I
never consciously set out to work for a porn magazine—that
is, until, unemployed, with no other job prospects in sight and
an MA in history to pay off to Uncle Sam, I found myself being offered
the chance to land an editorial position in the New York publishing
world. I could claim, I suppose, that I was forced into a life of
sordid sin by sheer financial necessity—but then, I'd be lying.
Though the money was a hell of a lot better than the usual entry-slave
wage, to be honest, the job also sounded like a lot of fun. Like
most twenty-something, overeducated, pretentious pseudo-intellectual
bastards in New York City, I have a fairly
liberal, positive attitude towards sex. And, after all,
isn't it the dream job of every merrily perverted American male
to get paid to look at pictures of naked women
all day? I felt like Norm from Cheers
in the episode when he was offered the quality-tasting job at the
brewery. Hell, I felt like G.
Gordon Liddy would have felt if he had beenoffered the
directorship of the CIA.
I'll have to admit, though, that I was a wee bit disappointed at
first when I showed up at the office for my interview. I guess I
expected shag carpeting, disco balls, and a '70s funk soundtrack,
heavy on the wah-wah pedal. Instead, it was a relatively standard-issue
New York modular cubicle maze—or at least it seemed that way
until I noticed that the cubes were filled with stacks and stacks
of porno magazines. The effect was a bit surreal, as if an accounting
office had been taken over by demented, sex-crazed periodical librarians.
The distractions also made it difficult to maneuver, since I kept
walking into things.
My
boss-to-be revealed himself to be a burly, jovial, red-faced guy
in his early forties. He wore blue jeans and a ponytail, which somehow
surprised me, despite that fact that, in retrospect, it seems a
bit ludicrous to have expected a dress code in an office that produced
nudie magazines. With his thick Brooklyn accent, he reminded me
of someone from my old neighborhood. I liked him instantly. Since
his office was decorated in a shark motif I dubbed "early Spieldbergian,"
to protect the not-so-innocent, we'll call him "Quint."
On Quint's desk were a framed picture of his three tousle-headed
kids and a vast cornucopia of filth. He had Polaroids of aspiring
porn stars, signed 8x10 glossies, gang-bang commemorative calendars,
greeting cards-you name it. To say that it was the most bizarre
interview I'd ever been on would be an understatement. No college
job fair had ever prepared me for this.
"So, it says here you're a writer?" Quint asked me.
"Yes, sir," I said, tearing my eyes from a pair of 36
DDs long enough to hand over a folder of clips.
Nonchalantly, he flipped through the collection of history-lite
pieces that I had managed to get published over the past few years.
They sported titles such as, "So, You Want to be a Swordsman?"
and "An Introduction to the Society
for Creative Anachronism." I was immensely proud
of them.
"And you got editing experience?"
"Yes,
sir." I shuddered at horror at the memory of the vanity press
where I had previously spent eight hours a day for six months reading
born-again Christian biker epics, World War II memoirs, and the
liquor-inspired ramblings of grandmothers from Nebraska who spent
their children's inheritances to publish 300-page warnings about
the coming Apocalypse.
"That's great!" he said. "Listen, we're going to
set you up with a little writing test, probably next week or somethin'.
Nothing too big-we'll just sit you down at a computer and have you
write some copy. But not just right now. We're a little crazy here
with the issue coming up now. Here, meanwhile, why dontcha take
some magazines and look 'em over, so you know what we do. I'll give
you a call, probably, like, tomorrow. Okay?"
"Great!" I said, shoving the magazines out of sight into
my bag.
I started worrying exactly what I had sold my soul to when I got
home. The magazines Quint had given me weren't erotica, or softcore
late-night cable euro-fluff. They were raw, hardcore porn. As I
looked at cum shot after cum shot, wondering exactly how this meshed
with my university-issued feminist values, the phone rang. It was
Quint. It turned out they didn't even need a writing test-they wanted
me to start as soon as possible.
Well, I thought to myself, it's a creative job. Maybe I can bring
some class and imagination to this thing.
Monday
found me ridiculously overdressed in a shirt and tie, being shown
my very own cubicle by a redheaded guy who reminded me of that camp
counselor who's always trying to be all the kids' buddy. He turned
out to be my managing editor and immediate supervisor. We'll call
him "Richard," after
Richard
Roundtree.
Shaft was more than Richard's favorite
movie: It was his philosophy of life.
"Hey,
new guy, nice to meet ya." We shook hands. "Hey, you like
pussy don'tcha?"
"Er, why, yes, I do." Was this a trick question?
"Excellent, man! This is the job for you! Just don't fuck up."
"I won't," I promised.
"Good! Quint will be in a little later, but he wanted me to
get you started writing some girl copy."
"What's girl copy?" I asked naively.
"Girl copy is the text that goes along with the photos. You
just write a little story about what's going on in the photos, and
then the art guys put it into the spread. It's the easiest fucking
job on earth. You're a lucky son-of-a-bitch, you know that?"
He handed me a sheaf of black-and-white laser printouts. "Hop
to it. You need me, I'll be in my office."
I sat down to look at the photo spread. There didn't seem to be
much room for me to work in terms of plot and characterization.
A vaguely Asian-looking model, lying on a cheap set straight out
of Valentino's "Desert Sheik," was displaying her goods
for the camera in what I soon came to recognize as the standard
"porno poses." In low-resolution black-and-white, it didn't
look erotic. In fact, it looked almost clinical. Feeling great empathy
for gynecologists everywhere, I sat down, took a deep breath, and
wrote my first few sentences of girl copy:
Michelle
is a slut with a secret. Trained in the ancient Chinese art of quim-do,
she can give a man the most intense orgasm of his life-or fuck him
to death. But what she really wants is a man to call her own, a
man she can please like she's always wanted to. Reclining in the
sumptuous harem where her latest mission has taken her, she gently
rubs herself as she envisions her fantasy lover. Soon, she will
have her assignment to fulfill-but until then, she has her right
hand to keep her company.
I titled
my masterpiece, "Nookie Ninja," proudly hit the print
button, and brought it into Richard's office.
"What the fuck is this shit?!" he sputtered, his red pen
leaving scarlet letters all over my work.
"Pardon?"
"First of all, what the hell does 'sumptuous' mean? And we
never use words like 'slut' or 'whore.' It's demeaning."
"Wait a minute. We can show girls getting man-cream facials,
but we can't call them sluts?" I'm not normally one to call
women "sluts," but I figured, like Eminem,
all is kosher in the name of art.
"The fucking feminists watch this shit like hawks," Richard
leaned in conspiratorially, his eyes shifting from side to side
as if a pickax-wielding Andrea
Dworkin were about to jump out from behind the door at
any moment. "There's a lot of people out there that don't give
a flying fuck about the First Amendment. If you make it seem like
you're demeaning women, you'll wind up in court in a minute, buck-o.
But don't worry. You'll catch on to how this game is played. Give
it another whirl."
"Got it, boss," I said, backing out the door slowly.
"Oh, and cut out the part about killing. It makes my dick shrivel
up just thinking about it," he shouted after me.
"Right, boss," I said.
"And give her an orgasm, too. They're not being exploited if
they're having fun, right?"
"Sure thing, boss."
Returning to my cube, I closed my eyes for a moment. I summoned
up everything my 11th-grade creative writing teacher had ever taught
me. And then, I began writing. I gave it passion. I gave it verve.
I gave it an orgasm. My act of creation complete, I presented the
clean printout to Richard.
"Close the door," he said. A lump in my throat, I closed
the door. I had heard that entry-level editors are like Kleenex:
throw this one out, there's another one queued up right behind.
"This
is great," he said. "It gives me a hard-on the size of
a Louisville Slugger. If there was a Pulitzer Prize for porn, you'd
win it for sure."
"Thank you—"
"Look, your job isn't hard," Richard went on. "You
write some girl copy, you edit some letters. You get to look at
pictures of naked chicks all day. Quint's a great boss. It's a great
fucking job. But there are two things you must never, ever do. The
first thing is that you must never piss off Frank and Tony."
"Who're Frank and Tony?"
"They're the big bosses. They own this shindig. They say jump,
you jump."
"OK, that I understand. What's the second thing?"
"There must never, ever be any money shots on the pages that
go into the Canadian edition of the magazine. If there is one fucking
drop of semen on the Canadian pages, your ass will be out on the
street so fast, you'll leave a skid mark from here to the East River."
"Why no cum in Canada?" I asked, and quickly wished I
hadn't, for it was then that I learned about the strange regulations
that cover the flow of smut over our northern border.
I went college in Buffalo, and so I was familiar with the "Canadian
content" laws. Toronto radio stations would play few tunes
by Pearl Jam or Nine Inch Nails, and then they'd throw in a Tragically
Hip song to keep the Canadian jingoist bastards happy. Strange to
say, Canadian content laws also apply to porn. You can sell pictures
of women and dogs just so long as they're women from Manitoba and
Labrador retrievers, but damned if you could import a good, wholesome
American money shot. The magazines would be impounded in the Great
White North until the company paid some unemployed hockey player
with a razor blade to slice out all of the offending pages.
The UK is even worse. A country that has nude women on page three
of the daily paper won't allow you to import a photograph of a woman
with her own finger in her private parts. There is absolutely no
penetration allowed in the UK. Plus, even though out of respect
to the tender sensibilities of the American distributors, you couldn't
put any of George Carlin's seven dirty words on the cover, you couldn't
even use old standbys like "quim" in the UK.
Richard's petty insanities notwithstanding, he was right in one
thing. It was not, after all, as if I had a difficult job. For one
thing, I got damn good at girl copy over the next few weeks. It
turned out that the secret was to make it as vapid as possible and,
preferably, on a third-grade reading level. Writing porn, I soon
discovered, was not something you needed Tolstoy's skills to pull
off.
Despite the lack of artistic fulfillment, I soon discovered that
I was, as you might expect, the envy of my male friends. Hell, guys
twice my age idolized me. When I went to synagogue for Yom Kippur
(and, man, did I have a lot to atone for), my father's friends pointed
me out to their offspring and said, "Do you see that man? Son,
when you grow up, I want you to be just like him."
I had the stories to back it up, too. For instance, there was my
first night working late. Distracted from my girl-copy duties by
bright lights in the cubicle next to mine, I peeked over the wall.
It turned out that though, normally, the photo shoots were done
on the West Coast, someone had had the brilliant idea to shoot a
cut-rate "cubicle sex" spread using local talent. There
were a guy and a girl spread-eagled on the desk next to mine, while
a photographer, lighting crew, and photographer hovered over them.
Meanwhile, a woman gave everyone directions, like, "OK, could
you spread your legs a bit more for me, honey? No, don't stick it
in, you idiot! This is going into the UK edition!"
"Um, can I get you guys some coffee?" I asked.
"No, that's OK, thanks," the director smiled back sweetly.
"Don't mind us."
"Er, OK." I went back to what I was doing.
So, everything seemed to be more or less groovy, at least on the
outside—just so long as I didn't have to interact with Frank
and Tony. Tony
was a really nice guy with a terrific sense of humor, an Italian
gentleman in the Sopranos tradition. Frank
was another story. Thankfully, I only really had to deal with the
terrible twosome at the post-mortem meetings. These were when the
entire staff would sit down in the conference room, go over the
sales figures, and generally critique the magazine. If Frank and
Tony liked it, the whole staff would be sent out to a nice restaurant
to eat lunch and get drunk on the company's bill. If they didn't,
well, heads would roll.
My
first post-mortem meeting was on the issue that had closed the month
before I had joined the company. We all sat down at the table, and
the first thing in the magazine that Frank opened was a photo feature
I still see in my nightmares. It opened with a hapless female traveler,
forced by necessity to use the men's washroom, relieving her bladder
in a filthy truck stop toilet. Turn the page, and—voila!—there
were no less than four cocks poking out through the glory holes
in the stall doors. Our heroine proceeded to suck off everyone off,
with the usual obligatory cum shots. Then I saw the last two pages.
"Um, excuse me," I said, disturbed. "Are they doing
to her what I think they're doing to her?"
"This is fucking brilliant," Frank cut me off.
"Yeah, well, you should have been there for the shoot,"
Quint smirked. As Editor-in-Chief, Quint got to fly to the West
Coast, supervise the shoots, and, of course, fuck the models.
"Why? What happened?"
"Well, OK, she had a little trouble pissing at first, so I
had her drink, like three bottles of water, and that solved that.
Then she sucked the guys off like a pro, and she was OK with the
cum shot.
" 'Great. Good work, baby,' I told her. 'Now get back in there.'
"
" 'What-why?'
" ' 'Cuz they're gonna piss on you!'
"She was all, like, 'No!' and I was all, like, 'Yeah!' and
she was like, 'no, no, don't make me,' but I held up the contract,
and I was like, 'do ya wanna get paid?!' So she did, and she came
out and she was all crying and shit. Then she asked me if she could
have a towel."
"What'd you say?" Frank was on the edge of his seat.
" 'No!' "
"Fucking brilliant!"
"Their minds always go, sooner or later," Quint shook
his head sadly. "You can see it in their eyes-—they get
lifeless
eyes, like a doll's eyes. I knew a girl once, she would
take it up the ass, she'd let three guys bang her and take their
loads on her face, and she was fine with it. Nothing ever bothered
her. She was like a rock. Then one day, I'm on the set, and I see
her sitting in the corner crying."
" 'Baby, what's the matter?' I asked her. 'Did somebody do
something to you? 'Cuz I'll take care of it, you know I will.'
" 'They… they…'
" 'They did what, baby?'
" 'They… made me fuck
a dwarf!' " He fell out of his swivel chair in hysterics.
That was not, of course, the most bizarre thing that happened at
the postmortem meetings. No, the most bizarre thing was Frank's
constant clamoring to have more transsexuals put in our pages. Despite
the fact that the sales figures always suffered whenever chicks
with dicks were foisted off on our loyal readership, Frank would
inevitably come up with a comment such as, "We need a she-male
here!" or "Just because a guy sucks a few cocks doesn't
mean he's gay, right?" And Frank, much like Tim Curry in The
Rocky Horror Picture Show, was the The Man. Therefore,
every so often, we committed newsstand suicide by taking a walk
on the wild side.
I suppose I should mention that, when I started working for the
magazine, I hadn't had a girlfriend in about eight months. Nor had
my morals degraded to the point where I was willing to just go out
and pick up some random girl, not that I would know how to pick
up a girl if I tried. I am, at heart, still the geek who spent all
his spare time in high school writing sci-fi stories. After six
months of all porn and no release, though, it seemed that even the
squirrels in Central Park were giving me come-hither looks. I was
beginning to fear permanent damage. Thankfully, I ran into an old
friend who worked weekends as the door dominatrix at New York City's
Hellfire
club.
Not only was she OK with my occupation, she wanted to corrupt me
further.
"You know," she told me one night as we lay together,
sweaty, naked, and unbound, "Your boss chases after trannies."
"Who? Quint? Quint's redder-blooded than the Marlboro man."
"No, not him: The skinny one with short, dark hair. I see him
at the Hellfire all the time. He's a tranny-chaser. He flashed his
business card to get in for free, and I asked him, 'don't you own
that magazine Tristan works for,' and he was, like, 'yeah, I do.'
He looked kind of embarrassed."
"Oh, Frank." I said, protecting my crotch from a sudden
pounce by her overly jealous cat. "If he were any further in
the closet, he'd pop out in Narnia.
Frankly, my dear, I'm not disturbed by anything I see there any
more."
Actually, I was. I hated my job. Worse, I hated myself. My idea
of a fun date is going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I fence
and ride horses for exercise and like reading novels by Umberto
Eco and Arturo
Perez-Reverte. I like women. I like sex. What I was doing
with the magazine, though, wasn't sex. It was something else. What's
worse, it was affecting my mind. For one thing, as sweet as she
was, and as understanding and nice as she was, I had no idea what
I was doing sleeping with someone who beat the hell out of Fortune
500 executives for a living.
My last post-mortem meeting did not go as well as the first few
had. To begin with, our sales figures were definitely declining.
In fact, it seemed as if the magazine had been selling less well
ever since I had joined the staff. Bruce and Frank were positively
scowling. Frank held up the magazine front cover, which featured
a truly beautiful model in a sheer top. Unlike most of the covers,
we hadn't had to put little dots over her nipples. No one actually
required that we cover up the nipples; it was just thought to make
the magazine look filthier.
"What the hell is this?" he demanded of Quint. "Where
are her fucking nipples? It looks like fucking Cosmo."
"I kinda like it," I said. "It looks classy. I bet
our sales figures would pick up if we had more photos like this."
Everybody looked at me as if I had just shit on the table. Actually,
let me rephrase that. Shitting on tables was standard editorial
procedure. Everyone looked at me as if I had just admitted that
I had accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior, and that the
two of us were going to Vegas to clean out the slots.
"And look at this photo spread," I opened to a gorgeous
black-and-white spread that Frank and Tony had particularly hated.
"The photography is great. The model has a sort of classic
beauty, like one of Botticelli's
Madonnas."
It really wasn't much of a surprise when Quint called me into his
office later that day.
"Tristan," he said to me. "I think you're a great
guy and all. But you don't really fit in around here."
"Really?" I acted dismayed.
"Yeah. I'm afraid I'm going to have to let you go."
Never in my life was I gladder to find myself on the unemployment
line. I'm all for erotica, and porno chic is all well and good.
However, when you see what goes on behind the scenes, it's a lot
different. All in all, it was a learning experience, but not one
I'm particularly proud of, or that I would care to repeat again.
And I swear to God, if I ever have to see a
picture of a naked woman again, I'm gonna puke.
Tristan Trout is the Publisher of CorporateMofo.com
Posted
January 1, 2002 4:15 AM