True Porn Clerk Stories - Ali Davis [3]
My position on porn is that I'm fine with whatever floats your boat, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult. Hentai throws both parts of that rule out the window. Sure, all the boxes claim that all the characters are at least 18, but a lot of them are drawn to look about 12. And there's a lot of raping. Not just run-of-the-mill raping, either -- we're talking about triple-penetration rape by demons.
I consider myself a first-amendment feminist, but to be honest the hentai really makes me wrestle with that sometimes. And guys who rent the entire La Blue Girl series all at once (check out the box cover sometime and you'll see what I mean) freak me out even worse than the guys who rent the Animal Trainer series.1
We have to watch the Anime section because it's right next to the foreign films and the tags are the same color, which means a clerk who isn't on his toes could check out a shitload of hardcore animated underage rape porn to a kid and yes, once they see that there's sex stuff on some of the boxes kids definitely try to slide it past.
Mr. Creaky, as you've guessed, was hardly a kid. I would have been frightened of him if he hadn't been so old and feeble. He would rent a stack of rape hentai at least once a week. He always had the same patter as he came up to the register:
"Do you watch that show The Sopranos?"
"No, sir."
"I hear it's pretty good."
"Yes, sir, that's what I hear too."
"I'd like to watch that show, but I can't. There's too much cussing."
Then, clever ruse in place, he would bring up his tags for Demon Beast.
Anyway, all would have been well had it not been for a well meaning but plateheaded clerk name Dan. Dan was a sweetheart, but had an astonishing ability to fuck things up. In this case, Dan had rented six of our very foulest titles to a 16-year-old. To give you the idea of the level of stupidity this involves, I'll just go ahead and tell you that the La Blue Girl series depicts a woman being raped by demons RIGHT ON THE BOX. I was horrified both at the thought of what this kid's mom would do to us when she found out and what the kid himself had just learned about the beautiful, tender world of lovemaking.
I talked to my manager. We didn't want to move the whole Anime section, so we needed a bright, easy signal for Dan, who for some reason still hadn't been fired. Our solution was to let the R-rated stuff slide, but if anything looked more like an X I highlighted the label on the tag and wrote a big "NC-17" on it.2
Mr. Creaky never came back.
So how did I manage to drive away half a customer? Well, he's not really quite gone yet. He still comes into the store a lot, but I may have destroyed his soul.
Mr. Buddy was the first guy people warned me about when I started working at the store.
He is heavily addicted to porn and a huge pain in the ass. He also desperately wants to be friends with the clerks. He wants to come behind the counter and look at the boxes when new porn comes in. We always tell him that customers can't come behind the counter and he says, "Yeah, but I can, right?" No, he can't. Sometimes with a new clerk he'll try "The old manager used to let me come behind the counter," at which point any other employee in earshot will chime in with "No, he didn't." He bitches about the prices and tries to haggle with us. "I swear to you, this has been on the new release shelf for a long time. I should get it for the old release price, right?" Wrong.
One time he brought back just a case, without the DVD in it. He actually expected me to check the empty case in and let him, you know, just drop the DVD by at his convenience. When I said no, he stood at the register and whined for nearly ten minutes.
His bitching and wheedling isn't caused so much by the fact that he's a cheapskate, which he is, as by the fact that he desperately wants to be a regular. He wants to be greeted by name