The Voyeur Mafioso, Part 4

Part 3 here.

If this wasn’t a job, I might find the finished product as attractive as our customers seem to feel. As it stands, I don’t really have the luxury. I never was the Peeping Tom sort, but I can at least intellectually understand why people are willing to pay the price for such veracity. If one finds oneself pleased by the sight of a woman clutching a handful of toilet paper, far be it for me to pass judgment. The spectacle never did much for me, but it does a great deal for many.

I guess I’m a bit more pragmatic. I’m attracted to the girl-next-door, the sort that might be interested in a guy like me. Beautiful women intimidate me. I see them on the street or through my viewfinder and question whether they’d ever be attracted to me. Our audience wants the girls who look like runway models, and that’s quite a tall order. I have no control over who enters the next dressing room. I wish I could tell them that beauty comes in many forms.

For the first time in my life, I’ve become skillful in something besides good intentions. As an adolescent, I was always attracted to films about hit men, the glamor of living a lone-wolf existence, the craft involved, and the insistent need for secrecy. I might not have approved of the tactics or the brutality of it, but I sensed it gave a man like me a purpose. I always shyly kept to myself, letting few people into the particulars of my life. I know it limited me socially, but I struggled to find a job where I’d have only sporadic contact with others.

Now, I fit someone’s profile. I never had to brave the indignity of demeaning vocational tests and overly polite job counselors. No one cared about my references or my flimsy resume. The two most important questions asked were whether I was willing to do it and would I keep the nature of my vocation a complete secret. I assented eagerly to both. If asked, I was to say that I edited raw film for a pornography website. No one ever asked any further questions.  

To this day, I don’t even know who my immediate boss is. The interview prior to my hire was conducted completely online through chat. I saw no faces and they did not see mine. Specifically they asked about my computer skills with a particular editing software program and stressed that, should I be hired,  I was to follow closely the demands and requests of our customer base. A week later I was scanning my inbox and found a job offer waiting for me. I accepted by way of calling an unlisted cell phone number with an out-of-town area code. The digits were included in the text of the e-mail.  I was told I would start in a week and to delete the message immediately.

We do have the law on our side, or at least in our back pocket. We have the impotence of the current statues on the books. What we do and how we do it is tough to prosecute. Most states have laws on the books defending women and girls who have been videotaped or photographed without their consent, but they are mostly used to protect children. If the parties involved are legal adults, it’s a different matter. We’ve insisted upon strict secrecy to make sure that those on film or in a photograph never come across their own image for any reason. If there’s ever any doubt, we pixilate faces or distinguishing marks.

Thus far, we’ve been lucky, though established protocols are in place should a woman make an accusation. We’ve made enough money by now to offer generous cash settlements that, in other endeavors, have ensured upon silence in a flash. Bad publicity is anathema of what we want. We bill ourselves, in long-established parlance, as a gentleman’s club. Once one person steps forward, the press starts digging into our content and three more women follow suit. We can pay off three people, but not thirty or three hundred.

Trying to skirt the issue is needlessly suspicious. My papers are legit and my employment is too. We even go to the trouble to hire a handful of women willing to strip and pose in conventional fashion, but that’s for deception’s sake. Anyone who signs up knows what he or she is really getting. We even have a handful of female members. Subterfuge is remarkably easy in the internet age.

If you listen to the politicians speak and take their rhetoric seriously, you might concur that I worked for one of those All-American startup small businesses boosting the economy with ingenuity and effort. It was certainly established with both in mind, but I doubt anyone would want to equate economic stimulus with a small online fetish pornography company. I know we’ve provided the basic needs of many, enough to keep us afloat from quarter to quarter.

I don’t rationalize what I do, but neither do I feel guilty. It’s interesting work and beats anything else I did beforehand. I take pleasure in my handiwork, especially in the editing room that doubles as one corner of the living room in my small apartment. In post-production, I do my best to make every word spoken come out as clear as a bell, removing extraneous noise. Customers have e-mailed us to say that the best videos make them feel like they’re actually in the room themselves, observing every moment and every sound. The fly in the wall effect is our goal every time out.

In accordance with our policy, the raw files successfully uploaded to the server and central control are then promptly destroyed. No need to leave a paper trail or an electronic one. Like a criminal wiping clean the fingerprints, I wipe over the hard drive three times before starting a new assignment. I never said this wasn’t a little sketchy or chancy, but perhaps this sort of business appeals to my rebellious side.