Memoirs of a Porn Store Clerk pt. 3

The nice thing about working in a pornography store is, if a customer starts getting rowdy, all you have to do is pick up the phone and say, “I’m calling the cops.” It absolutely doesn’t matter what the situation is. Nobody wants to explain themselves to the police while surrounded by butt plugs and nipple clamps. My boss, Paul, encouraged us to not take shit from the customers. We had a giant table leg wrapped in duct tape sitting by the cash register that we called “The Security System.” Every job has its own brand of interesting customers and you’d be hard pressed to find more interesting customers than the type of people who come into a porn store at 3 a.m.

We had a strict “No Returns” policy for obvious reasons, and by obvious reasons, I mean seamen. One day I got a call from an angry customer who wanted a refund on a movie he bought the day before. I informed him about our return policy but he wasn’t having it. This dude was fucking pissed. He said he was coming in to raise hell. I told him to go ahead and called up Paul. While I am the type to avoid confrontation, it’s the only thing that brings him any joy. The angry customer showed up a good fifteen minutes before Paul so I tried to keep things calm until he got there. The customer was about 55, short, and looked like the kind of guy you’d see working the counter at a family owned tractor supply store. He slammed his copy of “Soccer Boyz” on the counter and demanded a refund. I put the tape into one of the VCRs for our preview booths, watched just enough gay fellatio to see the tape worked, and handed it back to him.

“The movie seems to work fine,” I said.

“The people on the box aren’t the people in the movie! What kind of scam are you running here? I’m going to report you!” he shouted.

I was pretty confident he wasn’t going to call the Better Business Bureau about a bad copy of Soccer Boyz, and I was very confident that if he did, that shit wasn’t my fucking problem. Being the nice guy I am, I agreed to give Soccer Boyz another look. Sure enough, none of the beefcakes on the VHS cover were in the movie. It reminded me of a cheap Chinese knockoff toy, like that fake Ninja Turtle your grandmother got you for Christmas and it’s some discontinued action hero painted green, named Bikealangelo. About the time I started to sympathize with elderly gay soccer farmer, Paul squeezed his 6’4”, 400 pound ass through the front door in full attack mode. Bad Grandpa made a few comments about scams and calling “people” but Paul threw a schizophrenic shit fit full of obscene threats until Bad Grandpa ran away much smaller than when he walked in; he even forgot to take Soccer Boyz with him. I explained the discrepancy between the cover art and the movie to Paul and he started laughing. He showed me the back of the box where it said, “Models on cover not necessarily in movie (or something like that).” Then he walked me through the gay section, showing me the boxes. At least a third of the movies had the disclaimer. It wasn’t our scam, it was the movie distributor, but Paul knew about it and found it was easier to scream at customers until they left you alone than give refunds all the time.

One night, at like three in the morning, I saw an eighteen wheeler pull up. After 45 minutes I figured he pulled in for a nap or found someone to suck him off in the parking lot so I quit waiting for a customer to walk in and went back to watching Edward Penishands.

Then this wild eyed redneck trucker strolls in trying to act as casual as an 8th grader showing up to school stoned for the first time. He hangs out at the counter and talks my head off for an hour before renting some Barely Legal porn to watch in one of the preview booths. Then he came out and chain smoked cigarettes while talking my head off until the sun came up. This would have been a pretty standard night for me except for the fact that he had a disturbing amount of nose hair, which had giant balls of cocaine hanging from it that jiggled every time he moved his head. Looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t ask him for a bump.

Man, I miss that job.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,