by Zack Love
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.
“Shit,” she muttered under her breath, as she turned on the faucet and pushed the fallen toothpaste down the drain. She eyed his toothbrush, tempted to brush her teeth with it. For a moment, she hesitated, guilty about not first getting his permission. But then she realized that she was about to pass all of her mouth germs to him anyway and proceeded to brush her teeth rather thoroughly with his toothbrush.
Meanwhile Heeb sat on the couch, trying to hit a relaxed pose for when she emerged from his bathroom, but thinking all along about the various excuses she might invent to try to back out of the whole thing. He was convinced that she was thoroughly disappointed. “She just needed the bathroom to regroup and plan her exit strategy,” he figured.
Despite his initial instincts about her, his insecurities caused him to forget the extent to which Melody was, in every respect, a misfit with unpredictably quirky tastes – from makeup to music to men to just about everything else. So Heeb needlessly brainstormed for ways to keep her at his place long enough to reestablish the charm and spontaneity that they had enjoyed online.
When she finally came out, he awkwardly tried to start a conversation on a safe topic but was braced for the worst.
“Do you like this music?” he asked hesitantly.
“Um, do you have any Johann Sebastian Bach?” she replied, anxiously.
“I have about seventy-five CDs of Bach…Why?”
“Bach is the only thing I listen to.”
“Oh.”
As Heeb went back to his CD collection, he suddenly felt as if the evening might still be on.
“Do you have Magnificat?” she asked.
“Yes. It’s right here.”
“Put it on.”
“OK.”
As he replaced The Cure with J.S. Bach, Heeb had his back turned to Melody and couldn’t see that she had slipped out of her sneakers and taken off her jean jacket. His apartment was soon filled with the harmoniously uplifting horns and choral refrains of Magnificat. He turned around and noticed that she had moved quite close to him. The intense musical environment had an almost hypnotic power to it, and came to symbolize all of their shared quirks already known or soon to be discovered.
She moved closer still and – as Heeb was about to say something – she put her index finger on his lips, and then let her finger run down his chin, over his Adam’s apple, down his chest, and over his chubby belly. As the music grew more solemn, she took off her T-shirt and began to undress Sammy as if participating in some holy rite one performs in the presence of one’s long lost love. Sammy, on the other hand, thought he was in some sort of surreal film or wet dream. But the self-conscious monologue in his head faded into a purely physical concentration on the lanky body before him, as Melody pressed her body against his and kissed her way from his mouth to his neck. Between their caressing and kissing, they made their way to the nearby sofa, and continued discovering each other’s bodies.
They had said nothing from the moment he answered her question about Bach until the moment they were lying in each other’s arms on Heeb’s couch, spent and ecstatic from their sexual exertions. The music had provided the dialogue for them. Anything else – any words before the sex itself – might have sounded contrived, awkward, out of place, or simply unworthy of the event that was to follow. And as they lay there, in their afterglow, they continued caressing each other while listening to the rest of the music.
When the CD ended, they were silent for a moment, as if in deference to the brilliant music that had just finished. But Heeb felt a potential awkwardness creeping in, precisely because they had said so little up until then, and because it now felt as if they could no longer postpone conversation. So Heeb resourcefully returned them to the playfulness of their online chat.
“So are we now Winners Of Lust?”
“Winners Of Love,” she replied with a smile as she kissed his neck. “Put one of the Brandenburgs on,” she instructed him. “Preferably the Fifth…And let’s go to your bedroom. Under the covers.”
“OK,” he replied, dutifully getting up to take care of the music.
“Do you realize what you’ve gotten yourself into?” she asked lightly, as she made her way into his bedroom.
As Heeb approached the entrance to his bedroom, he saw that Melody was already under the covers.
For the seemingly interminable walk to his bed, during which her nakedness was c
overed but his was not, he slipped into a self-conscious moment of doubt again, bewildered at how she was still at his place rather than trying to flee the fact that she had just had sex with this fat bald guy. He abruptly quickened his pace to the bed, as if to minimize any chance that she might suddenly change her mind about him now that she could inspect his overall appearance more carefully.
But Melody was thinking nothing of the sort. She was preparing to deliver to Heeb the terms and conditions of the intense relationship that they had just embarked upon together. He would need to get a cell phone so that she could reach him if he wasn’t at work or at home. He would need to accompany her on every morning and weekend dog walk (helping out with the dung cleanup would be a very nice gesture but certainly not an absolute requirement). He would need to speak to her no fewer than two hours per day, although phone calls and dog walks certainly counted towards this time. They needed to go to an art museum at least twice a month, and an independent art house film at least once a week. He needed to make sure that his breath and body odor were at all times perfectly fragrant (he had done a very good job thus far). And there were other things, but that was enough for now; the rest would be spelled out as the circumstances required.
Although Heeb intended to make a good faith effort to comply with Melody’s long list of demands, they came as a peculiar surprise to him because Melody was still an enigmatic, total stranger to him. Melody, on the other hand, felt as if she could tell Heeb anything. In a leap of intuitive faith, she believed that he understood her at the core better than anyone else ever had. This intuition was based on their online chat, their shared humor and musical taste, and, most importantly, his unparalleled ability to decrypt her riddle.
The explanation for Melody’s sudden intimacy was simple. Every person is a puzzle with a password. By solving the puzzle, the potential for emotional and physical intimacy is realized. There are two ways to solve the puzzle: 1) a lengthy courtship in which the pieces of the puzzle are gradually assembled, or 2) a brief utterance of that one password – unique to every person – that establishes the same level of legitimacy, comfort, and intimacy that can otherwise be achieved only through a methodical assembly of the various puzzle pieces found during numerous experiences together.[2]