I thought it was going pretty well for a first date.
Staci laughed at all my jokes. From our table at Abe & Louie's in the Back Bay, she fed me salmon from her fork and didn't run off screaming when I told her that I made a living as a freelance writer. Good start, I remember thinking as I excused myself to take a leak. But when I returned from the bathroom, I was no longer the semi-famous word scribbler she pictured me to be moments ago. I could tell from her maddened eyes and that snarl on her lips that the jig was up: I was now a monster. "Who is Taylor Rain?" she demanded. I thought long and hard before answering: "The porn star Taylor Rain?"
Game over. Again.
You'd never believe how many times my debauched past has come back to bite me in the ass. One search is all it takes. And since we're on friendly terms, I'll spare you the click: look, I never really asked to become a celebrated porn "journalist," whose "job" consisted of consuming narcotics with half-naked, barely legal girls and then writing about it. It all just kind of happened.
In August 2000, after pacing in my dingy apartment for three weeks waiting for The Simpsons to call and offer me a staff-writing gig that would never come, I went and took a job editing at Hustler. Wouldn't you? Now it's 10 years later, and according to Google there are 90,000 reasons you should stay the hell away from me. Who the fuck is this Google, exactly, and what did I ever do to deserve this lubeless anal raping they call a "search result"?
Okay, Google, you got me: once upon a time I was romantically linked to a female sex starlet named Taylor Rain. A porn star, yes. And we weren't just romantically linked — technically, we were married. But it's really no big deal, and lasted about as long as a Roger Clemens steroid cycle. As for my career? I used to write about porn for a living, and there was a time when tens of thousands of upstanding citizens woke up every morning and went online to see what I had to say about their favorite perversion. And sure, I wasn't changing the world like, say, Matt Drudge — but I knew that at the end of the day we were pretty much the same beast . . . aside from the fact that I was literally immersed in semen-soaked dresses.
Except, well . . . try telling that to your dinner date, after she uses her phone to google your sorry ass and comes up with the article you wrote and co-starred in comparing porn star Jewel De'Nyle's vagina to her mass-produced signature pocket pussy.
