An Unspeakable Job
I didn’t always work in porn. I had a pre-porn life that was weird (musician), but not porn-weird. Understanding how weird working in porn was wouldn’t dawn on me until several months into my first job. It all started with a phone call on an ad in the paper to sell movies to stores around the country with telemarketing. This was well before adult DVDs. I like movies…I’d done telemarketing…I called the ad. At my job interview the first question they asked me was ‘Are you offended by adult material?’ Offended? At this stage I was completely naïve to the fact that anyone was offended by porn, and my experience with XXX movies consisted of seeing a couple at bachelor parties. The question seemed ridiculous to me. “Of course not” I answered. “You’re hired” they said.
As it turned out I was good at selling porn. It seemed a hilarious topic to be discussing with business owners, and as someone blessed with the gift of gab, I began earning money almost immediately. I was excited about the job and started telling everyone I knew about it. It wasn’t long before I began to understand what that first job interview question was all about.
My (now ex) wife and I went to a park one day and ran into a little girl who was in the same pre-school as our daughter, along with both her parents. As often happens, the wives played with the kids and the husbands strayed off a little to talk man stuff. His first question to me was ‘What do you do for a living?’ I was thrilled to tell him I had just landed a new job with an adult movie distributor and it was awesome! A pained look came over his face and he admitted that he’d had a porn addiction that had nearly cost him his wife and child. I was crestfallen and thought to myself ‘What are the odds?’ I lamely said something along the lines of ‘…Yeah, you probably… shouldn’t be… watching porn then…’ The rest of the conversation was a little strained.
I was still playing in bands at the time and at one gig I announced to the whole band my joy at landing the coolest job ever. Musicians – who by birthright are mostly natural horndogs, were all duly impressed. The bass player however was notably silent.
(Which reminds me: Did you hear about the drummer that locked his keys in the car? It took them 2 hours to get the bass player out)
On the break he took me aside and asked solemnly “Aren’t you concerned that you’re helping to spread a virus around the world?” This was of course several decades before an actual virus spread around the world. By now I was beginning to recognize a few general categories of people who were offended by images of naked grown-ups having sex. I asked him as delicately as I could “You wouldn’t be a Christian would you?” He answered in the affirmative and I mentally patted myself on the back for being so astute. I explained that comparing sexual images to a virus seemed pretty weak to me so no, I wasn’t concerned at all. At this stage of my porn career, I was still unaware of the truckloads of XXX movies that I would end up shipping to the bible belt over the following 20 years.
Once in the post office a smiling middle-eastern guy with an accent asked me what all the packages were. By now I was actively trying to identify potential porn-haters before I opened my mouth…a fool’s errand. He looked pretty young and hip so I told him. He immediately got angry with me for spreading filth around the planet that ‘makes men not want to sleep with their wives anymore’. I’d always found porn to have the opposite effect, providing you don’t watch it 10 minutes before sleeping with your wife. He continued to rant on the evils of sex as entertainment for about 5 more minutes making everyone in the post office look down nervously at their shoes.
Later on I had a customer in Africa of all places, who paid me handsomely to take the spools out of VHS tapes and ship them as ‘blank magnetic tape media’. I did this for him for over a year. Over 3000 VHS movies in total. He was combining up to 4 movies on one super long tape and selling them underground for hundreds of dollars…in Africa, where porn is illegal in most countries. Talk about an entrepreneurial daredevil… But institutionalized sexual repression has always created lucrative markets for porn, and I was proud at having helped spread a few boners to sub-Saharan Africa.
I eventually decided it was just easier to be vague about what I did. “I sell movies to stores around the country.” “What kind of movies?” “All kinds”. “Can you get me some deals on Disney stuff”? “Sorry, no.” Even after I owned a distribution company of my own, this was the conversation I had hundreds of times whenever I met a new career-inquisitive person. To this day, a few friends I see regularly know nothing about what I do beyond that.
It’s worth mentioning here that upon learning I sold dirty movies for a living, my two nephews who were in their late teens at the time told me as smiles spread across their faces, “You have the best job in the world!” They were right of course, and the porn-haters of the world need to just buy some smut and watch it. Oh wait…they already do.
Johnson Bangerwell