A Trip To The Porn Shop
You may have noticed that yesterday, the Oregon Ducks won the Civil War and will be going to the 2011 BCS Championship. With all due respect to that, I find that this event, which took place shortly thereafter, is a far better read.
When I was a child, I was always intrigued by the dozens of adult shops in Salem. What kind of stuff for adults did they sell that you couldn’t get anywhere else? I figured it was probably calculators and bleach – things that were either too boring or too dangerous for children and, as such, had to be sequestered in special shops. I couldn’t understand why these places seemed to be so popular, given what they were selling, but I imagined that I’d figure it out when I became an adult and gained a true appreciation of calculators and bleach.*
*The Mystique Adult Arcade, located in a seedy repurposed house on Lancaster Boulevard adjacent to a used car lot, was a lot more enticing. I didn’t like arcades much because they were so noisy and full of hyperactive children; I figured that an arcade for adults would be more classy and demure, with a dress code and a velvet rope around the Time Crisis 3 machine.
I tell you, nothing positively destroys your innocence like learning that people have a fundamental desire to watch other people bone, and a robust and successful industry exists to satisfy that need. It kind of cripples whatever childish ideas you had about the superiority of our race when you find out that a guy with a video camera and a few open minded, flexible friends can make more money than your dad.
In spite of the appreciation for pornography that I cultivated throughout my teenage years, I had never gone into an adult shop before. You have to keep in mind, I’m a fairly self conscious person; I felt embarrassed eating a deep fried pizza in public, so understand that I never wanted to visit a store where everyone can assess one another’s sexual preferences from a quick glance in the shopping cart.
Last night, though, was the night of a Christmas party that included a secret Santa gift exchange with a 15-dollar limit. I had drawn my friend Adam and neglected to buy a gift until an hour before the party, so my roommate Eli, who also needed to buy a gift, suggested that we go out to Castle, an adult shop in Springfield. His reasoning, which seemed pure at the time, was that when you’re looking for cheap gifts for a quick laugh at a party full of your morally questionable friends, you can’t go wrong with porn.
Ten minutes later, when I walked into my first ever adult shop, I was admittedly a little disappointed. I had expected long, well-stocked aisles, floor displays, maybe free samples of edible panties – basically like a really smutty Albertson’s. Instead what I got was a large, bare, harshly lit and sparsely furnished room full of sex toys and dirty movies. In retrospect, I guess they removed a lot of the clutter so as to eliminate any dark corners wherein patrons could test out the merchandise.
Eli and I walked through the aisles, looking for some pornography that was just dirty enough to be funny but not so dirty as to be awkward in a group setting. Unfortunately, while we saw DVD covers adorned with penises being inserted into orifices that I didn’t even know existed and women covered in a wide range of bodily fluids, none of it really jumped off the shelf and shouted ‘Adam!’ at us.
I made the assumption that an adult shop operates along the same principles as Barnes and Noble or JC Penny and went to the front desk to see if somebody could make a recommendation for me.
“Hi,” I said, approaching a well kempt woman in her mid 30s standing behind the counter. “I’m trying to buy some holiday porn for my friend. He’s Jewish, married, and he loves World of Warcraft. Have you got anything that fits with that?”
The woman furrowed her brow in thought for a few seconds before uttering arguably the most wonderful sentence in the history of language:
“Well, we’ve got some circus porn. Do you think he’s into that?”
I’ll never know how Judaism, matrimony, and the world’s most popular online game combine to form a bunch of clowns fucking, but I’ll be damned if that wasn’t exactly what the blurb on the back of the DVD promised. In all seriousness, though, I would’ve bought the movie for him if it hadn’t cost $35.
Hoping to find a more cost effective gift, I meandered on over to the dildo section, but the prices there got even higher. They were charging $150 for an apparatus that, thanks to its intimidating size and several curious protrusions, looked like it would do more harm than good.
I would’ve lingered more and given some real thought to my selections, but an adult shop in Springfield Oregon is not the sort of place where you want to spend a great deal of time. Most of the other patrons were overweight middle aged couples, the sorts of people who look like they’re bus drivers or middle school cafeteria workers, only they were locking eyes with me over by the gallon jug of discount body chocolate.
I realized that in these circumstances, Eli and I – a beefy former high school football player with a beard and an effeminate Conan O’ Brien knockoff, respectively – looked like basically the cutest gay couple in the world. Almost without thinking I grabbed the first novelty beer stein I could find and made a beeline for the counter.
In the long run I imagine it doesn’t matter what the patrons of Castle think about me, because if I bump into any of them again in my social life it will mean that something has gone very wrong. But I left the store all the same, because I found it personally offensive.
$35 is totally overcharging for circus porn.
Truman Capps wants to convey his sincerest and most heartfelt apologies to Mrs. Walsh, his third grade teacher who reads his blog, and assures her that he turned out this way due to his parents and not her teaching.
Oh, right, like I'm going to type 'pornography' into the Google Image Search window.
When I was a child, I was always intrigued by the dozens of adult shops in Salem. What kind of stuff for adults did they sell that you couldn’t get anywhere else? I figured it was probably calculators and bleach – things that were either too boring or too dangerous for children and, as such, had to be sequestered in special shops. I couldn’t understand why these places seemed to be so popular, given what they were selling, but I imagined that I’d figure it out when I became an adult and gained a true appreciation of calculators and bleach.*
*The Mystique Adult Arcade, located in a seedy repurposed house on Lancaster Boulevard adjacent to a used car lot, was a lot more enticing. I didn’t like arcades much because they were so noisy and full of hyperactive children; I figured that an arcade for adults would be more classy and demure, with a dress code and a velvet rope around the Time Crisis 3 machine.
I tell you, nothing positively destroys your innocence like learning that people have a fundamental desire to watch other people bone, and a robust and successful industry exists to satisfy that need. It kind of cripples whatever childish ideas you had about the superiority of our race when you find out that a guy with a video camera and a few open minded, flexible friends can make more money than your dad.
In spite of the appreciation for pornography that I cultivated throughout my teenage years, I had never gone into an adult shop before. You have to keep in mind, I’m a fairly self conscious person; I felt embarrassed eating a deep fried pizza in public, so understand that I never wanted to visit a store where everyone can assess one another’s sexual preferences from a quick glance in the shopping cart.
Last night, though, was the night of a Christmas party that included a secret Santa gift exchange with a 15-dollar limit. I had drawn my friend Adam and neglected to buy a gift until an hour before the party, so my roommate Eli, who also needed to buy a gift, suggested that we go out to Castle, an adult shop in Springfield. His reasoning, which seemed pure at the time, was that when you’re looking for cheap gifts for a quick laugh at a party full of your morally questionable friends, you can’t go wrong with porn.
Ten minutes later, when I walked into my first ever adult shop, I was admittedly a little disappointed. I had expected long, well-stocked aisles, floor displays, maybe free samples of edible panties – basically like a really smutty Albertson’s. Instead what I got was a large, bare, harshly lit and sparsely furnished room full of sex toys and dirty movies. In retrospect, I guess they removed a lot of the clutter so as to eliminate any dark corners wherein patrons could test out the merchandise.
Eli and I walked through the aisles, looking for some pornography that was just dirty enough to be funny but not so dirty as to be awkward in a group setting. Unfortunately, while we saw DVD covers adorned with penises being inserted into orifices that I didn’t even know existed and women covered in a wide range of bodily fluids, none of it really jumped off the shelf and shouted ‘Adam!’ at us.
I made the assumption that an adult shop operates along the same principles as Barnes and Noble or JC Penny and went to the front desk to see if somebody could make a recommendation for me.
“Hi,” I said, approaching a well kempt woman in her mid 30s standing behind the counter. “I’m trying to buy some holiday porn for my friend. He’s Jewish, married, and he loves World of Warcraft. Have you got anything that fits with that?”
The woman furrowed her brow in thought for a few seconds before uttering arguably the most wonderful sentence in the history of language:
“Well, we’ve got some circus porn. Do you think he’s into that?”
I’ll never know how Judaism, matrimony, and the world’s most popular online game combine to form a bunch of clowns fucking, but I’ll be damned if that wasn’t exactly what the blurb on the back of the DVD promised. In all seriousness, though, I would’ve bought the movie for him if it hadn’t cost $35.
Hoping to find a more cost effective gift, I meandered on over to the dildo section, but the prices there got even higher. They were charging $150 for an apparatus that, thanks to its intimidating size and several curious protrusions, looked like it would do more harm than good.
I would’ve lingered more and given some real thought to my selections, but an adult shop in Springfield Oregon is not the sort of place where you want to spend a great deal of time. Most of the other patrons were overweight middle aged couples, the sorts of people who look like they’re bus drivers or middle school cafeteria workers, only they were locking eyes with me over by the gallon jug of discount body chocolate.
I realized that in these circumstances, Eli and I – a beefy former high school football player with a beard and an effeminate Conan O’ Brien knockoff, respectively – looked like basically the cutest gay couple in the world. Almost without thinking I grabbed the first novelty beer stein I could find and made a beeline for the counter.
In the long run I imagine it doesn’t matter what the patrons of Castle think about me, because if I bump into any of them again in my social life it will mean that something has gone very wrong. But I left the store all the same, because I found it personally offensive.
$35 is totally overcharging for circus porn.
Truman Capps wants to convey his sincerest and most heartfelt apologies to Mrs. Walsh, his third grade teacher who reads his blog, and assures her that he turned out this way due to his parents and not her teaching.