Drew Smith - Arcade

There was another sign in the hallway, this one announcing prohibitions against standing, loitering, and lewd behavior. It stated in capital, underlined, enlarged letters that visitors must insert a token in the coin slot upon entering a theater, thus keeping the light outside of the booth lit for as long as they stayed inside.

I pushed into an empty booth and engaged the barrel bolt lock behind me. The room was dark, navigable only by the faint light of a video screen set into the wall, just below eye level. Two black vinyl benches took up most of the floor space. They were bolted to the ground and set perfectly parallel to one another, just a foot or so apart, like pews, where two rows of people could sit looking at the screen, on which the words “Drop A Token In The Slot” blinked. There was a coin slot lit red from within, the type found in video games, that you can press to get your quarter back when something goes wrong. I reached into my pocket for one, then deposited one of my souvenir tokens into the narrow hole.

The screen screamed to life that first time, as it almost always did, with the volume as high as it could possibly go. It was doubly shocking. The noise was startling, of course, but also, like most people, I had very little experience with pornography at high volumes. I pawed at the big, dimly glowing volume buttons mounted on the wall between the token slot and the video screen, lowering the volume until it was silent. The only remaining set of buttons were the same type as the volume controls, glowing plastic circles, bright green and labeled “Vid +” and “Vid −”. I tapped “Vid +”, and the video on screen changed from a graphic scene of a woman having sex with a man to a graphic scene of a woman having sex with five men.

Scrolling through the options, I understood that the videos playing in my booth corresponded with the DVD cases on display behind plastic outside the hallway. They were never in precisely the same sequence as in the display case. I checked.

I sampled the videos, watching mere seconds of each before advancing to the next, when the video stopped abruptly and returned with no warning to the default screen. “Drop A Token In The Slot.”

THINGS WERE PERMITTED THERE THAT WERE NOTpermitted inside city limits. Smoking indoors, for instance. Most of the customers were men, though I saw straight couples there on rare occasions. I saw transsexuals. Always male to female—“M2F” if you’re looking for one online. Once or twice, I saw single women there, but they spoiled the mood a little. I assumed the women who showed up alone were sex addicts. It goes without saying that a great majority of men are sex addicts, or would be if they could manage to get laid. Usually, the straight couples at the arcade just browsed the racks of DVDs or looked at vibrators and lubricants together. The woman would giggle, and the two of them would talk in low tones, the man’s voice pitched high, as if he were interviewing a child. You like this? You like that? Rarely, they would venture into the video booths, which was when things could get interesting.

Single men appeared to peruse the shelves of videos, but most of them were faking. They were just waiting to see who came in the door, occasionally jingling the tokens in their pockets so guys knew they weren’t really exploring Indian porn or Japanese porn or any of the other ethnicities represented on the wire metal racks around which the best view of the entrance could be had.

On either side of the main room were two dark hallways lined with viewing booths — a smoking hallway and a nonsmoking hallway. The corridors were U-shaped and ran parallel on opposite sides of the shopping space. If you entered at the front, you’d walk down the length of the corridor and exit at the back end of the store, emerging into the well-lit emporium, where you could pretend to look at DVDs for a while, or make your way to the opposite hallway to see what was happening there. Or, if you preferred, you could retrace your steps back down the same hallway through which you’d just passed to see what, if anything, had changed since you walked down it a few seconds earlier.

Things that might have changed in the interval:

1. Someone might have exited one of the viewing booths. So there might have been a new guy, a guy you hadn’t run into before, walking through the dim light and the bleachy, musky air towards or away from you. If someone had exited, and you liked what you saw, you could walk towards him and look at him, or you could stay put and look at him as he approached you. And if you looked at each other in a certain way, then you might go into a booth together and put a token in the slot, and pick a movie that would play in the background for sixty seconds while the two of you shared the space in whatever way you chose.

2. A red light might have come on outside one or more of the booths. A red light lit up when the booth’s occupant dropped a token in the slot, thus starting a movie and signaling to the other visitors that the booth was occupied. If you liked, you could walk up to the door and press against it. If you found it locked, you continued walking as if nothing had happened. If it was unlocked, you could enter and see what the booth held.

3. A red light that had been lit before might have been extinguished, signaling that the movie had ended, leaving the booth’s occupant(s) with a few options:

a) He/they/she (in order of likelihood) could drop another token in the slot to get the movie started again.

b) He/they/she could exit the booth.

c) He/they/she could stay in the booth without dropping a token into the slot, which was against the rules.

THE BUILDING WAS A CATALOG OF POTENTIAL PARTNERS, all moving in circles and lines and figure eights, from booth to booth, hallway to store to hallway. I was part of the catalog too. I looked at them and determined whether or not they were what I had in mind, and they looked at me and saw if I was what they had in mind, or whether I was close enough.

As a kid, everyone at my school was immensely impressed by a nearby restaurant renowned for employing an unusual gimmick for summoning wait staff. It involved utilizing a miniature flagpole with which all the tables were equipped. In order to capture the attention of your server, instead of waving your arms or crying waiter! across a crowded room, you sent a starched and scaled-down Mexican flag to full mast. It was my impression, even at that age, that the wait staff at the Mexican food restaurant suffered abnormal and excessive visits to their various tables, given that the control was so pleasurable and clear-cut.

Sometimes, like the waitresses called to refill half-full bowls of salsa, you ended up with people you wouldn’t normally have considered, just because they had flown a flag, and you didn’t have anything more pressing to do at the moment.

I HEARD STORIES FROM MY FATHER AND AUNT ABOUT THEIRhigh school days in the small Texas town where I grew up, and where they grew up before me. When they were young, all the high school students hung out at the town square, flirting and talking and showing off their cars. There were all these stories about things that happened there, pranks they played and songs they turned all the way up, who was smoking cigarettes and who was making out or leaving to go make out someplace else.

It seemed like somewhere other than the place where I was growing up, another world where there could exist this semblance of nightlife. I envied everyone who got to experience it, for having something to do in that town where I didn’t have anything. Even my cousin had hung out at the town square when she was in high school, and she was only nine years older than me. Somewhere between her youth and mine, the practice fell out of fashion.