A man gives himself two extra minutes in the car with the air conditioning running, because that is the window he has learned to leave between arriving and walking in. Any less and he is a sweat stain. Any more and he is stalling.
Houston in August. A bar in Midtown he has been going to for six of the eleven years it has been on the block. He checks the exits every time, front door and the fire exit left of the kitchen, because Santos taught him that.
I did not set out to write about any of it. This is one of the books that just grew.
Ethan is thirty-four, sells medical devices, and has spent twelve years perfecting a set of rules that keep him from ever being known. No third dates. No sleepovers past four in the morning. No meeting the friends. Afterward he draws every woman in a leather notebook, starting from whatever detail his attention caught first.
The system is not cruelty. It is physics, and it works, right up until it does not.
What is the inkblot method?
You drop one concept onto the page, then drop others near it.
Some of the blots touch each other and some do not. That part is not planned and cannot be. Then you write outward from each one, following whatever is there instead of working toward a destination you decided on in advance.
What you have for a long stretch is a set of story islands. Separate pieces that work on their own and are not yet connected to anything, and you keep writing until they reach each other.
Eventually they join and the thing is a coherent story. That is how this novel got written and it is how God Is Everything got written, which are two books with nothing else in common.
The book on this: Gettin’ Laid is a novel about a man with twelve years of rules that keep him from ever being known, and the hurricane that takes away his exit.
What are Ethan’s rules in Gettin’ Laid?
A system built over twelve years to prevent one specific outcome.
No third dates, because a third date is where a person starts becoming someone. No sleepovers past four in the morning, because the hours after four are where people talk. No meeting the friends, because friends produce context and context produces a version of you that has to be maintained.
Every rule looks like a rule about sex. Every rule is a rule about being known.
He does not experience it as avoidance. He experiences it as engineering, and he is not entirely wrong, which is what makes the character work.
What does the notebook do in the novel?
It is the one place the system leaks.
He draws every woman afterward in a leather notebook, and he starts from whatever detail his attention caught first. A wrist. The way somebody held a phone. Whatever the eye went to before the rest of it registered.
A man with rules against being known is keeping a careful record of other people. He would tell you it is a hobby.
Who is Lena and why does the system fail?
An ER nurse at the Texas Medical Center who refuses to perform anything.
Not warmth. Not interest. Not patience. Every rule Ethan has assumes the other person is doing something he can read and respond to, and she is not doing anything.
The system has no instruction for that. It has instructions for interest, for reluctance, for enthusiasm, and for withdrawal, and no instruction at all for a person who declines to give him a surface to work with.
The book is what he does while the system stops working.
What is in the shoebox?
Two notebooks full. Names and dates and pencil faces looking up at the dark in a closet.
That image arrived early and it is the one that told me what the book was. A man with rules designed to prevent anybody knowing him is keeping a careful archive of other people, filed away where nobody will find it.
He would tell you it is a hobby. He sleeps fine, has two hospital calls tomorrow and lunch with Santos, and the shoebox is in the closet.
A system that has to be documented is not a system somebody is comfortable inside.
Who is Santos?
The only person who can say the thing out loud, and he does it over sake.
Ethan tries to describe what is different about Lena. That she does not need him to be anything, that she is not filling a space with him, that she is simply there with whatever he is.
Santos nods once and says that this terrifies him. Ethan agrees. Then Santos completes it. If she is not making you into something, you have to be something. And if you are something, she can see it. And if she can see it, she can be disappointed by it.
Twelve years of engineering explained in four lines by a friend in a restaurant. Every novel about a person who cannot look at himself needs somebody in it who will.
Why is there a Danny in the book?
Because the contrast is instructive and it is not flattering to Ethan.
Danny walks into a room and the space belongs to him before he claims it, the way weather belongs in a room. Three women at a table near the door register him before he is four steps in, quietly, because conspicuous attention is less effective than the other kind and everybody involved knows it.
He receives it with the easy warmth of a man who has been receiving it for thirty years.
Danny has no system. He does not need one. Ethan’s twelve years of rules are the work of somebody compensating, and putting an uncompensating man in the same bar makes that visible without anybody having to say it.
How does the book handle the disruption?
It arrives at a birthday party, which is the correct venue for it.
Santos briefs him in the car on the way. Morgan does not believe in small birthday parties, has taken over a bar in Montrose, and will fill it with everybody he knows and stay until they throw him out.
Ethan asks why he is being briefed. Because you are going to meet people tonight, Santos says, and I want you to know what you are walking into.
It is November and the Houston heat has finally gone. That is a man being walked into a room he cannot control, by a friend who has decided it is time, and neither of them says so.
Why does a hurricane arrive in Gettin’ Laid?
Because every rule he has depends on being able to leave.
No third dates, out by four, no meeting the friends. All of it assumes a door and the freedom to walk through it on his own schedule.
A hurricane closes the door. Shelter in place, then day three, then the silence. Time with somebody, in a fixed space, with no exit and nothing to do but be present, which is the one condition twelve years of engineering never had to survive.
That was not the plan when I started. It is where the islands ended up connecting.
What kind of book is Gettin’ Laid?
A first person novel about wanting, and it carries a content warning for explicit sexual content and adult themes.
The title is doing something deliberate. It promises a book about conquest and delivers a book about a man who has built a machine to protect himself from intimacy and cannot say so, even to himself, for three hundred pages.
Readers who come for the first thing generally stay for the second.
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