Working Stiff

by Grant Stoddard

  “Well, that’s one reason, yeah,” I said.

  “Well, I ’ave news for you, little Grant.” She blew a huge plume of smoke into my face. “We are all going to die.”

  For all of her world-weary Parisian posturing, Louise would privately tell me that she loved my English accent when I spoke my smattering of remedial French. She said it drove her “mad completely.”

  Louise complained to Laure, who complained to Brian, who complained to me that no one was getting what they wanted and it was all my fault.

  “Just fucking lay one on her, you pussy,” said Brian.

  Louise was so French and young and stylish and cute that I had a hard time believing that she’d be into playing tonsil hockey with the likes of me. Brian was putting a lot more effort into trying to pair us up than I was.

  “He has got a TV show, y’know,” he said to Louise as we picnicked on top of their roof. She looked at me in disbelief, shrugged, and looked back up at the stars and enjoyed a huge drag off her cigarette. The three of them had all but lost their patience with me.

  The levee finally broke when we asked the girls to a Cake party that we’d been invited to through Nerve. Cake parties were occasions where a predominately hot and female crowd all got into their skivvies or less and fooled around on the bar. Brian and I had been friends with its founders since we lap-danced for three hundred handsy women at a Cake party for an “I Did It for Science” installment.

  Among the gyrating naked bodies, the hard-core porn playing on a big-screen TV, and with me dressed only in my underoos, I finally plucked up the courage to make out with Louise and wrapped her tight young body up in my arms. I didn’t even mind the cigarette taste on her tongue, something I’m usually extremely squeamish of. In fact, I quite enjoyed it.

  “Thank fucking Christ!” I could hear Brian scream over the music.

  After one more drink, we found our clothes and made our way outside. Brian optimistically hailed two cabs and gave me a wink.

  “I think I am going to hang out with Grant,” said Louise.

  “Ah! Qui est la put, Louise?” said Laure. She cocked an eyebrow and folded her arms in callous satisfaction.

  Without a word, Louise kissed me on the cheek and dutifully got into the cab with Laure, who was still smug with her perfectly timed retort, and drove away.

  “What the fuck happened there?” asked Brian.

  It soon became clear that the girls were waging a war of attrition against each other and that thanks in part to my prolonged hesitation, we were in the cross fire. We went on two more double dates before Brian lost interest and stopped calling Laure. When she wasn’t not putting out, Laure had gotten existential with Brian about their stilted dating.

  “Really, Brian, you live ’ere in New York, my ’ome is in Paris. We are some friendly…’ow you say…strangers? You want to make love wiv me but really”—Laure took a long drag on her cigarette and exhaled—“what eez the point?”

  This coincided with Brian lining up a sure thing elsewhere who wasn’t such a total pain in the ass. Conversely, I redoubled my efforts to fool around with Louise. I felt that after the drinks, the dinners, the repeatedly being called a faggot, I needed to close the deal: I wanted to get some value.

  The girls were leaving for Paris in a week. Over our next three dates, I took Louise to bars in concentric circles around my apartment, but before the end of the night Laure would suddenly materialize, despite neither of the girls having a cell phone and me keeping our various destinations shrouded in secrecy. On their penultimate night in town, Laure actually arrived as Louise stood on my stoop deliberating on whether to risk spending the night.

  “Tomorrow is our last night, little Grant,” she said as Laure herded her into a waiting cab. “Maybe I will stay at your ’ome.”

  The Bordeaux company was throwing the summer interns a good-bye party in the basement of Puck Fair, an Irish pub on Lafayette and Houston. For someone who was now effectively jobless, I had already spent hundreds of dollars on entertaining Louise and her contrary chaperone, so I arrived three hours after the party started, at around eleven thirty.

  “Little Grant!” yelled Louise from across the room. Even though her teeth were stained gray from the wine, she looked cuter than ever. “I am so glad that you came ’ere!”

  Previously, we had only kissed at the end of our dates, but Louise grabbed my face with both hands and darted her boozy, ashy tongue into my mouth. Laure was furiously making out with an orange-haired though not terribly unattractive Dubliner in the corner, which bode well for me finally wrapping up this stop-start summer fling.

  “What do you want to drink?” I asked as she eagerly stroked my leg.

  “I will ’ave a apple martini,” said Laure, who had briefly pulled her tongue out of ginger nut’s mouth.

  “Ahh, me also!” said the intended recipient of the offer.

  The design of the martini glass is the stuff of nightmares for me. Delivering two filled-to-the-brim martini glasses across a rowdy Irish bar filled me with trepidation. One needs the steady hand of a gunslinger to get them safely to the table without incident. An attribute I apparently do not possess.

  “’N’ just what da feck d’ya tink ure doon, noi?” said a fat woman with an underbite and an almost indecipherable Belfast accent. While hoisting the drinks over the Ulster bruiser’s frame, I’d received a knock and spilt a little from each glass onto her ill-fitting tank top and my ice-blue dress shirt.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said.

  “Well, sorry in’t gonna dry off me feckin’ tits noi, is it, ya wee bender.”

  Louise was waving me over from across the bar. It had taken ten minutes to get the drinks, and it looked like I was about to be beaten by this flabby and angry creature.

  “Well, okay, the next one’s on me,” I said and told the barkeep to put the next one on my tab.

  “Dat’s a bit more feckin’ like it, short-arse.”

  A round of shots arrived at the table followed by another and another. Though she’d had a three-hour head start on me, I seemed to be a lot worse for wear than Louise, who was slurring in neither French nor English.

  After several drinks and hours watching Laure molest the poor plumber’s apprentice, Louise looked at me and squeezed my hand.

  “Grant, tonight I fink it is time that I will sleep at your ’ouse.”

  It was three a.m.

  I quickly collected my credit card to find that the chubby bruiser and her mates had two rounds at my expense, bringing my tab to over $140.

  “Oi! I said one drink!” I yelled at the barkeep.

  “Sarry, pal, but dats not what you tol’ me, so pay up and piss ahf.”

  Louise was excitedly tugging at my hand, so I reluctantly signed the receipt, gave him a lousy tip, and wrote Wanker! at the bottom.

  Hand in hand, we walked back to my place on 14th and C. I was out of cash until I got my final Nerve paycheck on the first of the month and couldn’t afford a taxi.

  “My feet ’urt,” complained Louise, who was now wildly wobbling in her heels.

  “Nearly there,” I lied. We were still a mile away. It was one of those nights when the temperature had seemed to actually increase with the setting sun. The metal shutters, the pavement, the sidewalk were all radiating the day’s heat back at us. The smell of hot garbage seemed to stick to one’s hair, clothes, and skin. I was conscious of the patches under my arms. Louise just looked dewy and fresh.

  As we walked up the stairs in the flickering fluorescent light of my building, I realized just how drunk I’d become. Since meeting Louise to now, I’d drunk more than I had in the previous six months, and I suddenly seemed to be feeling the cumulative effect of all that booze. As I struggled to put the key in my front door, I realized that I was definitely too drunk to perform.

  We entered my place and were hit in the face by the smell of cooking bacon. The apartment is above Jack’s Deli, which exists to cater to the hard-hatted workers from the p
ower plant. They begin frying up at around a quarter to four. I usually relish the strong aroma, but it generally isn’t conducive to seduction. I turned on both of the huge air conditioners I’d been gifted.

  “It’ll be cool in here in a minute,” I promised. As Louise looked through my book collection and the posters that hung on my walls, I caught sight of the boxes of Nerve flotsam that I’d taken from my desk. Since meeting Louise, I had played down the fact that I was a sex columnist, an illusion that would be instantly shattered if she caught sight of two giant boxes full of dildos and condoms with the word “herpes” written on them.

  “May I ’ave a drink of water?” she said as I casually kicked them under the bed.

  “Yeah, in the fridge,” I called from my bedroom.

  “Ah, Grant, you ’ave a bottle of pinot grigio ’ere. May we open it?”

  “Mais oui, we may!” I said. No reaction. As a reflection of how drunk I’d become I considered that fucking brilliant.

  Though I did have a chilled bottle of white wine in my fridge, I didn’t have one of those easy openers with the arms that you push down.

  “’Ere eez a corkscrew,” said Louise, finding a rusty and ancient-looking little pig’s tail in the silverware drawer and handing me the bottle.

  “I must go to the bafroom to…freshen up.”

  My toilet is in a separate little room that is located out of my apartment and down the hall. Though it is for my use only, it is technically an outhouse. I have to explain this to guests and hand them a key to the padlock that keeps my WC shut. As it only houses a crapper, there is no pretense of one going in there to freshen up. If anything, the opposite is true. I found it sort of funny that Louise would use the very American euphemism of “freshening up” with me. As fellow Europeans, Louise and I ought to have been above that puritan nonsense. Also, because there is no sink in there, I am well aware if a person does not wash his or her hands after visiting the toilet room. My bathtub and bathroom sink are located in my kitchen.

  “Okay,” I said. I explained the drill and gave her the key.

  I started to fathom how an old-school corkscrew worked when I remembered that one of my boxes contained one 100-milligram dose of Viagra.

  Two columns ago, I had reported the experiences of having sex under the influence of five different drugs: cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms, weed, and Viagra. I still had some coke and Viagra left over!

  I ran into the bedroom and started rifling to find the smallest item in the box, eventually found it, and put the whole 100-milligram pill in my mouth. In my experiment I had only taken a 25-milligram dose, which resulted in a prizewinning erection that I terrorized my then-girlfriend with, an afternoon she rues to this day. I was totally sober then and figured that I probably needed an increased dose to combat the effects of the alcohol now. I also found the coke in a bullet-sized dispenser. I ran back to the kitchen and swallowed the large pill with some water, took two large bumps, and got to work on opening the wine and promptly broke the cork in half just as Louise walked through the door.

  “What ’ave you done?”

  Not being able to open a bottle of wine is embarrassing under any circumstances, but in front of a French girl it was completely emasculating. I jabbed at the remaining half of the cork with a stainless steel chopstick but it didn’t budge.

  “Ah, poor little Grant, ’oo cannot even open a bottle of wine.”

  Louise sat down on the corner of my bed, choosing not to wash her hands.

  “How about a line?” I said, poking my head around the door after finally giving up with the wine.

  “What?”

  “Would you like a little coke?”

  I rarely indulged, but offering it made me feel and sound like Scarface. I didn’t even really want any more but I somehow had to run down the clock while I waited for the sildenafil citrate to inhibit cGMP specific phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5), which is responsible for degradation of cGMP in the corpus cavernosum. The molecular structure of sildenafil is similar to that of cGMP and acts as a competitive binding agent of cGMP in the corpus cavernosum. Now given that I’d taken four times the amount that had given me a thumper for the better part of a weekend, I was fairly confident that I could overcome my case of brewer’s droop. All I needed was just a little more time.

  I figured I’d put the blow on a CD case and make a really big deal about meticulously chopping it up, which I could drag out for five or ten minutes.

  “Pffff! I absolutely fink no.”

  She looked horrified. Louise’s body language shifted from languid and suggestive to closed and distant. I was trying to push narcotics on a teen and it had inexplicably backfired.

  “No, me neither,” I said. “My friend had some and I’m…holding it for him. I just didn’t know if you…”

  “Grant, please, I would like it for us to go to bed.”

  Though I already had the thumping headache, I felt sure I needed to give the Viagra more time to work its magic.

  “Let’s watch some television!” I said and pulled her through my railroad apartment to the living room. It was four a.m., and there only seemed to be infomercials on.

  “’Oo eez dis man wiv ’is chickens?” she said after watching a studio audience get jazzed by a rotisserie oven.

  “That’s Ron Popeil,” I said. “He is a famous American inventor.”

  She looked at me, apparently unsatisfied with my reasons for making her watch late-night infomercials after a three-and-a-half-week campaign to get her back to my place.

  “Set it and forget it!” I said at an inappropriate volume that made Louise recoil.

  “Well, zis eez very strange to me, and I am very ty-aired. I must get up and pack tomorrow and…your face! It eez very red. Are you okay?”

  The headache, the red face. I had documented the chain of events in my experiment. I knew that I only needed to kill around ten more minutes before I’d have a chemically enhanced erection that would be the talk of the Champs-Elysées.

  I got the drip, and couldn’t help fidgeting with my nostrils.

  “The roof!” I said. “I need some fresh air. It’s beautiful up there.”

  I grabbed Louise and pulled her up four flights of rickety stairs to the roof. The Chinese families who lived on the top floor of the building often slept on the roof in the summer months, in lieu of having a way to keep cool at night, though thankfully there was no one up there. The heat had melted the tar on the roof, making the surface like a giant piece of flypaper. Great gobs of it were stuck to Louise’s shoes as I led her across the roof to admire the view.

  “That’s Stuyvesant Town,” I said, suddenly realizing how underwhelming the view must have been to her. “If you strain your neck and look between the two buildings in front of us, you can see the glow of the Empire State Building…but they turn off the lights at midnight.”

  “I see.”

  “And that’s the famous East River; the historical borough of Queens is on the other side. That’s where the airport is. Next to us is the ConEd power plant, can you hear it buzzing? And those buildings are Alphabet City projects. A hundred years ago this neighborhood was called Kleine Deutschland and was full of Germans. Allgemeine! I expect you could have seen the World Trade Center from here, but I didn’t live here then so don’t quote me on that. Below us is Fourteenth Street, which is mostly just dollar stores and fried chicken joints. So…”

  Silence.

  “And maybe a Rite Aid.”

  “It would ’ave been nice to ’ave that wine up ’ere.”

  Silence.

  Louise suddenly looked sort of bluish, which indicated that the Viagra was working. I excitedly made out with my Gallic smurf and painfully knocked teeth with her twice. With my hands exploring her tight rear, I sprang an instantaneous erection and pushed it into her taut midsection.

  “Let’s go to bed,” I said triumphantly and led her down the stairs, leaving two sets of tarry footprints that led into my now chilly apartment.

>   In what is a break from tradition, I undressed the girl first before shedding my own clothes. Her breasts were small and perfect, her skin white and even, the musculature of her abdomen discernable by accident rather than design, her bulbous little bottom caressed in surprisingly sensible white cotton underwear. We kissed and she tinkered with my fly for what seemed like ages before I yanked my pants off myself. My erection threatened to poke a hole through my underpants as I lowered her onto my bed and slid my hand into hers. She stopped me.

  “Grant,” she said hesitantly, “tonight, I fink I just want you to ’ug me.”

  “Huh,” I said and cupped her left breast.

  “I just want you to, to ’old me, before I leave for Paris.”

  “Yeah,” I said and spooned her, sliding my inhumanly turgid penis between the gap in her thighs. She jerked away from it, as if it had burned her. She made me set my alarm for 8:00. Her flight was at 12:45, but she needed to get down to Canal Street and pack.

  “Here, lie on my chest,” I said.

  We shifted positions.

  Everything was blue now, and with my hand I could feel the raised veins on my forehead popping out. My penis tented the comforter. I stroked Louise’s hair and lovingly kissed her dainty little fingers before curling them around my penis. She’d have to be impressed, I thought.

  “Grant, no, I must sleep.”

  It was getting light outside.

  “Sleep on the plane, baby.”

  Louise turned her back to me.

  “Good night, Grant,” she said. “Cute English boy.”

  The strange mix of chemicals racing around my body made sleep impossible. I spent the next three hours looking at the back of Louise’s head and the erection that would not back down. I reset the alarm for 7:30 in the hopes that Louise would want to fool around upon waking. I listened to the thunder in the distance come closer, until it seemed that the clouds had settled on my roof. It was the loudest thunder I’d ever heard but Louise didn’t stir. I must have finally gotten to sleep minutes before she woke up.

  “Shit!” she said, maniacally buzzing around my room foraging for clothing. The clock said 9:41.