Working Stiff (22 page)

It was true. Sometime after the VH1 debacle, Ross had pitched the idea of a travelogue-style show that I would host—coincidentally—to VH1. The network had bitten and wanted to set up a meeting with me immediately. Ross—who flew in from California—his production partner, Corin, and two VH1 execs met at a hotel bar, got drunk, and talked about what the show would be.

The show was built around the following premise: Charming if slightly clueless British guy goes from coast to coast taking part in Americana that the rest of the world might find strange. A drunken, cursory brainstorming of possible segments included participating at
the Lumberjack Games, becoming a rodeo clown, attending the Montana Testicle Festival, alligator wrestling, having dinner with members of the Flat Earth Society. It would be equal parts
Jackass
, Hugh Grant, and Alistair Cooke and a vastly preferable concept to dressing up in a gimp suit or inserting things into my rectum for yuks. Everyone professed to being “very excited,” though I soon learned that in TV talk, one must vocalize their extreme excitement at all times. The show would be called
Granted
, the tag: “‘Bloody bloke' Grant Stoddard looks at the America we take for granted.” It seemed too good to be true, an eponymous TV vehicle in which I got to have adventures, be myself, and make a good chunk of change in the process.

Ross, Corin, and I then flew to a TV conference in New Orleans the next day, prompting VH1 to play their hand, and within a very short-seeming period of time, they had green-lit a pilot shooting over four days in LA in October.

I summarized the concept to my now red-faced boss.

“Let me get this straight,” said Rufus. “So you try new things as an outsider and reflect upon the experience?”

“Well, in the very broadest sense, yes, that's right.”

“It sounds suspiciously like the concept of your column, which, as you're no doubt aware, Nerve has the rights to.”

Ross had mentioned that Rufus would be seeking “value” for Nerve as soon as he got word that we were working on something. A cornerstone of his business plan was to acquire a taste for anything vaguely related to the company he'd begun in a bedroom and then skillfully steered through the dot-com bust and into profitability. A current and slighted ex-employee working on a project that could be misconstrued to be a spin-off of Nerve's intellectual property was understandably hard for him to swallow.

“Rufus, I can assure you that it has nothing to do with the column or Nerve or anything.”

I meant it. He shook his head dismissively.

“Well, to be honest, Grant, I'm disappointed,” he said with a melancholy smile.

We shook hands; I returned upstairs to my desk and accidentally locked eyes with Alisa. Her eyes were red from crying. She narrowed them and shook her head at me.

I ran to the bathroom and threw up again.

That evening Nerve editor in chief Michael Martin summoned me to have dinner with him at a bar on East 5th Street. He had two large Jack and Cokes and told me that my presence was no longer required in the office but that he persuaded Rufus to allow me to continue contributing my column, which had become a fan favorite under Michael's watch.

“Rufus is hardly gnashing his teeth with glee at the arrangement, but I convinced him that it made sense,” he said. “You need to come by and clear your desk tomorrow.”

Though I'd always envied people who wrote from home on their own schedule, I was sorry that my transition to a freelancer was less than smooth or deliberate.

I came by the office around lunchtime, when I was fairly certain that Rufus and Alisa would be finding value for Nerve over some oysters at Balthazar. This was the first time in my life I'd been told to clear my desk. I found two cardboard boxes and filled them with most of the following items:

1. Penis-extender weight kit with instructional video
   
2. Liberator Shapes, foam sex platforms
   
3. Peppermint-flavor “ass-tringent”
   
4. Enzyte male enhancement pills
   
5. Condomania assortment pack
   
6. Passport
   
7. Viagra sample pack
   
8. Immigration paperwork
   
9. TongueJoy, tongue-mounted vibrator and attachments
   
10. New Sex
    , guide to female ejaculation DVD
    
11. Aneros prostate massager
    
12. No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Proven Plan for Getting What You Want in Love, Sex and Life
    , hardcover
    
13. CB2000 male chastity harness
    
14. 2001 and 2002 tax documents
    
15. Thirty-nine condoms from online herpes dating community (HDate.com)
    
16. American Bukkake 12
    , DVD
    
17. Credit card application forms
    
18. Knee Pad Nymphos #2
    , DVD
    
19. One gram of low-grade cocaine
    
20. Self-hypnosis cassette and instructional booklet
    
21. Assorted jelly cock rings
    
22. First Impressions dating consultants' questionnaire
    
23. Payment-past-due notices from immigration attorney James O'Malley and Associates
    
24. How to Succeed with Women
    , paperback
    
25. Seven issues of
    Adult Video News
    
26. The Accommodator, chin-mounted latex dong
    
27. Sweet Release semen-flavoring supplement (crisp apple)
    
28. Tend Skin, ingrown hair/razor bump formula
    
29. International money-wire transfer application forms
    
30. Kama Sutra–brand assorted flavor massage oils
    
31. Kama Sutra–brand “honey dust”
    
32. Edible underwear (women's)
    
33. Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm
    , hardcover
    
34. Vigel topical female sex-enhancing cream
    
35. Make Your Own Dildo molding kit
    

Brian helped me down to the street and put me and my sleazy paraphernalia in a cab.

“Hey, I'm going to Laure and Louise's apartment tonight,” he said over the din of a passing fire truck's siren. “You should come, it'll cheer you up.” It sounded like Brian needed me to play wingman again and I wasn't in the mood.

“No, it's okay,” I said, “I still haven't recovered from the other night.”

The next day, Brian called to tell me that I had remotely cock-blocked him. Apparently, he had arrived at their loft to find both girls dressed to the nines and a miffed Louise asking why
he
had turned up and
I
hadn't. The three of them drank wine on the fire escape until Laure took Brian by the hand and led him into her bedroom. Things were beginning to escalate when Louise, in hysterical tears, began thumping on the door, exclaiming,
“Laure, tu est une put!”
before collapsing into a sobbing heap on the floor, putting an understandable dampener on the evening. Brian was shown the door. Being more confident and easygoing, Laure's attentions had been courted more ferociously over the summer and Louise was seemingly at a breaking point. A similar dynamic existed between Brian and myself.

“So next time, if she hasn't already written you off as a complete faggot, you
have
to come with me, okay?”

And so began a short series of double dates during which I did little to prove that I wasn't a
pede
.

Even though she was merely a teen, Louise intimidated me greatly, what with her Galois and ennui. To her annoyance I had not yet tried to kiss her, though I very much wanted to.

“Why do you not smoke, little Grant?” she said over sake at Decibel. “Are you afraid, afraid you will get sick, that you will catch the…cancer?”

“Well, that's one reason, yeah,” I said.

“Well, I 'ave news for you, little Grant.” She blew a huge plume of smoke into my face. “We are all going to die.”

For all of her world-weary Parisian posturing, Louise would privately tell me that she loved my English accent when I spoke my smattering of remedial French. She said it drove her “mad completely.”

Louise complained to Laure, who complained to Brian, who complained to me that no one was getting what they wanted and it was all my fault.

“Just fucking lay one on her, you pussy,” said Brian.

Louise was so French and young and stylish and cute that I had a hard time believing that she'd be into playing tonsil hockey with the
likes of me. Brian was putting a lot more effort into trying to pair us up than I was.

“He has got a TV show, y'know,” he said to Louise as we picnicked on top of their roof. She looked at me in disbelief, shrugged, and looked back up at the stars and enjoyed a huge drag off her cigarette. The three of them had all but lost their patience with me.

The levee finally broke when we asked the girls to a Cake party that we'd been invited to through Nerve. Cake parties were occasions where a predominately hot and female crowd all got into their skivvies or less and fooled around on the bar. Brian and I had been friends with its founders since we lap-danced for three hundred handsy women at a Cake party for an “I Did It for Science” installment.

Among the gyrating naked bodies, the hard-core porn playing on a big-screen TV, and with me dressed only in my underoos, I finally plucked up the courage to make out with Louise and wrapped her tight young body up in my arms. I didn't even mind the cigarette taste on her tongue, something I'm usually extremely squeamish of. In fact, I quite enjoyed it.

“Thank fucking Christ!” I could hear Brian scream over the music.

After one more drink, we found our clothes and made our way outside. Brian optimistically hailed two cabs and gave me a wink.

“I think I am going to hang out with Grant,” said Louise.

“Ah! Qui est la put, Louise?”
said Laure. She cocked an eyebrow and folded her arms in callous satisfaction.

Without a word, Louise kissed me on the cheek and dutifully got into the cab with Laure, who was still smug with her perfectly timed retort, and drove away.

“What the fuck happened there?” asked Brian.

It soon became clear that the girls were waging a war of attrition against each other and that thanks in part to my prolonged hesitation, we were in the cross fire. We went on two more double dates before Brian lost interest and stopped calling Laure. When she wasn't not putting out, Laure had gotten existential with Brian about their stilted dating.

“Really, Brian, you live 'ere in New York, my 'ome is in Paris. We are some friendly…'ow you say…strangers? You want to make love wiv me but really”—Laure took a long drag on her cigarette and exhaled—“what eez the point?”

This coincided with Brian lining up a sure thing elsewhere who wasn't such a total pain in the ass. Conversely, I redoubled my efforts to fool around with Louise. I felt that after the drinks, the dinners, the repeatedly being called a faggot, I needed to close the deal: I wanted to get some value.

The girls were leaving for Paris in a week. Over our next three dates, I took Louise to bars in concentric circles around my apartment, but before the end of the night Laure would suddenly materialize, despite neither of the girls having a cell phone and me keeping our various destinations shrouded in secrecy. On their penultimate night in town, Laure actually arrived as Louise stood on my stoop deliberating on whether to risk spending the night.

“Tomorrow is our last night, little Grant,” she said as Laure herded her into a waiting cab. “Maybe I will stay at your 'ome.”

The Bordeaux company was throwing the summer interns a good-bye party in the basement of Puck Fair, an Irish pub on Lafayette and Houston. For someone who was now effectively jobless, I had already spent hundreds of dollars on entertaining Louise and her contrary chaperone, so I arrived three hours after the party started, at around eleven thirty.

“Little Grant!” yelled Louise from across the room. Even though her teeth were stained gray from the wine, she looked cuter than ever. “I am so glad that you came 'ere!”

Previously, we had only kissed at the end of our dates, but Louise grabbed my face with both hands and darted her boozy, ashy tongue into my mouth. Laure was furiously making out with an orange-haired though not terribly unattractive Dubliner in the corner, which bode well for me finally wrapping up this stop-start summer fling.

“What do you want to drink?” I asked as she eagerly stroked my leg.

“I will 'ave a apple martini,” said Laure, who had briefly pulled her tongue out of ginger nut's mouth.

“Ahh, me also!” said the intended recipient of the offer.

The design of the martini glass is the stuff of nightmares for me. Delivering two filled-to-the-brim martini glasses across a rowdy Irish bar filled me with trepidation. One needs the steady hand of a gunslinger to get them safely to the table without incident. An attribute I apparently do not possess.

“'N' just what da feck d'ya tink ure doon, noi?” said a fat woman with an underbite and an almost indecipherable Belfast accent. While hoisting the drinks over the Ulster bruiser's frame, I'd received a knock and spilt a little from each glass onto her ill-fitting tank top and my ice-blue dress shirt.

“I'm really sorry,” I said.

“Well, sorry in't gonna dry off me feckin' tits noi, is it, ya wee bender.”

Louise was waving me over from across the bar. It had taken ten minutes to get the drinks, and it looked like I was about to be beaten by this flabby and angry creature.

“Well, okay, the next one's on me,” I said and told the barkeep to put the next one on my tab.

“Dat's a bit more feckin' like it, short-arse.”

A round of shots arrived at the table followed by another and another. Though she'd had a three-hour head start on me, I seemed to be a lot worse for wear than Louise, who was slurring in neither French nor English.

After several drinks and hours watching Laure molest the poor plumber's apprentice, Louise looked at me and squeezed my hand.

“Grant, tonight I fink it is time that I will sleep at your 'ouse.”

It was three a.m.