A  ANAL BEADS
   I confess, I didn't know what they were until I started working at the sex shop. When I first arranged the oversized novelty sets in the window — they were too large to be considered "beads," really — I assumed they were meant to satisfy some sort of handball-related fetish. Later, I realized that the smaller sets were the more popular models. They looked like strings of rubber pearls.
   I had basically bluffed my way into the job. Two giggling girls were inquiring about the "Help Wanted" sign in the window. I waited for them to leave. Then I confronted Ali, the Pakistani manager. "You hiring?" I asked in a kind of Manhattan blasé, of-course-I'm-twenty-one kind of way. He nodded. "Look," I said, "I know what all of this stuff is for, and I know how to sell it." He asked me a few questions. I lied in response to all of them. He shrugged and said, "Okay. Show up at noon on Friday." My tutorial in the recreational possibilities of human orifices began shortly thereafter.

B  BABY
   

promotion

When the woman scooted her baby stroller past racks stuffed with handbills for fetish dance clubs and 1-900 numbers, it seemed strange at first. But from an infant's perspective, the shop was probably a delightful place to be. Most of the dildos were bright and primary colored, and every third piece of merchandise had a Gay Pride flag on it. (This was mandatory in New York City's West Village in the late '90s, where rainbows and pink triangles had assumed the touristy equivalence of cannoli in Little Italy). Not to mention the wall-to-wall tits. My God, I thought, the kid must think her mom brought her to some kind of all-you-can-eat infant buffet. The baby lifted her plump little fingers and cooed at the rack of videos that held Four Hours of Sucking and Fucking Vols. 1-4.

C  MR. CAO
   The shop was owned by a middle-aged Vietnamese man with graying hair and a dour expression. In his baggy cardigan and half-glasses, he looked like the proprietor of a small-town grocery. He kept the place clean, neat and brightly lit. Every video and sex-toy box was dutifully skimmed with his small feather duster, which I once mistakenly shelved with a rubber French maid's costume. Whether unpacking a box of Dirty Debutantes videos or

I felt like a sadomasochistic astronaut.

sliding a pair of spandex hot pants onto the blank, bulging loins of the window mannequin, he handled all the merchandise with great seriousness. Mr. Cao did not joke about the fetish items in wholesalers' catalogues. He was stern about lost inventory and late employees. He scolded us when we giggled about a grandmotherly woman's purchase of a comically large vibrator. "This is a neighborhood store," he would say. "Our customers are our neighbors."

D  DIALOGUE FROM HAL HARTLEY'S FILM AMATEUR
   Thomas: How can you be a nymphomaniac who's never had sex?
   Isabelle: (pause) I'm choosy.

E  EXOSKELETON
   I am no stranger to the occupational trial by fire. At just about every job I've had, I've been told that I was starting at a "bad time:" at the publishing house on the week my new boss started chemotherapy, in a PR firm right before a giant corporate merger eliminated all the people whose names I'd managed to learn, at the suburban ice cream shop during a record-breaking heat wave on Memorial Day weekend. But none of this compared to the insanity of starting work at a West Village sex store during Gay Pride Week. The store, usually half empty, was thronged with customers needing adjustable cock rings, nipple-less catsuits, poppers.
   Olivier, the store's French-Canadian leatherman, insisted that I dress up in some high-end merchandise to get into the week's hedonistic, celebratory spirit. He selected a pair of slick black vinyl pants and an intimidating black corset decorated with red flames. As he and Ellie — the shop's diminutive whips buyer — laced, buckled and hooked me into the corset, I felt like a sadomasochistic astronaut. In the mirror, my body looked as if it were taunting some serious tenets of physics. My breasts were high enough to serve as a tea tray; my abdomen felt as if it had been flattened into my spine.

The least, and most necessary word that needs be associated with the vagina seems to be "my."

For the rest of the workday, pissing was not an option.
   As I strolled around the store, my breathing grew shallower. But I got used to hearing my thighs squeak in the plastic pants. The Pride Week parades brought more foot traffic into the store, but none of the customers raised an eyebrow at my new incarnation. I looked incredibly appropriate, like a tuxedoed butler or an attorney skimming the halls of some wood-paneled law firm in a Brooks Brothers suit. Despite the lack of oxygen and the fact that my now-aggressive cleavage made eye contact impossible, I felt sheathed, snug, indestructible.

F  FIB
   To insure against any unexpected, well-intentioned visits from my family, I told them I was working the graveyard shift at a twenty-four-hour video store that specialized in avant garde art films.

G  GREEN CARDS, BLUE MOVIES
   Louis was a drag queen from Queens. His father was Cuban and his mother was Mexican. Ellie had a drawl that placed her origins firmly south of the Mason-Dixon line. Olivier was from Montreal. Tran came from North Korea. Ali had been in the country two years and had an astonishing grasp of the English language. Mr. Cao had emigrated sometime in the late fifties. On the weekend evenings when we all worked together, the store looked like a United Nations meeting.

H  "HOW MANY WOMEN'S STUDIES MAJORS DOES IT TAKE TO SCREW IN A LIGHT BULB?"
   "Two. One to screw in the light bulb, and the other to tell the light bulb how oppressed and objectified it is."

I  "I'M COMING"
   Louis worked the late shift. He wore blue contacts and had a tattoo of a nude, large-breasted woman on his forearm. I envied his height and the black curls that hung past his shoulders. He was, so he claimed, a magnet for married men from New Jersey, and he punctuated narratives of his weekends in the clubs with "Nigga, puh-lease!" and "Ayyy, si, papi!" This was the summer that Puff Daddy seriously broke into the mainstream, and Louis would shriek with delight whenever the intro to "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems" blasted out of the radio. I liked the buoyant, glittering samples and the nasal, snotty-kid quality of Puff Daddy's voice. Late-evening customers would find us strutting up and down the length of the shop, weaving in and out of the racks of vinyl bustiers and strap-on harnesses, swiveling our arms in circles above our heads, a butt plug in each hand, shaking our asses and bellowing along to the sample of the Diana Ross song: "I'm . . . COM-ing! I'm . . . COM-ing!"

J  JILLING OFF
   Nicholson Baker uses the term in his gleefully filthy novel The Fermata. When I first read the book at the age of eighteen, it took me a minute of free association to figure out what the expression meant. Huh? Jilling? To jill? Jill? Jack and . . . oh!
   Female sexuality suffers from a dearth of non-humiliating slang. Men have access to some enormously satisfying vernacular when it comes to the care and feeding of their genitals. Words like "cock," "dick" and "rod" have a pithy weight all their own, magnified by the possessive. "Pussy," "cunt," "slit" and "snatch" share the same monosyllabic weight, but are usually paired with the objectifying "her" or "some" or "that." The rarest word associated with the vagina seems to be "my."
   I helped many women buy their first vibrators or dildos. "Latex is going to be more lifelike, but it's hard to keep clean. To maintain its ideal shape,

My relationship with smut started when I was eleven.

store it upright. Silicone-gel models retain body heat better, although the color does fade over time. To prolong battery life, store them outside of the vibrator. Yes, we have packs of AA's by the counter. Have you ever owned one before? Do you have lube? Yes, you do need it. Right next to the batteries. We carry Astroglide and Wet. Oh, I dunno — they're about the same, except that Astroglide is approved by the FDA for medical use. I can take this up to the counter if you want to browse some more. Don't forget the lube."
   Once, I helped a friend buy a vibrator to commemorate her recent break-up. I recommended a pricey model from Japan, partially because of the raves it had received from other customers, partially because of the immensely satisfying feeling one gets from spending more than one can reasonably afford on sexual comfort. I have a photograph I took of her on the street. She is cheerfully holding it aloft, eight resplendent inches of jade green, as she leans against a brick mural of a psychedelic sunset and the enormous word, BEAUTIFUL.

K  KNEELING
   My relationship with smut started when I was eleven. In church, whenever I grew bored with the pastor's sermon, my hand would steal to one of the Bibles resting in the wooden slats screwed into the backs of the pews. Feigning penitence, I would page to the appropriate spot and feel a flush and thrill from the swirl of black type on onionskin: a bag of myrrh that lies between my breasts/your breasts are like two fawns/ravished/honey and milk are under your tongue/my hands dripped/your rounded thighs are like jewels.

L  LADYBUG
   There are two basic species of vibrators: representational and non-representational. The representational kind are shaped like penises, although the gamut of size, girth, and texture runs wild. Traditionally (if such a word can be used in this context), they're intended for penetration. Non-representational vibrators are used for external stimulation, usually for the clitoris (although the nipples, anus and testicles are fair game as well). These come in countless incarnations, from the battery-operated "shower massager" with a doorknob-shaped head, to the "animal cracker" variation, of which we stocked a veritable menagerie. The animal shape was designed to rest on the pubic mound, held in place by black elastic straps that fit around the user's thighs and buttocks. A short, off-white wire projected from the animal's abdomen and led to a small, handheld battery pack with a slider control, similar to the kind that maintains the faders on a mixing board. This allowed the user to vary the intensity of the vibrations. Pink dolphins, blue stingrays, green scorpions and red birds were lined up on a shelf at eye level.
   My favorite model was the ladybug. It suggested some wonderful, spontaneous synergy between the sexual and creative imaginations. The inventor might have been sitting out on the balcony deck of one of those condo villages, sipping an after-work beer, crotch warming a little at the memory of the office repairperson (bent over the copy machine, snug blue work pants weighed down by gleaming tools and calibrators), when a red-lacquered insect alighted on the sensitive webbing between a condensation-cooled thumb and forefinger. As if the memory of desire itself had materialized. Eureka.

M  MADE IN KOREA
   "What you think I am?"
   "Tran, I am so bad at these things . . ."
   "You think I gay, right?"
   "Well — "
   "Yes! You think I gay! Everyone think so!"
   "You're not?"
   "No! But people think: He wear leather. He like whips. Handcuffs. Work in gay store. Must be gay. No. I was a soldier in my country. Very hard. You march all day. They beat us. Scream at us. You do something wrong, you stand outside at night. No clothes. Sometimes officers, they stand there and watch you. Sometimes they pour bucket of water on you. With no clothes. Cold. They watch and laugh. You keep arms and back straight, like this . . . sometimes stand in hole in ground, only head stick out. Sometimes they beat with sticks, with pipes, with ropes that are wet. Hurts more when wet. All the time hurting."
   " . . ."
   "But I am a Communist, yes. I love my country."



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