IN HEELS, the supermodel seemed a good foot taller than me.
“What did you just say to me?” she said.
It was the third time she’d asked me to repeat myself.
She sounded German, perhaps Dutch. The pickup line would have sounded garbled even if there wasn’t a height difference, a language barrier, a pulsing bass beat, or the effects of drugs and alcohol to contend with. I balanced precariously on tiptoes and yelled in the general direction of her eardrum.
“I said, Your daddy doesn’t have a penis, he has a paintbrush!”
Even as concepts for my “I Did It for Science” column went, this one was patently preposterous. In an editorial meeting the previous week, I’d inadvertently leaked that despite being a kamikaze sex writer, I’d never used a pickup line on anyone. In fact, though I was checking off bizarre once-in-a-lifetime sexual experiences at a dizzying rate, I’d never done the normal stuff like ask for a girl’s number, French kissed a complete stranger, or had a one-night stand. I still haven’t. Within an hour, a short list of twenty of the most egregious lines had been made for me to unleash at a Ford model party that Wednesday night.
The model jumped back and held my shoulders at arm’s length.
“You…”
I braced myself for a stinging slap or knee to the groin.
Brian laughed and took a picture.
“…are so funny!”
She wrapped her arms around me, shoved my face to her clammy breasts, and swiveled at the hips several times.
“A paintbrush! Ha ha ha!”
She snapped her fingers at the bartender and pointed to me. Another free drink.
This was the fourth. I’d been making models laugh all night and they’d been rewarding me by buying me drinks on their boyfriends’ tabs and promptly disappearing. I tried not to take it personally, reminding myself that models are required to flit in and out of clubs all night. I’m not a big drinker and was only now realizing that my humiliation and my drunkenness were inversely proportional.
The night had started with Anna and me sharing several flasks of sake at Decibel. It was one of the semiannual occasions when we have a drink and talk about the tumultuous year that we dated each other. I walked her to her friend’s place on 3rd Street and Avenue A and was asked to stay for a glass of Riesling and a few chunky lines of coke. I left to join Brian and Vin at Cherry Tavern for a Tecate and tequila shot. Outside, I wretched twice. Nothing came up and the three of us headed over to the model party at Plaid.
I surveyed the dance floor for my next glamazon. If my liver could take it, I still had eight or nine pickup lines to bust out. In the distance I saw Brian threading himself through the crowd toward me.
“Hey!” he said.
I could barely focus my eyes on him.
“How do you like your eggs in the morning?” I slurred. “Fertilized?”
“Never mind all that,” he said. He pulled me across the dance floor by my shirt collar. “There’s this totally cute French girl who really wants to meet you.”
Even in my inebriated state I knew that this was Brian code for “I want to close in on a cute girl, so please make time with her clubfooted friend.”
Laure and Louise were both nineteen years old and both adorable, swinging their arms and legs around with a seemingly laissez-faire attitude toward the beat, as French girls in discotheques are wont to do. They were spending the summer in New York, interning for an importer of Bordeaux. It was easy to tell to whom we’d each been allotted. Laure was taller, blonde, and sun-kissed. Louise was shorter with paler skin and a stylish jet-black bob. She wore a black tank top, a short black-and-white polka-dot skirt, and black heels.
“Louise, this is Grant,” yelled Brian. He came close to my ear and yelled, “Your one.”
As they were both slim, pretty, and jerked their bodies in the same arrhythmic manner, I would have been happy with either, though I was acutely aware that they were seeing me at my drunkest and sweatiest. By the sixth week of a New York summer, people sort of surrender to the swampy air that has you schvitzing before you’ve walked a block from your apartment. In pairs we danced and talked.
“Your name?” said Louise, hooking her shiny black hair over her ear and putting it near my mouth.
“My name is Grant,” I said.
Louise raised her eyebrows and tugged Laure’s arm.
“Laure! Laure! Il s’appelle Grand!” she said as they succumbed to fits of girlish laughter.
A bouncer pushed past me and I spilt free gin and tonic over my shirt to more giggles from Louise. Laure and Brian were already making out and slapping each other’s asses in time to the music. With seemingly nothing left to lose, I proceeded to treat Louise to some of my comedy dance moves, which are, in truth, modified only slightly from my actual dance moves.
“You are cool!” she said with a wink.
She must have been as wrecked as I was.
“What are you doing later?” I asked just before an urgent need to throw up hit me like a kick in the gut.
“Well, per’aps we should ’ang out because I fink that your friend and Laure are going to…”
I left Louise mid-sentence and hurtled toward the exit and ran across the street from the club and started spitting out that awful-tasting liquid that tends to precede a Technicolor yawn.
I’m going to be sick, I’m not going to be sick, I’m going to be sick.
My body kept me guessing until I was a block from my house. I threw up outside the window of the Dynasty diner at the corner of 14th and B to the disgust of its nighttime patrons. As I got home, my phone rang several times. It was Brian; I didn’t pick up.
Hungover, I stumbled into the Nerve offices at around noon the next day. I sat at my desk and kept one eye on the bathroom door.
“Oh, man!” Brian said and laughed from across the room. “You were wasted last night!”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Even thinking about what I drank last night could restart the heaving.
“You actually left that girl while she was still talking to you.”
The pain of the hangover had nudged out any memory of the two teenage Parisians we had met. Brian filled in the gaps in my memory with snaps of the previous night on his digital camera.
“Wow, they’re pretty cute!” I said.
“Well, the one you could have taken home totally thinks that you are totally not into her. She got kind of upset. After you left she said…ha ha ha…oh, man, she said, ‘What eez wrong wiv your friend? Is ’e…’ow you say…a faggot?’ Ha ha ha ha!”
“Did you set her straight?”
“No, I told her that she was probably right!”
“Thanks.”
At around four, I kept down half a sandwich. At five I was called at my desk and summoned to Starbucks. I threw up the sandwich. The Starbucks on the corner of Crosby and Spring was where Rufus fired people. An enormous culling took place in the spring and summer of 2001. After each outgoing staffer left Nerve’s employ to the sounds of world Muzak and the smell of mocha lattes, the venue became known internally as Charbucks. Rufus was pissed at me.
BY THE FALL of 2002 Rufus Griscom had already had some success in transitioning Nerve-branded content into a wide array of other media: the Nerve HBO show; cobranded movie projects; Nerve online personals were spun into a separate company that powered personals for a plethora of Web sites; Emma Taylor and Lorelei Sharkey coauthored a hardcover sex guide, The Big Bang: Nerve’s Guide to the New Sexual Universe, and followed it with Nerve’s Guide to Sexual Etiquette. Rufus now had designs on spinning some Nerve content into a TV series and decided that a small-screen version of “I Did It for Science” could be a feasible project. Rufus had off-handedly brought up the possibility during an awkward moment in the elevator. Through spatial association, the elevator became the only venue where this formless project was touched upon.
“Why, Mr. Stoddard, sir!” he’d routinely say as we entered the elevator in the lobby.
Rufus often referred to and addressed me as Nerve’s unofficial mascot, a distinction I secretly enjoyed and tried to aspire to. I liked Rufus and thought him charming, quite Gatsby-ish. He is tall, slim, and bespectacled, with a triangular nose and prominent, noble-looking chin. He has a crest of thick, straight floppy hair and flings his arms around in wild gesticulation.
Third floor.
“Well, what a wonderful bouquet of bed-head you are presenting us all with this fine morning.”
The timbre of Rufus’s voice is somewhat odd and comical. His uvula, the circular muscle at the back of the throat, seems perpetually tensed, as when yawning. This can make him sound Kermit-like. The sound becomes more noticeable when he is excited or enraged, which is patently hilarious.
Fifth floor.
“So how about ‘I Did It for Science’ TV? That’d be quite something, wouldn’t it?”
“Totally.”
Sixth floor. Our floor.
We had this brief conversation about four times in as many months, always in the elevator, until seemingly out of the blue Rufus and Alisa invited me to accompany them to a VH1 meeting at 1515 Broadway.
Rufus’s girlfriend, the tall, blonde, perky, and Texan Alisa Volkmann, had been recently brought in to share Ross Martin’s position as the head of Film and TV projects. Shortly thereafter, Ross and his pregnant wife, Jordana, moved to LA, where he set up his own production company, Plant Film.
“We want you to see what a TV meeting is like, so you have an idea for when we pitch the ‘I Did It for Science’ show,” he said as we scooched into the backseat of a town car.
“Totally!” said Alisa. “A TV version of your show would just be rilly, rilly hilarious. And VH1 would be a totally koo-uhl home for it.”
The idea that the adventures of my genitalia could be the basis for a weekly half hour of nationally broadcast television certainly appealed to my ego, though I was unsure that I would be willing to bare all to a mainstream TV audience and skeptical that a network existed that would deign to show something quite so tragic and foul. VH1 had recently made the leap from showing Genesis videos to clip shows about the glitterati. Surely a show about a pasty, nervous, pigeon-chested weakling with an erection would be a colossal step backward.
We shoved away through the line of banner-waving kids who were there for MTV’s TRL. We filed into a conference room, where we all shook hands with frosted-hair TV execs whose teeth were bleached too white.
“And who might this be, Rufus?” said the one with the whitest teeth. He made little effort to finesse his distaste for the random scruffy person sitting in.
“This, guys, is Grant ‘I Did It for Science’ Stoddard.”
Blank faces all around. I began to feel like a complete asshole.
“Nerve’s most intrepid and most widely read columnist?”
No recognition whatsoever. Rufus was always overstating the cultural reach of his media empire and often making us all look like tools in the process.
“O-kay, so we have no time to talk about anything other than the matter at hand. Another meeting is using the room in, like, ten minutes.”
“Absolutely,” said Rufus. “Grant is just here to—”
“Great, let’s begin.”
The matter at hand was VH1 wanting to peripherally use Nerve personals for some reality dating show pilot. Over the next eight minutes, Rufus and Alisa began shooting out increasingly half-baked show ideas that would insinuate Nerve into the project to a more significant extent. Rufus’s voice got funnier. They hit a wall. I sank into my chair.
“Rufus, we already have our show.” White Teeth used his hands in the international gesture for calm the fuck down.
He and the other execs were exasperated. “We just wanted to know if you wanted to help us.”
“I just don’t see the value for Nerve,” Rufus said and folded his arms.
“Then I think we’re done here.”
The five execs got up and coldly shook hands with Rufus. People for the next meeting filed into the conference room and began sitting down.
“You guys!” said Alisa. She always spoke like a cheerleader. “Grant here is a fucking superstar!”
At that moment, I felt like less of a superstar than at any point in my life. I jerked into my overcoat without looking up. White Teeth gave Alisa the hand.
“Alisa, that’s our time here.”
“’Kay, but you guys, he is totally funny and he dressed up as a girl for his column and it was like, rilly, rilly hilarious.”
“Alisa, I need for you to hear me right now.”
“Yeah, but…”
“You have to leave.”
We were shooed out and down to the street, where we took a silent subway ride back downtown. In the ten months since, the TV show had been scarcely mentioned again.
MR. STODDARD, SIR! Take a seat!”
Rufus had taken his usual spot in the busy Charbucks. For all the firings and “serious chats” he had hosted there, Rufus never actually made a purchase, preferring instead to pop next door to the more chichi Balthazar for coffee.
“Well, the fall season is nearly upon us, the smell of pencil shavings hangs thick in the air.”
Rufus took great pains to appear his chipper self, though it was easy to tell from the look in his eye that he felt spurned.
“What’s on your mind?” I finally said after he let loose with yet another amusing anecdote from his heady days at Brown. The nausea was back with a vengeance.
“Well, Grant. It’s come to my attention that you are in talks to make a TV show with Ross Martin.”
It was true. Sometime after the VH1 debacle, Ross had pitched the idea of a travelogue-style show that I would host—coincidentally—to VH1. The network had bitten and wanted to set up a meeting with me immediately. Ross—who flew in from California—his production partner, Corin, and two VH1 execs met at a hotel bar, got drunk, and talked about what the show would be.
The show was built around the following premise: Charming if slightly clueless British guy goes from coast to coast taking part in Americana that the rest of the world might find strange. A drunken, cursory brainstorming of possible segments included participating at the Lumberjack Games, becoming a rodeo clown, attending the Montana Testicle Festival, alligator wrestling, having dinner with members of the Flat Earth Society. It would be equal parts Jackass, Hugh Grant, and Alistair Cooke and a vastly preferable concept to dressing up in a gimp suit or inserting things into my rectum for yuks. Everyone professed to being “very excited,” though I soon learned that in TV talk, one must vocalize their extreme excitement at all times. The show would be called Granted, the tag: “‘Bloody bloke’ Grant Stoddard looks at the America we take for granted.” It seemed too good to be true, an eponymous TV vehicle in which I got to have adventures, be myself, and make a good chunk of change in the process.
Ross, Corin, and I then flew to a TV conference in New Orleans the next day, prompting VH1 to play their hand, and within a very short-seeming period of time, they had green-lit a pilot shooting over four days in LA in October.
I summarized the concept to my now red-faced boss.
“Let me get this straight,” said Rufus. “So you try new things as an outsider and reflect upon the experience?”
“Well, in the very broadest sense, yes, that’s right.”
“It sounds suspiciously like the concept of your column, which, as you’re no doubt aware, Nerve has the rights to.”
Ross had mentioned that Rufus would be seeking “value” for Nerve as soon as he got word that we were working on something. A cornerstone of his business plan was to acquire a taste for anything vaguely related to the company he’d begun in a bedroom and then skillfully steered through the dot-com bust and into profitability. A current and slighted ex-employee working on a project that could be misconstrued to be a spin-off of Nerve’s intellectual property was understandably hard for him to swallow.
“Rufus, I can assure you that it has nothing to do with the column or Nerve or anything.”
I meant it. He shook his head dismissively.
“Well, to be honest, Grant, I’m disappointed,” he said with a melancholy smile.
We shook hands; I returned upstairs to my desk and accidentally locked eyes with Alisa. Her eyes were red from crying. She narrowed them and shook her head at me.
I ran to the bathroom and threw up again.
That evening Nerve editor in chief Michael Martin summoned me to have dinner with him at a bar on East 5th Street. He had two large Jack and Cokes and told me that my presence was no longer required in the office but that he persuaded Rufus to allow me to continue contributing my column, which had become a fan favorite under Michael’s watch.
“Rufus is hardly gnashing his teeth with glee at the arrangement, but I convinced him that it made sense,” he said. “You need to come by and clear your desk tomorrow.”
Though I’d always envied people who wrote from home on their own schedule, I was sorry that my transition to a freelancer was less than smooth or deliberate.
I came by the office around lunchtime, when I was fairly certain that Rufus and Alisa would be finding value for Nerve over some oysters at Balthazar. This was the first time in my life I’d been told to clear my desk. I found two cardboard boxes and filled them with most of the following items:
Brian helped me down to the street and put me and my sleazy paraphernalia in a cab.
“Hey, I’m going to Laure and Louise’s apartment tonight,” he said over the din of a passing fire truck’s siren. “You should come, it’ll cheer you up.” It sounded like Brian needed me to play wingman again and I wasn’t in the mood.
“No, it’s okay,” I said, “I still haven’t recovered from the other night.”
The next day, Brian called to tell me that I had remotely cock-blocked him. Apparently, he had arrived at their loft to find both girls dressed to the nines and a miffed Louise asking why he had turned up and I hadn’t. The three of them drank wine on the fire escape until Laure took Brian by the hand and led him into her bedroom. Things were beginning to escalate when Louise, in hysterical tears, began thumping on the door, exclaiming, “Laure, tu est une put!” before collapsing into a sobbing heap on the floor, putting an understandable dampener on the evening. Brian was shown the door. Being more confident and easygoing, Laure’s attentions had been courted more ferociously over the summer and Louise was seemingly at a breaking point. A similar dynamic existed between Brian and myself.
“So next time, if she hasn’t already written you off as a complete faggot, you have to come with me, okay?”
And so began a short series of double dates during which I did little to prove that I wasn’t a pede.
Even though she was merely a teen, Louise intimidated me greatly, what with her Galois and ennui. To her annoyance I had not yet tried to kiss her, though I very much wanted to.
“Why do you not smoke, little Grant?” she said over sake at Decibel. “Are you afraid, afraid you will get sick, that you will catch the…cancer?”
“Well, that’s one reason, yeah,” I said.
“Well, I ’ave news for you, little Grant.” She blew a huge plume of smoke into my face. “We are all going to die.”
For all of her world-weary Parisian posturing, Louise would privately tell me that she loved my English accent when I spoke my smattering of remedial French. She said it drove her “mad completely.”
Louise complained to Laure, who complained to Brian, who complained to me that no one was getting what they wanted and it was all my fault.
“Just fucking lay one on her, you pussy,” said Brian.
Louise was so French and young and stylish and cute that I had a hard time believing that she’d be into playing tonsil hockey with the likes of me. Brian was putting a lot more effort into trying to pair us up than I was.
“He has got a TV show, y’know,” he said to Louise as we picnicked on top of their roof. She looked at me in disbelief, shrugged, and looked back up at the stars and enjoyed a huge drag off her cigarette. The three of them had all but lost their patience with me.
The levee finally broke when we asked the girls to a Cake party that we’d been invited to through Nerve. Cake parties were occasions where a predominately hot and female crowd all got into their skivvies or less and fooled around on the bar. Brian and I had been friends with its founders since we lap-danced for three hundred handsy women at a Cake party for an “I Did It for Science” installment.
Among the gyrating naked bodies, the hard-core porn playing on a big-screen TV, and with me dressed only in my underoos, I finally plucked up the courage to make out with Louise and wrapped her tight young body up in my arms. I didn’t even mind the cigarette taste on her tongue, something I’m usually extremely squeamish of. In fact, I quite enjoyed it.
“Thank fucking Christ!” I could hear Brian scream over the music.
After one more drink, we found our clothes and made our way outside. Brian optimistically hailed two cabs and gave me a wink.
“I think I am going to hang out with Grant,” said Louise.
“Ah! Qui est la put, Louise?” said Laure. She cocked an eyebrow and folded her arms in callous satisfaction.
Without a word, Louise kissed me on the cheek and dutifully got into the cab with Laure, who was still smug with her perfectly timed retort, and drove away.
“What the fuck happened there?” asked Brian.
It soon became clear that the girls were waging a war of attrition against each other and that thanks in part to my prolonged hesitation, we were in the cross fire. We went on two more double dates before Brian lost interest and stopped calling Laure. When she wasn’t not putting out, Laure had gotten existential with Brian about their stilted dating.
“Really, Brian, you live ’ere in New York, my ’ome is in Paris. We are some friendly…’ow you say…strangers? You want to make love wiv me but really”—Laure took a long drag on her cigarette and exhaled—“what eez the point?”
This coincided with Brian lining up a sure thing elsewhere who wasn’t such a total pain in the ass. Conversely, I redoubled my efforts to fool around with Louise. I felt that after the drinks, the dinners, the repeatedly being called a faggot, I needed to close the deal: I wanted to get some value.
The girls were leaving for Paris in a week. Over our next three dates, I took Louise to bars in concentric circles around my apartment, but before the end of the night Laure would suddenly materialize, despite neither of the girls having a cell phone and me keeping our various destinations shrouded in secrecy. On their penultimate night in town, Laure actually arrived as Louise stood on my stoop deliberating on whether to risk spending the night.
“Tomorrow is our last night, little Grant,” she said as Laure herded her into a waiting cab. “Maybe I will stay at your ’ome.”
The Bordeaux company was throwing the summer interns a good-bye party in the basement of Puck Fair, an Irish pub on Lafayette and Houston. For someone who was now effectively jobless, I had already spent hundreds of dollars on entertaining Louise and her contrary chaperone, so I arrived three hours after the party started, at around eleven thirty.
“Little Grant!” yelled Louise from across the room. Even though her teeth were stained gray from the wine, she looked cuter than ever. “I am so glad that you came ’ere!”
Previously, we had only kissed at the end of our dates, but Louise grabbed my face with both hands and darted her boozy, ashy tongue into my mouth. Laure was furiously making out with an orange-haired though not terribly unattractive Dubliner in the corner, which bode well for me finally wrapping up this stop-start summer fling.
“What do you want to drink?” I asked as she eagerly stroked my leg.
“I will ’ave a apple martini,” said Laure, who had briefly pulled her tongue out of ginger nut’s mouth.
“Ahh, me also!” said the intended recipient of the offer.
The design of the martini glass is the stuff of nightmares for me. Delivering two filled-to-the-brim martini glasses across a rowdy Irish bar filled me with trepidation. One needs the steady hand of a gunslinger to get them safely to the table without incident. An attribute I apparently do not possess.
“’N’ just what da feck d’ya tink ure doon, noi?” said a fat woman with an underbite and an almost indecipherable Belfast accent. While hoisting the drinks over the Ulster bruiser’s frame, I’d received a knock and spilt a little from each glass onto her ill-fitting tank top and my ice-blue dress shirt.
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
“Well, sorry in’t gonna dry off me feckin’ tits noi, is it, ya wee bender.”
Louise was waving me over from across the bar. It had taken ten minutes to get the drinks, and it looked like I was about to be beaten by this flabby and angry creature.
“Well, okay, the next one’s on me,” I said and told the barkeep to put the next one on my tab.
“Dat’s a bit more feckin’ like it, short-arse.”
A round of shots arrived at the table followed by another and another. Though she’d had a three-hour head start on me, I seemed to be a lot worse for wear than Louise, who was slurring in neither French nor English.
After several drinks and hours watching Laure molest the poor plumber’s apprentice, Louise looked at me and squeezed my hand.
“Grant, tonight I fink it is time that I will sleep at your ’ouse.”
It was three a.m.
I quickly collected my credit card to find that the chubby bruiser and her mates had two rounds at my expense, bringing my tab to over $140.
“Oi! I said one drink!” I yelled at the barkeep.
“Sarry, pal, but dats not what you tol’ me, so pay up and piss ahf.”
Louise was excitedly tugging at my hand, so I reluctantly signed the receipt, gave him a lousy tip, and wrote Wanker! at the bottom.
Hand in hand, we walked back to my place on 14th and C. I was out of cash until I got my final Nerve paycheck on the first of the month and couldn’t afford a taxi.
“My feet ’urt,” complained Louise, who was now wildly wobbling in her heels.
“Nearly there,” I lied. We were still a mile away. It was one of those nights when the temperature had seemed to actually increase with the setting sun. The metal shutters, the pavement, the sidewalk were all radiating the day’s heat back at us. The smell of hot garbage seemed to stick to one’s hair, clothes, and skin. I was conscious of the patches under my arms. Louise just looked dewy and fresh.
As we walked up the stairs in the flickering fluorescent light of my building, I realized just how drunk I’d become. Since meeting Louise to now, I’d drunk more than I had in the previous six months, and I suddenly seemed to be feeling the cumulative effect of all that booze. As I struggled to put the key in my front door, I realized that I was definitely too drunk to perform.
We entered my place and were hit in the face by the smell of cooking bacon. The apartment is above Jack’s Deli, which exists to cater to the hard-hatted workers from the power plant. They begin frying up at around a quarter to four. I usually relish the strong aroma, but it generally isn’t conducive to seduction. I turned on both of the huge air conditioners I’d been gifted.
“It’ll be cool in here in a minute,” I promised. As Louise looked through my book collection and the posters that hung on my walls, I caught sight of the boxes of Nerve flotsam that I’d taken from my desk. Since meeting Louise, I had played down the fact that I was a sex columnist, an illusion that would be instantly shattered if she caught sight of two giant boxes full of dildos and condoms with the word “herpes” written on them.
“May I ’ave a drink of water?” she said as I casually kicked them under the bed.
“Yeah, in the fridge,” I called from my bedroom.
“Ah, Grant, you ’ave a bottle of pinot grigio ’ere. May we open it?”
“Mais oui, we may!” I said. No reaction. As a reflection of how drunk I’d become I considered that fucking brilliant.
Though I did have a chilled bottle of white wine in my fridge, I didn’t have one of those easy openers with the arms that you push down.
“’Ere eez a corkscrew,” said Louise, finding a rusty and ancient-looking little pig’s tail in the silverware drawer and handing me the bottle.
“I must go to the bafroom to…freshen up.”
My toilet is in a separate little room that is located out of my apartment and down the hall. Though it is for my use only, it is technically an outhouse. I have to explain this to guests and hand them a key to the padlock that keeps my WC shut. As it only houses a crapper, there is no pretense of one going in there to freshen up. If anything, the opposite is true. I found it sort of funny that Louise would use the very American euphemism of “freshening up” with me. As fellow Europeans, Louise and I ought to have been above that puritan nonsense. Also, because there is no sink in there, I am well aware if a person does not wash his or her hands after visiting the toilet room. My bathtub and bathroom sink are located in my kitchen.
“Okay,” I said. I explained the drill and gave her the key.
I started to fathom how an old-school corkscrew worked when I remembered that one of my boxes contained one 100-milligram dose of Viagra.
Two columns ago, I had reported the experiences of having sex under the influence of five different drugs: cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms, weed, and Viagra. I still had some coke and Viagra left over!
I ran into the bedroom and started rifling to find the smallest item in the box, eventually found it, and put the whole 100-milligram pill in my mouth. In my experiment I had only taken a 25-milligram dose, which resulted in a prizewinning erection that I terrorized my then-girlfriend with, an afternoon she rues to this day. I was totally sober then and figured that I probably needed an increased dose to combat the effects of the alcohol now. I also found the coke in a bullet-sized dispenser. I ran back to the kitchen and swallowed the large pill with some water, took two large bumps, and got to work on opening the wine and promptly broke the cork in half just as Louise walked through the door.
“What ’ave you done?”
Not being able to open a bottle of wine is embarrassing under any circumstances, but in front of a French girl it was completely emasculating. I jabbed at the remaining half of the cork with a stainless steel chopstick but it didn’t budge.
“Ah, poor little Grant, ’oo cannot even open a bottle of wine.”
Louise sat down on the corner of my bed, choosing not to wash her hands.
“How about a line?” I said, poking my head around the door after finally giving up with the wine.
“What?”
“Would you like a little coke?”
I rarely indulged, but offering it made me feel and sound like Scarface. I didn’t even really want any more but I somehow had to run down the clock while I waited for the sildenafil citrate to inhibit cGMP specific phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5), which is responsible for degradation of cGMP in the corpus cavernosum. The molecular structure of sildenafil is similar to that of cGMP and acts as a competitive binding agent of cGMP in the corpus cavernosum. Now given that I’d taken four times the amount that had given me a thumper for the better part of a weekend, I was fairly confident that I could overcome my case of brewer’s droop. All I needed was just a little more time.
I figured I’d put the blow on a CD case and make a really big deal about meticulously chopping it up, which I could drag out for five or ten minutes.
“Pffff! I absolutely fink no.”
She looked horrified. Louise’s body language shifted from languid and suggestive to closed and distant. I was trying to push narcotics on a teen and it had inexplicably backfired.
“No, me neither,” I said. “My friend had some and I’m…holding it for him. I just didn’t know if you…”
“Grant, please, I would like it for us to go to bed.”
Though I already had the thumping headache, I felt sure I needed to give the Viagra more time to work its magic.
“Let’s watch some television!” I said and pulled her through my railroad apartment to the living room. It was four a.m., and there only seemed to be infomercials on.
“’Oo eez dis man wiv ’is chickens?” she said after watching a studio audience get jazzed by a rotisserie oven.
“That’s Ron Popeil,” I said. “He is a famous American inventor.”
She looked at me, apparently unsatisfied with my reasons for making her watch late-night infomercials after a three-and-a-half-week campaign to get her back to my place.
“Set it and forget it!” I said at an inappropriate volume that made Louise recoil.
“Well, zis eez very strange to me, and I am very ty-aired. I must get up and pack tomorrow and…your face! It eez very red. Are you okay?”
The headache, the red face. I had documented the chain of events in my experiment. I knew that I only needed to kill around ten more minutes before I’d have a chemically enhanced erection that would be the talk of the Champs-Elysées.
I got the drip, and couldn’t help fidgeting with my nostrils.
“The roof!” I said. “I need some fresh air. It’s beautiful up there.”
I grabbed Louise and pulled her up four flights of rickety stairs to the roof. The Chinese families who lived on the top floor of the building often slept on the roof in the summer months, in lieu of having a way to keep cool at night, though thankfully there was no one up there. The heat had melted the tar on the roof, making the surface like a giant piece of flypaper. Great gobs of it were stuck to Louise’s shoes as I led her across the roof to admire the view.
“That’s Stuyvesant Town,” I said, suddenly realizing how underwhelming the view must have been to her. “If you strain your neck and look between the two buildings in front of us, you can see the glow of the Empire State Building…but they turn off the lights at midnight.”
“I see.”
“And that’s the famous East River; the historical borough of Queens is on the other side. That’s where the airport is. Next to us is the ConEd power plant, can you hear it buzzing? And those buildings are Alphabet City projects. A hundred years ago this neighborhood was called Kleine Deutschland and was full of Germans. Allgemeine! I expect you could have seen the World Trade Center from here, but I didn’t live here then so don’t quote me on that. Below us is Fourteenth Street, which is mostly just dollar stores and fried chicken joints. So…”
Silence.
“And maybe a Rite Aid.”
“It would ’ave been nice to ’ave that wine up ’ere.”
Silence.
Louise suddenly looked sort of bluish, which indicated that the Viagra was working. I excitedly made out with my Gallic smurf and painfully knocked teeth with her twice. With my hands exploring her tight rear, I sprang an instantaneous erection and pushed it into her taut midsection.
“Let’s go to bed,” I said triumphantly and led her down the stairs, leaving two sets of tarry footprints that led into my now chilly apartment.
In what is a break from tradition, I undressed the girl first before shedding my own clothes. Her breasts were small and perfect, her skin white and even, the musculature of her abdomen discernable by accident rather than design, her bulbous little bottom caressed in surprisingly sensible white cotton underwear. We kissed and she tinkered with my fly for what seemed like ages before I yanked my pants off myself. My erection threatened to poke a hole through my underpants as I lowered her onto my bed and slid my hand into hers. She stopped me.
“Grant,” she said hesitantly, “tonight, I fink I just want you to ’ug me.”
“Huh,” I said and cupped her left breast.
“I just want you to, to ’old me, before I leave for Paris.”
“Yeah,” I said and spooned her, sliding my inhumanly turgid penis between the gap in her thighs. She jerked away from it, as if it had burned her. She made me set my alarm for 8:00. Her flight was at 12:45, but she needed to get down to Canal Street and pack.
“Here, lie on my chest,” I said.
We shifted positions.
Everything was blue now, and with my hand I could feel the raised veins on my forehead popping out. My penis tented the comforter. I stroked Louise’s hair and lovingly kissed her dainty little fingers before curling them around my penis. She’d have to be impressed, I thought.
“Grant, no, I must sleep.”
It was getting light outside.
“Sleep on the plane, baby.”
Louise turned her back to me.
“Good night, Grant,” she said. “Cute English boy.”
The strange mix of chemicals racing around my body made sleep impossible. I spent the next three hours looking at the back of Louise’s head and the erection that would not back down. I reset the alarm for 7:30 in the hopes that Louise would want to fool around upon waking. I listened to the thunder in the distance come closer, until it seemed that the clouds had settled on my roof. It was the loudest thunder I’d ever heard but Louise didn’t stir. I must have finally gotten to sleep minutes before she woke up.
“Shit!” she said, maniacally buzzing around my room foraging for clothing. The clock said 9:41.
“Laure is going to kill me! What ’appened to the alarm?”
“I don’t know,” I croaked.
My head was spinning and my erection showed no signs of remittance.
I put on some pajama pants and walked her downstairs.
“Taxi!” She was already out in the road, arm extended.
The rain was still torrential and it was chilly outside. A cab pulled up and she held the door open as she kissed me on the cheek. I gave her a business card with my now-defunct e-mail address and phone number.
“I will write to you!” she promised and playfully batted my hitherto ignored member with her hand.
“I will write to you too!”
She sped off without waving.
I walked back upstairs, toweled off, and awoke at about the same time as her plane was due to leave. A monster hangover, the unsatisfying conclusion to a summer fling, no longer receiving a regular paycheck, and the Viagra Web site’s insistence that I seek urgent medical attention all ganged up on me at once and I suddenly felt lousier than I had in my whole life. The rain pelted against my cracked windowpanes and rattled on the tops of the air conditioners as I considered making the walk to the ER at Beth Israel, under an umbrella and half a pace behind an angry erection.
Summer had ended.