Working Stiff (21 page)

As soon as I had made the decision to go, I felt a massive sense of relief. In fact, the end of every sexual situation related to the column was marked by a feeling of dread, anguish, and insecurity being suddenly lifted. Making a break from Leather Camp was that feeling multiplied by a hundred.

I ran through the downpour to camp HQ and checked in my bed linen. There were only two trains to New York that day, and I was determined to catch the earlier one. There was no precedent of people leaving camp before the diabolical activities had reached their heady zenith at the Renaissance Fair, and consequently the camp's organizers were reluctant to let me go.

Jorge, one of Claudia's crew, who I'd meet in the group grope, very kindly offered to drive me the twenty miles to the nearest train station,
through torrential rain, after I'd explained that there'd been a family emergency that I had to get back for.

“Well, family is very important,” he said with his thick Venezuelan accent. “We'll make sure you get back to New York okay.”

I got on the train, thankful that I'd made it back undetected and in one piece, though I doubted that I'd ever really be “okay” again.

BASED ON THE CONVERSATION
I know will follow, I often dread to open my mouth. My diphthongs, my glottal stops, my singsongy inflection conspire against me and commit me to having the same conversation, every day, two, five, ten times a day since the late nineties. I'll have to write off the next ten minutes.

I love New York City. I belong to it and it belongs to me. Like most adopted New Yorkers, my love informs my politics and worldview, my lifestyle and relationships, my dress sense and street smarts, my hopes and aspirations. I walk the walk just fine, but whenever I talk the talk, I am stopped dead in my tracks.

“Hey, where are you from?”

I'll say “here” or “New York,” depending on where I am. I'll try to neutralize my accent, but it's too late. I know where this is going and there's no way out.

“No, I mean
really
from?”

If I have the energy to make them guess, just less than half of people will say England. The remainder will guess either Australia or New Zealand. Every twentieth person will guess South Africa or Ireland. I'm not sure if this corresponds with the commonly held view that in general Americans aren't all that worldly, or that by accident or design my accent has morphed over time.

“I was
raised
in England.”

My choice of words is conceited. If I can't be identified as a New Yorker, I'll accept “citizen of the world.” Anything but being backed into this one again.

Now, I'm aware that my accent has done me infinitely more good than harm at this point. It's opened doors, created opportunities, allowed me to jump the line, endeared me to otherwise indifferent people; it's kick-started thousands of conversations, it's gotten me laid well and often.

In major U.S. cities, being English is almost always relatable.

People always want to tell me that they spent a semester abroad in England, that they have family who live there, that they love soccer, Monty Python, Benny Hill, and Mr. Bean. An effective conversationalist uses first impressions to find common ground. It's cruel to derail a person's line of questioning but I attempt in vain to do just that, every time. It's not malicious; I'm trying to avoid being defined by a place that's never really felt like home and instead be allied with a place that does. No one lets me.

“What town?”

“A small village outside of London. I've lived here for years though. How do you know Brian?”

“West, north?”

“East of London. Hey, are you wearing Issey Miyake?”

“What's it called?”

“You would have never heard of it. I can barely remember it myself.”

“Seriously, what's the name of your town? I lived in England for a semester.”

Oftentimes my inflection, the cadence of my voice starts to feature in their sentences. My accent is almost always contagious.

“What did you study?”

“Economics. What town?”

“Corringham.”

“Never heard of it. Are you a cockney?”

He or she is almost always trying to be friendly, personable, yet it's got my blood boiling.

Bad teeth, gray skies, warm beer, pale skin, blood pudding. I am always overcome with the urge to create distance between me and all that; to prove that that's just not me. I wouldn't identify myself as a self-loathing Brit. In fact, I'm slowly beginning to like myself. Oblivious to my attempts to sever the national umbilical cord, people often introduce me to other Englanders.

I don't dislike British people per se. I just don't like them
here.

“This is James,” says the ruthless man introducing his friend. “James is another bloody Brit!”

Other “Brits” are my kryptonite. Well-meaning Americans always manage to conjure up an estranged countryman and set me up on a sort of expat playdate, unaware that their very presence strikes at the heart of my special powers—my presumed wit and charming accent. The intermediary will watch us shake hands and leave. Probably thinks we must have a lot to talk about, but I am instantly transported to my unhappy place.

I'd always railed against the archetypal Brit as portrayed in the American media, but I confront it whenever I meet an estranged countryman.

“Where are you from then?”

James's accent is always clipped, if a little slurred; nonregional. His hair is foppish and curly.

“Just east of London.”

I always give a vague response and hope that his or her concept of geography is thrown off by the alcohol that's causing him or her to sway. Nope, it's clicked. It usually does. Oh shit. He's pointing, smiling.

“Essex boy!”

In England and throughout the package vacation zones of southern Europe, the county of Essex has the unenviable reputation as a capital of utter barbarism, the nexus of tackiness and uncouth. I've referred to it as the New Jersey of England in the past, though in reality it's not nearly as quaint.

It's frosted hair, souped-up cars, bumper-to-bumper traffic, gangsters, random violence, ecstasy dealers, binge drinking, tanorexic girls, vandalism, designer-brand clothing, shopping malls, funky-house and theme-pub franchises. The urban areas smell of sulfur, the countryside smells of pig shit. Depending on the prevailing wind conditions, the odor in Corringham changes hour by hour. Essex is a cultural blind spot, a geopolitical punch line.

“Au-right, geeezaah!” James apes an Essex accent and slaps me on the back. The performance is too theatrical but technically accurate.

“What are
you
doing 'ere then?” James continues the impersonation.

I was blissfully unaware of the British class system until I moved to New York and met the Jameses and the Tobys, the Nicholases, the Emmas, the Sebastians, the Brunos. They are all in media, PR, or finance; overpaid, oversexed, and over here. The men have the Hugh Grant thing going on and use it night after night, whittling their bedposts to toothpicks.

“I'm a writer,” I'll say.

“Oh, you're a wri-ah!”

I make a fist and think about throwing it into their crooked teeth. All that money spent on boarding school, summer vacations in the Dordogne, winters skiing in Val D'Isere, and to have a mouth that looks stuffed full of smashed crockery. Twisted bicuspids, discolored canines, and unruly incisors aren't the only things they bring with them
from Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, and Surrey. They bring their colonizing instinct and stick together, a clan, a posse, a clique. Every year there's more of them. Tarquins and Olivers and Annas and Bridgetts. They meet to drink and watch cricket and rugby, only they call it “Ruggah.” I have more in common with a house cat than these people and no one can see it but me and them.

IN HEELS,
the supermodel seemed a good foot taller than me.

“
What
did you just say to me?” she said.

It was the third time she'd asked me to repeat myself.

She sounded German, perhaps Dutch. The pickup line would have sounded garbled even if there
wasn't
a height difference, a language barrier, a pulsing bass beat, or the effects of drugs and alcohol to contend with. I balanced precariously on tiptoes and yelled in the general direction of her eardrum.

“I said, Your daddy doesn't have a penis, he has a paintbrush!”

Even as concepts for my “I Did It for Science” column went, this one was patently preposterous. In an editorial meeting the previous week, I'd inadvertently leaked that despite being a kamikaze sex writer,
I'd never used a pickup line on anyone. In fact, though I was checking off bizarre once-in-a-lifetime sexual experiences at a dizzying rate, I'd never done the normal stuff like ask for a girl's number, French kissed a complete stranger, or had a one-night stand. I still haven't. Within an hour, a short list of twenty of the most egregious lines had been made for me to unleash at a Ford model party that Wednesday night.

The model jumped back and held my shoulders at arm's length.

“You…”

I braced myself for a stinging slap or knee to the groin.

Brian laughed and took a picture.

“…are so funny!”

She wrapped her arms around me, shoved my face to her clammy breasts, and swiveled at the hips several times.

“A paintbrush! Ha ha ha!”

She snapped her fingers at the bartender and pointed to me. Another free drink.

This was the fourth. I'd been making models laugh all night and they'd been rewarding me by buying me drinks on their boyfriends' tabs and promptly disappearing. I tried not to take it personally, reminding myself that models are required to flit in and out of clubs all night. I'm not a big drinker and was only now realizing that my humiliation and my drunkenness were inversely proportional.

The night had started with Anna and me sharing several flasks of sake at Decibel. It was one of the semiannual occasions when we have a drink and talk about the tumultuous year that we dated each other. I walked her to her friend's place on 3rd Street and Avenue A and was asked to stay for a glass of Riesling and a few chunky lines of coke. I left to join Brian and Vin at Cherry Tavern for a Tecate and tequila shot. Outside, I wretched twice. Nothing came up and the three of us headed over to the model party at Plaid.

I surveyed the dance floor for my next glamazon. If my liver could take it, I still had eight or nine pickup lines to bust out. In the distance I saw Brian threading himself through the crowd toward me.

“Hey!” he said.

I could barely focus my eyes on him.

“How do you like your eggs in the morning?” I slurred. “Fertilized?”

“Never mind all that,” he said. He pulled me across the dance floor by my shirt collar. “There's this totally cute French girl who really wants to meet you.”

Even in my inebriated state I knew that this was Brian code for “I want to close in on a cute girl, so please make time with her clubfooted friend.”

Laure and Louise were both nineteen years old and both adorable, swinging their arms and legs around with a seemingly laissez-faire attitude toward the beat, as French girls in discotheques are wont to do. They were spending the summer in New York, interning for an importer of Bordeaux. It was easy to tell to whom we'd each been allotted. Laure was taller, blonde, and sun-kissed. Louise was shorter with paler skin and a stylish jet-black bob. She wore a black tank top, a short black-and-white polka-dot skirt, and black heels.

“Louise, this is Grant,” yelled Brian. He came close to my ear and yelled, “Your one.”

As they were both slim, pretty, and jerked their bodies in the same arrhythmic manner, I would have been happy with either, though I was acutely aware that they were seeing me at my drunkest and sweatiest. By the sixth week of a New York summer, people sort of surrender to the swampy air that has you schvitzing before you've walked a block from your apartment. In pairs we danced and talked.

“Your name?” said Louise, hooking her shiny black hair over her ear and putting it near my mouth.

“My name is Grant,” I said.

Louise raised her eyebrows and tugged Laure's arm.

“Laure! Laure! Il s'appelle Grand!”
she said as they succumbed to fits of girlish laughter.

A bouncer pushed past me and I spilt free gin and tonic over my shirt to more giggles from Louise. Laure and Brian were already mak
ing out and slapping each other's asses in time to the music. With seemingly nothing left to lose, I proceeded to treat Louise to some of my comedy dance moves, which are, in truth, modified only slightly from my
actual
dance moves.

“You are cool!” she said with a wink.

She must have been as wrecked as I was.

“What are you doing later?” I asked just before an urgent need to throw up hit me like a kick in the gut.

“Well, per'aps we should 'ang out because I fink that your friend and Laure are going to…”

I left Louise mid-sentence and hurtled toward the exit and ran across the street from the club and started spitting out that awful-tasting liquid that tends to precede a Technicolor yawn.

I'm going to be sick, I'm not going to be sick, I'm going to be sick.

My body kept me guessing until I was a block from my house. I threw up outside the window of the Dynasty diner at the corner of 14th and B to the disgust of its nighttime patrons. As I got home, my phone rang several times. It was Brian; I didn't pick up.

Hungover, I stumbled into the Nerve offices at around noon the next day. I sat at my desk and kept one eye on the bathroom door.

“Oh, man!” Brian said and laughed from across the room. “You were wasted last night!”

“I don't want to talk about it.” Even thinking about what I drank last night could restart the heaving.

“You actually left that girl while she was still
talking
to you.”

The pain of the hangover had nudged out any memory of the two teenage Parisians we had met. Brian filled in the gaps in my memory with snaps of the previous night on his digital camera.

“Wow, they're pretty cute!” I said.

“Well, the one you
could
have taken home totally thinks that you are totally not into her. She got kind of upset. After you left she said…ha ha ha…oh, man, she said, ‘What eez wrong wiv your friend? Is 'e…'ow you say…a faggot?' Ha ha ha ha!”

“Did you set her straight?”

“No, I told her that she was probably right!”

“Thanks.”

At around four, I kept down half a sandwich. At five I was called at my desk and summoned to Starbucks. I threw up the sandwich. The Starbucks on the corner of Crosby and Spring was where Rufus fired people. An enormous culling took place in the spring and summer of 2001. After each outgoing staffer left Nerve's employ to the sounds of world Muzak and the smell of mocha lattes, the venue became known internally as Charbucks. Rufus was pissed at me.

 

BY THE FALL
of 2002 Rufus Griscom had already had some success in transitioning Nerve-branded content into a wide array of other media: the Nerve HBO show; cobranded movie projects; Nerve online personals were spun into a separate company that powered personals for a plethora of Web sites; Emma Taylor and Lorelei Sharkey coauthored a hardcover sex guide,
The Big Bang: Nerve's Guide to the New Sexual Universe
, and followed it with
Nerve's Guide to Sexual Etiquette.
Rufus now had designs on spinning some Nerve content into a TV series and decided that a small-screen version of “I Did It for Science” could be a feasible project. Rufus had off-handedly brought up the possibility during an awkward moment in the elevator. Through spatial association, the elevator became the only venue where this formless project was touched upon.

“Why, Mr. Stoddard, sir!” he'd routinely say as we entered the elevator in the lobby.

Rufus often referred to and addressed me as Nerve's unofficial mascot, a distinction I secretly enjoyed and tried to aspire to. I liked Rufus and thought him charming, quite Gatsby-ish. He is tall, slim, and bespectacled, with a triangular nose and prominent, noble-looking chin. He has a crest of thick, straight floppy hair and flings his arms around in wild gesticulation.

Third floor.

“Well, what a wonderful bouquet of bed-head you are presenting us all with this fine morning.”

The timbre of Rufus's voice is somewhat odd and comical. His uvula, the circular muscle at the back of the throat, seems perpetually tensed, as when yawning. This can make him sound Kermit-like. The sound becomes more noticeable when he is excited or enraged, which is patently hilarious.

Fifth floor.

“So how about ‘I Did It for Science' TV? That'd be quite something, wouldn't it?”

“Totally.”

Sixth floor. Our floor.

We had this brief conversation about four times in as many months, always in the elevator, until seemingly out of the blue Rufus and Alisa invited me to accompany them to a VH1 meeting at 1515 Broadway.

Rufus's girlfriend, the tall, blonde, perky, and Texan Alisa Volkmann, had been recently brought in to share Ross Martin's position as the head of Film and TV projects. Shortly thereafter, Ross and his pregnant wife, Jordana, moved to LA, where he set up his own production company, Plant Film.

“We want you to see what a TV meeting is like, so you have an idea for when we pitch the ‘I Did It for Science' show,” he said as we scooched into the backseat of a town car.

“Totally!” said Alisa. “A TV version of your show would just be rilly, rilly hilarious. And VH1 would be a totally koo-uhl home for it.”

The idea that the adventures of my genitalia could be the basis for a weekly half hour of nationally broadcast television certainly appealed to my ego, though I was unsure that I would be willing to bare all to a mainstream TV audience and skeptical that a network existed that would deign to show something quite so tragic and foul. VH1 had recently made the leap from showing Genesis videos to clip shows about the glitterati. Surely a show about a pasty, nervous, pigeon-chested weakling with an erection would be a colossal step backward.

We shoved away through the line of banner-waving kids who were there for MTV's
TRL
. We filed into a conference room, where we all shook hands with frosted-hair TV execs whose teeth were bleached too white.

“And who might this be, Rufus?” said the one with the whitest teeth. He made little effort to finesse his distaste for the random scruffy person sitting in.

“This, guys, is Grant ‘I Did It for Science' Stoddard.”

Blank faces all around. I began to feel like a complete asshole.

“Nerve's most intrepid and most widely read columnist?”

No recognition whatsoever. Rufus was always overstating the cultural reach of his media empire and often making us all look like tools in the process.

“O-kay, so we have no time to talk about anything other than the matter at hand. Another meeting is using the room in, like, ten minutes.”

“Absolutely,” said Rufus. “Grant is just here to—”

“Great, let's begin.”

The matter at hand was VH1 wanting to peripherally use Nerve personals for some reality dating show pilot. Over the next eight minutes, Rufus and Alisa began shooting out increasingly half-baked show ideas that would insinuate Nerve into the project to a more significant extent. Rufus's voice got funnier. They hit a wall. I sank into my chair.

“Rufus, we already
have
our show.” White Teeth used his hands in the international gesture for calm the fuck down.

He and the other execs were exasperated. “We just wanted to know if you wanted to help us.”

“I just don't see the value for Nerve,” Rufus said and folded his arms.

“Then I think we're done here.”

The five execs got up and coldly shook hands with Rufus. People for the next meeting filed into the conference room and began sitting down.

“You
guys
!” said Alisa. She always spoke like a cheerleader. “Grant here is a fucking superstar!”

At that moment, I felt like less of a superstar than at any point in my life. I jerked into my overcoat without looking up. White Teeth gave Alisa the hand.

“Alisa, that's our time here.”

“'Kay, but you
guys
, he is totally funny and he dressed up as a girl for his column and it was like, rilly, rilly hilarious.”

“Alisa, I need for you to
hear
me right now.”

“Yeah, but…”

“You have to leave.”

We were shooed out and down to the street, where we took a silent subway ride back downtown. In the ten months since, the TV show had been scarcely mentioned again.

 

MR. STODDARD, SIR!
Take a seat!”

Rufus had taken his usual spot in the busy Charbucks. For all the firings and “serious chats” he had hosted there, Rufus never actually made a purchase, preferring instead to pop next door to the more chichi Balthazar for coffee.

“Well, the fall season is nearly upon us, the smell of pencil shavings hangs thick in the air.”

Rufus took great pains to appear his chipper self, though it was easy to tell from the look in his eye that he felt spurned.

“What's on your mind?” I finally said after he let loose with yet another amusing anecdote from his heady days at Brown. The nausea was back with a vengeance.

“Well, Grant. It's come to my attention that you are in talks to make a TV show with Ross Martin.”