The Misadventures of a Porn Actor

By Hank Fredo

On a very sunny day in Berlin, Michael Meyer is going about his normal daily dealings, as normal as it could be for a sex shop attendant. Other than the scorching sun outside, another major concern of his are the financial troubles he needs to resolve.

His troubled mind isn't made calmer by the fact that his boss has some shady underground activities going on in the basement of the shop. It's nothing too sinister; they are only shooting porn movies.

Take a walk in Mike's shoes for a day and you'll be intrigued by certain things you'll discover – some shocking, some exciting; all equally fascinating.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seagull Editions
• Release date: May 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223164937

Book preview

Prologue: The Night Before

The young man swiped a handful of damp blond hair out of his face and behind an ear, then yanked at the silicone parts on the silver display pedestal harder than before. He had to wonder if the little suckers hadn’t decided to use glue in the prank this time around.

Freakin’ kids, he muttered under his breath as he fished his smartphone out of a back jeans pocket. Whatever the case was, his flashlight would give him a better idea of the situation than the dim neon red one the store shone down most sections.

Ey, arschgeige! I know they’re hard to figure out, but I don’t think the idea is to dig your girl a few extra inches each time you two do the dance ‘cos you can’t grow any more of your own, a voice snickered from behind the register.

Michael glanced up from the plastic dick and snatch he’d been trying to pull apart and paused to flip his co-worker Neil off.

The other guy laughed even louder before turning back to the money he had been counting.

Neil was the only one who still thought cracking sexual jokes was the hottest thing since streamed TV shows and seemed to have a new pointless quip set aside almost every day. After spending the last couple of years working at Palace Vergnügen Kino the novelty had kind of worn off for Mike. The job was routine until it wasn’t and when it wasn’t, sometimes he wished it was. He’d started seeing being an assistant at their little corner sex shop as no different than bagging at a supermarket or being a hired driver. Goodness knew he only made slightly more than either of those workers, and probably very few of them had to disinfect seats lathered in bodily fluids. And that hardly ever referred to just sweat either.

The now flustered 29 year old gave up trying to get one of their largest dildo sizes out of a central fleshlight piece and started trudging off to a storage room. Maybe people would assume it was part of the store’s décor; he had other things to do. The occasional group of college pranksters (usually foreign ones) seemed to dare each other to come in and check the place out almost every couple of months. And whenever they did, the staff was bound to find something dumb to clean up after by the end of the day.

It was usually just that one of the male cut-outs had been steadied behind a female one—or several males behind a female to flow with what was big in present meme culture—or someone drizzled lube on a door handle. Once, a TV playing retro smut had been tampered with so a children’s puppet show wound up being played through the store at full volume instead. That had been enough to gain the staff dirty looks from two other shoppers who’d been in at that same time. If there was one thing Mike had discovered people who had set out to spice up their sex lives didn’t like to think of, it was the basic biological result of sex.

The bottom line was, over time it’d gone from a silly joke the guys put up with to an irritating extra 15 minutes spent fixing up every so often. And they technically weren’t even allowed to police who came in aside from upholding the age limit rule. You could never tell who would wind up actually buying something just from the looks of them. And the lonely or weird looking ones were usually star customers waiting to happen.

When rooting around in the closets showed no signs of the mini vacuum cleaner Mike had to go over the place with at the end of each work day, he figured he’d check one of the other wings out back.

To anyone on the outside, the Palace was just a regular joint which sold nurse costumes and beginner gimp suits that came with whips, or offered cinema style celeb porn viewings (and the wanking tools to go with them). But in his time working there, Mike had got to know about the...extra ventures the store was into.

For one thing, there were two cabins where some of the (mostly male) customers could go to try out their new merch and probably beat off. From the rumors he had heard, back in the old days before sex shops were openly showcased and while everything was still fairly manual, there’d even been a few hookers and gay escorts hanging around those very cabins offering their own services. Cross dressers had also found a niche cruising around back before they became more widely accepted, or at least overlooked.

Which wasn’t to suggest today’s activities were that much cleaner. Between features like the gloryholes which could be opened or shut in each cabin for the thrill of the oral enthusiasts and the Dark Room which was essentially a pitch black space popular for its exclusive gang bangs, it was safe to say Vergnügen was keeping its old fire stoked.

Then, there was the side porn hustle the owner who was hardly ever around let operate just beneath the main store. The business was a whole thing too, boasting of a virtually new group of amateur actors every so often, and was complete with equipment for video editing.

For several reasons, this wasn’t the budding underground cash machine it would have been just a decade or two before. The modern world had killed off a lot of older materials like magazines and video sets. The internet alone had made nudity one of the most accessible guilty pleasures, probably only slightly less popular than chocolate. If any 14 or 79 year old with an internet connection could have access to the latest in Californian boob jobs with just the tap of a screen, it wasn’t hard to see that next to nobody would shell out money to watch the exact same stuff on DVD.

There was also the fact that all the girls drawing enough hype were on pay-to-view platforms like Onlyfans which claimed to have a more personalized style to them. Whenever the users of those services who’d since moved away from airbrushed, hour-long blue movies with entire plots to