I’m not one for shortcuts and quick gratification. I still use dial-up, for God’s sake. But no one with two children and a career can ever be completely immune to the seductive allure of efficiency. So when I got an e-mail from the company that makes Liberator “bedroom adventure gear,” promising that its sexy line of cushions could “help a person more easily achieve and maintain a sexual position … with less fatigue and stress,” I greeted the news with an enthusiasm I usually reserve for Friday-night pizza delivery, and the same measure of hope for something fast and satisfying.
While these days, Americans may associate self-proclaimed “Liberators” with bungling maneuvers and an apparent inability to pull out, the Liberator Web site promises customers a different kind of emancipation. Essentially, the Liberator is a jazzed-up riff on an old trick: a bolster meant to give sex a boost. If you’ve ever shared a bed for more than sleep, you’ve probably employed pillows as props at some point. (Not to mention that it’s nearly impossible to achieve certain positions during pregnancy without the extra leverage.) Nevertheless, most of us still regard our pillows as the place where our heads go. Liberators, on the other hand, go everywhere.
A few days later, after some inquiries to the company, a pair of innocuous, pyramid-shaped cushions arrived on my doorstep. But these were no bargain-basement Posturepedics; as the enclosed brochure explained, they’re engineered to accommodate the weight of a body or two in motion. I chose a leopard print model because the solids looked too much like something you might find in the IKEA children’s catalog. The “Wedge” was just a little bigger than a regular bed pillow, while the “Ramp” bore a striking resemblance to the wheelchair entrance of my building. There were other Liberator shapes to choose from, including the ottoman-like “Cube,” the rocking “Scoop” and the curvy “Esse,” all of which can be used individually or put together in Tetris-inspired combinations. But, frankly, there are only so many furniture-size sex props one apartment-dwelling family can accommodate.
After unpacking them, I jammed the cushions under my bed and began boning up with the handy position guide and accompanying DVD. The materials promised that with the “purpose driven pillow,” “it’s not a vagina, it’s wonderland.” And the photos, of a smiling couple engaged in positions like “Mama likes to mambo” and “Mister plow,” had an almost wholesome sheen. I wanted ecstasy, I thought, not Six Flags. But selling liberation, it seems, requires subtlety.
“We’re a mainstream brand; we don’t follow the adult trends,” says Louis Friedman, who co-founded the Liberator company three years ago. Instead, he demurs, “we’re a cushion.” It’s a brilliantly nonthreatening approach, aimed cleverly at the monogamous, exhausted masses. Although it doesn’t take a Caligula to guess how handy something that enhances rear entry and oral sex might be for a colorful variety of customers, the Liberator literature features strictly one-on-one, hetero activities.
After letting them languish under the bed for two weeks, finally, one relatively unstressed evening, my husband and I were ready to take the wedges for a spin. There may come a day when I’ve mastered the art of sexily tugging an overstuffed polygon out of the dust bunnies, but that day has not yet come.
Working on the principle that bigger is better, I first leaned back on the Ramp. I felt like a sexed-up Cirque du Soleil performer, ready for new heights of gymnastic transcendence. “How do you feel?” my husband whispered, rubbing up against me. “Like I’m going to fall off,” I muttered, clutching the precipice. But I wasn’t in danger; it turns out the Liberator’s cover is microfiber, which makes it both soft and Velcro-y. I half expected to make a ripping sound as I skidded off. And for the record, that baby is steep.
The whole production was a little awkward, but at least I was getting a different view. I’m not having a lot of spontaneous, wild sex on the kitchen floor these days. Or on any floor for that matter. What I never fully understood until I became a parent is that your kids aren’t just your kids, they’re your roommates. Roommates who don’t grasp the significance of, say, a tie on the doorknob.
“It’s sex by appointment,” says Friedman. That’s not necessarily a terrible thing — really, what is dating, after all, but sex by appointment? It just entails certain scheduling and geographic constraints. “When you’re married with kids, you’re typically restricted to the bedroom,” Friedman tells me. “We’re building out the bedroom as a lovescape.” (Customers who want to take their trips up a notch can try the company’s mats and “Black Label” line of restraints.) It’s a smart strategy — indeed, if my sex life is going to be confined to one small room, after the hour of 9 p.m., I want to make sure I’m getting the most bang for my buck. Literally.
Determined to give the Ramp a successful stress test, I tried a new position, easing myself facedown onto the cushion and letting gravity work its mojo — a move the guide refers to as the “moon rover.” As my husband knelt behind me, I thought, Now we’re on to something. After a while, though, I was mostly just antsy to try something else. “You get on it,” I commanded, and climbed astride him. Each new maneuver we tried was pleasant enough, but not the mindblower I’d been wishing for. It was more like making love with a third party in the bed. A big, fat, hunk-of-cheese-shaped third party.
Maybe we needed to scale down. I tossed the Ramp on the floor, where it obscured the rest of the bedroom, and reached for the Wedge. The Wedge is small, friendly and unimposing, with a manageable 27-degree angle. I slid it beneath my posterior, propping myself up for some slightly elevated missionary-style high jinks. And here’s what I learned: There’s something pretty sweet somewhere in those angles. It felt good. Really good. Efficient, even. Mere moments later, my husband observed, with more than a touch of understatement, “So, that seemed to work out OK for you.” At least I think it was something to that effect, because I was already half-asleep.
As with so many things in life, sex with the Liberator seems to come down to perspective. A little shift in angle makes things feel a little deeper, a little bigger, a little easier to hit the good spots. Subsequent experiments have proved less spazzy, less imperative driven. Basically, the props let me feel lazy and adventurous at the same time, which is my ideal state of mind. How good is the Liberator? I’ve probably had hotter sexual adventures with the aid of tequila, but this fits my current lifestyle better.
Once you’ve been liberated, though, you notice erotic potential all over the place. Last week, I was flipping through a catalog for a big chain of department stores when I saw something. There, in the pictured bedding, was an innocent wedge-shaped pillow, “therapeutically designed for comfortable support.” On the same page I spotted a modestly priced, waterproof pillow protector and a “versatile foam mattress topper.” You dirty, dirty big-box store.
Being a “Scrubs” fan is a little like being a Neil Diamond fan. It’s the kind of thing that originally seemed so cheesy you didn’t want to admit it, but somehow over the years gained its own warped credibility. It’s not so much that the thing itself has changed; it’s just that maybe the rest of us have finally discovered its loopy, heartfelt charm.
When the series premiered five years ago, it didn’t stand out in the prime-time wasteland of high-concept sitcoms. A bunch of idealistic, attractive and mistake-prone young doctors fumble their way through hospital residency, butting heads with their cranky superiors and having implausible encounters with their colorful patients. It’s a show that has stunt casting (hello, two-episode arc with Zach Braff’s girlfriend Mandy Moore!) and just plain stunts (hello, “Wizard of Oz” episode!) galore, which makes the fact that it’s so damn good all the more impressive. This is a show that’s made Tara Reid funny and Molly Shannon poignant.
But “Scrubs’” real revelation, from the first season through this, its most brazenly, risk-takingly surreal one, is how much tender humanity it manages to bring to the most absurd situations. It may carry the whiff of must-see TV, but it’s closer in spirit to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Veronica Mars” — shows that make you laugh at their wry wit, the better to devastate you later as they put their characters through the wringer.
Full of dream sequences, imagined conversations, Dr. “J.D.” Dorian’s (Zach Braff) deadpan narration, and jokes about crystal meth labs and melon-size prostates, Tuesday’s hourlong season finale delivered a trademark barrage of taste-defying gags to its blissfully laugh-track-free beat. Winding down for the summer, Sacred Heart Hospital was ripe with “that end-of-the-season smell” — an aroma that, it turns out, isn’t as enticing as eau de midseason.
In wrapping up its assorted plotlines, “Scrubs” fell short on offering the day-to-day, life-and-death dramas that give it its soul. At its best, the show has always used the routine mortality of a hospital to explore the very different ways human beings grapple with the frustrating, downright pathetic fallibility of body and spirit. When, earlier this spring, Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) made a hasty wrong decision regarding transplants that resulted in the loss of a string of patients, their deaths, and Cox’s resulting plummet into drinking and depression, were a kick in the pants to anybody who thinks you have to be “E.R.” or “House” to do medical drama right. Even more affectingly, an episode in which the Janitor (whose name remains a mystery because, really, who’s going to take the time to learn it?) embarrasses himself trying to be heroically helpful gave a measure of dignity to one of the show’s most caricatured players.
The season finale, in contrast, erred more on the side of sitcom, although the writing is so funny it could almost be forgiven for one poop joke too many. Elliot (Sarah Chalke) is fed up with her boyfriend, Keith (Travis Schuldt), but eventually comes back around. Nurse Carla (Judy Reyes), whose pregnancy has snowballed from a line on a stick to full-blown waddling seemingly overnight, is a basket case of hormonal overreactions, mostly aimed at her amiable, fashion-impaired surgeon spouse, Dr. Turk (Donald Faison). The spectacularly abrasive Dr. Cox and his even more hostile significant other, Jordan (Christa Miller Lawrence), are no sooner basking in the glow of having a toilet-trained toddler than they discover that Cox will want a refund on that vasectomy. Thrown in for good measure are vampire spoofs, vandalism with golf clubs, aging homosexuals, a cappella jingles used for the purposes of torture and an in joke about the opening credits. There’s also the obligatory dose of stunt casting, this time in the form of Elizabeth Banks (“The 40-Year-Old Virgin”) as Kim, a urologist whose suspect judgment is mitigated by her spectacular hotness. She’s here, of course, to wind up dating J.D., and she inevitably does. But when her hands find their way to his crotch, it’s not, unfortunately, in quite the way Dr. Dorian had hoped.
As the episode ends, fittingly, to the awesome strains of Neil Diamond’s “Delirious Love,” couples are paired off under the stars, embracing all that love and the night can offer. It’s a display of the cast’s easy chemistry — the sly, happy glance exchanged between the usually brittle Cox and Jordan, a quick warm look between exes J.D. and Elliot as she clears the way for his budding relationship with Kim. It seems a gently romantic way to float away for the summer, with a kiss and a melody. So it comes as a pleasant sting when the words “Two and a half weeks later” appear onscreen, and Kim informs a bouquet-brandishing J.D. that she too is pregnant. Stunned, J.D. leaves us for the summer with a gaping jaw and just one question: “What now?”
I knew I wasn’t doing a bang up job feeding my kid before she was even born. I’d been taking prenatal vitamins and drinking calcium fortified orange juice, but I also laughed in horror when I picked up a pregnancy guide that suggested whole wheat oatmeal cookies (ha!) as a once-a-month (ha! ha! HA!) treat. The turning point was when I took a sample class from a natural childbirth instructor, and she asked us all to write down everything we’d eaten that day. I didn’t get any extra credit for honesty when I handed in my sheet — I had cheerfully hoovered a slice of pepperoni pizza and hot fudge sundae minutes before the class commenced. The teacher looked at the page as if I’d confessed to washing down my crack with a forty of malt liquor. “You know,” she said, “everything that goes into you goes into your baby. But it’s okay,” she added brightly, “you can do better tomorrow.” I hung my cured meat and cheese-loving head in shame, and five years later, I’m still trying for that better tomorrow.
You start out with good intentions. You watch a baby open her rosebud mouth to you, and the delight and trust on her face are so pure it makes you want to cry. When I recently bought my second daughter her first solid food, I trotted to the natural food store and picked out a box of organic brown rice cereal. Then I gave the four year old a handful of M&Ms. I may not be some Jerry Springer-ready mom filling her infant’s bottles with Coke, but I’ve got a job, two kids, and three meals a day plus snacks to fall short on, and heaven knows I do.
I have a hard enough time trying to feed myself right, but now I have to be not just the chief house chef but a decent role model. It’s exhausting. I know I can’t expect my daughters to sit down and eat square meals at regular intervals if I’m grabbing a bag of Tostitos and calling it lunch. They won’t learn to read nutrition labels if I don’t drag them to the supermarket and have them watch me do the same. They won’t someday be able to feed themselves if I don’t invite them into the kitchen to cook. And they won’t believe that being a woman doesn’t automatically mean being forever on a diet unless they’re raised by one who isn’t herself. Yet here I sit, quietly craving a diet Snapple and wishing to god we’ll get takeout for dinner tonight.
I watch my older daughter on the playground, and I catch my breath a little every time a friend offers her some high fructose treat. Do I have her best interests at heart if I say she can’t have it, or is it better to let her, and assume it’s a valuable lesson in sharing? I can pull out any of my dozens of cookbooks and make fabulous homemade macaroni and cheese for dinner, knowing damn well it’ll be greeted with disappointment, or shrug as I rip open the blue box of Kraft. I struggle for an answer when she asks, “How many more carrots do I have to have before I can eat dessert?” And I kick myself when I let the baby have the sweetened applesauce when it’s the only thing at the store and we’re far from home.
I used to be able to control every morsel that went into my elder daughter’s mouth, as I do now with the baby. I nursed her, and then I fed her organic baby food and pureed her fresh fruits and vegetables. And I still managed to feel inadequate — was all that fruit creating an overdeveloped sweet tooth? Was I sending her down the road to white flour addiction by letting her teethe on a bagel? Cheerios? Loaded with salt! Yogurt? A sugar bonanza! Those playground staples, Goldfish and Teddy Grahams? Don’t even ask. Then one day, at another child’s first birthday party, she snatched a fistful of chocolate cake off the table and shoved it greedily into her little mouth. It was the happiest I think she’d ever looked. And it taught me something, something I’d heard long ago in Catholic school but never fully understood until then. We don’t have to be of the world, but we do have to live in the world. Chocolate cake happens, and it’s not a tragedy when it does.
The thing about food is, it isn’t just food. What’s obvious from the way my baby nuzzles contentedly on my breast, taking not just milk but love and comfort and security, becomes so much more tangled up the minute a child first pries herself off mom and toddles over to a bowl of Veggie Booty. I want to raise my kids to be healthy, strong women who get their recommended daily allowances of vitamins and minerals. I want them to be highly skeptical of at least half the chemically altered, nutritionally vacant stuff at the supermarket, no matter how alluringly, brightly colored it may be. But I also want to give them joy, and sometimes joy is a candy coated milk chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hand.
It’s not sufficient for me to raise them to eat healthy food, I have to figure out, every damn day, how to raise them to have a healthy relationship with food — which, paradoxically, means making room in our lives for unhealthy food. While I can feel satisfied that my children have never had fast food or soda, I want to feel equally okay when the inevitable moment comes that they do. They’re girls, and it’s going to be different for them. Someday, probably soon, someone will tell them about going low carb or high protein or counting calories. And soon after they may lose their gift for devouring second helpings with unselfconscious enthusiasm, they may stop loving their beautiful bellies and their round angel faces as much as they do now. I cringe every time I lazily let my preschooler order a hot dog for dinner, but if the alternative is making her feel there’s something catastrophic about it, I’ll live with the guilt. I’ll take inspiration from my husband, a man whose relationship with vegetables is ambivalent at best, and simply serve up the fries with a side of broccoli, the ice cream with a few strawberries. And the funny thing is, left to their own devices, they actually eat both with gusto, growing and thriving on a mix of healthy meals and occasional flat out crap.
I don’t want them looking for happiness in a box of Ding Dongs, but I really don’t want them growing up under a mother who neurotically rations out their food or greets their pleasure in something from the ice cream truck with a disapproving eye. All I can do is feed them lovingly, talk to them honestly, and hope they listen. That, after all, is what the dinner table was made for, even when there’s pizza on it.
When it comes to sex, I’ve always been an overachiever. From the moment I crossed “lose virginity” off a youthful to-do list like it was taking the SATs, I relished the challenge of being good in bed. In my adventures I’ve experienced earth-shaking lust and utter abandon. Still, I realize now how often the thrill of sex was tinged with something else — the triumph of conquest. I read the Kama Sutra and sex books with the steely discipline I applied to yoga class, confident there wasn’t a skill I couldn’t master with limberness and resolve.
Then I had a baby.
I don’t know if it’s true what they say about sex during pregnancy being incredibly hot. That’s how I remember it, but now that I’m a mother the memory of any kind of uninterrupted, unexhausted encounter seems like the apex of ecstasy. I do know that as my belly expanded my libido went right along with it. When certain moves involving weight on my big, big midsection became logistical absurdities, I cheerfully learned new ones to compensate, flipping onto my sides, enlisting chairs and bedposts for support. My hormones were amped up to previously unimagined heights while my puzzle-solving brain relished every obstacle. It was perfect. In the back of my mind, however, I was worried about what would happen next.
I’d heard stories of couples who’d gone at it like gangbusters until an 8-pound bundle of joy killed their sex lives. I saw once recklessly sultry friends get sensible haircuts and saggy bellies, preoccupying themselves with sippy cups and singalongs. I became determined not to commit the sin of letting myself go. I was screwing like a condemned woman.
So it came to pass that precisely six weeks after pushing a human being out of my body, I lay on my back in the doctor’s office awaiting the go-ahead to put something else in it. My middle was a vast expanse of squish. My breasts were tender and aching from the infant who’d clamped herself on me in the delivery room and had barely come up for air since. I was so sleep deprived I’d hallucinated a few times. And below deck? Pure wreckage. I had been torn, and was still bleeding. I had hemorrhoids, the least sexy condition ever invented. Yet I was considered normal for all I’d weathered, and had reached a deadline matter-of-factly referred to in pregnancy guides on the “How soon can I have sex?” page. So it didn’t surprise me in the least when the doctor removed the speculum, peeled off the gloves and declared, “You’re fine to resume sexual activity.”
I took the words not as a suggestion but an imperative. It was what I was supposed to do. My body had been pronounced capable; my psyche didn’t even stop to question why it was less enthused. Besides, I figured that after our longest period of marital abstinence, my husband was deserving of — nay, eager for — my lustful embraces.
I went home and informed him that as soon as the baby was solidly asleep, we were to commence fornication. He gave me a weary thumbs up. Had I not been too tired myself to pay attention, I might have noticed that his work-all-day, up-half-the-night-with-the-baby schedule hadn’t exactly been stoking his fires.
The baby’s sleep was still as easily and noisily set off as a car alarm on a Sunday morning. At the first sign of her buzz-saw-like snore, we plopped her drowsing form in the other room, where fitful gurgles told us we’d better try to wrap it up as soon as possible.
We undressed quickly and he fondly touched my breasts, a pair of old friends he hadn’t seen in a while. I cringed. His hands felt like sandpaper on my raw skin. It wasn’t just that it was painful, though; it was worse than that. After having the baby on them all day, I wanted them all to myself for a while. They’d gone from sex props to utilitarian devices, and the thought of having somebody else needing my tools filled me with dread. I swatted his hands away with a grimace. He looked at me, a mixture of hurt and concern on his face. So much for foreplay.
It didn’t get any steamier from there. “How do you want to do this?” he whispered huskily, while I paused to contemplate my options. I climbed aboard, figuring that would afford me the greatest measure of control.
It was agonizing. You’d think that after delivering something the size of a Thanksgiving turkey, a woman would feel like she’d just added a lane or two to her private highway. Instead, I’d lately been looking at my ultra-slim tampons and thinking, Oh God, no, never. My earliest sexual exploits had been awkward and a little uncomfortable, but full of fun and foreplay. This? This felt like the Amityville Horror, my husband in the role of unwelcome interloper and my lower half ominously commanding, Get out!
We didn’t last much longer after that. We hadn’t even fully gotten to penetration, let alone thrusting, let alone pleasure. After a few uninspired minutes, I defeatedly flopped down beside him.
I had what is tactfully referred to as a performance problem. In a previous life, I might have gamely switched tactics, attempted some partner-pleasuring tricks of an oral or manual variety. Instead, I sulked. My husband didn’t push it. You’d be surprised what a few yelps of “Ow. Ow. OWOW NOOOOOO” can do to dampen a man’s mood. In retrospect, if he’d still been up for it at that point, I’d have considered the possibility that I had married a sadist.
I lay in bed thinking, I have failed. But the truth was, I hadn’t wanted to have sex at all that night. I’d convinced myself that because I allegedly was able to, I automatically ought to, and preferably better than anyone else ever in the history of postpartum sex. It just hadn’t worked out that way. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to have sex again. For someone who’d invested a certain amount of her self-worth in the idea she could be a wanton slut bomb at will, this was a terrifying place to be. If I couldn’t make it happen tonight, surely I was headed down the road of separate twin beds and Lanz of Austria nightgowns. Maybe my brain was never going to have another horny thought. Maybe my body was never going to admit any more visitors.
Or maybe, I realized, this whole fiasco had been more about my ego than my libido. All those satisfying, playful years spent with a partner I loved hadn’t diminished my sexual Type A personality. Instead, I had been plagued by the same doubt that had haunted me when I was a young woman devouring magazine articles on how to have Mindblowing Sex Tonight — the dark fear of not making the grade. Humbled by my changed body and life, I had to learn something I couldn’t find in a manual or a porn movie.
I could grit my teeth and attempt another crack at it, with this lovely man who looked petrified I was going to smack him if he touched me the wrong way, or I could let it go. I could cling to the hope that desire, like a full night’s sleep and my curvy old ass, would one day return.
Much later, when I had cultivated candid friendships with fellow breeders, we could swap horror stories with the easy rapport of comrades in arms. “You waited only six weeks? My God, you’re brave,” I’d hear, from women who’d endured months of colicky babies and blocked milk ducts and episiotomy or cesarean scars before they could even think about intimacy again. Yet all of them, and their partners, had survived. Wounds healed. Kids grew, and sleep returned. And eventually we accepted that if ever there were a reasonable period in life for sex to take a temporary sabbatical, the time right after we’ve experienced one of its most awe-inspiring, ass-kicking consequences would be it.
My husband and I kept trying. Not every night. Not even all that often at first. When we did climb into bed together, I had to, of necessity, pipe up about what felt good and what didn’t. Along the way, I began to notice a shift in my attitude. Never before in my life had sex necessitated such intense contemplation. Never before had I needed to plan for it, psych myself up for it, schedule it into my bedraggled existence. But as the months wore on, never before had I felt more appreciative of the simple act of intimacy, stripped of bells and whistles and fueled by pure longing.
I would no longer have the luxury of making love to prove my prowess. I would no longer have sex because I believed it was what I was supposed to do. I would have sex because I wanted to, because dammit, I believed it would be fun. I would discover all over again for the first time what would work for me and what wouldn’t. It’s not that things ever quite went back to exactly as they were, but I began to understand that they didn’t have to. This new stage would have its rewards too.
I’m still open to possibilities, eager for novel ways to discover bliss. I’m just not such a hardass about it anymore. Six weeks after my second child was born, I was back at the doctor’s office, in the same undignified, scooted-down position. “You’re ready to resume sexual activity,” he pronounced authoratively, as if speaking ex cathedra. I smiled indulgently, thanked him, and immediately resolved to ignore him. Because this time, I was going to be the one to decide when I was ready. And I knew that someday soon, I really would be.
He had me at “Mr. Roboto.” I know he’s just a shallow phony, a shill for The Man, a calculated pretender affecting a hipness he blatantly lacks. But if loving Jack, the new radio format spreading Starbucks-like throughout the country, is wrong, I don’t want to be right. Because after years of having it the other way around, my radio is finally turning me on.
I’d given up on ever finding anything on the local dial decades ago. In college, I spent a summer working at a top-40 station. Three months of sitting in the veal-fattening pen with a bunch of slick-voiced would-be DJs, listening to Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock” over and over, effectively crushed my interest in the airwaves. Sometimes I took a walk on the quirky side and tussled with college stations, and in later years I searched the Web for destinations with playlists that were eclectic without being affected. But frankly, my aural libido had pretty much died. Then fate threw me in the path of Jack.
And if he hasn’t already, Jack will doubtless be sauntering in your direction soon too. Infinity has already replaced a few of the local rock stations that carried Howard Stern with Jack’s irresistibly prefab format.
My own love affair began, as these things often do, one Friday evening last summer. It was too late in the day for another Snapple, too early to start cracking open the beer. I turned the radio on to the golden oldies station, in the hope of catching an up-tempo classic to help me regain the will to live. Flicking on the dial, I didn’t hear the usual “Help Me Rhonda” or “My Girl” - but I did find Elvis. As “Radio, Radio” blared, I pogoed around the living room in amazement like some idiot in a John Hughes movie. It was instant, breathless infatuation. A bland voice deadpanned, “We’re Jack.” Well, helllllo, mister.
By the next day, the news was out. The station’s owner, Infinity, had sprung the surprise format change just minutes before I’d happened to tune in. The oldies and the stable of the city’s most venerable DJs were out. The new image would be modeled more on the iPod’s shuffle, with an automated playlist of thousands of songs from the last few decades, and no disc jockeys. With little bits of patter between songs now delivered in a prerecorded, just-not-that-into-you drone, Jack was about as genuine as a 2 a.m. pickup line. And for me, just as promising.
Like Rush, Men Without Hats, and Dudley Do-Right, Jack originally hails from Canada. His “variety hits” format took its name from a Vancouver DJ’s on-air persona and migrated to the States in 2004. Why give a radio station a guy’s name? Because you can’t get the hots for something called Smooooth or Lite. But Jack? That’s someone you banged, or wish you had.
In the ensuing weeks, Jack has become my new constant companion. He’s like the investment banker I used to date. The guy had a ponytail. He was a soulless yuppie douche bag. But he radiated horniness, and there are times in a woman’s life when that’s just her type.
While the deluge of business-related articles written about Jack lately have focused on his ADD-level playlist and efficient elimination of costly on-air personalities, the real secret to Jack’s allure is his blatant 24-7 fixation on sex. Sure, hooking up is an inevitable motif in any pop-based playlist. But Jack is never more than one song away from another ode to shagging. “Justify My Love” follows “Let’s Get It On” follows “Give It to Me, Baby.” Which is followed by an ad for car insurance, just to mess with my head.
It’s been so long since I turned on the radio and felt any element of surprise; I don’t even mind that as often as not, the surprise isn’t a good one. One moment I’m putty, wailing along with Patti Smith or Led Zep, the next I’m spanked back with a dose of Huey Lewis. But when I tune in and he offers the playfully erotic call-and-response teaming of “Brick House” and “I Want Candy,” I think, I don’t care if it’s just a random, computer-generated thing. Jack, you get me.
As a woman in the death throes of her 30s, I know I’m an easy mark for an operator like Jack. I don’t know what he looks like, but Jack smells like Obsession. More than half of his playlist is composed of top-40 hits from the ’80s. It’s the music you remember hearing on an overheated night in a parked car, right down to the awesome song followed by a sucky one. It’s a lyrical reminder of that time in life when going all the way still meant something, and “I Was Made for Loving You” wasn’t a piece of ripe musical cheese but a full-blown state of mind. Listening to Jack feels like being buzzed on wine coolers, making out to the Cure with a stranger at a party - a little nauseating, but fun as hell.
There are Jacks now all over the country, in dozens of cities from Las Vegas to Buffalo. Every market he penetrates with a cocky swagger. He slightly adjusts his personality to blend with local tastes, yet he remains essentially the same guy wherever he goes. In Philadelphia, he’s Ben. In the South, he’s Hank. Last month, I drove around New England, and at a certain point on the road Jack went away and Mike took over. Mike’s not my Mr. Right either, but for a few days, he was Mr. Right Now.
I keep telling myself this thing with Jack is a fling, a little “Hot in the City” to get through the long, cold winter nights. We’ll never make it stick, what with his repetitive, canned small talk and penchant for 38 Special. And it’s killing my self-esteem when I realize he’s got me singing along to Stevie Nicks and feeling like a creature of dubious, potentially deviant appetites.
But my preferred pleasures have always been the guilty kind. Even if I finally pony up and make the commitment to get an iPod of my own, and even if I fill it up with obscure B-sides and alternate tracks, I know I’ll keep Jack on the side. Because tonight he might just play “Shame.” And I’ll know he’s playing it just for me.
“Do you own stock in the company, or what?” a friend asked me recently. So perhaps I’ve been a tad evangelical about Netflix lately. But you really do have to try it. Seriously.
I found the online DVD rental service via a discussion on Table Talk. I had given up on most television somewhere around the time “Buffy” went belly up, and now, except for a weekly date with “Arrested Development,” I find myself resorting to reading and talking to my spouse for entertainment.
I was ripe for conversion.
What first seduced me was the seemingly endless number of titles Netflix offers. And though normally I’m too lazy to sign up for anything, the prospect of more efficient laziness — like never having to go the video store again — was appealing.
Previously, I had to get my movie fixes in one of two ways. I could go to the vaguely filthy, irrationally organized local independent shop, where a request for “Let’s Get Lost” would be greeted with “We have ‘Let’s Get Naked.’” Or I could go to Blockbuster. And I hate Blockbuster. Forget the robotic staff. Forget getting stuck with charges for movies I knew I’d brought in under the wire. Forget the way a wall of “Creepmaster III” boxes could gobsmack me into blanking on the movie I’d originally come for. They lost me the day the clerk loudly announced to me and the throng behind me at the checkout, “You have a late fee on ‘Bubble Boy.’” Oh the shame.
Now I live with no deadlines. No minimum or maximum number of DVDs. And no judgmental clerks. I can have practically the entire Criterion Collection and every volume of “Freaks and Geeks” at my fingertips. And I can luxuriate in every bonus feature without speeding through to get the damn thing back by noon. Dude!
The monthly fee has proved considerably more economical than what I used to pay in rentals and penalties. I can add titles to the queue whenever I think of them, not when I’m in a retail-induced sensory overload. I can log on and see a friendly suggestion that I might enjoy “Donnie Darko.” Netflix, you know me too well.
With our family’s plan, we’re limited to three titles out at a time, a perfectly generous amount. My husband can have “Blue Crush,” my daughters can have “My Neighbor Totoro, and I can have “The Day After Tomorrow” at the same time. Peace reigns in our household.
When we’re finished with a title, which, in the case of my children, happens around the 300th viewing, we just slip it in a prepaid envelope and drop it in the mail. The next movie in our list arrives, like a little present from the movie fairy, faster than you can say “Gyllenhaal.” I love Netflix so much I want to marry it. And what I love best is not only can I — shamelessly — bring “Bubble Boy” home any time I want, I can keep him as long as I like.
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