Chapter 46 The Scrotum Was Fair Game
The Scrotum Was Fair Game
“Hey, brother, glad you made it!”
Anton DeGrado swung his head and torso around the doorframe into the RedLite lobby, where Evan had been waiting for twenty minutes under the affable watch of a comely redheaded receptionist. When she’d checked Evan’s ID, logged him into the system, and assigned him a visitor access card, she’d done some light flirting, flashing unlikely violet eyes.
He’d also received a somber nod of kinship from the gym-swollen security guard standing sentry by the water cooler, a Taser gun on his belt.
“Jake Van Dorn, yeah? Jake the Rake! I read some of your pieces. Good stuff, good stuff.” DeGrado swooped toward Evan, winding up for an amphetaminized handshake. Firm grip, sawing motion, aggressive gregariousness.
As always, Melinda Truong’s backstop for Evan’s alias had held up—Substack articles, bits and pieces across various AI-generated blogs, a LinkedIn profile.
Evan said, “Thanks for finding the time, Mr. DeGrado.”
“Mr. DeGrado! Pssht! Anton, Anton.” Now he launched an elaborate handshake ritual with thumb clasps and knuckle bumps, less street than playground. “We’re informal here, kind of like a big family, aren’t we, Gracie?”
The redhead flashed a professional smile and shot them what seemed an obligatory wink.
DeGrado wore lime-green designer sneakers, a fashion utility kilt, and a beige guayabera with hibiscus appliqués that looked like a woman’s blouse. “C’mon, let’s get back to my office.”
He gestured for Evan to scan his card at the wall sensor, and then Evan followed him up a stark white corridor.
The kilt was ridiculous, with nail pockets, folds, and steampunk chains.
It was easy to imagine the sales clerk in a Beverly Hills boutique making the sale, telling DeGrado this was the new look, that he’d be on fashion’s cutting edge.
A dome security camera gleamed on the ceiling, but Evan wasn’t concerned, given the facial-recognition-thwarting hidden pattern of his long-sleeved button-up.
“Want anything? Water, tea, Red Bull, kombucha, espresso? We got one of those machines makes lattes, all that, even the matcha stuff with all the antioxidants.”
“Tea would be great, thank you,” Evan said.
“Detour thisaway.” DeGrado rested a guiding hand on Evan’s shoulder, steered him into a self-serve kitchenette. A tic twitched his left eye. He had a slight overbite he compensated for musculoskeletally with a self-conscious jutting of his lower jaw. “Help yourself.”
Evan busied himself over the tea boxes, pretending to peruse the offerings as he freed a threaded catch inside his shirt cuff.
“How’s the Substack game? You figure out how to monetize your blog okay?”
“Yes,” Evan said, letting one of Joey’s RedLite flash drives slide from his sleeve onto the countertop beside the coffee stir sticks. “Positive sexuality is good business.”
“You know, I’m so happy you said that.” DeGrado came over to Evan, leaning on the counter. His pinkie was an inch from the discarded flash drive with its shiny RedLite logo. “People don’t always get what folks like you and me do. That it’s about freedom.”
Evan dropped a green-tea sachet into his mug and turned for the trash can, drawing DeGrado’s attention with him. “People who are scared of sexuality,” Evan said, “want to control it.”
“Ex-zactly! That’s exactly right.”
Evan dunked the tea bag a few times, standing over the trash can.
He scratched his knee through the fabric of his blogger slacks, loosing another flash drive from the tiny pocket he’d sewn in next to his patella.
The drive slithered down the front of his leg, easing into view atop the toe of his boot.
As he flicked it off, he dropped the tea bag through the swing lid of the trash can, the noise covering the faint clattering of the flash drive onto the tile floor.
He spun around, blocking the drive with his heel, and gestured for the door.
DeGrado led the way out, checking a watch with a face like a hockey puck, inanely large and crowded with subdials. “I’m sorry but I only have about twenty minutes. Frankie’s jet already landed—”
“Frankie?”
“Our CEO. So we have to make sure, you know, everything’s locked down and squared away.”
Two middle-aged women in frumpy dresses passed, offering the boss a nervous grin.
They were followed by an older man with a three-piece suit, a dense trimmed beard, and slicked-back hair dyed an unlikely mahogany.
DeGrado aimed a finger gun at him: “Need those content-clearance docs for Asia by EOD, buddy. Don’t let me down! ”
The man offered a rakish two-finger yes-sir tap of his forehead.
DeGrado and Evan kept on. They passed a bathroom door with classic male and female symbols and also a pictogram of a male bending the female over.
A rare aberration in the antiseptic corporate design.
DeGrado followed Evan’s stare and chuckled.
“If you can’t have a sense of humor at work, why bother working? ”
“Agree,” Evan said. “Mind if I duck in a sec?”
“Of course. But a warning, brother. No glory holes in the stalls!”
He offered a fist bump in parting.
Evan went inside, set down his mug of tea by the sink, and then dug in his pocket for a few more flash drives. One he left on the counter by the soap dispenser. Another on the floor. A third on the toilet tank lid in the handicap stall.
He washed his hands thoroughly, dumped out the tea—because who ingested anything after it had entered a public bathroom—and exited.
DeGrado grinned big. “All set?”
“All set.”
He ushered Evan around a corner toward his office. “Are you gonna run photographs? With the piece?”
“No.”
“Okay.” DeGrado paused outside his door. “Because if you decide to I can have my press girl get you some headshots. If it’s helpful, ya know, to put a face to the name.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
DeGrado swung inside. The door was hefty, likely soundproofed for midday assignations, no doubt one of many job perks.
In contrast to the generic office world they’d left, his suite was a stately pleasure dome.
Brass-studded leather armchairs, a curved walnut desk on a raised platform, modern canvases with artless action-painting splashes.
DeGrado fell into a massive Bond-villain swivel chair behind the desk, swung around, and propped his ridiculous lime-green sneakers on the desktop. A hot-pink neon sign behind him glowed #PROUDSLUT.
“Please,” he said. “Sit.”
The armchair opposite was significantly lower, so Evan had to look up at DeGrado. Mercifully the knee-length kilt had gathered to swathe his thighs.
DeGrado splayed his hands and then tented his fingers over his solar plexus. He looked like he was posing for the cover of a finance magazine from 1986. “Ask me anything,” he said grandly.
“Some people might be concerned that some of the content you run is illicit—”
“Look, we all have haters,” he cut in. “Everyone who accomplishes anything in life does. Guys like me and you, right? Tall poppy syndrome, they call it. It’s, like, an Australian term.”
He had sad-sack eyes, top and bottom pouches like slider buns, and when he spoke his hands flopped outward apologetically.
This is just how it is, those hands said.
How it’s always been. The eye tic, the try-hard jaw jut, the way his lazy tongue softened his “r”s, residual from a childhood speech impediment—it all spoke to a guy who’d spent his life scrambling as hard as he could to stay king of the shitheap.
“Of course there are complaints out there,” he went on.
“But what we ask in here is: What’s our ‘why’?
And it’s this: A judgment-free environment.
Free choice, free speech, free sex, pro-women, pro-desire, pro-play, pro dignity of sex work, pro-safety, pro paying workers, pro giving people what they secretly want.
And we do our best. We do our best. We verify all vendors who post, which helps us get around CSAM and IBSA laws—oh, sorry, Child Sexual Abuse Material, Image Based Sexual Abuse.
So it’s on them. It’s on them if they post something illegal.
We do our part but we’re like the post office.
Someone wants to mail something illegal, it’s not like we can search inside every envelope, can we? ”
“So some of your content is illegal?”
“I mean, we host two hundred terabytes of video. At peak hours we serve ten thousand pages per second. We’re talking billions and billions of views.
You know how much a billion is, brother?
That’s, like, everyone. Everyone’s watching.
And the Christian right or feminazis or whoever can always claim that maybe one or two of them are blackmail tapes, nonconsensual, trafficking, underage, posted under fake user verifications, whatever.
But this is the world we live in. And here in the real world? Good enough is great.”
“Well, I’m sure you have procedures in place for legit complaints,” Evan said.