Drew Smith - Arcade

Those types, men posing as regular straight guys, would be infinitely easier to find as I got older.

WHEN I TOLD MALCOLM ABOUT MY BOYHOOD DREAMS OFbeing molested, he said, “I think that’s normal,” as he did about almost everything.

We were catching up after more than a week without speaking. He’d decided to take a break from his struggles at the hotel in Boston to go home and spend a few days with his partner, Ron. They’d been missing each other, he told me. Neither of us mentioned the possibility of meeting in person while Malcolm was in town, and it was a given that he wouldn’t be available to speak again until he was back in Boston.

All that week, I felt slightly on edge. Every time I went to the store or to get gas, I was hyperconscious that we might run into one another. Not that he would’ve recognized me. He still hadn’t seen my face or even learned my real name. I didn’t know the proper way to react. I figured I’d just pretend not to know him.

I had a fantasy about flying to Boston and staying in his empty room to restore the balance. He had described his penthouse suite little-by-little over our talks, and I had a vision of a sprawling, past-its-prime retreat with a giant oak desk, a king-size bed, a big flat-screen TV in the master bedroom and an old tube TV in the living room, a stocked minibar, and a cart from room service shoved in a corner. In the living room, a dated sofa, the floral print of which I’d seen over a video chat when the two of us jerked off together. A balcony looking out onto some historic harbor.

Malcolm said it had been a glamorous place once, and named some stars who had stayed in his room: Candice Bergen, Judd Hirsch, Lonnie Anderson, Dixie Carter. Fred Savage had stayed there with his parents. They were all people who had been on TV decades earlier. The company he worked for bought it cheap and were relying on Malcolm to bring it back to its “quote unquote former splendor.” He’d done the same thing in other cities all over: San Diego, St. Louis, Philadelphia.

I had to admit I admired him. I’d always appreciated him for his help, and I even liked the guy, but hearing about his job I realized that I respected him too.

“Do your coworkers know about you?” I asked him.

“Know what about me?

“That you like guys?”

“Yes, they know, obviously.”

“Why ‘obviously?’”

“Because I’m obviously gay.”

“You think people know just when they meet you?”

“I’d say unless they’re pretty clueless they figure it out relatively quickly.”

“On the phone you don’t sound too… too swishy or whatever. Are you more like that in real life?”

“Like am I a big queen?”

“I guess. You know. Do you do the floppy wrist thing? Or like big gay gestures or something?”

“No, I don’t think I do that.”

“But people still know you’re gay.”

“Right.”

“Do you wear bracelets? It seems like a lot of really gay guys have a thing for bracelets and rings.”

“I don’t, no. Ronald does, actually. But I don’t know if that’s really a gay thing.”

“Oh, it definitely is.” The one gay person I had known growing up was a piano player in my hometown. He had given me lessons, and when his thin, gold bracelets would occasionally get stuck in the keys he’d let out a short little yip, scandalized every time it happened. “The bracelet thing is definitely gay.”

“You’re the expert, Sam.”

“Don’t get annoyed. I’m just asking questions.”

“I’m not annoyed. But I do have to hang up soon. Hurry up and fill me in on the news about the cop and the kid before I fall asleep. What did I miss?”

“Not much. They’ve been going back and forth about this permission slip the kid’s folks supposedly have to sign for the kid to go on that cruise, since he’s under twenty-one.”

“I’m sure his parents were really into that.”

“They didn’t even ask them.”

“They forged it?”

“Yeah. It didn’t even have to be notarized or anything, apparently. So they just signed it with his parents’ names.”

“Makes sense.”

“You don’t think it’s weird? Morally? That he’s a cop forging documents for his underage lover?”

“God, Sam. I’ve probably done worse things in the last month than that. He’s getting him onto a cruise, not enlisting him in the army. Anyway, the kid’s nineteen years old. He’s not a child.”

“I guess so, but it’s still illegal. I feel like maybe the cop is brainwashed or something. Don’t you think he probably had to take some kind of oath swearing to uphold the law?”

“‘An oath to uphold the law?’ I swear, I’ve never known anyone whose standards were so high and so low at the same time.”

And I still hadn’t even told him about the arcade.

THE GUYS WHO APPEARED TO HAVE A GENUINE INTERESTin the videos and products at the arcade confounded everyone. You couldn’t be sure who was actually looking to fool around. It was even more disconcerting when a straight couple came in to check out dildos and cheap negligees, as if taking a shot at spicing up their sex life or beginning in earnest their earliest dalliances into swinging. The wives looked at us baffled, and the husbands narrowed their eyes as they pieced together what we were doing out there. Whatever sick shit they were involved in, at least they were straight and probably fucking in beds like normal people instead of in shabby, cramped coin-op booths on the outskirts of town.

If there was a crowd that seemed especially judgmental though, it was the groups of girls who came in giggling and goofy, there to buy supplies for some bachelorette party. They filled their arms with balloons made to look like dicks, the cake pan in the shape of an enormous cock, and the pin-the-penis game marketed alternately under the names “Pin the Macho On the Man” and “Pin the Junk On the Hunk.” The girls always gave looks of outright disgust to all they saw at the arcade, as if there might be any threat of us coming on to them. I did my best to mirror their horrified expressions, imitating them to themselves. But that was strictly for my own entertainment. I don’t think they understood anything.

It was incredible how quickly we put on masks for the shoppers, donning phony versions of ourselves the same way my friends and I had at junior high dances when we’d catch sight of a chaperone we knew — a teacher we liked or one of our friends’ parents. Our collective abandon was shattered the second they looked at us. Whatever we might have been from the inside, from the outside, we understood, we were nothing more than a bunch of dumb kids jumping around.

It bothered me that we behaved differently when other people were at the arcade. It bothered me that we had to be different at different times. I wished we could always be ourselves — or at least that version of ourselves — if only out there. After all, they were the intruders, not us.

At least outsiders brought with them the advantage that the clerks never used the PA system when they were around. They never got on the loudspeakers to tell people to find a booth or to drop tokens or get out. They never targeted guys for having their cell phones out. You were protected as long as there were straight shoppers about, like a kid who can rebel against his stepfather as long as his mother is nearby.

The few men who actually came in looking to buy DVDs carried with them the erotic possibility that they would somehow become curious right there in the store. Perhaps one of them would become reminded of some terrific sexual encounter he’d had with another male in his youth. Or maybe he’d just say, “Hell, let’s see what all the fuss is about.”