True Porn Clerk Stories - Ali Davis [6]
I just want him to know that I am not impressed. I want him to know that his cell phone and pile of bags do not make him impressive; they make him a human logjam. I want him to know that renting a stack of six porn movies a day tends to undercut his intended dashing, man-about-town effect. I want him to know that true big shots do not try to screw small locally-owned businesses out of petty amounts of cash. I want to have the pleasure of publicly deflating him.
There is no earthly reason I should care so much, and it drives me nuts that I do. I am a pacifist. I like to think of myself as a nonviolent and gentle person. I have actually fantasized about knocking Mr. Pig to the ground and kicking him. Once, when he was being particularly obnoxious, I had a flash of an image: Me putting a foot on Mr. Pig's chest, shoving a gun in his mouth, and blowing his brains across the New For Sale section. It frightened me, but I enjoyed it.
He knows my name now. He came in as I was leaving one day, just as the other clerks said "Bye, Ali!" So he leaned right into my face and said "Byyyyye, Ali!"
Now he greets me every time. I hate Mr. Pig.
Fetishists
As you might expect, we get a lot of fetishists in the video store.
If a customer is going to rent porn, I actually prefer to see a mixed bag of videos -- that way all I know about him is that he wants porn. Someone comes up with a stack of five videos about people pissing for each other, and suddenly I know a very intimate thing about a relative stranger. (An interesting distinction in Illinois porn law: you can rent videos about people pissing for each other, and you can rent videos about people pissing near each other, but you may not rent videos about people pissing on each other. Go figure. There's apparently a Byzantine set of codes that have to do with taking a dump for each other, but I really don't want to know.)
Lots of people are hung up on a particular race, or a particular combination or races, and many straight men are pretty specific about breast size. (For the record, the Nice Rack series and the Itty Bitty Titty series seem to rent fairly evenly.)
The most common fetish, if you can call something so common a fetish, is for borderline jailbait. This is true of both straight and gay porn. The gay series to watch are Eighteen Today, Just 18 and Gay and First Time Tryers. The straight series are Bring 'Em Young, Barely Legal, and, horrifyingly, Faces with Braces. We actually have a guy who vets all our videos and makes sure that nobody is under 18, but still, guys who bring a stack of those up to the counter make me want to hiss and warn them away from my little sisters.
And it's never the 21-year-olds who rent Barely Legal, it's always the 45-and-ups. Gah. The 21-year-olds do occasionally rent the one copy of Older Women, Hotter Sex that we have. I approve of this, in a shocking display of my own personal prejudices.
Except for the occasional too-personal glance into their psyches, most of the fetishists don't really bug us, except for those in one special category: those who fetishize the video store itself.
They can't masturbate because of the cameras, but they do everything else. They damage the cassettes on purpose. There's at least one guy in the straight section who rips pictures off the boxes, and a guy in the gay section who apparently carries an X-acto knife.
People in both sections steal the boxes, which drives us nuts -- a video without a display box won't rent because people can't see what it's about. It can take weeks to get a new, empty box and it's expensive. One guy in the gay section is definitely doing it as some kind of triumphant "fuck you" to the store -- he always jams the plastic insert into the DVD rack as a calling card.
One guy called for weeks, trying to get us to special order a tape called Autofellatio. (By the way, I have seen the box for Autofellatio, and it looks like cheating to me. The guy on the cover is bracing himself up against a pool table. Dammit, if you're going