The 24-Hour Porn Shop

This picture by Claes Oldenberg so tickled me that it seemed only meet and just that it deserved some words. Three times I have worked in art shops, once as a framer, once as a manager, and once as an owner. That I owned an art shop was accidental and temporary. I'd answered an advert in the Washington Post for a job as a framer and mat cutter, and after a phone interview, I was told that they'd keep me in mind. Maybe six months later, the woman called me back and explained that she and her husband had an old house in a commercial section of Falls Church, Virginia where she had a graphics studio upstairs, and the first floor was a a frame shop and picture gallery. Her husband had two years and maybe 60k invested in the shop part, and he played in the Navy Band, the Navy Jazz Band, as well as his own band, writing and arranging music, he'd gotten overbooked. He told me his music situation, and said that I could have the shop, just take it off his hands because he was too busy to deal with it. I didn't feel right about that from the beginning, and said that I'd baby-sit the place for a while until he got less busy. I cut a lot of mats for my own pictures, fancy double and triple mats. During the whole time that I was there, I think that only one person came in, a woman with some antique Chinese silks to be framed under glass.

So, the 24-hour porn store part came about in Portland, Oregon when I was going to Portland State University. I'd signed-up for some courses and had space for one elective kind of a course. The two courses that seemed interesting were "Serbo-Croatian," a language course, and "Pornography and the Law," a political science course. I thought it would be kind of a hoot to get three credits for looking at porno, and waxing philosophic about the vagaries of T&A, so, I signed up for it. Also, at that time, I was looking for some part-time work to augment my non-income from my food co-op job. The Oregonian newspaper had a porn store clerk job listed! Night shift, Midnight 'til 8AM! Perfect! That would fit my class schedule, and would justify the choice of the porn class, as well as be some sort of a practicum. The interview went off without a hitch and I got the job, which consisted of taking inventory of every item in the store every night, counting all of the cash, dividing the cash in half and giving half to the "bag man" who came in at 2AM each morning. Half of the place was also a pool hall that permitted minors, and part of the job was to keep the minors out of the porn part, which I could see would be difficult and could lead to legal problems. There was every damned variety of porn, and a special room for extra-kinky hard-core. The glass counter display case had vintage porn from fifty years ago and more. Also, appliances. One item was a vibrating sander, which was marked .95, but the same item at the hardware store was only .95! So, after taking inventory for three nights, which took about four hours and got tedious rather quickly as after the first couple of times the novelty wears off, Portland State University canceled the porn course, I never did find out if it was canceled due to lack of interest, or too much interest. Which was just as well, because my houseman at the time was a psych student at Reed, and our schedules weren't matching. Also, good because after that I started working for the Portland Metropolitan Steering Committee, the Portland Metropolitan Youth Commission, and a market research and Entrepreneurial development company all at the same time while going to Portland State University, so, I was plenty busy anyway. The porn store nightshift job would have been good because I thought that I'd have four or five hours to study, but the kids in the pool hall were too distracting, and I felt less sleazy working for the "betterment" of Portland rather than contributing to the moral turpitude of the citizenry. Portland's got enough problems without my help.