“We don’t spell ‘come’ C-U-M here,” Lauren explained while standing in front of my little Formica desk in the office which, one week prior, had been the Xerox room. “I know most other adult magazines do, but we don’t. If you look up ‘cum’ in the dictionary, it means ‘along with or in combination with.’ It does not mean semen—male or otherwise.”
“That’s very true,” I replied, glancing at the eleven highlighted cum references in the half-page column of text in my hand, which I was supposed to have proofread for those types of discrepancies. I leaned over my computer and handed the printout back to her. “It just feels so natural for it to come out as … as cum … the C-U-M version. Sorry about that.”
“Nobody seems to get it right,” she said. “Don’t worry. I know it doesn’t look right, but it’s proper. That’s what I’m most concerned with. Nobody seems to give a shit about the proper use of English these days, so I’m doing what I can to correct that. Even if it’s just here in porn.”
She was the sexiest boss I had ever worked for, with her pale skin, dyed pink bob cut, plaid miniskirt, and knee-high boots. And to see her standing before me, and to listen to her explaining her grammatical preference of euphemism for a man’s ejaculate was a position that I had never dreamed possible. But there I was, the newest Copy Editor for three of the nation’s biggest gay men’s adult magazines, mistaking cum for come on my first day. For shame, self. For shame.
“But you really need to catch these things. It’s all in the Style Guide that I gave you; all the acceptable spellings and punctuation points,” she added. “And remember: no children, no animals, no forced sex. You need to send it back to the writer if you see any of those.”
“I’ll be sure and keep an eye out,” I replied.
“Oh, and feel free to use other euphemisms for ‘come’ or ‘cock,’” Lauren added. “You’ve got like … nine … ten ‘cocks’ peppered throughout this article. Readers get bored with reading the same name over and over. Try replacing some of these ‘cocks’ with ‘dick,’ ‘prick,’ ‘meat-finger,’ or ‘shaft.’ They’re the Holy Four. They’ll get a lot of use. And ‘balls’ too. ‘Nuts’ are fine, or ‘sack’ if you have to … just not ‘testicles.’ There’s nothing sexy about the word ‘testicles.’”
She definitely misread the expression on my face; what she must have thought was revulsion was really just pure and simple astonishment—astonishment at hearing such colorfully perverse words spoken so nonchalantly by both an attractive woman and an employer. “You’re all right with this still, aren’t you?” she asked with motherly eyes. “I’m not freaking you out, am I? That look on your face …”
“No, no, not at all,” I replied. “It’s quite the opposite, actually. This look is my thinking look. What about skin plums?”
“Skin plums. Instead of testicles. Because they hang, like fruit.”
“Ummm, not so sure about that one.”
“How about meat-fruit? Like, ‘this is my meat-fruit.’ Or man-fruit might be pretty good,” I added.
My references were getting more comical and less sexy, according to Lauren. She explained that it was probably due to some inherent mental safety mechanism which substituted humor for emotion when confronted with sex; she then asked if I grew up Catholic. She was good, but I denied everything. Then she suggested come-dumplings for the article, and I proposed man-yolk, but we both settled on cock-giblets.
My first week as Copy Editor at Sizzling Publications passed by rather quickly, and quite easily. My average day was divided into two tasks: (1) writing photographer and model credits across the bottoms of photos of men with 9-inch penises penetrating other men with nine-inch penises, and (2) writing red hieroglyphic code beside misspellings and grammatical errors in articles and fiction pieces for the upcoming issues. The proofreading language was an amazingly spirited vocabulary of symbols, once you memorized its thirty or so most-used characters—or once you invisi-taped a small cheat sheet to the bottom of your monitor. The swirls and circles and dotted lines looked like a primitive Hebrew language that had all but died out with the Old Testament, and now only a few highbrows and scholars knew how to use it correctly. And I made sure to explain it this way to most people when asked what I now did for a living, and always while rubbing my chin and nodding. Sure, any asshole could circle a word that needed to be capitalized, or find a location in a sentence that would be better served with a comma instead of a period. But find me one son of a bitch that can propose using a semicolon correctly, especially in a paragraph about two men fondling each other’s scrotums, and I’ll show you a genius in the wrong line of work.
So I arrogantly inscribed my little red marks beside, below, and above every grammatical error, punctuation problem, and misspelling I could find, explaining to each and every staff writer—with my intellectually superior crimson code—that his use of “their” should have been a “they’re,” and his “cum” should be “come.” Drunk with this newfound power, and only slightly to impress Lauren, I began to go above and beyond what was editorially necessary. Almost every “that” became a “which,” “where,” or “when.” Semicolons were appearing everywhere; hyphens were popping up between “cock” and “sucker,” but not between “cock” and “sucking,” which was a totally different ballgame, according to the Style Guide—the whole noun-versus-verb thing, you see. My budding passion for the job helped me to realize that I had always been a proofreader at heart. I had just never really known it until I applied for a job as one.
But the question of my sexual preference never came up—not during the interviewing process and not as the weeks passed on. I guess they just assumed that any man applying for an editorial job at a gay men’s porn magazine was either gay, really into man-on-man pornography, both, or none of the above and just needed a job. Falling into that latter category, I knew the laws had worked to my advantage in getting the position, because it was illegal to ask the sexual orientation of a person during the hiring process. I also realize that this law was usually reserved for the gay not the straight, but the sauce for the goose was the same for the gander, according to Grandma. But I thought for sure, by now, someone would have just asked me.
It took another week until I realized that I was literally the only heterosexual man in an office of over fifty male coworkers. I had a few solid paychecks in the bank and a brief understanding of the rights I had as an employee, so I felt it was time to let a little bit of the truth out. Nothing too damaging at first; just a few random comments to Lauren, then a few through the local gossip channels in the graphic arts department. Just enough for them to question my preference for the vagina or the penis, maybe even toy with the idea of “playing for both teams,” at the very least. Then a three-day weekend found me in the arms of a woman named Brass McMann, who had taken it upon herself to blow into her cat’s rectum while I was giving her oral, and I felt the need to relay this odd information to an editor named Michael that following Tuesday back at work. We worked for a porn magazine, after all, and I hadn’t had too many recent tales to tell at the watercooler, so I needed something to share. But it was now finally out of the bag: I slept with women; I was a breeder. Much to my surprise, he complimented me on being so well dressed and well groomed for a “vagina preferer,” then passed the news through a few of his own gossip channels. Well, his channels reached much farther than mine did, and by lunchtime the news of my heterosexuality had reached Sandy.
“You’re straight?!” she charged into my office with a great big smile and announced uncomfortably loud. “I knew it! I knew you were straight! I had a bet going on, and I knew it! It’s just you and me … and Lauren … but she’s married. Everybody else here blows cock! Well, I guess I do too, and probably Lauren. But you sure don’t! Wow! Great! That is so good to hear!” And at precisely that moment I knew I should have kept my mouth shut.
When you surround a single woman in her mid-30s with nothing but gay men and one straight man, you’re looking at trouble. When you surround Sandy with nothing but gay men and one straight man, you’re looking at an orgy and probably a lawsuit. She was the editor of the magazine Young Guys, which, like its name made clear, showed pictures of early-20-something twinks flirting with the camera in such scenic locations as pool, locker room, pool, and locker room. My first conversation with Sandy established that she was “very much” a single, heterosexual woman; healthy and disease-free; on several dating websites; turned on by male porn; “very much” a single, heterosexual woman again; that she preferred cum over come; and then a little joke about just preferring cum in general. After she flashed that devious, love-thirsty smile of hers, I knew employment at Sizzling Publications would never be the same again. My candor had severed the innocent unicorn’s horn.
Sandy was graced with an enormous set of breasts, an intrusive personality, and a phone-voice that permeated office walls. And she seemed to have a talent for writing male-on-male pornographic prose, although she had the good sense to use manly sounding author aliases like Sherwood, SJ, and Sam for her articles—to keep the illusion alive for her readers. Her “Editor’s Recommendations” page of the top-performing dildos and vibrators always had a tried-and-true quality about it, although I considered it a little devious to judge a vibrator’s merit on vaginal stimulation as opposed to anal stimulation. But a good Copy Editor doesn’t dare touch such topics out of his pay grade.
There are times when someone flirts and it’s so subtle that the message goes unnoticed by the receiving party. And then there were Sandy’s flirtations, which were always noticed, always seemed to take place over a desktop full of nude photographs, and consisted of comments like, “Look at that cock, will ya? God, I’d give anything to rub that sweet little pecker right now. Say … he looks kind of like you …” Or, “Do you ever just stand in front of a locker-room mirror like that and jack off? I bet you make a face like his when you blow your load on your own reflection? I have a big mirror like that at my place … we can find out.” And yes, I agree, it’s difficult to judge what truly makes a flirtation a flirtation when you’re staring at a photo of a college quarterback masturbating, which also happens to be part of your job. But if you could have just seen that look in her eyes—like a wolf in heat staring at a rabbit that resembled both lunch and the last penis on Earth—then you would know what a dangerous situation I had found myself in.
“She’s loud and obnoxious,” Lauren would always say after slinking into my little office seconds after Sandy left. “I hate her. I really hate her. I can hear her from my office, and I’m way over there.”
“She said I—”
“And she’s a sycophant. And she’s one of the leading contributors to the whole ‘cum–come’ debacle. I truly hate her. I’m going to ask Papa Legba to teach her a lesson. I really am. If she keeps this up, I am.”
Papa Legba. It was moments after this precise conversation when I discovered that Lauren was a practicing witch. And not the hippie-mom, quartz necklace, Sarah McLachlan type of witch, but the Haitian voodoo type. The type that put themselves into trances, made strange little dolls, used powders made from dried bones, and swore oaths of vengeance on people they hated. Apparently, Papa Legba was her spiritual guide in the afterlife, and she made offerings to him weekly. He could only be reached by closing her eyes and chanting his name or something, which she did quite frequently in her office.
Papa Legba or not, the feud between Lauren and Sandy was escalating day by day, and I, like most of the other employees, was slowly being forced to pick a side or fall into the void between. Because, like any good grudge between female coworkers, it wasn’t just them that you had to worry about; it was the legions they built around themselves. Sandy had her friends-turned-allies, most of whom were in the advertising and graphic departments. And Lauren had her supporters, who were upper management and Human Resources. The rest of the editorial department was split on their partisanship: Follow the loud lady that talks too much, or follow the smart one who makes us spell “cum” as “come”?
There was no decision on my part. Even though I was beginning to suspect that Lauren was a little crazier than I had originally assessed—be it the rattling drawer full of empty antidepressant bottles or the time she asked me to hold a tape recorder while she underwent one of her rolled-back-eyes trances—the alternative to her was a thousand times worse. Besides, Lauren had hired me. She had helped me to realize my true nature as a Copy Editor in pornography. She had also won my undying loyalty by introducing me to her medicinal marijuana dealer, who made weekly deliveries to the office. And, of course, I still wanted to sleep with her. So I signed the deed. I had her back, and she had mine.
Regardless of—or possibly as a result of—the feud between the two editors, my career in gay porn began to flourish. I was asked to write a few short articles about gay-related news events for an upcoming issue, which then turned into erotic storylines for a few picture sets. Within a week of the publishing of that second article, I was promoted to Associate Editor of both 9 Inches and Young Guys, and given a bigger office and an assigned parking spot in the subterranean garage. Along with my new windowed view of Wilshire Boulevard and my pay raise, I also received health insurance and a healthy 401(k) package. I began writing more and more articles and fiction pieces for the magazines. And according to the letters to the editor, it was top-notch gay porn.
The best I could figure it, my porn succeeded where others’ failed because mine was written from a different perspective than what most readers were used to—like the way S.E. Hinton, who was a young female author, had penned such an insightful, male-coming-of-age novel like The Outsiders. For Hinton, not knowing what it felt like to be a teenage boy somehow helped her to write about teenage boys. And for me, not knowing what it felt like to be in a teenage boy somehow helped me to write about being in teenage boys. For instance, instead of the typical storyline of “Bobby” meeting “Tony” under the college stadium bleachers to celebrate a football game victory with a hand-job and a finger up the ass, my plots dove into Tony’s and Bobby’s emotional and psychological sides. My character development was rich and deep, and exposed the true nature of Tony wanting to get hammered by the quarterback. You see, Tony was a lonely child; he burned ants with a magnifying glass when his mother wasn’t around; he stuck candles in his ass as a teenager before going off to college to discover his true nature, his true sexuality. Now, Tony couldn’t get enough cock, and Bobby the quarterback was more than willing to provide. Bobby, you see, loved the game of football so much that he equated the pigskin with the asshole. Climaxing was his touchdown and the field goal was the reach-around.
I even surpassed Lauren’s “Holy Four” recommendation by creating my own long list of usable euphemisms for the three most overused terms in male pornography: cock, balls, and the ass. I had every corner covered with my new index. Need a good substitute for cock? Try a poker, meat-rocket, prober, porker, chunky finger, dong, the ripper, pork sandwich, Dr. Feel-Good, the thick one-eye, beef monster, meat enchilada, skin stick, vein burrito, bulbous bologna, and man-meat. Or for the uncircumcised I had the cloaked druid and the pig-in-a-blanket. Oh, balls, you said? How about meat plums, man-fruit, coin purse, candy sack, come-factory, danglers, love-nuggets, dingleberries, come-kwats, or little hairless fellas. Ah, yes, lest we forget the asshole … the cornerstone of any good bout of sodomy. Try one of these on for size: man-pussy, hot-pocket, brown-eye, the pooper, the pooder, the dingus, man-gina, my sweet ride, velvet cocoon, chocolate-pocket, raspberry starfish, pink balloon knot, meat sleeve, love-hole, manhole, sweet meat, chili cup, the midnight gap, the meaty hollow, snack crack, and The Angus.
I had everything going for me those first few days until the other part of the new job duty surfaced: As Associate Editor, I was also supposed to work directly under the other editors, one of whom was Sandy. And she made sure to state it like that every time the issue came up in conversation: “You do a great job working under me,” she would joke constantly. “You use your ‘cocks’ so powerfully under me.” A few times a week would have been funny … for that first week. But it was a few times an hour, every hour. And always with the perfume, leaving a thick, scented trail between her office and mine every 20-25 minutes.
I started to dread hearing the clopping of her approaching high heels, and I would constantly pick up the phone and pretend to be in a conversation with a freelance writer or curious customer when she poked her head into my office. With my head angled down and eyes shielded by a tensed palm, anybody else would have simply placed their workload onto my desk and left, or come back in a few minutes. Not Sandy. When standing in my doorframe for five or ten minutes wouldn’t grab my attention, walking in and leaning over my desk would. Her thick cleavage would pour out from her low-cut black top and steal the thought from my head—I was forced to acknowledge her.
Her advances and candor and perfume were escalating each day. Normally a smiley type of guy, I tried instead offering her blank stares and stiffened lips when spoken to, but that did little more than beg her to finish her long-winded stories. I tried another method, passing a bit of gossip around where I had finally gotten serious with a nice gal in Beverly Hills and wanted to settle down, but that still did little to quell the beast in the black skirt. So, I went for the Nagasaki number and attached a plastic dropbox outside my office door and sent an email around telling my department that they could simply leave their work for me in there if they so desired, thereby eliminating the time-consuming chore of having to speak with me. But that didn’t work either. Instead, Sandy took it up a notch. As punishment for my dropbox idea, she began announcing over the office intercom, “Brandon, please report to Sandy’s office immediately!” whenever she needed me.
An earlier version of myself, like the 1996 model for example, would have taken Sandy up on her advances and fucked her on a lunch break just to get her to leave me alone. And just to fuck her, too. But this newer model that I was now behind the wheel of, it had an extra decade of experience under the hood. And this newer model had also learned the hard way what sleeping with coworkers can do. Twice.
My allegiance to Lauren was growing stronger with every one of Sandy’s attempts at getting to know me better. We started taking cigarette breaks downstairs at the lobby café, doing nothing but sipping, inhaling, exhaling, and grumbling about Sandy. It was amazing; our mutual hatred of “the loud one” was actually bringing Lauren and I closer together. Even in our weekly staff meetings in the conference room, Lauren and I would walk in together, sit together, and leave together in a conversation—replacing the old system of Sandy arriving late and pushing any available seat across the room and next to me. Needless to say, Sandy was not happy about this new seating arrangement. Then it started to get really complicated.
Sandy began leaving work exactly when I did every night. She would take the elevator down with me and ask if I wanted to meet her for a drink. I knew this because she had asked me that same question a dozen times or more already—at the front desk, in my office, in the elevator, in the lobby, in the parking garage. A man could not humanly have that many “prior plans” on his calendar, and my excuses were beginning to wear thin. So I started staying later at work, and then so did she. And when she couldn’t find any work to do to warrant staying an extra hour in her office, she would sit in her car, parked beside mine in the parking garage, waiting for me to take the elevator down and attempt to leave. There would always be a little pile of cigarette butts at the foot of her car door—like a 1940s private investigator on a stakeout—giving away exactly how long she’d sat there for. I kind of felt badly for her, that she would have to go to these lengths just to get some guy to spend five minutes with her. And as I spied on the perfumed private investigator from my hiding spot behind the column near the elevator, creating my own pile of cigarette butts beneath me, I actually considered just walking over to her car and asking her out for a drink. How bad could it be? Just two coworkers blowing off some steam over a beer. But then I caught a whiff of her perfume seconds before I heard her car door slam. She had applied a fresh dousing of fragrance and was headed back up to the office, no doubt to search for me with an alibi of “forgetting something.” I did what any person would do in my situation: I hid behind the concrete column until she entered the elevator, then I dashed to my car and sped off before she could come back down.
That was a bad idea, I learned the next day. A very bad idea. Sandy didn’t even have time to take off her sunglasses before she stormed into my office and slammed the door behind her. She tore off her shades and shouted, “Why won’t you go out with me?! I’ve been nothing but nice to you! What’s wrong with me?! Huh?! Answer me! Answer me, goddamnit! What the fuck is wrong with this? This should be perfect! It’s just you and me here!”
I was more than a little caught off guard. “Because we work together,” was all that my three sips of coffee could put together that early. “That’s just … and I’m dating some—”
“Oh bullshit!” she screamed. “You don’t think I know you’re single? Bullshit! It’s written all over you! So you’d rather just be alone, huh? Is that it? You don’t think I’ve heard that shit before, huh?”
Coworkers were beginning to walk past my closed glass door and not-so-subtly glance inside. Sandy must have looked like a bulldog pacing before its prey. Her stout little body, packed into a black skirt and blouse, waddled back and forth down the length of my desk. She was spewing out bits and pieces of complete thoughts that she must have rehearsed a dozen times on the drive to work that morning. Something this huge had to be premeditated. I really didn’t know what to do, so I stayed in my seat and watched her face grow redder with every outburst.
“Phone calls! I called your cell phone three times over the weekend! And did you return any of my calls? Of course not! Why? I don’t know! I’ll tell you why! You think you’re too … too … hot shit, don’t you? Is that it? Well, you’re not! I’m a good person! I’m better than you! Don’t even return any of my calls! I made you! I gave you this position! I’ll take that shit away too! Watch me! Teach you not to return my calls, mister!”
I started to run through my usual excuses for not returning phone calls before realizing that I had never given Sandy my phone number. I’d start there. “Hey! Easy, easy … First off, how did you get my number? I never—”
“What?! What are you whining about?”
“My private number. I never gave it to you; and now I think you can see—”
“Don’t be such a pussy! You’re on Google; everyone’s on Google! You’re not special! I can call whoever the hell I want to call! I don’t need you to give me your number!”
She proceeded to shout at me for another 10 minutes before I finally reached my boiling point and demanded she leave my office. Nothing. I stood and pointed at the door. She folded her arms. Fine. If she wasn’t going to leave, then I was. I grabbed my blazer, pushed her out of my way, and rode the elevator down to the lobby café for an espresso and a cigarette. I needed to think. I needed to do something. Employment there could never again be the same after that morning. I’m sure the entire place was by now afire with rumors and gossip of the two breeders’ love quarrel, because that’s exactly what it must have looked and sounded like to anyone within an earshot of my office. At that thought, part of me wanted to get into my car and drive the hell out of there, forever; they could mail me my last check. But then Sandy would have won. Everybody would have assumed that I was the asshole that screwed her and dumped her, or somehow broke her heart and spit on the pieces. Who in their right mind would believe that I was being stalked by a lady half my size? Who would believe that I was the one being harassed in this scenario? Harassed. The word kept repeating itself in my head. Harassed. Then the prefix arrived and changed everything: sexual. Sexually harassed. Sexual harassment. And just like that, I knew what I was going to do. I’ll see your loud, humiliating outburst, Sandy, and I’ll raise you a sexual harassment suit!
Four simultaneous conversations happening around the receptionist’s desk halted the exact moment that I stepped out of the elevator. Eight pairs of outraged eyes were now fixed on me, none of them able to look away or even blink. I felt good, though, and I smiled at them—a mischievous smile, but still a smile. And then, instead of turning left toward my office, I walked around the right side of the receptionist’s desk and directly to the Human Resources department. I sat down opposite the HR manager, and the first words out of his mouth were, “Yeah, I thought I’d see you in here this morning.”
No city knew their lawsuits like Los Angeles; and no company took their sexual harassment cases more seriously than an adult magazine publisher. You put those two points together and you get one hell of a “Fuck you, Sandy!” It looked so good on paper, too: A boss intimating sexual favors from her assistant; stalking the assistant; threatening to fire him, etc. By the time I left his office 30 minutes later, a sexual harassment complaint had been filed against Sandy, and legal documents were being drawn up in the corporate offices in New York. They asked if I wanted to make it a legal matter, and they’d even provide the attorney, but I declined as long as I never had to work under Sandy again. Although I was angry enough to file a harassment complaint against her, I wasn’t angry enough to ruin the next 10 years of her professional life—I just wanted it to be like that first month again, when she thought I was gay. So our offices were separated even farther from one another, and Lauren became the buffer between all oral and email communication between Sandy and me. I couldn’t have arranged a better settlement.
And it was a great couple of weeks that followed before the remorse kicked in. Not necessarily remorse for what had happened to Sandy, but remorse for what it said about all of us heterosexuals. Like we were all pussies; couldn’t settle something sanely and without attorneys involved. This big melting pot of a company, with fifty gay men and four lesbians living, working, and coexisting happily alongside one another in the eccentric world of hardcore sex—but it was those two damn straight people that had to take it too far.
Although I lost a few coworkers as friends because of the event, Lauren, as well as the new glow on her face, were companions enough for me. She loved what was going on. She adored torturing Sandy, and now she didn’t need to limit herself to simply imagining a world where Sandy didn’t exist; she could now orchestrate it. Lauren said I wasn’t allowed to write anything for Young Guys any longer, which left Sandy to write all her own articles for the upcoming issue. And her emails that asked for my help never made it past Lauren’s draconian buffer—well, they did, but Lauren and I just laughed at them. I’ll admit, at first I loved watching Sandy struggling to keep her head above water, and forced to stay late every night to get her work done. But as the weeks wore on with this same sad scenario, I started to feel really sorry for her. She was actually honoring the guidelines set up by the Human Resources department to keep her job, and she even tossed me a couple of apologetic smiles when we were caught in the elevator together. But what I really felt badly about was aiding Lauren in a voodoo ceremony, where I kept guard while she poured some type of mystical powder under Sandy’s desk and cast a spell. And I felt even worse that next morning when Sandy came in with her arm in a cast after some “crazy homeless guy” attacked her while she was walking her dog the night before. Lauren was ecstatic; I was freaked out.
Every night I left at 6:00, and every night I would see Sandy’s car still in the parking garage—no piles of cigarette butts under her door, no perfume, no Sandy. There was a little part of me that began to miss that, and I didn’t know why. I had never been the object of someone’s fanatical adoration before, and I guess I’d always assumed that if it had ever happened to me it would register as some feeling other than infuriation. I began toying with the idea of all the other scenarios that could have played out had I been a bit more imaginative to Sandy’s advances. I could have turned it into a secret sexual partnership where I was the boss; maybe make her my love slave and act out all my secret perversions; perhaps I could have used her to bargain for a better position in the company; forced her to never speak to her relatives again; maybe even have sex with an animal. I could have probably turned her crush into almost any twisted thing I desired. And it was that last thought which made me realize that I had changed. I had always been sort of a dick, according to close acquaintances, but now I was getting vicious. I was actually considering more ways to hurt someone just to mask the guilt of hurting them in the first place. I could blame the porn all I wanted for my sudden lack of empathy—staring at photos of sweaty, hardcore sex all day would desensitize anybody after nearly a year—but the real fault fell upon me and me alone. Because I had allowed it to affect me. I had left my moral door ajar, and the dick walked right in.
I made a vow to myself; I was going to change. At work the next day I said “Good morning” to Sandy in the lobby, and she smiled kindly. I then offered to write an article for her after lunch, and she thanked me graciously as she handed me three photos of an uncircumcised 8-inch cock, and with no innuendo. When I left Sandy’s office to return to my own, Lauren grabbed me by the arm and yanked me into the kitchen.
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded. “You’re not … you can’t help her! We’ve got her right where we want her! She’s going to quit soon! Papa Legba confirms this. I heard around that she’s calling up other magazines for jobs, but no one wants her. Don’t help her anymore!”
“I … there’s no one to write the … I just wanted to help her out with an article,” I replied. “I feel bad about all this, and I had some free time.”
“Bad?” Lauren snapped. “Papa Legba said to be strong. The homeless guy attacking her was just the beginning. She’s going to pay for being such a … such a cunt! She will pay. And don’t stand in the way of Papa Legba or his retribution.”
Fucking Papa Legba again. God, I wanted to be a gay man at that moment. If this was how breeders acted—voodoo curses, sexual harassment lawsuits, punishing coworkers—then I wanted nothing to do with the vagina any longer.
I got back to my office and knew what I had to do. There was only one remedy to this situation. I had been happily welcomed into the jovial kingdom of gay men’s porn, and I shat upon the rug in the warmth of its glow. I would have to remove myself from this fertile kingdom, to save Sandy’s job and possibly her life, and to again level the playing ground that the two female editors had shared before I arrived. Although porn had been very good to this professional gypsy, it was time for me to leave.
Not knowing who else to talk to about my decision, I traced my cell phone’s incoming-call history and found Sandy’s phone number from several weeks back, and I rang her that night. We talked for a solid hour about life, about the sexual harassment complaint, about the magazines, about Lauren, and then about me quitting. Although she was against me leaving the magazines, she knew that it would be beyond weird for me to resume working there, and be friends with her, with the Human Resources department and Lauren keeping tabs on us both. Before I hung up, I informed her that Lauren was out for blood and had been putting magical powders under her desk, and she promised to start locking her office door at night.
That next morning was a Friday. I walked into the HR office and, after lifting the harassment complaint against Sandy, I offered my two-week resignation. They asked if it was due to Sandy, or if she had threatened or coerced me in any way. I laughed a little, which probably wasn’t the most professional thing to do when resigning, then simply explained that the pornography had finally begun to affect me. I guess that was a common thread among quitters in the adult business, because they offered to let me vacate my position as Associate Editor one week from that day and still leave with a good recommendation.
So that’s exactly what I did. That next Friday rolled around, and I packed all my belongings into a cardboard box and said good-bye to all of my coworkers. Sandy was the only one that offered to help me carry my stuff down that afternoon, and we stood and smoked a cigarette in the parking garage.
“God,” Sandy remarked with a grin, “all this because of a crush. I’m really sorry it came to this.”
“Kind of snowballed, didn’t it?”
“That’s an understatement,” she replied. “I promise from here onward, I’ll never try and fuck a coworker again. No matter how much I want to.”
We both giggled a bit. Then there was a brief patch of silence while we individually debated what to say to one another next. Then a weird bit of eye contact. It was obvious that both of us wanted to say what was really on our minds, but we were still a little gun-shy from the whole harassment thing. So I unlocked the back door of my car and threw the box onto the floor. She remarked on how big my backseat was, then how dark my tinted windows were.
“Technically, we’re no longer coworkers,” I said. “Just two people smoking cigarettes in a parking garage.”
“So, getting into your backseat and lifting my skirt wouldn’t be grounds for termination?” she asked jokingly.
“I don’t think that would, no.” I replied. “But if you, let’s say, touched my man-fruit or rubbed my glazed beef-cicle, then that probably would … if I still worked here.”
“You mean your meat burrito and side of beans?”
“My little Vic Mackey and his dangling backpack.”
“Vic Mackey?” she asked.
“The bald guy from The Shield … Michael Chicklis …”
“I so would have fired you for that one.”
And with that, Sandy crawled into the backseat of my old ‘97 and pulled up that black skirt of hers just like she said she would, and I promptly followed her in. It was a quick and dirty bout of sex, but it was one of life’s more memorable ones because of the closure aspect. That backseat romp was our apology to one another. It was our good-bye to one another. And it was our act of contrition for defacing the good name of heterosexuality.