Dr. John’s

We just passed the school girl outfits, and were moving onto the sex toys spanning down a long wall towards two thousand porno DVD’s, when the door opened and the bell went off. Meredith interrupted my tour and left me staring at the merchandise on the wall while she checked the ID’s of people coming in the store. It was a knee jerk reaction to ask what it was like to work at Dr. John’s, a porn shop north of town. I followed through on her offer to give me a tour because I secretly wanted a chance to look, look closely, at the place I had swiftly walked by many times. The group that came in stayed together, pointed at different things, and giggled before leaving without buying anything. A couple came in after them and when they quietly stood at the counter, I watched as Meredith rang them up.

Meredith is an attractive woman with this sort of no-shit toughness she wears like a jacket when she works. She takes a vibrator out of the box, and makes sure it works right in front of the couple. They don’t say anything, but pay, and walk out.

“We don’t accept returns, so I have to check that everything works,” she says, as she comes back to where she left me in front of a shelf of lubes. I imagined her taking toys out of their packaging and waving them around while they hummed and wiggled in front of other mortified buyers trying to get out of the store as quickly as possible. For some reason it comforts me to see others in here acting as meek and uncomfortable as I am.

“This is one of our best sellers,” she says, and lifts what looks like a medium plastic tube of toothpaste, “Cherry anal lube.” She puts the tube down and steps to the next shelf where she starts to show me other lubricants for every part of the body.

Everything in the store is expensive. I try to imagine all the people involved in getting these products to Dr. John’s. I think of the chemists producing the lubes, the engineers coming up with the proper specs on the toys, or the purchasing agent ordering plastics from overseas, the deliverymen, and Meredith, whose extra work chore on Saturday is, “Dusting the dildos.”

“Do the images from the DVD’s and product packaging have any affect on you?” I ask Meredith.

“No, but my friends think it’s bad for my psyche,” she says.

She’s worked here for the last two years while working her way through the graduate school we both attended. “I’m used to it,” she says, pulling a movie from the shelf. The cover has naked women showing their wild black pubic hair. I could see the images of hundreds of more women as I walked down the aisle wondering who they all were.

Looking at those covers, I remembered driving through a valley in Hollywood with a Dutch girl I fell in love with. We were on our way to Mexico because her Visa had expired four months earlier. She pointed to a crummy motel she stayed at when she first got to the states which was on the down slope of one of those steep hills. She told me how guys were always coming around the pool area waving cash around to get young women to come do porn movies for the day. Her long tan legs, white-blond-hair, and way-out-of-my-league body, kept me from asking if she went, or how much money they offered. I just looked down further into the valley and wanted to floor it straight to Mexico, where the distance between would hammer those questions out of my head.

Meredith shows me the magazine rack. “We don’t have subscriptions. We just take several random dirty magazines and wrap them up in plastic so you buy them by the lot. See.” She hands me a plastic sealed bag with four magazines inside. I pinch and pull the plastic back and peak at a title. It says, Plumpers. “This is a totally heterosexual store,” she tells me, “except girl on girl.” I pick up a few more magazine bags to read the titles. A varying degree of tastes could be satisfied within those shelves. It made me wonder what part this sort of thing played in other people’s lives, and in my own?

I remembered Monsignor Kevin, coming into my eighth grade classroom at Immaculate Conception Elementary School, and talking to the boys about sexuality and how we should behave according to the bible. He went on to tell about not having premarital sex, and that masturbation was a sin which he loosely connected to one of the Ten Commandments. His talk gave me a steady foundation of Catholic guilt about sex. During his lecture, I felt immediately guilty from remembering myself years earlier, on hands and knees, naked, jerking off for the first time on the hardwood floor of my bedroom. I had held my own flaccid penis, not out of want, or urge, but curiosity, and shame that I had not figured it out yet. At the time I was like a grunting idiot forcing something that was not ready to happen—ashamed of myself when I only forced out a few drops of urine that I sat up on my knees and stared at in the light—a confused kid.

The part of me that knew Monsignor Kevin’s speech shaped a lot of my young life wanted to call him up and tell him I was in a porno store. But that part of me wondered exactly when, if ever, have I gotten over his rules of implied wrong doings. Was it when James Tanner stole his dad’s porn video of a German Shepherd mounting a woman and we huddled around it? Or was it seeing Phil Eckert’s older brother’s bedroom that was wallpapered in centerfolds? Inside his room I saw a picture of a buttered up and bronzed brunette holding a giant python that made me wonder if the locker room talk I’d heard about snakes and sex was literal.

I remembered my childhood wrestling icon, Jake The Snake Roberts, who wore tall leather tie up boots, tight spandex pants with a snake on them, and his massive chest muffin-topped above his waistline. Jake would toss a sack out on the ring with a fifteen foot python in it, and everyone he ever beat-up got the snake tossed onto them as they laid there in their feigned state of unconsciousness with a python crawling on them. Years later, when I was in my mid-twenties, I saw a documentary about wrestling that interviewed him. He was a crack addict, traveling the country working the lowest circles of wrestling. He spoke of how it gets old for him to have different sex partners all the time. He said he had to keep spicing things up. He said something along the lines of, “After you’ve done everything to one woman, you add a second and a third, and then toys, and props, and you never lose the hunger, but have to do more to fulfill it, and you can’t come home from a trip on the road like that and be happy making love to your wife.” I imagined Jake The Snake Roberts checking out at the counter with Meredith and how no part of him seemed connected to a boyish innocence of the world.

I had part of Monsignor’s speech in my head when I was still a young boy and my father brought me up from the subway in Manhattan in the mid 1980’s to walk me around 42nd street—to see what it was like. I saw the women and the store windows and neon blinking “Girls, Girls, Girls.” I had part of Monsignor’s speech in my head when my mother and aunt took me to the Red Light District in Amsterdam when I was sixteen because, “I had to see it.” The day time prostitutes who wore lingerie and sat on cracked-vinyl stools in front of little slips in the brick wall big enough for a bed and door to cover what was happening inside called out to me, “Hey American boy,” and I felt my blood flush to my face when I saw a beautiful young black woman shifting an infant from one hip to another over her pregnant stomach. I remember the brown color of the water in the canal to my right when she said that and remembered thinking of all the bikes that must get dredged up when they scrape the bottom. I tried to hold that thought so my mother and aunt, who I’d begun to see were extremely liberal people, could not sense how embarrassed and out of place I felt.

I also have part of Monsignor’s speech in my head as Meredith shows me a wall of sex toys. A few scare me. One looks like a person made a fist with both hands, put their elbows together, and started moving their forearms in opposing concentric circles.
“Most of the things we have are for men to last longer, and for women to get off with,” Meredith says as we move towards the rack of male potency pills. Part of me feels like some judgmental asshole in her store. It is becoming clear that I am still either too prudish or inexperienced to really think of how these kinds of things could fit into my life.

Even as Meredith walks me to the front door after my tour, I find myself wondering how many ways life can get complicated by sex. As I walk out, the doors set off the doorbell, and I hurry out of the glow of the Dr. John’s sign, like I’m doing something wrong just by being here.

Monsignor Kevin’s speech spoke right at the desires of pubescent boys, and boxed in what we were naturally becoming with moral and religious rules. Now it makes me livid thinking of how that whole issue of puberty and becoming a sexualized person would have been complicated enough without adding the eternal ideas of sin on top of it. For me, his argument catered to scaring the heat out of horny young boys was spot-on. The box I was unwittingly put in had bold commandments generically stamped on the inside walls, in a formal font. That box made me less confident around girls, as there was always some moral shadow play at work that had to be accounted for. I’d get so worked up without saying anything that it became easier to keep my distance from any sexual charged situation, which at that age, was damn near everything. From the corner I placed women on pedestals because of their foreignness to me. Now I think of the vibrator Meredith just sold and all those other props, and wonder if each is a tool to push out against the walls of the boxes we are put in—to give our brewing desires more space.

I’ve heard and seen things that should have broken every hold Monsignor Kevin put on me when I was a boy, but I realize as Meredith shows me around that I still haven’t shaken loose.

I spent several years working as a seafarer and watched fellow crew members running off to whorehouses. Once in Caracas, Venezuela, I went too. It was the only safe place for us to drink. Once there, a stunningly large breasted Venezuelan woman rubbed the inside of my thigh while one of the other women took a crewmember upstairs for $46. $5 was for the room and a buck for a rubber. Another woman went right to work on a man who went by “Big Gay Brad.” She was grabbing his penis through his pants and didn’t give up when he protested he didn’t like women. Brad and I stayed close to each other that night out of some mutual fear—his of being in the wrong brand of whorehouse, and me because the sweat beads forming just at that woman’s hairline could have very easily been worked up by servicing the last ship’s crew of thirty that may have just left ten minutes before I arrived. Somehow I’ve always been bothered by any woman’s past. I grew up idealizing them due to some implemented Virgin-Mother-Mary syndrome, and therefore it didn’t take much to taint the image of women who I’d put too high on a pedestal. I had wished they didn’t have a past, as everyone’s past included a sexual past, and each simple human sexual action seemed to surprise me as applied to other people’s lives.

I have a problem with people being so human, and fluid, and wanting, and Monsignor’s speech, that has been shaken at moments, like when an old lady once told me for no reason that, “Columbus brought back Syphilis from the new world and it was epidemic in Russia three years later, and that ought to tell you all you need to know about people,” made me think how ridiculous my prudishness was. Any sense of sexual purity that was instilled in me was a false goal. I could not live up to it myself, but had somehow survived as a double standard for people I chose to be intimate with. Somehow, I know that makes me unenlightened, or simple, but I still can’t shake that feeling.

I think, maybe I will never shake that brainwashed sense of guilt over my own sexuality. Though I know the rules I was taught were too ridged. They were fairytale rules told to thirteen year old boys before their lives got weighted by experience. Those rules gave me a set of standards that I had to wrestle to justify as they crumbled like an old building as I grew up. Then the rules stopped applying all together the way they were stated, when I stopped feeling suspended between being saved and dammed by sex, and accepted what a lovely let down the freedom to be yourself really is.