True Porn Clerk Stories - Ali Davis [0]
The other day I realized, as a cold claw of pure fear squeezed my frantic heart, that I have been working as a video clerk for ten months.
This is a job that I took on a temporary basis for just a month or two until freelancing picked back up and I got my finances in order.
Ten months.
It has been a test of patience, humility, and character.
It has been a lesson in dealing with all humankind, including their personal bodily fluids.
It has been $6.50 an hour.
Tae Bo
A guy came up to the counter a few days ago and asked me if Tae Bo was in.
I explained that we don't carry exercise videos and he said no, we had it -- he'd seen the box downstairs. Downstairs is, of course, the porn section.
Some porn movies do ape mainstream titles -- David Cop-a-Feel was my all-time favorite -- but not as many as you'd think. A lot just follow a simple pattern: (A) B N, where A is the race of the participants (optional), B is the sex act or kink -- sometimes this gets astonishingly specific -- and N is the number of the series. Thus, you get Blow Bang 25 or Asian All-Anal Action 15.
The Little White Chicks, Big Black Monster Dicks series (note intriguing combination of race and fetish) has some of the most offensive cover art I've ever seen, not because of the sexual content but because it's incredibly racist. The little white chicks look at you demurely over their shoulders while surrounded by scowling African-American men. The men are repeatedly referred to as "monsters" ("monster dicks" itself doesn't bother me because it merely implies that said dicks are monstrously large, but referring to the men themselves as monsters is another story) and their faces are actually mounted on cartoon animal bodies. There's no way in hell you could put that cover on, say, a book and not get your store burnt down, and perhaps rightly so. But my well-intentioned liberalism can pretty much go screw itself, because the series is cheerfully (and heavily) rented by people of all races.
Anyway, Tae Bo. I can't find it in the computer, but that's not unusual -- deliberate misspellings are common in porn. That, plus the inevitable similarity of titles makes it a real pain in the butt to look things up. Does the customer want Black Ball, Blackball, Black Balled, Blackballed, Black Balls, Blackballs, Black Ballers, BlackBallers, Black Ballz, Blackballz, Black Ballerz, or BlackBallerz? And does he want the one in the gay section or the one in the straight section?
But I keep looking. The Zen lesson of my job is this: just because I do not want to be a video clerk doesn't mean I shouldn't be the best possible video clerk I can be. There's no way to just pop up a partial alphabetical list of titles, so you have to pick a likely starting point and then flip through entry after entry.
"It was a weird spelling, right?" I ask, still typing in variations on Tae Bo as fast as I can think of them.
"Yes," he says "It was spelled weird."
"Do you remember it?"
Yes, he does: T-A-B-O-O
Lube Warning
We all abuse the hand sanitizer. We can't help it.
Contamination is everywhere. I see people sneezing onto the tape cases. They cough wetly into their palms right before handing me change. They squeegee out their ears with their pinkies. They forget about the security cameras downstairs and pick their noses with wild abandon and astonishing force. Still, the only thing that really freaks me out is the semen. Well, OK, the lubricant freaks me out too, but I'm pretty sure that's because of the implied presence of semen.
The only thing we can do is use the hand sanitizer. I use it so much that I lose all finger traction and can't open our plastic bags. I've had days when I've used it so much that I can't make fingerprints on the glass countertop. It freaks me out, but the thought of not using it is worse.
Sometimes people get animalistic about the tapes. For the real addicts (I'm convinced that porn is like alcohol: some people can stop at just one every now and then, some people just binge on weekends,