My life in porn

My first job out of college was as associate editor of a porn—err—men’s sophisticate magazine in midtown Manhattan. Strangely enough, I didn’t get the usual porn burnout from looking at people in various states of sexual congress all day. Like an old person driving a car, I simply learned to shut off my better senses, stop paying attention and hope for the best. There were a lot of things going on in our office, and graphic depictions of sex acts were the least interesting of them. The most obscene thing I dealt with on a daily basis was probably my salary.

We were in the same building as NPR. There’s nothing like being trapped in an elevator with Ron Jeremy, Scott Simon and Ted Turner, everyone staring straight ahead and deathly silent.

Somehow, the Mafia had allegedly gotten control of our Internet sites and were allegedly churning the public out of hundreds of millions of bucks a year via credit cards. Eventually, the FTC took down our Internet operations, and the president of our company went into the Witness Protection program and supposedly owns a fish store somewhere in Arizona. But for a while, we ate big, expensive power steaks at The Palm, almost daily. We never ate at Sparks Steakhouse even though it was a block closer. That was the place where alleged mob boss Paul Castellano was gunned down by the same guys who allegedly ran our Internet sites. Allegedly. The guy who actually owned the series of magazines we published was some kind of billionaire recluse who was said to haunt the building at odd hours in a bathrobe. In the porn industry, he was known as the Invisible Man. There was a bronze bust of him on the 19th floor. Word was he owned a 10-person submarine and spent his time tooling around the deep Atlantic like some kind of confused German U-Boat captain.

My job pretty much consisted of writing “girl copy” and sex letters. It’s not that we wouldn’t publish a real letter, it’s just that 99 percent of the real ones we got were incoherent or just plain threatening. Most came stamped with their prison of origin. A lot of the guys would write telling how they were doing two years for something rather innocuous, like burglarizing a Dairy Queen. I’d look them up on the Internet, and more often than not, they had killed somebody with a rake. Sometimes whole families. I took advice from the guy at High Society across the hall and started opening the mail with rubber surgical gloves. There were a disturbing amount of them in the office supply chest.

One day, I was writing the girl copy for a two-guy-one-woman orgy. Unless the people were established stars, part of my job was to come up with names for them. I’d usually use the names of friends. Or ex-girlfriends. The girls we used were mostly from Eastern Europe. The Czech Republic, in particular. Occasionally, I’d miss somebody and get called out onto the carpet by my boss. Once, he came out of his office steaming, holding a black-and-white printout in his hand and slamming it onto the light box. “That’s Brick Majors and Brian Surewood boning Jewel DeNyle. Why the hell do you keep calling these guys ‘Kenny?'”

Enough. I was going to get out of the industry for good. By moving to Nevada and marrying a hooker.

Sometimes you lean into a fall to pull out and just end up crashing even harder.