Working Stiff (13 page)

Sam had a busy day: he fetched water and lube when the girls asked for it, removed discarded clothing from the set with the speed and skill of a ball boy at Wimbledon, and had driven to the local pharmacy on several occasions to buy douche kits, home enema sets, and condoms. Sam couldn't believe that I'd flown in from New York. “You came all this way for this?” he said. “You must be disappointed.”

Jay is a friend of Sam's family and offered him some work on his movies while he looks for PA work in mainstream pictures.

“I thought I was going to get laid,” he said. “My friends are all jealous of me. In fact, Jay had me round up a bunch of them to be extras in a scene tomorrow. Then they'll see.”

We took our places on a set made to look like a prison rec room.

“I've spent half my fucking life in prison and it looks just like this!” said Robby.

Kyle sat at a table with Sam as they shuffled through a pack of Vivid playing cards, each featuring a porn starlet.

“Fucked her, fucked her, I'd like to fuck her, I'm fucking her next week…,” said Kyle.

“Take your medication and get in the fucking shower!” Jay screamed into his cell phone. “I fucking mean it!”

He continued pacing up and down, waving his free arm around.

“I…I don't care, Marcy is in charge now. Do what Marcy says. Take your medication. I'm going to throw you in the fucking shower when I get home. I mean it. Get Marcy on the goddamn phone.”

He strode out of the room. No one else batted an eyelash. I became unsettled and uncomfortable. I signed a release form.

I was sitting next to a four-hundred-pound black man who was stroking my shoulder. It appeared that I was playing his prison bitch. “Okay…er…what's your name?” shouted Robby.

“It's Grant,” I said.

“Okay, Grahhnt,” he said, aping my accent. “Now, he's going to put his arm around you and I want you to look really fucking terrified, okay, Grahhnt? Action!”

The camera panned across the scene as the big guy stroked me like a lap dog. I looked terrified and it wasn't acting.

“And…cut!” yelled Robby. The scene was over and I was free to go.

“Okay, Grahhnt, you're all set,” he said and then looked at me quizzically. “Uh, why are you here, anyway?”

“I'm writing a piece for Nerve in New York,” I explained, realizing that Jay had kept everyone else in the dark as to what I was doing—which incidentally seemed to have worked to my advantage.

“Oh,” said Robby. “I thought that you just walked in off the street, and you weren't getting in the way so I didn't say anything.”

He shook my hand warmly and I ran outside.

“Walked in off the street?” I said to myself as I walked out into the warm California evening. There is no street—the studio was on a lot in the middle of the fucking desert!

I called Daryl and pleaded with him to come and pick me up.

“What the fuck?” he screamed. “It's still Yom Kippur!”

“The sun's going down. It'll be dark by the time you get here.”

“This is re-goddamn-diculous!” he said. I could hear him rattle his car keys in the background.

I felt awful dragging poor Daryl out again, and I swore I would do anything, anything if he helped me out. He said that if I should ever write about him, I should portray him as tall, dark, and handsome.

The desert scenery put me in mind of Anna's installation. I couldn't wait to get back to New York. I leaned up against a truck, watching the porn stars leave the set one by one and drive home elsewhere in the San Fernando Valley. Daryl arrived forty minutes later and took us back to Hollywood for a “breaking the fast” dinner.

An empty plane ride home.

Back in New York I began to have breathing problems, as were a lot of people at the time. I saw my doctor, who suggested that I had posttraumatic stress syndrome and prescribed the antianxiety medication Klonopin. I suppose the 9/11 attacks had affected me more than I'd allowed myself to believe. I'd tried to take Anna's icy position on the situation and it didn't take. Anna gently made fun of me for it, then offered that my malady was more likely linked to what I'd experienced in California.

 

HOW WAS YOUR TRIP
to Los Angeles?”

My mother's question during our biweekly phone conversation took me aback.

“Um…it was good.”

I backtracked to our previous conversation and thought about how I'd framed my business trip to my family. Only one installment of “I Did It for Science” had been published and I was waiting to hear whether it would be ongoing before telling my parents about it. I felt that with my family getting high-speed Internet service, they would soon be on the cusp of discovering Google, and, seconds later, would be rocked by the revelation that their only son had left the continent to become a sex worker. I needed them to hear the sordid facts from me.

“You were going to a film set, weren't you?” she said.

The events of September 11 had provided enough background chatter for me to leave the details extremely vague, but now my family were back in the business of finding out what was going on in my life.

“Yeah, I went to a movie set and wrote about it,” I said.

“What's the name of the Internet company you're working for?” she said. “I keep forgetting it.”

I didn't even tell my family I'd left Orchard Records until months after I made the move. They were temporarily satiated when I told them I'd become an admin assistant at an Internet company, but now that I was being flown across the country, they were on an incessant quest for fresh information.

“It's called Nerve,” I said. “What's the weather been like?”

“And I can find it…y'know…on the computer?” she asked.

“In theory,” I said. My mother was so afraid of the laptop my dad had given her when she started her business that she'd only logged a few hours using it. Her technological incompetence had only infuriated me before, though now it seemed it might actually pay dividends.

“So it's double-u, double-u, double-u, dot, N, E, R…”

“Wait!” I said upon hearing a slow clicking sound far away in the background. “Are you at your computer?”

“No,” she said. “Dad is. So, Brad, it's N, E…”

The idea of my parents being confronted with what they would almost instantly gather was a Web site devoted entirely to the flesh was too much. They were mere seconds from discovering what the theme of my first business trip was all about and I didn't need to hand-hold them for that revelation.

“Mum, I have to go, right now.”

“But…”

“Love to Dad.” Click.

Since I began writing “I Did It for Science,” the most common question among my friends had been, “What do your parents think about this?” It was a question I hadn't wished to ruminate on for more than a nanosecond. The last time I'd visited them and something
vaguely risqué or sexual had come on the telly, I had to run out of the room. My sister could happily sit there in the midst of a sex scene or a graphic joke, while the sight of a nipple sent me scurrying into the kitchen yelling, “Would anyone like a cup of tea?” They were no doubt aware that I didn't have a girlfriend throughout high school and college, and, consequently, I'm quite sure the idea that I was gay had crossed their minds.

After hanging up I sat on my bed and imagined the Web site in all its Dionysian glory flickering before their eyes, three thousand miles away, before instinctively running into the kitchen asking Anna if she'd like a cup of tea.

BECAUSE
of the cheese-and-wine parties, the book readings, the movie premieres, and prerequisite cocaine use, Nerve had a fairly liberal attitude toward the official commencement of the working day. CEO Rufus Griscom couldn't let a militant stance toward timekeeping detract from Nerve's hard-won image as the online home of literate hedonism, but somewhere between the bleary-eyed start, slow warm-up, two-hour lunch, the much ballyhooed thirty-minute catnap, heated set of Ping-Pong, and the evening's next round of comped drinks to quaff and swag bags to collect, there was apparently work to be done. Pre-dot-com crash, employees were pretty much golden provided they managed to stagger in by 11:00 a.m. or so. Rufus gradually coaxed the staff into a less decadent work schedule, via the cunning use of compli
mentary doughnuts, which appeared on the conference table between 9:45 and 10:15, a window of time we called the sugar rush. Without ruffling anybody's feathers, Rufus squeezed an extra hour of productivity out of twenty-five people—many Ivy League graduates—at the cost of just sixty cents a head. It remains his most astute business accomplishment to this day.

As we shuffled around two boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts one bone-chilling February morning, Emma Taylor, Nerve's other Brit, told me about a conversation she'd had at a mixer at the Tribeca Grand the night before. Emma (Em) was one-half of Nerve's irreverent sex advice columnists, Em amd Lo, Lo being Lorelei Sharkey. It was at the beginning of a gold-rush period, in which the opportunities of ce
web-
rities seemed suddenly lucrative and limitless. Book, TV, and movie deals were dangled in front of everybody's faces—as evidenced by what you currently hold in your hands—and Em and Lo were in the midst of the feeding frenzy. Introduced as straight-shooting sex columnists, Em and Lo were received with relish as they glad-handed and double air-kissed their way through the trendy hotel bar. Toward the end of the boozy evening they were introduced to a particularly enthusiastic agent named Peter, who proceeded to treat them to an anomalous sexual encounter he'd had around the holidays. Sex advice columnists are often expected to ply their trade at the drop of a hat, and four martinis in the ladies were happy to oblige.

“This guy we met, Peter, had a date with this other guy, Jonathan,” said Emma.

“Go on.”

“Apparently the nicest guy, well dressed, whatever. So they go back to his place and he asks if Peter wants a beer. He says no, but Jonathan insists that he have one. He asks Peter to take a swig and spit it out all over him. So he does and he sort of just moaned. Then he stripped off—”

“Who strips off?” I said, still half asleep.

“Jonathan,” said Emma, annoyed that my confusion was interrupting the flow of her story. “So
Jonathan
asks him to go to the fridge and throw all the food at him.”

“Sploshing.” A copy of
Splosh!
magazine had recently arrived at the office and the staff had become acquainted with the kink.

“It's called sploshing. When all the food was gone he asks Peter to leave. The next day Peter gets an e-mail saying that he'd had a fantastic time, that it had taken him four hours to clean up, and that they should ‘do it again sometime.' And he wants Peter to bring a friend.”

 

UP UNTIL NOW
the “new things” I had tried included having sex with my girlfriend on the subway, product testing a cock ring, Frenching a guy, being an extra in a porn movie, and competing in an amateur stripping contest in front of two hundred drunk and very aggressive women. Six months earlier, I was the perennial virgin, a shy, inexperienced, terribly self-conscious immigrant nerd, destitute and a gnat's eyelash from throwing in the towel on my American excursion and fleeing home with my tail between my legs. Now my name was synonymous with being a willing participant in perverse sex acts throughout the tristate area. Unbeknownst to me, it became my calling.

“He said he'd love to have you along, if you'd like,” Emma said, washing down her second free doughnut with a swing of free black coffee. Before I had a chance to compute how my life was rapidly spinning out of control and beyond recognition, the sploshing idea was floated at the next editorial meeting and I was immediately assigned to participate in a quasi-sexual food fight with two gay men.

I obligingly touched base via e-mail with Peter, who admitted that while he had little
personal
interest in degrading poor Jonathan further, he'd be glad to make it happen for the sake of helping me out. He'd read the first few installments of “I Did It for Science” on Em and Lo's request and insisted that he'd found the concept terribly amusing. Peter contacted Jonathan, who responded promptly, requesting that we provide him with a shopping list of items we'd like to fling in his general direction. The list included yogurt, eggs, soda, chocolate pudding, ketchup, chocolate syrup, crème fraîche, and whipped cream. As the day drew closer, a paranoid Jonathan promised to pay us $250 each to ensure that we didn't flake out, adding that he wanted to make it a
weekly deal. My mind boggled at the thought of an easy extra $12,000 per year, or almost two years' rent.

The founding father of sploshing is a gentleman by the name of Bill Shipton. My first task was to get him on the phone to explain why on earth people would want to shower each other with pudding. Shipton is the editor and publisher of
Splosh!
magazine, which comes out of a notoriously dreary English coastal town called St. Leonardson-Sea, a hamlet near where an entire branch of my family have quietly eked out their golden years with the minimum of fuss. I thumbed through a copy and wondered if poor old Aunt Mary and Uncle Tom would have had any inkling that a snaggletoothed woman by the name of Dirty Deidre was lying prostrate in a bathtub full of baked beans in one of the adjacent bungalows. Sploshing, as explained by its creator, seemed like a bit of slapstick, surrealist fun in the vein of Benny Hill or Monty Python. Similarly, sploshing seems to have been spawned by the British upper classes—presumably after realizing that throwing British food on your girlfriend is marginally preferable to putting it anywhere near your mouth.

Though we'd e-mailed several times I first met Peter in a Wild West–themed bar, an hour before we were due to go to Jonathan's place on the Upper West Side. It was a chilly March night that coincided with the six-month anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I caught sight of the columns of light for the first time as I walked from the subway stop to the bar.

I saw Peter nursing a beer between two cowpokes. I quickly recognized him from Emma's thoughtful description: tall, but stocky like a rugby player, with a large, round, close-cropped and happy-looking head, mid-thirties, smiley. I sidled up next to Peter, who seemed pleased to see me if a little embarrassed by the circumstances. We spent the first two rounds talking about anything but the poor bastard we were about to abuse. Peter had a relaxed, lilting, and kind tone that reminded me of Bob Ross. He was as big a sweetheart as Emma had led me to believe. I was instantly relieved that I was embarking on this strange assignment with somebody so incredibly normal seeming.

It was only as we readied ourselves to go out onto the icy sidewalks of Amsterdam Avenue that we vocalized our own ideas at exactly what made Jonathan so keen to be used as a waste disposal.

“Listen, Grant,” he said. He took a fantastically deep breath. “I probably should have told you this before, but there may be a stronger sexual element to what's going to happen tonight. And I just wanted to make sure that you are okay with that.”

I cocked an eyebrow, inviting Peter to explain further.

“Well, I might be participating in the sexual side of things. If you are feeling it, you can jump in too, but it might get a bit weird. So you sure that's cool?”

“Weirder than a guy who likes having food thrown at him?” I said.

“Well, perhaps.”

“I'm sure that it'll be fine,” I said as we entered Jonathan's art deco building.

 

PETER TOLD
the uniformed and mustachioed doorman that we were here to see Jonathan in 17H. He immediately stared us up and down with utter contempt.

He sneered and called up to our host's apartment. “You have-a visitors,” he said coldly. Then he slammed the receiver down and pointed toward the mirrored elevators. Peter succumbed to a giggling fit that he finally got under control between the eighth and ninth floors.

“Also, you should probably know that I didn't
actually
go on a real date with Jonathan,” he said. He continued to look straight ahead. Beads of sweat began to form in the meaty furrows of Peter's brow.

“Go on,” I said. This was intriguing, but I started to get a little freaked out.

Peter thought about how the impact of what really happened could be lessened before quickly blurting out, “It was Christmas Day and I was cruising some Web sites. He asked me to come over to his place. I sort of knew he wanted some strange stuff before I left.”

As open-minded as I told myself I had become, I found something about cruising for strange, anonymous, lonely gay sex on one of the
holiest days in the Christian calendar mildly upsetting. The silence was thick and punctured by the soft ding that demarcated another floor.

“Okay,” I said, unconvinced. “But why didn't you mention this to Em and Lo?”

“What?” he said. “I'd just met them, and we were in polite company. I didn't want them to think that I was some sort of sexual…
deviant
.”

“You're not?”

Peter looked at me, disgusted that I seemed to be passing judgment on how he spent the Yule.

“No! I was bored and depressed. I always feel down around the holidays.”

With that, the elevator doors slid open and dumped us into a long, narrow corridor painted a ghastly pastel pink.

“His apartment is that one at the end of the hall,” said Peter in a theatrical whisper that was markedly louder than his talking voice.

The door at the end was ajar; a blue light seeped out of the crack. Following Peter's lead, I tiptoed up to the door behind him. Peter took a peek inside.

“Yeah, it's set up like before,” he whispered. “We have to be quiet. The neighbors complained last time. Just follow my lead and hold tight.”

Before I had a chance to think about what Peter had said, he rushed into the dimly lit apartment and I gamely followed after him. The first thing I noticed was the large flat-screen TV playing hard-core gay porn, which seemed to take up a whole wall of this neat and compact studio apartment. The TV was on mute. In the middle of the room was a massive tarp, and directly across from the TV was a bed upon which lay a stark-naked and furiously masturbating man who I assumed to be Jonathan. The man looked up at both of us from under his formidable unibrow, and although he seemed to quake with fear, he never compromised the lively rhythm of his onanism.

 

JONATHAN LOOKED
Mediterranean and fairly athletic, though his troubled face was a mess of acne scars. Aside from the masturbation, his body movements were like a high-strung squirrel's. He pivoted his head to take in a view of myself, Peter, the porn, and his penis, each turn lasting a fraction of a second. After four go-rounds, Jonathan used his free hand to grab a Heineken and bottle opener that had been positioned on his nightstand ahead of our arrival. He scooted off the bed and landed on his knees, his head now inches in front of Peter's crotch. Peter took the beer, then reached down and grabbed Jonathan by his right ear and pulled him sharply upward.

The only sound in the room was the rapid wet slapping of our host's frenzied self-abuse, but I clearly saw Peter mouth “Suck my fucking cock” into the stretched lobe that he held mercilessly betwixt forefinger and thumb. Peter pulled down his sweatpants to mid-thigh, revealing his fully erect penis, which he maliciously poked in both of Jonathan's eyes before sinking it deep and hard into his gaping maw. Jonathan gagged, sputtered, and teared.

My coconspirator had gone from amiable teddy bear to Gestapo bully-boy sex fiend in mere seconds. I looked on from the doorjamb, still holding two plastic bags full of auxiliary yogurt and two dozen eggs we'd picked up at a bodega on Jonathan's block. Incidentally, Peter had insisted that the eggs be free-range and the yogurt organic, which cemented the image I was building of a caring, considerate person.

“Get fucking undressed,” Peter said. I recoiled with fear and briefly reckoned how easy it would be to dump the groceries and make a run for freedom, leaving these two lovebirds in flagrante delicto. This was rapidly beginning to seem very distant from the definition of sploshing that I'd been given. This poor bastard Jonathan was being treated like a sexual ashtray by a guy who'd been a gentle giant minutes earlier. I began to think through how my failure to go through with this would go down with Michael Martin, Nerve's editor in chief. One of Michael's conditions for taking the head position at Nerve was that I should be
paid full-time to write. Up until then, I wrote the column in between reordering ink for the printer, answering customer service e-mails, and bothering the female interns, and for no extra pay. When he joined the company, Michael made it clear that if ever I felt I was in physical danger during an assignment, I should leave immediately. I certainly didn't want to betray his confidence in me by using a lifeline—something I did only once in three years of sexual misadventures.

“We are about to fuck this faggot's shit up,” said Peter as he intensified his thrusts into poor Jonathan's face.

I stepped backward into the bathroom and slowly peeled off my clothes, folded them into a neat pile, and set them on the tank of the toilet. I stopped short of stripping completely naked, thinking that my nudity would be mistaken as a green light for full involvement. More important, the ongoing fight-or-flight process had rendered my penis both tiny and useless. As if I wasn't already embarrassed enough. I didn't realize I was shaking until I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I splashed my face with water. I'd seen this technique used in movies to provide a burst of clarity in harrowing situations, but it didn't do the trick. Most of the water ran down my elbows and onto the crotch of my light gray briefs. It looked as though I'd peed in my underwear and only served to heighten the tension. I splashed more water on more underpants to detract from the singular pee patch until the whole front section was wet through and charcoal in color.