*Everything in this story is 100% true except proper names of people and business entities. Content may not be safe for work or for delicate sensibilities.
In 1993 I was 24 years old and answered a classified ad for a cashier job at an adult bookstore. At my interview I was told that the previous clerk had been fired after Wichita police — apparently insufficently occupied with the city’s then-ongoing crack-driven gang wars — staged a sting operation in which they sent a bearded 17-year-old into the store to buy a nudie magazine. The clerk made the sale, in violation of a state law which requires one to be 18 years of age before purchasing such materials, and that was the end of his employment with Aphrodite’s Toybox.
As a former liquor store clerk and bartender, I was more than familiar with the process of checking IDs; I told the man as much and was hired. Just a couple days later I went to work full-time, 40 hours a week, at $4.25 an hour.
At first I worked the evening shift, which ran 4:00 pm to midnight, at the store on South Broadway, in between Bosley’s Tire Super Store and the mysterious hidden neighborhood known locally as “The Hole.” Aphrodite’s had three locations in town, all overseen by the person who had interviewed me, a heavyset middle-aged man named George with a neat beard and a permanently harried disposition. He was a nice enough guy, but if you screwed up, he would give you a thorough ass-chewing — though never any more than you deserved. I liked him.
One afternoon I came in and George was sweating bullets. The boys from headquarters, located in a bigger city one state over, had come down to squeeze him because they suspected his wife was horning in on their action with her home-based lingerie business, which in reality was something she had started to sew up custom bras and support wear for women who had undergone mastectomies — not at all the kind of flimsy sub-Frederick’s-of-Hollywood stuff sold in our chain of smut shops. I didn’t understand why he was so nervous until later that evening, when I mentioned it to a co-worker.
“Oh yeah, this place is totally run by mobsters,” my colleague told me straight out. “Didn’t you ever wonder why our paychecks come from something called BXQ Amalgamated Limited?” I had to admit that I hadn’t.
After that I paid closer attention during the regular visits from this big fat loudmouth kid named Steve — reputedly the son of the “big boss” — who came down from HQ each and every week in a different very expensive late-model car. He would pore over the store’s ledgers, inspect bank deposit records and even brought a goon with him to count the tokens from the video booths. A longtime employee named Gordon, an older hippie type who lived in a remote trailer house in the country and considered himself a Druid, warned me to stay on my toes: “If you’re one quarter short on tokens, they’ll take you in the back room and turn your pockets out, my friend.”
But I never had any trouble with Steve, and I found the job on the whole to be as tolerable as one could reasonably expect any minimum wage position to be. Mostly I sat on a stool behind the counter renting pornographic VHS tapes to customers, and selling them dildos, personal lubricant, toy handcuffs lined with fake fur, butt plugs and all manner of vibrating objects. There was some minor accounting at the end of each shift and a fair amount of restocking videotapes — but I got to take home all the porno movies I wanted for free, so long as I brought them back.
Just as had been my experience working at bars and liquor stores, I quickly became familiar with numerous customers who came in on a regular basis. One was an old friend from high school — in another town 50 miles away, no less — who I hadn’t seen in years. He got a panicked look in his eyes and visibly blushed when he placed a stack of dirty movies on the counter in front of me for the first time. Other friendly patrons would ask for viewing recommendations, or to be informed if a movie came in starring a specific performer. In that way it was like any other mom-and-pop store, and I actually got pretty comfortable there in short order.
After a few months, the assistant manager, a younger fedora-wearing stoner guy named Alan with a blonde mullet and a laugh like Pauly Shore, asked me if I would take over night shifts at the store way out on West Kellogg. He sweetened the deal with the promise of a shift differential in pay — an extra 25¢ an hour. And so the next week I started showing up at midnight and working til 8:00 in the morning at the location just west of the airport on the big highway.
The best part about the third shift was that its pace was relaxed in the extreme. I could sometimes go two or three or more hours without a single customer, and I occupied my time reading the entire original run of James Bond paperbacks and calling Orin Friesen on KFDI-AM to request old hillbilly tunes. I was making a little more money, too, and I really didn’t mind the hours. The worst hassles I had with customers were minor — occasional visits from drunken teenagers and, creepier, middle-aged married men who would stand at the counter and talk me up for long stretches of time, hoping in vain for a chance to fellate me.
But there was a downside, too — third shift was cleanup shift.
The west shop was comprised of a couple big long main rooms arranged with display shelves like any other video rental store, a room off to the side filled with toys and accessories, a video peep show area hidden around a dark corner and, down a long hallway, a series of six small viewing rooms, in each of which one could sit on a love seat and watch a rented videotape right there in the store. The retail areas were a breeze to clean, but the sections of the store dedicated to actual viewing were, on a number of levels, more challenging.
The video peep show room was always kept very dark and consisted of a row of individual stalls, as in a men’s room, only instead of a toilet or urinal, each of these bays had inside it a small video screen and outside it a curtain to separate the occupant from the open walkway behind them. Someone had cut gloryholes in the dividers between a few of the booths but management, leery of being hassled by law enforcement, had screwed sheet aluminum plates over them. Tokens purchased at the front counter turned on the screens, each of which displayed a selection of about a dozen different porn videos that played on endless loops; the patron had a button to choose which one they wanted to watch. I think a quarter bought something like maybe two minutes? It wasn’t much time, for sure.
The most regular user of these booths on my shift was a gentleman in his 60s who came in almost literally every morning that I worked. He would pull into the parking lot around 7:00 am in his crisp red Cadillac with the Shriner front license plate and walk in dressed for an office job, with a jacket and tie, fresh shave, trimmed white mustache, waft of aftershave, wedding ring.
“Well, good morning!” he would boom cheerfully, giving a wave. He would place a dollar on the counter and I would give him four tokens and he would go back there for a few minutes and then walk back out. “Have a great day, young man!” he would say loudly on his way out. I wondered what would happen if his wife ever followed him to work. Would she be upset to find out about his morning ritual? Or perhaps relieved?
At any rate, he might have been the most regular guy I saw using the viewing booths, but he sure as hell wasn’t the only one. At cleanup time each night there would be numerous crusty wads of tissue not only in the wastebaskets and on the floor, but stuck to the walls, too. There were semen splatters everywhere one might look, as if some of these guys had been shooting for distance. And of course, there was always dried jizz plastered all over the screens, often to the point of obscuring the videos. These deposits appeared in a remarkable range of viscosity, texture and degrees of desiccation, each requiring its own removal strategy.
To that end I was equipped with thick rubber gloves that literally went up to my elbows, several extremely dangerous chemical cleaning solutions and one of those remote extension grabber claw things to pick up the tissues off the floor. The smell in there was an almost overpowering juxtaposition of the earthy, tangy musk of stale semen against the acrid, synthetic, headache-inducing haze of solvent vapor. I have to admit I probably did this portion of my duties with more emphasis on speed than thoroughness.
But perhaps more problematic when it came to cleanup time were the individual viewing rooms, which offered customers more privacy and control over the viewing material.
Here’s how they worked:
A customer would browse our selection of videotapes, bring their selection to the counter and pay to watch it in-store. I would then assign them to one of the six numbered rooms — let’s say it was a guy and he brought up “Bun Busters No. 1” and paid the six bucks, so I would send him to room number four. I would pop the tape into one of the six VCRs mounted behind the counter and it would automatically start playing. Meanwhile, in Room 4 — which by the way was maybe about eight feet square — the guy would sit on the love seat, door closed, with a pretty big CRT television set on a stand in front of him. To his right on the wall were two controls for the video: one a volume knob, the other a fast-forward button. He was allowed to neither pause the video, nor rewind it.
Back up at the front counter I could hear when someone was fast-forwarding a tape, and I had a little screen to monitor what any of the six VCRs may have been playing at any given time. Sometimes when bored I would look over to see what was being fast-forwarded through. Was the customer just skipping time-wasting expositional dialogue, or were they turned off by the action or performers in this specific scene? I never judged, of course.
One brutally stormy night the only customer I had was a guy in his 30s who came in wearing a long, buttoned-up trench coat. He chose a movie, went back to the room to watch it, then came out and picked another movie, which he watched in the same private room. He stayed through much of my shift that night, renting and watching one video after another before stumbling off into the dawn. When I went in after him to tidy the room he had occupied for hours, I was surprised to find a 12-pack box of Milwaukee’s Best beer, with all of its dozen cans emptied and neatly placed back inside, just as it had been packed at the factory. As a bonus there was a 13th empty in the wastebasket. This guy had snuck in not just a whole 12-pack of beer, but also one more in his pocket — and then drank them all in the dark while watching porn in an adult bookstore on the outskirts of Wichita. I didn’t know whether to be impressed or depressed.
Among the things I found in these rooms most frequently were underwear, more of the ubiquitous crusty tissues, used condoms and their discarded wrappers. And then there was the night I walked into one of the private rooms and found on top of the television set a rather huge open jar of Vaseline, its lid sitting next to it and a giant paw-shaped scoop missing from its slippery contents.
But the single most notable experience I had during my brief tenure at Aphrodite’s Toybox came on a lovely cool autumn night. I had the store’s two front doors propped open in hopes of exchanging some of the stale, stank air inside the building for even just a little breath of the lush, fresh outdoors. The clock on the wall said it was a bit after 5:00 am when I heard the clattering diesel of a big truck pulling into the parking lot.
Now this was nothing unusual — the store was right on a major interstate and lonely/horny truckers made up a significant percentage of our customer base at this location. Sure enough, a minute later, a man sauntered in, stretching his arms and stifling a yawn.
“Good morning,” I said with a smile.
“G’mornin’,” he replied with a slight lilting drawl, walking casually up to the counter.
He was a man of probably 40 years, with chestnut hair that stuck out from under the edges of a foam-front gimme cap advertising a feed store. He wore overalls over a dark t-shirt and under a light blue windbreaker. His face was stubbled enough that it was hard to tell if it was the beginnings of an intentional beard or a merely a gap in maintenance. I wondered how long he had been sitting behind the wheel without a break.
“Say,” he continued, “do y’all happen to have any of them there blow-up women?”
“Uh, yes, we sure do,” I replied, a bit taken aback at the stark bravura of his query. I pointed him to the toys & accessories room off to the side. “Right through there. Let me know if you need any help or have any questions.”
The trucker thanked me and walked into the side room and started comparing products. I watched him for a minute in the convex mirror mounted up on the wall for purposes of theft prevention, but he didn’t seem like he was there to steal any dildos.
It was then, as he perused our inventory, that I first detected the odor. It had the distinct fetor of death, the mephitic funk of a roadkilled deer bloating like a giant furry basketball on the side of a Kansas county highway in July. But where was it coming from? I walked up to the front and stuck my head out of the building into the parking lot. The stench was definitely coming from out there.
And then I saw it. The trucker had parked his rig parallel to the road out front, all the way across the lot from the store. It was a big dump truck, and sticking out of the top of its hopper I could see numerous sets of hooves. The thing was apparently full of dead livestock. My stomach heaved a little as I quickly pulled out the doorstops and shut the doors.
Just as I got back to the counter the trucker came up with a box, inside which was our most expensive sex doll. It was a hybrid model of sorts, part inflatable and part squishy foam-like substance, made to resemble a pretty blonde woman, but one with dead eyes and a mouth shaped like an O that never closed and a removable vaginal insert that I imagined one could clean in the sink in any truck stop men’s room.
“So, what do you grease these things up with?” the man asked, looking me directly in the eye.
“Well,” I replied, pointing him back toward the room where he had chosen the doll, “if you look over in the corner to your right in there, you’ll see a bunch of different lubricants. But you’ll most likely want something water-based, as it has less chance of degrading the material of the, um…” I gestured vaguely toward the blank-faced doll in the box.
The trucker walked back there for a minute, then returned to the counter. He slapped down a cardboard box containing a massive hospital-size tube of KY Jelly.
“Will that work?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Is there anything else?” He shook his head and I rang up his items. The total came to something like $135.
“Y’all take Discover, don’t ya?” he asked, holding up his Discover card. I grimaced.
“I’m really sorry, sir, but we only take Visa and Mastercard,” I said. He remained stoic.
“Well, let me go see how much cash I have in the truck.”
The trucker walked out into the parking lot. I stood behind the counter waiting in the empty store for several long minutes, the smell of dead animals still hanging in the air, the rubber woman in the box gaping at me silently like a fish. I wondered if he would come back, and began to think he wouldn’t, but then the door opened and there he was.
“Well, I don’t have enough to cover it,” he said sheepishly. “Can I put her back and pick a cheaper one?”
“Sure,” I replied. He picked up the box with the blonde deluxe sex doll inside and carried it back to where he had found it. A minute later he returned to the counter with a plastic bag containing a substantially less expensive model, one designed to resemble a sexy Black woman but made entirely of a flimsy PVC plastic material that smelled and felt more or less exactly like a beach ball.
I rang up the revised sale, which came to just under $90, and he paid me in cash.
“Thanks for your help,” he said, gathering up his purchases.
“Thank you, sir,” I replied. “We appreciate your business. Be careful out there.”
“Will do,” said the trucker as he moseyed out the door, across the parking lot and into his dump truck filled to the brim with bloated livestock corpses. He fired up the engine and pulled slowly and smoothly out of the parking lot with his new blow-up woman, still folded up in her plastic bag, riding shotgun.
