Here’s a list of all the jobs I had before I was in Porn. There are a shit ton of jobs on this list. Clearly, I got fired a lot. I mostly got fired for showing up late, but occasionally I got fired for straight up incompetence, which somehow feels way less like a failure in the moment of being fired.
1. Weirdo at the mall that juggles in front of the store to attract customers
I didn’t actually juggle as much as I played with devil sticks and yo-yo’s. It was my first job as a 15 year old at Eastern Mountain Sports. Technically I didn’t get fired. I was seasonal, and was asked not to come back anymore after the Christmas season. I was really really good at getting customers in the store. I was just completely socially awkward and I think my co-workers didn’t know what to do with me.
2. FAO Schwarz
Kept this job for 3 straight years through High School. They didn’t mind me being consistently over 10 minutes late, or really really high on Ritalin and Weed. My job was to play with toys and interact with customers. I mostly did the devil sticks there. Sometimes I got to wear the big teddy bear suit and frighten children.
3. Street Performer in New Orleans
After 4 good years of doing lots of speed and obsessively playing with devil sticks I got really good at. Kinda ridiculously good. So I decided to take it to the street in the French Quarter. I was doing about 20 hits of LSD (every few days) at the time. I was really seeing “the big picture.” I remember getting yelled at by a mime because I performing on his turf.
The most important part of making money as a street performer is how you talk to the people walking by. You gotta sell them on putting money in your hat. I was too tripped out to talk the whole time. Eventually a saxophone player threatened me (I had trouble keeping track of which corner belonged to who) so I gave it up. I was always able to pull a big crowd. They never really put much money in my hat though.
4. Person that puts flyers on your car on a college campus
Had trouble remembering which rows of the parking lots I already walked down
5. Drug Dealer
I was a pretty ineffective drug dealer. Mostly because I did all the drugs. I mean ALL THE DRUGS. (The drugs I was supposed to sell, your drugs, any drugs within walking distance…)
6. “Hard Drug” Dealer
After consistently failing at selling weed, Ritalin and LSD, I thought I’d try cocaine and heroin. I figured that since I didn’t really like needles, I wouldn’t do all the drugs. It didn’t work out as planned.
7. Sandwich maker at a coffee shop that had some sandwiches
I made excellent sandwiches. This was my first job as a sober person. This job doesn’t count as one I sucked at. It’s just not a job anyone can keep forever.
8. Apartment Leasing Office
This was my first attempt at a “grown up” job. I thought that since I was sober, I’d should wear a tie and do grown up stuff. I probably got the idea from watching Trainspotting. In 9 months I didn’t lease one apartment. I was still seeing things funny from all the LSD I’d done in the years prior, which made paperwork nearly impossible.
9. The Person at an Office That Takes Your Picture and Prints Your Lanyard.
The apartment thing sucked, and one of my friends got me a job making security badges. If I would have kept this job, I would be retired by now. I think SAIC is currently the world’s largest employee owned company. Even the security badge guy got shares. I had to show up wearing ironed khaki pants everyday at 8:30 AM (Washington DC rush hour included) I slept in too much. Total failure.
10. The most boring data entry job ever
Before OCR was widely used, (Optical Character Recognition) someone had to re-type legal agreements and contracts into a computer so they could be digitally stored. I got fired for playing with my devil sticks in the office in a fit of monotony driven insanity.
11. College Student
Since I’d been staying sober for a while at this point, my parents decided to help me out again and pay for community college classes. This was against the advice of both the family shrink and a neurologist. Those doctors claimed that my brain was too fried from all the drugs to handle higher education.
“Your son is going to live in your basement for the rest of your life” – said the Doctors to my parents
Apparently my IQ was sitting somewhere kinda deep under 100. Not sure if that ever got better, but as it turns out college isn’t that hard when you show up to class and ask for help from the teachers with the homework.
12. McDonalds
This was one of the coolest jobs I ever had. You can do whatever the fuck you want as a McDonalds employee. You just have to show up on time and show up sober. I made close friends with my co-workers. We got in food fights at work. We played cheeseburger baseball at work. After working my way up to drive-thru I would greet customers with, “Welcome to McDonalds, can I spank your mother?” They always said, “Uh, yes. I’ll have a number (whatever) with a coke…”
My parents where not even a little thrilled about this job. They were less thrilled that I’d stopped taking community college classes because I wanted to live near a beach and fuck off at McDonalds. This was when they cut me out of their Will and stopped helping me with money. That was the best thing they could have ever done for me.
13. Nordstrom Ladies Shoe Salesman
The summer was over, so I moved back to the DC area and worked at the mall again with some friends. I had a bunch of roommates and we had a ton of fun. I spent a few years working at Nordstrom. I will always be grateful for the good habits of kindness and customer service that they instilled in me. They are seriously a pretty cool company. I also enjoyed touching women’s feet and looking up their skirts. I learned a cool trick that will always be useful. If you get a boner when you’re not supposed to, it helps to count to 100 in your head. Also, put a shoe in front of it.
I didn’t make my quota consistently enough. Possibly because I was not focused on the numbers enough. They eventually fired me because I was late on a really bad day to be late. I think it was a big employee meeting / pep rally or something.
14. Person that goes door to door asking if they can rake your leaves for money
I couldn’t ask my family for help anymore. My resume was basically blank for many years, since I couldn’t put the jobs I got fired from. I was kinda fucked. This is when I learned the term, “unemployable.” One of my good friends gave me a rake. He really helped me a lot. He told me to go door to door in his neighborhood and ask people if I could rake their leaves for money. When I came back in an hour and told him I was just getting rejected, he sent me back out. He told me not to take “No” as an answer. This is when I learned the art of sales. I was hungry. I was out of cigarettes. I had a few weeks to come up with rent money. I made it happen. I raked leaves all of that Fall, and actually made pretty good money.
15. “Hair Model”
This wasn’t a paying gig. I got recruited to be a hair model for Vidal Sassoon. This was when it was cool to for dudes to have frosted tips. They would cut my hair for free and give me free hair products. I just had to let them experiment with tip frosting methods on my hair. Sometimes I got to walk on a runway. They normally gave me a cup of coffee too.
16. Water Aerobics Instructor
This one only lasted a day. I was in a pool telling senior citizens what to do with various foam floaty thingys. If I didn’t have to show up at 7 AM the next day, I might have given it a fair try.
17. “House Boy” (age 24)
Some family got wind that this gun was for hire. I think they mostly liked that I had zero ambition or agenda. They hired me to fix stuff and clean stuff around their house. I got paid $5 per hour, and they let me stay in their guest room and fed me. They had a young autistic son who would wake me up every morning with a cup of coffee. He didn’t talk, but he would clap when he was happy. They also had 2 cats and a dog. It was a warm and friendly home. They taught me how to paint walls without painters tape, which I consider an valuable life skill.
They had a beat up pick up truck in their back yard that they were using for a dumpster. They said I could have it if I worked for them for a month for free. After I worked the truck off, I loaded it up with my few belongings and moved to Florida. I had a couple friends from Nordstrom that got transferred there, and figured it would be a fun place to live.
18. Homeless Couch Surfer
That truck broke down on the way to Florida. I could have called some friends back in DC to come get me. I had tons of friends at the time. I probably could have even called my parents at this point. For some reason I wasn’t willing to give up on the geographical cure for my meaningless life that I thought Florida was. I sold everything I owned out of the truck at a rest stop. I got another $100 for scrap metal from the truck itself. I got a one way rental car with that money and made it to Florida with around $50 to spare. My friends that moved to Tampa weren’t too thrilled that I was going to be staying on their sofa with no money, no car, no cell phone, no resume… They were as loving as they could be and told me to hit the street.
I met a college student who mentioned in a conversation that he didn’t have a sofa in his dorm room. I found a sofa on the side of the road and a convinced some guy with a pick up to take it to the college kid’s place.
“Hey man, we met earlier today. I got you a sofa. You needed one, right? So…. can I sleep on your sofa?”
It really went down exactly like that.
I did some odd jobs. Painting. Demolition. Other construction “helper” things. Whatever money I made, I gave to the dude that was letting me stay in his dorm room.
So I wasn’t totally homeless, but I was totally demoralized. I can say from my own experience, it’s way harder when you are sober. I had been sober for a few years at this point. As lame as it was, it changed me for the better. I had some long nights on that sofa getting bitten by whatever bugs were living in it, wondering how long the college kid was gonna let me stay. I grew a relationship with whatever it is that I call God(s). At the end of the day we all sleep alone, or we all don’t. When I couldn’t find day labor, I made my way to the local mall and filled out applications. I lived off the free food samples in the food court. They cut me off from the chicken-on-a-toothpick things right about the same time Starbucks hired me. I will always know that if I didn’t have to get wasted to cope with that period of time, I will never need to.
19. Starbucks
I really enjoyed working at Starbucks. It was just like McDonalds, but I got tips. Also, people seemed to think it was cooler than working at McDonalds. This still doesn’t make sense to me. It’s the same fucking job. Anyway, I love coffee and I really enjoy giving people what they crave. I always have. It was a great “get on your feet” deal too, since I could wear a hat and dirty pants to work. I would have kept working there for a long time, but one of the other applications I filled out earlier came through with a management position.
20. Abercrombie Dude
Actually I worked at Hollister’s, but it’s the same thing. I folded clothes. I folded more clothes. I was an assistant manager, so I got paid more to fold clothes than the other people who folded clothes. It was almost as monotonous as the data entry thing, but at least I was surrounded by eye candy. I did have some opening shifts (my Achilles Heel) so I was always under the threat of getting fired for being late to work.
A funny thing happened at this point. I met a girl.
21. College Student, again
I was walking back to the college kid’s place when I saw a girl with pretty eyes and a great ass kicking a soda machine and screaming at it. She was beautiful. She was violent. She was the one. The soda machine had eaten her last quarter. I had a total of 25 cents to my name. I gave her my quarter and introduced myself. She let me move in with her that night. She grew up in a bad alcoholic home, and I think she was enamored with the fact that I was sober. Also, from fear of being homeless again, I put up with all of her emotional aggression and insanity with out complaining.
She was about to graduate (top of her class BTW) with two degrees in Psychology and Women’s Studies. If you ever meet a pretty young woman who double majored in Psych and Women’s Studies, I will wager two things. She is probably great in bed, full of psycho-fuck-energy. She is probably always more or less really bitchy as well. Anyway, she convinced me to get student loans and finish my Bachelors. I enrolled at USF and started taking 18 credits a semester for the next 2.5 years while working full time. Thank God she had amazing tits. I couldn’t have gotten through that without her tits. We broke up right about as I was finished my degree. I believe God put her crazy tits in my life so I could finish school. She’s some kind of a relationship shrink now and writes books about dating. I was in love with her, but it would’ve never worked because she got insanely jealous every time she found porn on my computer. Plus, she was really mean most of the time.
22. Chicken Wing Delivery
While in school, I found a gig as the night time delivery guy for The Wing King. The wings were fucking fantastic. Driving around trailer parks and the projects with a sign that says “I have cash and fried chicken” on your car is not fantastic. While there, I did paint a cool yellow stripe around the Wing King building, which is cut-in perfectly and is still there to this day.
23. Drive Thru Coffee Shop
I had drive thru experience. I had coffee shop experience. Why the fuck not? Free coffee as a college student is a good deal too. The thing is, drive thru coffee places make most of their revenue from people commuting to work in the morning. That meant early ass morning shifts. So, I was fired for being late too many times.
24. Valet Parking Guy at a Nice Hotel
Still in school and needed a night job. I could drive stick, and I had a valid license. That’s all you really need to be a valet guy. You certainly don’t have to be a good driver. They didn’t fire me until I wrecked 13 cars (that they knew about). This was at the same hotel that Fet Con is at in Tampa every year. If you valet your car, make sure to look for scratches and dents when you get it back.
25. Coffee Shop Where People Act Cool
I finished my degree while working at Joffrey’s Coffee in Chanelside (Port of Tampa). It isn’t there anymore, which is a shame. It was really the best coffee shop in Tampa. They also had bomb sandwiches (you’re welcome, if you had one). I had decided to take a chance and just be honest with the owner. I told her that if I were scheduled to come in before noon, I would probably be late. This worked out beautifully, since they were open till 11 PM.
I invented two coffee drinks there and I learned how to make iced-brewed coffee. I still make it at home every summer. It has about 10 times the caffeine as normal coffee and tastes better.
26. 1st B2B Sales Job / (Wear a Suit, Growed Up Job)
After graduating, I had a shit ton of student loans to pay back. The job market is a million times better in DC than it is in Florida, so I moved back. A friend got me an interview at a place that sold Litigation Support Services to big law firms. It impressed my parents, who were just starting to talk to me again. The money was good. The base salary was $35k and I made double that in commissions. I was good at sneaking into big law firms and fearlessly walking into the partners’ offices to ask for their business. I attribute that to the leaf raking experience.
The services we sold involved teams of Vietnamese and Cambodian families scanning and copying legal documents for anti-trust cases. I do not have any beef with Vietnamese or Cambodian people as a whole. The particular ones that worked in our shop were fucking savages. They stole my lunch every day. I started putting my lunch in a tackle box with a pad lock. They cut around the lock and stole my food anyway. I pooped in Tupperware and put it in a brown bag in the fridge in hopes of discouraging them. They were sly as foxes and didn’t eat my poop, but continued to steal my hot pockets.
Also, one of the head management guys was stealing money from the company. I wasn’t savvy in office politics. When questions were getting asked, I wasn’t smart enough to friend up with right managers, and I got canned with the assholes. This was a good lesson that I didn’t learn at the time. It’s not always how hard you work. It’s who you impress at work. Unless you just own your own company.
27. Recruiter for B2B Sales Guys
I got a job trying to place IT sales professionals into jobs. I was good at sneaking into companies, finding decision makers, stealing employee directories and smoking cigarettes with secretaries who I’d coerce into telling me who’s about to get fired. I think I might have made a good spy or something. I sucked at showing up for the 8:00 AM meetings. I took too many smoke breaks on the days I was supposed to be in my cubicle all day. They fired me in less than 6 months. I’m pretty sure I changed the way they drum up new accounts though.
28. Cold Caller for Software Company
As I was getting fired from the recruiting gig, I managed to recruit myself into a sales job with one of their accounts. It was a start-up company called Parature. They made customer support software. It was “cloud based” which was a hot buzzword at the time. My job was to call any company who might have a need to cut down on their customer support costs and set sales meetings for our senior sales guys. This was the first start-up I worked for. I fell in love with the idea. The owner was a guy who had just graduated college, and it looked like he was having a blast.
I was really good at setting good meetings for our sales guys. I loved the hard working yet not stuffy work environment. Then the company got a second round of funding and everything changed. They brought in a soul crushing, corporate style, VP of Sales. I’m sure he was actually a good guy. I just wasn’t mature enough to respect him. We butted heads on things like “proper work attire,” “too many cigarette breaks,” “too much porn on my company laptop…” and eventually he started scheduling 8 AM sales meetings every Monday. My goose was cooked. At this point, my friends and family would ask me why I couldn’t just get up early in the morning like all the other grown ups. I still don’t know why. Maybe my dreams just seem really important. Maybe I’m just a lazy baby about the whole thing. Either way, I got fired.
29. Construction Worker Helper Guy, Again
My closest friend, roommate, and in many ways life partner, was running a successful high-end bathroom and kitchen remodeling biz. He’s a fucking badass. He’s like Macgyver. He can fix anything. Anyway, he felt bad for me so he hired me as his helper. I pretty much handed him tools and kept him company while he did his thing. I got to feel like a macho man and wear a tool belt. He woke me up every morning and I’d make us breakfast. I liked working with my hands and I liked watching a true master work. It’s a beautiful thing to see any kind of creative work get done by someone with great skill. Even installing toilets and cabinets.
He probably would have let me work for him forever. He’s got a big heart. I knew I wasn’t worth my weight. I couldn’t remember measurements and my hands are too shakey to do much more than paint.
30. BuySAFE, another start-up sales gig
So, BuySAFE had a decent idea. They teamed up with Allstate and sold surety bonds for online transactions. This was before Amazon was a big deal. Ebay was king of eCommerce, and customers had to trust ebay sellers to actually deliver the goods after a transaction. Bonding the transaction meant that if you didn’t get what you paid for Allstate would reimburse you. This worked so well for Ebay, we sold the idea to other companies that sold stuff online. Diamond merchants. High-end electronics. I killed it there. They didn’t care what time I showed up or what I wore to work. They just wanted me to hit my quota. I was their top sales guy, making around $120,000 a year (if I would have made it a year). I also learned a ton about eCommerce, online shopping carts, traffic conversions, online customer retention… Then they got another round of funding.
The new investors fired the whole sales staff. If I were politicking with the owners, going to the happy hours they invited me to, took interest in the pictures of their kids on their desks… I’m pretty sure they would have found a way to keep me. Since I was just another commission check to write, I was out the door.
31. Merchant Processing Salesperson
While I was at BuySAFE I learned that if you were the guy that sold the merchant processing stuff to a company, you get whatever percent of all their revenue that you got away with writing into the contract. Forever. As long as you keep them processing through you. Visa or Mastercard take about 1.9% of all the sales. If you convince a company that processing the transaction costs 3%, or 5%, you keep the rest. Processing the transaction actually doesn’t cost anything to you. All the work is already done by the banks that you broker for. It’s that stupid. So I got underwritten by a bank to sell merchant processing for them. I guess I was bitter about getting canned from every job I ever liked. I couldn’t really stomach it though. It’s basically taking advantage of peoples’ ignorance. I’m glad I went through the effort to get underwritten. I learned a lot. I never closed a deal though.
32. LawProspector, another start-up sales gig
This was a really cool idea. I met Lawyer/Entrepreneur/Artist who became sort of a mentor to me. He put together a software (via hiring overseas developers) which crawled all the court dockets in America and put all the data in good order for anyone who might profit from said data. As it turns out, lots of companies can make a lot of money when other companies are suing each other.
I was his first sales guy. He paid me a tiny bit per month as a draw, and the rest was commission. I was on fire at first. He was amazed at my ability to find the decision makers of any company he pointed me to and get a meeting with them. I was amazed at his impressive work/life balance. He was clearly a happy and good human being. He was also the CEO of multiple companies, the father of triplets, and a good husband.
I got to work from home and work whatever hours I wanted. The problem was, the software was a little janky sometimes. That happens when you hire overseas people sometimes. More often than not, we couldn’t get the data to come out right when we presented it. That wouldn’t have been a huge deal, but I got frustrated and lazy. After a few months of all my deals falling through I stopped working hard. I regret that.
I had to pay rent, so I got a job with a big company.
33. Senior Sales Guy for THE INTERNET Itself
I was in a ton of debt. Late on all bills. I was getting calls from 1-888 numbers all fucking day and ignoring them. My friends were going on European vacations and buying houses. I was sick of being broke all the time. I thought maybe I should just cowboy up and get a real corporate job. I quit drinking coffee after 11 AM. I cut down on sugar. I was able to wake up at 6 AM consistently for the first time in my life. It totally sucked though, and I hurt a little every day.
Anyway, I interview well. I was able to land a Senior Sales job at Cogent Communications. They own a good percent of all the fiber in the world that is what we call “The Internet.” My job was to sell wholesale bandwidth to anyone who would buy it. Mostly to companies that sell you and me bandwidth (data centers, cable companies, anyone who streams ton’s of stuff online). I gave that job everything I had. I’d get home from work, pack a lunch for the next day, iron and set out my suit for the next day, eat dinner, go to sleep early. I learned that “freedom” isn’t doing whatever the fuck you want all time. It’s a feeling you get when you live with integrity. I liked paying off my debts. I liked being on time to stupid sales meetings EVERY FUCKING DAY at 8 AM. I didn’t even really mind kissing my bosses’ asses, and creatively finding ways to make them look good to their bosses.
I learned all kinds of shit about the internet too. Unless you are a pretty serious nerd, you probably can’t describe how the internet actually works. What are all the parts? Where is it fragile? What companies and governments entities (mostly companies though) keep it going? It’s cool shit.
I still got fucking fired. The sales quotas were pretty high. I really gave it my all, but I couldn’t hit the numbers. 15 hour workdays wouldn’t cut it. Spending my weekends researching for leads and opportunities so I’d be more effective on Monday wouldn’t cut it. I watched other men and women around me hit their numbers. I seemed to be better on the phone than them. I seemed to be on the phone for more hours than them. They just closed more deals than me.
Failing at that level kinda broke something inside me. It kinda rattled something free at the same time.
34. My First Gay Porn
Back when I was doing the “hair model” thing, I would occasionally poke around the internet for real modeling gigs. I’m not tall enough to be a mainstream male model, but I figured there might be something. Anyway, at some point I had come across an ad to be in a gay porn. I hadn’t ever hooked up with a dude at this point. To be totally honest, I wasn’t open minded enough to admit to myself that I sometimes thought about dudes when I masturbated. For some reason, dicks would make their way into my spank bank (amidst all the boobs and girls in pantyhose) then after I’d drain all my energy into a paper towel the dicks would run and hide deep in my subconscious. It’s a funny thing how that works for many “straight” men.
I actually had done one day of fetish porn work before this for Lexi Sindel’s femdom site, but it wasn’t paid.
I was in a big “fuck it” state of mind and reached out to SeanCody.com. To my surprise, they flew me out to San Diego right away and paid me $1900 to do a solo jerk off. This was in 2008. I had to sign a contract stating that I wouldn’t work for any other porn company for the next 12 months. I didn’t mind, since I figured it was a one time thing. I was just trying to make rent money.
Seancody really impressed me. I had just given my heart and soul to a “real company” who had cut me loose. Yet, this gay porn company was being totally upfront with me. They paid me when they said they would. They mandated a sober work environment, which was and still is important to me. Some part of me knew that I would one day be holding a camera like them. I just wasn’t ready to go all in yet.
35. Debt Mediation Gig
An old friend of mine called me from Sarasota. Last time I checked, he was living in the Salvation Army with his dad. Now he was running his own “Debt Mediation” company, and he was making a really good living. He made living in Florida again sound so nice. He was also the only person in the world who would hire me with my lack of work experience that didn’t end in me getting fired. I knew Alex really well. I figured if he could start a successful company out of a homeless shelter, maybe I could find my way in life if I worked for him. He moved me down and hired me as a sales guy. His company actually helped people. It was a cool thing. We were helping retired people settle their massive credit card debts and we made their lives more comfortable.
I had somewhat of a flexible schedule. When SeanCody called me back and wanted to fly me back out to do my first gay sex scene for $3000, I couldn’t think of a reason why I shouldn’t.
36. SeanCody Contract Model
I spent the next year or so working for Alex full time, and flying out to San Diego doing gay porn scenes for SeanCody. It was nice. I was saving up money for the first time in my life. The ridiculously high scene rates at SeanCody ($3000 every scene) helped a lot. I learned a bunch of things about porn modeling. I got fucked by some of the biggest dicks I’ve seen to this day. At first the scenes were physically painful, but worth the money. After a few, I really enjoyed getting fucked and getting my face covered in cum.
My contract was coming to an end with them. Once it was up, I started looking for local Florida fetish porn work.
37. Advertising Sales
I was still too scared to go all in and do full time porn. The laws around Debt Mediation changed, so my friend had to let me go. I didn’t think I could make enough money doing porn full time. I found that every company other than SeanCody pays a fraction of what they do. I still loved it. I was making friends with people in the Florida fetish porn scene, mostly getting myself booked as a stunt cock for straight hand job scenes. The truth is I was scared to tell everyone in my life that I worked in porn. I needed a day job as a cover. I got a commission only sales job for a small advertising company in St Petersburg. I really sucked at it. I had a taste of doing something for work that I was genuinely good at (porn) and it was really hard for me to try to close advertising deals.
38. “Cloud Consultant,” whatever the fuck that means
Ad sales wasn’t paying the bills. Hand jobs were awesome, but also not paying the bills. I found a software company in Orlando called Riptide Software. Their CEO is awesome. Most of their staff are really cool people. They made all their money by making software for the military. They wanted to capitalize on the “Cloud Computing” buzzwords of the day so they hired me to help build a book of business with companies in Florida who also didn’t know what “The Cloud” is. I knew I wasn’t going to keep that job. I knew it was going to be my last “real job.” I was simply building the courage to be a full time porn guy.
They let me work from home most of the time. It made sense because no one at that company had any idea what I was actually hired to do, including me. One night I bought a shitty SD camcorder from Walmart at 2AM. I put an ad on backpage.com looking for “Fetish Models.” In under 2 minutes I got a call from a girl. Apparently when my ad posted she was trying to build up the courage to put out an escort ad for herself, even though she didn’t really want to escort. She needed money to feed her daughter. She called me before posting her ad, and that night she became “Kelly Rockstone.” We filmed all night. I paid her everything I had (I think a few hundred bucks, but can’t remember). Within a few days I got the content up on clips4sale. A few weeks later I had shot her more, and some other girls I knew from my previous hand job scenes. “Kelly” made enough money from me to get on her feet and get into nursing school. I can’t remember the exact number, but it was in the thousands. She hasn’t modeled since. Within a month I was making more from fetish porn than I was from my bullshit “Cloud Consultant” job. I should have quit the job then, but to be honest I kept letting them pay me to “work from home” for another few months until they fired me. I used the money they paid me hire more models.
The CEO of Riptide and I kept in touch. He knew that I used my paychecks from him to start a porn business and was really cool about the whole thing. Sometimes he gave me advice on nerdy dev stuff.
Since writing this I sold my porn company. I got to live my best life and I regret nothing. I wish I saved my money better I guess but honestly everything was necessary to get me where I am now. I’m in a good place. I have full comfort in being myself. That’s something I never had before I transitioned. I have good friends. I get gender euphoric when I brush my teeth in the morning. I don’t have anyone coming after me anymore (I had a gnarly stalker in there I didn’t mention but he’s locked up now). I don’t have the money thing quite figured out but I feel like I have life in check if that makes sense.