Joanna Angel
NIGHT SHIFT
A CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN EROTIC FANTASY
For Asa Akira
(This couldn’t have happened without you.)
1
I’m at a coffee shop getting my usual toaster oven delicacy—an egg white and turkey bacon English muffin, with a blonde veranda blend coffee and three espresso shots to wash it down. Yes, I get the weakest coffee and I un-weaken it with the molly of Arabica beans. I’m tired. I’m waiting for the caffeine to kick in so I can start my day, even though it’s 7:00 P.M.
I’m still getting the hang of this nocturnal lifestyle. My friend Jimmy told me it gets easier. “After a while, you’ll find it in yourself to wake up early, so you can at least get a little sunlight,” he laughed, “But you’ll learn to love the dark. Good things happen in the dark.”
That’s easy for a famous DJ to say; his dark nights are filled with people fawning over him, throwing him alcohol, praise, and promises of whatever sex he wants in exchange for his musical stylings. It’s still weird to think of him like that, the dorky acquaintance from high school who always talked a big game. He actually made it. I see his name and photo on billboards all over town, accompanied by phone numbers to call for “very important” tables and bottle service. And if it wasn’t enough that he’s famous and adored, he makes bank for these promotions! He spent more than what I make in a month on an array of furry hand cuffs, sparkly dildos, and colorful panties.
How do I know this? Well, because I was the one who rang him up.
“That will be three thousand four hundred sixty-two dollars and twenty-nine cents.”
Sparkly butt plugs of various sizes, rainbow thigh-high socks, and lime green penis lollipops line my counter, and the pile is still growing, the entourage of Tinkerbells still not done with their horny shopping spree. This had to be the most colorful pile of debauchery I had ever seen. But then again, I’ve only been working here for a week. It’s my sixth “day” working as a cashier at Dreamz, an adult video and novelty shop located inside of a strip mall on Highway 19 in Pasco County, Florida. A scenic road known for its unusually high number of pedestrian deaths… and porn stores. I was hesitant about accepting the job here for a lot of reasons—one of them being the oncoming traffic. Another was that I was worried someone I knew would run into me here. It’s not that I have any aversion to dildos, adult DVDs, and little booths to masturbate in, but I don’t exactly have an all-consuming passion for it either. I’m not a virgin, but I can count the times I’ve had sex on one hand. A self-imposed friendless and sexless life, combined with a cum laude English degree from a state university, was supposed to lead to a dream job in academia. Yet, here I stand, behind a register, ringing up lube at the crack of dawn thanks to a shitty economy and an influx of girls who loved Jane Austen in middle school and also decided to pursue English teaching degrees. However, Dreamz does have about seventy different kinds of lube. I had no idea there was seventy different ways to moisten up your genitals. That’s just not something you learn while deconstructing The Canterbury Tales.
My first week at the store had actually been pretty bland until Jimmy walked in on my first Friday night. He recognized me immediately, which isn’t so surprising because I’d barely changed anything about myself other than being a few pounds heavier than I used to be. Jimmy looked completely different. He used to sport a long, greasy ponytail, which was now a very well-manicured, bleached faux-hawk. He was also now covered in tattoos (one of which is a portrait of his very own face) and was wearing excessive, giant pieces of jewelry, things Joan Rivers would have called “statement pieces.” A giant dollar sign necklace certainly says a statement to me, and that statement is I can pay my rent and bills, and have lots of money left over for anything I could ever want.
Jimmy entered the store with a group of incredibly attractive female disciples. It was 5:30 A.M. I presume the sun was rising, but there aren’t any windows in the store so I wouldn’t know. The girls looked like mini-me versions of Jimmy, also with multi-colored hair and tattoos, wearing various neon colored tutus, slap bracelets (Where did they even find those? Weren’t they outlawed in, like, 1986?), fuzzy leg warmers, and platform sneakers. Their eyes were large and bloodshot; I imagine they were on some kind of designer drugs only famous people have access to. This motley crew of rainbow-bright puke skipped around the store, and swooped up anything shiny they could penetrate or vibrate themselves with; they plopped the objects on the checkout counter with glee, while Jimmy watched from the front of the store, nodding in approval. Once they were done, Jimmy strutted over to me, his focus trained on preparing his wallet for the transaction, but he immediately did a double take when he looked up.
“Taryn?!” he asked, surprised.
“Yeah! Hey!” I replied. I wasn’t quite sure how to play this off because he had been in the store for at least 30 minutes, I just didn’t want to say hi to him unless he said hi to me first.
“Damn! I haven’t seen you in a minute.”
It had actually been about six years. But I suppose when your life is a constant drug-and-sex rush, time has a different meaning.
“Yeah! Well… I see posters of you all over the place. So I’ve been seeing you. Congrats on everything. I guess when you told everyone you were dropping out of high school to be a famous DJ, you were really on to something.” A short skinny girl dressed like Betty Boop from the wrong side of the tracks interrupted this awkward reunion by plopping down a tiny, precious Swarovski crystal butt plug on the counter.
“I want this, too,” she said, batting her eyes at Jimmy.
I was still new there and not entirely sure how to converse with the customers. Was I supposed to act as though I was ringing up laundry detergent at Walgreens, totally nonchalant? Or was being a slight amount of sleazy the professional thing to do? I received about forty-five minutes’ worth of training for this job from the owner of the store, who happened to be drunk on her own batch of moonshine at the time. Half the items Jimmy and his minions wanted weren’t tagged properly so I made up prices based on how expensive things kind of looked. So uh, $249.99 seemed about right for this butt plug. The amount of money I made in a week, going straight into an asshole.
“This looks like quite the adventure!” I said, in a very grandma tone.
“Hell yeah! We’re all celebrating, ’cus I dropped a new single tonight,” Jimmy said.
“Well, I hope someone picked it up for you!” I nervously replied. God damn it. Fortunately, I don’t think he heard my horribly lame joke. Either that or he heard it and ignored it, which was a completely appropriate thing to do.
“That will be three thousand, four hundred and sixty-two dollars and twenty-nine cents.” I said. This didn’t faze him at all. He handed me a credit card. Just one credit card, without a blink of an eye. Damn. My college books were about $3,000 and I used to always spread that among three different cards along with a handful of cash.
“Oh yeah—and an hour in room four, please,” he said, just before I finished ringing everything up.
In my entire week-long employment here, no one had asked for one of the rooms before. Oh wait. I mean “ROOMZ.” That’s what they’re called here. The letter “z” apparently exudes a sexiness which I don’t understand. They never taught me that in college.