Working Stiff

by Grant Stoddard

  “That UPS delivered a parcel but you weren’t home so they have it for you to pick up.”

  Relieved beyond measure, Chris and I collapsed in fits of laughter, much to the translator’s astonishment, and enjoyed a cold beer before trekking back to Manhattan.

  In July, Chris left New York for a month to visit his family, who lived in the remote, rough terrain of the northern Greek mainland, entrusting me with the apartment.

  I awoke one morning about an hour earlier than usual and went to boil some water, which I drank with a few slices of fresh ginger, as per my newly New Age mother’s latest recommendation. As I walked into the kitchen, a section of the ceiling directly above my bed collapsed. This wasn’t light plasterboard of the twentieth century but a thick heavy plaster attached to a kind of cement several inches thick. Chunks of wood, animal bones, and decaying rags came down with it too, filling the apartment with a thick dust. The weight of it all crashing down broke my nightstand and shattered my lamp and alarm clock. If I’d have still been in bed I’d have been robbed of my trademark Bee Gee teeth and aquiline nose. I considered it a spooky warning shot. I turned on a few fans, took a few changes of clothes, and camped out at Brian’s house on the Bowery for the weekend.

  I returned on Sunday night to an apartment that was hot, dark, rank-smelling, and full of choking dust. Having the two fans on apparently blew the fuse shortly after I left and there was no electricity. The fuse box was in the basement that the super of the building had under lock and key, meaning that I couldn’t change it myself. Whatever was in the fridge was stinking to high heaven, and from what I could make out from the flickering, buzzing fluorescent lights in the hallway, the whole place was an utter disaster area. I stayed the night regardless, sleeping in Chris’s bedroom, which was relatively dust-free. I was awakened at six in the morning by a persistent pounding on my door, which I tried to ignore in vain. The woman who immediately started screaming at me was demanding that I turn off my shower. I told her that it’s the middle of the night and that I wasn’t using my shower and even invited her in to look, but she just repeated “Turn off shower!” as she stormed back down the stairs. I went straight back to sleep and was awaken three hours later by more screaming and shouting coming from the hallway. I went to pee and saw that my kitchen and bathroom were now under an inch and a half of water. The leak was coming from the apartment above ours and it was now that resident who was getting an earful from the woman who’d given me my wake-up call.

  I e-mailed Chris in Athens. He suggested that I mop up the mess as best I could, buy a fuse, and put it in a bag with a note written in Chinese that said the fuse in apartment nine needed replacing. He told me to hang the bag on the super’s door handle, bang on the door, and run away as fast as I could. I asked Brian’s roommate Victoria to write the note in Cantonese. I returned that evening to find that power had been restored. I could now concentrate on another pressing problem—namely, the gaping hole in the ceiling that seemed to be growing by the hour. I cleared the rubble and dust from my room, but whenever the kids upstairs ran around, more debris would fall through. I began to have horrible nightmares about the mysterious bones constantly falling through the ceiling being those of a human baby. I was beginning to think the Taoist monk was right when he suggested that the apartment was haunted.

  Chris returned from Greece with a renewed energy and within a day of his return he expertly installed a new ceiling, gave the plumbing an overhaul, repainted, plastered, and had the place looking better than ever in no time. Paying so little in rent actually left me with extra money each month for the first time in my life. I decided I would use this extra cash to first visit my parents, sort out my visa, and then really make inroads on making 45 Henry our own. After so long on the move, I was extremely excited to have a stable home. I’d been here six months, survived detection and the apartment’s attempts to kill us both. Things looked like they would be running smoothly from then on.

  Toward the end of my ten-day trip to my parents’ home, I got a cryptic e-mail from Chris saying that he’d packed my stuff up and put it somewhere until I got back. I couldn’t imagine what had happened. Had Peggy found out? Had another supernatural disaster rendered my room permanently uninhabitable? Had the Triads taken a baseball bat to Chris’s knees? I called Chris, who apologized for the terse e-mail but explained that there had been a sudden and unfortunate turn of events regarding the apartment. Alex had moved in.

  Alex was a sixty-year-old Siberian man who taught sambo at Peggy’s school. Despite sounding like a dance, sambo is a lethal type of no-frills hand-to-hand combat employed by Spetsnaz—the Soviet equivalent of the British SAS or American Green Berets—perfected against the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Peggy had suddenly needed to find a living space for the illegal immigrant killing machine.

  I jumped in a cab at JFK and went straight to the apartment. Chris wasn’t picking up. His last instruction to me was simply to get out as soon as I could. Chris had always said that I may need to leave at a moment’s notice. It just seemed so cruel that it would have to happen now. The place was a real shag pad and afforded me a disposable income. I was living high off the hog and having lots of sex: my American wet dream come true.

  I opened the apartment door. All the lights were off. I threw my bag down and started feeling my way toward my bedroom when I bumped into a large object in the middle of the living room. I tripped and tumbled into the kitchen. After a few seconds of fumbling for the light switch I opened the fridge door, which cast an eerie light over the obstruction. A short bald man with a barrel chest and hands like bunches of kielbasa was standing perfectly still in the middle of the room. He had been standing there like that in the pitch dark.

  “What the fuck?”

  “My name is Alex.”

  He still hadn’t turned his face to look at me and his gaze remained on the back wall of the living room.

  “I come to live in here.” He turned his head to look at me for the first time.

  “Sorry.”

  His Brezhnevian face softened and he even cracked a brief but apologetic smile, revealing a tangle of silvery bridgework. Alex was earning money in the United States through teaching sambo and was sending the proceeds back to his wife and kids in Siberia. He hadn’t seen them for almost four years.

  Alex gave me a hand with moving out. Not a huge task, as there was just a suitcase, a guitar, and two garbage bags full of clothes. Once again, I left everything that wouldn’t fit in the trunk of a taxicab. I put the suitcase and the guitar in the trunk of the waiting taxi and went to shake Alex’s mighty paw. He shook my hand firmly, placing his left hand on my elbow, and in doing so relinquished his grip on the bags, dropping all of my clothes into a deep, muddy Chinatown puddle.

  It didn’t occur to me that I really had nowhere else to go until I was in the taxi. I had keys for the Nerve office, so I told the driver to take me to the corner of Broadway and Spring. I stashed all of my worldly belongings under my desk and fell asleep on the couch. I figured that until I found a new living situation, I could live in the office and join the New York Sports Club across the street so that I could still shower regularly. I could also have a schvitz anytime I wanted and, if the mood ever took me, pump a little iron.

  Michael woke me up the next morning.

  “Do you know how to play bridge?” he asked.

  I hadn’t thought about bridge since living with Mrs. Montague. For her the game was both her reason for living and the bane of her existence. One night I’d made the mistake of asking her how to play and subjected myself to a two-hour primer that left me confused and confounded.

  “I have no idea,” I said and made for the coffeepot.

  “Well, you’re going to learn tonight.”

  Michael was referring to a biweekly bridge class that was taking place that evening. According to the ad that had been posted on Craigslist, Doug, the bridge expert, has a “thick, ten-inch cock.” This claim is the most striking feature of the ad he
placed online to conscript novices to his “clothing-optional” bridge class, which took place twice a month on Wednesday evenings at his apartment in uptown Manhattan. Aside from his purported dimensions, the main body of the ad is about guys in their mid-twenties to mid-forties learning and playing bridge in a relaxed atmosphere. “There is to be no touching before, during, or after the class. The class is clothing-optional with pupils invited to wear as much or as little as you feel comfortable in.”

  Still ruing the previous night’s eviction, I e-mailed Doug and expressed a desire to learn and insinuated an undercurrent of voyeuristic intent. Within what seemed like nanoseconds I received a reply that again stressed the relaxed vibe he sought to create during the class, the strict no-touching rule, the phallus that encroached upon a foot in length, and my responsibility to be height/weight proportionate. “Because no one wants to look at a bunch of fat guys playing cards.” I was asked to report my stats or ideally to send along a recent picture. Attached to his e-mail was a menagerie of playful pictures of Doug smiling coquettishly while brandishing what looked like a length of radiator hose, dressed in wingtips, black socks, and a yellow and black letterman jacket.

  With some frightfully fruity underwear purchased just for the occasion, I stood on a chair in the Nerve bathroom and tried to take a self-portrait looking both sexually alluring and eager to learn a card game whilst precariously balanced. I sent the picture along to Doug and received a reply some hours later that made no judgments on my twinkish shot but did suggest that I arrive at his apartment early so that I could be shown the basics. “I will be naked,” he advised.

  I’d surmised from our e-mail exchange that Doug was much more of an exhibitionist than a voyeur. As I strolled the alien world of the Upper West Side, I meditated on whether bridge or any activity that was predicated on sitting around a table was ideally suited for exhibiting one’s genitalia as, for the most part, his phallus’s majesty would be obscured by the playing surface. As I walked along I made a mental short list of other activities that might be more effective to that end. They included yoga and jump rope.

  Doug wanted me to arrive at seven with the other pupils arriving at seven thirty, but I decided that ten minutes alone with Doug and his special something would be more than sufficient. I was jet-lagged, suddenly homeless, and about to kick back with a naked man in his sixties. With my heart thumping, I walked into a very grandiose but dimly lit marble lobby that smelled strongly of hearty, simple, Central European foods. I told the doorman the apartment number.

  “You’re here to play cards?” he asked. “Go on up.”

  Apartment 8H; the home of the whopper. I knocked on the door and waited nine long seconds before Doug appeared around the door, seemingly dressed.

  “Grant?” he asked with a broad and kind grin. “Come on in!”

  I was in Doug’s place for several more seconds before becoming aware of a swaying movement around my host’s mid to lower thigh. I’d assumed naked meant bereft of clothing, but Doug was wearing a rather jolly animal-print T-shirt, slippers, socks, and a pair of bookish spectacles with a velvet cord that linked the parts that hook over one’s ears. His loins and legs were especially pink, naked, and open to the elements. Doug seemed puzzled by the six-pack of beer that I’d brought along, more as common courtesy than from a need or desire to get tipsy.

  “You did grocery shopping on the way here?” he asked.

  “I just picked up some beers.”

  “Oh,” he said, seeming slightly miffed. “We actually don’t do that here, but you are welcome to indulge if you’d like.”

  This exchange was the evening’s only conversation that didn’t directly relate to the folly of bridge. A shame, as I had prepared nuggets of small talk and benign chatter on a variety of subjects.

  “Well, we have ten minutes before the others arrive so let me just run you through the basics.”

  The dual decorative themes for Doug’s place are “fruits of the forest” and gold lamé, which seemed too disparate a pairing until I spied a wreath of gilded plums that neatly tied the two motifs together. Doug sat down at the circular glass table in the middle of the room and urged me to sit opposite him. The table is glass! Of course, I thought. Doug placed an ace, a king, a queen, and a jack on the table as I took my seat. The placement of the cards seemed deliberate as they perfectly eclipsed his much-hyped appendage. Doug explained the numeric value of the picture cards and the pecking order of the four suits and immediately quizzed me. As I began to deliver the answers to his questions, Doug slid the cards around, allowing partial glimpses of the monster member, a sort of dance of the seven veils. I found that I had to use every ounce of concentration as the relatively simple questions came with a peek-a-boo glimpse that I found very distracting. I couldn’t help notice Doug’s grin widen as he deliberately sabotaged my ability to count to four. With a Herculean effort I answered most of his questions correctly, prompting my host to sweep the cards off the table and reveal the element that made this card game something special. There it was. Based on its size, I was convinced that Doug owned the world’s only bifocal tabletop. I tried not to look directly at it by focusing on a coffee ring on the glassy foreground. I was struggling with whether I ought to vocally acknowledge its presence when I was saved by the doorbell. The star of the show went to greet the other pupils, with Doug following several moments later.

  Sam and Dimitri had arrived. I was glad that the other bridge wannabes were here to give me an idea of how to behave in this unique scenario. Sam set himself down on the sofa, waking a noticeably annoyed white Persian cat.

  “Be careful with those black pants,” said Doug, grinning. “You’ll leave here with pussy hair all over you and we wouldn’t want that, now would we.”

  “It’d certainly be a first,” parried Sam. We all laughed mischievously.

  I hadn’t been invited to disrobe and wondered what the others would be “feeling comfortable in.” One-and two-lesson veterans respectively, Sam and Dimitri looked like stereotypical denizens of the neighborhoods in which they resided. Dimitri, heavily muscled, tanned, and wearing a baseball cap, khaki shorts, and tight white tank top was from Chelsea. Sam was a nebbish, bookish, buttoned-up gent from midtown. They each clutched Xeroxed handouts that had been their bridge homework from last time. Sam held a copy of Bridge for Dummies.

  “Throw that away,” said Doug disdainfully. “You can’t learn what I’m about to teach you from a book.” I took this as alluding to some hanky-panky, but he went on to talk about the card game as if it was delivered to mankind from a higher being and should be handed down, person to person. The conversation was so immediately and wholly bridgecentric that I wasn’t even introduced to the other guys; we threw around a cursory nod as cards were being dealt.

  Bridge seems to have a language all its own, as foreign to English as Urdu. Terms like “singleton,” “doubleton,” “trump,” and something called “the Gerber method” were all mentioned with nary a regular English word to give any clues as to what it all meant. “If you are feeling confused, that’s okay,” said Doug with a chuckle. “You should be.”

  Sam and Dimitri remained fully dressed. I watched my fellow players’ gazes intensely. Sure, they had been to Doug’s class before, but I was surprised that no one was doing or saying anything to reference the fact that one of the four of us wasn’t wearing any pants. The others seemed as if they actually wanted to buy in to what Mrs. Montague called a recipe for madness. They wanted to learn how to play bridge, regardless of the distraction. We silently looked down at our hands, tallying points. We looked as if we were studying some prehistoric species of sea cucumber through a glass-bottomed boat. I had counted my cards incorrectly during the past two hands, so this time Doug got up and walked around the table to look at my hand over my shoulder. Despite my fear that his schlong would swing into my ribs, no contact took place. Doug returned to his place satisfied that I’d leaned something. I had. But he thought it had to do with cards.
/>
  At 8:00 a din filled the room as five clocks chimed out the hour simultaneously. The racket was an indistinguishable cacophany but the clock nearest to us was definitely playing “Deutschland Über Alles.”

  “Is this tune what I think it is?” I asked Doug as he shuffled the deck.

  He neither confirmed nor denied it but instead closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and pursed his lips as he conducted an imaginary orchestra by moving his forefingers in a wide U-shaped motion.

  I decided I could probably use a drink. I offered everyone a beer, but they politely declined while looking at me as if I had a drinking problem. I hardly drink at all, but I felt obligated to get rid of at least some of the beer. Returning from the fridge, I noticed that in my thirty-second absence Sam had stripped down to a pair of black boxer briefs. I’d decided that if Dimitri took his clothes off, I would follow suit. No one was taking a blind bit of notice of either of the two partially naked players, which I imagined was a little disheartening for Sam, as he’d really put himself out there. He looked nervous—perhaps about his gynomastia, more commonly known as having man-titties. I made sure that he caught me looking at his adolescent-looking physique so he would feel that stripping hadn’t been an entire waste. Unencumbered by clothing, Sam soon became a different type of player, bidding high, taking risks. Dimitri was very kind and gave me guidance when he could see that Doug’s instruction left me more bewildered.

  Ultimately, Doug’s mighty penis seemed incidental. No one was overtly looking at it or talking about it. I wondered what he got out of our indifference toward it. Was he getting off by having his equine penis ignored? His ad said that he loved showing off his “cock and nuts,” but he really made little effort to draw our attention to it. Doug always steered the conversation away from anything that had nothing to do with cards and really got quite passionate when any of us had played a good hand or conversely made a “silly, silly mistake.” In the few hours I’d had to speculate on how the evening would go, I never once entertained the idea that there would be an entirely scholarly atmosphere with little or no mention or deference given to the pink elephant under the glass tabletop in the living room. Doug spent too much time tsking our silly mistakes to revel in his exhibitionism.