True Porn Clerk Stories

by Ali Davis

  That said, I hope management understands why rumors were flying. I was remarkably successful, minutes before the meeting, in maliciously spreading the rumor that we had a new dress code involving orange jumpsuits.

  Anyway, to make a long story short, Bob sold the store.

  He sold it to a chain, sort of, though not to one of the big ones. I'm glad about that. It's a company that owns several small chains like ours, and also some weird stuff like shoe stores and tanning salons. We'll be keeping our name and, fortunately, our branch managers, but the central managers will be gone.

  We're told that day-to-day operations and things like in-store music and our utter lack of a dress code will stay the same, but I'm going to maintain a gentle but healthy skepticism until I see it.

  The new administrative managers -- ours is named Gary -- seemed fine, and remarkably calm given the facts that they'd only found out about their new jobs about an hour before and were now being stared down by about fifty clerks with creative hair.

  So we'll see.

  But at least for now, I am still not fired.

  I Seek the Keymaster

  We all used to be masters of our own keys to the store. The thing about having the flexibility of hours that we did (and, for the time being, do) is that anyone could end up opening or closing on any given day. It ends up being a pain in the ass if someone doesn't have a key, so pretty much everyone who's been trustworthy for a month or two gets one. (I got one after a couple of weeks. I think it was the occasion of my first flush of video clerk pride, rapidly followed by my first wave of fear that I might be a career video clerk.)

  That is no longer the case. We'd been having some occasional problems with the burglar alarm going off overnight so Nick, the new owner, had Gary, the new whatever-he-is, change the locks. Nick then went out of town and Gary said that we would "discuss" who got keys when Nick got back.

  Nick and Gary are apparently used to working with full-timers (everyone on our staff is part-time except the managers) and actually thought they could narrow the key thing down to two openers and two closers at most. Right. Between college schedules, holiday/semester breaks, and the various bands, improv groups and other assorted performances people are involved in, I'm amazed that the schedule gets made at all every week, let alone a schedule that can make sure that one of only four keys is always on hand.

  Gary is not great at the scheduling. We just got our first one and many clerks are pissed. I'm not pissed, but it is an odd schedule. People didn't get the hours or shifts they were used to, and a few people have been scheduled for shifts they specifically said they could not work. But again, scheduling looks like a nightmare task. Maybe Gary will get the hang of it. If he doesn't, it certainly won't be for lack of helpful, pointed clerkly suggestions.

  I feel sort of bad for Gary. He's been dropped into this situation and immediately had to make a hugely unpopular move. We're annoyed because it seems like the new ownership doesn't trust us, because nobody mentioned to the managers that their keys wouldn't be working anymore, and because until Nick gets back we have to wait for goddamn Gary to show up before we can open or close the store.

  Friday morning I spent half an hour waiting on the sidewalk in front of the store. This one wasn't Gary's fault -- there was some sort of traffic tie-up -- but it was still hard not to be absolutely murderous by the time he got there.

  I had made a resolution to reserve judgment on the ownership change and try to be friendly to Gary, but by the time I had spent a full 30 minutes meditating on the fact that if I'd had my own key I'd have been warm, on-schedule to open, and not so fully occupied with trying to find the spot on the sidewalk with the least amount of pigeon shit, I'll admit that I had fallen down a bit in my self-imposed task. By the time he jogged up and asked if I'd been waiting long I gave him a look so full of steaming hot death that he pretty much gave up on chatting. I felt bad, but not bad enough to make polite employee banter.

  He was less late on Saturday, but still late enough to eat into my set-up time. I dislike having to rush my store set-up, and I dislike having to wait outside with my early-morning porn customers even more. When I hit the lock in the morning they stream towards the door from all directions, so I know that even the ones who haven't been out on the sidewalk with me have been waiting and watching me stand there helplessly in my own private Beckett tribute.

  But we had yet another meeting this week and I think Gary is beginning to see our point on the key issue. We'll see.

  We're all hedging our bets. I think we'd like it if things settled into a nice routine and we could keep our jobs but maybe have a more regular schedule of pay raises, but I don't think anyone really believes that. There have been a lot of classified sections of various papers lying around the store lately.

  My first interview is this week.

  I Miss Mr. Cheekbones

  I haven't seen Mr. Cheekbones in months. Casey and I got to talking about him the other day and we both feel bad about it. I'd even had a twinge when I noticed that we'd sold off his favorite video. It was called Pee for Me.

  Mr. Cheekbones was another customer whose name I learned early on. He usually came in with his headphones on and bopped as he walked around the store, singing along to the music in an odd falsetto range of his raspy voice. He liked porn -- particularly peeing-for-each-other porn -- and always asked when we were going to get some new kung fu movies, but really his tastes went across the board. He liked to try a little bit of everything, and was just as likely to rent Othello or the latest art house release as his trusty, much-rented favorite.

  That made him unusual, but that wasn't why I learned his name early on: Mr. Cheekbones was a pain in the ass who I magically turned into a regular.

  Mr. Cheekbones liked to prepay for his movies, which we usually don't do. It's not a huge deal, but it does require a special entry in the register and printing out a receipt to put in your drop at the end of the night. Now I could do it while blindfolded, shackled, and under the influence of a horse tranquilizer, but when I first started clerking prepayments were a pain. The prepayment itself bugged me, and then the fact that Mr. Cheekbones always mentioned his prepayment just after I'd checked out his movies and cleared my screen bugged me too. I'd have to ask for his account number again and it threw off my rhythm and now it seems like a very petty thing to be irritated with at all, but I think when I started I was an angrier clerk, or at least a more resentful one. (I wonder if that means I've learned an important life lesson or if I've simply given myself over to despair.)

  So I'd get annoyed when I'd see Mr. Cheekbones coming and he'd sense my distaste and be annoyed right back. We didn't like each other, and we kept not liking each other for a week or two.

  Then one night he bopped up to the counter and chose David's register instead of mine. David was an even newer clerk than I was, so I gave him a friendly warning.

  "That's Mr. Cheekbones," I said, "He likes to prepay."

  And suddenly Mr. Cheekbones broke into a huge grin. He was a regular. I knew his face, his name and his preferences. A regular.

  After that, we were buddies. We joked at the register, and talked, however briefly, about movies. One night he was checking out new tapes and I told him that the tapes he'd checked out before were due that day. He raced home, swearing he'd be back before we closed. I said he was never going to make it, but he stunned us all by doing it. He made it back to the store, sweating and wheeling his bike, with just minutes to spare. I clapped when I saw him coming.

  He also had a pride about the way he paid: bills, not change. Once -- only once -- he had to pay for a movie with a handful of quarters and dimes, and he was furious with himself. It wasn't a big deal -- we don't mind taking change for a $2.10 charge -- but he kept saying, over and over, "You know me. I don't pay with change. You know me. I'm not the kind of guy who pays with change." He never did again, or at least not with me.

  But we'd been seeing less and less of him for a while, and he wasn't looking
too good. He didn't bop, he didn't chat, and he leaned on the counter like he was exhausted.

  Once he came in with an awfully small dressing over a wound. Casey and I both thought it looked like he'd been shot. We're no experts, but still.

  I don't know what happened, but somewhere in there he got his account cancelled. There's an outstanding charge of about $180 on his account, which usually means someone checked out movies and never brought them back.

  Somewhere in there his life took a slide, and I hope he can make it back.

  Wherever he is, I hope he has his headphones on.

  My Day in Court

  This is my own fault. I slacked off on updating (general business and some actual freelance work came up) and now I have to write about the many things that have happened with the curse of perspective. I'll try to stave it off as best I can.

  Thursday the 14th was my court date for the whacker. We had to be there a little before 9:00. Megan, my manager, was nice enough to pick me up and drive me there. I hadn't had quite enough sleep the night before and I barreled out of the apartment having remembered to do everything but eat breakfast, so I nearly wept for joy when I discovered that Megan had also been nice enough to pick me up some orange juice and a blueberry muffin. Empathy: the hallmark of an excellent manager.

  We actually had a pretty good time. Megan had a mix CD playing, and while we must forever agree to disagree on the joys of Aqua, she did have some excellent non-dance Swedish music. We were a little early, so we chatted, caught up on the paper, and listened to the song that she used to torture her customers with back in her clerking days. It was impressive.

  Security tape in hand, we went through the metal detectors (People, for chrissakes. We all know the drill now. We're going to be having our metals detected for quite some time to come. Have your goddamned keys and your goddamned change and your goddamned giant metal belt buckles OFF YOUR PERSON AND READY TO PUT IN THE LITTLE BASKET. Must we really act like it's a surprise every time? I would ordinarily have been willing to cut people slack on that point, assuming that perhaps they are unfamiliar with airports or courthouses or are from foreign lands where people aren't quite so jumpy about being blown up [Are there any of those left?], but my friend Sheila the lawyer says that she used to routinely watch people be surprised about having their metals detected before court in the morning and then, coming back from their lunch break, be surprised all over again. I realize that in a way that must be a nice way to live, but for the sake of the rest of us, PLEASE WAKE UP.) and found our courtroom.

  Our courtroom was the one for misdemeanors and it was packed to the gills. Megan and I only got seats when we explained to the bailiff who was trying to throw us out that we were actually involved in a case and not just hanging out.

  The seats were a mixed blessing. We had a good view and reasonable physical comfort, but we also had someone in the very near vicinity who smelled a lot like stale urine. No, a lot like stale urine. I was very attentive during our time in court, but there was a renegade part of my brain that would not stop trying to figure out who it was. I had it narrowed down to either the woman on my left or the guy in front of me, but afterwards Megan definitively said it was the guy on her right. Though I was happy to have the mystery solved, I was vaguely horrified to realize that the woman on my left and the guy in front of me may well have had their suspects narrowed down to me.

  9 a.m. hit, the judge arrived, and suddenly we were whipping through cases like nobody's business. Megan and I were out of there by 9:30, and there were easily 15 cases in front of us. Most of them were dismissed because the accusers hadn't shown up. Bang, dismissed.

  I couldn't believe it at first, but then I realized it was pretty efficient. Clear out the chaff so that the people who are serious about it get more time from the court system down the road. (Marshall Field's, we noticed, does not fuck around when it comes to shoplifting. They had a guy stationed there whose whole job seemed to be showing up as the accuser.)

  A couple of people pled out, a few more no-shows, the woman on my left (who, for the record, did not smell like pee) asked to wait a few minutes because her lawyer had stepped out and not come back, and then there was a mini-drama: three teenaged boys had their case (Trespassing? Harrassment? I can't remember.) dismissed because their (female) accuser hadn't shown up, but the judge ordered them to all stay the hell away from her anyway.

  I was mulling over whether the accuser had been afraid to show up or if hijinks had just gotten out of hand and she didn't really want to press charges or what when the whacker's name was called.

  Megan and I went up, but the whacker was nowhere to be found. I wasn't too surprised: his address on the police report was in Michigan and I hadn't seen him in the courtroom and it was, let's face it, a pretty humiliating charge.

  The D.A. seemed pretty happy that someone who wasn't just a paid store representative had actually shown up. He put a warrant out on the whacker, told us it might be a while before we heard anything, and off we went.

  Megan and I agreed that it had been an extremely interesting morning and wondered if they'd ever actually catch him. I was just delighted to have been on the clock for it.

  The New Overlords Are Neither Merciful Nor Just

  I had this Monday off.

  I walked in on Tuesday morning to find that Megan had been fired.

  Well, technically she'd been "downsized," but the net effect was still the same.

  It was incredibly weird -- she'd put up one last note about busting holiday shoplifters before getting the news, and then she was gone.

  Jeremy, once our assistant manager, is now the manager. He's a good guy and will handle it very well, but it isn't the way he'd wanted to get promoted.

  Megan, by the way, will be fine. She's a writer and this might just be the shove from Fate that she needs to get going on the life she really wants. On the other hand, she'd been at the store for four years and had worked her way up from clerking. It would have been nice if the New Masters had taken that into consideration.

  My understanding is that Megan, having been given a bunch of new responsibilities what with upper management gone and all, had asked for some more money. Instead she was told that we'd be getting a new software system that would eliminate many of her duties and she would no longer be needed.

  The decision came from Nick, the new owner, so nobody can quite decide how to treat Gary. Gary has been friendly but extremely and understandably nervous all week.

  More changes are, reportedly, on the way.

  The new software system will usher in a new way of doing things. Some of them, like the addition of a drop box, will make our customers happy, but I don't think most of them will.

  We will no longer allow customers to take IOUs, and we will no longer allow customers to sign up for memberships without a credit card.

  In other words, we will be doing our best to prune off our customers with lower incomes.

  The credit card thing is especially harsh. I do realize that the ones who sign up without cards are statistically a little more likely to be a problem down the road, but I always liked the fact that we didn't tar everyone who didn't have a credit card with that same brush.

  We have people come in from all over town, incredibly far away in some cases, because we're the only store that will give them a membership. Most of them are good customers. What are they supposed to do now?

  Even though it means that most of our bigger pains will be eliminated, most of the clerks don't like it, and we're all fairly shaken about Megan getting yanked, and yanked so suddenly.

  I spent much of Tuesday ratting out the Overlords to our customers and indeed, I'm continuing to do so.

  It's been a weird, sad week. More to come.

  I Am Still Not Fired

  ÉBut I did quit.

  I'd been looking for work for a while. As freelancing work gradually dwindled I was getting more and more dependent on my video store income, which just wasn't cutting it. One of the
main reasons I'd been staying at the store was the flexibility that allowed me to take on freelance assignments, which was starting to lose its point. The New Store Order wasn't helping matters either. One of the other main reasons I'd been staying was a fondness for my managers (one down) and fellow clerks, who were starting to do some nervous looking around. The pleasures of working for a funky little neighborhood store looked to be hurtling towards an end as well.

  There were more prosaic hardships too. The New Overlords let the general managers go when they took over. In addition to being swell guys, the general managers ordered the store supplies. Suddenly we were doing without incidentals like fresh punch cards and crucial necessities like toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Jeremy would have been more than capable of running out and picking up a few things until supply lines were back in place had the Overlords not also taken away the petty cash. The shift when the sanitizer ran out reduced David and me to jittery wrecks. So many matinee specials came in that dayÉ Eugh.