I used to walk into an adult bookstore about once every 3 weeks. I'd risk it no more than that, risk being seen.
Sure, there are books there, but they're also full of pictures. And 95% of the store is dvds. Sex dvds.
The guy behind the counter looked over his glasses at me. He nodded like he knew who I was, but he didn't. He couldn't - I never gave him an opportunity to remember me, never even said a word to him. Not even when I was buying something. The purchases were transacted in grunts and nods and with halting credit-card handovers. He doesn't know what I like, or what I respond to. He doesn't have to. I don't know myself half the time.
It wasn't long after I was old enough before I went all the time to see these pictures on my own, with their images and their forbidden secrets. Adult movie theatres were the only place in the early '80s I could see naked women in motion. No video then. My dating life wasn't developed at the age of 17 - my success was all downtown, and the outskirts, where the shops and theatres lay as remnants of a more vibrant community that had long abandoned the city center. The theatres were all downtown in the rundown district, old palaces now empty of the gentrified crowds that filled the roadshows of "Camelot" or "The Sound of Music" years ago. The advent of video had emptied the downtown San Diego streets, where now hookers, drug takers and sailors stood out watching their own lives pass them by. You went into the large dark emporium, in public, but anonymous, looking up at the aging stained screen.
Surrounded by strangers. I never went with any friends. Who knew who went into these theatres and what those strangers were up to. Like it was ever in doubt. And you never encountered a more rapt and subdued collection of misfits. The danger of going out at night was reduced indoors.
All it cost was money. Oh the money. Everything's for sale now here. Anything you could think of - fetishes like girls that take it up the ass, or women that let guys come on their face to an excessive degree. Some guys go no doubt to the pissing section - there's a section. Whatever works for you.
For me the promise is told on the cover box. A combination of title and sample pictures to let me know the imagery, the girls, the aesthetic will be right, properly respectful to the subject matt
The promise of course that leads to the impulsive buy. The conveyance of the nasty life encapsulated therein. Of the fun the participants are having, that are on display for my ownership. Fun, with a camera present. The image offered. Here - surrounded by tits, pussies, out of context
But then it is its own reality. Movies with people who fuck. The neighbor talks to the mailman, they fuck, the husband at work, with secretary, they fuck. The new guy sees the female boss, she fucks him. All personal interactions related to fucking, to pulling open your pants, and sucking on the other person's genitals.
It's reduced to commonplace. Fucking as primary interaction between all adults in the play. People do this all the time. Will wifey find out? Taste the sweat and emissions of an asshole dripping with cum. They did this back in Roman times. The power of pussy, human and instinctual, the curve of a woman's ass has kept this species alive through the ages.
Sex is life. People are into it. It has to feel good. What drives us? Drives me into this store, filled with maybe a dozen other men right now.
It's not the middle of the night, it's not late in the evening. It's 3 p.m., just past lunch hour, before the time to go home, into cocktail hour with the boss. They all avoid eye contact with the others here. We stare intently at the color images on the cardboard covers in front of us, the girls airbrushed, posed, open. The customers are exposed here, as well, naked to the siren lust that has pulled them in, guilty by their presence, found out and defensive, caught, male...needy, horn. And semi-erect. We try to be as invisible and unobvious as possible, lost in a personal search for sexual epiphany, as we finger the pages, and turn over the boxes.
We're receptive through our eyes. Looking for imagery to get us off, to remind us of how it feels...how it must feel. To remind us of that woman we want to be fucking, that whore, that old cheerleader, that ex-wife or future wife. That neighbor, that cipher who comes in from next door...the woman - no, girl, with open legs, wet pussy lips, and a willing schedule and a good attitude. Penetrated.
We're all here to find something to capture our imagination. We need big tits, or maybe dark skin. Open bald pussies or cheerleader outfits. Cum shots to the face...or internal, dripping slowly out down their asscrack. What gets you off, reminds you of the hot feeling that is emotional, instinctual, that works. We take our handful of tokens and we wait in the hallway past the curtain for the booths, for more. For the films.
Three of us wait patiently outside the booths. Number 3 is out of order, and the other 7 have users inside. We see what's happening inside each - on little monitors that are feeds of what's showing. There are 50-word summaries printed on cards with a still posted outside in metal frames next to a LCD screen by each door.
Fuckfilms, handheld, shown inside in close-up. Too small to distinguish details. We can't quite see. They've gotten worse in the 20 years I've been watching. They used to have more art to them. Now they point at the most obvious place and film away, without edits. We wait in the hallway like lambs, quiet, ever patient, and in a way powerless. In spite of the testosterone here and all the men, this is not a macho environment. It's not an arena in which the strongest men negotiate, spar or bargain, in display of alpha-male territorialism. We're all here completely at the mercy of what we are here to consume. We've lost, acquiesced, and accept it - we welcome the mantle of defeat. We're whipped.
But we will get our payoff. Booth 4 shuts down; Don the store guy comes back, glancing at us as he passes with a certain amount of disdain. We back up and let him pass so he can investigate. No one's complaining. We stand in no judgment. You can't break it while sitting and watching. Waiting for the cum in my gaping asshole, the suck my dick, the fuck my pussy. Surrounded by sexualized women, images and products, the hyper-sexual response tempered by what stands out in a sea of exceptions. Our ability to be shocked has been sublimated, disregarded, and defused. The technical problem should stem from the front dvd playback deck.
There's no one here to say, "You like this shit?" "That's not natural." "You're sick." The girlfriends are at home. You're among friends. We get it. We all get it.
Check out the tits on that bitch.
The films barely narrate a story, a series of images in sequential order to relate a cascade of events. "Story" isn't right. The power of film is to depict a reality in realistic images. What's photographed has happened on the stage, and is manipulated by camera work and editing. The camera angles favor the women, not the man, showing her in long shots, positioning her centrally in the frame. The guy (often never showing his face) is secondary, with that big dick, that piece of meat intrusive and necessary, yet distracting and somewhat troublesome.
Sometimes the guy enters her with a little bit of sideways. The audience's stand-in for themselves, the transferred personal, in the pussy, as she poses. Spreads and stretches. For us, we identify with her, not him. She poses in positions open to reveal for the camera. And she looks at us, held up, in the room that never changes, in rhythmic movement. Beach house. Window. Couch. Linoleum floor. Tattoos.
She's playing herself. Reverse cowgirl. Does anyone fuck like this? It's a character note, revealing her enthusiasm. She kneels over his cock, facing backwards, legs spread and balanced on her high-heels. The pose is calculated to show a bald asshole and penetration. And the male body is out of the way as much as possible. She's doing it. Really doing it.
The search is never ending. For me it started with that girl in the trailer in the Academy theatre, jerking off while she talked on the phone. I'd actually seen something I had never seen before. What was that film called? The girls with light hair turned me on, the red pussy hair. It suggested a certain exotic wild archetype that was captured and conveyed, not from any personal remembrance.
It became as film - stories, fantasies as maids, doctors in lingerie, stewardesses, or secretaries, ordinary everyday people. Fairy tales, run of the mill, and they have pussies and sex lives too. Sex lives I could only dream of seeing. At the tender age of 19 I began to have true sexual relations. My fantasy turned to housewives...everyday people, students even - and other taboo transgressions. The hotness of being found out, of being with someone you shouldn't. Was it wrong? Was it possible? Was this a manifestation of almost fucking my girlfriend's best friend my first year in college? When I hadn't quite fucked her yet?
No. I think it was a manifestation of my best friend actually fucking my girlfriend, later, whom I had not fucked yet.
I'm still looking for that thrill - that intoxicating rush of seeing and being where I should not see and be. But the narratives could go only so far. The fantasies weren't very well created. We're here to see people fucking. It's done by amateurs.
Your neighbors made this film in their living room. It's not a stunt. True and unadorned - shocking by its unfamiliarity, yet deadpan in the depiction. All cut together and reproduced as objective product, in long takes. Unmediated, and therefore powerful in its guileless banality.
The actress looks at me. Sees me looking back at her. And she smiles, and implicates me in this act, unexpectedly, this unfakable sexy and dirty open workout.
She got me.
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