True Porn Clerk Stories

by Ali Davis

  I don't know when it will end. I can pull an opener without caffeine, but not without Aqua.

  Women Who Aren't on the Boxes

  Today was a banner day, of sorts. Four women went into the porn section. They went down in pairs, a couple of hours apart.

  Two were straight girls out for an afternoon who went down to browse. They had shopping bags with them, and seemed like they pretty much just wanted to see what it looked like. They just sort of wandered around a bit, keeping their distance from the shelves except for the occasional swoop in to look, and then left without getting anything. (The store is a bit notorious in the neighborhood and people do sometimes just wander in to see that, yup, there's porn, and then leave.)

  The other two were a lesbian couple. They were there with more purpose. One came up to the counter and asked if we had lesbian porn, then they both went downstairs to look. They scoped the place out pretty thoroughly, made a couple of selections, then came up and set up a membership. I was glad they found something they liked. While we do have lesbian porn, we don't really have porn that's aimed at lesbians. I'm not sure how to back up that statement. Arguably, hot chicks having sex with each other is aimed at much at lesbians as at straight men... only it isn't. It's just the feel of the thing - a general "Hey, fellas! Getta load of this!" vibe.

  Maybe I'm imagining it, but I don't think so. We don't get much repeat lesbian business. In fact, there's only one I've seen who has ever come back, and her visits are months apart. I just don't think there's much here for her.

  Anyway, I was surprised at the sudden surge of female traffic. I can go for weeks on end without seeing a woman down there at all.

  I know there is porn aimed at women in the world, but we don't really carry it. I try my best to help steer the women who do come in towards something they'll like, which is difficult. For one thing, porn is a pretty personal choice, and for another, I don't actually know that much about it. The last thing I want to do at the end of my shift is check out a little porn. (This is true of the guys too, actually, and sometimes it freaks them out. To be a 20-year-old male and numbed out to porn is, apparently, a scary thing.)

  In the interest of good clerking, I did finally ask my manager and learned to steer my straight female customers towards Wicked Video stuff, which have budgets and stories and nobody gets called a dumb cunt on the box copy.

  I think I'm a pretty good guide. The women who do come in solo -- and they are very, very rare -- are usually pretty uncomfortable about it.

  It doesn't help that our porn section is a completely white room with a white linoleum floor lit by bright white fluorescent lights broken up by security cameras and wall-to-wall orifices. It hits somewhere between futuristic alien clinic and porn carnival.

  If our decor makes a statement, it's "Hey, fucko! Don't masturbate!" It's just not a cozy or welcoming place. So I try to be both as businesslike and as gentle as possible. I want them to know that it's fine and normal to rent porn, and that they're safe. Sometimes I'll ask another clerk or a manager to cover my register and go down with them. It seems to help get them acclimated.

  Usually the women who come in are half of a straight couple. They cover the full range of comfort and discomfort. My favorite was a pretty girl with a peaches-and-cream complexion and a Laura Ashley flowered dress. When I went down to ask if she and her boyfriend needed help, she belted out "Yes! We want to BUY!" while he stood blushing in the corner.

  Most are pretty quiet, though, and usually let the guy take the lead.

  I don't think it's that women are less sexual than men. I think they could or would like porn if the situation were different. There are still fairly big taboos about women admitting to being interested in porn -- even for the ones who rent pretty racy stuff from upstairs. And the movies would have to be different, I think. There'd have to be more about why these people are having sex. A better reason than Tab A fitting into Slot B, at least.

  And, from what I do know about porn, the sex would have to be different. It doesn't look like the women on porn boxes are having that much fun. They're always being bent or twisted into uncomfortable positions, or trying to avoid sperm being shot directly into their eyes. The fact that the men watching want to see as much as possible means that the women don't seem to be getting touched much. They're just getting poled by some guy who's apparently deliberately avoiding their erogenous zones. Whee.

  So we don't get many women downstairs.

  I hope the few brave feminine souls who do go down there find what they're looking for.

  Oh, by the way...

  Management found out about this journal and the NPR piece over the weekend.

  I am not fired.

  Men and Women and Porn

  Here's what I've learned in my year-and-change as a porn clerk: men like porn.

  Admittedly, my sample is skewed because many men come to our store just for the porn and have other accounts elsewhere, but almost all of the men who come in do eventually go down to the porn section. And I don't mean "almost all" in the 90% sense, I mean all but maybe two since I've started working there.

  This is a lesson because I now understand that pretty much any man I date is going to at least occasionally enjoy pornography. I don't think a lot of women have fully dealt with that. If one reads the advice columns, a lot of women can't even deal with the idea that their mate masturbates at all. Ladies, please. Chill out.

  What the porn section has taught me that I think many women don't understand is that porn is a physical thing for guys, not an emotional one. It seems to be a quick, physical release. It's a way of feeling good and making sure the plumbing is still in working order and that's about it. With the exception of the addicts, I don't think it has any more significance than grabbing a burger when you're hungry or standing up and stretching when you've been trapped in a car all day.

  Many women are jealous of or threatened by porn, and we shouldn't be. The key is the difference between your dog, which is a Sheltie-terrier mix that hides under the bed during thunderstorms, has a passion for cat food and prefers tug-of-war to fetch, and the general dogness of the "dog" in the dictionary.

  I think a woman in a porn movie, as a rule, is taken as a general woman rather than a specific woman. She is there to stand in for general womanness. (And, based the number of rewind fees I dish out, once the viewer comes she ceases to exist.)

  I think guys rent porn as a way to have the pleasure of sex without the added complexity of having to tend to someone else's needs. Which doesn't mean that he's a bad guy or won't do plenty of tending later, it's just that right now he just wants to wolf down a burger.

  In a way, a guy who is renting a porn video is courteously having his selfish sex on his own time so he won't bother you with it. And "selfish" isn't a bad thing here. It's also selfish to take a hot bath and read a book by yourself, but it's important to do that every now and then.

  And besides, if you had a choice between your guy renting a video and renting a person, which would you choose?

  Now that I've cleared up that little misunderstanding for all time, here's what men don't understand about porn: Women do take it personally. When a woman sees your porn rental, she is likely to conclude that that is what you want. The sex act in question, the level of communication, the inflated porn body -- all of it. In all likelihood, she doesn't see the woman on the box as a convenient avatar of general womanness, she sees her as tangible proof that what the owner of said box really, truly wants is a nineteen-year-old emaciated blonde with enormous fake breasts and a deep desire to take it up the ass.

  This is why a gentleman is very, very careful about leaving his porn lying around the house.

  Communication can also help and all that, but, hell, I'm not an advice columnist. I just think, based on what I've seen, that men and women look at porn very differently and it can't hurt for both sides to take that into account.

  I think it's cool when couples rent porn together, and I'm impressed with how mu
ch they had to do to get there, or with what I hope they did, anyway.

  I know it's fashionable again to say that men and women are fundamentally different -- God, I cannot wait for that particular social pendulum to swing back -- but I don't think they are, or at least not in this case. I think attitudes toward porn have a lot to do with socialization. There's a pressure to overpersonalize sex on one side, and to depersonalize it on the other. As always, I think moderation is a good way to go.

  Figuring this out has helped me understand my customers better, I think. Knowing the guy is watching for general sex and not specific sex makes it easier to see why we have those four-hour clip jobs of just come shots. Keeping in mind that what our clients are renting is physical and not emotional or mental keeps me from caring too much about what they're renting, and in many ways that detachment is a key part of my job. (Trust me: the guy with the Iowa driver's license and the wedding ring does not want me to care about the fact that he's renting gay porn.)

  In a way, I keep learning the same lesson over and over again: just because people's tastes don't match mine doesn't mean they're wrong. Soon, I hope, it'll stick.

  Do Not Feed the Clerks

  I've never understood why people give us food, but they do. I mean, yeah, none of us are working there because we're so bored with collecting those interest checks on our trust funds, but there are plenty of starving brethren in the customer service industry. Why us?

  The first couple of times a customer offered me food, I kept saying "No, thanks" as politely as I could. One guy kept pressing an "extra" doughnut he'd bought on me so eagerly that there was no way in hell I was going to eat it. I was new then and the possibility of someone replacing the Boston Creme with roofies seemed like a very real possibility, so I finally just took it and threw it away as soon as he was out the door. I couldn't figure out the impulse. While I've been fond of many a video clerk in my past, it never occurred to me to feed them.

  Like everything else, though, I've gotten used to it. People have given us stuff on Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July. One guy has, on more than one occasion, brought us cookies. Really good ones from a gourmet store. He's neither one of the creepiest customers nor one of the chattiest. He'll perk up if we say hi, but it's not like he's hanging around dying to be our friend. Why the baked goods?

  I finally adopted a policy of eating food that customers had dropped by, but only if one of the other clerks has eaten it without incident first. Perhaps it was wrong to use my coworkers as mineshaft canaries, but trust me, they'd have eaten it anyway.

  Our main benefactor, though, is Mr. Tint. Mr. Tint was the first regular I got to know, and that was at the angry insistence at the other clerks. I was working a night shift and the phone rang.

  "Who's your daddy?" said the voice on the other end. It was my first week and I'd already fielded several prank calls, so I hung up.

  He called back: "Who's your daddy?" I hung up again. I mentioned to the other clerks on duty that I'd just fielded two prank calls from the same idiot and when I told them what he'd said they almost strangled me with the phone cord. Apparently that was Mr. Tint's way of saying hello. Once you correctly identified him as your daddy, he'd bring by food.

  Lots of food. Enough for everybody to eat dinner and then some.

  Mr. Tint works in several capacities in the food industry and has access to a lot of it. He brings it by all the time -- usually a couple of times a week at least.

  I wouldn't eat it for a long time; it was just too weird. Casey, who started just a little before I did, was creeped out by it too. His theory was that Mr. Tint was fattening us up to eat us, and he was only mostly kidding.

  Eventually, though, we all succumbed. We've all had more than one evening in which we weren't sure how we'd get dinner if Mr. Tint didn't drop by.

  What he got out of it, of course, was a shitload of free rentals. Management knew what was going on and winked at it, figuring that it was a pretty good perk for the clerks at very little cost to the store. Like several tipping situations I've been in, the value of what he was bringing by was way, way more than he'd have spent if he'd simply paid for his videos. (On the other hand, I don't know that he paid for it. I ran into him at a mailing store once and he had some sort of goods-for-services thing going on over there too. I think Mr. Tint enjoys living by the barter system and feeling like he's getting away with something.)

  But he also got a very special regular status at the store, the kind Mr. Buddy would kill for. Mr. Tint, having delivered his manna from heaven, would choose his videos (or pick up the ones we'd held behind the counter for him) and then hang out and chat. We're talking 45 minutes at a time of chatting, customers or not.

  It was a delicate situation. He definitely made it difficult to properly attend to our other customers, and there was at least one incident before my tenure in which Mr. Tint so distracted the clerks (and blocked their view of the sales racks) that several items were stolen while he chatted away.

  It's difficult, though, to ask someone to piss off when your mouth is full of his pizza.

  Mr. Tint is still a regular, but his glory days are over. S's firing made head management go through the free rentals with a fine-toothed comb, and our side of the barter is no longer available. Our assistant manager told him as gently as possible that he'd have to pay for his movies, but it was still a hard transition.

  He still chats a lot, and still lays a tacit claim to super-regular status, which we have to explain to the newer clerks. Sometimes he'll even drop by food, but without the free rentals the joy is gone.

  I'm sort of glad it's over. He saved my bacon on many an evening, but it was weird to take his food, even when he was getting something out of it. He could barter free rentals, but not quite the friendships he seemed to be hoping to get out of it, and that was awkward, to say the least.

  People still drop by food sometimes, but I've returned to my old policy of not eating it. I don't really think people want to poison us, but until I feel like I have a better handle on what they do want I don't feel right accepting it.

  Home Is the Sailor

  I've been back at the store for just over a week after all my summer traveling. I was away for a wholesome vacation to national parklands with my family, then off to an actual performing gig with my improv group. The family trip included my (much younger) little sisters and the show was in a foreign country where porn is illegal (though I hear they're having a bit of trouble with the Internet) so my vacation was blissfully, totally porn-free. I'd sort of forgotten that that's how my life used to be -- no involvement whatsoever with the secret desires of total strangers.

  I wish the transition back had been a harder one, but no. I slipped right back into my World of Orifices without batting an eye.

  My first day back I actually picked up a shift at one of our other locations; after all that gallivanting around, I need the hours. It doesn't have nearly as good a spot for foot traffic as my branch, so the day got pretty boring. I knew that a lot of our regulars have memberships at both stores, and I could't stop myself from checking:

  They hate Mr. Pig too.

  Since then I've been back at my usual branch, trying to get back up to speed. I'm off my game a bit -- I used to get compliments on how well I rattled off the New Membership Speech, but now I have to stop and think about it.

  New Memberships, by the way, suck. They suck hard. I know they keep the store in business and all, but good lord, do we hate them. They take a clerk out of commission for anywhere from 5--10 minutes (which is not so much during the midmorning lull, but an eternity during the 4 o' clock rush) and if two new memberships get going at once, forget it: we've created a traffic snarl that's not going to get untied for the next hour or so.

  No one ever listens to the New Membership Speech. By the time we get through all the paperwork and the ID checks they just want to get the hell away from the counter and rent some frigging movies and they don't want to hear it. We could tell them they hav
e to give us hair and urine samples with every return and they'd just nod and step up their get-on-with-it body language.

  We are, in fact, telling them important information like the fact that we don't have an after-hours drop box, but it's a lot to take in all at once and people just glaze over. Which doesn't help either of us a week later when they're back at the counter, this time seething with rage over late fees.

  I'd be more sympathetic if there weren't a big sign over my head outlining the very same policies covered in the New Member Speech. People almost never read the sign -- not even a glance at it to see what sort of information it might contain if they chose to read it at some later date.

  The quickest way for a new member to win instant and massive goodwill from me is to actually read the sign. "Now how much are rentals -- oh, it's right up there!" is sweet, sweet music to my ears. This is a customer who makes an effort to adjust to new surroundings by looking for and absorbing helpful information. This is a customer who will return his late films and accept his fees with grace, knowing that said late fees were his own fault. This is a customer who will not bitch about the fact that he didn't return his movies on Labor Day because he assumed that we'd be closed and how the hell was he supposed to know we'd be open? because he saw -- and read -- the giant sign to that effect that was posted on the front door.