True Porn Clerk Stories

by Ali Davis

  Until, of course, I saw the box for Gay Bukkake. Yup. Same deal, only it's a man in the center. I realized that I found straight bukkake degrading, but gay bukkake merely incredibly disgusting. Did that make me a sexist, or was I penalizing straight men for being straight? So except for the disgusting part, I had to pencil in a new opinion.

  Occasionally I get caught up in the principle of a thing, and when my manager mentioned the no-more-bukkake decision I actually started to argue with her. It took me a couple of minutes to ratchet my brain down from the logistics of it and remember that I loathe having to look at the bukkake boxes and having them out of the store would suit me fine.

  So I backed out of an ethical debate and went against my newfound principles for my own comfort.

  What a wuss.

  The Art of the Shuffle

  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 7 a.m. are regulars.

  To open the door at 7:00, I arrive at about 6:30. My rule is, if I'm hitting the door at 6:30 a.m., 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.

  ÉUntil 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 love Aquarium. It's the very finest in Scandinavian synth-pop dance music. It's also 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 Scandinavian 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 Scandinavians, 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 just 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 synthesizers. 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 Tuvan throat-singing, which was a delight.

  Roy Orbison, the Trainspotting soundtrack, Soul Coughing, 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, damn it," 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.

  World's Largest Cocks

  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 really believe that men can't spot fake breasts. I think they're just happy to have any breasts around and 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, it'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 satisfaction, 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 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 are guilty of their 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.

  Can't Stop the Music

  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 damn it, 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".