True Porn Clerk Stories (13 page)

Ali's List of Employee Picks that Nobody Ever Rents

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

I Don't Date My Customers

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 of
 
all video crimes. If you're one of the dirtsacks who keep 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 sophisticated 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 most suave 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.

Mr. Hazy

Mr. Hazy was one of the first customers I got to know at the store -- certainly the first name I learned. Like anywhere else, the first people I learned at the video store were the complete nightmares and the really nice ones (we have lots of normal customers; I just don't need to write about them) but Mr. Hazy was an exception to that rule. I learned him first simply because he was at the video store all the frigging time. Like Mr. Buddy, he spends literally thousands of dollars a year in porn rentals.

He's like clockwork: In, six hardcore porn videos, and then back again within a day or at most two. He does have to stagger his schedule a bit -- Wednesdays and Fridays are New Porn Days and he can't miss those, so it's tough to fall into a strict two-day rhythm what with these darn seven day weeks we insist on keeping.

Besides, sometimes he gets through six videos in a day just fine.

That six videos in a day thing used to astonish me -- it seemed superhuman -- but then I got clued into the fact that many of the heavy renters are doing a lot of fast-forwarding. They have to burn a lot of video to get to what they want.

At least I hope to God that's what they're doing. How could you spend twelve hours a day, every day, masturbating? Wouldn't you get bored? Would calluses eventually become a problem? Some of our six-a-day customers, obviously, are just pirating our tapes, but not all of them. I know. Trust me.

I don't know why five or six videos a day creep me out but not, say, three. Why should six solid hours a day of masturbation be a reasonable amount of time? I have no idea. It's something internal that I can't seem to logic away: I have no problem with three or four hardcore pornographic videos a day, but five or six is excessive. Perhaps I shouldn't have children.

Anyway, Mr. Hazy is definitely not pirating. As I mentioned, Wednesday and Friday are New Porn Days and he has to hit them because he has seen all of our other straight videos.

I'll type that again: He has seen all of our straight videos. Try though we do to rotate the stock, we just can't keep up.

That, my friends, is why I feel comfortable using the phrase "porn addiction".

Mr. Hazy isn't the only one who has finished off the store. There are several customers that have seen everything we carry, or at least everything that floats their particular boats. That's why I loathe New Porn Days. We don't get the new stock out on the shelves until 4 or 5 p.m. at the earliest -- sometimes we don't even receive the shipment until then -- but people start calling at about 10 in the morning and the frequency of the calls and intensity of the whining only increase as the day goes on. (Mr. Hazy, to his credit, knows the system and doesn't show up until 4:00.)

People want to paw through the new boxes. The want us to bring them over to the counter so they can stare at them. They want us to read off the new titles, never mind the woman with three small children standing at the counter. They want to see and touch and rent the new tapes, and they want them
now
.

I haven't quite pegged exactly why people get so frantic over New Porn Day, or why it's so important to be the first person to rent the new movies. I think part of it is that, yeah, they've seen everything and here's a new shipment of new bodies and new fucking and another shot at or variation of whatever they're looking for, but I also think it has something to do with the firstness of it. I think some of them get off on knowing that they are the first to whack off to that particular tape. I don't think they care about being the only one, but there does seem to be something about being the first one. "Don't rent it to anybody else," they'll scream into the phone, "I'm on my way!"

Every week or two, there's a new title in the gay section that everyone wants, and we'll start getting calls for it days ahead of time. People call, they beg, they bitch, they try to put it on the reserve list for days in a row. We do our best. The thing is, the movie is hot for two weeks and then forget it -- only the poor stragglers who missed the first round want it and then it slowly fades away. It seems simple to figure out that if you just held off for a few days and got yourself a week or two behind the cycle, you could rent the almost-new-but-no-longer-hot releases at your leisure and without all the heartache, but that's not what people want. They want the newest.

I sometimes wonder if it's something akin to the virginity thing or if my renters are, deep down, just as creeped out by some of their fellow renters as I am. If so, I wish they'd think about that for a minute before turning in a spooged out tape that's still stopped in the middle at the exact spot where they came.

Anyway, Mr. Hazy seems to be more about the novelty than the firstness. New Porn Day is actually the easiest day to deal with Mr. Hazy, because as long as he's getting six new videos he's happy. When he's really selecting videos, we have to be careful. Mr. Hazy has terrible eyesight and can't actually read the tags, so he doesn't always know what he's renting. He just finds a box that he likes and pulls the tag hanging underneath.