Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (4 page)

I still haven’t really thought about what I’m going up to the moon to do. I’m a little afraid of being known as space’s first whore, even though I don’t really feel like a whore. I never have. At least I’m not giving people root canals. At least I’m not putting makeup on the dead.

As the day ends, the show’s executives give us a sneak peak at our real suits. By us, I mean whoever wins and myself. Each suit has a small portal; mine’s in the back and his is in the front. The man who’s explaining it to us wraps their ends around each other, like marching elephants clinging trunks to tails. Once they’re aligned, they open, pressurize, and retract to an acceptable length. This way he can enter me. On the moon.

Because I’ll be in a suit and will look like a hulking male physicist from behind, they’ve outfitted the back of my helmet with a monitor. It’ll show footage of me, doing what we’ll be doing, only un-space-suited.

“Any questions?” the scientist asks.

Bill has one. “Can you like, kneel down and stuff?”

I imagine Bill’s panting coming through my headset in stereo. It’s going to sound like he’s in boot camp fulfilling a midday order to dig a ten-foot latrine. The secret to having sex with people who make disgusting sounds is to out-moan them. It gets them there quicker, too, which is half the battle.

A few days before the launch, the contestants are brought in to sample the eat-off product, which was partially designed by NASA. Because the food must be unable to break off and create airborne crumbs, the execs chose a type of hybrid sausage. It’s a gelatinous, partial-meat substance that won’t flake or fragment.

“Could we make this peanut butterier?” Guff’s vote for a flavor infusion is denied.

“It doesn’t smell like anything,” says Leo. This is true, but Leo says this carefully, as if he knows they’re about to tell him,
It smells delicious
.

“Actually,” says one scientist, “it should smell like plastic.”

Leo sniffs again. He nods.

Bill is holding a coil of sausage in two fingers, like it’s the world’s longest cigar.

“Uh,” says Bill.

This should be good.

“I mean, do we have to eat something that looks so much like a you-know-what? Once in a while people even say the word ‘sausage’ instead of saying you-know-what.”

“It’s just food,” I tell him. “It’s just meat.”

“Well,” says the scientist, “it’s not
just
meat.” He goes on to list several items that aren’t normally found in either sausages or you-know-whats.

We’re told that the eat-off contest will be taped and performed when the ship is hovering overtop the moon. The winning contestant and I will then travel in a small capsule to the lunar surface to perform the sex act. The way the executive describes it sounds oddly like a honeymoon, a man and wife being escorted off to more private quarters.

Blast-off is hard. There’s a moment when my mind tells me that we’ve blown up, and it takes a few more seconds to realize that we haven’t. I feel like my bones are being chewed upon by a glacier with really dull teeth.

Then everything stops. The cabin is instantly too still. When I look at my reflection in a chrome panel, the expression on my face seems a thousand years old.

Bill mutters something about being a space cowboy. I’m staring at Dick, the only one here I really know. He’s looking out the window, and he seems horrified. Instead of coming with me and the contestants to train before the launch, he opted to prepare using his own regimen of hypnosis and magnet therapy.

“Dick, are you okay?” My voice sounds weird. I decide I should just have a space persona, and that way I can quit feeling so uncomfortable about nothing being the same. I rename myself Lorna. I roll the r in a Spanish way and bat my eyelashes at the lack of gravity.

Dick is not okay.

He’s very tan, and loves being very tan, and perhaps this explains his sudden preoccupation with the sun.

“Where is the sun?”
He keeps screaming this. It’s making Leo unsettled. Guff is looking for the sun inside the cabin.

Bill is trying to recite a list of one-liners from memory and keeps having to look down at the cheat-sheet in his hand. Most of the hottie-billing contestants try to memorize jokes before taping. Once the camera starts rolling, they never remember them. Never.

The medical adviser/cameraman tranquilizes Dick and straps him into a cocoon on the wall. It looks as though some giant spider caught him and hung him there. I keep watching the cargo door for a human-sized space arachnid to enter and devour him whole. I rub Dick’s arm a little bit and drool comes out of his mouth. It’s decided that I’ll host the show on my own.

We take about an hour or so to tumble through the air and get used to weightlessness. Quarters are tight and Bill keeps reaching out to tickle my feet. I can feel my stomach and my crotch in the same place; there is no middle. Just my head and then everything else.

“I really don’t feel like eating,” Leo says as they give him his food-coil. After several debates, the execs decided to wrap it in yet another layer of edible protective casing. If the coil were actually dropped onto the ground on Earth, it would probably bounce.

Bill points to my chest for the camera. “I’ve got all the inspiration I need right there,” he says. I want to remind Bill that even if he wins, he won’t be seeing or touching my breasts at any point in time. But I don’t. I get out my stopwatch for the eat-off. Guff has already opened his mouth wide in a head start.

“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 is by far the biggest, but the problem with large contestants is that they’re used to eating out of hunger. He has already taken in about two feet of sausage (who knows what percentage of that is plastic), and really can’t be too hungry anymore.

Bill is hurting; it’s clear. I know a lot about the gag reflex. Throats are one-way lanes, up or down, and it’s my professional opinion that Bill’s throat has now switched 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 puke sack. It Velcros to his face like a giant gray shoe. I watch with pleasure as his abdominal contortions propel him around the cabin.

Guff has almost quit moving and resembles a gargantuan toy that needs to be rewound. 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 from my abdomen 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, the answer to something very important would be revealed.

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 then even with the cameras it seems like no one can see me.

I took a baby panda home from the zoo. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to. I decided to keep my job there, at least for a while, so as not to look 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 Fruit 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. When people ask me why I did it, I tell them, “She was soft.”

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

“Dead Mom is not a mellow subject, Sis.” 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 Copper Tone. 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 passions. Unless, like Sister’s, they will hinder someone’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 love; it’s like giving a can of food to forest-people who can’t understand its monetary value, or the delicious pleasure that awaits them inside.

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 firmly in like hotel bed sheets.

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, the bassist, uses humor to mask his negative thinking when he agrees with the Management about hotels. He says things like “How can I round up babes for bonefests and take them to the middle of a corn field? 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 all 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 you 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 angels 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 makeup until I realized she didn’t wear any (not to be commercialized but she could use it. Pastel, bare minerals). Her face is kind of gray too because she never goes outside; she fears nature like it’s a rapist or murderer, even though 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 Dan Rather’s facial expressions.