My Drawer of Shame

When you spend over 20 years selling adult DVDs, you see some stuff. I’m not talking about naked women and people having sex…that goes without saying. No, I’m talking about strange stuff. Sad stuff. Alarming stuff. Stuff that comes in the mail. I’ve collected a small cache of letters that have been sent to me over the years by porn fans, wanna-be porn stars, chronic whiners, and the occasional mental patient. I’ll share a few here while leaving the names out so none of these people come and murder (or sodomize) me in my sleep.

When you sell on ebay as we used to, ‘feedback’ is a big deal. Buyers are encouraged to leave seller feedback and if you get enough negatives it can affect everything from the traffic ebay sends you to the fees you pay. It literally pays to not piss people off on ebay. However, some folks just need to go through life miserable.

We noticed that most of the people who left us negative feedback never contacted us before leaving the negative. Sellers are allowed to respond to negatives publicly for all to see, but you can’t be rude and call people names…as tempting as it may be at the time. So we developed a technique of responding to negative feedback by addressing the problem and then leaving the disgruntled buyer with a farewell slight in some foreign language, so as not to get flagged by ebay’s good-manners police. Nothing too extreme mind you, just something that if the customer wanted to look it up, they’d understand that we were not happy. Things like:

‘beißt mich Eseljunge‘ (German – Bite me donkey boy)

È vero, il cliente non ha il pene’ (Italian – It’s true, the customer has no penis)

‘A plus tard connard’ (French – See you later asshole) And my personal favorite-

‘fáe to sorts mou lypiménos ántras’  (Greek – Eat my shorts you sad little man)

One particularly angry buyer was forced to send some returns back to us by ebay, and he included a letter which called me a ‘connard’ 8 times in one short paragraph. Then he lamely felt the need to add ‘BTW I have always known what a connard is.’ Dude needs a lesson in insults, and when to walk away.

I received a letter from a guy who said he’d shot an adult movie of himself masturbating, and because he was not an attractive person, it was shot ‘close up’ on only his midsection…and he did it all by himself. How ambidextrous of him! He was looking for distribution of his genitals on adult DVD, and while I was at it, a few girls he could shoot with – for free, because he didn’t have any money to pay them.

Another sent a letter addressed to ‘University Coeds’ with about half the street name and somehow it still made it to my door. He was looking to shoot porn and described in minute detail way more than I needed to know about his body, stroking technique, and particularly the size, shape and color of his weiner.

Yet another wrote me about getting into porn with the following threat:

“Dear All You Can Eat videos, I am interested in getting into porn. I am well known all over the world in 235 countries. I am the most powerful man in the world. Japan gave me fining power. I can fine anyone in the world”

He proceeded to demand that we send a film crew to his home, along with some porn girls of course, or he would fine me 10 billion dollars. He ended with a promise that if we didn’t comply he would fine the whole porn industry ½ trillion dollars. Thank goodness it wasn’t the whole trillion. I don’t think even the entire porn industry could afford that, but fate smiled on us and we never heard from him again.

One writer sent a letter scribbled with such fury and aggression that we were unsure about what we should be more concerned about – the person who wrote it, or the fact that he sent it to us. Even the envelope it was delivered in had the word ‘Rush!!!!!’ angrily scribbled large 5 times followed by ‘please rush!!!!!’. It took a while to decipher the scrawl but the content was not threatening…oddly enough the guy wanted to get into porn. However, the script itself can only be described as disturbing with every millimeter of the page filled in with jagged dementedly exaggerated cursive. Both sides.

So send us your stray thoughts, your fever-dreams, your bizarre porno-fantasies. Your innermost kinky secrets are safe with us. But if it’s weird enough, I can’t promise you it won’t end up in our drawer of shame for posterity.

Johnson Bangerwell