Stories From The Sex Shop, Part II: Superfluous Papilla

One chilly January night, my co-worker and I were trying to make our shift pass more quickly. It was that time of year right after Christmas, but not quite close enough to Valentine’s Day, so very few fun-seekers had wandered in to the store that night. This made for easier conversation between my co-worker and I, and somehow during the course of our chat, we ended up on the subject of superfluous papillae.

“Superfluous what-now?” Pat said after I’d stated the term.

“Superfluous papilla,” I repeated. “It means that you have an extra nipple on your body somewhere.”

She was enthralled. She hadn’t heard of it before, and had more than a few questions about it. As we speculated over the specifics of such a condition, a couple wandered into the store, minding their own business. After offering them help, we fell quietly (we thought) back into our conversation as they browsed.

“I mean, does it lactate? Can you get milk out of it?”

“I don’t think so. I think it’s just a show nipple. It’s not like it’s hooked up to anything.”

“Well, how does it happen?”

“I dunno. Maybe it has to do with re-absorbing a twin in the womb or something.”

"So it's like a tiny Siamese twin?"

“A Siamese nipple?” We laughed.

“That’s crazy. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this before,” Pat said. “I wonder how many people have this. What is it called again? Superlative-what?”

“Superfluous papilla,” I said.

“I have one,” a voice said.

We looked up. We’d almost forgotten about the browsing couple. They had both turned toward us, and the woman was nodding. “I do,” she said.

We stood, openmouthed for a second, trying to go over what we’d just been saying in our heads. Had we said anything rude? Had we used any slurs to which the abundantly-nippled population might take offense (Did I say the word “udders”? Anything about nursing a litter? Shit, “Siamese nipple” might be trouble.)?

Mostly, though, I think we were in shock. I mean, what were the fucking odds that someone with an unusual amount of nipples would happen to come into the store just as we were talking about it?

It was a legitimate question, actually, and I wanted to know the answer.

After a moment, I decided to take my chances. “Do you really have one?” I asked the woman timidly.

“I really do,” she said.

“She really does,” her husband echoed. “I’ve seen it.”

Pat and I looked at each other. “Well…” I said. “I mean… if you don’t mind me asking… where is it?”

The couple laughed and came over to the counter. Thank God.

“It’s right here.” The woman pointed to her left side, about halfway down her torso. I tried not to let her see me looking for any sign of it. Please, someone come in the front door, I need some cold air to waft over here…

“Wow. That’s… I mean, I don’t mean to be rude or anything…”

“No, I don’t mind,” she said, laughing again. “I used to be embarrassed about it, but now it doesn’t bother me.”

I took that as an invitation. I was beyond excited at this point. I had never actually met anyone who possessed a third nipple. I had so many questions. I tried to choose the most pressing ones. “So what does it look like?”

“It just looks like a nipple,” her husband said. “Like a regular nipple. It used to creep me out, but now I don’t really notice it.”

“It’s not shaped weird or anything?”

“I mean, it’s a little smaller than my other two, but that’s about it.”

“Do you know why you have it? I mean, why it’s there?” I could tell I was embarrassing Pat at this point, but I realized that I may never have this opportunity again in my life, and I had questions that needed answers, dammit.

“Not really, no.” The woman shrugged casually, as if her third nipple was completely normal, arbitrary conversation material that came up often when talking to strangers. “They never really told me anything about it.”

I shook my head in amazement. “That’s so interesting,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bother you or anything, I’ve just never met anyone who had one before.”

“Oh, it’s really fine, I don’t mind!” The woman said again, laughing.

After a few more casual exchanges, Pat rung up their purchase for them, which happened to be a fishnet body suit. Now, I’ve never seen anybody wearing one, nor have I ever donned one myself, but I assume, according to the lovely picture on the box, that one of its primary perks (no pun intended) is the way your nipples can stick out between the fabric, like they’re pointing at your seductee, beckoning him/her toward you.

It goes without saying, then, that their purchase opened my mind to an entirely new set of questions as well as images over which to ponder.

I kept my mouth shut, though. I decided that I’d bothered the woman enough for one day. Also, I didn’t see how my new set of questions wouldn’t cross the line of being offensive. There’s curiosity, and then there’s verbal sexual harassment. It’s a fine line, and when you work in the industry that I did, it’s definitely not a line you want to toe.

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!