Adult Video, Route 9

he first customer I see is a beautiful woman with long brown hair, tied loose in a low ponytail. She goes over to the girl-on-girl video section and begins to browse, picking up videos with her long thin hands, peering at covers of women and more women with their legs spread open, displaying their pink vaginas.

“Do you know what defines a Puritan?” Larry asks me, his lips pulled over his missing tooth. His flattish nose flares and his weak chin trembles slightly as he speaks. He balances a cigarette between his lips. “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is happy.” He rocks back on his heels as he finishes the joke.

On the counter in front of Larry are racks of lighters printed with nearly naked girls (Rub the underwear and it disappears). There are some glow-in-the-dark condoms. There are plastic cock rings (“I don’t know why they even make plastic ones,” says a man who comes in with his wife. “The steel ones are the only ones that work.”)

In a little green plastic basket next to the lighters, someone has arranged a clutch of chocolate eggs wrapped in pastel bunny-rabbit foil. But no one ever seems to want one. In the battle between chocolate and sex, the winner is always sex.

Behind Larry, a video plays on an old TV. Naked girls by a swimming pool, plunging their fingers inside each other. Their bathing suit tops are placed carefully next to their bodies, string and triangles woven together.

The shot shifts so we see the backside of a blonde with an ugly face. Her back arches like a tree snapping back and forth in the wind. An endless orgasm. Larry offers me his business card, a white rectangle with his name and the number of the store.

“This state. I tell ya. I was a custodian at U-Mass, before this, with Jerry.” Larry points his thumb to the left, indicating a guy leaning against the counter. “Jerry and me both. We were cited this one time for ‘excessive happiness.’ Isn’t that right, Jerry, isn’t that what they said? ‘Excessive happiness’?”

Jerry nods, his red baseball cap tilting, his Hispanic features pulled into a grin. “Sure was. We was too happy.”

Larry continues: “Let me tell you something that U-Mass should do. Let me just tell you what they need. They need a Sexual Sciences department. Every man should be taught how to give a woman an orgasm. Or a man, or whomever. But I’m telling you. You wonder why there’s so much teen pregnancy. It’s so fucking taboo. It’s not talked about when it matters. If we could just teach basics, like body language, like when you ask your wife ‘Honey, what’s wrong?’ and she says ‘Nothing.’ Well, smart guy, something is definitely wrong.” Larry’s American Spirit cigarette shrinks as he sucks in breaths of nicotine.

Larry is the manager of Adult Video. He seems pretty smart, pretty right-on - and a little creepy. His eyes are weak; a little red around the edges. Their color is nondescript. Heavy eyelids.

Larry muses a little further. “Take your father and your mother for example. Or mine. Or anybody’s. They were probably happy if they achieved orgasm once every thirty years. And they couldn’t get divorced. Not really. But now people can and do, definitely, get divorced all the time. I promise you the divorce rate would fall so fast if a man would give his wife an orgasm. If wives were enjoying sex they’d be digging their claws in so deep they’d never leave their men. How are people ever gonna learn to satisfy each other sexually if they don’t get taught? Someone needs to be telling women: this is how you rub the penis. Men: this is where the clitoris is. Porn can show that. It can be a learning manual.”

A kid, seventeen, eighteen, walks in. “Larry, where’s the unemployment office?”

“I’m talking to somebody, have Jerry tell ya.”

Jerry looks up from his post where he is doing nothing. “Of course the Puerto Rican knows where the unemployment office is, huh, Larry?”

Larry laughs with his mouth open. I can see his fillings and his thick pink tongue. He licks his lips as he finishes his laugh. Jerry has taken the kid outside to point him in the right direction.

“If you look way back in the Bible, to versions that aren’t as manipulated as they are today, sex is mentioned. It’s not taboo. In some version, I forget which, Christ is even married.

“My God loves all of us. None of this twisted Puritanical bullshit. Did you see the sign outside the door when you came in - ‘Backwards Superstitions Forbidden Beyond this Point’? My God’s a humorous guy. Anybody that would put the human recreation center and the town dump right next to each other is looking for a good laugh.

“And separation between Church and State? That’s the biggest laugh of all. We’ve still got draconian laws in the Third Millennium. “I’m scared,” Larry says. “Personally. I’m scared. Especially with this administration. John Ashcroft and his freaky religion being in charge, gearing up to prosecute. It’s the fucking scariest thing I’ve ever heard. Right now the big thing on their agenda is getting rid of the poo-poo videos.”

“Poo-poo videos?” I ask.

“Here, I’ll show ya.” Larry walks around the counter and takes me to the far right corner of the tiny store. “These here. See?” There are pictures of men and women pissing and shitting into each other’s mouths. “They’re all German. You can’t make them in the US, but you can sell them. So, we sell them because there are people who want them. Usually the same people all the time. And they’ll come in and rent all of them, eight videos in one night and bring them back the next day and that’s it. And then a month later they come back and do it again. I don’t judge, ya know. It’s whatever they want to do. I don’t care. I mean, I care but… Bestiality is illegal, so we don’t have that and we don’t have children younger than 18.”

I mention that the video Braces Covered in Cum had girls on the cover that looked as if they were 15. Larry looks me straight in the eye. “I don’t control the industry.”

Massachusetts has tough laws. The Commonwealth just passed a law a couple years ago that porn shops can’t be within 1000 yards of any mall, church, school, hospital or place where young people congregate. A bike trail runs behind Adult Video. The trail’s considered a place where young people congregate, but since the store was already there, it was grandfathered.

“But,” says Larry, “say we closed down and another porn store wanted to open up business right here. They wouldn’t be able to because of those laws. It’s just so stupid. As if any of it is gonna make the porn industry stop producing. You know how many videos the industry puts out a year? Ten thousand. And that’s a low estimate, if you ask me. Hollywood? They put out 400. And I’d bet you that the porn ones are more widely watched. I’ve heard figures that say the porn industry is bigger than all the American sports put together.”

More people are coming in now, and Larry’s getting busy. The store has maybe ten people in it, but it’s small, so it’s full. I tell Larry I’ll come back when it’s not so busy. He thanks me for talking to him. He says it’s important that the word gets out there about porn. I should tell my friends to come.

I am tired as I leave, almost as tired, perhaps, as the girls by the pool whose orgasms have gone on for over an hour. At the door, there’s a basket full of magazines that have been damaged. They are free and I take one called Tight on my way out. Once past the heavy metal door (it used to be glass, but people threw bricks, shot BB guns), the sun blinds me. There’s a picnic table near the entrance, and I sit down in the sunlight.

Outside the store, someone has placed a row of wooden pots filled with pale, dying plants. In some of them, silver pinwheels spin in the winter wind. Gaudy plastic and metallic lights hang from the shingled roof. It’s like a third-rate Vegas.

I open up Tight to a girl who looks no older than my seventh grade sister. I’ve been desensitized by an afternoon of porn, but the picture is still hard to look at. The girl’s legs are spread and white panties dangle from her young ballerina’s foot. She’s pretty, with stylish glasses. A plaid skirt lies at her feet. Beside her picture, it says “Jessica, age 18, virgin, Daddy’s little girl.” There’s a story written as if it were a page from Jessica’s diary about how she went away with her stepfather to look at colleges and he raped her. He raped her and she enjoyed it. Immensely.

She looks at me in the sunlight, her green eyes almost the same color as my own. Her mouth is plump and pouting. I almost cry.

Jesse, a 23-year-old woman who works at Adult Video, says she’s rarely uncomfortable at her job. Other than the one time when a guy asked her what she would do for a hundred dollars. And that one other time when someone asked her if he could jack off in the corner. She has been there for six months. In October, she had come in with her husband as a customer, and when she saw the ‘Help Wanted’ sign by the cash register, her mind flickered nervously past the idea. It was actually her husband’s idea that she interview. Larry loved her open attitude, her friendly demeanor, her easy smile. He knew she would bring some much-needed light into the store.

Jesse, a newlywed, was desperate for a job. She had recently “taken a break” from her studies at Worcester State. The first time she saw a porno was in her freshman year of college. Her friends had dragged her to Gala Video, a local porn store, and she had giggled at the crude pictures, at the gay men having sex. But she had always been curious about bondage, so she picked a bondage video. She liked it more than she expected to. These days, she and her husband watch a lot of bondage videos together, and she says she’s interested in the culture of bondage and sadomasochism.

Her first day on the job felt strange, but, she says, she’s begun to really appreciate her work. Many of the customers know her name; they joke with her and sometimes they stay and talk.

“Not just about porn,” she says. “This isn’t some cesspool of pornography and sex. We are regular people with regular conversations. This might as well be Seven-Eleven.” Larry had said the same thing. “I wouldn’t be undressing you with my eyes,” he’d said, “if I worked in Seven-Eleven, and I’m not doing that here.”

Jesse thinks she can change the way people look at pornography and sex. She wants to make it from something dirty into something that people enjoy and share with their loved ones. “I wish more men shared their interest in porn with their wives. It shouldn’t be a replacement for your wife, but a mutual thing. I bet that most wives would be down for it. At least they’d rather be involved than not involved. Some men ask me for advice. As long as the conversation seems respectful, I love helping. So many men complain that they can’t get their women off. I can kind of suggest things, or suggest some porn they can watch together. I try to help.” She pauses. “Oh! This funny story. Well, not funny, really. But it shows how you can really make a difference. This guy in a wheelchair used to come in all the time. And we talked, just small talk, and this one day, I just had to ask. I put it tactfully. I asked him ‘So… does it work?’ And he laughed and said it did but that if he doesn’t, you know… work the muscle… then it’s gonna lose its… well… ability to work… so he has to make himself get erections. He was single, so it was his only way and he said he was getting tired of it. Well, anyway… I ended up suggesting he get a penis pump because that gets you hard without having to really do anything. So he got one and he hasn’t come back since. It must be working!”

Jesse’s interest in her job and in helping people is genuine. She’d make a good teacher or doctor. She’s helping people, but in her own way. “I’m also expanding our selections. I want some more soft porn, because women don’t just like the sex and then more sex and then - cut to next scene - more sex. And we need more gay male videos, all of ours are the same.” She says her parents know she works a video store, but they haven’t been filled in on the specifics. Her friends love her job. They all received very fun toys for Christmas.

Larry hired Jesse as a way to make female customers feel more comfortable buying porn. It seems to be working. Adult Video has seen a steady increase in female customers and couples since Jesse’s joined the store. “At first, they came in packs, full carloads, and they’d be joking and giggling and screaming bloody murder when they got to the poo-poo videos. Now individual housewives are coming in, that’s the greatest. They’re just nervous as hell. They park in front of the market and come over here and are just shaking when they walk in the door. My job is to make them feel comfortable once they get in. I can’t control how much they sweat in the parking lot.”

Unlike Larry and Chris, Jesse says hello when people come in. She asks if she can help them. She shows people different kinds of toys - dildos, vibrators, pocket pussies - and explains how to use them. She offers recommendations, and she’s sensitive to people’s budgets. She goes through her sales pitch with me, dusting off the plastic toy packages with the hem of her t-shirt as she talks.

“Women always go to the toys first, while men go to the videos and they barely even look at the dildos and stuff,” she remarks. I point to a package of Nipple Clamps and ask “Do those really feel good?” Jesse peers at me over her glasses. “Honey, they feel goo-od.”

Our conversation drifts back to the customers. Jesse says they get every type of person, except for old ladies. She has yet to see an old woman come in. As she says this, a sixty-year-old woman walks in the door, looks around nervously, her head shaking like a rabbit, and mumbles “Sorry, I’m just trying to pay my…” and shuffles out the door.

Jesse laughs good-naturedly. “How ironic! People pay their phone bills and electric bills next door at the Asian food market, so sometimes people mess up. This one woman, very nicely dressed, in her fifties, came in and shrieked once, just this awful high-pitched noise, and ran out. Her husband was behind her and he peeked in, saw the mistake she’d made, and apologized. She came in later with her groceries and her husband, and she apologized to me for making a scene.”

I ask Jesse if anything disturbs her about pornography. She pauses and looks around to see if any customers with potentially disturbing fetishes are within earshot. “Well… see.. a perk of having this job is that I get free rentals - my husband loves that - and sometimes I rent things just out of curiosity, just for the hell of it, and well … I rented this one video - Skinny Skinny Minis - and it was these girls, honey, I cannot even explain to you how skinny they were - just skeletons with skin pulled over their rib cages and their pelvis bones and their butts… there were just no butts... just so unhealthy and… Who likes that? Seeing such unhealthy… Christ.” She pauses and I wait for her to continue. “I mean, but who am I to say that… ‘cause I’m into bondage. I mean, I like all that romantic girly stuff too, but I love bondage. The toys, the videos… and some people can’t stomach that at all.” She pauses, thinks for a second, maybe she senses my next question. “And yes. The young young girls, they bother me too. But that’s part of the game and I just hope that they know what they’re…” She trails off.

We’ve been talking a while. I ask Jesse if she considers herself a feminist. She’s a smart woman and she asks me what I mean by feminist. I stumble through an explanation and she takes my awkward definition in stride. “Yes. I do. I am a feminist. But it’s complicated.”