Memoirs of a Sex Shop Worker: Another Day, Another Dildo

I have recounted the story of my time working in an adult shop so many times over the years, I’m beginning to wonder whether the truth of it has in fact escaped me, and I simply experienced a particularly sleazy, but dull, fever dream. Often, at dinners, in the smoking areas of clubs, and in the taxis en route home, I feel the anecdote emerge on auto-socialise, and struggle not to roll my own eyes back in my own head before my closest friends get the chance.

But there it was, nearly half a decade ago now, a shorter period than I often misremember, but longer than you might have hoped for any ambitious 21-year-old. Life was a joke at the time. Figuratively and literally. Still skirting the relatively bleak fringes of standup comedy, I’d pretty much do anything for the brief rush of identity it was possible to conjure from a decent story, often at the expense of my dignity. And I needed the money. Not that there was much of it in the post-recession wilderness of 2010, but with three managerial stints at three different stores across the Northwest under my belt within mere months, I quickly learned that the best way to get ahead in an industry was to get directly involved in one that nobody else wanted to touch.

If you’re wondering what sort of person wastes their precious calories visiting a sex shop with so much dead eyed digital porn flying around, I can reveal some standout examples: the elderly customer who would wander in, pretend she had walked into the wrong shop, apologise, then blow a decent chunk of her weekly pension on increasingly complex tools of genital stimulation; and hey, why not? The wideboy purchasing a ‘shaggable’ inflatable sheep for an upcoming stag do. The electrician anxiously seeking advice or a device to satisfy his kind Thai bride. The ex-copper explaining his inability to maintain an erection without injecting a measure of saline into his own scrotum.

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"Forced to watch the same HD cum shots repeatedly, I felt my consciousness begin to bottom out"

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But the core customer base was perhaps even more of an increasingly rare breed. These were men – occasionally women, but almost always men – who truly valued whatever role pornography played in their lives. They hankered for the physical format, the artefact. Some were friendly, most were discreet, some were unusual or socially dysfunctional beyond cliché. Whoever they were, they had managed to take that moment of lonely clarity post-orgasm, and dedicate a portion of their furniture to it.

I once spent a memorable and humbling afternoon chatting with the kindly rural caretaker. A lifelong closeted homosexual owing to both his profession and the ever decreasing circles he was established within, the hardcore pornography I sold was perhaps his only window into a world of abandon that would otherwise be unconjurable fantasy. It stands out as a rare moment of warm human connection, albeit from a period during which my biggest working achievement otherwise was untangling a large bundle of bulk-bought leather wrist straps.

When a fellow jobbing comic offered me the job, I was initially worried that perhaps I’d never want to have sex again, or worse, it’d turn me into a relentless deviant unable to forge basic emotional connections. But, it transpires that work is just work. At one particularly bleak branch, the counter faced a monitor displaying a recent highlights reel of releases. Forced to watch the same HD cum shots repeatedly, while listening to Steve Wright in the afternoon, I felt my consciousness begin to bottom out. A week later, I was advised by upper management to use a hammer to attack a local gangster insinuating he would beat me senseless with a used and deficient dildo, crudely wrapped in a Tesco bag. Whatever I had envisioned my life to be like after dropping out of university, this was not it. I soon handed in my notice, and I did not look back. Sometimes you can have enough stories.