True Porn Clerk Stories (16 page)

There's a piece of equipment in our storage area. I'm fascinated with it because printed across the base are the words "IMPULSE SEALER". It is, of course, for sealing off items that have been newly shrink-wrapped, but lately I've been pretending it's not and it has become an increasingly large part of my behind-the-counter fantasy life. There are many, many people who need to have their impulses sealed, and for some reason they all end up at my store.

No more warnings. From now on whackers will be referred directly to the police.

Staff Meeting

We've had an interesting development. I knew one was coming because a sign appeared at the store this weekend to the effect that all four locations would be closing early Wednesday for a special meeting.

This would be the Wednesday in question, or at least it was when the meeting started.

We all knew something was up because meetings are usually held on a store-by-store basis. Nobody could ever remember having a giant summit meeting before.

No one would tell us anything. Well, actually the manager and assistant manager of our branch told us that they hated the fact that they couldn't tell us anything, and they thought it was a suckola way to do business. They were correct.

It always amazes me when upper power echelons in a company tell staff that something's up but they can't know what yet and then are shocked -- Shocked! -- when rumors start flying. Well, what did they think? You can't play "I've got a secret" and expect people to cheerfully play along when you have the power to fire them. If there's no information coming down from above, the plebes will use their best guesses to create information of their own.

In this case, it was a Big Deal that had Lots of Points to Work out and yeah, yeah, nothing could be said until everyone was absolutely sure, and I understand that.

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.