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“But what has this got to do with me?”

“It’s really remiss of them not to have notified you,” the reporter said. “They fed the question into their computer and turned it loose on their sampling lists, and the computer came up with you.”

“With me?” George said.

“Yes. They really should have notified you.”

“I’m supposed to be the Average American Man!”

“That’s what the computer said.”

“But that’s crazy,” George said. “How can I be the Average American Man? I’m only five foot eight and my name is Blaxter spelled with an ‘l’, and I’m of Armenian and Latvian ancestry and I was born in Ship’s Bottom, New Jersey. What’s that average of, for Chrissakes? They better recheck their results. What they’re looking for is some Iowa farmboy with blond hair and a Mercury and 2.4 children.”

“That’s the old, outdated stereotype,” the reporter said. “America today is composed of racial and ethnic minorities whose sheer ubiquity precludes the possibility of choosing an Anglo-Saxon model. The average man of today has to be unique to be average, if you see what I mean.”

“Well...what am I supposed to do now?” George asked.

The reporter shrugged. “I suppose you just go on doing whatever average things you were doing before this happened.”

There was a dearth of interesting news in London at that time, as usual, so the BBC sent a team down to interview George. CBS picked it up for a thirty-second human-interest spot, and George became a celebrity overnight.

There were immediate repercussions.

George’s novel had been tentatively accepted by the venerable British publishing firm of Gratis & Spye. His editor, Derek Polsonby-Jigger, had been putting George through a few final rewrites and additions and polishes and deletions, saying, “It’s just about right, but there’s still something that bothers me and we owe it to ourselves to get it in absolutely top form, don’t we?”

A week after the BBC special, George got his book back with a polite note of rejection.

George went down to St. Martin’s Lane and saw Polsonby. Polsonby was polite but firm. “There is simply no market over here for books written by average Americans.”

“But you liked my book! You were going to publish it!”

“There was always something about it that bothered me,” Polsonby said. “Now I know what that something is.”

“Yeah?”

“Your book lacks uniqueness. It’s just an average American novel. What else could the average American man write? That’s what the critics would say. Sorry, Blaxter.”

When George got home, he found Big Karen packing.

“Sorry, George,” she told him, “but I’m afraid it’s all over between us. My friends are laughing at me. I’ve been trying for years to prove that I’m unique and special, and then look what happens to me—I hook up with the average American man.”

“But that’s my problem, not yours!”

“Look, George, the average American man has got to have an average American wife, otherwise he’s not average, right?”

“I never thought about it,” George said. “Hell, I don’t know.”

“It makes sense, baby. As long as I’m with you, I’ll just be the average man’s average woman. That’s hard to bear, George, for a creative-thinking female person who is unique and special and has been the old lady of Larry Shark when he was with Brain Damage during the year they got a gold platter for their top-of-the-charts single, All Those Noses.’ But it’s more than just that. I have to do it for the children.”

“Karen, what are you talking about? We don’t have any children.”

“Not yet. But when we did, they’d just be average kids. I don’t think I could bear that. What mother could? I’m going to go away, change my name, and start all over. Good luck, George.”

After that, George’s life began to fall apart with considerable speed and dexterity. He began to get a little wiggy; he thought people were laughing at him behind his back, and of course it didn’t help his paranoia any to find out that they actually were. He took to wearing long black overcoats and sunglasses and dodging in and out of doorways and sitting in cafes with a newspaper in front of his average face.

Finally he fled England, leaving behind him the sneers of his onetime friends. He was bad-rapped but good. And he couldn’t even take refuge in any of the places he knew: Goa, Ibiza, Malibu, Poona, Anacapri, Ios, or Marrakesh. He had erstwhile friends in all those places who would laugh at him behind his back.

In his desperation he exiled himself to the most unhip and unlikely place he could think of: Nice, France.

There he quickly became an average bum.

Now stick with me, Joey, while we transition to several months later. It is February in Nice. A cold wind is whipping down off the Alps, and the palm trees along the Boulevard des Anglais look like they’re ready to pack up their fronds and go back to Africa.

George is lying on an unmade bed in his hotel, Les Grandes Meules. It is a suicide-class hotel. It looks like warehouse storage space in Mongolia, only not so cheerful.

There is a knock on the door. George opens it. A beautiful young woman comes in and asks him if he is the famous George Blaxter, Average American Man. George says that he is, and braces himself for the latest insult that a cruel and unthinking world is about to lay on him.

“I’m Jackie,” she says. “I’m from New York, but I’m vacationing in Paris.”

“Huh,” George says.

“I took off a few days to look you up,” she says. “I heard you were here.”

“Well, what can I do for you? Another interview? Further adventure of the Average Man?”

“No, nothing like that...I was afraid this might get a little uptight. Have you got a drink?”

George was so deep into confusion and self-hatred in those days that he was drinking absinthe even though he hated the stuff. He poured Jackie a drink.

“Okay,” she said, “I might as well get down to business.”

“Let’s hear it,” George said grimly.

“George,” she said, “did you know that in Paris there is a platinum bar exactly one meter long?”

George just stared at her.

“That platinum meter,” she said, “is the standard for all the other meters in the world. If you want to find out if your meter is the right length, you take it to Paris and measure it against their meter. I’m simplifying, but do you see what I mean?”

“No,” Blaxter said.

“That platinum meter in Paris was arrived at by international agreement. Everyone compared meters and averaged them out. The average of all those meters became the standard meter. Are you getting it now?”

“You want to hire me to steal this meter?”

She shook her head impatiently. “Look, George, we’re both grown-up adult persons and we can speak about sex without embarrassment, can’t we?”

George sat up straight. For the first time his eyes began tracking.

“The fact is,” Jackie said. “I’ve been having a pretty lousy time of it in my relationships over the past few years, and my analyst, Dr. Decathlon, tells me it’s because of my innate masochism, which converts everything I do into drek. That’s his opinion. Personally, I think I’ve just been running a bad streak. But I don’t really know, and it’s important for me to find out. If I’m sick in the head, I ought to stay in treatment so that someday I’ll be able to enjoy myself in bed. But if he’s wrong, I’m wasting my time and a hell of a lot of money.”

“I think I’m starting to get it,” George said.

“The problem is, how is a girl to know whether her bad trips are her own fault or the result of the hangups of the guys she’s been going with? There’s no standard of comparison, no sexual unit, no way to experience truly average American sexual performance, no platinum meter against which to compare all of the other meters in the world.”