True Porn Clerk Stories Read online

  I wasn't offended so much by any sort of tastelessness as I was by the completely failed attempt at humor. There wasn't even a vestigial joke. Mr. Buddy handed it to me, I made the same noncommittal friendly noise you make when you've been handed a drawing by a small child, and then tried to hand it back. "No," he said, "I made it for you guys! You keep it!" So I kept it until he left, then threw it away. The next time Mr. Buddy came in he was all upset -- he'd actually expected us to post it behind the register.

  You wouldn't think it would be possible to drive away Mr. Buddy, but it turns out you can. As I said, I have always been civil with him, even when he is making yet another attempt to get me to waive his late fees. But a couple of weeks ago he caught me at the end of a heavy dirtball day.

  We'd been swamped: pervs, box thieves, scam artists, people dropping tapes and running without paying for them, and plenty of general crabbiness. And it was a New Porn Day, so the phone had been ringing off the hook and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I was very, very tired. Mr. Buddy was one of my last customers. He pulled his usual asshole routine for about five minutes, and then as I started checking out his tapes he launched into how awesome we were.

  I don't remember the exact phrasing of what was said. I just remember that one of the other clerks made a joke about closing early or closing altogether, and Mr. Buddy said something like "Aw, you can't do that -- I need you guys! Who am I gonna hang out with?"

  "Oh, Jesus, don't say that!" I said, "We can't be your only source of emotional support!"

  I tried to turn my voice up into a joke at the last second, which almost worked.

  "Don't say that," Mr. Buddy tried to joke back, "You make me sound pathetic."

  We made eye contact before I could compose my face. In that moment, Mr. Buddy knew that I do, in fact, find him pathetic. And I'm the nice one. He still comes in, but he isn't chatty anymore.

  The other clerks love it. I feel like a creep.

  1 No, we don't carry bestiality. Animal Trainer is about training women.

  2 Yes, this was a violation of MPAA copyright.

  I Hate Mr. Pig.

  There are many customers that bug me, and quite a few that give me the willies. One or two set off a very primal alarm in my fear center, right in my gut. They make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I know, on a purely instinctual level, that they are very, very dangerous.

  But the only one I really hate is Mr. Pig. I loathe Mr. Pig. I hate him so much I need a new word for it.

  Mr. Pig is the first customer to win a snotty note on his file from me. I refrained from the sport of snotty customer file notes for months. Most of the time it's a genuine warning ("This guy might be moving pricing stickers" "WATCH OUT FOR JIZZ-MASTER ZERO"), but sometimes it's just us blowing off steam or trying to crack each other up. My favorite is "Mr. Excitement!!!!!!!!!!" on the file of the guy who seems to be part tree sloth, while others favor "Engage, Number One!" on the file of the guy who looks a little too much like Johnathan Frakes.

  Funny, yes, but unprofessional. I held off until I ran into Mr. Pig. He came up to the counter with his briefcase and two or three designer shopping bags. The counter is designed for two customers, but he piled all his stuff across it to take up the whole space. He pulled his videos out of his bags, handed me the new tags he wanted to check out, and then whipped out his cell phone to make a call.

  I have to check an ID when someone rents new videos and, of course, get them to pay for their returns. Mr. Pig took up the whole counter and made me wait through his entire conversation -- about a very, very big deal and conducted at about 30,000 decibels -- before I could do either. When he finally got off, he said "Sorry, I had to do that. It was a big deal," just in case I'd missed that point.

  Yes, important enough to hold up me and a line, but not so urgent as to, say, start the conversation before he came in.

  Finally, stack of porn in hand, Mr. Pig pulled his briefcase and designer bags -- did I mention they were designer bags? Because he did. -- off the counter and left, and thus became the recipient of my first snotty note: "THIS MAN WANTS YOU TO KNOW THAT HE IS VERY, VERY IMPORTANT."

  That was all I noticed about him the first time. Over time, though, he has burned himself into my brain. He always takes up the whole counter no matter who else is waiting, he usually shouts into his cell phone, and he always makes sure to allude to how very important he is. He has a password on his account, "KITTY". It's an old, old policy that a few old customers still use, but at least they're not freaks about it. The idea is that if you don't have ID, you can just give your password. We don't do it anymore, but we let old customers keep them. Mr. Pig is very, very proud of having a password. When we ask for ID, he shouts that he has a password, then leans in very close so the riffraff can't hear and whispers "Kitty".

  I always ask him for his ID anyway. It drives him nuts. He wants to be a regular even more than Mr. Buddy does, and he hates it when I ask to see ID. He talks about the old managers, the old policies, and how long he's been here. Then I ask to see his ID. Sometimes I wonder if he leaves the store and bursts into tears.

  So far, all of this is pathetic. Who the hell is that invested in impressing his video clerk? I should be unable to summon up an ounce of human feeling for Mr. Pig at all beyond pity. But no, it's a deep, burning antagonism.

  It's the punch cards that got me. We give all our customers a gold punch card each month. Each time they return a movie, they get a punch. After six punches, they get a free rental. After another six, they get half off, then a free again. There are about 30 spaces. Some of the heavy porn renters make it through a few cards a month, so it's not unusual to give out a new card before the month is over.

  Mr. Pig figured out that two frees in a row is better than a free and a half off, so he gets his free punch and then asks for a new card. So he's screwing the store out of $1.75 twice a month. Fine. It would be one thing if he just asked for his goddamned new card each time, but he can't just leave it at that. He's so proud of his penny-ante fucking over the store that he has to make a big deal out of it. "For heaven's sake," he'll bellow, "Can I PLEASE have a new card?" And then he won't quite have his old not-fully-punched card out of sight, in the hopes that the clerk will call him on it so he can launch into his speech about how very clever he is.

  I just want him to know that I am not impressed. I want him to know that his cell phone and pile of bags do not make him impressive; they make him a human logjam. I want him to know that renting a stack of six porn movies a day tends to undercut his intended dashing, man-about-town effect. I want him to know that true big shots do not try to screw small locally-owned businesses out of petty amounts of cash. I want to have the pleasure of publicly deflating him.

  There is no earthly reason I should care so much, and it drives me nuts that I do. I am a pacifist. I like to think of myself as a nonviolent and gentle person. I have actually fantasized about knocking Mr. Pig to the ground and kicking him. Once, when he was being particularly obnoxious, I had a flash of an image: Me putting a foot on Mr. Pig's chest, shoving a gun in his mouth, and blowing his brains across the New For Sale section. It frightened me, but I enjoyed it.

  He knows my name now. He came in as I was leaving one day, just as the other clerks said "Bye, Ali!" So he leaned right into my face and said "Byyyyye, Ali!"

  Now he greets me every time. I hate Mr. Pig.

  Fetishists

  As you might expect, we get a lot of fetishists in the video store.

  If a customer is going to rent porn, I actually prefer to see a mixed bag of videos -- that way all I know about him is that he wants porn. Someone comes up with a stack of five videos about people pissing for each other, and suddenly I know a very intimate thing about a relative stranger. (An interesting distinction in Illinois porn law: you can rent videos about people pissing for each other, and you can rent videos about people pissing near each other, but you may not rent videos about people pissing on each other. Go figure.
There's apparently a Byzantine set of codes that have to do with taking a dump for each other, but I really don't want to know.)

  Lots of people are hung up on a particular race, or a particular combination or races, and many straight men are pretty specific about breast size. (For the record, the Nice Rack series and the Itty Bitty Titty series seem to rent fairly evenly.)

  The most common fetish, if you can call something so common a fetish, is for borderline jailbait. This is true of both straight and gay porn. The gay series to watch are Eighteen Today, Just 18 and Gay and First Time Tryers. The straight series are Bring 'Em Young, Barely Legal, and, horrifyingly, Faces with Braces. We actually have a guy who vets all our videos and makes sure that nobody is under 18, but still, guys who bring a stack of those up to the counter make me want to hiss and warn them away from my little sisters.

  And it's never the 21-year-olds who rent Barely Legal, it's always the 45-and-ups. Gah. The 21-year-olds do occasionally rent the one copy of Older Women, Hotter Sex that we have. I approve of this, in a shocking display of my own personal prejudices.

  Except for the occasional too-personal glance into their psyches, most of the fetishists don't really bug us, except for those in one special category: those who fetishize the video store itself.

  They can't masturbate because of the cameras, but they do everything else. They damage the cassettes on purpose. There's at least one guy in the straight section who rips pictures off the boxes, and a guy in the gay section who apparently carries an X-acto knife.

  People in both sections steal the boxes, which drives us nuts -- a video without a display box won't rent because people can't see what it's about. It can take weeks to get a new, empty box and it's expensive. One guy in the gay section is definitely doing it as some kind of triumphant "fuck you" to the store -- he always jams the plastic insert into the DVD rack as a calling card.

  One guy called for weeks, trying to get us to special order a tape called Autofellatio. (By the way, I have seen the box for Autofellatio, and it looks like cheating to me. The guy on the cover is bracing himself up against a pool table. Dammit, if you're going to fellate yourself, do it on pure strength and flexibility or don't do it at all.) Anyway, it's a hard-to-find tape, and the guy called over and over. I talked to him twice, and I was pretty sure he was masturbating both times. When we finally found the tape, he cancelled the order, claiming he'd found it somewhere else. I think it was the act of calling that turned him on.

  People do get hung up on the act of seeing or even just renting a particular video. A guy at one of our other branches rented his favorite literally hundreds of times, checking it in and then right back out. The staff begged him to just buy it, but he wouldn't. His life was destroyed when his tape was either damaged or sold to someone else. He came to our store looking for it, and wouldn't tell me the title -- he wrote it down and passed the folded paper to Jeremy, the assistant manager.

  Mr. Dreadlocks's particular fetish is the naughty act of renting itself. I've always had a fine relationship with Mr. Dreadlocks, but then he's gay and I don't apply to his fetish. The male clerks can't stand him, because what he likes to do is rent a tape from one of them, go home, masturbate, (we think, based on the short time he's gone, that he doesn't actually watch the tape) come back, pay for his one tape, and then pick out another and start again. Sometimes he has an erection during checkout, and once he had semen stains on the front of his pants. He freaks the shit out of the male clerks, and I understand why -- it's pretty hideous to be an unwitting participant in someone else's sex act.

  A lot of fetishizing has to do with unwitting or unwilling participants, and that runs pretty hard up against my "whatever floats your boat" policy. On the other hand, the more I work at the store, the more it seems like some people are just hardwired in a certain way and there may not be anything they can do about it. Which doesn't really make it OK for them to call me and masturbate or steal stuff, but what can either of us do? We're at an impasse.

  But I'm still calling the cops if I catch them tearing up our boxes.

  Junior Crime Dog

  Part of my job is watching the security cameras downstairs. I have a love/hate relationship with the security cameras. Sometimes they're fun, but mostly it's a pressure situation. Nobody wants to have a box get stolen or ripped up on his or her shift. It's easy to keep an eye on them during slow periods, but when the register is slammed, forget it.

  It's frustrating, because it's easy to tell when someone is up to no good. Thieves will come right up to the register, check a small bag, and tell you that they aren't going to steal anything. Some people give the counter a long, long look before going down, while others just try to zip past, hoping you don't see them go down at all. It's weird -- people really can't seem to act normally when they're planning to be creeps. The trick, of course, is having the time to watch and catch them. Sometimes when someone's weaselling around down there, I just want to get on the Voice of God mic and say "WE CAN SEE YOU."

  Winter drove me nuts because everybody dressed like a thief -- bulky coats and plenty of face-covering accessories. Nowadays it's warmer (well, for Chicago) and the coat, hat, hood, scarf, and sunglasses combo stands out a little more.

  Not everyone that acts suspicious is going to steal or vandalize something, of course. We spent a big chunk of Saturday watching a guy down there who was hoping to masturbate. It got sort of hilarious, in a disgusting way. He would study and study the boxes, then his hand would creeeeeeep over to his crotchÉ and then someone would come downstairs and wreck everything.

  He had dressed well for his plan, if a little obviously -- a huge coat with a big, fuzzy hood, a hat pulled down over his eyes, and baggy, low-slung pants. He kept hunching away from the one security camera he'd spotted -- unfortunately giving us a great face shot on the one he hadn't.

  So anyway, he'd find a box that turned him on and go over to what he thought was a discreet corner, but again, we're a little high-traffic for that, so he kept getting interrupted. Apparently in the old days it was different -- no security cameras and longer dead spells. My manager used to clerk then, and she said that having to clean come out of the corners and off the walls was pretty routine.

  Now there's way less masturbating privacy, which explains the upswing in box thefts. Whackers find the image they like, but have to steal it and go somewhere else if they want an uninterrupted session. And it's pretty easy to interrupt them -- all the potential jerkers I've had to deal with have been huge cowards with big shame issues. Letting them know you're on to what they're up to is usually enough to get rid of them.

  Finally we got tired of our visitor and decided we'd rather roust him than catch him in the act and call the cops. (Catching a customer vandalizing, stealing, or masturbating and getting him arrested means a bonus because word gets out in the dirtball network that we prosecute. So waiting to catch a guy in the act is a temptation, but then it also carries the risk that he might finish before the police arrive.) Our decision meant that I got to roust him -- for some reason the other people at the store, including management, have decided I'm good at flushing people out of the porn section.

  I'm not sure why, but I have two theories: The first is simply that I am pretty much the polar opposite of the women on the porn boxes. I don't know if I am a harsh dose of reality or if I remind them of their moms or their girlfriends or their wives or just the archetypical Feminine Principal or what, but straight guys hate it when I'm down there putting away tags. Sometimes simply going downstairs is enough to clear the area of dirtbags and legitimate customers alike.

  I do like to think I'm pretty good at it when I actually have to card people or ask them to leave. I try to make it a face-saving situation for everyone and acknowledge that yeah, the store's 21-and-over policy really sucks. I try to be as easygoing about it as possible, especially when I have to throw out a bunch of kids.

  I get sort of conflicted about throwing kids and teenagers out of the porn section. I really do
n't want them down there, not because I think sex is dirty or bad, but because I don't want them to think that that's what sex is about. The stuff on our boxes is sex in the basest, sometimes most brutal terms -- naked women spreading their relevant orifices and making that Porn Face. Unless you're talking about the Max Hardcore series, which involves women with "SLUT" and "WHORE" written across their foreheads in lipstick. And besides, do we really need to raise another generation of men who can't deal with pubic hair?

  So I don't feel bad about getting them out of there, except that I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm a woman while I'm doing it. I worry that I'm either setting up or reinforcing the idea that there are fun, bad women who like sex and good, boring women who restrict access to sex.

  I always want to debrief them. "Hey, guys, it's cool that you're curious, but this isn't the way to find out. Porn is fine, but it's not real sex. Real sex is great, and even good girls love it, but it has to be a two-way street..." But I always just end up with "Sorry, guys. Come back when you're 21." Perhaps I should write a children's book: Porn Is Healthy and Fine, but Only as a Temporary Physical Release.