Enjoy:
___________
PROLOGUE:
11:40 pm. Dec. 31st, 2008. I’m sitting in the Tiger’s
Den sex shop, alone. I couldn’t take another song that our modern rock radio
station would play, so I just turned it off to enjoy the silence. Better than
that damn Papa Roach or Hinder song again. I’m sitting in the manager’s chair behind
the counter, fighting off the depression state that I’m not home with my wife
and newborn son to ring in the new-year together. She quit texting me an hour
ago. She’s tired and has since fell asleep. The snow was demolishing the ground
outside and I had not seen a customer for over two hours. The shop was an
isolated place, right off the interstate, nothing major of note nearby. Just a
crappy truck stop across the street, and they are all closed up for the night….as
every place should be on a holiday like this. I wished I was anywhere else but
where I was. I was too bored to read my book I brought, too bored to draw
anything. I just preferred the quiet sound of the heavy snow pounding on the
roof and the cheap metal wall covering the outside. I wanted to wallow in my
lonely pity that I was stuck there on New Year’s Eve, alone.
A light on the security screen out of the corner of my right
eye makes me turn to face it. I notice on the camera that a car has pulled up
to the building. It slips and slides through our parking lot in the almost foot
of snow blanketing its existence. The tracks left behind its tires was an
interloper to the beauty of the quiet and untouched snowfall. A man in his late
40’s gets out of the Dodge Durango and heads for the front. The familiar door chime
rings and pierces my ears. It is doubly loud when its dead quiet in the store.
I nod at his direction, and in my head cursing that he even bothered to trek
out into these dangerous conditions for porn he could have easily looked up
online for free. But that’s not any way to think is it? Number one rule to
retail: Customers are not an interruption
to our work, but the purpose of it. I should be thankful I have a job at
all in these rough times… so they tell me.
The minutes tick away and I’m silently begging in my head.
“Please don’t let me have to ring him up at midnight. Please
don’t let me have to ring him up at midnight.” It becomes a mantra I repeat
slowly in my mind as I watch him browse.
While the man walks around the store he keeps glancing in my
direction. Anyone in with any sort of retail training knows this look, and it’s
a concern that a person might be trying to steal something. He fiddles with his collar and and a couple
quiet sighs leak from his ugly face. I scan his hand for a ring to see if he is
married. Yes. Obviously the misses didn’t feel like putting out on a nice night
like this so he was coming here to get some porn to hide from her.
As I continue my Hercule Poirot-style observations of the
stranger I notice that he is obviously wearing a bra under a skin-tight shirt.
It was likely some sort of secret fetish dress play. I would wager a bet that
he was wearing panties too. A thong perhaps? Or all silky so it would tingle
and rub at his man parts? He strolled around the store while carrying four
$5.95 DVDs from the cheap bin. Three contained straight sex, with themes of choke
on cock style of gagging, bukkake and double anal threesomes. The fourth disc
was a transsexual flick, for you know, if the wife found it he had a safe excuse.
“How did I grab this one by mistake?!” As if it would get lost in the shuffle,
or the silly clerk at the front would judge his choices less if I didn’t
notice…. As if I gave a shit.
As feared, he approached the counter at 11:58. (sigh) I rang
him up and he paid cash. A few minutes ago I was screaming in my brain that I
wished I was at home when the ball dropped. But no, I was stuck here, ringing
up a secret cross-dressing stranger at the stroke of midnight. I noticed the digital
clock pass midnight on my computer clock. I said nothing. I gave the total,
with discount for buying four movies. He paid and I started to bag them up.
“Hey. Uh, Happy New Year,” I said with a half smile. He looked
up at the big clock behind me.
“Oh yeah…. You too,” he said in the most nervous type of
tone. I decided to go with a joke to deflect the awkward silence.
“No offense, but I’m not giving you a kiss,” I said through
the fake smile. I don’t think he got that I was joking around.
“Hey listen, can you take them out of the cases? I just need
the discs.” This was a common request. Most likely to ensure one could easily
hide them from his spouse in whatever CD in his collection she would never
touch and find his hidden stash. I emptied the cases and handed him a bag of
discs. Head down, he grabbed his bag and headed out the door into the snowy
night. I sat back in the chair by the manager’s computer and sighed. I watched
him drive away on the outside camera. I could hear the rush of the trucks on
the freeway nearby, the pitter patter sound of the snow hitting the outside
walls. The silence of no music in the
store now made my ears sting. The store was empty and cold. I was alone and it
was quiet. The smell of lube and glass cleaner hung in the air, my only
companion on this late New Year’s night.
“How did it come to this?” I ask myself aloud. No one
answered back.
----
It was 1983. I was five years old. And I was laying flat on
the floor in a video store in protest of pornography.
My parents were doing their best to raise me to have a level
head and decent scruples. They weren’t bible thumpers although we were
practicing Jehovah’s Witnesses for a time. (I quit when I was fifteen because I
wanted to start banging chicks.) I grew up in the country with no neighbor kids
to play with, nor was there any cable TV in our area. The only thing I was able
to watch was PBS, which had shows like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers
Neighborhood on it. For some reason early on I developed a streak of telling
people what they were doing right and wrong in their lives. I would hang “No
Smoking” signs drawn in crayon in the houses of smokers in my family. I would
warn my parents to not watch movies that had dirty scenes in them. But I never
protested the extreme violence, just the boobs and butts. I recall my mother
watching “The Godfather” while I was in the room. But I didn’t care about
violence. Only nudity. I wanted to cleanse the world. (For some silly reason)
It was with this mindset that on this particular winter day
in 1983 that I went to the now long gone mom and pop style store called “Video
World” in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan with my mother and her friend Robin. They were
talking on and on and browsing the movies. Robin snuck off to the adult video
room, which was sectioned off from the rest of the store. My mother followed
her in, only to continue their conversation. To my knowledge she was never
interested in renting pornography for herself or for her and dad to watch when
I finally hit the sack. Maybe they did and I didn’t know it. But I highly doubt
it. (And let me keep doubting it, please)
But unknown to me her motivations, in she went. From
browsing the Looney Tunes and Masters of the Universe Betamax tapes I saw her
go in. I could not go back there to inform them of the wrong that they were
doing, so I was stuck without a weapon for vocal protest. For some reason, I
decided to lie down in the middle of the floor, arms and legs spread wide and
there I lay, quietly. My mother emerged and with a gasp of embarrassment
exclaimed, “Honey! What on Earth are you doing?”
“I am protesting mom,” I said simply.
“Protesting what?” She asked.
“I am protesting the fact that you went into that room with
the dirty movies. Those movies are wrong and you shouldn’t watch them!” My
mother almost fainted with embarrassment as chuckles echoed throughout the
store. Our video rental days at Video World ended that day, as we never went
back. She didn’t rent those dirty movies (not that she even intended to in the
first place) and I had won.
---
If you reflect back on that day in 1983 and compare it to
now, it’s complete night and day. Her son that held that quiet protest on the
floor that day has since grown up to work in several adult stores, managed one
of them, hung out with strippers, worked on adult artwork, wrote many adult
stories, had lots of angry, sordid sex with many different women and has
certainly changed his mind on the stance of pornography. I have come to peace
with my inner pervert, if you like.
However, in my years of growth and enlightenment, there have
been many occasions for me to encounter the most, shall we say, colorful
individuals and situations that life simply doesn’t teach you how to face
properly. There simply is no guidebook that would help me combat and deal with
these things as they arose. I have stories beyond stories of truly unique
encounters of the kooky and the strange to the positive and then back to the
plain and simple extreme perversion that is associated with that beloved genre.
And it’s not all bad. Certainly I’ve had my share of weird occasions and
people, but I’ve also had great times with folks. It all comes together in a large
steamy stew of experience that I am eager to share with the rest of the world. It
is with these things in mind that I present this novel of complete non-fiction
to you for your enjoyment.
Do you want to hear about the time I dealt with the trucker
who was dating a mentally handicapped lot lizard? How about men hooking up in
secret locations over and over in arcade booths? Or the time that a man wearing
a diaper and an inserted butt plug asked us if he could clean our bathroom
because his mistress demanded him to ask us? Or being asked to assist a 70 year
old cross dresser for his role play? Its all here in its uncut, completely 100%
accurate and depraved glory. This is the blatant and embarrassingly honest tale
of one man’s journey of finding inner peace within the genre of pornography,
even so much as to work in the industry itself. He swam through the sludge deep
within and emerged with crazy stories that he can tell till his dying days. I’ve
had the ultimate peek behind the curtain and I want to share what I lived
through with you.
Still want to read it? If you say yes, you’re a sick mother-fucker.
And welcome!
--T
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