Working Stiff (23 page)

I quickly collected my credit card to find that the chubby bruiser and her mates had two rounds at my expense, bringing my tab to over $140.

“Oi! I said
one
drink!” I yelled at the barkeep.

“Sarry, pal, but dats not what you tol' me, so pay up and piss ahf.”

Louise was excitedly tugging at my hand, so I reluctantly signed the receipt, gave him a lousy tip, and wrote
Wanker!
at the bottom.

Hand in hand, we walked back to my place on 14th and C. I was out of cash until I got my final Nerve paycheck on the first of the month and couldn't afford a taxi.

“My feet 'urt,” complained Louise, who was now wildly wobbling in her heels.

“Nearly there,” I lied. We were still a mile away. It was one of those nights when the temperature had seemed to actually increase with the setting sun. The metal shutters, the pavement, the sidewalk were all radiating the day's heat back at us. The smell of hot garbage seemed to stick to one's hair, clothes, and skin. I was conscious of the patches under my arms. Louise just looked dewy and fresh.

As we walked up the stairs in the flickering fluorescent light of my building, I realized just how drunk I'd become. Since meeting Louise to now, I'd drunk more than I had in the previous six months, and I suddenly seemed to be feeling the cumulative effect of all that booze. As I struggled to put the key in my front door, I realized that I was definitely too drunk to perform.

We entered my place and were hit in the face by the smell of cooking bacon. The apartment is above Jack's Deli, which exists to cater to the hard-hatted workers from the power plant. They begin frying up at around a quarter to four. I usually relish the strong aroma, but it generally isn't conducive to seduction. I turned on both of the huge air conditioners I'd been gifted.

“It'll be cool in here in a minute,” I promised. As Louise looked through my book collection and the posters that hung on my walls, I caught sight of the boxes of Nerve flotsam that I'd taken from my desk. Since meeting Louise, I had played down the fact that I was a sex columnist, an illusion that would be instantly shattered if she caught sight of two giant boxes full of dildos and condoms with the word “herpes” written on them.

“May I 'ave a drink of water?” she said as I casually kicked them under the bed.

“Yeah, in the fridge,” I called from my bedroom.

“Ah, Grant, you 'ave a bottle of pinot grigio 'ere. May we open it?”

“Mais oui, we may!” I said. No reaction. As a reflection of how drunk I'd become I considered that fucking brilliant.

Though I did have a chilled bottle of white wine in my fridge, I didn't have one of those easy openers with the arms that you push down.

“'Ere eez a corkscrew,” said Louise, finding a rusty and ancient-looking little pig's tail in the silverware drawer and handing me the bottle.

“I must go to the bafroom to…freshen up.”

My toilet is in a separate little room that is located out of my apartment and down the hall. Though it is for my use only, it is
technically
an outhouse. I have to explain this to guests and hand them a key to the padlock that keeps my WC shut. As it only houses a crapper, there is no pretense of one going in there to freshen up. If anything, the opposite is true. I found it sort of funny that Louise would use the very American euphemism of “freshening up” with me. As fellow Europeans, Louise and I ought to have been above that puritan nonsense. Also, because there is no sink in there, I am well aware if a person does not wash his or her hands after visiting the toilet room. My bathtub and bathroom sink are located in my kitchen.

“Okay,” I said. I explained the drill and gave her the key.

I started to fathom how an old-school corkscrew worked when I remembered that one of my boxes contained one 100-milligram dose of Viagra.

Two columns ago, I had reported the experiences of having sex under the influence of five different drugs: cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms, weed, and Viagra. I still had some coke and Viagra left over!

I ran into the bedroom and started rifling to find the smallest item in the box, eventually found it, and put the whole 100-milligram pill in my mouth. In my experiment I had only taken a 25-milligram dose, which resulted in a prizewinning erection that I terrorized my then-
girlfriend with, an afternoon she rues to this day. I was totally sober then and figured that I probably needed an increased dose to combat the effects of the alcohol now. I also found the coke in a bullet-sized dispenser. I ran back to the kitchen and swallowed the large pill with some water, took two large bumps, and got to work on opening the wine and promptly broke the cork in half just as Louise walked through the door.

“What 'ave you done?”

Not being able to open a bottle of wine is embarrassing under any circumstances, but in front of a French girl it was completely emasculating. I jabbed at the remaining half of the cork with a stainless steel chopstick but it didn't budge.

“Ah, poor little Grant, 'oo cannot even open a bottle of wine.”

Louise sat down on the corner of my bed, choosing not to wash her hands.

“How about a line?” I said, poking my head around the door after finally giving up with the wine.

“What?”

“Would you like a little coke?”

I rarely indulged, but offering it made me feel and sound like Scarface. I didn't even really want any more but I somehow had to run down the clock while I waited for the sildenafil citrate to inhibit cGMP specific phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5), which is responsible for degradation of cGMP in the corpus cavernosum. The molecular structure of sildenafil is similar to that of cGMP and acts as a competitive binding agent of cGMP in the corpus cavernosum. Now given that I'd taken four times the amount that had given me a thumper for the better part of a weekend, I was fairly confident that I could overcome my case of brewer's droop. All I needed was just a little more time.

I figured I'd put the blow on a CD case and make a really big deal about meticulously chopping it up, which I could drag out for five or ten minutes.

“Pffff! I absolutely fink no.”

She looked horrified. Louise's body language shifted from languid and suggestive to closed and distant. I was trying to push narcotics on a teen and it had inexplicably backfired.

“No, me neither,” I said. “My friend had some and I'm…holding it for him. I just didn't know if you…”

“Grant, please, I would like it for us to go to bed.”

Though I already had the thumping headache, I felt sure I needed to give the Viagra more time to work its magic.

“Let's watch some television!” I said and pulled her through my railroad apartment to the living room. It was four a.m., and there only seemed to be infomercials on.

“'Oo eez dis man wiv 'is chickens?” she said after watching a studio audience get jazzed by a rotisserie oven.

“That's Ron Popeil,” I said. “He is a famous American inventor.”

She looked at me, apparently unsatisfied with my reasons for making her watch late-night infomercials after a three-and-a-half-week campaign to get her back to my place.

“Set it and forget it!”
I said at an inappropriate volume that made Louise recoil.

“Well, zis eez very strange to me, and I am very ty-aired. I must get up and pack tomorrow and…your face! It eez very red. Are you okay?”

The headache, the red face. I had documented the chain of events in my experiment. I knew that I only needed to kill around ten more minutes before I'd have a chemically enhanced erection that would be the talk of the Champs-Elysées.

I got the drip, and couldn't help fidgeting with my nostrils.

“The roof!” I said. “I need some fresh air. It's beautiful up there.”

I grabbed Louise and pulled her up four flights of rickety stairs to the roof. The Chinese families who lived on the top floor of the building often slept on the roof in the summer months, in lieu of having a way to keep cool at night, though thankfully there was no one up there. The heat had melted the tar on the roof, making the surface like a giant piece of flypaper. Great gobs of it were stuck to Louise's shoes as I led her across the roof to admire the view.

“That's Stuyvesant Town,” I said, suddenly realizing how underwhelming the view must have been to her. “If you strain your neck and look between the two buildings in front of us, you can see the glow of the Empire State Building…but they turn off the lights at midnight.”

“I see.”

“And that's the famous East River; the historical borough of Queens is on the other side. That's where the airport is. Next to us is the ConEd power plant, can you hear it buzzing? And those buildings are Alphabet City projects. A hundred years ago this neighborhood was called
Kleine Deutschland
and was full of Germans.
Allgemeine!
I expect you could have seen the World Trade Center from here, but I didn't live here then so don't quote me on that. Below us is Fourteenth Street, which is mostly just dollar stores and fried chicken joints. So…”

Silence.

“And maybe a Rite Aid.”

“It would 'ave been nice to 'ave that wine up 'ere.”

Silence.

Louise suddenly looked sort of bluish, which indicated that the Viagra was working. I excitedly made out with my Gallic smurf and painfully knocked teeth with her twice. With my hands exploring her tight rear, I sprang an instantaneous erection and pushed it into her taut midsection.

“Let's go to bed,” I said triumphantly and led her down the stairs, leaving two sets of tarry footprints that led into my now chilly apartment.

In what is a break from tradition, I undressed the girl first before shedding my own clothes. Her breasts were small and perfect, her skin white and even, the musculature of her abdomen discernable by accident rather than design, her bulbous little bottom caressed in surprisingly sensible white cotton underwear. We kissed and she tinkered with my fly for what seemed like ages before I yanked my pants off myself. My erection threatened to poke a hole through my underpants as I lowered her onto my bed and slid my hand into hers. She stopped me.

“Grant,” she said hesitantly, “tonight, I fink I just want you to 'ug me.”

“Huh,” I said and cupped her left breast.

“I just want you to, to 'old me, before I leave for Paris.”

“Yeah,” I said and spooned her, sliding my inhumanly turgid penis between the gap in her thighs. She jerked away from it, as if it had burned her. She made me set my alarm for 8:00. Her flight was at 12:45, but she needed to get down to Canal Street and pack.

“Here, lie on my chest,” I said.

We shifted positions.

Everything was blue now, and with my hand I could feel the raised veins on my forehead popping out. My penis tented the comforter. I stroked Louise's hair and lovingly kissed her dainty little fingers before curling them around my penis. She'd have to be impressed, I thought.

“Grant, no, I must sleep.”

It was getting light outside.

“Sleep on the plane, baby.”

Louise turned her back to me.

“Good night, Grant,” she said. “Cute English boy.”

The strange mix of chemicals racing around my body made sleep impossible. I spent the next three hours looking at the back of Louise's head and the erection that would not back down. I reset the alarm for 7:30 in the hopes that Louise would want to fool around upon waking. I listened to the thunder in the distance come closer, until it seemed that the clouds had settled on my roof. It was the loudest thunder I'd ever heard but Louise didn't stir. I must have finally gotten to sleep minutes before she woke up.

“Shit!” she said, maniacally buzzing around my room foraging for clothing. The clock said 9:41.

“Laure is going to kill me! What 'appened to the alarm?”

“I don't know,” I croaked.

My head was spinning and my erection showed no signs of remittance.

I put on some pajama pants and walked her downstairs.

“Taxi!” She was already out in the road, arm extended.

The rain was still torrential and it was chilly outside. A cab pulled up and she held the door open as she kissed me on the cheek. I gave her a business card with my now-defunct e-mail address and phone number.

“I will write to you!” she promised and playfully batted my hitherto ignored member with her hand.

“I will write to you too!”

She sped off without waving.

I walked back upstairs, toweled off, and awoke at about the same time as her plane was due to leave. A monster hangover, the unsatisfying conclusion to a summer fling, no longer receiving a regular paycheck, and the Viagra Web site's insistence that I seek urgent medical attention all ganged up on me at once and I suddenly felt lousier than I had in my whole life. The rain pelted against my cracked windowpanes and rattled on the tops of the air conditioners as I considered making the walk to the ER at Beth Israel, under an umbrella and half a pace behind an angry erection.

Summer had ended.

THE LIMO THAT PICKED ME UP
from Long Beach Airport was chock-full of candies, snacks, and bottles of mineral water. I'd been in a limo once before, during a bachelor-party-style weekend in Montreal in November 2002. That one was stretched, white, full of liquor, and the transport that delivered us to more restaurants, bars, “full-contact” strip clubs, peep shows, diners, and roadhouse brothels than I care to remember. It glowed purple underneath and I'm sure we were deservedly referred to as assholes dozens of times.

This
limo was black, modestly unstretched, and had a courteous uniformed driver by the name of Terry.

“You movin' out here, bro?” he said.

“Well, maybe. I'm shooting a pilot, and if all goes well, then…y'know?”

I'd been to Southern California once before and hated it. But then my trip was just thirty hours long, and the lion's share of it was spent on the set of a porno movie. That trip was Ross's doing too. This stay would be for several weeks, most of it spent in preproduction for the pilot of
Granted
and then a four-day shoot. And if we went to series…who knows?

“Shit, if you like warm weather and beautiful babes, you ain't gonna leave in a hurry,” said Terry.

While I certainly
was
a fan of beautiful babes, I also rather liked the seasons, but I chose not to get into that with Terry, as he might reckon me a fairy, and he seemed to be on a roll.

“And if you are gonna be on TV, man, I tell ya, you'll be gettin' so much freakin' pussy you'll have to beat it off with a stick. But hey, that's Hollywood for ya. Where you comin' from?”

“New York.”

“New York Ci-tay,” he said under his breath. “I always wanted to go there.”

I arrived at Ross and Jordana's home near North Hollywood around nine to find Ross waiting in the driveway. It was great to see him again. When he left Nerve, he promised that he and I would work together again soon, and true to his word, here we were. The house was a charming one-level, three-bedroom with a good-sized swimming pool and a two-car garage that Jordana used as her painting studio. I walked in and set my bags down.

“Welcome to Valley Village, California!” Jordana said and gave me a big, good-feeling hug. Their son, Dashiell, had just turned one and was already asleep, but we crept into his room to take a peek. He was beautiful and I told them so.

“Wait 'til you see his penis,” whispered Ross. “It's massive.”

We ordered Chinese food, caught up, and I was overcome with the realization that, TV show or not, I was completely starting over, in
a new place, with new people, with a new job, and within a very short period of time had a whole new ready-to-wear life in the sunshine. A few days before I got on the plane, I sublet my apartment to a Texan debutante via Craigslist for almost double what I paid. I saw some friends, tied up some loose ends, and didn't even stop to think about how efficiently I seemed to have packed up and moved on.

This was all brought sharply into focus the next morning when I got a phone call from my ex-girlfriend Sophie. I had begun breaking up with her on Memorial Day, and by late August she had sort of gotten the message, though not before she broke into my apartment and stood over me as I slept.

“Hello?”

“I've been doing some thinking and I think that we should go out again.”

“Now? Christ, it's six thirty a.m.,” I said.

“No, it's not, it's nine thirty,” she replied.

She hadn't heard that I'd moved, but then I didn't have much time to tell anyone.

“I'm in California.”

“What are you doing
there
?”

“I'm making a TV show. I sort of…
live
here now.”

She began to cry then hung up. We had spoken less than three weeks ago, when the TV show was merely a pipe dream.

Now that I was up, I decided to figure out how to use a cafetière and make some coffee.

“This is Dashiell!” Ross was already up and brought Dash into the kitchen so we could meet properly. He was still wiping the sleep from his eyes but already starting to giggle as I shook his little hand.

“Want to go hiking in the canyon with us?” asked Ross.

To my untrained ear “hiking in the canyon” sounded like a formidable physical challenge.

“Um, I don't have any…equipment,” I said. I was thinking boots, pickax, guide ropes.

“You'll be fine in a sweater, jeans, and sneakers,” he said.

It seems that in Los Angeles, hiking in a canyon actually means taking a relatively brisk walk up a hill and down again, and the use of the term sort of made me chuckle. Had Ross assimilated to being a West Coaster in just a year? In any case, as I'd landed in darkness, it was useful to look at my new surroundings from some high ground. In Los Angeles you can't fool yourself into thinking that you live in an entirely man-made place, like you can in Manhattan. You can use natural topography to get your bearings, as opposed to bridges and skyscrapers.

“Hollywood is on the other side of these hills,” said Ross as we reached a point with a view of the San Fernando Valley. At eight a.m. the air was clean, cool, and fresh, though I could feel the temperature rising by the minute.

It's strange to think about how I'd first surveyed Manhattan from the observation deck of the World Trade Center, thinking about whether I could ever call the city home, whether I would soon be navigating its arteries instinctually. And it's funny to think about how I first perceived the city at street level. Becky had parked in Hoboken and we took the Path train in, eventually emerging on leafy 9th Street and Sixth Avenue before walking east through Washington Square, past NYU and onto Broadway as an armada of yellow cabs flew by the Tower Records store at East 4th Street. I got a hot dog from a street vendor and was overcome yet fully satisfied with the New Yorkness of it all. This view, even from the “wrong side” of the Hollywood Hills, was impressive in a sort of serene way, but I wondered if it was a place I'd ever think of as home.

We deposited Dash back at home and crawled to Santa Monica for the first day of preproduction. A portion of a floor at VH1's Santa Monica offices had been devoted to
Granted
. The name of the show was affixed to each of the brightly colored pens, and the wallpaper and screensavers for each of the dozen computers in the
Granted
zone were ridiculous life-sized snapshots of my mug. The ten-person production team had been assembled and I moved along a line of them like the queen at an important movie premiere.

“Everyone, this is the notorious Grant Stoddard,” announced Ross to my embarrassment. “He's our talent.”

“Please don't call me that again,” I said to Ross when I got him alone for a second. The total cost of the pilot was heading for the better part of a hundred grand, and from my interactions with the production team, it was becoming clear that no one knew that my experience “on camera” was limited to a few home videos. Being constantly referred to as “the talent,” given that I was completely unproven, seemed sarcastic and served only to heighten my anxiety.

Just getting to this point had been an adventure in and of itself. Despite my assurances that
Granted
the TV show had nothing whatsoever to do with the “I Did It for Science” column or its hypothetical TV spin-off, Rufus threatened litigation on intellectual property grounds and through his old boy network could make sure his saber rattling could be well heard. In the pre-pilot stage even the mere whiff of legal hurdles could quash our TV show with Viacom, and with that in mind the VH1 people put pressure on Ross to capitulate with Rufus's demands just to keep the project alive. Rufus's first preposterous set of conditions included naming the show
I Did It for Science
or having some Nerve cobranding in the title of the show. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Ross eventually agreed to give a percentage of the show's prospective profits and to add wording in the end credits reflecting Nerve's involvement in the development of the “Grant Stoddard character.”

This led me to wonder if my character had in actuality been developed by Nerve. It was certainly true that my suddenly being obligated to participate in bizarre sexual activity had certainly broadened my outlook on sex, people, and life in general. It was also fair to say that the company had given me an amazing opportunity to start and build upon a career in writing that would never have presented itself otherwise. It was assured that Nerve had gotten me laid, a
lot
. Surely, if it wasn't for Nerve, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to make an eponymous TV show. But the assertion that Rufus Griscom and Nerve somehow fashioned my persona from scratch was completely inaccurate. Rufus's percentages weren't even coming out of my share, but out of Ross's.
Rufus was ruthless in the pursuit of value, and we felt as though we were being shaken down in spectacular fashion.

Everyone at VH1 had been urged to bone up on my writing and the regular appearances I'd made on friends' photo blogs and had become intimately familiar with some of my more intimate moments. I had a dozen insta-friends, who already knew a good deal about me. This felt extremely odd but appealed to my ego.

Most days were brainstorming sessions in which we hashed out the segments we would try to include in the pilot. Logistical and financial constraints meant that all the segments would be shot in LA, though I'd envisioned the real contrast of the show to be the relationship between myself and subject matter more readily found in the interior of the country.

With that being the case, we quickly tailored the pilot episode to our surroundings. One of my ideas was for me to emcee a karaoke night for washed-up celebrities. The execs in New York said they were “psyched” about the idea and we started creating a list of who these possible D-listers could be. The following day, the execs called to say that they continued to be psyched about the idea but especially loved the thought of me singing karaoke dressed as a woman and that this segment should be “tweaked slightly” to that end. They'd read the “I Did It for Science” column in which I'd dressed up as a woman and incidentally found it “rilly, rilly funny,” funny enough to try to shoehorn into a show about wacky Americana.

And so began a pattern in which the execs seemed to latch on to a tiny and inconsequential part of each idea and run it off on some tangent that somehow made perfect sense to them. In 2005 VH1 launched a show called
So You Think You Can Sing?
in which minor celebrities sang karaoke songs.

Back in New York, Michael Martin was throwing all sorts of freelance gigs my way so that I wouldn't see that much of a drop-off in my income. In among putting the pilot together, I also had to interview Ricky Gervais, then a complete unknown in America, and orchestrate and participate in a threesome with a girl and another guy for my “I Did It for Science” column, despite knowing nary a soul west of Wee
hawken. Some magazine work for
Glamour
and
BlackBook
was also sent my way, and I would regularly sit Dashiell for an hour or two. Despite having so much to do, I felt that time moved slower out here and I could get to work in earnest.

Ross, Jordana, Dashiell, and I lived together as a nuclear family, though I could never really figure out if I was the funny uncle, roguish bachelor, guest of honor, eldest son, or babysitter. But, I was certainly made to feel integral to their home, despite my klutziness increasing exponentially. In my first week I blocked the toilet in the guest bathroom, damaged the upholstery in Ross's car, shattered the porcelain faucet handle in their shower, put dish detergent in the dishwasher that filled the kitchen knee-high in suds, and woke everyone in the house by having the two other participants of my threesome jump in the pool to pee at three in the morning due to the aforementioned blocked toilet in the guest bathroom. Jordana classified these extremely embarrassing episodes as (Gr) antics.

In addition to the preproduction of
Granted,
Ross was also taking meetings for a handful of other projects. I was only needed at the VH1 offices for a few hours each day, though Ross left the house before nine and often didn't return until the wee hours of the morning. This left Jordana, Dash, and me together most nights.

As we drew closer to the shooting date, the show began to shift tone and form to the point that it was quite a different project from the action-packed anthropological travelogue I'd initially envisioned. The concept had shifted much more toward the slapstick, pratfall end of the spectrum in which I would be a roving Mr. Bean–type character. I felt that we'd lost control of the project entirely, but Ross assured me that the execs were doing exactly what they needed to do in order for the show to go to series and, once green-lit, we would get to steer it back.

The five segments we eventually settled on were:

1. Me and a group of friends going to restaurants and seeing what we could get for free by telling them that it was our birthday.
   
2. Me hanging out at a truck stop and offering truckers tea and scones as part of something called “Trucker Appreciation Day.”
   
3. Me participating in a staged audition for a fake reality TV show.
   
4. Me dressing in drag and singing at a karaoke bar.
   
5. Me training with high school cheerleaders then taking them around Los Angeles to spread cheer among its citizens.
   

According to the call sheet, at all times I would be surrounded by a minimum of fifteen people. Ross and Corin Nelson, associate producer Jen Ehrman, assistant producers Brian Wahlund and Cherry Jimenez, my seventeen-year-old PA, Andrew Karlsruher, production manager Jennifer Dugan, makeup artist Lucy Fleetwood, VH1 execs Rob Weiss and eight-months-pregnant Lauren Gellert, who had flown out from New York for the shoot. Then there was the four-man camera crew, headed up by a guy named Christian, along with his men Brett, War-Dog, and a terribly nice chap who was referred to only as the Donger. This entourage was then expanded with the introduction of fifteen teenage cheerleaders, a handful of gnarled truckers, a slew of singles at a karaoke bar, a group of instant best friends, and over a hundred reality TV star wannabes, waving their eight-by-tens around and trying to appear zany and unpredictable.