During a weekend shopping trip, Jill and I found ourselves at Suzie’s, our favorite local adult store. As we looked around, Jill gravitated toward a doorway in the corner of the store, and she stood outside as though contemplating whether to go in.

“Is that where the peep booths are?” she asked. Unsure as to whether or not she was joking, I passed the doorway and moved into the video rental section. Jill lingered there. “Seriously,” she continued, “what’s back there? Do they have women dancing or what?”

“Probably not,” I said, smiling at my wife’s naïvete as I scanned the DVD racks. “I’m sure it’s just movies you can watch.”

“Really?” she asked, still looking toward the doorway. I could hear more than a slight trace of curiosity in her voice. “So what? Guys go in there and watch porn and what? Jerk off?”

Why else would guys watch porn if not to masturbate? I certainly don’t do it for the storylines or the acting. Then again, in the past Jill and I have watched porn the way other people might watch 1950s B-movies: To heckle and laugh. But I’m pretty sure that was her idea. As I led her away from the door way I said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

“No way,” she said, as though she had just been told that one of the booths held a talking German shepherd handing out thousand-dollar bills to women with her exact name.

I was surprised by her surprise; there was no way that she was unaware that such booths existed, and I called her on it. “You’re kidding, right? You can’t be that sheltered.”

“I’m not!” she insisted. “I’ve just never been to a store where they had that. And guys really jerk off in there?” I nodded. Knowing my wife the way I do, I immediately thought of several questions she probably wanted to ask, and I wasn’t surprised when she did in fact ask one: “Do they do it all together?” My wife makes no secret about her fascination with the penis, and not just mine. She once seemed disappointed when I told her that men’s restrooms typically don’t consist of a large, circular trough around which men stand to urinate. To this day I can’t fathom where her misconception came from, though she swears she saw such a thing in a men’s room once.

I resisted the urge to chuckle over the question, not wanting Jill to think I was laughing at her. “They’re booths,” I reiterated. “Each guy goes into a booth and picks whatever movie he wants to watch. It’s private.”

I wondered if the privacy aspect made it more appealing to her, or less. We browsed the video section, occasionally picking up DVDs that caught our eye. But I could tell that she was still focused on the video booths. Finally she spoke: “So how does it work? You have to pay for it, right?” I told Jill that, yes, an adult video store would definitely charge a patron to watch porn in their booths in order to be able to pay its staff to clean up after said patron. Beyond that, I honestly wasn’t sure. I’d never been in such a booth, but I was aware of how they worked. I seemed to recall reading that the old coin-operated booths of yesteryear had given way to ones that could read a debit card, or else a user could purchase a block of time from the store’s cashier. I had no idea how the booths worked at Suzie’s.

Her next question was one I’d wondered myself: “Why would you pay to watch porn here when you can do it at home?” It was a thought-provoking question, one that a woman like Jill, accustomed to the convenience of downloading porn from the internet, would ask. And I had to think about it. While there were a great many answers to her question, it took me a few minutes to think of them.

“Maybe it’s cheaper to watch it here than to rent a DVD and take it home,” I said. She expressed disbelief at this. Again, I had no idea what it cost to sit in one of Suzie’s booths and watch porn, but I had to think that, unless the rental price was astronomical, it probably would have been worth it to pay the difference and jerk off in the privacy of my own home. All at once, possible reasons flooded my mind, and I began to rattle them off: “Also, don’t forget not everyone is in a relationship like ours. A guy who comes here, maybe he’s got a wife who won’t let him look at porn.”

She seemed to be considering this scenario, though I could tell she found it implausible. I continued. “Maybe they’re kids who still live at home, and their parents are fundamentally against it. Maybe they’re on parole and they’re not allowed to have porn. If their parole officer does an inspection and finds porn at their house, they go back to prison. So they come here instead.”

I could tell that none of these possibilities had crossed her mind, and it occurred to me that I was lucky to be married to someone who was so confident in herself, and in our relationship, that she didn’t care if I looked at porn when I was alone, and in fact was happy to watch it with me in order to augment our sex life. I could very easily have married someone who was less open to the idea of porn, or who felt threatened by it, and that possibility was downright scary. Silently I counted my many blessings.

As I replaced the DVD I’d been looking at on the shelf, I glanced at my wife, who was again peering toward the doorway to the arcade. I knew she was curious about the type of men in the booths; in her mind they were all strapping, broad-chested men in their twenties and thirties, each impressively-endowed and with no apparent hygiene problems. She was probably wondering if any women went in there, or any couples, or if couples were even allowed in a single booth. (Well, I know I was wondering about that.)

“How much does it cost?” she asked. “Can we find out?” I hadn’t expected these particular questions, though it made sense. I knew she wanted to go in, if only to try and satisfy her curiosity. She didn’t want to watch porn there, not when our home was relatively safer and cleaner. In fact, I suspected that if she couldn’t see the other patrons – which I assured her she would most certainly not be able to do – the novelty would be short-lived.

I speculated that it probably wasn’t cheap enough to justify paying for it, not when we could watch any of a number of porn films at the touch of a button at home without coughing up a dime. Jill admitted that this made sense, since the people who watch porn at an adult video store likely had no other option. Of course, I knew she was still curious.

I, on the other hand, didn’t have the slightest interest in visiting the booths. Although given my wife’s sudden interest, this was changing. I wouldn’t have minded, say, getting some oral sex or fingering Jill while she fantasized about watching strapping, broad-chested men in their twenties and thirties getting off, all to the standard boom-chicka-wah-wah porno soundtrack. Of course, I suspected that, even if couples were allowed inside the booths, they weren’t spacious enough to comfortably accommodate two people. Still, it might have been worth looking into, even if it required a couple extra dollars for the employee on duty to ignore the fact that we would be violating their hypothetical “one person per booth” rule.

Then we watched as a couple patrons exited, and suffice it to say that they fell very short of her imagined ideal. Though we left Suzie’s with a small bag of new purchases, we did not try out the booths that day. I actually felt bad; I wish we would have left sooner, before Jill’s fantasy of strapping, broad-chested men in their twenties and thirties, each impressively-endowed and with no apparent hygiene problems, standing shoulder-to-shoulder and working toward exquisite simultaneous release (or whatever she might have had in mind) was dashed to pieces.

In doing some research for this entry, I came across the following article:

Dump truck crashes into video arcade in SF

The back of a dump truck delivering 20 tons of dirt to businesses on Sixth Street in San Francisco tipped and crashed into an adult video arcade this morning, narrowly missing three patrons.

“It was close,” said a video clerk at the Liberty Bookstore, who identified himself as Jersey Dog. “One guy was near the inside of the wall, but no one was hurt.”

The incident happened at 9:10 a.m. when Sukhdev Singh of Economy Trucking was dumping dirt to be used to fill in several businesses’ sub-basements on the 100 block of Sixth Street, said Sheri Costa, a spokeswoman for the city Department of Public Works.

The back of the truck tipped over to the side and into the wall of the store, shattering windows and dumping dirt into the part of the store that houses booths for video peep shows.

Firefighters used a thermal imager to ensure that no one had been buried dead or alive under the mound of dirt. Then they closed off the area and waited for a building inspector to deem the building structurally sound.

Traffic on the stretch of Sixth south of Mission Street was only slightly affected, mainly by motorists leaning out their windows to snap pictures with their camera phones.

Police Sgt. Jim Millett said he didn’t know who would have to pay for the damage. But, he said, “there are liability issues here for sure.”

Both the Department of Public Works and the city Redevelopment Agency are trying to improve the blighted stretch of Sixth Street by putting in street lights, new sewers and sidewalks. But first, the local businesses have agreed to pay some of the cost of bringing their sub-basements up to code.

No one could explain the upending of the back of the truck, but driver Singh blamed the road, which he said was uneven.

This is the second accident in as many years to damage adult stores at the corner of Sixth and Mission streets.

On Dec. 15, 2003, a 14-Mission bus slammed into the Golden Gate Adult Superstore across the street from the Liberty Bookstore. Seventeen people were hurt in that accident.

Read that second-to-last paragraph again: “This is the second accident in as many years to damage adult stores at the corner of Sixth and Mission streets.” Weird.

-Jack