Part 2 of 3: The Dorm Room Hustle: Clark Atlanta Edition
All publicity is good publicity.
THE TAPE, THE TRAP, & THE 6PM NEWS
Let me tell y’all something, when the money first started coming in from my website, it was like watching cheat codes work in real life.
Balancing classes and porn? That was the real work-study program. One minute I’m in African-American Studies trying to decode Du Bois, next minute I’m in my dorm bathroom adjusting the ring light yelling, “Arch your back, baby, we losing light!” You don’t know stress until you’re trying to export a sex scene while submitting a midterm on Canvas.
Now, everything was cool, until it wasn’t.
Enter Stage Left: Trouble in Lace Panties
There was this girl, we’ll call her “T.” She did one scene for the site, cute, confident, knew her angles. Her performance? Solid B+. I paid her, she signed the release, everything on the up-and-up.
Then comes the call.
She’s frantic. Apparently, her boyfriend and his homeboys were scrolling and stumbled across her scene. First off, why they so familiar with amateur porn sites based on Clark Atlanta dorm room wallpaper is a whole separate therapy session, but I digress.
She tells me, “Can you take it down? Please? That’s not who I am anymore.”
I hit her with the business tone:
“For $1,500, I’ll take it down and even throw in a complimentary hoodie.”
She blacked out on me like I asked for her social security number and her mama’s potato salad recipe. Starts cussing, then flips it up talking about, “Actually… can I come over and talk in person?”
Red flag. But I let her. (Don’t judge me, I wanted to see if she was going to do what I thought she was going to do. And she did.)
I had class in 30 minutes, so I leave her in my dorm/office/porn studio unsupervised while I hit up Intro to Mass Communications. Came back, sis was GONE and so was the master tape.
Now, I should’ve panicked. But see, what you need to know is this: at the time, campus police were my VIP customers. One even subscribed with his .edu email like a fool. So I make a call to Officer “J,” he makes a call to her, and boom, less than an hour later, he comes strolling in with my tape like it was a piece of lost homework.
But Shorty wasn’t done yet.
She made another call, this time to the local news station.
Yup.
I’m at home studying when I hear the knock.
“Are you… the guy shooting adult films in Clark Atlanta dorms?”
Now at first, I was like, “Nah, wrong door, bro.” But then I remembered Rule #1 in Communications:
“All publicity is good publicity.”
So I pull out my media-ready hoodie, straighten up my twisted durag and say:
“You got five minutes?”
I gave them a full TED Talk.
Told them I wasn’t doing anything these girls weren’t already doing for free. I was just giving them a check and an HD camera angle. Some of them were already strippers and honor students—this was just adding credits to their HoeFax.
And guess what? They let me name the website and dropped the link ON AIR!
I braced myself thinking they were gonna spin it, make me look like the villain. But nah… that segment aired raw and unedited on the 6PM news. The reporter even nodded like he was proud. My phone would not stop ringing.
I shut the site down that night around 5:45PM. Fell asleep at 9PM dreaming of cease-and-desist letters.
When I woke up and logged in at school the next morning?
250 new orders.
$25 a pop.
$6,250 overnight.
I damn near passed out in the computer lab.
I hit up Micro Center, bought a DVD burner that could cook up 10 discs at once, locked in like I was mastering the Carter III.
Because if this was the storm…
Part 3 is when the hurricane hits.
TO BE CONTINUED…
