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. Enjoy 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.
I’ve never been able to sleep on planes, even after a long evening of booze, drugs, anonymous sex, and serial cuckolding. I fantasize that if something horrible happened to the crew, I would bravely volunteer to get the bird back on terra firma. I wouldn’t let having no knowledge of how to pilot a commercial airliner get in the way. If I was asleep, I figured, I’d miss my chance at glory.
Consequently, I looked like the walking dead as I waited at the baggage carousel at Heathrow Airport. I hadn’t showered since leaving the orgy, but had the presence of mind to wash my hands and face directly before greeting my father, mother, sister, and grandmother, who had come to pick me up.
“For a laugh” my mother had enlarged a particularly comical portrait picture from when I was six years old, duplicated it four times, mounted the picture on cardboard, cut around the shape of my head, punched eye holes and Scotch-taped pencils to the underside, making four masquerade masks with which to greet me at the airport. I was jet-lagged, cracked out, shagged out, and hungover, so what was supposed to be a sight gag almost birthed an anxiety attack.
I hadn’t been home in two years and a lot had changed. I’d been writing my column for almost a year. I had started to get over feeling like a scumbag, but being at the orgy had sent me back there once again. I hoped that the stay in Corringham would take my mind off my sordid profession, that the humdrum of a working-class English village would help me to convalesce from my work. For the next two hours my family gave me tea, crumpets, and their undivided attention as we sat around the kitchen table. I gave them heavily censored accounts of my life in the Big Apple before sleep deprivation finally got the better of me. I should have stayed awake longer. After some glorious shut-eye, my two-year absence was seemingly forgotten about and the household chore rota had been affixed to the fridge with a magnet that professed that “Anxiety comes from feeling unequal to the task.” Beneath the text, a lion was pictured wearing a gold medal and giving a thumbs-up sign.
Unload the dishwasher, take out the rubbish, mow the lawn.
I would also have to find time to meet the deadline for my orgy story, as well as popping in to see all the relatives, keeping the fact that I was a sex worker on the down low. The main reason I came home was to apply for a new work visa. My first one had almost expired. I got three weeks’ vacation per year. This is how I was spending it.
They say that people become their jobs; I was becoming mine and it wasn’t a natural fit. Fiona had given me a lot to think about.
Fiona had also given me chlamydia.
That night at my place, I had just slipped it in without a condom for a second or a minute. Did I mention that we did it five times? That brief dip was long enough for me to catch a sexually transmitted disease of some description. I thought I was imagining the slight pain, but when I used the bathroom when we got back to my parent’s house, it had become too acute to ignore. I hoped it was a urinary tract infection. When my previous girlfriends had UTIs they would disappear into the bathroom with a stack of magazines, a gallon of cranberry juice, and reemerge a few hours later, feeling a hundred percent better.
I limped down our street, past the smashed bus shelter and the graffiti-strewn pillar box to the corner shop on Lampits Hill. Or what I had referred to as a bodega for the past four years.
Raj, the shop’s proprietor and only staff member, recognized me instantly.
“My goodness, I haven’t seen you in a long time,” he said. He looked me up and down. “A bloody long time.”
I was a paper boy for Raj when I was thirteen and fourteen. Since then I was sent down the street to buy lottery tickets for my father every Saturday evening.
“Hi, Raj.”
“Where have you been?”
“America. I live there now, in New York.”
“New York, eh? Yes, very good. Well, what can I help you with, Mr. Trump?” He laughed heartily at his cleverness.
“Do you have any cranberry juice?”
Raj gave me a puzzled look, as if I’d asked for powdered rhinoceros horn.
“I am afraid not, sir, no.” He folded him arms and looked at the floor.
I walked to another corner shop up the road, then about a mile to a medium-sized supermarket, where I found some cranberry “drink” in small juice boxes, which was the closest thing. I wasn’t in New York anymore. I bought ten juice boxes and carried them home. I drew a hot bath and read my mother’s copies of OK! and Hello! magazines from cover to cover, thinking that women’s magazines were somehow vital to the relief of my symptoms.
Posh, Becks, Posh, Becks, Camilla, Posh, Becks, and so on.
The bath and the cranberry drink had been completely fruitless.
Two days into my stay it had become quite unbearable and I began dredging the Internet for information about what I should do.
Orsett Hospital is the place of my birth. Wings of the hospital had been shut down annually due to NHS spending cuts, and by 2002 the huge complex of buildings housed little more than an infirmary and the Sexual Health Centre, or “clap clinic,” as it was known provincially. A brusque receptionist set up an appointment for me the following morning. The only appointment she had all week. Orsett is around six miles away from my parents’ home in Corringham. Since the hospital had shrunk in size, one could no longer take the bus there from our town. A taxi would be over forty dollars round-trip and I wasn’t insured to drive either of my parents’ cars. I mulled my options over before asking the question no child wants to ask a parent.
“You want me to give you a lift to the flipping clap clinic?” said my mother.
She tugged theatrically on her thick black hair.
“My God, Grant, what are you doing with your life?”
“Don’t make this any worse than it already is!” I pleaded. “There’s no need to tell anyone else.”
“Oh, do you think it’s something I’d like to scream from the hilltops? ‘I’m taking my son to the clap clinic!’”
“You’re what?” My kid sister had silently walked into the house and heard our conversation through the door.
“Nothing!” I snapped. “Mum’s just being weird again.”
As distraught as she seemed to be, my mother did a sort of Irish jig around the kitchen to demonstrate her supposed dementia. This satiated my sister’s curiosity and she bounded back into her bedroom.
“I know the woman who used to work there, you know,” she whispered. “I went to school with her. She might even still be there. God. How embarrassing.”
We drove in silence to Orsett Hospital at eight thirty the next morning. I was dropped off outside the infirmary and walked around to the bleachy-smelling Sexual Health Centre. The building was divided into a men’s and women’s area. Sitting in the waiting room of the men’s area was an embarrassed-looking sixty-year-old man under a jet-black toupee, a ginger bruiser in his late teens, and a thirty-year-old with too much jewelry and a terrible stutter. I wondered who was sleeping with these men, then remembered that I was one of them. I was embarrassed for having chlamydia and more embarrassed for the company chlamydia kept.
Over the past two years England had started to become very foreign seeming, antiquated and broken. But as I sat there in the husk of the hospital where it all began, I remember thinking that there’s something very civilized about the government picking up the tab for that time you threw caution to the wind and just stuck your penis in a stranger. If one doesn’t have decent health insurance in America by contrast, one should probably invest in a first aid kid and a crash helmet. My buddy Chris had some bad sushi and it cost him eight grand.
On the wall was a sign that read, If you require a health care technician of your own gender, please inform the receptionist 48 hours prior to your arrival.
I filled out a questionnaire and some other paperwork. Like the decrepit red-brick shell around it, the Sexual Health Centre seemed very empty. Just one female nurse appeared to be on staff—was it my mother’s school friend, Linda?
Like Fiona, she would soon have four penises in her grasp. The National Health service would never acknowledge it, of course, but the nurse simply must compare the hundreds of penises she sees week in, week out: a big one, a small one, a ginger one, a pretty one, an ugly one, and—once in a blue moon—a circumcised one. The only common themes would be disease and irritation, infection and dysfunction. She was seeing unhappy penises attached to unhappy people. I’ve become hyperconscious of the working conditions of other sex workers. To that end I decided I would be concerned yet jovially pragmatic. I sort of was anyway. I had been rolling the dice for a while and finally got snake eyes.
“Arrrrghhhh!” came a disconcerting cry of pain from down the hall. I jumped in my chair. Nobody else reacted to it.
Wiggy and ginger nuts were awaiting test results. Mush-mouth was on his way out.
“Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fanks very much, love,” he said after scheduling a follow-up appointment with the receptionist for two weeks hence.
“See you in a fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fortnight,” he added as he walked out to the parking lot.
“Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fuckin’ ’ell!” said Wiggy once the stutterer was safely out of earshot. “’E ’ad a lot to say for ’imself, didn’t ’e?”
We all laughed, save ginger, who seemed to be praying and rocking in his chair, oblivious to the rest of us.
“Don’t be so bleedin’ ’orrible, you!” said the receptionist before succumbing to a wheezing cackle.
“Wot-choo talkin’ baht, babes?” said Wiggy with a chuckle, “I’m only ’avin’ a laugh, ain’t I?”
“Oooh, you are a wicked little sod!”
“But you love me anyway though, don’tcha!”
Either Wiggy was a regular or oozed an easy charm. Perhaps that’s what he was in for.
“Grahnt?” called a short, chubby blonde women with outsized spectacles.
I raised my hand.
“Come on, love, let’s sort you out, then.”
Her name tag said Linda. I appreciated her jolly demeanor and appreciated how she must have honed it over years in the discharge business.
“Now before we start, would you like to be tested for HIV?”
“Is it free?” I hadn’t shaken the habit of taking anything if it was free.
“Of course.”
“Then sure.”
“Okay, well, now it’s the law for anyone who takes the test to have a counseling session whether it comes up negative or not, all right, love?”
“No problem.”
She readied the syringe. I rolled up my sleeve.
“Little bit of a pinch,” she said. She filled the chamber. “All done.” She sang.
“Now, what seems to be the problem?”
“It burns when I go to the bathroom.”
“Going to the bathroom” is a turn of phrase than can sound both odd and vague to the Saxon ear.
“It ’urts when you do a wee, you mean?” said Linda, getting to the bottom of things.
“Precisely.”
“Okay, well, what I’m going to do is take a little scraping from your urethra. I must warn you that it is quite painful, but it’ll be over in a second. Okay, love, pants down.” Linda snapped on some rubber gloves then referred to the paperwork I’d filled out.
“Stoddard?” She looked up at my face. She saw the likeness—everyone does. I made out the recognition in her eyes, but the circumstances probably prevented the follow-up questions.
She scrunched up her nose and took a long hard look at my business, rolling it around in her rubber-coated hands. My penis had overheard what was about to happen and was inching its way up into my body. If it happened to be larger looking, I might have pursued the personal connection we had, but in its current state my tiny penis would have brought dishonor upon my family name.
“You might want to grip the side of the bed, all right, dear?”
I braced myself. My sweaty palms gripped the aluminum bar along the side of the bed. The Q-tip–like implement went in and out. It wasn’t particularly pleasant, but it was not the hellish pain I’d been led to believe.
“There’s a brave soldier!” she said, in a very lovely and maternal way. “I’ve ’ad two men cryin’ in ’ere, just this week. Ohhh and the profanities I ’ear when I pull it out. They turn the air blue!”
Linda introduced me to the woman who counseled me on not having HIV while she determined the results of the scrape. She came back with a choice. Chlamydia or Non-Specific Urethritus, N.S.U. for short.
“You can take your pick as they are both treated with the same antibiotics.” She placed them in my hand.
Chlamydia sounded like a flower, N.S.U. like a state college. It was a toss-up.
“We need to check up so we’ll have you back ’ere in a fortnight, all right, love?”
“Yes,” I lied.
In a fortnight I’d be back where I suddenly realized that I felt at home, squatting in a tenement building in New York’s Chinatown, being handsomely paid to have sex with strangers and write about it.
I bought a Coke from a vending machine and slurped down the first dose of antibiotics. It was already eighty degrees out, but unlike muggy New York the air was fresh and clean. I walked about a mile to the main road, where I was told I could catch a bus, but carried on walking.
I walked all the way home.