Diamond in the Rough

5/11/07


I presume that just about every town has at least one business that’s been there just for friggin’ ever and, despite all logical reasons to the contrary and no real visible means of income, stalwartly refuses to go out of business. It just sort of lingers on and on like nursing-home-grandma who won’t just die already so we can get our damn inheritance and have a fancy coke party. You find yourself passing it and wondering “just who the shit is frequenting that place anyway? Are they selling drugs out of there?” It’s the diametric opposite of that one location in your town that is sort of the revolving door of retail; every few months a new business opens up there and you think, “oh, a pet store; that’s a good idea,” and the next time you pass it it’s selling used tubas or something.

I have come to the conclusion that “Diamond Video” is Nixa’s forever-holdout business. It’s perhaps the last privately-owned video store in the country, and it’s been sitting there in a tiny strip mall since VCRs exploded onto the scene in the early 80s. I remember going there as a kid because it was the only game in town unless you wanted to haul your ass up to Springfield or peruse the terminally paltry selection at the supermarket. My family got a VCR relatively early, and I can still remember advertising displays in Diamond Video of VHS vs. Betamax!* The store made sense back when rental super-chains were still just cresting the horizon, but with juggernauts like Movie Gallery, Blockbuster and now Netflix, I had predicted Diamond Video would go the way of the dodo sometime around the turn of the millennium. And yet there she still sits like an elderly holdout to a bygone era. Not only a privately owned small business, but a seemingly successful bulwark against the two or three rental chain stores that now dot the town. And it does my heart some good to see the familiar retail face there year after year, like an old Native American who refuses to be kicked off his land no matter how many federal men in dark suits throw dead weasels into his well. Besides, I have some fond memories of that place.

Diamond Video is responsible for my first real foray into the land of soft-core porn, gods bless them. The year was probably 1992 and I was the tender age of 14. My friend Aaron and I had walked past the VHS jacket for 2069: A Sex Odyssey numerous times at old Diamond Video, but heretofore hadn’t had the cojones to actually take it up to the counter for rental. Usually we just averted our eyes and made a beeline for our umpteenth rental of Transformers: The Movie. But one fine summer day when our pubescent hormones were running particularly high we shamefacedly carted the box up to the counter as if we were ex-convicts requesting kiddie-porn and actually made the purchase before sprinting for the parking lot.

Upon arriving back at his house, with trembling, sweaty little hands we popped this jewel of adolescent wonder into the VCR and…! What followed was 2 of the oddest hours I can recall in my life. Two fourteen-year-old boys, sexual ferocity just reaching the pinnacle of their lives, watching a deeply strange, quasi-sexual 1977 movie filmed in West Germany (the Hollywood of Europe!) about female aliens from the planet Venus who come down to earth in order to harvest human sperm to revitalize their civilization. Oh, and neither of us had quite figured out how to masturbate yet. So I got to heap staggering sexual frustration on top of the pile. Frankly, the movie could have been animated toenails dancing to the Nutcracker and I probably still would have gotten an erection; they were coming on the order of about 3 an hour back then, but whenever the movie was over I just kind of sat there like warm pudding, wondering if maybe there wasn’t a hole in a tree somewhere in the backyard which I could romance.

Why anyone...ever, would want to harvest anything from this guy is beyond me.

I’m sure the frustration only lasted long enough for us to embark upon a plan to remove the gunpowder from old fireworks in order make a bomb out of a prescription pill bottle, but it sticks out in my mind as a distinctly surreal event in my life. No worries, though; I belatedly learned the clumsy mechanics of self-stimulation in less than a year and haven’t slowed down since. Viva la masturbation!



*You remember Beta, right? I find it fascinating that one theory (Wikipedia) as to why VHS eventually crushed Betamax has to do with the fact that pornography was more readily available on VHS, and porn drives the advancement of new technology. The internet, for example; or as I like to call it, “the global porn palace of happy time in my pants.”