IT WAS A HIGH-SUMMER NIGHT in 2007. I was standing on a friend’s rooftop in Hell’s Kitchen, basking in the glare from nearby Times Square, which bounced off the glass-sided skyscrapers and lit up the night around me. I was drunk. There was a similarly intoxicated group of old friends surrounding me, wine flowing and music playing, and the sweaty embrace of an August evening in New York cradled me.
I was twenty-four years old. I considered myself a writer, but I hadn’t written anything of note except a few poems and some essays that had earned me scholarship money and minor recognition at the undergraduate level. I had a BA in English literature with a minor in philosophy, a year of volunteering experience, and several positions as an administrative assistant under my belt. I had absolutely no plans for the future. Nor did I have a job.
But with the buzzing energy of New York thrumming through my system, I wanted to grab my ambitions by their necks, squeeze out the drops of talent I’d been squandering, and get into the game somehow. I had just returned to the city after two years, having graduated from one of its several universities in 2005 and then wandered off to collect life experiences elsewhere before crawling back, tail between my legs, about a week earlier. I’d left Chicago in a haze of depression and self-medication and landed in a sweltering apartment in a filthy building in Harlem with my boyfriend and two grad-student roommates. I had no prospects, no plan, and nothing to do other than accept whatever cash might deign to come my way. In short, I was a mess.
“Samantha,” I slurred to the friend whose shoebox of an apartment downstairs was notable mostly due to its exceptionally well-located roof. “Do you know anybody who’s looking for a writer? I need a job.”
She cocked her head to one side, evaluating me. We’d known each other since high school, and though we’d never been particularly close, she knew me pretty well: a country girl with a flair for the dramatic, a wide rebellious streak, and a need bordering on compulsion to write.
“Well …” she replied slowly, considering each word. “I do have a friend who’s looking for writers …”
I perked up. “Yes! Give them my name!”
“Well …” she said again, tilting her head to the other side. “It’s at a magazine …”
“I can do magazines! Hook me up!”
A pause. She straightened her head and looked me dead in the eye. “It’s at a porn magazine.”
I blinked and tilted my cup to my mouth. This required more wine. A vision of what writing for a porn magazine would entail formed hazily in my mind: There would be parties, I thought. Elbow rubbing with sophisticated types, and sexy new friends, surely. I would probably be, within a matter of months, the coolest person I knew. Probably the coolest person anyone knew. An exotic, interesting, worldly, very, very cool porn journalist.
Little did I know that at that very moment, the porn industry wasn’t particularly exotic, worldly, or cool. As a matter of fact, it was just as much of a mess as I was. A hot, sweaty, confused, desperate mess. As I’ve spent years watching it from my particular vantage point, halfway in and halfway out, I’ve come to realize that it has always been a mess, and will likely always be a mess. Not because of the literal messes of bodily fluids, or the ethical ambiguity in which it exists, so much, but because it is a mess of an industry. I don’t mean that as a put-down, rather as a statement of fact and, really, of wonder that it has clung on as tenaciously and successfully as it has through the near-constant shitstorms that have always plagued it.
Pornography may not really be that exotic or that cool, but it is just as interesting as I hoped it would be that night. It is as vast and varied as the City of New York, as disorganized as the mind of a twenty-four-year-old writer. It has no agreed-upon leader, no formalized code of conduct, no entrance exam or standard for advancement. The only rule, really, is to follow the money in as safe a way as possible, with the word “safe” being a very malleable term indeed. Perhaps the only trait its denizens have in common is a genius for finding a way forward—toward the money—through technology, media, and the marriage of the two. That, and a very high libido.
But I knew none of this on that roof in 2007. At the moment in question, with my red Solo cup at my lips, all I saw was unbounded opportunity reflected by the electric skyline.
“Fine by me,” I said to Samantha at last, trying to sound as if I weren’t mentally foaming at the mouth for the job. “Give him my name! I’m into it.”
I didn’t want to sound too excited. After all, porn was a shameful kind of thing, in my experience, and I was talking to someone from high school. We’d been raised in the same part of the world, where sex wasn’t talked about and the prospect of hobnobbing with degenerates excited nobody. But I was thrilled. In my fuzzy dream-vision, my future porn-journalist self was hobnobbing with French art film types and drinking much better wine than the cheapest stuff I’d been able to find at the liquor store on my way here. She was someone I wanted to be.
“Okay,” Samantha said. “His name’s j. vegas. That’s his porn-writing name, but it fits pretty well. I’ll give him your info.”
“Fantastic! Thank you so much!”
Samantha fiddled with her phone, maybe sending my number to him right then, and I wandered off to refill my cup, then looped my arm around my boyfriend—whom I’d also known since high school. Life was looking extremely rosy.
In that moment, porn was an unexpected godsend. It was something that I, like many young adults, had never spent much time thinking about, aside from the few minutes every day or two I spent getting myself off to it. I’d had moments of doubt and guilt over it, like most of us do, but I’d never gone very far down the rabbit hole of considering its implications on my life, or the world, or the people who made it. Porn just was, as unknowable to me as the fashion industry that was currently crowding Bryant Park a half mile away for Fashion Week. As mysterious as whomever lived in the penthouses all around me, looking down on us mortals clustered desperately on a fourth-story rooftop. Impenetrable as the glittering sidewalks.
I’ve since walked down those sidewalks for ten years longer than I ever planned to, infiltrated the offices of a porn magazine, met a man named j. vegas who would change my life, and though I’ve looked back many times and wondered why I chose this thorny, often dark, and always fascinating path, I’ve never turned around. I’ve learned volumes about the permeability and malleability of one of the most diverse and nebulous—and profitable—industries in the world, about the people who make it what it is, and about what it all means about us as humans. I’m going to try to fit it into this book, if you’re willing to come along for the ride.
We’re both consenting adults, right?