by Zack Love
Sammy and Carlos were so different in looks, style, and personality that they would have never become such close friends were it not for the random housing lottery that made them roommates after Carlos returned from his junior year abroad in Brazil. Living together in close quarters for their last year of college forced each to embrace the crazy quirks and neuroses of the other, usually after some extensive badinage. And Carlos was unquestionably the perfect roommate for Sammy, because – since the age of sixteen – Carlos had easily attracted pretty females, and therefore carried absolutely no insecurities about his desirability as a man. Hence, he wasn’t the least bit concerned that Sammy’s ineptitude with women and his dramatically less attractive looks might harm his ability to interest women when the two were together.
So while most men with Carlos’s looks would snobbishly shun someone like Sammy, Carlos decided to embrace the oddball, and make him a regular partner in his outings. Carlos never fully realized that such social altruism actually made him even more desirable in two respects: 1) his good looks were even more pronounced in the company of the far less handsome Sammy, and 2) his tolerant and good-natured character shone through, as he was clearly above the superficial snap judgments that led most “cool” people to summarily dismiss anyone like Sammy.
Sammy didn’t really have any reliable “good friends” besides Carlos and Titus. Titus was an African-American man in his late sixties who checked into a Boston clinic for the blind after losing his sight to glaucoma during Sammy’s freshman year. The two of them met on Sammy’s first day as a volunteer at the clinic.
“Why you spendin’ your fine days as a young college student with a blind old fart like me?” Titus asked, in his characteristically blunt and playful manner.
“Well, after twelve years of Hebrew school, I really remember only one thing: thou shalt not place stumbling blocks before the blind.”
“Is that right? Is that all they taught you in twelve years?”
“It’s the only thing that really stuck with me. I don’t know why. There’s just something so cruel about the idea of people placing stumbling blocks in front of the blind that – ever since I heard that – I’ve always wanted to do something to help them.”
“Well, that’s mighty kind of you, Sammy.”
“I guess so…I can’t have my parents thinking that twelve years of Hebrew school was a complete waste.”
“You mean you didn’t learn any Hebrew after twelve years of Hebrew school?”
“I know how to say ‘I don’t eat pork.’”
“Now that’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard!”
“Why is that?”
“Because the only people who are ever gonna understand you when you say that to them in Hebrew are people who would never try to serve you pork anyway.”
“True. But I was never very good at foreign languages.”
“I thought you said you go to Harvard.”
“You know, that’s the problem with telling people you go to Harvard. If they’re dialing some phone number in Tajikistan and they forget the country code, they’re shocked if you can’t spit it out for them.”
“I’m not talkin’ about country codes for Tajikistan. I’m talkin’ ’bout the language your parents paid good money for you to study for twelve years.”
“Well I got into Harvard on math and science. Not foreign languages. I can barely speak English, much less a language with a different alphabet that’s read in the opposite direction.”
“But you’re Jewish!”
“Yeah, but I’m a bagel Jew.”
“What’s that?”
“You know: for me it’s more about the food, the culture.”
“Well, you oughta know how to say a few things in your own language. Looks like I’ll have to teach you some things.”
“You speak Hebrew?”
“I worked on a kibbutz for a summer when I was in college, so I learned a few phrases that were useful with the honeys over there. And boy, lemme tell you. They definitely got some honeys over there.”
“Maybe that’s why it’s called the land of milk and honey,” Sammy joked.
And ever since that day, Sammy made weekly visits to see Titus, to help him with his errands or any paperwork he had to take care of, or just to describe the day for him with as many adjectives as he could conjure to satisfy Titus’s visual curiosity. After a few years of Titus’s persistent tutoring, Sammy even learned how to get through a very basic conversation, and conclude it by saying “You’re a beautiful woman. Can I kiss you?” in Hebrew.
Back at school, Sammy always had a few friends during any given semester. But once the class that brought them together ended, so did any need for Sammy’s perfect notes and understanding of abstruse issues, and these “friends” would soon disappear. Indeed, Titus was Sammy’s only friend from freshman year who would last more than a semester. And Carlos was the first roommate in Sammy’s college days to nurture a real friendship beyond mere cohabitation. Naturally, Sammy didn’t know what he had done to deserve a roommate like Carlos, but he felt eternally grateful for the godsend and tried to reciprocate with math and science tutoring services whenever Carlos needed the help.
Carlos emboldened Sammy and made him feel like he was cool. During one of their first nights out together at a college dive called the Bow and Arrow, Sammy was unable to gather the gumption to approach a cute college student at the other end of the bar.
“She’ll never talk to me, Carlos. I’m a year away from baldness.”
“You’re not a year away from baldness.”
“I’m a year away, and it’s killing me.”
“Are you seriously worried about it?” Carlos asked.
“I’m obsessed.”
“Why don’t you try one of those hair loss treatments?”
“I have. Nothing works on me. Minoxidil is the most effective treatment and it works on only forty percent of men.”
“Forty percent?”
“Yeah. Do you know how many doctors, scientists, and multimillionaires are bald?”
“So?”
“So do you really think they’d be bald if there were a scientifically established cure out there for everyone?”
“Well what about the stuff you haven’t tried?”
“The other stuff out there is even less effective and could cause reduced sex drive or even impotence.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. Isn’t that absurd? The same product that I’m taking to help me get laid ends up making me impotent!”
“That is absurd. But you’ll never get laid if you stand here all night and complain about your bald spot. You have to go up to her and charm her.”
“But it’s an objective fact that she’ll never go for me. Not in a thousand years.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“It says it all over her face.”
“Why is that?”
“Because she’s really cute.”
“So?”
“So she’s thinking: I look good and therefore I should prefer good-looking men. Bald men are inherently less good-looking than men with hair. Therefore, I should prefer men who aren’t bald. QED.”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what she’s thinking. Especially the QED part.”
“I just analyzed her thinking into its component parts for you, but it’s all there.”
“You know what you need?”
“What?”
“You need to think about what a badass bald man would do in this situation.”
“There are no badass bald men. By definition.”
“What about Dwight D. Eisenhower?” Carlos suggested.
“President Eisenhower?”
“Doesn’t he qualify as a badass?” Carlos insisted.
“Look, he may have been president, but he doesn’t exactly come to people’s minds when you ask them to think of a badass.”
“All right. How about Kojak?” Carlos asked.
“That po
lice detective show with Telly Savalas?” Sammy asked.
“Yeah, Kojak. He was a badass. Always cool under pressure.”
“All right,” Sammy replied. “Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that Kojak was a bald badass. So what?”
“So you have to imagine how Kojak would deal with this situation we have in front of us. He wouldn’t be worried about whether this girl digs bald guys. He would just walk right up to her, knowing that he’s a badass and just take care of business. You see, it’s all in the delivery.”
“The delivery?”
“Yeah, the execution. I learned that in my sophomore acting class. And from just watching people in action…How you say something is often more important than what you say. If you have the world’s slickest line and you deliver it pathetically, it’s doomed to fail. And if you have a really cheesy, unoriginal line that you deliver in the slickest, most confident way, it has a pretty good chance of succeeding.”
“And Kojak never delivers a line poorly,” Sammy concluded.
“Exactly. Because he’s Kojak. Now go over to that girl, and show her where Kojak learned his stuff.”
All pumped and ready to go, Sammy walked towards her, but by the time he was close enough to say anything, two football players had already begun talking to her. Sammy stopped in his tracks and thought to himself, “Why does that never happen to Kojak?”
While that was Sammy’s first and last attempt to approach a female on his own that night, several important concepts were born: “Kojaking” a situation; being a “Kojak”; and possessing “Kojak.” These terms would be regularly invoked by Carlos whenever Sammy needed some psychological fortification.
Despite all of Carlos’s best intentions and efforts to prop Sammy up, there was no helping the fact that Carlos also made Sammy’s physical handicaps (shortness, baldness, plumpness and plainness) stand out more by the stark contrast that was created when the two were together. And, as if Sammy’s odds of attracting a woman weren’t already bad enough, Sammy studiously avoided Jewish women, even though they were consistently the only ones who would even consider talking to him.
Early in their friendship, Carlos quizzed Sammy about this paradox.
“But if you’re proud to be a Hebrew, and you’re determined to marry a Hebrew woman some day, why won’t you date any?”
“Because then I’ll have to actually take her seriously. If my parents find out, they’ll be asking me about her all the time, hoping that I’m planning to marry her some day. I’ll have to have a real relationship. And if I can’t sow my wild oats now, in college – which is supposed to be the best time of your life – then when can I do it? When I’m married with two kids and have even less hair?”
“You got a point there, I guess. I mean, if I completely distort the rules of logic.”
“I don’t know what it is. Call me crazy.”
“No. I think I’ll call you Heeb.”
“Heeb?”
“Look, if you’re gonna call me Chucky, which is a gross Americanization of my name – ”
“Lucky Chucky sounds much better than Lucky Carlos.”
“But Chucky sounds nothing like Carlos.”
“It’s an approximate derivation. Charles is the American version of Carlos. And Chucky is a familiar version of Charles. Therefore Chucky is a familiar American version of Carlos.”
“Well, you’re Heeb. You’re a dweeby Heeby who explains nicknames with syllogisms.”
“How is Heeb anything like Sammy Laffowitz?”
“Because it’s completely laughable that a Hebrew who wants to marry another Hebrew can’t date any Hebrews, because he’ll sleep around with only non-Hebrews.”
“That’s not funny. I haven’t slept around with anyone in two years.”
“Well maybe if you stopped discriminating against your own kind you’d have better luck.”
“Can’t do that, Lucky Chucky.”
“Whatever you say, Heeb.”
Fortunately for Heeb, Lucky Chucky was impossibly selective, and the women he rejected left Heeb with a far greater number of opportunities to strike out than he would otherwise enjoy. In fact, if Heeb wanted to go out and look for women, he would just follow Lucky Chucky around – even if Carlos was just headed for the library or the grocery store, rather than some bar in Boston. Women just seemed to gravitate towards the Latin stud, sometimes with far-fetched pretexts (“Didn’t I see you in some Spanish movie?”) and sometimes with more brazen approaches (“Where are you going, and do you mind if I tag along?”). But no matter how perfect the girl looked to the rest of the world, Carlos always had some very particular reason for graciously rejecting her, and his reputation for extraordinary selectivity only made him that much more desirable to the women who knew of him. These women saw him as possessing a certain mythical, celebrity-like status and were intrigued by the challenge of trying to seduce a man whom no woman – no matter how stunning and brilliant – had succeeded in snaring. There were even occasional speculations that Carlos was gay, but those who knew him could see that he was clearly interested in women and unequivocally indifferent to men – including the many handsome homosexuals who regularly approached him.
A peculiar constellation of Puritanical beliefs, severe standards, paranoia about germs, and a hesitation about developing intense emotional intimacy prevented Carlos from indulging in the only gender that caught his attention. For Carlos even to consider straying from his strictly celibate norms on behalf of a particular woman, she first had to meet the Carlos requirements that Heeb and others could at least understand if not endorse. The woman had to be:
strikingly beautiful;
“intellectually dangerous” (as Carlos liked to put it);
fluent in Spanish, so that he could feel comfortable reverting to his native tongue with her;
an ex-Catholic so that she would naturally understand his neuroses and cultural traditions; and
a staunch environmentalist who was a non-smoking vegetarian with a Buddhist outlook, so that their worldviews and healthy lifestyles would be compatible.
Carlos was an eco-Nazi who excoriated anyone he caught throwing away recyclable goods, thanks to a crush he had had on his English teacher, back when he was a fifteen-year-old fawning after the brunette by the blackboard whose wardrobe always managed to show some leg. The busty Buddhist pedagogue was eight years his senior, but she shared her ideology with the pimply and precocious Carlos as if he were her peer. In time, Carlos became increasingly health-obsessed, eating only organic foods, exercising regularly, and avoiding all unnecessary environmental hazards (from excessive sun exposure, to X-rays and microwave ovens, to cell phones, when they became more popular during his late twenties). By the time Lucky Chucky got to college, his body was a temple to be zealously guarded from all elements or forces that might degrade its quality or shorten its life, and that included women with unhealthy lifestyles, germs, or worldviews.
But it wasn’t enough for Carlos to find a gorgeous, intellectually brilliant, fluently Spanish-speaking, ex-Catholic-turned Buddhist, who is a non-smoking, strict vegetarian and a staunch environmentalist. The woman had to meet an additional set of bizarre requirements (or “crazy Carlos criteria,” as Heeb called them) that disqualified even the rare women on the planet who made it past the first set of “coherent Carlos criteria”:
She had to be able to name at least five great Latin American writers, at least two of whom had to be Mexican.
She had to possess a European passport, so that he could get European citizenship in the event that they got married.
While not an absolute requirement, if her name began with the letter “C,” it was a superstitious “bonus” for Carlos. His only two prior loves had names starting with that letter and – in true schoolyard love fashion – Carlos wanted to be able to write “C+C” everywhere, once he did meet his dream woman.
It was no wonder that, at the age of twenty-two, despite the hundreds of otherwise attractive and high-q
uality women who had made passes at him over the previous six years, Lucky Chucky was still a virgin who didn’t feel nearly as lucky as Heeb made him out to be.
One time, just before spring break, Heeb and Lucky Chucky crashed a Harvard alumni party in Boston, where Carlos was accosted by a woman who satisfied 4.75 of the five “coherent Carlos criteria” (she was a smoker, and so failed a quarter of the fifth criterion). She even met one of the three crazy Carlos criteria (she had a European passport). Carlos was devastated at having met someone who came so close but would not get his cigar. And Heeb was appalled at Chucky’s intransigent commitment to the irrational.
As they rode the subway (“the T” as Bostonians call it) back to their dorm, Heeb began to mourn the loss of what was undoubtedly the last great hope for Chucky: “But how could you?” he began, in offended astonishment. “How could you? I mean, she was…She was perfect…Absolutely perfect, Lucky Chucky – ”
“Would you stop calling me Lucky Chucky? Call me late bloomer; or lame bloomer. Call me destined to virginity. Call me choosy Chucky. But don’t call me Lucky Chucky…I don’t feel very lucky right now.”
“I can’t believe the crap you’re trying to feed both of us. I mean, you’re a freak of nature – a statistical anomaly. No matter what you do or say, you’ve got hot women throwing themselves at you every other minute. The fact that you’re too insanely picky to take any of them suggests that your name ought to be ‘Dummy Chucky’ but there’s no way that you’re not going down in history as the luckiest man alive.”
“I told you that I don’t look at women like you do. I can’t just bone someone who’s not good enough to marry.”
“How about just boning someone who’s good enough to divorce?”
“Huh?”
“This is where you’ve still got major Catholic issues, Chucky.”