by Ali Davis
But that wasn't the really weird thing. We all have our musical quirks, and tolerate each other's pretty well. What was weird was S.'s Superclerk persona. Like the rest of us, he wasn't at the video store bucking for a management position. He was a computer programmer, having recently graduated from DeVry ("Oh," said my mother, "Then he's really just sort of a programmer.") and was looking for a job. The store was pretty cool about keeping him working five shifts a week with the understanding that he'd drop the job with very little notice once one of his interviews paid off.
So he made no secret of being on his way out, but insisted on playing Superclerk. Actually, he was really more HallMonitorclerk. He'd automatically check the clock to see if other people were on time for their shifts -- and in fact he'd comment on it if I were only on time instead of a few minutes early. Every time I relieved him he'd gleefully show me how many sales he'd made, even though we're not on commission or anything. Clerks don't really do sales except in the sense that we accept money for purchases -- we don't push anything.
He'd always bitch when his shift was slow, saying he'd rather keep busy, and took careful notice of who was not as particular as he was with their cleaning assignments.
He'd complain when he found little doodles on Post-it notes around the counter -- how could the night shift do these damned things when nearly every morning he came in to find the vacuuming below par? He'd get jazzed up about staff meetings for weeks ahead of time.
In short, S. was a nice guy, but an incredible pain in the ass.
A week ago Friday, I got a call at home from Matt, the guy who does all the scheduling. Would I be able to take an extra shift or two?
S. had been arrested.
In the seven months S. had been working at the video store, he had embezzled nearly six thousand dollars. And that's what they can prove -- my manager thinks it may have been more like ten thousand.
The managers were all furious -- they felt they had treated S. like part of the family and he had betrayed their trust. The reaction of the clerks was less visceral, but the same across the board: Wait a minute. If he was already stealing from the store, why did he have to be such a self-righteous prick about the cleaning assignments? It still doesn't make sense.
The bizarre thing is I don't think it was a cover. I'm pretty sure that in his own mind, S. was far and away the best clerk at the store. I don't even think he thought of what he was doing as stealing, and certainly not as grand theft. He was, after all, doing his thieving three bucks at a time.
It wasn't even a programming trick (thus adding credence to my mother's assessment). We're pretty sure he was just telling the customer the prices for their returns (which wouldn't be hard -- the same combinations come up a lot) and then zeroing out the numbers in the computer as though they had free rental cards. Then he just pocketed the overage at the end of his shift.
It wouldn't be hard, and actually the anal-retentive way the store handbook suggests counting out our drawers facilitates it.
On the other hand, it was really, really stupid. It's not like we don't have accountants. It didn't take all that long to notice that S.'s drops averaged anywhere from $50--$100 less than any other clerk working the same shift, or that he gave out way more free rentals than anybody else.
I can't believe they waited as long as they did to nail him.
But nail him they did. They had him arrested and cuffed right off the register in the middle of his shift. Pretty hardcore. Apparently his parents are paying back the money he stole so he'll have a misdemeanor instead of a felony on his record. It's tough to think of many things I'd want to do less than explain to my parents that I'd been arrested for seven months of petty theft.
So S. goes free and the store gets its money back. It's the remaining clerks, of course, who will end up taking the brunt of the fallout.
The upstairs security cameras, once aimed so that we had a good view of the hands and faces of people browsing the for-sale movies, have been re-aimed. Now they give a good view of the hands of the clerks.
I was so insulted by this that I considered walking right off the job. It's ridiculous. You can see our hands, yes, but it's not like you can tell if someone is zeroing out the prices on the computer screen. The thief-magnet sale racks are now only vaguely visible in the background. Incredible.
We also got a letter in our paychecks from Bob, the owner. It describes the arrest in lascivious detail, then has a message for the rest of us about how he's sure we're all great people with big plans for the future, but he will not hesitate to bust our asses if it turns out we're not.
So there's a bit of a clampdown. Everyone's afraid to give a good customer a break on, say, accidentally bringing up the wrong tag and getting the wrong movie because we know our free rentals are being gone through with a fine-toothed comb. The cameras are always pointed at us and the general managers call about fifteen times a day to make sure everything's OK.
On Tuesday Bob stopped by at 7 a.m. -- NOT to check up on me, mind you, just because he was in the neighborhood. But while he was there, how was everything going?
S. is truly amazing. He managed to be a pain in the ass one last time.
I Hope This Isn't a Trend
I caught another jerker in the porn section today. It's amazing -- I'm already jaded about it. Part of it was that I just caught him on the security camera, so I had that distance, and he was really more of a stroker than a jerker. I don't think he had come in intending to masturbate. I think he just got aroused by some of the boxes. He had one hand in his sweatpants and was just sort of giving himself the occasional stroke or two as he went along.
Still, discretion doesn't make it OK to whack off in my store. I popped him up for a close-up on the monitor and, yup, that's what he was doing.
I thought about calling the police, then figured screw it. I got on the Voice of God mic and said "Sir, you need to keep both hands where I can see them."
He looked up at the camera, pulled his hand out of his pants, and continued the rest of his porn box perusal whack-free.
As he was leaving the store, I went up to him and said, "Next time you don't get a warning -- I'm just calling the police." He looked at me and nodded OK. There wasn't any guilt, but there was no defiance either -- he'd tried it, I'd caught him fair and square, and we both knew I'd been way nicer about it than I had to be.
To be honest, it made me feel sort of bad-ass to be so calmly and firmly in control of the store. Once I thought about it, I realized that I felt like a jolly, middle-aged madam in the Old West -- ready to take care of my customers' needs in a friendly and straightforward manner, but with a strict policy against taking any guff. Shoot, they're just men. I can handle those whippersnappers.
The store is definitely changing me. I can't tell if that's a good thing or not.
Gaping Asshole Inside
Several of our straight porn boxes have a cheerful little blue circle on the front. It's designed to look like a sticker and it says "Gaping Asshole Inside!" in the same sort of cheerful font one might use for "Now with more fiber!" or "New fresh scent!"
It is clearly meant to be a feature, a sort of guarantee of quality: whatever else may or may not happen in this film, you are guaranteed at least one gaping asshole. Frequently there is also a gaping asshole holding the box, but that issue is not addressed.
It baffles me.
I understand, on an intellectual level, why porn is so focused on anal sex. It's taboo and a large segment of the female population will have no truck with it. Of course that's what guys, or at least a lot of them, fantasize about. But why even the biggest butt freak in the world would want to hunker down and take a look inside is beyond me.
But porn, or at least the porn we're carrying, is very big on taking cameras up and in and through anywhere they can go.
Part of it is a general gross-out, can-you-top-this thing that seems to be part and parcel of the adult industry -- world's biggest cocks, the century's most extreme penetrations. I
think porn, which doesn't have much in the way of scripting or acting chops to move it along, has to rely on other ways to convey intensity: bigger, harder, faster, freakier.
There is a new title in the straight section: V8. The caption says, "Four in the ass and four in the pussy!" It was the first box that has given me pause in a while.
"Sweet Jesus," I thought, "Where would everyone stand?"
Calmer reflection and the laws of physics have convinced me that they can't possibly mean penises, or at least not all at once, but I'm afraid to turn the box over and find out for sure.
I think heavy porn renters must get jaded to watching plain old sex -- How could they not? -- and that's what leads to the bizarre for its own sake: obesity porn, little person porn, old person porn, bondage porn, foot porn. Double penetration. Cartoonishly huge sex toys. Sticking a camera up someone's urethra. Can it possibly be sexy?
It's easy to dismiss "Gaping Asshole Inside!" as just another instance of breaking a woman down into her component parts instead of dealing with the whole being, and I almost did. I mean, ew.
But a part of me thinks it isn't just objectification. I wonder, sometimes, if the appeal of "Gaping Asshole Inside!" is one, oddly, of intimacy.
Maybe deep in his creepy little social leper soul, what the guy who picks up these boxes really craves is a woman who is so close to him that she will completely open herself to his view, someone who knows and loves him well enough to let him see absolutely everything about her. Maybe these men are looking for an act of trust as much as an act of sex.
On the other hand, maybe they're just dirtbags.
An Interesting Development
I reached an interesting new level with one of my regulars this week. He's one of my early morning guys. My favorite, in fact.
On weekdays the store opens at 7 a.m., and I've been doing that a lot lately. Mr. Gentle comes in early -- not with the first rush that comes when I open the door, but before the on-the-way-to-my-9-to-5 guys. He's quiet. He always comes in not-quite-awake with his coffee and gives me a little wave before he goes downstairs.
He doesn't fuck with the boxes, he doesn't drool over the new releases, he doesn't move the tags around. He just chooses a movie or two and comes back up.
Then he turns in his old tapes (rewound, on time, and clean) and asks, "How are you?" And means it. He listens when I say "OK," is sensitive to the variation in my tone of voice when I say it on different days, and gives me a genuine answer when I ask him how he is back. He's quite literally soft-spoken, in deference to the earliness of the hour, I think, and he always says a few kind words about how godawful early I must have had to get up to be there. I like him.
It's sort of soothing to have him come by in the mornings. At least one other clerk has noticed that too -- there's a note on his file that says "I wish I could option him to come in instead of some of my other customers."
Mr. Gentle is an academic of some sort. A fair chunk, if not all, of his frequent renting is due to his working on a project about representations of gender in film. It didn't occur to me until I started writing this to wonder if that's true or not, but I think it is. He's clearly both very smart and very well educated, and one day he rather fervently mentioned looking forward to the day he could stop renting all that porn. There was a note of desperation in his voice that I've only heard before from my fellow clerks.
I've asked Mr. Gentle about his project a couple of times, while we're, say, easing into the day by waiting for our ancient Etruscan credit card machine to crank up, but he's pretty vague about it. He's always said something along the lines of "You wouldn't be interested," in a friendly way. He could really mean "You wouldn't be interested," or he could mean "You wouldn't understand." I'm not sure. He's never been condescending about it in any way -- as I said, he's always been friendly -- but there is, as a rule, a tacit assumption among most customers that their video clerk has perhaps not been keeping up her subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine. (In all fairness, I haven't.)
Wednesday Mr. Gentle was in and in a fairly bad mood. Not snippy, of course, but definitely unhappy and sort of exhausted. He said he'd just been discussing his paper with someone and was upset because he thought he might have to switch the focus. He couldn't decide whether or not to risk his academic credibility a bit and write for a more popular audience.
"Worked out pretty well for Margaret Mead," I said, and looked up in time to see his head snap up and three thoughts go through his face all at once. The first was the realization that writing for a popular audience had, in fact, brought worldwide fame and respect to Margaret Mead for a solid 50 years. Hmm. Thoughts two and three were, in rapid succession, the realizations that his video clerk had not only just referenced Margaret Mead but seemed to have at least a basic handle on her career.
And suddenly we were friendlier. As I said, he's always been great, so the change was a tiny one. Now we're friendly-friendly instead of transaction-friendly.
He's always been very aware that there was a worthwhile human being behind the counter, it's just that now he's had a hint that there's a brain in the worthwhile human being behind the counter. We chatted more. I recommended an article in Salon, which he wrote down eagerly, and then he went away.
Today when he came in instead of hello and isn't it early we talked about the FBI scandal and what we thought the fallout would be.
I was very happy at the new nuance in our customer-clerk relationship. My intellectual vanity is, I think, the personality flaw that I've done the most work on and made the least progress with. I like him. I want him to know I'm smart and trust me to understand what his paper is about, and I like getting to talk to him a little longer in the quiet of the morning.
The downside is that now I seem to make Mr. Gentle a little sad. He seems to be fairly sensitive to nuance himself, and now I think he knows how much I don't want to be there. I want to tell him that it's OK, that things are looking up and even when they're not I'm using it all for writing fodder. But I can't tell him that because, in another nuance, while we are friendlier, we are not friends.
I'm looking forward to the day I can resign now more than ever, and in a new way. There will be a quiet pleasure in telling Mr. Gentle, when he asks, that today I am not just OK.
Wuss
First off, two updates:
1. I am pained to admit that my informal bisexual tally is not going well. The ratio is something like one incredibly cool person to every 200 complete freakballs. I am beginning to understand the origin of the unpleasant stereotyping; I'd be wary of dating me too.
2. I am deeply relieved to report that V8 refers to fingers. How sad that I've reached a point in my life where the fact that a woman is only having four fingers jammed up her anus while another four are jammed into her vagina is a relief.
ÉWhich brings me to M. I never actually met M. She was a new clerk we hired who quit after one day. She left a note on the manager's desk saying that she couldn't stay because the job was too degrading to women.
When I told the story to my friend Jenny, she said "Good for her!" I was taken aback for a moment, because my reaction had been "What a wuss!" Most of the women at the store had said some variation on "What a wuss!" I had told the story to Jenny in anticipation of her saying "What a wuss!"
I think the right response is somewhere in between. Some porn is degrading. Hell, a lot of it is degrading very much on purpose. It's hard to look at the box for Young, Dumb and Full of Cum and think the filmmakers had anything else in mind.
(On a side note, I hate it when people use the spelling "cum". I HATE IT. What, it's supposed to be dirtier that way? Just because it's supposed to be all raw and sexy doesn't mean you have to be an idiot about it. Jesus.)
But the more I've worked at the video store, the less I'm convinced that porn is inherently degrading, and the line between degrading and not gets blurrier.
For example, the [My Store] chain, (and by "chain," I mean four stores, three of which
actually deal in porn) does not carry pregnancy porn. My internal reaction to that is "Good," but I couldn't tell you why. I know that pregnant women have sex. I know that some pregnant women have been frustrated by their partners' reluctance to have sex or queasiness over seeing them as sexual beings.
For that matter, it's arguably a good way for a resourceful mom to start off Junior's college fund. But we don't carry it because The Powers That Be find it inherently degrading and it's never been a point I've cared to argue. If I look at it dispassionately, though, I don't think it is. Or at least it's dependent on what the pregnant woman in question is being asked to do.
We recently stopped carrying bukkake, also because it's degrading. When I first started working at the store, that one seemed like an easy call for me. Bukakke involves a circle of men with a woman in the center. The men jerk off, covering the woman in semen. It's hard to think of a context in which that wouldn't be degrading. It certainly was hard for me.
