Questions You Hope You Never Have to Answer

My wife called me late yesterday afternoon to ask me a question. She had been helping her mother clean out her mom and dad's garage, and they had run into a problem for which she hoped I could find a solution. Was there someplace they could take a collection of around 200 used VHS adult videos?

The videos belonged to her late brother, who passed away in the late summer of 2003. They were in my mother-in-law's possession because he had been living with his parents, never having moved out after graduating from high school. He kept a steady job and helped keep the bills paid. Indeed, I suspect if he had moved out, his parents would have been homeless because of the way his dad mismanaged the household finances.

But, there they were -- a huge stash of X-rated vids, lingering in storage for over three years. I suspect that there were two separate forces that kept them around. First, his mother was so devastated emotionally by his death that she could never bring herself to throw anything of his away. Second, I recall my wife saying that prior to his debilitating stroke in the spring of 2005, her dad was hoping to make some extra money selling them off.

So, I sat there, brainstorming. They didn't have any more room in the trash for the tapes, and they really wanted to get rid of them because they suspected that one of our nephews, who is 16, would be all to happy to sneak off with a few. I said the only places I could think of would be pawn shops and maybe adult video stores. She then asked me to call around to a few places in town to see if they would take them.

So I fired up the web yellow pages and found the three closest pawn shops to our mailing address. Nope, they wouldn't take them. So I called an adult video store. The man who answered the phone said that if we brought them in during the day, there would be some guy who would pay us cash for them.

So I called my wife back, and she seemed unhappy with my findings. She didn't want to have to go to an adult video store. Moreover, she wasn't going to let me go to the store because of my past issues. She then wondered if she could get her best friend to go with her while another friend watched the kids.

She then said she'd feel weird doing that because all of the videos were girl-on-girl, and she was worried that the guy at the store would think that she and her friend were "together". I said something like, "I'm sure he'd be extra friendly to both of you." In the darkest reaches of my mind I was really thinking, "He wouldn't be the first person to think that."