Working Stiff

by Grant Stoddard

  As well as the cougars, the ranch was full of coyotes, large deer, and the odd bear or wolf. Some years ago, someone had given the ranch a few wild boars that had multiplied exponentially and roamed around in gangs terrorizing all in their path. Aside from the Kesselmans, the only other semipermanent residents on the Circled W were the outgoing and incumbent ranch managers, Tom and Jesse respectively. I would see them from afar on my mid-morning jogs, AC/DC accompanying me on my iPod. I often wondered what these guys thought of the city-slicking Semites and their friends who came in from Los Angeles and San Francisco to play at being cowboy at the weekend.

  I’D ONLY STAYED in touch with a small handful of people from Corringham, and Charlotte was one of them. I had invited her out to visit me at the ranch and, to my amazement, she jumped on a plane about a week later. I excitedly drove down to LAX to pick her up and met up with Ross, Jordana, rising comedian Freddy Soto, and his wife, Cory, for dinner in Beverly Hills. From there, I took Charlotte to an incredibly sketchy part of downtown LA in the name of science. Most of my experiments had been pretty tight in terms of a clear objective. Attending a porn star’s Christmas party was a bit of a stretch as decent fodder for an “I Did It for Science” installment, but it appeared that after almost three years, I’d just about exhausted every conceivable sexual kink and proclivity known to man. Living in the middle of nowhere had only served to exacerbate the problem. Being my friend, Michael Martin knew too much about my financial situation to say no and green-lit an article about being a guest at Kylie Ireland’s annual Yuletide soiree. Before she left for LA, I asked Charlotte if she’d mind popping into a sex party with me. Though she was stunningly beautiful, bubbly, and charming, I always found Charlotte to be prudish and resolutely asexual, at least with regard to me. I’d had a silent crush on her since we were sixteen, both sales assistants in a men’s clothing store in the local shopping mall, though much to my chagrin, we quickly became more like brother and sister.

  “I really like her shoes,” said Charlotte.

  Her eyes had been nervously flitting around the large loft space in the ten minutes since we’d arrived and had finally seen something that she could bring herself to say out loud.

  “Yeah, they’re really nice,” I replied. “Prada?”

  “Hmmmm, I’m not quite sure,” said Charlotte, squinting her eyes and leaning ever so slightly forward.

  We talked about the shoes as if they weren’t the items being worn by the women preparing to be fisted on the bench next to us. Despite being around five feet nine, the woman in the nice shoes had corset-trained her waist to a circumference of under nineteen inches, giving her the appearance of some sort of human-wasp hybrid.

  “I think your hands are too big,” she said to the frustrated gentleman between her legs.

  She propped herself up on her elbows so that she could get a better view of the action and direct accordingly.

  “Put your thumb flat to your palm,” she said as the man’s forehead vein bulged with concentration.

  “Maybe I’ll get a pair like that while I’m out here,” said Charlotte.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Although you certainly won’t be needing them at the ranch.”

  Given the size of the man’s mitts it seemed that the wasp-waisted woman should be in physical pain, yet it was her beau whose face registered some discomfort. Ultimately, his human glove called for assistance.

  “Kylie!”

  The party’s hostess, resplendent in a long, burgundy velvet skirt, black leather boots, a shiny plastic corset that stopped just below her boobs, which were held captive in a tight, long-sleeved fishnet shirt, strode over, and after seeing the problem firsthand, commandeered the situation and showed the ham-fisted boyfriend a better technique. The victim hollered, the cuckolded boyfriend looked on intently with arms folded, as Kylie went deep, well beyond the tan line from her wristwatch.

  “You know, we can leave whenever you want,” I said.

  “No, really, I’m fine,” said Charlotte, who’d been yawning all through dinner. “I think I got a second wind.”

  It was 10:30 p.m. in LA, 6:30 a.m. her time—GMT. We could have both used a line, but the party was billed as strictly drug-and alcohol-free. About ten feet in front of us, a blindfolded woman—naked save for a dog collar—was strung to a piece of scaffolding while a man with a braided ponytail and bowler hat methodically slapped her ass with his hand. He was putting a lot of thought into every slap, hopping around her body, turning his head this way and that, holding his chin thinking through his next move.

  “I hope you’re not too freaked out by all this?” I said, finally acknowledging the fact that we were in the midst of a bacchanal. A small handful of friends from home knew what I did for a living, one or two of them had even read about my exploits, but this was the first time one of them had been witness to the sort of bedlam I was paid to be involved in. Before that very evening, Grant Stoddard the sex writer would have been purely theoretical, perhaps farcical in Charlotte’s mind. Since we’d arrived at the party, it had become simultaneously apparent to the both of us that I’d somehow become a bit of an old hand at this sort of thing: I’d absentmindedly stepped over a couple in coitus to get to the buffet; I nonchalantly sidestepped the reach of a cat-o’-nine-tails en route to the bathroom, and brushed past a man brandishing a monkey wrench and large container of lube without a pang of curiosity for how those items were related. Charlotte wasn’t shocked at the situation so much as she was astounded to witness how comfortably I existed within it.

  “I’m okay,” she said, “I just…can’t believe that this is what you…do.”

  In truth, this was not typically what I did. I was typically obligated to be the one being flogged on the rack, on the end of a leash, the one elbow-deep in a stranger’s vagina. Charlotte knew that.

  “If you need to…y’know…” Charlotte gestured toward the growing conga line of furiously masturbating men and strap-on-wielding women taking turns penetrating a prostrate and buxom partygoer. “I can wait in the car, if you’d prefer.”

  It was abundantly clear that it was Charlotte who would prefer to not see her childhood friend in any of the hard-core sexual acts erupting all around her, though it was awfully thoughtful of her to make it seem as if it would be my decision. That’s English for you, polite to a fault. Mustn’t grumble. I’d almost lost that sensibility entirely. I’d become very American in the way that I voiced my needs and sought to fulfill them posthaste.

  Michael would be expecting me to participate, but even with Charlotte in the general vicinity, it was never going to happen. Though Charlotte never made me feel horrid about myself, I slipped into my old persona as soon as I saw her at the airport. I could fool strangers into thinking I wasn’t formerly a social leper, but in the presence of any of my old pals I was suddenly Grunt Stoddard again: virginal, desperate, bucktoothed, acne-ridden, problem-haired, and prone to wearing his heart on his sleeve, invariably with tragicomic effect.

  We stayed for a little longer until Charlotte’s second wind died down to a gentle breeze and her eyes glazed over. She’s so English. Even though she had almost fallen asleep twice while standing up, she insisted that we stay until I did what I had to do for the article.

  “Honestly, honey,” she said with eyelids drooping. “I was just resting my eyes for a bit.”

  I abused her good nature for just a minute or two longer, then thanked Kylie Ireland for having us over.

  “Not at all, thanks for coming!” she said as a man with a goatee fucked her hard from behind.

  “Take care!” he added.

  With my homegirl now positively zombiefied, I practically carried her into the car and sped off toward the Valley.

  We spent the night at Ross and Jord’s before heading up to the ranch.

  “Like I said, there’s really not much to do up there,” I said as we drove I-5 to a mountainous stretch of road known as the grapevine. “We’re just going to chill.”

  “T
hat’s fine,” she said. “Work’s been so crazy, I could really use a bit of that.”

  Charlotte was part of the small minority of people from our town who went on to university. She moved to North London shortly afterward and worked for a hip PR company off of Tottenham Court Road. She consequently lost the last remaining vestiges of her Essex accent, though it wasn’t very strong to start off with. Her parents were from Zimbabwe and she had been taught to speak quite properly. When we were sixteen, I knew that if any of my peers had the will and the wherewithal to leave Corringham it would be her.

  “Can you believe we’re here?” I said as the fire finally started kicking out some heat and I poured us each a glass of supermarket cabernet sauvignon. We relaxed after the four-hour drive.

  “It’s really lovely, Grant,” she said. “You’re so bloody lucky.”

  “Wait until the morning,” I said; we’d arrived in darkness. “It’s beautiful outside. You’re going to freak out. There’s an open outdoor shower that overlooks the valley. It’s an amazing way to start the day.”

  As the fire died down to embers, I gave Charlotte the option of sleeping in my bed or in the room on the other side of the house. Even though she’d spent the previous decade tactfully assuring me that we would never sleep together, I sort of hoped that the wine, the romantic, rustic setting, the jet-lag, my California tan, and the unabashed carnality of the previous evening would conspire to cloud her judgment, weaken her resolve. But, as I suspected, she chose to sleep in the bedroom way over on the other side of the house.

  I woke up at 3:31 a.m. to Charlotte shouting. Through two closed doors and the large expanse of the living room I couldn’t make out any specific words, though she clearly sounded angry, upset. I half listened as the shouting stopped and started over for several minutes. Then silence. I’d promised myself that I’d get up and wake her if it started again. I was pretty sure that it was during sleepwalking, not sleeptalking, that you shouldn’t wake someone, but I wasn’t one hundred percent positive. I was a sleepwalker as a ten-year-old and once urinated in the kitchen garbage during a dinner party my parents were throwing. My parents made sure not to wake me then as their friends all watched me in stunned silence.

  There was no more sleeptalking from Charlotte, however, and I fell back to sleep. It was just before five when I awoke again to a soft knock on my bedroom door.

  “Grant,” she whispered. “Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” I said, praying that she’d finally caved. “What’s up?”

  “Can I sleep in here with you?” Her brow was furrowed. “It’s gotten a bit chilly in there.”

  “Sure,” I said. She slid into the king-sized bed in her pajamas and stayed to one side.

  I woke her the next morning for coffee on the porch, just as sunlight began to pour into the valley. The sky was blue, the air crisp, the snow-peaked mountains looked close enough to touch. I folded my arms and gauged Charlotte’s reaction. I felt proud to show my paisan where I’d landed in the world. I couldn’t have been more proud if I had created the vista myself and dug out the valley with my own bare hands.

  “It’s really gorgeous,” she said, taking it all in. She seemed somehow troubled.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I just didn’t sleep all that well last night.”

  I hoped she wasn’t referring to how I’d overzealously tried to spoon her.

  “Yeah, I heard you talking in your sleep. Do you always do that?”

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  We spent the rest of her four-day stay at the ranch futzing around the ranch and the house, going for drives, making dinner, getting drunk by the fire, popping into Fresno to watch a movie. It was somewhat uneventful but fun.

  “I have to tell you something,” said Charlotte as we passed by the relative civilization of Bakersfield on the way back to LA. “The first night…I wasn’t sleeptalking.”

  “Well, who were you talking to?” I asked.

  “I was shaken awake. I mean shaken really hard. I thought it was you, winding me up.”

  “I would never do that,” I said.

  I would totally do that sort of thing as a prank, though probably not to Charlotte.

  “Well, what you heard was me telling you to fuck off and to stop messing about. But it wasn’t you, was it?”

  “No.”

  “Then the room got really cold, and I saw something go around the edge of the bed really fast.”

  “Are you winding me up?” I said.

  “I’m not.” She looked like she was on the verge of crying. “It felt like I wasn’t alone in the room. I kept hearing little noises. That’s why it took so long to get up the courage to run across to your room.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts, silly,” I said, but her conviction was beginning to unnerve me.

  “Neither do I. I didn’t want to tell you, seeing as you are going to be spending a few months there, but I had to say something, I felt like I was going mad. But…I felt it, the whole time that we were there. Didn’t you notice? I hardly left your sight.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me until she said it, but Charlotte had been physically close to me the entire length of her visit. When she took a shower she asked me to talk to her through the bathroom door. But from a sunny California highway, her experience was easy to dismiss as a figment of her imagination, and after a few more miles I’d practically forgotten about it.

  After another day or two in LA, I dropped Charlotte back at LAX. It was a few days before Christmas and I’d decided that although I dismissed the holidays as humbug, I certainly didn’t want to spend them alone. Ross and Jordana were out and about doing family things, however, and I found myself kicking around the house without them. My Christmas in LA was infinitely depressing: plastic snowmen and reindeer next to palms, sixty-two degrees, drizzly and overcast. Christmas is sort of a bigger deal in England and especially within my family. They were all stunned when I didn’t come home for the first time but had begrudgingly gotten used to it over the years. The phone was passed around to almost all of their fourteen guests, who all asked if I was having a lovely “Crimbo.”

  I told them all that I was having a great time.

  Ross found some time to have a semblance of a Christmas dinner with me at the International House of Pancakes on Sunset before continuing on with his errands. I’d resigned myself to the idea of spending the rest of the day moping around when I got a call from Jane Chung. I’d met Jane at a karaoke party in New York a few months earlier. We went on a date, a few drinks on the Lower East Side. We had a very nice time and kissed. Jane was eighteen and had no idea that I had spent the past three years as a sort of literary gigolo, which made our evening sort of sweet. It made me realize that I hadn’t had a date that wasn’t somehow spun off from my column in a long while. Jane was in Pasadena, back from NYU and visiting with her parents for the holidays. She needed to escape from a family that was too close to her, I needed a distraction from one that suddenly seemed too far away. I drove inland, picked her up, and we went to see a movie. It was something terrible and before too long we were down each other’s pants in the back row. After the movie Jane snuck me up to her bedroom adorned with posters, cheerleading paraphernalia, and other trappings of an archetypal Californian mall rat. Whispering, so as not to arouse the suspicions of her strict Korean parents, Jane told me that she was—somewhat regrettably—a virgin. It seemed that the karmic surplus I’d accrued over a sexless youth had come to bare in a solitary moment, though it was abundantly clear that the venue was not here, the time was not now. I contemplated taking her to Ross and Jordana’s, plotting ways in which we could keep from waking them or Dashiell up. I finally understood how difficult it must have been for my peers to have sex while still living with their parents. Ten years after the fact I had a sudden respect for the pluck, resourcefulness, and tenacity that must be a huge part of the teen sex experience.

  “You should come to
the ranch!” I said, not realizing the brilliance of the idea until the words actually tumbled out of my mouth.

  “Really?” she said.

  Really. An idyllic setting, total privacy, an element of danger, a sexually experienced older, European man; in a moment of unchecked narcissism, I actually began to covet the theoretically perfect experience I was going to give to this young colt. Not only would this be an excellent way to stave off the loneliness and put off doing any writing, but it would also be a chance to make up for the last botched opportunity I had to successfully stamp somebody’s V-card. Plus, Jane was incredibly cute, smart, and fun, and it seemed a good time was virtually assured.

  Jane began working out a series of lies to tell her parents in order to spend a long weekend away from home, and I picked her up under the guise of being her best friend’s adopted brother and drove her the three and a half hours north to the ranch. A moonlit sky, an open fire, a bottle of red wine, somebody I could truly care about. Over the past three years most of my sexual dalliances had been slapdash, tawdry, loveless, careless, or bizarre. But being alone with Jane in the middle of nowhere and doing it right helped to pry off the adopted persona I’d taken on with my job.

  We spent our time at the ranch canoodling, making extravagant meals, getting drunk, sleeping in, sunbathing on the ranch, sledding in Yosemite, but mostly talking about our passion for New York and our shared longing to return. In the morning we’d collect fresh eggs from across the ranch and pick rosemary from Jordana’s herb garden.

  I drove Jane back to Pasadena and put some last-minute voice-over material on the show at VH1 in Santa Monica. My MTV staff pass had expired, so Ross had to come and collect me from the front entrance. I’d realized by this point that Los Angeles is a fine town to be in if you happen to be busy or feel in some way useful. Not being allowed access to the building helped to reinforce that sentiment. After we’d shot the show, everyone involved with Granted was on to the next project, and aside from the occasional V.O. I was left kicking around until the execs in New York had decided what they were going to do with the show, where I was going to live, what I was going to do, who I was going to be, and so on.