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Authors: Grant Stoddard

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BOOK: Working Stiff
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“Check that shit out!” He chuckled and replayed the moment ten times, marking the moment of ejaculation with a
“Bam!”
or a
“Pow!”
every time.

Squirt.

Paul:
“Bam!”

Me: “Wow!”

Sade: “Sweetest taboo.”

Lilly: “Swedish taboo.”

Squirt.

Paul:
“Boom!”

Me: “Wow!”

Sade: “Sweetest taboo.”

Lilly: “Swedish taboo.”

Back and to the left, back and to the left.

Back in the SUV we made a beeline for Boston and arrived at the Quincy T stop sooner than I had expected.

“You should come visit us and Paul can show you how to make me squirt,” said Lilly from underneath a black mourning veil, which she lifted to give me a peck on the cheek.

“That'd be great,” I said. I sort of meant it.

“Okay, champ. We'll see you around,” Paul said and shook my hand, and then sped off to grieve his loss.

I took the T to downtown Boston. My friend Fatty was up there for the weekend and said he could give me a ride back to New York with him. Seeing one of my best friends was a relief, as I felt that I'd somehow been altered beyond recognition by my experience.

“Dude!” he said after I gave the tale its first telling. “I just can't believe you
did
that!”

Fatty and all of my other friends knew me as a sort of sweet, scrawny little kid. The kind of wide-eyed rube who gets addressed “sport,” “champ,” or “li'l buddy,” who has his cheeks pinched, his hair ruffled, his leg pulled, his chops busted. Certainly the least likely candidate to travel across New England seeking sexual adventure. I'd told my friends about the trip before I went. It seemed that no one really believed I would go through with it, and until I was actually on the bus, I don't suppose I did either. Because of my difficulty talking to girls, and later, women, I'd always fantasized about some sort of emotionally void sexual
transaction and I thought that this might have been an experience like that. But I liked Paul, Lilly, and Dave, and grew particularly attached to Lisa, and so even in this most bizarre sexual scenario, my nature had prevented me from being the sort of person who could have sex willy-nilly. The evening seemed to have a profound effect on me. For the days and weeks afterward I'd replay the night's events over and over in my mind, trying to retrace my steps from the debauchery I'd inexplicably gotten myself involved with back across the ocean to the person I used to be. I was never a thrill seeker, a bad seed, a drifter—how did I even get myself into this? I liked cups of tea, watching telly, saying no to drugs (they were never really offered), talking with old people about the Blitz. Outside of what I know, I become terribly nervous and unsure. I like routine; growing up I'd become accustomed to it. Yet somehow, pushing further away from my comfort zone left me feeling alive, proving that I had some semblance of control over the outcome of my life, after all. Where I grew up, one's life seemed largely predetermined. By fourteen everyone seemed to know if they'd be working at the Ford plant in Dagenham, at the BP refinery in Coryton, in the mall at Lakeside, at a mortgage brokerage, insurers, or multinational financial institution in the City. We knew when and where we would likely meet our husbands and wives, how attractive they'd be, and in which neighboring town they'd be looking to buy a starter home. Beyond that, at home, life choices are reduced to where you vacation, what you drive, where you drink, the team you support, and whether you spend Christmas Day with
her
family, Boxing Day with yours, or vice versa. Needing to make any decisions beyond these binary ones is seen as a complete imposition and most undesirable. Unless you have some sort of inner conflict, ambition, or restlessness, it really pays to move only within the channels provided.

With the end of my American excursion almost inevitable, I'd been perversely looking forward to marching in step with everyone else. Contenting myself with the beautiful simplicity of it all. I'd have some catching up to do, though; most of the people I knew from back home were either married, home owners, parents, or all three.

But somehow, meeting Lisa under those extenuating circumstances had been the point of no return. I'd changed forever. At home everybody was busy getting their lives on track, but I was suddenly and inexplicably off-roading; living on someone's couch, dirt poor, lamming it from the INS, unable to earn a living wage, leaving my very existence entirely to chance for the first time and wondering how I could live any other way.

MY TRIP TO NEW HAMPSHIRE
immediately prefaced a general upswing in my living situation. The combined effects of getting laid by two married women in one night, a slightly improved cash flow, and a bedroom with a door had me feeling like I had the world on a string.

The week after meeting Lisa and Dave I moved uptown. In the fall of 2000 you didn't see that many young white kids in Washington Heights. I took some pride in being among the first groups of rent refugees establishing a beachhead at the top of the island, eschewing the trendy hairstyle set, like some sort of grown-up.

The place was a gem. Large, cozy, and fairly clean, like Mike had said, the apartment had astonishing views of the George Washington
Bridge, the mighty Hudson River, and the deliberately unblemished New Jersey Palisades on the opposite bank. From our roof, the long strip of Manhattan was laid out before us. The topography of the area meant we were at eye level with the top floors of the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building. The commute downtown was 185 blocks long. The location fostered a drive to make the most of the neighborhood. This meant trips to nearby Ft. Tryon Park, dining at the grimy but charming Hillside Diner, and generally reading books I'd been meaning to read and watching movies I'd never gotten around to renting. Being a ne'er-do-well made moving easy. I arrived at 436 Fort Washington Avenue with a mattress, box spring, and a Hefty bag full of clothes and bedding. I painted my yellow and blue bedroom walls a deep scarlet and felt fully satisfied that I finally had a place I could rightfully call my home.

 

LISA CALLED ME
to ask if there were any details I would like her to omit or otherwise obscure before she handed her account of the previous weekend to Nerve for publication.

“Um…I don't know, should I?”

“Well, I'm not going to say anything bad,” she said. “I'm very fond of you. You don't mind if I use your real first name?”

“Are you going to say I was…y'know, good in bed?” I asked.

“I
might
do.”

“Then, yeah. Go ahead.”

Since being back in New York, I had read almost all of the writing Lisa had on Nerve.com and I rather loved the way she described the characters in her life. I decided that if I was going to be immortalized in her prose, using a pseudonym would remove me from the experience and somehow read untrue. More important, it would make it harder to convince the lads back home that the shy English wife-defiler in this crazy woman's online diary was actually me, “Grunt” Stoddard. I had planned to e-mail them the story when it came out.

Reading a public account of your sexual mannerisms is an extremely surreal experience, especially when you are as sexually inexperienced as I was. Nerve, Lisa told me, was attracting over a million unique visi
tors a month. My heart was beating its way out of my chest as I began reading the first line of Lisa's diary at my desk at The Orchard.

Grant comes from Manhattan via London…

I tried to read about the details of our weekend as if I were disconnected from the experience entirely. Lisa had indeed portrayed me in a very flattering and touching light. Most of what I'd said had appeared verbatim. This made me cringe at first, then be thankful that I didn't say anything worse. It's like that awful realization of how you actually sound when you hear your voice on a home movie or a tape recorder, but many thousands of times worse.

At Lisa's suggestion, I contacted Nerve about the Customer service Rep position she'd mentioned. Lorelei Sharkey promptly returned my e-mail and invited me to Nerve's offices for my interview that Friday afternoon. The elevator opened up into a large open loft space and almost total silence. Aside from the tapping of keyboards, there was a pronounced public library feel to the place. If it wasn't for the huge neon Nerve logo on the back wall, I would have thought I'd gotten off at the wrong floor. I'd researched the company ahead of time and learned this:

It was in 2000 that Nerve made the leap from a small Internet magazine about sex started by a couple in their studio apartment to producing a glossy print magazine, groundbreaking online personals database, and HBO show. The Web site featured contributions from writers like Norman Mailer, Spalding Gray, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Erica Jong, and was being translated into several different languages. Copublisher Rufus Griscom was the self-styled Hugh Heffner of the twenty-first century, his staff a collection of beautiful, brilliant libertines, the work atmosphere a cocaine-dusted bacchanal at the nexus of business and pleasure, all in a sunny loft on Broadway and Spring.

“Hi,” whispered the young blonde girl at the front desk.

“I have a meeting with Lorelei and Julia.”

Lorelei was the head of the Nerve Center, the name given to their online community. Julia was handling customer service. The successful candidate would be her assistant.

Lorelei skipped over to meet me and gave my hand a firm shake. The blonde girl offered me some coffee and a seat in the open lounge area, and I accepted both.

“You come highly recommended from Lisa Carver,” said Lorelei, without so much as a smirk.

“Oh, that's nice to hear.”

I had no idea whether Lorelei knew the capacity in which Lisa and I were acquainted. The recommendation as an asset to the company could only have been grounded in cunnilingus.

Julia ran me through what I'd be dealing with should I get the job: answering e-mails, sending out back issues of magazines, sending people forgotten password information, and helping people with their online personal profiles. No one would be baying for my blood over a ten-dollar payment and I was told that the phone hardly rang.

Lorelei suggested that I create a personal ad myself so that I could get a better idea of the type of problems people might experience. We shook hands and she told me that the job was as good as mine.

What made the Nerve online personals head and shoulders above any other dating site's in 2000 was that its constituents were first and foremost fans of the content of the Web site, a smart, hip magazine about sex that had a fairly even gender split in its readership. One could safely assume then that a Nerve “date” would be literate, liberal, college-educated, and not morally opposed to some reciprocal oral on the first date.

While waiting for a confirmation that I'd gotten the gig, I spent most of my workday at The Orchard creating and tweaking my ad and contacting other personals users. I got my first response from Sonya, a thirty-year-old woman, who stated that she was five feet four and 120 pounds, smoked, drank, and drugged often. Her ad did not include a picture, and so in my first message to her I requested one.

“Don't worry, I'm not ugly,” she wrote back. “I look like Brigitte Bardot.”

Her personal ad said that she was a huge fan of Lisa Carver, so I promptly told her that I was the gentleman she'd been writing about
in her last two columns. Her response was just her phone number and the instruction to call her ASAP. On the phone, Sonya sounded sassy and/or drunk.

“Lisa wrote that you are good at eating pussy,” she said. “That true?”

“Well, I don't know. She seemed to think so.”

“I love you fucking Brits, man. Such modesty, such fucking bullshit.” She took a long drag on a cigarette. “How do you like to fuck?”

This was a neat segue into phone sex. Despite never doing it before, let alone with a stranger, I found myself getting over the initial embarrassment and running with it.

“That was really great!” I realized that I sounded a little too precious as the words left my mouth.

“Yeah, yeah. Call me over the weekend, maybe I'll let you lick my cunt.”

Could it really be this easy?
I couldn't get my mind around how available casual sex could be in the right circles. I waited until Sunday afternoon, took a train to the East Village, and called her from a pay phone.

“Hello?”

“Um, hi, Sonya? It's Grant from the other night.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Where are you?”

“I'm at St. Mark's and A.”

“Oh, I'm at the Gap on St. Mark's. Meet me at the southwest corner of St. Mark's and Second in fifteen minutes. Goddamn, I need a drink.”

Sonya had seen the picture of me I'd included as part of my personals profile, but I only had her own description to work with. Brigitte Bardot, indeed. This could only mean gap-toothed and blonde.

I stood behind a group of midwesterners under the
STOMP
awning and peered across the avenue. Standing across from me was a blonde woman in cowboy boots, gray single-ply sweatpants, a tan leather jacket, and a pair of sunglasses that ensconced the top half of
her face. Her description wasn't entirely accurate, but she certainly looked attractive from across four lanes of traffic. She smoked a cigarette like a fisherman and looked around expectantly. Could it be her? Did women this attractive make a habit of taking scrawny boys home on Sunday afternoons?

I crossed to the northeast corner, then across to the northwest so that I could come in from behind. I wondered if she'd registered my presence across the pedestrians and the traffic. I looked at her from behind. She checked the time on her cell phone. Six p.m. I knew it was time to make contact or lose her. I felt nauseated with anticipation as the thought of her rejecting me entered my mind. It could really go one way or the other. We'd already chatted each other to orgasm on the phone, surely that would count for something. It was do or die.

Fuck it!

“Sonya?” I said.

“Did you get a good look?” she said, still looking toward the
STOMP
marquee.

“Yeah, sorry, it's just that…I wasn't sure if it was you, but I mean…you're really hot.”

No Brigitte Bardot, but certainly upward of a Renée Zellweger.

“I told you, didn't I?”

She flicked her cigarette into the street, hitting a Chinese delivery guy on his bike, and reacted as if he was the intended target.

“There's only one place you can drink in the daylight and that's an Irish bar.” She linked her arm in mine. “Let's go, Ringo.”

We walked into an empty Irish pub on 14th Street. She ordered a Bloody Mary. I got a Budweiser.

“I'm still hungover from last night,” she groaned before regaling me with how she'd hooked up with a girl on the hood of a Trans Am after attending a Nashville Pussy concert. She talked, I listened. The more I listened the more I thought that sleeping with her meant risking an STD.

“There's this video of me getting fisted floating around on the Internet,” she threw out casually.

Another drink, another three cigarettes. She still hadn't taken off her shades.

“Okay, sport,” she said. “Wanna come back to my place?”

I was totally out of my depth and nowhere near manly enough to be in the same room as this woman. I'm what they call a two-beer lightweight; I can't stand to kiss a smoker; and at the time my drug experience was limited to the time I'd eaten hash and thought I was a piece of paper for the next six hours. But the one and only time I'd slept with a crazy thirty-year-old stranger had turned out to be sort of life-affirming and magical, so I looked her in the eye and said,

“Sure.”

Sonya's place was a very large one-bedroom across the street from Irving Plaza. She told me what she paid and it seemed astronomical to me at the time. She worked in retail and I couldn't figure out how she could afford it. She told me to take a seat on her sofa, put out some food for her molting Persian cat, and stood in front of me. She pulled on the drawstring of her sweatpants and, with a shimmy, they fell about her ankles, exposing a freshly waxed vagina, the first I'd ever seen in real life. Sonya stepped out of the pants, and finally exposed her eyes, which were deep set and ringed with purple.

“Eat it, bitch,” she said.

I put up little resistance and had been giving Sonya oral sex for almost forty minutes when she rapped me hard on the head with her ringed knuckles.

“Shit, stop!” She frantically searched the couch for the remote control. “My show is on.”

She'd stopped me for appointment television, which hadn't happened before then.

“I love
Sex and the City
!” she said, pushing me to the other end of the couch with her feet.

I patiently watched the show with her as she howled with laughter. When it was over she jumped up and led me into the bedroom.

“Fucking cat!” she screamed as we entered, making me jump.

A large cat turd sat in the exact center of the bed.

“I don't think he likes you,” she said, picking it up and flushing it down the toilet. She threw the soiled comforter in the laundry basket, washed her hands, laid down on the bed, and spread her legs.

“You may continue,” she said. I obligingly did until she came once again.

“Your turn,” she said, unbuttoning my jeans, and went at it with similar aplomb.

She stopped after a few minutes.

“Are you holding back or something?” she said confrontationally. “I only ask because I'm
really
good at this.”

She was. I had been gripping the edge of the bed, white-knuckled, knees locked, toes curled since she began. Having not gotten any play in high school, a blow job was never a self-contained event for me but rather a warm-up to sex. Sonya, however, had other plans.

“Don't think I'm gonna let you fuck me, I have someone coming over in twenty minutes. Hurry the fuck up.”

The very notion that I was just an hors d'oeuvre in a grander feast did the trick almost immediately and I was finished.

Time for afterglow.

“Okay, now get the fuck out.”

Sonya scooped up all of my clothes, ran out of the bedroom, and threw me out the front door.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed.

BOOK: Working Stiff
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