Recap of my first week

(Friday, June 5, 1998)

Okay, I’ll admit it. In theory working overnights at a porn-store-head-shop sounded fantastic. I usually stay up late all the time anyway and it can’t be that hard to sit behind a glass counter and sell smut. But after staying up all night and sleeping during the day for a week in preparation for my first overnight shift, and after living this schedule while working, my body is telling me something is wrong.

The first rule I learned on the second day of staying up all night was to go to sleep as early as possible. Don’t stay up until 2 p.m. and attempt to sleep until 10 p.m. for your 11 p.m. shift. I don’t care how early you’ve had to wake up in the morning, attempting to convince your body that 10 p.m. is the appropriate time to begin your day is damn-near impossible. Once you make it out of your bed, which is an event in itself, you’ll quickly find that your legs don’t want to work, it’s very easy to fall back asleep in the shower and that a double cheeseburger combo meal is the absolute worst thing to eat right after waking up.

But let’s start with my first night at southern Minnesota’s finest place to buy porn, a hash pipe or jerk off to a dirty movie in your own private booth during any time of the day or night. Before starting work, I had only visited the place a handful of times. My pot smoking days were over and thanks to the recent advancement of the internet, paying for pornography seemed completely antiquated. My friends joked frequently about how working there would be the perfect college job. Working overnight would free your days for classes, there would be plenty of down-time to study and you could kick out any customer that got on your nerves. While all of this turned out to be true, the reality wasn’t nearly as exciting once the novelty wore off.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect during my first shift training all night with a seasoned overnight clerk, so I brought a lunch, a few books and an optimistic attitude. At 10:45 p.m. I opened the store’s door and the brightness of the fluorescent lights burned into my psyche like a powerful pornographic messiah and it took a few seconds to get my bearings and finally introduce myself.

I had never wondered what Darth Vader would sound like if he were a morbidly obese male, but meeting my trainer Bill gave me a pretty good idea of what this would be like in real life. This 400+ pound idiot deserves a separate entry completely dedicated to his comical and amazing habits, but for now I’ll say that training with him was probably one of the most amusing experiences of my life.

Overall, working the overnight shift is pretty basic. The main priority is keeping an eye on the customers. Not to assist them, but to make sure they’re not stealing anything. Suffice it to say that customer service is not one of the priorities in a setting like this. Bill made it perfectly clear that you can’t trust ANYONE, and always makes special effort to keep a close eye on anyone who looks Mexican or gay.

Next in order of importance is keeping an eye on the security screen that monitors the video booth hallway. This is essential because some of the customers will try to sneak into each other’s video booths to have sex with each other. It’s also important to listen carefully, since the experienced video patrons know we have a security camera up and will slide under the booth walls, across the cum-stained floors to jerk and/or suck each other off. I’m still not sure what the appeal of this is, but it’s pretty amusing catching someone, literally, with their pants down. Bill seems to take special pride in this aspect of his job, yelling at people as he ushers them out the door and telling them they’re no longer welcome to masturbate in our private video booths.

Next on the list is making sure the videos for the video booths are up and running. There are 30 VCRs set on repeat that often overheat, turn themselves off and need to be reset. Resetting them involves taking apart the VCRs and cleaning the video head manually with a paper towel and bottle of video head cleaner. Since we’re already selling head cleaner to the video booth customers, better known as Rush inhalant, there’s always a fresh supply to use for keeping the VCRs running. After giving myself an accidental and extremely unpleasant “Rush” while cleaning one of the VCRs (more on this later), I really wonder why anyone would put themselves through this experience intentionally. Then again, I wasn’t on my hands and knees, masturbating while licking other people’s cum off the floor at the time, so maybe I missed the something about experience.

Last on the list, and only so because you can really only do it when there aren’t any customers in the store, is the once-a-shift cleaning. There are the normal retail cleaning duties, mopping the floor, cleaning the glass displays, organizing the merchandise, but with one crucial addition, the video jerk-off booths must be cleaned. I was somewhat relieved to learn that this process involves everything being sprayed liberally with ammonia and then wiped clean with disposable paper towels. As I got ready to help with the cleaning, I put on the shoulder length rubber gloves, but Bill decided that he didn’t need anything covering his hands… nor did he feel the need to wash his hands after the cleaning was finished.

As gross as the last duty sounds, the great this about this job is that the cleaning only takes about an hour of the shift and after about 2 a.m., no one comes in and I’m free to do just about anything. Bill said that reading during your shift was frowned upon, so I left my books in my bag after we were done cleaning and spent two hours trying to make small talk with this wonderfully disturbing man-child until people started coming in again around 6 a.m.

There’s really too much ground to cover in a single entry, so I’ll focus my writing from now on, on specific topics, subjects or events. My only hope is that the strange stuff that happens doesn’t become too commonplace that I decide not to document it.