text: Another in the 100 two-minute myths I'm writing here: &#x200B; It was early July and the young people in Baie Verte were drinking so much, they had to post blurry pictures of themselves online, or their friends wouldn’t recognize them. The only person under 25 immune to the fever was Maxine Payne, who worked at the Legion where she moved behind the bar like she was acting out poems about water. Her hair cascaded down her back and broke over her hips as she walked away from Bill Downey, who sat at the corner of the bar, as far away from Maxine as he could get without leaving the place. Like all men over 30 on the Baie Verte Peninsula, due to zinc levels in the water, Bill suffered from venustraphobia, a rare disorder which left his nerves unable to bear the weight of beauty. A side effect of the affliction was being scared stiff in the company of single women. So, small capelin of fear teemed here and there just under his skin at the thought of the unthinkable - actually having a conversation with Maxine longer than a drink order - but he had no choice if he wanted the $25,000. That was what Viagra, a pill for men who suffered from erectile dysfunction, was offering as the prize for whoever came up with the best advertising campaign. His idea was to show a woman and man in a hotel room where, just as he starts to take off her sweater, she stops him, goes into her purse, as though looking for a condom, and pulls out a Viagra pill instead. The camera would then pan out to show a waterfall through the window with the words, *Take a Second Honeymoon in Viagra Falls.* Bill knew his idea depended on getting a woman for the ad who was so beautiful that men would have no choice but do what she said and he knew that the woman had to be Maxine Payne. To build up his nerve, he’d been coming to the legion for 18 straight nights, but even when he was playing pool with friends he still couldn’t find the balls he needed. But, the contest was closing and he could no longer avoid the conversation, so he’d been sitting at the bar for two hours pounding beer and dying in his seat. When she came back with his beer, words base jumped off his tongue and fell to their death on the bar top. In a liquid voice that came from a small spring and flowed over her tongue as she spoke, she told him his idea was so lame it needed a crutch. What men had always wanted, she explained, was both an easy way, as well as hard, and offered to meet him the next day to kick around some ideas. Within an hour of that meeting, Bill was so captivated by the breadth of her mind that he had forgotten she was beautiful, and the two laughed the afternoon away as they drew stick men and women on napkins in the corner coffee shop. Three weeks later an image of them being presented with a giant $25,000 check went viral. Six months after that a billboard appeared on the lip of town showing a couple, blurred in the background, behind a spilled bottle of Viagra pills on a hotel room night table. Over the image were the words, *One pill. One hour before,* and underneath, written in an unassuming font, *Viagra.