I start walking toward the customer restroom, carrying my green scrub pad and cleaning solution to check the walls in there when suddenly I hear the phone ring up front. “Taco, it’s for you,” my boss shouts. I walk back and answer it, my heart pounding because the only people who call me at work are bill collectors. “Yeah, what?” I say into the receiver. It’s a telemarketer from Taco Cow, saying they have a special on cute, college babes’ pubic hairs spread over nachos.
“QUIT CALLING ME AT WORK!!” I scream into the receiver, feeling stressed beyond belief as I stomp toward the customer restroom. On the way there I see Opey, a red-haired, flat sloth of a dick pirate who trolls the store constantly, every single day for hours waiting for a cock to suck, any cock. I know that he’s a regular donator to Taco Cow, too, and that they put his red dick hairs inside burritos labeled as “extra spicy”. I say “excuse me” to him because he is standing right in my way, but trying to keep my cool so as not to snap at him. My boss forbids me snapping at even the most pathetic customers. I look at the back of the bathroom door and sure enough, there is this guy’s phone number again, written in small numbers with a fine-point pen: “Socially conscious? Call 332-1625 and I'd love to suck your cock. In return, give me your pubes to give to Taco Cow for helping feed the poor,” it says. I scrub it off, look inside the toilet and see two turds floating in the water, shit splattered all over the rim. I hadn’t had a chance to clean the restroom yet that morning because I’d been too busy scrubbing off fucking phone numbers in the arcade. I hear the faint sound of the telephone ringing again up front. “Oh shit, it’s Taco Cow again,” I think, as I start to scrub a stranger’s poop from the toilet rim.
My boss starts yelling for me to come to the phone. I start walking back up front, bump into Opey. “Excuse you,” Opey says in his sickening, soft effeminate voice. I look at his fat face and can tell that it’s his fucking shit I was just scrubbing, his two tiny turds floating in the golden, piss-stained water. He has a “poop face” so I can tell he just took a shit. I want to say “Will you get a fucking life and get out of here or at least stay the fuck out of my way?” but I keep my cool, knowing that blowing up at a paying customer could very well cost me my job. I arrive at the counter and notice my boss has already hung up the phone.
“Was it a female voice?” I ask.
“No, it was the guy who left just a few minutes ago, the one whose house people keep calling. He says no sooner did he walk in the door of his house when someone called wanting their cock sucked in exchange for their wife’s pussy hairs. They said they got his number from the bathroom door and I just wanted to know if you got it.”
“I just scrubbed it off.”
“Good.”
Poop stains need to be chipped off with something when they have sat over night. I use the end of a flat screwdriver alot of times. Cum stains on the walls, especially if they are the stains of old, gay men, need doused with very potent cleaner, let to soak for an hour and then scrubbed vigorously, using a lot of elbow, before they can finally be removed. For this and other duties I get paid $10/hr and I owe Taco Heaven $50,000 for four years worth of tacos that weren’t even all that good to begin with.
My old friend, Barney, came into the porn store today. He’s a few years younger than me, around 27 or so. He was my neighbor a few years back when I lived near downtown. After he graduated from the local college he got the noble notion of going into the Army as an enlisted man instead of an officer. The country wasn’t at war at the time so I wished him well and figured he’d be alright. The military can be a good career for certain personality types. Myself, I was in the Navy for 4 years before I even met Barney and I hated it; it just wasn’t for me and I only enlisted to get money for college. I hadn’t heard a word from Barney the whole time he was gone and when I saw him in the store it was the first time I’d seen him in six years or so. He looked about the same with a little wear and tear, except his blonde hair had a buzz-cut which I figured meant he was still in the service and was on leave. There was a strange, empty, dull look in his eyes, though, when I said, “Hey, is that you Barney?”
He was thumbing through a spank-mag and probably hadn’t banked on anyone he knew seeing him there, let alone be working there like I was. I don’t think he recognized me right off, or maybe he pretended not to. I’d heard from a friend that Barney had been over in Iraq back when the war first started. I was curious to know how it went for him over there and was at least glad to see he was alive.
“I’m alright,” Barney mumbled. He seemed embarrassed. He then looked over at me and studied my face a second or two. “Taco!” he exclaimed. “Oh Jesus, sorry, man, I didn’t recognize you when I walked in. Sure as hell wouldn’t expect you to still be in this damn town let alone standing behind the counter of a dirty bookstore. I figured you got the hell outta here as soon as you finished school.”
“Yeah, well, I guess I decided to stay here in town for awhile,” I said, sort of embarrassed.
“I hear ya,” Barney said as he walked over to another rack of magazines, started thumbing through “Naked, Hairy and Scary,” one of my favorite hirsute female mags. Barney and I had actually been really good buddies, had alot of drunken good times together out on the front porch we shared when we were neighbors, and it disappointed me a tad, him giving me such a lukewarm greeting. He just kept picking up magazines, thumbing through one real quick and then getting another one, seeming to try to ignore me. A funny thing I noticed is that he kept his right hand buried deep in the right front pocket of his desert khaki pants halfway up to his elbow. I thought maybe he was playing pocket pool, stroking his big fat soldier’s cock as he looked at the naked, pretty ladies. The fact he had a buzz-cut and wore the khakis made me say, “So, you still in the Army then?”
“Nope,” he said. “Been out about six months now, since I got back from Iraq.”
“Yeah, I heard you got shipped over there and I was concerned. So . . . umm . . how’d it go over there?”
“You don’t want to know,” he said tersely, his face positioned in a magazine he had propped up on the rack. I noticed he was turning the pages with his left hand and the right hand he had buried in his pocket he was grinding like crazy, shaking it around in there and I wondered if he was trying to fondle his cock enough underneath his khakis to bust a nut right there in the store. It seemed odd to me because Barney had always been a “manly” type who vocally shunned and teased people who admitted to masturbating, myself included. He ended up purchasing the copy of “Naked, Hairy and Scary” and left with hardly another word. I thought it was strange of him to buy a hirsute magazine because when I knew him before he had always been partial to the cookie-cutter, shaved pussy types. I then wanted to ask him if he fucked any hot Middle Eastern babes with hairy tacos and hoped I’d see him again soon.
He came back in a few days later. This time he drifted over into the DVD section, spent a lot of time fumbling through the titles. After a while he said to me, “What do you have to do to rent a hairy pussy video?” I told him you had to have a Visa or Mastercard to make a deposit for the retail price of whatever movies you wanted to rent. If the video was more than 3 days late, we charge it to your card and you can just keep it. And aside from the deposit, it’s $3 a night for VHS, $4.95 a night for DVD.
“I don’t have a credit card,” Barney said. “While I was in Iraq my bitch ex-girlfriend didn’t pay my bills for me like she said she would, even though I gave her the money for it, and now I got bad credit . . or maybe it’s just slow. Whatever it is nobody will give me a damn credit card. Can’t I just give you a cash deposit?”
“Sorry, dude,” I said. “I can’t take a cash deposit. The boss won’t let us take them anymore because we’ve had trouble in the past with clerks stealing the money.”
“C’mon, man, just keep the money yourself until I bring the movie back. I’ll bring it back tomorrow, I promise. There’s a fine bitch with a big, black bush in this one flick here I wanna see get fucked real bad.” Barney was getting agitated, started wandering toward the Anal Toy section, staring in fascination at the arrangement of many assorted butt plugs and beads on the wall. I was getting under the impression that whenever he became agitated he started fondling himself because again, like the other day, he had half his right arm jammed into the front pocket of his desert khakis, shaking it and making an awful face, thrusting his pelvis back and forth.
“Damn shit itches,” I heard him say.
I’d sort of had enough of this guy. Sure, he and I had been good friends but I was put off by the cold shoulder he’d been giving me, acting all weird and distant like I was some loser working in a porn store and he was this “respectable war veteran”. I appreciated the fact that he’d been through combat experience. I, myself, was in Desert Storm in the early 90’s but had never really seen combat, nothing like what the ground troops were experiencing in this new war in Iraq. But I was really annoyed by the fact he’d stand right there in front of me, in the middle of the store, choking himself amidst other customers, this asshole who didn’t even have a fucking CREDIT CARD in today’s commercial, consumer-oriented society, for Christ’s sake! And it also occurred to me that now that he was into hairy pussies he might be competition because a lot of the town’s werewomen might take him over me because of his “war hero” status. So I looked at him sternly, cleared my throat-- as he stood there playing his ferocious brand of pocket pool, staring at the butt plugs, shaking and seeming near orgasm-- and said to him, “You know, Barney, I really appreciate the fact that you went to war and all while I sat on my ass, but I can’t keep letting you do what you’re doing, jerking yourself off like that right here in the middle of the store. If you want to do things like that you need to buy tokens and head to the back where all the movies are playing. There’s a couple hirsute movies playing back there right now, I think, if you’re into that sort of thing these days. ”
