When I was 18, I got my first professional writing job, writing pornography for 976-lines (a phone number you could call, enter your credit card information, and hear a pre-recorded 2 minute porn script “performed.”)
A lot of the cute actress girls in my drama class at San Francisco State were reading the scripts for extra money.
I was a pothead, mostly making my way through college doing afro-Haitian dancing and selling joints I rolled badly from a Hefty bag of “shake” (the world’s weakest marijuana - no buds, mostly just crushed leaves). I used to keep joints in a decorative brass box on a silk cord around my neck — my customers knew this (and usually looked around for better deals.)
Then I met ‘Shana’ (not her real name), the woman in charge of the outfit. She was a very together, very practical petite strawberry blond woman who had been producing the porn tapes in the back yard of her burgundy-painted Victorian in the Haight, in the pool cabana. Her husband Rick, with whom she was involved in a slave/master relationship, did all the technical work, maintaining the phone lines — he had been a computer guru at some point in his career.
At first, not wanting to actually participate in the porn end of Shana’s dealings, I just cleaned her and Rick’s house; all the closets were filled with a remarkable variety of linty sex toys. After a few weeks it became glaringly apparent that I was a terrible housekeeper, so I opted, out of financial desperation, to join the dial-a-porn life.
I started writing the scripts for ten dollars a page — hunkering down in the top of the Student Union building where they kept a number of IBM Selectric II typewriters. There was a format. The speaker, always female (unless the scripts were gay), has to meet the listener in a strange environment, e.g.
Hey stud. We’ve been stuck in this elevator an awfully long time, and I am so HOT. Aren’t you? Here, let me unbutton your shirt…
And from the introduction, the narration had to become a screaming orgasm in one minute and fifty-six seconds, exactly.
I wrote piles of these things — straight, gay, BDSM — the entire spectrum of sexual practices from the normal to the disgusting. At a certain point I realized I could also make ten dollars for reading the scripts, so I started doing that as well. Shana taught us tricks, like teaching us to suck our fingers to make various wet noises.
What was kind of amusing in a weird way was how profoundly unsexy the whole recording process was. We (the performers) would be in the moldy, soundproofed pool house which had a wall of recording equipment, sitting at a small table with a headset in front of a microphone, all the while holding a stopwatch. The sound engineer was usually the only one present — he was a lovely guy; a skilled technician who suffered from the deformities caused by Thalidomide — his hands more or less projected straight out of his shoulders, without any real arms. We’d record about five to ten of these scripts at a session, while the capable sound man professionally ignored all the enthusiastic ass-poundings we were simulating.
My mother, of course, was horrified at my new employment — she found it sleazy, and thought it would give me a sleazy affect. When a pervert climbed into our back yard and watched me undress, then sent a letter about it (addressed to “Blondie” — my mother naturally opened and read it, assuming it was for her, even though I was several hundred shades lighter blonde than she was), my mother blamed me for “pulling in that kind of energy.”
That was unnerving, but had no real effect on me — I was making great money for my age and had no intention of giving up the gig. It was easy and stupid and I didn’t care what anyone thought about it.
I moved into a small room in a large apartment inhabited by two girls who also went to SF State — one short, dark and fat, the other tall, lean and pale. These girls had been dating two brothers —roughneck Irish guys who did construction. One of them, the taller boyfriend of the tall girl, used to sit in the kitchen in the wee small hours doing lines of methamphetamine and drawing incredibly detailed pictures of soldiers in the jungle in Vietnam, in felt pen. “It was my past life,” he would say, offering lines of meth (which I refused) on a bone china saucer. “I think I was killed over there.”
Things went on without incident until one day I arrived home to find that the locks had been changed. I was stupefied, since I was up to date on rent. The fat dark girl opened the door an inch and snarled at me from behind the chain lock. “Your phone bill is $600,” she said. “You’re not coming in until you pay it.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded.
“There’s $600 worth of dial-a-porn on our phone bill! Obviously you’ve been calling it to listen to yourself!”
“Are you kidding?” I asked. “I have access to all the tapes I want! If I wanted to play myself doing dial-a-porn I could listen to them all day long. But why would I want to? That shit is disgusting!”
The taller brother appeared momentarily behind the fat girl and gave me a shrug.
It was blatantly obvious that the smaller, slimier brother had been calling my porn lines obsessively, and had lied about it. The roommates finally decided that since “nobody” had called the dial-a-porn lines, we would all split the $600 bill. I found this quite outrageous and refused to do it, so they took my cappuccino machine hostage and refused to give it back until I coughed up.
This finally put me off of the porn scripts. There was too much weird fallout. I eventually got a much better, classier job, as a Jägermeister shot nurse.
Cintraw@gmail.com
Artwork: “Triffids,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2022
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