My Brief Career as a Writer of Erotic Fiction
When I was a kid, seven or eight or so, reading pretty much anything I could get my hands on, especially if I was bored, I became interested in my father’s Playboy and Esquire magazines. I had my heart set on becoming a centerfold one day and was utterly enchanted by the Vargas cartoons in Esquire which I imagined modeling myself after when I grew up. Not your average kid’s dream, I suppose, but a lot of my young life had revolved around sex so that’s what I knew and these magazines made it look good.
By the time I got old enough to pursue such things I’d pretty much lost hope of living what I perceived to be a glamourous life; I was immersed in my co-interests of writing and art, one of which was supposed to find me a job someday. I had been published in a national magazine when I had been a senior in high school. I’d imagined a bright future ahead for myself; my mother saw me in art school. She was paying the bills and that was the official end of my dreams of becoming a writer.
So, in my mid-30s, married and with two kids, when I saw on the evening news one spring day, that Playboy was planning to open a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, less than an hour from where I lived, and that they were doing a kind of casting call thing at a hotel that was about 20 minutes from my house, I just couldn’t resist. Here it was, a decade late, but what the hell.
They would end up choosing 300 women from a group of over 3000 so I knew it was a long shot but I also knew that I’d have regreted it for the rest of my life if I didn’t try, so I went and to my surprise, about six months later, I received the official mailgram welcoming me to training. My husband was really jazzed to be able to say that he was married to a Playboy bunny so no objections were raised and off I went.
Now he knew, when he sent me off that first day, that my past history was anything but admirable. We’d had trouble with my behavior practically since we married. I was promiscuous as all hell, despite hating myself for it, so we both knew that this promised to be dangerous territory… and it was. I found myself, on a regular basis, unable to turn down a good time.
A year or so before the marriage finally ended, though, he thought perhaps we should try marriage counseling. I would’ve tried anything because I could not help myself and I knew it. The way the counselor laid out her plan of attack was that she would see each of us separately, then both of us together, and so on as time passed. In one of my solo meetings with her, she suggested that I write some stories about what she referred to as “my adventures” because, she said, if I ever actually told my husband everything I’d done, he’d probably have a heart attack. This way, she continued, I could share the things I was writing with him under the context of ‘therapy’ and even though I wouldn’t say that I had actually done them, he would, somewhere inside himself, understand that and somehow be okay with it. What the hell; it was worth a try.
I wrote them; he read them… who knows. He said nothing. The counselor read them and she loved them. She said that she suspected that I could make a living writing erotica and that, since my husband had stated that I could no longer work outside the house no matter what, writing seemed like it might have potential. And it turned out that she was right. I wasn’t exactly making money hand over fist, but I was making money. And over time, I graduated from men’s magazines that I’d never heard of and I’ll bet nobody else has ever heard of either, to writing for Penthouse.
I’d also seen a call for erotic material in a writer’s magazine that was based in the Philadelphia area and I answered with a sample of my work. I got a letter back from the editor saying, “This is some of the hottest stuff I’ve ever read.” I wrote back proposing a series, Casino Cock Tales. He bought it and I started writing for them on a regular basis. After about six months, they asked me to do a Q&A for them as well. I called it Smart Ass and pretty much wrote all my own questions and then answered them. Whatever. It worked.
None of this put a dent in my bad behavior.
I ended up having an affair with the managing editor of the magazine… asking my husband for a divorce, losing custody of my children, and taking a full-time job which included being a reviewer of whorehouses. The women loved me because a) I didn’t want sex from them, and, b) I took really nice photographs of them. “Your pictures are so much better than the pictures the guys take!” No shit they were. I have a great sense of composition and I posed them like the strong women that they were. I met some remarkable women and was grateful to have done so. I learned a lot from them.
I eventually married the managing editor and soon afterward we were both fired, essentially for bringing down the randy atmosphere that had permeated the place. Thus ended my approximately four year long career as an erotic writer.
(PS: the marriage lasted 23 years but also did not end well. Not my fault, though! Yay me! I did pretty good.)
