Barbara the Slut and Other People

by Lauren Holmes

  “Thanks so much,” I said. “I’m Brenda.”

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Eunice.” She smiled and we shook hands. I realized my engagement ring was on my other hand and hoped Eunice hadn’t noticed. She gave me a business card and I left.

  I looked up directions to the store, Making Love, and rode back through the park to the Castro. When I got there I put my ring in my pocket, and went in and asked for Chad. Chad was huge and black and he was wearing a T-shirt that barely fit around his arms. I was pretty sure I could see every muscle underneath.

  “Oh, great!” he said when I told him I wanted to apply to work at Desert Hearts. “That’s great!”

  He took me into the back and asked me a million questions about my employment history, my sexual history, and what I was doing in the hilly city. I told him I moved with my girlfriend Nadeen, who was a lawyer, and that I’d been a sexual health educator in college. The man at the bagel store had seemed concerned that I graduated from law school, so I decided to leave that part out. The sexual health educator part was true. And Nadeen was not completely untrue. I slept with her my freshman year of college after my dad told me that he didn’t want to hear about any of this “gay until graduation” stuff if I insisted on attending a girls’ school.

  Then Chad told me about the stores, talking a mile a minute, and soon we were out on the floor and he was showing me the lesbian section and the exclusive harness they carried and the line of dildos they sold to go with it. The harness was really special because it was made out of leather and the ring was internal. Chad let me hold the harness and feel the ring, which apparently was around the hole underneath the two layers of leather. I didn’t ask what the ring was for or why internal was better.

  “Wow, this is nice,” I said.

  “I know, right?” said Chad. “I mean I don’t know, but, you know.”

  “Ha,” I said, “right.”

  There were a million dildos in a million colors, in sizes from baby carrot to miniature log.

  Chad introduced me to the people working at Making Love, and said I would be working at Desert Hearts by myself, and if I could work five days a week, one of the Love girls would fill in on the other two days. Eunice was a friend of the owner, Pamela, and was just filling in until they found someone more permanent.

  “And I would like that to be you!” said Chad. “I have to run this by Pamela, but I know she will think you are just adorable!”

  “Great,” I said.

  • • •

  When I got home I took a shower and made stuffed peppers and waited for Danny for a while, then ate the peppers by myself and watched a two-hour dating show. My dad called to bother me so I told him I was going to work at a sex toy store and he said he didn’t have time for my jokes, and to call him back when I was ready to get serious about my life.

  When Danny got home at ten I told him I might have gotten a job.

  “Where?” he said.

  “At this store in the Mission,” I said. “A sex toy store.”

  “Ha,” he said.

  “No really,” I said.

  “Really?” he said, looking worried.

  “I can still look for law jobs,” I said, to make him feel better. “But this way I can make some money and have some interim work to put on my resume.”

  “I don’t think you can put that on your resume,” he said. “Do you even know anything about sex toys?”

  “Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I do. I learned a lot today. And I have that vibrator.”

  “That blue dolphin thing?” he said. “Has that ever had batteries in it?”

  “So?” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Well, I hope you get the job if you want it.”

  “Thanks baby,” I said. “I want it.”

  I guess thinking about the toys made Danny feel sexy, because he got me started when we got into bed, and we had sex for the second time in San Francisco. The first time we were exhausted from moving, and giddy because we had had too many beers to celebrate. Then when Danny started working and it didn’t happen again, I started worrying that it was the beginning of the end, and in twenty years when our kids claimed we only had sex twice, once for each of them, it would be more or less true.

  But that night after Desert Hearts and Eunice and Chad, it was as good as it had ever been. I choked myself up thinking how grateful I was to have someone who knew my body by heart and could get me off in two minutes or two hours, and especially how grateful I was when it was two hours. When we finally went to sleep, I had a dream that I worked at the store and I had to wear a tiny dildo necklace.

  • • •

  The next afternoon Chad called to say I got the job, and he wanted to know if I could work the next day. The next day was Saturday but I said okay. He asked me if I thought I remembered enough from Making Love to come up with some talking points for the harness and the dildo collection. I said yes and had a feeling that I was going to spend the next twenty-four hours reading about lesbian sex and sex toys on the internet. He said he would meet me at Desert Hearts at noon to train me to use the register and some other store-specific stuff, like the sex machine.

  “Great,” I said.

  When Danny got home I told him I got the job and was going to start tomorrow. He said it was fine; he had a lot of work to do anyway.

  “And maybe I’ll come visit you,” he said.

  “Oh god,” I said. “Please don’t.”

  Later he caught me printing out pictures from the dildo website, which I was planning to use for flash cards to help me learn the names of the different models. He laughed at me and I laughed too. He kissed my neck and I felt the hairs there stand up. I followed him to the back of the apartment, hopeful, but by the time I finished brushing my teeth he was asleep.

  • • •

  On Saturday I rode to Desert Hearts and Chad tried to teach me how to use the register, which was a computer with the most complex software I had ever used. I was finally able to make a successful transaction around two in the afternoon, and Chad sighed a big sigh of relief and brought in some books from his car, put them on the table at the front of the store, and told me he was leaving.

  Two women who had been whispering in the dildo section asked me for help. They had picked out a fabric harness and were trying to decide on a dildo, and wanted to know what other colors “Buck” came in. I told them he came in three skin tones, vanilla, caramel, and chocolate. And I asked them if they had seen our exclusive harness and gave them the whole speech about the virtually seamless leather and the internal ring and everything. I didn’t think they would go for it since it cost twice as much as the one they picked out, but they did. They said they were glad they talked to me because they weren’t thinking of it as an investment before. When I turned around Chad was still there, folding shirts. The women picked the caramel Buck, and I checked them out with no problems.

  When they were gone Chad said, “See, you are smart! That was just great! You’re going to do great. The only thing is don’t call the dildos ‘he,’ okay? Most lesbians don’t really like that.”

  “Oops,” I said, “okay.” That made sense but it really seemed like a stretch to imagine Buck as female or sexless. Buck had a very realistic-looking head, and veins up and down the shaft. Buck didn’t have balls, but several of the other dildos in that collection did. And Buck was circumcised, but some of the others weren’t. I could see calling the dildos in the other, smoother, more abstract collections “she,” but when I see a head, veins, and wrinkled balls, I think “he.” I wondered who was designing these things and why they thought lesbians wanted penis replicas.

  Chad left and later called to see if I could work the next day so that I could meet Pamela and have her show me around.

  • • •

  Before Pamela came in I saw her parking her motorcycle in front of the store and taking her helmet off. She looked like Eunice, but heavier and without the rat tail, and when she came in I couldn’t tell
if she had a really kind face or a tired face. She gave me a once-over and a terse smile and I decided on tired face.

  “I’m Pam,” she said. “Thanks for working on such short notice.”

  She explained everything to me again, looking at me skeptically the whole time. In the middle of the harness speech she looked at me and said, “Have you ever actually used a harness?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course. I’ve used yours. I mean the Desert Hearts one. My girlfriend and I got it when we were up here last year.”

  “Oh really?” said Pam. She looked pleased but didn’t smile. “Do you like it?”

  “Yeah we love it,” I said. “I’ve never worn anything more comfortable.”

  “Huh,” she said. “Great.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have said I was the one who wore it. I guess if I was a lesbian I wouldn’t be a top. But I figured I would be willing to at least try it.

  I listened through the harness speech and the dildo speech and the lube speech, and by the time we got to the vibrators I started to get impatient and started cutting her off. Like when she said, “The Eroscillator is the number-one-rated stimulator,” I said, “It was engineered in Switzerland and university-tested in the U.S. There is no better vibrator.”

  “Good,” she said. “I guess Chad went over everything.”

  When Pam got back on her motorcycle and rode away, I tried out all of the vibrators on my nose like she told me to tell the customers to do, but I wasn’t sure that gave me a good sense of how they would feel on my clit. I did like the Eroscillator though. There were seven attachments and I cleaned off the Grapes and Cockscomb attachment with a Clorox wipe and massaged my face with it. At the end of the day, I bought the Eroscillator with my employee discount. Danny laughed about it at first, but then we had sex and we used it, and it made him feel good and it made me feel like I was on another planet.

  • • •

  The next morning Chad called and asked if I could work at Making Love instead, and when I got there he told me that Pam was concerned about me working at Desert Hearts. He held his hands up like, What can you do? and started explaining all of the men’s color-coded leather accessories.

  The other people working were Marc and Estelle, and they worked the floor while I stayed at the register. Some guys came in and asked for poppers and I looked in the cock ring display case, wondering what might be called poppers. Marc was in the video section, and I didn’t want to ask him what they were, so I just asked him where they were.

  “Um, they are NOWHERE,” he yelled back, “because we do not have POPPERS, because they’re ILLEGAL!”

  “Oh,” I said, and tried to smile at the guys as they hightailed it out of the store.

  Marc told me that poppers were muscle relaxants and he also told me that Pam didn’t want me to work at Desert Hearts because I didn’t look gay.

  “That’s discrimination,” I said.

  “What are you going to do, call a lawyer?” said Marc.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “She didn’t really fire you.”

  “True.”

  I worked at Making Love all that week and Eunice worked at Desert Hearts until they found a replacement, Carol, who had a crew cut. Marc said if I was really mad he would cut my hair and lend me some cargo shorts. It was clear to me that I needed a rat tail, and later Danny told me he would pay me a hundred dollars to get a mullet, but Marc thought I needed something more subtle, like a faux hawk.

  But then on her third day, Carol the real lesbian dropped the entire computer on the floor by accident. Somehow Pam didn’t fire her for that, but Carol never showed up to work again. Marc told me that Pam begged Eunice to come back before she decided I would have to work at Desert Hearts again. I was almost sad to leave Making Love because I liked working with everyone there and I liked gay men—when it came to sex toys, they were much more outgoing than lesbians—but I was glad to be by myself and read all of the books, and the new cash register was so easy. I just typed in the prices, and if something wasn’t marked, I made up a price that I thought sounded fair.

  • • •

  I asked Chad if he could start sending someone from Making Love to work some of the shifts, like he had originally promised. He did, and I got Sundays off. On those mornings, Danny and I slept in and went and got eggs Benedict and talked about whether we should get a Newfoundland or a mutt. I wanted a little tiny dog that would sit in my lap all the time. I imagined bringing her to the store. I imagined that I owned it and instead of sex toys it sold something else, like maybe cheese, or actually maybe dog toys. Danny wanted a Newfoundland because his family always had Newfoundlands. Those dogs don’t live for very long so his family had had a lot of them, and they were all named Boomer—Boomer the first, Boomer the second, et cetera. Danny could somehow tell them apart, and he choked up at the thought of each one.

  • • •

  Now that I was back at Desert Hearts, I realized how different the stores were. At Making Love, the boy toys were front and center—butt toys, cock rings, and what I was sure was more lube than even the city of San Francisco could use. The backdrop was leather accessories, bondage accessories, a sex swing, porn, and in one corner, the lesbian and straight stuff, just in case.

  At Desert Hearts, the space was so small that everything was kind of front and center, but it was the books you saw first. Sometimes people looked at them if they were too nervous to head right for the good stuff, which must have been the books’ purpose, but no one ever bought them.

  I obviously didn’t know what lesbians wanted, but I didn’t think we needed the books to make it a classy place. I thought we should send a more affirming message like, You don’t have to pretend to look at these books. If it were up to me, I would have had one shelf around the store, vibrators on one long wall, harnesses on the short wall, and then dildos on the other long wall, and maybe lube by the register. Very minimal and chic. Kind of like a nice jewelry store, but with softer lighting.

  I think I would have done without the sex machine. It was basically a motorized dick and when you plugged it in, the dick flew in and out of the console. It was four hundred dollars and it took up a lot of space on a shelf at the back of the store. On Friday nights drunk women would come in and ask me to turn it on. There was one group that came in almost every week. It was four or five women and they always looked like they had been drinking since noon, and they almost always got out of hand and I had to kick them out. I thought one of them liked me. Her name was Lucy and she hung out by the cash register and didn’t ask questions about any of the merchandise, which I thought was smart. She was my age and pretty and I probably flirted with her more than I should have, but I was bored.

  One week she was distracting me, talking about how she could show me around the city if I wanted. She was saying we should go to this restaurant called Carmen’s, if I like Cuban food, which I do, when I looked up and saw the loudest woman, a tiny blonde with a pixie cut and huge boobs, on top of the shelf and on top of the machine, pretending to use it. The other women were laughing hysterically.

  “Okay,” I said. “Time to go.”

  She didn’t get down and I had to go over and pull her off the shelf with Lucy’s help.

  “I want it so bad!” the little blonde said as she was getting down.

  All her friends laughed again but I didn’t think she was kidding.

  • • •

  The next time Pam came in to bring more custom harnesses, she quizzed me about what lesbian bars I liked to go to. I wasn’t ready, so I told her Nadeen worked too much and we didn’t go out.

  “You’ve never gone out to a bar,” she said.

  I tried to think if I had heard of any. “No,” I said. “Not yet.” I asked her what bars she recommended for our next free night and she squinted at me and said she didn’t know but she thought maybe the younger women went out in Bernal Heights.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  • • •

  I di
dn’t know if Nadeen worked too much, but Danny did. He stayed late almost every weeknight and went in for full days on the weekends. I tried to be cool like I was when we were in school, when he would disappear for weeks at a time and then come back to me only to pass out cold for another week.

  One morning I woke up and Danny hadn’t come home, and as I was leaving for work he came in. He looked like the old Danny, two bruised eyes and a shadow beard.

  “I am so sorry,” he said.

  “Oh baby,” I said. I hugged him and kissed him on his eyes. “Can you go to sleep now?”

  “No,” he said, “I just need to take a shower and change my clothes.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Want me to take a shower with you?”

  “Not now, babe. I’m sorry.”

  He got in the shower and I made toast for him and left.

  • • •

  The less Danny slept, the more I did. I started getting into bed when I got home and sleeping twelve or fourteen hours until I had to go to work again.

  My dad kept calling to harass me. He thought I was lying about the store. On one call I told him it was a lesbian sex toy store, and on another call I gave him the name and the address and told him to look it up if he didn’t believe me. On another call I offered to send him a pay stub. On another call I told him I was trying to get pregnant. I knew I shouldn’t antagonize him, but I couldn’t help it. He seemed so far away, now that I was in San Francisco and he was in Los Angeles, and now that my bank account was no longer attached to his.

  It wasn’t a total lie that I wanted to get pregnant. Danny and I were planning to work for a year or two, get married, and then have kids. But I was becoming more and more convinced that sooner would be better than later, so that I could have some company.

  I also couldn’t stop thinking about sex, which I guess was inevitable. I wanted to have it more than ever, and I was having it less than ever. I started using the toys by myself. I had never even really masturbated before, but now I did it almost every day. I mostly used the Eroscillator and a gold glitter dildo, which had a retracted foreskin but no veins or balls. I also purchased another vibrator called a Rock-Chick, which was U-shaped and which you were supposed to rock in and out. I hadn’t been able to get the hang of it, which was what Pam told me to tell customers, that they just needed to get the hang of it. Now I knew that was a lie. Something was anatomically incorrect. So I gave myself a refund, and I marked them down from $39.99 to $19.99. Pam was very excited when I called Chad and told him we were out. But she didn’t restock them, which confirmed she knew they were no fun. We also sold out of some 99-cent bullet vibrators, which I had marked down from $4.99 when I realized that all of their batteries had leaked acid.