WRITING SEX

At twenty-nine, I found myself with a baby daughter and her mother to support. I took a job at a bookstore in Los Angeles, the salary barely enough to keep us afloat, but at least I got to be around books.

My fellow employees included other aspiring writers, among them a guy named Mark who claimed to be making pretty good money writing erotic fiction for a small independent press in the San Fernando Valley. He gave me the name of the editor and said if I was interested I should contact him. 

I’d written a little about sex in my first novel attempts and wasn’t averse to trying more if I could make some money at it. I called and made an appointment to meet the editor. I found his office in a corner of a large warehouse on a nondescript street in the Valley. A bearded, ponytailed guy in teeshirt and jeans introduced himself as Brian, the editor and publisher of Brandon House Books.  

He said he’d established the press with money from the burgeoning porn industry, modeling it along the lines of Paris’s risqué Olympia Press, renowned for having published Beckett, Nabokov, William Burroughs and other important writers early in their careers. I was surprised, and comforted somewhat, to see his list of contemporary fiction writers and poets, many of them quite prominent, writing under pseudonyms for Brandon House, a few under their own names. It helped mitigate the creeping sense of sleaziness I’d felt in the car driving over there. 

“You write the first novel on spec,” Brian said. “If I accept it, you’ll receive $750 and an advance on a second one.”  

For the next six weeks, I spent nights at my typewriter trying to fashion a pornographic novel. The protagonist was to be a lapsed straight businessman who sold not only exotic drugs but powerful aphrodisiacs to well known figures of the day, sending them into wild bouts of orgiastic sex. I wanted it to be satirical, surreal, extreme, in the spirit of the underground comics of the day, bacchanals of Boschian excess. I titled it The Dealer and invented an authorial pseudonym: Malcolm Spade. I can’t remember a word of it. 

I was concerned Brian would find The Dealer too ridiculous to be arousing, not to mention utterly libelous. But he didn’t seem to mind. He paid me and commissioned me to write a sequel. 

The Dealer Strikes Back was another tale of absurdist, celebrity-packed pornographic satire, full of grotesque, cartoonish couplings. Again Brian accepted it and paid me to craft a second sequel.

Later that year, Brandon House ran into financial or legal difficulties, or both, and temporarily suspended publication. My second novel was already in galley proofs and the third one was emerging from my typewriter. I called Brian repeatedly but only got an answering machine. Not long after that, Brandon House ceased publishing altogether.

I netted, I think, $1,500 from the entire episode.  

A decade later, I was publishing novels with large New York presses. My eleven-year-old daughter was exploring every nook and cranny of the house in her curiosity, and I figured sooner or later she’d come across my copies of those early erotic books and manuscripts. The thought rendered me sleepless. I decided they were juvenilia, remnants of a chapter in my life best put behind me now, and had to go. One winter night, with barely a twinge of regret, I tossed them all in the fireplace.  

I thought no more about it, and that’s the truth. But of course I failed to take into account the rise of the internet.

In cyberspace, nothing vanishes, nothing dies.