Diary of a porn store clerk

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

The short, squat man in the Dallas Cowboys windbreaker staggers out from the arcade, propping himself against the wall. Between that and the sweat beading his body, I know he’s left me a surprise in one of the booths: My first dirty needle. A minor panic fills my body. I hope he hasn’t buried it underneath a pile of semen-encrusted paper towels. No job is worth hepatitis. Especially not a job monitoring glory holes at a cruising spot across the street from a middle school in Portland, Ore.

No matter how much you think you know about the varied and nuanced spectrum of human sexuality, you realize you don’t know squat until you work in a porn store with a vibrant and active arcade. People don’t come here to buy porn. Our customers -- over 90 percent same-sex-attracted men -- come here to meet up for casual, semi-public sex. The arcade is a dark, damp area with about 15 small, squarish booths with video screens, chairs, trash cans and, of course, paper towels. The defining feature, however, is the holes between the booths, called glory holes. They aren’t jury-rigged glory holes common in arcades. They are professional, finished pieces of custom carpentry. The booth has three hard-and-fast rules: No drugs (except the amyl nitrate and nitrous oxide we sell at the counter), no turning tricks, and always feed the meter if you want to stay in the booth.

Salon.com > Nicholas Pell

Diary of a porn store clerk