When you get two e-mails from a prospective employer in the span of twenty minutes, and one of them says, “Well, you’ll certainly make more money from sex toys than you will from mortgages,” and the other says, “Must move interview until your cold clears up. *Cannot* afford to get sick,” well, you know it’s going to be a fascinating interview.

But I suppose I already knew this. I had found Entertainment Partners, Inc., on a well-known job posting website and immediately sent in some writing samples in response to their ad looking for content writers. Within ten minutes, I had received an e-mail asking me to call them as soon as I landed in Boston. So when I got in, I called and explained who I was. The owner said, “Um…who?” I explained again. He said, “Oh, right. Send me everything again?” It seemed like a red flag, but I sent it again. A few days and a couple of weird, weird emails later, I was on my way in for an interview.

Actually, calling it an interview isn’t quite accurate. He had already told me that I had the “job.” He had explained that the salary was, um, zero. Or five percent of revenues, which I assumed in a four-month old company to be a number approaching zero. I was more interested in the cards he had insisted on playing close to his vest: What, exactly, I might be writing. The address. Who else worked there. I wondered about all these things as I smoothed my coat and tie and rang the doorbell on a Back Bay townhouse that corresponded to the address he had sent me.

Someone buzzed me in and a barefoot young man in shorts, met me in the hall. “You here to see Stanley?” he said. I nodded and he ushered me into the office: Stanley’s dark studio apartment, outfitted with a long folding table, a couch, and a bed that, together, took up all of the available, non-kitchen floor space. Laundry covered all furniture that wasn’t used for holding up a computer. Typing away at the folding table were five young men in what could generously be called office casual wear. I sat on the couch with Stanley’s dog. And Stanley himself sat on the edge of his bed, smacking at a keyboard and yelling about whatever he had going on the screen into a telephone headset.

The first thing he said to me was, “Oh, Jesus, you gotta loosen that tie, man; you’re freaking me out.” The second was, “Dan, this a real busy time of day for us. You got me right in the middle of some bids.” Bids on what, I did not ask. I also didn’t ask why he had told me to come for my not-quite-an-interview in the middle of his bidding time. The third thing he said, not quite to me, was, “Oh, f***, someone just bought analangels.com out from under us.” I stayed quiet and looked at the dog.

As Stanley worked at his computer and the dog and I got tired of staring at each other, I tried to sort of poke around the apartment with my eyes. The walls were decorated with a mishmash of old posters, motivational sayings, and soft-porn photos. Books on the shelf that dominated the side of the room behind the bed ranged from a travel book of Spain to the “Kama Sutra for Dummies” (honest); the juxtaposition of these two volumes would be explained later when, as I talked about Barcelona with another employee, Stanley yelled, “I love Barcelona! That’s where I had my first threesome!” And along the side of the couch, in a pile three feet tall, was a stack of what I was realizing I was being hired to market: the smash hit video, ‘Anal Aggression.’ I went back to looking at the dog.

Stanley finally got finished with his auction and pulled up a chair next to me. “So,” he said, “got any questions?” Did I have any questions? How about, What in the hell am I doing here? I skipped that one in favor of a question about what sort of revenue I could expect from writing these sites for him. He showed me a few examples of their work in the debt-consolidation industry, then found a site they had built that sold sex toys. Just as he had promised in the email! The ultra-lucrative sex toy website. Sales for the month of August, as of August 28? Fifteen hundred bucks. My cut, at 5%? That would be seventy-five American dollars. I could probably make more money delivering the sex toys. Or cleaning the apartment, for that matter. “Well,” said Stanley. “I got some questions for you. Let’s take a walk.” Then he turned away to berate one of his employees, a young man who looked to be about sixteen. “Arjay, do you have any idea what you’re doing here? What your job is?” Arjay nodded. “Are you comfy? Good chair?” Arjay looked at his computer and swallowed hard. “Great,” said Stanley. “Let’s go.”

Though I could not help but think of how mobsters in movies say, “Let’s take a ride,” to the guy they’re about to kill, I went for the walk. The dog came too, which made me feel a little more comfortable.

“So,” he said. “Married?” When I said I was, he said, “What’s the wife do?” I explained. “Hmmm,” said. “So if your wife is in public education, is it a problem if you’re writing about dildos?”

“Probably,” I said.

“That’s why I could never be married,” he said. That, and also the videotape collection, I thought. Also, your haircut. But I didn’t say anything. We walked to the Public Garden. “So listen,” he said. “Let me tell you about how this all works.”

“We got company 1, which builds sites. Gonna commodify the whole business of building web sites. You can get a site cheap. But that business is dormant, since May.”

“Didn’t you start it in April?” I said. But he was already on to company two. Company two was what the five guys in his bedroom were busy with. “The top of the line, those guys are, in terms of technologists,” he said. “The best search engine marketer technologists money can buy.”

“And three? Three is top secret.”

“Well, secret how?” I said. “Like, you can’t tell me what it does?”

“The guys in the office, the top technologists, they won’t even talk about it. It’s that secret,” he said. I was thinking, at that moment that Arjay didn’t look like he would hold up under questioning. Stanley saved me the trouble of getting the information from poor Arjay. “They do work with loopholes.”

“In what?” I said.

“Ah ha! If I told you, they wouldn’t be loopholes anymore, would they?”

“Ok,” I said, “but are they in laws? Software? What?”

“Loopholes,” he said again. “In the web itself? I can’t say anything else at all. Nothing.”

“You mean, like, it’s a way to get your web site to show up first in any search engine? That kind of loophole?”

“Exactly,” he said. “Don’t say anything.”

“And company four?”

“Company four,” said Stanley, “is a labor of love. A sex directory.”

“What is that, even?” I said.

“A directory,” he said. “Of sex.”

“But what’s on it?”

“Real stuff. Great writing. We already got an editor, a great name, everything. The people who write that are gonna be top of the line content people. The best writers I can find. Best in the area, in the country. Experts in our areas.”

What areas, you ask?

“DVD reviews, video reviews, sex toy reviews, sex site reviews, best places to have sex outside of the home reviews, sex current events, sex features, position reviews, lustrology, and booze,” he said.

“Boos?” I said.

“Booze,” he said. “Liquor. Want it?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“It’s gonna take a top line writer, a real liquor expert. You’d get a lot of free booze, but you’d have to write great stuff. Now, I know, Jewish boys like you and me, we don’t have a reputation for drinking a lot. But let me tell you, if you’re reviewing tequila, I can help you there. Believe me, I’ll put away some tequila. You know, that’s ok, get people to help you, drink with you. Anything goes. Oh, and chocolate – I’ll get smashed on Godiva, Bailey’s, anything chocolate.”

Chocolate, analangels, and tequila? “What’s the column pay?” I asked.

“Five percent of revenues,” he said. “But it won’t make money for a long time. Say you want it and it’s yours. Or gimme a call, let me know what you think.”

“I’ll give you a call, for sure,” I said. But I was already thinking I would turn this unpaid position down. I *cannot* afford, after all, to get sick. And I have a feeling that, in a tiny office filled with people, dogs, and hardcore videos, it might be a possibility.

Epilogue
I called Stanley a week later to turn down the “job,” since I’m not looking for volunteer work in the sex industry right at this minute.

“Hi,” I said. “This is Dan Barcan.”

“Who?” said Stanley.

“You offered me a job,” I said.

“Okayyyyy,” he said, slowly.

“Well,” I said. “Thanks very much, but I won’t be able to take it.”

“Who is this again?” he said.