Hella Nation - Evan Wright [2]
I pieced together that my résumé contained a typo, which disqualified me for the position of copy editor. I remember only disjointed pieces of the afternoon from that point on—shaking hands, walking across a floor that felt bouncy like a trampoline, trying to hold on to a No. 2 pencil as I filled out some papers. I came to the next morning in my apartment, wondering what had happened. I phoned Hustler’s offices and was put through to MacDonell. It was a confusing conversation—I’m sure for both of us—because MacDonell had offered me a job the day before, and I had accepted, and now I was on the phone with him trying to pretend like I knew that already.
It was only on the following Tuesday when I showed up for work and was led to a spacious private office—with a large TV and VHS player across from my desk and stacks of adult videotapes on the shelves—that I discovered I had been hired as Hustler’s entertainment editor, responsible for covering the adult industry. Later I would find out that my hiring had come about after the hasty departure of my predecessor, whose heroin problem had gotten so bad MacDonell had been forced to fire him. I was told that my predecessor’s heroin problem hadn’t been grounds for his termination. It was his other behavior, such as never leaving his office. One of my new coworkers explained, “The guy who had the job before you would come in every morning with a two-liter bottle of Pepsi, drink it all by lunch and spend the rest of the day peeing in the empty bottle, so he could hide in his office.” My colleague offered a tip: “Just make sure, no matter what you do in your office, you step out and walk around sometimes so MacDonell can see you. He gets freaked out if employees don’t seem to be able to walk around.”
If you could meet the minimum standards, the porn industry was a welcoming place to individuals like me who had grave personal problems. Though the business is a legal one, like the manufacture of assault weapons or the marketing of fortified malt liquor in poor neighborhoods, its existence is barely tolerated by the public. Given the social opprobrium under which the business functions, it’s tantamount to a black market enterprise. Like any black market, the adult industry is a place of rogues, borderline criminals, people with little to lose. If you are a screwup, an alcoholic, drug addict, nymphomaniac (of course) or freak, failure or deviant of just about any kind, it is a remarkably tolerant place.
My own decline had begun in high school. I had peaked around my junior year as a total nerd. A member of the debate team, I left school early whenever possible to attend lectures at the Council on Foreign Relations on the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks with the Soviet Union. In my free time I read Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. I wavered between dreams of attending Annapolis to become a military aviator and my volunteer work with Amnesty International writing letters to urge the release of “prisoners of conscience” held by foreign despots. I was torn by the traditional beliefs I had been raised with in the efficacy of militarism to promote Truth, Justice and the American Way and a growing personal conviction that the only proper course of action in a world of cruelty and horrors was absolute pacifism.
My crack-up began in earnest during a senior seminar on nineteenth-century European political thought when we came to the Russian nihilists, whose motto was “Smash everything that can be smashed.” According to my teacher, Bruce Carr, the slogan urged conceptual—not literal—action, to eradicate old, unworthy ideas by subjecting them to hammer blows of withering criticism and retaining only those that survive. The concept set the gears turning in my teenage brain. I resolved to live by subjecting every thought I held dear to extreme criticism, the more destructive the better.
In my career as a high school history student, the more I learned of the world and man’s inhumanity