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.
PORN STAR
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.