On the home front, tired of having some manganzon' living under her roof, my mother began to incorporate tough-love tactics. She wanted my ass the fuck out! And honestly, who could have blamed her? I was, after all, a parasite! I was not contributing anything towards the household expenses or maintenance. Whatever money I had left over from paying my car note, auto insurance, and a couple of miscellaneous credit bills would go on to be blown on marijuana, music, and call-girls. Plus, she caught me banging a couple of broads in the house on separate incidents; it had clearly become a bad scene by my own irresponsible doings. I think I would have done the same thing if I was in my mother's position. She would say to me daily, "Move out, motherfucker", but I think she quickly picked up on my 'I-ain't-going-nowhere' attitude, so she decided to take a more persuasive approach. She was going to smoke me out of my hole! It was at this point that she stopped buying groceries and she cut off the cable.
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| The temple that crunchy tissue paper built |
SHE CUT OFF THE CABLE! This was serious, no-joke horror business right here! She had made her point, and so I agreed to leave the old crow's nest... again. Hopefully for good this time. In order to do so I was going to need supplemental income because this FP&L gig alone wasn't going to cover rent. So I began my search for part-time work which quickly turned unfruitful, partially because I was being just a tad selective about where I would have liked to have been employed. Desperation began to set in. So I lowered my bar and resolved that I would take employment in any shape or form at the very next help wanted sign that I were to come across... which just happened to be at an adult video store by the Miami Airport. Oh, and just to stress the particular creepiness of this joint, it was conveniently located right next door to a Greyhound bus station. If you're familiar with Greyhound bus stations than you should already be able to imagine the drug-tourist and travelling prostitute demographic that would spill over and patronize this place asides from the local regulars.
I accepted my fate. I walked in and asked for an application. Believe me when I tell you that I wasn't happy about this. I've been in these jerk joints before, just for laughs strictly, (okay, maybe for a tug or two), after nights of heavy boozing or psychedelia, and even when you're inebriated the creepiness factor of the Whack Shack and its patrons doesn't diminish.
I filled the application while trying to make as little contact between my hands and the page as possible- god only knows where the fuck this application has been. I completed the form and turned it in to be reviewed by the owner, a tough old Jew with a Brooklyn accent. "I need a guy for 11pm to 7am, when can you start" he asked, barely pronouncing the R in start. I told him I could start on Monday. I needed a weekend to mentally prepare for what lie ahead. Graveyard shift means graveyard creeps. Certainly not all of the children of the night are as charming as your friend and narrator.
Monday night came around and I was off to my new adventure as a smut peddler. En route to training day I smoked a bowl and a half of the finest greenery to smooth out the edge, and in case I was given a quick 15 minute break at some point in my shift I made sure to pack a sizable joint. I was going to need it.
Despite the fact that this was a shop where you can buy amyl-nitrate and a five-headed dildo called "The Hydra", my job description seemed pretty run-of-the-mill. The actual training as far as how to work the register didn't take more than 10 minutes, but there were some other tasks as well. My Brooklynite boss broke it all down:
1. Ring up the customers
3. Tidy up the shelves before the morning guy shows up.
Much to my contentment, boss-man made it clear to me that I was not responsible for cleaning the private booths (sigh of relief) because he had a Guatemalan lady who he payed to do that solely. He did mention however, that should the lady encounter any type of problem back there in the booths that I was to buzz-lock the front door and go sort it out. What did he mean problem?
"You know, no fuckin' monkey business, ya' know, like two mooks crammin' into one booth, shit like that!"
Oh wait, I forgot one major job duty...
4. Make sure no one steals. He really seemed to emphasize this point. This actually seemed like the fun part. The owner told me to feel free to use the sawed-off wooden bat that was stashed under the counter. Believe me, I only prayed that I would catch some pervert stealing something, anything, just so that I can grab him by his collar and smash his fucking face into tomato paste. That wasn't to say that I harbor any ill will towards perverts and weirdos, but I have my kinks too, and at that time of my life there was nothing that I wanted more than to take a definitive work of "god" such as a "fellow" man and destroy him with my own art of pain and ugliness.
The owner also showed me a small revolver which was stashed inside the register, he said that was in case someone tried to rob the joint. "Oh yea, yea, it's just to ensure protection", he uttered. The revolver kind of freaked me out a little bit because the handle was wrapped in duct tape which according to Brooklyn was due to the handle falling apart. I wonder if the trigger was falling apart too, since it also had duct tape around it. To me it looked an awful lot like the gun that Clemenza gave to a young Michael Corleone in order to buck down McClusky and Solotso. Regardless, I knew that unless I were to see a ski mask and a barrel pointing at me from across the register my best bet was not to so much as breathe a single DNA molecule onto the questionable firearm.
The porn zombies started walking in around a quarter past 2AM. Baseball caps on low and dark shades drawn, they met the night casually cloaked and thinly veiled for their illicit activities. There were some patrons that genuinely went into the joint to shop for the latest in skin flick cinema who didn't want no fuss. They would go rack to rack, browsing DVD covers for a while and then eventually making their purchase. Legitimate shoppers like these didn't make eye contact with anybody. They didn't look in any direction but directly before them. They would seek their porn, buy it, and off for home to make love to their hand and DVD player. Others would head straight into the private viewing areas, and for the most part, I observed the same behaviors from the quick-Jack patrons.
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| Abandon hope ye who enter here... |
It was the OTHER breed of overnight porn consumers that made this gig a creep show: The "Cruisers".
The "Cruisers" gave me the fucking heebie-geebies. These were the dudes that either hung outside in their cars all night or they would post up by the entrance smoking cigarettes, clearly cruising for random hookups from random scumbags, eventually disappearing into the private viewing area. I clocked two separate dudes wandering the store for what seemed like an hour at a time, until eventually they both scurried towards the video booth area and vanished for 15 minutes. Do I need to fill in the blanks? I feel it necessary at this point to mention that it was all male on male action going on. I surmised that straight people don't go cruising sex at the whack-shacks, at least not straight women, or any women for that matter... I'm sure that straight men are more than aware of this, so you can figure out the rest as to why a man would frequent the porn store in the wee hours. Oh and by the way, none of what I'm retelling here is supposed to be an indictment of the gay lifestyle, rather, it's an exposition of the deviance of man. Male humans are vile; but we created the sickness, by inadvertently forcing people to repress their sexual desires. I think that was what I was witnessing first hand, a bunch of repressed men who were ashamed of pursuing sexual thrills in the open. Mind you, this was way before the age of dating or hookup apps.
This one shithead "customer" approached me at the counter to make like he had a legit question about some video. "Hey have you seen this one? Is it worth buying or should I rent it instead?" I glanced at the DVD box he was holding to see the title Bunker Busters All Out Anal Assault Volume 9 in hot-pink letters over the photograph of a woman seemingly impaled rectally on a penis that looked like a toddlers arm on steroids. "It's fucking great", I snapped in sheer annoyance. "Scorsese directed it", I added. This guy wasn't fooling me with his straight-anal video selection. He was cruising and figured that since I'm on staff that I was fair game too. He was gauging me, checking me for receptiveness, and it became clear once he made his second attempt at conversation. "Whoa, what is that you're listening to? Sounds like some real heavy metal stuff!" He was referring to the small Sony boombox behind the counter which I was listening to music on. It had a CD player and I brought down a disc from my car to play during my shift. If I recall correctly, it was the Croatoan album by Starkweather which I believe had just come out. His insistence on a conversation aggravated me. "I'm busy here, you gonna' buy something or what?" Message delivered. He walked away, placed the DVD box back in its rack and continued to hunt for another willing glory-hole technician with which to apply his rough trade.
Remember the part about problems in the viewing booth area? Well, sure enough, Antonia, the very nice Guatemalan lady who was in her mid-fifties came to the counter with a problem. She said that she saw two of the quick-jack creeps coop up into one booth and when she knocked on the door to correct the situation they apparently ignored her, so she came to me for help. That was a big no-no in that joint, it was the owner's golden rule posted clear as day on the booth area's entrance. ONLY ONE PERSON PER BOOTH. I don't think the owner cared so much about guys butt-slamming each other in the booths, because even when the rules were obeyed there was shenanigans, after all, every single booth in that place had at least one glory hole, minimum. I think the owner was more concerned with the economics of things, he just didn't want two guys getting peep shows and glory blows for the price of one. Finally, I thought, a chance to use this little half of a Louisville Slugger to perhaps cause a skull to fragment and splinter. I grabbed the bludgeoning tool and buzz-locked the door like Brooklyn had asked me to do and I stormed towards the video milk-sheds.
Antonia led me to the booth and as I neared I could already hear the rustling behind the door. I knocked on the booth's door with the small club, and sounding a little bit like my current boss I shout "alright, let's go you jerk-offs". The next thing I heard was the sound of zippers being raised and belt buckles being adjusted. I tap again, a little more frantically this time. "Lets go you assholes". Finally, these two pricks come out of the booth and see me standing there with my bat in hand, which I used to point at the sign which clearly stipulated a one person capacity per booth. "Do you know how to fucking read?" One of the dudes became a little defensive from my tone and the fact that I was brandishing a weapon. "What do you have that bat for? Are you threatening us?"
Antonia thanked me, and told me that I have tremendo genio, which though it gets lost in translation, roughly translates to "you're a man with a great fury within". She was right. Just after she paid me that compliment, I looked behind Antonia and saw the hefty bag full of cum rags left behind by the nocturnal deviants that this nice woman had to lug into a dumpster every night to feed herself and probably her children. I'm sure by the time she would actually get out to the dumpster, the sticky tissues had all solidified into some giant paper mache' jizz-boulder. Ah! The American Dream! Back in Guatemala, Antonia could almost smell it; just nobody told her that it would smell like cum, Marlboros and air freshener. For me, seeing that poor lady's hustle, it did it for me, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. Ironically, straw in spanish is paja, which is also a euphemism for jerking off, FYI. No clever pun was intended, though it would have been clever indeed...
Morning came soon, and I anxiously awaited my relief to arrive so that I can get the fuck out of dodge. Not only that, but I left a message for Brooklyn... I Quit! It only took a single 8-hour shift at a porn shop to realize that as much as I advocate for perversion I would still much rather enjoy it far away from other perverts. It was the only time in my adult life where I was forced to equivocate sexual deviance with wickedness, two things that are not synonymous but seemingly intertwined within the context of this little shop of horrors. All philosophy aside, my main concern was for that of my own sanity, and being so close to that ground zero for abhorrence could not have been beneficial for my then burgeoning mental health issues. So I did my stint in the adult movie business and that was that... and I have never walked into a Jack-Shack since, not even for a quick tug, no seriously.
(And yes, I shortly thereafter found work, an apartment, a broad to live with, yadda yadda yadda, the whole nine; things sorted out just nicely after that little bump in the road of life. Yep, everything worked out nicely, really! So nicely, in fact, that I'm in with a psychologist every two weeks and in with a psychiatrist monthly to discuss exactly how nicely I'm doing! What a fucking happy life...)
