The Pornographer Diaries

2. Can you get me a job?

So I’m in reception and it’s all very nice; polished wooden floors, pine or beech panelling on the walls, a large black leather sofa to wait on and a couple of really quite realistic plastic trees to lend to place a touch of class. They’d really done a nice job on the interior decoration, although there was one question I couldn’t shake out of my head.

Where were all the tits?

This was supposed to be a porno company, wasn’t it? What was with the New York City skylines on the walls? Why couldn’t I see any arses?

Sure they provided some magazines for visitors to browse: The Spectator, The New Statesman, Private Eye, What Mortgage and Tatler (in case, I suppose, you fancied banging one out while you waited). But there was no Bling, no Ace, no Froth and not even the slightest hint of Bangers! and yet these were the magazines that Moonlight Publications produced.

Disappointed.

I picked up The Spectator and tried flipping through it while I waited for my interview. The receptionist looked up at me for a moment through half an inch of bullet/nutter proof glass then got back to her reading – Harry Potter. Shouldn’t she at least be pouring over Bling’s famous blowjob column and reading about naughty Natalie’s latest gutful? I would’ve if I’d worked here, I thought to myself.

If I worked here. ‘If’ being the operative word.

See, I was here for my interview for the position of sub-editor on Bling. I was suitably qualified for the job (I wasn’t just chancing it) having spent the last three years working as sub on a car magazine (alright, caravan magazine) but this was a job I really fancied. I’d seen several such vacancies advertised in the media pages of the national press over the years and they were always worded the same:

SUB-EDITOR

Hard working, talented, full-time professional required for market-leading title. Must have minimum 18 months publishing experience on consumer titles and be proficient in Word & QuarkXpress. circa £17k. CV and cuttings to Stuart Toldo, Moonlight Publications Ltd, etc.

They weren’t fooling anyone – Moonlight Publications? Anyone’s who’s been bashing off to porn since the seventies should know the name Moonlight Publications, so that would be most of the adult male population of Great Britain. Like I said, I’d seen a few of these adverts crop up in the past and I’d always applied for them, you know, just on the off-chance. The way I looked at it, even if I didn’t get the job, just the interview in itself would be something I could tell my grandchildren about.

So here I was, third time lucky. They’d got in contact with me, liked my CV and asked me to write them a 500 word dirty story, a 500 word fictional porn star interview, half a dozen dirty sound-bites and an 800 word humorous feature on Baywatch (I later found out that they’d strung the vacancy out for over two months before making up their minds because they had some three dozen hopeful applicants doing all their work for them). Six weeks after dropping my contributions to issues three and four in the postbox I got a call for a young girl who invited me along for an interview.

This would be the first and only time I’ve ever managed to talk to a girl on the phone and stare at her tits at the same time.

The interview was for 10am sharp and it was now 10.25am. I tried reading The Spectator and got quite engrossed in the first four words of an article by Gore Vidal before chucking it in and picking up What Mortgage. It was no use, I just couldn’t concentrate, not knowing (or at least fantasising about) what was behind the glass doors and the Muggle on reception.

Would I see a naked girl? Would they just be walking around out back? What if the whole place was just wall-to-wall with pictures of tits and fannies and I couldn’t look anywhere without seeing them? I hadn’t looked at a porn mag in the company of someone else since I was 14 years old and I wasn’t sure a job interview was the right time to start again. What if we were looking through a couple of issues together and the editor turned to me and told me he had a stiffy?

Jesus!

Normal job interviews were scary enough but this one had me unable to sit still for five seconds straight. My heart was thumping inside my chest, my armpits were sticky with sweat and my heavily gelled-hair was itching like mad. I tried scratching it without messing the rest of it up too badly and took a few deep breaths. The receptionist hadn’t given me so much as a glance in the last ten minutes, although I felt like I had a hundred eyes on me.

I bet she knows the score, I thought to myself as I stared at her through the glass. Working in a place like this she had to be a bit open-minded. I mean, sex was probably no big thing to her, second-nature and all that. She certainly had nice tits. I wondered if she’d ever done any modelling herself. More than likely. Perhaps she’d even done hard-core, it wouldn’t have surprised me. I was just starting to wonder if she had anything on underneath the desk when I stopped before I got to the point where I couldn’t stand up if called upon to do so. My train of thought was further disturbed by a courier arriving with a large A3 enveloped marked ‘PROOFS’. The receptionist buzzed him through the security doors, signed for the envelope, then picked up the phone and dialled. The courier paid me no attention and I paid him even less, my attention was firmly fixed on the envelope and my mind was galloping off in half a dozen directions when all of a sudden some guy leaned out of the security doors and asked me if I wanted to come through.

The only thing I was about to come through was my pants.

‘Sorry to keep you, one of those mornings. Stuart Toldo,’ he said introducing himself and offering me his hand. I took it, shook it and returned it to him, then followed him through the security doors.

Alice was stepping through the looking glass.

‘Good luck,’ the receptionist smiled, looking up from her book and I almost managed to return her smile without looking at her tits. Almost.

‘Well, we’ve got four magazines in the company, Bling, Ace, Froth and Bangers! I edit Bling, which is the one we’re going to be testing you for today.’

Testing?

‘You’ve read Bling before I take it?’ he asked.

If it had been anyone else in the world asking me that question I would’ve replied, ‘No. But my mate’s got a stack of copies,’ but what I actually said was, ‘Yes, I’ve read a few copies... good mag... very... I like it,’ although again this wasn’t strictly true. I hadn’t actually ‘read’ it, as in the strict definition of the word, what I usually did was spread four or five issues about me and open them up onto my favourite pages, then lob my seed on stony ground. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but even up to this point I was half-expecting him to point at me and laugh, ‘He admitted it, everyone, he admitted it, he buys porno mags,’ then for everyone to pour out of the various offices either side of the corridor and laugh too while the women viewed me with contempt.

‘Christ, we just produce them, we’re professionals, but you actually buy them. What a creep!’ the receptionist would shout after me, then scream, ‘Rapist! Rapist! Rapist!’ as she pulled her cardigan tightly across her big, fat, enormous, round, firm, bouncing...

‘Yes, well Bling is seen as the classiest of the titles we produce,’ Stuart replied bringing me back to reality. ‘We get the best girls, at least we try, and generally work with the best photographers to produce a mag that’s the fourth best-selling in the country.’

‘What’s your circulation?’ I asked him, trying to show a professional interest.

‘Around about 90,000,’ he replied and I stopped dead in my tracks.

‘A month?’

‘Yes, give or take. It generally goes up if we’ve got a free video or some other gift on the front cover but it basically hovers around the 90,000 mark.’

This was staggering. 90,000 copies sold every month! I was expecting him to say 5,000 or even 10,000, but 90,000! Fuck me! And that was only the fourth best-selling mag on the top shelf? What the fuck was the best-selling one doing? I thought for a moment about all the dozens of different mags up there in the newsagents and then about numbers I’d just heard and put it together that Britain must shift something like 500,000 to a million dirty mags every month.

Every month!

Hang on a minute, let’s just work this out. Say, for argument’s sake we took a good month and porn mags made a million sales (as it makes it easier to work out). There were 60 million people living in Great Britain, half of them were fellas. Now say the average life expectancy for blokes in the UK was three score and ten and let’s just say that no one under the age of 18 ever bought a mag because they’re not able to. Alright, so 52 as a percentage of 70 was just over 74 per cent (I’m using a calculator now so don’t get too impressed) and 74 per cent of 30 million was... hang on I pressed the wrong key... was 22,200,000. That’s just over 22 million blokes of nudey mag-buying age. Let’s knock the pensioners off that total, because they probably weren’t up to it anyway and get it down to a manageable 20 million. That meant that on average, one in every twenty blokes in this country regularly went down the newsagents (or in my case the 24hr service station at midnight) and bought a dirty mag every month. One in twenty. With such a common phenomenon going on around us all the time you’d think you’d see more blokes buying them, wouldn’t you? I’d seen a badger once but to this day I’ve never seen anyone walk out of the newsagents with a dirty mag under his arm; mind you I’d seen plenty of people walking out of the newsagents with a suspiciously thick The Exchange and Mart under their arms.

It suddenly felt good to know that it wasn’t just me buying them.

‘Yep, people are always surprised how many we sell,’ Stuart said. ‘We’re like the Masons, in a way.’

‘Yeah, you both have your secret handshakes, I suppose,’ I replied, but I didn’t get the laugh I was looking for.

We carried on walking up the corridor, past offices on either side, then 20 yards later through a big pair of double doors and into a large open-plan editorial office. There were no pictures of the New York skyline in here, nor were there any copies of The New Statesman (that I could see), the place was wall to wall with pin-ups, posters and polaroids. Great piles of mags overflowed by the side of every desk and boxes of mags, videos and slides were heaped on top of a large bank of filing cabinets against the far wall. There was even a shelf close-by with something like a dozen dildos laid out like a weapons rack.

It was an Aladdin’s cave of porn.

‘This is where we work,’ Stuart told me while I gaped about. ‘All four mags are done in this room and there’s probably about...’ quickly started counting up under his breath, ‘about a dozen of us who work in here, although it’s a bit early so no one’s in yet.’

I looked at my watch, it was 10.30am and there were three people sat about reading the newspapers and Harry Potter. 10.30am and a bit early? Fuck me I wanted a job in this place, didn’t I?

‘Everyone’s got phones, most of the iMacs have got email and pretty much everyone’s on the net.’

‘I bet this is about the only place in London you wouldn’t get sacked for looking at porn on the internet all day isn’t it?’ I thought out loud.

‘It’s probably the only place in London where nobody wants to,’ he replied, making me feel stupid. I made a mental note to stop with the witty insights and shut my gob. ‘Alright, well that’s it really, just thought I’d show you the offices. Usual procedure from here on in now, we’re going to do a quick interview in one of the rooms back there and then I’ll give you a subbing test and then we’ll see how you get on with it. Right, this way then.’

I followed Stuart back down the corridor and into a large but sparsely furnished office. There was a big table in the middle of the room with half a dozen chairs around it and a computer set up at one end. This was much more like the sorts of interviews I’d come to know and hate.

‘Take a seat,’ he said, indicating to one side of the table as he slid in behind the other. He plucked several copies of Bling off the shelf behind himself and laid them on the table in front of me. One of them I already had at home, but the other two I didn’t. I wondered if he’d let me take them with me.

‘This is our mag, as you probably now. Lots of girls...’ he said, flipping through it in front of me, making me blush inwardly, ‘... a few features, funny stuff, lads type stuff. A few sporty things...’ he was saying and I tried nodding along as if I’d even noticed one of his funny lads/sporty features/things ever before, ‘... lots of readers’ letters, true confessions, stuff like that... a shit load of adverts at the back you won’t have to worry about and that’s about that,’ he finished and turned it over to me. ‘Questions?’

‘Are the true confessions really true?’

‘I doubt it. They’re all written by a regular contributor, and if you saw the state of her you’d wonder if she’d ever had it in her life. We just change her name every month. The readers’ letters are all genuine, well, you know, we get real letters in, I can’t remember if these are genuine or not,’ he said staring down at the page in front of me. ‘They need subbing, which’ll be your job,’ he said in a way that made me think I’d already got it. ‘That and you’ll have to write the funnies and the reviews and the girl blurbs and, well basically every word in here that isn’t sent in by a contributor or an advert. See what I mean, it’s a lot of work.’

‘What’s girl blurb?’ I asked.

‘These bits, by each of the girl sets.’ Stuart opened up to a page showing some tall slender blonde bird rolling around in a stable, butt-arse naked, and indicated to a few paragraphs of text and a pull-out quote up in one corner of the picture.

‘What I’ll have to interview the girls?’ I said, hopefully.

‘Be a bit fucking difficult,’ he replied, flipping through the mag. ‘She’s Hungarian. This one’s Czech. So’s she. She’s Estonian. This one’s Russian and this one’s from Wolverhampton, so none of them speak English. No, you just look at the pictures and get a feel for the set. Maybe look up a few back issues if they’ve been in before and then write a few words as to what you imagine they would be saying, if asked the right questions.’

‘Imagine,’ I mused, quickly reading the girl in the barn’s fantasy about taking shelter out of a storm and getting done in both ends by a couple of wandering farm hands while the horses watched.

‘Yeah, you know, make it up. We got you to do some before and send them in, stuff like that.’

‘Oh right,’ I replied and tried to hide my disappointment. I’d always thought the girls had said these things themselves. Had I bashed off to something some geezer like me had written in the past?

‘Right, so why do you want to work for Bling?’ Stuart asked, looking across the table at me.

‘Well, I think it would be great working with naked birds all day and getting sucked off left, right and centre,’ I obviously didn’t say, although if you’ve ever been for a job on a porn mag this is your motivation. Don’t pretend it’s not.

‘Well,’ I started, wondering how the hell I was going to answer this. I’d known about my interview for a few days now and had been dreading this question and I still hadn’t come up with anything convincing. ‘I’ve always been interested in fashion.’

‘What’s that got to do with porn?’ Stuart asked, making me backpedal frantically

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Nothing at all. As for working here, I just thought it would be a bit of laugh, that’s all. I work in a very stuffy office at the moment and I just think that perhaps it would be nice to work somewhere fun for a change,’ I said and half-expected him to tell me that this was a serious business, not Alton Towers, but luckily he didn’t.

‘Yes, it can be alright,’ he admitted. It was about the best answer I could’ve given. If I’d told him I’d always been fanatical about porn and that it had been my lifelong ambition to work in the industry, I doubt I wouldn’t have stood a chance. I mean, who wants to work with someone who’s frothing at the bit about being surrounded by dirty mags all day long. Pretty unsettling, no. Same as Mr Kipling; how would he fancy some thirty stone lard arse working in his cake factory?

‘How much notice would you have to give at your current place of employment?’ Stuart asked.

‘Four weeks is the standard but I can negotiate if you need me sooner,’ meaning I’d drop them in the shit and jack tomorrow if you give me this job.

‘Money?’ he asked.

‘I can only afford to pay you a hundred a week,’ I joked. We both laughed and Stuart made a mental note to knock two grand off the number he’d first thought about.

‘Seriously, how much are you looking for?’

‘Well, if possible it would be nice if you could match my current salary,’ I told him, then chucked four grand on the top of my current salary.

‘Okay, I’ll see what I can do. Right, let’s get you set up on this subbing test then. The page should already be up on screen. It’s a 500 word dirty story, I just want you to go through it and correct and rewrite where you think it needs it and fit it to the page. If you could bold out any changes you make, that’ll save me reading the whole fucking thing again.’

I sat myself down in front of the computer and looked at the Quark page open up onscreen.

‘Alright if you start now you’ve got 15 minutes, that should give you plenty of time,’ he assured me.

I quickly skim-read the story which seemed to be about a posh housewife, a broken sink, a plumber, his mate and a big smelly face-full of splodge. It over-ran off the page by a couple of hundred words and there were a number of spelling, grammatical and physically impossible mistakes that all needed to be amended as well as a big pull-out quote which just read ‘FILL ME FILL ME FILL ME FILL ME FILL ME FILL ME FILL ME’. I was half-tempted to leave it as it was, as it seemed like the sort of thing she’d say anyway.

‘Is blowjob hyphenated or two words?’ I asked Stuart, who’d just phoned his secretary for coffee.

‘Hyphenated,’ he replied so I changed it to ‘blow-job’. At that moment there was a knock at the door and when I looked up I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like there was an explosion of realisation in my head and my heart leapt into my throat. Standing before me, asking me if I’d like tea or coffee, was a tall, slender blonde girl, say 21 or thereabouts, wearing nothing but high heels and a couple of hair clips. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and I’m serious, I literally could not believe my eyes.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked again, giving me a slight smile.

‘Erm... please,’ I replied, finally finding my voice.

‘One lump or two?’ she asked, barely three feet away. Her big round tits swung slightly as she leaned over to address me and her belly button stood at about my eye level, at least it would’ve been had I been looking at her. It seems daft, I know, there was a beautiful (and I do mean beautiful) naked girl standing not three feet from me and talking to me politely and the only place I could look was my shoes. I was burning up with embarrassment and my collar suddenly felt like a garrotte. I can’t explain this, I guess at the end of the day, all fantasies aside, most normal people feel fairly uncomfortable confronting bedroom stuff outside of the bedroom, particularly if you’re trying to sit a test.

A test?

That’s what it was. This was a test? The article didn’t matter, that was a red-herring, this girl in front of me was the test. Fuck, what was I meant to do?

First thing was first, I think she needed answering.

‘No sugar for me, than you.’

‘Cream?’

Oh God!

‘Just milk thanks,’ I replied and she gave me a little wink and left the room. Being the gentleman that I was, I waited until her back was turned before staring at her as hard as I could to try and indelibly imprint her image on my brain.

I looked over at Stuart, who hadn’t even looked up from his notes. I thought maybe he’d be smiling or laughing or trying to hide his boner like I was but he was completely unmoved. Was this a test? Perhaps not. Perhaps they really did have naked women who worked here full-time. What am I talking about why would they? What would be the point? Sure it was a porno company but that didn’t mean everyone who worked here had to wander around butt-arse naked all the time. Or did it?

No, it had to be a test. But again what sort of test? What was expected of me? If Stuart had turned around to me and told me to oil her tits up or take pictures of her then at least I would’ve known what to do, but he hadn’t. He hadn’t said a word. The initiative was all with me.

Not my specialist chosen subject.

They weren’t expecting me to get naked as well, were they?

No, they couldn’t be. Or could they? Why else bring a naked girl into the room? Oh lord, she was back.

‘There you go,’ she said, putting a mug of tea down next to me.

‘Rebecca, could you take a letter for me please?’ Stuart said and Rebecca sat in the chair next to me, picked up a pen and pad and started scribbling down whatever it was Stuart started banging on about. I couldn’t hear him. All I could hear was the blood coursing through my ears, my heart thumping in my chest and my zip starting to give.

I ploughed my way through the article, trying to take my mind off the naked woman beside me by reading about an altogether separate naked woman who had two cocks in her mouth.

Oh no, this wasn’t the test, was it?

I didn’t have to have sex with this girl in front of Stuart, did I? Oh Christ, I couldn’t do that, no way. I had trouble taking my top off at the beach, but getting my old fella out in front of another man? Oh no, oh no no no!

Was that what I was what was expected to do? I mean this was the porn industry after all. Presumably they were looking for a certain type of person who could work in the industry; a person who – like in the stories – enjoyed spit-roasting posh housewives in the afternoon while high-fiving their mates across her back. They didn’t want prudes or namby-pamby shy boys working with them. And if I wanted this job, I was going to have to overcome my inhibitions and prove I could be like the nastiest of them too. This was the real test, wasn’t it? To see if I was man enough to work in the industry. Me and Stuart were both going to have to do her and presumably high-five and say; ‘Yeah, take it bitch’ at some point.

Oh God, what if my balls accidentally touched his? I knew they’d shrivel up to the size and hardness of small diamonds and never be seen again.

I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t. I knew that was what they were both waiting for, for me to stand up and say, ‘Come on then, let’s party!’ but fuck that! No way. If this was what it took to get a job in porn then I had to admit I just wasn’t up to it and good luck to whoever was.

I cracked on with the article and subbed it and proofed it one last time before asking if that was all.

‘Good, well time’s up now anyway. Did you bold all the bits you’d done?’

I told him I had.

‘Well that’s about it then, unless there’s any final thing you’d like to ask?’ Stuart said.

I thought about this for the briefest of moments, this was my last chance.

‘Just one thing,’ I said and looked at Rebecca, ‘which temp agency do you use?’

A joke. One feeble joke, that was all I could manage. What a feeble excuse for a man I was. Stuart and Rebecca smiled and Stuart said he’d show me out. As I got to my feet, slowly and carefully, Rebecca glanced at the front of my trousers and then up at me and smiled. I could’ve cried. What was I doing? I’d never had anyone this beautiful taking an interest in me in my life (and wasn’t ever likely to) and I was turning tail and running like a coward. I caught her eye one last time and she gave me a wink.

Wasn’t life cruel?

If only Stuart had left the room, just for five minutes, not even that. Thirty seconds would’ve been long enough, the state I was in.

So unfair.

Stuart shook my hand again, told me he’d be in touch and pointed me towards the door. I didn’t believe him for a minute. What must he be thinking of me right now? The receptionist asked me how it had gone as I passed by and I told her not too good.

‘I’m sure you did fine,’ she replied and added, ‘Basically, with this company, if they like you they’ll hire you. I mean, how many people are likely to have the sort of experience we’re after?’ making me feel no better for it. You know it’s funny but I could see right down her cleavage as I said goodbye, but it didn’t even register with me until I was out. I wondered if the receptionist had picked up on this too and came to the same conclusion as Stuart.

Probably gay.

‘Jesus, he seemed more interested in me than in you,’ I could hear Stuart telling Rebecca back in the interview room.

‘I could’ve turned him,’ she was arguing back, ‘If you’d just left us alone for five minutes. I would’ve done anything for him.’

This conversation raged across my brain for the whole of the Tube ride home and culminated in Stuart giving Rebecca my address so that she could come after me. She was probably on a Tube right now, I told myself, and due to start banging on my front door at any minute. While I waited for her to get here, I slipped off my jacket, kicked my shoes across the room, drew the curtains and had the biggest and baddest wank of my life.