Friday, 9:30 PM. The event your whole life has led up to—your first visit to an actual adult entertainment shop, in the big city yet, a shop you’ve passed countless times walking to and from your telemarketing job at Ventco Home Improvement, Inc., where you call local residents and try convincing them to let a salesperson stop by and extol the benefits of the company’s triple-guaranteed aluminum siding, aluminum gutters, aluminum windows, and that notable duo aluminum soffit and fascia. (Wheeling counts as a big city, right?)
You enter the shop, Kittykat Adult Books and Video, which sits wedged between a vacant pager shop and a vacant wig shop. Despite the run-down neighborhood, KittyKat looks clean and inviting, not sleazy at all. Bright fluorescent lights that don’t flicker too much. Shiny white stucco walls, like at Olive Garden. The classic rock station playing.
You vow not to look like a sheltered rube, but your eyes can’t help widening as you walk down the aisles and spot rack upon rack of neatly-arranged magazines, videotapes, DVDs, lingerie, dildos, vibrators, inflatable women, inflatable men, disembodied plastic vaginas (with hair), you name it, anything to facilitate orgasm in this new millennium. You don’t see any actual books, though, other than a few tiny shrink-wrapped paperback novels (Her Strange Urge, French Lesbians) whose covers sport photos of (eeugh!) chunky, bored-looking nude women with floppy breasts and droopy rears.
You don’t feel like reading tonight, anyway. You head toward the new rental videos (nothing but the most current of anything for you) and almost pick the first tape you see, Hot Hole 6. At least the woman on the cover has nothing floppy, nothing droopy. She wears just a ratty pink dress so short you can see she shaves all over. Except for the tattoo on her left bicep of something red and dripping, she sort of looks like that brunette girl from high school who snickered in your face when you asked her to the senior prom. (The senior prom? Junior stuff! Sappy music, silly fashions. Good thing you wised up and showed some maturity by staying home alone prom night and watching ESPN.)
But you quickly control yourself and put back the tape. You want to forget high school, to forget the classmates who made your life miserable. Rednecks, hillbillies, trailer trash and burnouts. Dumb jocks and their dumb cheerleader girlfriends. Skanks with high hair sprayed into immobility. You graduated just four years ago but it seems like four thousand. You’ve moved on with your life, made a fresh start in a new town, started tapping into your fullest potential.
You examine the other new rentals—Amateur Ass Virgins 3, Nude Chewed & Screwed, Orgy in Acapulco, Ballbuster U., Ultimate Bukkake (what the hell’s buck-cake?), Star Whores: Attack of the Bones, Lezboland 27, Uncut Marines, Bang My Big Black Butt, et cetera, et cetera—but find nothing that meets your demanding standards. The tapes look too sleazy, too grubby, something the nitwits from high school would watch while swilling Budweiser in their dilapidated mobile homes.
Then you see it: Passionate Embrace II: Kyla’s Desire, starring Kyla Monroe. You’ve never heard of her. On the cover she wears a nice black lace bra-and-panties combo, like from Victoria’s Secret, and stands before a marble-design lavender dropcloth. She has long, lustrous brown hair and obviously fake but impressively spherical cleavage. She smiles, left hand on hip, right hand inserting a lock of hair between her teeth. She even wears pearls around her neck, two strings of pearls. Except for the implants, she sort of looks like your supervisor at work, Sherrie, a real West Virginia country bumpkin just a few years older than you.
You’re the company’s most successful telemarketer (based on sales from arranged meetings). You deserve Sherrie’s job, and she certainly must know this already. Her goody-goody demeanor fools everyone but you; you can just feel the jealousy and spite behind her “friendly” remarks to you. Take today at work, when she sauntered up to you at your painfully-beige cubicle and asked in her usual honeydripping twang “Ya git them phone logs I spoke to you about?” You gave them to her. “Thanks, yer a real sweetie.”
“Yeah, log this, sweetie,” you thought. As if she even cares about you. You hate working for hicks, especially phony ones with actual offices and with better looks than most of the women you’ve ever screwed.
You don’t waste time there at Kittykat. You grab the tape. At least it’ll help you imagine Sherrie working under you. Working under you in more ways than one. And, what the hell, you also grab Hot Hole 6—might as well relive the past, this time in triumph.
Copyright © 2002 by David V. Matthews
May 13-17, 2002
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 