Tackling a new letter, I'd first hit the find and replace key and change every "cum" to "come" (an average of 19 changes per letter). As per my style sheet, I'd make sure every "doggie-style" was hyphenated, every "bunghole" was not, every "blowjob" was one word, every "daisy chain" was two. Picture, if you will, all of this being dispatched with a 10-month-old baby draped over my lap. In our cozy, kinky domesticity I enlisted my wife to proofread, which she'd do during commercials of "20/20." "Honey," I'd call out from my study, "is 'dream cock' hyphenated?" Nor would the picture be complete if I didn't confide that I was performing this editorial duty at a time when my wife and I weren't getting any, due to a combination of pregnancy and other perils of middle-aged matrimony. Two of the most celibate people on the East Coast were doing some of the dirtiest editing in history, then going to their separate bedrooms to sleep. To my thinking, this gave the venture a poetic justice it otherwise might have lacked.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"Good morning, Daniel. Name your pleasure: I have 'Meatballs,' I have 'Gang Bangs,' I have 'Three-for-All.'"

"Chastity! Those are my least favorite! What happened to 'Blow the Man Down?' Something I can sink my teeth into!"

"Well, I didn't want to bring this up," Chastity said. "But as long as you're proving intransigent, I may as well tell you that you let a little pain slip through."

"I did? Where?"

"When he screws her in the ass. And I quote: 'My ass felt like it was being split in two.'"

"But doesn't she go on to say she liked it like that?"

"Doesn't matter. And remember: No coming on anyone's face or hair, and two men can't come at the same time on the same place."

Truly she was my guru, my guide through the netherworld of copy editing. And more, through life, in a certain sense.

"Let me get this straight, Chastity. A guy can come on a woman's breasts and two seconds later another guy can come on her belly, but both guys can't come on her breasts at the same time."

"I don't make the rules, Daniel."

Pause.

"Hey, how's that darling little baby of yours?"

"He's lying right here."

"Awww, kootchie kootchie koo!" she said, ringing off.

The towering giantess could suck very good, I read. I left it uncorrected.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The remuneration was indeed grand, as Green had promised. Never before having sold out in large degree or small, I was gratified to discover that smut editing filled up the larder with jars and jars of organic baby food. At a rate that boiled down to something like $150 per hour, it purchased the extended afternoon session at day care. I was fast becoming the envy of colleagues who had to supplement their incomes by appearing as expert witnesses on "Larry King."

Another benefit was that my computer was developing street smarts. I had loaded into its spell-checker all manner of esoterica such as "suckfest" and "cockhead," which it thereafter allowed without so much as a red flag. And I myself was becoming proficient in certain arcane areas of copy editing that otherwise might have escaped my expertise, such as the difference between "lie" and "lay." Thus, the buxom blonde lies spread-eagled, but the muscle-bound black lay down in the leaves.

Speaking of which, I thought it peculiar how blacks were able to ignite so much passion in normally reserved white women -- Henriette K. loved to look in the face of her coal-black lovers as they slid their ebony rods between her lips -- until I studied the magazine's demographics. Turned out that a high percentage of Joystick's readers were not only college students and concert pianists (because they're good with their hands?), but also black prisoners of state and federal penitentiaries.

So the readers were real. But were the writers? This question -- the very one asked by concert pianists as well as jailhouse sodomites all over the nation -- went unanswered. It was conveyed to me, by coughs and silences over the phone, that this was something we didn't talk about. I decided to put it to Chastity in a roundabout fashion.

"Morning, Chast, I was just wondering. Is it kosher to change the letters a great deal?"

"In what sense?"

"In the sense of padding, or changing beyond recognition; y'know, fictionalizing? "

Chastity cleared her throat, a holdover from her days as a doctoral candidate at Radcliffe. "As long as the original text's understandable, we don't need to add such traditional literary devices as rhythmic build, picaresque characters or peripeteia."

"Peripeteia?"

"'A sudden change of events or reversal of circumstances.' It's from the Greek word 'peripiptein.' Capiche?

"Capiche, mistress."

"But as long as we're on the subject, Daniel, I may as well ask you, purely theoretically: What would you say if I were to ask you to compose some letters from scratch?"

Figuring it was some sort of test I could always get out of later, I said sure. It was never brought up again.

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