Humor by DAR

Tenderness in Gomorrah:
On Editing X-rated Letters for a Men's Magazine

(First published in Salon)

We shall call him Mr. Green. He was introduced to me at a party. Party was fun: had various penniless celebs all crushed into a room the size of a janitor’s storeroom. A New York City writers’ party, in other words, and Mr. Green observed me carefully as I spoke touchingly of my wife’s second pregnancy and the various financial burdens presented thereby. Then he asked if I wanted freelance work.

“Copy-editing jerk-off letters for a skin mag,” Green amplified. “Your eyes will glaze over but the money’s grand.”

He was my kind of people, Green was, a varnished old rogue in a stained ascot. He reminded me of the octogenarian sport I’d once met at a Ritz wine tasting who silently held up three fingers across the table, signaling that he was available for a menage. It was his vaulting ambition that appealed to me, that a wheezing geezer was so game. Except in this case, so was I.

It started off pleasantly enough with a phone call the next morn.

"Good morning, Daniel. My name is Chastity. I work for Mr. Green.”

“Ah yes, how do you do, Chastity.”

“Would you like Butt Busters or Cluster Fucks?"

We were off to the races.

It wasn’t long before I found myself developing category preferences: No masturbation scenes. The writer’s lot was lonely enough without having to deal with someone else’s isolation. On the other hand, no orgies. Orgies were the equivalent of sweat shop labor. I had to draw diagrams just to keep the positions straight (Peg’s on the left, Roger’s on his knees, but where’d Yvonne go? Quick, someone call 911! How’d we lose Yvonne?) Cluster fucks, indeed: They couldn’t exploit me that way.

But Fetish Frenzy was good: expanded my thinking. Handicap Parking was lovely: nice to see that amputees got love, too. I was given the official Style Sheet to refer to and a copy of Canada’s guidelines to memorize. For Canada was a problem. Since all the American issues were published for possible export to Canada, the entire industry had to oblige Canada her narrow views. No pain of any sort, no handcuffs, not even a harmless little enema here and there. On this last point in particular, Canada was a stickler. Anal play was to be held to a strict minimum. Didn’t matter how much you may have thought Dudley Doright was in need of a grape juice enema, he wasn’t going to get one in the pages of Joystick.

In no time I had my routine down pat. First thing each evening, after a nice home-cooked meal of pot roast and kasha, I’d retire to my sun porch to download my files and see what was on the minds of America. The primary thing I noticed was the touchingly naive formula so many of the letters seemed to follow (I was hesitant to explore … it worked out wonderfully … our sex life is enhanced … my partner and I love each more than ever). It was poignant to behold the quantity of gentleness I encountered. (He was gentle as a lamb, suspending his bulk above her, tenderly sharing with my wife the gift of his youthful vigor.)

Tenderness in Gomorrah. I’d be damned. But that wasn’t all. What was positively inspiring was the unselfconscious vitality in the vernacular. He was packing some heat in his meat … she had nipples you could dial a phone with … she came so hard I felt the waves … Some of the primitive language I was being paid to correct was actually more colorful in the original: I burst my pants instead of burst out of my pants. She was sucking on his dick, instead of just plain sucking.

I also enjoyed the addition of too many commas, a stylistic idiosyncrasy that gave the text a breathless quality. (I kept her underwear, and, allowed her to get dressed … When I finally saw my wife, with her legs spread wide around Mike, I thought my heart would pound, out of my chest … I got an idea, as he chased my naked bare-assed wife, around the apartment.) And the absence thereof. (She began licking between her breasts removing my spunk.) I appreciated the unintentional stiltedness of the language that devolved from the fact that the letter-writers tended almost never to contract: Sophie licks her to orgasm every time she has finished shaving her. Frequently this gave the raciest sentences an incongruously Puritan flavor, especially during moments of passion (‘I am feeling myself relax,’ she purred softly. ‘Now I am ready to have some fun with you.’) Other times it made the dialogue sound unintentionally like Bert and Ernie. (‘Let me see,’ said Jane as she leaned over to see the love juices winding down her cousin’s thigh. ‘Wow, that is a lot!’)

“Ernie, look at the mess you have made!”

Before long I had my groove down to a science. Tackling a new letter, I’d first dispense with the technicalities. I’d hit the find and replace key and change every cum to come (an average of 19 changes per letter). As per my Style Sheet, I’d make sure every doggie-style was hyphenated, every bunghole was not, every blowjob was one word, every daisy chain was two. Picture, if you will, all of this being dispatched with a ten-month-old baby draped over my lap. In our cozy kinky domesticity I enlisted my wife to proofread, which she’d do during commercials of 20/20. A cartoon I conceived during this period summed up our situation neatly, of a scholarly-looking gent (that would be me) at the word processor in his study calling out to his wife knitting before the TV: "Honey, is 'dream cock' hyphenated?"

Nor would the picture be complete if I didn’t confide that I was performing this editorial duty at a time when my wife and I weren’t getting any. Due to a combination of pregnancy, chronic minor psychic irritations, and other perils of middle-aged matrimony I would edit, she would proofread; two of the most celibate people on the East Coast were doing some of the dirtiest editing in history, then go to their separate bedrooms to sleep. To my way of thinking, this gave the venture a poetic justice it otherwise might have lacked.

“Good morning, Daniel. Name your pleasure: I have Masturbation, I have Gang Bangs, I have Three-For-All.”

“Chastity! Those are my least favorite! You know my policy on Three-For-All! They’re almost as bad as Cluster Fucks! What happened to Blow The Man Down!? Something I can get my teeth into!”

“Well I didn’t want to bring this up,” Chastity said. “But as long as you’re proving intransigent, I may as well tell you that you let a little pain slip through.”

“I did? Where?”

“When he screws her in the ass. And I quote: ‘My ass felt like it was being split in two.’”

“But doesn't she go on to say she liked it like that?”

“Doesn't matter. Can't be any pain whatsoever.”

Sometimes it was like splitting hairs, but I found the linguistics fascinating. “In that case,” I inquired, “is it too painful to talk about hard thrusts?”

“Yes. Substitute deep thrusts for hard thrusts. And remember: No coming on anyone's face or hair, and two men can't come at the same time on the same place.”

Truly she was my guru, my guide through the nether world of copy-editing. And more, through life, in a certain sense …

“Let me get this straight, Chastity. A guy can come on a woman’s breasts and two seconds later another guy can come on her belly, but both guys can’t come on her breasts at the same time.”

“I don’t make the rules, Daniel.”

Pause.

“Hey, how’s that darling little baby of yours?”

“He’s lying right here.”

“Awww cutchee cutchee coo!” she said, ringing off.

The towering giantess could suck very good, I read. I left it uncorrected.

The remuneration was indeed grand, as Green had promised. Never before having sold out in large degree or small, I was gratified to discover that smut editing bought wooden venetian blinds for all 14 windows in my sun porch. At a rate that boiled down to something like $150 per hour, these letters represented jars and jars of organic baby food in the larder as well as the extended afternoon session at daycare. I was the envy of colleagues who had to supplement their incomes by appearing as expert witnesses on Larry King.

Not another negligible side-benefit was that my computer was developing street smarts. I had loaded into its spell-checker all manner of esoterica such as suckfest and cockhead which it thereafter allowed without so much as a red flag. And I myself was becoming proficient in certain arcane areas of copy editing that otherwise might have escaped my expertise, such as the difference between lie and lay. Lie, for all you lay readers out there, is intransitive (does not take an object), whereas lay is transitive (takes an object). Thus, the buxom blonde lies spread-eagled, but the muscle-bound black lay down in the leaves.

The fact that he was black was a subject of its own: I thought it peculiar that so much ink was spent describing how the raw prowess of black men was able to ignite lust in normally reserved white females – Henriette K. loved to look in the face of her coal-black lovers as they were pumping their meat home, and the sight of an ebony rod sliding between her lips was just about worth an orgasm on its own – until I studied the magazine’s demographics. Turned out that a high percentage of Joystick’s readers were not only college students and concert pianists (because they’re good with their hands?), but also black prisoners of state and federal penitentiaries.

So the readers were real. But were the writers? This paramount question – the very one asked by concert pianists as well as jailhouse sodomites all over the nation – went unanswered. It was conveyed to me, by coughs and silences over the phone, that this was something we didn’t really talk about. After months of soul-searching, I decided to put it to Chastity in roundabout fashion.

“Morning Chast, I was just wondering. Is it kosher to change the letters a great deal?”

“In what sense?”

“In the sense of padding, or changing beyond recognition, y’know: fictionalizing?

“Fictionalizing, Daniel?”

“Well, let’s put it this way. How much must we adhere to the original?”

Chastity cleared her throat, a holdover from her days as a psychology doctoral candidate at Radcliffe. “Two rules of thumb should suffice,” she replied. “It is preferable to delete rather than to add. Adding distorts the writers’ original voice. Second, we should not attempt to lend stylistic consistency to the original work. As long as the text’s understandable, it doesn’t need such traditional literary devices as rhythmic build, picaresque characters, or peripeteia.”

“Peripeteia?”

“Peripeteia means ‘a sudden change of events or reversal of circumstances, especially in a literary work.’ It’s from the Greek word peripiptein, to change suddenly. May I go on?”

“By all means.”

“If those elements are present in the original, fine and dandy, but it isn’t our job to supply them. The overarching intent is that the original writer would recognize his or her work and, to the extent possible, not notice that we’ve fiddled with it. Capiche?”

“Capiche, mistress.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Little tantrum going on with the baby. So these letters are real?”

“Daniel. People buy our magazine seeking the voice of the people, and that’s what we give them.”

This was not really answering the question, I didn’t think. But then she asked me a question that went to the heart of the matter.

“As long as we’re on the subject, Daniel, I may as well ask you, purely theoretically: What would you say if I were to ask you to compose some letters from scratch?”

Figuring it was some sort of test I could always get out of later, I said sure. It was never brought up again.

As the months rolled by I remained impressed. By the ingenuity of the fantasies (the black man tying up the white husband with his necktie and riding the wife to fruition two inches from the husband’s nose while he begged the black man to go faster). By the humor (the woman keeping a measuring tape by her bed to measure not only her lovers’ girth but also the distance they could ejaculate). By the sheer kinkiness (the husband who arranged to sniff his girlfriend’s feet while she was fellating other fellows). Like reading Voltaire or Nabokov, it enlarged my sense of the possible.

From my dubious perch outside America’s bedroom window, I found myself in a unique position to be able to monitor national trends. As the example just mentioned illustrated, feet were clearly becoming the third biggest fetish in the nation (after breasts and ass). Cross-dressing, on the other hand, was not the national pastime bloviators were having us believe. What apparently was surging was the sexualization of cigarettes, as in She rolled her cigarette around that pouty wet mouth of hers like it was a small erect cock, licking and sucking the blue hazy smoke like she was coaxing it to climax. I was astounded by the amount of sheer animal sensuality that was abroad in the land: the crystal-clear water amorous swimmers make love in, the hot summer air caressing the bikers riding to an assignation. The ayatollahs were right: We were a shamelessly sensual culture. We were a nation of racehorses. We were bulls and heifers. Brawny, lunatic, infantile, and brave: By evidence of these letters, America was a force of nature.

Did it get old? Hell, anything gets old. Time will darken it, as William Maxwell has said. But also darkening it were repeated phone calls from Chastity during dinner telling me I had “trespassed considerably.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s neatly-trimmed pussy, Daniel. With a hyphen! Whenever you have two adjectives describing something, you have to hyphenate.”

My wife passed the jar of strained pears for me to take over. “I’ll try to remember, Chastity.”

“Please do, Daniel. And S&M has an ampersand.”

“How come?”

“Look, you want to get into semantics? What you should be paying attention to is the fact that you don’t spell out 69. And I quote: ‘There are only three instances when numerals should be used: (1) When the sexual position is meant, use the Arabic number 69; (2) When a woman’s measurements are given (36-25-36) and (3) When referring to specific types of guns (a .38 caliber.)’ Haven’t you memorized the Style Sheet yet?”

Problem was, I had it too memorized. I went over the rules in my sleep. G-spot was always capitalized. Handjob was one word. Cocksucker was one word but cock-tease was a hyphenate. Ass-cheeks was hyphenated but asshole was not. Mine was not to question why. Mine was to see if I could get health benefits.

My computer was also acting up, auto-correcting such words as “cumputer.” The evidence was mounting that I had polluted my hard drive, and this the machine upon which I transposed my fears and dreams. It felt a little like I’d leant my high school sweetheart out to a motorcycle gang for the weekend.

The sad truth of it is that every editing job you do leaves a bit of itself on you. When I’d once had a stint as book editor of a yuppie magazine and had to go through twenty-four business books a month, I thereafter couldn't unlearn the nasty habit of skimming. With this X-rated job my grammar was going to hell in a hand basket. At a black tie dinner party, I heard myself say “suck on” instead of “suck.” When talking to the information lady, I was adding and subtracting commas inappropriately (What is, the number, of Richard Spunk please?)

But much much much much worse than this, much much much worse, was the fact that I was no longer aroused by the pin-ups in Joystick. I would glance at a cover girl and see with the curse of clarity that she was just a heavily made-up post-pubescent drop-out pushing her sun-freckled boobs together rather pathetically. How could this be? My eyes were beginning to glaze over, just as Green had warned. I would stare at a vid cap of a dirty movie in the review section and think, “Is his face covered in pussy juice or covered with pussy juice?”

“Morning, Chastity, how’re tricks?”

“Everything’s fine, except we’re letting go of all the freelance copy-editors …”

A thrill went through me that was almost sexual. This was the kinkiest thing yet. To be fired by Chastity: Here was a sado-masochistic buzz that was almost a category by itself. CUT OFF BY EDITRIX (she was strangulating my income and I was staring into her sea-green eyes … she hoisted me in chains above my creditors as I sputtered my innocence …)

“Fired, Chastity! Was it something I said? Was it something I didn’t say?”

“Well to tell the truth, all you copy editors were getting a little literary there.”

“Literary, moi?”

“Peripeteia. Onomatopoeia, up the wazoo. Whatever. It was like you couldn’t control yourselves. That, and those X-rated films you’re always making up. Swedish Meatballs? C’mon Daniel …”

“I guess this means you won’t be paying those chiropractic bills I forwarded, huh?”

“Pretty definitively not, I’m afraid …”

So I was history. And just when Canada was loosening up, too. The same day I got my walking papers I also received this from the Director of Prohibited Importations, Canadian Customs Department: “This department has recently revised the administrative guidelines contained in departmental Memorandum D9-1-1 elucidating Tariff Code 9956 with respect to the provisions dealing with anal penetration.” Butt-surfing, in other words, was at long last OK by the Canucks.

Too late for me. Dudley Doright could force feed it to Chastity, for all I cared; I was gone. The kid came out of extended day care. The new kid arrived on the scene, doubtless armed with enough X-rated pre-natal vibes to scandalize his future shrink. Style-sheet in hand, my wife and I ventured back to the nuptial bed where -- a happy ending for you, and a good night to all -- we proceeded to hyphenate like bunnies.