by Zack Love
“That’s like a woman asking why she can’t date a rich man with personality.”
“Well why can’t she?”
“She can. And she will – which also proves how women are smarter.”
“How does it prove that?”
“Because a man’s superficiality just gets him a nicer-looking woman. A woman’s superficiality gets her a nicer life.”
Evan thought about Heeb’s observations, and furrowed his brow, somewhat troubled by everything he was hearing. Heeb saw that he was clearly having an effect on Evan, and this only encouraged him to expound further upon his ideas, so that he could – for a little longer – relish the guru power that he seemed to hold over Evan now.
“That’s why wealth is such an important factor in a man’s SQ – and arguably even more important than his age. Think about it: a multibillionaire – whether he’s sixteen or eighty-two years old – can still attract a vast number of women, because women have their eye on the ball. It’s their evolutionary survival instinct. They’re looking to find the most plentiful and resourceful environment for their offspring.”
Evan started fretting about his net worth. He owned a small, unimpressive studio, with a large mortgage on it. He calculated that his net worth was about sixty thousand dollars. Then he started thinking about how long it would take him to be worth eight million dollars, and whether that would be enough to guarantee him the SQ that he wanted.
“And the nice thing about wealth,” Heeb continued, “is that it’s always true that more is better. It’s not like weight or height or even hair. At some point, if you get any more of those things, you hit an unattractive extreme. You start to look like a blimp, a skyscraper, or the Planet of the Apes. But that’s never the case with money. In fact, with enough money, you can actually make up for any freakish extremes or deficiencies you might have.”
“You don’t even need personality.”
“Nope.”
“So would you give up your personality for a few billion dollars?” Evan said.
“Of course not.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t give up who I am. Besides, personality includes IQ, and if I give that up, then I’d quickly lose all my money – on bad investments, idiotic purchases, and fraudulent schemes that exploit my stupidity.”
“That wouldn’t be good.”
“No, it wouldn’t. Then I’d be a short, bald, overweight, twenty-seven-year-old idiot with no cash and no personality.”
“Yeah, that would be bad.”
“You can’t lose perspective, Evan. SQ isn’t everything.”
“I guess it isn’t.”
“Unless, of course, you haven’t been laid in a while.”
“Right.”
*****
The next morning, the nurse gave Evan some medications and cleaning material to care for his wound at home and gave him some pointers to keep in mind until his follow up visit in one month. Evan happily took off his hospital gown, put his regular clothes back on, and then thanked the nurses and doctors who had helped him during the last four days and nights.
Heeb was secretly a little envious of Evan. Irrationally, he even felt a tad betrayed by Evan for being so happy about leaving. Heeb knew, deep down, that he and Evan had bonded in a deep and lasting way. But the fact that he would now be alone for the next forty-eight hours made him reflect on how both his injury and his SQ were worse than Evan’s, and how these differences could mean that their close bond might be as temporary as the circumstances that united them.
Fortunately, the two had grown so attuned to each other’s emotional states that Evan quickly felt the awkward tension and unspoken questions surrounding his imminent departure. He walked over to Heeb’s bed.
“Sammy, thanks for making this whole thing so much more bearable.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“In some sick way, I’m going to miss our hospital room days together.”
Heeb’s face lit up. “Me too,” he replied. “Particularly since I’m still here for another forty-eight hours.”
“You’re gonna be fine. Ten years from now, this will just be another funny anecdote from your past.”
“What are you talking about? It’s already a funny anecdote.”
“Yeah, but you better not tell anyone!” Evan said sternly but with a smile.
“Don’t worry, our time here is not exactly something I’m putting on my resume.”
Heeb got up from his bed to embrace Evan and say goodbye. But he felt somewhat ridiculous standing barefoot on the lukewarm hospital floor with nothing on him but the grey hospital gown, looking up at the taller and fully clothed Evan.
“Just remember what Nietzsche once said,” Evan began, trying to offer some inspiring words of fortitude for Heeb’s remaining time in the hospital. “Anything that doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.”
“In our case it’s more like: Anything that doesn’t castrate you could still ruin your sex life.”
“Tell me about it,” Evan replied, suddenly retreating from his bravado. “I don’t even want to think about what this did to our SQ.”
“Dick-bite scars are at least a ten-percent deduction.”
“No. That’s too much.”
“At least that, if not fifteen percent,” Heeb insisted.
“Like I said before, if a woman is getting anywhere near your dick scars, you’ve already won her over.”
“True, but you can always scare her off at the last moment.”
“Keep the lights dim and it won’t be more than a two-percent deduction, Sammy.”
“You know, I thought of a way for us to possibly compensate for the SQ loss.”
“How?” Evan asked.
“At the end of the day, finding women comes down to odds. Like everything else in life. And I’ve been thinking that our odds would improve significantly if we formed a posse of four or five guys.”
“A posse of players, eh?”
“You bring in Narc and Trevor, and I’ll bring in Carlos.”
“That’s gonna be really tough.”
“Not tougher than Carlos. He’s happily married, for God’s sake.”
“Yeah, but Narc and I had a falling out. And Trevor could be impossible.”
“Trevor needs to be rescued anyway,” Heeb insisted.
“You’re right. He’s gotta get over that incident.”
“Look, I don’t know for sure if Carlos will join, but it’s certainly worth a try. We have nothing to lose. And there’s a huge potential upside.”
“Like what?” Evan asked.
“First of all, a posse would produce a certain Spice Girls effect.”
“It’s funny because I never did think those girls were that cute as individuals, but there was definitely something sexy about them as a group.”
“Exactly. With a posse, the whole is sexier than the sum of its parts,” Heeb said, happy to elaborate. “And it makes each of us look like we’re socially well adjusted enough to have lots of friends.”
“Women definitely prefer guys who seem normal,” Evan agreed. “And the more friends you have, the more normal you seem.” Evan thought of another advantage. “And if you’re seen as a group of normal guys, it probably tempts women to start speculating about the members of your group, comparing them, following their individual stories – like what happens with boy bands,” Evan added.
“Yes! And if you get rejected, it just becomes a group joke rather than a personal failure,” Heeb added.
“There’s strength in numbers, as they say.”
The two spontaneously clasped each other’s hands on the proposition. Sammy wanted to embrace Evan, but it would have felt too strange getting so close to him with his convalescing Hebrew National dangling freely below.
“I’d hug you, but – ” Heeb looked down, and Evan laughed a little.
“That’s all right. I’ll consider myself hugged.”
“Hugging just seems like the right thing to do after you�
�ve formed the fellowship of the schlong,” Heeb gushed.
“Well, consider yourself hugged too,” Evan reassured him lightly, still holding Heeb’s hands.
“Long live the fellowship of the schlong!” Evan cried out, raising their clasped hands even higher, as if to formalize an important military alliance between two neighboring medieval tribes.
“Amen!” Heeb added.
They looked at each other, smiled, and released their hands. Evan started towards the door of their shared room and Heeb accompanied him. When they arrived at the door, they stopped.
Like a prisoner of war about to escape an enemy prison on his own and sadly unable to bring his fellow prisoner friend with him, Evan turned to Heeb and said solemnly, “I’ll be back for you. I promise.”
They shared a smile and a thumbs-up, and Evan turned around and left.
Chapter 24
Operation Repulsive
During the three months that followed their serendipitous introduction, Heeb and Evan helped each other through the persistent difficulties and insecurities that accompanied their injuries. The bad news for Evan, which he discovered about two weeks after his release from the hospital, was that he had contracted syphilis. The good news was that he was spared the uglier effects of the disease by promptly obtaining treatment. Within one month, he was completely cured of the disease and no longer infectious. However, the fact that he had contracted the STD increased his anxiety about the HIV and Hepatitis B tests that he would have to take three months after his fellatio bite.
Aesthetically, Evan’s member seemed to be healing well, and he was hopeful that within six months, the scarring would be relatively minor. Heeb’s injury also saw substantial improvement, but it wasn’t nearly enough to restore Heeb’s confidence to where it had been before he hit the Jackpot.
“It’s not like my SQ wasn’t already really low to begin with,” Heeb remarked, a few weeks after his hospital discharge.
“At least you didn’t get syphilis with a chance of getting HIV or Hepatitis B,” Evan replied.
“Why is that supposed to make me feel better about having a scarred penis?” Heeb asked.
“Because things could be worse. A lot worse. Hell, you could have gotten rabies on your dick.”
“True. But things could always be a lot worse.”
“They could be. You could be dead.”
“But then I wouldn’t know the difference.”
“Yeah, but you’ll get there anyway. So you might as well enjoy the ride along the way as much as possible.”
“OK. But why do others get to enjoy a better ride along the way?”
“Others? Like who?”
“Like all those guys who have a penis without scars, a scalp full of hair, and a bank account with millions of dollars in it. Can’t I be depressed about the fact that I don’t have those things?”
“Look, the scars will improve with more time, you’re on way to becoming a partner at your actuary firm, at which point you’ll have millions of dollars too. And science is working on a cure for baldness. Isn’t that close enough?”
“I guess it’ll have to be.”
“How about this: if we can still get you laid with a hottie, will you feel better about things?”
Heeb grinned and they shared a laugh, acknowledging that virtually any worry or woe could be cured by a beautiful woman. “You realize that it’s a contradictory idea. What you’re really asking me is: would I feel better about having such a low SQ if I had all the benefits of a high SQ?”
“But that’s not totally absurd,” Evan insisted. “People can still have very successful lives despite relatively low IQs. So maybe they can have very successful sex lives despite relatively low SQs.”
Evan decided that he wouldn’t pursue women again until his hepatitis and HIV test results arrived in early December 2000; if they came back negative, he would jump back into the game. Until then, he decided that he would focus all of his free time exclusively on his novel, because he couldn’t be sexually involved with anyone for several months anyway, and – more importantly – because a best-selling novel was the only way he thought could compensate for the injury-related drop in his SQ. Quite apart from his injury, he concluded that he had no more than ten years with a full head of hair and therefore needed to be rich and/or famous by then to compensate for the additional drop in SQ that would follow. Ten years struck him as very little time to become rich and the Internet certainly wasn’t getting him there.
But because it had taken Evan five years to write fifty-nine pages, he didn’t exactly trust himself to enforce this new resolution to finish his novel over the next few months. Thus, he adopted some drastic practices that he believed would make it easier for him to stay disciplined. He stopped shaving or grooming himself and dressed in the most stylistically inept and unattractive way he could imagine, so as to minimize the odds that any female might cast a favorable glance in his direction. As if this measure weren’t enough, Evan also began eating large quantities of garlic and onions throughout the day, to quickly stave off any woman who miraculously managed to get past his outdated, mismatched, and generally disheveled appearance.
“How’s ‘Operation Repulsive’ coming along?” Heeb would ask, during their daily phone call.
“I’ve been happily hunkered down in my place as if it weren’t, in fact, a tiny, roach-infested, light deprived, slovenly hole in the wall.”
“How have you managed to overlook the many charms of your apartment for such extended periods of time?”
“I don’t know, but it’s amazing. I’m on my third straight week of solid writing. No female distractions whatsoever, and I’ve written one hundred more pages. Can you believe that? Three weeks of writing without thinking about or talking to women gets me twice as far as five years of writing with women in my life. Of course, being unemployed is also big help.”
“Not to take the wind out of your sails, but what if it turns out that you’re just writing a bunch of crap?”
“Now why would you want to take the wind out of my sails like that?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Look, every writer has to contend with the haunting thought that what he’s writing is really just a bunch of crap. That’s what makes this solitary art form so damn painful and why every writer has to convince himself that he’s writing a masterpiece, even if in the end everyone hates it.”
“So you work under a narcissistic fantasy as a way to stay motivated?”
“Exactly. And this whole process has also made me realize a basic writing truth.”
“What’s that?”
“If there’s always the chance that what I’m writing is really just a bunch of crap, I’d rather write it in a few months than in a few years.”
“You got a point there. Better to produce a bunch of crap quickly than slowly.”
By the seventh week of Operation Repulsive, Evan had barely seen the light of day: he had been writing for forty-two consecutive days, spending an average of fifteen hours per day on his novel. He was on page 240, had covered about two-thirds of the story in his novel, and was convinced that he was writing a masterpiece.
But Evan’s unprecedented forward momentum came to an abrupt halt on October 18, 2000, at 11:29 p.m., when he had to leave his apartment and go to the corner store for some toilet paper and toothpaste, both of which he had depleted almost sixteen hours earlier. He was in the most revolting condition ever – far worse than what he had looked like after the all-nighters he had pulled as a college student at Brown, cramming for finals. The last two days he had barely slept, after being possessed by the muse like never before. His scraggly beard, thoroughly tangled hair, tired and bag-ridden eyes all appeared to be part of the same lifestyle choices behind the dirty, wrinkled, and clashing clothes that covered his body. Evan had even exhausted his clean underwear and was down to the last pair in his “reserve” pile (which, thanks to age, had developed some built-in ventilation). Daily sandwiches of canned sardin
es, raw garlic, and uncooked onion all but ensured that his breath could be weaponized, if produced in highly concentrated form.
In this veritably frightful state, Evan emerged from his writing lair to stock up on some basic supplies at the local twenty-four-hour Duane Reade drugstore. With his head still thoroughly immersed in the alternate reality that was his novel, Evan’s brain was floating far too much to take any notice of the white stretch limousine parked in front of the Duane Reade. In zombie-like fashion, he began strolling the aisles of the store looking for toothpaste and toilet paper. Some late night drugstore patrons noticed Evan walking by them and eyed him with a mixture of disgust, bewilderment, and either fear or pity. Evan was largely oblivious to these people, but after a few minutes of wandering about the store he had become somewhat more conscious of his surroundings, to the point that when he walked past Delilah Nakova, he suddenly realized that there had been a white stretch limousine outside.
A jolt of adrenaline suddenly snapped down Evan’s entire back as a stream of panic-stricken questions seized him: Was it really Delilah? What was she doing in this particular Duane Reade at 11:47 p.m.? Had she recognized him? If so, were his dreams of Delilah forever doomed now? If not, could he quickly clean himself up enough to talk to her? Maybe even in Czech? Could this be a divinely delivered first chance to make a second impression? Or could it even be a second chance to make a first impression, if she miraculously forgot about their prior encounter about seventeen months ago at Float and didn’t recognize him in his current state?
Having had virtually no contact with the outside world for the last few weeks, Evan had temporarily forgotten the social norms governing shopping conduct or approaching celebrities in public. Nor did Evan have the time to reacquaint himself with such trifles. Instead, he became singularly focused on quickly cleaning himself up enough to approach Delilah before she got back into her limousine and disappeared forever. He spotted some toothpaste on the shelf and hastily opened it and squeezed some into his mouth, and put the rest into his shopping basket. As he chewed on the toothpaste, he spotted some mouthwash and quickly took a swig, gargled for a few minutes, and then – not having anywhere to spit out the sharp, powerful alcohol-based liquid – he spat the liquid and the toothpaste back into the bottle of mouthwash, which he then put in his shopping basket. Afraid that Delilah had already been out of sight for too long, he ran to the end of the aisle and across the back of the store, until he spotted her looking up and down the shelves where the chocolate “energy” bars were located.