Between Consenting Fantasies

The next book I write is going to be about sex.

It will be the ultimate erotic fantasy. Sex with unicorns, sex with mermaids, sex with trolls and sex with ogres.

It will be an international best seller, outraging even as it sells in the millions.

I will be condemned in every section of the globe, but if I’m not, I will do a sequel that will combine sex and religion, with all of its startling ecclesiastic manifestations.

If you think Sinead O’Connor raised hell tearing up a picture of the Pope, wait until you see what “Sex in the Vatican” will do.

When I have been established as the king of erotica, I will publish a series of paperbacks dealing with sex at City Hall, sex in school, sex on the waterfront, sex among bird watchers, sex on the playground, sex at the circus and sex in the mall.

Ultimately, there will not be one section of life that will remain untouched my lascivious outreach.

If arrested, I will write about sex in jail. If sued, sex in court. If I win, sex and the 1st Amendment. If I lose, sex among prudes.

The nation will be awash in sex, drowned in it, suffocating from it.

That will serve two purposes. First, I will be filthy (you’ll pardon the term) rich. Second, we’ll finally get enough public sex.

I am thinking in these terms due to the success of a book by Madonna Louise Ciccone called “Sex.”

It falls into the tradition of explicit titles. Just as Ernest Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea” was about an old man and the sea, so “Sex” is about exactly that. In every human form.

Almost everyone I know has either purchased the book, borrowed it or can’t stop talking about it.

Some of them have not even thought about sex for years and suddenly they are drooling over photographs hot enough to wilt ranunculuses.

A friend bought it for his infirm 86-year-old grandfather who, the friend claims, threw away his crutches after reading it and walked for the first time in years. It saved a trip to Lourdes.

“Boy,” an acquaintance said, staring at a naked female posing frontally about halfway through the book, “if I only had that cookie overnight!”

“You are 78 years old,” I said. “Your gratification in bed is limited to completing a crossword puzzle. What in God’s name would you do with a naked tigress?”

He just shrugged sadly and shook his head. The drooling stopped. Men can’t even drool much after 75.

A bookstore employee told me everyone is buying “Sex.” “It has captured the public’s imagination,” was the way he put it.

“Has it captured yours?” I asked. He was a man in his 20s with beady little eyes. Earlier he had told me he was a vegetarian.

“I think there’s something to learn from it,” he said.

I have the book. My wife, Cinelli, bought it for me when I had the flu.

“This will make you sweat,” she said. “Sweating is good for the flu. Just don’t fall out of bed.”

If there is anything to be learned from “Sex” it is contained in this passage from the book: “There is something comforting about being tied up, like when you were a baby and your mother strapped you in a car seat.”

The lesson: by strapping down baby, you may be creating a sadomasochist who digs bondage. Think about it, mom.

The major appeal of Madonna’s book is to the demented teen-agers who scream at her every move in the crotch-grabbing, eye-rolling videos that have been her hallmark.

They equate sex not with love, warmth or even normal desire, but with erotic public displays done to the thumping sounds of rock, or packaged in Mylar and thrust in your face.

“Sex” is like a coffee table book in a whorehouse. It leaves nothing to the imagination in terms of human erotica, exposing erogenous zones I never knew existed.

You see more mouths, tongues, breasts, behinds and genitalia of both sexes than you will probably personally witness in a lifetime.

But, hey, every generation reinvents sex and Madonna’s is no exception. Unfortunately, she is about as subtle as a pimple on the nose in just about everything she does.

If you’re looking for candlelight and wine, forget it.

Our only hope is that “Sex” will at least temper our obsessive desire to see, hear and read about it, so that we can get on to other matters.

But if it doesn’t, I wait in the wings with the ultimate books of sex. Even Pinocchio won’t be safe, and Alice will rediscover Wonderland, baby, in ways she never imagined.