They say 40 is the new 30. That may well be true, socially. But in advertising, 40 is what it has always been... retirement age. The day before you turn 40, you may be on top of the world, with your finger on the pulse of the nation. The day after, you're just a bitter old man yelling at the kids to get off the lawn. It's all because the day you turn 40 you fall out of the Golden Demographic, the Holy Grail of advertising, ages 25 - 39. You're now worthless. I blew past that milestone several years ago but thought my innate good taste and talent would carry the day. We all did. We were wrong. Which explains why all my contemporaries and former colleagues are all unemployed or underemployed. Or have given up all together and taken up knitting. As a career.
I thought my career had completely hit bottom early this year when out of complete desperation I answered a Craigslist ad from an adult film company. They were looking for someone to design box covers and I hadn't worked in weeks and losing the house had become a very real possibility. And it paid ridicuously well.
A few days later I received an email from "Marco" expressing an interest in my work. A meeting was set up for the following day at 10.
10pm.
Which, it turns out, is the start of the business day in the porn biz. It's like working with vampires. So the next night, I swallowed my pride, and a Xanax, and set off for the big meeting.
Every cliche about the porn business is true. The address I was given was an unmarked, rundown warehouse across from the Van Nuys airport. Instead of a receptionist, there was an armed bouncer. After being kept waiting for almost an hour, I was finally led back through half-built sets (doctor's office, locker room, jail, etc.) and introduced to the owner, "Nick". An athletic version of Tony Soprano, he shook my hand and invited me to sit in a tiny chair set before his massive desk. There were five other men in the room who were never introduced and never spoke. I wasn't sure whether they were his henchmen or his entourage. After exchanging some pleasantries he asked to see my portfolio. I handed it over and he proceeded to leaf through it, slowly, silently. The goons just stared at me and I started to sweat uncontrollably. If he didn't like the work, my lifeless body would be found in a dumpster the next day.
But it turned out he liked the work and now it was time to meet his "VP of Marketing". It was now close to midnight. He made a call and within a minute in walked "Christiana". Mid 30's, quite pretty, in a slutty kind of way. She was formerly one of the stars, but was now schtupping "Nick" on the side and he'd promoted her. She'd obviously had work done, with the type of anti-gravity tits only found in porn.
She would be my boss.
Porn is a lot like baseball - you have your majors and then a farm system of minor league players that catch talent on the way up, or on the way down. In this case it was mostly down. This was definitely D-league. Their stable of "stars" was mostly 40-something skanks that looked pulled off the street. My first assignment featured a haggard woman who looked like my Jr. High lunch lady after a hard night. "Nick" had delusions of respectability and had said he wanted it "classy", but "Cristiana" had other thoughts and wanted it "DIRTY,DIRTY,DIRTY".
"Christiana" was insane. One minute she's be talking in a sex kitten purr, the next cussing like a rapper. She was either a crackhead or had multiple personalities. Or both. She'd already admitted she was "Marco", and her increasingly unhinged e-mails, always sent around 3am, came under a variety of names... "Destiny", "Lola", "Misty". My first artistic attempt was deemed too "soft", the second, (which featured the "star", bent over grabbing her boobs, taking it up the ass) was too "sophisticated". The third wasn't "dirty enough" and the fourth was dismissed with a curt "WHERE'S THE FUCKING PUSSY????". Throwing caution and taste to the wind, I made one final attempt. A tight crop on a beaver shot with an angry vagina that looked like the gaping entrance to the Holland tunnel. "I don't get it" she wrote back.
It was clear we weren't seeing eye to eye. Or eye to vagina. So I bailed. Never even billed them for all the work that had been done for fear of finding the goon squad on my doorstep. I'd finally reached rock bottom - I'd failed at porn. There's no way things could get worse.
And then we moved to Bako.
I've been scraping along for months with bottom-feeder local clients and the occasional bone tossed over the hill from LA. But I recently picked up a job that's done what porn couldn't... make me want to throw in the towel.
Port-A-Potties. An ad for Port-A-Potties. Granted, it's the deluxe, "executive" model, but it's still just a shitter on wheels.
Stick a fork in me. I'm done.
