True Porn Clerk Stories (3 page)

We made eye contact before I could compose my face. In that moment, Mr. Buddy knew that I do, in fact, find him pathetic. And I'm the nice one. He still comes in, but he isn't chatty anymore.

The other clerks love it. I feel like a creep.

¹
No, we don't carry bestiality.
Animal Trainer
is about training women.

I Hate Mr. Pig.

There are many customers that bug me, and quite a few that give me the willies. One or two set off a very primal alarm in my fear center, right in my gut. They make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I know, on a purely instinctual level, that they are very, very dangerous.

But the only one I really hate is Mr. Pig. I loathe Mr. Pig. I hate him so much I need a new word for it.

Mr. Pig is the first customer to win a snotty note on his file from me. I refrained from the sport of snotty customer file notes for months. Most of the time it's a genuine warning ("This guy might be moving pricing stickers" "WATCH OUT FOR JIZZ-MASTER ZERO"), but sometimes it's just us blowing off steam or trying to crack each other up. My favorite is "Mr. Excitement!!!!!!!!!!" on the file of the guy who seems to be part tree sloth, while others favor "Engage, Number One!" on the file of the guy who looks a little too much like Johnathan Frakes.

Funny, yes, but unprofessional. I held off until I ran into Mr. Pig. He came up to the counter with his briefcase and two or three designer shopping bags. The counter is designed for two customers, but he piled all his stuff across it to take up the whole space. He pulled his videos out of his bags, handed me the new tags he wanted to check out, and then whipped out his cell phone to make a call.

I have to check an ID when someone rents new videos and, of course, get them to pay for their returns. Mr. Pig took up the whole counter and made me wait through his entire conversation -- about a very, very big deal and conducted at about 30,000 decibels -- before I could do either. When he finally got off, he said "Sorry, I had to do that. It was a big deal," just in case I'd missed that point.

Yes, important enough to hold up me and a line, but not so urgent as to, say, start the conversation before he came in.

Finally, stack of porn in hand, Mr. Pig pulled his briefcase and designer bags -- did I mention they were designer bags? Because he did. -- off the counter and left, and thus became the recipient of my first snotty note: "THIS MAN WANTS YOU TO KNOW THAT HE IS VERY, VERY IMPORTANT."

That was all I noticed about him the first time. Over time, though, he has burned himself into my brain. He always takes up the whole counter no matter who else is waiting, he usually shouts into his cell phone, and he always makes sure to allude to how very important he is. He has a password on his account, "KITTY". It's an old, old policy that a few old customers still use, but at least they're not freaks about it. The idea is that if you don't have ID, you can just give your password. We don't do it anymore, but we let old customers keep them. Mr. Pig is very, very proud of having a password. When we ask for ID, he shouts that he has a password, then leans in very close so the riffraff can't hear and whispers "Kitty".

I always ask him for his ID anyway. It drives him nuts. He wants to be a regular even more than Mr. Buddy does, and he hates it when I ask to see ID. He talks about the old managers, the old policies, and how long he's been here. Then I ask to see his ID. Sometimes I wonder if he leaves the store and bursts into tears.

So far, all of this is pathetic. Who the hell is that invested in impressing his video clerk? I should be unable to summon up an ounce of human feeling for Mr. Pig at all beyond pity. But no, it's a deep, burning antagonism.

It's the punch cards that got me. We give all our customers a gold punch card each month. Each time they return a movie, they get a punch. After six punches, they get a free rental. After another six, they get half off, then a free again. There are about 30 spaces. Some of the heavy porn renters make it through a few cards a month, so it's not unusual to give out a new card before the month is over.

Mr. Pig figured out that two frees in a row is better than a free and a half off, so he gets his free punch and then asks for a new card. So he's screwing the store out of $1.75 twice a month. Fine. It would be one thing if he just asked for his goddamned new card each time, but he can't just leave it at that. He's so proud of his penny-ante fucking over the store that he has to make a big deal out of it. "For heaven's sake," he'll bellow, "Can I PLEASE have a new card?" And then he won't quite have his old not-fully-punched card out of sight, in the hopes that the clerk will call him on it so he can launch into his speech about how very clever he is.

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 to fellate yourself, do it on pure strength and flexibility or don't do it at all.) Anyway, it's a hard-to-find tape, and the guy called over and over. I talked to him twice, and I was pretty sure he was masturbating both times. When we finally found the tape, he cancelled the order, claiming he'd found it somewhere else. I think it was the act of calling that turned him on.

People do get hung up on the act of seeing or even just renting a particular video. A guy at one of our other branches rented his favorite literally hundreds of times, checking it in and then right back out. The staff begged him to just buy it, but he wouldn't. His life was destroyed when his tape was either damaged or sold to someone else. He came to our store looking for it, and wouldn't tell me the title -- he wrote it down and passed the folded paper to Jeremy, the assistant manager.

Mr. Dreadlocks's particular fetish is the naughty act of renting itself. I've always had a fine relationship with Mr. Dreadlocks, but then he's gay and I don't apply to his fetish. The male clerks can't stand him, because what he likes to do is rent a tape from one of them, go home, masturbate, (we think, based on the short time he's gone, that he doesn't actually watch the tape) come back, pay for his one tape, and then pick out another and start again. Sometimes he has an erection during checkout, and once he had semen stains on the front of his pants. He freaks the shit out of the male clerks, and I understand why -- it's pretty hideous to be an unwitting participant in someone else's sex act.

A lot of fetishizing has to do with unwitting or unwilling participants, and that runs pretty hard up against my "whatever floats your boat" policy. On the other hand, the more I work at the store, the more it seems like some people are just hardwired in a certain way and there may not be anything they can do about it. Which doesn't really make it OK for them to call me and masturbate or steal stuff, but what can either of us do? We're at an impasse.