Monday, July 25, 2016

The Voyeur Mafioso, Part 3

Part 2 here.
Part 1 here.

I check my phone for a text message.

GAP DRESSING ROOM, DOWNTOWN, 3:00 to 4:30 pm

That store always makes me nervous. It provides considerable challenges even when it is not packed to the gills. I know that whatever I salvage from this trip is going to come at great risk and what is usable won’t be much. Apparently it’s a popular location for our subscribers, which is why I keep coming back here against my better judgment.

When I set up next to a woman in an adjacent room, I have little to no idea of what she looks like. I have to rely on my ears, not my eyes. Based on what I’ve heard, I assume the occupant is a woman in her late teens. This is confirmed when I peek slightly over the divider, using my camera attachment like a flexible periscope.

She’s also trying on bathing suits, but only the brassiere portion. She calls out to an unseen friend who is also trying on clothes. A group of girls appear to have gone on a shopping trip together.

Maybe we should go to Target later.

Yeah, we should, she replies.    

Her voice is girlish and youthful, very much the stereotypical high femme girly girl with immaculately applied makeup and blow-dryed hair. The audience likes women like her, based on the statistics and the research. When one considers the number of highly ranked and liked downloads, women like her are among our most favored. There’s commission in it for me if stumble upon a particularly creative and revealing setup and produce a particularly popular clip.

That depends on luck more than it does skill. Much like the dynamics of a viral video, it’s often difficult to predict success and interest. Videos I thought were fairly unimpressive have at times struck a chord.

Assuming I had a girlfriend, I might be able to take on-the-job experience and apply it to my love life. I’ve seen hundreds of women preen and primp before the mirror, scrutinizing themselves in a way they would only do in strictest privacy. That ritual in insecurity can take whole minutes before I need to start filming. I often have to do lots of editing to compress ten minutes live action into two or three.

After going through an elaborate, private ritual of self-scrutiny, each subject puts on a new outfit or element of clothing. Aesthetically speaking, this is, in many ways, much more interesting to observe. Sex is one thing, but vulnerability and perceived total secrecy is even more private than that. We may be more comfortable as sexual beings in the outside world, on our own terms. We are considerably much less confident when our bodily flaws are on display. Our worst critics are ourselves.  

I’ve done this for five years and I’ve developed a sixth sense about this location. Something about this place makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’m tempted to leave a few minutes early. The effect reminds me of gambling. Should you chance upon a winning streak, the best decision is in knowing when to quit.  The odds are in your favor only to an extent. Eventually, mathematically speaking, your luck will swing against you. Time to cut one’s losses and move elsewhere.

As I alluded to earlier, the pay isn’t what I’d prefer, but neither do I have to work terribly odd hours. Once I slaved away as a security guard at an exclusive golf course. My assignment was the graveyard shift, 7 pm to 7 am. Twelve hour shifts will really take it out of you, as well hitting the bed after the sun has risen. I don’t have to guard ice machines and golf clubs at early mornings anymore, and I’m thankful for that much. It’s tough to be strictly ethical when you’ve never had much money. Even with the constant threat of great terror that would come from being discovered, my work is generally fun.

One learns to not ask questions of one’s superiors. Plausibility denial is a good strategy. I don’t even know the name of who puts clips and pictures online. I send them along in edited form to a purposefully innocuous e-mail address. I am instructed only to use it for video submissions. Few of my contributions are ever returned for being of insufficient quality or for needing additional video edits. An operation this intensive and complex could only work in a large city, which is how I’ve learned nearly every neighborhood and general area, even if I’ve gotten completely lost a time or two.

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