Working Stiff (26 page)

“Honestly, honey,” she said with eyelids drooping. “I was just resting my eyes for a bit.”

I abused her good nature for just a minute or two longer, then thanked Kylie Ireland for having us over.

“Not at all, thanks for coming!” she said as a man with a goatee fucked her hard from behind.

“Take care!” he added.

With my homegirl now positively zombiefied, I practically carried her into the car and sped off toward the Valley.

We spent the night at Ross and Jord's before heading up to the ranch.

“Like I said, there's really not much to do up there,” I said as we drove I-5 to a mountainous stretch of road known as the grapevine. “We're just going to chill.”

“That's fine,” she said. “Work's been so crazy, I could really use a bit of that.”

Charlotte was part of the small minority of people from our town who went on to university. She moved to North London shortly afterward and worked for a hip PR company off of Tottenham Court Road. She consequently lost the last remaining vestiges of her Essex accent,
though it wasn't very strong to start off with. Her parents were from Zimbabwe and she had been taught to speak quite properly. When we were sixteen, I knew that if any of my peers had the will and the wherewithal to leave Corringham it would be her.

“Can you believe we're here?” I said as the fire finally started kicking out some heat and I poured us each a glass of supermarket cabernet sauvignon. We relaxed after the four-hour drive.

“It's really lovely, Grant,” she said. “You're so bloody lucky.”

“Wait until the morning,” I said; we'd arrived in darkness. “It's beautiful outside. You're going to freak out. There's an open outdoor shower that overlooks the valley. It's an amazing way to start the day.”

As the fire died down to embers, I gave Charlotte the option of sleeping in my bed or in the room on the other side of the house. Even though she'd spent the previous decade tactfully assuring me that we would never sleep together, I sort of hoped that the wine, the romantic, rustic setting, the jet-lag, my California tan, and the unabashed carnality of the previous evening would conspire to cloud her judgment, weaken her resolve. But, as I suspected, she chose to sleep in the bedroom way over on the other side of the house.

I woke up at 3:31 a.m. to Charlotte shouting. Through two closed doors and the large expanse of the living room I couldn't make out any specific words, though she clearly sounded angry, upset. I half listened as the shouting stopped and started over for several minutes. Then silence. I'd promised myself that I'd get up and wake her if it started again. I was pretty sure that it was during sleep
walking
, not sleep
talking
, that you shouldn't wake someone, but I wasn't one hundred percent positive. I was a sleepwalker as a ten-year-old and once urinated in the kitchen garbage during a dinner party my parents were throwing. My parents made sure not to wake me then as their friends all watched me in stunned silence.

There was no more sleeptalking from Charlotte, however, and I fell back to sleep. It was just before five when I awoke again to a soft knock on my bedroom door.

“Grant,” she whispered. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” I said, praying that she'd finally caved. “What's up?”

“Can I sleep in here with you?” Her brow was furrowed. “It's gotten a bit chilly in there.”

“Sure,” I said. She slid into the king-sized bed in her pajamas and stayed to one side.

I woke her the next morning for coffee on the porch, just as sunlight began to pour into the valley. The sky was blue, the air crisp, the snow-peaked mountains looked close enough to touch. I folded my arms and gauged Charlotte's reaction. I felt proud to show my paisan where I'd landed in the world. I couldn't have been more proud if I had created the vista myself and dug out the valley with my own bare hands.

“It's really gorgeous,” she said, taking it all in. She seemed somehow troubled.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I'm fine,” she said. “I just didn't sleep all that well last night.”

I hoped she wasn't referring to how I'd overzealously tried to spoon her.

“Yeah, I heard you talking in your sleep. Do you always do that?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

We spent the rest of her four-day stay at the ranch futzing around the ranch and the house, going for drives, making dinner, getting drunk by the fire, popping into Fresno to watch a movie. It was somewhat uneventful but fun.

“I have to tell you something,” said Charlotte as we passed by the relative civilization of Bakersfield on the way back to LA. “The first night…I wasn't sleeptalking.”

“Well, who were you talking to?” I asked.

“I was shaken awake. I mean shaken really hard. I thought it was you, winding me up.”

“I would never do that,” I said.

I would
totally
do that sort of thing as a prank, though probably not to Charlotte.

“Well, what you heard was me telling you to fuck off and to stop messing about. But it wasn't you, was it?”

“No.”

“Then the room got really cold, and I saw something go around the edge of the bed really fast.”

“Are you winding
me
up?” I said.

“I'm not.” She looked like she was on the verge of crying. “It felt like I wasn't alone in the room. I kept hearing little noises. That's why it took so long to get up the courage to run across to your room.”

“I don't believe in ghosts, silly,” I said, but her conviction was beginning to unnerve me.

“Neither do I. I didn't want to tell you, seeing as you are going to be spending a few months there, but I had to say something, I felt like I was going mad. But…I felt it, the whole time that we were there. Didn't you notice? I hardly left your sight.”

It hadn't occurred to me until she said it, but Charlotte had been physically close to me the entire length of her visit. When she took a shower she asked me to talk to her through the bathroom door. But from a sunny California highway, her experience was easy to dismiss as a figment of her imagination, and after a few more miles I'd practically forgotten about it.

After another day or two in LA, I dropped Charlotte back at LAX. It was a few days before Christmas and I'd decided that although I dismissed the holidays as humbug, I certainly didn't want to spend them alone. Ross and Jordana were out and about doing family things, however, and I found myself kicking around the house without them. My Christmas in LA was infinitely depressing: plastic snowmen and reindeer next to palms, sixty-two degrees, drizzly and overcast. Christmas is sort of a bigger deal in England and especially within my family. They were all stunned when I didn't come home for the first time but had begrudgingly gotten used to it over the years. The phone was passed around to almost all of their fourteen guests, who all asked if I was having a lovely “Crimbo.”

I told them all that I was having a great time.

Ross found some time to have a semblance of a Christmas dinner with me at the International House of Pancakes on Sunset before con
tinuing on with his errands. I'd resigned myself to the idea of spending the rest of the day moping around when I got a call from Jane Chung. I'd met Jane at a karaoke party in New York a few months earlier. We went on a date, a few drinks on the Lower East Side. We had a very nice time and kissed. Jane was eighteen and had no idea that I had spent the past three years as a sort of literary gigolo, which made our evening sort of sweet. It made me realize that I hadn't had a date that wasn't somehow spun off from my column in a long while. Jane was in Pasadena, back from NYU and visiting with her parents for the holidays. She needed to escape from a family that was too close to her, I needed a distraction from one that suddenly seemed too far away. I drove inland, picked her up, and we went to see a movie. It was something terrible and before too long we were down each other's pants in the back row. After the movie Jane snuck me up to her bedroom adorned with posters, cheerleading paraphernalia, and other trappings of an archetypal Californian mall rat. Whispering, so as not to arouse the suspicions of her strict Korean parents, Jane told me that she was—somewhat regrettably—a virgin. It seemed that the karmic surplus I'd accrued over a sexless youth had come to bare in a solitary moment, though it was abundantly clear that the venue was not here, the time was not now. I contemplated taking her to Ross and Jordana's, plotting ways in which we could keep from waking them or Dashiell up. I finally understood how difficult it must have been for my peers to have sex while still living with their parents. Ten years after the fact I had a sudden respect for the pluck, resourcefulness, and tenacity that must be a huge part of the teen sex experience.

“You should come to the ranch!” I said, not realizing the brilliance of the idea until the words actually tumbled out of my mouth.

“Really?” she said.

Really. An idyllic setting, total privacy, an element of danger, a sexually experienced older, European man; in a moment of unchecked narcissism, I actually began to covet the theoretically perfect experience I was going to give to this young colt. Not only would this be an excellent way to stave off the loneliness and put off doing any writing,
but it would also be a chance to make up for the last botched opportunity I had to successfully stamp somebody's V-card. Plus, Jane was incredibly cute, smart, and fun, and it seemed a good time was virtually assured.

Jane began working out a series of lies to tell her parents in order to spend a long weekend away from home, and I picked her up under the guise of being her best friend's adopted brother and drove her the three and a half hours north to the ranch. A moonlit sky, an open fire, a bottle of red wine, somebody I could truly care about. Over the past three years most of my sexual dalliances had been slapdash, tawdry, loveless, careless, or bizarre. But being alone with Jane in the middle of nowhere and doing it right helped to pry off the adopted persona I'd taken on with my job.

We spent our time at the ranch canoodling, making extravagant meals, getting drunk, sleeping in, sunbathing on the ranch, sledding in Yosemite, but mostly talking about our passion for New York and our shared longing to return. In the morning we'd collect fresh eggs from across the ranch and pick rosemary from Jordana's herb garden.

I drove Jane back to Pasadena and put some last-minute voice-over material on the show at VH1 in Santa Monica. My MTV staff pass had expired, so Ross had to come and collect me from the front entrance. I'd realized by this point that Los Angeles is a fine town to be in if you happen to be busy or feel in some way useful. Not being allowed access to the building helped to reinforce that sentiment. After we'd shot the show, everyone involved with
Granted
was on to the next project, and aside from the occasional V.O. I was left kicking around until the execs in New York had decided what they were going to do with the show, where I was going to live, what I was going to do, who I was going to be, and so on.

The last voice-over session was booked to redo the British-sounding exclamations that would appear with a translation at the bottom of the screen throughout the show. Everyone seemed to be convinced that these would be a charming addition.

“Blimey!” I said into the mic.

“Again,” said Ross. “More bemused than shocked.”

“Blimey!” I said again for the twentieth time. To my ear it was the same as the previous nineteen.

“That's it!” said Ross. “Does everybody love that one?”

Everyone in the sound room nodded their agreement.

“Great! Okay, next one, Grant,” he said.

I looked down at the cue sheet.

“I'm knackered!” I said.

“Again,” said Ross. “Remember, we're going for tired here, but ultimately satiated.”

The drive to and from the ranch was becoming ingrained in my mind. The 101 to the 10 to the 405 to the 5 to the 90. I was on autopilot when my phone rang. It was Michael Martin from Nerve. For some weeks he'd been voicing concern over the drop-off in decent subject matter for the column. Two issues had converged to potentially spell the end of the column: my having already done all there is to do sexually and choosing to live in isolation in the California wilderness. I'd been to orgies, sex parties, porn sets, BDSM retreats; I'd used cock rings, prostate massagers, and tantra; attempted “injaculation,” tried to induce female ejaculation, had sex on a pupu platter of drugs, had a happy ending massage, received relationship coaching, watched twenty-four hours of porn, trawled Craigslist for a casual hookup, taken pictures of couples having sex, worn a chastity harness, taken pictures of girls posing nude, made out with a guy, offered myself up at a gay bar, given lap dances at a male revue, been a cock model, a foot model, had a threesome, had sex with a lifelike mannequin, had sex on the subway, been treated like an infant, and sploshed. There were of course some other things to do, but by and large we were scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of fresh ideas. Michael had seen the end of the column some months prior, but being my only income, I'd clung to it for dear life.

“What have you got for me?” asked Michael.

“Well, I mean, it's difficult up here,” I said.

Because of the money situation, I had to take my rental car back
to Oakhurst, meaning that aside from trips to the grocery store in the pickup truck, I would be effectively marooned at the ranch.

“What?” he said. “You're breaking up.” Beyond the Fresno city limits, cell reception was patchy at best.

“I said it's hard because I'm on my own up here.”

“Okay….”

I was spending money hand over fist and couldn't afford the column to end, but I was clearly reaching. The account of the porn star Christmas party was in Michael's words “a bit of a snooze,” a complaint he'd been voicing more frequently over the past few months.