I Used To Work In Porn - Part Two

This post is a continuation of the post from yesterday. Before reading, you may want to visit this post to get caught up.

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As explained in yesterday's post, I had accidentally fallen into a way to make money and had started looking for ways to make more. Suddenly, finding myself surrounded by hard-core pornography, I had an idea.

Kids didn't have access to this kind of stuff. Other than sneaking looks at the Playboy's in their dad's closets, this was unavailable to people our age. However, I had access to a lot of it and I was just positive they would be willing to pay.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I found any excuse I could to ride my bike into town. This town was in the city limits and I lived a few miles out. I would go into the abandoned house, load up my backpack and ride back home to put the magazines in boxes under my bed. It took me a few dozen trips to get them all. Occasionally, my friend who found them was available to help me, but most of the time, I was on my own.

The second floor of our house consisted of only the bedrooms of my brothers and myself, so my parents didn't come up there very often. I used this fortunately convenient privacy as an opportunity to start sorting through these adult publications to get them in some sort of reasonable order. Once I felt that I had a decent grasp on my inventory and was familiar with what I had, it was time to find buyers.

I never got caught with anything at school, but there were a few close calls. A bunch of students standing and giggling in the middle of the hallway while crowded around something had a tendency to attract the attention of school faculty. I quickly decided that was too risky. I needed another tactic.

On the weekends, I would load up my backpack and make house calls. I went to kids' houses and showed them what I had. Since, I had paid nothing for any of it, every sale was pure profit. I sold most magazines for five dollars, but I quickly discovered that junior high kids really had no grasp on what stuff was worth and could sometimes sell a magazine for as much as twenty. I could really pull a lot of money by cutting one up and selling individual pictures for a dollar or two a piece.

I know these prices sound outrageous, but a sixth grader would give me anything he could get his hands on in order to have his own picture of a naked woman.

I would go with my parents to a wedding and gather several kids to go outside and see what I had brought. Soon the money would start changing hands. I sold porn to kids from my school, kids from other schools at basketball games, kids I had never met at weddings and anyplace else that I could. Looking back on it, I have no idea how I never got ratted out by any of them.

Eventually, my friend who had originally found all the magazines, decided he wanted a bigger cut of the money I was making. I had been paying him 10% since he was the one who had found them, but did not feel that he was entitled to any more since he wasn't doing any of the work and was incurring none of the risk. However, he did not agree. Finally, he demanded that I give him half of the magazines that I still had or he would inform my parents of what I had been doing. I stood firm and decided to call his bluff.

He wasn't bluffing.

He showed up at our house the very next day and told my mother. Now, he either didn't tell her the entire story or she missed some of the details during the shock of what she was hearing, but when she came to talk to me, she didn't know about the porn ring I was running out of my bedroom. All she knew was that I had pornography in my possession.

When she told me to retrieve the magazines out of my room, I will never forget the look on her face as her jaw dropped when I came down the stairs carrying two large paper grocery bags filled to the top. When I turned around to go back to my room, she said, "Where are you going? We aren't done here."

I sheepishly answered, "There's more. I'm going to get the rest."

My poor mother spent the next couple of hours trying not to look at the dirty pictures as she cried over a burn barrel while ripping them up to toss in the fire. I sat in the house wondering what would happen when dad got home and found out.

I know NOTHING!

When she asked my little brothers if they had seen my magazines, thankfully, they both covered for me. They claimed they didn't know anything about them. They may have just been covering their own butts, but had Mom known that my little brothers had been subjected to that filth as well, I would have been in much more trouble.

I didn't get into as much trouble as I thought I would. In fact, I never heard a word about it from my dad, but my future as a porn empire magnate was over. Being so young, the money I made was not spent on anything substantial. I have no idea how much passed through my hands since it was being spent as I made it. I remember that I always had a soda when I wanted one and I could buy a book or video game for myself if my parents said no. Soon it was all gone and I had nothing to show for it.

I ended up back where I started and had to go back to selling lunch room tickets, but I was smarter than before. However, it would be many years before I would be able to use my new knowledge. Turns out that real life was not like those magazines.