Working Stiff (29 page)

Have you gotten feedback from anyone you grew up with who wrote you off?

Aside from my own immediate family I'm not sure my friends from home actually have any idea. It's difficult. I got a Myspace message from a friend I hadn't seen in eight years who said, what have you been up to? And I kind of skirted the question because I think it would be difficult for them to get their minds around the idea of me and my bizarre lifestyle. At a certain point, the story becomes unrelatable to a large portion of my friends.

What experiment do you regret?

The orgy. I took the wrong girl, had the wrong mind-set, and I wish I had enjoyed it more, because it's something I may never do again.

Are you scarred for life by your experiences? Is there any hope for you to have a monogamous sex life?

I think that I was more scarred by the period when I was a sexual persona non grata.
A period of time I like refer to as the 1990s. I think that was the most damaging. If any damage happened to my psyche, it happened then. The opportunity to be reborn as a sort of literary gigolo actually resulted in my having a healthier mindset.

Are you not more impressed with yourself than you used to be?

Um…I suppose. I think that I'm most impressed with how I've been able to adapt. When I take inventory of all the amazing opportunities that have come my way since arriving in America, I can't help feeling electrified by the unordinary life I've found and I feel quite invincible for a minute.

About the book

On Writing
Working Stiff

I
T
'
S FITTING THAT
W
ORKING
S
TIFF
came about in the same manner as all of the other wonderful opportunities I've had since arriving in America from England in the late nineties. Like leaving my staid little hometown, moving to New York City, getting a record deal, becoming a sexpert, and having Viacom fund my eponymous TV pilot, taking stock of my experiences in a memoir was something that somebody simply thought I should have a crack at. Whether it's my accent, the cut of my gibe, or just good old American hospitality at work, time and time again people ask me to do things I'm in no way qualified to do. It came as quite a shock to me that I was the type of person to run with any opportunity that came my way.

Working Stiff
is primarily about the three years I spent writing my experiential sex column, “I Did It for Science,” for Nerve.com. I eventually wrote thirty installments of the column, though I'd only written about six when the idea of writing a book was first mentioned by a man whom I'd just witnessed urinating on a masturbating stranger, ostensibly for episode number seven. He put me in touch with a literary agent in London, whom I met with on my next trip home in the summer of 2002. Before meeting me, the agent envisioned an anthology of my columns, but over lunch I expanded on my journey from the perennial wallflower to accidental sexplorer and he suggested that this transformation should be the main theme of the book, not just the columns themselves. As
the column—and the transformation—was ongoing and with my humiliation growing exponentially with each installment, I decided that writing an account of the experience at that point would have been blowing my figurative wad too soon.

As my column grew in popularity, I found myself writing sex and relationship features in several other publications and making TV appearances as some kind of expert on sex, to the startled amusement of anyone I'd gotten into bed. My raised profile had my employers at Nerve thinking of spin-offs into other media: audio, TV, and books. It was at this point that I left Nerve.com full-time and seconded to Los Angeles to make a TV pilot that had less to do with sex and more to do with my propensity for being immersed in bizarre situations. The TV show
Granted
was created and produced by Ross Martin. Ross introduced me to Claudia Cross of Sterling Lord Literistic in New York, who seemed enthused about representing the project I had recently started referring to as
Working Stiff.

This created tension with Nerve.com and derailed their plans to spin off “I Did It for Science” and something called the “Grant Stoddard character” into other Nerve-branded media. However, as I was a popular columnist on Nerve, I continued to write “I Did It for Science” on a freelance basis.

Once the pilot was shot and my days as a columnist for Nerve were clearly drawing to a close, I was given an opportunity to disappear into Ross's vacation home in California's Central Valley to commence work on the book that several people wanted to read. Three months in the seclusion of a 4,000-acre ranch seemed like an opportunity to write
Working Stiff
while awaiting the fate of the
TV show. But it soon transpired that I was losing my mind in isolation, and I arrived back in New York without my bread-and-butter column, anything towards my memoir, or the TV show being picked up for production. Once back in Manhattan, I made a semblance of a living writing for
New York
magazine,
Muscle and Fitness
,
Glamour
,
Black Book
,
Men's Health
,
Playgirl
,
Vice
,
Vitals
, and the British edition of
GQ
, leaving me little time to concentrate on
Working Stiff
, though it had been almost three years since the idea was first floated. Interested parties redoubled their efforts to have me squeeze out a proposal, though with my being flat broke, I felt that I needed to concentrate on paying the rent. To that end, I got a temp job as a filing clerk at a French bank and some weeks later bizarrely became the managing editor of
Playgirl
magazine. It was in between hours of shuffling through nude pictures of oiled beefcakes and editing hausfrau erotica that I finally put a proposal together, and Claudia Cross deftly sold the project to HarperCollins. I quit my job at
Playgirl
, having clocked up five and a half weeks there, and began writing.

Me on my last day at Nerve, cleaning out my desk

I completed
Working Stiff
some four years after the project was conceived, though the timing was
opportune. I had never had a clear idea of the book's shape until the column had truly ended and I had been given a buffer of time in which I could make sense of what had happened to me, the mania slowing down just enough to see the story with some clarity.

“I Did It for Science”

T
HE BULK OF
W
ORKING
S
TIFF
is about the three years I spent writing my column “I Did It for Science.” I think I explained the concept in the body of the book, but here's an idea of what it actually looked like.

Experiment:

To subject myself to the rigors of a full-body massage and attempt to get a manual release.

Hypothesis—state your hypothesis in the form of a prediction that can be verified by the results of the experiment:

No really, it's not my bag! But the thought of a hot stranger getting her hands on the goods is a little naughty. Is this what they mean by hands-on reporting?

Materials—please list all the materials required for this experiment (including, if applicable, how they were obtained):

Massage parlor (one).

Method—in this portion of your report, you must describe, step-by-step, what you did in your lab. It should be specific enough that someone who has not seen the lab can follow the directions and re-create the same lab.

Trying to find a massage establishment that offers a “happy ending” is no easy task, especially if you're not intimately familiar with a city's seedy underbelly. Luckily, Isabella just happened to know a “friend of a friend” who was aware of such a place. As directed, I went to a faceless building in midtown Manhattan, feeling more than a little sheepish. Although the thought of being interfered with by a beautiful, skilled masseuse was exciting fodder for my teenage dreams, by the day of reckoning I was a bundle of nerves.

I walked into the building's lobby and was greeted by a rotund man in a crumpled blue shirt that sported a blob of every condiment in the Heinz rainbow. I asked where the massage place was. He gestured to the basement, his verbal skills compromised by the two or three knishes he seemed to be masticating simultaneously. I headed down a flight of stairs that ended with an unmarked gray door. This led to another flight, and
another and another. Curiouser and curiouser, I thought as I opened the final door into the softly lit lobby of a spa. The room contained a counter and a plush leather sofa that snugly accommodated four attractive Korean women between the ages of twenty and forty. “Hello,” chirped the most senior both in age and standing, and she hopped up to get behind the counter. “Hi, I'd like the full massage,” I stuttered, placing a clumsy and unnecessary-in-hindsight emphasis on the word “full.” The younger women smiled at each other and me with a kind of curiosity that I would encounter on several more occasions this afternoon.

I was asked if I had been to the spa before. It was then that I became conscious, nay, extremely paranoid that anything I said could blow my cover. I said I hadn't. “Seventy-five dollar, cash,” said the woman, who handed me a fresh towel, a crisp robe, and a locker key affixed to a comically large chunk of lumber. “You follow me,” she ordered and led me into the men's locker room. I use the words “locker room” loosely, as I'd never seen its like before. The “lockers” were made of an ornately carved, heavy dark wood; the floor was granite. A large marble sink and counter was covered with expensive soaps, aftershaves, deodorants, razors, and shaving gels. I don't know what this says about the circles I run in, but this was the fanciest joint I'd ever seen! In the middle of the attractively lit room was a low bench with twenty pairs of sandals underneath it. “You shower, lock locker real good and keep key all time,” the woman commanded. I nodded a little too much. She left the room, and I got changed. Looking around the changing room for signs of any other clients, I spied a pair of large black dress shoes tucked into the row of sandals. I hardly recognized my reflection as I stared back at the kimono-wearing dork in the mirror. I was just a ponytail and a copper bracelet away from becoming Steven Seagal.

Wearing a pair of grossly oversized sandals, I shuffled through an opaque glass door into a large granite-and-marble shower room. Five huge shower heads—the ones the circus uses for hosing down elephants—adorned the walls, and a steam room and sauna were nearby. With the Japano-futuristic look of the place, the gaggle of uniformly dressed Asian beauties around and the perception that I was several miles below the Earth's crust, I started to believe that I was living out one of my numerous James Bond-inspired dreams: Trapped in the belly of an evil corporation's lair, treated with the utmost courtesy while my movements are monitored by a team of beautiful-yet-deadly double agents.

I made my shower last. The water pressure at my apartment provides little more than an occasional moody trickle, so I took advantage of the
high-pressure jet and used every soap, shampoo, conditioner, exfoliating body scrub, washcloth, and loofah at my disposal. Feeling fresh as a daisy, I left the changing room and was assigned a masseuse. She was one of the older women, possibly in her late thirties, short and slight with a bob haircut and dressed in a clinical white uniform. She led me down a hallway to a small, demurely lit room, then told me to disrobe and lie stomach-down on the table, where there was an opening for my face. I skimmed my hand against the starched white tablecloth to see if there was a corresponding hole for my unit. Until this point, I hadn't really thought about how the pleasure would be administered. Simultaneously, all my daydreams about being on her majesty's secret service evaporated as I realized how quickly I crumble under questioning.

“My name Jung, what your name?” asked my inquisitor as she began to rub my neck. “Er…Jeff,” I replied. Jeff? Where the fuck did that come from? “Oh,” she said, sounding surprised and skeptical. Had she been through my locker and seen my ID? I started to sweat. “You live here, work here?” she asked as she covered my body in a thin, crisp linen sheet. “Yeah,” I said, “in…Soho,” “Oh,” she replied. “What you do?” Butcher, baker, candlestick maker—any of those would have sufficed, but instead I blurted out, “I work for a magazine.” Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! What a total fuckwit. I might as well have told her that I was with the NYPD vice squad. I quickly followed up by qualifying that I worked for a publication about fishing. “Oh ma gah!” said Jung, sounding disturbingly interested. Christ! Who was Soho Jeff from
Rods and Reels
? What's with the third degree already? I decided that as long as Jung didn't start questioning me about the ins and outs of koi carp, I would shut my stupid mouth and get this experiment back on track.