True Porn Clerk Stories (6 page)

For a second, I just stared.

Then, before I knew it, I heard a new voice coming out of my mouth. It was a furious principal's voice, a drill sergeant's voice, Sigourney Weaver's voice just as she's about to wax an alien. It came up from the diaphragm, resonating through my chest, deep, powerful and furious.

"PUT IT AWAY AND GET OUT!"

He dropped the box he'd been holding and whipped around, eyes huge with astonishment.

He had been scratching his stomach.

Interesting Porn Phenomena

1. Beth's First Law of Tag Replenishment:

Of any ten tags you need to put away, nine of them will be in front of the big creepy guy who won't move.

Ali's Corollary:

Of these nine, at least five will require you to bend or crouch in such a way that your head is right in front of his groin.

2. Porn Trance

This is the odd, timeless zone that people go into when studying the boxes. Lone porn renters go into it immediately and resent being pulled out.

Group renters never intend to go into Porn Trance. They start out laughing together, pointing at the boxes and reading particularly ludicrous copy out loud. They are far too hip to really be interes… and then they see an orifice that really strikes them and one by one they get sucked in and the porn section is quiet again.

Couples do not go into Porn Trance. There has already been a great deal of negotiating in getting both parties down there together. If either partner gets even a tiny fraction more interested in a porn star body than the other, the delicate balance -- and quite possibly the relationship -- is destroyed.

We have two rooms of floor-to-ceiling boxes. People in Porn Trance methodically look at every single one in their section. They don't realize they've just rented new releases because they don't realize they've moved around the entire circumference of the room. They don't hear announcements over the Voice of God mic until you get drastic. ("Sir? YOU! In the red jacket! With the baseball cap! YOU! We're closing! BRING UP YOUR MOVIES RIGHT NOW OR YOU DON'T GET TO RENT ANYTHING AT ALL!") People literally spend hours in Porn Trance. I see people look at box after box for two hours at a stretch all the time, and three hours is not uncommon. These are the same people who tell you they're in a hurry when they hit the register.

I think finding the right video is such a primal, visceral thing that people really can't think about time or comprehend verbal announcements the first time around. They've gone back down to the reptilian brain and it takes a few seconds for those higher lobes to kick back in. Or maybe, since to choose the right tape they have to sort of mentally masturbate to it, they have also mentally locked themselves in the bathroom and all other stimulus is just so much faint knocking. I don't know. I haven't asked.

3. Porn Drift

People who have been in the straight section for a while will, more often than you think, get progressively more adventurous. Suddenly videos featuring pre-op transsexuals (sensitively called "She-Males") start showing up. Most of the time that's all there is, but not necessarily. We do feature bisexual videos (and by that, of course, we mean bisexual men - bi-girl action is pretty much a given in the straight section) and every now and then someone you didn't expect will dip his first toe into the gay end of the pool.

There are way more bisexuals in the world than you think there are. I know there are way more than you think, because there are way more than I thought, and I'm bisexual. People who have finally gotten rid of all their inhibitions in that regard rent all over the Kinsey scale -- there are a few 50/50 renters, but more people just seem to throw in what suits them. It still freaks out many of my fellow clerks when people do that. "Weird. That guy rented three gay videos and two straight," comes up a lot. I usually gently mention that there are more than two options in the world, but they tend to just give me blank looks. Oh, well -- most of them are still in college. They'll learn.

I tend to notice bisexuals a lot because it's fascinating to me that there are so many more than I ever knew, but also because I really don't want them to be creeps. Some of our coolest customers rent bi, but then some of the biggest freakos do too. I'm keeping an informal mental tally and frankly it doesn't look good. I'm hoping some nice bis will step up to the plate.

But I digress. We actually hardly ever turn people gay or even bi. The clerks at our all-porn branch have noticed a fairly strict progression because their porn is broken up by far more than gay and straight. According to them, the most likely Porn Drift path for a straight male goes from all lesbian to straight sex (some guys are so freaked out about seeing another guy's penis that straight sex videos are called "gay male" in some circles) to she-male section.

We keep the transgender stuff in the straight section -- straight guys do not want to go to the gay section for their chicks with dicks videos.

And for the most part, gay men don't rent them.

(I have been given two interesting explanations as to why straight guys like women with penises. The first is that men don't believe that women like or want sex as much as they do. A chick with a penis, then, is a woman who has a full, hearty, male sex drive and must want sex as much as he does. The second one is almost touching to me: Vaginas are mysterious, and penises are by comparison fairly straightforward and easy to satisfy. A guy knows what to do with a penis, so if a woman has one he can be sure he knows how to satisfy her.)

I am actually sort of heartened by Porn Drift. I like seeing concrete evidence that sexuality is a more fluid thing than people like to admit, and I like seeing people stop worrying about what they're supposed to be turned on by and just go with what they like. I feel like the more people stop trying to fit themselves into rigid little boxes, the more they'll be able to cut people slack when they fit into a different box, or don't fit into a box at all.

So depending on your point of view, we're either helping people to open up to a new understanding of themselves and others, or we're helping to turn previously normal people into depraved freakos.

Dirtbags

I never thought I would be the sort of person who would mentally categorize people as "dirtbags," but I am and I do. In a way, it's part of my job. Dirtbags rip up boxes, tamper with tapes, and try to steal the DVDs. They try to peel off pricing stickers and put them on movies that aren't for sale. They claim damages on tapes that are fine, they try to scam us with the punch cards, they keep movies for weeks on end and try to weasel out of the late fees. They try to masturbate.

Sometimes I don't even know what they're doing -- I just know that they're dirtbags and need to be watched. It bothers me that I can spot them when they hit the door. I don't like the fact that I'm categorizing people, but then I hate getting scammed or taken more. It makes me angry, it makes me tired. So I keep an eye out for dirtbags.

There is, as you might expect, a healthy intersection between dirtbags and heavy porn renters.

I think it's partly due to the expense involved in a porn addiction -- scamming is a way to cut corners -- and partly that anyone renting six hardcore videos every single day of his life has already at least to an extent said his goodbyes to the laws of society. But you'd be surprised: not all porn addicts are dirtbags and not all dirtbags rent porn.

Though dirtbags do seem to have a common fondness for backyard wrestling videos and the
Faces of Death
series.

I couldn't tell you what makes a dirtbag. It's like obscenity: you know it when you see it. If I had to put it into a word, I'd go with "shiftiness". Dirtbags are trying to do something wrong and deep down in their dried-up little dirtbag souls they know it and somehow their mental can-I-get-away-with-this calculations show.

One guy actually has shifty eyes. I couldn't believe it -- I'd always thought that that was one of those Victorian techniques for recognizing the Criminal Type, but damned if it isn't true. I was stunned when Mr. Creepy came up to the counter, claiming that an entire stack of porn he'd rented should be free because somehow the clerk had given him six wrong tapes, and there were his eyes, shifting shifting shifting around like beady, guilty little gnats, looking at anything in the room but me or the incriminating videos.

Mr. Creepy is the one who makes me meditate on the nature of dirtbagness the most. He is always scamming. Bogus damage reports, punch card scams, claiming he got the wrong videos, and of course moving pricing stickers around. The first three bother me the most because they take advantage of our good nature. I hate it when people chip away at our likelihood to cut a good person a break. Especially when they're just trying to save up for the next entry in the
Stop! My Ass Is on Fire!
series.

The thing is, Mr. Creepy always thinks that we're the ones trying to scam him. He sometimes will pre-pay for a movie. The flag that shows a credit to someone's account is a smallish one, and the clerk won't always see it unless the customer points it out. This is especially true in Mr. Creepy's case, since there are so many notes on his account that it lights up like a Christmas tree.

In the process of making sure he didn't tamper with the tapes he's turning in and making sure he acknowledges that the one's he's checking out are correct and he isn't stealing anything and he isn't trying to get his card double-punched and wondering why this fucker still has an account with us at all, it's easy to miss the credit. And he flips out. He thinks we're trying to cheat him, even if the clerk who did the prepayment gave him a receipt, even if we apologize.

I wonder how many times you have to get cheated or scammed or worked over by life to turn into Mr. Creepy. Did his parents teach him that or was it one event or was it a long, slow process? How do you decide that it's OK to be a dirtbag, and at what point is it OK for me to write him off as one? Yes, I know: ideally, never.

I sometimes wonder what it would take to turn him around, although I am honest enough with myself to admit that I wouldn't want to be the one to do it. Could he be turned around at this point? Or will he just spend his life committing petty scams and getting creepier? As a good liberal and a caring person who recognizes that life is a web of interconnecting influences, I feel sad for Mr. Creepy. As a clerk, I want him to get the fuck out of my life and never come back.

As I said, I am conflicted about my growing instinct for spotting dirtbags. I think I'm an equal-opportunity spotter. I'm pretty sure that I base it on shiftiness rather than any other factors, but I worry. My friend Eric, a six-foot-something black man, was once telling me about his frequent trips to Canada. His favorite thing about Canada, he said, is that white women who see him coming down the street don't clutch their purses like they do here. Gah.