Working Stiff (17 page)

They say that people become their jobs; I was becoming mine and it wasn't a natural fit. Fiona had given me a lot to think about.

Fiona had also given me chlamydia.

That night at my place, I had just slipped it in without a condom for a second or a minute. Did I mention that we did it five times? That brief dip was long enough for me to catch a sexually transmitted disease of some description. I thought I was imagining the slight pain, but when I used the bathroom when we got back to my parent's house, it had become too acute to ignore. I hoped it was a urinary tract infection. When my previous girlfriends had UTIs they would disappear into the bathroom with a stack of magazines, a gallon of cranberry juice, and reemerge a few hours later, feeling a hundred percent better.

I limped down our street, past the smashed bus shelter and the graffiti-strewn pillar box to the corner shop on Lampits Hill. Or what I had referred to as a bodega for the past four years.

Raj, the shop's proprietor and only staff member, recognized me instantly.

“My goodness, I haven't seen you in a long time,” he said. He looked me up and down. “A
bloody
long time.”

I was a paper boy for Raj when I was thirteen and fourteen. Since then I was sent down the street to buy lottery tickets for my father every Saturday evening.

“Hi, Raj.”

“Where have you been?”

“America. I live there now, in New York.”

“New York, eh? Yes, very good. Well, what can I help you with, Mr. Trump?” He laughed heartily at his cleverness.

“Do you have any cranberry juice?”

Raj gave me a puzzled look, as if I'd asked for powdered rhinoceros horn.

“I am afraid not, sir, no.” He folded him arms and looked at the floor.

I walked to another corner shop up the road, then about a mile to a medium-sized supermarket, where I found some cranberry “drink” in small juice boxes, which was the closest thing. I wasn't in New York anymore. I bought ten juice boxes and carried them home. I drew a hot bath and read my mother's copies of
OK!
and
Hello!
magazines from cover to cover, thinking that women's magazines were somehow vital to the relief of my symptoms.

Posh, Becks, Posh, Becks, Camilla, Posh, Becks, and so on.

The bath and the cranberry drink had been completely fruitless.

Two days into my stay it had become quite unbearable and I began dredging the Internet for information about what I should do.

Orsett Hospital is the place of my birth. Wings of the hospital had been shut down annually due to NHS spending cuts, and by 2002 the huge complex of buildings housed little more than an infirmary and the Sexual Health Centre, or “clap clinic,” as it was known provincially. A brusque receptionist set up an appointment for me the following morning. The only appointment she had all week. Orsett is around six miles away from my parents' home in Corringham. Since the hospital had shrunk in size, one could no longer take the bus there from our town. A
taxi would be over forty dollars round-trip and I wasn't insured to drive either of my parents' cars. I mulled my options over before asking the question no child wants to ask a parent.

“You want me to give you a lift to the flipping clap clinic?” said my mother.

She tugged theatrically on her thick black hair.

“My God, Grant, what are you doing with your life?”

“Don't make this any worse than it already is!” I pleaded. “There's no need to tell anyone else.”

“Oh, do you think it's something I'd like to scream from the hilltops? ‘I'm taking my son to the clap clinic!'”

“You're
what
?” My kid sister had silently walked into the house and heard our conversation through the door.

“Nothing!” I snapped. “Mum's just being weird again.”

As distraught as she seemed to be, my mother did a sort of Irish jig around the kitchen to demonstrate her supposed dementia. This satiated my sister's curiosity and she bounded back into her bedroom.

“I know the woman who used to work there, you know,” she whispered. “I went to school with her. She might even still be there. God. How embarrassing.”

We drove in silence to Orsett Hospital at eight thirty the next morning. I was dropped off outside the infirmary and walked around to the bleachy-smelling Sexual Health Centre. The building was divided into a men's and women's area. Sitting in the waiting room of the men's area was an embarrassed-looking sixty-year-old man under a jet-black toupee, a ginger bruiser in his late teens, and a thirty-year-old with too much jewelry and a terrible stutter. I wondered who was sleeping with these men, then remembered that I was one of them. I was embarrassed for having chlamydia and more embarrassed for the company chlamydia kept.

Over the past two years England had started to become very foreign seeming, antiquated and broken. But as I sat there in the husk of the hospital where it all began, I remember thinking that there's something very civilized about the government picking up the tab for
that time you threw caution to the wind and just stuck your penis in a stranger. If one doesn't have decent health insurance in America by contrast, one should probably invest in a first aid kid and a crash helmet. My buddy Chris had some bad sushi and it cost him eight grand.

On the wall was a sign that read,
If you require a health care technician of your own gender, please inform the receptionist 48 hours prior to your arrival
.

I filled out a questionnaire and some other paperwork. Like the decrepit red-brick shell around it, the Sexual Health Centre seemed very empty. Just one female nurse appeared to be on staff—was it my mother's school friend, Linda?

Like Fiona, she would soon have four penises in her grasp. The National Health service would never acknowledge it, of course, but the nurse simply
must
compare the hundreds of penises she sees week in, week out: a big one, a small one, a ginger one, a pretty one, an ugly one, and—once in a blue moon—a circumcised one. The only common themes would be disease and irritation, infection and dysfunction. She was seeing unhappy penises attached to unhappy people. I've become hyperconscious of the working conditions of other sex workers. To that end I decided I would be concerned yet jovially pragmatic. I sort of
was
anyway. I had been rolling the dice for a while and finally got snake eyes.

“Arrrrghhhh!” came a disconcerting cry of pain from down the hall. I jumped in my chair. Nobody else reacted to it.

Wiggy and ginger nuts were awaiting test results. Mush-mouth was on his way out.

“Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa
fanks very much, love,” he said after scheduling a follow-up appointment with the receptionist for two weeks hence.

“See you in a
fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa
fortnight,” he added as he walked out to the parking lot.

“Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa
fuckin' 'ell!” said Wiggy once the stutterer was safely out of earshot. “'E 'ad a lot to say for 'imself, didn't 'e?”

We all laughed, save ginger, who seemed to be praying and rocking in his chair, oblivious to the rest of us.

“Don't be so bleedin' 'orrible, you!” said the receptionist before succumbing to a wheezing cackle.

“Wot-choo talkin' baht, babes?” said Wiggy with a chuckle, “I'm only 'avin' a laugh, ain't I?”

“Oooh, you
are
a wicked little sod!”

“But you love me anyway though, don'tcha!”

Either Wiggy was a regular or oozed an easy charm. Perhaps that's what he was in for.

“Grahnt?” called a short, chubby blonde women with outsized spectacles.

I raised my hand.

“Come on, love, let's sort you out, then.”

Her name tag said Linda. I appreciated her jolly demeanor and appreciated how she must have honed it over years in the discharge business.

“Now before we start, would you like to be tested for HIV?”

“Is it free?” I hadn't shaken the habit of taking anything if it was free.

“Of course.”

“Then sure.”

“Okay, well, now it's the law for anyone who takes the test to have a counseling session whether it comes up negative or not, all right, love?”

“No problem.”

She readied the syringe. I rolled up my sleeve.

“Little bit of a pinch,” she said. She filled the chamber. “All done.” She sang.

“Now, what seems to be the problem?”

“It burns when I go to the bathroom.”

“Going to the bathroom” is a turn of phrase than can sound both odd and vague to the Saxon ear.

“It 'urts when you do a wee, you mean?” said Linda, getting to the bottom of things.

“Precisely.”

“Okay, well, what I'm going to do is take a little scraping from your urethra. I must warn you that it
is
quite painful, but it'll be over in a second. Okay, love, pants down.” Linda snapped on some rubber gloves then referred to the paperwork I'd filled out.

“Stoddard?” She looked up at my face. She saw the likeness—everyone does. I made out the recognition in her eyes, but the circumstances probably prevented the follow-up questions.

She scrunched up her nose and took a long hard look at my business, rolling it around in her rubber-coated hands. My penis had overheard what was about to happen and was inching its way up into my body. If it happened to be larger looking, I might have pursued the personal connection we had, but in its current state my tiny penis would have brought dishonor upon my family name.

“You might want to grip the side of the bed, all right, dear?”

I braced myself. My sweaty palms gripped the aluminum bar along the side of the bed. The Q-tip–like implement went in and out. It wasn't particularly pleasant, but it was not the hellish pain I'd been led to believe.

“There's a brave soldier!” she said, in a very lovely and maternal way. “I've 'ad two men cryin' in 'ere, just this week. Ohhh and the profanities I 'ear when I pull it out. They turn the air blue!”

Linda introduced me to the woman who counseled me on not having HIV while she determined the results of the scrape. She came back with a choice. Chlamydia or Non-Specific Urethritus, N.S.U. for short.

“You can take your pick as they are both treated with the same antibiotics.” She placed them in my hand.

Chlamydia sounded like a flower, N.S.U. like a state college. It was a toss-up.

“We need to check up so we'll have you back 'ere in a fortnight, all right, love?”

“Yes,” I lied.

In a fortnight I'd be back where I suddenly realized that I felt at home, squatting in a tenement building in New York's Chinatown, being handsomely paid to have sex with strangers and write about it.

I bought a Coke from a vending machine and slurped down the first dose of antibiotics. It was already eighty degrees out, but unlike muggy New York the air was fresh and clean. I walked about a mile to the main road, where I was told I could catch a bus, but carried on walking.

I walked all the way home.

AS MADCAP AS
evading detection had been, Chris and I lived with a very real fear that the housing situation in the area was regulated in part or full by the Chinese mob, the Triads. News of two Caucasians, one of whom conspicuously sported more body hair than the rest of Chinatown's residents combined, taking up a space that would usually house one large and unspeakably poor immigrant family could put the both of us in harm's way.

Tensions were raised by all of the mysterious or sinister activity that was going on around us in Chinatown. Three prostitutes had been slain on New Year's Day, stabbed to death in an abandoned building opposite The Orchard's office on Orchard and Hester. Clues pointed toward mob involvement. A young girl from the neighborhood copy
shop that we knew suddenly had a baby on her hip one day. Grace looked about thirteen and weighed eighty pounds soaking wet. The kid was at least six months old and already quite a porker. It couldn't have weighed much less than Grace, but she happily hauled him around the neighborhood.

“What do you mean
bought
him?” I asked her.

Grace's English was broken and I felt sure that the story behind the baby's sudden appearance had been corrupted in translation.

“Yes. I boughted him from man,” she said, exasperated. It was the third time I'd asked. I was troubled and unsatisfied by her explanations.

“How much did you pay for him?” I asked.

Despite the language barrier, Grace suddenly realized that my line of questioning had gone from friendly to investigative.

“I don't want talk anymore!” she said, instantly upset.

We didn't talk about the baby or anything other than photocopying ever again.

Shenanigans were also afoot in our immediate surroundings. Every morning I would sneak down our steps to find a bag lady in her sixties hanging out in the hallway. She was white and had one of those early twentieth-century New York accents.
I saw a doughty boid on toity toid and toid.

“Mawning, sweet-haught!” she said each morning. “You stay in school!”

I found her presence particularly odd as Chinatown is a less than desirable location for homeless people. No one in the neighborhood over the age of fifty was above Dumpster diving for the aluminum cans and recycling them for a nickel each. I just couldn't figure out why she always hung out in my building. One morning, I heard her having a conversation with somebody with a Chinese accent. I quietly snuck down the stairs and watched her wildly gesticulating with a clean-cut guy in his early twenties. The talking stopped before I could make out words, and I looked through a gap in the stairwell to see the woman counting out twenty-dollar bills that she was handing to him. I couldn't
believe my eyes as she gave him over seven hundred dollars. A wad of cash large enough to choke a donkey. There could have been more but they quickly stopped as somebody came through the front door. I walked past them quickly but the woman gave me a knowing look, extended her stained index finger, and pointed at me in short jabbing motions. It seemed like everybody was trying to hide something, and as long as Chris and I didn't pry into other people's business they'd leave us well alone. The intrigue was killing me, but satisfying my curiosity was not worth risking the best deal. Almost all of my peers were spending a third to a half of their income on rent. I was spending less than an eighth, affording me a lifestyle otherwise unobtainable to someone earning thirty thousand dollars a year in New York City. The saving was great, but I really reveled in the bragging rights.

The temperature in July hardly dropped below ninety at night and the humidity meant that getting a good night's sleep was almost impossible. We had a puny air-conditioning unit but rarely used it, as it almost always blew the main fuse.

One particularly sticky night, I came home to find a note scrawled in red, dramatic Chinese characters pinned to our door. I called Chris, who joined me in thinking the worst: an eviction notice with an ultimatum, a promise of violence if we did not comply immediately. Chris rushed over and we took the note to a man he knew in a Chinese bar near his girlfriend's place in Brooklyn. We sweated profusely as the gentleman read it through and theatrically raised his eyebrows.

“Your neighbors,” he said. He cleared his throat. “They want you to know…” He stopped to give direction to a busboy, leaving us on tenterhooks for five seconds, although it felt like an hour.

I wanted to grab him by the collar and give him a thorough shake. He faced us again and traced the characters with his finger.

“…that they have something to give you.”

“Oh, shit,” said Chris.

“Is that bad?” I asked.

“That UPS delivered a parcel but you weren't home so they have it for you to pick up.”

Relieved beyond measure, Chris and I collapsed in fits of laughter, much to the translator's astonishment, and enjoyed a cold beer before trekking back to Manhattan.

In July, Chris left New York for a month to visit his family, who lived in the remote, rough terrain of the northern Greek mainland, entrusting me with the apartment.

I awoke one morning about an hour earlier than usual and went to boil some water, which I drank with a few slices of fresh ginger, as per my newly New Age mother's latest recommendation. As I walked into the kitchen, a section of the ceiling directly above my bed collapsed. This wasn't light plasterboard of the twentieth century but a thick heavy plaster attached to a kind of cement several inches thick. Chunks of wood, animal bones, and decaying rags came down with it too, filling the apartment with a thick dust. The weight of it all crashing down broke my nightstand and shattered my lamp and alarm clock. If I'd have still been in bed I'd have been robbed of my trademark Bee Gee teeth and aquiline nose. I considered it a spooky warning shot. I turned on a few fans, took a few changes of clothes, and camped out at Brian's house on the Bowery for the weekend.

I returned on Sunday night to an apartment that was hot, dark, rank-smelling, and full of choking dust. Having the two fans on apparently blew the fuse shortly after I left and there was no electricity. The fuse box was in the basement that the super of the building had under lock and key, meaning that I couldn't change it myself. Whatever was in the fridge was stinking to high heaven, and from what I could make out from the flickering, buzzing fluorescent lights in the hallway, the whole place was an utter disaster area. I stayed the night regardless, sleeping in Chris's bedroom, which was relatively dust-free. I was awakened at six in the morning by a persistent pounding on my door, which I tried to ignore in vain. The woman who immediately started screaming at me was demanding that I turn off my shower. I told her that it's the middle of the night and that I wasn't using my shower and even invited her in to look, but she just repeated
“Turn off shower!”
as she stormed back down the stairs. I went straight back to sleep and
was awaken three hours later by more screaming and shouting coming from the hallway. I went to pee and saw that my kitchen and bathroom were now under an inch and a half of water. The leak was coming from the apartment above ours and it was now
that
resident who was getting an earful from the woman who'd given me my wake-up call.

I e-mailed Chris in Athens. He suggested that I mop up the mess as best I could, buy a fuse, and put it in a bag with a note written in Chinese that said the fuse in apartment nine needed replacing. He told me to hang the bag on the super's door handle, bang on the door, and run away as fast as I could. I asked Brian's roommate Victoria to write the note in Cantonese. I returned that evening to find that power had been restored. I could now concentrate on another pressing problem—namely, the gaping hole in the ceiling that seemed to be growing by the hour. I cleared the rubble and dust from my room, but whenever the kids upstairs ran around, more debris would fall through. I began to have horrible nightmares about the mysterious bones constantly falling through the ceiling being those of a human baby. I was beginning to think the Taoist monk was right when he suggested that the apartment was haunted.

Chris returned from Greece with a renewed energy and within a day of his return he expertly installed a new ceiling, gave the plumbing an overhaul, repainted, plastered, and had the place looking better than ever in no time. Paying so little in rent actually left me with extra money each month for the first time in my life. I decided I would use this extra cash to first visit my parents, sort out my visa, and then really make inroads on making 45 Henry our own. After so long on the move, I was extremely excited to have a stable home. I'd been here six months, survived detection
and
the apartment's attempts to kill us both. Things looked like they would be running smoothly from then on.

Toward the end of my ten-day trip to my parents' home, I got a cryptic e-mail from Chris saying that he'd packed my stuff up and put it somewhere until I got back. I couldn't imagine what had happened. Had Peggy found out? Had another supernatural disaster rendered my room permanently uninhabitable? Had the Triads taken a baseball bat
to Chris's knees? I called Chris, who apologized for the terse e-mail but explained that there had been a sudden and unfortunate turn of events regarding the apartment. Alex had moved in.

Alex was a sixty-year-old Siberian man who taught sambo at Peggy's school. Despite sounding like a dance, sambo is a lethal type of no-frills hand-to-hand combat employed by Spetsnaz—the Soviet equivalent of the British SAS or American Green Berets—perfected against the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Peggy had suddenly needed to find a living space for the illegal immigrant killing machine.

I jumped in a cab at JFK and went straight to the apartment. Chris wasn't picking up. His last instruction to me was simply to get out as soon as I could. Chris had always said that I may need to leave at a moment's notice. It just seemed so cruel that it would have to happen now. The place was a real shag pad and afforded me a disposable income. I was living high off the hog and having lots of sex: my American wet dream come true.

I opened the apartment door. All the lights were off. I threw my bag down and started feeling my way toward my bedroom when I bumped into a large object in the middle of the living room. I tripped and tumbled into the kitchen. After a few seconds of fumbling for the light switch I opened the fridge door, which cast an eerie light over the obstruction. A short bald man with a barrel chest and hands like bunches of kielbasa was standing perfectly still in the middle of the room. He had been standing there like that in the pitch dark.

“What the fuck?”

“My name is Alex.”

He still hadn't turned his face to look at me and his gaze remained on the back wall of the living room.

“I come to live in here.” He turned his head to look at me for the first time.

“Sorry.”

His Brezhnevian face softened and he even cracked a brief but apologetic smile, revealing a tangle of silvery bridgework. Alex was earning money in the United States through teaching sambo and was
sending the proceeds back to his wife and kids in Siberia. He hadn't seen them for almost four years.

Alex gave me a hand with moving out. Not a huge task, as there was just a suitcase, a guitar, and two garbage bags full of clothes. Once again, I left everything that wouldn't fit in the trunk of a taxicab. I put the suitcase and the guitar in the trunk of the waiting taxi and went to shake Alex's mighty paw. He shook my hand firmly, placing his left hand on my elbow, and in doing so relinquished his grip on the bags, dropping all of my clothes into a deep, muddy Chinatown puddle.

It didn't occur to me that I really had nowhere else to go until I was in the taxi. I had keys for the Nerve office, so I told the driver to take me to the corner of Broadway and Spring. I stashed all of my worldly belongings under my desk and fell asleep on the couch. I figured that until I found a new living situation, I could live in the office and join the New York Sports Club across the street so that I could still shower regularly. I could also have a schvitz anytime I wanted and, if the mood ever took me, pump a little iron.

Michael woke me up the next morning.

“Do you know how to play bridge?” he asked.

I hadn't thought about bridge since living with Mrs. Montague. For her the game was both her reason for living and the bane of her existence. One night I'd made the mistake of asking her how to play and subjected myself to a two-hour primer that left me confused and confounded.

“I have no idea,” I said and made for the coffeepot.

“Well, you're going to learn tonight.”

Michael was referring to a biweekly bridge class that was taking place that evening. According to the ad that had been posted on Craigslist, Doug, the bridge expert, has a “thick, ten-inch cock.” This claim is the most striking feature of the ad he placed online to conscript novices to his “clothing-optional” bridge class, which took place twice a month on Wednesday evenings at his apartment in uptown Manhattan. Aside from his purported dimensions, the main body of the ad is about guys in their mid-twenties to mid-forties learning and playing bridge in a
relaxed atmosphere. “There is to be no touching before, during, or after the class. The class is clothing-optional with pupils invited to wear as much or as little as you feel comfortable in.”

Still ruing the previous night's eviction, I e-mailed Doug and expressed a desire to learn and insinuated an undercurrent of voyeuristic intent. Within what seemed like nanoseconds I received a reply that again stressed the relaxed vibe he sought to create during the class, the strict no-touching rule, the phallus that encroached upon a foot in length, and my responsibility to be height/weight proportionate. “Because no one wants to look at a bunch of fat guys playing cards.” I was asked to report my stats or ideally to send along a recent picture. Attached to his e-mail was a menagerie of playful pictures of Doug smiling coquettishly while brandishing what looked like a length of radiator hose, dressed in wingtips, black socks, and a yellow and black letterman jacket.