For You, The Stars
Chapter Eleven: Please Forget You Knew My Name
Installment 1
I started making plans to get a new job. They were laying people off at the architecture firm and the place was getting depressing. They were letting architects go and hiring more marketing people. None of the architects liked the new CAD systems they were being trained on. Nobody gets a degree in architecture to design hospital wards by dropping cookie-cutter stencils of sinks and cabinets and bathrooms into one identical sized room after another. Every now and then, someone would say to me, “What are you doing here?” This had happened since I started but now I started asking myself the same question.
I’d eked out a few raises, so now I was making about $9.50 an hour, enough to get by on, given my $300 a month rent for my tiny room in the Gomer group house, but I wasn’t going to get rich being a studio assistant.
One of Dave’s high school friends, Marvin, came out to stay with us for the traditional two weeks before getting started. He’d just come out in another sense, telling Dave he was gay the first night he arrived. We all got drunk and high and he talked about how he had just told his parents and they hadn’t exactly kicked him out or disowned him but they hadn’t really protested when he told them he was going to hitchhike out to San Francisco.
Dave was I guess what you’d call a bear, or a bear cub. He was incredibly hairy. He had thick white-blond hair and a thick beard with a hint of red in it. His chest looked hairy too. Dave said he was famous, actually, for how hairy he was. He was also a little thick around the middle with a barrel chest. He told us that he was a “type” that some other gay dudes found especially attractive. That sounded interesting. He told us about cruising public bathrooms and exploring other underground aspects of gay sexual culture. I could tell Dave was a tiny bit wigged out by all this information, though he acted cool about it. I just found it all fascinating.
Marvin wasn’t sure what he wanted to do for work. He went down to Santa Cruz for a few days to hook up with a friend and when he got back he told me he had a line on a job. He had met a guy who publishes dirty magazine, the small form factor ones that feature letters to the editor.
“Like Penthouse Forum?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, “but the whole thing is just the letters, with maybe a few illustrations or photos stuck in to illustrate them.”
I had seen things like this. I think Penthouse even had a letters-only edition in that small size. I vaguely remembered buying it, or maybe something similar called Variations and sticking it in my pocket to sneak it back to my parents’ apartment when I was still a teenager. No matter where I hid these kinds of magazines, usually in the bottom of my closet or behind the books on one of the many shelves in our house, they’d always be found eventually and I’d be humiliated ritually.
I guess I was sort of aware there were gay versions of these things. I remember my brother had once brought a small photocomic type booklet home that he had found on the subway. We looked at all the photos of young guys with stiff erections. We found it pretty fascinating. We didn’t really worry that it was obviously aimed at gay men or possibly women but probably not. At that age we were just hungry for any information or depictions about sex we could find. I’d seen those letters-type magazines at the newsstands. The ones for men were called things like Honcho or Inches on ManDate.
I didn’t recognize the names of the ones Marvin reeled off. Maybe they were regional. Anyway, he said, this guy was willing to pay $50 a pop for letters.
“You mean the letters aren’t real?” I asked him.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Well, I don’t know!” I felt stupid. “I figured maybe some of them were real and then they wrote other ones - the ones that seemed obviously over the top.”
“No,” he said. “They’re all fake. It’s like professional wrestling.”
“Wait, you mean….?” I said. He stared at me like I really was an idiot.
“No,” I said. “I’m kidding! Doy!”
We talked about some of the tropes of these letters. He knew more about the gay ones but aside from the sex itself the formulas were remarkably similar. There were always people claiming to go to large northeastern colleges, avid readers of thus and such magazine, who never believed the stories were true, till one day when this happened to me. Usually “one thing led to another,” and so on.
He said the publisher guy gave him the plots: guy with a flat tire gets picked up by bikers, or spending the night in the drunk tank or wild spring break weekend. He was even told what specific sex acts, even positions to include. Sometimes he was even given descriptions to work with. “Bears,” he said, which was when he explained the concept to me, “or twinks.” He also told me about drag queens and how transvestites weren’t necessarily gay. It was pretty fascinating.
I started wondering if maybe I could write like that. Fifty dollars wasn’t much but the stories were short, and if you could crank out a bunch of them, it would beat spending all day in a stifling office downtown.
Marvin got his own place down in Santa Cruz, but he came up to visit every now and then. I asked him about the gig and he said he didn’t think they’d really want a straight guy writing the stories, but he gave the name of a publisher of actual dirty books, the kind you buy in the airport, called Climex, where he said they were looking for an assistant editor. He’d heard about this from his publisher friend and he said he could get him to put in a good word for me. Apparently these dirty publishers all knew each other.
Cecilia thought it was hilarious that I was thinking about getting into the porn world. “It’s not porn,” I said, “exactly. There’s no photos in these books and even the paintings on the paperback covers are just suggestive. They look kind of romance novels.”
“It’s still porn,” she said, but she was actually supportive.
“Why not? It would probably be fun, and you obviously like sex.”
“Who doesn’t?” I said.
“Well…” she said.
“You like the idea of sex,” I said.
“True.”
“Plus,” I said. “I wouldn’t be writing them, just editing them, or something. I’m not even really sure. I still need to call them.”
“Well, you should,” she said. She knew I was going crazy doing spreadsheets all day.
I did call and sent them my resume. There wasn’t much on it yet, though I included all my summer and winter jobs from high school and college, the paralegal work, the legal summarizing, and the studio assistant job I had now. They called me back and asked me to come in for an interview. I wasn’t sure what to expect. A bunch of aging hippies sparking up in the office. Red lighting? It was remarkably businesslike, though, not much different from the place I was working now.
Climex was located in the east bay, in a place called Emeryville that I had to buy a map to find. They told me how to get there. I had to take the Muni downtown, then BART across the bay and then a bus to get out to Emeryville, which seemed to be mostly a warehouse district with some big box electronic stores near a massive highway on-ramp/off-ramp maze. The commute alone was enough to make me think twice about taking a new job. I almost stayed on the bus until it came around to the BART stop again but I figured I had already taken the day off from work and it would be kind of pathetic not to show up.
I got off the bus and found the right building. There was no receptionist out front, just a series of brass plaques bolted onto an exposed brick wall inside the front doors. Climex was on the third floor. They did have a receptionist, just outside the elevator. I said I was there for the interview with Bryan and Judith and the receptionist, who was young and normal looking except for having like eight piercings along the cartilage at the top of her left ear, told me to have a seat in the waiting area, which consisted of three overstuffed leather couches formed into an open rectangle under the large warehouse windows to one side of the reception desk.
There was a glass coffeetable with a set of Climex books scattered across it. The covers were indeed fairly tasteful. They reminded me of Beeline books. Some of them actually had two novels back to back. You’d read to the middle of the book and then flip the paperback over to read the second story. Lots of cheerleaders and teachers, medieval stuff, and taboo things like incest, priests and nuns. Guys with their shirts off tied to benches and pneumatic woman who looked like their blouses were about to burst. The surroundings were so odd that I didn’t find any of it arousing, but I could see where I would have, easily, in the privacy of my room.
“Daniel?”
I looked up at a middle-aged woman with long ringlets of gray hair down the middle of her back. She was wearing a denim work shirt, black jeans and heels.
“That’s me,” I said.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Judith. Come on back but Bryan’s office with me.”
She walked me back through a maze of cubicles to a modest office with a window against the back wall. Bryan was sitting behind his desk. He looked a little older than Judith, maybe 50 or so. He had a white ponytail and a little goatee.
“So you want to break into publishing,” he said.
“Yes sir.”
“It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” he said.
“I’ll say,” interjected Judith, as we both sat down.
I didn’t really know how to respond to that.