Stories From The Sex Shop: The Prologue

So, I used to have a somewhat, um, “unconventional” job.

No, I wasn’t a stripper. But strippers were our primary clientele.

A few years ago, when “flat broke” was an understatement of my financial status, my definition of a good job was one that offered to hire me on the spot and that paid its employees in cash. That was how I stumbled upon “Erogenous Zone,” a gem of a store on South Street (South Philly’s block of cheesy, tourist trap-y stores) that dealt primarily in adult novelties and exotic dancewear.

That’s a delicate way of saying that I worked in a sex shop.

You know your job is going to be interesting when, at the end of your first day, you’re sent home with a reference book of all the sex toys you can imagine, and some you can’t. I knew nothing about this industry upon starting out (I never thought that my lack of knowledge about kinky sex would be a bad thing, but there you go). But I was going to have to learn the intricacies of all things phallic and tingly, because it was now my job to convince people that they needed this stuff. This is more difficult than it sounds, because I have never and will never believe that anyone, at any time, needs a vibrating rubber fist.

And that was only half of it. They kept all those, um, “playthings” in the back of the store. The front housed the outfits marketed to strippers, dancers, and middle-aged women trying to keep their husbands from leaving them. I say “outfits” because “clothes” is a gross exaggeration. Think full body fishnet suits. Think assless chaps. Think crotchless panties. The list goes on.

This was how I came to spend my nights and weekends surrounded by lime green double-sided penises and strawberry flavored edible underpants. At first I didn’t really understand why store employees would play a significant role in the whole process of buying sex toys. I had always thought that if a person has enough willpower and drive to enter a sex shop at all, he/she should already have adequate knowledge of the product he/she seeks. But products of this nature are sold in somewhat surprising abundance on South Street, so once I got over the shock of unfailingly catching a glance of some sort of representation of a genital every time I looked anywhere in the store, I realized that as long as there is a demand for these products, there will be a niche for people to supply them.

Since the store was located in an area popular with tourists, we had plenty of people come in just to giggle their way around the store. My role was to bother these people until they stopped finding the merchandise funny and began to think of the ways their lives could be improved by it. Because of this, it was essential that I develop nothing short of a breadth of knowledge on the subject. Customers in a store of that nature have trouble trusting your opinion if you don’t sound like you know what you’re talking about. So, realizing that I had no choice but to embrace my new profession, I schooled myself until I could recite, describe, and demonstrate all the tricks and treats of even the most complex rubber penis.

I consider my nearly-yearlong experience working in the adult industry to have been worthwhile. I took away from it a body of knowledge that most people can’t say they have: I am a sex toy expert. Curious and adventurous friends of mine now have someone to approach with questions of that nature. It also makes a fantastic conversation piece, particularly with people I’m just meeting for the first time. And, most importantly, it made for some of the best people-watching I’ve ever done. You can’t even imagine some of the characters I encountered there.

But those stories are to come at later dates.

Look for more installments in the “Stories from the Sex Shop” series!