I've been torturing my morning customers lately.

The store has been creeping up my opening shifts over the past several months anyway, and now that S. is gone almost all of my shifts are openers. There are plenty of random freakos that shuffle in and out in the morning, but most of the people that come in at 7am are regulars.

To open the door at 7, I arrive at about 6:30. My rule is, if I'm hitting the door at 6:30 am, I can play whatever the fuck I want on the stereo to keep myself awake. Thus, the torture.

What keeps me awake is Aquarium, by Aqua. You may remember Aqua - they were a Danish-Norwegian technopop group that won both worldwide fame and my heart by pissing off Mattel with the song "Barbie Girl".

I honestly can't remember why I bought the entire CD. I know I wanted to use the song for something, but why didn't I just get the single? This would have been back in 97 or so when the song came out, and at the time I had a full-time job and actual disposable income, but still. Anyway, I used the song on a mix tape or something and then never really listened to the whole CD.

...Until I took this job. Shifts can become gulags of boredom without the CD player. My collection isn't exactly huge, so before long I was digging back through the pile.

And that's when I discovered that I loveAquarium. It's the very finest in Scandanavian synth-pop dance music. It's incredibly chipper, in a modern Abbaesque sort of way. Years ago, I went out a couple of times with a guy who had been to Sweden and he said you really couldn't understand Abba until you'd traveled through a Scandanavian winter. I think he meant that they need that level of perkiness to keep themselves awake and sane during those endless cold nights, and I can't help but think that Aqua was doing the same public service.

Whatever they did for the Swedes, it really cheers me up first thing in the morning. "Barbie Girl" is great, of course, but the one that has most won my heart is the first track, "Happy Boys & Girls". After an opening synthesizer blast, the opening lyrics go like this:

Be HAPPY!
(Come on, let's go get it on!)
Be HAPPY!
Be HAPPY!
(Come on, let's go get it on!)
Be HAPPY!

And it just keeps getting better.

There's also a delightfully baffling song called "Doctor Jones":

Doctor Jones, Jones, Calling Doctor Jones, Doctor Jones, Doctor Jones get up now!
(Wake up, now!)
(Female lead yodels like a cowgirl)

I don't know if it's the lyrics written by non-native speakers of English or simply the relentless throbbing disco beat, but I just can't get enough of it.

Or, more accurately, I can't open the store without it. I play it every time I open. The whole album. I can't help it - the morning just isn't complete without it. If I time it just right, I can hit "play" when I'm rounding the counter and the lead singer screams "Be HAPPY!" just as I open the door.

I am happy, but I know it's driving my customers crazy. The songs have been drilled into their brains so many times that some of them unconsciously sing or whistle along. But not in a good way. There tends to be a bit of eye-rolling when they hit the door. Straight guys hate it the most, of course. It's hard to shop for rugged, manly porn to high-pitched singing and bouncy synthesisers. I hope that both "Barbie Girl" and the underrated "For Once in Your Life, Be a Man" give them something to think about, but I doubt it.

I feel bad for them, but I can't stop. (Well, I mostly feel bad for them. A tiny, sadistic part of my brain that I can't quite get rid of sees their pain and laughs like Renfield at their torment. The only one I've actually apologized to is Mr. Gentle. He sheepishly admitted to enjoying it, solidifying his position as my favorite customer ever.)

When I first started at the store, we weren't allowed to play whole albums. Our old manager hated being subjected to one choice for an hour at a time, so he mandated filling the player with different stuff and shuffling.

I hated it at first, but then I really got into it. The challenge of creating really good shuffle is endlessly entertaining, and appreciated by all clerks, no matter what our musical tastes. For a while Casey and I were really into Bollywood soundtracks, and, really, anything that would make the customers look up at the speakers in an attempt to figure out what the hell we were playing. Casey eventually got his hands on some Mongolian throat-singing, which was a delight.

Roy Orbison, the Trainspotting soundtrack, Soul Couging, and any good New Wave collection used to be a favorite blend of mine, though Casey came up with the most elegantly simple mix: Belle & Sebastian and GWAR.

Constructing theme days were fun, but after a while we just got into trying to crack each other up. Someone found a Stryper CD in a bargain bin somewhere and it was in the player for about three solid weeks.

But, as I said, I pull fewer and fewer night shifts and there's a high turnover - now that mini culture is gone and we're back to throwing stuff in to suit ourselves.

If my CDs send a message, it is, generally, "Be HAPPY!" That's because I'm sort of over it. Most CDs that we play - and I am occasionally still guilty of this - send this message: "We are cooler than you."

The clerk is of course automatically cooler than the customer because we are accepted by the public at large as snotty arbiters of movie taste, and also because anybody with a shit job is automatically cooler than someone with a 9-to-5. Too bad, no arguing, we're cooler. Our store is a nasal jewelry, snotty film school sort of place and we employ people coldblooded enough to work with hardcore pornography every single day of our lives (Oh, all right. Just every shift.) so there are plenty of extra bonus cool points right there. I have actually had word come back to me that people sometimes hate coming to our store because they feel their relative coolness is being rather harshly judged. I, as the least cool clerk (Cf: S.'s firing), sometimes feel bad about this, but many of my fellow clerks don't.

Music underlines that point, especially if it's scary music. Some of the clerks really like death metal - the kind of stuff that goes so far over the top that I end up pissing them off by giggling at it. I don't like death metal, but it does perform a valuable function - it puts a big, scary wall of cool between us and our customers. And nothing clears the porn section out faster after a long evening. Mason used to turn it up so loudly and so suddenly that we'd all run to the security monitor to see people flinch.

It sound childish, and it is, but sometimes it's there for a reason. We have a lot of whacked-out people coming into the store. Sometimes it feels like it helps to have a soundtrack of tough playing. It makes me feel like a puffer fish: "Back off, dammit," says our music, "There might be poison in here!"

But as I said, I'm over it, and the mornings are a little lower key. I don't care if people think I'm cool or not. I just want us all to be happy.

This week I made an important sale-bin discovery: Aquarius. Another Aqua CD. I'm really going to enjoy it if I can hear it over the sound of Renfield laughing.

Last edited by Ali Davis on 06-23-2002 at 03:24 AM

I sometimes worry that the porn section may be destroying my sense of proportion. I spend at least part of every shift face-to-face, as it were, with almost cartoonishly huge cocks.

The women's bodies on porn boxes are out of proportion too, but not to the extent that you'd think. I see a lot of fake breasts, sometimes distended to the point that they must be uncomfortable. I'm not just talking about the unwieldy size; on a few women the flesh of their breasts is stretched so tightly that their nipples are distorted. But that's rare - usually it's just the standard eerily spherical balloon breasts. Don't men know that real breasts hang? (Actually, I don't believe that men really can't spot fake breasts. I think they're just happy to have any breasts around and just don't care whether they're real or not. In a bizarre way, it's sort of a friendly policy.)

The implants, while definitely a major part of the straight porn world, are less omnipresent than you'd think, though. Many boxes, most notably those in the Real Naturals series, now promise that they only feature real breasts. And the porn industry, in its eagerness to please, has realized that many men don't even want big breasts. The young-stuff movies in particular, like the Barely Legal series feature smaller-proportioned women. I guess it's easier to pretend that a girl is jailbait if it looks like she could still have some breast development to go.

Eugh.

But anyway, I'm not really worried about losing my sense of proportion for female bodies. For one thing, I've got one of my own for reference, and for another I see normal female breasts every day. So do you. Even when they're clothed, they're pretty much out there. There are plenty of ordinary, walking-around reference points to keep a person in scale. (Now that I think about it, I'd be interested to know what body issues come up in, say, Inuit society.)

But with penises, I worry. Unlike breasts, you really don't see them until (one hopes) you get fairly friendly with their owners. There's just as not as much basis for comparison.

And as badly distorted as the female porn body can get, that's nothing compared to what happens to the men.

There's a series in the straight section called Mr. Eighteen Inches. Eighteen! Apparently twelve isn't even impressive anymore. The gay section has the Cocks as Big as This Box series. I find this title hilarious, because while I know they're only talking about length, I always picture all three dimensions. Where would they find pants?

Both the gay and straight sections have giant cock fixations. The straight section tends to be more graphic about it, usually showing just pictures of women posing with a giant cock and no guy attached at all, like they didn't have room for him in the picture. The gay section - though it certainly has some crude and graphic exceptions - tends to be a little more demure about it. The men are clothed on the front, then naked on the back. Usually the guy on the front just has his penis outlined through his clothing. Wet clothing is very popular. I think it's a nice way of handling it. The customer gets the idea that the cock in question is giant, erect, and undoubtedly throbbing, but it still leaves a little mystery.

(The exception is in the videos for guys that love foreskin. Uncut movies usually feature naked, flaccid cocks on the front.)

Anyway, stuff in the gay section definitely shows a healthy interest in larger-than-average plumbing, but there's also just as big an interest in beautiful men in general. For every box with a giant penis on the front, there are two more that just show a smiling, handsome man from the waist up. Clearly said handsome man has spent mind-numbing amounts of time at the gym, but at least he's not asking you to inspect his genitals.

(By the way, the guys on the gay boxes aren't just handsomer. They also seem nicer, somehow. The guys on the straight boxes are always frowning or grimacing or just looking mean. I understand that you don't need [or want] a handsome guy in a straight film, because holy shit, what if the straight guy watching it gets a little bit attracted?, but I haven't figured out why the guys on the straight boxes can't look friendly.)

Here's what the straight boxes have taught me, though: guys are the ones who care about giant cocks.

Not women, guys.

Especially the straight ones.

I understand porn's fascination with giant members because it's a visual medium and, let's face it, a dumb one. Giant cock is the quickest shorthand for virility. Big muscles = big strength, so why shouldn't big penis = tremendous power to satisfy?

Men are the ones who think a dick needs to be big to be satisfying. Sure, there are a few size queens out there, but as a rule women are way less picky about size as long as the owner of said penis learns to use it correctly. That's actually the heart of the problem - men assume that more penis automatically means more satsfaction, when in fact it has very little to do with it. I've known more than one woman who's been initially delighted to discover that she's with a larger man, only to realize to her disappointment that he thinks that all he has to do is be large. Conversely, one hears that overcompensation can be a lovely thing.

While I'm on the topic, I'll mention another quick gender-based misconception: when men refer to big, satisfying cocks, they talk in terms of length. Case in point, Mr. Eighteen Inches. Women, to the extent that they care at all, care about girth. When was the last time you heard a woman say "Wow, I bet that guy could really bruise my cervix!"?

But again, when it comes to the porn section we're not talking about anything in the normal human realm here. It doesn't even look like fun.

The porn box women, of course, love these huge genitals. There's even a series called Chasing the Big Ones. I think it's another form of metaphor - women who want giant cocks must really, really like sex, right? Insatiable means insatiable. Or something.

I think the reason straight guys like enormous schlongs, apart from the whole bigger = more powerful and more potent thing, is that it's an easy answer to Freud's unanswerable question: what do women want? The real answer is too hard. Women want you to be independent but emotionally available. They want you to be attached but not smothering. They want time and attention, and also some time alone. They want you to grow and change with them. They want you to be all kinds of things, and it's going to be a different list for every woman, and that list is always subject to change without notice. For some men, and many of my regular porn addicts, I think, fall into this category, the answer is that women want you to change that glaring personality flaw and learn to talk to them like a human being. Maybe they want you to take a frigging shower.

The other way is so much easier. What do women want? Enormous, glistening cocks. If you've got one, great, your job is done. No need to worry about anything else. If you don't, well, then if women don't like you it's not your fault.

But then, none of that applies to the gay section and I'm not a guy so who am I to speculate?

I guess guys just like big cocks because they're so frequently told that that's what manhood is all about. Sure, he donated a kidney to his daughter and all, but I hear he's hung like a gnat.

I feel bad for guys. There's definitely a lot of male pressure involved, but women certainly are guilty of their fair share of tiny penis jokes. It's awful to feel like your body is inadequate - I wish we as a gender wouldn't participate in perpetuating that particular bit of hurt.

There's a "clinic" that drops fliers in our store every few days. They say "BIG ENOUGH?" and of course, they're for penile enhancement surgery. What I've heard about breast enlargement surgery is that it's painful and dangerous, that the implants can leak or harden and cause all kinds of physical problems. I can't imagine that penile surgery is any safer or less painful, and all for what sounds like less than an inch of "improvement".

The fliers, when I see a new batch, become my good deed for the day. I throw them out.

Last edited by Ali Davis on 07-14-2002 at 12:14 AM

I'm a monster.

Since my purchase of the second Aqua CD I've become positively Satanic about my musical choices. I do genuinely love it, but I also have to admit it's feeding a mean streak I never knew I had.

It started with just a nearly two-hour Aqua block at the beginning of my shift. Then I dug out the Right Said Fred CD. Right Said Fred are those British weightlifter/musicians who did "I'm Too Sexy," though if you ask me the best cut on the album is the magically bouncy "Don't Talk Just Kiss."

That was an excellent three-hour set (OK, yes, that's cruel and unusual. But dammit, if you're looking at porn for three CDs worth of time you've got to be prepared to take the consequences.) but recently I've started mixing it up. I'll play two of the three, then slip in a CD of something other people actually like and then go back to the dance music. I stun them with two quick jabs and then make them wait for the haymaker.

Again, my primary purpose is not to torture my customers, it just happens to work out really well that way. (Actually, they don't all hate it. Every now and then I'll catch someone dancing on the security monitor, which pleases me to no end. One guy who was all alone started doing the Bus Stop.)

I'm still closeted about it with the other clerks. I tend to time the more socially acceptable music for when my relief comes in. I don't know what I'll do when they discover me. Run into the swamps, I guess, and spend the rest of my life in hiding, quietly humming "We Are the Cartoon Heroes".

I don't know when it will end. I can pull an opener without caffeine, but not without Aqua.

[Hi. Thanks for reading this far. If you're new to this board, I encourage you to scroll down to the bottom, jump to the Journals forum, and check out some of the other journals on this board. There's some great stuff, and you and I both know you weren't going to get any work done anyway. - AD]

Today was a banner day, of sorts. Four women went into the porn section. They went down in pairs, a couple of hours apart.

Two were straight girls out shopping who went down to browse. They had shopping with them, and looked like they pretty much just wanted to see what it looked like. They just sort of wandered around a bit, keeping their distance from the shelves except for the occasional swoop in to look, and then left without getting anything. (The store is a bit notorious in the neighborhood and people do sometimes just wander in to see that, yup, there's porn, and then leave.)

The other two were a lesbian couple. They were there with more purpose. One came up to the counter and asked if we had lesbian porn, then they both went downstairs to look. They scoped the place out pretty thoroughly, made a couple of selections, then came up and set up a membership. I was glad they found something they liked. While we do have lesbian porn, we don't really have porn that's aimed at lesbians. I'm not sure how to back up that statement. Arguably, hot chicks having sex with each other is aimed at much at lesbians as at straight men... only it isn't. It's just the feel of the thing - a general "Hey, fellas! Getta load of this!" vibe.

Maybe I'm imagining it, but I don't think so. We don't get much repeat lesbian business. In fact, there's only one that I've seen that has ever come back, and her visits are months apart. I just don't think there's much for her.

Anyway, I was surprised at the sudden surge of female traffic. I can go for weeks on end without seeing a woman down there at all.

I know there is porn aimed at women in the world, but we don't really carry it. I try my best to help steer the women who do come in towards something they'll like, which is difficult. For one thing, porn is a pretty personal choice, and for another, I don't actually know that much about it. The last thing I want to do at the end of my shift is check out a little porn. (This is true of the guys too, actually, and sometimes it freaks them out. To be a 20-year-old male and numbed out to porn is, apparently, a scary thing.)

In the interest of good clerking, I did finally ask my manager and learn to steer my straight female customers towards Wicked Video stuff, which have budgets and stories and nobody gets called a dumb cunt on the box copy.

I think I'm a pretty good guide. The women that do come in solo - and they are very, very rare - are usually pretty uncomfortable about it. It doesn't help that our porn section is a completely white room with a white linoleum floor lit by bright white flourescent lights broken up by security cameras and wall-to-wall orifices. It hits somewhere between futuristic alien clinic and porn carnival. If our decor makes a statement, it's "Hey, fucko! Don't masturbate!" It's just not a cosy or welcoming place. So I try to be both as businesslike and as gentle as possible. I want them to know that it's fine and normal to rent porn, and that they're safe. Sometimes I'll ask another clerk or a manager to cover my register and go down with them. It seems to help get them acclimated.

Usually the women that come in are half of a straight couple. They cover the full range of comfort and discomfort. My favorite was a pretty girl with a peaches-and-cream complexion and a Laura Ashley flowered dress. When I went down to ask if she and her boyfriend needed help she belted out "Yes! We want to BUY!" while he stood blushing in the corner.

Most are pretty quiet, though, and usually let the guy take the lead.

I don't think it's that women are less sexual than men. I think they could or would like porn if the situation were different. There are still fairly big taboos about women admitting to being interested in porn - even for the ones who rent pretty racy stuff from upstairs. And the movies would have to be different. There'd have to be more about why these people are having sex. A better reason than Tab A fitting into Slot B, at least.

And, from what I do know about porn, the sex would have to be different. It doesn't look like the women on porn boxes are having that much fun. They're always being bent or twisted into uncomfortable positions, or trying to avoid sperm being shot directly into their eyes. The fact that the men watching want to see as much as possible means that the women don't seem to be getting touched much. They're just getting poled by some guy who's apparently deliberately avoiding their erogenous zones. Whee.

So we don't get many women downstairs.

I hope the few brave feminine souls who do go down there find what they're looking for.

Management found out about this journal and the NPR piece over the weekend.

I am not fired.

Here's what I've learned in my year-and-change as a porn clerk: men like porn.

Admittedly, my sample is skewed because many men come to our store just for the porn and have other accounts elsewhere, but almost all of the men that come in do eventually go down to the porn section. And I don't mean "almost all" in the 90% sense, I mean all but maybe two since I've started working there.

This is a lesson because I now understand that pretty much any man I date is going to at least occasionally rent and enjoy porn. I don't think a lot of women have fully dealt with that. If one reads the advice columns, a lot of women can't even deal with the idea that their mate masturbates at all. Ladies, please. Chill out.

What the porn section has taught me that I think many women don't understand is that porn is a physical thing for guys, not an emotional one. It seems to be a quick, physical release. It's a way of feeling good and making sure the plumbing is still in good working order and that's about it. With the exception of the addicts, I don't think it has any more significance than grabbing a burger when you're hungry or standing up and stretching when you've been trapped in a car all day.

Many women are jealous of or threatened by porn, and we shouldn't be. The key is the difference between your dog, which is a Sheltie-terrier mix that hides under the bed during thunderstorms, has a passion for cat food and prefers tug-of-war to fetch, and the general dogness of the "dog" in the dictionary.

I think a woman in a porn movie, as a rule, is taken as a general woman rather than a specific woman. She is there to stand in for general womanness. (And, based the number of rewind fees I dish out, once the viewer comes she ceases to exist.)

I think guys rent porn as a way to have the pleasure of sex without the added complexity of having to tend to someone else's needs. Which doesn't mean that he's a bad guy or won't do plenty of tending later, it's just that right now he just wants to wolf down a burger.

In a way, a guy who is renting a porn video is courteously having his selfish sex on his own time so he won't bother you with it. And "selfish" isn't a bad thing here. It's also selfish to take a hot bath and read a book by yourself, but it's important to do that every now and then.

And besides, if you had a choice between your guy renting a video and renting a person, which would you choose?

Now that I've cleared up that little misunderstanding for all time, here's what men don't understand about porn: women do take it personally. When a woman sees your porn rental, she is likely to conclude that that is what you want. The sex act in question, the level of communication, the inflated porn body, all of it. In all likelihood she doesn't see the woman on the box as a convenient avatar of general woman-ness, she sees her as tangible proof that what the owner of said box really, truly wants is a nineteen-year-old emacaited blonde with enormous fake breasts and a deep desire to take it up the ass.

This is why a gentleman is very, very careful about leaving his porn lying around the house.

Communication can't hurt and all that, but screw that, I'm not an advice columnist. I just think, based on what I've seen, that men and women look at porn very differently and it can't hurt for both sides to take that into account.

I think it's cool when couples rent porn together, and I'm impressed with how much they had to do to get there, or with what I hope they did, anyway.

I know it's fashionable to say that men and women are fundamentally different again - God, I cannot wait for that particular social pendulum to swing back - but I don't think they are, or at least not in this case. I think attitudes toward porn have a lot to do with socialization. There's a pressure to overpersonalize sex on one side, and to depersonalize it on the other. As always, I think moderation in all things is a good way to go.

Figuring this out has helped me understand my customers better, I think. Knowing the guy is watching for general sex and not specific sex makes it easier to see why we have those four-hour clip jobs of just come shots. Keeping in mind that what our clients are renting is physical and not emotional or mental keeps me from caring too much about what they're renting, and in many ways that detachment is a key part of my job. (Trust me - the guy with the Iowa driver's license and the wedding ring does *not* want me to care about the fact that he's renting gay porn.)

In a way, I keep learning the same lesson over and over again: just because people's tastes don't match mine doesn't mean they're wrong. Soon, I hope, it'll stick.

I've never understood why people give us food, but they do. I mean, yeah, none of us are working there because we're so bored with collecting those interest checks on our trust funds, but there are plenty of starving brethren in the customer service industry. Why us?

The first couple of times a customer offered me food, I kept saying "no, thanks" as politely as I could. One guy kept pressing an "extra" doughnut he'd bought on me so eagerly that there was no way in hell I was going to eat it. I was new then and the possibility of someone replacing the Boston Creme with roofies seemed like a very real possibility, so I finally just took it and threw it away as soon as he was out the door. I couldn't figure out the impulse. While I've been fond of many a video clerk in my past, it never occured to me to feed them.

Like everything else, though, I've gotten used to it. People have given us stuff on Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July. One guy has, on more than one occasion, brought us cookies. Really good ones from a gourmet store. He's neither one of the creepiest customers nor one of the chattiest. He'll perk up if we say hi, but it's not like he's hanging around dying to be our friend. Why the baked goods?

I finally adopted a policy of eating food that customers had dropped by, but only if one of the other clerks has eaten it without incident first. Perhaps it was wrong to use my coworkers as mineshaft canaries, but trust me, they'd have eaten it anyway.

Our main benefactor, though, is Mr. Tint. Mr. Tint was the first regular I got to know, and that was at the angry insistence at the other clerks. I was working a night shift and the phone rang. "Who's your daddy?" said the voice on the other end. It was my first week and I'd already fielded several prank calls, so I hung up.

He called back: "Who's your daddy?" I hung up again. I mentioned to the other clerks on duty that I'd just fielded two prank calls from the same idiot and when I told them what he'd said they almost strangled me with the phone cord. Apparently that was Mr. Tint's way of saying hello. Once you correctly identified him as your daddy, he'd bring by food.

Lots of food. Enough for everybody to eat dinner and then some.

Mr. Tint works in several capacities in the food industry and has access to a lot of it. He brings it by all the time - usually a couple of times a week at least.

I wouldn't eat it for a long time; it was just too weird. Casey, who started just a little before I did, was creeped out by it too. His theory was that Mr. Tint was fattening us up to eat us, and he was only mostly kidding.

Eventually, though, we all succumbed. We've all had more than one evening in which we weren't sure how we'd get dinner if Mr. Tint didn't drop by.

What he got out of it, of course, was a shitload of free rentals. Management knew what was going on and winked at it, figuring that it was a pretty good perk for the clerks at very little cost to the store. Like several tipping situations I've been in, the value of what he was bringing by was way, way more than he'd have spent if he'd simply paid for his videos. (On the other hand, I don't know that he paid for it. I ran into him at a mailing store once and he also had some sort of goods-for-services thing going over there. I think Mr. Tint enjoys living by the barter system and feeling like he's getting away with something.)

But he also got a very special regular status at the store, the kind Mr. Buddy would kill for. Mr. Tint, having delivered his manna from heaven, would choose his videos (or pick up the ones we'd held behind the counter for him) and then hang out and chat. We're talking 45 minutes at a time of chatting, customers or not.

It was a delicate situation. He definitely made it difficult to properly attend to our other customers, and there was at least one incident before my tenure in which Mr. Tint so distracted the clerks (and blocked their view of the sales racks) that several items were stolen while he chatted away.

It's difficult, though, to ask someone to piss off when your mouth is full of his pizza.

Mr. Tint is still a regular, but his glory days are over. S's firing made management go through the free rentals with a fine-toothed comb, and our side of the barter is no longer available. Our assistant manager told him as gently as possible that he'd have to pay for his movies, but it was still a hard transition.

He still chats a lot, and still lays a tacit claim to super-regular status, which we have to explain to the newer clerks. Sometimes he'll even drop by food, but without the free rentals the joy is gone.

I'm sort of glad it's over. He saved my bacon on many an evening, but it was weird to take his food, even when he was getting something out of it. He could barter free rentals, but not quite the friendships he seemed to be hoping to get out of it, and that was awkward, to say the least.

People still drop by food sometimes, but I've returned to my old policy of not eating it. I don't really think people want to poison us, but until I feel like I have a better handle on what they do want I don't feel right accepting it.

Last edited by Ali Davis on 08-26-2002 at 02:46 PM

I've been back at the store for just over a week after all my summer traveling. I was away for a wholesome vacation to national parklands with my family, then off to an actual performing gig with my improv group. The family trip included my (much younger) little sisters and the show was in a foriegn country where porn is illegal (though I hear they're having a bit of trouble with the Internet) so my vacation was blissfully, totally porn free. I'd sort of forgotten that that's how my life used to be - no involvement whatsoever with the secret desires of total strangers.

I wish the transition back had been a harder one, but no. I slipped right back into my World of Orifices without batting an eye.

My first day back I actually picked up a shift at one of our other locations; after all that gallivanting around, I need the hours. It doesn't have nearly as good a spot for foot traffic as my branch, so the day got pretty boring. I knew that a lot of our regulars have memberships at both stores, and I couldn't stop myself from checking.

They hate Mr. Pig too.

Since then I've been back at my usual branch, trying to get back up to speed. I'm off my game a bit - I used to get compliments on how well I rattled off the New Membership Speech, but now I have to stop and think about it.

New Memberships, by the way, suck. They suck hard. I know they keep the store in business and all, but Good Lord do we hate them. They take a clerk out of commission for anywhere from 5-10 minutes (which is not so much during the midmorning lull, but an eternity during the 4 o' clock rush) and if two new memberships get going at once, forget it - we've created a traffic snarl that's not going to get untied for the next hour or so.

No one ever listens to the New Membership speech. By the time we get through all the paperwork and the ID checks they just want to get the hell away from the counter and rent some frigging movies and they don't want to hear it. We could tell them they have to give us hair and urine samples with every return and they'd just nod and step up their get-on-with-it body language.

We are, in fact, telling them important information like the fact that we don't have a drop box, but it's a lot to take in all at once and people just glaze over. Which doesn't help either of us a week later when they're back at the counter, this time trembling with rage over their late fees.

I'd be more sympathetic if there weren't a big sign over my head outlining the very same policies covered in the New Member Speech. People almost never read the sign - not even a glance at it to see what sort of information it might contain if they chose to read it at some later date.

The quickest way for a new member to win instant and massive goodwill from me is to actually read the sign. "Now how much are rentals - oh, it's right up there!" is sweet, sweet music to my ears. This is a customer who makes an effort to adjust to new surroundings by looking for and absorbing helpful information. This is a customer who will return his late films and accept his fees with grace, knowing that said late fees were his own fault. This is a customer who will not bitch about the fact that he didn't return his movies on Labor Day because he assumed that we'd be closed and how the hell was he supposed to know we'd be open? because he saw - and read - the giant sign to that effect that was posted on the front door.

But most people don't read the signs and they zone out during the speech and they get really angry about late fees. They feel violated. Even though they had both written and verbal warnings of our policies, and even though we gave them a printout with the due dates on it. I know that late fees suck, but less than half our customers seem to be able to psychologically deal with the fact that they're the ones who checked out the movies and they're the ones who kept them late.

My favorite angry-customer tactic is stalking off and threatening to go to Blockbuster. They think they are cutting us to the core and that we'll run to them and hug their knees and beg for forgiveness. Well, no. The local Blockbuster has a truly crappy selection. Godspeed and welcome to it.

But I digress. Other than a higher-than-usual Crazy Magnet setting, my first week back was uneventful. I've mostly been trying to get up to speed with what the new high-demand porn tapes are and doing a bit of quiet mourning over the dismal performance of my Employee Picks section. You people don't know what you're missing.

Last edited by Ali Davis on 09-03-2002 at 03:13 PM

American Movie
Heavenly Creatures
The Haunting (original, thank you very much)
The Interview
The Manchurian Candidate
One False Move
Run Lola Run
Say Anything
Shadow of a Doubt
Strictly Ballroom
The Warriors

That's not a set personal policy, really, just the way it's worked out. I don't date my customers and I don't imagine that I ever will. (Mr. Gentle, for the record, rents gay, and for this and a few other reasons I've always worked under the assumption that he's not a romantic prospect. So those of you who have written me about him can chill out. But thanks.)

I'm not saying it's never crossed my mind. When I first thought about video clerking as a temporary supplemental career, everyone I knew seemed to have a story about a crush on a video clerk. "Oh, my God!" My sister swooned, then launched into a tale of the young god who used to work at her local store. She was not alone, and I had high hopes.

I'd never had a crush on a video clerk, but there had been a quite a few I'd really wanted to impress. I think the allure has something to do with the combination of intimacy and aloofness, and, whether warranted or not, the previously mentioned sheen of Video Clerk Cool.

I've certainly developed crushes on a few rental histories. Mr. Scruffy's is almost too good to be true - it's almost a film education in itself. All the classics, all the indies, all the greats. It's intimidatingly good, really - the kind of rental history that both inspires me to expand my film knowledge and makes me feel like a complete troglodyte for having rented and enjoyed Deep Blue Sea. While Mr. Scruffy has the rental history I wish I had, Ms. Leather Jacket has pretty much the rental history I do have. Sure, lots of capital-G Good stuff, but also a healthy appreciation for The Evil Dead II.

But something always gets in the way. For one thing, I'm very much aware that it's creepy for me to be noticing what people rent at all, so I do make a sincere effort to cut it out. And a great rental history doesn't necessarily mean I'd actually enjoy watching movies with its creator. There are plenty of scumballs with excellent taste in movies. (By the way, while I'm on the topic, having good taste in movies does not absolve you from all crimes. If you're one of the dirtsacks who keeps stealing our rental copies of Wet Hot American Summer and The Big Lebowski, please be aware that this does not make you a resourceful collector, it makes you a fucking thief. Yes, even if you are white and middle class and in college. Even if it's all to feed your sophsticated appreciation of Japanese animation. You are a fucking thief, and you're no better than the guy downstairs who reeks of stale whiskey and is trying to tear pictures off the porn boxes with his teeth. Please keep that image in mind the next time you sit down to watch your ill-gotten copy of Akira.)

But I digress. The main barrier to dating my customers is the fact that virtually all of my male customers (we don't get many lesbians) end up down in the porn section. I'm aware - very aware, nowadays - that any man I date will probably rent and enjoy porn while I'm with him, and that's fine. But that doesn't mean it's something I'd like to chat about right off the bat. I've had a (very) few customers try to flirt or hit on me, but it's just too weird. I think they've forgotten that they're in the middle of renting porn, but I haven't. Essentially, they they're being their very suavest with me and then ending by saying "See you later - off to masturbate!" It's just too much to know.

I used to have pretty good conversations with one of my customers a few months ago. He was a nice guy, and we had similar-though-not-identical tastes in movies. We had some pretty good debates, chewing over things like why I ended up hating Fire Walk with Me and why he ended up loving it. He started sort of flirting and I started thinking about it. Thinking favorably, in fact.

He's African-American and I'm white, which suddenly became relevant on the day that he came in, browsed and chatted a bit, flirted a bit, then went downstairs and came up with five porn titles, all from Black Dicks in White Chicks and other similarly-themed series.

I told this story to a few friends, all of whom had the same reaction: "Did he realize what he was doing?"

I don't know if he knew what he was doing or not when he brought the tapes up, but the minute I glanced at the tapes we both knew it was the wrong thing. It was just too weird. We'd destroyed the impersonality of his porn rental by chatting, and made the chatting way too personal with his porn rental.

It's the polite fiction again. Sure, flirtation or an invitation on a date implies at least some sexual interest, but there's something to be said for a little mystery.

He didn't come back to the store for a long time, which I think was more comfortable for both of us, and now we don't chat anymore, which is too bad.

So as I said, I don't think dating my customers is ever going to happen, largely because I get to know them in reverse - I learn about their deepest kinks first, and then I get around to learning their names a few months later. It's just as well. When it comes to the porn section, it's more comfortable for everyone if I stay disengaged.

Last edited by Ali Davis on 09-11-2002 at 05:20 AM