The Job Pirate Page 4

  Because of the overhead security cameras, I devised a way to open the register and remove the $100 by leaning over the opened drawer while pretending to straighten the sunglasses rack that sat beside it. To the camera, it would appear that I was just lazy, not thieving. And it was beautifully executed too, my opened blazer engulfing the entire theft from view of the cameras. With my empty right jacket sleeve tucked into my pants pockets, I surreptitiously grabbed the bill and slid it into my shirt and hurried out to my car once Green Eyes relieved me.

  I hid the money in the seat springs, ate my sandwich, then smoked two cigarettes back to back before leaving my ‘81 Firenze. Upon my return to the cash register, however, was not the usual sight of my Filipino manager tapping his watch. Greeting me now was a 30-something female employee in a smart pantsuit, who turned in my direction as soon as my little manager pointed at me approaching.

  My heart suddenly began to pound in my chest and my legs felt as if they were about to collapse beneath me—how had they discovered my thievery so soon? Was there another overhead camera that I hadn’t seen? Did my manager count the money in the drawer while I was gone? Was that unpleasant female customer actually a shill on a mission from management to catch me stealing? Sweat was beginning to form across my forehead and the back of my neck, and my right hand fumbled to find a pocket. Would jail be involved? Did they have a holding cell in the basement like Disneyland did? The questions kept coming with every step closer to the register until finally I arrived with the sorriest example of a smile smeared onto my wet face.

  “Hello there,” I said.

  “Are you Brandon?” Pantsuit asked, showing no sign of emotion.

  “I am.”

  “Oh, good,” she said and handed a small burgundy jewelry box to me. “I’m Rhonda, in Human Resources. We just like to show our friendliest salespeople that we appreciate their smiles, even if they’re new to the store.”

  I opened the little felt box and pulled out the lacquered gold and bronze star tucked inside. It was no bigger than a cufflink, with a tiny earring-like shaft poking out from the back. I examined it closer then displayed it to Rhonda and my manager, as if it were some type of surprise birthday gift that they were anxious to get a look at.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll cherish it.” I ran my fingers over the lapel of my coat trying to find the embroidered slit where you put things like whatever that star was, but Rhonda stopped me and tapped her fingernail on my plastic nametag.

  “It goes on your nametag, so customers know you’re a star.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said and popped the bitty burgundy thing into the groove in the plastic, between the store’s name and my own. “This is very sweet. Thank you.”

  “You don’t need to thank us; thank yourself for being such a great salesperson. And thank the customer you helped buy a portable CD player this morning. She just couldn’t stop raving about what a nice salesperson you were.”

  “The older gal? Really?”

  “Yep, she even went down to customer service to sing your praises.”

  As Rhonda walked away, I glanced over at my manager to find him glaring at the new star on my nametag. He didn’t have one on his nametag. That fancy suit, the silk tie and matching socks, the leather shoes, the year of employment there—all that and no star.

  “That’s got to feel pretty shitty, huh?” I asked him, still sore about having had to raze the Citadel of Toaster Ovens. He frowned, shook his head, and walked away without a verbal reply. He’d never say another word to me again.

  Nothing ever became of the missing $100, although I’d like to think that having the bronze star on my nametag made me impervious to accusations like that. And when we got a big order of rice cookers in the following week, I rebuilt the citadel with no protest from Green Eyes.

  MEAT BURRITO AND A SIDE OF BEANS

  JOB #63

  “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?”

  “Once more?”

  “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 w
ith 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 be
ginning 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.