Disappointed.
I picked up The Spectator and tried flipping through it while I waited for my interview. The receptionist looked up at me for a moment through half an inch of bullet/nutter proof glass then got back to her reading – Harry Potter. Shouldn’t she at least be pouring over Bling’s famous blowjob column and reading about naughty Natalie’s latest gutful? I would’ve if I’d worked here, I thought to myself.
If I worked here. ‘If’ being the operative word.
See, I was here for my interview for the position of sub-editor on Bling. I was suitably qualified for the job (I wasn’t just chancing it) having spent the last three years working as sub on a car magazine (alright, caravan magazine) but this was a job I really fancied. I’d seen several such vacancies advertised in the media pages of the national press over the years and they were always worded the same:
SUB-EDITOR
Hard working, talented, full-time professional required for market-leading title. Must have minimum 18 months publishing experience on consumer titles and be proficient in Word & QuarkXpress. circa £17k. CV and cuttings to Stuart Toldo, Moonlight Publications Ltd, etc.
They weren’t fooling anyone – Moonlight Publications? Anyone’s who’s been bashing off to porn since the seventies should know the name Moonlight Publications, so that would be most of the adult male population of Great Britain. Like I said, I’d seen a few of these adverts crop up in the past and I’d always applied for them, you know, just on the off-chance. The way I looked at it, even if I didn’t get the job, just the interview in itself would be something I could tell my grandchildren about.
So here I was, third time lucky. They’d got in contact with me, liked my CV and asked me to write them a 500 word dirty story, a 500 word fictional porn star interview, half a dozen dirty sound-bites and an 800 word humorous feature on Baywatch (I later found out that they’d strung the vacancy out for over two months before making up their minds because they had some three dozen hopeful applicants doing all their work for them). Six weeks after dropping my contributions to issues three and four in the postbox I got a call for a young girl who invited me along for an interview.
This would be the first and only time I’ve ever managed to talk to a girl on the phone and stare at her tits at the same time.
The interview was for 10am sharp and it was now 10.25am. I tried reading The Spectator and got quite engrossed in the first four words of an article by Gore Vidal before chucking it in and picking up What Mortgage. It was no use, I just couldn’t concentrate, not knowing (or at least fantasising about) what was behind the glass doors and the Muggle on reception.
Would I see a naked girl? Would they just be walking around out back? What if the whole place was just wall-to-wall with pictures of tits and fannies and I couldn’t look anywhere without seeing them? I hadn’t looked at a porn mag in the company of someone else since I was 14 years old and I wasn’t sure a job interview was the right time to start again. What if we were looking through a couple of issues together and the editor turned to me and told me he had a stiffy?
Jesus!
Normal job interviews were scary enough but this one had me unable to sit still for five seconds straight. My heart was thumping inside my chest, my armpits were sticky with sweat and my heavily gelled-hair was itching like mad. I tried scratching it without messing the rest of it up too badly and took a few deep breaths. The receptionist hadn’t given me so much as a glance in the last ten minutes, although I felt like I had a hundred eyes on me.
I bet she knows the score, I thought to myself as I stared at her through the glass. Working in a place like this she had to be a bit open-minded. I mean, sex was probably no big thing to her, second-nature and all that. She certainly had nice tits. I wondered if she’d ever done any modelling herself. More than likely. Perhaps she’d even done hard-core, it wouldn’t have surprised me. I was just starting to wonder if she had anything on underneath the desk when I stopped before I got to the point where I couldn’t stand up if called upon to do so. My train of thought was further disturbed by a courier arriving with a large A3 enveloped marked ‘PROOFS’. The receptionist buzzed him through the security doors, signed for the envelope, then picked up the phone and dialled. The courier paid me no attention and I paid him even less, my attention was firmly fixed on the envelope and my mind was galloping off in half a dozen directions when all of a sudden some guy leaned out of the security doors and asked me if I wanted to come through.
The only thing I was about to come through was my pants.
‘Sorry to keep you, one of those mornings. Stuart Toldo,’ he said introducing himself and offering me his hand. I took it, shook it and returned it to him, then followed him through the security doors.
Alice was stepping through the looking glass.
‘Good luck,’ the receptionist smiled, looking up from her book and I almost managed to return her smile without looking at her tits. Almost.
‘Well, we’ve got four magazines in the company, Bling, Ace, Froth and Bangers! I edit Bling, which is the one we’re going to be testing you for today.’
Testing?
‘You’ve read Bling before I take it?’ he asked.
If it had been anyone else in the world asking me that question I would’ve replied, ‘No. But my mate’s got a stack of copies,’ but what I actually said was, ‘Yes, I’ve read a few copies... good mag... very... I like it,’ although again this wasn’t strictly true. I hadn’t actually ‘read’ it, as in the strict definition of the word, what I usually did was spread four or five issues about me and open them up onto my favourite pages, then lob my seed on stony ground. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but even up to this point I was half-expecting him to point at me and laugh, ‘He admitted it, everyone, he admitted it, he buys porno mags,’ then for everyone to pour out of the various offices either side of the corridor and laugh too while the women viewed me with contempt.
‘Christ, we just produce them, we’re professionals, but you actually buy them. What a creep!’ the receptionist would shout after me, then scream, ‘Rapist! Rapist! Rapist!’ as she pulled her cardigan tightly across her big, fat, enormous, round, firm, bouncing...
‘Yes, well Bling is seen as the classiest of the titles we produce,’ Stuart replied bringing me back to reality. ‘We get the best girls, at least we try, and generally work with the best photographers to produce a mag that’s the fourth best-selling in the country.’
‘What’s your circulation?’ I asked him, trying to show a professional interest.
‘Around about 90,000,’ he replied and I stopped dead in my tracks.
‘A month?’
‘Yes, give or take. It generally goes up if we’ve got a free video or some other gift on the front cover but it basically hovers around the 90,000 mark.’
This was staggering. 90,000 copies sold every month! I was expecting him to say 5,000 or even 10,000, but 90,000! Fuck me! And that was only the fourth best-selling mag on the top shelf? What the fuck was the best-selling one doing? I thought for a moment about all the dozens of different mags up there in the newsagents and then about numbers I’d just heard and put it together that Britain must shift something like 500,000 to a million dirty mags every month.
Every month!