Man-Child
When I was ten years old, my mother got a part time job at the local video store (called Video Theater) in our town. She worked only a couple nights a week, and every Friday afternoon I would cross the street from my elementary school and hang out at the store for a few hours while she finished her shift.
It was a humble video store. Although it was extremely small in retrospect, it contained more valuable information and life lessons than any public library could handle. Rocky IV and Superman IV informed me of the cold war and the folly of mankind’s creation of the atom bomb. Friday the 13th I-VIII made me aware of the consequences of letting ugly children drown. Westworld brought the hypothetical dystopian family vacation to life. Robocop taught me the ills of corporate greed and corruption, and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Unnameable preached the dangers of man playing God. The list of condensed morals on the walls made me more gluttonous than the fattest, most cavity-ridden child in the largest of all candy stores, and that was only the main part of the video store.
There were two other smaller areas in the back. On the right side by the counter was a small alcove with movies strictly for kids: Your Looney Tunes, your Yogi Bear, your Fievel Goes West…
Every once in a while I would venture back to the children’s section and get The Garbage Pail Kids Movie or a copy of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi if I wanted to get back in touch with my inner seven year old, but most of the time I just hung out in the main area looking at the Horror section.
The other alcove on the left side, adjacent to the children’s section, was protected by two wooden saloon-style doors. The doors may have left the top and bottom of the doorway exposed, but they were placed at the perfect height to prevent any kids from peering inside.
Even before my mother worked there, when our family were just regular customers, I knew that room was off-limits. My mother never explained the exact reasoning why, but I was able to piece it together. Adult stuff. Nudity. Sex. I often “accidentally” dropped a nickel or penny in front of the saloon doors so I could bend down and get a peek, but it was always in vain.
The only analogy my prepubescent mind could come up with to summarize these adult films was to compare it to a sex scene in Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Without giving the entire plot of the movie away, there was a scene where Joey, a psychiatric hospital patient, was being seduced by a pretty blonde nurse. The nurse asked Joey to unzip her nurse’s uniform, and as she turned her nude body towards Joey, she asked, “Do you like my body, Joey?” And after Joey nodded (For that was the only thing Joey could do, he was a mute after all), the nurse kissed him, and much to Joey’s shock, the nurse suddenly had a gigantic slimy tongue sticking out of her mouth, and she spewed it out like a dart, wrapping Joey’s arm to the bedpost! She fired three more tongues at him, tying up his other arm and his legs. Well, the nurse soon turned into the badly burned child-murderer, Freddy Krueger, and he said, “What’s wrong, Joey? Feeling tongue-tied? Hahahahaha!” Then the bed gave way to show a fiery pit of doom that Joey was suspended above.
So, my childhood theory on the “adult” films were just like that scene in Nightmare 3, only the nurse wouldn’t spew out any tongues. There would be no severely burned child murderer wearing a glove made of knives. And worse yet, there would be no brilliant puns. The nurse would stay nude, the kissing would be uninterrupted, and the scene would progress to something I couldn’t even imagine. And who the heck would want to see that? But there was some unknown force that would cause me to rewind the nurse scene when I watched the movie alone in my room. Something I couldn’t quite understand.
“Do you like my body, Joey?”
“Do you like my body, Joey?”
“Do you like my body, Joey?”
Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for my mother, the bathroom in the store was located through the back of the Adult section. If I ever needed to use it, my mother would have to walk behind me with her hands over my eyes until I blindly reached the toilet, then she would wait outside until I was done and repeat the steps leading me back out to the common area of the store.
Sometimes there would be a crack of opportunity between my mother’s fingers, and my eyes were exposed to nothing but pictures of barbaric female flesh on the walls. The look on the faces of the nude women were nothing but angry; their chests jutting out, curling their lips and gritting their teeth. I later found out that this was the look of lust, but at the time, I worried that the movies were nothing but an hour and a half of a nude woman yelling at the camera. I mean, some of them were holding whips, so why not?
Eventually, corporate video rental stores like West Coast Video and Blockbuster Video came stomping along with their multiple copies of movies and wide selection of Nintendo games and put Video Theater and other stores like it out of business. But, despite all my searching inside the gargantuan confines of Blockbuster, I could find no saloon doors or secret entrances. Almost all of the movies were clean, with no nude women on the cover. The closest thing I found was Sex, Lies, And Videotape, but that seemed to pale in comparison to the real hardcore stuff behind the saloon doors of Video Theater. It was the end of an era.