Working Stiff

by Grant Stoddard

  The strangest effect was that all stripes of women were suddenly paying attention to me. E-mails from Vassar freshmen arrived in my inbox professing their love of my “work” and would I be interested in having a drink with them sometime. Others didn’t need to go through the artifice of a social drink and simply asked for directions to my apartment. I’d often just meet them at the F stop on East Broadway so that I could both check them out and fully explain the stealthy silence with which they were required to ascend to the apartment.

  In regard to girls, even ones who had scheduled overt fuck dates with me, I was terribly backward in coming forward. Once they were in the apartment, unbuttoning clothes and getting touchy-feely, I’d always be pushing the idea of watching a DVD on them or asking them if they’d like to look at some pictures. In spite of my profession, or perhaps because of it, I was dreadfully squeamish about the idea of strangers getting together to do “it.” Especially when the pressure was often on me to transport them to hitherto uncharted heights of sexual pleasure. With a reputation as a sexual Svengali preceding me, crushing disappointment was all but assured. When the movie had been watched, the beers imbibed, the snapshots shuffled with, and the conversation becoming strained and repetitive, the poor misguided girl and I would often just sit there looking at each other. They waited for me to pounce. Though I was thought to be a carnal black belt, I’d somehow never learned to initiate sex. I still haven’t.

  Since the days of playing kiss-chase in Corringham County Primary School as an eight-year-old, I’ve been much more at ease with being the prey than the hunter. Though when you are short, pimply, and have a chest that looks like two aspirin on an ironing board, it’s not a smart tactic. Almost without exception, all the women I’ve slept with have inexplicably all crossed my path or jumped into my lap. Thanks in large part to my loveless, sexless teen years, I’ve never had the confidence to pick someone up in a bar, initiate a conversation with a pretty girl in an elevator. I’ve never had a one-night stand. Had I grown up in an era where it wasn’t kosher for women to be sexually proactive, I may very well be a virgin today.

  The type of girls who seemed to suddenly be offering sex ran the gamut in terms of sexual experience. I met Samantha, a tall, bookish twenty-five-year-old at a bar on the Lower East Side. After three drinks and repeatedly professing to be a fan of my writing, she asked to be taken home. To my home.

  After sneaking up the stairs and remarking on my Anne Frank–type existence in the Chinese tenement, she peeled off her clothes, revealing a long, lithe body and largish perfect breasts that were almost mouth level on me. I thought she looked like a young Sigourney Weaver and I told her so. She undressed me and pushed me onto my single bed. An inordinate amount of reciprocal oral sex followed, and judging by her reaction, she wasn’t about to call my sexual credentials into question.

  She sat bolt upright.

  “There’s something you should know,” she said as she rolled on a condom in a deliberate and textbook fashion. “I’ve never done this before.”

  “Had sex with a funny little Englishman in a squat?” I said in what proved to be a vain attempt at lightening the mood.

  “No. I mean…had sex. Ever.”

  I was stunned. She was beautiful. She was slightly older than I was. Unlike me she had no excuse to be a virgin.

  “Do you still want to?” she said.

  At twenty-four, I’d imagined that my opportunity to take someone’s cherry was consigned to the mid-1990s. At the moment of her admission, we were at the point of no return. The difference between doing it and not was a small thrust of the hips. I’d listened in on other men’s experiences regarding the act of devirginizing women and the general consensus was that it was better to give the experience to some other poor sap, as the girl would almost assuredly become some sort of psychopath.

  We both focused our glares on the space between my bits and hers.

  “Aren’t you a bit old to be a…?” I said.

  She rolled her eyes, as if she was dreading having to explain herself.

  “I just wasn’t interested in college. Then I dated some guys that were…just pricks. And now people are frightened to, because they think I’ll be beholden to them forever. So I thought, who better to—” She looked down at her impeccably maintained vagina—“than you?”

  I frankly couldn’t think of anyone worse than me. The slow, sensual, gentle sex that I imagined the situation required was certainly not my forte. Besides, in heels this girl was a head taller than me. I imagined her throwing me around like a Muppet.

  She had given me an out, but my ego suddenly kicked in and I subjected her to one of my top three lousiest sexual performances to date. It was awkward, clumsy, misinformed, intermittently flaccid, and over far too soon.

  She put her proportionately large head on my chest. I wished that she would fall asleep and I could perhaps make up for things the next morning. But Samantha wanted to chat. To debrief, to pick over one of the most lackluster sexual unions ever performed.

  “Is that how it’s supposed to happen?”

  “Well, kind of like that, yeah,” I lied.

  “Oh.” She let out a huge sigh. “Don’t people usually make eye contact or kiss?”

  “Sometimes they do,” I said. “But what you see in the movies isn’t always accurate.”

  “Oh. I would have liked to have done it…facing each other. For a little while at least.”

  “Shhhhhhhh,” I said, hoping to staunch the continual flow of dashed expectations.

  I felt a giant tear roll into the faint line that bisected my underdeveloped pectoral muscles. From my ego’s perspective, this was my lowest ebb. Not long ago I had been in her position. But somewhere along the line, I’d allowed myself to feel deserving of the hype and become a menace to women everywhere.

  I made an attempt to make it up to her the next morning by taking her to a fancy champagne brunch in the Meatpacking District, and we didn’t see each other again.

  ALL THE WAY AND BACK AGAIN

  I PICKED OUT a pineapple-and-cheese skewer from the buffet table and looked across the plush hotel suite at Fiona. She shot me a smile that was simultaneously caring and seductive. It was only our third date but I had a good feeling about this girl from the moment I’d met her, a feeling that was at odds with my growing distain for the English, specifically the English abroad. Fiona was resoundingly English. I thought she looked like Kate Winslet, but blonder, and svelter. She’d grown up in a leafy part of Berkshire, in a village with a cricket green and a village hall and a pub with ivy growing wild up the walls. Fiona was very posh, and in a good-natured sort of way she made fun of my accent. She said I spoke like a chimney sweep.

  We shared a bottle of wine on our first date and kissed some. The second date we had cocktails and dinner and she stayed over at my place in Chinatown. We did it five times and she fell asleep on my chest.

  I imagined that she might put my parents on edge if I took her home to meet them. I’d warn my mother, who would likely say something like, “She’ll have to take us as she finds us.” Though I feared that Fiona’s excellent diction and expensive Alpine education might snap the whole family into subservience.

  I couldn’t conceive of a person like me dating a girl like Fiona back at home. I suppose us both living in the alleged meritocracy of New York made that happen. This was my fourth year in America and her second month.

  “Are you okay?” she mouthed. She’d noticed that my mood had changed over the course of the past three hours. She’d surmised that as I grazed the buffet I was working something through in my mind.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  I was at the party for work, and as such found it hard to let go.

  She beckoned me closer to her. I squeezed my way through the gyrating crowd and stood by the ornate chaise longue she reclined upon.

  “We can go if you’d like,” she said. Fiona ruffled my hair with her free hand.

  “No, really, it’s cool. En
joy yourself.”

  I wasn’t being a martyr; I had a flight to London at 8:00 a.m. the next day. It was already 2:00 a.m. and I had planned to take a cab directly to JFK from the hotel. I stick rigidly to any plans that I make. I’d brought my suitcase to the party.

  Still locking eyes with my date, I slumped down in an antique leather armchair.

  Fiona smiled sweetly before turning to face the wrist-thick ten-inch penis she’d been absentmindedly pumping in her right fist and hungrily licked it from hilt to tip. Its owner, a quarterback-looking type, groaned with pleasure, prompting his girlfriend to sink her fingers ever deeper into his ass while fondling Fiona’s large alabaster breasts. This reinvigorated the small Thai man with the blond bouffant who pounded away between her legs with a huge smile plastered across his face. Throughout the large suite, small clusters of pretty women and their slightly older, wealthy companions were in groups of three, four, or five, clusters of limbs, necks, and pelvises moving like pistons to a universal rhythm I couldn’t lock on to.

  I polished off another piece of bruschetta and thought about what was keeping me from enjoying being there. Perhaps it was partly the combination of odors: incense, tequila, lube, sweat, finger food, men’s cologne, latex, the fifty sets of genitals being waved at each other. Another man had joined Fiona’s clique and she fairly divvied up the oral sex to him and the quarterback. Earlier on I had fucked Fiona on the king-sized bed as another writer I knew looked on at close range.

  “Hi,” I said, embarrassed.

  “You are doing a good job!” she said. I took it as mockery.

  Together Fiona and I then went down on a tall Norwegian woman with an athletic body. My date went on to be the belle of the ball, but that was as much anonymous group sex as I could stomach.

  In theory, attending an orgy should have been the zenith of my compact sexual career, but I managed to not enjoy myself to the degree I’d hoped. I’d imagined what it might be like thousands of times since I was shown a videotape of Caligula as a fourteen-year-old. Aside from the inordinate amount of time I’d spent browsing a case of CDs and skulking around the pâté plate, this was pretty close to the fantasy.

  I was expensing the $150 cover fee to Nerve. All I had to do was find a female date. Bringing at least one girl was a prerequisite. I was shocked at how easy that part was. I was even more shocked that Fiona, a sexy, smart, knockout anthropologist of superior breeding, was so willing to accompany me.

  Now the veteran of over a year of experiments, I never ceased to be amazed by just how easy it had become to find willing participants in my assignments. I had rather sheepishly asked one of our office interns to accompany me to the nude beach at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, only to find that she was thrilled to tag along and had no reservations about immediately stripping and doing a painstakingly meticulous job of applying sunblock. The intern, Joanna Angel, went on to be a stripper and later a star and director of hipster porn movies, and I like to think I played a small part in her career.

  Likewise, I had a pick of attractive girls who were more than ready to go to the orgy with me. In a stunning misjudgment, I chose Fiona, chiefly because I could see myself dating her long-term. The orgy was my first assignment as a single man after dating Anna for the past year. I hadn’t yet grasped the concept of casual sex fully. I didn’t realize that, provided everyone is on the same page, it’s perfectly fine to have intercourse with somebody you see no real future with. Some people actually find it preferable. I, however, have never been one of those people. I put this down to my loveless, sexless teen years and my wont to cling desperately to any female willing to have sex with me. Almost all of the time, girls had been ready to cling back.

  I answered Fiona’s online personal ad for my own purposes; I was, in some roundabout way, looking for a girlfriend. I wanted sex, sure, but also snuggles, spooning, movies, decadent weekend brunching, pet names, the whole bit. I was assigned the orgy article on the day I met Fiona in person and offhandedly told her about it over coffee. If nothing else, being paid a decent living to engage in bizarre sex acts with strangers was a surefire icebreaker. Many girls jumped to the erroneous conclusion that I was some sort of sexual wizard and were ready to see for themselves after a drink. Silly girls.

  With hardly any cajoling from me, Fiona told me that she was in, and before I knew it she was making like a circus seal and I was jealous as hell. I was experiencing a kind of envy that can’t even be dissipated by an unsolicited Russian Perfect 10 model popping up out of nowhere to furiously rub some life into my flaccid penis, like it was a newborn puppy.

  “Hello,” she said. For all the elbow grease she was putting into the task at hand, she looked terribly bored.

  “Hi,” I said. She was beautiful and her dirty blonde hair smelled of cigarettes.

  “Is that your woman?” she said, nodding to the blonde head poking out from the middle of a pink huddle.

  “Well, we’re just getting to know each other.”

  “She from agency?”

  I told her that she wasn’t from an agency. I started to chafe.

  The Russian was from an escort agency whose sole business was catering to men who couldn’t find women to bring to sex parties.

  “They have to sign contract. They no get to touch me if I not want. And I never want. Look at him. They all like him.”

  She nodded her head in the direction of a large hairy man wearing only his wig, a Rolex, and a gold Chai pendant around his chubby neck. He was rubbing a petite Asian girl’s feet as she deep-throated her good-looking date.

  “I fuck every man here but not him. He is animal.”

  Her grip tightened and I winced with pain and dug my fingers into the chair.

  It was common knowledge that several celebrities had frequented this monthly soiree, but I hadn’t successfully pinpointed any. It was hard to tell with the wigs on. The party’s general theme was that attendees had to be dressed from head to toe in white and have some kind of fake hairpiece. The clothes had all come off hours ago, the wigs had stayed on.

  Fiona momentarily stopped what she was doing and gave me the thumbs-up sign. I thought about how I would ask my Russian to stop.

  “I think my girlfriend needs me.”

  She looked over at Fiona, who was now busy with almost three feet of penis, and cocked an eyebrow.

  “I’m not so sure.”

  She let go and reached out for the nearest male member without missing a stroke.

  By 3:45 a.m. I had watched Fiona have intercourse with four men, orally service another three and two women. She looked happy but exhausted. I was shell-shocked.

  I’d sort of expected that the two of us might get to third base in a dark corner and spend the rest of the night gossiping about the other attendees and marveling at the alien world we’d somehow gained access to. Instead the party gave a collective groan when I finally found Fiona’s thong and bra, pushed through her new fan club, and placed them on her shoulder. I already had my jacket on. It was time to go home.

  Even as she dismounted the quarterback with the horse cock, she knew something in our burgeoning relationship was broken.

  “Seriously, something’s bothering you, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t bring him next time!” offered the gentleman attached to an aggressive-looking erection.

  “Can we talk about this outside?”

  We found her clothes, she dressed, and we said good-bye to Apollonia, our host.

  “Darling, you were breathtaking tonight,” she said to Fiona.

  “Yes!” agreed one of the men she’d had sex with, and squeezed his business card into her palm. “Please call me….”

  “Fiona,” I said.

  “Yes, Fiona. I would love to sample your unique effervescence once again.”

  Seriously. He actually said that.

  With my suitcase dragging behind me we walked out into the warm August night. She tried to give me a hug but I recoiled.

  “Okay,” said Fiona. She took
a deep breath. “You seem really quite upset with me.”

  “Well, yeah. You just fucked an entire party.”

  “It was your fucking idea!” she shrieked. “It was an orgy and you asked me to come!”

  A cabbie pulled up beside us and rolled down his window.

  “Fuck off!” Fiona screamed and the scared cabbie obliged.

  “Well…you certainly ran with it. I didn’t know how I would feel.”

  “Don’t you do this, like, all the time? I thought this was your job, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Well…I think that I really liked you.”

  “Liked? So you mean that’s it, is it?” She began to cry. “I don’t care about all this, y’know!” She theatrically ripped up the business card and threw the pieces in my face.

  “I should be the one crying. You just fucked Uncle Miltie.” I tried to stifle a smirk.

  “Well, thanks a fucking lot.” A cab arrived on cue and she jumped in. Instead of pulling away immediately, the cabbie paused to write down the location of the pickup in his log book. We looked at each other blankly for an inordinately long seven or eight seconds.

  She wiped tears from her eyes as the cab pulled away.

  “Who’s Uncle Miltie?” said Fiona, breaking the icy silence and evoking guffaws from a pair of inebriated homosexuals mincing by. The question hung in the air, the last thing I heard her say.