The other day I realized, as a cold claw of pure fear squeezed my frantic heart, that I have been working as a video clerk for ten months.

This is a job that I took on a temporary basis for just a month or two until freelancing picked back up and I got my financial shit in order.

Ten months.

It has been a test of patience, humility, and character.

It has been a lesson in dealing with all humankind, including their personal bodily fluids.

It has been $6.50 an hour.

A guy came up to the counter a few days ago and asked me if "Tae Bo" was in.

I explained that we don't carry exercise videos and he said no, no we had it - he'd seen the box downstairs. Downstairs is, of course, the porn section.

A lot of porn movies do ape titles - "David Cop-a-Feel" was my all-time favorite - but not as many as you'd think. Most follow a pattern: (A) B N, where A is the race of the participants (optional), B is the sex act or kink - sometimes this gets astonishingly specific - and N is the number of the series. Thus you get "Blow Bang 25" or "Asian All-Anal Action 15". The "Little White Chicks, Big Black Monster Dicks" (note intriguing combination of race and fetish) series has some of the most offensive cover art I've ever seen, not because of the sexual content but because it's incredibly racist. The little white chicks look at you demurely over their shoulders while surrounded by scowling African-American men. The men are repeatedly referred to as "monsters" ("monster dicks" itself doesn't bother me because it merely implies that said dicks are monstrously large, but referring to men themselves as monsters is another story) and their faces are actually mounted on cartoon animal bodies. There's no way in hell you could put that cover on, say, a book and not get your store burnt down, and perhaps rightly so. But my well-meaning liberalism can pretty much go screw itself, as the series is cheerfully (and heavily) rented by all races.

Anyway, Tae Bo. I can't find it in the computer, but that's not unusual - deliberate misspellings are common in porn. That, plus the inevitable similarity of titles makes it a real pain in the ass to look things up. Does the customer want Black Ball, Blackball, Black Balled, Blackballed, Black Balls, Blackballs, Black Ballers, BlackBallers, Black Ballz, Blackballz, Black Ballerz, or BlackBallerz? And does he want the one in the gay section or the one in the straight section?

But I keep looking. The Zen lesson of my job is this: just because I do not want to be a video clerk doesn't mean I shouldn't be the best possible video clerk I can be. There's no way to just pop up a partial alphabetical list of titles, so you have to pick a likely starting point and then flip through entry after entry.

"It was a weird spelling, right?" I say, still typing in variations on "Tae Bo" as fast as I can think of them.

"Yes," he says "It was spelled weird."

"Do you remember it?"

Yes, he does: T-A-B-O-O

All of us abuse the hand sanitizer. I know that over-the-counter antibacterial products are bad. I know that it actually develops hideous resistant strains of bacteria. I even did the high school biology experiment where you put penicillin in a petri dish of E. Coli, then watch the zone of inhibition get smaller and smaller as the bacteria learn to eat the stuff for breakfast. I know it is bad, and I don't think it should even be legal to sell it. All of my fellow clerks agree with me, but we all abuse the hand sanitizer. We can't help it.

Contamination is everywhere. I see people sneezing onto the tape cases. They cough wetly into their palms right before handing me change. They squeegee out their ears with their pinkies. They forget about the security cameras downstairs and pick their noses with wild abandon and astonishing force. Still, the only thing that realy freaks me out is the semen. Well, OK, the lubricant freaks me out too, but I'm pretty sure that's because of the implied presence of semen.

The only thing we can do is use the hand sanitizer. I use it so much that I lose all finger traction and can't open our plastic bags. I've had days when I've used it so much that I can't even make fingerprints on the glass countertop. It freaks me out, but the thought of not using it is worse.

Sometimes people get animalistic about the tapes. For the real addicts (I'm convinced that porn is like alcohol: some people can stop at just one every now and then, some people just binge on weekends, and some people get genuinely, horribly addicted) the reptilian brain kicks in. They hit the magic portion of the tape and they're done. They pop out the tape and slam in another one, and the next day the stack comes back, unrewound and covered in goo.

Repeat offenders get a note on their file that says "LUBE WARNING". Management policy is that for $6.50 an hour, clerks should not have to deal with the bodily fluids of others. The first time we discreetly but firmly remind the customer that the tapes need to come back clean. The second time we hand him the tape, the Windex, and the paper towels and tell him to clean off the tape in full view of whoever else is at the counter.

It astonishes me that someone could actually forget to clean off his sticky and/or slippery tapes, but what amazes me even more is that people actually have the balls to argue with us about it. They always claim they got the tapes that way. They will actually claim that the spooge in question was missed by both the clerk that checked it in and the clerk that checked it back out, and that they figured what the hell, they'd go ahead and play it, even though it was covered in gel.

One guy brought back a DVD with a big white thumbprint of come on it. He actually tried to argue with me: "That's not mine. I never even played that! I never even took it out of the case!"

I pointed out that the DVD had been put back in the case with the reverse side up, which was where the thumbprint was. The clerk couldn't have checked the tape out to him that way because the serial number is on the front. The guy still tried to protest that sure, maybe he'd picked it up and looked at it but - "Sir," I said, "It's your THUMBPRINT. Do you really want to get into this?" He did not.

I hate it when people argue, but I understand why they do. I don't think there should be any shame in masturbating, but I do think there should be shame in expecting someone with whom you are not very, very close to deal with a wad of your spooge. I think they get all defensive because in that moment, they realize it too, but I think there's more to it than that.

One of my favorite concepts in anthropology is that of the polite fiction. It's something nobody believes, but we all pretend to because it makes life so much easier. My favorite example was of a Pygmy couple. Pygmy divorce involves quite literally breaking up the home: the couple tears apart their house (it's easy - the houses are made of leaves) and once it's down, the union is dissolved. One anthropologist was watching a long-married couple have a fight. It escalated until the wife threatened to leave, and the husband yelled something along the lines of "Fine!" and there was nothing the wife could do but start tearing down the house. She began tearing the roof off, clearly miserable. The husband looked wretched too, but at this point neither could back down without losing face and by now the whole village was watching.

Finally, the husband called out the Pygmy equivalent of "You're right, honey! The roof is dirty! It'll look much better once we get those leaves washed!" The two of them started carrying leaves down to the river, soon with the help of the whole village, and then washed and rebuilt the whole roof. When the anthropologist later discreetly asked how often one washes the roof, everyone looked at him like he was a complete doofus.

The polite fiction of the porn section is that, while people do generally use porn for the purpose of masturbation, there is no reason to believe that this particular customer will be doing so. He could be using them for his Master's thesis. Hell, he may not get around to watching them at all. We all like to believe that. When it becomes all too clear to everyone involved that said customer did, in fact, not only lube up, watch the tape, stroke himself to orgasm, and then grab the goddamned thing without even taking the basic courtesy of washing his goddamned hands first, we all get uncomfortable.

On the other hand, he gets angry because he's ashamed of something that was entirely avoidable and his own fault. I'm supposed to keep my temper even though I've just put my hand in a wad of his semen.

The destruction of the polite fiction is what creeps me out about one of my weekend regulars. He comes in when I open at nine, then chooses and rents two movies. He leaves for exactly two movies' worth of time, then returns them before four to get the matinee special. I hate it because there's no way to pretend he's been doing anything else. I just hope to God there's been a hand washing between him and me. I think there is, because his tapes are always clean, but it still gives me the shivvers and sends me straight to the hand sanitizer. It's just too much to know.

Mr. Glasses is the very creepiest, though. He's always very friendly, even courtly. He's too friendly, actually - he's always doing stuff like announcing "It's THAT kind of personal service that sets your store apart from the Blockbusters!" Yeah, whatever. The over-friendliness itself is creepy, as is the way he sort of doesn't blink enough and doesn't know that most business transactions don't really involve sustained eye contact. (No, he's not hitting on me. He's gay.) But of course what puts him over the top is that he's our biggest repeat lube offender. I hate seeing him coming. It's like Russian Roulette.

Rainy days are the worst. He just plunks a wet bag on the counter and we have to reach in and get the tapes. You know that initiation ritual in Flash Gordon where the guy has to stick his hand way, way down a hole and usually it's fine but sometimes there's a venemous beastie at the end that stings him? It's like that. Actually, it isn't quite. The tapes are always a bit wet on rainy days - it's just that my brain can't stop churning about what they might be wet with.

We all abuse the hand sanitizer. And I am deeply grateful that it exists.

If you don't count rousting teenagers out of the porn section, I have only driven away two and a half customers.

The only one I'm proud of happened pretty recently. I was ringing up a sale and I heard a crash from downstairs. My manager was out, so I couldn't leave the register to go down and see what happened. I glanced at the security monitor and saw a guy downstairs calmly flipping through the DVD section. He had knocked down three entire shelves. Instead of picking them up or coming to get me or even shoving them over into a pile and then continuing his porn shopping, he was just standing in them and on them, flipping away.

I got on the Voice of God microphone and said, in as friendly a voice as I could, "Hi! Could you pick those up, please?"

He started, then came charging up the stairs. "It was an accident!" he yelled, "Knocking over those DVDs was an accident!"

"I believe you, sir." I said.

"And you want me to pick them up? You want ME to pick them up?!"

And without waiting for an answer, he stormed out.

Actually, I didn't really expect him to pick them up. I wouldn't have minded picking them up if he'd just come upstairs and said something like "Jesus, I'm an idiot and I knocked down a substantial chunk of your DVD section." Or put them into halfhearted little piles. Or really anything other than just standing on them while continuing to shop for porn.

I don't think he was as angry at the notion that he might have to clean up his own mess so much as he was furious that he'd been caught making it. Sometimes new customers don't see the security cameras right away, and they sure as hell don't expect the Voice of God mike. When you're scrutinizing the charming cover art of White Trash Whore the last thing you want is to be chastized by a booming voice from above.

I'm not particularly sorry we lost his business. I do feel bad about driving away Mr. Creaky, even though he used to give me the creeps. Mr. Creaky was not, technically, a porn customer. He liked the Japanese animation. The Anime section is the one that really makes me cringe. It's upstairs in the general releases since it's all, you know, cartoons, and some of it is charming fare like My Neighbor Totoro. But a lot of it is incredibly hardcore stuff - way worse than we'll allow in the real-people porn downstairs. My position on porn is that I'm fine with whatever floats your boat, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult. Manga throws both of those rules out the window. Sure, all the boxes claim that all the characters are at least 18, but a lot of them are clearly drawn to look about 12. And there's a lot of raping. Not just run-of-the-mill raping, either - we're talking about triple-penetration rape by demons.

I consider myself a first-amendment feminist, but to be honest the anime section really makes me wrestle with that sometimes. And guys that rent the entire La Blue Girl series all at once (check out the box cover sometimes and you'll see what I mean) freak me out even worse than the guys who rent the Animal Trainer series.*

We have to watch the anime section because it's right next to the foreign films and the tags are the same color, which means a clerk who isn't on his toes could check out a shitload of hardcore animated underage rape porn to a kid and yes, once they see that there's sex stuff on some of the boxes kids definitely try to slide it past.

Mr. Creaky, as you've guessed, was hardly a kid. I would have been frightened of him if he hadn't been so old and feeble. He would rent a stack of rape manga at least once a week. He always had the same patter as he came up to the register: "Do you watch that show The Sopranos?"

"No, sir."

"I hear it's pretty good."

"Yes, sir, that's what I hear too."

"I'd like to watch that show, but I can't. There's too much cussing." Then, clever ruse in place, he would bring up his tags for Demon Beast.

Anyway, all would have been well had it not been for a well-meaning but plateheaded clerk name Dan. Dan was a sweetheart, but had an astonishing ability to fuck things up. In this case Dan had rented six of our very foulest titles to a 16-year-old. To give you the idea of the level of stupidity this involves, I'll just go ahead and tell you that the La Blue Girl tapes depict a woman being raped by demons RIGHT ON THE BOX. I was horrified both at the thought of what this kid's mom would do to us when she found out and what this kid had just learned about the beautiful, tender world of lovemaking.

I talked to my manager. We didn't want to move the whole anime section so we needed a bright, easy signal for Dan who for some reason still hadn't been fired yet. Our solution was to let the R-rated stuff slide, but if anything looked more like an X I highlighted the label on the tag and wrote a big "NC-17" on it.**

Mr. Creaky never came back.

So how did I manage to drive away half a customer? Well, he's not really quite gone yet. He still comes into the store a lot, but I may have destroyed his soul.

Mr. Buddy was the first guy people warned me about when I started working at the store. He is heavily addicted to porn and a huge pain in the ass. He also desperately wants to be friends with the clerks. He wants to come behind the counter and look at the boxes when new porn comes in. We always tell him that customers can't come behind the counter and he says "Yeah, but I can, right?" No, he can't. Sometimes with a new clerk he'll try "The old manager used to let me come behind the counter," at which point any other employee in earshot will chime in with "No, he didn't." He bitches about the prices and tries to haggle with us. "I swear to you, this has been on the new release shelf for a long time. I should get it for the old release price, right?" Wrong. One time he brought back just a case, without the DVD in it. He actually expected me to check the empty case in and let him, you know, just drop the DVD by at his convenience. When I said no, he stood at the register and whined for nearly ten minutes.

His bitching and wheedling isn't caused so much by the fact that he's a cheapskate, which he is, as by the fact that he desperately wants to be a regular. He wants to be greeted by name and not have to show ID and get whatever mythical special privileges he's imagining. The problem, of course, is that we're the ones who decide if he's a regular or not, and we don't like him.

The fact that he's an asshole is part of the problem, and the other part is that he seems to be completely devoid of social skills. Even the total dirtbags know better than to hit on me when I'm putting tags away downstairs. Mr. Buddy did not.

And again, he desperately, desperately wants to be friends with us. He's maybe 45 years old, and has a good enough job to spend literally thousands of dollars a year on porn alone. We can't figure out why he wants to be friends so badly, but he does. "You guys are awesome!" he'll say after trying to get Dustin to pay the extra $.50 he owes for him, "Seriously, you guys are the best!" Never, not once, has he received a positive response to this behavior, but he still does it. "You guys rule, you know that?" I've met Golden Retriever puppies with more dignity.

I always try to be civil to him in a distant, customer service sort of way, which is apparently the best he gets. ("You're always so nice to me! You rule!")

Round about September 14th he brought in a picture he'd downloaded from the internet. It was President Bush photoshopped so that he had a long beard and was dressed in vaguely Middle Eastern clothes. Mr. Buddy had drawn a cartoon voice balloon coming out of his mouth so that he was saying "Rent at [My Store's Name] Video!" I wasn't offended so much by any sort of tastelessness as I was by the completely failed attempt at humor. There wasn't even a vestigal joke. He handed it to me, and I made the same noncommital noise you make when you've been handed a drawing by a small child and then tried to hand it back. "No," he said, "I made it for you guys! You keep it!" So I kept it until he left, then threw it away. The next time Mr. Buddy came in he was all upset - he'd actually expected us to post it behind the register.

You wouldn't think it would be possible to drive away Mr. Buddy, but it turns out you can. As I said, I have always been civil with him, even when he is making yet another attempt to get me to waive his late fees. But a couple of weeks ago he caught me at the end of a heavy dirtball day. We'd been swamped - pervs, box thieves, scam artists, people dropping tapes and running without paying for them, and plenty of general crabbiness. And it was a new porn day, so the phone had been ringing off the hook and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I was very, very tired. Mr. Buddy was one of my last customers. He pulled his usual asshole routine for about five minutes, then as I started checking out his tapes launched into how awesome we were.

I don't remember the exact phrasing of what was said. I just remember that one of the other clerks made a joke about closing early or closing altogether, and Mr. Buddy said something like "Aw, you can't do that - I need you guys! Who am I gonna hang out with?" "Oh, Jesus, don't say that!" I said, "We can't be your only source of emotional support!" I tried to turn my voice up into a joke at the last second, which almost worked.

"Don't say that," Mr. Buddy tried to joke back, "You make me sound pathetic."

We made eye contact before I could compose my face. In that moment, Mr. Buddy knew that I do, in fact, find him pathetic. And I'm the nice one. He still comes in, but he isn't chatty anymore. The other clerks love it. I feel like a creep.

*No, we don't carry bestiality. Animal Trainer is about training women.

**Yes, this is a violation of MPAA copyright.

There are many customers that bug me, and quite a few that give me the willies. One or two set off a very primal alarm in my fear center, right in my gut. They make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I know, on a purely instinctual level, that they are very, very dangerous.

But the only one I really hate is Mr. Pig. I loathe Mr. Pig. I hate him so much I need a new word for it.

Mr. Pig is the first customer to win a snotty note on his file from me. I refrained from the sport for months. Most of the time it's a genuine warning ("This guy might be moving pricing stickers" "WATCH OUT FOR JIZZ-MASTER ZERO") but sometimes it's just us blowing off steam or trying to crack each other up. My favorite is "Mr. Excitement!!!!!!!!!!", while others favor "Engage, Number One!" on the file of the guy who looks a little too much like Johnathan Frakes.

Funny, yes, but unprofessional. I held off until I ran into Mr. Pig. He came up to the counter with his briefcase and his designer shopping bags. The counter is designed for two customers, but he piled all his stuff across it to take up the whole space. He pulled his videos out of his bags, handed me the new tags he wanted to check out, and then whipped out his cell phone to make a call.

I have to check an ID when someone rents new videos and, of course, get them to pay for their returns. Mr. Pig took up the whole counter and made me wait through his entire conversation - about a very, very big deal and conducted at about 30,000 decibels - before I could do either. When he finally got off, he said "Sorry, I had to do that. It was a big deal," just in case I'd missed that point. Yes, important enough to hold up me and a line, but not so urgent as to, say, start the conversation before he came in. Finally, stack of porn in hand, Mr. Pig pulled his briefcase and designer bags - did I mention they were designer bags? Because he did. - off the counter and left, and thus became the recipient of my first snotty note: "THIS MAN WANTS YOU TO KNOW THAT HE IS VERY, VERY IMPORTANT."

That was all I noticed about him the first time. Over time, though, he has burned himself into my brain. He always takes up the whole counter no matter who else is waiting, he usually shouts into his cell phone, and he always makes sure to allude to how very important he is. He has a password on his account, "KITTY". It's an old, old policy that a few old customers still use, but at least they're not freaks about it. The idea is that if you don't have ID, you can just give your password. We don't do it anymore, but we let old customers keep them. Mr. Pig is very, very proud of having a password. When we ask for ID, he shouts that he has a password, then leans in very, very close so the riffraff can't hear and whispers "Kitty".

I always ask him for his ID anyway. It drives him nuts. He wants to be a regular even more than Mr. Buddy does, and he hates it when I ask to see ID. He talks about the old managers, the old policies, and how long he's been here. Then I ask to see his ID. Sometimes I wonder if he leaves the store and bursts into tears.

So far, all of this is pathetic. Who the hell is that invested in impressing their video clerk? I should be unable to summon up an ounce of human feeling for Mr. Pig at all beyond pity. But no, it's a deep, burning antagonism.

It's the punch cards that got me. We give all our customers a gold punch card each month. Each time they return a movie, they get a punch. After 6 punches, they get a free rental. After another 6, they get half off, then a free again. There's about 30 spaces. Some of the heavy porn renters make it through a few cards a month, so it's not unsual to give out a new card before the month is over.

Mr. Pig figured out that two frees in a row is better than a free and a half off, so he gets his free punch and then asks for a new card. So he's screwing the store out of $1.75 twice a month. Fine. It would be one thing if he just asked for his goddamned new card each time, but he can't just leave it at that. He's so proud of his penny-ante fucking over the store that he has to make a big deal out of it. "For heaven's sake," he'll bellow, "Can I PLEASE have a new card?" And then he won't quite have his old not-fully-punched card out of sight, in the hopes that the clerk will call him on it so he can launch into his speech about how very clever he is.

I just want him to know that I am not impressed. I want him to know that his cellphone and pile of bags do not make him impressive, they make him a human log jam. I want him to know that renting a stack of 6 porn movies a day tends to undercut his intended dashing, man-about-town effect. I want him to know that true big-shots do not try to screw small locally-owned businesses out of petty amounts of cash. I want to have the pleasure of publicly deflating him.

There is no earthly reason I should care so much, and it drives me nuts that I do. I am a pacifist. I like to think of myself as a nonviolent and gentle person. I have actually fantasized about knocking Mr. Pig to the ground and kicking him. Once, when he was being particularly obnoxious, I had a flash of an image: Me putting a foot on Mr. Pig's chest, shoving a gun in his mouth, and blowing his brains across the New For Sale section. It frightened me, but I enjoyed it.

He knows my name now. He came in as I was leaving one day, just as the other clerks said "Bye, Ali!" So he leaned right into my face and said "Byyyyye, Ali!"

Now he greets me every time. I hate Mr. Pig.

As you might expect, we get a lot of fetishists in the video store.

If a customer is going to rent porn, I actually prefer to see a mixed bag of videos - that way all I know about them is that they want porn. Someone comes up with a stack of five videos about people pissing for each other, and suddenly I know a very intimate thing about a relative stranger. (An interesting distinction in Illinois porn law: you can rent videos about people pissing for each other or near each other, but you are not allowed to rent videos of people pissing on each other. Go figure. There's apparently a Byzantine set of codes that have to do with taking a dump for each other, but I really don't want to know.)

Lots of people are hung up on a particular race, or a particular racial combination, and many straight men are pretty specific about breast size (The Nice Rack series and the Itty Bitty Titty series seem to rent fairly evenly). The most common fetish, if you can call something so common a fetish, is for borderline jailbait. This is true of both straight and gay porn. The gay series to watch are Eighteen Today, Just 18 and Gay and First Time Tryers. The straight series are Bring 'Em Young, Barely Legal, and, horrifyingly, Faces with Braces. We actually have a guy who vets all our videos and makes sure that nobody is under 18, but still, guys who bring a stack of those up to the counter make me want to hiss and warn them away from my little sisters. And it's never the 21-year-olds who rent Barely Legal, it's always the 45-and-ups. Gah. The 21-year-olds do occasionally rent the one Older Women, Hotter Sex video we have. I approve of this, in a shocking display of my own personal prejudices.

Except for the occasional too-personal glance into their psyches, most of the fetishists don't really bug us, except for those in one special category: those who fetishize the video store itself.

They can't masturbate because of the cameras, but they do everything else. They damage the cassettes on purpose. There's at least one guy in the straight section who rips pictures off the boxes, and a guy in the gay section who apparently carries an X-acto knife. People in both sections steal the boxes, which drives us nuts - a video without a display box won't rent because people can't see what it's about. It can take weeks to get a new, empty box and it's expensive. One guy in the gay section is definitely doing it as a triumphant "fuck you" - he always jams a plastic insert in the DVD rack as a calling card.

One guy called for weeks, trying to get us to special order a tape called Autofellatio. (It looks like cheating - on the box cover the guy is bracing himself against a pool table. Dammit, if you're going to fellate yourself, do it on pure strength and flexibility or don't do it at all.) Anyway, it's a hard to find tape, and he called over and over. I talked to him twice, and I was pretty sure he was masturbating both times. When we finally found the tape, he cancelled the order, claiming he'd found it somewhere else. I think it was the act of calling that turned him on.

People do get hung up on the act of seeing or even just renting a particular video. One guy at one of our other branches rented his favorite literally hundreds of times, checking it in and then right back out. The staff begged him to just buy it, but he wouldn't. His life was destroyed when his tape was either damaged or sold to someone else. He came to our store looking for it, and wouldn't tell me the title - he wrote down the title and passed the paper to Jeremy, the assistant manager.

Mr. Dreadlocks's particular fetish is the naughty act of renting itself. I've always had a fine relationship with Mr. Dreadlocks, but then he's gay and I don't apply to his fetish. The male clerks can't stand him, because what he likes to do is rent a tape from one of them, go home, masturbate, (we think, based on the short time he's gone, that he doesn't actually watch the tape) come back, pay for his one tape, and then pick out another and start again. Sometimes he has an erection during checkout, and once he had semen stains on the front of his pants. He freaks the shit out of the male clerks, and I understand why - it's pretty hideous to be an unwitting participant in someone else's sex act.

A lot of fetishizing has to do with unwitting or unwilling participants, and that runs pretty hard up against my "whatever floats your boat" policy. On the other hand, the more I work at the store the more it seems like some people are just hardwired in a certain way and there may not be anything they can do about it. Which doesn't really make it OK for them to call me and masturbate or steal stuff, but what can either of us do? We're at an impasse.

But I'm still calling the cops if I catch them tearing up our boxes.

Part of my job is watching the security cameras downstairs. I have a love/hate relationship with the security cameras. Sometimes they're fun, but mostly it's a pressure situation. Nobody wants to have a box get stolen or ripped up on their shift. It's easy to keep an eye on them during slow periods, but when the register is slammed, forget it.

It's frustrating, because it's easy to tell when someone is up to no good. Thieves will come right up to the register, check a small bag, and tell you that they aren't going to steal anything. Some people give the counter a long, long look before going down, while others just try to zip past, hoping you don't see them go down at all. It's weird - people really can't seem to act normally when they're planning to be creeps. The trick, of course, is having the time to watch and catch them. Sometimes when someone's weaselling around down there, I just want to get on the Voice of God mike and say "WE CAN SEE YOU."

Winter drove me nuts because everybody dressed like a thief - bulky coats and plenty of face-covering accessories. Nowadays it's warmer (well, for Chicago) and the coat, hat, hood, scarf and sunglasses combo stands out a little more.

Not everyone that acts suspicious is going to steal or vandalize something, of course. We spent a big chunk of Saturday watching a guy down there who was hoping to masturbate. It got sort of hilarious, in a disgusting way. He would study and study the boxes, then his hand would creeeeeeep over to his crotch....and then someone would come downstairs and wreck everything.

He had dressed well for his plan, if a little obviously - a huge coat with a big, fuzzy hood, a hat pulled down over his eyes, and baggy, low-slung pants. He kept hunching away from the one security camera he'd spotted - unfortunately giving us a great face shot on the one he hadn't.

So anyway, he'd find a box that turned him on and go over to what he thought was a discreet corner, but again, we're a little high-traffic for that so he kept getting interrupted. Apparently in the old days it was different - no security cameras and longer dead spells. My manager used to clerk then, and she said that having to clean come out of the corners and off the walls was pretty routine. Now there's way less masturbating privacy, which explains the upswing in box thefts. Whackers find the image they like, but have to steal it and go somewhere else if they want an uninterrupted session. And it's pretty easy to interrupt them - all the potential jerkers I've had to deal with have been huge cowards with big shame issues. Letting them know you're on to what they're up to is usually enough to get rid of them.

Finally we got tired of our visitor and decided we'd rather roust him than catch him in the act and call the cops. (Catching a customer vandalizing, stealing, or masturbating and getting him arrested means a bonus because word gets out in the dirtball network that we prosecute. So waiting to catch a guy in the act is a temptation, but then it also carries the risk that he might finish before the police arrive.) Which meant that I got to roust him - for some reason the other people at the store, including management, have decided I'm good at flushing people out of the porn section. I'm not sure why, but I have two theories. The first is simply that I am pretty much the polar opposite of the women on the porn boxes. I don't know if I am a harsh dose of reality or if I remind them of their moms or their girlfriends or their wives or just the archetypical Feminine Principal or what, but straight guys hate it when I'm down there putting away tags. They just can't seem to deal with me, so sometimes just simply going downstairs is enough to clear the area of dirtbags and legitimate customers alike.

I do like to think I'm pretty good at it when I actually have to card them and/or ask them to leave. I try to make it a face-saving situation for everyone and acknowledge that yeah, the store's 21-and-over policy really sucks. I try to be as easygoing about it as possible, especially when I have to throw out a bunch of kids.

I get sort of conflicted about throwing kids and teenagers out of the porn section. I really don't want them down there, not because I think sex is dirty or bad, but because I don't want them to think that that's what sex is about. The stuff on our boxes is sex in the basest, sometimes most brutal terms - naked women spreading their relevant orifices and making that Porn Face. Unless you're talking about the Max Hardcore series, which involves women with "SLUT" and "WHORE" written across their foreheads in lipstick. And besides - do we really need to raise another generation of men who can't deal with pubic hair?

So I don't feel bad about getting them out of there, except that I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm a woman while I'm doing it. I worry that I'm either setting up or reinforcing the idea that there are fun, bad women who like sex and good, boring women who restrict access to sex.

I always want to debrief them. "Hey, guys, it's cool that you're curious, but this isn't the way to find out. Porn is fine, but it's not real sex. Real sex is great, and even good girls love it, but it has to be a two-way street..." But I always just end up with "Sorry, guys - come back when you're 21." Perhaps I should write a children's book. Porn Is Healthy and Fine, but Only as a Temporary Physical Release.

So anyway, I started out with the Discreet Method: I went down with a handful of tags and put away the ones right around where he was, hoping to drive him out with a quick dose of Virgin/Nun/Mom/Mother-Goddess. No dice. He just kept turning his back to me - an increasingly hard prospect as I corralled him into the corner.

He actually tried the hand creep once until he glanced over and realized I was a)an employee and b)female. He decided to wait me out, pulling his pants up and his coat down a bit - I had clearly cramped his masturbating style.

He stayed hunched in the corner and wouldn't go away on his own, so I finally broke down and asked him if he had ID and an account with us. We have a sign saying you need to set up an account to even browse down there. We don't really enforce it unless we're ousting a dirtbag, but then it comes in fairly handy. As it did in this case - just addressing him directly did the trick and he dropped his box and fled as casually as possible.

My manager high-fived me when I came up. I had kept our store clean and safe for our non-masturbating porn freaks and done my little bit to keep the virgin/whore dichotomy firmly in place.

Mom would be so proud.

Saturdays I open the store and work close to a nine hour shift. I start out OK, but it's hard to stay cheery the whole time, even when I'm blasting Norwegian techno music.

I used to hate opening on weekends because the early morning customers scared the shit out of me. The store opens at 9. I usually do about 20 mintues of set-up and hit the front door at 9 on the dot by the store clock. There is always someone waiting to get to the porn. Once or twice I have had a problem - a register came up short or a circuit breaker was blown - and I've opened the door at, say, 9:01 and 52 seconds. In both cases, a guy was actually pounding at the door when I got to it. Not the same guy - I'm not sure whether that's scarier or not. Both guys almost flipped out when I took the time to slide the sign from "closed" to "open" before turning the lock.

It gets pretty full at 9am on Saturdays and Sundays. I don't know if people are just getting up or if they stayed up or what. I just know they've been waiting for porn until they almost can't stand it.

As I said, they used to scare me until I got to know my regulars. If you don't count the porn addiction, they're not such bad guys. And once I thought about it, they'd be my best chance if someone tried to rob the store. They'd never let me get shot- who would give them their porn?

The not-so-regulars are still sort of scary. For some reason, I tend to draw the weirdest ones. My close friends and relatives call it the Crazy Magnet, but at the store they've gone with Freak Magnet.

The Freak Magnet was definitely on today - the phone started ringing before I was even open. Mr. Dreadlocks called early on, asking to reserve two movies. "OK, what are the titles?" "I can't recall." I invited Mr. Dreadlocks to call back if and when he figured it out, but he never did, and he didn't come in. He likes me, but I'm disappointing because he's hoping to get a male clerk. I'm guessing the evening shift will get that particular treat.

The most disturbing customer of the day called right at nine to ask when we opened. I told him we were, and he asked if the DVD of "L.A. Sex Party" was in. (A lot of our movies have "sex party" in the title. It was only a few months ago that I realized that this is because a lot of porn renters don't know what "orgy" means.)

It was in, but today we didn't have another clerk on yet, and I can't leave the register unattended to go downstairs and all the way to the back to pull a gay adult DVD tag. So I told him we expected one in and I could put him on the reserve list. He called back less than an hour later to see if it was in yet. He knew, as a member, that rentals aren't due back until closing the night they're due. He was clearly going to call back at half-hour intervals until I said the tape was in, which sounded like a long shift to me, so I told him the truth. I explained that I could go down and pull his tag as soon as the new clerk came in, which would be very soon. It wasn't a new release and not in much demand. I told him that it was a safe bet that it would be in when he got there - especially since he said he would come right over. "Well, if someone tries to rent it, could you take it away from them?" Um, no. I explained for about the thirtieth time that another clerk would be on soon, and that it was unlikely that his DVD would rent before then. And then as politely and gently as possible I refused to rip the DVD from another renter's hands.

He got to the store before the second clerk did.

He went racing right downstairs, which wasn't that unusual - Saturday morning porn renters all but throw themselves down the stairs.

He got back up behind two other renters, who made the mistake of breaking their pace to get their tags together before hitting the register. He ran around the side and cut in front of them. The three of us not-freaks exchanged looks for a second. I almost made him wait, then realized we all just wanted him out of there. No time for thought (or indeed, basic courtesy) though.

"It was here!" he crowed, "I'm the one who called!" His precious DVD was in, as were two others. I took a look at him as I pulled up his account and checked his ID. He looked like he was either a hotel desk manager or a flight attendant. He had just missed pilot. He was wearing a navy blue suit with a white stripe at the wrists. He had what looked like airline wings on his chest, as well as what may have been a small brass nametag and some sort of Masonic or fraternal pin.

He caught me trying to figure it out as I checked him out. "No, I don't fly for the airlines," he said proudly. (Because I am a good clerk, I refrained from saying "Of course not. You look like a flight attendant,") "I just have a thing for uniforms," he went on, loud enough for the whole line to hear, "I'm trying to pick someone up this morning!"

And with that, he and his homemade uniform were gone.

We have a new vistor to the porn section. He's been in twice now. Actually, he's been in at least three times, as he is a registered member, but he's only stood out twice.

He comes in, goes down to the straight porn section, and whips out a hand mirror. Then he applies makeup for about an hour.

Seriously.

No browsing, no chatting people up, no whacking. In, mirror, makeup and out. And again, he's in the straight section.

No one's sure what to do yet.

The last time he was in, two clerks went down to ask him a) what was up and b) to leave. He pointed out that he was a registered member, and that he wasn't stealing, whacking off, or bothering anyone. Since he wasn't hurting anyone, why did he have to leave?

Nobody's thought of an answer yet, and we're not really sure we want to toss him for loitering. He is, after all, just putting on makeup.

But why in our porn section? It has such harsh fluorescent lighting.

I'm sure we'll find out eventually. I can't wait.

I'm having another existential video store crisis. I have them every now and then, but this one is biggish - this Friday will be my one year anniversary. It isn't the worst job in the world. It's helped me plow through some difficult financial times, they're terrific about letting me take off for an audition, and they have twice let me take a full month off to go do a show. The pay sucks, but there's no dress code and you can't beat the flexibility.

But still, holy fuck. I know it is exactly a year this Friday because I started the job (a year ago - have I mentioned this was a year ago?) precisely one week before my thirtieth birthday. Talk about your existential crises. That one was enormous, and it came on in a single moment: I was putting away porn tags, when suddenly I looked up and came face-to-face with the box for Fuck Pigs 5. I can still see the box. There was, of course, a woman on it, offering up her orifices for the pleasure of anyone who wanted a look. She seemed friendly, almost shy. And she was being called a fuck pig.

"Good Lord," I thought, "What HAPPENED to me? I'm about to turn 30 and I'm on my knees in a basement restocking incredibly degrading porn."

This time around I will be about to turn 31 and I will be on my knees in a basement stocking incredibly degrading porn. At least I can laugh about it. Sometimes I have to pull my lips into a rictus grin, peel my tongue off the roof of my mouth and punch myself in the solar plexus, but a laugh is a laugh.

I've gotten numb to a lot of it over the past year - and some of it I do find genuinely hilarious - but I am still, sometimes, conflicted about the really degrading porn. The Fuck Pig stuff.

It took a long time for me to even admit to myself that porn can be degrading. I'm a sex-positive, first amendment feminist. I've been through the progressive arguments: lesbians enjoy it too, the woman giving the blow job is in control of the sex act, and what if they come for your porn first. I got them, I believed them, I was willing to defend to my death (or at least to my jailing) the right to produce porn, assuming all the actors truly consent. (No, I would never watch Deep Throat. Last time I checked, porn produced at gunpoint is rape on film.)

As is so often the case, I had those lofty ideals before I really had any experience with porn other than as an abstract concept. Working with porn on a regular basis, while it has expanded my whatever-floats-your-boat tolerance, has led me to conclude that yes, sometimes porn is degrading. Indeed, sometimes it's meant to be degrading. That's the whole point.

Take, for example, the Guttermouth series, the latest example of which arrived last week and triggered my current case of porn clerk malaise. In a way, it was satisfyingly cyclical moment - Guttermouth also refers to its stars, still young enough to look happy and proud on the box, as "fuck pigs". They look about 19. They look sweet. They're posing in bikinis and looking right at the camera, hoping you will like them. Fuck pigs. The box copy is what's really revolting. It's over the top, but I don't think it's meant to be funny. There are short fake cast bios of all the girls, in the same happy tone of theater bios before the actors grow up and get hip and cynical. One of them is called a dumb slut, another a worthless cunt. I'm fairly certain there was more on the other two, but it was just too depressing to keep reading.

This is the one porn impulse that I honestly don't get. (Oh, all right. I don't get peeing on each other or hurting each other, but I think I understand intellectually how one might get there.) I don't understand the need to degrade someone. But that need is definitely, sadly out there. One of our best-renting titles of long standing is called Grudge Fuck.* It rents right back out as soon as we can replace the tag. Every time.

Much as I hate to say it, it seems to be a straight guy thing.

There's definitely a Captain Kirk-style exploration up and down the imaginary social ladder in both the straight and gay sections. In addition to the dozens of variations on (oddly - or sadly) still taboo interracial pairings, we have More Dirty Debutantes and White Trash Whore on the straight side, Straight off the Street and The Other Side of Aspen on the gay side. You can fuck rich or fuck poor on either side of the invisible barrier between the straight and gay sections. But you can only fuck lesser in straight.

I think it's because there's not enough otherness in gay porn. There's still bondage and S&M stuff, plenty of dominance and submission, but even the most submissive sub is still a man just like the dom, just like the viewer. How much separation can there be?

On the straight side, it's different. One of the Extreme Penetrations boxes shows a woman, legs spread and sticking straight up, with some sort of funnel or bowl shoved into her vagina. It actually has pretzels in it. Rocco's Animal Trainer series, I'm told, traditionally ends with Rocco fucking a woman up the ass while he shoves her head into a toilet and flushes.

Some straight porn does seem to be made in sort of a happy, fun spirit: women are beautiful and fun to look at, sex is fun and good to have. Whee! And then there's Guttermouth.

Is it fear? Is it anger? Is it such an unfamiliarity in dealing with women that they don't even seem like real people? Or is it, as I'm prone to suspect on difficult days, that some people are just complete shitheads? I don't know.

What I learned in Women's Studies is that porn is not necessarily degrading. What I've learned at the video store is that sometimes it is.

My position on porn hasn't really changed. I would still defend to my death the right to produce it. I just sometimes wish they wouldn't.


*Actually, the title is Grudge F*ck. There's a picture of a guy reaming a woman on the box. Why the hell did they get squeamish about the F-word?

This is - almost - a story of triumph.

I've always been worried about what I'd do if I actually caught a jerker in the porn section. I mean, of course, while I'm physically in the porn section. Catching someone on the security camera didn't bother me - call the police and collect a bonus for busting a creep. My only concern on that count was who's responsible for cleanup.

But actually catching someone while down there has always been a concern. I'm 5'3" - not a terribly imposing presence. While, as I've said before, most of the people who attempt to masturbate in the store are cowards, there are no guarantees. I've read more than one study that indicates that rapists start off with indecent exposure before graduating to scarier, more violent stuff. It wasn't like it was a constant fear for me, but it certainly popped into the back of my mind more than once.

And it had been in my mind recently because Jonathan caught a jerker a couple of weeks ago. By the way, it turns out the managers are willing to take care of the mopping.

The porn section is not completely isolated from the upstairs counter, but it's a hike. You could get around (or over) the counter and downstairs in a few seconds. The whole section is covered by the cameras, but we usually have the sound off unless we're watching someone in particular. On the other hand, you can hear someone making loudish noises like knocking over shelves in the straight section. Essentially you could get help from upstairs, but not without a few seconds' delay.

OK, so I have thought about it some. But I've honestly never known how I'd react. Scream? Run? Quietly go upstairs and then get help? What?

I found out this weekend. I was bored out of my skull about halfway through my usual nine-hour Saturday Shift of Doom, and I was downstairs putting tags back out. There was only one other person down there - a young guy, not a regular. I'd been keeping one eye on him anyway because he was wearing way more coat than he needed, which is the I'm-gonna-steal-a-box uniform.

We were on opposite sides of the room with our backs to each other. Gradually, I became aware of movement behind me. I turned around. His pants were drooping a few inches below the waistband of his boxers. He had snaked his right arm up underneath his coat and it was moving rhythmically.

For a second, I just stared.

Then, before I knew it, I heard a voice coming out of my mouth. It was a furious principal's voice, a drill seargeant's voice, Sigourney Weaver's voice just as she's about to wax an alien. It came up from the diaphragm, resonating through my chest, deep, powerful and furious.

PUT IT AWAY AND GET OUT!

He dropped the box he'd been holding and whipped around, eyes huge with astonishment.

He had been scratching his stomach.

1. Beth's First Law of Tag Replenishment:
Of any ten tags you need to put away, nine of them will be in front of the big creepy guy who won't move.

Ali's Corollary:
Of these nine, at least five will require you to bend or crouch in such a way that your head is right in front of his groin.

2. Porn Trance
This is the odd, timeless zone that people go into when studying the boxes. Lone porn renters go into it immediately and resent being pulled out. Group renters never intend to go into the Porn Trance. They start out laughing together, pointing at the boxes and reading particularly ludicrous copy out loud. They are far too hip to really be interes... and then they see an orifice that really strikes them and one by one they get sucked in and the porn section is quiet again.

Couples do not go into Porn Trance. There has already been a great deal of negotiating in getting both parties down there together. If either partner gets even a tiny fraction more interested in a porn star body than the other, the delicate balance - and quite possibly the relationship - is destroyed.

We have two rooms of floor-to-ceiling boxes. People in the Porn Trance methodically look at every single one in their section. They don't realize they've just rented new releases because they didn't realize they'd moved around the entire circumference of the room. They don't hear announcements over the Voice of God mike until you get drastic. ("YOU! In the red jacket! With the baseball cap! YOU! We're closing! BRING UP YOUR MOVIES RIGHT NOW OR YOU DON'T GET TO RENT ANYTHING AT ALL!") People literally spend hours in the Porn Trance. I see people look at box after box for two hours at a stretch all the time, and three hours is not uncommon. These are the same people that tell you they're in a hurry when they hit the register.

I think finding the right video is such a primal, visceral thing that people really can't think about time or comprehend verbal announcements the first time around. They've gone back down to the reptilian brain and it takes a few seconds for those higher lobes to kick back in. Or maybe, since to choose the right tape they have to sort of mentally masturbate to it, they have also mentally locked themselves in the bathroom and all other stimulus is just so much faint knocking. I don't know. I haven't asked.

Porn Drift
People who have been in the straight section for a while will, more often than you think, get progressively more adventurous. Suddenly videos featuring pre-op transsexuals (sensitively called "She-Males") start showing up. Sometimes that's all there is, but not necessarily. We do feature bisexual videos (and by that, of course, we mean bisexual men - bi-girl action is pretty much a given in the straight section) and every now and then someone you didn't expect will dip his first toe into the gay end of the pool.

There are way more bisexuals in the world than you think. I know there are way more than you think, because there are way more than I thought, and I'm bisexual. People who've finally gotten rid of all their inhibitions in that regard rent all over the Kinsey scale - there are a few 50/50 renters, but more people just seem to throw in what suits them. It still freaks out many of my fellow clerks when people do that. "Weird. That guy rented three gay videos and two straight," comes up a lot. I usually gently mention that there are more than two options in the world, but they tend to just give me blank looks. Oh, well - most of them are still in college. They'll learn.

I tend to notice bisexuals a lot because it's fascinating to me that there are so many more than I ever knew, but also because I really don't want them to be creeps. Some of our coolest customers rent bi, but then some of the biggest freakos do too. I'm keeping an informal mental tally and frankly it doesn't look good. I'm hoping some nice bis will step up to the plate.

But I digress. We actually hardly ever turn people gay or even bi. The clerks at our all-porn branch have noticed a fairly strict progression, because their porn is broken up by far more than gay and straight. According to them, the most likely Porn Drift path for a straight male goes from all lesbian to straight sex (some guys are so freaked out about seeing another guy's penis that straight sex videos are called "gay male" in some circles) to she-male. We keep the she-male stuff in the straight section - straight guys don't want to go to the gay section for their chicks with dicks videos, and for the most part gay men don't rent them.

(I have been given two interesting explanations as to why straight guys like women with penises. The first is that men don't believe that women like or want sex as much as they do. A chick with a penis, then, is a woman who has a full, hearty, male sex drive and must want sex as much as he does. The second one is almost touching to me: Vaginas are mysterious, and penises are by comparison fairly straightforward and easy to satisfy. A guy knows what to do with a penis, so if a woman has one he can be sure he knows how to satisfy her.)

I am actually sort of heartened by Porn Drift. I like seeing concrete evidence that sexuality is a more fluid thing than people like to admit, and I like seeing people stop worrying about what they're supposed to be turned on by and just go with what they like. I feel like the more people stop trying to fit themselves into rigid little boxes, the more they'll be able to cut people slack when they fit into a different box, or don't fit into a box at all.

So depending on your point of view, we're either helping people to open up to a new understanding of themselves and others, or we're helping to turn previously normal people into depraved freakos.

What else is new?

I never thought I would be the sort of person who would mentally categorize people as "dirtbags," but I am and I do. In a way, it’s part of my job. Dirtbags rip up boxes, tamper with tapes, and try to steal the DVDs. They try to peel off pricing stickers and put them on movies that aren’t for sale. They claim damages on tapes that are fine, they try to scam us with the punch cards, they keep movies for weeks on end and try to weasel out of the late fees. They try to masturbate.

Sometimes I don’t know what they’re doing – I just know they’re dirtbags and need to be watched. It bothers me that I can spot them when they hit the door. I don’t like the fact that I’m categorizing people, but then I hate getting scammed or taken more. It makes me angry, it makes me tired. So I keep an eye out for dirtbags.

There is, as you might expect, a healthy intersection between dirtbags and heavy porn renters. I think it’s partly due to the expense involved in a porn addiction – scamming is a way to cut corners – and partly that anyone renting six hardcore videos every single day of his life has already at least to an extent said his goodbyes to the laws of society. But you’d be surprised: not all porn addicts are dirtbags and not all dirtbags rent porn, though they do seem to have a common fondness for backyard wrestling videos and the Faces of Death series.

I couldn’t tell you what makes a dirtbag. It’s like obscenity: you know it when you see it. If I had to put it into a word, I’d go with "shiftiness". Dirtbags are trying to do something wrong and deep down in their dried-up little dirtbag souls they know it and somehow their mental can-I-get-away-with-this? calculations show. One guy actually has shifty eyes. I couldn’t believe it – I’d always thought that that was one of those Victorian techniques for recognizing the Criminal Type, but damned if it isn’t true. I was stunned when Mr. Creepy came up to the counter, claiming that an entire stack of porn he’d rented should be free because somehow the clerk had given him six wrong tapes, and there were his eyes, shifting shifting shifting around like beady, guilty little gnats, looking at anything in the room but me or the incriminating videos.

Mr. Creepy is the one that makes me meditate on the nature of dirtbagness the most. He is always, always, always scamming. Bogus damage reports, punch card scams, claiming he got the wrong videos, and of course moving pricing stickers around. The first three bother me the most because they take advantage of our good nature. I hate it when people chip away at our likelihood to cut a good person a break. Especially when they’re just trying to save up for the next entry in the Stop! My Ass is on Fire! series.

The thing is, Mr. Creepy always thinks that we’re the ones trying to scam him. He sometimes will pre-pay for a movie. The flag that shows a credit to someone’s account is a smallish one, and the clerk won’t always see it unless the customer points it out. This is especially true in Mr. Creepy’s case, since there are so many notes on his account that it lights up like a Christmas tree. In the process of making sure he didn’t tamper with the tapes he’s turning in and making sure he acknowledges that the one’s he’s checking out are correct and he isn’t stealing anything and he isn’t trying to get his card double-punched and wondering why this fucker still has an account with us at all, it’s easy to miss the credit. And he flips out. He thinks we’re trying to cheat him, even if the clerk who did the prepayment gave him a receipt, even if we apologize.

I wonder how many times you have to get cheated or scammed or worked over by life to turn into Mr. Creepy. Did his parents teach him that or was it one event or was it a long, slow process? How do you decide that it’s OK to be a dirtbag, and at what point is it OK for me to write him off as one? Yes, I know – ideally, never. I sometimes wonder what it would take to turn him around, although I am honest enough with myself to admit that I wouldn’t want to be the one to do it. Could he be turned around at this point? Or will he just spend his life committing petty scams and getting creepier? As a good liberal and a caring person who recognizes that life is a web of interconnecting influences, I feel sad for Mr. Creepy. As a clerk, I want him to get the fuck out of my life and never come back.

As I said, I am conflicted about my growing instinct for spotting dirtbags. I think I’m an equal-opportunity spotter. I’m pretty sure that I base it on shiftiness rather than any other factors, but I worry. My friend Eric, a six-foot-something black man, was once telling me about his frequent trips to Canada. His favorite thing about Canada, he said, is that white women who see him coming down the street don’t clutch their purses like they do here. Gah. Spotting dirtbags always brings up the worry that I have prejudices that I don’t know about. We did used to have a clerk that, some of us noticed, only kept an eye on our black customers. An old manager had a problem with people who didn’t speak English like a native. One of our local policemen once warned me that I need to be especially careful of my register when "fags" are in the store. Me, I used to feel happy for elderly gay men who rent porn because they finally have an outlet after all these years, but completely creeped out by elderly straight men. Now that I’ve been at the store for awhile, I’ve progressed. I’m creeped out by both.

I like to think of us a very diversity-friendly store. While many of our titles are certainly indelicate because of porn's cut-to-the-chase nature, we do feature porn starring as many different ethnicities in as many different combinations as we can find. I didn't think of this as a public service until one of our customers brought it up. He had come to our neighborhood from way, way downtown, which a lot of people do. People sometimes come in from a state away, especially gay porn renters, so crossing town didn't seem that odd to me until he commented on it: "You know how hard it is to find porn on DVD with people who look like me in it?"

So I at least had an odd pride about us providing equal access to porn... until the guy in the wheelchair came in. Our store is deliberately designed to make the porn section hard to get to. We want people to have to pass the register so the clerk can see them and we make them snake through the shelves a bit so it's hard for kids to get down there. Turns out it was a nearly impossible gauntlet for a wheelchair.

The guy was surprisingly nice about it. He'd already had a shitter of an evening. All he wanted was to rent some videos, which many of our customers do on autopilot. He had to wait more than an hour for a cab to pick him up - he was on some kind of subsidy for taxi transportation, but that meant he had to wait for a specific company to bother to send a driver around. Then he had to get over our doorstep, which is wheelchair accessible in a theoretical sense at best, and weave his way through too-tight aisles only to hit a freaking staircase.

Luckily he could walk a bit. He took the railing with one hand and my arm in the other and we went down, then I went back and brought the chair down for him. With the taxi, getting him in the door, and getting him downstairs, I was now the third person who he'd had to ask for help just to rent some frigging porn. I was torn between sticking around to help - from the chair he could only reach about three shelves - and giving the poor guy some privacy. I went with moderate privacy, leaving him alone and checking out the security camera every now and then until it looked like he was done, then going down to help him back up.

...And then he had to wait over an hour yet again for another taxi, which never showed. We finally hailed him one, and a friend of mine who happened to be passing helped me help him into the not-at-all wheelchair modified cab, bringing the total number of people who'd helpfully intruded on his porn rental to about 7. I think the whole trip took about 4 hours. Except to return the videos, he hasn't been back and I can't blame him. A year ago, I didn't think of porn as a basic human right, but now I sort of do.

Several of our regular porn renters are mildly retarded, which brings up another prejudice I didn't know I had until I started clerking. It's amazing how little our society recognizes that the mentally challenged have adult sexual impulses, but they sure enough do.

We thought Mr. Stiff was just a pain in the ass at first. He always needs to restate everything: how many days he gets to keep his movies, what each will cost individually, what the total will be, what specials he's eligible for, and that, yes, he will in fact get them. After a few visits, I realized that he's just covering his retardation really well. He wants to make sure he understands everything, and I think he does it in the angry, pain-in-the-ass tone of voice because it's better than being vulnerable. I think in a way he's coming from the same point of view as Mr. Creepy - he's so used to not understanding things or the rules apparently changing on him that he feels like people are trying to cheat him all the time. Mr. Creepy uses that as an excuse to scam us, Mr. Stiff just tries to make sure everything is clear.

I think he's stiff and stilted partially because he's working so hard and partly because he's nervous; he never knows when the situation is going to fall apart and turn humiliating.

I feel bad for Mr. Stiff because at some point someone apparently told him that either porn or sex itself is dirty and bad. Every now and then he'll get mad at himself, come in, cancel his account and announce that he's never coming back. He cancelled and re-opened his account so many times at one of our other branches that they told him he couldn't re-open his account any more. Now he comes to us, but he still hates that he does it.

The Symbiots used to freak us out pretty badly. It was a retarded gentleman and his nephew - or, as we feared, his "nephew". They did have IDs with the same last name, but it was a pretty common one and we were worried we had some kind of chickenhawk situation on our hands and didn't know what to do about it. The nephew was too young to go downstairs (it wasn't ridiculously creepy - he was maybe 18 or 19) but was caught down there with the uncle and rousted several times.

The problem with rousting the nephew was that the uncle couldn't pick out porn by himself. Every time they came he went though the entire gay porn section one box at a time. He couldn't remember what he'd seen before. He couldn't remember that you bring up the tags and not the boxes. He couldn't spot the difference between the for sale stuff and the rentals. He couldn't remember that you only get to check out six movies at a time. He only wanted the cheaper old releases, but couldn't distinguish the old and new release sections. It would take him hours and hours, and he usually got something wrong and had to go back down. We actually debated saying screw it and letting the nephew, who was of normal intelligence, go downstairs to expedite things, but our manager nixed it.

Finally he'd get back upstairs. The nephew would help the checkout go smoothly; his job was to make the world easier for the two to negotiate. Then we got to the uncle's half of the relationship: he had the money. He had all the money, and what's more he knew it was the source of his power and kept a pretty tight reign on it. Occasionally the nephew would pick out a video from upstairs, but his uncle had the account, so he had to check it with him first.

The whole thing freaked all of us at the store out very, very badly.

There were a lot of clerkly notes on the file. We didn't know what was going on, just that it was creeping our shit. Were we supposed to do something? There was an ongoing debate as to who was taking advantage of whom.

I served the Symbiots several times and, though nobody at the store agrees with me, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't a sexual relationship. I'm even pretty sure that they really were uncle and nephew. I think they had somehow discovered that they were both gay and formed an interesting team - separately, they couldn't get porn, but together they were unstoppable.

Unfortunately, sometimes our mentally challenged customers cover so well that at first glance they come off as dirtbags. It's hard, in a quick transaction, to tell the difference between someone who is genuinely confused about the rules and someone who's trying to get around them. I usually slip a note on the file suggesting that the customer in question may need some extra assistance, but there's only so much that can do.

It can get frustrating, and I worry that I'm not doing enough. That's why I try to do my best: at least that way whatever else happens, at the end of the day I can rest secure in the knowledge that I have done all I can to make sure that every adult has an equal shot at renting Fuck Pigs 5.

You may be wondering how to scandalize a bunch of jaded porn clerks. I'll give you a hint: it's not with porn.

S. was a weird clerk to work with. For one thing, he was really into 80's hair bands. Also Nickelback, which only really became difficult after, say, the third consecutive round on the CD player. I didn't really mind that so much, though, because not only did S.'s presence drop me down to the rank of second oldest clerk at my store, it also meant that I was only the second least funky. Our store is sort of aggressively funky, but I still felt better being knocked out of the top slot.

But that wasn't the really weird thing. We all have our musical quirks, and tolerate each other's pretty well. What was weird was S.'s Superclerk persona. Like the rest of us, he wasn't at the video store bucking for a management position. He was a computer programmer, having recently graduated from DeVry ("Oh," said my mother, "Then he's really just *sort of* a programmer.") and was looking for a job. The store was pretty cool about keeping him working five shifts a week with the understanding that he'd pretty much drop the job with very little notice once one of his interviews paid off.

So he made no secret of being on his way out, but insisted on playing Superclerk. Actually, he was really more HallMonitorclerk. He'd automatically check the clock to see if other people were on time for their shifts - and in fact he'd even comment on it if I were only on time instead of a few minutes early. Every time I relieved him he'd gleefully show me how many sales he'd made, even though we're not on commission or anything. We don't even really sell people movies except in the sense that we accept money for their purchases.

He'd always bitch when his shift was slow, saying he'd rather keep busy, and took careful notice of who was not as particular as he was with their cleaning assignments. He'd complain when he found little doodles on Post-it notes around the counter - how could the night shift do these damned things when nearly every morning he came in to find the vacuuming below par? He'd get jazzed up about staff meetings for weeks ahead of time.

In short, S. was a nice guy, but an incredible pain in the ass.

A week ago Friday, I got a call at home from Matt, the guy who does all the scheduling. Would I be able to take an extra shift or two?

S. had been arrested.

In the seven months S. had been working at the video store, he had embezzled nearly six thousand dollars. And that's what they can prove - my manager thinks it may have been more like ten thousand.

The managers were all furious - they felt they had basically treated S. like part of the family and he had betrayed their trust. The reaction of the clerks was less visceral, but the same across the board: Wait a minute - if he was already stealing from the store, why did he have to be such a self-righteous prick about the cleaning assignments? It still doesn't make sense.

The bizarre thing is I don't think it was a cover. I'm pretty sure that in his own mind, S. was far and away the best clerk at the store. I don't even think he thought of what he was doing as stealing, and certainly not as grand theft. He was, after all, doing his thieving three bucks at a time.

It wasn't even a programming trick (thus adding credence to my mother's assessment of DeVry...). We're pretty sure he was just telling the customer the prices for their returns (which wouldn't be hard - the same combinations come up a lot) and then zeroing out the numbers in the computer as though they had free rental cards. Then he just pocketed the overage at the end of his shift. It wouldn't be hard, and actually the anal-retentive way the store handbook suggests counting out our drawers facilitates it.

On the other hand, it was really really stupid. It's not like we don't have accountants. It didn't take all that long to notice that S.'s drops averaged anywhere from $50-$100 less than any other clerk working the same shift, or that he gave out way, way more free rentals than anybody else.

I can't believe they waited as long as they did to nail him.

But nail him they did. They had him arrested and cuffed right off the register in the middle of his shift. Pretty hardcore. Apparently his parents are paying back the money he stole (he's in his thirties...) so he'll have a misdemeanor instead of a felony on his record. It's tough to think of many things I'd want to do less than explain to my parents that I'd been arrested for seven months of petty theft.

So S. goes free and the store gets its money back. It's the remaining clerks, of course, who will end up taking the brunt of the fallout. The upstairs security cameras, once aimed so that we had a good view of the hands and faces of people browsing the for-sale movies have been re-aimed. Now they give a good view of the hands of the clerks. I was so insulted by this that I considered walking right off the floor. It's ridiculous. You can see our hands, yes, but it's not like you can tell if someone is zeroing out the prices on the computer screen. The thief-magnet sale racks are now only vaguely visible in the background. Incredible.

We also got a letter in our paychecks from Bob, the owner. It describes the arrest in lascivious detail, then has a message for the rest of us about how he's sure we're all great people with big plans for the future, but he will not hesitate to bust our asses if it turns out we're not.

So there's a bit of a clampdown. Everyone's afraid to give a good customer a break on, say, accidentally bringing up the wrong tag and getting the wrong movie because we know our free rentals are being gone through with a fine-toothed comb. The cameras are always pointed at us and the general managers call about fifteen times a day to make sure everything's OK.

On Tuesday Bob stopped by at 7am - NOT to check up on me, mind you, just because he was in the neighborhood, But while he was there, how was everything going?

S. is truly amazing. He managed to be a pain in the ass one last time.

I caught another jerker in the porn section today. It's amazing - I'm already jaded about it. Part of it was that I just caught him on the security camera, so I had that distance, and he was really more of a stroker than a jerker. I don't think he had come in intending to masturbate - I think he just got aroused by some of the boxes. He had one hand in his sweatpants and was just sort of giving himself the occasional stroke or two as he went along.

Still, discretion doesn't make it OK to whack off in my store. I popped him up for a close-up on the monitor and, yup, that's what he was doing.

I thought about calling the police, then figured screw it. I got on the Voice of God mike and said "Sir, you need to keep both hands where I can see them."

He looked up at the camera, pulled his hand out of his pants, and continued the rest of his porn box perusal whack-free.

As he was leaving the store, I went up to him and said "Next time you don't get a warning - I'm just calling the police." he looked at me and nodded OK. There wasn't any guilt, but there was no defiance either - he'd tried it, I'd caught him fair and square, and we both knew I'd been way nicer about it than I had to be.

To be honest, it made me feel sort of bad-ass to be so calmly and firmly in control of the store. Once I thought about it, I realized that I felt like a jolly, middle-aged madam - ready to take care of my customers' needs in a friendly and straightforward manner, but with a strict policy against taking any guff. Shoot - they're just men. I can handle those whippersnappers.

The store is definitely changing me. I can't tell if that's a good thing or not.

This is the letter we got after S.'s arrest. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

I quote here, of course, for review purposes only.

"To the staff of [My Video Store]

For purposes of clarity, and knowing how stories can change and have a life of their own as they go from person to person, I want everyone to be aware of the basic events that occurred last Friday, May 17th, and company policy pertaining to the issue.

We had reasons to believe there were theft problems at [My Branch]. After careful investigation we had evidence to prove our charges. At about 1:00 p.m., I had an employee arrested and taken to jail for theft at [My Video Store Again]. He was handcuffed, searched, and removed from the [My Branch] store by two officers of the Chicago Police Dept. in the presence of myself, [My Manager], [The Assistant Manager], [A Clerk Who I Wish To God Had Been Me] and an interested customer. Later that evening, after being fingerprinted, photographed, and while still handcuffed, he was presented with the evidence against him. He acknowledged to me, in the presence of a detective, that he was guilty of the charges against him. Rather than risk spending a night at Cook County jail, he contacted his girlfriend and his parents to assist in his release. He was released late that night. Currently there are theft charges pending against him and a court date set for June.

I know, and respect the fact, that we have one of the most well educated and intelligent staffs in the industry. The vast majority of you are idealists full of integrity and cool plans for the future. I will never forget that fact and am sincerely impressed with it.

But for those few less than mediocre souls who are lacking integrity and were mistakenly hired and stay there, the remainder of this letter is strictly for you. Beware, this company policy is rigid:

If anytheft is uncovered it will be documented, and I will contact the appropriate authorities and have the guilty party arrested and taken to the police station for processing. Felony or misdemeanors will be handled with the same degree of attention, potentially resulting in a permanent criminal record.

I will never feel guilty about sending a "wake-up" call in the form of the police, theft should result in arrest. Your choice.

Bob [Last Name]

Several of our straight porn boxes have a cheerful little blue circle on the front. It's designed to look like a sticker and it says "Gaping Asshole Inside!" in the same sort of cheerful font one might use for "Now with more fiber!" or "New fresh scent!"

It is clearly meant to be a feature, a sort of guarantee of quality: whatever else may or may not happen in this film, you are guaranteed at least one gaping asshole. Frequently there is also a gaping asshole holding the box, but that issue is not addressed.

It baffles me.

I understand, on an intellectual level, why porn is so focused on anal sex. It's taboo and a large segment of the female population will have no truck with it. Of course that's what guys, or at least a lot of them, fantasize about. But why even the biggest butt freak in the world would want to hunker down and take a look inside is beyond me.

But porn, or at least the porn we're carrying, is very big on taking cameras up and in and through anywhere they can go.

Part of it is a general gross-out, can-you-top-this thing that seems to be part and parcel of the adult industry - world's biggest cocks, the century's most extreme penetrations. I think part of it is that porn, which doesn't have much in the way of scripting or acting chops to move it along, has to rely on other ways to convey intensity: bigger, harder, faster, freakier. There is a new title in the straight section: V8. The caption says "Four in the ass and four in the pussy!" It was the first box that has given me pause in a while. "Sweet Jesus," I thought, "Where would everyone stand?" Calmer reflection and the laws of physics have convinced me that they can't possibly mean penises, or at least not all at once, but I'm afraid to turn the box over and find out for sure.

I think heavy porn renters must get jaded to watching plain old sex - how could they not? - and that's what leads to the bizarre for its own sake: obesity porn, little person porn, old person porn, bondage porn, foot porn. Double penetration. Cartoonishly huge sex toys. Sticking a camera up someone's urethra. Can it possibly be sexy?

It's easy to dismiss "gaping asshole inside" as just another instance of breaking a woman down into her component parts instead of dealing with the whole being, and I almost did. I mean, ew.

But a part of me thinks it isn't just objectification. I wonder, sometimes, if the appeal of "gaping asshole inside" is one, oddly, of intimacy. Maybe deep in his creepy little social leper soul, what the guy who picks up these boxes really craves is a woman who is so close to him that she will completely open herself to his view, someone who knows and loves him well enough to let him see absolutely everything about her. Maybe these men are looking for an act of trust as much as an act of sex.

On the other hand, maybe they're just dirtbags.

I reached an interesting new level with one of my regulars this week. He's one of my early morning guys. My favorite, in fact.

On weekdays the store opens at 7am, and I've been doing that a lot lately. Mr. Gentle comes in early - not with the first rush that comes when I open the door, but before the on-the-way-to-my-9-to-5 guys. He's quiet. He always comes in not-quite-awake with his coffee and gives me a little wave before he goes downstairs.

He doesn't fuck with the boxes, he doesn't drool over the new releases, he doesn't move the tags around. He just chooses a movie or two and comes back up.

Then he turns in his old tapes (rewound, on time, and clean) and says "How are you?" And means it. He listens when I say "OK," is sensitve to the variation in my tone of voice when I say it on different days, and gives me a genuine answer when I ask him how he is back. He's quite literally softspoken, in deference to the earliness of the hour, I think, and he always says a few kind words about how godawful early I must have had to get up to be there. I like him.

It's sort of soothing to have him come by in the mornings. At least one other clerk has noticed that too - there's a note on his file that says "I wish I could option him to come in instead of some of my other customers."

Mr. Gentle is an academic of some sort. A fair chunk, if not all, of his frequent renting is due to his working on a project about representations of gender in film. It didn't occur to me until I started writing this to wonder if that's true or not, but I think it is. He's clearly both very smart and very well educated, and one day he rather fervently mentioned looking forward to the day he could stop renting all that porn. There was a note of desperation in his voice that I've only heard before from my fellow clerks.

I've asked Mr. Gentle about his project a couple of times, while we're, say, easing into the day by waiting for our ancient Etruscan credit card machine to crank up, but he's pretty vague about it. He's always said something along the lines of "You wouldn't be interested," in a friendly way. He could really mean "you wouldn't be interested" or he could mean "you wouldn't understand". I'm not sure. He's never been condescending about it in any way - as I said, he's always been friendly - but there is as a rule a tacit assumption among most customers that their video clerk has perhaps not been keeping up her subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine. (In all fairness, I haven't.)

Wednesday Mr. Gentle was in and in a fairly bad mood. Not snippy, of course, but definitely unhappy and sort of exhausted. He said he'd just been discussing his paper with someone and was upset because he thought he might have to switch the focus. He couldn't decide whether or not to risk his academic credibility a bit and write for a more popular audience.

"Worked out pretty well for Margaret Mead," I said, and looked up in time to see his head snap up and three thoughts go through his face all at once. The first was the realization that writing for a popular audience had, in fact, brought worldwide fame and respect to Margaret Mead for a solid 50 years. Hmm. Thoughts two and three were, in rapid succession, the realizations that his video clerk had not only just referenced Magaret Mead but seemed to have at least a basic handle on her career.

And suddenly we were friendlier. As I said, he's always been great, so the change was a tiny one. Now we're friendly-friendly instead of transaction-friendly.

He's always been very aware that there was a worthwhile human being behind the counter, it's just that now he's had a hint that there's a brain in the worthwhile human being behind the counter. We chatted more. I recommended an article in Salon, which he wrote down eagerly, then he went away.

Today when he came in instead of hello and isn't it early we talked about the FBI scandal and what we thought the fallout would be.

I was very happy at the new nuance in our customer-clerk relationship. My intellectual vanity is, I think, the personality flaw that I've done the most work on and made the least progress with. I like him. I want him to know I'm smart and trust me to understand what his paper is about, and I like getting to talk to him a little longer in the quiet of the morning.

The downside is that now I seem to make Mr. Gentle a little sad. He seems to be fairly sensitive to nuance himself, and now I think he knows how much I don't want to be there. I want to tell him that it's OK, that things are looking up and even when they're not I'm using it all for writing fodder. But I can't tell him that because, in another nuance, while we are friendlier, we are not friends.

I'm looking forward to the day I can resign now more than ever, and in a new way. There will be a quiet pleasure in telling Mr. Gentle, when he asks, that today I am not just OK.