I had to call the police the first night I worked at the porn store. It wasn’t one of those nice, brightly lit, corporate looking places that have the word “Romance” worked into the name. My store was just called “Adult Video” and had all the warmth and charm of a staph infection. We had your normal assortment of gay, straight, bi, and granny porn as well as the strap-ons, dildos, butt plugs, blow up dolls, lotions, and lubes that you would expect from any respectable establishment.
We also had a few things that not necessarily every porn store has. That is, a thirty seat theater where people could jerk off in public. Occasionally someone would bring in their wife to get gang banged by strangers with no concept of the word “Dick rot”. We also had four preview booths where you could rent a movie and watch it in the back and beat off or screw your girlfriend (or boyfriend) for a quick thrill. When it got real cold outside, I’d let homeless people sleep in the preview booths since they didn’t get used very often. We also had a hallway of private booths with T.V’s where you put tokens into the wall and have a porno come on for 45 seconds.Unbeknownst to me, when I took the job, these hallways (all over America) were the new Roman bathhouses. Gay dudes would hang around in the “arcade,” watching porn and sucking each other off through the glory holes. Sometimes my friends would hang out at the store and marvel at the parade of queens coming through showing their penises off to each other. We had a lot of regulars who hung out at the store that I got to be pretty good friends with. Most of them were just normal guys. Dudes in the late 90’s - early 2000’s didn’t have many options when it came to places for guys to just hang out and be comfortably gay.
We got paid minimum wage but earned commission on everything we sold, which was nice because everything at a porn store is marked up a minimum of 300%. I don’t mean to brag, but I was damn good at selling sex toys. Most people already know what they want to buy before they show up. The trick is making them comfortable enough to actually buy it. I accomplished this by playing oldies music and ignoring the customers. I also had to shoo all the queens back to the arcade when they were hanging around the counter and paying customers came in.
We had to close the store every night around 3am to mop all the jizz off the floor and walls. Trust me when I say it was a lot of spooge. I don’t know how much jizz moppers get paid at other establishments, but at my store it was five measly ass dollars. Sometimes we’d find money while cleaning up, but it was usually just syringes and used condoms. One of the more interesting things I found on the floor was a bath towel. This bath towel had been rolled up into a cylinder, wrapped tightly with duct tape, and somehow sheathed with a condom that someone had sodomized themselves with in one of the preview booths. I want you stop for a second and think about how big a rolled up bath towel is. To this day I still wonder about some guy sorting through their bathroom looking for that perfect towel, wrapping it in duct tape (Did he already have some or did he have to go to Home Depot?), breaking who knows how many condoms until he got one around this towel, tucked this weapon of ass destruction into his coat, drove to a seedy establishment, picked out a movie to rent, paid, went into the next room, butt fucked himself, and then just left it on the floor in a puddle of lube and fecal matter for some poor kid to deal with. I don’t use the word “Hero” very often, but what other word is there to describe such a man?
One boring night the cops wandered in and asked if they could use our bathroom to search the anus of some guy they picked up in the parking lot. I said “ok” and they went back outside. They came back in about forty five minutes later and said, “Never mind, we found what we were looking for.” I never saw the perp or got the rest of the story.
There were many occasions when some dude wearing khakis and a polo shirt would come in on a Sunday afternoon for some stranger danger. You’d hear his phone ring in the arcade and see him running out the door going, “Yeah honey, I’m at the grocery store. I’ll be home in a minute.” While all the queens are screaming, “He ain’t at the store honey!” Ahhh, good times.
Oh, I almost forgot. On my first night, the manager trained me for all of one hour and left so he could go get drunk. I hear some banging and yelling back in the arcade and two dudes are running for the front door with their pants hanging halfway down. One dude looked very professional; let’s call him Bruce. The other guy was an effeminate coke head. We are going to call him Nancy. So I hear a bunch of yelling and then see Bruce and Nancy bolt out of the arcade. Bruce managed to get to the door first and block Nancy from getting out. Then Bruce starts screaming that Nancy was giving him a blowjob and stole his wallet. I’m sitting there like “most awkward first day ever.” Then Bruce starts yelling at me to call the cops. I was hesitant; part of my training was being told to never call the cops because they might arrest us for allowing so much illegal shit to happen at our place of business. Also, for some reason, our work phone didn’t make outgoing phone calls. It would be another five years before I got my first cell phone so I had to bum a quarter off one of the customers to use the payphone in the corner of the store. The dispatcher had a pretty good laugh at my call and said they’d send someone over as soon as they could. After I hung up I told Bruce and Nancy the cops were on their way. They both froze like deer in headlights and Bruce said, “You know what, I might have left my wallet in the car.” Then Nancy said, “I’ll help you look for it,” and they both ran out of the store. They were both gone by the time the cops showed up, who ran into the store way too excited for someone responding to a robbery call.
