Sex shop

I open the sex shop door. Imme­di­ate­ly, my nephew Dim­itri rec­og­nized me, hap­py and sur­prised. “Hey, uncle ! Oops,” he said, “I should­n’t call you that in a place like this!” I burst out laugh­ing. “Yes, I am, I’m an old pervert.”

An incon­gru­ous dia­logue, if any, for a man who has rocked the oth­er. I’ve known Dim­itri since he was born. He has come a long way in twen­ty-four years, going through many attempts to get inter­est­ed in school, and then flee­ing to India for six months. He is an artist, an ele­gant elf, with this look in his eyes that are say­ing they want to have fun and that tell you that they have seen many things.

“I grew old too fast, when I was young, now I still want to have a lit­tle fun before I get seri­ous again,” he says, and then intro­duces myself to his co-work­er, a ner­vous lit­tle guy, a lit­tle old­er too. Both dressed in a sober uni­form. Black shirt and pants, red tie. Real sex elves.

Despite his appar­ent good mood, I feel that Dim­itri is intim­i­dat­ed by my pres­ence. “Go ahead, shoot me your ques­tions, that’s why you came.”

— “There’s no rush,” I say, “I cer­tain­ly came to take notes, but it’s more inter­est­ing to know you as well as your colleague.”

I have the idea of camp­ing my next text in the uni­verse or around the uni­verse of a sex shop, with­out going into Amélie Poulin’s kind mawk­ish­ness. If there is a place where you can show your true nature, it is well, with death, and in bed.

I go around the aisles. The place is well kept. The room occu­pies the size of maybe half my apart­ment and the het­ero­sex­u­al sex­u­al panoply on the shelves is not very dif­fer­ent from what I am used to see­ing in their homo­sex­u­al equivalents.

“There can’t be much that shocks you here,” Dim­itri suggests.

— Indeed, there may have been more crude­ness in gay shops.

— Yeah, when I go there, my eyes are wide open…”

I smile. Dim­itri belongs to women, but he has the eyes and the frank heart of the one who must have tried a lot of things. And, in the end, an ass is an ass.

His com­pan­ion is talk­a­tive, asks me ques­tions about my writ­ing. After a while, I ask them a frank question :

“Look, you seem to me like two smart, crazy guys. With­out devalu­ing the place, how come you’re here?”

They laugh in good faith, under­stand my ques­tion, scratch their heads, look at each oth­er. Jean-Louis final­ly sighs. And I know what this could mean, that his sto­ry is com­pli­cat­ed. He sug­gests that he was anx­ious at school and that he had to run away. Kind of like Dim­itri, I think. When you run away, you agree to change roads and it is some­times dif­fi­cult to get back on the high­way of peo­ple who all do the same thing. This is the fate of artists in gen­er­al. Dim­itri is, Jean-Louis would like to be and he admits to me that he is burn­ing with the desire to write.

“Well, then, you just have to do it.

— Yeah…”

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It is on Wednes­day evening. There are no crowds in the shop. I ask the boys many ques­tions about the type of clien­tele, about the rela­tion­ship between men and women. Many young peo­ple, it seems, are strug­gling to know what the school no longer offers them, name­ly a basic course on sex­u­al­i­ty. Oth­er young peo­ple, some­times vio­lent, have dif­fi­cul­ty express­ing the impuls­es of their hor­mones, still trapped in a sti­fling reli­gious moral­i­ty. Some tourists allow them­selves to buy here what they would­n’t buy from them.

Besides, a cou­ple comes in. Jean-Louis goes answer­ing them. There will be a sale of a small pock­et stim­u­la­tor for women. Dim­itri advis­es him on the type of lubri­cant to use with this type of device. Total frank­ness, it’s very beau­ti­ful, I tell you. The young woman is hap­py, her part­ner seems hap­py too. He’s not buy­ing any­thing for him­self, but I guess he’ll be the accom­plice of the evening.

A lit­tle lat­er, two guys buy “nat­ur­al” via­gra, one of the biggest sell­ers in the area. Then come two hap­py, total­ly drunk but mer­ry men who come to say good evening to their friends. They are reg­u­lars who leave almost as fast the come. Apart from the slight­ly bor­ing music, the place is bathed in a sim­ple aura of a small, ordi­nary and clean shop. Obvi­ous­ly, both the prod­uct sold there and the cus­tomers who come to the store have noth­ing to do with the local con­ve­nience store.

I would almost like to work there if only to feed myself on the human­i­ty that lurks there. The sex shop is not a place of debauch­ery and many peo­ple come here to buy the nec­es­sary sup­ple­ments to express their desires and fan­tasies. This is com­plete­ly nor­mal and harm­less. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, accord­ing to what my two hosts tell me, we also see the dam­age caused by so many mis­un­der­stand­ings. They are try­ing to restore the bal­ance. The play some­what the role edu­ca­tors, these two, because seri­ous are the dis­as­ters of sex­u­al mise­d­u­ca­tion. It is no won­der then to see those cathars­es on con­sent and rape that are emerg­ing today.

Sex­u­al­i­ty is the land of hon­esty and since human nature is still untamed (will it ever be free and con­sent­ing?), it takes a lot of skill and intel­li­gence for peo­ple in a bed, or in the back of a cor­ri­dor, to com­plete the sweet and warm dance of plea­sure with­out spilling blood or cry­ing. This applies to men, women and those who nav­i­gate between the two. This also applies to oth­er human rela­tion­ships born of the desire to move for­ward, to con­quer, to trans­mit one’s genes at all costs.

A great dance, I tell you, a great fight.

I promise myself I’ll come back to this sex shop. I am a voyeur, after all, not in acts, but for human beings. I can also under­stand the Jean-Louis and Dim­itri of this world to dwell on it. Strange­ly enough, this kind of place is good for the soul.

Dim­itri tells me about his plan to con­tin­ue his jour­ney beyond India. We are all explor­ers. It would be so much eas­i­er if we stopped deny­ing each oth­er the adventure.