“You can’t flunk out of porn”

I’m writing a story about how the late Porn Wikileaks and the late Adult Industry Medical are only symptoms of a disease the porn industry is unable or unwilling to treat, how some victims of Porn Wikileaks are using the database to harass others, how meanness is intelligence-agnostic, and how Twitter is like throwing oil on a fire—from a plane. Stay tuned!

The following story is from March, 2009.

Pornic Voices: Jimmy D.

James DiGiorgio is one of those guys who has been working in Porn Valley for so long that nothing surprises him. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years, but he continues to work as a director and/or photographer for companies like Harmony Films, Teravision, Vivid, and Hustler.

(Jimmy would understand that it was incumbent on me to include a naked Kimberly Kane in a story about him. It’s the way the business is.)

“Don’t lower your rate for anyone, Grams,” Jimmy said, “or you’ll never get it back.”

“Wait,” I said, “people are supposed to pay me?”

Jimmy is very likely the originator of an axiom that has been in my mind lately.

I got an e-mail from a former porn performer this month on the second anniversary of an event that accelerated the death of his career. He used the free version of an e-mail service that allowed him to write anonymously. The letter was poorly written, threatening, and abusive. The author couldn’t resist hinting at his true identity, the hallmark of any cyberstalker, and the letter read like “The Catcher in the Rye” for any borderline retarded self-hating homosexual recidivist thug who should commit suicide to save his offspring the shame of knowing the abortion he has for a dad. Oh well. Occupational Hazard.

Anyway, it brought to mind the maxim that you can’t flunk out of porn. Could this guy be the one exception?

And as I was talking with Jimmy today we mentioned a few people, some in jail, some out of the business by their own choice, some still working on the fringes, who would have been booted out of any self-respecting business years ago for their incompetence and/or antisocial behavior.

“You can’t flunk out of porn,” DiGiorgio said, and I thought of the anonymous letter writer as the exception that proved the rule. “You know, I believe I coined that saying.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. It was like meeting the guy who invented “Good enough for government work” or “I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was an interview I did a few years ago.” Of any quote from this area code that should go into Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Quotations, it’s that one.

There is a chance that Mike South first spun that construction. It does seem like something he’d say, too. But Jimmy laid (tentative) claim to it, and I believe him.

If anybody was making real money in this business anymore, they should give Jimmy a quarter for each time “you can’t flunk out of porn” was used in conversation. He’d be able to buy a Red Sox hat.

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Oh JC’s Girls, Book II
See also: Jimmy D