Stoya: Fonder with or without the absence

I’m trying to get rid of an Airport Express. I’ve had the craigslist ad up for maybe a month, renewing it once a week along with the dozen or so other things I keep in the garage that none of my friends will take for free, no school AV departments will consent to have donated, and that I just can’t bring myself to cart to the curb for that exciting 2 a.m. Armenian swapmeet that goes on in my neighborhood.

Someone named Terry emailed me this morning:

Need more info on the Airport thanks tex only please 323392—-

I’ve never been scammed on craigslist in ten years of buying and selling there, and I don’t plan to start now. It just seemed weird that someone would email me and then ask me to only text him back. My pride was a little hurt as well, because I believe my cragslist ads are perfectly descriptive and need no goddamn clarification.

Plus, who’s named Terry anymore?

So I Googled craigslist+phishing+text and a couple of other variants and ended up at the Village Voice, where there was a chilling article about a person who had rented a New York apartment from a German named Rita. This person had done enough due diligence, in my opinion, had actually seen the apartment and met the person purportedly renting it, and had found out that she was one of dozens of people scammed out of cash.

“That’s terrible,” I said.

Then my eye drifted to the right—out of deference to Colin James Hay, probably—and I saw a familiar face before a magenta background. I didn’t realize it was Stoya until I saw the caption; it was just a familiar face.

Read Amanda Hess’s article. I travel in and out of the porn loop but I have always enjoyed meeting up with Stoya, who’s a freaking breath of fresh air. What I liked about Amanda Hess’s article is that the only surprises were events and locations—Stoya with Amanda Palmer? With Salman Rushdie? Stoya lives in Bushhwick?—but Stoya herself, and the person I remembered her to be when I interviewed her and she promised to always be mine, was the same woman who took my camera and snapped pictures of her vagina under the table at dinner.

Then you can read my equally descriptive reminiscences about our smoke breaks and love for pierogies.

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Someone’s in the shower with Stoya, and other stories; Stoya finds cigarettes, pierogies in Philadelphia; Sex mit Stoya macht dich frei