Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

by Alissa Nutting

  “Ready . . . get set . . . go!”

  The first thirty seconds of the race are always the best, showcasing an initial rush of adrenaline. For a moment, it seems like anyone’s game. Guff starts too quickly, devouring the first two feet of sausage for a huge lead before coming to a standstill.

  Bill is hurting; it’s clear. I know a lot about the gag reflex. Throats are usually one-way lanes, up or down, and it’s my professional opinion that Bill’s throat is about to switch to rising motion.

  Leo, skinny dark-horse candidate Leo, is surprising us all. He’s eating in snakelike motions, slithering his coil down like it’s one of his own organs that he coughed up on accident—there’s a place for it, and he knows where it goes, and he’s putting it there.

  In the last thirty seconds, Bill has to quit and strap on his sick bag. It Velcros to his face like a giant gray shoe. I watch with pleasure as his abdominal contortions propel him around the cabin.

  Guff slows to near-stillness like a gargantuan spent windup toy. Leo finishes ten seconds before the deadline. We declare him the winner, and as he and I get strapped into the craft that will take us down to the moon’s surface, he keeps saying, “I’ve never won anything before.”

  * * *

  As we step out I feel like there’s a tree growing inside my ribs whose leaves weigh fifty pounds each. They keep falling off and floating down to my knees with a heavy thickness.

  I’m watching Leo attempt a bouncing sort of walk when the intercom on my helmet beeps. “We’re ready.” It’s one of the show’s executives on Earth; I can’t remember his name but he always wears funny ties. Funny in a bad way. Tiny cans of beer with angel wings.

  Something about hearing his voice amidst all the nothingness makes me realize I’m being watched. It’s a sensation that oddly has never occurred before in the past during any close-up, or even times when I had to squat over a toilet bowl that wasn’t a bowl at all but a giant camera. I feel my fake-smile muscles involuntarily flex.

  Leo gets behind me, and I give him an encouraging low-gravity pat on the arm. It takes a few moments for our suits’ portals to align. When they open, it sounds like something very important is leaking out. The noise is high-pitched and quick, like wind from the future.

  “Um . . . just a second,” says Leo.

  I tell him, “No rush; there isn’t a time limit,” although we’re breathing tanked oxygen and there certainly is. When he finally enters me, I’m staring at Earth, which looks like the circular door of some ancient tomb, like if we could just reach out and slide it aside, we’d see the answer to something very important.

  There’s a hiccup of static and I can hear the execs talking: Why does this look so educational? and Should’ve gone with the body bubble. I moan their voices out.

  “Er . . . just a sec,” Leo says again.

  “Take your time,” I say, but I break from my sex-voice to say it. “Keep it hot,” the intercom reminds me.

  I feel fine but also very strange, looking at the world and its distance. I feel its weight in my stomach like a pregnancy, like an old meal. When I want to, I cover up the Earth and its oceans with my hand, and even with the cameras it seems like no one can see me.

  Zookeeper

  I took a baby panda home from the zoo. Technically, I was not supposed to. I decided to keep my job there, at least for a while, to avoid looking suspicious.

  Dolores from reptiles almost got me.

  “Aren’t those panda droppings?” she asked, pointing to my hair.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I put on a helmet. The panda and I were still working through bathroom and sleeping arrangements.

  I named her Lulu. Pandas really like bamboo. That’s not a myth.

  At the time I was living in a room of the Sleep-Eeze Inn. All my local calls were free, as was my cable. I put up a DO NOT DISTURB! sign but worried it might fall off, so I taped several others like it to the actual door.

  One night I came home from work with some chicken tenders. I figured the two of us could share them. I did not bring enough for all the policemen who were outside my door.

  I pretended to be part of the crowd. I pinched a mother of five on her elbow.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  She covered the ears of her youngest. “They thought someone was making a pornographic film in that room. There were all these signs up and people heard growling and scratching.”

  I saw them carrying out Lulu. She looked at me with her giant panda eyes.

  “Mother,” she yelled.

  I didn’t know that pandas could talk. It might have been an accident.

  While the cops questioned me, Lulu and I tidied up what was left of the continental breakfast in the lounge. I stuck Froot Loops on the tips of her canine teeth. She seemed to be smiling.

  I went to jail. Lulu went to the zoo.

  There’s a website, freelulu.com, that has a photo of both of us standing behind our respective bars.

  Each month I write the zoo a letter, in cursive, asking them to send me a lock of her hair. They will not. People ask why I did it, which is hard to explain. I usually tell them, “She was soft.”

  Bandleader’s Girlfriend

  “You are embarrassing yourself on a national level,” Sister yells into the phone. “What about Dead Mom?”

  Dead Mom is not a mellow subject. I look over at my dearest lover, CT, who is lying on the couch rubbing slices of ripe grapefruit across his chest. He’s watching a television program about sexual behavior in dolphins.

  “Such liquid-rubber bodies,” he whispers. CT is the lead singer for Wolf Rainbow. They are a total hit but CT doesn’t measure success in terms of money; true success lies in Worm Vibrations, or wormbrations.

  “CT” stands for “Coppertone.” He is into the rays of the sun.

  Sister clears her throat. Talking with her makes me feel a little cosmically disturbed. I try to remind myself that she has invested a lot of time in me, that it became quite a habit for her, a passion, even, and I think it is important for people to follow their passion. Unless, like Sister’s, they hinder another’s enlightenment. Namely mine.

  My enlightenment is sparkling pink water and Sister is a levee, but CT allows me to rise up and overwhelm her walls. Sister has never before experienced the unrestricted passion of one as enlightened to the Worm as CT is. She has no idea what to do with such emotion.

  A good example of this occurred when I took CT home for Thanksgiving and Sis extended her hand to him.

  “Mother of my love-cub, I greet you,” he said, and softly licked her face. After this display of vulnerability Sis’s vibes were very tight and secluded. The corners of her mouth tucked themselves in firmly like hotel bedsheets.

  CT and I prefer to sleep outdoors but sometimes we’re forced to stay in really nice hotels. It’s all Management. If it were up to CT we’d just find a field close to our next venue and sleep there, but Management makes some good points: privacy, etc. CT’s nightly rituals, which are not exclusionary of nudity and spiritual vision accelerators for communication with the Worm Eternal, can be wrongly interpreted by people like the authorities.

  Grog, Wolf Rainbow’s bassist, uses humor to mask his negative thinking when he agrees with Management about hotels. He says things like “How can I round up babes for bonefests and take them to the middle of a cornfield? The hottest babes with the biggest milkbags will not go for this. They want open bars and heart-shaped beds. Such are the desires of those with giant milkbags.” Then he’ll pause, adding, “I can’t believe you sleep in the buff where it is wild and shit. What if a snake bit your johnson?”

  Now Sister gives a loud gasp. She always talks so quickly that what she says seems urgent and true. It is some kind of trick. “You’re on nearly every television station right now! I called because I need to talk to you about something serious, and now there’s this drama. Do you ever stop to think about how your actions affect others? I mean what if deceased loved ones get one day to
peek down to Earth from Heaven and Tuesday was the one day Mom had for all eternity to check up on us and our lives? When she opened the clouds she would’ve been greeted with your . . . your spectacle.” Sister begins crying.

  I know from experience that her tears aren’t clear; they’re a strange gray color like weird steam. I always figured they were mixing with her gothish makeup until I realized she doesn’t wear any. Her face is just kind of gray, too, because she never goes outside; she fears nature like it’s a rapist or murderer, even though, as I tell her all the time, it’s so the opposite—nature is what’s getting raped and murdered! But despite not having sun damage she got wrinkles before her time from watching constant news television and subconsciously reproducing the expressions of worry-stricken anchors.

  Sister likes to pull back the curtains of her windows, then stare out of them and look up at the sky suspiciously.

  “What did you want to talk about?” I ask. “Do you need some money?” Of late, Sister has been plagued with a variety of fiscal obligations. “Listen, Sis, I do understand what you’re saying.” I peek behind my shoulder and watch CT—naked, gentle CT, pink grapefruit juices dripping down his body like cartoon sweat—pretend to plug the blowhole of the dolphin on television with a slice of his grapefruit. His giggles are like heartbeats: steady and seconds apart. “But you just have to realize that we’re on different planes of existence. I’m not saying I’m better than you, just that my path is way more open with lots more colors.”

  Sister’s weeping intensifies. “What the hell are you talking about?” she asks. “You’re speaking the drug-talk. I want Claudia back.”

  If the spasm that afflicts my back and spine at the mention of the name “Claudia” could make a sound, a single note, it would be unharmonious beyond this dimension. Such a wonky note that no one would even be able to hear it, because evolution’s design protects us. It’s one of those things; the sound is made but does anyone hear it? Was it made? I speak but Sister does not hear me. Do I speak?

  “Uuuuuuuhhhhhhhhmmnnnngg.” CT lets out a guttural moan to begin his A.M. bowel gyrations. His torso bounces up and down while his hips move like he’s using an invisible Hula-Hoop.

  His is a Hula-Hoop made of enchantment. It’s built of understanding, spiritual experience, and opium ether, in addition to a variety of invisible delights. Most of our senses are completely inadequate and not to be trusted; our true feelings come from our wormholes, often described as “the heart in our stomach between our legs.”

  “Think about it,” CT likes to say, “the organ that the wormless refer to as ‘heart’ is like, entirely muscle. A bodybuilder. A worker bee. Do bees have muscles?”

  Sister does not affect my wormhole, but her disapproval makes my pulse quite irregular.

  “Sister,” I say firmly, “Claudia is dead.”

  Sis wails. I feel like I am some sort of hostage negotiator, except Sister is both the hostage and the captor. “We’ve been over this. My name is Aura Solara Sorcerella. It’s official; I have stationery. Our bathrooms are filled with ASS embroidered towels. You used them to wipe the perspiration from your forehead the last and only time you visited our tree house. Please don’t backpedal. You’ve chosen to remain in my journey, thus my life.”

  “Jesus, Claudia. The court fines I paid when you lived with me during high school. That guy who set your car on fire in our driveway. After everything we’ve been through, some rock ’n’ roll weirdo can just roll up and brainwash you?”

  Sister is not receptive to meditative breathing exercises so I decide to suggest something a little more hands-on for her anxiety. “Sister, if I send you some special brownies, will you eat them?”

  CT passes by with the walking stick and gives me the thumbs-up, meaning he’s embarking on a defecation stroll. I wave goodbye. Perhaps sensing my tension, he jiggles his dingy slightly.

  “Sweet earth for my loveworm,” he shouts, “I shall return.” Several flies are enjoying the streaks of grapefruit juice that ran down his chest and pooled in his groin and thighs. As he walks past me there is a loud unified buzzing; it is so cosmic, all those individual flies but just one buzz. It strikes me that it’s like my feelings for Sister—all the different harsh emotions could come out in one unified primal scream. I emit this into the receiver once CT has ventured far enough on his defecation stroll that he will not hear me and fear danger has struck my physical person. CT and I do not like to use toilets—we only do this when we have to, like in super-posh hotels and backstage on television programs and concert tours. Sometimes the super-posh hotels have double toilets and then he and I sit on them together, stare at each other, and try to predetermine when the other will flush, thereby flushing at the same time without ever looking away from one another’s eyes or communicating a will to do so. We have gotten very, drastically close to simultaneously flushing on more than one occasion. I’m pretty sure complete synchronicity is nigh the next time we are at the Plaza.

  “You just blew my ear out. I’m hanging up.”

  Sister does not understand that her ears are already worthless. Their spiritual defects predated my scream by decades.

  “Sis, if I want to ingest the most powerful hallucinogen the Worm Eternal has provided to earthlings and copulate with my soul mate beneath the desert stars, that is my business and my right.”

  “The balcony of your Vegas hotel suite is not the desert! Do you know how many photos there are of you plastered everywhere, how many videos? How is continuous sex for that long even possible? The police had to break into your room.”

  The psychoactive vital worm-fluid allows for radical love-energy. Management was charged for the cost of the door. “Sister, no harm, no foul.”

  “No HARM? You look like sex freaks to the entire world! You should see the faces you’re making! Two attractive people should have better orgasm faces. You look carsick and blinded by headlights.”

  “It’s not about how we look to other humans, Sis. Third eye. There’s more to see than you think.”

  “Ugh, it’s on the TV right now.” There’s a long silence; I can almost hear her eyes squinting. “What the hell is that, a tattoo?”

  I decline to answer, as Sister wouldn’t understand. I recently had a bottle of wine tattooed on my mons.

  “CT and I got married,” I offer.

  Sister hangs up, then calls back and hangs up again, then finally calls back and is able to sort-of speak through the wheezing.

  “Married to that creep,” she sputters, “to that pervert hustler? Did you know he hit on me at Thanksgiving? I was putting the cranberry sauce into Tupperware when I felt a stiffness on my leg and turned around. He was down on the floor like a crab rubbing his . . . his . . . extension near my ankles. His pants were made of some weird sheer material. I could feel everything.”

  “He is a wonderful lover, Sis.”

  “I can’t do this right now,” she says, and then hangs up.

  I stay on the phone and let the open dial tone be a sort of beacon-call, a homing signal for CT to return, bowels empty, groin hungry.

  I should mention that Sister is also my mother, somewhat. When Mom died, Sister was nineteen and I was four. As a teenager I used to love calling Sister “Smother.” She was overbearing, and it was a perfect combination of “sister” and “mother.”

  * * *

  “Sustainable,” replies CT, “so bitching.” We’ve come to see Gustav, a fashion designer whose mansion is built into the side of a cave. One room of his house is actually filled with bats; when I grabbed an infrared flashlight sitting by the door and shined it up to the ceiling, there were tons of bats instead of popcorn paint. The room has no furniture due to “Ze guano, yeesh!, ze guano,” but there is a mounted television on the wall that plays looped footage of a buxom young woman feeding a loaf of French bread to a Dalmatian dog over and over again.

  We came to Gustav to get fitted for full-body leather suits. “Ju can wear zees forever,” he says, “drink en zem, sex e
n zem, die en zem.” They have zippers and ties all over the place so they can stay on during a variety of activities, like going to the bathroom or getting an immunization shot in the upper arm.

  CT raises his glass of wine up to the ceiling, an enthusiastic salute. The wine is red and has ten to fifteen drops of bat blood in each bottle; it’s from the designer’s own vineyard with blood from his own bats.

  Then CT covers his mouth with the glass and sucks in with his cheeks so the glass stays magically attached to his face as a sort of bulb-nose. He looks at the ground and puts his arms out in a crucifixion pose, then begins moving his arms and skipping around the room. He resembles a postapocalyptic hummingbird who has to fly around with its own personal glass vase of nectar attached to its face since all the flowers are dead.

  Gustav disappears for a minute and then returns holding three pairs of night-vision goggles. “Let us go inside ze bat cave,” he suggests. He is no longer wearing a shirt.

  The goggles make everything green and give us all emerald eyes, the bats and CT and the designer. Several battery-operated floor cleaners roam around the cave’s paved cement and eat the guano. They remind me of stingrays or giant moving sand dollars, very flat and white.

  Gustav kneels down onto the floor and begins untying CT’s new leather suit fly. I look away. “It kind of feels like we’re underwater,” I say, “an underwater cave.” But in the cave, as in water, my voice does not seem able to travel.

  For a moment there is a sting of panic in my stomach; my mellowness is suddenly a balloon full of water being poked with a stick. It could burst open or just spring a leak or perhaps not puncture at all. The free love of the Worm Eternal instructs us to love our fellow worms in communal polyamory.

  But sometimes I fail the Worm and grow jealous.

  CT hands me a bottle of bat blood wine. “My cherished one, please pour this on top of Gustav and me, pour it slowly so that he and I shall be like a primordial fountain flooded with the sacred blood of cursed statues, unholy stones.”