Sex Lives & Blow-Up Dolls (standard:humor, 2481 words)
Author: AJ	Added: May 30 2001	Views/Reads: 22331/11181	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A sex-store employee becomes disillusioned when she befriends an inflatable doll.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story


I have one co-worker at SexWorld, Eliot.  He is twenty years old, just
like me, and he used to ask me out all the time, and I would always say 
“no”.  But that was before he got his new girlfriend.  Her name is 
Gwen, and she has the personality of one of our inflatable dolls.  And 
she is always hanging around the store.  I tried to make friends with 
her, but a few sentences into every conversation she’d interrupt and 
say, “Wait...what were we talking about?” I happen to know that Eliot 
and Gwen always make out in the back room, and rent the porno videos 
without paying.  I wish Nitrous would hire another person, SexWorld is 
a big store for me to handle alone while they’re in the back room. 

Every day I pick Eliot up before work, because his car is “going through
repairs.”  Once I saw this “car” in his garage, it doesn’t have any 
tires or doors or even a steering wheel for that matter, so I guess 
I’ll be driving him for a while.  Most of the time he’s asleep when I 
come to his apartment, and I have to disentangle him from Gwen before 
we can go to SexWorld. 

When we arrive at work, we open up the store, and get Nitrous out from
the back room, where he sits with his gas mask on, connected to the 
maternal tank by a rubber umbilical cord. The back room is wallpapered 
with pages from pornographic magazines that make Eliot’s voice crack, 
but Nitrous focuses on the tank, caressing the cold metal like it’s the 
skin of a lover.  He always shows Eliot and me the sticker on the tank, 
which says, “Just Say NO!”—NO being the chemical symbol for Nitrous 
Oxide.  Every day, Nitrous explains the weak joke to us, and laughs 
like a hyena. 

As I’m unlocking the store, I sometimes have to let in one or two eager
customers who’ve been waiting for us to open since 11:55.  One day, not 
too long after I sold the man his blowup doll, I recognize him as I’m 
opening up.  He follows me into SexWorld, and to the register, where he 
throws down the shriveled remains of the curly redhead. 

“I’m returning this doll.” He states simply.  The doll stares up in
disbelief from the counter, her mouth set in a permanent stiff pink O 
of surprise at this rejection.  For some reason, I am at a loss for 
words, though I’ve dealt with dozens of similarly stupid customers, at 
whom I want to yell, “There is nothing I would hate more than to take 
back your repulsive USED rubber woman!”  But usually I just explain our 
return policy, or, if I’m in a really shitty mood, I’ll point them to 
the big sign where our return policy is detailed simply, in short 
words. 

But I feel inexplicably indignant about this man returning this doll.  I
want to know how she didn’t live up to his expectations, with her curly 
red hair, lying there like a shed snakeskin on my counter.  As it turns 
out, he’s more than happy to explain.  I am amazed at his ability to 
completely abandon his story about his “friend’s” bachelor party 
without so much as a blush. 

“This doll is just no fun.  I can’t imagine that it is a real woman. 
Its skin doesn’t feel like real skin, and its hair doesn’t feel like 
real hair, and sex with it doesn’t feel like real sex, so I’m returning 
it.” 

I look at the doll’s poreless glossy pink skin, and am reminded of the
unblemished airbrushed skin of the porn models that decorate the back 
room.  I touch her curly red hair, which feels slick and shiny, as if 
coated with Vaseline.  Under the red lights of SexWorld, her hair looks 
bright and glazed, like the overstyled, overdyed, overextensionfull 
hair of those models. 

The back room models’ skin doesn’t look like real skin, and their hair
doesn’t look like real hair, and I wonder if they are real or if they 
are full or air like this doll was before she became a deflated shell 
of a woman.  They are full of air, air and silicone, and pink O 
openings and Vaseline hair. 

I feel a strange sort of sympathy for this doll, who had been sold, and
used, and violated.  She’s been made to look as little like a real 
woman as possible to please this man, and now he discards her like she 
hasn’t devoted her whole sad life to his pleasure. 

I want to wrap my arms around this empty girl and comfort her and tell
her that she doesn’t need to be fake and live her life for sleazy men.  
I want to be her Gepetto.  I want to tell her that sometimes her mouth 
can be a straight line or even a smile.  But I can’t, she’s only a 
rubber doll, and this is not a fairy tale. 

“Angela?” the man says, looking at me quizzically, as my tears add
highlights to my eyes. 

“No.” I say shakily.  Then I remember where I am and who I am with.  “I
mean yes, I can see how you might be...disappointed with her, I mean, 
it, but we—we don’t give refunds on...used merchandise.” 

“Oh.” He says, his mouth forming an identical O to that of the blowup
doll’s.  He looks at me carefully.  “That’s a cute outfit you’re 
wearing.” He says, referring to my red SexWorld T-shirt and white 
jeans.  I just stare at him, unbelievingly, knowing what would come 
next and not wanting to hear the dirty words from his dirty mouth. 

“But it would look a lot cuter crumpled up on my bedroom floor!” he says
with a wink and a wet tongue and lip gesture.  I can feel myself 
beginning to be sick.  I look desperately around SexWorld, seeing the 
dull shine of the rubber coating on the vibrators, and the plastic 
glossy glint of the porno videos, and the fake squeaky gleam of my 
doll’s pink skin.  What am I doing here? 

I stare at the man in shock. 

“What makes you think you have the right?” 

I pick up the doll by her slippery red hair, holding her smooth,
featureless face next to my own.  Her arms dangle like a pair of 1980’s 
earrings. 

“Do I look like this to you?”  I ask heatedly.  “Does she look like me?”


The man backs up a few steps, holding up his hands, although I am still
on my side of the counter. 

“Whoa there, girlie.  I didn’t know I was talking to a ball-cutting
feminist here,” he sneers. 

“I’m not a feminist!” I scream.  Maybe the counter that separates us is
the barrier in communication here.  I run around the counter, and stand 
in front of him, looking up into his pock-marked, sweaty face. 

“I just ... I just ...”  I sputter. 

The man turns to Nitrous, who is alphabetizing the new video selections
in the tape section. 

“You know, you have a psycho working for you, dude.” 

Nitrous laughs. 

I sit on my heels, leaning against the counter, my mind reeling in
search of something to say.  I stand up, stumbling towards the back 
room. 

I escape to the back room, where Eliot and Gwen are making out, and I
touch the smooth steel-grey-blue Nitrous tank, trying to get the 
comfort from it that Nitrous gets.  Impulsively, I turn the valve on 
the tank, and bring the mask to cover my face.  Sweet gas invades my 
throat; it is so cold, cold. My lungs might freeze. 

I want to laugh.  I want everything to be funny for me again, like it is
for Nitrous, like it was before.  I want to laugh, and make fun of the 
people who can’t just want a person, and want a person’s body, and be 
with that person and be happy.  I want to laugh like hell, until my 
face hurts, until my sides hurt. 

But I can’t laugh, remembering how much fun Eliot and I had had at the
expense of the desperate men and women with the red glints in their 
eyes from the fluorescent SexWorld glow.  I can no longer see the humor 
in it; it just seems sad and a little pathetic.  Sad that so many 
people need sexual relief so much they would want to buy it here.  
Pathetic that they don’t realize the depravity that, like the 
puncture-repair kit, comes with buying things like inflatable dolls.  I 
look at the “Just Say NO!” sticker, really seeing it for the first 
time.  I stand up, needing to share my newfound knowledge with Eliot 
and Gwen, who are still in the throes of passion. 

“It means just say NO to faking and fucking and faking until the line
between reality and fake are blurred beyond recognition,” I say, 
tearing down a shiny magazine page from the back room wall.  “It means 
just say NO to laughing when nothing’s funny and nobody’s happy, and 
Vaseline hair, and a rubber heart.”  I rip fistfuls of pictures off the 
walls. 

Finally I can laugh. It isn’t the happy laugh of Nitrous but a bitter,
ironic laugh that I’ve never heard myself make before. 

I sit down on the corner of the pull-out bed next to Eliot and Gwen,
overwhelmed by all these new insights.  Eliot looks at me quizzically, 
and I know he’s trying to reconcile the old me with the me who is 
lecturing him.  I try to explain: 

“It’s like, I want to be the kind of person who sees so much, and
accepts everything and everyone.  And I have seen a lot.  But I’ve been 
observant, not perceptive.  I’ve been listening, but not absorbing.  
Until this doll, it made me think ... I don’t know, somehow, I just 
reached the point where I could no longer not have a stand on anything, 
because it, the doll reminded me ... of someone, and I had to speak 
out, I had to have an opinion, I’m sick of being neutral.”  I started 
to cry, at Eliot’s blank look.  “And now, now I’m talking, but I’m not 
communicating...” 

Eliot points to the ruined wall.  “Nitrous is going to yell at you for
that.” But Nitrous doesn’t yell when he comes in, he just laughs.  And 
he just laughs when I tell him I quit.  And I hear his laughter 
following me out the red door of SexWorld. 


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