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  True Porn Clerk Stories

  The other day I realized, as a cold claw of pure fear squeezed my frantic heart, that I have been working as a video clerk for ten months.

  This is a job that I took on a temporary basis for just a month or two until freelancing picked back up and I got my finances in order.

  Ten months.

  It has been a test of patience, humility, and character.

  It has been a lesson in dealing with all humankind, including their personal bodily fluids.

  It has been $6.50 an hour.

  Tae Bo

  A guy came up to the counter a few days ago and asked me if Tae Bo was in.

  I explained that we don't carry exercise videos and he said no, we had it -- he'd seen the box downstairs. Downstairs is, of course, the porn section.

  Some porn movies do ape mainstream titles -- David Cop-a-Feel was my all-time favorite -- but not as many as you'd think. A lot just follow a simple pattern: (A) B N, where A is the race of the participants (optional), B is the sex act or kink -- sometimes this gets astonishingly specific -- and N is the number of the series. Thus, you get Blow Bang 25 or Asian All-Anal Action 15.

  The Little White Chicks, Big Black Monster Dicks series (note intriguing combination of race and fetish) has some of the most offensive cover art I've ever seen, not because of the sexual content but because it's incredibly racist. The little white chicks look at you demurely over their shoulders while surrounded by scowling African-American men. The men are repeatedly referred to as "monsters" ("monster dicks" itself doesn't bother me because it merely implies that said dicks are monstrously large, but referring to the men themselves as monsters is another story) and their faces are actually mounted on cartoon animal bodies. There's no way in hell you could put that cover on, say, a book and not get your store burnt down, and perhaps rightly so. But my well-intentioned liberalism can pretty much go screw itself, because the series is cheerfully (and heavily) rented by people of all races.

  Anyway, Tae Bo. I can't find it in the computer, but that's not unusual -- deliberate misspellings are common in porn. That, plus the inevitable similarity of titles makes it a real pain in the butt to look things up. Does the customer want Black Ball, Blackball, Black Balled, Blackballed, Black Balls, Blackballs, Black Ballers, BlackBallers, Black Ballz, Blackballz, Black Ballerz, or BlackBallerz? And does he want the one in the gay section or the one in the straight section?

  But I keep looking. The Zen lesson of my job is this: just because I do not want to be a video clerk doesn't mean I shouldn't be the best possible video clerk I can be. There's no way to just pop up a partial alphabetical list of titles, so you have to pick a likely starting point and then flip through entry after entry.

  "It was a weird spelling, right?" I ask, still typing in variations on Tae Bo as fast as I can think of them.

  "Yes," he says "It was spelled weird."

  "Do you remember it?"

  Yes, he does: T-A-B-O-O

  Lube Warning

  We all abuse the hand sanitizer. We can't help it.

  Contamination is everywhere. I see people sneezing onto the tape cases. They cough wetly into their palms right before handing me change. They squeegee out their ears with their pinkies. They forget about the security cameras downstairs and pick their noses with wild abandon and astonishing force. Still, the only thing that really freaks me out is the semen. Well, OK, the lubricant freaks me out too, but I'm pretty sure that's because of the implied presence of semen.

  The only thing we can do is use the hand sanitizer. I use it so much that I lose all finger traction and can't open our plastic bags. I've had days when I've used it so much that I can't make fingerprints on the glass countertop. It freaks me out, but the thought of not using it is worse.

  Sometimes people get animalistic about the tapes. For the real addicts (I'm convinced that porn is like alcohol: some people can stop at just one every now and then, some people just binge on weekends, and some people get genuinely, horribly addicted) the reptilian brain kicks in. They hit the magic portion of the tape and they're done. They pop out the tape and slam in another one, and the next day the stack comes back, unrewound and covered in goo.

  Repeat offenders get a note on their files that says "LUBE WARNING". Management policy is that for $6.50 an hour, clerks should not have to deal with the bodily fluids of others. The first time we discreetly but firmly remind the customer that the tapes need to come back clean. The second time we hand him the tape, the Windex, and the paper towels and tell him to clean off the tape in full view of whoever else is at the counter.

  It astonishes me that someone could actually forget to clean off his sticky and/or slippery tapes, but what amazes me even more is that people actually have the balls to argue with us about it. They always claim they got the tapes that way. They will actually claim that the spooge in question was missed by both the clerk that checked it in and the clerk that checked it back out, and that they figured what the hell, they'd go ahead and play it, even though it was covered in gel.

  One guy brought back a DVD with a big white thumbprint of come on it. He actually tried to argue with me: "That's not mine. I never even played that! I never even took it out of the case!"

  I pointed out that the disc had been put back in the case with the reverse side up, which was where the thumbprint was. The clerk couldn't have checked the movie out to him that way because the serial number is on the front. The guy still tried to protest that sure, maybe he'd picked it up and looked at it but --

  "Sir," I said, "It's your thumbprint. Do you really want to get into this?"

  He did not.

  I hate it when people argue, but I understand why they do. I don't think there should be any shame in masturbating, but I do think there should be shame in expecting someone with whom you are not very, very close to deal with a wad of your spooge. I think they get all defensive because in that moment, they realize it too. But I think there's more to it than that.

  One of my favorite concepts in anthropology is that of the polite fiction. It's something nobody believes, but we all pretend to because it makes life so much easier. My favorite example was of a Pygmy couple. Pygmy divorce involves quite literally breaking up the home: the couple tears apart their house (it's easy -- the roofs are made of leaves) and once it's down, the union is dissolved. One anthropologist was watching a long-married couple have a fight. It escalated until the wife threatened to leave, and the husband yelled something along the lines of "Fine!" and there was nothing the wife could do but start tearing down the house. She began tearing the roof off, clearly miserable. The husband looked wretched too, but at this point neither could back down without losing face and by now the whole village was watching.

  Finally, the husband called out the Pygmy equivalent of "You're right, honey! The roof is dirty! It'll look much better once we get those leaves washed!" The two of them started carrying leaves down to the river, soon with the help of the whole village, and then washed and rebuilt the roof. When the anthropologist later discreetly asked how often one washes the roof, everyone looked at him like he was a complete doofus.

  The polite fiction of the porn section is that, while people do generally use porn for the purpose of masturbation, there is no reason to believe that this particular customer will be doing so. He could be using them for his Master's thesis. Hell, he may not get around to watching them at all. We all like to believe that. When it becomes all too clear to everyone involved that said customer did, in fact, not only lube up, watch the tape, stroke himself to orgasm, and then grab the damned thing without even taking the basic courtesy of washing his goddamned hands first, we all get uncomfortable.

  On the other hand, he gets angry because h
e's ashamed of something that was entirely avoidable and his own fault. I'm supposed to keep my temper even though I've just put my hand in a wad of his semen.

  The destruction of the polite fiction is what creeps me out about one of my weekend regulars. He comes in when I open at nine, then chooses and rents two movies. He leaves for exactly two movies' worth of time, then returns them before four to get the matinee special. I hate it because there's no way to pretend he's been doing anything else. I just hope to God there's been a hand washing between him and me. I think there is, because his tapes are always clean, but it still gives me the shivers and sends me straight to the hand sanitizer. It's just too much to know.

  Mr. Glasses is the very creepiest, though. He's always very friendly, even courtly. He's too friendly, actually -- he's always doing stuff like announcing "It's THAT kind of personal service that sets your store apart from the Blockbusters!" Yeah, whatever. The over-friendliness itself is creepy, as is the way he sort of doesn't blink enough and doesn't know that most business transactions don't really involve sustained eye contact. (No, he's not hitting on me. He's gay.) But of course what puts him over the top is that he's our biggest repeat lube offender. I hate seeing him coming. It's like Russian Roulette.

  Rainy days are the worst. He just plunks a wet bag on the counter and we have to reach in and get the tapes. You know that initiation ritual in Flash Gordon where the guy has to stick his hand way, way down a hole and usually it's fine but sometimes there's a venomous beastie at the end that stings him? It's like that.

  Actually, it isn't quite. The tapes are always a bit wet on rainy days -- it's just that my brain can't stop churning about what they might be wet with.

  We all abuse the hand sanitizer. And I am deeply grateful that it exists.

  Customers I Have Driven out of the Store

  If you don't count rousting teenagers out of the porn section, I have only driven away two and a half customers.

  The only one I'm proud of happened pretty recently. I was ringing up a sale and I heard a crash from downstairs. My manager was out, so I couldn't leave the register to go down and see what happened. I glanced at the security monitor and saw a guy downstairs calmly flipping through the DVD section. He had knocked down three entire shelves. Instead of picking them up or coming to get me or even shoving them over into a pile and then continuing his porn shopping, he was just standing in them and on them, flipping away.

  I got on the Voice of God microphone and said, in as friendly a voice as I could, "Hi! Could you pick those up, please?"

  He started, then came charging up the stairs. "It was an accident!" he yelled, "Knocking over those DVDs was an accident!"

  "I believe you, sir." I said.

  "And you want me to pick them up? You want ME to pick them up?!"

  And without waiting for an answer, he stormed out.

  I didn't really expect him to pick them up. I wouldn't have minded picking them up if he'd just come upstairs and said something like "Jesus, I'm an idiot and I knocked down a substantial chunk of your DVD section." Or put them into halfhearted little piles. Or really anything other than just standing on them while continuing to shop for porn.

  I don't think he was as angry at the notion that he might have to clean up his own mess so much as he was furious that he'd been caught making it. Sometimes new customers don't see the security cameras right away, and they sure as hell don't expect the Voice of God mic. When you're scrutinizing the charming cover art of White Trash Whore, the last thing you want is to be chastised by a booming voice from above.

  I'm not particularly sorry we lost his business. I do feel bad about driving away Mr. Creaky, even though he used to give me the creeps. Mr. Creaky was not, technically, a porn customer. He liked the Japanese animation. The Anime section is the one that really makes me cringe. It's upstairs in the general releases since it's all, you know, cartoons. Some of it is charming fare like My Neighbor Totoro, but a lot of it is incredibly hardcore stuff -- way worse than we allow in the real-people porn downstairs.

  My position on porn is that I'm fine with whatever floats your boat, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult. Hentai throws both parts of that rule out the window. Sure, all the boxes claim that all the characters are at least 18, but a lot of them are drawn to look about 12. And there's a lot of raping. Not just run-of-the-mill raping, either -- we're talking about triple-penetration rape by demons.

  I consider myself a first-amendment feminist, but to be honest the hentai really makes me wrestle with that sometimes. And guys who rent the entire La Blue Girl series all at once (check out the box cover sometime and you'll see what I mean) freak me out even worse than the guys who rent the Animal Trainer series.1

  We have to watch the Anime section because it's right next to the foreign films and the tags are the same color, which means a clerk who isn't on his toes could check out a shitload of hardcore animated underage rape porn to a kid and yes, once they see that there's sex stuff on some of the boxes kids definitely try to slide it past.

  Mr. Creaky, as you've guessed, was hardly a kid. I would have been frightened of him if he hadn't been so old and feeble. He would rent a stack of rape hentai at least once a week. He always had the same patter as he came up to the register:

  "Do you watch that show The Sopranos?"

  "No, sir."

  "I hear it's pretty good."

  "Yes, sir, that's what I hear too."

  "I'd like to watch that show, but I can't. There's too much cussing."

  Then, clever ruse in place, he would bring up his tags for Demon Beast.

  Anyway, all would have been well had it not been for a well meaning but plateheaded clerk name Dan. Dan was a sweetheart, but had an astonishing ability to fuck things up. In this case, Dan had rented six of our very foulest titles to a 16-year-old. To give you the idea of the level of stupidity this involves, I'll just go ahead and tell you that the La Blue Girl series depicts a woman being raped by demons RIGHT ON THE BOX. I was horrified both at the thought of what this kid's mom would do to us when she found out and what the kid himself had just learned about the beautiful, tender world of lovemaking.

  I talked to my manager. We didn't want to move the whole Anime section, so we needed a bright, easy signal for Dan, who for some reason still hadn't been fired. Our solution was to let the R-rated stuff slide, but if anything looked more like an X I highlighted the label on the tag and wrote a big "NC-17" on it.2

  Mr. Creaky never came back.

  So how did I manage to drive away half a customer? Well, he's not really quite gone yet. He still comes into the store a lot, but I may have destroyed his soul.

  Mr. Buddy was the first guy people warned me about when I started working at the store.

  He is heavily addicted to porn and a huge pain in the ass. He also desperately wants to be friends with the clerks. He wants to come behind the counter and look at the boxes when new porn comes in. We always tell him that customers can't come behind the counter and he says, "Yeah, but I can, right?" No, he can't. Sometimes with a new clerk he'll try "The old manager used to let me come behind the counter," at which point any other employee in earshot will chime in with "No, he didn't." He bitches about the prices and tries to haggle with us. "I swear to you, this has been on the new release shelf for a long time. I should get it for the old release price, right?" Wrong.

  One time he brought back just a case, without the DVD in it. He actually expected me to check the empty case in and let him, you know, just drop the DVD by at his convenience. When I said no, he stood at the register and whined for nearly ten minutes.

  His bitching and wheedling isn't caused so much by the fact that he's a cheapskate, which he is, as by the fact that he desperately wants to be a regular. He wants to be greeted by name and not have to show ID and get whatever mythical special privileges he's imagining. The problem, of course, is that we're the ones who decide if he's a regular or not, and we don't like him.

  The fact that he
's an asshole is part of the problem, and the other part is that he seems to be completely devoid of social skills. Even the total dirtbags know better than to hit on me when I'm putting tags away downstairs. Mr. Buddy did not.

  And again, he desperately, desperately wants to be friends with us. He's maybe 45 years old, and has a good enough job to spend literally thousands of dollars a year on porn. We can't figure out why he wants to be friends so badly, but he does. "You guys are awesome!" he'll say after trying to get Dustin to pay the extra $.50 he owes for him, "Seriously, you guys are the best!" Never, not once, has he received a positive response to this behavior, but he still does it. "You guys rule, you know that?" I've met golden retriever puppies with more dignity.

  I always try to be civil to him in a distant, customer service sort of way, which is apparently the best he gets. ("You're always so nice to me! You rule!")

  Round about September 14th, 2001, he brought in a picture he'd downloaded from the Internet. It was President Bush photoshopped so that he had a long beard and was dressed in vaguely Middle Eastern clothes. Mr. Buddy had drawn a cartoon voice balloon coming out of Bush's mouth so that he was saying, "Rent at [My Store's Name] Video!"