Working Stiff (27 page)

“How about phone sex?” I said.

“No, boring, next.”

“Um…Fresno has a Craigslist. I could try to do a—”

“If you couldn't do it in New York you won't do it there. You're on a ranch, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Will you fuck an animal?”

There was little I'd said no to as my column had gotten progressively more daring, but trying to have sex with livestock was totally and utterly out of the question.

“Are you fucking nuts?”

“At least it'd be
interesting
,” said Michael.

“What with the foot-and-mouth….”

“Well, okay then, what's the plan?” he said. Michael had had a huge amount of patience with me in the past but it seemed to be suddenly waning.

“Give me a few days to think about it.”

“Huh?”

“Give me a—”

I finally lost service as I branched off onto Road 200.

Without my car, cell reception, Jane, and no prospect of another visitor, the ranch seemed suddenly and overwhelmingly daunting. I arrived back there just in time to collect kindling before the sun went down. For the first few weeks of my stay there, I'd left it too late and
often found myself poking around the brush with a flashlight, content that the rustles in the bushes were just deer, but since the Kesselmans' tales of bloodthirsty mountain lions, I'd become much more cautious.

I convinced myself that now that the distractions were gone and weeks of near solitude stretched out before me, I'd really try and knuckle down and get some serious writing done, but I was unable to get myself out of bed the next morning. Over the next few days I found myself in the midst of a deepening existential crisis. I'd always assumed that I was far too shallow a person to dip a toe into any real introspection, but it was clear that I'd been saved from my own company by the white noise of my life all this time. My livelihood was hanging by a thread, there was no money coming in, Ross had begun to pessimistically manage my expectations regarding the show, and my column, which had provided such a framework for who I was, was ending, and for the first time ever I felt completely and utterly alone.

As I lay paralyzed on the carpet in front of the dying fire, I didn't want to admit that I was suffering with some manner of mental episode, though that's clearly what was happening: an anxiety attack. Whatever crippling self-doubt I was experiencing seemed to be amplified by the quiet and the solitude. Charlotte's insistence that she'd experienced a malevolent spirit made me aware of a sinister presence, be it mental or supernatural. Ross had told me that someone had in fact died in the house. My increasingly fragile mental state contributed to my completely freaking out when a bat flew out of the chimney one evening and buzzed my head several times. I screamed and ran into the bedroom before plucking up the courage to throw a bath towel over the tiny mammal and release it outside. My self-image as a latter-day Davy Crockett was now just an embarrassing memory.

Jane wrote me letters and sent me DVDs to watch, which helped me immensely. I wrote her long letters and e-mails. She had become the focal point for my homesickness and it became unclear to both of us whether I was primarily missing her or missing home.

On the rare occurrences that the land line would ring, I would attempt to keep the person on the phone for as long as possible, though
I had nothing to say. They were on New York time and, as supportive as they tried to be, they had shit to do.

After a few more days passed and my mania worsened, I was talking to myself, prone to hysterical crying fits followed by long periods of despondency. Ross was now talking about the future of the TV show in decidedly bleaker terms; Rob had left VH1 for a position at Fuse; Lauren was on maternity leave; Ross was in LA; there was no one left to vouch for
Granted.
I couldn't conceive of what I'd be doing with my life, going forward. I'd attempted to pitch articles to other magazines but largely came up empty-handed. For the first time in years I flirted with the idea of going to Defcon 4 and calling my parents, requesting that they spirit me home. But in those years, where they lived and where I was raised had ceased to be my home. I was a New York City boy.

On Sunday, I finally took the Kesselmans up on their open invitation to join them for morning meditation in their zendo. I have an aversion to anything even vaguely spiritual or New Agey, but I was so completely starved for human interaction that I'd been looking forward to seeing them for days. I was hoping that a few girls my own age might even show up. But there, atop their barn, a rather motley, baby-boomer congregation sat in silence amid the chanting and the ringing of bells. The agenda was a half hour of meditation, fifteen minutes of walking meditation, a second half hour of mediation, then a talk about the meditation with jasmine tea, baby carrots, and those glazed, Japanese seaweed snacks. I walked back feeling slightly disappointed that the meditation gathering hadn't yielded the sort of human interaction I was hankering for. The upside, however, was that Hank gave me a pile of Steve McQueen movies to distract me from myself.

Michael finally called to see what I'd come up with in terms of new column ideas, but I had nothing to offer.

“How about that girl, the fair maiden?” he said.

I'd told Michael all about Jane and my seemingly altruistic plan to make her first time special.

“What about her?” I asked.

“Well, did you make a woman out of her?”

“She's not a virgin anymore, if that's what you mean.”

“Well, that's a
great
column, right there.”

This would be the first time an experience from my own life had been misappropriated into column inches, after the fact. The idea of blending my personal life—not to mention the personal lives of the unsuspecting girls I was dating—into my job was simultaneously meta and incredibly distasteful. What made the column interesting—as far as I could tell—was my dependable reluctance to engage in any given activity; the sense of shame, self-doubt, and embarrassment I carried with me into the BDSM dungeon, the gay bar, the dating coach's office, the orgy. If it wasn't for the column I'm sure I wouldn't have had a fraction of the sexual experiences I'd crammed into the past two and a half years.

“The poor girl! Hasn't she been through enough?” I said.

I was already thinking through the conversation I'd have with Jane, coaxing her to agree to me spilling something almost sacrosanct into the public sphere for my financial gain. Even the hypothetical conversation made me feel quite disgusting.

“Just ask her,” said Michael. “She knows what you do for a living, right? It's not beyond the realm of possibility that anyone you hook up with may or may not appear in your writing, right? You're a sex writer and them's the breaks.”

As my work and personal life had become ever more interdependent over the recent months, the girls who had come in and out of my life had made a point of saying that it was or wasn't kosher to write about the sex we had, were immediately about to have, or—most disconcertingly—were in the process of having. Excepting my alleged hoodwinking at Leather Camp, however, I'd never written an unsuspecting civilian into an installment of the column.

“It sort of negates the whole me-making-it-all-nice bit though, doesn't it? I mean it was atypically special, if I do say so myself.”

“Then surely she'd be thrilled if you recorded it for posterity, no?”

After years of getting me to agree to throw myself into some alarming, even dangerous situations, Michael knew precisely how to manipulate me.

“You'll change her name, the setting, anything identifiable.”

As much as I didn't want to sell Jane out, my financial outlook was grim. The utility bill was becoming astronomical, not to mention four straight months of car rental. Being in California had proved to be just about as pricey as my living costs in Manhattan, costlier once I factored in my deteriorating mental health and its cancerous effect on my productivity.

Jane called that evening from the relative civilization of her NYU dorm by the South Street Seaport. She told me that huge ice floes were drifting down the East River, making me homesick for the cold.

“Jane,” I began my pitch with some trepidation. “Would it be okay if I wrote about what we did up at the ranch for my column?”

Silence.

“Wait,” she said. “You did
me
for science?”

“No, no, no!” I said. “I did you for…I mean, I didn't
do
you for anything.”

Silence.

“Look, the truth is, I've run out of money and it looks like the column is going to end if I can't think of anything to write about. I'll change names, situations and stuff, but if you don't want me to write about this, I totally understand.”

“Well, what are you going to say?” she asked. “I mean,
good
things?”

“Jane! Of
course
good things. I had an amazing time up here with you. It was the best.”

It was true.

“Hmmmm. I guess it might be okay then. Let me sleep on it.”

“Thanks, baby.”

Ross called to say that VH1's ninety-day option on the show had expired and that they had extended it for yet another ninety days. This meant we would most likely not know whether we had a TV show until early summer, and therefore were to remain in limbo. There was certainly no way I could stay in isolation at the ranch for months on end, so I began making plans to go back to New York as soon as some
outstanding checks came in to cover the airfare. I gave the girl living in my place five weeks' notice and started counting down the days in the same excited way that I counted the days between my November birthday and Christmas as a child.

With some hesitance and several conditions with regard to her anonymity, Jane generously gave her blessing to my recounting the loss of her virginity in a humor column. I also managed to get a smallish but extremely welcome freelance assignment from Nerve cofounder Genevieve Field, who was now an editor at
Glamour
. That combined with an end in sight for my self-imposed exile in California did wonders for my mental state and the debilitating personal crises were somewhat abated. I filed my virginity piece, worked on the
Glamour
article, and continued puttering around the house.

My friend Jamye Waxman asked if she could come and stay at the ranch with me to write and of course I jumped at the opportunity to have someone to talk to, not to mention escape to the comparative metropoli of Oakhurst or Fresno with. Jamye wasn't arriving for another three weeks, so in order to preserve my hard-won sanity, I cut hours, days, and weeks up into chunks of time allotted to certain endeavors. I decided that it was the lack of structure that was loosening my grip on reality, so I put in place a fairly rigid activities roster.

I would rise at 9:00, take coffee on the porch until 10:00, prepare and consume breakfast until 11:00, check e-mail and surf the Internet until 12:30, run until 1:15, shower until 1:45, prepare and consume lunch until 2:30, take phone calls until 3:30, work until 7:00 with one fifteen-minute break, which I spent collecting kindling and firewood. Make and eat dinner until 9:00. Watch a DVD until 11:00, yoga and/ or calisthenics until 11:45, which allowed me a fifteen-minute period of leisure time before bed at midnight. Days were demarcated by the people I would like to talk with. I e-mailed them all and asked if they had a time slot they'd prefer, A friends getting twenty-minute slots, B friends ten. Jane got as long as she wanted. On Sunday mornings I spoke with my parents.

Michael called to tell me to be on the lookout for a package he had had sent to the ranch.

“It's a make-your-own-dildo kit,” he said quite matter-of-factly.

“You want me to make a model of my own you-know-what?” I said.

“For starters,” he said. “Then have someone strap it on and fuck you with it. It's brilliant. Go fuck yourself: the ‘I Did It for Science' finale! Can you find someone to help you out with that?”

As luck would have it, Jamye was the perfect person to assist me. She was a sex educator, completely uninhibited, and perhaps most important, a dear friend.

“Yeah, my friend Jamye arrives in a few days.”

“Okay, well, you kids get it on and gimme a call to let me know how it goes. Remember, this one has to be a doozy.”

Given the circumstances leading up to this moment, fucking myself was spectacularly apropos, poetic even.

As I'd suspected, Jamye didn't even flinch when I asked her to bugger me. I even got the sense that she was rather looking forward to it.

Three days later, the day of Jamye's arrival, I awoke to find that one of the cowboys had left the Make Your Own Dildo Kit on the front porch. The box had been damaged in transit and its contents—a plastic tub with the mold, plaster, and other apparatus with a picture of an erect penis on the outside—were clearly visible. I cringed at what whoever delivered it must have thought when they drove into North Fork to pick up the mail from the post office. These were tough yet wholesome manly men, men I had always aspired to become like. It's no wonder they gave me funny looks as I pranced around the ranch on my daily jogs.

Fairly early on in my freelance writing career I learned that the sooner one files an article, the sooner one gets paid. To that end, Jamye and I got to work on the dildo project almost as soon as she'd dropped her bags and I'd given her a cursory tour of the interior. Neither of us batted an eyelash, carrying on our dinner discussion as I masturbated to a full erection and she mixed the plaster with water that had to be at a precise temperature.

“Wait until morning,” I said, my fist pumping away. “We'll go for a drive, you won't believe how beautiful this place is.”

“I can't wait,” said Jamye, carefully stirring the porridgelike mixture. “I'm really looking forward to writing and chilling out for a week or two.”