Working Stiff (25 page)

After the insanity of the preproduction and three-day shoot, life back in the Martin household seemed serene. I was only required for voice-over sessions in Santa Monica for a few hours per week, and with little else to do I began to get the distinct impression that I'd outlived my use, worn out my welcome, and was increasingly getting under everyone's feet. Los Angeles, it seemed, was a fine place if you happened to be working, but a lull in productivity felt like creeping death. I became so homesick for New York that I began to manifest physi
cal symptoms. I'd never felt like this when I left Corringham for New York.

Ross suggested that I spend my time working on a proposal for my book. It had already been eighteen months since I'd met with several literary agents, who seemed eager to help me sell an account of my time at Nerve. Furthermore, he insisted that I disappear off into the wilderness to write it.

THE CIRCLED W RANCH
occupies over four thousand acres of land just outside the town of North Fork, which is located in the exact center of California. Jordana's grandfather had bought the land in the late 1950s from a Native American tribe. The land straddles a hill range and seeps down into the valleys on either side. Over the past half century the head of cattle had been greatly reduced and the land had been parceled and sold to family and friends. When they married, in 2000, Ross and Jordana had been given a beautiful home on one of the ranch's highest elevations. It overlooks a deep valley, and above the opposing slope one can easily see El Capitain and the white-capped mountaintops of Yosemite National Park in the distance.

I'd visited the ranch during a break in the preproduction of the show. Ross, Jordana, Dash, and I had arrived there in darkness, leaving me unaware of the stunning beauty of the place until I was awakened to see the sun creeping over the mountains and illuminating the interior of the valley below us. I sort of fell in love with it immediately.

“Stay at the ranch,” Ross had generously suggested after the show wrapped.

He didn't want me to leave California before we knew the fate of the
Granted
project.

“You can write without distractions, without having to pay silly New York rent, you can borrow one of the pickups to drive, you'll get inspired and still be able to drive down to LA to take meetings when you need to.”

As much as I missed New York, it did seem like an amazing opportunity. I couldn't remember spending more than a few hours in my own company. Perhaps it was not having enough alone time that prevented me from being a prolific writer, I thought.

I bought a laptop and Ross and Jord took me up there to show me where everything was, how everything worked. The pickup was available for me to use, but I was only allowed to take it as far as Oakhurst, meaning I'd have to keep my rental for trips to and from LA at a cost of a thousand dollars a month. Other unexpected costs included having a high-speed Internet connection installed. Due to its relatively remote location, one company had the monopoly on almost every utility service available and charged high premiums. A local phone call was charged at over seventy cents per minute. I swear that when I called about the propane tank, the plumbing, the DSL connection, and the telephone bill I was chatting with the same person.

Being in such a remote place meant that writing about strange sexual experiences—my bread-and-butter gig—was going to be somewhat of a challenge. Since moving to California I'd successfully had a threesome and somehow convinced three strangers to let me take pictures of them naked. In LA those kinds of things were comparatively easy to pull off, but forty-five minutes from Fresno, in the foothills of the
Sierra Nevadas, my options were limited. Nerve was paying me fifteen hundred dollars a column, my only steady income, and it was proving barely enough to live on, despite paying no rent.

I decided that because I had at least three months ahead of me, there was no need to rush headlong into writing. To that end, I demarcated my day along themes of rest and relaxation: awaking at my leisure, coffee on the porch, picking rosemary from the garden to make elaborate omelets, followed by an hour-long run around the grazing area of some truly bewildered cattle. After lunch, some light reading before going out to collect kindling for the fireplace. After catching up with e-mails and events from the outside world, I'd make a nice fire, make dinner, and get through a bottle of Charles Taylor cabernet sauvignon. “Two Buck Chuck” was selling at Trader Joe's at $1.99 a bottle, and I'd bought two cases on my way through Fresno.

After a few days without seeing another soul I began to wonder how quickly I would get used to my own company. I encouraged friends in New York to call me as often as they could, though day to day I really had very little to report. Every day was clear, crisp, and sunny, up to eighty degrees in the day, down to forty at night. Each night coyotes serenaded me as squadrons of bats flew in to pick off the moths fluttering around the porch light.

Several parcels of land on the ranch had been sold to close family friends, who'd built vacation homes there. The Kesselmans were at their home quite a lot of the time, and after a week of my leisurely routine they extended an invitation for dinner to me, being new and all. The Kesselmans were my de facto next-door neighbors on the ranch, though they lived almost a mile away. Sandy and Hank were in their fifties, tall, good-looking, and incredibly charismatic. Hank had a wide range of interests, from mastering classical guitar to delivering spot-on impersonations of Ali G. I found this so incredibly surreal, because before Ali G that affect wasn't heard outside of Pakistani and Indian areas of west London, where I went to school. Sandy was a trained clinical psychologist and an ordained Zen priest in the Suzuki-roshi
lineage. When performing her priestly duties her name was not Sandy, but Grace.

“We have our meetings every Sunday morning at eight forty-five,” said Hank. “If you'd like to join us you're very welcome.”

Having dinner with other people reminded me just how starved I was for human interaction, so I jumped at the chance to spend Sunday with a group of people. After coffee, Hank showed me the zendo, which was the converted second story of a barn, and ran me through what a meeting is like. Hank then loaded me up with an armful of Kurosawa DVDs and gave me a light scolding for walking over and not using my car.

“We lost a horse to mountain lions one night last year,” he said gravely. “They'd make short work of you. I'm giving you a lift back.”

I was enthralled at the idea of danger lurking all around me. Until then it hadn't occurred to me just how particularly mild a place England is: seldom too hot or too cold, free of poisonous reptiles and long since cleared of large carnivorous mammals, rarely subject to earthquakes, volcanoes, tornados, or tsunamis. It made me think about how a region's environment informs its inhabitants' dispositions and how my life would improve as a result of my becoming more rugged, independent, even manly. As a young child, I would listen to my grandparents' old 78 of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” repeatedly. I somehow felt that in moving to the ranch I was taking a small step to becoming a bit of a frontiersman myself. This made things particularly awkward as I realized I had no clue how to build an effective fire, use the stars to navigate, or stay sane without being surrounded by several million other human beings.

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.