The Bad Call

By Clay Allen

There were a million reasons to take the job at Sexworld. It was ironic and irony is valued in our society, it was a rite of passage for an overeducated kid from the suburbs, and Sexworld gave employees a solid discount. The universe was calling me to go and see some fucked up shit, and I heard that call loud and clear.

Two days after I graduated college, my meal plan gone forever, I found myself driving to Minneapolis and moving in with a hermetic friend who attended art school there. I found clean, shiny Minneapolis strange and lonely. I bought a cheap bike and took long rides, trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing.

My first thought was that I might try to break into the ad game. It seemed a good fit for someone with no tangible skills. I wrote some specs and called in a few connections, but I gave up quickly when I didn't receive a hero's welcome. I hadn’t learned much in film school, few people do, but the one thing they taught me was that if the value of fresh, uncorrupted talent wasn't immediately recognized and richly rewarded, then fuck them in the ass with a hat rack.

In reality, I had no idea how to get a real job. The only advice my dad gave me was to dress up like a pizza man and take pizzas into people I wanted to meet with. I fancied myself a risk-taker, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

So I rode around until I found exactly what I knew I shouldn’t be looking for.

Sexworld. A two-story smut emporium spread out in an enormous converted warehouse. The main floor housed the bulk of the porn, divided into sections by genre and then again by studio. There were magazines from every corner of the world, and more than a few local publications, which I thought was generous. There was even a smoke shop, which sold cigarettes, bongs, whippets and balloons.

And then there was the next-level stuff. Live girl booths, complete with a leather-bound menu of shows. Video booths were upstairs, sixty of them, along with the queer porn, S&M gear and hooker clothes. This was all tied together by a friendly (but creepy) circus theme. When I saw a restraining apparatus selling for $6800 dollars, I conceded that Sexworld was truly deserving of its name.

The interview process took all of fifteen minutes, the most complicated part being the photocopying of my drivers’ license. As my Tory, my 26 year old, neck-tattooed boss fumbled with the machine, I watched a pair of lesbians dildo shopping on the security monitors. “God bless them and their vaginas,” I thought proudly, “God bless us all.”

Tory kicked the photocopier, oblivious. “Wear whatever you want, don’t take shit from anybody, and don’t steal anything,” he muttered through drags of a Pall Mall. Maybe I would get to be like that, unfazed by people shopping for things to have sex with. But it would never happen. I too greatly enjoyed the contortions of thrill, desire and shame.

For my first day of work, per Tory’s instructions, I wore white pants, green shoes, and a sleeveless t-shirt depicting Shaquille O’Neill as “Shazam!” A checkered golf cap completed my ensemble.

“You look like the ice cream man,” Tory told me when I showed up. I was fairly sure that was a compliment.

They let me cut my teeth in the Smoke Shop, and then I was posted in the Triangle, the oozy-cruzy upstairs section, where people into “other stuff” shopped. My hours would be 12 – 9 a.m.

I was asked to stay up through paper-thin hours of the night selling the dirtiest porn to the sketchiest people in an unfamiliar city. This was asked of me by a man who considered his body lice a political statement. I didn’t argue. It was the call, and I had to follow it. I dressed stupid, drank rivers of coffee and smoked a hole into my left lung.

It was a savage turn, but having made it, I was given front row seats to the show. I watched a drunk Native American stumble out of the bathroom covered in vomit and he tried to sucker punch Dennis, the 250 lb. clerk who worked overnights with me. Dennis, incidentally, was the driver of the Sexworld car in the Jordan County demolition derby. This was a tough dude, a for real dude. It only took him one shot to take the drunk down, but these were followed by several kicks of a steel toed boot that served as his escort out of Sexworld into what would otherwise be a perfect Midwestern summer dawn.

I sold lube and poppers to an endless stream of cruisers, their eyes furtive and guilty, their hearts practically leaping through their throats.

I engaged in a heated argument with hooker who tried the old “price-tag-switcharoo” on a pair of red leather boots. I argued with logic, she called me the N-word, in earnest, which hurt much worse than I’d expected.

I watched on the security monitors as men would come out of the video booths after masturbating and stick their hands straight into the “serve yourself” popcorn maker we kept by the elevator. There was a scoop available, of course, but I guess some folks just wanted a handful.

Overnight hours melted much-needed body weight from my bones and turned my head into pea soup. Though still somehow amusing, it became hard to remember what the point of this had been.

And then I saw what was clearly the most fucked up shit you could ever want to see in a porno store. I knew it the second the elevator doors opened. This is it, I thought. This is why I’ve been called here.

It was between 1 and 2 in the morning. The coffee was still fresh and I was on my first cigarette of the night. Bar-time folks were having their fun, sales were breezy, when my radio went off.

“Yo, bro.” It was Dennis “Watch this group coming up.”

The elevator doors opened and out they came: seven retarded adults guided by a shiny young couple in matching visors.

A sight such as this begs a series of urgent questions, which you may be asking yourselves now: Who’s charged these two children with the care of seven mentally challenged adults at this no-good hour of the night? And being that they look like they’ve never made it past 2^nd base themselves, how did they agree on Sexworld as the outing’s destination?

Even if you could reasonably answer those two questions, is there any possible explanation for herding these people onto a sticky elevator and taking the up to the most perverted section of Sexworld, where herpes is transmitted by sight?

There were no answers. Not for me. There was only abject horror as I watched, mouth agape, as retarded people fingered boxes like “Big Bear, Little Bear” and “Granny Fucks A Tranny!!!” They swerved in and out of the booths, pushing buttons, playing with the doors. Cruisers vanished, forsaking free popcorn for a speedy exit. Overweight, retarded men and women walked through the isle holding hands, clapping, laughing, cheering for the dildos, the group leaders right there with them.

A man in a dingy yellow shirt ran up to the counter and dug his hands into a bowl of lube singlettes.

“Candy!” he screamed.

“No, not candy,” college visor said, smiling at me. It was the kind of smile that said, ‘Thanks for your patience, I know it’s strange, but I’m a better person than you because I’m helping and you work at Sexworld.’ They used the Triangle like a playground for about 20 minutes and left without buying anything.

I cried when I rode my bike home that morning. In white tennis shorts and child-sized cardigan sweater, coming from my overnight shift at the porno superstore, I knew I was an equally sad spectacle to the 9-5’ers as I’d witnessed earlier that night.

As the summer drew to a close, I quit quietly and made arrangements to move back to New York. Tory saw it coming. “Guys like you don’t last very long,” he told me. Thank Christ. When I got to my folks place in Chicago, I fell asleep for hundred years. When I woke up, the call that had seemed so important and real was now remarkably distant, like the sound of a kickball bounced on a deserted playground blacktop. Today, if I listen hard and pretend I never needed forgiveness, I can just hear it.