‘Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books’
Aldous Huxley
THE PORNOGRAPHER DIARIES
Danny King
AUTHOR NOTE
This edition of The Pornographer Diaries was released by as an ebook by the author. It was originally published in paperback in 2004 by Serpent’s Tail and later in Russia by AST, Italy by Kowalski and Taiwan by Sharp Point. It was also produced for the stage by Kate McCarthy (Have A Word Productions) and played throughout the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Further details can be found on my website, dannykingbooks.com – DK
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Moonlight Publishing Personnel
Position Name (aka)
Publisher Philip Goss
MD Peter McMenamin (Dirty Mac)
Production Jennifer Ball
Reception Wendy Pickles
BLING
Editor: Stuart Toldo
Sub Godfrey Bishop (God’)
Designer Roger Noble
FROTH
Editor Roger Montgomery (Monty)
Sub Matt Sanders
BANGERS!
Editor Susie Potts
Deputy Hazel Smith
Designer Don Atkins
ACE
Editor Ryan Breen (Paddy)
Sub Paul Tompson (Fat Paul)
Designer Hasseem Abdul
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
Bling/Froth Jackie Griffin
Bangers!/Ace Mary Clarke
Prologue: The questions
Working for a porn mag, you’re always asked the same questions over and over again when people find out what you do. They vary in style and phrasing a little but basically they boil down to the same five questions:
1. Can you get me some mags?
2. Can you get me a job?
3. Are the letters real?
4. Do you get to go on photo shoots?
5. Do you get to shag the models?
The quick answers to all of these questions is yes, no, yes, yes and sometimes, if you’re lucky. The long answers are, well, they’re a little more involved...
1. Papier mâché porn
‘Ow!’ I yelped.
‘What’s up?’ Barry asked from the track.
‘I got a thorn stuck in me,’ I told him, pulling my hand out of the brambles and sucking at the little black dot that had buried itself into my palm. The thorn showed enough of itself so that I could get my teeth on the end of it and yank it out, which brought a couple of tears to my eyes and made my lip wobble a bit. Luckily, I had my back to Barry so the rest of the school never got to hear about it. I wiped the blood onto my jeans and began crawling through the bush again.
‘Have you got it yet?’ he whined again.
‘You ask me that one more time and I’ll smack you in the fucking mouth!’ I hissed back at him, meaning, ‘You ask me that one more time and I’ll chuck your bike in the river while you’re in the shops and pretend it was Neil Barratt who came along and did it.’
I caught hold of a few more muddy and tattered pages that had been torn from the rest of the mag and gazed upon them in awe. The colours were dark from the damp and the dirt and some of them showed only fragments of pictures – but there was enough. Curvy, voluptuous ladies stared back at me wearing nothing but vacant expressions and an unidentifiable sludge you find under bushes in Berkshire – er, thorny bushes that is, not ladies’ bushes.
This was my first ever glimpse of a nudey mag and I liked what I saw. Sure I was no stranger to the Great Universal catalogue underwear and shower curtain sections, and if you took mine and every other lad in my geography class’s text books and hurled them across the playground, they’d all fall open on one particular page, but this was different.
This was a nudey mag.
A real, no joking naked ladies nudey mag. And it was amazing. Big round boobs and big hairy fannies that were so real I didn’t need to use my imagination any more. Whole glossy pages of pink, bare flesh with just a hint of bird shit and mildew that was suddenly more fascinating and exhilarating than hunting Christmas presents or finding my big sister’s diary.
See, just lately I’d been finding women’s bodies fascinating – not girls, not the little girls in my class, I still didn’t care about them, I was talking about women – my friends’ mums or even some of my mum’s friend and I had a recurring fantasy about my form tutor Miss Jenkins keeping me behind after school to sit on my head, but I was still in the process of putting all the pieces together. Nudey mags seemed to hold some interesting clues.
I’d all heard about these magazines before of course. Gary Allison had told us he’d seen one his dad’s stashed away in the shed and it was stacked full of pictures of ladies that had to take all their clothes off and stand in front of the camera while people took pictures of them. Barry had asked if they were covering themselves up with their hands or standing sideways or something and Gary had reassured us all that they were, ‘standing facing the camera and you can see everything.’ At this point someone might as well have told me that the universe went on forever for all the ability I had to comprehend this.
‘Everything!’ David Tinnings exclaimed and normally we would’ve told him to fuck off and go and play with his flute but most of us were suddenly far too busy rearranging our own flutes at this point.
‘Bring it in,’ Barry urged him.
‘No I can’t, it’s my dad’s, he’d kill me,’ Gary replied.
‘Yeah, Jimmy Hill. Your pants are on fire,’ Neil Barratt responded, then added, ‘He’s lying,’ for those of us who didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘I’m not,’ he insisted.
‘Then bring it in,’ the whole of the first year waded in. Suddenly you could see it in his eyes, Gary was wishing he’d never said anything about the mag because now he was backed into a corner and there was no way out without losing all face – and when you’re only eleven years old this simply isn’t an option.
The next day Gary swiped his old man’s mag and brought it to school. An enormous cluster around the tennis courts resembling Mecca at rush hour alerted Mr Escott-Neu that something was amiss. Gary tried to stuff the offending contraband back into his bag before our House Master clocked it but this was impossible in the feeding frenzy he’d created.