In order to continue with a job that was becoming physically, mentally, and morally challenging, I found myself shifting my own definition of what was embarrassing or even potentially damaging. The envelope of what I would actually consider doing for the column seemed to grow exponentially with every passing day. Pushing the boundaries of what was and wasn’t acceptable behavior had, in the previous few years, become a national pastime—the numerous celebrity sex videos, one president getting blow jobs in the Oval Office, the next having had a cocaine habit, Bob Dole hawking Viagra, the celeb-reality TV explosion—and behind it all was the Internet, ushering in a new culture of disclosure, irreversibly shifting the paradigms of modesty, privacy, and shame. When I felt that I was getting in too deep—as I almost always did—I consoled myself with the idea that in the subsequent few years the shift in what was viewed as being kosher would reach escape velocity, burst forth from New York and other coastal cities and flood into the towns and villages, winning the hearts and minds of those in the world’s hinterlands, and that instead of a shameless sex pervert, I would come to be seen as some sort of brave pioneer, holding a mirror to mankind’s basest physical needs in all their weird and wonderful manifestations.
Though as Anna fell into a deep sleep, I laid awake fretting about how wacky my résumé would look on paper.
NERVE ENDINGS
I HAD DECIDED that I would definitely need to break up with Anna some months before the actual event. I had become convinced that she didn’t have my back. I felt that she should have done a better job of going to bat for me with her parents and that I would punish her with dismissal. I had recently found out that I could be finicky and incredibly ruthless with people if I felt slighted by them, and I could tell that Anna had no inkling of the kind of lather I worked myself into about the situation.
Anna’s parents were upset that she had broken up with her yuppie boyfriend and immediately shacked up with another man. Furthermore, they were completely livid that her new beau was, in their estimation, a pornographer. Anna’s father was a Vietnam vet of Prussian extraction, her mother an accented German woman of aristocratic lineage, which somehow made their distain for me that much more stark.
With the holidays approaching and me unable to return home because of a visa issue—I’d lost it in the back of a cab—I’d assumed that I’d be spending Christmas with the Braunschweigers. But shortly after Thanksgiving, Anna told me that I wasn’t welcome at their Colonial Maryland home.
This came as a shock because, in general, parents loved me. Not as an ideal mate for their daughters, necessarily, but as a quirky, slightly fey but completely harmless placeholder while they sought out somebody, if not “better,” then certainly taller. In the company of parents I am polite, charming, complimentary, self-deprecating, and can chat about current affairs at length without breaking a sweat. All of these attributes apparently count for little when you are extolling the virtues of their undergraduate only child’s vagina to several thousand avid readers every month.
They just end up resenting you.
“They say that Christmas is just for family,” said Anna on the A train journey home to Washington Heights.
“But I can’t go home to mine,” I said.
My losing my visa had meant that I couldn’t even return home for my paternal grandmother’s funeral some months earlier, which I felt terrible about.
“Did you tell them that I can’t go home?”
“Yes. They didn’t really care,” said Anna.
We sat in silence as the train stalled at 103rd Street. Anna and I had been living together in Washington Heights for six months. We left the house each morning and commuted together, came home about the same time and made dinner together. It had been fun, this playing house with my beautiful, perky Aryan college senior. I began to think that spending the holidays together would be a logical continuation of our grown-upness.
“Well, I guess that’s okay, we’ll just have our own little Christmas,” I said and put my arm around her, making her flinch. “I’ll get us a nice tree and we’ll cook dinner together. I’ll buy a goose!”
“Are you out of your fucking mind? I can’t not go home for Christmas, they’d cut me off!”
“Then what the fuck am I going to do?” I said.
“Well, my mom says that you ought to volunteer at a homeless shelter.”
I’d always thought that one day I’d grow into the sort of good person who would volunteer a lot of his time to helping the disenfranchised, but I lost my shit at the suggestion that it’s something that I really ought to do, as if it would serve as some sort of penance.
“And you’re okay with that?” I said.
“I really don’t have a choice.”
“Stand up to them!”
Anna produced an emery board from her purse and absentmindedly filed away at her talons. I ended up spending Christmas with Becky and her family. Being spiteful wasn’t my intention but I got some satisfaction when it made Anna bristle.
“They’re wicked bleeders, the krauts,” said my grandmother when I gave her my sob story at being shunned at Christmas. I’d long suspected Anna of being too cold and dispassionate to have a real relationship with. I’d spent the fall trying to push her buttons just to wrangle some sort of emotion out of her, but strategic and premeditated freak-outs had become exhausting, predictable, and I was running out of plates to smash.
Ideally I would have wanted a clean break, but Anna was broke and had nowhere else to go. When she returned from Maryland I told her that for the sake of our relationship we should really think about getting our own places. I’d been forced into sharing a bed with an ex-girlfriend before and wasn’t about to make the same mistake. Once we were in separate apartments, I would sever the ties, but not before.
A few weeks after we moved to our respective new homes on opposite banks of the East River it would be time to take action. I’d never dreamed that I’d be with a sexy fashionista like Anna, and now I was breaking up with her. Something had changed.
As breakups go, it was actually fairly pleasant. I was dog-sitting at a friend’s beach house on the Jersey Shore one squally April weekend. I picked Anna up from the Asbury Park train station and we spent the time sitting around, cuddling, eating their food, drinking their wine, watching their movies. We eventually had a little cry together. But that was that. No mess, no fuss.
Michael Martin, Nerve’s new editor in chief, was delighted with the news that I was now single, as it meant a whole slew of sexual scenarios with a rotating cast of unsavory characters was now possible, or perhaps even mandatory.
When Michael came to interview at Nerve I took an instant disliking to him. From across the room I could see that he was too good-looking, too stylish, and at twenty-five far too young to be an editor in chief. I didn’t know then that in Michael I had a champion and that once he secured the position, one of the first things he’d do was make me part of the editorial team full-time. Up until Michael joined I sat in on editorial meetings, but my day-to-day work was focused on managing the interns, ordering office supplies, and monitoring the customer service situation. Before Michael took over, I felt that the previous regime had regarded me as a novelty. Michael, however, had believed in me enough to allow me to legitimately write for a living and persuaded Rufus not only to make that happen, but also to pay thousands of dollars to have my INS status put in order. In fact, after one visa application was rejected without reason, Michael ensured that Rufus paid for a whole new petition.
Michael’s vision of “I Did It for Science” going forward would require a lot more commitment from me, however.
“I think that you are at the zenith of your powers when you are at your most uncomfortable,” he said before mapping out his vision of me using glory holes, starring in porn movies, and offering myself up at gay clubs, and was willing to up my salary accordingly.
CHINATOWN
I HELPED ANNA MOVE to an apartment in the ass-end of Williamsburg, then m
oved to Chinatown in a taxicab. My new room couldn’t accommodate a queen-sized bed or the chest of drawers I’d found on the street, so I bequeathed them to my estranged girlfriend.
I’d moved several times over the past few years. Every move began with me selling or gifting my things, packing a gym bag and a suitcase, hailing a cab, and calling 1-800-MATTRESS from an empty room. Up until very recently I’d viewed the furniture I bought or found as practically disposable. The cost of renting a moving truck would often be greater than the value of the items, and in the case of my Chinatown apartment, moving in had to be executed in utter secrecy.
New York’s Chinatown is an ideal location for someone as thrifty and vain as me. One can instantly boost their “cool capital” by taking residence in an edgy neighborhood still resistant to gentrification. But unlike Harlem or Washington Heights, Chinatown is sandwiched between the neighborhoods a savvy twenty-something would be spending his or her time in. It’s a short walk from the East Village, a stone’s throw from the Lower East Side, SoHo, NoHo, Little Italy, Nolita, and the Financial District. If you were dropped there in the middle of the night, however, you would assume you were in Shanghai or Hong Kong. London’s Chinatown is Disney-fied and Lilliputian in comparison. It’s just a short, brightly colored, clean street full of non-offensive-smelling restaurants whose patrons are from every corner of the globe except China. Chinatown in New York is an adventuresome place, especially down near Henry Street, where nary a non-Chinese is spotted. The thickest odors hang in the air. What’s most disconcerting about the smells, which reach their rank peak in the summer months, is that they completely elude categorization. You can never seem to pinpoint exactly what’s making you wretch.
It’s like rotten meat meets bad fish, hot vomit, trash, and dead mice. In fact, that’s precisely what it is.
The whole place is like an obstacle course during trading hours. Live frogs and crabs escape their barrels and make a desperate dash for Division Street before being squashed by traffic or scooped up by the grocers and repositioned on display. Sometimes both. Kitchen staff dump out gallons of old acrid cooking oil onto the sidewalk, turning Market Street into a huge unsanitary slip ’n’ slide. Metal doors to basement entrances are flung open and slammed shut without warning. I once glanced down into a subterranean kitchen containing three cooks standing knee-deep in brown water in which several objects I identified as duck carcasses were bobbing up and down. Men with filth-encrusted fingers and two full inches of ash hanging off their cigarettes scream at one another and their customers while hovering above containers of live eels, skate, and mackerel. Cantonese is a tonal language; the same word said slightly differently can mean two, three, or four entirely different things. Coming from Essex, that’s something I can relate to completely; the word “cunt,” for example, can be the most hurtful, spiteful thing to call someone, a precursor to violence. It can also, however, be a term of sincere affection, depending on the intonation and pronunciation.
The Chinese are effective squatters in every sense of the word. Instead of sitting on a stoop to smoke a cig or play dice, the Chinese manage to get down on their haunches, where they seem to balance perfectly for hours on end. Spitting is also very popular in Chinatown. The men and women, the old and the young, think nothing of theatrically hocking up inordinate amounts of phlegm and distributing it over the neighborhood’s sidewalks with reckless abandon. It was a challenge just to walk to work each morning without getting bull’s-eyed with a gelatinous green blob.
Chris had invited me to see the apartment before beginning renovations on it in the spring of 1999. He was turned on to the place by a woman named Peggy Chu. It looked like something from a horror movie, and to my mind completely unsuitable as a human dwelling.
Peggy Chu was Chris’s martial arts instructor. Her mother had lived in apartment nine at 45 Henry Street through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s and had recently died, leaving the one-and-a-half bedroom apartment vacant. Peggy’s spiritual advisor, a Taoist monk, strongly recommended that she not take up residence there for fear of creating some sort of paranormal discord. Peggy then offered the apartment to Chris, for the bargain-basement price of $500 per month, conditional on him fixing up the place a little bit.
Thirty years of incense burning had covered every surface with a sticky film of red goo. Through holes in the floor and ceiling, upstairs and downstairs neighbors were clearly visible and seeping odors completely smellable.
The term “death trap” is too often flung around with little thought for its literal meaning. The tiny bathroom in Chris’s fabulous find was the most dangerous enclosed space in the Western world. Two days after Chris had started his preparations to start work, a football-sized chunk of concrete had fallen through the bathroom ceiling, shattering the toilet tank’s porcelain lid to smithereens and missing Chris’s head by mere inches. A day later, Chris sat on the same toilet, only to experience a short freefall. The beams between apartment nine and the one below were rotted through, and Chris’s weight—a lean, mean 125 pounds—had caused the stem of the toilet to jut through the ceiling of the Huang family underneath. The toilet bowl—being larger than the gap in the beams—prevented Chris from dropping in on them. After a fourteen-hour day at The Orchard, Chris would often spend five or six hours each night trying to get his place into some sort of habitable state.
As he renovated, there were always exciting new things to be discovered in the place. The flooring in the kitchen was lumpy and uneven. It was made up of layer upon layer of linoleum, each separated by a perfectly preserved layer of magazines and newspapers from each era of home improvement. There was one layer every ten years until the late ’70s. The oldest was a fragile copy of Life magazine that detailed the National Socialist Party’s rise to power in Germany in 1933. In addition, a small hole in the living room ceiling would inexplicably spew chicken bones, gnawed clean.
After a few months the place was unrecognizable. Chris had transformed apartment nine into a bright, clean, sunny, even homey living space. He managed to turn the small back room into a space to work on his various art projects. Chris finally left The Orchard despite being owed thousands of dollars in back pay. Unable to find work and pay Peggy rent money in cash, he bartered with his own labor, turning into a janitor, accountant, and moving live target at the martial arts school, where he could be found day and night, five to six days a week. I put the idea of crashing at Chris’s place to him, and after a few days he agreed.
The back room, my room, was small—about six feet by eight feet. The position of the door meant that I could only squeeze in a twin bed. It didn’t matter. It was clean, comfortable, and bright. My windows opened onto a wrought-iron fire escape painted bright red, which was festooned with a circular billboard ad for something in Chinese.
Even with the two of us sharing the one-and-a-half-bedroom place, we still had the lowest apartment occupancy in the tenement by two or three people. Chris didn’t tell Peggy that he was taking rent money from somebody living in his “art studio.” He put a lock on my door and advised that I keep it locked should Peggy unexpectedly drop by while we weren’t there. Chris would only take $250 a month from me in rent. My friends all seethed with envy at my miniscule living costs, but the place came with a huge caveat: we could never be seen by the neighbors under any circumstances, which forced us to come and go in absolute secrecy. In the two and a half years that he’d lived there, Chris had successfully managed to avoid causing turbulence among the neighbors, no mean feat considering that two days after moving in he greeted the neighbors atop a porcelain throne.
To avoid detection, Chris established a few ground rules: We were not to arrive back at the apartment until after midnight if at all possible. Between midnight and six in the morning, hardly a soul would be seen out in the entire neighborhood. Before leaving the apartment we used the spy hole in the door and listened for footsteps before making a dash for the street. Should we run into somebody in the hall, we would not make eye contac
t, and in the most unlikely event of a neighbor striking up a conversation with either of us, we would say we were nocturnal plumbers, electricians, or simply delivering a package for Ms. Chu. This was an unlikely story because the community is so insular that no one would conceive of hiring a contractor from outside, and what could you possibly want delivered that you couldn’t get in Chinatown? In any case, that was our alibi.
Chris also told me to be prepared to vacate the room and live elsewhere with little or no notice whatsoever.
Initially, Chris made attempts to make the place look as though Peggy was living there. The coat rack next to the door was full of Asian-looking coats and silk slippers were lined up under the huge oak-framed bed. One of the martial arts school’s ceremonial dragon heads was hung over the bed in full few of anyone who might briefly glimpse inside when we darted in and out the door. We even had a parasol hanging off the gaudy chandelier. Our attempts at subterfuge were, in retrospect, slightly heavy-handed and had made the place look like a stage set from The King and I. I suspect that our attempts to blend in were only fueling the neighbors’ suspicions.
After a few months our routine began to lapse. I soon found myself shepherding a rotating cast of slightly tipsy girls up the rank-smelling, ramshackle staircase. Chris was spending the wee hours of the morning playing flamenco guitar on the fire escape on the front of the building and the apartment was now free of the Oriental knickknacks we had been using for camouflage.
It was during this time that the infamy of my position caught up with me. PR reps for hundreds of pleasure-enhancing creams, pills, hardware, software, and products began calling my work phone at an astonishing rate. The folks at Aneros, the ergonomically designed prostate massager, reported an astonishing spike in sales after I took it (or it took me) for a test-drive. I read some of my adventures for Audible.com. I began to appear as a guest on a late-night chat show entitled Naked New York with Bob Berkowitz, which was shown on the Metro Channel. To my absolute horror, I was billed on the show as a sexpert and was respectfully treated as such. The idea of Grant Stoddard the sexpert seemed absolutely surreal to me, and positively ludicrous to anyone I’d slept with. Just a year ago I was the sexual nonstarter. Now I was being heralded as somebody with a better than good idea of how to give women sexual pleasure and spent a lot of my time perpetuating that myth in several media.
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