Working Stiff

by Grant Stoddard

  “Smell Joanne Davis!” he said to anyone who’d listen. He didn’t even curtail his piggish behavior as Joanne glided into biology and took the seat next to mine, yielding an immediate stirring in my loins.

  I looked at her apologetically on behalf of fourteen-year-old boys everywhere. With that look, I wanted her to know that should I be given the opportunity to put my hand in her knickers, I would make it ever so special. I’d probably go the whole hog and tell her that I loved her. I smiled gamely at her and to my complete surprise she smiled back. I was so caught up in the moment that I barely noticed Wilson walk around behind me, where he released something both silent and deadly between my dream girl and myself.

  “Uurrhh, Stoddard! That fucking reeks!” he shrieked.

  A truly awful fart cloud completely enveloped Joanne and me.

  “That wasn’t me, it was Wilson!” I blurted out as the true perpetrator sought sanctuary on the other side of the biology lab, still reassigning me the blame.

  “Oi, Stoddard’s just dropped his guts!” he announced to the group he’d been defaming Joanne to just thirty seconds earlier.

  “I swear it wasn’t me!” I pleaded.

  Joanne looked at me with utter contempt.

  “You’re fucking disgusting,” she spat and excused herself from the offending area.

  Whether it was my pimply face, buckteeth, wispy frame, or the supposed culprit of a noxious fart, I grew to feel more and more disgusting by the minute.

  Humiliation in the eyes of girls had somehow become a daily occurrence for me. Every day at school, it became more apparent that I was a permanent member of a dwindling group of boys who girls wanted nothing to do with. By the time I was eighteen and still hadn’t convinced a female to lock lips with me for the briefest moment, I’d grown to accept that I’d be one of the unfortunate creatures that shuffled around Corringham town center smelling of urine and muttering to himself. By age twenty, I was almost looking forward to it.

  Yet here I was, a fledgling sex writer, on the platform of the 207th Street A train stop in New York City with my blonde, knockout American live-in girlfriend, who was more than happy to let me fuck her on public transport; my first assignment was to have sex on the subway. My girl’s only conditions were that her face or real name not appear in the column, which I thought was more than fair.

  It was almost one in the morning, and as I’d suspected, the platform looked deserted. I’d never had sex in public before. We would be able to commandeer an empty subway car for our purposes. It was the height of a particularly steamy New York summer, when the temperature didn’t seem to dip with the sun at night. Anna was wearing a tight T-shirt, short denim miniskirt with no underwear underneath, and, at my request, a pair of good running sneakers should we need to flee. Getting caught in the throes of passion was not an option for either of us. Her parents would have been unable to withstand the double whammy of shock and shame at their only child’s indiscretions. My precarious visa situation meant being caught with my pants around my ankles could have been good grounds for deportation. Being kicked out of a country that was suddenly granting my every wet dream would have been more than I could take.

  Being late at night, there was hardly a soul in the station. As it was after 11:00 p.m., however, the A train was now running a local service and we only had the time it takes for the train to speed from one station to the next, and the risk of onlookers increased with every stop headed downtown.

  “You’d better be ready to go once the doors close,” said Anna, shoving a hand into my skivvies.

  It wasn’t until then that it occurred to me that I was really in no mood to have sex at that moment, under the harsh fluorescent lights of a chilly, Brooklyn-bound A train. This was the first time I would be engaging in sexual activity under obligation to a third party, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

  Bing bong.

  The doors slid shut and the train lurched forth into the tunnel, before stalling, allowing Anna some extra time to kiss some life into my atypically hesitant penis.

  “Come on!” she said and pulled her T-shirt over her implausibly large and perfect twenty-one-year-old’s breasts.

  Ladies and Gentlemen: we apologize for the delay, we will be moving momentarily.

  The PA system in the car was way too loud and the crackly, Bronx-accented announcement hurt my ears and jangled my nerves, causing Anna to work harder than a hard-bodied college senior should ever have to. As the train slowly crawled forward toward the Dyckman Street stop, Anna spun around, hiked up her skirt, and put a foot up on the seat. The train was still moving at a snail’s pace but that didn’t quell her sense of urgency.

  “Fucking put it in!” she screamed at me.

  Anna’s vim for the assignment far outstripped my own, which sort of surprised me. I did as I was told as the train started speeding toward the next stop.

  I grabbed Anna’s hips for balance as the train violently shook back and forth on the tracks and tried to center my thoughts on my objectives.

  Susan had said that we should go as far as we could. Wanting to exceed my employer’s expectations, I was insistent on going to completion. I knew that we only had another few blocks to play with, though it was incredibly difficult to gauge precisely where we were, and so I banged away at my inexplicably willing assistant with everything I could muster. Fortuitously the train slowed to a sudden stop once again. Although I very nearly fell over, the stop bought us a little more time. Anna looked over her shoulder at me.

  “Are you nearly done?” she asked.

  “Nearly there.”

  I was close.

  The train sped up and then began to slow as we neared the next station.

  “Oh no!” I cried, aware that I needed a few more seconds. Anna then inserted a finger into her bum and said something as raunchy as it was considerate.

  “You’d better come in my mouth. I don’t wanna leave a mess.”

  Her vocalized civic responsibility was exactly what I needed to bring things to a head, seemingly nanoseconds before the train pulled into Dyckman Street. With a minimum of fuss or mess, Anna pulled her skirt down over her bottom just as a heavyset woman in a Wendy’s uniform stomped aboard.

  “Are you okay?” said Anna upon noticing that I was clearly not okay.

  “I’m fine,” I said, visibly shell-shocked. “I can’t believe we just did that!”

  Anna made the noise that would usually accompany a shrug. She was unflappable to the point of utter disinterest. I felt that at twenty-four, I’d skipped the bit where young people were supposed to have sex partially clothed, outside of the bedroom, high on drugs, and with people they didn’t necessarily know or even like that much. Arbitrary, casual, distasteful sex: screwing for screwing’s sake. After going so long without any at all, I sort of gave it a reverence my contemporaries didn’t. I only fooled around with people I could imagine going on picnics with, people I would look after should they catch the flu. People I—and I shudder to say this—would not fuck, but make love to. I could barely pull myself away from Lisa the night after I met her. I am, or at least I was, old-fashioned in that regard. Writing a column about new sexual experiences would provide me with a novel but valid excuse for catching up on something I felt I shouldn’t have missed—a free pass to engage in the mischief I felt I’d been precluded from having thus far.

  TWO DAYS IN THE VALLEY

  MY LIFE SEEMED LIKE it had been suddenly accelerated as I sat in the back of the empty Boeing 747. Ten days after the 9/11 attacks, I was atypically plastered and flying toward California on my first ever business trip. My brief was to travel to the town of Chatsworth, where I would be appearing as an extra in a porno flick. I would then write about it as, in the past six weeks, I had unwittingly become a writer.

  The trip had been arranged a few weeks earlier, but what with the seemingly apocalyptic goings-on in Manhattan, I found myself and my surroundings too discombobulated to sufficiently prepare for my trip.

>   Nerve’s SoHo offices are about a mile from the World Trade Center. The first plane had already hit by the time I boarded the A train at 181st Street. Typically the A rockets through its uninterrupted sixty-six-block run between 125th and 59th streets. It was running incredibly slow that morning, finally crawling into the 59th Street station at 9:25. During one five-minute standstill around 77th Street the conductor announced that there were delays due to an incident downtown. Before September 11th, an “incident” in the context of the subway system meant that someone had jumped onto the tracks. As a subway commuter in New York, one quickly loses compassion for people who choose the morning rush to end it all. It’s extremely inconsiderate.

  The doors opened. A heavyset Dominican girl jumped in the car and scanned the other passengers’ faces for acknowledgment of what was happening downtown and didn’t get it. The doors closed behind her.

  “Ahm gettin’ da fuck offa Manha-en,” she said and shook her head in disbelief.

  No one looked up from their papers. People are always exclaiming their intent to no one in particular and commuters have learned to ignore them, along with the prepubescent break-dancing crews, Patagonian guitar players, and the women who place the crumpled photocopied sign language cards on their laps.

  “Yo, I said I needs ta get da fuck offa dis island, stat! Go ta Jersey or some shit.”

  Not an eyebrow was raised. The train stood still in the station. Frustrated, she cupped her hands around her mouth for a makeshift megaphone.

  “Yo! Dey blew up da World Trade and da damn White House,

  people!”

  Now she was beginning to get some people interested enough to look up. The train doors opened.

  The woman’s shouts were validated by the conductor’s announcement that A train service was being suspended and that passengers needed to evacuate the station immediately. I felt sick with the thought that what the loudmouthed girl was bellowing was an actual fact. We quietly disembarked, all of us no doubt thinking about how accurate the Dominican girl had been. Columbus Circle was always frantic at rush hour, but walking up to street level it was clear that something was amiss. It was bedlam outside.

  Long lines of people stood in front of pay phones. Cell phones appeared to not be working. People were crying, screaming. I walked into a Laundromat and stared up at the TV screens with a crowd. The image of the second plane hitting the building was being replayed over and over as the crawl confirmed that it was the Pentagon and not the White House that had been hit. The subways weren’t running. The buses were nowhere to be seen.

  I didn’t know whether to walk the three miles to work or the eight miles home. Anna was probably safe, I decided. She had set off to embark on her final semester at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville before I’d even left the house that morning. As the enormity of the situation became increasingly apparent, I headed west then turned north up Riverside Park, getting home at around noon. The large smoke and dust cloud was clearly visible from the northern tip of the island. There were four messages on the answering machine: Mike’s father, Anna’s father, my panicked ex-girlfriend Becky, and my sister. My parents were en route home from Spain.

  It was difficult to make outgoing calls. I e-mailed my family, told them I was fine, and made a cup of tea. Anna’s father called again.

  “Where’s Anna?”

  It seems inconceivable now, but at the time my girlfriend and I didn’t have cell phones. Where anybody was then was reduced to a best guess based on what they told you when you last saw them.

  “I’m sure that she’s okay, she’s up at school.” It was probably true.

  I sat and waited. I wanted to fall asleep for a month, to be woken up when it had blown over some.

  Anna strolled in at around three. I held her close and thought about sobbing into the nape of her neck. After a few seconds she wriggled free of my bear hug and shrugged laconically.

  “I’m already kind of over it,” she said.

  Anna was raised by Germans. I didn’t know whether to admire or rail against her steely stoicism, but over the next hours and days, being with her was a welcome relief from the unchecked flow of raw emotion pouring out of everybody else.

  By the afternoon, the awful burning stink had made its way up the avenues to the north end of the island. I managed to get in touch with Becky at around five. I could barely make out what she was saying through her wails.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said over and over.

  I wasn’t dead.

  An e-mail arrived saying that Nerve was closed for the rest of the week. As soon as the bridges were reopened the next day, Brian drove Anna and me out to his parents’ house in Jersey, where we watched movies, read, ate in empty restaurants, and got drunk in their hot tub. No one we knew had died, but we were each one friend removed from the grave reality of the event.

  I’D NEVER BEEN OUT west before. When I met Anna she was creating an art installation inspired by the six-month stint she’d spent in Southern California. I went to see it at Sarah Lawrence and was wholly impressed with my twenty-one-year-old girlfriend’s powerful summation of that period in her life; the floor of the art space was covered with sand. Bleached-out transparencies of palm-tree-flanked highways, scrubby hillsides, and concrete structures were mounted in glass cases and hung by fishing wire from the ceiling. The bare halogen lights were far too bright and positioned so that they were always in one’s eyes. A scaled-down approximation of the LA River bisected the room. The walls were peppered with appropriate quotes about California from books by Joan Didion and Douglas Copeland. It didn’t look like the Hollywood version of Hollywood.

  The flight attendants on National Air didn’t wear a uniform as such, but rather a purple polo shirt with jeans and sneakers. They looked like waitresses in some godforsaken sports bar, which sort of terrified me. One gave the safety demonstration as if there was more than one person in her section of the cabin, but I was alone. I’d already downed some NyQuil and one and a half Jack Daniel’s miniatures before I’d boarded, which had taken the edge off a little.

  Ross Martin had arranged to send me to the set of Hard Evidence 2 but could only scare up enough money for a $175 round-trip ticket and $100 in petty cash. I was still an unknown quantity as a writer: my first installment of “I Did It for Science” had just been published and had gotten a warm yet modest response. I had made out with Anna’s friend Luis and had written about the experience of kissing another guy. Two more installments, “Cock Ring” and “Sex on the Subway,” had been written and were ready to go.

  Ross had made sending me to a porn set a reality, but accommodations and transport were something I had to deal with myself. My Orchard coworker Daryl Berg was the only person I knew in Los Angeles. He gladly let me crash at his Hollywood apartment, though he told me he’d be at temple when I arrived. It was Yom Kippur.

  At the age of twenty-four, I was still too young to rent a car, so I took a cab to Daryl’s place at Melrose and Spaulding. The ride over looked just like Anna’s installation: dusty, arid, spread out, and surrounded by scrubby mountains. The journey from the airport had eaten over half of my cash.

  I found the key under the mat and let myself in. The phone rang. It was Daryl; he sounded panicked.

  “Dude! Put some water in a pot and boil it. There’s pasta in the cupboard, marinara sauce in the fridge. I gotta eat before sundown. Shit! Shit!”

  I looked outside: the sun had already dipped low in the sky.

  “I’m five minutes away!”

  Twenty minutes later Daryl burst through the door and into the bowl of hastily prepared rigatoni, scarfing it down with one eye on the setting sun.

  “Thank fucking Christ!” he said, exhausted from the speed eating. “I’m going to be fasting all day tomorrow.”

  After his first year in Hollywood, Daryl had a multitude of sins to atone for. I didn’t realize just how pious Daryl could be until I asked him for a ride to Chatsworth the next morning.

&n
bsp; “Okay, (A) that’s like a fucking million miles away in the Valley somewhere and (B) this is the day of fucking atonement. I can’t be hanging out at a porno.”

  Usually Daryl would be the first in line to attend the shooting of a porno movie.

  “Well, how much would a cab fare be?” I asked.

  “Dude, this isn’t New York. It’d cost you, like, eighty bucks.”

  “Well, couldn’t you just drop me off?”

  “Holy shit, dude!” He stomped around the apartment and shook his head incredulously. “Okay, but you have to figure out your own way back.”

  Daryl mentioned that he was friends with Matt Zane, rocker, pornographer, and self-proclaimed pioneer of the rock-porn crossover. At my request he invited him over so we could talk about porn.

  “Maybe you can write about him,” said Daryl.

  Zane’s main claim to fame is that he “invented” the idea of throwing luncheon meat at naked girls. He was about to turn twenty-seven. He arrived at Daryl’s looking like a teenage goth kid: hip-length hair and all-black ensemble. His face looked like it had experienced a lifetime of seediness.

  “After three or four years,” reflected Zane as he stroked his chin, his eyes cast skyward, “one tires of the flesh.”

  I had hoped that meeting with Zane would heighten my excitement about the upcoming Vivid shoot even further, but over the course of an hour he spoke only of his boredom with the genre, his accidental incarnation as a pornographer, and how being pigeonholed as a pornographer was strangling his creativity.

  “If I cannot be free to realize my artistic visions outside of porn, I must welcome death with open arms,” he said.

  Zane then told me he had “banged almost a thousand chicks,” but then six months ago he decided to refrain from sexual relations with girls in the categories of groupies, strippers, or porn sluts.