Accidental Playboy: Caught In the Ultimate Male Fantasy
by
Leif Ueland © 2002

Sometime journalist Leif Ueland has hit rock bottom as a straight single male: not only does he not have a girlfriend, but he's also a really nice guy who's visibly uncomfortable in the presence of overt he-manishness. Combine that with no job, money, or decent apartment, and the result is acute insecurity. How, he wonders, can he expect to decode women's sexuality if he can't even understand his own? Then, the opportunity of a lifetime comes along: The world's leading men's magazine needs a Fearless Reporter to travel cross-country for six months on the "Playboy Bus" in search of the Playmate of the Millennium. Dozens of cities. Thousands of women, willing to take it all off for cheesecake immortality. One man, covering it all: Leif, the anti-Hefner, the only son in a family of feminists, who finds himself at the center of a vortex of erotica, sexual harassment, plastic surgery, stripping, and, always, beautiful women.As the cross-country journey progresses and the overwhelming sense of vertigo increases, Leif struggles to figure out what it is to be a heterosexual single guy. Is it being sensitive to women's needs, like his mother and women friends taught him? Is it being a "man's man," full of machismo and meaningless sex? Or can he find some kind of utopian meeting place, preserving a liberal, enlightened sensibility while at the same time giving his libido a "ticket to ride"?

CHAPTER ONE... by Leif Ueland
Los Angeles, California
My journal from this day only makes passing reference to the conversation, a sentence amid paragraphs of writerly woe. Understandable, really. First, friends-whose-friends-know-a-guy leads are as likely to pay off as discarded lottery tickets, especially when the job in question is one I imagine every normal male writer would go to extreme lengths to land. Second, I have no intention of giving up on the novel. Third, there's no way I'm descending to the world of she-had- very-above-average-breasts writing. Not with current life expectancy rates and lack of convincing evidence for reincarnation. And yet. . . Miss Millennium. The title alone is so rich, so historic, it would be difficult to dismiss it outright. I mean, if Lewis and Clark called up looking for a writer-photographer to chronicle their expedition, would I say without a moment's hesitation, No way. I've got a bestseller to write?
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