Drew Smith - Arcade

Nights like that, the guy up front was just there to sell tokens, not monitoring anything besides the register. Men were hanging out in the hallways smoking cigarettes, leaning against the pressed wood walls with one foot flat against the vertical surface like James Dean. The hall transformed into a promenade, where you found yourself walking back and forth before groups of loiterers who were openly sizing you up, or trying to draw you into something, or pointedly ignoring you. I always behaved the same way, wandering slowly, acting a bit like I’d just lost something or had forgotten something I was trying to remember, or as if I was on the hunt for the perfect booth, and was operating purely on feel, a dowser missing his divining rods. I felt foolish and self-conscious when groups of guys were clumped together talking in little cliques. They’d be quiet for a second as you made your way past but then inevitably they’d whisper something right after, and even if it wasn’t about you it seemed like it was. Nights like that, the place felt haunted. The Amityville Peep Show.

After watching scary movies with the friends of my childhood, we could create nights in which the air itself felt barbed with fear and excitement, a buzz in our little chests as we talked about our scariest nightmares and the times we thought we saw a ghost or heard one just outside our windows, saying Bloody Mary into a dark mirror. Telling the story of how someone broke into my aunt’s house while she was in the shower and stole her jewelry, leaving behind a trail of muddy, bare footprints. We talked about Ouija boards, and the girl at school who did tarot card readings in the lunchroom and had Sharpied a pentagram onto her three-ring binder.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the mysteries of the world. I checked out every book in my small town library on the subjects of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. I read about UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle and Stonehenge. I thought about telekinesis and astral projection and psychic powers and what it meant when something popped into my mind for no reason. I could never understand why everyone else wasn’t as fascinated. When I learned about germs, I remembered the way we had to watch eclipses through a special apparatus we made from a paper towel roll. I became fixated on the idea that we were surrounded by things no one knew about because they hadn’t yet thought of the right way to see them.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind played on TV when I was a kid. In the film, the government knows of the existence of extraterrestrials and is in the early stages of establishing contact with them. Despite denials from the authorities, the connection is already clear to many citizens who have experienced firsthand UFO sightings and, in some cases, abductions.

I watched the film over and over again and memorized the three types of encounters.

Close Encounter of the First Kind: Sighting of a UFO

Close Encounter of the Second Kind: Physical Evidence

Close Encounter of the Third Kind: Contact

After a close encounter of the first kind, Indiana lineman Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfuss, becomes inexplicably obsessed by a figure that intrudes on all his thoughts. In the movie’s most iconic sequence, he molds a mound of mashed potatoes into that inscrutable shape, as yet unaware that he is replicating the Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming. Staring at the form, not knowing what to make of it, he says to his frightened family, half out of frustration and half as a revelation, “This means something. This is important.” The scene led me to experience a swell of emotion I couldn’t begin to describe or understand.

I rented Close Encounters in adulthood and found that it held up. I still liked it for more than nostalgia’s sake, and when Richard Dreyfuss said, “This means something,” I got choked up, even though over the years I’ve heard so many negative things about Dreyfuss, who developed a reputation as a difficult and unpleasant person later in his career. My opinion of him softened briefly when I read that he had spoken publicly about being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But I’ve noticed that people who are horrible because of their mental disorders are still horrible people, and I don’t know quite how to think about that.

Watching Close Encounters, I could imagine just how it felt looking at that mass and not knowing what to make of it. I knew how exhilarating and terrifying it could be to have things happen to your mind over which you had no control. Things you wanted and didn’t want at the same time.

AS A BOY, ALL MY FANTASIES CENTERED ON THE WISH THATsomeone would molest me. I grew up in an era of panic about the fates of latchkey kids, and adults were always talking about the different kinds of touching, and how some of them were bad. I knew it was wrong to feel titillated by those discussions, but the idea of some older man sneaking into my room and touching me seemed so exciting and great. I’d lie in bed thinking about it until I shook all over.

When I wasn’t praying to have a big penis, as I did every night, I prayed to be molested. It was a great blow to my ego that no grownup ever tried forcing me to perform oral sex on him. Wasn’t I as good as all the other kids who were supposedly being raped pretty much around the clock? Even then, I had a sense of the limited time at my disposal. I knew I could only attract child molesters for a scant few years. I wondered if there was a signal I was supposed to learn to let people know I was a good candidate. I wanted them to know that I would never tell, that it would be our secret. They wouldn’t even have to threaten my family or me, unless they wanted to, in which case it would be fine.

Of course, I didn’t understand what molestation would entail. I only knew that, even not knowing what it was, it sounded like exactly what I wanted. I thought the word “fondle” was the sexiest word in the world. I didn’t even care who it was. I just wanted some creepy old pervert to spread his trench coat in front of me, or to pose as a trusted member of the community and to lure me into an innocent-looking relationship. Then, on some overnight camping trip, he could teach me how to fuck.

Particularly influential on my earliest sexual fantasies was the “very special” two-part episode of Diff’rent Strokes in which Arnold and his best friend, Dudley, are seduced by the owner of a nearby bicycle shop, a lovely-seeming man who happens also to be a pedophile. In the show, the kindly cycling enthusiast seduces the boys with ice cream, and then wine. He shows them naked photographs of himself. In the end, of course, his plot is discovered before anyone can get really and truly molested, but it did give me an idea of what kinds of things I could anticipate if I could attract the right man.

The 1989 airing of the TV miniseries I Know My First Name is Steven gave me my first misgivings about my dreams of molestation. The story, based on the real-life kidnapping of seven-year-old Steven Stayner, made me call into question all my fantasies. Stayner had been held for more than seven years before escaping his captor with another boy named Timmy White. The name of his abductor, Kenneth Parnell, has stayed on my mind all these years.

Walking home from school just a few months after seeing I Know My First Name is Steven, a stranger actually did pull his car to the curb and offer me a ride. I shouted, “No!” and ran home, hysterical and constantly checking over my shoulder. The driver hadn’t given chase. After that, at night, I sometimes masturbated to the fantasies of what might have become of me had I said yes and had gotten in his car and been carried away. By then, I was already resigned to the notion that a kind, older friend posing as a regular straight guy would never molest me.