THE RANCH

THE CIRCLED W RANCH occupies over four thousand acres of land just outside the town of North Fork, which is located in the exact center of California. Jordana’s grandfather had bought the land in the late 1950s from a Native American tribe. The land straddles a hill range and seeps down into the valleys on either side. Over the past half century the head of cattle had been greatly reduced and the land had been parceled and sold to family and friends. When they married, in 2000, Ross and Jordana had been given a beautiful home on one of the ranch’s highest elevations. It overlooks a deep valley, and above the opposing slope one can easily see El Capitain and the white-capped mountaintops of Yosemite National Park in the distance.

I’d visited the ranch during a break in the preproduction of the show. Ross, Jordana, Dash, and I had arrived there in darkness, leaving me unaware of the stunning beauty of the place until I was awakened to see the sun creeping over the mountains and illuminating the interior of the valley below us. I sort of fell in love with it immediately.

“Stay at the ranch,” Ross had generously suggested after the show wrapped.

He didn’t want me to leave California before we knew the fate of the Granted project.

“You can write without distractions, without having to pay silly New York rent, you can borrow one of the pickups to drive, you’ll get inspired and still be able to drive down to LA to take meetings when you need to.”

As much as I missed New York, it did seem like an amazing opportunity. I couldn’t remember spending more than a few hours in my own company. Perhaps it was not having enough alone time that prevented me from being a prolific writer, I thought.

I bought a laptop and Ross and Jord took me up there to show me where everything was, how everything worked. The pickup was available for me to use, but I was only allowed to take it as far as Oakhurst, meaning I’d have to keep my rental for trips to and from LA at a cost of a thousand dollars a month. Other unexpected costs included having a high-speed Internet connection installed. Due to its relatively remote location, one company had the monopoly on almost every utility service available and charged high premiums. A local phone call was charged at over seventy cents per minute. I swear that when I called about the propane tank, the plumbing, the DSL connection, and the telephone bill I was chatting with the same person.

Being in such a remote place meant that writing about strange sexual experiences—my bread-and-butter gig—was going to be somewhat of a challenge. Since moving to California I’d successfully had a threesome and somehow convinced three strangers to let me take pictures of them naked. In LA those kinds of things were comparatively easy to pull off, but forty-five minutes from Fresno, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, my options were limited. Nerve was paying me fifteen hundred dollars a column, my only steady income, and it was proving barely enough to live on, despite paying no rent.

I decided that because I had at least three months ahead of me, there was no need to rush headlong into writing. To that end, I demarcated my day along themes of rest and relaxation: awaking at my leisure, coffee on the porch, picking rosemary from the garden to make elaborate omelets, followed by an hour-long run around the grazing area of some truly bewildered cattle. After lunch, some light reading before going out to collect kindling for the fireplace. After catching up with e-mails and events from the outside world, I’d make a nice fire, make dinner, and get through a bottle of Charles Taylor cabernet sauvignon. “Two Buck Chuck” was selling at Trader Joe’s at $1.99 a bottle, and I’d bought two cases on my way through Fresno.

After a few days without seeing another soul I began to wonder how quickly I would get used to my own company. I encouraged friends in New York to call me as often as they could, though day to day I really had very little to report. Every day was clear, crisp, and sunny, up to eighty degrees in the day, down to forty at night. Each night coyotes serenaded me as squadrons of bats flew in to pick off the moths fluttering around the porch light.

Several parcels of land on the ranch had been sold to close family friends, who’d built vacation homes there. The Kesselmans were at their home quite a lot of the time, and after a week of my leisurely routine they extended an invitation for dinner to me, being new and all. The Kesselmans were my de facto next-door neighbors on the ranch, though they lived almost a mile away. Sandy and Hank were in their fifties, tall, good-looking, and incredibly charismatic. Hank had a wide range of interests, from mastering classical guitar to delivering spot-on impersonations of Ali G. I found this so incredibly surreal, because before Ali G that affect wasn’t heard outside of Pakistani and Indian areas of west London, where I went to school. Sandy was a trained clinical psychologist and an ordained Zen priest in the Suzuki-roshi lineage. When performing her priestly duties her name was not Sandy, but Grace.

“We have our meetings every Sunday morning at eight forty-five,” said Hank. “If you’d like to join us you’re very welcome.”

Having dinner with other people reminded me just how starved I was for human interaction, so I jumped at the chance to spend Sunday with a group of people. After coffee, Hank showed me the zendo, which was the converted second story of a barn, and ran me through what a meeting is like. Hank then loaded me up with an armful of Kurosawa DVDs and gave me a light scolding for walking over and not using my car.

“We lost a horse to mountain lions one night last year,” he said gravely. “They’d make short work of you. I’m giving you a lift back.”

I was enthralled at the idea of danger lurking all around me. Until then it hadn’t occurred to me just how particularly mild a place England is: seldom too hot or too cold, free of poisonous reptiles and long since cleared of large carnivorous mammals, rarely subject to earthquakes, volcanoes, tornados, or tsunamis. It made me think about how a region’s environment informs its inhabitants’ dispositions and how my life would improve as a result of my becoming more rugged, independent, even manly. As a young child, I would listen to my grandparents’ old 78 of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” repeatedly. I somehow felt that in moving to the ranch I was taking a small step to becoming a bit of a frontiersman myself. This made things particularly awkward as I realized I had no clue how to build an effective fire, use the stars to navigate, or stay sane without being surrounded by several million other human beings.

As well as the cougars, the ranch was full of coyotes, large deer, and the odd bear or wolf. Some years ago, someone had given the ranch a few wild boars that had multiplied exponentially and roamed around in gangs terrorizing all in their path. Aside from the Kesselmans, the only other semipermanent residents on the Circled W were the outgoing and incumbent ranch managers, Tom and Jesse respectively. I would see them from afar on my mid-morning jogs, AC/DC accompanying me on my iPod. I often wondered what these guys thought of the city-slicking Semites and their friends who came in from Los Angeles and San Francisco to play at being cowboy at the weekend.

 

I’D ONLY STAYED in touch with a small handful of people from Corringham, and Charlotte was one of them. I had invited her out to visit me at the ranch and, to my amazement, she jumped on a plane about a week later. I excitedly drove down to LAX to pick her up and met up with Ross, Jordana, rising comedian Freddy Soto, and his wife, Cory, for dinner in Beverly Hills. From there, I took Charlotte to an incredibly sketchy part of downtown LA in the name of science. Most of my experiments had been pretty tight in terms of a clear objective. Attending a porn star’s Christmas party was a bit of a stretch as decent fodder for an “I Did It for Science” installment, but it appeared that after almost three years, I’d just about exhausted every conceivable sexual kink and proclivity known to man. Living in the middle of nowhere had only served to exacerbate the problem. Being my friend, Michael Martin knew too much about my financial situation to say no and green-lit an article about being a guest at Kylie Ireland’s annual Yuletide soiree. Before she left for LA, I asked Charlotte if she’d mind popping into a sex party with me. Though she was stunningly beautiful, bubbly, and charming, I always found Charlotte to be prudish and resolutely asexual, at least with regard to me. I’d had a silent crush on her since we were sixteen, both sales assistants in a men’s clothing store in the local shopping mall, though much to my chagrin, we quickly became more like brother and sister.

“I really like her shoes,” said Charlotte.

Her eyes had been nervously flitting around the large loft space in the ten minutes since we’d arrived and had finally seen something that she could bring herself to say out loud.

“Yeah, they’re really nice,” I replied. “Prada?”

“Hmmmm, I’m not quite sure,” said Charlotte, squinting her eyes and leaning ever so slightly forward.

We talked about the shoes as if they weren’t the items being worn by the women preparing to be fisted on the bench next to us. Despite being around five feet nine, the woman in the nice shoes had corset-trained her waist to a circumference of under nineteen inches, giving her the appearance of some sort of human-wasp hybrid.

“I think your hands are too big,” she said to the frustrated gentleman between her legs.

She propped herself up on her elbows so that she could get a better view of the action and direct accordingly.

“Put your thumb flat to your palm,” she said as the man’s forehead vein bulged with concentration.

“Maybe I’ll get a pair like that while I’m out here,” said Charlotte.

“Yeah,” I said. “Although you certainly won’t be needing them at the ranch.”

Given the size of the man’s mitts it seemed that the wasp-waisted woman should be in physical pain, yet it was her beau whose face registered some discomfort. Ultimately, his human glove called for assistance.

“Kylie!”

The party’s hostess, resplendent in a long, burgundy velvet skirt, black leather boots, a shiny plastic corset that stopped just below her boobs, which were held captive in a tight, long-sleeved fishnet shirt, strode over, and after seeing the problem firsthand, commandeered the situation and showed the ham-fisted boyfriend a better technique. The victim hollered, the cuckolded boyfriend looked on intently with arms folded, as Kylie went deep, well beyond the tan line from her wristwatch.

“You know, we can leave whenever you want,” I said.

“No, really, I’m fine,” said Charlotte, who’d been yawning all through dinner. “I think I got a second wind.”

It was 10:30 p.m. in LA, 6:30 a.m. her time—GMT. We could have both used a line, but the party was billed as strictly drug-and alcohol-free. About ten feet in front of us, a blindfolded woman—naked save for a dog collar—was strung to a piece of scaffolding while a man with a braided ponytail and bowler hat methodically slapped her ass with his hand. He was putting a lot of thought into every slap, hopping around her body, turning his head this way and that, holding his chin thinking through his next move.

“I hope you’re not too freaked out by all this?” I said, finally acknowledging the fact that we were in the midst of a bacchanal. A small handful of friends from home knew what I did for a living, one or two of them had even read about my exploits, but this was the first time one of them had been witness to the sort of bedlam I was paid to be involved in. Before that very evening, Grant Stoddard the sex writer would have been purely theoretical, perhaps farcical in Charlotte’s mind. Since we’d arrived at the party, it had become simultaneously apparent to the both of us that I’d somehow become a bit of an old hand at this sort of thing: I’d absentmindedly stepped over a couple in coitus to get to the buffet; I nonchalantly sidestepped the reach of a cat-o’-nine-tails en route to the bathroom, and brushed past a man brandishing a monkey wrench and large container of lube without a pang of curiosity for how those items were related. Charlotte wasn’t shocked at the situation so much as she was astounded to witness how comfortably I existed within it.

“I’m okay,” she said, “I just…can’t believe that this is what you…do.”

In truth, this was not typically what I did. I was typically obligated to be the one being flogged on the rack, on the end of a leash, the one elbow-deep in a stranger’s vagina. Charlotte knew that.

“If you need to…y’know…” Charlotte gestured toward the growing conga line of furiously masturbating men and strap-on-wielding women taking turns penetrating a prostrate and buxom partygoer. “I can wait in the car, if you’d prefer.”

It was abundantly clear that it was Charlotte who would prefer to not see her childhood friend in any of the hard-core sexual acts erupting all around her, though it was awfully thoughtful of her to make it seem as if it would be my decision. That’s English for you, polite to a fault. Mustn’t grumble. I’d almost lost that sensibility entirely. I’d become very American in the way that I voiced my needs and sought to fulfill them posthaste.

Michael would be expecting me to participate, but even with Charlotte in the general vicinity, it was never going to happen. Though Charlotte never made me feel horrid about myself, I slipped into my old persona as soon as I saw her at the airport. I could fool strangers into thinking I wasn’t formerly a social leper, but in the presence of any of my old pals I was suddenly Grunt Stoddard again: virginal, desperate, bucktoothed, acne-ridden, problem-haired, and prone to wearing his heart on his sleeve, invariably with tragicomic effect.

We stayed for a little longer until Charlotte’s second wind died down to a gentle breeze and her eyes glazed over. She’s so English. Even though she had almost fallen asleep twice while standing up, she insisted that we stay until I did what I had to do for the article.

“Honestly, honey,” she said with eyelids drooping. “I was just resting my eyes for a bit.”

I abused her good nature for just a minute or two longer, then thanked Kylie Ireland for having us over.

“Not at all, thanks for coming!” she said as a man with a goatee fucked her hard from behind.

“Take care!” he added.

With my homegirl now positively zombiefied, I practically carried her into the car and sped off toward the Valley.

We spent the night at Ross and Jord’s before heading up to the ranch.

“Like I said, there’s really not much to do up there,” I said as we drove I-5 to a mountainous stretch of road known as the grapevine. “We’re just going to chill.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “Work’s been so crazy, I could really use a bit of that.”

Charlotte was part of the small minority of people from our town who went on to university. She moved to North London shortly afterward and worked for a hip PR company off of Tottenham Court Road. She consequently lost the last remaining vestiges of her Essex accent, though it wasn’t very strong to start off with. Her parents were from Zimbabwe and she had been taught to speak quite properly. When we were sixteen, I knew that if any of my peers had the will and the wherewithal to leave Corringham it would be her.

“Can you believe we’re here?” I said as the fire finally started kicking out some heat and I poured us each a glass of supermarket cabernet sauvignon. We relaxed after the four-hour drive.

“It’s really lovely, Grant,” she said. “You’re so bloody lucky.”

“Wait until the morning,” I said; we’d arrived in darkness. “It’s beautiful outside. You’re going to freak out. There’s an open outdoor shower that overlooks the valley. It’s an amazing way to start the day.”

As the fire died down to embers, I gave Charlotte the option of sleeping in my bed or in the room on the other side of the house. Even though she’d spent the previous decade tactfully assuring me that we would never sleep together, I sort of hoped that the wine, the romantic, rustic setting, the jet-lag, my California tan, and the unabashed carnality of the previous evening would conspire to cloud her judgment, weaken her resolve. But, as I suspected, she chose to sleep in the bedroom way over on the other side of the house.

I woke up at 3:31 a.m. to Charlotte shouting. Through two closed doors and the large expanse of the living room I couldn’t make out any specific words, though she clearly sounded angry, upset. I half listened as the shouting stopped and started over for several minutes. Then silence. I’d promised myself that I’d get up and wake her if it started again. I was pretty sure that it was during sleepwalking, not sleeptalking, that you shouldn’t wake someone, but I wasn’t one hundred percent positive. I was a sleepwalker as a ten-year-old and once urinated in the kitchen garbage during a dinner party my parents were throwing. My parents made sure not to wake me then as their friends all watched me in stunned silence.

There was no more sleeptalking from Charlotte, however, and I fell back to sleep. It was just before five when I awoke again to a soft knock on my bedroom door.

“Grant,” she whispered. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” I said, praying that she’d finally caved. “What’s up?”

“Can I sleep in here with you?” Her brow was furrowed. “It’s gotten a bit chilly in there.”

“Sure,” I said. She slid into the king-sized bed in her pajamas and stayed to one side.

I woke her the next morning for coffee on the porch, just as sunlight began to pour into the valley. The sky was blue, the air crisp, the snow-peaked mountains looked close enough to touch. I folded my arms and gauged Charlotte’s reaction. I felt proud to show my paisan where I’d landed in the world. I couldn’t have been more proud if I had created the vista myself and dug out the valley with my own bare hands.

“It’s really gorgeous,” she said, taking it all in. She seemed somehow troubled.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I just didn’t sleep all that well last night.”

I hoped she wasn’t referring to how I’d overzealously tried to spoon her.

“Yeah, I heard you talking in your sleep. Do you always do that?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

We spent the rest of her four-day stay at the ranch futzing around the ranch and the house, going for drives, making dinner, getting drunk by the fire, popping into Fresno to watch a movie. It was somewhat uneventful but fun.

“I have to tell you something,” said Charlotte as we passed by the relative civilization of Bakersfield on the way back to LA. “The first night…I wasn’t sleeptalking.”

“Well, who were you talking to?” I asked.

“I was shaken awake. I mean shaken really hard. I thought it was you, winding me up.”

“I would never do that,” I said.

I would totally do that sort of thing as a prank, though probably not to Charlotte.

“Well, what you heard was me telling you to fuck off and to stop messing about. But it wasn’t you, was it?”

“No.”

“Then the room got really cold, and I saw something go around the edge of the bed really fast.”

“Are you winding me up?” I said.

“I’m not.” She looked like she was on the verge of crying. “It felt like I wasn’t alone in the room. I kept hearing little noises. That’s why it took so long to get up the courage to run across to your room.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts, silly,” I said, but her conviction was beginning to unnerve me.

“Neither do I. I didn’t want to tell you, seeing as you are going to be spending a few months there, but I had to say something, I felt like I was going mad. But…I felt it, the whole time that we were there. Didn’t you notice? I hardly left your sight.”

It hadn’t occurred to me until she said it, but Charlotte had been physically close to me the entire length of her visit. When she took a shower she asked me to talk to her through the bathroom door. But from a sunny California highway, her experience was easy to dismiss as a figment of her imagination, and after a few more miles I’d practically forgotten about it.

After another day or two in LA, I dropped Charlotte back at LAX. It was a few days before Christmas and I’d decided that although I dismissed the holidays as humbug, I certainly didn’t want to spend them alone. Ross and Jordana were out and about doing family things, however, and I found myself kicking around the house without them. My Christmas in LA was infinitely depressing: plastic snowmen and reindeer next to palms, sixty-two degrees, drizzly and overcast. Christmas is sort of a bigger deal in England and especially within my family. They were all stunned when I didn’t come home for the first time but had begrudgingly gotten used to it over the years. The phone was passed around to almost all of their fourteen guests, who all asked if I was having a lovely “Crimbo.”

I told them all that I was having a great time.

Ross found some time to have a semblance of a Christmas dinner with me at the International House of Pancakes on Sunset before continuing on with his errands. I’d resigned myself to the idea of spending the rest of the day moping around when I got a call from Jane Chung. I’d met Jane at a karaoke party in New York a few months earlier. We went on a date, a few drinks on the Lower East Side. We had a very nice time and kissed. Jane was eighteen and had no idea that I had spent the past three years as a sort of literary gigolo, which made our evening sort of sweet. It made me realize that I hadn’t had a date that wasn’t somehow spun off from my column in a long while. Jane was in Pasadena, back from NYU and visiting with her parents for the holidays. She needed to escape from a family that was too close to her, I needed a distraction from one that suddenly seemed too far away. I drove inland, picked her up, and we went to see a movie. It was something terrible and before too long we were down each other’s pants in the back row. After the movie Jane snuck me up to her bedroom adorned with posters, cheerleading paraphernalia, and other trappings of an archetypal Californian mall rat. Whispering, so as not to arouse the suspicions of her strict Korean parents, Jane told me that she was—somewhat regrettably—a virgin. It seemed that the karmic surplus I’d accrued over a sexless youth had come to bare in a solitary moment, though it was abundantly clear that the venue was not here, the time was not now. I contemplated taking her to Ross and Jordana’s, plotting ways in which we could keep from waking them or Dashiell up. I finally understood how difficult it must have been for my peers to have sex while still living with their parents. Ten years after the fact I had a sudden respect for the pluck, resourcefulness, and tenacity that must be a huge part of the teen sex experience.

“You should come to the ranch!” I said, not realizing the brilliance of the idea until the words actually tumbled out of my mouth.

“Really?” she said.

Really. An idyllic setting, total privacy, an element of danger, a sexually experienced older, European man; in a moment of unchecked narcissism, I actually began to covet the theoretically perfect experience I was going to give to this young colt. Not only would this be an excellent way to stave off the loneliness and put off doing any writing, but it would also be a chance to make up for the last botched opportunity I had to successfully stamp somebody’s V-card. Plus, Jane was incredibly cute, smart, and fun, and it seemed a good time was virtually assured.

Jane began working out a series of lies to tell her parents in order to spend a long weekend away from home, and I picked her up under the guise of being her best friend’s adopted brother and drove her the three and a half hours north to the ranch. A moonlit sky, an open fire, a bottle of red wine, somebody I could truly care about. Over the past three years most of my sexual dalliances had been slapdash, tawdry, loveless, careless, or bizarre. But being alone with Jane in the middle of nowhere and doing it right helped to pry off the adopted persona I’d taken on with my job.

We spent our time at the ranch canoodling, making extravagant meals, getting drunk, sleeping in, sunbathing on the ranch, sledding in Yosemite, but mostly talking about our passion for New York and our shared longing to return. In the morning we’d collect fresh eggs from across the ranch and pick rosemary from Jordana’s herb garden.

I drove Jane back to Pasadena and put some last-minute voice-over material on the show at VH1 in Santa Monica. My MTV staff pass had expired, so Ross had to come and collect me from the front entrance. I’d realized by this point that Los Angeles is a fine town to be in if you happen to be busy or feel in some way useful. Not being allowed access to the building helped to reinforce that sentiment. After we’d shot the show, everyone involved with Granted was on to the next project, and aside from the occasional V.O. I was left kicking around until the execs in New York had decided what they were going to do with the show, where I was going to live, what I was going to do, who I was going to be, and so on.

The last voice-over session was booked to redo the British-sounding exclamations that would appear with a translation at the bottom of the screen throughout the show. Everyone seemed to be convinced that these would be a charming addition.

“Blimey!” I said into the mic.

“Again,” said Ross. “More bemused than shocked.”

“Blimey!” I said again for the twentieth time. To my ear it was the same as the previous nineteen.

“That’s it!” said Ross. “Does everybody love that one?”

Everyone in the sound room nodded their agreement.

“Great! Okay, next one, Grant,” he said.

I looked down at the cue sheet.

“I’m knackered!” I said.

“Again,” said Ross. “Remember, we’re going for tired here, but ultimately satiated.”

The drive to and from the ranch was becoming ingrained in my mind. The 101 to the 10 to the 405 to the 5 to the 90. I was on autopilot when my phone rang. It was Michael Martin from Nerve. For some weeks he’d been voicing concern over the drop-off in decent subject matter for the column. Two issues had converged to potentially spell the end of the column: my having already done all there is to do sexually and choosing to live in isolation in the California wilderness. I’d been to orgies, sex parties, porn sets, BDSM retreats; I’d used cock rings, prostate massagers, and tantra; attempted “injaculation,” tried to induce female ejaculation, had sex on a pupu platter of drugs, had a happy ending massage, received relationship coaching, watched twenty-four hours of porn, trawled Craigslist for a casual hookup, taken pictures of couples having sex, worn a chastity harness, taken pictures of girls posing nude, made out with a guy, offered myself up at a gay bar, given lap dances at a male revue, been a cock model, a foot model, had a threesome, had sex with a lifelike mannequin, had sex on the subway, been treated like an infant, and sploshed. There were of course some other things to do, but by and large we were scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of fresh ideas. Michael had seen the end of the column some months prior, but being my only income, I’d clung to it for dear life.

“What have you got for me?” asked Michael.

“Well, I mean, it’s difficult up here,” I said.

Because of the money situation, I had to take my rental car back to Oakhurst, meaning that aside from trips to the grocery store in the pickup truck, I would be effectively marooned at the ranch.

“What?” he said. “You’re breaking up.” Beyond the Fresno city limits, cell reception was patchy at best.

“I said it’s hard because I’m on my own up here.”

“Okay….”

I was spending money hand over fist and couldn’t afford the column to end, but I was clearly reaching. The account of the porn star Christmas party was in Michael’s words “a bit of a snooze,” a complaint he’d been voicing more frequently over the past few months.

“How about phone sex?” I said.

“No, boring, next.”

“Um…Fresno has a Craigslist. I could try to do a—”

“If you couldn’t do it in New York you won’t do it there. You’re on a ranch, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Will you fuck an animal?”

There was little I’d said no to as my column had gotten progressively more daring, but trying to have sex with livestock was totally and utterly out of the question.

“Are you fucking nuts?”

“At least it’d be interesting,” said Michael.

“What with the foot-and-mouth….”

“Well, okay then, what’s the plan?” he said. Michael had had a huge amount of patience with me in the past but it seemed to be suddenly waning.

“Give me a few days to think about it.”

“Huh?”

“Give me a—”

I finally lost service as I branched off onto Road 200.

Without my car, cell reception, Jane, and no prospect of another visitor, the ranch seemed suddenly and overwhelmingly daunting. I arrived back there just in time to collect kindling before the sun went down. For the first few weeks of my stay there, I’d left it too late and often found myself poking around the brush with a flashlight, content that the rustles in the bushes were just deer, but since the Kesselmans’ tales of bloodthirsty mountain lions, I’d become much more cautious.

I convinced myself that now that the distractions were gone and weeks of near solitude stretched out before me, I’d really try and knuckle down and get some serious writing done, but I was unable to get myself out of bed the next morning. Over the next few days I found myself in the midst of a deepening existential crisis. I’d always assumed that I was far too shallow a person to dip a toe into any real introspection, but it was clear that I’d been saved from my own company by the white noise of my life all this time. My livelihood was hanging by a thread, there was no money coming in, Ross had begun to pessimistically manage my expectations regarding the show, and my column, which had provided such a framework for who I was, was ending, and for the first time ever I felt completely and utterly alone.

As I lay paralyzed on the carpet in front of the dying fire, I didn’t want to admit that I was suffering with some manner of mental episode, though that’s clearly what was happening: an anxiety attack. Whatever crippling self-doubt I was experiencing seemed to be amplified by the quiet and the solitude. Charlotte’s insistence that she’d experienced a malevolent spirit made me aware of a sinister presence, be it mental or supernatural. Ross had told me that someone had in fact died in the house. My increasingly fragile mental state contributed to my completely freaking out when a bat flew out of the chimney one evening and buzzed my head several times. I screamed and ran into the bedroom before plucking up the courage to throw a bath towel over the tiny mammal and release it outside. My self-image as a latter-day Davy Crockett was now just an embarrassing memory.

Jane wrote me letters and sent me DVDs to watch, which helped me immensely. I wrote her long letters and e-mails. She had become the focal point for my homesickness and it became unclear to both of us whether I was primarily missing her or missing home.

On the rare occurrences that the land line would ring, I would attempt to keep the person on the phone for as long as possible, though I had nothing to say. They were on New York time and, as supportive as they tried to be, they had shit to do.

After a few more days passed and my mania worsened, I was talking to myself, prone to hysterical crying fits followed by long periods of despondency. Ross was now talking about the future of the TV show in decidedly bleaker terms; Rob had left VH1 for a position at Fuse; Lauren was on maternity leave; Ross was in LA; there was no one left to vouch for Granted. I couldn’t conceive of what I’d be doing with my life, going forward. I’d attempted to pitch articles to other magazines but largely came up empty-handed. For the first time in years I flirted with the idea of going to Defcon 4 and calling my parents, requesting that they spirit me home. But in those years, where they lived and where I was raised had ceased to be my home. I was a New York City boy.

On Sunday, I finally took the Kesselmans up on their open invitation to join them for morning meditation in their zendo. I have an aversion to anything even vaguely spiritual or New Agey, but I was so completely starved for human interaction that I’d been looking forward to seeing them for days. I was hoping that a few girls my own age might even show up. But there, atop their barn, a rather motley, baby-boomer congregation sat in silence amid the chanting and the ringing of bells. The agenda was a half hour of meditation, fifteen minutes of walking meditation, a second half hour of mediation, then a talk about the meditation with jasmine tea, baby carrots, and those glazed, Japanese seaweed snacks. I walked back feeling slightly disappointed that the meditation gathering hadn’t yielded the sort of human interaction I was hankering for. The upside, however, was that Hank gave me a pile of Steve McQueen movies to distract me from myself.

Michael finally called to see what I’d come up with in terms of new column ideas, but I had nothing to offer.

“How about that girl, the fair maiden?” he said.

I’d told Michael all about Jane and my seemingly altruistic plan to make her first time special.

“What about her?” I asked.

“Well, did you make a woman out of her?”

“She’s not a virgin anymore, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, that’s a great column, right there.”

This would be the first time an experience from my own life had been misappropriated into column inches, after the fact. The idea of blending my personal life—not to mention the personal lives of the unsuspecting girls I was dating—into my job was simultaneously meta and incredibly distasteful. What made the column interesting—as far as I could tell—was my dependable reluctance to engage in any given activity; the sense of shame, self-doubt, and embarrassment I carried with me into the BDSM dungeon, the gay bar, the dating coach’s office, the orgy. If it wasn’t for the column I’m sure I wouldn’t have had a fraction of the sexual experiences I’d crammed into the past two and a half years.

“The poor girl! Hasn’t she been through enough?” I said.

I was already thinking through the conversation I’d have with Jane, coaxing her to agree to me spilling something almost sacrosanct into the public sphere for my financial gain. Even the hypothetical conversation made me feel quite disgusting.

“Just ask her,” said Michael. “She knows what you do for a living, right? It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that anyone you hook up with may or may not appear in your writing, right? You’re a sex writer and them’s the breaks.”

As my work and personal life had become ever more interdependent over the recent months, the girls who had come in and out of my life had made a point of saying that it was or wasn’t kosher to write about the sex we had, were immediately about to have, or—most disconcertingly—were in the process of having. Excepting my alleged hoodwinking at Leather Camp, however, I’d never written an unsuspecting civilian into an installment of the column.

“It sort of negates the whole me-making-it-all-nice bit though, doesn’t it? I mean it was atypically special, if I do say so myself.”

“Then surely she’d be thrilled if you recorded it for posterity, no?”

After years of getting me to agree to throw myself into some alarming, even dangerous situations, Michael knew precisely how to manipulate me.

“You’ll change her name, the setting, anything identifiable.”

As much as I didn’t want to sell Jane out, my financial outlook was grim. The utility bill was becoming astronomical, not to mention four straight months of car rental. Being in California had proved to be just about as pricey as my living costs in Manhattan, costlier once I factored in my deteriorating mental health and its cancerous effect on my productivity.

Jane called that evening from the relative civilization of her NYU dorm by the South Street Seaport. She told me that huge ice floes were drifting down the East River, making me homesick for the cold.

“Jane,” I began my pitch with some trepidation. “Would it be okay if I wrote about what we did up at the ranch for my column?”

Silence.

“Wait,” she said. “You did me for science?”

“No, no, no!” I said. “I did you for…I mean, I didn’t do you for anything.”

Silence.

“Look, the truth is, I’ve run out of money and it looks like the column is going to end if I can’t think of anything to write about. I’ll change names, situations and stuff, but if you don’t want me to write about this, I totally understand.”

“Well, what are you going to say?” she asked. “I mean, good things?”

“Jane! Of course good things. I had an amazing time up here with you. It was the best.”

It was true.

“Hmmmm. I guess it might be okay then. Let me sleep on it.”

“Thanks, baby.”

Ross called to say that VH1’s ninety-day option on the show had expired and that they had extended it for yet another ninety days. This meant we would most likely not know whether we had a TV show until early summer, and therefore were to remain in limbo. There was certainly no way I could stay in isolation at the ranch for months on end, so I began making plans to go back to New York as soon as some outstanding checks came in to cover the airfare. I gave the girl living in my place five weeks’ notice and started counting down the days in the same excited way that I counted the days between my November birthday and Christmas as a child.

With some hesitance and several conditions with regard to her anonymity, Jane generously gave her blessing to my recounting the loss of her virginity in a humor column. I also managed to get a smallish but extremely welcome freelance assignment from Nerve cofounder Genevieve Field, who was now an editor at Glamour. That combined with an end in sight for my self-imposed exile in California did wonders for my mental state and the debilitating personal crises were somewhat abated. I filed my virginity piece, worked on the Glamour article, and continued puttering around the house.

My friend Jamye Waxman asked if she could come and stay at the ranch with me to write and of course I jumped at the opportunity to have someone to talk to, not to mention escape to the comparative metropoli of Oakhurst or Fresno with. Jamye wasn’t arriving for another three weeks, so in order to preserve my hard-won sanity, I cut hours, days, and weeks up into chunks of time allotted to certain endeavors. I decided that it was the lack of structure that was loosening my grip on reality, so I put in place a fairly rigid activities roster.

I would rise at 9:00, take coffee on the porch until 10:00, prepare and consume breakfast until 11:00, check e-mail and surf the Internet until 12:30, run until 1:15, shower until 1:45, prepare and consume lunch until 2:30, take phone calls until 3:30, work until 7:00 with one fifteen-minute break, which I spent collecting kindling and firewood. Make and eat dinner until 9:00. Watch a DVD until 11:00, yoga and/ or calisthenics until 11:45, which allowed me a fifteen-minute period of leisure time before bed at midnight. Days were demarcated by the people I would like to talk with. I e-mailed them all and asked if they had a time slot they’d prefer, A friends getting twenty-minute slots, B friends ten. Jane got as long as she wanted. On Sunday mornings I spoke with my parents.

Michael called to tell me to be on the lookout for a package he had had sent to the ranch.

“It’s a make-your-own-dildo kit,” he said quite matter-of-factly.

“You want me to make a model of my own you-know-what?” I said.

“For starters,” he said. “Then have someone strap it on and fuck you with it. It’s brilliant. Go fuck yourself: the ‘I Did It for Science’ finale! Can you find someone to help you out with that?”

As luck would have it, Jamye was the perfect person to assist me. She was a sex educator, completely uninhibited, and perhaps most important, a dear friend.

“Yeah, my friend Jamye arrives in a few days.”

“Okay, well, you kids get it on and gimme a call to let me know how it goes. Remember, this one has to be a doozy.”

Given the circumstances leading up to this moment, fucking myself was spectacularly apropos, poetic even.

As I’d suspected, Jamye didn’t even flinch when I asked her to bugger me. I even got the sense that she was rather looking forward to it.

Three days later, the day of Jamye’s arrival, I awoke to find that one of the cowboys had left the Make Your Own Dildo Kit on the front porch. The box had been damaged in transit and its contents—a plastic tub with the mold, plaster, and other apparatus with a picture of an erect penis on the outside—were clearly visible. I cringed at what whoever delivered it must have thought when they drove into North Fork to pick up the mail from the post office. These were tough yet wholesome manly men, men I had always aspired to become like. It’s no wonder they gave me funny looks as I pranced around the ranch on my daily jogs.

Fairly early on in my freelance writing career I learned that the sooner one files an article, the sooner one gets paid. To that end, Jamye and I got to work on the dildo project almost as soon as she’d dropped her bags and I’d given her a cursory tour of the interior. Neither of us batted an eyelash, carrying on our dinner discussion as I masturbated to a full erection and she mixed the plaster with water that had to be at a precise temperature.

“Wait until morning,” I said, my fist pumping away. “We’ll go for a drive, you won’t believe how beautiful this place is.”

“I can’t wait,” said Jamye, carefully stirring the porridgelike mixture. “I’m really looking forward to writing and chilling out for a week or two.”

“Well, there’s plenty of R and R to be had out here. We could go horse riding one day,” I offered.

“Really? That’d be so cool. Okay. Thermometer says it’s almost the right temperature. Are you ready?”

“Yeah, I think so….”

“Well, it looks pretty hard to me,” she said. She batted my hand away and pushed the tip toward the floor with her index finger, felt the resistance for a second and released, my penis snapping back skyward like a ruler on the end of a desk. I half anticipated that ber-doi-oi-oi-oinggg sound.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

Jamye handed me the mold and I plunged my unit into the tepid ivory-colored slime.

“Oooohhh. It’s a bit chilly!”

I had to maintain my erection for two minutes. Jamye kept an eye on the microwave timer as I conjured up lewd images in my mind. The last ten seconds or so, I definitely sensed that the lukewarm mixture was taking its toll.

“Okay, that’s two minutes!” Jamye said and helped my pull off the mold. With some effort on her part and a slurping, sucking sound, the mold finally came off, and after a few more minutes we filled the void with a rubber solution and put it on a shelf to harden overnight. While I took a shower Jamye washed the mixing bowl we’d used for the plaster so that I could mix the eggs, cream, chives, black pepper, pancetta, and parmesan for the linguine carbonara recipe that I’d perfected during my tenure at the ranch.

The next evening, immediately postcoitus, I looked over my shoulder at my penis as it proudly jutted forth, spent yet unflagging from between Jamye’s legs.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I lied as I tried to reconcile the vulnerable and empty feeling my penis’s clone had left me with. “I think I just need to lie here for a minute or two.”

“I’ll get you some water,” she said and walked to the kitchen, dismantling the harness that held the prosthesis to her body.

Michael said that he’d continue to call on me to write freelance bits and pieces for Nerve, but the real end of my career there was ushered in with Jamye’s final pelvic thrust. My ass, like my whole future, was up in the air. It was at this moment that I began to experience the sensation of freefall I’d gotten every time I’d taken a leap out of my ever-expanding comfort zone, the fear and exhilaration of the unknown. Any pang of shame I might have felt from the circumstances was overridden by the question I asked myself over and over. I’d always told myself that in this day and age, my being a former sex worker would not be a strike against me in an interview situation, but now that I would presumably be putting this to the test, I was suddenly less secure in the assertion. When I began writing the column I was too concerned with having a roof over my head and a little pocket money to think about my time as a gonzo sex columnist being a great dirty stain on my résumé. Where would I go from here? How long could I coast before having to make some possibly difficult decisions.

Over the next two weeks Jamye and I hung out and worked on our respective projects while I counted down the days until I would eventually leave the rustic idyll of the Circled W ranch and get back to New York. I’d missed it immensely and found myself constantly daydreaming about my return: the plane’s wheels touching the tarmac, the frigid February air filling my lungs, treating myself to a cab back to Manhattan. I felt that the new me, sans column, already resided there, and I was eager to get back to Manhattan and see what he would be all about.