Sex in the Title (21 page)

“Laffovitz, I said change zeh positions of your feet! Vaht are you still doing zhere in zeh first position?” Henrik exclaimed. “Zis is not a difficult job, Laffovitz!”

“Sorry…Sorry about that,” Heeb stammered, as he snapped out of his head chatter and switched the positions of his feet.

His thoughts continued: “Well, if I do sit this one out, I’ll certainly be able to handle any game of strip poker…And that short Indian cutie with the frizzy hair is just delicious-looking. I wonder what she’s thinking of me right now. Probably something like, ‘What a loser. He can’t even find a self-respecting job. Why can’t they at least get us body-builder types for models? Or at least someone with a hairy scalp. Or really well hung. That would be more interesting to paint.’ That’s what she’s thinking. God, I’d love to tell her that I’m really an actuary who makes six figures. That would set her thinking straight, right? Yeah, right. Who the hell am I kidding? There’s no recovering from the fact that I volunteered to publicly show my schlong so that she’d have something to paint. Especially if I didn’t do it for the thirty dollars they’re paying me.”

He wondered whether looking in her direction again would cause him to break his pose enough to incur Henrik’s ire. As his eyes moved from easel to easel, he again felt the surrealism of the moment, hearing the light tapping of brushes against canvas in the quiet loft, and watching intently focused eyes shift between him and their easel, with paintbrush ends popping up and down out of the sides of the easels, like the spear tips of cannibals preparing for their kill.

His eyes finally made it to her easel and, just as they were about to follow a collision course to the humiliatingly self-aware moment of eye contact, he saved himself the ultimate mortification and let his eyes shoot straight down toward the floor. There would have been something intolerably desperate about making eye contact with her at that moment, if only because she might interpret it as some attempt by him to make her pity him. Heeb spent the remainder of the first hour plotting his breach of contract with the art school that had hired him to model nude for another seven painting sessions.

There was a ten-minute break after the first hour, which seemed too short to get fully dressed again – particularly since Henrik and all of the students had filed out towards the bathroom area or near the elevators, so that there was no one left in the vicinity to make Heeb feel strange about walking around in a kimono. The brief freedom to pry suddenly possessed Heeb with an irrepressible curiosity and he urgently had to know what the various paintings of him looked like, particularly when it came to any representation of his Hebrew National.

As he quickly surveyed the twenty easels, he was dismayed to discover that virtually everyone had given him the short end of the stick, so to speak. Just as offensive, every painting had applied sufficient detail to his head so that the extent of his baldness was prominently and accurately portrayed. He also thought that the paintings tended to exaggerate the extent of his pudginess. Of course, the only paintings he could have possibly found both accurate and acceptable would have depicted a muscularly fleshy, well-endowed man with a thinning hairline, and so Heeb was inevitably disappointed. But he tried to take solace in the fact that most of the paintings were still in a rough, sketch form that could be corrected without too much difficulty.

When the class reconvened for the last fifty minutes, Henrik instructed Heeb to stand with his left hand holding his right elbow and his right hand contemplatively supporting his chin. Heeb – in mid-pose – couldn’t stop thinking about how the class had cheated him on his manhood. He grew particularly vexed by the fact that the attractive Indian woman was no exception in this matter. To vindicate his masculinity, Heeb concluded that he needed to enlarge himself enough to force a subtle correction amongst all of the painters striving for realism and accuracy under the watchful and exacting eye of their instructor. The only way to compel this correction during the forty-eight minutes that remained, Heeb figured, was to fantasize enough to get himself aroused. He was initially concerned about going laughably and obviously overboard, but he realized that there were two powerful forces that would probably prevent him from getting overly excited: 1) he couldn’t actually touch himself given the pose he had to hold, and 2) the pressure of having twenty people looking at him, with the risk that they might grow giddy upon noticing that he was at all aroused, was enough to check the effects of Heeb’s rich and well-practiced erotic imagination. In fact, it was initially difficult for Heeb to concentrate on anything potentially arousing. But he eventually found a fantasy that suited him quite well, and he was confident that he could sustain it for just enough time to produce a dimensional correction in the depictions of his body.

He pictured all eight male students suddenly going bald, packing up their things, handcuffing Henrik, and leading him out of the loft and into a local prison, where they locked him up. He then imagined the twelve women, led by the cute Indian female, putting down their paintbrushes and forming a semicircle around him while he continued to hold his pose. The two women directly in front of him shed their clothing, article by article, and the other women caressed him and licked his body, while whispering erotic desires and flattering confessions into his ears. Once the two women in front were fully undressed, the semicircle would march clockwise so that two new, fully clothed women stood directly in front of him and began to strip. After about ten minutes, all of the women were naked, and they were all fawning on Heeb while caressing, kissing, and licking him all over his body. They played affectionately with his body fat, telling him how loveable yet manly it was, how brilliant his mind was, and how utterly charming and irresistible his personality was. And then they began to squabble over who had the privilege of sucking on Heeb’s toes and who had the right to give him fellatio. Heeb, with his infinite wisdom and conflict-management skills, suggested that the labor be divided among the four prettiest women, including Miss India (she was now Miss India, and not just an attractive female of Indian heritage). He noted that they could even divide the work up into simultaneous shifts of two. And all of the women were so pleased at Heeb’s Solomon-like solution that they started to laugh with delight and pride at their wise ruler, who was kept cool by giant, feathered fans waved softly by the two beauties standing next to him. The others continued laughing and touching each other and caressing him – as if they were all on some potent ecstasy drug – and two women sucked and licked his toes as Yumi had once done, while two other females began his fellatio and, as the laughter grew more unrestrained, Heeb realized that he had made himself much too erect and that the laughter he was hearing was from some of the nearer students standing behind their easels. Mortified, his face turned redder than a stop sign.

Much to Heeb’s relief, the minute he snapped out of his fantasy and realized that the students standing closest to him had noticed a remarkable change in his shape and size, his frankfurter quickly shriveled up in a panic, just in time to avoid detection by Henrik. He couldn’t tell whether the Indian girl had noticed what had just happened, but he desperately wanted the class to end.

When it finally did end, after what seemed like an eternity of curious conversations with himself, Heeb robed himself in the kimono and scurried over to the dressing room, where he quickly put his clothes back on. Meanwhile, Henrik gave his final remarks for the day by pontificating on Leonardo Da Vinci’s biography and how nobody there, as far as he could tell from the day’s work, was truly gifted as a painter. He nevertheless concluded by urging the students to spend their every free moment studying the life, work, and techniques of Da Vinci.

Now fully dressed, Heeb made sure to avoid Henrik as he moved towards the exit, behind a crowd of students shuffling out. He thought for a moment about trying to say something to the cute Indian woman, but he felt too ridiculous each time he got close enough for her to hear him.

“How would Kojak handle the situation?” he heard Carlos say in his mind. “You know that Kojak would go right up to her without the slightest hesitation.”

“Even Kojak couldn’t do it, if he went through what I just went through.”

“Heeb, are you doubting the great Kojak? Are you doubting for a second that he would go right up to her as if he had done her and the rest of the world a major favor by modeling for them?”

“That’s exactly what I’m doubting,” Heeb said to the imaginary Carlos.

“Well you’re wrong, Heeb. Because Kojak knows that he did them a favor that they are all eternally grateful for. A favor they’ll forever remember and be influenced by.”

“Only if Kojak were on crack.”

“Wrong! Kojak wouldn’t need crack because he wouldn’t care about her reaction. Why? Because she’s the one who should be trembling at the thought of being spoken to by the almighty Kojak.”

“I can’t do it!” Heeb protested.

“Why not? What have you got to lose?”

“My self-respect.”

“You already lost that.”

“Very true.”

“You might as well try to get whatever upside there is from this situation, right?”

“I guess so.”

“You’re quitting this modeling thing anyway, so you’ll never see her again. Might as well treat this as another opportunity to find the Kojak in you.”

“Good point.”

The imaginary dialogue empowered Heeb to press forward, and follow her until she was alone enough to approach. As luck would have it, she went into a nearby deli unaccompanied, where she walked over to the fruit section. Heeb discreetly followed her as she looked around at the various fruit options in front of her. Just as Heeb decided to deliver his opening line, she put her hand on a banana and began to wrest it from the bunch.

“So have you been painting for a while?” he asked. She looked up at him and – not expecting to find the nude model she had just been painting, as she gripped a fat and long banana – she could only smile in awkward surprise.

Heeb, subtly influenced by her grip on the banana and painfully self-conscious about how the two had originally met, thought to himself “She probably just wants to tell me what she thinks of my dimensions.”

“Not long,” she replied, finally pulling the banana off the bunch. Her darkish complexion turned beet red.

“What do you mean by ‘Not long?’” he asked, fearing the worst.

“You know, like a couple of months.” The girl was still embarrassed and clearly hoping this conversation would end soon.

“Oh. Well was this your first time painting a live model?”

She nodded her head, with an almost guilty look on her face.

“What’s it like?”

“Hard,” she replied.

Chapter 15
Heeb Tries Online Dating in New York City

Sammy quickly cut short his career as an art model but continued enjoying the rest of his busy cultural and educational schedule – even if it hadn’t yet yielded more than a handful of dates, none of which fructified. But nothing could discourage Heeb – particularly after the mettle he had acquired from his harrowing experience as an art model.

So, to take full advantage of the hyperactive New York dating scene, Heeb became an early adopter of online dating. Back in the early summer of 2000, when Heeb first joined Match.com, those who logged on for love were a slightly geekier, tech-savvier crowd who saw the phenomenon as an empowering adventure for the socially awkward rather than as a random new way to meet psycho-killers. Sammy discovered that he had a knack for witty online banter in chat rooms and was able to line up more New York dates in a week than he had in an entire year in DC.

Even more to Heeb’s advantage, he started surfing for dates back when it was quite normal and acceptable not to have a picture posted. When women chatting with him online asked him what he looked like, he would often reply, “Let me put it this way: I’ve worked as a model before.”

Because online dating – particularly back then – was somewhat predicated on deceiving the other person into an in-person rendezvous, women online responded to Heeb’s dodge with varying degrees of tolerance. The worst rejection he had was with a five-foot-ten, Scandinavian ex-model who was now a web developer living in Williamsburg and curious about the online dating phenomenon.

She sent Heeb her scanned photo and was so fascinated by his online persona that she agreed to meet him sight unseen (since he, of course, had no digital photo, and she wasn’t going to insist that he snail mail her a printed one). She was fascinated by this modern Renaissance man who studied acting and photography, understood advanced topics in mathematics and statistics, could inline skate and dance hip-hop, and had even worked as a model. She was so eager to meet him, in fact, that she showed up early to the agreed upon meeting place, in the book section on fashion modeling, in the Barnes and Noble bookstore at Union Square.

Heeb was so excited about the fact that a former model had actually agreed to meet him on a date (an historic moment for him), that he showed up late after spending an extra twenty minutes combing the strands of hair that formed the crown around his large bald spot, as if the additional grooming might actually make a difference. When Heeb spotted her across the store, he lost his Kojak as he excitedly went up to her with an outstretched hand and said, “Hi, I’m Sammy. The guy from Match.com. You know, the guy you’re supposed to meet here at 8 p.m. for coffee. The café is actually on another floor, but I thought it would be easier for us to find each other in a specific section of the bookstore, so I picked the fashion modeling section because that’s a topic that’s of interest to both of us, which is good to have in case someone’s running late. Have you been waiting here long? I apologize for running a bit late…I didn’t mean to keep you waiting…”

“I’m sorry. I think you’re confusing me with someone else,” she said, genuinely convinced that some coincidental mix up of sorts had somehow inflicted itself upon her.