As a teenager in west Kendall, Maria Teresa Goobs fantasized about the life of a vintage gumshoe reporter. "I'd imagine myself in a sports jacket and porkpie hat chasing down rackets all over the city," the 31-year-old Cuban-American scribe says. "Then my first assignment for the Miami Herald Neighbors section was about gingerbread cookies. Talk about the lamest story ever."
Blessed with an enormously colorful and sassy personality, the Florida International University journalism school grad hadn't wanted to launch her career covering the bakery beat. But she toiled away in the Neighbors section, covering local government in small communities such as Miami Shores and Biscayne Park. "I hated writing stories about these smarmy, small-town politicians," she says. "I couldn't be impartial."
The last straw came after Goobs scored her first 1A story about a Liberty City drill instructor who ran a boot camp for inner-city teenage boys. "I got excited about writing again," she recalls, "and then they stuck me back in Neighbors. Ugh."
She quit in 2004. While she was scouring for a mindless job like data entry that would give her time to focus on creative writing, a friend recommended a position at a Miami-based porn company that produces and distributes print and video smut. "Everybody imagines a porn office as some sleazy place with a scumbag exposing his chest hair through an unbuttoned dress shirt running things," Goobs says. "But it wasn't like that at all. It looked like any other office until they show you the porn."
During her interview, DVDs and magazines catering to lovers of big booties, super-wonder titties, interracial banging, midgets, you name it, were spread before Goobs. She didn't flinch and accepted a job as a filing assistant. Her boss quickly picked up on her writing talents and promoted her to editor of a magazine dedicated to naturally voluptuous women, which Goobs could easily relate to because of her abundantly curvy figure.
"Now I get to talk and joke with naked people all day," she notes, "and watch porn on my work computer without getting in trouble. It is the coolest job ever."
When she's not in the "porn mines," as she calls it, Goobs is an editor at Miami culture blog Antisteez, where she drops prose about the local people, places, and events she loves. "We want to glorify what a great city we live in," she says, "where you can go grab a colada in Little Havana's Domino Park or hang out with the hipsters at Grand Central or the Vagabond."
The last venue is where Goobs has hosted breast cancer benefits the past two summers. She dubbed the fundraiser "Goobs for Boobs," in conjunction with the Vagabond's Thursday-night Shake party. "It's funny how people remember you when your last name rhymes with boobs," she gushes. "I get a kick out of it all the time."
<<Jeff McInnis | Ingrid Hoffmann>>
