True Porn Clerk Stories - Ali Davis [2]
The destruction of the polite fiction is what creeps me out about one of my weekend regulars. He comes in when I open at nine, then chooses and rents two movies. He leaves for exactly two movies' worth of time, then returns them before four to get the matinee special. I hate it because there's no way to pretend he's been doing anything else. I just hope to God there's been a hand washing between him and me. I think there is, because his tapes are always clean, but it still gives me the shivers and sends me straight to the hand sanitizer. It's just too much to know.
Mr. Glasses is the very creepiest, though. He's always very friendly, even courtly. He's too friendly, actually -- he's always doing stuff like announcing "It's THAT kind of personal service that sets your store apart from the Blockbusters!" Yeah, whatever. The over-friendliness itself is creepy, as is the way he sort of doesn't blink enough and doesn't know that most business transactions don't really involve sustained eye contact. (No, he's not hitting on me. He's gay.) But of course what puts him over the top is that he's our biggest repeat lube offender. I hate seeing him coming. It's like Russian Roulette.
Rainy days are the worst. He just plunks a wet bag on the counter and we have to reach in and get the tapes. You know that initiation ritual in Flash Gordon where the guy has to stick his hand way, way down a hole and usually it's fine but sometimes there's a venomous beastie at the end that stings him? It's like that.
Actually, it isn't quite. The tapes are always a bit wet on rainy days -- it's just that my brain can't stop churning about what they might be wet with.
We all abuse the hand sanitizer. And I am deeply grateful that it exists.
Customers I Have Driven out of the Store
If you don't count rousting teenagers out of the porn section, I have only driven away two and a half customers.
The only one I'm proud of happened pretty recently. I was ringing up a sale and I heard a crash from downstairs. My manager was out, so I couldn't leave the register to go down and see what happened. I glanced at the security monitor and saw a guy downstairs calmly flipping through the DVD section. He had knocked down three entire shelves. Instead of picking them up or coming to get me or even shoving them over into a pile and then continuing his porn shopping, he was just standing in them and on them, flipping away.
I got on the Voice of God microphone and said, in as friendly a voice as I could, "Hi! Could you pick those up, please?"
He started, then came charging up the stairs. "It was an accident!" he yelled, "Knocking over those DVDs was an accident!"
"I believe you, sir." I said.
"And you want me to pick them up? You want ME to pick them up?!"
And without waiting for an answer, he stormed out.
I didn't really expect him to pick them up. I wouldn't have minded picking them up if he'd just come upstairs and said something like "Jesus, I'm an idiot and I knocked down a substantial chunk of your DVD section." Or put them into halfhearted little piles. Or really anything other than just standing on them while continuing to shop for porn.
I don't think he was as angry at the notion that he might have to clean up his own mess so much as he was furious that he'd been caught making it. Sometimes new customers don't see the security cameras right away, and they sure as hell don't expect the Voice of God mic. When you're scrutinizing the charming cover art of White Trash Whore, the last thing you want is to be chastised by a booming voice from above.
I'm not particularly sorry we lost his business. I do feel bad about driving away Mr. Creaky, even though he used to give me the creeps. Mr. Creaky was not, technically, a porn customer. He liked the Japanese animation. The Anime section is the one that really makes me cringe. It's upstairs in the general releases since it's all, you know, cartoons. Some