True Porn Clerk Stories (7 page)

Spotting dirtbags always brings up the worry that I have prejudices that I don't know about. We did used to have a clerk that, some of us noticed, only kept an eye on our black customers. An old manager had a problem with people who didn't speak English like a native. One of our local policemen once warned me to be especially careful of my register when "fags" are in the store.

Me, I used to feel happy for elderly gay men who rent porn because they finally have an outlet after all these years, but completely creeped out by elderly straight men. Now that I've been at the store for a while, I've progressed. I'm creeped out by both.

Porn and the Differently Abled

I like to think of us a very diversity-friendly store. While many of our titles are certainly indelicate because of porn's cut-to-the-chase nature, we do feature porn starring as many different ethnicities in as many different combinations as we can find. I didn't think of this as a public service until one of our customers brought it up. He had come to our neighborhood from way, way downtown, which a lot of people do. People sometimes come in from a state away, especially gay porn renters, so crossing town didn't seem that odd to me until he commented on it: "You know how hard it is to find porn on DVD with people who look like me in it?"

So I at least had an odd pride about us providing equal access to porn... until the guy in the wheelchair came in. Our store is deliberately designed to make the porn section hard to get to. We want people to have to pass the register so the clerk can see them and we make them snake through the shelves a bit so it's hard for kids to get down there. Turns out it was a nearly impossible gauntlet for a wheelchair.

The guy was surprisingly nice about it. He'd already had a shitter of an evening. All he wanted was to rent some videos, which many of our customers do on autopilot. He had waited more than an hour for a cab to pick him up -- he was on some kind of subsidy for taxi transportation, but that meant he had to wait for a specific company to bother to send a driver around. Then he had to get over our doorstep, which is wheelchair accessible in a theoretical sense at best, and weave his way through too-tight aisles only to hit a freaking staircase.

Luckily he could walk a bit. He took the railing with one hand and my arm in the other and we went down, then I went back and brought the chair down for him. With the taxi, getting him in the door, and getting him downstairs, I was now the third person who he'd had to ask for help just to rent some frigging porn. I was torn between sticking around to help -- from the chair he could only reach about three shelves -- and giving the poor guy some privacy. I went with moderate privacy, leaving him alone and checking out the security camera every now and then until it looked like he was done, then going down to help him back up.

...And then he had to wait over an hour yet again for another taxi, which never showed. We finally hailed him one, and a friend of mine who happened to be passing helped me help him into the not-at-all wheelchair modified cab. I think by the end of the night the total number of people who'd helpfully intruded on his porn rental was six or seven. And I think the whole trip took him about four hours. Except to return the videos, he hasn't been back and I can't blame him. A year ago, I didn't think of porn as a basic human right, but now I sort of do.

Several of our regular porn renters are mildly retarded, which brings up another prejudice I didn't know I had until I started clerking. It's amazing how little our society recognizes that the mentally challenged have adult sexual impulses, but they sure enough do.

We thought Mr. Stiff was just a pain in the ass at first. He always needs to restate everything: how many days he gets to keep his movies, what each will cost individually, what the total will be, what specials he's eligible for, and that, yes, he will in fact get them.

After a few visits, I realized that he's just covering his retardation really well. He wants to make sure he understands everything, and I think he does it in the angry, pain-in-the-ass tone of voice because it's better than being vulnerable. I think in a way he's coming from the same point of view as Mr. Creepy -- he's so used to not understanding things or the rules apparently changing on him that he feels like people are trying to cheat him all the time. Mr. Creepy uses that as an excuse to scam us. Mr. Stiff just tries to make sure everything is clear.

I think he's stiff and stilted partially because he's working so hard and partly because he's nervous; he never knows when the situation is going to fall apart and turn humiliating.

I feel bad for Mr. Stiff because at some point someone apparently told him that either porn or sex itself is dirty and bad. Every now and then he'll get mad at himself, come in, cancel his account and announce that he's never coming back. He cancelled and re-opened his account so many times at one of our other branches that they told him he couldn't re-open his account any more. Now he comes to us, but he still hates that he does it.

The Symbiots used to freak us out pretty badly. It was a retarded gentleman and his nephew -- or, as we feared, his "nephew". They did have IDs with the same last name, but it was a pretty common one and we were worried we had some kind of chickenhawk situation on our hands and didn't know what to do about it. The nephew was too young to go downstairs (it wasn't ridiculously creepy -- he was maybe 18) but was caught down there with the uncle and rousted several times.

The problem with rousting the nephew was that the uncle couldn't pick out porn by himself. Every time they came he went though the entire gay porn section one box at a time.

He couldn't remember what he'd seen before. He couldn't remember that you bring up the tags and not the boxes. He couldn't spot the difference between the for sale stuff and the rentals. He couldn't remember that you only get to check out six movies at a time. He only wanted the cheaper old releases, but couldn't distinguish the old and new release sections.

It would take him hours, and he usually got something wrong and had to go back down. We actually debated saying screw it and letting the nephew, who was of normal intelligence, go downstairs to expedite things, but our manager nixed it.

Finally he'd get back upstairs. The nephew would help the checkout go smoothly; his job was to make the world easier for the two to negotiate.

Then we got to the uncle's half of the relationship: He had the money. He had all the money, and what's more, he knew it was the source of his power and kept a pretty tight rein on it. Occasionally the nephew would pick out a video from upstairs, but his uncle had the account, so he had to check it with him first.

The whole thing freaked all of us at the store out very, very badly.

There were a lot of worried clerkly notes on the file. We didn't know what was going on, just that it was creeping our shit. Were we supposed to do something? There was an ongoing debate as to who was taking advantage of whom.

I served the Symbiots several times and, though nobody at the store agrees with me, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't a sexual relationship. I'm even pretty sure that they really were uncle and nephew. I think they had somehow discovered that they were both gay and formed an interesting team -- separately, they couldn't get porn, but together they were unstoppable.

Unfortunately, sometimes our mentally challenged customers cover so well that at first glance they come off as dirtbags. It's hard, in a quick transaction, to tell the difference between someone who is genuinely confused about the rules and someone who's trying to get around them. I usually slip a note on the file suggesting that the customer in question may need some extra assistance, but there's only so much that can do.

It can get frustrating, and I worry that I'm not doing enough. That's why I try to do my best: at least that way whatever else happens, at the end of the day I can rest secure in the knowledge that I have done all I can to make sure that every adult has an equal shot at renting
Fuck Pigs 5
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Scandal Rocks the Video Store

You may be wondering how to scandalize a bunch of jaded porn clerks. I'll give you a hint: it's not with porn.

S. was a weird clerk to work with. For one thing, he was really into '80's hair bands. Also Nickelback, which only really became difficult after, say, the third consecutive round on the CD player. I didn't really mind that so much, though, because not only did S.'s presence drop me down to the rank of second oldest clerk at my store, it also meant that I was only the second least funky. Our store is sort of aggressively funky, but I still felt better being knocked out of the top slot.

But that wasn't the really weird thing. We all have our musical quirks, and tolerate each other's pretty well. What was weird was S.'s Superclerk persona. Like the rest of us, he wasn't at the video store bucking for a management position. He was a computer programmer, having recently graduated from DeVry ("Oh," said my mother, "Then he's really just sort of a programmer.") and was looking for a job. The store was pretty cool about keeping him working five shifts a week with the understanding that he'd drop the job with very little notice once one of his interviews paid off.

So he made no secret of being on his way out, but insisted on playing Superclerk. Actually, he was really more HallMonitorclerk. He'd automatically check the clock to see if other people were on time for their shifts -- and in fact he'd comment on it if I were only on time instead of a few minutes early. Every time I relieved him he'd gleefully show me how many sales he'd made, even though we're not on commission or anything. Clerks don't really do sales except in the sense that we accept money for purchases -- we don't push anything.

He'd always bitch when his shift was slow, saying he'd rather keep busy, and took careful notice of who was not as particular as he was with their cleaning assignments.

He'd complain when he found little doodles on Post-it notes around the counter -- how could the night shift do these damned things when nearly every morning he came in to find the vacuuming below par? He'd get jazzed up about staff meetings for weeks ahead of time.

In short, S. was a nice guy, but an incredible pain in the ass.

A week ago Friday, I got a call at home from Matt, the guy who does all the scheduling. Would I be able to take an extra shift or two?

S. had been arrested.

In the seven months S. had been working at the video store, he had embezzled nearly six thousand dollars. And that's what they can prove -- my manager thinks it may have been more like ten thousand.

The managers were all furious -- they felt they had treated S. like part of the family and he had betrayed their trust. The reaction of the clerks was less visceral, but the same across the board:
Wait a minute. If he was already stealing from the store, why did he have to be such a self-righteous prick about the cleaning assignments?
It still doesn't make sense
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