Adult World
The story of my film, for those who didn’t know, is that an insane guy falls in love with a light switch. I decided to incorporate in this film an idea I had in Production I that I was going to do for my two-minute film but decided just to abandon. The story of that film is that a guy is getting ready to go on a date with a girl, so he gets himself off on a blow-up doll…and then gets stuck in it. The reason I never shot that story was that I could never think of a convincing motivation for the guy to not just jerk off. There’s no sense in trundling out an inflatable doll to do the job of a malodorous fist.
That said, I thought it would be amusing if the reason for the main character being sent to an insane asylum had to do with him getting caught with a blow-up doll hanging from his cockadoo. That way, no motivation is really required; he’s just crazy. When I couldn’t think of an ending, Gina one-upped that so that the happy ending involves the light switch transforming into a blow-up doll.
That meant I had to get two blow-up dolls. Which meant I had to go to a porn shop. Which I’ve never done before. And will never do again.
There’s a porn shop near my house. I live basically in a suburb that’s chunked into three sections: the West Side, which is full of newer houses and receives the spillage from the Schaumburgites who can’t quite afford Schaumburg but want to be close to Woodfield Mall; the East Side, which is more blue-collar, with older houses; and the industrial park, which was at the one time and might still be the largest business park in North America.
I live on the east side of the East Side, near the industrial park. The porn shop, Adult World, is actually in the Des Plaines industrial park, which pretty much butts up against ours. It’s about a ten-minute drive from my house. The reason Adult World exists is based solely on coincidence: the city of Chicago, for whatever reason, happens to own that piece of land. Around O’Hare, the city of Chicago has sort of snaky tendrils of ownership all over the place, so for four seconds you’re in, say, Mount Prospect, then suddenly you’re on Chicago property, then you’re back in Mount Prospect. It’s an odd thing.
Nobody in Des Plaines wants Adult World, except for the people who live in the trailer park across the street and probably most of the employees of the industrial park. The city of Chicago doesn’t give enough of a shit to close it down because li’l ol’ Des Plaines whines. I think Chicago has bigger problems, such as fighting with my town’s mayor about O’Hare expansion.
So, there’s Adult World, a blighted zone on Touhy Avenue., with an enormous blue-and-white sign announcing its presence to the world. I’ve passed it every day for the past two years, driving to school, so when I realized I needed to go to a porn shop, Adult World was the first place that popped in my head. It’s open 24 hours, one could make the assumption that it would have two distinctly different blow-up dolls, and it’s right by my house.
Like I said, I’ve never specifically been to a porn shop. I have, however, paid people to go for me. I know a lot of people with very little dignity. I dabbled briefly with the idea of responding to one of the thousands of ads up in the Fiction office to write erotic short stories, and while one could assume my imagination on this particular subject would be more than sufficient, I thought I should at least sample what was out there.
For those who are really wondering, most pornographic literature — not accompanied by photographs — attempts grandiose, bizarre storytelling that mostly consists of really unattractive, oafish guys arbitrarily finding themselves having their cock sucked by two women at the same time. This essentially matches my own personal imaginings of what erotic literature would offer; I didn’t, however, anticipate such a dry, drab non-style. It’s almost Hemingway bad. There aren’t even really any descriptions, except for awkward similes and occasionally confusing sexual imagery. It’s mostly like this:
“Johnny walked down Plymouth Street with an armful of groceries. That’s when Susan approached in her dominatrix outfit. They went back to her place, and she whipped him like a snake in October.”
Drab, boring, and puzzling. I figured I could do it, but I’ve worked myself into a rut of a style, and I don’t think I could match the anti-style even if I tried. So, I gave up and threw out the three novels and two magazines I had made someone buy.
This morning, around 7:30, I drove on over to Adult World. I figured, yeah, it’s the morning, there wouldn’t be (m)any customers, nobody I knew would happen to see me as they drove down Touhy, etc.
I had never actually paid attention to the place before, aside from seeing the sign on a daily basis. It’s a squat, one-story building built on a sort of artificial hill, above the street, most likely so passersby can’t see any of the customers. Also, the windows are all entirely blacked out. The final notable thing was that, even at 7:30 in the morning, most of the parking lot was full.
The first thing I noticed about the place was the smell. It smelled of the seemingly logical combination of rubber, vinegar, Vaseline, and celluloid. It was also cleaner than I would have assumed such a seamy place would be. Clean and brightly lit. Too brightly lit. If I’m in a porn shop, I want stark shadows to dwell in. I don’t want floodlights following my every movement. Of course, it makes sense, because as we all know from True Porn Clerk Stories, places like these get more than a few rogue masturbators. Shadows are bad.
The layout was essentially like this: directly to the right of the door was an extensive, high-walled counter behind which several clerks leered at the women (yes, there were actual, honest-to-god women in the place at 7:30 in the morning). Sprinkled beneath the counter were, seriously, pornographic impulse purchases. You know, small stuff: lube, butt-plugs, mini-dildoes (apparently women do crave the tiny cock; my Ex lied to me about that one), and digest-sized magazines full of women with enormous, fake breasts.
The main part of the store consisted mostly of magazine racks and shelves on which sex toys, articles of clothing, and novelty items were hodge-podged together, seemingly based on the amount of space they took up. They had dildoes in every color of the rainbow, and also in some colors that I don’t think I’ve actually seen in a rainbow. Every size, shape, and function. One of my friends, the Pothead, told me she went to some sex party (that aroused me more than it probably should have) that predominantly featured a specific type of vibrator that, when turned on, spun around like a helicopter. I have no idea how practical that could be to a non-tranny, but she said she bought it because it amused her.
In the back of the store, rows upon rows upon rows of VHS and DVD porno films stretched onward into infinity. Seriously, they seemed to have a library of every single porno movie ever made, and as the cheapness and efficiency of video shooting can attest, there are a lot.
I really wish I had paid more attention to all that was offered. I was mostly trying to get out of the store as quickly as humanly possible while making as little eye contact with anybody as I possibly could. I found the blow-up dolls fairly quickly, on a high shelf that lined the far wall, but they were all over $200. I was not going to spend $200 on a blow-up doll that I’m not even going to have fake sex with.
I couldn’t find any, ahem, less costly dolls, but I knew they had to have them somewhere. Lord knows they had everything else. This meant I had to — shudder — speak with a clerk.
There were three of them. One, the one who helped me, was a soft-spoken Puerto Rican. The other two were average slobs who seemed to enjoy standing behind the Puerto Rican and giggling. I wondered if they were new to the job, or if the novelty of porn shop customers simply never got old (although Ali seems to think it gets pretty old).
I approached the counter and stood in silence. I had absolutely no idea what to say.
The clerk asked me, “Can I help you with something?” Snorting and chuckles from the others.
“Yeah, uh,” I said confidently, “I need, um, an…” I trailed off for a moment, wondering if “blow-up doll” would be offensive to a porn clerk. I immediately came up with a more politically correct term. “I need an artificial companion.”
This term baffled the clerk. “Huh?” he asked politely.
“Blow-up doll,” I corrected myself.
“Oh,” the clerk said with the glee of recognition. “Over in the back, top shelf.”
“Those are too much,” I said. “You don’t have any cheaper ones? Novelty ones, or whatever?”
“Oh, yeah, we got those. You just have to look at the prices on all of them. The cheaper ones are, uh, cheaper.”
“Thanks,” I muttered, frustrated at the prospect of manually examining every single blow-up doll on the long shelf until I found two that were under $30.
On my way back to the shelf, I saw a man at a magazine rack. He was my typical view of a guy who frequents a porn shop. His beady eyes looked glazed and shifty as he examined the stacks, stooped, shoulders hunch. He had a wide, terrifying grin on his face, like he got his sole jollies every day at 7 o’clock when he went to browse the thousands of magazine titles at the porn store. As I passed him, I heard him muttering something in a strange voice that sounded like a Mel Blanc character.
I looked for a few more minutes for blow-up dolls, pulling down ones that were smaller, which I assumed accurately would be cheaper. They can’t fit realistic parts in the smaller boxes. I did end up finding two different dolls, and as it turned out, one was a blond and one was a brunette. They look essentially like the inflatable “auto-pilot” from Airplane!, except with three orifices through which one derives sexual pleasure.
The boxes of both looked suspiciously different from the inflated beauty it contained. Both had women with enormous, silicone breasts that looked almost painful to house on their tiny frames. One actually advertised — and delivered — a promise of “BIG BOOBS!” That one was $10 more than the one that had apparently normal-sized breasts. The cheaper one also didn’t have nipples. Nor did it have an enormous, gaping, pink-red anus. It did, however, have an anal orifice; it was simply a skin-toned hole. A no-frills doll, I guess.
My favorite thing about the blow-up dolls were the use instructions. One had step-by-step instructions on how to insert one’s male genitals into its apparently cumbersome rubber orifices of pleasure. Step one: NO SCISSORS. They also both came with lube. I thought it was ironic; now that I’ve actually seen a cheap blow-up doll in the, ahem, flesh, I realized how easy it probably would be for someone to get his penis stuck in one of those things. If you didn’t lube up, the tight hole would probably trap somebody.
As I was browsing for blow-up dolls, I distinctly heard one of the clerks say, “Hi, Mom!” to a middle-aged, female customer. That almost made me laugh out loud, because it wasn’t a mother politely visiting her son at a horrible job — she was actually an honest, paying customer.
Finally, I found the two dolls that were cheap enough for me. I took them up to the counter and paid the Puerto Rican. As he rang me up, I noticed several overexposed Polaroids of female customers in the store, all of whom had their shirts up around their neck, exposing their small breasts and doughy midsections. I recognized one of the girls from high school, and I wondered if she lived in the trailer park across the street.
When I was finished, and I had my receipt, I ran as quickly as I could to my car, breathing a sigh of relief to be out of there. Honestly, the entire place made me nervous. The atmosphere, the merchandise, the disturbing amount of early-morning customers, and most of all, the smell.
Afterward, I drove home and inflated the dolls. In my car. I have an electric air pump, but it doesn’t have standard A/C adapter — just a car cigarette lighter adapter. So I had to pump them up in the backseat of my car, and then make a mad lineman dash into my garage before any of the neighbors could see me with my new friends.
Then, I shot my film. Jeff was a sport, and assuming everything comes out fine, it should be the first film I’ve made at Columbia that (1) I’m actually genuinely proud of and (2) reflects my personality (some would say “insanity”) and the general tone I like to set in my writing and possibly my films, if I decide to keep making films after I finish school.
Then, I fucked around for several hours, while intermittently trying to get this entry done. And now I finally have. Enjoy, suckers.
Posted by Stan on August 6, 2003 7:03 PM | Permalink | Classic Issues, Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation | Digg It
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