Drew Smith - Arcade

“Huh,” the bouncer said.

“Everybody’s different. Some of the clerks are friendlier than others. I mean, none of us are gay, so there’s that difference from the start. I think that’s intentional on the part of J.R. Not that he’s like discriminating against them or whatever. I mean, I don’t know if a lot of gay guys have applied for jobs here, but I don’t think he’d be interested in staffing the place with a bunch of homos if he could avoid it. J.R.’s pretty smart about getting the most out of people, which can be a good thing and a bad thing, if you know what I mean. Anyway, supposedly there was some trouble with the last gay clerk a while back, so he pretty much stopped hiring them.”

“Sounds about right,” the bouncer said.

The heavyset clerk went on. “But in general, speaking only for myself, I’d say you don’t have to work here long before you notice that there are a few different types of customers, and it’s pretty rare that someone just goes and breaks the mold.”

“Like what kind of types?” the bouncer asked. “Like aggressive guys?”

“No, not aggressive. Like a few of them are really flamey and over the top. And some of them are real reserved and conservative. Not what you’d usually think of. Some of the guys are here all the time, like they’re real junkies for it. I mean, some of them you just see over and over again, every day. Some of them want to talk to you and kind of try to be your friend or whatever.”

“Well, that shit ain’t gonna work with me. I’m not looking for friends out here.”

“People get the idea pretty quick if you’re not a chatty type. Most of them are actually alright. A lot of them just like being here. For some of these guys it’s funny, it’s like their favorite place to be.”

“Sounds pretty fucking desperate.”

“Yeah. Like I said, everyone’s different, and for sure Casey’s style is going to be different than Ray’s style, is going to be different than Jason’s style. And they’re all different from my style, which is still different than what J.R. would say about how we should be running the place. But if you ask me, it’s a good idea to try to avoid getting too judgmental about people. My ex-wife was a stripper, so I know how that stuff goes.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I’m sure I’ve had my moments or whatever, but I try to be respectful and cool with everybody. I mean, people know I’ll drop the hammer if I have to, but I try to avoid it.”

The bouncer seemed to be thinking. “I guess if there was a place like this with women roaming around looking to get fucked, I might check it out,” he said. He laughed at the idea.

“Of course, man. That’s the thing. The thing is, these guys that come out here are getting laid like three or four hundred times more than most straight guys. And they’re sure not all lookers. I mean, that guy over there with the headphones. I’ve definitely seen him go into booths with people, just like anyone else. And, you know, like I said, no judgment. I mean, he’s not a freak or anything, but he doesn’t exactly look like the type to get a lot of action, you see what I mean? So I guess there are a lot of those types out here too. Sort of average guys, I guess you’d say.”

“I guess you see all kinds of shit out here.”

MAYBE THE CLERKS THEMSELVES FELT JUDGED ABOUT THEIRunconventional service industry jobs, as I often did at the motel. A lot of the guys who went to arcade had respected positions in the fields of their choosing. When guys like that were at the arcade, it was understood that they were slumming. They’d show up wearing suits and shirts pressed by wives or dry cleaners. Guys like that thought they were doing the clerk a favor if they acted like his pal for five seconds or asked about the book he was reading.

I grew up in small-town upper middle class society, thinking the same way, projecting myself into a future where I too would learn the names of my servers in restaurants so I could use them excessively in a show, not of genuine respect, but of some studied and disingenuous facsimile of regard for one’s “peers.” That’s why I always made up names to give the guests when they asked for mine. The joke was on them when they kept thanking Mitch or Jeffrey for helping them with their stopped sink or for explaining how to get an outside line on the telephone in their room. Or when they complained that Ivan wasn’t very helpful when they had a problem connecting to the Wi-Fi.

Once, my manager came to the lobby before leaving for the night and said, “Have you been telling people your name is Champ?”

“No,” I said, “but I told someone my name is Chip.”

“That solves that mystery. A woman in 254 complained that there weren’t enough pillows in her room, and that Champ acted put out by her request for one or two extras.”

“She asked for seven extras,” I said. “In addition to the eight that were already on the two queen beds in the room.”

“What the fuck?”

“Exactly. I had to make two trips. And she was the only person in there.”

But she remembered my name, or tried anyway.

I could never have predicted those kinds of conversations when I was younger. For all my progressive leanings, well into young adulthood I still believed that the most intelligent people were the ones who had money. If you were smart, I figured, you’d find a way to get your hands on it or else you’d just end up with it. I probably got that wrong impression from repeated viewings of The Big Chill, in which Tom Berenger’s character says to his old college friend played by Kevin Klein, “Who would have thought we’d both make so much bread?”

Of course, I learned it doesn’t flutter down quite the way I thought it would.

I read that empathy is the highest form of emotional intelligence, and that most people won’t ever experience it. It’s not simply that most people won’t have a clue what it’s like to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Most would never even be inclined to try.

I became preoccupied by the subject of empathy soon after starting work at the motel, where I interacted with people all day but felt invisible, not to mention broke and hypersensitive and too aware of the difficulty of bridging the class divide over the course of some fleeting encounter with a vacationing guest.

My friends from college were all financially secure by then. To them, my situation was a novelty. Over dinner Jarrod said of me to his wife, Lara, “He’s the poorest of our friends now, isn’t he? It used to be Wayne, but then he got that great job in New York.”

Later that evening we were talking about the punk bands from our youth that were reuniting and touring. Jarrod said, “What do they have to lose? They’re probably just working at Home Depot or something now.”

I said, “There’s nothing wrong with working at Home Depot. I think I read they have really good benefits for their employees, actually.”

They didn’t say anything, but I felt something pass between them over the table, an unexpressed eye roll, a bookmark in the conversation they might talk about later as they got ready for bed. Or laugh about. “There’s nothing wrong with working at Home Depot,” Jarrod might mimic later that night, as he flossed and Lara brushed her teeth. Then they’d laugh. I wondered if they thought I was a class warrior.

A few months earlier Jarrod had been laid off from his job. When Lara called to tell me that he’d found another, I said, “That’s great. Did he have to take a pay cut?”

“Actually this job pays about $15,000 more than the last one,” she said. “Of course, at our level, that won’t make any difference to us.”