Working Stiff

by Grant Stoddard

  Time for afterglow.

  “Okay, now get the fuck out.”

  Sonya scooped up all of my clothes, ran out of the bedroom, and threw me out the front door.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed.

  “Oh, be nice, and I’ll let you go down on me again,” she said, shoving me out into the hall. “I might even let you fuck me.”

  I managed to get into my underpants and T-shirt before an Orthodox Jewish woman walked down the hallway pushing a baby carriage. Sonya was looking through the spy hole. I could hear her laughing. The woman pretended not to notice as I shrugged my pants on and made a run for the elevator.

  I’d been used for sex, and although I found it exciting, I found myself struggling with the emotions it wrenched up.

  CHRIS APOSTOLOU was making more progress at chopping away at my back wages, meaning that I could afford a ticket back home for Christmas.

  Christmas for me is an odd time to go home. Compared to spending the “holidays” in America, a British Yule is a bit of a sad, tawdry, and drunken affair, demarcated by what’s on telly. In the morning, it’s carols in cathedrals, then perhaps a program in which terminally ill children have their Christmas wishes granted by C-list celebrities. At three o’clock it’s the Queen’s speech, followed by a wrist-splittingly depressing episode of EastEnders, then a host of blockbuster movies that saw their theatrical releases several years ago. People sit around half conscious with paper party hats from their Christmas crackers perched on top of their heads. The weather in England at this time is approaching its bleakest. Everyone I see asks when I’ll be coming home to live, as if I’m still on some extended vacation or being held in America against my will.

  “But don’t you miss it ’ere?” they all ask.

  I miss them and I tell them so. But gone are the years in which I’ll humor relatives and friends by professing to an unrelenting homesickness. Understandably, people can take it to heart when you tell them that you never again want to be where they’ll surely never leave, but by 2000 my leaving Corringham had begun to define me in some very significant way. Aside from my immediate family, people at home seemed to take it as a slight against them. In working-and lower-middle-class Britain, I feel that there’s an unwritten rule to not do or say anything that would make you seem dissatisfied enough with your lot to actually do something about it. It’s the antithesis of the American way.

  I’ll have a chance to be put in my place when I’ll accidentally use an American turn of phrase and be ridiculed for it.

  “Use the bathroom! ’Ark at ’im! Bleedin’ Yankee-doodle.”

  IN THE NEW YEAR, The Orchard had again fallen way behind with back wages and I found myself in real trouble once again. I called Lorelei to see if there was any chance of the Nerve job becoming available.

  “The position has been put on ice indefinitely,” she said apologetically. “But we do have a customer service internship available.”

  I was now twenty-four and felt a little too long in the tooth to be a gofer to a twenty-one-year-old customer service rep, but I was running out of options and money. I quit The Orchard in the knowledge that I might never see the forty-five hundred dollars they owed me.

  I began working at Nerve Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at five dollars an hour in January 2001. Technically, my work visa meant that I could only work as a recording artiste and only for The Orchard, but I spoke to some other people on similar visas who said that everyone moonlighted and that the IRS and INS didn’t cross-reference data and consequently it shouldn’t be a problem. My intern’s wages almost covered the cost of my rent and monthly subway costs.

  Unlike me, the other interns were almost all in college; they were predominantly female and similarly desperate to get their writing under the noses of the editorial team, and were fully prepared to bend over backward to that end. Nerve had published four issues of their print magazine, and this was the main thrust of the energy in the office.

  Though my days were primarily taken up with customer service inquiries, I would also be asked to fetch coffee or water for visitors, run out to Staples or the post office, and deliver everybody’s mail to them at their desks. Being on the lowest rung of the company, I found that no one, save my fellow interns, gave me the time of day. I quickly became infatuated with another intern, Abigail. Abigail was from Belfast and, like me, too old and wise to be fetching coffee for peanuts. Unlike the other interns, Abigail had had her writing published in many esteemed British and Irish papers, including The Independent, The Guardian, and The Times, and had also written for a lot of travel guides.

  Though she’d hardly set foot in England and I’d never crossed the Irish Sea, we had enough shared cultural reference points to chat about while being dissimilar enough to not steal one another’s thunder. Abby was about three inches taller than me at five feet eleven, was long-bodied and swan-necked with incredible blue eyes and snowy white, almost translucent-looking skin. She dyed her hair jet black and her teeth were typically crooked, but in a sort of charming way that reminded me of home. I fell for her quicker and harder than any other girl before or since, and after a month of unrequited advances, persuaded her to finally sleep with me.

  Abby was very conscious of presenting a free-and-easy sexual persona, and even before the afterglow of our first time had subsided, she took great pains to tell me that we owed each other nothing and that we should keep things “cool.”

  “Seriously,” she continued, “you should absolutely see who you want, when you want. Because, y’know, I will be.”

  No one had ever said anything remotely like that to me before, my past four infatuations being traditionally romantic and conventional. I wanted the same thing for Abby and me, but she seemed convinced that we would have the most fleeting of affairs.

  Trading on the Lisa Carver connection I’d casually dated several women over the winter, meaning that I was in a position to take Abby’s words at face value.

  “What did you do last night?” she asked in Des Moines, a coffee shop on Avenue A.

  I sort of resented that Abby didn’t care enough to want to keep me for her own and decided to pull no punches in my response.

  “I fucked a hot med student at her dorm in the Bronx.”

  Her jaw dropped but no words came out of her mouth.

  “You said that we should see who we wanted, when we wanted,” I reminded her.

  “Well…I know but…I mean, talk about a blow to the ego.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, you’re much funnier.”

  Abby stormed out of the café and didn’t talk to me for a week.

  The following week, Abigail went home to Belfast and was denied entry back into the United States for some sort of visa infraction, effectively drawing a line through our quasi-relationship.

  After six weeks as an intern, it was discovered that I was capable of doing Julia’s job for less money and she was promptly let go. This meant that for the first time during my almost three-year tenure in the States, I would be paid a half-decent salary with health benefits as regular as clockwork. I couldn’t have been happier.

  To celebrate, I took Anna out to lunch. Anna Braunschweiger was another intern and a student at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville. She had a longtime boyfriend but our conversations became increasingly flirtatious.

  With the new job and the exponentially accelerating rate at which I was sleeping with pretty girls, my confidence was hitting hitherto uncharted territory. This enabled me to do things I’d never dared to before.

  After a Nerve work function about twenty of us ended up at the Lakeside Lounge on Avenue B. Anna, flanked by her boyfriend, Zach, and myself, was poring through the songs on the jukebox when I started running my hands up her thighs. I was atypically smashed and so was she. She parted her legs enough for me to slip my hand up her denim miniskirt and finger her for a good five minutes, with poor Zach blissfully unaware of what was going on. He ended up selecting a track by the Doors
. He was kind of queer like that.

  The following weekend, in the middle of May, Anna borrowed Zach’s car and drove us a little ways upstate to Bear Mountain. It was nice to get off the island, something I hadn’t managed to do in almost four months.

  Anna was oddly beautiful, with strong Germanic features, blonde hair, and ice-blue eyes. Though I’d publicly fingered her days earlier, the fact that she had a boyfriend prevented me from making a bona fide move. It took three more dates and her inviting herself over to my place at one a.m. on a Tuesday night for me to get the message. Even then the action was prefaced by her exasperatedly saying, “So, are we just gonna talk all night or what?”

  It was four thirty a.m. and we’d been lying on my bed for the past three hours.

  I’d been a late starter with women but in the past six months had more than made up for lost time, and now, a year and a half after Becky, I was ready for a girlfriend.

  Anna and I were polar opposites. She had designs on becoming a writer, made her own clothes and accessories, chain-smoked Marlboro Lights, and was as cool, calm, dispassionate, and distant as I was nervy, spasmodic, highly strung, and emotional.

  It was the end of the school year and Anna was resigned to spending the summer at her parents’ house in Maryland for financial reasons.

  “Break up with Zach and live with me for the summer,” I said, surprising myself.

  “Okay,” she said.

  There’s no greater catalyst to cohabitation with a sexual partner than the tantalizing proposition of slashing your rent clean in half. It didn’t hurt that Anna was a pretty yet ruthless-looking Aryan, whose every body part jutted aggressively outward, implying ownership over everything in her twenty-one-year-old path.

  We took Zach’s car and loaded it up with her personal effects from her dorm room, unloaded it at my house, and then she drove down to TriBeCa and returned the car to Zach and broke up with him.

  She arrived back at my place and I erroneously told her that she’d done the right thing. My roommate, Mike, was on an extended vacation in the Philippines, so I couldn’t ask him if Anna living with us was kosher or not. Something to figure out when he got back, I thought. The plan was for Anna to get a summer job and kick in a few hundred dollars when she could. He’d go for that, right?

  In a whopping oversight, Intern Coordinator was added to my job description in June. My first hire was a sexy and incredibly charming California girl named Jenny. Jenny was far too smart and qualified for the likes of me to be telling her what to do, but must have needed the credits for a postgrad course or something. I can’t remember.

  What I can remember was that her first day on the job happened to be an incredibly special day in Nerve’s history. Part of the forthcoming Nerve HBO show was a party scene. A huge TriBeCa party venue was rented for the night, naked waiters and waitresses were brought on, hundreds of gallons of free booze were acquired, and in the center of the twelve-thousand-square-foot space an “exhibitionist booth” had been erected. This was a structure that looked like a little cottage and was full of cameras that fed images to the room through a twenty-foot LCD display on the room’s far wall.

  Anna and I were getting touchy-feely in the exhibitionist booth when new girl Jenny ran in and started sucking her boyfriend’s positively ginormous cock. I stepped outside the booth to see a large group of revelers looking at the action and cheering them on.

  “I love the new girl,” said Ross.

  Ross was already sort of in the doghouse with Rufus. Earlier in the evening, Rufus had been in rapt conversation with a millionaire venture capitalist and potential investor in Nerve. Rufus had been chatting with the investor with his hands behind his back. On a dare from his wife, Jordana, Ross had unzipped his pants and placed his testicles in Rufus’s hand. Rufus was far too engrossed in conversation to pay too much attention to what he was holding and for the next thirty seconds simply rolled them around in his palm like Chinese stress balls. The penny finally dropped just as the investor offered his hand for Rufus to shake.

  I’d now slept with two of the four Nerve interns and each time it had coincided with them leaving the company. It was enough cause for concern for Rufus to pull me aside and have a chat about it.

  “The gallivanting Mr. Stoddard,” he began in his typically verbose manner. “It seems that yet another fine young mind has fallen foul of your old-world charm and scruffy demeanor.”

  “I know how it looks, Rufus, but really, Anna is the one. We’re living together and everything.”

  “Well, I hope that this curtails your intra-office carousing, because I cannot let this continue in good conscience. You do understand?”

  “I do.”

  I’d never dreamt that it would be my carousing that would get me in hot water at a job. Just a few months prior, the idea would have been quite inconceivable.

  “Good, because you are in serious danger of becoming this company’s talisman.”

  “Understood.”

  “Oh, by the way, congratulations on Anna; she is certainly the employee de choix.”

  It was in mid-July when the print magazine’s editor in chief, Susan Dominus, strode up to my desk, her high-heeled boots clicking against the parquet floor. It startled me chiefly because she had never deigned to utter a word to me before now.

  “You’re Grant?” said Susan.

  We’d been sitting two desks apart for four months.

  “Er…yes.”

  “You are from England?”

  “I am, yeah.”

  Then, in a hushed tone, Susan said, “Did you win that competition to have sex with Lisa Carver?”

  “That was me, yes.”

  “What made you decide to do it?”

  I gave Susan an abridged version of my downward mobility, possible deportation, and quest to have at least one story worthy of telling to the proverbial grandkids.

  “Oh my God! And that’s why you are working here?”

  “Yeah, Lisa hooked me up.”

  Susan walked back to her desk, sat down, got up, and walked back to my desk.

  “Okay, well, do you think you’d do anything?”

  I’d been saying yes to everything recently and it appeared to have set me on a winning streak. Besides, I was now out of college for almost three years and had little to show for it. Anything seemed more interesting than fielding customer service calls.

  “I don’t see why not,” I said, giving little thought to exactly what she had in mind.

  “Can you write?”

  “Well, to be honest, I haven’t before.”

  Susan asked Ross Martin and me to work out a concept for an item in which I would be inserted into a sexual situation, then write a play-by-play account of my experience. I would be a proxy, an everyman, who, if the bit was made a regular feature, would be ticking off items on a sexual to-do list.

  Either Ross or new hire Brian Battjer suggested that the prospective column would really be a series of sexual experiments, that the format would be based on a high school lab report with headings equating to: hypothesis, apparatus, method, results, and conclusions. I wanted to call the column “Lab Rat,” but it was decided that it would be called “I Did It for Science.”

  BABY STEPS

  HAVING ME WRITE about sex was like having Steven Hawking write about tap dancing.

  Despite the recent spike in sexual activity thanks to Lisa, I was still hopelessly inexperienced and apparently largely misinformed. One particularly brusque partner informed me that I had the “lovemaking skills of a demented muskrat.” In addition, I had absolutely zero experience with regard to creative writing. This made the other interns—all creative writing majors—bristle with envy.

  Despite having no literary experience, the actual writing part didn’t faze me, but I hadn’t quite gotten over how disgusting and undesirable I felt throughout high school and college, and the idea that someone could read about my sexploits and not bring up their lunch seemed terribly far-fetched. My first
stab at describing a sexual encounter on the page made me want to wretch, which left me wondering how I could ever sell it to anyone else. I certainly couldn’t have done it without Anna, who was absolutely ready, willing, and able to do anything to help me. Having a hot girlfriend to share these experiences with made them much less scary and enabled me to write without feeling like some sort of disgusting little perv.

  Actually doing the first few “experiments” wasn’t really a problem either. It was writing about my bits ’n’ pieces that was scary. I was always aware that recounting a sexual encounter without lashings of self-deprecation, humility, and compassion can result in something that reads like a Penthouse “Forum” letter.

  The subject matter for the experiments were to be things that are purported to enhance the sexual experience, be it an activity, like having sex outside, a product or device, such as a cock ring, or a fetish, like bondage or dressing up like a sports team’s mascot. The beauty of me writing it, I was told, was that my relative inexperience would provide a “vanilla” everyman’s perspective that could be accessible to a larger audience.

  A large part of my agreeing to write about my sexual adventures for a large audience was that the very idea of it was so incredibly ludicrous. Would my friends commuting to the city or working at the oil refinery even be able to get their heads around the concept? Many of them, I’m quite sure, would question whether I’d had sex at all, let alone being paid to do so. Regardless of who got their pubes first or who went from tenor to baritone the quickest, the true measure of when one becomes a man is his first knickers-off experience with a female. By that token, at age fourteen, I was a boy among men.

  What really drove me crazy back then was how nonchalant the popular boys could be about it all.

  At fourteen, Joanne Davis had suddenly blossomed into a living goddess. I could barely speak around her, felt I didn’t deserve to be in the same dimension as her. And there’s greasy-haired Mark Wilson, regaling the back row of the biology class with how he absentmindedly fingered her behind the music department, waving his middle finger around as olfactory evidence. I couldn’t get a girl to look at me and Wilson was two knuckles deep in my dream girl before recess.