Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (3 page)

“Later, a party,” she says. I can hear happy screams in the background and their shrillness stabs into me. I know those screams belong to completely impractical people, and I hate them for it. “When?” I ask, “How do I get there?”

I stop by a nearby bar to have a few drinks alone before going up to the party. It feels good to sulk over a glass in public. How could I have let my guard down so badly? Before Garla, I had been all-guard. Before Garla, I would’ve seen Garla coming. My pre-Garla life suddenly seems like an amazing thing; I hadn’t even known what I was missing. As I walk out of the bar and look up near the balcony I’m headed to, I can actually see Garla. It makes me feel creepy but I stand there and watch for a while anyway, until the two of us seem like strangers. Under the streetlamp and despite our distance, I notice her bone structure dazzle in the candlelight.

Compared to her, I am like a sandwich. I am completely inhuman and benign. I try to remember a sandwich I’d eaten in the fourth grade and cannot. I can’t even really remember one I’d eaten a month ago. We all must be like fourth grade sandwiches to Garla.

It’s not until I get inside the suite and look around that I realize it’s the same residence where I first met Garla. This makes my hands and feet sweat rapidly; the line is suddenly becoming a circle.

But circles are infinite too. It’s not just lines that go on forever.

As the night moves on, it’s like going back in time. When I enter, Garla gives me a soft embrace and kisses my cheek, but I want restitution. I quit my job and had the week from hell, and she isn’t going to flash a quick smile and reenter my life. Maybe I’m replaceable, but I don’t have to be happy about it.

I take my old seat by the window and start rapidly boozing. The lights change colors in ways that suggest I’m going too fast, and that is the speed I want to go. It’s a rush, like skydiving. I keep giving Garla a scowl that says, “Hey, you. I’m not holding on. See my empty hands.”

She’s rubbing pieces of chocolate over her lips like Chap Stick and men are helplessly pulled to her side of the room. Garla’s face is a centrifuge that separates the confident from the weak and the jealous, and I have been spun away.

Stumbling to the bathroom, I get out my jeweled Garla-phone. Part of me wants to put it into the toilet, or at least try to see if it will fit through the hole in the bottom of the bowl. I want to puke on it but it is so shiny that with its jeweled crystals and my drunken compound fly-eye vision, I couldn’t aim if I wanted to. Instead the puke falls into the water and the phone falls on the ground, and when I’m finished and my cheek hits the floor the phone looks like a store of riches behind the plunger. I grab the phone and open it, kind of bumping it around, hoping it will call a friend who will come pick me up.

But it’s Garla’s phone, so it calls Garla. I hang up but a few minutes later she’s standing over me in an Amazonian manner, one leg on either side of my body. “Put you in tiny coffin,” she says, rolling out some toilet paper and batting it against my wet cheek.

“I wish you would.”

She doesn’t appreciate my display of self-pity. I watch her toss her martini glass out the window onto the patio where it breaks. “You go home and rest doctor-television.”

After she leaves, a bodyguard enters and picks me up with a disgusted look, like he’s emptying a full bedpan. He helps me into the taxi. Motoring away, I watch the colored streaks of Garla on the patio upstairs.

With panic I check my purse to make sure I still have it: the Garla-phone, the jewel. The cursed treasure that brought distress alongside fortune. Glistening in my lap it is too beautiful to be trusted. As the cab nears my apartment, I have the urge to leave the phone behind on the seat for someone else to find and answer. But I won’t. Instead I’ll go home and wait for her to call me and turn me into something special for however long she wants, and this time I won’t forget to be grateful.

I’m expected to have anal sex with the winning contestant on the moon. I work on an Adult Network reality show called
Eat It
, where male contestants eat all they can of a given substance in order to win some level of fornication with the program’s hostesses. Our show’s executives decided to do a space episode for the season finale to keep up with the current trend of filming in extreme and sensational locations.

I found out that I got the space bid at a surprise luncheon in my honor. They gave me champagne and several helium-filled balloons with silver moons on the sides. I began to recall a documentary on the Discovery Channel about bathrooms on spaceships. Apparently the toilet sucks it in. It is like a pee-vacuum.

“Space itself is one big vacuum,” said Dick, the show’s host. He handed me a cupcake decorated with a frosting rocket ship. Dick is responsible for overseeing the eating contests and judging the line between an acceptable gag and a disqualifying vomit.

Throughout the party I smiled at the bad puns, the jokes about “reentry.” As I left, my coworker Priscilla told me how lucky I was.

“Space is like …
hot
right now, you know? An exclusive club.”

That night after a shower I stared down at my nipples and their bumpy, vaguely lunar surface. I checked the show’s online message boards to see what people were saying about my selection. Even though I’ve only been on the show for one season, I’m a hit with viewers.

GoodEatFan from New Jersey wrote,
Her breasts have a soft expanding look about them, like rising bread
. Most of them talk about my trademark—my hair. It’s really brown and thick and long, and every contestant I’ve ever been assigned to, before we start doing anything, has always turned me around and pushed his member into my hair. It’s the first thing that happens, every time. Of course that won’t be possible on the moon.

Before I even meet the contestants, the show execs and I watch them get interviewed. We spy in on their conversation through a one-way mirror, giving the whole situation a police-sting kind of feel.

The contestants I’ll be doing the show with are Guff, Leo, and Bill. Guff owns his own fertilizer company and is by far the largest of the bunch. His voice is crazy-deep. Dick can’t get over it.

“If James Earl Jones yodeled into the universe’s vagina, Guff’s voice is the noise that would echo back.”

Kevin in HR agrees. “His chest seems supported by some exterior plate that’s masked with hair.”

A hidden camera—they’re everywhere—zooms in on Guff’s face. He is a mouth-breather. His teeth are a variety of sizes in all the wrong places, as if they’d once fallen out and he had to shove them back in a hurry with no regard to their original position. He looks naked without a log of wood beneath his arm, though this is the first time I’ve ever seen him, and he’s logless. I bet he likes waffles.

Leo is physically much smaller than I am. What’s sad is, I can tell he thinks he really dressed up for the audition. He’s a disaster of buttons. Every single button on his shirt is closed and there appears to be an unnatural number of buttons—auxiliary buttons and safety buttons to back up the backup buttons, vestigial buttons that hang at the tops of his sleeves as though, many centuries ago, a pocket may have been there. His hair is too long for his face and it makes him look extra-gaunt. I hear the executives mumble that he should be given a second HIV test,
just to be sure, he doesn’t look too good
, and they’re right. When I glance at Leo, it’s like seeing a lemon the color of tooth enamel.

Sheila, the only other female in the room, says, “It’s as if he lives in a median between our world and a race of anemic man-lizards. He lives there in his car.” Sheila’s an exec, not a do-er, but she seems to constantly place herself in do-er shoes and ask,
Who could ever touch him?
She’s asking this question to everyone but me. I’m the answer, though, so I speak up.

“I vote keep him. He won’t be any trouble. It’s more than we can say about Guff.”

A consenting murmur makes its way around the table.

Bill is Bill. Each episode they choose at least one contestant who could be misconstrued, on a good day, as not completely repulsive, and this episode it’s Bill. The fact that he knows this, that he’s receiving “hottie billing,” makes him so much more sleazy and disgusting than the others. He is in no way actually attractive. Someone from casting was probably instructed to go into a PTA meeting, find the one guy there with the smallest boobs and the shortest receding hairline, and to not take any points off if his eyes were far apart. Instead of “for sure,” he keeps saying, “for surely.” The interviewer finally asks if Shirley is someone close to him. He roars. He acts as if he’s met his comical match and tries to give a high-five, which the interviewer does not take him up on.

I meet the contestants in person on the first day of physical training. It’s being taped as bonus footage for the season’s DVD. We’re going to put on the suits and walk around in an underwater tank.

Guff, who apparently developed extraordinary lung capacity by playing the baritone through high school, is requesting he not have to wear the suit or receive oxygen.

“I’ve got heavy boots,” he says. “I’ll just walk with you on the bottom.”

“No showing off,” I tease. I’m supposed to tease. I’m wearing a surfer-style bodysuit that has breast-like gel inserts sewn into the chest pockets. My actual breasts are spilling out the top of the suit, creating the effect that they’re jewels of a much larger crown. Occasionally I remember that I’m the lone woman on the entire set and that everyone is staring at me, but it’s something that only comes back to me every twenty minutes or so, about five minutes after I recall that I’m completely stoned.

“Your beauty is beautiful,” Guff says, and immediately realizes he should’ve spiced the compliment up a bit. Before he starts trying to dig himself out of that hole, I notice he’s eating a package of Lance Peanut Butter Crackers.

“Are those things ever fresh?” I ask.

He looks down at the package as though it will give him the answer. Neon-orange crumbs are furrowed in his beard like lice from another planet.

“I just mean,” I say, “every time I see them in a vending machine, they look like they’ve been sitting there since the seventies. Maybe it’s the wrappers.”

Guff’s chest starts heaving up and down, and I take a few steps back. It’s possible that Lance products from vending machines are the only thing he ever eats and that they are the source of his superhuman size and strength. Maybe before he found Lance products he was as thin as Leo. I suddenly worry that I just insulted his favorite thing in life. I think about how I would feel if someone came up to me and said, “What are Valium addicts thinking? Pills can never make you truly happy!”

But instead he starts laughing, guttural undulations somewhere between the Green Giant and Santa. Leo walks over to the corner of the room, curling to it like it’s his mother. He whispers, “I love those crackers.”

Guff likes this. It doesn’t take long before brains meet brawn and the two of them form a symbiotic relationship, like barnacle and whale. When they stand next to each other, I get the feeling that Leo recently broke out of Guff’s chest, that he started as a tapeworm but fought his way up the evolutionary ladder.

Bill, of course, is too good to talk to anyone but me. I notice that his enormous gold watch doesn’t work.

A medical crew puts us through a series of tests to check our vitals: treadmill running, push-ups, that sort of thing. Bill keeps checking out his own ass in the mirror. I watch him stare at my ass, then his ass, then mine, then his, as though they’re having a conversation with one another and only he can hear it.

Leo has taken this occasion as an opportunity to quit smoking, which is laudable, except the combination of physical exertion and nicotine patches are making him ill. When it’s his turn for the treadmill, he runs over and his shirt is soaked from warm-ups. He peels it off and there are already four patches over his chest, sitting almost exactly where the doctor intends to put the electrodes.

“Are those supposed to be placed directly over the heart?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. A former contestant I had to sleep with wore a patch once. When he said to me,
Baby, watch the patch, eh?
, I first stared with confusion at his small, triangular goatee. But then he lifted his sleeve and displayed the patch with great pride, the way a fifth grader might show off a temporary tattoo of a cobra. Apparently it hurts if the patches get bumped, which he used as an excuse to not flex for me. As if I’d been looking forward to that.

We wait until Leo is done throwing up then go get into our suits. Once inside, Leo’s arms, which previously looked like blanched string beans, now appear to be relatively the same size as Bill’s. This boosts his confidence.

Guff and Leo solidify their union underwater. Instead of using the reach-claw we’ve been provided with, Guff places Leo on his shoulders and operates him like an extended limb. Bill keeps dropping his claw and cursing into his headset microphone. He is unable to complete his “mission” of using the claw to tighten a loose bolt.

I take a moment and enjoy the secluded world we’ve entered, in addition to my new role as an asexual giant. It’s fun to be individually wrapped and surrounded by water on all sides. Just when I’m starting to feel like one of the guys, Bill lumbers over.

“Wanna see my electric eel?”

He places his fishbowl head against mine, and we clink like crystal glasses toasting.

At lunch Guff devours all the complimentary sandwiches then asks for more, like some steroidal Oliver Twist from the lumber-and-fur orphanage. Leo ended up having to eat activated charcoal. When we were coming up from the water he puked in his suit, specifically inside his face helmet. It covered the entire lens and made it impossible to tell whether he’d gotten sick or his head had exploded. Bill claimed to have lost his appetite over this incident, but after desuiting I saw him walk straight to the catering table.

The rest of the day it’s just Guff, Bill, and me. Leo has taken the afternoon off to recover. Guff keeps giving Bill this odd look out the corner of his eye, like he knows Bill is hiding a cookie in one of his pockets—he just can’t figure out which one.