Accidental Playboy
by Leif Ueland
Warner

Leif Ueland was diligently pounding away on his bestseller, focused on literary success to the exclusion of all else, when he got the call. Did he want to sign on as the chronicler of the search for the Playmate of the Millennium? Did he want to spend six months on a tricked-out bus full of eager, curvaceous girls-next-door? Did he want to sit down and chat with bunny candidates, armed with Playboy credentials and a digital camera? Did he want to partake in the ultimate male fantasy and get paid for it?

Leif Ueland was a Los Angeles-based freelance writer struggling with irregular income, sexual dysfunction and low self-esteem. Did I mention that he was hard at work on a less-than-certain "bestseller"? It was a hard sell, but Ueland signed on as Playboy.com's "Fearless Reporter."

To hear him tell it — and that's what you will do if you tuck into "Accidental Playboy" — it was nothing more than a strange twist of fate. Time and time again, our Fearless (read, hapless) Reporter pleads for sympathy. "What was I doing here?" he cries at a gentleman's club in Portland; "Who am I kidding?" he exclaims as judge of a bikini contest in New Orleans; At the pinnacle of his transformation, Ueland throws a video-linked birthday party for himself in his hotel in Athens, Ga., and choreographs a collection of scantily-clad beauties feasting on cake from his bared chest. "What had happened to me?" he wails in conclusion.

They say fact is stranger than fiction. But it isn't always. These are great stories. Stories to tell your friends, new acquaintances, and hungry fans waiting for a daily dispatch on the titillations of a warm-blooded male. But they are no crazier than the average fantasy conjured up by the suggestion of a bus full of Playboy bunnies. What distinguishes Ueland's account from the sum total of his six-month's worth of dispatches is his candid self-portrait as a guy who really doesn't know what to think about sex.

Apparently, five years of involuntary abstinence punctuated by romantic dead-ends and weekly therapy sessions can undermine enthusiasm for an assignment with Playboy. Ueland, who writes easily about sex, anatomy and erotica, was initially unnerved by the mandate to do so.

"What if next time you see me I'm calling myself Phallus and waxing on about some woman's very-above-average breasts?" he implores his shrink before embarking. "What if there is a serious pig within, just waiting to get out?"

As his tale unfolds, it becomes clear that Ueland's fears are not entirely unfounded. He is soon calling himself the mini-Hef and discoursing freely on chi-chi's, hot-house flowers and precome. He heaves himself over his inhibitions and his job description to re-invent himself as a serious nude photographer. By Detroit, he is staging solo shoots in the back of the bus and reveling in his newfound arousal. Something has gotten out, and it's fair to call it Phallus.

Still, our reporter never succeeds in convincing us that he is a serious pig. It takes six months for him to finally make it to bed with a candidate and he has divulged too much along the way to suggest that he is entirely cured of his reservations about sex. Perhaps the finest passage in Ueland's sometimes monotonous tale comes when he discovers guilt as the root of his complex:

Going for runs in the evening, the way women walking alone will hear the rapidly approaching footsteps and whip their heads around, their faces filled for a moment with terror. Or growing up with a sister, watching her dating emotionally arrested guys, stupid guys, mean guys, dangerous guys ... Or women friends who have had a sexual experience involving too much alcohol and something less than consent ... Even bathroom graffiti — who writes it? Who walking among us feels compelled midshit to scribble out that thought about women being whores or all loving it in the ass? And in the same vein, those moronic letters I get from readers: "I want pussy" and "send me porn." Who are these men?

"Accidental Playboy" will not be the bestseller Ueland once wanted to write. It is raw, novice and a little too faithful to the chronology of a cross-country quest. Some of the anecdotes are amusing, but many are unexceptional. Ueland's writing style also wants some restraint (please, fewer italics and exclamatory disbelieving asides!!). One sometimes wonders if he writes to an internal checklist of obligatory puns, devices and rollicking adjectives.

That said, Ueland often turns a beautiful phrase: models walk "slowly, a step up from slow motion, a speed that if it were on a blender would be labeled delicious;" the million dollar search bus draws satellite news vans in every city, "parked at haphazard angles around the bus, seemingly poised to mate with the thing."

Moreover, Ueland's sense of humor is sharp, when stripped of its italics and printed "ha-has." He drifts through a celebrity party at Hugh Hefner's mansion snapping photos and encounters Drew Carey: "He can't stop laughing, is going to swallow his tongue, and I don't know CPR. I must get away"; Ben Affleck: "regular guy hanging out with his boys, not talking to women"; and even the grown-up kid actor from Witness, who is "spooked by my request ... like he really is Amish and has never seen anything like this before."

Most importantly, Leif Ueland, the "shy-guy" who asks in the dedication to his parents that they not read any further, has shown himself to be a Fearless Reporter, in a sense any reader can appreciate. He has posited himself as the most freakish exhibit in a display of American cultural perversity. So hats off to the Accidental Playboy (and thongs and tight T-shirts as well).

— Elizabeth Kiem (eckiem@yahoo.com)