By: Rachel Morgan
2/28/2010
Editor's note: This post is R-rated.
It looks just like any other DVD store. A cheerful blue awning with unassuming white letters that read ‘14th St. DVD Center,’ juts out onto the street. Walk through the smudged double glass doors, however, past the three shelves of over-priced regular DVDS and you will enter the store’s immense x-rated section.
The section is three times larger than its PG-counterpart. A gold curtain separates the two, but it’s almost always pulled back to reveal six rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves. The shelves are organized into different genres - guy-on-guy action, women with unnaturally large breasts, the archetypal schoolgirl fantasy.
One has to wonder who would work in a place like this, with nude, suggestive posters plastering the walls and x-rated DVDs and sex toys lining the shelves. Perhaps the clerk at the counter isn’t a sex fiend with a toe fetish, rather a recent immigrant who came to the United States to in search of opportunity and the quintessential American dream but instead found himself behind the counter of a sex shop.
Behind this glass countertop sits 21-year old Dawson Pavithran of Queens, manager of the store.
He’s short in stature, only about 5’5’, and has two rows of perfectly straight, startlingly white teeth. He wears a gold chain with a tiny silver hoop attached. He said his mother warns him to stay away from the homosexual customers that come into his store.
“My mother gave me this necklace with a cross on it, but I lost the cross to I replaced it with my earring,” he said. The earring has a tiny marijuana leaf on it. He wears a navy blue hoodie with no shirt underneath, unzipped to reveal a patch of jet-black chest hair.
The counter is raised about two feet so he can see the whole store, watching for shoplifters - perhaps a prepubescent boy too embarrassed to buy the pornographic video about naughty Catholic schoolgirls.
The soft-spoken Sri Lankan native has worked at 14Th St. DVD Center for nearly two years. He came to the United States for the same reasons as many – in search of a better life, higher-paying job, to attend college. His mother and father are still living in Sri Lanka.
“I wanted a better life,” he said simply. Despite his aspirations of pursuing a better life, it’s obvious that Pavithran’s dreams didn’t quite pan out.
But Pavithran is not alone. According to the Fiscal Policy Institute of New York, immigrants of working age tend to work a wider variety of jobs – in other words, will work jobs that their American-born peers may not want. The study showed that 35 percent of the workforce of New York City is made up of immigrants, although they make up only 28 percent of the population.
Pavithran got the job at the DVD store because it is owned by one of his father’s friends. He said both his mother, a housewife, and father, who owns a jewelry store, know he works there.
“[My father’s] been there,” he said. “He’s cool with it.” He says his mother, a native of India and a Hindu, is okay with his job, but is always sure to separate her son from the work he does.
“She says, it’s just a job, what I’m doing is just a job,” he said. “It’s not who I am.” Pavithran himself is Roman Catholic, like his father, but he said he doesn’t attend church regularly.
Pavithran didn’t come to the United States to sell pornography and strap-ons to the residents of the East Village. It was simply a product of circumstance. He attended FIT for three months for fashion design before he ran out of money and was forced to withdraw, he said. Now, he’s working to save up money to go back to school, so he can achieve his dream of designing his own line of clothing.
“I got about halfway through and now I really wanna go back,” he said. But he has no set date or plan as to when he will.
Pavithran has an unexpected passion when it comes to design.
“My thing is wedding gowns, that’s my [dream,]” he said, leaning his arm against a partition adorned with a giant poster that reads “Oil Dat Big Ass Up” and featured various well-endowed, well-oiled women in thongs.
While he explained his dreams to finish his schooling at FIT and someday see his designs grace the pages of Vogue and InStyle, a 50-something year old, hefty businessman in a khaki trench coat purchased a stack of six videos from the girl-on-girl section.
The store is lit by floresant lighting, giving its patrons neither privacy nor anonymity to purchase its wares.
Pavithran completes the whole transaction without meeting the man’s gaze, it’s hard to tell if this is an unofficial requirement of the job or just his personal preference.
“People who come here are really freaks,” he said. “There are all different kind of people, different mentalities.”
Just last week, he went rogue and got into a fistfight with a male patron who was hitting on him and wouldn’t take no for an answer, he said.
“He come on to me,” he said. “[Some of the homosexual] people come in here, go to the gay section. But instead of looking at the movies, they look at us. They don’t care if we are gay or straight. It just makes them feel happy when they look at us.”
Pavithran has a girlfriend, a part-time babysitter who doesn’t like the fact that he works in the XXX section of a video store.
He said he’s not really into the sexually adventurous things that are sold in his store.
"This is just my job,” he said. But, he does say that if he and his girlfriend want to purchase sex toys or porn videos, they go to another store, so that his co-workers won’t give him a hard time.
Pavithran cites the store’s top sellers as the Rabbit , although he was unaware of the Rabbit’s infamous appearance on the popular HBO show Sex and the City, and the Bullet, both vibrators.
When asked by acquaintances where he works, he usually just tells people it’s a video store, he said.
“I’m really looking for some other jobs too,” he said. “If I find a better job I’ll leave this.”
But for now, it’s easy for him to pretend that he has a regular 9-5 gig, as he works Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. – 6 p.m. It’s clear that he’s not exactly proud of where he works.
“This is my life,” he said, gesturing toward a wall covered in freakishly large rubber penises, oversize strap-on breasts and synthetic vinyl vaginas. “Every morning when I come in, I see boobs. Fake boobs.”
