Pornography Shops: Not a Good Place to Meet People

"I'm not from around here. Do you know where I could go for a good time?"

I looked at him. He was in his mid-fifties, scruffy, glasses. Skinny guy. Baseball cap.

"Uh, there's some strip clubs down the freeway." I walked away.

If there's one thing you don't do when you're in a porn store at two in the morning, it's strike up a conversation with someone. Most porn stores (well, the few that I've been to in my life) have parking lots filled with cars with the Jesus fish or bumper stickers that advertise that "My Son/Daughter is an Honor Student at ______", and hence, the guys shopping there grab the first thing that piques their interest, pay, and leave. And that's the way they like it.

I was eighteen, didn't have a girlfriend, and worked as a busboy, so it didn't really matter to me how long I browsed or if anyone saw me there. I took my time, especially because if I made a bad choice, I was six dollars poorer for no good reason.

I walked around the corner to a different rack of videos, looking at the oversized box covers. A few seconds later, the talker appeared in my aisle. I moved again. That's another unspoken rule: "Keep as much space in between you and the other people in the store." Of course, he'd already gone about two steps further than that already when he opened his mouth. He followed again. I picked something quickly and walked to the register.

As I paid, a guy I worked with approached the line and stood behind me. He was red-eyed and jumpy. He had just come from one of the "viewing" rooms.

"Hey Chris! How's it going!" he offered his hand.

"Bryan, what are you doing here?" I said, reaching out to shake his hand, and then, realizing, quickly putting it in my pocket before I touched him.

He was defensive. "The same thing you are. What do you think?"

Bryan was in his late twenties, out of shape, had a goatee and a bad haircut, and would probably be single and working in restaurants for the rest of his life. I'd seen him hitting on a girls we worked with in the past. He wrote one of them, a girl I was friendly with who was engaged, a poem--something about "ample breasts", "moist lips" and "eternal beauty".

I noticed sweat collecting on Bryan's forehead, and making little dark patches on the chest of his red t-shirt. I finished paying, said goodbye, and walked out. Before I left, I looked around and didn't see the talker in the store anymore. I walked quickly through the parking lot to my car.

"Hey."

I looked to my left, and there was the talker in the front seat of his early-model maroon Ford Ranger, arm out the window, looking right at me.

"Yeah?"

"Hey, I was just wondering, you know, if you'd like to make some money."

Oh, shit.

"I mean, I ain't gay or nothin', I got a wife and kids at home, so you know, I ain't gay."

Right.

"But I'll give you twenty dollars if you'll let me suck your dick."

"No thanks."

"I mean, I ain't a weirdo or anything. You don't have to do anything. Just get in the car and I'll suck it. It'll feel just like a girl's doing it."

"No, man." I kept walking.

"Twenty dollars," he called. "I'll do it real good."

I got in my car, slammed the door, started the car, and peeled out of the parking lot. He followed me. I drove quickly through the suburbs surrounding my neighborhood, twisting and turning, and I turned my lights off once I hit a dark road, and didn't turn them on again until I thought I'd lost him. What the hell? I thought to myself. Maybe all those Jack Chick comic books about gay guys in Sodom were right--this guy's a freakin' sex-crazed lunatic.

I pulled into my house, parking the car out of view of the street, just in case, hurried inside, and locked the door behind me. I didn't even watch the movie that night.

The moral here is simple: why go out to get porn when you can get it for free, at home on the internet?