Not Safe for Work

by Michael Estrin

  The first guy to move loses.

  A ribbon of pot smoke twists like a serpent in the air between us.

  I want to clear my throat, or shift my weight. But I know I can’t. He’s got the power pose.

  I have gumption, I hope.

  But I can’t hold out forever.

  Twisted up like a pretzel, my chin resting on my left palm, shoulders curled low, torso leaning back, I wonder if Bobby Beauchamp is even licensed to practice law in California, or anywhere? Maybe his credentials are as fake as his clients’ breasts.

  I should verify his license. If he’s lying about that, it would simplify things. One big lie and you lose all credibility. But something tells me there’s at least an element of truth in what Beauchamp has to say. Detecting the bullshit? Well, I guess that’s why Oz pays me the big bucks.

  “Shouldn’t you be writing this down?” Beauchamp asks in a jarring voice.

  Fuck. He’s right. I should be writing this down. That’s also basic—reporters write things down. Shit, I feel like an amateur, and I suppose that’s not far off. I haven’t been a working reporter long, and what little experience I have isn’t something I’d put on a resume.

  My hand feels for a pen that isn’t there.

  Shit, fuck, piss.

  Question: What kind of a reporter forgets to take notes?

  Answer: A cub porn reporter drowning in the deep end.

  He must know I’m a fraud. I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid to think that I could just chat with the lawyer of a murder victim and crack the case. Even for a real journalist that would be an impossible feat.

  If there’s a fine line between naïveté and hubris, I’m riding right on the edge, and right off the rails. My end game in all of this is a scenario that’s about as realistic as a pizza delivery guy getting a blow job for a tip.

  As Dean would say, this isn’t the Times, dude.

  “Fuck!” Beauchamp screams, sucking his thumb and finger because the joint burnt his hand. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  “Are you OK?”

  Beauchamp doesn’t answer. Instead, he sucks his thumb like a baby and tells me that I should write about how Johnny died fighting TubeWorks.

  “Those fucking tubes are ruining the Valley,” he says. “They’re based in Amsterdam, or the Cayman Islands, or somewhere. Johnny was the only guy left standing up to those motherfuckers.”

  “I thought he was making Fuck-Whores 8 for them?”

  Beauchamp waves his hand to air his thumb out and says, “We’re all just dancers for money. But only Johnny had the balls to give those cocksuckers the finger.”

  I’m not sure what that really means, but I’d have to be an idiot to miss the theme emerging in Beauchamp’s answers. As he sees it, Johnny Toxic was a thorn in the side of a very powerful, mysterious company. But is such a thorn worth murdering? Probably not. For Beauchamp’s cockamamie story to make any sense, Toxic would have to have stood in the way of something big, but as far as I can tell he was just working with TubeWorks and bitching about it.

  On the other hand, the idea that a business dispute turned deadly might not be all that implausible. For one thing, money is always an excellent motive for murder. Ask any contract killer. And while murdering an unruly pornographer for profit seems implausible, far-fetched, and irrational, that trifecta pretty much describes life in Porn Valley.

  Maybe I’m through the looking glass. Maybe Alice fled the farm, caught a bus to the coast, and got double-teamed by Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Or maybe that’s all bullshit.

  I think about my next question while Beauchamp tilts his chair back as far as it can go. I can beat around the bush and ask him more about TubeWorks in order to suss out some additional information, or I can take the direct route and ask if he thinks Johnny’s murder had something to do with his opposition to the tube sites, but I can’t do both at the same time. Such is the conundrum of interviewing a coked-out lawyer—ask the right question and the world could be your oyster, ask the wrong question and you may never recover the fumble.

  But there’s also an upside to interviewing a cokehead. Sometimes they just keep talking.

  He tells me that there used to be hundreds of guys like Johnny Toxic in the good old days, which began in the mid-nineties and lasted about a decade.

  Maybe they had grown complacent, but the pornographers of the Web 1.0 era hadn’t seen tube sites or social networks coming. Basking in the glow that came with being among the first industries to figure out how to make money on the internet, their success had made them fat, dumb, and happy. Or maybe they were just born that way.

  Copying YouTube with original names like YouJerk and FuckTube, the tube sites rolled up the first generation of digital pornographers like one of Mary Jane’s joints and smoked them all.

  Like robber barons for the digital age, the tubes began life as pirates, stealing content from the small-timers—guys who were in the business of shooting a scene every day and posting it to one of their half-dozen subscription sites. Most of the content was generic. They’d shoot a blow job scene for TotallyBlown.com, a MILF for MothersLittleHelper.net, or a new girl with pigtails for SweetValleyTeens.com. Then they’d grab lunch at PF Chang’s, take a siesta, and party until dawn. It wasn’t rocket science, but with a network of affiliate webmasters tempting customers with free previews, it was easy to sell access to the better stuff.

  “Easy and profitable,” he says with a nostalgic smile.

  But it was even easier and more profitable to rip these morons off. Back in the day, you couldn’t throw a rock down Van Nuys Boulevard without hitting a millionaire high school dropout. They rotated trophy girlfriends like they were Ed Hardy shirts, flew private to Vegas, and snorted the profits they didn’t spend on McMansions and Escalades. It was an American success story—Ayn Rand’s wet dream.

  Occasionally, these operators would strike it big with “high-concept” stuff like the guys who came up with the idea of fucking a girl in a van and then leaving her several miles away from her stated destination. Those guys were especially popular, probably because they leveraged the misogyny their competition thought didn’t exist because, in porn, female talent earns more than their male counterparts.

  Johnny Toxic was one of those guys. Before Fuck-Whores was a film franchise, it was a website. Thousands of subscribers paid $19.95 a month to watch a new woman each week whore herself out for rent money. There were other websites where producers would turn an amateur into a pro for the masturbatory pleasure of their audience, but according to his lawyer, Johnny Toxic was an innovator, carving out his particular niche in the gonzo genre, the category that defined internet porn’s glory days.

  “He actually paid the girls on camera,” Beauchamp gushes. “That was his contribution.”

  Sometimes he would hand out hundred-dollar bills for each individual act of depravity, other times he would stick a Benjamin to a woman’s forehead.

  “He was the first guy to use his jizz as an adhesive,” Beauchamp tells me proudly. “We actually filed a utility patent on his spooge.”

  “That worked?”

  “Not legally, of course not. But it was marketing gold!”

  Johnny Toxic had written “patent pending” on his website. One of my predecessors had run with the nonstory, probably because he was either bored by the onslaught of lesser press releases, or desperate to hit his quota. A few weeks after that, TechCrunch wrote a post calling for patent reform—a popular topic for the Silicon Valley set. They linked to The Daily Pornographer story as proof that patents had jumped the shark. That was their hook, the thing that got people to click on the article, which really had nothing to do with porn. Johnny Toxic’s patent-pending spooge was click bait for a serious post about intellectual property in the digital age, but it was also the best publicity a money shot could buy.

  “Sales went through the roof,” Beauchamp says. “Johnny did Stern.”

  Life was good for Johnny Toxic. Women were emailing him. They were
looking for a way into a six-figure life.

  “It beats waiting tables at the local Applebee’s and shitting out kids,” Beauchamp explains, as if the trade-off was obvious. “They figured they liked sex and they had the bodies that were in demand, so why not?”

  I watch Beauchamp do another bump.

  “All Johnny Toxic had to do was keep his dick hard and the cameras rolling.”

  But it’s pretty much an ironclad rule of business that if you’re making easy money, someone else is out there looking for a way to cut you off at your knees and drink your milkshake.

  By the time TubeWorks came for Johnny Toxic and the other guys who owned the established adult brands, they came with enough lawyers and money to get Warren Zevon out of a jam in Havana.

  Collectively, the tubes had muscled the industry in a Wall Street kind of way. The tubes devalued the product with tons of free porn, lowering the value of the product, and as a consequence, diminishing the capacity of the Valley’s pornographers to fight back.

  “Back then, free content was a marketing tool—a loss leader that could be used to get the wankers to type their credit card numbers in with one hand.”

  But that free content consisted exclusively of low-resolution pictures and thirty-second clips. It was an elaborate tease executed with internet efficiency, and eventually the industry wore its customers down.

  The tubes just took free content to its logical conclusion. Like an army of geeky Gordon Gekkos, they “shit-hammered the porn industry” by beating it at its own game.

  Instead of making content and giving out samples, the tubes made nothing and gave away someone else’s material for free. It was the perfect internet business—steal your product and monetize the traffic with ads.

  What happened next was Darwinian. Pornographers without an exclusive niche, gimmick, or girl fell first.

  “If all you sold is the promise of a blonde woman getting wildly fucked, you were pretty easy to imitate.”

  Even if you complained to a tube site and they took your content down, they still had thousands of similar clips from your competitors.

  “Eventually, the guys producing generic shit just gave up,” he says. “You can’t fight city hall.”

  At the other end of the spectrum, the studios drove hard bargains, demanding a better revenue share with the tubes and their own channels with prime placement for their high-priced contract girls.

  “The contract girls saved the studios, only the contract girls don’t know that, because if they had any brains they’d pay someone else to take it in the ass.”

  But according to Beauchamp, it was porn’s middle that really got squeezed—producers with original content worth protecting, but not enough muscle or savvy to fight the inevitability of what the economists call creative destruction.

  Not that they went quietly.

  A few of the more principled small-time pornographers took the tube sites to federal court.

  “You know, because the feds loved seeing the same assholes they’re trying to put in prison for obscenity start bitching about intellectual property.”

  The little guys got justice, but they couldn’t pay her bill. The shrinking profits went to the lawyers. Meanwhile, the tube sites were effectively judgment-proof.

  “It’s the law of the three ins,” Beauchamp explains. “Either they’re insolvent, in prison, or in some fucking foreign country where you can’t get their money.”

  TubeWorks was smart enough to be in some fucking foreign country, which is how the company survived the tumult of lawsuits that ravaged porn at the dawn of Web 2.0.

  When the dust settled, TubeWorks was one of the few outfits left standing. They consolidated their power by buying smaller tubes. They were able to optimize their traffic for maximum profitability because they knew what the entire world jerked off to. It was an early and filthy application of Big Data.

  And it was a gold mine.

  As TubeWorks got bigger and the market became so oversaturated with free porn that even high-concept stuff got lost in the noise, they offered guys like Johnny a deal.

  “Take-it-or-leave-it revenue shares. The split was shit, barely enough to make it worth the effort.”

  TubeWorks had turned porn into a feudal enterprise. By the time I met Johnny Toxic, he had laid off all his employees and, more or less, bowed down to the new world order.

  “They had him by the balls,” Beauchamp says. “In porn today, the tits and cocks are big, but the paychecks are small.”

  The story tracks with what Booty and Dean have told me. It explains much of what I’ve heard from pornographers—perverts, scumbags, and buffoons caught in a pincer of shitty licensing deals and content that’s been commoditized, a word that sounds good, until you realize that the only time a commodity is hot is when it’s rare, which is never when it comes to free porn. Such is the plight of today’s pornographers, operating on razor-thin margins because, with very few exceptions, most of us aren’t all that loyal to the brands we jerk off to.

  That’s Beauchamp’s story, but I’m not really sure what the proliferation of free porn and the collapse of the adult entertainment industry have to do with Johnny Toxic’s murder.

  “You said Johnny fought TubeWorks, how?”

  “Go Fuck Yourself.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “GFY,” he says.

  I’m drawing a blank, and apparently it shows on my face.

  “Go Fuck Yourself—the bulletin board,” he says. “You don’t know about GFY?”

  I’ve been told to go fuck myself plenty of times, especially in the last week. But I’ve never heard of GFY.

  “Jesus, they don’t teach you guys shit,” he says. “They just call you a reporter and send you out to the wolves, huh?”

  My eyes look to the ceiling, like I’m looking for an answer or maybe a press pass tucked into my hatband.

  “So, GFY is...” I say.

  “It’s an industry bulletin board,” he says. “It’s where people get their news. Johnny used it to make trouble for TubeWorks. He’d post threads about how they took down porn they didn’t like, and how they cheated producers out of revenue. Johnny posted about how TubeWorks really operates. He spoke truth to power.”

  “What was that truth?”

  “That TubeWorks wanted to control every cent of revenue in the industry,” he says. “Total monopoly—Boardwalk and Park Place. Hotels. Even the low-rent whores on...what were the purple ones at the beginning called?”

  I sink into my chair, feeling totally useless. It’s bad enough that there’s a rival news source that matters more than the publication I work for. But the fact that I didn’t even know about that source leads me to conclude that I’m either an incompetent or a total fraud. Or both.

  “Baltic Avenue!” Beauchamp says, finding a memory of childhood board games through the drug haze. “They want that one too.”

  I’m contemplating the fact that we don’t hear much about antitrust anymore, despite the fact that it’s fashionable—at least in left-leaning college-educated circles—to say that we’re living in a new Gilded Age, when Beauchamp pours salt on my wounds.

  “The rumor on GFY is that a performer killed Johnny Toxic,” he says.

  “Ron?” I ask.

  “Are you kidding?” he says. “Ron Jeremy wouldn’t kill anyone.”

  “No, I mean Ron, the guy who was in Fuck-Whores 8.”

  “Who?”

  “The other guy,” I say. “He fucked...he did the scene...well, he was the first one with Mary Jane, before Johnny.”

  Now it’s Beauchamp’s turn to give me a blank look.

  “Do you know him?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Do you have production records?” I ask.

  “Like what?”

  “Performer contracts, deal memos.”

  “For Fuck-Whores 8?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t actually get to do those before the shoot.”


  Somehow it doesn’t surprise me that the Beauchamp fumbled the legal task. But GFY may be able to lead me to the other Ron. More importantly, Beauchamp wants to get back to the game, so this concludes our interview.

  He walks me to the door and pats me on the back.

  “Are you sure you can’t stay? You will get more laid than you’ve ever been.”

  It’s tempting because I wasn’t aware there were degrees of getting laid. But I decline without offering a reason.

  “Heywood,” Beauchamp says, putting his arm on my shoulder. “I like you, so here’s a little free legal advice.”

  “OK.”

  “Don’t source any stories to GFY,” he says. “Oz will have your ass in a sling.”

  Chapter 32: Go Fuck Yourself

  The good news is that Bobby Beauchamp was right—Go Fuck Yourself really is a reporter’s gold mine. The bad news is there’s no way to search the forum for information pertaining to Johnny Toxic (or anything else, for that matter) because there’s no search bar.

  I suspect that the webmaster behind Go Fuck Yourself deliberately refrained from adding a Google search bar to make the forum highly addictive to the adult traffic jockeys who linger there all day. Without a way to search the site, regulars must stay logged in to keep current, scanning each new thread as it goes live. Otherwise there’s a good chance that something important may tumble into the digital abyss that is more than a decade’s worth of industry scuttlebutt.

  But an alternate theory that I’m also willing to entertain is that the webmaster purposefully omitted the search bar to keep Google from indexing the site in a halfhearted attempt to protect whatever privacy people think they might have online. This theory is bolstered by a high number of angry political posts espousing a libertarian ideology that is impossible to pigeonhole as either Left or Right.

  Mostly, GFY is about fucking around on the internet, cracking dick jokes, posting gross-out photos, and bathing in unsubstantiated rumors. In theory, that behavior is part of managing one’s porn business persona. So arguably, posting a picture of your girlfriend doing nude Pilates is as much about networking as it is perversity. If your friends bump that thread—and if she’s hot, why wouldn’t they?—people will want to do business with you. Or at least, they’ll do business with you once to see if that traffic you’re selling really does convert.