Sex, Lies and the Dirty (38 page)

We hear it all the time:

“Fast food is bad for you.”

“The animals don’t look happy.”

“Abortion is against God’s plan.”

They all have billboards, advertising, pulling you away from your everyday routine. Some of them are considered socially acceptable. We pass them all the time without giving them a second thought. Others, like the abortion clinic, are considered immoral. Unlike the fast-food restaurant or zoo, there’s no sheen of good intentions.

So these people, the pro-lifers, they go after the billboard company. They call the 1-800 number and make their demands, their threats. They
keep bombarding them with their moral fortitude and guilt until the ad gets pulled from the side of the road. In this day and age, if you cry and complain long enough, more often than not, you can get what you want. Temporarily, at least.

The Dirty
functions much the same way as a billboard company. The difference is that we’re putting up coke dealers, Vegas escorts, and fame-chasers. We’re putting up socialites and guys who are cheating on their spouses. And just like any cheeseburger or cosmetics line you see towering by the highway, you can choose to ignore it. Drive on. Don’t pay it a second thought if it offends you. That’s what I keep telling people.

“If you don’t like it, don’t come to the site.”

No one is forcing you to buy a Coach purse, the same way I’m not forcing you to come to
The Dirty
. Every post is a billboard submitted by someone else: a friend, an ex, a family member. It’s submitted by an enemy or someone you’ve fallen out of favor with. It’s not Nik Richie. It’s not the staff. We hit “publish” and move on. Nine times out of ten, we have no fucking clue who you are. We’re just the billboard company.

And people like Anderson and Dr. Phil are always suggesting that I shut down
The Dirty
, as if that would really clear up all the so-called “problems” they have with my site and what it does. They make it sound so easy. So simple. The problem with that logic is that there are plenty of billboard companies. There are numerous sites trying to do what I do, and the moment I shut down, ten more would rise up in an attempt to fill the void. You can take down a billboard for something you don’t agree with, but that doesn’t mean it won’t crop up on another interstate the next week. There’s always another company, another website. Someone is always waiting to step in, and that applies with
The Dirty
too.

Shutting it down wouldn’t fix a fucking thing. I know this because there’s a demand for the platform. It’s a demand that I can numerically measure with analytics and track in hits, and as the years go on, the consumer base gets larger and larger. Closing the door on
The Dirty
would open up ten windows for the next wannabe Nik Richie.

And one Nik Richie is enough.

Origins (Part 5)

It was a bad situation.

One of my investors had quit. The other one was telling me that all the money was gone and we had to close up shop. Shut down the site. Meanwhile, my wife and I were on the verge of divorce. We barely spoke. She resented me as a person and gave up on me as a husband. Being Nik Richie was literally the only joy I had left in my life, so once again, I had to fight for it.

I sat Jim down at one of the laptops, opened up a browser window and asked, “When you look at this site, what do you see?”

He leaned toward the screen, pointing to different parts of the page, saying, “The colors are off here on this graphic, and we need to reformat this part—”

“—Jim, I’m not talking about the graphics or the colors,” I cut in. “I’m asking you, when you go to this site, what do you see?”

He paused, thought it about. Jim said, “I see Nik Richie.”

“Why do we have sixteen employees, Jim?”

He looked at me, not speaking. I really didn’t want him to say anything since there was no right answer.

“Why are we spending all this money? This isn’t Club Jenna,” I told him. “We’re not trying to be cool and down. We already are cool and down.”

“What are you telling me? That you’ve got a solution?”

“Tomorrow I’m coming in and I’m firing everyone. I’ll keep Gayden, but everyone else is gone,” I explained. “We’ll cut the overhead, we’ll cut my salary down to 5K a month. All I need from you is to make it so the existing ads can cover the payroll.”

“Okay…” Jim said, as if he wanted to hear more of the plan.

“Give me two months. Let’s see what I can do in two months.”

“Fine,” he nodded. “Two months. I think you know what happens after
that if this doesn’t start turning around.”

I knew exactly what would happen.

Nik Richie would die.

The next morning I did what had to be done.

I gathered everyone up and told them that due to the financial situation, we were going to have to let everyone go. It wasn’t a long dragged-out speech. Even though some of the girls were crying, I knew they understood it wasn’t anything personal. Gayden was informed that he’d made the cut (purely out of nepotism).

The Dirty resigned from the Club Jenna offices and moved into one of Jim’s condos in Phoenix. The place had been empty for months, so we turned that into our new headquarters and saved even more money on our overhead. We found our groove. Jim handled the business stuff, tracking our expenditures and trying to fetch more ad revenue. He put in an additional $100K to keep everything alive. Gayden went over posts. I made my comments on the bottle rats in New York or the pretend models in L.A., hit publish, and moved on to the next thing. It made me happy. Doing this, being Nik Richie, it didn’t feel like work. I got to say what I thought all day, but I had just gone from a staff of sixteen to just myself and Gayden. Two guys combing through thousands of submissions. We literally could not keep up, so I had to make the call.

I had been receiving emails. For months, these things had come in, and they all pretty much said the same thing: that he couldn’t believe I cut him out, that he had always been there for me. He was there for me through thick and thin. Sometimes it was a guilt trip. Other times it was a death threat. Not a for real-death threat. Anthony was telling me that he was disappointed in the way that Anthony does, and I ignored the guy. Ignored the emails and calls. There was one instance where we talked about
The Dirty
and how it wasn’t my decision on who got hired. I blamed it on the investors, but it was bullshit. Anthony had been around in some capacity for the CIG and NPMG scams. I didn’t want him around for this.
The Dirty
wasn’t a scam or a way to fuck people out of money, so in my mind, Anthony wasn’t right for it. That didn’t stop him from reaching out. Like clockwork, the guy either emailed or called, telling me that he deserved a spot after all the shit we’ve been through. This isn’t how you treat your friends, he said. I ignored it. All of it.

I put off Anthony until I absolutely couldn’t anymore: this particular moment in which I was trying to run a site that’s understaffed and over a half-million dollars in the hole. It was the situation in which I would have accepted anyone’s help, but I needed a guy that I could trust, and that truly wanted to be here with me. So I finally called Anthony. It had been close to two years since I had last reached out to him.

He picked up, and the first words out of his mouth weren’t hello.

He asked, “Where do you want me, boss?”

Anthony came on board.
I told him I wasn’t paying him shit for like five months. He was going to have to prove himself as an intern first, which was fine by him. All the guy ever wanted was to be included, and he made plenty of money selling drugs and painting houses on the side. I only had one rule: the minute we put him on payroll, he couldn’t sell drugs anymore. I didn’t care if he did them, but I refused to employ a guy that dealt. Until then, he could do whatever he needed to make ends meet.

So he started working out of the condo with Gayden, but it came to light pretty quick that the kid didn’t know shit about computers or Photoshop or anything that would have been considered useful for the job. We had to train him from scratch on everything. Literally everything, and this is how Anthony came to be called Junior Varsity.

The phone call proved something to me, and I think I had known it for quite a while, but when I reached out it was confirmed: JV would take a bullet for me. I could not talk to the kid for fifty years, but if I was in Russia with a gun to my head, he’d be on the first flight out with a million dollars in ransom money. He’d find a way to get me out of the situation. If he couldn’t, he would find someone that could. JV is a jammer, but the problem is that everything he does is junior varsity
⁷⁹
level. He’ll get the job done, but it’s going to be slightly janky and fucked-up. That’s the thing Gayden and I learned when he started working for the site: the work ethic was there, but it was fucking junior varsity.

I remembered something that happened in Hawaii:
Amanda and I were hiking, and we had gotten to a spot on the island where we were elevated
enough to get a great view of everything. I remember my eyes tracing the place where the ocean and the beach met, taking in clean air and feeling calm for once. There was this beautiful view in front of us, and my wife broke the silence and told me, “I don’t know what the fuck it is, but every time I do something good you top it.”

It was an out-of-the-blue comment, yet I knew exactly what she was talking about. The thing about Amanda is that she tried. She worked hard; she had the credentials. She was a smart businesswoman. All things considered, she should have been making six figures by now. Yet somehow this college dropout scam artist of a husband had made something bigger than what she could. I was successful by accident. That’s what bugged her. I wasn’t even trying and I still overshadowed anything she had ever done.

“I’m going to be honest,” she said. “I’m jealous.”

That was her way of saying: “I resent you.”

I think that was the first time I realized this wasn’t going to last.