“Change the locks on the back?” he asked Anthony Hawley from the customer side of the front counter as he entered.
“Yeah,” said Hawley, trying to appear busy with the cash register: he wasn’t a good actor. Derrick could tell there was something he wasn’t ready to say yet. After a minute of deep concentration, he drew his hand out of the till; there was a molded plastic Monster Adult X key ring looped around his index finger. Derrick knew there were boxes containing hundreds of these key rings on a shelf in the supply closet, but the keys on this one looked shiny and new. “Here. Put the extra someplace safe.”
“Done,” Derrick said, nodding his head as he stuck the pair of new keys into his pocket. “Anybody in the back?” He meant the arcade.
“Not just now,” said Anthony, but Derrick was already retrieving his mop and bucket. It was true, the daily routine at Monster Adult X was gross. But it gave him pocket money, and a chance to prove to himself that he knew how to be a good employee, the kind who was loyal enough to stick around even when things changed. The kind of person who shows up on time and goes right to work, and the kind who knows better than to ask the boss annoying questions about things he doesn’t need to know.
He headed back to the arcade. Mop-up was the worst part, and it had to be done several times a shift. It was best to get the first one out of the way early.
MINOANS I
Hot and Ready. Hot, Young and Ready. Hot and Young. Hot Young Punks. New Wave Hookers. Backstage Pass. The Devil in Miss Jones 3: A New Beginning. Café Flesh. Night Hunger. On Golden Blonde. Rush. Bolt. Crypt Tonite. Pig Poppers. Secrets of the Orient. Deep Chill. Anal Assassins 5. Motion Lotion. Emotion Lotion. Mr. Prolong. Lady-hunger. Sex Fiend Firemen. Sex Fantasy. Sex Orgy. The Training of Rose-Marie. Curious Co-eds. Co-ed Surprise. Topless Co-eds. Sex Hideaway. Sex Dungeon. Private Orgies. Secret Dreams. Night Visions. Night Shivers. Dungeon Slaves. Deep Chill. For the Love of Blondes. Young and Blonde. Blonde Agony. Whipped and Restrained. Captives of Lust. Apartment Babes. Tijuana Tingler. Swedish Fly. Parisian Nights. Ball Gaggers. Hogtied. Swedish Erotica. European Special #5. Secrets of Japanese Bondage. Just Over 40. From Sex to Sexty. Never Too Old.
These, such as they were, were the assets of Monster Adult X: VHS tapes, their housings on display in the store and the tapes in translucent clamshells behind the counter; sex toys packaged in brittle, yellowing plastic; inhalants marketed as fuel additives or liquid incense; magazines of unknown vintage, probably trading hands multiple times en route to the rack, where they gathered dust. Most suppliers had a very strict no-returns policy, although one or two offered limited and very modest discounts if you sent back exhausted stock with your new order—what use they might have found for all that dead weight was hard to imagine, but the policy was there if you had the pluck to try them on it. Send back five old tapes nobody rents, see if a new one doesn’t have better luck. Ten dust-gathering toys sealed in their original packaging invoice, five dollars off any order. The stuff in the bottles and capsules under the counter wasn’t returnable but somebody had to want it. It would be possible, if he sold the store, to turn all or some of this into cash somehow, Anthony thought, but the math on it felt like more work than it was worth. He spent half an afternoon working out a few possibilities for it on paper after he learned he’d have to vacate the building, and then he decided to cut his losses.
“Probably closing early tonight unless something happens,” he said to Derrick out of the silence that had gathered between them as they sat on their stools behind the counter after the arcade was clean. Derrick’s nose was in a copy of Epic, one of the old science fiction magazines from the Monster Comics days.
“Yeah?” he said, sensing that something was different but not wanting to seem nosy.
Hawley looked up from his ledger. “Yeah,” he said, turning to Derrick and looking him in the eyes. “And I think I’m kind of short here generally.”
“Short?”
“I think I’m going to do something else,” Hawley said. “I read about how you can open an office and do phone sales. No monthly overhead except for rent and the phone bill, clock out by five every night. No more booths.”
“No!” said Derrick, reflexively; he didn’t know what else to say. It was weird to feel sentimental about his time in the arid, creepy darkness of the store. But it was nice to have a job with downtime for reading; he knew sketching in his notebook was a luxury few other jobs would offer. He dreaded the prospect of job interviews, having to dress up for them and answer questions: “Why do you want this job? Do you see yourself staying with it?” The people asking these questions—at restaurants, at convenience stores—were barely older than he was. Most of them still had wispy facial hair. It was embarrassing. The store job was perfect, in its way.
Hawley laughed. “Derrick, it’s just a dirty bookstore,” he said. “Places like this come and go. Every job you get after this one will be better than this one.”
Derrick considered this for a moment in silence. He tried, but he couldn’t find a counterargument. “Well, no more booths, then,” he said finally; he ventured half a smile, trying to guess at his boss’s feelings.
“I’m sorry,” said Hawley. “There’s just not any money in it, you know. Been doing this three or four years now on my end. It starts to get to you.”
“I hear that,” Derrick said, but he could tell there was something else. He wanted to know; he wondered if he could help. But he decided to wait it out.
“Besides,” Hawley said, and then he paused for a moment; what he wanted to say was more a feeling than a thought, but he felt like he might miss the chance to do Derrick a small favor if he held it back. “If you look around—I’m not in any position to judge anybody, but just for myself, you know, when I go home and think about this place, sometimes I remember how when I was a kid it was a diner. You know? Or even when it was a normal newsstand.”
“Yeah?” Derrick wasn’t sure where Hawley was going with this idea.
“Well, and then I think about”—he extended his arm from his chest, like a master of ceremonies introducing a beauty contestant—“all this.”
It was in Derrick’s heart to disagree: “All this,” to him, looked like money in the bank and the right to say you answered to no one. What was more, the people who came in here weren’t going to suddenly get religion if they showed up one day to find the place closed; they’d just go get the same thing six or seven exits farther down the highway. Why not keep taking the money, if it was just there for the taking?
He understood the bit about some weird tension between the interior of the store and the world outside—stepping into the sunlight after being inside too long was always a little like returning to Earth from space, or passing through a portal between conflicting realities. But that feeling, for him, never followed him all the way home. He hadn’t considered how it might be different for Hawley, who worked here seven days a week, and who stayed until midnight on weeknights and then even later on weekends, changing twenties for whoever came to a place like this that late.
“Guess I can see what you mean,” he said. “If this was a business you loved, it would be different.”
“It would be different.”
“Still, like, I don’t know,” he said. “It’ll be weird when it’s gone. I get a lot of reading done in here when it’s slow.”
The screen door in front of the front door was opening; it triggered an electronic doorbell. “We’ll talk more. It won’t be right away,” Hawley said, turning. He nodded to the customer as he came in, a man in a baseball cap who looked nervous, but he offered no verbal greeting and didn’t look directly at him. Etiquette. Wait for the customer to say hi first. It’s not exactly a rule in stores like this, but it’s a good idea.