Working Stiff

by Grant Stoddard

  As the girls all hugged and kissed each other good luck, we were led from the greenroom to a windowless audition room, where Ross asked each of us to behave in strange ways: act like a chicken, be a tree, pretend to be a mugger, and so on, then all interact with each other. With international fame seemingly within reach, everyone took to their assigned roles with conviction. And after two minutes Ross calmed everyone down.

  “Okay,” he said. “The head of the network is watching this on a live feed elsewhere in this building. You each have fifteen seconds to look into the camera and explain why you should be the sole subject of MTV’s most revolutionary programming to date.”

  In truth, Rob and Lauren were watching on a live feed.

  Ross pointed at Dave.

  “Go!”

  Dave leapt forward.

  “Hey! My name’s Dave, I got no tattoos, I don’t smoke, drink, or do drugs; I’m the boy next door. Your friggin’ next-door neighbor is doing porn, bro. Whad’ya think about that?”

  “Cut!” said Ross. “Beth.”

  “Let’s see. I’m Beth. Um…people like me. I’m fun and personable. Good to be around…and…um.”

  “Cut! Ebony.”

  “Hey, my name is Ebony. I’m a strong, sentient being who is both pishon…wait…. I am passionate and iticolade…sorry, articulate um…and…”

  “Cut! Dan!”

  “’Sup, MTV?” Dan suddenly picked up a hitherto undetectable blaccent. “My tag’s Dan and da question you gots ta acks yo’self is can you people handle this?”

  Dan shucked himself out of his tight white T-shirt and flexed his gym-rat body. Ross sadistically let Dan silently flex for about twenty long seconds, leaving him to rack his tiny brain to fill the dead air. But instead there was the most sphincter-clenching awkward silence as Dan’s eyes shot around the room, begging for Ross to yell cut.

  “Yeah, baby!” he finally said after half a minute had elapsed.

  He kissed his bicep.

  “It’s a gun show!”

  “Okay, that was real nice, Dan, thanks and…cut.”

  Embarrassed, Dan shuffled back to his place on the line.

  “Okay.” Ross cleared his throat, looked up at me, and skillfully stifled a grin. “Is it Grant or Graham?”

  “It’s Grant.”

  “Australian?”

  Ross knew that being erroneously pegged as an Aussie was intensely annoying to me. We both stifled a smirk.

  “English.”

  “Okay, Grant, show us what you got.”

  Jen Ehrman, Ross, Brian Wahlund, Christian, Brett, War-Dog, and the Donger all knew what was about to happen, but did remarkably well to conceal their anticipation.

  I could just imagine Rob and Lauren in the adjacent room leaning in closer to the monitor that was showing the live feed.

  Ross had told me that this would all be about the reaction of the five other finalists, something we wouldn’t be able to easily reproduce, so I’d have to get it right the first time. I wasn’t thrilled with the segment, but in theory the reveal was really funny, if a little base.

  I began marching on the spot with my elbows and knees locked straight.

  “My name is Grant Stoddard,

  “I walk about the town,

  “Sometimes with my trousers up and sometimes with them down!”

  On the word “down” I bent over, grabbed the fronts of my tear-away pants, and yanked them off in one deft motion, revealing my naked lower half, save the knotted tube sock I’d tucked my penis and testicles into.

  My unwitting costars’ jaws dropped as I heard four loud gasps behind me. Their eyes were flitting between Ross and my bare behind.

  “Oh yeah, oh yeah!” I said, transforming the march into a cancan, then a rough approximation of Riverdance, while yelling, “Pick me, pick me, pick me!” the stuffed sock flying hither and dither.

  “Cut!” yelled Ross, holding back laughter. “Okay, well, Grant seems to have upped the ante, but I’m feeling nice, so does anyone want to take another shot at this?”

  They didn’t.

  “I think he just shut down the audition,” said Ebony.

  I had.

  The next morning we awoke at five thirty to be at a Burbank Catholic school at sunup.

  I had been outfitted in a tight tracksuit top, running shoes, over-the-knee tube socks, Bjorn Borg–style sweatbands, and a pair of skintight, lime green, terry-cloth booty shorts that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. Minutes before the shoot began, a meeting was called in the school parking lot to discuss whether parading my clearly visible package around in front of fifteen eighth-grade girls was grounds for a lawsuit. Though Rob spent an inordinate amount of time assessing my situation, he decided that I should probably wear underpants, but even when not “commando” I looked as though I was smuggling five servings of fruit about my loins. It seemed that the comedy premise of the show was entirely genital in nature.

  The segment started with me running out of a wooded area, vaulting over a creek and into the throng of the ponytailed adolescents.

  “Hello, ladies!” I yelled as I sprinted toward them.

  “Hi, Grant!” they yelled back in well-rehearsed unison.

  “Girls,” said one of the two impossibly glammed-up coaches, “let’s show Grant what we’ve been working on for him.”

  The girls snapped into formation. A crowd of bemused early-morning onlookers began to assemble on one side of the field.

  “Ready? Okay!” they all shouted.

  The girls then proceeded to spell out my name with their pompoms, yelling each letter in time.

  “G, G, G, G, R, R, R, R, A, A, A, A, N, N, N, N, T, T, T, T, what does it spell? GRANT! Whooooo!”

  The girls put me through my paces, eventually hoisting me up on their dainty shoulders to be the zenith of a pyramid and helped me dismount without injury.

  “I’d like to get me some a that!” said one sassy and buxom Lolita to her friend while pointing at my crotch.

  Ross and Corin were being fed lines by Rob and Lauren for me to say, finally decimating my concept of a documentary-style travelogue. The situations were now quite skitlike.

  “Honey,” said Corin, running over to me while still receiving instruction on her earpiece from Lauren and Rob. “You’re a fucking superstar, but we need you to say, ‘Girls, would you like to help me spread cheer around Los Angeles?’ but say it more British. Call them ‘Love’ or ‘Birds’ or some shit like that. Okay, so way more British. Go!”

  The idea of “turning up the British” was sort of abhorrent to me, but I’d do my best to humor everyone if it meant the show would stand a better chance of being green-lit for a series.

  “So, girls, would you like to help me spread cheer around Los Angeles?”

  From the corner of my eye I caught Lauren immediately address Ross and Corin on their earpieces.

  “More British!” they both mouthed to me, pointing skyward.

  I turned up the British and ended up sounding like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

  “Blimey, loves, what do you say to spreading some cheer around LA?”

  “Yes!” mouthed Ross and Corin, giving enthusiastic thumbs-up signs.

  On the ride over to the next location with the cheerleaders, Ross made me write down all of the most ridiculous British slang and turns of phrase, which he wanted to pepper all of my subsequent dialogue with.

  There was “knackered,” meaning tired; “bollocks,” meaning bullshit; “blimey” and “crikey” as interchangeable exclamations; “throw a wobbly,” meaning to have a tantrum, and so on and so forth.

  “So every time you say one of those words a subtitle will appear on the screen, giving a translation,” said Ross.

  “But I would never say any of these words.”

  “Trust me,” he said. “It’ll be hilarious.”

  By ten a.m. it was already over ninety degrees in North Hollywood, where we were due to “spread cheer” to a picket line of employees f
rom Von’s supermarket. My waxy makeup was beginning to melt and I was becoming increasingly strangulated by my tiny terry-cloth booty shorts. By 2003 the reality TV craze was so pervasive that a crew’s prime concern is to not get another reality TV crew in frame. In that one North Hollywood parking lot three other crews, albeit more modest than our thirty-person entourage, were roaming around in hot pursuit of reality.

  After terrorizing several dozen Los Angelinos, Andrew, Ross, and I cooled off in Ross and Jordana’s swimming pool before shooting the third of the five segments that afternoon. The concept of the “birthday” segment was so formless and inane that even as the cameras started rolling none of us had any idea what on earth we were supposed to do. The brief was that the fifteen-person crew plus five “friends” would appear at several different restaurants and see what we could get for free by telling them that it was my birthday, and then exponentially request more and more menu items on the house. The problem of course is that when a party of six is accompanied by a television crew, waiters are waving their eight-by-tens around and are ready, willing, and able to do anything for a measly bit of camera time. Having no real friends on the West Coast, my group of pals was made up of Jordana’s cousin Steve, Ross’s friend Amin, Corin, Susan, a friend of Jordana’s, and Gabrielle, the girl I’d enlisted to help me in the threesome the week before. With no direction, canned lines, and overly accommodating waitstaff hamming it up for the camera, the segment ended up like a low-wattage version of a Punk’d skit and was completely unsalvageable as far as I could tell.

  The last day of shooting began at daybreak at a shady-looking truck stop in downtown LA. Toothless crack whores scuttled between the tractor trailers like roaches from the beam of a flashlight as our crew arrived just after dawn. As I chatted with the truckers, I felt that the segment was much more in line with my idea of the show and hoped it would be apparent to the powers that be at VH1. I didn’t even mind Corin’s constant coaching to be more British, which in addition to saying “blimey” and “crikey” also involved serving tea and scones to the truckers, who regaled me with tales from the road. It was our interaction that was driving the comedy of this segment, not me in tight shorts. I tried chewing tobacco, played with their CB radios, and even got to drive a big rig the length of the parking lot.

  The last segment to shoot was the one Rob and Lauren were most “totally jazzed” about, me dressing up as a woman and trying to pick up guys at a karaoke bar. I spent the afternoon having my legs waxed and being made up at a beauty spa before heading out on the town. How this all figured into the theme of the pilot remained unclear.

  After the three-day shoot I flew to JFK and caught a flight to London, where I met up with Brian, Chris, and Fatty. We’d had a European vacation booked for several months. The shooting schedule meant I’d regrettably missed the first leg in Reykjavík, Iceland. From London we flew to Athens then Crete, where Brian’s parents had a time-share. We flew back to London, and the four of us spent a couple of days in Corringham, staying at my parents’ house. I got to spend a week in New York before heading back to LA to do voice-over work on the pilot. There was no money left in the show’s budget to accommodate this, and so I flew out on my own dime and took up residence in Ross and Jordana’s spare room and rented a compact car.

  After the insanity of the preproduction and three-day shoot, life back in the Martin household seemed serene. I was only required for voice-over sessions in Santa Monica for a few hours per week, and with little else to do I began to get the distinct impression that I’d outlived my use, worn out my welcome, and was increasingly getting under everyone’s feet. Los Angeles, it seemed, was a fine place if you happened to be working, but a lull in productivity felt like creeping death. I became so homesick for New York that I began to manifest physical symptoms. I’d never felt like this when I left Corringham for New York.

  Ross suggested that I spend my time working on a proposal for my book. It had already been eighteen months since I’d met with several literary agents, who seemed eager to help me sell an account of my time at Nerve. Furthermore, he insisted that I disappear off into the wilderness to write it.

  THE RANCH

  THE CIRCLED W RANCH occupies over four thousand acres of land just outside the town of North Fork, which is located in the exact center of California. Jordana’s grandfather had bought the land in the late 1950s from a Native American tribe. The land straddles a hill range and seeps down into the valleys on either side. Over the past half century the head of cattle had been greatly reduced and the land had been parceled and sold to family and friends. When they married, in 2000, Ross and Jordana had been given a beautiful home on one of the ranch’s highest elevations. It overlooks a deep valley, and above the opposing slope one can easily see El Capitain and the white-capped mountaintops of Yosemite National Park in the distance.

  I’d visited the ranch during a break in the preproduction of the show. Ross, Jordana, Dash, and I had arrived there in darkness, leaving me unaware of the stunning beauty of the place until I was awakened to see the sun creeping over the mountains and illuminating the interior of the valley below us. I sort of fell in love with it immediately.

  “Stay at the ranch,” Ross had generously suggested after the show wrapped.

  He didn’t want me to leave California before we knew the fate of the Granted project.

  “You can write without distractions, without having to pay silly New York rent, you can borrow one of the pickups to drive, you’ll get inspired and still be able to drive down to LA to take meetings when you need to.”

  As much as I missed New York, it did seem like an amazing opportunity. I couldn’t remember spending more than a few hours in my own company. Perhaps it was not having enough alone time that prevented me from being a prolific writer, I thought.

  I bought a laptop and Ross and Jord took me up there to show me where everything was, how everything worked. The pickup was available for me to use, but I was only allowed to take it as far as Oakhurst, meaning I’d have to keep my rental for trips to and from LA at a cost of a thousand dollars a month. Other unexpected costs included having a high-speed Internet connection installed. Due to its relatively remote location, one company had the monopoly on almost every utility service available and charged high premiums. A local phone call was charged at over seventy cents per minute. I swear that when I called about the propane tank, the plumbing, the DSL connection, and the telephone bill I was chatting with the same person.

  Being in such a remote place meant that writing about strange sexual experiences—my bread-and-butter gig—was going to be somewhat of a challenge. Since moving to California I’d successfully had a threesome and somehow convinced three strangers to let me take pictures of them naked. In LA those kinds of things were comparatively easy to pull off, but forty-five minutes from Fresno, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, my options were limited. Nerve was paying me fifteen hundred dollars a column, my only steady income, and it was proving barely enough to live on, despite paying no rent.

  I decided that because I had at least three months ahead of me, there was no need to rush headlong into writing. To that end, I demarcated my day along themes of rest and relaxation: awaking at my leisure, coffee on the porch, picking rosemary from the garden to make elaborate omelets, followed by an hour-long run around the grazing area of some truly bewildered cattle. After lunch, some light reading before going out to collect kindling for the fireplace. After catching up with e-mails and events from the outside world, I’d make a nice fire, make dinner, and get through a bottle of Charles Taylor cabernet sauvignon. “Two Buck Chuck” was selling at Trader Joe’s at $1.99 a bottle, and I’d bought two cases on my way through Fresno.

  After a few days without seeing another soul I began to wonder how quickly I would get used to my own company. I encouraged friends in New York to call me as often as they could, though day to day I really had very little to report. Every day was clear, crisp, and sunny, up to eighty degrees in the d
ay, down to forty at night. Each night coyotes serenaded me as squadrons of bats flew in to pick off the moths fluttering around the porch light.

  Several parcels of land on the ranch had been sold to close family friends, who’d built vacation homes there. The Kesselmans were at their home quite a lot of the time, and after a week of my leisurely routine they extended an invitation for dinner to me, being new and all. The Kesselmans were my de facto next-door neighbors on the ranch, though they lived almost a mile away. Sandy and Hank were in their fifties, tall, good-looking, and incredibly charismatic. Hank had a wide range of interests, from mastering classical guitar to delivering spot-on impersonations of Ali G. I found this so incredibly surreal, because before Ali G that affect wasn’t heard outside of Pakistani and Indian areas of west London, where I went to school. Sandy was a trained clinical psychologist and an ordained Zen priest in the Suzuki-roshi lineage. When performing her priestly duties her name was not Sandy, but Grace.

  “We have our meetings every Sunday morning at eight forty-five,” said Hank. “If you’d like to join us you’re very welcome.”

  Having dinner with other people reminded me just how starved I was for human interaction, so I jumped at the chance to spend Sunday with a group of people. After coffee, Hank showed me the zendo, which was the converted second story of a barn, and ran me through what a meeting is like. Hank then loaded me up with an armful of Kurosawa DVDs and gave me a light scolding for walking over and not using my car.

  “We lost a horse to mountain lions one night last year,” he said gravely. “They’d make short work of you. I’m giving you a lift back.”

  I was enthralled at the idea of danger lurking all around me. Until then it hadn’t occurred to me just how particularly mild a place England is: seldom too hot or too cold, free of poisonous reptiles and long since cleared of large carnivorous mammals, rarely subject to earthquakes, volcanoes, tornados, or tsunamis. It made me think about how a region’s environment informs its inhabitants’ dispositions and how my life would improve as a result of my becoming more rugged, independent, even manly. As a young child, I would listen to my grandparents’ old 78 of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” repeatedly. I somehow felt that in moving to the ranch I was taking a small step to becoming a bit of a frontiersman myself. This made things particularly awkward as I realized I had no clue how to build an effective fire, use the stars to navigate, or stay sane without being surrounded by several million other human beings.