Working Stiff

by Grant Stoddard

  “Laure is going to kill me! What ’appened to the alarm?”

  “I don’t know,” I croaked.

  My head was spinning and my erection showed no signs of remittance.

  I put on some pajama pants and walked her downstairs.

  “Taxi!” She was already out in the road, arm extended.

  The rain was still torrential and it was chilly outside. A cab pulled up and she held the door open as she kissed me on the cheek. I gave her a business card with my now-defunct e-mail address and phone number.

  “I will write to you!” she promised and playfully batted my hitherto ignored member with her hand.

  “I will write to you too!”

  She sped off without waving.

  I walked back upstairs, toweled off, and awoke at about the same time as her plane was due to leave. A monster hangover, the unsatisfying conclusion to a summer fling, no longer receiving a regular paycheck, and the Viagra Web site’s insistence that I seek urgent medical attention all ganged up on me at once and I suddenly felt lousier than I had in my whole life. The rain pelted against my cracked windowpanes and rattled on the tops of the air conditioners as I considered making the walk to the ER at Beth Israel, under an umbrella and half a pace behind an angry erection.

  Summer had ended.

  THE TALENT

  THE LIMO THAT PICKED ME UP from Long Beach Airport was chock-full of candies, snacks, and bottles of mineral water. I’d been in a limo once before, during a bachelor-party-style weekend in Montreal in November 2002. That one was stretched, white, full of liquor, and the transport that delivered us to more restaurants, bars, “full-contact” strip clubs, peep shows, diners, and roadhouse brothels than I care to remember. It glowed purple underneath and I’m sure we were deservedly referred to as assholes dozens of times.

  This limo was black, modestly unstretched, and had a courteous uniformed driver by the name of Terry.

  “You movin’ out here, bro?” he said.

  “Well, maybe. I’m shooting a pilot, and if all goes well, then…y’know?”

  I’d been to Southern California once before and hated it. But then my trip was just thirty hours long, and the lion’s share of it was spent on the set of a porno movie. That trip was Ross’s doing too. This stay would be for several weeks, most of it spent in preproduction for the pilot of Granted and then a four-day shoot. And if we went to series…who knows?

  “Shit, if you like warm weather and beautiful babes, you ain’t gonna leave in a hurry,” said Terry.

  While I certainly was a fan of beautiful babes, I also rather liked the seasons, but I chose not to get into that with Terry, as he might reckon me a fairy, and he seemed to be on a roll.

  “And if you are gonna be on TV, man, I tell ya, you’ll be gettin’ so much freakin’ pussy you’ll have to beat it off with a stick. But hey, that’s Hollywood for ya. Where you comin’ from?”

  “New York.”

  “New York Ci-tay,” he said under his breath. “I always wanted to go there.”

  I arrived at Ross and Jordana’s home near North Hollywood around nine to find Ross waiting in the driveway. It was great to see him again. When he left Nerve, he promised that he and I would work together again soon, and true to his word, here we were. The house was a charming one-level, three-bedroom with a good-sized swimming pool and a two-car garage that Jordana used as her painting studio. I walked in and set my bags down.

  “Welcome to Valley Village, California!” Jordana said and gave me a big, good-feeling hug. Their son, Dashiell, had just turned one and was already asleep, but we crept into his room to take a peek. He was beautiful and I told them so.

  “Wait ’til you see his penis,” whispered Ross. “It’s massive.”

  We ordered Chinese food, caught up, and I was overcome with the realization that, TV show or not, I was completely starting over, in a new place, with new people, with a new job, and within a very short period of time had a whole new ready-to-wear life in the sunshine. A few days before I got on the plane, I sublet my apartment to a Texan debutante via Craigslist for almost double what I paid. I saw some friends, tied up some loose ends, and didn’t even stop to think about how efficiently I seemed to have packed up and moved on.

  This was all brought sharply into focus the next morning when I got a phone call from my ex-girlfriend Sophie. I had begun breaking up with her on Memorial Day, and by late August she had sort of gotten the message, though not before she broke into my apartment and stood over me as I slept.

  “Hello?”

  “I’ve been doing some thinking and I think that we should go out again.”

  “Now? Christ, it’s six thirty a.m.,” I said.

  “No, it’s not, it’s nine thirty,” she replied.

  She hadn’t heard that I’d moved, but then I didn’t have much time to tell anyone.

  “I’m in California.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “I’m making a TV show. I sort of…live here now.”

  She began to cry then hung up. We had spoken less than three weeks ago, when the TV show was merely a pipe dream.

  Now that I was up, I decided to figure out how to use a cafetière and make some coffee.

  “This is Dashiell!” Ross was already up and brought Dash into the kitchen so we could meet properly. He was still wiping the sleep from his eyes but already starting to giggle as I shook his little hand.

  “Want to go hiking in the canyon with us?” asked Ross.

  To my untrained ear “hiking in the canyon” sounded like a formidable physical challenge.

  “Um, I don’t have any…equipment,” I said. I was thinking boots, pickax, guide ropes.

  “You’ll be fine in a sweater, jeans, and sneakers,” he said.

  It seems that in Los Angeles, hiking in a canyon actually means taking a relatively brisk walk up a hill and down again, and the use of the term sort of made me chuckle. Had Ross assimilated to being a West Coaster in just a year? In any case, as I’d landed in darkness, it was useful to look at my new surroundings from some high ground. In Los Angeles you can’t fool yourself into thinking that you live in an entirely man-made place, like you can in Manhattan. You can use natural topography to get your bearings, as opposed to bridges and skyscrapers.

  “Hollywood is on the other side of these hills,” said Ross as we reached a point with a view of the San Fernando Valley. At eight a.m. the air was clean, cool, and fresh, though I could feel the temperature rising by the minute.

  It’s strange to think about how I’d first surveyed Manhattan from the observation deck of the World Trade Center, thinking about whether I could ever call the city home, whether I would soon be navigating its arteries instinctually. And it’s funny to think about how I first perceived the city at street level. Becky had parked in Hoboken and we took the Path train in, eventually emerging on leafy 9th Street and Sixth Avenue before walking east through Washington Square, past NYU and onto Broadway as an armada of yellow cabs flew by the Tower Records store at East 4th Street. I got a hot dog from a street vendor and was overcome yet fully satisfied with the New Yorkness of it all. This view, even from the “wrong side” of the Hollywood Hills, was impressive in a sort of serene way, but I wondered if it was a place I’d ever think of as home.

  We deposited Dash back at home and crawled to Santa Monica for the first day of preproduction. A portion of a floor at VH1’s Santa Monica offices had been devoted to Granted. The name of the show was affixed to each of the brightly colored pens, and the wallpaper and screensavers for each of the dozen computers in the Granted zone were ridiculous life-sized snapshots of my mug. The ten-person production team had been assembled and I moved along a line of them like the queen at an important movie premiere.

  “Everyone, this is the notorious Grant Stoddard,” announced Ross to my embarrassment. “He’s our talent.”

  “Please don’t call me that again,” I said to Ross when I got him alone for a second. The total cost of the p
ilot was heading for the better part of a hundred grand, and from my interactions with the production team, it was becoming clear that no one knew that my experience “on camera” was limited to a few home videos. Being constantly referred to as “the talent,” given that I was completely unproven, seemed sarcastic and served only to heighten my anxiety.

  Just getting to this point had been an adventure in and of itself. Despite my assurances that Granted the TV show had nothing whatsoever to do with the “I Did It for Science” column or its hypothetical TV spin-off, Rufus threatened litigation on intellectual property grounds and through his old boy network could make sure his saber rattling could be well heard. In the pre-pilot stage even the mere whiff of legal hurdles could quash our TV show with Viacom, and with that in mind the VH1 people put pressure on Ross to capitulate with Rufus’s demands just to keep the project alive. Rufus’s first preposterous set of conditions included naming the show I Did It for Science or having some Nerve cobranding in the title of the show. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Ross eventually agreed to give a percentage of the show’s prospective profits and to add wording in the end credits reflecting Nerve’s involvement in the development of the “Grant Stoddard character.”

  This led me to wonder if my character had in actuality been developed by Nerve. It was certainly true that my suddenly being obligated to participate in bizarre sexual activity had certainly broadened my outlook on sex, people, and life in general. It was also fair to say that the company had given me an amazing opportunity to start and build upon a career in writing that would never have presented itself otherwise. It was assured that Nerve had gotten me laid, a lot. Surely, if it wasn’t for Nerve, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to make an eponymous TV show. But the assertion that Rufus Griscom and Nerve somehow fashioned my persona from scratch was completely inaccurate. Rufus’s percentages weren’t even coming out of my share, but out of Ross’s. Rufus was ruthless in the pursuit of value, and we felt as though we were being shaken down in spectacular fashion.

  Everyone at VH1 had been urged to bone up on my writing and the regular appearances I’d made on friends’ photo blogs and had become intimately familiar with some of my more intimate moments. I had a dozen insta-friends, who already knew a good deal about me. This felt extremely odd but appealed to my ego.

  Most days were brainstorming sessions in which we hashed out the segments we would try to include in the pilot. Logistical and financial constraints meant that all the segments would be shot in LA, though I’d envisioned the real contrast of the show to be the relationship between myself and subject matter more readily found in the interior of the country.

  With that being the case, we quickly tailored the pilot episode to our surroundings. One of my ideas was for me to emcee a karaoke night for washed-up celebrities. The execs in New York said they were “psyched” about the idea and we started creating a list of who these possible D-listers could be. The following day, the execs called to say that they continued to be psyched about the idea but especially loved the thought of me singing karaoke dressed as a woman and that this segment should be “tweaked slightly” to that end. They’d read the “I Did It for Science” column in which I’d dressed up as a woman and incidentally found it “rilly, rilly funny,” funny enough to try to shoehorn into a show about wacky Americana.

  And so began a pattern in which the execs seemed to latch on to a tiny and inconsequential part of each idea and run it off on some tangent that somehow made perfect sense to them. In 2005 VH1 launched a show called So You Think You Can Sing? in which minor celebrities sang karaoke songs.

  Back in New York, Michael Martin was throwing all sorts of freelance gigs my way so that I wouldn’t see that much of a drop-off in my income. In among putting the pilot together, I also had to interview Ricky Gervais, then a complete unknown in America, and orchestrate and participate in a threesome with a girl and another guy for my “I Did It for Science” column, despite knowing nary a soul west of Weehawken. Some magazine work for Glamour and BlackBook was also sent my way, and I would regularly sit Dashiell for an hour or two. Despite having so much to do, I felt that time moved slower out here and I could get to work in earnest.

  Ross, Jordana, Dashiell, and I lived together as a nuclear family, though I could never really figure out if I was the funny uncle, roguish bachelor, guest of honor, eldest son, or babysitter. But, I was certainly made to feel integral to their home, despite my klutziness increasing exponentially. In my first week I blocked the toilet in the guest bathroom, damaged the upholstery in Ross’s car, shattered the porcelain faucet handle in their shower, put dish detergent in the dishwasher that filled the kitchen knee-high in suds, and woke everyone in the house by having the two other participants of my threesome jump in the pool to pee at three in the morning due to the aforementioned blocked toilet in the guest bathroom. Jordana classified these extremely embarrassing episodes as (Gr) antics.

  In addition to the preproduction of Granted, Ross was also taking meetings for a handful of other projects. I was only needed at the VH1 offices for a few hours each day, though Ross left the house before nine and often didn’t return until the wee hours of the morning. This left Jordana, Dash, and me together most nights.

  As we drew closer to the shooting date, the show began to shift tone and form to the point that it was quite a different project from the action-packed anthropological travelogue I’d initially envisioned. The concept had shifted much more toward the slapstick, pratfall end of the spectrum in which I would be a roving Mr. Bean–type character. I felt that we’d lost control of the project entirely, but Ross assured me that the execs were doing exactly what they needed to do in order for the show to go to series and, once green-lit, we would get to steer it back.

  The five segments we eventually settled on were:

  Me and a group of friends going to restaurants and seeing what we could get for free by telling them that it was our birthday.

  Me hanging out at a truck stop and offering truckers tea and scones as part of something called “Trucker Appreciation Day.”

  Me participating in a staged audition for a fake reality TV show.

  Me dressing in drag and singing at a karaoke bar.

  Me training with high school cheerleaders then taking them around Los Angeles to spread cheer among its citizens.

  According to the call sheet, at all times I would be surrounded by a minimum of fifteen people. Ross and Corin Nelson, associate producer Jen Ehrman, assistant producers Brian Wahlund and Cherry Jimenez, my seventeen-year-old PA, Andrew Karlsruher, production manager Jennifer Dugan, makeup artist Lucy Fleetwood, VH1 execs Rob Weiss and eight-months-pregnant Lauren Gellert, who had flown out from New York for the shoot. Then there was the four-man camera crew, headed up by a guy named Christian, along with his men Brett, War-Dog, and a terribly nice chap who was referred to only as the Donger. This entourage was then expanded with the introduction of fifteen teenage cheerleaders, a handful of gnarled truckers, a slew of singles at a karaoke bar, a group of instant best friends, and over a hundred reality TV star wannabes, waving their eight-by-tens around and trying to appear zany and unpredictable.

  In the few days prior to their departure, Lauren and Rob were constantly having conference calls with Ross and Jen Ehrman tweaking, finessing, massaging, and frequently leaving us all wondering if they were high on drugs.

  “What I’m about to say comes from a place of love….”

  Rob would always preface another step away from our original concept and toward unrestrained physical comedy.

  Despite being Ross’s production partner on this project, Corin Nelson had been absent throughout the weeks of preproduction due to her recent appointment as the executive producer of the ill-fated Sharon Osbourne Show. Ad hoc ideas flew out of her mouth as quickly as she’d conceived them. If an idea was well received she’d continue to flesh it out on the fly; if it sunk it was immediately discarded, never to be thought about again.

  Cori
n was constantly fluffing my ego and stoking my imagination.

  “America is going to want to fuck you,” she’d tell me on a daily basis. “You’re going to have your pick. I hope you’re ready for what’s about to fucking happen for you.”

  The first day of shooting was at the Viacom offices in Santa Monica. The premise of the segment was that with reality-based programming being so pervasive, auditioning for reality TV shows had become an American way of life. Concept-wise, it was sort of a stretch, but the idea was a firm favorite of the execs in New York.

  In just a few hours, six hundred people had answered an ad Brian Wahlund had posted on Craigslist. The post was an open casting call for a new reality series that MTV was producing and it instructed applicants to send a picture and brief bio.

  The idea was that from the moment the hopefuls arrived, they would be pumped up to believe that this particular project would be the biggest thing MTV had ever produced and would make the single successful applicant a household name the world over. A series of cuts would be made and the final six applicants would each be given ten seconds to prove why they should be the successful applicant.

  Around a hundred people were shoved into a large greenroom. For many, this was just one stop on a day full of open auditions. I recognized a few faces from back home in the East Village, but my concocted back story was that I’d just moved to LA from merry old England, so I couldn’t say anything. Jen Ehrman, Cherry, and Andrew ran around the greenroom taking down particulars of the candidates, and we pretended not to know each other. One hundred was cut to forty, which was cut to twelve, then left only six applicants, the sixth being me.

  There was Dave, a clean-cut-looking porn impresario from Orange County; Ebony, a pretty young actress; Dan, a peroxide-blond pretty boy who managed to be both fratty and fey; Tiffany, a rail-thin Tara Reid–esque party girl; and Beth, a nondescript shy girl.