WHEN PORN HUB ISN’T ENOUGH
ALM 92, August 2026
SHORT STORIES
(a novella excerpt)
Author’s Note
Ruby Greenberg, a socialite from the affluent town of Palo Alto, joins the San Francisco Probation Department. Due to the recent death of her father, she feels that her life is adrift and wants to put meaning into it. “I wanna help people,” she tells her mother, “as long as they’re not homeless and smelly.” Her mother advises her to stick to her tennis club, but Ruby ignores her mother’s advice. Shortly after completing her probation officer training, Ruby is assigned a caseload that includes Nathan Scudder, a stalker on probation for emailing death threats to a female movie star. Although on probation, Nathan keeps on emailing threats to the star, so Ruby is forced to arrest him and petition the court to revoke his probation. The judge, however, cuts Nathan loose when the star fails to answer a subpoena to testify against him. Released from jail, Nathan begins threatening Ruby.
I spent the next couple of days trying to reach Nathan on his cell phone. Now that the asshole was out of jail, I still had to babysit him. He didn’t answer my calls or texts, and after my seventh try, I went back to court and persuaded the judge to slap a bench warrant on him.
A day later, the emails began so I knew that he hadn’t forgotten me. They were posted on my work account, and I got about one every hour.
God’s angel will get u.
I’ll see you in hell.
Yer goin ta disappear.
Every time I checked my email, another message from him was there. I made it a point to not answer his taunts—that would only have encouraged him—but holding back made no difference. The messages kept pouring in.
Do ya think yer a higher authority, lady?
Do you think you could handle my cok?
Do you think yer bigger than the FBI cuz I reported you for kidnapping?
A couple of days later, some revenge porn popped up on my personal Facebook feed. He had dug up some photos I’d posted of me wearing a bathing suit, and he shared them every hour or two along with dirty messages.
Worse thing I ever ate.
Bitch gave me the clap.
She’s gonna beg for mercy when the FBI waterboards her.
I didn’t want to go looking for him because his threats were freaking me out, so I phoned the sheriff’s department and asked if the sheriff could pick him up. Someone in the sheriff’s department must have bitched about my request because my supervisor came and told me that it was my job to return him to jail. He said the sheriff was understaffed and had hundreds of crooks to catch, so the sheriff expected the probation department to make its own arrests.
After getting chewed out, I asked Rob Rosso to help with the bust. Rosso’s a senior probation officer and he used to be a bond runner, and I’m real fond of him although he’s primitive dude. Once, when I tried to discuss movies with him, Rosso just shook his head and told me all he ever watches is Porn Hub on his iPhone. But although he’s a bit of a caveman, he realized I was spooked, and he said to me, “Stop trembling, Rubes. I’m gonna have yer back.”
Before we began our manhunt, I chambered a round in my Glock and then I slipped an armor panal into the pouch of my First Response Vest. My hands were still shaking like rabbits as we got into our cop sedan, so when Rosso drawled, “it’ll be all right, Rubes,” I didn’t feel too convinced.
Rosso drove us to Nathan’s address of record, which is in the slummy southside of Frisco. I didn’t think Nathan still lived there, but at least it was somewhere to start. We drove around for five or ten minutes before we spotted the place, and it turned out to be in the saddest hotel that I had ever seen.
As we slipped into the lobby, I felt like I’d been smacked in the face. Bums were sleeping on the floor, graffiti was all over the walls, and the air was so ripe and tangy that my lungs began to cramp. The place was such a shithole it should have been condemned, and for a moment, I almost felt sorry for the little jerk.
We located Nathan’s room on the second floor of the building. Rosso rapped on the door a couple of times, but we didn’t get an answer, so he rammed the door with his shoulder. The frame broke free of the lock. As Rosso pushed the door open, I smelled weed and dirty socks.
Peering into the room, Rosso said, “There ain’t nobody here, but Rubes, ya better prepare yerself before you go inside.”
I wish I had taken a couple of deep breaths before I walked into the room. I wish I had been wearing my duty cap and had pulled it down over my eyes. I was in no way ready for the shit that was in that room—it was as though I’d been living a daydream from which I’d been woken up.
The room was so small that a cot and a dresser filled up most of the space, so it took me a second to notice all the pictures covering the walls. There were dozens of them and they all were of me wearing my bathing suit–I guess Nathan must have somehow printed them off the internet. More of those fucking pictures were on a desk beside the window. These were glittering softly because they were sitting in the sun, and when I looked closer, I saw they were littered with oyster-colored blots.
The room began to reel as though I was trapped on a carousel, so I grabbed hold of Rosso’s arm, and he helped me lean on the dresser. “Find me a john ,” I said. “I’m gonna puke my guts,” and Rosso said, “Rubes, just throw up on the floor. I don’t think anyone lives here and this room can’t smell no worse.”
Clutching the dresser, I puked so hard I felt like an active volcano. When I was done, I said, “Let’s go. I can’t stay any longer in here.”
“First, snap some pics,” said Rosso. “You might need ’em for evidence.”
My cell phone trembled like Jell-O as I snapped a bunch of photos. It was hard to aim the camera because it kept slipping from my grip. After I’d photographed each wall several times, Rosso grabbed my hands. “Let’s go, girl,” he said softly. “Ya got all the photos ya need.”
I have no memory of leaving the building—I just remember being back in the car. I was hugging Rosso’s neck as though a whirlpool was sucking me down, and even though I was taking deep breaths, my lungs kept tugging like dogs. All the time, Rosso kept saying, “Honey, he’s just a little perve.” I never thought Rosso could act so gently, and I was real glad of that because, after a couple of minutes, I was able to catch my breath.
As he drove us away from that sleazy hotel, Rosso shook his head. “Damn,” he said, “why couldn’t Porn Hub have been enough for him?”
James Hanna is a retired probation officer and a former fiction editor. His work has appeared in multiple journals, including Sixfold, The Satarist, and The Literary Review. James is also the author of seven books all of which have won awards. Global Book Awards recently gave his book, Call Me Pomeroy, a gold medal in the humor category and his anthology, Fact Check and More Probing Tales, a gold medal for contemporary fiction.
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