My heart pounds and I steady myself with another sip.
“Dean saw it scheduled in the content management system. He forwarded it to me.”
My heart sinks a little. My plan had been to set the CMS to publish the story automatically after midnight. If I did nothing, the story would run with a graph at the end stating that Oz declined to comment.
My play was a little insurance policy in case Oz tried to kill the story. Not a very good one, I know. But I also know it wouldn’t need to be up for long. On the Web you only need to live for a few minutes to exist for eternity. So I figured—hoped really—that a few local news outlets would pick up the story and run with the ball long enough to make it real. From there, I planned to cover whatever fallout there was as a freelancer. With any luck I’d land on staff somewhere in the next year. But what I hadn’t counted on was Dean’s loyalty.
“Do you remember your interview?” Oz asks.
“When you told me you didn’t want to hire a whore?”
Oz smiles. It occurs to me that this is the longest we’ve ever spoken. It also occurs to me that he hasn’t once picked his nose, for which I am grateful.
“I guess I’m not employee material,” I say.
“It’s too bad. You connected the dots. For the most part.”
“So it’s true,” I say. “You own TubeWorks.”
Oz nods and says, “I own the future.”
“OK, so why keep that a secret?”
“It’s not a secret,” he says. “It’s just not something I advertise.”
“What’s your connection to Johnny Toxic?” I ask, taking a notepad out of my pocket.
“That’s cute,” Oz says. “But this isn’t an interview.”
“Then why are we here?”
“We want the truth, right?”
Oz lifts his glass, and I’m obliged to do the same.
“To the truth,” he says.
We swallow our medicine. It stings, burning a hole down to my core. Oz smiles, like he’s gotten one over on me, but I can’t figure the angle.
“Now, what I need to know is where you got your information,” Oz says.
“What if I don’t tell you?”
There’s that smile again—sinister.
“Then you might not make it to the hospital in time,” Oz says.
My mind goes blank. I look at my drink and the pieces tumble together.
“And even if you do, they may not know which poison you ingested,” Oz continues. “And more importantly, they won’t know which antidote to give you.”
I check my glass again. It’s empty, but I feel normal, which is to say that I feel like shit.
“You’re bluffing,” I say.
“So call my bluff.”
Oz smiles and I get the feeling that he’s not bluffing.
“You see all the people out there, Heywood? See them dancing and drinking like there’s no tomorrow? They’re doomed. Do you know that?”
I look out across the room. Miles is doing body shots off his favorite porn star. Her body is a temple, each curve a sacrifice to the pleasure gods. She is a perfect sex idol. This is the pinnacle of her existence, her raison d’être. There under the lights, pressed up against a seething sea of men who worship her, if only for a fleeting masturbatory moment. She is the nectar their ids crave. She is a Siren, calling them to her, wrecking them on the rocky shores that separate men from their carnal dreams. And when they wreck, when they wash up on a broken beach of a fantasy that could never be real, they’ll dispose of her. They’ll clear their history, dispatching her flesh to a digital garbage bin. And then they’ll go searching for another woman—different, but always the same; perfect, but always just out of reach.
“There is no life after porn,” Oz says. “Once you cross that line, there’s no going back. And there’s no pot of gold at the end of the fuck-rainbow either. Not anymore. Not for the talent.”
“Let me guess, this is the part where you tell me your diabolical plan because you know I’m about to die,” I say. “Well, guess what, I’ve been there, heard that, and I’m still standing.”
Oz breaks out into hysterical laughter.
“There’s a fine line between smart and stupid and you ride it like a champ,” Oz says. “Do you know how much traffic we get?”
“Very little,” I say. “Nobody in the industry reads the site.”
“We get eight million visitors a month.”
My head spins like a merry-go-round, but I can’t tell if it’s the poison Oz says he put in my drink, or the realization that millions of people are reading the news-like substance I produce. Somehow the bigger the lie, the more it crushes my soul.
“Need another drink?” Oz asks with a dark grin. “We’re the number one referral site to the TubeWorks network. Every time a porn star or company appears in a story there’s a link.”
“To the adult film database.”
“Which I own, and which I use to send traffic to TubeWorks,” Oz says. “That’s why spelling is so goddamned important. Fuck up the spelling like your pal Booty kept doing and the linking code doesn’t work, and we lose traffic. And Heywood, traffic is money.”
The tubes make money off of ads for penis pills and low-rent dating sites. It’s a volume business, Oz explains. And the best way to get volume is to cater to the millions of fanboys who hunger for stories about porn between jerk-off sessions.
“I mean, how many times can you jerk off in one day?” Oz asks.
“I don’t know, but I’m guessing one of these days I’ll get a press release about some guy trying to break the record.”
Oz chuckles a little. Then his face turns serious.
“We’re just like the Hollywood trades,” he says. “Most of the people who read them aren’t connected to the industry at all, they just want to feel like they’re in the know. That’s a powerful feeling, because if they believe it, then you can get them to click on anything. It’s the way of the world. Information is traffic and traffic...”
“Is money,” I say. “So you’ve been taking money from advertisers to direct traffic to the very thing that’s killing their business?”
“Well, when you put it like that, yes. The tubes are a reality, Heywood. If I didn’t own them, someone else would, and they’d do the exactly the same thing.”
“Which is?”
“Innovate. Disrupt. It’s called creative destruction. There’s still money in porn, Heywood. A lot of money. But selling porn is a losing proposition, and making it is for suckers, no pun intended. Porn’s an ad-supported medium now, and with a few computers and a small but loyal staff, I can own it all.”
“Except you’re missing one thing,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“A monocle.”
Oz’s eyes angle up to his forehead like he’s searching for the reference, scanning his mind.
“It’s capitalism, Heywood. There are winners, and there are losers.”
“Did he tell you who the source was?” Rachel asks as she takes a seat across from me.
“No, not even when I threatened to poison him,” Oz says.
“Maybe he’s a tough guy,” Rachel says.
“Maybe he’s a fool.”
“Maybe he just wants a straight fucking answer,” I say.
“You didn’t tell him about the story?” Rachel asks. “All that traffic, all those millions of lonely fucks pulling their peckers on New Year’s Eve. You didn’t tell him how many losers have read that story in just a few hours?”
“I thought the story was dead?”
“Your version is dead,” Oz says. “I had Dean edit me out. The story went live and it’s already gone viral.”
A sense of relief washes over me. There’s no telling the damage done by Dean’s edits, but a viral story is still the best ticket back to serious journalism. Such is the nature of news in the age of clicks.
“Mary Jane was just another anonymous piece of ass,” Rachel says. “She could fuck and s
uck with the best of them, but she never quite figured out how to make a name for herself.”
“But you did,” Oz says, thumbing a booger out of his nose. “The traffic to her videos is killing it.”
“Thanks to your story about a cute stoner with dangerous curves,” Rachel adds. “Even Ron’s name is starting to trend. Honestly, I think he’s worth more dead than alive.”
My stomach turns. I wasn’t sorry to see Ron go—the threat of being impaled with a hockey stick can do that to you—but it sickens me to hear that his death is being monetized.
“It’s all just grist for the mill,” I say. “Exploitation any which way you can.”
“You catch on slow,” Rachel teases.
“I’m promoting you,” Oz says. “Sunny quit.”
“You want me to be the editor in chief? I thought you were trying to poison me?”
“That was a joke,” Oz says. “You don’t think it was funny?”
I feel relieved about the poison, but that relief quickly gives way to anger at being toyed with.
“No, I don’t find it funny, asshole.”
“You’ll have to excuse Oz,” Rachel says. “He’s not a people person.”
“That’s why I have Rachel,” Oz says. “But I do need to know how you connected me to TubeWorks—that’s not negotiable.”
“We aren’t the only tube operator out there,” Rachel says. “In a year, that information will be public knowledge, but right now...let’s just say that it would be unfortunate if it became public.”
“Unfortunate or disastrous?”
Rachel smiles. I know she doesn’t want Oz publicly connected to TubeWorks, but I’ll never know how bad she wants it.
“What if I say no? What if I quit?”
“Then this is goodbye,” Rachel says.
Chapter 57: Odds & ends
January 2, 2012
The cold air stings my bruised face. I can feel the promise of rain in my shoulder with the kind of certainty that broken people say comes from having your bones twisted in directions they were never meant to go. What is less certain is if the rain will be enough to wash the city clean. I doubt it.
I stop by the office to pick up my last check, which Oz has left on my desk. I’d like to think that the money is payment for journalism services rendered, but I know better.
Inside the editors’ office, I see Dean typing away at his computer—the last man standing. He rocks with a twitchy rhythm, waiting for his smoke break so he can wrap the morning’s doubts in a sweet cannabis fog. I won’t tell Oz that Dean’s public records research helped me connect the dots when I saw Boyd’s file. Eventually, I know, Oz will discover Dean’s duplicity. But when that happens I know Dean will take whatever payoff he can get. Such is the nature of hiring whores. We are predictable and abundant; but for some of us, the payoff is the breaking point.
Before I leave, I take my copy of the AP style guide. I never opened it once while working as a porn journalist. At this point, I think it’s safe to say that, at best, it was a prop, a really big dildo that never quite got around to being jammed up someone’s ass. Such is the nature of dildos, which apparently don’t fall under the same rule Chekhov had about guns appearing in the first act and going off in the third.
***
As I walk to my car, my phone rings. I don’t recognize the number, but I pick up anyway.
“Heywood,” a woman’s voice says. “This is Sunny. Sunny Day.”
She tells me her real name. It comes out a little bashful, like she’s not used to using it. She congratulates me on the story. Then she asks me if I still have a job.
“Listen,” she says before I can answer. “I have something for you, a job. It’s kind of a strange publication. We need a journalist who can handle things when the going gets weird.”
I take the phone away from my ear and stare at it for a moment.
“Heywood, are you there?”
I press the phone back to my ear, not sure if I’m waking up from a dream or a nightmare.
“Is it porn?” I ask.
“No.”
“I’ll take it.”
***
At Aroma, I wait for Miles and Tan Girl, the assistant I met at our apartment over bagels and football. That was just a few days earlier, but it seems like a lifetime ago.
Tan Girl read Miles’ script the day before, while he nursed a hangover with college football and cold cuts. She called during halftime of the last game to say she liked the script, but that she had some concerns about “believability.” Which is why Miles has asked me to join them for lunch.
“No matter what,” Miles warns me, “just say yes. We can fix the story later.”
Miles has been sweating this meeting ever since it was set. But he has nothing to worry about. If Tan Girl picks up the check, I’ll tell her whatever she wants to know. Like the former publisher of The Daily Pornographer told me just before he was fired and I was hired, there are two sides to every story. I used to think that was bullshit. Now, I know I was wrong. There’s what really happened, and then there’s whatever they’re willing to pay for.
Author’s note
I began my career in porn journalism. Our staff was small, so I wore many hats. As often as possible, we churned out clickbait to support whatever publicity stunts the denizens of the San Pornando Valley might concoct. I visited film sets, covered business news, and wrote obituaries of “industry legends.” Because I had a law degree, I was assigned to cover obscenity trials, FBI raids, civil lawsuits (pornographers are surprisingly litigious), and even a bankruptcy. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was getting valuable experience for life after porn as a tech reporter.
It was a tech story, in part, that inspired me to write Not Safe for Work. As I was leaving porn, a handful of tube sites came along to disrupt and, ultimately, control the industry. Within a few years, many of the self-proclaimed “outlaws” and “perverts” I had covered were gone. Many of the porn stars I’d met had moved on too—porn is a transient business. But their successors seemed to be signing up in droves for shorter, nastier, lower-paying careers. At the same time, billions of fans suddenly had unprecedented access to an infinite universe of free porn videos. Somehow, the oldest and most reliably profitable product in history, commercial sex, was unprofitable for all but a handful of anonymous disruptors.
Curiously, or maybe not, I found the same disruption at work once I went “legit.” As a mainstream journalist, I covered tech, advertising, law, and personal finance. Each beat was unique, but always my coverage came up against the same economic question: can free news be good news? After all, as the old Silicon Valley saying goes, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
What that means, at least in the world of journalism, is that instead of producing news to sell to consumers, journalism has shifted to producing content so that media companies can sell consumers to their advertisers. Regardless of which news sources you prefer, you may have noticed that what’s called news, at least in the United States, is actually a news-like substance with heavy doses of opinion. That content is cheap to produce. Moreover, it’s presented as hyperbolic clickbait—the better to cut through the noise of an echo chamber made cacophonous by, you guessed it, clickbait. The internet really is an ouroboros of bullshit.
In creating Heywood Jablowme, I wanted to tell the story of a young reporter, someone hell-bent on speaking truth to power, struggling in the face of an expanding and brutal media echo chamber. At first glance, porn might strike you as a silly way into such a serious topic. But what I saw happen to porn turned out to be a prelude to what I would witness in journalism. Like pornographers, media outlets chase clicks, ratings, or whatever metric their business model values. In the end, journalists and porn stars might have more in common than they think. Of course, if that’s true, making yourself an informed citizen in the age of free news might be as daunting as looking for true love on a porn website.
The other inspiration for
writing Not Safe for Work came from “civilians,” the industry slang term used to describe outsiders. Male civilians always asked two questions: had I slept with a porn star, and could I introduce them to a porn star who would sleep with them? The answer to the first question was always “none of your business.” The answer to the second question was usually a variation on the following: “You’re barking up the wrong tree, dude, but let’s get real—just because a woman has sex for work doesn’t mean she’ll have sex with you.” Usually, that would end the conversation.
But to female civilians, I was a porn industry Ask Me Anything. In writing this book, I tried to speak to the countless women who asked me to explain a medium that is as ubiquitous as it is misunderstood. The truth about porn is stranger than fiction, in part because any industry that deals in taboos attracts oddballs and weirdos. As Hunter S. Thompson famously said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
I’ve always adored Thompson’s quote, but I’m not sure weird is the right way to describe porn’s place in our culture. Porn may be the product of society’s fringes, but its appeal is mainstream. In that sense, porn is the alter ego of our cultural zeitgeist. Or, as porn star Dylan Ryan put it, “Porn is the ultimate representation of human sexuality, and the biggest way in which we incorrectly interpret human sexuality. Porn is us.”
In Not Safe for Work, I’ve begun to tell the strange, messy, ludicrous, dark, bizarre, sexy, silly, unappealing, mind-blowing, depraved, toxic, empowering, troubling, and conflicting truths about content that billions of people watch each day. Telling that story will take multiple books. So please be on the lookout for book two in the series: The Last Sex Tape.
In the meantime, if you want to join my mailing list to receive updates about future books, please visit www.slackernoir.com.
Michael Estrin
Los Angeles
October 2020
About the author
For a time, Michael Estrin worked for porn’s second-best trade publication. Like all writers, he did it for the story, as well as for the money. Eventually he went legit, first as a mainstream journalist, then as a ghostwriter. His short stories have appeared in Akashic and Out of the Gutter Online. His fiction has won two Watty Awards, and he is a proud member of the Wattpad Stars program. His creative nonfiction has been published by Narratively, Vox, and Tablet. Like the ashes of a Viking warrior dispatched to Valhalla, his journalism is scattered all over the Web. He writes the “Situation Normal” newsletter on Substack. Not Safe for Work is his second novel. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Christina, and their dog, Mortimer.
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