Editor’s Note: This short story is a work of fiction. The views expressed in this fiction are solely of its author. This fiction does not reflect nor represent the views, beliefs and opinions of the editors and publishers. This fiction depicts adult content and obscene scenarios. Reader discretion is advised.

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Touch of Velvet by Bill Tope

i

One of my early exploits in the realm of bizarre employment, in between getting my degree and finally finding a real job, occurred in the early 1980s when I worked as a cashier at the Touch of Velvet pornography shop in a small college town in Southern Illinois. Seeing a Help Wanted ad in the local newspaper, I checked out the shop to get an idea of what I might be getting into. I wasn’t overly impressed with the cashier who was then working. He wore a tired flannel shirt and a threadbare vest and stank of rum. So, when I applied for the job, which was located just off the interstate on the edge of town, I was sure to wear a clean shirt. Suitably impressed, Crystal, the manager, hired me on the spot. She was a much-divorced, washed-out blond, at least twenty years older than me, and showed the wear of hard use.

“Which shift would you want to work?” she asked me in her southern accent. The shop was open 24/7 including holidays, owing no little to the fact that the lock on the front door was broken and the owner was too cheap to fix it.

“Any shift but midnights,” I told her.

“What’s the matter with midnights?” she asked suspiciously, narrowing her eyes at me.

“Well,” I said honestly, “it seems to me that the really weird people would flock to a place like this late at night or early in the morning.”

She wasn’t offended; she said she thought all the weirdoes came in on her shift. “Besides,” she said, “midnights is the only shift open.” So I swallowed my misgivings and said okey-dokey.

She gave me a tour of the shop. Up front was the checkout counter, behind which I would work. It was outfitted with a stool and an array of small video screens, showing the various films playing in the back of the store, plus a space heater. I raised my eyebrows–it was summer–but she said just wait till winter, I’d freeze my ass off. I glanced at the front door: there was a two-inch gap between the frame and the door and I could see as how it might get a little chilly in here.

Adjacent to the register was a display case, which held all the mysteries of commercial pornography: trays of amyl nitrate which Crystal said would cause the user to “blow his nuts” when he orgasmed. I grimaced. “Sell at lot of that?” I asked dubiously.

“Yup,” she said. And, at $10 per one ounce bottle, forty years ago, it was a pricy little item. She also had exotic items like ben wah balls, cock rings, and complicated electrical devices, the function of which I never did discover. I sold not a one of them.

In the next room, visible from the register and past a seedy looking curtain of beads, three walls were festooned with every sexual device known to mankind. There were dildos and vibrators and pocket vaginas and books on sodomy and rape and fellatio and on and on and on. I was making a face at this sordid literary collection when Crystal murmured, “We sell lotsa’ these how-to manuals.” It was as if she were discussing books on how to repair your lawnmower. I pushed out a breath, advanced farther into the room. “Know what this is?” she asked brightly, snatching and holding up a pyramid-shaped piece of plastic with a four-inch base. I shook my head no. “Butt plug!” she exclaimed happily.

“Who would buy something like that?” I wanted to know.

She shrugged. “Jus’ about everybody,” she said wearily.

There were inflatable men, inflatable women. “Tanya here is a best seller,” remarked Crystal, stopping and pointing to a boxed doll with an O-shaped mouth and meager stands of plastic red hair on her head. She was rather sad looking and sordid. The boss indicated an array of plastic men, likewise uninflated and boxed up with only their faces showing. I remarked that all the inflatable men closely resembled Freddy Mercury of the band Queen and she said she’d never heard of him.

Returning back to the display case she pointed out little wind-up penises and vaginas. She wound one up and it went yak-yak-yak across the glass surface and disappeared over the side of the case. There were myriad other devices, including penis-shaped erasers which fitted onto the end of a pencil. “If they buy a lot of merchandise,” Crystal told me, “toss one of these little rubber peckers into their bag; people love them.” I could just picture young children going off to elementary school, innocently clutching Daddy’s pencil.

I looked at the register. “There’s no receipt paper,” I noted.

“You don’t give them no receipts,” Crystal explained. “Boss is too cheap to buy rolls of paper.” And that was pretty much the theme at Touch of Velvet. He was too cheap to buy bags, too, so people had to carry their infamous purchases out in the full light of day–or in my case, moonlight. I could understand his economizing; I mean, he charged $80 for an inflatable Tanya doll, and a grocery bag at that time cost upwards of two cents.

Additionally, the place–a converted Amoco station as it turned out–had no restroom for customers. The one restroom was located outside the building, in a grimy little space with a toilet that didn’t flush. Every day we would have to venture down to the drainage ditches along the perimeter of the property and scoop water into an old five-gallon pickle bucket and use it to flush the toilet, mud and blades of grass and all.

But the manager saved the piece de resistance for last: the viewing chambers. Lining one wall of the third room, in back of the front desk, was a series of small plywood cubicles, the viewing rooms, replete with video screens and chairs and of course, absorbent tissues. My job, basically, was to give these men–in the two years that I was thus employed I never once saw a recognizable woman use the facilities–change so they could feed these video monsters. And did they ever! After they were through, we would go back to the booth they had quitted and replace the tissues and wipe the screen, if necessary. To say it was humbling work is perhaps an understatement.

What I discovered as I worked the midnight shift was that during that time–12 a.m. to 8 a.m..–all the crazies come out. And like with any business, there are regulars among the crazies as well. One gentleman, a cross dresser, was just such a customer. An Italian fellow he was and as such his whiskers had tremendous growing power; he used to shave at least twice daily, he once mentioned. He had been pointed out to me by the manager when he was dressed straight: suit, silk tie, vest, the works. We estimated that, at six feet four inches, he tipped the scales at about 250.

During my first experience when he was “in uniform” as Crystal was fond of saying, he stepped through the door rather uncertainly and stopped before the counter. He was clad in quite a nice gown–taffeta I believe he called it–and because I might have winced, he asked, “….No, huh?” There was pain in his eyes. I shook my head. “The three days growth of beard really ruins it,” I admitted. His shoulders sank. “Nice dress, though,” I said. He smiled at this and then went back to the booths to do his business.

Another regular, a more conventional sort, worked at a local carpet business as an installer. I knew this because he always came in early in the morning before work wearing a company shirt and carrying in his back pocket a huge, razor-keen carpeting tool. He said little, somewhat embarrassed to be there, perhaps. He exchanged his bills for quarters and back to the booths he went. He seemed almost angry most of the time. Crystal later told me that he came in usually three times a day. She commented that he could have made a fortune at a sperm bank. (Yikes!)

We sold girly magazines too. They were carefully sheathed in plastic wrap so that dirty fingers wouldn’t soil the pages. Sometimes the men would secretly break the seal and peep at the pictures–there was virtually no text in these magazines. And they cost at least $20, which is equivalent to more than $45 today. Sometimes they would sneak a magazine off the shelf and take it into the back room, into a booth, for mind-boggling stimulation, I suppose. After the end of my shift, when I policed the area a final time, I’d find the magazine with its pages stuck together. Whenever I’d turn it into Crystal, she’d say, “Shit!” and toss it aside. The next night, however, I’d find the volume rewrapped and back on the shelf.

ii

The owner of this den of iniquity–whom nobody had ever met, by the way–made money hand over fist. There was a steady stream of customers parading through the shop all day long and some of them spent two or three hundred dollars (in 1980s dough) for this shit. Inflatable dolls, as I said, were best sellers. One man came in and bought one for sixty bucks, only to return an hour later for a refund. We don’t usually exchange the inflatable women, I told him, particularly if they’ve been used–as this one had. He became irate at first, then took a more conciliatory approach and explained patiently that he’d purchased “Sheila” for his nephew Roger who, he said, was a virgin and only wanted to practice up for the big event. Then what’s the problem? I asked. His face got red and he admitted that the doll’s aperture was too large. I blinked. Then I told him that most dolls were a one size fits all kind of thing. Not so, he said. This bitch Sheila wouldn’t do her part! Roger was a rather young man, not fully developed yet. No friction, he said. I advised him to apply four of five condoms–available here for just a dollar apiece–and then Roger should be able to cut the mustard. He accepted my advice gratefully and went on his way with the condoms and the errant Sheila. I didn’t ask him who had successfully seduced Sheila. Probably an instructive warmup act for the feckless Roger.

Sometimes customers would come in with the warm glow of a gentle buzz. Other times they would enter the premises three sheets to the wind. Such was the case with Eldon, a strange, ferret-like little man. After securing his quarters he careened down the corridor, bouncing off walls, thoroughly in his cups, only to return moments later totally nude. I must have done a double-take because he looked sheepish, then invited me to join him in booth number 5. I determinedly shook my head no and he grabbed an immense butt plug off the wall and stole back to his booth. “Pay for this when I get back,” he promised over his shoulder. He reemerged thirty minutes later, still naked, this time demanding a paper towel. I handed one over and he disappeared for another thirty minutes. I began to grow concerned, but he eventually turned up, redressed, and paid me fifty bucks for his device, plus a ten-dollar tip for me. Pleasure doing business with you, he said in leaving.

iii

At length, having proved my mettle by enduring the vicissitudes of the midnight shift, Crystal promoted me to evenings: 4 pm, when she got off work, till midnight, when another man, named Luther, relieved me. He was newly returned from a stay in the hospital, where he had received treatment for a gunshot wound. Luther was a Black man, about five feet six inches tall and weighed on the order of 400 pounds. Coming from E. St. Louis Illinois, a town with the highest per capita murder rate in the nation at the time, he was formidable; no one messed with him. He worked the day shift at the university, repairing electronic gizmos, so the owner finessed him into working on the inhouse system we had, which was basically VCRs and channel-switching devices. When Luther managed to sleep or have a life I never learned.

And Luther was careful: if a customer asked how business was, Luther would reply intimidatingly, “That’s none of your business now, is it?” He explained to me that if it were known how much money this place made, then we were apt to be robbed. Such things happened in E. St. Louis every day, he told me. And to further forestall such an event, he stowed a gun beneath the counter. Just grab it and shoot them through the base of the counter, it’s only cheap plywood, he instructed. He added that there were no serial numbers on the piece. And truth be told, there were times when I clutched it, just in case.

The evening shift had a little more traffic than midnights, and some of the midnight crazies patronized the place during the day as well. And I got offers: a man came in one day toting a ghetto blaster he said was worth $200 and offered it to me for only forty. I examined it critically, noted that the antenna was broken off, that the case was scuffed and that the dial buttons had gone missing. Just put a piece of aluminum foil on what’s left of the aerial, he told me, and it would play “Just dandy.” I turned it on and the volume was just a whisper. Needs new batteries, he explained. There was no cord. Thanks, I said, but no.

Another guy, a former employee named Bruce, came in with a treasure of a different sort: a large, ominous looking black revolver. Expertly snapping it open, he revealed live ammo, telling me he would give me a box of bullets for free if I bought it today. How much, I asked just from curiosity. $50, he said alluringly. But, I don’t even know how to use a gun, I protested. Not a problem, he assured me. Snapping it closed, he drew a bead and shot a male doll that Crystal had inflated, blowing his privates off. I instantly grew alarmed. Cool down, Bruce said, it was dark out now and nobody could hear anything. At that moment, three customers emerged from their booths, panicky. One still had his jeans down around his knees. They appraised Bruce, the gun in his hand, the smell of cordite in the air, and quickly fled.

“Don’t worry about them peckerwoods,” Bruce said. “They won’t say nothin’ less’ their wives find out they been beatin’ off at a porn shop.” I had to admit that he had a point. But what about the inflatable dude? I asked him, trying to speak his lingo. He said he’d fix it with Crystal and inasmuch as he was dating her daughter, I supposed that everything would be alright. I never heard another word about it.

Working in a pornography shop was interesting at first, but I soon grew jaded. I didn’t even like to watch the movies. All the characters in the little video dramas did exactly the same thing, mostly in the same way and with the identical histrionics. Besides, the unpleasant sight of a nude Ron Jeremy fairly ruined vicarious sex for me. Since the magazines were all wrapped tightly in plastic, I didn’t read them. Until one night, when I saw the face of an ex-girlfriend on the cover of a book called Anal Safe, a how-to book for health conscious sodomists. I could have sworn that was Kathy, but I hadn’t seen her for five years and so it was hard to tell. I unsheathed the volume and read. Her name, it said, was Raven, obviously a stage name, and that she lived in St; Louis; so did my Kathy! I finally rewrapped the magazine and returned it to its shelf, still wondering. I never did discover the truth of her identity.

As I mentioned before, the boss was rather cheap. I was paid the meager sum of four dollars per hour to interact with the dregs of society. Crystal, who made only five dollars per hour herself, allowed me to supplement my income, however, by levying a somewhat bogus cover charge of fifty cents. On average that would boost my wages to six or seven dollars per hour but if the customer were a real skinflint and complained, then I’d waive the cover and let him in without paying.

A part of my job was to come in to do maintenance work in my spare time; this allowed me to earn a little extra income. I repaired the electric, put in a new floor one time and had the responsibility of plugging up the “glory holes.” These were cavities bored by the customers in the walls of the booths they occupied. This allowed them to peep at their fellow perverts in the next booth. Sometimes the holes were huge, big enough to…well, you get the idea.

We were never once bothered by the law. No curious policemen checking the place out in their free time; no detectives looking for underaged customers; no cops copping free dildos or what have you. Clearly, they had been paid off. Just part of the cost of doing business, Crystal explained. Another cost was theft. Every now and then, when we got really busy and then all the customers left, I’d notice a blank spot on the wall where some device or other paraphernalia had been just minutes before. One time early in my shift fifteen or twenty teenagers descended like on the place like acne-covered locusts, surging through the door, grinning and with mischief in their eyes. They roamed everywhere at once and I didn’t know quite what to do. Finally, I stood up behind the counter, gripping the police baton kept there for emergencies and waved it menacingly about. The kids’ eyes grew wild and they took flight. As I settled with relief back onto my stool, I saw that at least a dozen items had been seized from the wall of goods. I watched them abscond with the loot through the open door.

Coda

Like I said, our business drew its share of crazies, loonies, and assorted nutballs. One such character spelled the end of Touch of Velvet when, in the dead of winter, a rat faced little man somehow got through the back door without being heard. Ostensibly he had manipulated the lock during a prior visit and then broke in on the midnight shift, carrying with him a can of gasoline. Flooding the carpet outside the six booths, he then quitted the place. Luther, working that shift, smoked like a billowing chimney and it was not long before gasoline fumes reached the front of the shop and he must have detected the telltale odor of the spilt fuel. No one knows quite what happened after that, because no one survived. The flame from Luther’s cigarette or some other spark ignited the gasoline and the whole shop went up like a rocket. According to the Fire Marshal’s report; Luther–and an estimated three or four other humans–were incinerated. The culprit was later discovered after he bragged of his crime in a dive bar, where he claimed to have done “…the Almighty’s work in expunging Satan….” and so on.

Luther’s widow came out alright, though, after she sued the owner for building code and fire safety infractions. Turned out that the owner was some kind of hedge fund manager in New York and was worth a cool six million (1980s) bucks. He had twelve such shops across the country. Crystal and I didn’t fare nearly as well: we were out of a job, and our only job reference was from a porn vender doing time at Menard. But Crystal married one of her former customers and I went on to become a caseworker for the State of Illinois, from which I was fired after it was discovered that I failed to disclose the nature of my previous employment. My dismissal was perhaps preemptive: one of the men on the panel of suits who discharged me was in fact a regular customer of the former Touch of Velvet. And he was one of those who never paid the cover charge. I believe that I mentioned Eldon.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Bill Tope 2024