True Porn Clerk Stories - Ali Davis [15]
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.
Spotting dirtbags always brings up the worry that I have prejudices that I don't know about. We did used to have a clerk that, some of us noticed, only kept an eye on our black customers. An old manager had a problem with people who didn't speak English like a native. One of our local policemen once warned me to be especially careful of my register when "fags" are in the store.
Me, I used to feel happy for elderly gay men who rent porn because they finally have an outlet after all these years, but completely creeped out by elderly straight men. Now that I've been at the store for a while, I've progressed. I'm creeped out by both.
Porn and the Differently Abled
I like to think of us a very diversity-friendly store. While many of our titles are certainly indelicate because of porn's cut-to-the-chase nature, we do feature porn starring as many different ethnicities in as many different combinations as we can find. I didn't think of this as a public service until one of our customers brought it up. He had come to our neighborhood from way, way downtown, which a lot of people do. People sometimes come in from a state away, especially gay porn renters, so crossing town didn't seem that odd to me until he commented on it: "You know how hard it is to find porn on DVD with people who look like me in it?"
So I at least had an odd pride about us providing equal access to porn... until the guy in the wheelchair came in. Our store is deliberately designed to make the porn section hard to get to. We want people to have to pass the register so the clerk can see them and we make them snake through the shelves a bit so it's hard for kids to get down there. Turns out it was a nearly impossible gauntlet for a wheelchair.
The guy was surprisingly nice about it. He'd already had a shitter of an evening. All he wanted was to rent some videos, which many of our customers do on autopilot. He had waited more than an hour for a cab to pick him up -- he was on some kind of subsidy for taxi transportation, but that meant he had to wait for a specific company