True Porn Clerk Stories - Ali Davis [20]
But a part of me thinks it isn't just objectification. I wonder, sometimes, if the appeal of "Gaping Asshole Inside!" is one, oddly, of intimacy.
Maybe deep in his creepy little social leper soul, what the guy who picks up these boxes really craves is a woman who is so close to him that she will completely open herself to his view, someone who knows and loves him well enough to let him see absolutely everything about her. Maybe these men are looking for an act of trust as much as an act of sex.
On the other hand, maybe they're just dirtbags.
An Interesting Development
I reached an interesting new level with one of my regulars this week. He's one of my early morning guys. My favorite, in fact.
On weekdays the store opens at 7 a.m., and I've been doing that a lot lately. Mr. Gentle comes in early -- not with the first rush that comes when I open the door, but before the on-the-way-to-my-9-to-5 guys. He's quiet. He always comes in not-quite-awake with his coffee and gives me a little wave before he goes downstairs.
He doesn't fuck with the boxes, he doesn't drool over the new releases, he doesn't move the tags around. He just chooses a movie or two and comes back up.
Then he turns in his old tapes (rewound, on time, and clean) and asks, "How are you?" And means it. He listens when I say "OK," is sensitive to the variation in my tone of voice when I say it on different days, and gives me a genuine answer when I ask him how he is back. He's quite literally soft-spoken, in deference to the earliness of the hour, I think, and he always says a few kind words about how godawful early I must have had to get up to be there. I like him.
It's sort of soothing to have him come by in the mornings. At least one other clerk has noticed that too -- there's a note on his file that says "I wish I could option him to come in instead of some of my other customers."
Mr. Gentle is an academic of some sort. A fair chunk, if not all, of his frequent renting is due to his working on a project about representations of gender in film. It didn't occur to me until I started writing this to wonder if that's true or not, but I think it is. He's clearly both very smart and very well educated, and one day he rather fervently mentioned looking forward to the day he could stop renting all that porn. There was a note of desperation in his voice that I've only heard before from my fellow clerks.
I've asked Mr. Gentle about his project a couple of times, while we're, say, easing into the day by waiting for our ancient Etruscan credit card machine to crank up, but he's pretty vague about it. He's always said something along the lines of "You wouldn't be interested," in a friendly way. He could really mean "You wouldn't be interested," or he could mean "You wouldn't understand." I'm not sure. He's never been condescending about it in any way -- as I said, he's always been friendly -- but there is, as a rule, a tacit assumption among most customers that their video clerk has perhaps not been keeping up her subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine. (In all fairness, I haven't.)
Wednesday Mr. Gentle was in and in a fairly bad mood. Not snippy, of course, but definitely unhappy and sort of exhausted. He said he'd just been discussing his paper with someone and was upset because he thought he might have to switch the focus. He couldn't decide whether or not to risk his academic credibility a bit and write for a more popular audience.
"Worked out pretty well for Margaret Mead," I said, and looked up in time to see his head snap up and three thoughts go through his face all at once. The first was the realization that writing for a popular audience had, in fact, brought worldwide fame and respect to Margaret Mead for a solid 50 years. Hmm. Thoughts two and three were, in rapid succession, the realizations that his video clerk had not only just referenced Margaret Mead but seemed to have at least a basic handle on her career.
And suddenly we were friendlier. As I said,