Authors: Zack Love
Mercifully, Evan finally managed to pull the wallet out of his pocket. With one last desperate yank, it fell out and rolled down the seat and onto the ground in front of where Bonnie was standing. She picked it up and began going through its contents.
Brandy unlocked her dental mousetrap and released Evan’s traumatized trouser snake.
He fell back against the seat. The pain, shock, and hyperventilation were too much.
Evan had fainted.
When he came to, he was in an ambulance with gauze bandages around his Johnson.
Chapter 5
Lucky Chucky and Heeb
Unlike Evan, Carlos Fuentes lived a thoroughly charmed life. Carlos’s family beat the odds twice by not being caught during their illegal border crossing from Mexico to California, and then winning the naturalization lottery a few years later. In school, if the gifted student had made a strategic choice not to study certain material while cramming for an exam, it would conveniently not appear on the test. At cards, he consistently had the best poker face, and if it was raining, he always had an umbrella. In a high school car accident that left the vehicle totaled, a tree mangled, a fire hydrant overturned, and passengers injured and drenched in water, Carlos somehow emerged dry and unscathed.
But it wasn’t until the fall of 1994, at the start of his senior year at Harvard College, that Carlos was dubbed “Lucky Chucky” by his new roommate, Sammy Laffowitz. The nickname was inspired when Sammy, a short, balding, heavy-set, bookish type from the suburbs of Philadelphia, became enviously dumbstruck at the female fortunes that constantly graced Carlos. Ironically enough, Carlos remained single and regularly complained of having no luck with women. But most men with his attributes would be unattached for a small fraction of the time that Carlos would stay single. Standing six-one, Carlos had the slick, Latin look of a telenovela star. He dressed with impeccable style, maintained a great physique, and easily charmed with his silver tongue. He was considered a mega-catch even before “dropping the H bomb” on women.
“Dropping the H bomb,” as he and his friends referred to the tactic, involved any ostensibly nonchalant, circuitous attempt to mention the school they were attending in the hope of impressing a girl. The trick was to say something that induced the female to ask, “What school do you go to?” (for example: “In my college, we don’t have majors, we have concentrations”). Then, when she would ask, “Where do you go to school?” the artifice involved avoiding the actual name of the school, so as to appear modest (for example: “I go to school in the Boston area”).
Sammy, on the other hand, had absolutely no luck with women, no matter how many times he dropped the H-bomb. While his baby face had pleasantly benign features and a cutely compact nose, there were several liabilities that made it difficult for him to get anywhere (at least by his own estimation): the hair on the top of his head had thinned so much that his scalp seemed far more prominent than the thin brown layer of hair combed over it; his pudgy frame rose only five feet and seven inches; his breath sometimes took only an hour to beat the most potent mouthwash; and he absolutely loved to discuss quantum mechanics, epistemology, and topological algebra – in no small part because it was his acumen at math that enabled him finally to lose his virginity to a homely and promiscuous sophomore who got into Harvard because of her father’s connections and who desperately needed Sammy to take her final exam for her. Despite numerous indications to the contrary, Sammy continued to operate under the illusion that what got him laid once could get him laid again, and that if he just displayed his knowledge of higher mathematics to enough women, one of them might declare herself willing to barter some sex for his math skills.
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 police 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.”