Big Egos

by S. G. Browne

  “As intrigued as I am by the thought of it,” I finally manage to say, “I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we work together,” I say. “And because I have a girlfriend.”

  “I notice you didn’t give that as your first reason.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s any less important.”

  She gives me the slightest of smiles and I find myself staring at her lips and I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to kiss her.

  That’s one of the problems with being a man. We’re total idiots.

  “Working together wouldn’t be a problem for me. And I’m not looking for anything serious, so you don’t have to worry about any awkward phone calls or text messages or messy entanglements,” says Chloe. “Oh, and did you just refer to your girlfriend as it?”

  Before I can respond, Vincent returns with two beers, one for him and one for Chloe, and she starts talking with him as if our conversation never took place. She’s smiling and laughing, a stray hand reaching out and touching Vincent once, then a second time, her eyes never leaving him to dart over to see how I’m reacting.

  Moments later, Emily returns from the bathroom, followed by Neil, who pretends to be amused by the joke Chloe played on him about signing him up for karaoke, then he tells Chloe that she should really wash her hands after having held the microphone, which more than a dozen people have touched since we’ve been here. Chloe ignores his suggestion, continuing to flirt with Vincent as Kurt arrives with the hot brunette who needs a fire extinguisher. He slaps me on the back and asks me if I’m ready for a big night, then introduces the brunette to the table as Ashley.

  Before we have a chance to all shake hands, which launches Neil into another helpful tip about transferring germs, “Desperado” is done and Angela is at the microphone launching into Billie Holiday’s “Me, Myself, and I.”

  We all turn our attention to the stage and applaud and let out a few shouts of encouragement. Occasionally I glance at Chloe to see if I catch her looking my way, but her attention is on Angela and Vincent and something Emily says. Anywhere but on me.

  And I wonder if I imagined our entire conversation.

  CHAPTER 19

  I don’t remember the last time I had sex as myself.

  You’d think you’d be able to remember something like that, but I’ve had sex as so many different people that I’ve actually forgotten what it’s like to feel myself behind the overwhelming desire to fulfill my carnal lust.

  Is it role-playing if you think you’re someone else?

  Right now I’m Indiana Jones, complete with felt fedora and trusty whip, standing at the edge of the California king with my pants around my ankles and Mary Magdalene naked on her hands and knees begging me to find the Holy Grail.

  I never said I expected to go to heaven.

  It’s not like Delilah and I planned this out. I never would have picked Indiana and Mary to be compatible sex partners, but sometimes the most unlikely of combinations proves to be the most interesting.

  The way this works is that one of us picks who they want to be first, and then the other one gets to choose. The idea is to challenge your partner to pick someone who has some sort of connection, the more ambiguous or bizarre the better. Kind of like playing the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, only we’re looking for a game of connected sexual partners.

  Since I have access to the complete line of Big Egos, the possibilities are endlessly erotic.

  Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.

  Captain Kirk and Ellen Ripley.

  Pablo Picasso and Jessica Rabbit.

  But tonight we played Russian roulette, picking random identities and seeing what came up, though the way things turned out, it seems like our subconscious had a hand in the decision-making.

  Freud said that the id is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality. A chaos. A cauldron full of seething excitations, striving to bring about the satisfaction of instinctual needs.

  Truth is, we’re just a slave to our instincts.

  Men are genetically hardwired to have sex with as many different women as possible. Spread our seed. Ensure the propagation of our DNA. We’re like the rhesus monkeys in that experiment where they put a male monkey in a cage with a female monkey and then let them go at it until the male monkey rolls over and starts snoring. Then they take out the female monkey and replace her with another female monkey. She taps the male on the shoulder and says, “Hi handsome.” He perks up and says “Hey, you’re new.” And they go at it until he once more grows bored with her company. Then she gets replaced.

  It goes on like this for hours, a revolving door of female monkeys.

  Switch. Fuck. Repeat.

  It’s a regular primate porno.

  Human men aren’t much different. Given the opportunity and a free pass from consequences or complications, we’d have sex with as many women as possible. Marriage is an unnatural hindrance to our intended purpose.

  So we cheat.

  We watch Internet porn.

  We pretend to be burglars or deliverymen or HDTV repairmen in order to spice things up in the bedroom. To keep the flame of passion from burning out. To maintain the façade of monogamy behind the personas we’ve adopted.

  Sometimes we even inject the persona of an iconic film series character into our brain and have sex with a misunderstood biblical figure.

  Mary glances back over her shoulder, her eyes half closed, and tells me she’s about to ascend to heaven.

  I consider telling her that I’ve already ascended without her, but I don’t want to break the mood. So instead I think about ancient civilizations and priceless artifacts and getting chased by Nazis and that seems to do the trick.

  When you’ve been having sex as someone else for as long as I have, you learn a few tricks, not the least of which is how to maintain some stamina.

  Taking deep breaths.

  Focusing on your sexual awareness.

  Contracting your pubococcygeus muscle.

  Problem is, when you’re having sex with someone famous or new or taboo, you tend to lose yourself in the experience. You forget everything you’ve learned and you just let go. You surrender to the pleasure. You lose yourself in the identity of someone else.

  Antony and Cleopatra. Superman and Lois Lane. Ken and Barbie.

  Sometimes I wonder if I know what I’m doing. If I’m still me. If I’m in control of this or if it’s in control of me. But then I realize that I’m the one wondering about this, not Indiana Jones or Harrison Ford. These are my thoughts, my underlying current of reason that still exists. And I breathe a sigh of relief.

  It’s good to know I’m still in here somewhere.

  But at the moment, I’m channeling my inner seeker of lost artifacts.

  So I continue to bang away with Mary Magdalene, doing it doggie style with the alleged wife of Jesus, or at least his girlfriend, possibly one of his apostles, thinking about Judas and that blond German bitch from The Last Crusade, and I can’t help but wonder if Mary is a Nazi spy.

  CHAPTER 20

  I’m wearing an oversized, hunter green, Italian two-piece suit, which looks rain forest lush against my white collared shirt. A two-inch-wide coordinating tie nearly finishes off the ensemble until I bring my irises in line with colored contacts.

  Tonight, green is my favorite color.

  The clock on the wall indicates I’m approaching fashionably late. From a safe behind an original John Lennon drawing, I remove a small plastic vial filled with a fine white powder. After sliding the vial into my inside jacket pocket, I’m out the door and sitting behind the wheel of my 1962 Aston Martin on the way to an exclusive party in the Hollywood Hills.

  “Thunderball” by Tom Jones pumps out of my stereo speakers as I pull out of my garage. Carly Simon sings “Nobody Does It Better” while I make my way up Laurel Canyon. Paul McCartney belts out “Live and Let Die” as I wind my way along Mulholland Drive.

 
There’s nothing like having your own personal soundtrack to get you in the mood.

  The entire time, I keep checking my rearview mirror to make sure I’m not being followed by any members of SPECTRE. You never know where Ernst Blofeld and his white Persian cat will show up.

  After an all-too-brief drive, I arrive at my destination—a three-story sprawling monstrosity off Mulholland Drive with a 180-degree view of the San Fernando Valley. An eight-person gondola runs on a set of cables from the house to the automobile courtyard. I can tell the character of this particular gathering by the number of Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, though I spot a Porsche 911 and a 1957 Corvette, so not everyone will be pretentious.

  I greet the valet with a nod and a Franklin, give him the keys to my car, then I step into the gondola. As the car lifts off and begins its climb toward the house, I case the grounds, looking for potential danger and alternate routes of escape, scanning for any sign of Hugo Drax, Dr. No, or Auric Goldfinger. And Oddjob. I hate that guy.

  A few minutes later the butler lets me in the front door. A freshly groomed shih tzu with a purple bow on its head gives me the third degree, barking several times in an annoying, high-pitched yap before running off huffing and puffing. I watch the obnoxious, beady-eyed, walking throw rug disappear into the main room and wonder why anyone would choose a shih tzu over a Great Dane or an Old English mastiff. I guess some people lack the skills to own a real dog.

  Morticia Addams appears in a black, form-fitting gothic dress with a hobble skirt and greets me with an alluring smile and a lingering handshake as she plants a kiss on my right cheek.

  “Darling,” she says. “So glad you could join us. Do come in.”

  Morticia leads me by the arm into the main room, which is large enough to accommodate one hundred people, though only forty-five, including myself, are in attendance. Tables of food line two of the walls. A string quartet is crowded into a corner playing something that sounds like an old television theme song, while a full-service bar takes up half of a third wall. I glide over to the bar and ask for a vodka martini, shaken, not stirred. I also ask for a small dish of pimento olives.

  Three men nearest me at the bar are throwing out one-liners and making fun of the other guests. The tall one is Johnny Carson. The other two are Groucho Marx and George Burns. A dozen feet from them, Betty Boop is flirting with Winston Churchill. John Candy has camped out in front of the spinach dip while two women, both Annie Hall, are having an argument. Albert Einstein is talking politics with Pablo Picasso while Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra smoke cigars and share a laugh. Henry David Thoreau stands by himself off in the corner, watching everyone, taking notes.

  Edgar Allan Poe, Martin Luther King Jr., Billie Holiday, Mr. Rogers, Harry Houdini, Princess Diana, Atticus Finch, Ronald Reagan—all are among the celebrities, writers, poets, politicians, musicians, artists, scholars, and fictional characters who have gathered here this evening.

  My martini arrives with the dish of olives. I thank the bartender with a Jackson, spear an olive with a toothpick, and drop it into my glass, then return my attention to the room.

  In the far corner, a yellow and blue macaw sits in a cage hanging from the ceiling. The macaw’s round, black eyes follow Jake La Motta and Judy Garland as they walk past the cage and approach the bar. La Motta, the De Niro version from Raging Bull, is dressed in a black suit with no tie while Judy is wearing a white, low-cut satin dress with thigh-high slits that make me wonder if she’s wearing any underwear.

  While La Motta orders a beer and a gin-and-tonic, Judy looks me up and down and smiles and asks if I’m the Wizard of Oz.

  I tell her I can be anything she wants me to be.

  La Motta steps up to me and gets in my face. “You got a problem, big shot?”

  I shake my head and tell him my only problem is that I’m alone while he’s with the most beautiful woman at the party.

  “You got that right, tough guy,” he says, then he takes his date by the elbow and leads her away. Judy gives me several coy looks when La Motta isn’t watching and I know that in less than five minutes I could have her for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’ve always wanted to have sex with Judy Garland. But tonight, sexual pleasure is not on my agenda.

  At least not until I find what I came here for.

  A few more guests arrive—Mozart and Carrie Bradshaw, Jackie Robinson and Snow White—but as far as I can tell, all of them are upstanding citizens. But that doesn’t mean one of them can’t be a double agent.

  For the next forty-five minutes I sip my martini, engage in brief conversations with more than half the guests while observing the others, order a second martini, and begin to wonder if I’m going to have any reason to use the vial in my pocket. Then I hear the doorbell, followed immediately by three rapid knocks. The door opens and I can hear the shih tzu yapping, followed by Morticia Addams greeting the late arrival. After a brief flurry of apologies and laughter, the new guest joins the party.

  When the woman walks into the room, forty-nine pair of eyes follows her—fifty-one if you count the shih tzu and the macaw. The woman staggers across the floor on three-inch heels, her unencumbered breasts bouncing around inside her low-cut blue satin blouse like a pair of overfilled water balloons. She brushes her hair out of her face with an abrupt wave of her hand, then smiles and grabs a glass of champagne from a passing tray. She has lipstick on her teeth. Her upper lip is twitching.

  I watch her as she moves through the other guests like a shopping cart with a bad wheel, stumbling into Barney Stinson, who helps her to her feet and himself to a handful of her left breast. She laughs and continues toward the tables of food.

  I finish my second martini and order two more. After tipping the bartender another Jackson, I ask him if he would mind finding me a cigar. As soon as he’s gone, I spear a single olive with the toothpick from my mouth and drop the olive into one of the martinis, then I reach inside my jacket pocket and remove the small vial with the white powder, which I empty into the other martini while everyone else is distracted by the new arrival. I spear two more olives with a toothpick and stir them into the glass before I take both glasses and make my way across the room toward the woman who appears to be a flawed rendition of Marilyn Monroe. Or possibly Jayne Mansfield. It’s hard to tell. But with the way her breasts are balancing in the confines of her dress and teetering on the precipice of a nipple slip, I’m guessing Jayne Mansfield.

  Jayne attempts to scoop some of the smoked salmon onto a cracker but the salmon keeps falling to the floor. Charlie Chaplin approaches and offers to hold her champagne while she gives the salmon another try. She downs the champagne, hands Chaplin her empty glass, and tells him she’s still thirsty. He leaves in search of a refill, his hopes of an easy conquest evident in his brisk walk.

  The instant Chaplin steps away I take his place. Jayne looks at me and snorts laughter. “Who are you? Gumby?”

  I smile and shake my head, though I tell her some of my female acquaintances have affectionately called me Pokey.

  She laughs again, this time without the snort, and notices the two martinis I’m holding.

  “You planning on drinking both of those?” she asks.

  Not without some help, I tell her.

  She smiles. It’s a nice smile, even with the twitching upper lip and the lipstick on her teeth. I hand her the glass in my right hand, the martini with the two olives, and take a sip of my own martini while she removes the olives, slides them off the toothpick with her teeth, then slugs down the martini and the olives in one gulp. She hands the glass back to me with the toothpick in it and asks if I would mind getting her another drink.

  I tell her it would be my pleasure.

  The moment I leave, Chaplin is back with two glasses of champagne, talking the woman up and shifting his gaze from her face to the constant motion of her breasts. They’re nice breasts. You can tell they’re real. But I’m a betting man and I’m betting Chaplin won’t get the chance to discover what they look like insi
de her blue satin blouse.

  I set Jayne’s empty martini glass on the bar, where the bartender hands me a Monte Cristo. I finish my martini, thank the bartender for his company and tip him another Jackson, then I give my regards to Morticia Addams on my way out the front door. I consider going back and liberating Judy Garland from La Motta, but I don’t want to make a scene. Besides, I have plenty of women I can call for a late-night rendezvous.

  As the gondola glides slowly along the cables toward the automobile courtyard, I light up my cigar and wonder if Honey Ryder would like to saddle up. If Pussy Galore has any to spare. Whether Holly Goodhead needs some practice.

  I wonder how much it would take to get Miss Moneypenny out of her clothes.

  CHAPTER 21

  “I’d like to get her out of her clothes,” says Nat.

  “Who?” I say.

  “The bartender,” he says, taking a drink of his beer and pointing to the bleached blond Asian woman serving drinks to the other members of the Bruin Democrats—the UCLA chapter of the College Democrats of America.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Good luck with that.”

  Where we are is the bar at Palomino in Westwood in late September 2016, celebrating our recent canvassing of the UCLA campus to register voters for the upcoming presidential election. We’re all feeling good about our candidate’s chances. Not to mention that we kicked the Bruin Republicans’ asses in our annual co-ed ultimate Frisbee game.

  That’s what they get for trying to regulate and oversee morality.

  I became a member of the Bruin Democrats at the end of my freshman year, when it became clear to me that a career as a professional soccer player didn’t offer enough in the way of personal fulfillment. I needed to find a different role. Something that gave my life more meaning.

  So when I came across a voter registration table at the South Campus Student Center two and a half years ago, I found myself drawn to the cute redhead with a ponytail and an alluring smile sitting behind the table.