Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

by Alissa Nutting

  It’s not until I get inside the suite and look around that I realize it’s the same residence where Garla and I first met. This makes my hands and feet sweat rapidly; the line is becoming a circle.

  As the night moves on, it’s like going back in time. When I enter, Garla gives me a soft embrace and kisses my cheek, but I want restitution. I quit my job and had the week from hell, and she isn’t going to reenter my life with one quick, pouty smile. Maybe I’m replaceable, but I don’t have to be happy about it.

  I take my old seat by the window and start rapidly boozing. The lights change colors in ways that suggest I’m going too fast, and that is the speed I want to go. It’s a rush, like skydiving. I keep giving Garla a scowl that says, “Hey, you. I’m not holding on. I’m in free fall.”

  She’s rubbing pieces of chocolate over her lips like ChapStick and men are helplessly pulled to her side of the room. Garla’s face is a centrifuge that separates the confident from the weak and the jealous, and I have been spun away.

  Stumbling to the bathroom, I get out my jeweled Garla-phone. Part of me wants to put it into the toilet, or at least try to see if it will fit through the hole in the bottom of the bowl. I want to throw up on it but it is so shiny that with its sparkling crystals and my drunken compound fly-eye vision, I have no aim. Instead the puke falls into the water and the phone falls on the ground, and when I’m finished and my cheek hits the floor the phone looks like a store of riches behind the plunger. I grab the phone and open it, kind of bumping it around, hoping it will call a friend who will come pick me up.

  But it’s Garla’s phone, so it calls Garla. I hang up but a few minutes later she’s standing over me in an Amazonian manner, one leg on either side of my body. “Put you in tiny coffin,” she says, rolling out some toilet paper and batting it against my wet cheek.

  “I wish you would.”

  She doesn’t appreciate my display of self-pity. I watch her toss her martini glass out the window onto the patio, where it breaks. “You go home and rest doctor-television.”

  After she leaves, a bodyguard enters and picks me up with a disgusted look, like he’s emptying a full bedpan. He helps me into the taxi. Motoring away, I watch the colored streaks of Garla on the patio upstairs.

  In a panic I check my purse to make sure I still have it: the Garla-phone, the jewel. The cursed treasure that brought distress alongside fortune. Glistening in my lap, it is too beautiful to be trusted. The cab nears my apartment, and I have the urge to leave the phone behind on the seat for someone else to find and answer. But I won’t. Instead I’ll go home and wait for her to call me and turn me into something special for however long she wants, and this time I won’t forget to be grateful.

  Porn Star

  I’m expected to have anal sex with the winning contestant on the moon. I work on an Adult Network reality show called Eat It, where male contestants eat all they can of a given substance in order to win some level of fornication with the program’s hostesses. Our show’s executives decided to do a space episode for the season finale to beat the competition in terms of filming in extreme, sensational locations.

  I found out that I got the space bid at a surprise luncheon in my honor. They gave me champagne and several helium-filled balloons with silver moons on the sides. I began to recall a documentary on the Discovery Channel about bathrooms on spaceships. Apparently the toilet sucks it in. It is like a pee-vacuum.

  “Space itself is one big vacuum,” said Dick, the show’s host. He handed me a cupcake decorated with a frosting rocket ship. Dick is responsible for overseeing the eating contests and judging the line between an acceptable gag and a disqualifying vomit.

  Throughout the party I smiled at the bad puns, the jokes about “reentry.” As I left, my coworker Priscilla told me how lucky I was.

  “Space is like . . . hot right now, you know? An exclusive club.”

  That night after a shower I stared down at my nipples and their bumpy, vaguely lunar surface. I checked the show’s online message boards to see what people were saying about my selection. Even though I’ve only been on the show for one season, I’m a hit with viewers.

  GoodEatFan from New Jersey wrote, Her breasts have a soft expanding look about them, like rising bread. Most of them talk about my trademark—my hair. It’s really brown and thick and long, and every contestant I’ve ever been assigned to, before we start doing anything, has always turned me around and pushed his member into my hair. It’s the first thing that happens, every time. Of course that won’t be possible on the moon.

  * * *

  Before I even meet the contestants, the show execs and I watch them get interviewed. We spy in on their conversation through a one-way mirror, giving the whole situation a police-sting kind of feel.

  The contestants I’ll be doing the show with are Guff, Leo, and Bill. Guff owns his own fertilizer company and is by far the largest of the bunch. His voice is crazy-deep. Dick can’t get over it.

  “If James Earl Jones yodeled into the universe’s vagina, Guff’s voice is the noise that would echo back.”

  Kevin in HR agrees. “His chest seems supported by some exterior plate that’s masked with hair.”

  A hidden camera—they’re everywhere—zooms in on Guff’s face. He is a mouth-breather. His teeth are a variety of sizes in all the wrong places, as if they’d once fallen out and he had to shove them back in a hurry with no regard to their original position. He looks naked without a log of wood beneath his arm, though this is the first time I’ve ever seen him, and he’s logless. I bet he likes waffles.

  Leo is physically much smaller than I am. What’s sad is, I can tell he thinks he really dressed up for the audition. His shirt is buttoned all the way up and the way his hair is wet-combed and parted reminds me of an antique ventriloquist’s dummy. The executives mumble that he doesn’t look healthy, and they’re right. Something’s off. When I glance at Leo, it’s like seeing a lemon the color of tooth enamel.

  Sheila, the only other female in the room, says, “It’s as if he lives in a median between our world and a planet of anemic man-lizards. He lives there in his car.” Sheila’s an exec, not a do-er, but she seems to constantly place herself in do-er shoes and ask, Who could ever touch him? She’s asking this question to everyone but me. I’m the answer, though, so I speak up.

  “I vote keep him. He won’t be any trouble. It’s more than we can say about Guff.”

  A consenting murmur makes its way around the table.

  Bill is Bill. Each episode they choose at least one contestant who could be misconstrued, on a good day, as not completely repulsive, and this episode it’s Bill. The fact that he knows this, that he’s receiving “hottie billing,” makes him so much more sleazy and disgusting than the others. He is in no way actually attractive. Instead of “for sure,” he keeps saying, “for surely.” The interviewer finally asks if Shirley is someone close to him. He roars. He acts as if he’s met his comical match and tries to give a high five, which the interviewer does not take him up on.

  * * *

  I meet the contestants in person on the first day of physical training. It’s being taped as bonus footage for the season’s DVD. We’re going to put on the space suits and walk around in an underwater tank.

  Guff, who apparently developed extraordinary lung capacity by playing the baritone through high school, is requesting he not have to wear the suit or receive oxygen.

  “I’ve got heavy boots,” he says. “I’ll just walk with you on the bottom.”

  “No showing off,” I tease. I’m supposed to tease. I’m wearing a surfer-style bodysuit that has breast-like gel inserts sewn into the chest pockets. My actual breasts are spilling out the top of the suit, creating the effect that they’re jewels of a much larger crown. Occasionally I remember that I’m the lone woman on the entire set and that everyone is staring at me, but it’s something that only comes back to me every twenty minutes or so, about five minutes after I recall that I’m completely stoned.


  “Your beauty is beautiful,” Guff says, then immediately realizes redundancy. Before he starts trying to dig himself out of that hole, I notice he’s eating a package of Lance Peanut Butter Crackers.

  “Are those things ever fresh?” I ask.

  He looks down at the package as though it will give him the answer. Neon-orange crumbs are furrowed in his beard like lice from another planet.

  “I just mean,” I say, “every time I see them in a vending machine, they look like they’ve been sitting there since the seventies. Maybe it’s the wrappers.”

  Guff’s chest starts heaving up and down, and I take a few steps back. It’s possible that Lance products from vending machines are the only thing he ever eats and that they are the source of his superhuman size and strength. Maybe before he found Lance products he was as thin as Leo. I suddenly worry that I just insulted his favorite thing in life. I think about how I would feel if someone came up to me and said, “What are Valium addicts thinking? Pills can never make you truly happy!”

  But instead he starts laughing, guttural undulations somewhere between the Green Giant and Santa. Leo walks over to the corner of the room, curling to it like it’s his mother. He whispers, “I love those crackers.”

  Guff likes this. It doesn’t take long before brains meet brawn and the two of them form a symbiotic relationship, like barnacle and whale. When they stand next to each other, I get the feeling that Leo recently broke out of Guff’s chest, that he started as a tapeworm but fought his way up the evolutionary ladder.

  Bill, of course, is too good to talk to anyone but me. I notice that his enormous gold watch doesn’t work.

  A medical crew puts us through a series of tests to check our vitals: treadmill running, push-ups, that sort of thing. Bill keeps checking out his own ass in the mirror. I watch him stare at my ass, then his ass, then mine, then his, as though they’re having a conversation with one another and only he can hear it.

  Leo has taken this occasion as an opportunity to quit smoking, which is laudable, except the combination of physical exertion and nicotine patches is making him ill. When it’s his turn for the treadmill, he runs over and his shirt is soaked from warm-ups. He peels it off and there are already four patches over his chest, sitting almost exactly where the doctor intends to put the electrodes.

  “Are those patches supposed to be placed directly over the heart?” I ask. A former contestant I had to sleep with wore a patch once. When he said to me, Baby, watch the patch, eh?, I first stared with confusion at his small, triangular goatee. But then he lifted his sleeve and displayed the patch with great pride, the way a fifth grader might show off a temporary tattoo of a cobra. Apparently it hurts if the patches get bumped, which he used as an excuse to not flex his arms for me. As if I’d been looking forward to that.

  We wait until Leo is done throwing up and then go get into our suits. Once inside, Leo’s arms, which previously looked like blanched string beans, now appear to be relatively the same size as Bill’s. This boosts his confidence.

  Guff and Leo solidify their union underwater. Instead of using the reach-claw we’ve been provided with, Guff places Leo on his shoulders and operates him like an extended limb. Bill keeps dropping his claw and cursing into his headset microphone. He is unable to complete his “mission” of using the claw to tighten a loose bolt.

  I take a moment and enjoy the secluded world we’ve entered, in addition to my new role as an asexual giant. It’s fun to be individually wrapped and surrounded by water on all sides. Just when I’m starting to feel like one of the guys, Bill lumbers over.

  “Wanna see my electric eel?”

  He places his fishbowl head against mine, and we clink like crystal glasses toasting.

  * * *

  At lunch Guff, like some steroidal Oliver Twist from the lumber-and-fur orphanage, devours all the complimentary sandwiches and then asks for more. Leo ended up having to eat activated charcoal. When we were coming up from the water he puked in his suit, specifically inside his face helmet. It covered the entire lens and made it impossible to tell whether he’d gotten sick or his head had exploded. Bill claimed to have lost his appetite over this incident, but after desuiting I saw him help himself to a shrimp cocktail.

  The rest of the day it’s just Guff, Bill, and me. Leo has taken the afternoon off to recover. Guff keeps giving Bill this odd look out the corner of his eye, like he knows Bill is hiding a cookie in one of his pockets—he just can’t figure out which one.

  There’s little discussion about what I’m going up to the moon to do. I wonder what their advertising spin is going to be; if they’re planning on billing me as space’s first whore. I try not to let those types of words bother me. At least I’m not giving people root canals. At least I’m not putting makeup on the dead.

  As the day ends, the show’s executives give us a sneak peak at our real suits. By us, I mean whoever wins and myself. Each suit has a small portal; mine’s in the back and his is in the front. The man who’s explaining it to us connects the portals to one another, like marching elephants clinging trunks to tails. Once they’re aligned, they open, pressurize, and retract to an acceptable length. This way he can enter me. On the moon.

  Because I’ll be in a suit and will look like a hulking male physicist from behind, they’ve outfitted the back of my helmet with a monitor. It’ll show footage of me, doing what we’ll be doing, only un-space-suited.

  “Any questions?” the scientist asks.

  Bill has one. “Can you like, kneel down and stuff?”

  I imagine Bill’s panting coming through my headset in stereo. It’s going to sound like he’s in boot camp fulfilling a midday order to dig a ten-foot latrine. The secret to having sex with people who make disgusting sounds is to out-moan them. It gets them there quicker, too, which is half the battle.

  * * *

  A few days before the launch, the contestants are brought in to sample the eat-off product, which was partially designed by NASA. We can’t use any foods that could break off and create airborne crumbs, so the execs chose a type of hybrid sausage. It’s a gelatinous, partial-meat substance that won’t flake or fragment.

  “Could we make this peanut butterier?” Guff’s vote for a flavor infusion is denied.

  “It doesn’t smell like anything,” says Leo. This is true, but Leo says this carefully, as if he knows they’re about to tell him, It smells delicious.

  “Actually,” says one scientist, “it should smell like plastic.”

  Leo sniffs again. He nods.

  Bill is holding a coil of sausage in two fingers, like it’s the world’s longest cigar.

  “Uh,” says Bill.

  This should be good.

  “I mean, do we have to eat something that looks so much like a you-know-what? Once in a while people even say the word ‘sausage’ instead of saying you-know-what.”

  “It’s just food,” I tell him. “It’s just meat.”

  “Well,” says the scientist, “it’s not just meat.” He lists off several ingredients not found in either sausages or you-know-whats.

  We’re told the eat-off contest will take place when the ship is hovering over the moon. The winning contestant and I will then travel in a small capsule to the lunar surface to perform the sex act. The way the executive describes it sounds oddly like a honeymoon, a man and wife being escorted off to more private quarters post-ceremony.

  * * *

  Blastoff is hard. There’s a moment when my mind tells me that we’ve blown up, and it takes a few more seconds to realize that we haven’t. It feels like gravity wants to separate my skeleton from my flesh.

  Then everything stops. The cabin is instantly too still. When I look at my reflection in a chrome panel, the expression on my face seems a thousand years old.

  Bill mutters something about being a space cowboy. I’m staring at Dick, the only one here I really know. He’s looking out the window, and he seems horrified. Instead of coming with me and the contestants to train before
the launch, he opted to prepare using his own regimen of hypnosis and magnet therapy.

  “Dick, are you okay?” My voice sounds weird. I decide I should just have a space persona, different even from my porn persona, and that way I can quit feeling so uncomfortable about nothing being the same. I secretly rename myself Zero G and bat my eyelashes at the lack of gravity.

  But Dick is not okay.

  He’s a big tanning bed fan, which perhaps explains his sudden preoccupation with the sun.

  “Where is the sun?” He keeps screaming this. It’s making Leo unsettled. Guff is looking for the sun inside the cabin.

  Bill is trying to recite a list of one-liners from memory and keeps having to look down at the cheat sheet in his hand. Most of the hottie-billing contestants try to memorize jokes before taping. But once the camera starts rolling, they never remember them. Never.

  * * *

  The medical adviser/cameraman tranquilizes Dick and straps him into a cocoon-bed on the wall. It looks as though some giant spider caught him and hung him there. I keep watching the cargo door for a human-sized space arachnid to enter and devour him whole. I rub Dick’s arm a little bit and drool comes out of his mouth. It’s decided that I’ll host the show on my own.

  We take about an hour or so to tumble through the air and get used to weightlessness. Quarters are tight and Bill keeps reaching out to tickle my feet. I can feel my stomach and my crotch in the same place; there is no middle. Just my head and then everything else.

  “I really don’t feel like eating,” Leo says as they give him his food-coil. After several debates, the execs decided to wrap it in yet another layer of edible protective casing. If the coil were actually dropped onto the ground on Earth, it would probably bounce.

  Bill points to my chest for the camera. “I’ve got all the inspiration I need right there,” he says. I want to remind Bill that even if he wins, he won’t be seeing or touching my breasts at any point in time. But I don’t. I get out my stopwatch for the eat-off. Guff has already opened his mouth wide in a head start.