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It's the type of statement you'd expect from someone who has spent the past 18 years dealing with people who deal with the minutiae of other peoples' lives. Hayden, 49 and still built like a cinder block, fell into gossip reporting mostly by accident. He held a variety of dead-end jobs—male stripper, car washer, failed punk rocker, bartender, swimming pool digger—after finishing up a four-year stint with the navy in 1981, and had settled into a gig in Ridgewood selling blood chemistry machines to hospitals in Kuwait and Iraq. ("They check your cholesterol levels and stuff like that," he says.) Sinead O'Connor was performing at the nearby Garden State Arts Center, and Hayden desperately wanted to meet the bald-headed singer, on whom he had a crush.

"I figured the easiest way to do that would be by trying to interview her," he explains. "I'd seen this magazine called Steppin' Out at a bar across the street, so I took a copy, pasted the logo onto some fake stationary, and sent a press request to Warner Bros. I figured I'd get away with it because who the fuck had heard of Steppin' Out?"

He got the press pass. And then when O'Connor caused a minor firestorm by refusing to go onstage if the American national anthem was performed beforehand, Hayden ended up with a compelling interview on his hands. He immediately called up Larry Collins, the magazine's publisher, and offered to sell him the interview. Collins gave him $25 and told him that he'd pay him for any future interviews. Hayden's been wrangling celebrities for Steppin' Out ever since.

Today, Steppin' Out has a circulation of around 85,000 and is distributed throughout New Jersey and New York City by a team of 30 drivers. Hayden is the editor, but, more important, also serves as the magazine's de facto publicist: Since no one actually reads it, it's up to him to feed the best material to the various gossip outlets around town, most of which are desperate to fill column space each day. In this capacity, Hayden has proven fairly adept.

"It's actually not that difficult to get people to appear in the magazine," he says. "I just promise them the cover. Of course, no one has ever seen the damn thing, but publicists have usually heard of it, which is good enough. Everyone's a fame whore in this town."