Working Stiff

by Grant Stoddard

  “Hey!” he said.

  I could barely focus my eyes on him.

  “How do you like your eggs in the morning?” I slurred. “Fertilized?”

  “Never mind all that,” he said. He pulled me across the dance floor by my shirt collar. “There’s this totally cute French girl who really wants to meet you.”

  Even in my inebriated state I knew that this was Brian code for “I want to close in on a cute girl, so please make time with her clubfooted friend.”

  Laure and Louise were both nineteen years old and both adorable, swinging their arms and legs around with a seemingly laissez-faire attitude toward the beat, as French girls in discotheques are wont to do. They were spending the summer in New York, interning for an importer of Bordeaux. It was easy to tell to whom we’d each been allotted. Laure was taller, blonde, and sun-kissed. Louise was shorter with paler skin and a stylish jet-black bob. She wore a black tank top, a short black-and-white polka-dot skirt, and black heels.

  “Louise, this is Grant,” yelled Brian. He came close to my ear and yelled, “Your one.”

  As they were both slim, pretty, and jerked their bodies in the same arrhythmic manner, I would have been happy with either, though I was acutely aware that they were seeing me at my drunkest and sweatiest. By the sixth week of a New York summer, people sort of surrender to the swampy air that has you schvitzing before you’ve walked a block from your apartment. In pairs we danced and talked.

  “Your name?” said Louise, hooking her shiny black hair over her ear and putting it near my mouth.

  “My name is Grant,” I said.

  Louise raised her eyebrows and tugged Laure’s arm.

  “Laure! Laure! Il s’appelle Grand!” she said as they succumbed to fits of girlish laughter.

  A bouncer pushed past me and I spilt free gin and tonic over my shirt to more giggles from Louise. Laure and Brian were already making out and slapping each other’s asses in time to the music. With seemingly nothing left to lose, I proceeded to treat Louise to some of my comedy dance moves, which are, in truth, modified only slightly from my actual dance moves.

  “You are cool!” she said with a wink.

  She must have been as wrecked as I was.

  “What are you doing later?” I asked just before an urgent need to throw up hit me like a kick in the gut.

  “Well, per’aps we should ’ang out because I fink that your friend and Laure are going to…”

  I left Louise mid-sentence and hurtled toward the exit and ran across the street from the club and started spitting out that awful-tasting liquid that tends to precede a Technicolor yawn.

  I’m going to be sick, I’m not going to be sick, I’m going to be sick.

  My body kept me guessing until I was a block from my house. I threw up outside the window of the Dynasty diner at the corner of 14th and B to the disgust of its nighttime patrons. As I got home, my phone rang several times. It was Brian; I didn’t pick up.

  Hungover, I stumbled into the Nerve offices at around noon the next day. I sat at my desk and kept one eye on the bathroom door.

  “Oh, man!” Brian said and laughed from across the room. “You were wasted last night!”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Even thinking about what I drank last night could restart the heaving.

  “You actually left that girl while she was still talking to you.”

  The pain of the hangover had nudged out any memory of the two teenage Parisians we had met. Brian filled in the gaps in my memory with snaps of the previous night on his digital camera.

  “Wow, they’re pretty cute!” I said.

  “Well, the one you could have taken home totally thinks that you are totally not into her. She got kind of upset. After you left she said…ha ha ha…oh, man, she said, ‘What eez wrong wiv your friend? Is ’e…’ow you say…a faggot?’ Ha ha ha ha!”

  “Did you set her straight?”

  “No, I told her that she was probably right!”

  “Thanks.”

  At around four, I kept down half a sandwich. At five I was called at my desk and summoned to Starbucks. I threw up the sandwich. The Starbucks on the corner of Crosby and Spring was where Rufus fired people. An enormous culling took place in the spring and summer of 2001. After each outgoing staffer left Nerve’s employ to the sounds of world Muzak and the smell of mocha lattes, the venue became known internally as Charbucks. Rufus was pissed at me.

  BY THE FALL of 2002 Rufus Griscom had already had some success in transitioning Nerve-branded content into a wide array of other media: the Nerve HBO show; cobranded movie projects; Nerve online personals were spun into a separate company that powered personals for a plethora of Web sites; Emma Taylor and Lorelei Sharkey coauthored a hardcover sex guide, The Big Bang: Nerve’s Guide to the New Sexual Universe, and followed it with Nerve’s Guide to Sexual Etiquette. Rufus now had designs on spinning some Nerve content into a TV series and decided that a small-screen version of “I Did It for Science” could be a feasible project. Rufus had off-handedly brought up the possibility during an awkward moment in the elevator. Through spatial association, the elevator became the only venue where this formless project was touched upon.

  “Why, Mr. Stoddard, sir!” he’d routinely say as we entered the elevator in the lobby.

  Rufus often referred to and addressed me as Nerve’s unofficial mascot, a distinction I secretly enjoyed and tried to aspire to. I liked Rufus and thought him charming, quite Gatsby-ish. He is tall, slim, and bespectacled, with a triangular nose and prominent, noble-looking chin. He has a crest of thick, straight floppy hair and flings his arms around in wild gesticulation.

  Third floor.

  “Well, what a wonderful bouquet of bed-head you are presenting us all with this fine morning.”

  The timbre of Rufus’s voice is somewhat odd and comical. His uvula, the circular muscle at the back of the throat, seems perpetually tensed, as when yawning. This can make him sound Kermit-like. The sound becomes more noticeable when he is excited or enraged, which is patently hilarious.

  Fifth floor.

  “So how about ‘I Did It for Science’ TV? That’d be quite something, wouldn’t it?”

  “Totally.”

  Sixth floor. Our floor.

  We had this brief conversation about four times in as many months, always in the elevator, until seemingly out of the blue Rufus and Alisa invited me to accompany them to a VH1 meeting at 1515 Broadway.

  Rufus’s girlfriend, the tall, blonde, perky, and Texan Alisa Volkmann, had been recently brought in to share Ross Martin’s position as the head of Film and TV projects. Shortly thereafter, Ross and his pregnant wife, Jordana, moved to LA, where he set up his own production company, Plant Film.

  “We want you to see what a TV meeting is like, so you have an idea for when we pitch the ‘I Did It for Science’ show,” he said as we scooched into the backseat of a town car.

  “Totally!” said Alisa. “A TV version of your show would just be rilly, rilly hilarious. And VH1 would be a totally koo-uhl home for it.”

  The idea that the adventures of my genitalia could be the basis for a weekly half hour of nationally broadcast television certainly appealed to my ego, though I was unsure that I would be willing to bare all to a mainstream TV audience and skeptical that a network existed that would deign to show something quite so tragic and foul. VH1 had recently made the leap from showing Genesis videos to clip shows about the glitterati. Surely a show about a pasty, nervous, pigeon-chested weakling with an erection would be a colossal step backward.

  We shoved away through the line of banner-waving kids who were there for MTV’s TRL. We filed into a conference room, where we all shook hands with frosted-hair TV execs whose teeth were bleached too white.

  “And who might this be, Rufus?” said the one with the whitest teeth. He made little effort to finesse his distaste for the random scruffy person sitting in.

  “This, guys, is Grant ‘I Did It for Science’ Stoddard.”

/>   Blank faces all around. I began to feel like a complete asshole.

  “Nerve’s most intrepid and most widely read columnist?”

  No recognition whatsoever. Rufus was always overstating the cultural reach of his media empire and often making us all look like tools in the process.

  “O-kay, so we have no time to talk about anything other than the matter at hand. Another meeting is using the room in, like, ten minutes.”

  “Absolutely,” said Rufus. “Grant is just here to—”

  “Great, let’s begin.”

  The matter at hand was VH1 wanting to peripherally use Nerve personals for some reality dating show pilot. Over the next eight minutes, Rufus and Alisa began shooting out increasingly half-baked show ideas that would insinuate Nerve into the project to a more significant extent. Rufus’s voice got funnier. They hit a wall. I sank into my chair.

  “Rufus, we already have our show.” White Teeth used his hands in the international gesture for calm the fuck down.

  He and the other execs were exasperated. “We just wanted to know if you wanted to help us.”

  “I just don’t see the value for Nerve,” Rufus said and folded his arms.

  “Then I think we’re done here.”

  The five execs got up and coldly shook hands with Rufus. People for the next meeting filed into the conference room and began sitting down.

  “You guys!” said Alisa. She always spoke like a cheerleader. “Grant here is a fucking superstar!”

  At that moment, I felt like less of a superstar than at any point in my life. I jerked into my overcoat without looking up. White Teeth gave Alisa the hand.

  “Alisa, that’s our time here.”

  “’Kay, but you guys, he is totally funny and he dressed up as a girl for his column and it was like, rilly, rilly hilarious.”

  “Alisa, I need for you to hear me right now.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “You have to leave.”

  We were shooed out and down to the street, where we took a silent subway ride back downtown. In the ten months since, the TV show had been scarcely mentioned again.

  MR. STODDARD, SIR! Take a seat!”

  Rufus had taken his usual spot in the busy Charbucks. For all the firings and “serious chats” he had hosted there, Rufus never actually made a purchase, preferring instead to pop next door to the more chichi Balthazar for coffee.

  “Well, the fall season is nearly upon us, the smell of pencil shavings hangs thick in the air.”

  Rufus took great pains to appear his chipper self, though it was easy to tell from the look in his eye that he felt spurned.

  “What’s on your mind?” I finally said after he let loose with yet another amusing anecdote from his heady days at Brown. The nausea was back with a vengeance.

  “Well, Grant. It’s come to my attention that you are in talks to make a TV show with Ross Martin.”

  It was true. Sometime after the VH1 debacle, Ross had pitched the idea of a travelogue-style show that I would host—coincidentally—to VH1. The network had bitten and wanted to set up a meeting with me immediately. Ross—who flew in from California—his production partner, Corin, and two VH1 execs met at a hotel bar, got drunk, and talked about what the show would be.

  The show was built around the following premise: Charming if slightly clueless British guy goes from coast to coast taking part in Americana that the rest of the world might find strange. A drunken, cursory brainstorming of possible segments included participating at the Lumberjack Games, becoming a rodeo clown, attending the Montana Testicle Festival, alligator wrestling, having dinner with members of the Flat Earth Society. It would be equal parts Jackass, Hugh Grant, and Alistair Cooke and a vastly preferable concept to dressing up in a gimp suit or inserting things into my rectum for yuks. Everyone professed to being “very excited,” though I soon learned that in TV talk, one must vocalize their extreme excitement at all times. The show would be called Granted, the tag: “‘Bloody bloke’ Grant Stoddard looks at the America we take for granted.” It seemed too good to be true, an eponymous TV vehicle in which I got to have adventures, be myself, and make a good chunk of change in the process.

  Ross, Corin, and I then flew to a TV conference in New Orleans the next day, prompting VH1 to play their hand, and within a very short-seeming period of time, they had green-lit a pilot shooting over four days in LA in October.

  I summarized the concept to my now red-faced boss.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Rufus. “So you try new things as an outsider and reflect upon the experience?”

  “Well, in the very broadest sense, yes, that’s right.”

  “It sounds suspiciously like the concept of your column, which, as you’re no doubt aware, Nerve has the rights to.”

  Ross had mentioned that Rufus would be seeking “value” for Nerve as soon as he got word that we were working on something. A cornerstone of his business plan was to acquire a taste for anything vaguely related to the company he’d begun in a bedroom and then skillfully steered through the dot-com bust and into profitability. A current and slighted ex-employee working on a project that could be misconstrued to be a spin-off of Nerve’s intellectual property was understandably hard for him to swallow.

  “Rufus, I can assure you that it has nothing to do with the column or Nerve or anything.”

  I meant it. He shook his head dismissively.

  “Well, to be honest, Grant, I’m disappointed,” he said with a melancholy smile.

  We shook hands; I returned upstairs to my desk and accidentally locked eyes with Alisa. Her eyes were red from crying. She narrowed them and shook her head at me.

  I ran to the bathroom and threw up again.

  That evening Nerve editor in chief Michael Martin summoned me to have dinner with him at a bar on East 5th Street. He had two large Jack and Cokes and told me that my presence was no longer required in the office but that he persuaded Rufus to allow me to continue contributing my column, which had become a fan favorite under Michael’s watch.

  “Rufus is hardly gnashing his teeth with glee at the arrangement, but I convinced him that it made sense,” he said. “You need to come by and clear your desk tomorrow.”

  Though I’d always envied people who wrote from home on their own schedule, I was sorry that my transition to a freelancer was less than smooth or deliberate.

  I came by the office around lunchtime, when I was fairly certain that Rufus and Alisa would be finding value for Nerve over some oysters at Balthazar. This was the first time in my life I’d been told to clear my desk. I found two cardboard boxes and filled them with most of the following items:

  Penis-extender weight kit with instructional video

  Liberator Shapes, foam sex platforms

  Peppermint-flavor “ass-tringent”

  Enzyte male enhancement pills

  Condomania assortment pack

  Passport

  Viagra sample pack

  Immigration paperwork

  TongueJoy, tongue-mounted vibrator and attachments

  New Sex, guide to female ejaculation DVD

  Aneros prostate massager

  No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Proven Plan for Getting What You Want in Love, Sex and Life, hardcover

  CB2000 male chastity harness

  2001 and 2002 tax documents

  Thirty-nine condoms from online herpes dating community (HDate.com)

  American Bukkake 12, DVD

  Credit card application forms

  Knee Pad Nymphos #2, DVD

  One gram of low-grade cocaine

  Self-hypnosis cassette and instructional booklet

  Assorted jelly cock rings

  First Impressions dating consultants’ questionnaire

  Payment-past-due notices from immigration attorney James O’Malley and Associates

  How to Succeed with Women, paperback

  Seven issues of Adult Video News

  The Accommodator, chin-mounted latex dong

&n
bsp; Sweet Release semen-flavoring supplement (crisp apple)

  Tend Skin, ingrown hair/razor bump formula

  International money-wire transfer application forms

  Kama Sutra–brand assorted flavor massage oils

  Kama Sutra–brand “honey dust”

  Edible underwear (women’s)

  Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm, hardcover

  Vigel topical female sex-enhancing cream

  Make Your Own Dildo molding kit

  Brian helped me down to the street and put me and my sleazy paraphernalia in a cab.

  “Hey, I’m going to Laure and Louise’s apartment tonight,” he said over the din of a passing fire truck’s siren. “You should come, it’ll cheer you up.” It sounded like Brian needed me to play wingman again and I wasn’t in the mood.

  “No, it’s okay,” I said, “I still haven’t recovered from the other night.”

  The next day, Brian called to tell me that I had remotely cock-blocked him. Apparently, he had arrived at their loft to find both girls dressed to the nines and a miffed Louise asking why he had turned up and I hadn’t. The three of them drank wine on the fire escape until Laure took Brian by the hand and led him into her bedroom. Things were beginning to escalate when Louise, in hysterical tears, began thumping on the door, exclaiming, “Laure, tu est une put!” before collapsing into a sobbing heap on the floor, putting an understandable dampener on the evening. Brian was shown the door. Being more confident and easygoing, Laure’s attentions had been courted more ferociously over the summer and Louise was seemingly at a breaking point. A similar dynamic existed between Brian and myself.

  “So next time, if she hasn’t already written you off as a complete faggot, you have to come with me, okay?”

  And so began a short series of double dates during which I did little to prove that I wasn’t a pede.

  Even though she was merely a teen, Louise intimidated me greatly, what with her Galois and ennui. To her annoyance I had not yet tried to kiss her, though I very much wanted to.

  “Why do you not smoke, little Grant?” she said over sake at Decibel. “Are you afraid, afraid you will get sick, that you will catch the…cancer?”