Working Stiff (6 page)

FRIENDS OFTEN PUT TO ME
that I hadn't really taken full advantage of my time in America, but none more succinctly than my friend Mark.

“Y'know, you've been here for two years and you've only fucked one girl.”

His calculation was both smarting and accurate, but didn't take into account that for eighteen months I was living with Becky, the girl I had come to America to win over.

“So?” I said, feeling incredibly defensive.

“I'm just sayin' is all. You're twenty-three years old, you play guitar, living in New York City. You ain't
that
bad-lookin',
and
you've got that stupid fuckin' accent. Girls love that, don't they?”

“Well, some do…I suppose.”

“Well, you should be livin' the life, balls-deep in strange ass every fuckin' night of the week.”

While I'm sure that my accent has enabled me to make time with more pretty women than I've really deserved to over the years, its aphrodisiacal value—at least in my experience—is infinitely more subtle than one might think. In addition, there's nothing like being penniless to negate the charm of a foreign accent. I couldn't afford meeting a girl for drinks or a movie, let alone dinner. In theory, gallery openings could mean free wine, cheese-based snacks, and entertainment, but this was only worth attempting if they happened to take place within walking distance of my tumbledown part of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Even then, I doubt I'd have the gall to invite them into the space I called my own, just a ratty mattress on a scuffed linoleum floor in a common kitchen and living room area that inexplicably smelled strongly of gasoline. As is the case for many men, my ego inflates and deflates in concert with my cash flow, and consequently, this was a near all-time low. I craved to hold a naked female but I was in no state to court women in the time-honored tradition. I needed a sure thing; no drinks, dinner, or pretending to be interested in them or pretending to be anything more than a foreign drifter.

That I was prepared to travel three hundred miles for sex I'd won in an online trivia contest surprised me.

I stuffed a bottle of tap water and two frozen bagels in my backpack with some clean underwear and a toothbrush. The bus ride to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was a long one. I walked north from my squat behind the Domino Sugar factory. The area was largely untouched by gentrification and still pretty colorful: a biker's hangout was stationed opposite the ramshackle building I was calling home, its denizens always revving their hogs and doing wheelies through the potholed streets. Hasids in giant hockey-puck-shaped fur hats poured through the streets at sundown on Fridays, followed by wave after wave of well-scrubbed Poles en route to the Warsaw Social Club an hour later. Dominicans made full recreational use of the sidewalks, with
the sound of meringue music filling the air all day and the smell of burnt sugar hanging thick at night. The sugar factory workers were in a running dispute with their British parent company and had taken to defacing the Union Jack and images of the Queen in protest on Kent Avenue. It never failed to stoke the few dying embers of patriotism that I still had in me.

It was 9:30 a.m., hours before the Saturday brunch rush on the more genteel and gentile stretch of Bedford Avenue. Trembling pretty people with preposterous cockatoo haircuts were still getting home. They had been drinking, drugging, and having sex and generally making the most of both their early twenties and the beautiful Indian summer. I had not. I was broke. In fact, I was quasi-homeless, hungry, ill, lonely, and a bad month away from going back to England a broken man, provided I could scare up the airfare. I took the L train from Bedford Avenue, changed to an uptown C train at Eighth Avenue and waited for the Greyhound to Boston at gate 71 of the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 42nd Street. I had just over an hour to sit and think about what was waiting for me on the other end of my journey.

Two weeks prior, with my reluctant repatriation seemingly inevitable, I decided that I would have a stab at doing something that took me out of my malaise, if only for a few hours. As I opened my mind beyond what I could scrounge up to eat, an opportunity plopped neatly into my lap: a friend suggested that I enter a competition, a general knowledge quiz that took place in an Internet chat room. The prize was sexual intercourse with Lisa Carver, a former teen prostitute, performance artist, and writer at her home in Dover, New Hampshire. She lived up there with her husband and six-year-old son, who was sired by a prominent member of the Church of Satan.

Up until this point my experience with women other than Becky was next to nil. By the age of twenty-three, the opportunity to engage in casual sex had not presented itself, and I remain clueless as to how to effectively go about it to this day. Free, transactional sex was the perfect sexual adventure for a socially awkward and downwardly mobile man.
Lisa, bless her restless, reckless heart, was giving me that opportunity, and in doing so the opportunity to resurrect my American dream.

Lisa wrote a biweekly column for Nerve.com in which she reported on the intimate details of her long, rich, and tumultuous sex life. She had recently gotten married and decided that she would keep things interesting for herself and her fanatical following by having sex with the winner of a random trivia contest. I hadn't heard of Nerve.com or Lisa Carver before entering the competition; being preoccupied with my life's downward spiral I had reverted to a hunter-gatherer existence, oblivious to popular culture. A coworker at The Orchard sat me down at the computer to answer trivia questions at work. It was only after the competition that she filled me in on who Lisa was, what Nerve was all about.

By the time the decrepit bus willed itself past Hartford, Connecticut, I noticed that the reds and golds of autumn had arrived here weeks sooner than in Manhattan and that my bagels had thawed just enough to eat. I tore off bite-sized hunks of the cinnamon-raisin and popped them into my mouth despite being nauseated with fear. I found that the only way to abate the nausea was by telling myself that Lisa would understand if I backed out.

We pulled into Boston, where I ran to catch my connecting ride to New Hampshire. I got the last available seat, which was behind the driver, and asked him to tell me when we got to Portsmouth. I didn't have a particularly clear idea of what Lisa looked like. There were a handful of pictures that existed online, but she looked dramatically different in each one. They spanned a period of almost fifteen years, a spectrum of hair color, and a marked difference in breast size. In one picture she was holding a puppy, in another she was peeing in a litter box in front of a large crowd of cheering Frenchmen. I
could
gather that she was pretty, tall, wiry, and feral, but little else. I hardly told anyone about my trip up north in the two-week period between winning and collecting the prize. Every day I woke up thinking that I should probably bail out, but somehow I kept forgetting to make the call. I wanted adventure, I wanted to have sex with somebody I probably wasn't going
to marry, and I didn't want to pay for it. As the bus drew closer to Lisa and the sun began to sink, I could barely recognize my behavior as my own. I felt I was choosing darkness. Filiz (pronounced Felice), the college friend who had introduced Becky and me, was visiting from London, splitting her time between us both like some overgrown love child. Though it was inconvenient for both of them, I sent Filiz to Becky's new apartment in Newark so that I could have loveless sex with a stranger. I told them that I had a job interview in Boston. I was desperate, deceitful, and a terrible friend.

From the other side of the window, New Hampshire was telling me it was tough, that it was the Granite State, that its residents live free or die, that its motorcyclists don't wear helmets. Dover, Portsmouth, Durham—as the situation I had put myself in became more alien, the place names on the road signs became more familiar; they were all English place names. No one at home would believe this.

Lisa and I had talked on the phone the night before. It was my last out, but I'd solemnly vowed that I would be on the bus.

“I'm exited to meet you!” she said. “Dave's excited to meet you, too!”

Dave is Lisa's husband. Dave had told Lisa that he was cool with the competition but had second thoughts about it all a few days before. Lisa appeased him by having a second trivia competition that yielded a female winner for Dave to have sex with. Dave was the gentle foil to Lisa's wildness in her columns and had quite the following himself.

“Dave's winner backed out last-minute. Can you believe that?”

“No.” I could
definitely
believe that.

“So I have this other woman on standby. So she's coming by. She'll take care of Dave while we, y'know.”

“I know.”

I felt calmed that I would have another outsider there, someone else who would probably be feeling similar emotions, somebody to absorb the oddness of the situation along with me. I had told Lisa that I was broke. She said that I should borrow the bus fare and she would reimburse me.

The bus driver told me that we'd reached my stop. I got out and noticed the twenty-degree dip in temperature throughout my body. Because of its size, weather in the UK is rather uniform. The idea of hopping on a bus to change the weather continues to startle and fascinate me after years in the United States. I hadn't brought a decent jacket. The stop was in the middle of a parking lot off the highway. This didn't look at all like the stop Lisa had described. I walked into a glass terminal structure and made four fruitless calls to Lisa's house on a pay phone.

“Please check the number and try again,” said the infuriating voice each time.

I became scared that I had written her number down wrong and would be left here to freeze overnight. I've grown to feel helpless, disoriented, and uneasy once I leave Manhattan, and being broke, cold, and hungry in the middle of nowhere was the actualization of my worst fears. I considered crying, and then considered having a temper tantrum, then considered leaving out the area code, as this was probably a local call, and immediately got through. I described my surroundings and Lisa said that they'd be there as soon as possible, although I was an hour early and several miles away. I had half an hour to wait and erroneously pegged three different women as being Lisa, giving them goofy and unrequited smiles before she strode into the empty terminal.

“Hey.” She smiled politely but didn't look at me for more than a second, which surprised me and made me feel on edge. I feared that she could not stand to look at me and was asking herself why she'd gone through with this. Lisa spun around and marched out to the parking lot.

“Dave's in the car,” she said over her shoulder without looking back at me.

She walked fast and I had to break into a canter every few steps to try to keep up with her, but only saw her from the back all the way to the car. She wore high-heeled black leather boots, which when coupled with her foal-like gait made an incredible noise. She wore black woolly stockings over her equine legs and a black corduroy miniskirt. A cream-
colored angora turtleneck clung tightly to her fake breasts, making them look conspicuous even as I viewed her from behind.

Lisa opened the car door and folded the front passenger seat down for me and looked above my head and over yonder, nixing another opportunity for a proper greeting. The back of their compact car was full of trash and magazines, for which Lisa apologized, then added that she was buying a new car next week anyway, so there was no point in cleaning it up.

“Hello,” said Dave without looking at me, and put his foot on the gas before Lisa had closed her door. It was immediately evident from their conversation about the best way to drive to dinner that Dave was gentle and passive and Lisa was odd and spasmodic.

“Do you like Pacific Islander food?” asked Lisa, facing forward.

“I am not sure that I've ever had it,” I said, relieved that the ice was broken. I stuck my head in the gap between their headrests, prompting Lisa to look out her window. I wondered if she was autistic.

“We are meeting them at the Tiki Hut. I think the food is very good there,” she said.

I gathered that Lisa was talking about Dave's contest winner but wasn't aware she was coming with someone. Lisa answered my question before I asked it.

“She doesn't drive, so her husband is with her,” she said. Dave shook his head and blushed. Lisa looked at his embarrassed expression and pointed, giggling at him.

“Aw, Leese,” he said. Everything about Dave had an “aw shucks” feel about it, which I found acutely endearing.

We soon arrived in downtown Portsmouth and parked by a life-sized fresco of a blue whale. Any initial standoffishness dissipated as Lisa shook my hand in exaggerated fashion that jarred my shoulder. She looked me up and down. She had a kind face that protruded forward, longish brown hair, and excited blue eyes that looked younger than the rest of her.

“Ha ha ha! You look like Dave!” she said, pointing at me then him to illustrate her point. Bashful Dave was strolling around the car and I agreed that we could be related.

Lisa and I talked on the way to the restaurant as Dave shuffled on a few steps ahead of us, and by the time we arrived at the restaurant I'd concluded that she wasn't the lunatic that her life story suggested she might be. An attractive Waspy girl in leis and a grass skirt showed us to the table Lisa had reserved.

“It's on me, so please order whatever you'd like,” she said, eyeing the menu up and down. “I am starving!”

“Oh my God, Lisa!”
screamed a shrill voice as we pondered the menu.

I spun around along with the rest of the restaurant's patrons to see a short Filipina in a cocktail dress, tiara, and a purple feather boa around her neck. She teetered through the tables, unwittingly trawling the end of her boa through an elderly gentleman's Lobster Rangoon, though he seemed too amused to mind. She fell into Lisa's lap and gave her a loud smooch on the lips that three younger guys at the next table applauded. Dave looked mortified and almost disappeared under the table, causing Lisa to again point and laugh at him. This was the stranger Dave would be having sex with, a concept he had apparently refused to think about until she was standing in front of him, larger than life. Lilly looked at Dave and me with a quizzical look on her face.