It Happened To Me: Peddling Smut Was The Best Job I Ever Had
PLUS! Jane wants to hire you as a writer/editor. Apply here! No experience or degrees needed (but if you have a degree I can make you and your parents feel better about it by saying it was a factor).
Hello, my favorite people!
Today's entry is entirely courtesy of the great Charlie, whom you old-timers here likely already know and love. For you who don’t yet, let me suggest the following compendium of Charlie’s Another Jane Pratt Thing artistry. (It might sound like I'm being sarcastic, but I am genuinely not. He is an artist as far as I'm concerned - and a humdinger of a guy.)
There are so many to choose from, but here:
Charlie’s experiences with fatphobia affecting his healthcare, fatphobia being something he writes about in a more vulnerable way than I have ever seen from a person of his gender.
A personal favorite of mine he wrote on tax day last year that I think is so powerful about the political issues we are all grappling with and I wonder if you agree.
And the classic “I Shit My Pants At Work,” accompanied by one of the best opening images in my publishing history.
Now For The Fun Job Posting Part:
I have at least 20, maybe more, incredible stories to post here. What I don’t have is enough time myself to build and publish them. (On top of regular AJPT stuff, my book is due in 10 months, which sounds like a long time and is not at all for the way that I like to write and then revise and add and revise and subtract to within an inch of my poor writing’s life. Also, the private stuff I am writing about - and I know a lot of you memoir writers can relate - is difficult to dredge up and relive, so that excavation process can add time. And as I am telling many of my personal stories for the very first time - to anyone in any format - there is no shorthand with which to say them.)
Anyway, enough parenthetical entitled griping over my little humble-braggy problem! What I need is someone willing to help me edit, build and post all these current glorious gems and to work with me on other ones for the future. If you’re into writing, you could do that here too, no problem. I know that whoever you are, we’ll have so much fun together, I will work really collaboratively (maybe more than you would want!), pay fairly and be forever in your debt for helping keep AJPT growing and thriving. If you think that might be you, please let me know in the comments and await further instruction. Thank you in advance!
Last thing, especially for you new subscribers I value so much and thank for managing to hang on this far: Every day is a surprise here and if you don’t care about today’s featured piece, that’s fine and there will be more and different ones coming right after. I also deeply appreciate you letting me barge into your inboxes. I don’t take that access lightly. But since I am currently in, I will be like the person who blurts out during sex and say it to you here: I love you!
And in this case, I really do! I will be back with a story from me in two days and I hope you stick around.
XOJane
By Charlie Connell
For the first 15 minutes of my job interview at Nationwide Video, nothing exceptional or out of the ordinary happened. I answered a bunch of questions about my previous employment, explained why I was excited to work at a video store1 , and I lied profusely about my work ethic. You know, normal job interview nonsense. Then things took a turn I never saw coming2.
“Well, Charlie, I really like everything I’ve heard so far,” the interviewer said to me. “But we aren’t actually hiring for this location…”
“Fuck a duck, what was the point of even bringing me in,” I wanted to scream, but instead I waited for him to finish his sentence.
“...but we are hiring at the Clarendon location. We have a more robust adult section there, so the last question I have for you is, would you be comfortable working in an environment surrounded by adult videos like this?”
Then he held up an oversized box for the film “Black African Gold: Hardcore.” With this being a family-oriented publication, I don’t want to be crass and describe the cover in too much detail. I’m confident you already have some sort of picture in your mind, and no matter what that picture is, I can tell you two things: 1. You’re on the right track, and 2. His manhood is at least 43% larger than what you pictured. But more than the shock of having hardcore porn thrown in my face during a job interview, I remember the serene, yet simultaneously bored, look in the cover model’s eyes. Well, that and the horrifyingly large dong.
I took a second to gather myself and process what had just been the craziest 30 seconds of my young professional life. “Porn’s rad,” I said with a chuckle. “I have no problems with it whatsoever.”
And that was that. I had walked in a slacker looking for the ultimate slacker job, and I walked out as a smut peddler.
A Den of Iniquity
Before we get too far into this, this was a rental video store specializing in porn, not a sex shop with toys, magazines, or spooge booths. I swear that every time I would say I worked at a porn shop, the follow-up question was always about the booths. That’s not to say that there weren’t some disgusting moments (once you reach the end of this you’ll consider this sentence to be Chekov’s Revolting Substance), but aside from the content on the tapes, Nationwide Video looked like any other independent video store in a major city in the early aughts.
In the stereotypical indie store, there would be a large section of movies and then tucked away in the corner, perhaps behind a beaded curtain, would be a small adult section. Nationwide was the exact inverse of that. On the ground floor, we had a small checkout counter and a dozen or so shelves of videos nobody ever glanced at, let alone actually rented. There was a law in Chicago mandating at least 15% of the stock to be non-adult, so once the new releases had grown stale at the other three locations, they were shipped over to the Clarendon branch to rot. We had an entire shelf of “Airheads,” with a full shelf of “The Avengers” (Connery and Uma, not Iron Man and Cap) below it. There was a stairway in the back that led to the Hot-N-Nasty Annex. No, that’s not a flourish of prose; it was the actual name, complete with an honest-to-god neon sign.
As you walked up the stairs, under that gaudy neon, a brand new world rose ahead with each step. Think of it like when they drive into Toontown in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, but instead of Goofy and Bugs, it’s tits and ass. At the top of the stairs, customers were faced with a choice: take a left to the straight section or pull a right and head to the gay section. Or, if you didn’t move it all, you could choose a video from the hilariously minuscule Bi section that served as a sort of demilitarized zone between the two others. And yes, this arrangement was done purely for our own amusement. Across from there was a counter with security monitors, a Coke machine3, and a 10-foot Xenomorph wearing a thong.
Whereas downstairs was cramped, upstairs was as massive as a suburban Blockbuster. There were thousands of VHS tapes. I know what you’re thinking right now — it was the 2000s and the store was still all video tapes? Back in the olden days before you could pull up 10,000 XXX videos within five seconds on your phone, porn was really fucking expensive, even on VHS. We’re talking over $70 (back then!) for a new release, and when things came out on DVD they were even more expensive. It seems backwards since porn tends to be the first industry to latch on to any new technology — it was porn choosing VHS that killed Betamax, afterall — but the prohibitive prices made it so we were very busy renting VHS tapes long after most stores phased them out.
Among all those thousands of tapes, there was a little something for everyone. And quite often that something was a fetish I had never even fathomed could “be a thing,” which is saying something for an urbane sophisticate such as myself. Discovering what bukake is for your job is the kind of thing you wish you could unlearn, but know you never will4. For the first couple of weeks, I made note of every funny video title (“Sistas Gotta Piss 2: Pissin’ In The Fat Lane” will always be the champion) and outrageous premise (“Mister 18 Inch Meets Bridget The Midget”), but soon it all sort of blurred into the background.
Once you get beyond the shock of working in an all-caps PORN SHOP, this was the idyllic hipster video store job. I got to wear whatever I wanted (fraying corduroy shorts and punk band tees). I got to listen to whatever I wanted to (ska when my coworkers would allow, more often punk and metal). I got to spend most of the time reading whatever I wanted (The Onion, The Chicago Reader, and Tolstoy). And if you wanted to have a few small beers during your shift, nobody gave a shit. Most of my coworkers were artsy weirdos like me who had applied to work at the non-porn location, which meant we all had enough in common that everybody was pretty close.
It was a job like any other job. Stocking shelves with copies of “Down The Hatch #8” is really no different than stocking them with cans of soup; annoying customers are annoying customers no matter what they’re buying. But then, out of nowhere, some wild shit would spring up as a brutal reminder that no, this wasn’t a normal job.
At Least We Got Hazard Pay
It was a dreary morning and I was working the counter downstairs. We’d only been open for about 20 minutes, and I was still working on my bagel and coffee when a customer came in and threw four videos onto the counter to return them. I aimed for the one on top of the pile and as I squeezed my fingers to grab it the video case shot out of my hand and on to the floor.
“What the…” For a split second, I was in a daze, unable to connect the dots as to what would make a plastic video case shoot out of my hands like a carp. Then I felt the bile start to rise up my esophagus as the revulsion of the moment struck.
“My hand is covered in fucking lube!5 What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I screamed as I grabbed a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex and shoved them into the arms of the bewildered customer. “Clean up your fucking mess and apologize.”
“They were like that when I rented th…” he tried to stammer out before I managed to find an even higher decibel level to bellow, “Do you see me freaking out?! There is no possible way that tape was put on a shelf in that condition. Do I need to cancel your account?”
“I’d like to see the manager…”
“I am the fucking manager.”
And like that, it was over. He put his head down, red with shame, and moved to the side of the counter to clean the tapes while another customer stepped up to rent his store-maximum six porno films. Officially, we called this a “substance warning,” but that really undersells how dehumanizing it feels to have to serve some asshole who couldn’t even be bothered to wipe the spunk and filth from his hands before running out the door to rent six more and repeat the cycle. Sure, I got to charge him an extra $5 and cow him into an almost sincere apology, but it’s hard not to develop a hatred for someone like that. Which is why I completely lost my shit and went into a panic when my wife and I were standing outside the Lincoln Park Zoo 15 years later when I recognized a customer notorious for substance warnings pulling up to the curb in a pedicab. I never forget my enemies6.
Even though substance warnings were few and far between, eventually they happened to everyone. For me, it was the first time I had any reservations about the job, but then I remembered two very important things: I actually had fun almost every single day (high praise for a retail job) and I was making about $12 an hour. In 2000. That was significantly more than my friends working at sandwich shops and bookstores, and my job was infinitely more chill than any other part-time gig I could find. Hell, when you factor inflation in, I’m not making too much more at my very professional journalism job. Yeah, every once in a while, I had to call the police because a guy was in the corner whacking it to the cover of some Jeff Stryker movie, but every job has its drawbacks.7
A World Without Women
The most peculiar thing about working at Nationwide Video was the complete and total absence of living, breathing human women. Not only were 99% of the customers men — during my four-year term as a smut peddler, the number of female customers I served was in the single digits — but so were all of my coworkers. While I’m pretty sure the policy was never actually written down, especially given the probable illegality of it, we never hired any women. The thinking was often that it was for the woman’s safety, but I always thought it was more for the customers’ comfort. On the rare times a woman was in the store, the customers didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t that they were creeping on them (thankfully), but more like they were dumbstruck by the mere presence of a woman. Imagine the kind of look you’d have on your face if you got off a plane in Hawaii to find yourself surrounded by 15-foot snow drifts; that’s what the customers looked like. Most of the time, they’d lock their eyes on the ground and shuffle out as quickly as possible.
Being surrounded by nudity all day, every day had a few odd side effects. The most notable was how it completely altered how I thought about sexual attraction. Look, I was 20 when I got the gig, and even if I were a Lothario, I still wouldn’t know shit about shit at that age; but as a happily married man in his forties, I can comfortably admit how sheltered and inexperienced I was. It had only been a few years since I would flip back and forth to the Spice channel, hoping that for just a split second the cable box would fail to scramble and maybe, just maybe, I’d get a peek of a nipple. Now I was spending entire shifts where it was impossible to stare straight ahead without seeing two dozen naked men and women in all stages of sexual congress.8 It scrambled my brain. I became completely desensitized to nudity. Remember Nipplegate and all that nonsense after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime show? I was watching when Jackson’s wardrobe “malfunctioned,” I just didn’t process that there was anything strange about it since it was the 683rd nipple I had seen that week.
The flip side of that naughty lil’ coin is that it became incredibly hot to see women fully clothed. And if they had an ankle-length skirt and a heavy cardigan on… va va voooom! From the time I was 13 on, I desperately wanted to know what women looked like nude, but once seeing naked women became just another part of my job, that allure was gone.9 I was still telling people that I bought Playboy for the articles, but this time I wasn’t lying.
Jokes aside, I think that this aspect of working at the porn shop rewired my brain in a healthy way. Lonely, horny teens tend to think about women in some pretty disgusting ways, especially during the late ‘90s/early aughts, and I could see an alternate universe where I ended up becoming a toxic incel. Working in the porn industry (albeit in a tangential way) forced me to really consider all the aspects of it, which killed a lot of the boneheaded machismo nonsense lurking in the corners of my brain. My mind was opened to a lot of concepts I’d rarely considered before, like sex positivity and ethical pornography. Considering that this porn shop was in the Chicago neighborhood known as Boystown, I naturally met a ton of people from the LGBTQ+ community. It’s embarrassing to admit this in 2026, but even as a radically progressive guy in 2001, I still had a few less-than-enlightened ideas gleaned from stereotypes that I probably would have held on to had I not been forced to confront them. When a dude who calls himself Stick Daddy brings you bagels every once in a while, all of that stupid, bigoted bullshit evaporates.
Super Stupid Saturday and Other Adventures in Mischief
What happens when you get a bunch of dudes in their early twenties and throw them into the aforementioned world without women? A lot of really dumb shit, that’s what. This is one of the oldest cliches around, but it’s also true — when women aren’t around, dudes get very creative with our mischief.
On the clock, this usually meant dashing fluorescent light bulbs over each other’s backs on the way to the dumpster or writing pithy notes on a customer’s account page. If you’ve ever been at a video store and seen the clerk stifle a giggle after entering your account number, I can assure you that they are laughing at a note left by a coworker. My favorite instance of this occurred with a customer who had a quite unfortunate name — Robert E. Lee.10 The second his phone number was entered the following note would pop up on the screen:
I gave the customer his change in $5 bills and he rudely ripped them in half and spat on the ground before storming out.
Paid with a $50 while mumbling about how Grant was a worthless drunk with no honor. Real weird.
After checking out he said, “These videos will help my Dixie rise again.”
You get the idea. We spent hours trying to one-up each other with jokes in the notes. So much so that pretty much every store meeting included at least one half-hearted plea for us to use notes for business reasons only. Or at least primarily. These pleas fell on deaf ears.
My favorite little bit of mischief was finding ways to drink on the job without getting found out by the customers. Our bosses didn’t really care as long as we got everything done, but customers couldn’t be trusted to be as cool. So we would rip out pages of Adult Video News — the trade magazine of the porn industry — and wrap our tall boys of Old Style with them. If a customer ever asked what I was drinking, my answer was always “Porn Soda.” This did a great job of fooling the customers, but ended up really irking the bosses since we needed those AVN catalogs for work.
Off the clock, things got drunker and weirder. Every Wednesday the bowling alley down the street did cheap games (If I recall correctly, they started at $.50 and I think were $2 by the time Marigold Bowl shut down. RIP), so we’d get a crew including folks from other stores and show up. We did not consider bowling to be an athletic competition as much as an opportunity to pound Bud heavies in bottles shaped like bowling pins, throw eight-pound balls 84% of the way down the lane in the air, and tackle each other as we were about to throw the ball. Once we wore out our welcome, or when the bar closed, we’d end up at a 24-hour taqueria until the wee hours of the morning.
One of my favorite things we did was Super Stupid Saturdays. A typical one of these involved a couple cases of Old Style, illegal fireworks being shot off a roof in Uptown, and ordering an absurdly large pizza that needed to be put at a diagonal to make it through the door. We loved our dumb hijinks. At one momentous party, one of my coworkers powerbombed another one through a folding table in somebody’s kitchen. But we weren’t total ingrates; we brokered a price for the table before wrecking it. I’m pretty sure I still have a chunk of it in a box somewhere.
There was a lot of insanity over the years, but also a lot of bond-building. Working at a video store, even a Hot-N-Nasty one, involved a ton of downtime. Most days were spent just listening to music and shooting the breeze with my coworkers. There are so many authors, bands, and (mostly not x-rated) films that I first got into thanks to my coworkers. Working alongside a bunch of other artsy college kids opened my mind in a lot of different ways, a thing I’m reminded of every time I put on Jawbreaker’s “Dear You,” reread Solzhenitsyn, or try to explain the revulsion/infatuation I had watching “Gummo.”
It’s been 26 years since I started working there and I still talk to a bunch of my coworkers. I ended up becoming really close friends with a few guys, one of whom moved to Jersey City and kept coming back to Chicago with his buddies from town, many of whom I would become friends with. My first break in media came from one of them, and a few years later, when my relationship ended and I was politely asked to find somewhere else to live, I said fuck it and came to Jersey.
Which brings us to that enormous blizzard we had last February. I had tucked into an edible and was walking around the deserted streets, marveling at the snow and thinking, when a thought hit me with the force of a runaway plow — taking that job at Nationwide Video was the single most consequential decision of my life. It’s certainly more impactful than choosing where I went to college or any of the other jobs I’d go on to accept. Even more so than responding to an OKCupid message from some cute girl in Brooklyn who would eventually become my wife. Taking that job was the butterfly effect moment from which everything I love about my life today became possible. Holy shit. It’s the kind of story I imagine I’d regale my non-existent grandchildren with if the entire narrative didn’t hinge on looking at a gargantuan cock.
Editor-in-Chief was the best professional title I’ve ever had, and getting paid to write will always feel like a gift more than a chore, but the best job I ever had was as a smut peddler.
Every child of the ‘90s knows this was the second-best retail job behind record store employee. And I’ve always been much more of a Randall (from “Clerks”) than a Rob (from “High Fidelity”), so this was in my wheelhouse
Pun not intended, but it’s pretty damn good, isn’t it?
Sometimes we’d put beers in there, which was pretty hilarious on the very rare occasion a customer would buy a Mr. Pibb and end up with an Old Style
I’m not trying to be a scold here, people are into whatever they’re into and that’s cool but again, it’s just not the kind of thing you want to be forced to learn about for work
I sincerely fucking hope that’s all it was
And don’t you forget about it, Summit Roy, the meanest kid on the playground at Valle Verde Elementary in 1986.
The cops always showed up in under a minute because we’d give them free rentals. Few things will make your skin crawl like renting a pile of “Barely Legal” tapes to a Dennis Farina clone working for the CPD
I love this term so much because I have way too active an imagination. Please note, I did not say a “dirty” imagination. No, instead I picture a leather-clad senate majority leader pounding a giant, floppy dildo like a gavel, desperately trying to get all the other similarly clad in fetish gear congress critters to pay attention. And yes, it is Mitch McConnell with his floppy turkey neck calling everybody to order. I need help.
Well, not completely gone. Just diminished by an exponential factor.
Making this even stranger is that he was a Black man. He was a super nice dude, so I finally asked him how he ended up with that name and the answer is remarkably simple — he was born abroad and his parents had zero idea who the Confederate general was.
I’m curious what level of editing and shaping you are looking for?
When you mentioned spotting the former customer at the Lincoln Park Zoo, for a split second I thought you wrote that you'd seen him step out of a pedocab.
I would've flipped out too.