Doppelbänger

“I would fuck myself,” Joe said. Then the Ben Stiller-getic 26-year-old smoking a stogie at a table in front of Tarpon Bend last Saturday night explained: “I’m a good catch, I guess. I have a head on my shoulders. I’m young. I’m eligible.”

Joe, who was wearing a sensible, short-sleeved, buttoned-down shirt, saw his sexual appeal in well-reasoned terms — dating terms, if you will. He’s a solid, upstanding young man. The question I had asked him was, “If you were a woman, would you want to have sex with you?”

Admittedly, it’s a weird query, and it doesn’t mean masturbation. More specifically, what I wanted to know from Joe and the world at large was: If you were a person of the opposite gender and you met yourself, would you be hot for you?

And Joe said, “Yes.”

So next question, “What would Joe the girl do to get your attention, Joe?”

“It’s very simple. I would be able to hold a conversation. It’s an unseen phenomenon in these parts,” he said, looking up at the beer-toting crowd of regular Joes and hos that showed little promise of contradicting his assessment.

So I threw at Joe, “Do you think that if you were a woman, you’d be able to do it for you?”

“If I were a woman,” he conjectured, “and I knew what Joe the guy wanted, would I satisfy him? Yes.”

“Well, I just know,” I replied, “that if I were a man, I would feel a little out of sorts trying to navigate the twig and berries.”

“It has a mind of its own,” Joe assured. “It would lead you.”

That sure seemed to make sense, at least more sense than what Joe said next… which was: “It never hurts for a girl to go to strip clubs with your guy or you have to wonder if he’s going to a strip club when he says he’s just going out to a club.”

Paranoid party of one.

Was Joe the girl already getting suspicious of Joe the guy? Or just excited by the prospect of watching himself gape stupidly as a bored female wound her hips in his face at a local tilt-a-whirl of T&A?

In any event, it seemed we were getting a little off subject, so I hit him with: “What do you think it would feel like to have a vagina?”

“That’s an impossible question,” he responded.

And it’s an old one too. As the story goes, one day that crazy, contentious couple that headed the Olympian gods, the philandering Zeus and his megapower bitch wife, Hera, took to disagreeing about who receives more pleasure from sex, men or women. Zeus said women, and Hera said men, which might explain why their marriage was so rocky. But the real victim was a poor wise man named Tiresias, who’d spent seven years of his life as a woman; the divine couple summoned him to resolve the dispute.

Tiresias said women get more pleasure out of sex.

Hera got so peeved about losing the argument that she struck him blind.

We can never really know what it might be like to live as a person of the opposite gender, just as we can’t know whether there’s life after death. It’s fun rather than frustrating to listen to people speculate, because it reveals their narcissism. (“Of course I’d do me. I’d bang me seven ways from Sunday.”) In fact, of the 15 people I posed this question to, only one, a man, said, “No.” Does that tell you anything about the maniacally egotistical nature of sunny South Florida?

Next, I took the question to the VIP room at China White, where there was an exclusive NFL football party for Miami Dolphins defensive back Sam Madison’s 29th birthday. For some reason, they let me in, and not being much of a sports fan, I navigated through the forest of giants and came across one willing to talk. But, he said, “no names.”

Thirty-three-year-old “John,” a tall handsome man in nice black pants and a pressed shirt, said, “If I looked at me and I was a woman, I’d be like ‘Damn!’ I’d want to have sex with me. From what I know about me in bed, I’d be a stalker.”

Whoa! Who could but pity the girls who break themselves upon the rock of this guy’s ego.

“Do you think you the man might break the heart of you the woman?”

“No possibility.”

Tough crowd.

Next I took my question to the plebians downstairs.

A girl with long brown hair was sitting at a high-top table engrossed in her cell phone. I asked her whether she’d fuck herself.

She said, “Yeah.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause I’m cute, and I’m educated too.”

She was kind of cute, so I asked, “As a man, would you be intimidated by you?”

“I would be scared to approach me,” she said.

Then, the “Electric Slide” came on. Why I don’t know, but she walked away from me and took a leggy friend to the dance floor.

If I were a guy, I wouldn’t fuck a self-proclaimed educated lame-o who’d rather dance the electric slide than contemplate the intricacies of her sexual identity.

A spunkier, blond female in tight jeans and a tank caught my attention.

I tossed her the question, and she answered, “Fuck yeah! Are you kidding me?”

“Why?”

“‘Cause I’m fucking awesome. I’m the fucking best.”

Party.

Her friend, a soft-built man in a blazer answered, “Fuck no.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have entirely too many problems. I got lucky. My girlfriend is a corporate litigator.”

Their tall, skinny blond friend in a pink tank top and blue jeans yelled “Yeah” excitedly and said she would because “I have long legs, dimples, soft hair, and I’m cute.”

On the other side of this trio stood James, 33, a very handsome, bald black man.

If he were a girl thinking about doing him, he’d be all, “Hell yeah, and twice on Sundays.”

So enthused was he that I had to ask, “If you were a girl, what would you do for you?”

“Any goddamned thing I wanted me to.”

He kept on dancing, then turned back around and said, “I have a question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“Would you fuck me?”

Ascertaining whether John meant in reality or in the realm of the hypothetical took a second.

John said: “You hesitated. You wouldn’t fuck a brother, would you?”

That’s not a cool accusation, and by the way, in the realm of sex, the burden of proof lies in answering the question of why someone should screw you, not in guessing at why they wouldn’t.

“But you would fuck you?” he asked.

Well, yeah, I thought. No better way to keep my numbers down.