Rob Colla

“It seems strange to be discussing these things, doesn't it?”

“Larry was so nice at first,” Mary sighed, recalling the nights she had spent in his warm embrace. “But then he started getting weird. He bought a big German shepherd and brought him to bed with us. He built a torture chamber in our basement — whips and chains and branding irons. He brought his friends over for orgies. He tied me up and beat me and raped me.”

I was editing a book a day now, each one no more than a blurry 40,000-word stream of obscenities.

Rob Colla

“Oh, Mary!” Kathy consoled her. “That sounds terrible!”

“Well, it wasn’t that bad. I just thought I’d better leave before it got worse.”

I hadn't planned on becoming a porno book editor. I had just left my previous job, certain that increasing portions of my mind were leaking out through my fingertips the longer I worked as a typist.

Fifty percent was the sexual threshold.

Rob Colla

Between appointments at the welfare office I dreamed of storming the literary world with a brilliant treatise relating disco mania to vitamin deficiencies in the American diet. I outlined my novel, the gripping tale of a woman driven to insanity by mushy greeting cards.

I was counting my food stamps when a friend and former porno editor called me about the job. “Erotic fiction,” I told her, was not quite the intellectual challenge I had in mind. Nor would the low salary contribute toward the eventual purchase of the secluded beach cottage every bona fide writer lists as a business expense.

Nevertheless, my monthly date with my landlord was quickly approaching, and I applied for the job. I was called for an interview by someone named Greg. I arrived at dusk. The address in Clairemont turned out to be a dark, deserted warehouse with a small office in front. A dark-haired man, looking to be in his early thirties, answered my tap on the glass door. He locked the door behind me and smiled.

“Greg?” I asked.

“Yes.” We shook hands. He sat opposite me at a broad desk, reviewing my hastily prepared resume and portfolio.

“I’d like you to take a couple of tests.” He held out a sheaf of papers. “First, a spelling test.”

I dutifully corrected the spelling of “occupied” and “similar.” “luscious” and “caress.”

“And now, I would like you to edit this.”

The two double-spaced paragraphs concerned a dark-skinned doctor testing the hypothesis that when women say “no,” what they really mean is “yes.” I presumed that my personal thoughts on the subject were inappropriate, and instead I took to inserting commas between progressive steps of the doctor’s examination.

“You do understand,” Greg began when I finished, “the nature of our books?”

I nodded my head.

“And do you have any qualms about editing them?”

I shook my head.

“Good. Do you have any questions?”

I cleared my throat. “Only one. If I work here, what are my chances of being arrested?”

He leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands.

“You have nothing to worry about,” he assured me. “We have a very, very good lawyer.”

Monsoon-like rains hit San Diego my first day on the job. Were the heavens weeping for my fall from grace, or was this a ceremonial cleansing of the last vestiges of a conservative upbringing? Walking through the rain from the bus stop, my thoughts turned to my very wet and cold feet. I arrived at the office and readied myself for whatever I might find beyond the glass door.

Greg was there to greet me. More animated now, with a perpetual smile and a hurried step, he led me from one small room to the next, introducing me to some ten employees. They surprised me, most in their twenties and thirties, casually dressed, some of them listening to rock music from a radio as they went about their work. I had half-expected an office full of buxom blonds being chased around their desks by sticky-fingered, balding executives to the strains of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Instead I found the same kind of people I traded mispaired socks with in my apartment building laundry room.

Greg and I sat at a table in a vacant office to begin work on my first manuscript. My hands were just beginning to warm up when Greg began telling me that somehow I would have to fit a four-letter word into the first sentence, something to tickle the fancy (and other assorted parts) of the potential customer. Secondly, I would have to replace all the author's boring physiological terms and charming euphemisms with hardcore, right-to-the-point grabbers. It’s called “flip strength,” he explained, derived from the reader’s flipping through a book from cover to cover in search of his three dollars’ worth of erotica.

My hands now folded securely in my still-wet lap, I pondered my rapid heartbeat and heavy breathing. I'm not a total prude, I thought. I had seen Last Tango in Paris and still used butter on my muffins. In the Playboy issue with the Jimmy Carter interview, I had looked at the cartoons first. But here I was, fumbling and fidgeting while my new boss recited terms for the male sex organ in the same tone of voice he might use to discuss the weather.

“It seems strange to be discussing these things, doesn't it?” he asked, seeing my embarrassment.

I barely giggled out my agreement. “Okay, let me know when you’re finished with the first ten pages. I’ll go over them with you.”

Greg led me into the editorial office. A boisterous conversation among Bette, Paul, and Ronnie, the other three editors, stopped short as I sat at my desk and took to my task anxiously. Fantasies of psychosomatic paralysis floated through my mind as I forced my hand to write words I had never even scrawled in a public restroom stall. Very quickly I got a sense of the book's plot: a virginal high school teacher takes her first physiology lessons from a teenage stud obsessed with black lace panties and breaking down steel doors. I wondered where I’d been in high school.

Bette broke the silence. “What the hell is a ‘golden shower’?” Paul looked up from his manuscript and shrugged his shoulders. Greg tossed Bette a paperback.

“Oh, how gross!” she exclaimed, edifying us with the true fact that some people take a perverse pleasure in sharing their liquified excrements with their loved ones.

“If you ever don’t know what a word means,” Greg explained to me, “you can look it up in that. It’s a dictionary of sexual terms.”

Attempting to express my commitment to pornographic proficiency, I asked, “Can I take it home with me tonight?” Suddenly everyone broke into hysterical laughter.

“Do you want to sleep with it under your pillow?” Greg kidded me.

My face turned hot with shame, and everyone was laughing louder. I was sure I had failed the initiation rites just as a secretary walked into the room, looking for the other secretary.

“She’s here,” muttered Ronnie. “Right under my desk.”

The secretary scurried out the door in search of her co-worker while my fellow editors smiled at me conspiratorially. I stopped holding my knees together so tightly beneath my desk. I flung off my wet shoes and unloosed my pen on Teacher With The Hots. If I had been paid a dime for every dirty word I got into those first ten pages, I could have treated the whole crew to a double feature at the Pussycat Theatre.

While I dirtied up our books’ sex scenes, I cleaned up their grammar and spelling as well.

“Language is beautiful and should be used correctly,” Greg would repeat to me during my training. He had been a member of summer stock theater in high school and had received his college degree in English. Before starting his career in porno here nine years ago, he had done some writing and edited children's books. His background illuminated our training sessions. In discussing the importance of a good “narrative hook” (that crass clincher in the book’s first sentence), he would cite less lewd examples from modern American literature. And while I followed his orders to search the dictionary for the proper spelling of “lascivious,” he searched his memory for an appropriate Shakespearean quote.

I learned the grammatical rules of dialogue, no matter what the characters' dialect. Horny housewives, insatiable secretaries, unprincipled teachers, impatient nurses — I corrected their syntax in their most intimate moments. 1 learned to take the authors’ words literally. “Are Richard's eyes really glued to Linda’s legs?” Greg would question me, conjuring up visions of Elmer’s Glue seeping between Richard’s lenses and Linda’s loins. When a bawdy babysitter entertained her boyfriend on the job, I checked that the hand she used to rock the cradle was not the same hand she used to fondle his fulcrum. When an ambitious career woman bedded her way to the top, I made sure all of her positions were humanly possible.

“You anal opening!” Bette would complain about her author. “This guy changes his character’s name on page fifty!”

“So? This character is proud to have a dong as big as a German sausage . . . and he’s Jewish!" Paul would offer.

“You think those are bad,” Ronnie would announce. “Listen to this: ’Sitting on the edge of the bed, his hand rose into the air and touched her heart, like a live wire let loose in a candy store.’ What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

We would chuckle appreciatively, shake our heads in mutual disdain. Ronnie, the managing editor, had been doing this for nearly seven years now, following a short stint of unemployment and, before that, college and a couple of years writing newsletters in the Navy. Bette and Paul had been here for some five months, having spent their two years since college discovering their journalism degrees qualified them for special introductory offers from countless book clubs.

And now we all read porno eight hours a day, working our fingers to the bone while our characters worked their boners to the finger. Sometimes I wondered, who cares? Did our readers truly appreciate the effort we made in smoothing out our characters’ wrinkles, in simplifying confounding sentences and paraphrasing paragraphs ... or were our readers merely kneading between the lines?

One day, in the seventh hour, Bette came upon a chaotic swap meat in which everyone in a large roomful of characters was making it with somebody else’s spouse. The only thing clear to Bette was the obvious inability of the author to keep straight the numerous names of his dabbling duos.

“ AAAAEEEEEEEE!” she shouted, imitating the pre-orgasmic outcries of every character who'd had to keep it up for ten straight pages. She flailed her arms and. when her breathing became regular, she turned to her list of who. exactly, was married to whom.

“I know it's not easy,” Ronnie said in his measured tone of experience. “Orgies are hardest at the end of the day.”

The final step in my training was learning to write a foreword. Three or four paragraphs long, these comments from the publisher assured our readers that no harm was meant in stories detailing the kidnapping of homecoming queens for eventual sale and service to men infatuated with size 42D pompons. These somber messages declared that behind the white lace curtains of many a staid Midwestern home, lonely wives were making clear connections with their telephone repairmen, while their husbands went door-to-door demonstrating battery-operated Fuller brushes. It happens every day, we wrote. Our readers may never have been aware of the truth about their preacher's wife or their mother and brother, but surely they had read about Charles Manson, Richard Nixon, and Son of Sam. And with psychopaths like that in our midst, what commendable standards of behavior were to be expected from people who had only the likes of Howard Jarvis and his counterparts as national heroes?

These forewords would probably never pass approval by the trained mind of a logician, but the trained mind of an attorney called for such disclaimers. Pleading the socially redeeming nature of our books, we hoped to save our very sensitive necks in the event of a raid. (The same roundabout logic prevails in my decision here to not furnish the company’s name. Those people have kids, you know.)

Despite the sudden lockjaw that would develop among employees whenever a stranger walked in, the company made little effort to keep its existence a secret from San Diegans. I never made a check of downtown adult bookstores, but I could scan copies of our latest editions while waiting in line for a sandwich at the corner deli-liquor store in Ocean Beach.

Neither did I keep my association with porno publishing a secret, though 1 received mixed reviews on my admission. My parents were at first amused and then concerned for my future. Many people took it as a sign that they could confide in me the details of their own sex lives, an added benefit I neither expected nor rejected. And my own friendly cohabitant only hoped he would not read summaries of our private habits in the next month's selections.

His concern was a legitimate one. We editors spent forty hours together each week, reading books wherein the whole of humanity was stripped of position and prestige, pants and panties, reduced to the basics of survival and procreation. What information could we possibly divulge that would be shameful or shocking? We told each other what it had been like the first time. We compared bathroom fantasies.

Nothing was sacred, and consequently, nothing was sacreligious, not gay rights or women’s liberation or skin color or nationality. We played games with words and with principles. We played under the face we presented to the rest of the world, the liberal, thoughtful, empathetic people we defined ourselves as.

‘‘Says here,” Ronnie read from the newspaper during one lunch hour, ‘‘that women want to make it a felony for an employer to approach his female employees sexually.”

‘‘That’s silly,” Bette commented, taking a bite out of her apple. “I would never complain when you do that to me!”

My training period concluded, I joined the ranks as a full-fledged editor, sharing with the others the dubious honor of getting thirty books edited and proofread and off to the printer each month. We were also responsible for choosing the books to be purchased for the price of $400 each.

The evaluation process is called slushing, a term probably coined in some East Coast publishing house by editors barely managing to wade through the mountainous “slush” of unsolicited manuscripts. We received a fair share of hopeful submissions from big cities, small towns, and sometimes, federal prisons. Our standards were not stringent: 40,000 words, everyday people-type characters, writing the average sixth-grader could understand, and vivid sex scenes many a sixth-grader might understand as well.

Ronnie was always more than happy to send a letter detailing these standards to anyone requesting them by mail. Nonetheless, we received many a manuscript following no rules but the author’s. These “amateurs,” as we called them, sent books that were either too long or too short, or books with proud title pages replete with misspellings, or books typed single-spaced or written in longhand in green ink on notebook paper. One author even sent us a full-color illustrated version.

Many amateur manuscripts had little to do with sex and more to do with the premise that everyone has a story to tell, one which they should tell by all means. A week rarely passed without receiving the dog-eared sweat-stained autobiography of an alienated victim of misparenting, of boot camp, of wives who didn’t understand, and of one too many exposures to the Gong Show. Occasionally such a storyteller would wise up and sprinkle his tale with accounts of his sexual awakening in the arms of the local mademoiselle, and of the many ladies he left waiting in his cross-country search for his long-lost collie.

Most amateur manuscripts were immediately returned to their senders. Those authors who showed some promise of developing and improving their sexy style might receive a note of encouragement from Ronnie. For the most part, I believe it was all Ronnie could do to prevent himself from ripping out his hair from all the awful writing crossing his otherwise professional desk.

Most of the books we purchased were from “regulars,” authors who had written for us perhaps once and maybe even hundreds of times before. On varying schedules, often once or twice a month, we received these authors’ latest creations. Men and women alike, they had proven to Ronnie that, first, they could write, and second, they could write on “commercial” themes. “Commercial," in the lingo of the business, is what is selling well. For reasons we could only speculate upon, stories about promiscuous college girls were not selling well; but wayward wives, incestuous families, rape, and bondage were high on the charts. Books from a male viewpoint were a no-no. as were any stories aimed solely at a female audience. Gay books for men were doing well, as were the perversely popular pet books (such as Roll Over Rover and Three Dog Night).

Regular authors were honored with varying reputations among the editors, by merit of correspondence (a law student from the South always sent funny letters with his manuscripts) or personal appearance (some were from San Diego and Los Angeles). Each was unique. Someone once ventured the generalization that women authors were more descriptive than men when it came to the female body, but one male author was always more descriptive than the women in describing women's clothing. Gay books weren’t necessarily written by gay men. Wife-swapper authors probably had monogamous marriages. Some authors were living on their porno book wages, while others sold them as an outside income.

Finding a manuscript that looked likely to be accepted, we read through it quickly to check for character development, plot, conflict, and resolution, and most important, the sex count. Keeping close tab on the number of pages spent in description of shin-to-shin contact, we divided that number by the total number of pages in the book to derive this magic quotient. Fifty percent was the sexual threshold.

Ronnie made the final decision. Once he purchased a book, he placed it on the side of his desk and would later invent a catchy new title. Porno book editors are predisposed to bland titles for their books, as the title is clearly printed on the writer’s paycheck for all to see. It’s not very professional, but according to some of our authors, bank tellers in some parts of the country have been known to cash and tell.

And so. it was down to business. Greg flew to Hollywood each month to buy photos for the book covers, portraits of big-breasted young girls who had traded their reputations for a moment of infamy and cash on the spot. A salaried artist also showed up every two weeks or so to turn in his acrylic renditions of pizza deliverymen getting it on with dope-smoking high schoolers while little brothers crouched wide-eyed in the dark doorways. Ronnie called the printer to complain about uncropped pubic hair, outlawed for public consumption in some Southern states.

In other rooms, typists hammered out the manuscripts on magnetic tape, monitors ran the tapes through typesetting equipment chapter by chapter, layout people pasted on corrections and designed front pages. Every few weeks we would all work together to stuff legal-size envelopes with the current brochures — book descriptions and order forms — to be sent to thousands of people across the country who had signed up for the mailing list (a service received by filling out a coupon in the back of one of our books and adding one’s signature attesting to being a law-abiding citizen, eighteen years or older, and in no need of Postal Service ‘protection" against receiving sexually explicit publications).

Computer print-outs were kept of the sales record of each book. On an irregular basis, we editors were asked to analyze sales in terms of theme, cover art, title, author, and so on, computing the . percentage of sales in each category. The sales analysis I took part in netted varied results in most categories, but one result came through loud and clear: the most popular themes were rape and bondage.

“That’s too bad,” Greg commented, shaking his head. I sighed as resignedly as him. I was editing a book a day now, each one no more than a blurry 40,000-word stream of obscenities. I had long stopped paying attention to plot, since what plots existed were repeated from one book to the next. I had even managed to dull my visceral response to women being raped at knifepoint, children being sold into slavery, and men being portrayed as vacuous beasts. All of us must have said it at one time or another: “This stuff is sick.” But now it had come down to “too bad.”

Drowning in drivel all-day long, we each did what we could to nourish our own fantasies. Paul wanted to put a selection of our books in a time capsule and laugh at them from a more self-secure vantage point some time in the cosmic future. Bette wanted to be a star reporter or leave the country, whichever opportunity came first. Ronnie wanted his kids to learn how to cook their own dinner so he could begin work on his best-selling novel. And Greg, Greg wanted the wisdom of Shakespeare and the innocence of childhood, both at once.

My dream was to wake up, to stop saying “too bad” and start feeling alive again. But my eventual resignation, after five months and 800 hours of porno, was not an heroic act of principled conscience. I had another job that would pull me through. And I am not regretful for having worked there. I learned some new skills, met some good people. I’ll just call it my porno period, and move on to the next chapter.