dating guys who look like me, do you?” Heeb replied.

“That’s just because they haven’t discovered your lovely cock yet.”

“Hey, that’s not funny,” Sammy snapped, getting defensive and insecure.

“Coming from me it is! Come on, you can tease me about the same issue. We have to be able to laugh about this, or we’ll never get over it.”

“All right, but don’t get us off on a tangent. Our theory still works,” Heeb said.

“What theory?”

“We can still safely conclude that if you eliminated every penis on the planet earth, very little would get done, and the human species would go totally extinct in no more than about a century.”

“You mean eliminate men? Or leave the men but eliminate their penises and testicles?” Evan asked.

“The second one.”

“And you’re assuming that the sperm banks have gone bankrupt?” Evan clarified.

“Yes, take all frozen sperm out of the equation.”

“OK, so if all you have is men without their equipment, then you don’t have sperm. And then the men have no sex drive, so they have no motivation to do anything significant, and the women’s eggs all go to waste, and, as the decades pass, more and more of humanity is gone.”