"This is great," he said. "It gives me a hard-on the size of a Louisville Slugger. If there was a Pulitzer Prize for porn, you'd win it for sure."

"Thank you—"

"Look, your job isn't hard," Richard went on. "You write some girl copy, you edit some letters. You get to look at pictures of naked chicks all day. Quint's a great boss. It's a great fucking job. But there are two things you must never, ever do. The first thing is that you must never piss off Frank and Tony."

"Who're Frank and Tony?"

"They're the big bosses. They own this shindig. They say jump, you jump."

"OK, that I understand. What's the second thing?"

"There must never, ever be any money shots on the pages that go into the Canadian edition of the magazine. If there is one fucking drop of semen on the Canadian pages, your ass will be out on the street so fast, you'll leave a skid mark from here to the East River."

"Why no cum in Canada?" I asked, and quickly wished I hadn't, for it was then that I learned about the strange regulations that cover the flow of smut over our northern border.

I went college in Buffalo, and so I was familiar with the "Canadian content" laws. Toronto radio stations would play few tunes by Pearl Jam or Nine Inch Nails, and then they'd throw in a Tragically Hip song to keep the Canadian jingoist bastards happy. Strange to say, Canadian content laws also apply to porn. You can sell pictures of women and dogs just so long as they're women from Manitoba and Labrador retrievers, but damned if you could import a good, wholesome American money shot. The magazines would be impounded in the Great White North until the company paid some unemployed hockey player with a razor blade to slice out all of the offending pages.

The UK is even worse. A country that has nude women on page three of the daily paper won't allow you to import a photograph of a woman with her own finger in her private parts. There is absolutely no penetration allowed in the UK. Plus, even though out of respect to the tender sensibilities of the American distributors, you couldn't put any of George Carlin's seven dirty words on the cover, you couldn't even use old standbys like "quim" in the UK.

Richard's petty insanities notwithstanding, he was right in one thing. It was not, after all, as if I had a difficult job. For one thing, I got damn good at girl copy over the next few weeks. It turned out that the secret was to make it as vapid as possible and, preferably, on a third-grade reading level. Writing porn, I soon discovered, was not something you needed Tolstoy's skills to pull off.

Despite the lack of artistic fulfillment, I soon discovered that I was, as you might expect, the envy of my male friends. Hell, guys twice my age idolized me. When I went to synagogue for Yom Kippur (and, man, did I have a lot to atone for), my father's friends pointed me out to their offspring and said, "Do you see that man? Son, when you grow up, I want you to be just like him."

I had the stories to back it up, too. For instance, there was my first night working late. Distracted from my girl-copy duties by bright lights in the cubicle next to mine, I peeked over the wall. It turned out that though, normally, the photo shoots were done on the West Coast, someone had had the brilliant idea to shoot a cut-rate "cubicle sex" spread using local talent. There were a guy and a girl spread-eagled on the desk next to mine, while a photographer, lighting crew, and photographer hovered over them. Meanwhile, a woman gave everyone directions, like, "OK, could you spread your legs a bit more for me, honey? No, don't stick it in, you idiot! This is going into the UK edition!"

"Um, can I get you guys some coffee?" I asked.

"No, that's OK, thanks," the director smiled back sweetly. "Don't mind us."

"Er, OK." I went back to what I was doing.

So, everything seemed to be more or less groovy, at least on the outside—just so long as I didn't have to interact with Frank and Tony. Tony was a really nice guy with a terrific sense of humor, an Italian gentleman in the Sopranos tradition. Frank was another story. Thankfully, I only really had to deal with the terrible twosome at the post-mortem meetings. These were when the entire staff would sit down in the conference room, go over the sales figures, and generally critique the magazine. If Frank and Tony liked it, the whole staff would be sent out to a nice restaurant to eat lunch and get drunk on the company's bill. If they didn't, well, heads would roll.

Next: Life After Post-Mortem