(Friday, June 12, 1998)
One of the strangest things about adult bookstores, particularly ones on the edges of towns, is the concept of a video booth. Here, individuals can enter a semi-private stall to watch dirty movies for $.25 a minute while jerking off.
Even as a clerk at a porn store who understands how much money these booths bring in, this concept seems strange to me. Don’t get me wrong. When I was a teenager, I masturbated all the time and having a socially acceptable place to do it in public would have seemed like heaven when I was 14. By the time I was 18, I’d learned to use more restraint and the idea of watching dirty movies alongside 8 other guys with nothing but black-painted particleboard between us seems… yucky.
As the overnight clerk, one of my main responsibilities is to clean the video booths once a shift. It sounds grosser than it is. I have thick, rubber gloves that go up to my armpits and spray the walls liberally with ammonia before scrubbing them down. Other than that, it’s just mopping the floor that happened to be covered in cum. But still, this is the only real work the job requires me to do and this particular part is over in less than a half-hour. When I talk to friends who spend long hours in hot kitchens, waiting tables or working on assembly lines, even with the jizz mopping, this job seems pretty sweet.
(Editor’s note: To this day, the smell of ammonia brings me back to sitting in a fluorescent dump in the middle of the night, waiting for 6 a.m. to roll around.)
As you might expect (or maybe not, I expect most people’s minds don’t work this way), one of the biggest problems of having video booths is that some men will use the location to attempt to have sex with other random men. This is Mankato, which doesn’t have a gay bar or any other gay locale other than the college SAGE organization for gay and transgender students and their supporters. Unfortunately, because of the lack of a better option, some people use the video booths for random ‘romantic’ interludes. I’m responsible for paying attention to the security camera screen that broadcasts what was going on in the hallway of the video booth room. Some of the regular “patrons” discovered that there was a video camera in the hallway and in an attempt cheat the system, try to sneak to the booths next to them by sliding on the semen-covered floor.
Because of this, I have to constantly be listening for the sound of clothing sliding across linoleum, louder than normal grunts or the clang of a belt buckle hitting the floor.
I’ll admit it. When I first started, it was a rush to run in with a huge mag-lite and catch a guy on all fours trying to jerk off the guy in the booth next to him. Patrons caught in this position seem to fly straight up into the air when the light hits them, despite being on all fours, like a cat being tossed into a boiling hot bathtub. I’ve also seen guys damn-near knock themselves out when they realized they were busted, stood up quickly and ran face-first into solid plywood.
Very funny, but also pretty sad. I try really hard to think that the guys I catch aren’t sexual deviants, that they’re just lonely and this is the only way they feel they can act on their sexuality. But deep in my heart I know that the Gay 90s is only a 90-minute drive away and that if they really wanted a meaningful relationship, they wouldn’t be searching for it the back of a store that sells 10 different styles of nipple rings.
A friend joked about how funny it would be if I went to check on the booths, only to have a 350-pound gorilla of a man come out and beat the crap out of me. I fail to see the humor in this, but it did make me pay closer attention to who was going in and out of the booths.
Knowing this insider information, you may ask why a business owner would put up with this kind of activity at their store. It’s a simple matter of money.
On a slow week, the booths bring in $1,000 a week.
This means that the whole video booth computer system paid for itself in less than a year! (Yes, the whole thing is run by a computer hooked into the VCRs.) Additionally, the movies played on the 30 available channels are movies that come directly from the store’s stock, so there’s no need to buy movies extra moves for the booths. The manager just needs to look at the weekly view report, find which movies were most popular and stock up the rest of the channels with similar movies.
I was honestly surprised to learn how many “genres” of porn exist. For the booths, channels one through ten are 6-hour heterosexual scene compilation tapes. These are great because they take longer to play through, there’s less rewind and replay cycles, and the VCRs don’t need to be restarted as often as the ones playing shorter tapes. Channels 11 through 15 are always lesbian videos and always the least popular channels. The store manager is able to choose what to play on channels 16 through 19, which means they were usually the strangest fetish tapes he could find in the store’s selection of videos. While we originally put them on as a joke, the report showed that videos like Ragtime (women having sex during their monthly period), the World of Denni-O (videos of extremely large dildo penetration) and any number of bondage videos were very popular and making us the most money after the gay videos. Finally, channels 20 through 30 are gay and also always the most popular (the look I received from Bill when I asked why more channels weren’t gay discouraged me asking this question again.)
This does bring up the point of copyright control. Most adult movies have the standard FBI warning we’ve all seen that explains this video is for personal use only and that you cannot charge people to watch it. Charging people $.25 a minute to watch porn in a video booth is in direct violation of this law, but I have yet to hear of an adult video company cracking down on adult bookstores for engaging in this practice. Maybe the video companies don’t care about this copyright violation, I expect they know it’s happening all over the place, but I don’t expect them to make an effort to enforce their rights anytime soon. What a great business to get into when you can (albeit illegally) make money from someone else’s “hard” work?
I can’t imagine what kind of cash a larger store like Sexworld in Minneapolis brings in with their video booths. Then again, I expect downtown Minneapolis’ warehouse district provides a lot more colorful clientele than the porn store on the edge of a college town.
It never ceases to amaze me what people will pay money to do.
Showing posts with label Mankato. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mankato. Show all posts
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
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.
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.
My First Night
(Sunday, May 31, 1998)
I should be excited about tonight, my first overnight training shift at the porn store, but to be honest, I’m just tired. I stayed up all night the past few days in hopes of avoiding being exhausted for my first shift, but tonight, I just feel like the change in sleep schedule is catching up with me.
So, I’m tired, grumpy and it’s depressing. Part of me feels like I’m going to young-male Disneyland, but the rest of me has no idea what to expect and just wants to go to bed.
Ever since I got the job offer, I’ve been telling everyone about my new job. The reaction has either been one of disgust (most casual acquaintances) and jealousy (pretty much all of my friends), but only time will tell who is right.
What does one do in an adult bookstore for an eight hour shift? I guess I’m about to find out.
I should be excited about tonight, my first overnight training shift at the porn store, but to be honest, I’m just tired. I stayed up all night the past few days in hopes of avoiding being exhausted for my first shift, but tonight, I just feel like the change in sleep schedule is catching up with me.
So, I’m tired, grumpy and it’s depressing. Part of me feels like I’m going to young-male Disneyland, but the rest of me has no idea what to expect and just wants to go to bed.
Ever since I got the job offer, I’ve been telling everyone about my new job. The reaction has either been one of disgust (most casual acquaintances) and jealousy (pretty much all of my friends), but only time will tell who is right.
What does one do in an adult bookstore for an eight hour shift? I guess I’m about to find out.
An Introduction
As an avid fan of the History and Discovery Channels, I’ve learned that mankind has had porn from just about the time we could write on cave walls. Drugs, or at least efforts to alter our consciousness, have been around even longer. I feel the need to point this out before the reader goes any further. It’s very easy to look at porn stores and head shops as beacons of vice that should be eradicated off the face of the earth. However, from a historical standpoint, it’s fairly obvious that any attempt at outlawing any product simply creates an underground market for it.
I’ll freely admit that sale of these items does have a tendency to attract the underbelly of society. That’s one of the reasons why these stories are so amusing. Anyone who’s been at a bar at closing time has seen this too. It just comes with the territory of mind-altering products and I’ve chosen to view these incidents as amusing, rather than shameful. If each of us takes a look at our own experiences, we’ll each find embarrassing experiences on drugs or alcohol that we’d prefer weren’t told.
This is not academically-based, non-fiction and since the action takes place in adult bookstores, it will be easy to be judgmental towards the wide variety of clientele that come through the doors. Yes, there are people who are mentally ill and addicted to sex that frequent porn stores simply looking for anything to fuck. But on the other hand, I met a lot of sincere individuals and couples that came into the store honestly looking for some tools to make their loving connections stronger and more exciting. There are two sides to every story and while the content may focus on the freaks and weirdoes (they tend to be more entertaining), know that not everyone who shops at adult bookstores is the type of person who would, given the chance, violate you with a turkey baster.
I use to feel conflicted when I worked at the adult bookstore/head shop in a small, Minnesota college town. There were lots of people coming in to buy pipes that looked like they should be spending this time getting their lives in order. And since this town didn’t have a safe and accepted gay hangout, lots of young, gay guys would troll the back video booths, looking for a “date.”
But life is about choices and the fact that Mankato didn’t have decent outlets for the young people who live there, nor a gay bar or social club to allow homosexuals to meet new people in a non-sexually deviant environment isn’t the fault of the store. We provided goods that people were looking for and this, my friends, is how America works.
It’s unfortunate that compulsive people have based their lives around drug use or random sexual encounters with strangers, but you might as well ban alcohol or casual sex based on these factors. The majority of customers weren’t coming in everyday and weren’t trying to hump each other in the back.
Sit back, relax and have some fun taking a look at the strange things that happen when you sell “tobacco” supplies and mature content.
I’ll freely admit that sale of these items does have a tendency to attract the underbelly of society. That’s one of the reasons why these stories are so amusing. Anyone who’s been at a bar at closing time has seen this too. It just comes with the territory of mind-altering products and I’ve chosen to view these incidents as amusing, rather than shameful. If each of us takes a look at our own experiences, we’ll each find embarrassing experiences on drugs or alcohol that we’d prefer weren’t told.
This is not academically-based, non-fiction and since the action takes place in adult bookstores, it will be easy to be judgmental towards the wide variety of clientele that come through the doors. Yes, there are people who are mentally ill and addicted to sex that frequent porn stores simply looking for anything to fuck. But on the other hand, I met a lot of sincere individuals and couples that came into the store honestly looking for some tools to make their loving connections stronger and more exciting. There are two sides to every story and while the content may focus on the freaks and weirdoes (they tend to be more entertaining), know that not everyone who shops at adult bookstores is the type of person who would, given the chance, violate you with a turkey baster.
I use to feel conflicted when I worked at the adult bookstore/head shop in a small, Minnesota college town. There were lots of people coming in to buy pipes that looked like they should be spending this time getting their lives in order. And since this town didn’t have a safe and accepted gay hangout, lots of young, gay guys would troll the back video booths, looking for a “date.”
But life is about choices and the fact that Mankato didn’t have decent outlets for the young people who live there, nor a gay bar or social club to allow homosexuals to meet new people in a non-sexually deviant environment isn’t the fault of the store. We provided goods that people were looking for and this, my friends, is how America works.
It’s unfortunate that compulsive people have based their lives around drug use or random sexual encounters with strangers, but you might as well ban alcohol or casual sex based on these factors. The majority of customers weren’t coming in everyday and weren’t trying to hump each other in the back.
Sit back, relax and have some fun taking a look at the strange things that happen when you sell “tobacco” supplies and mature content.
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