Drew Smith - Arcade

It was awful when he got busted. At thirteen, I was already convinced that masturbating was the worst thing I could possibly do. Hearing that a childhood hero had been convicted as a criminal for jerking off, seeing the way his mug shot appeared all over television and even in the newspaper my parents read, was strange and upsetting. I felt personally implicated when, over breakfast, my father shook the newspaper in my direction and said, “Look what your hero did.”

The mug shot didn’t look like him. It looked like someone who was the exact opposite of Pee-wee Herman. He looked like someone from another time, some roadie from the 1970s, some drummer, some weirdo who would get caught jerking off in a movie theater. It was such a dramatic public shaming. Overnight, he was out of work, and everything associated with him was a joke and a collector’s item. I could empathize. I could imagine myself being outed in the same way at school or in church. I thought about it when I jerked off. Or, actually, the second after I ejaculated.

In the booths, my rule was that I always let the other guy take his out first. I got that from drug movies in which the dealer always makes the new guy snort a little of whatever they’re selling to prove that he is who he says he is and not some cop, which he always turns out to be anyway. I figured if I was looking at another guy’s dick, then odds were good he wasn’t going to bust me.

I wished I could have asked the cop’s advice. He would have known whether I could have been arrested and on what charges. Maybe he would have said that I was too good for that sordid, degenerate place. No, not degenerate. Not sordid. Scummy, he’d say. Or sketchy.

MR. GRATE AND BENCH CALLED TO MAKE HIS BOOKINGSfor the next three months, making several reservations at once as he had the whole time I worked at the motel. He was already booked for a reservation the following week, when he could have secured the other nights in person, but he always said he liked to be at his desk with his calendar spread out in front of him. I noted all the dates and made his reservations as cheerfully and efficiently as possible, and when he offered to read off his credit card number, I told him not to worry about it.

“I know where to find you,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said.

“How’s it going with your pregnant employee, by the way?”

“That’s what I’m going to come and find out,” he said. “The numbers out there don’t look great, but I’ve seen worse. Partly it’s just the time of year.”

“I hear you,” I said, but I had no idea what he meant.

Though only minutes earlier, a woman in her sixties had repeatedly and unapologetically passed gas in the lobby while waiting on her cab, I demonstrated laudable restraint by not grasping the phone with both hands and screaming into the receiver’s many tiny holes, “Help! Help! Get me out of here! Hire me, I’m begging you!”

I almost couldn’t imagine having a different job and no longer being a clerk, with its lowly title, bad hours, and meager pay. I couldn’t quite conceive what I might do with vacation pay and national holidays off work. It seemed obvious the cop would find me more appealing if I had a normal schedule and a more middle class presence in the world.

I wondered if I’d become just another business-casual salesman type, like Mr. Grate and Bench. It seemed risky somehow. Maybe I’d like it too much. Maybe I’d want for nothing and turn out to be the best grate-and-bench salesman in the world.

If I am that, what then won’t I be? That’s what I wondered.

But of course I’d have to take the job with its normal hours and normal clothes and its total lack of any edge. At dinner parties, people would ask what I did, and instead of choking out that I was a desk clerk, I’d say that I handle outside sales for a major distributor of quality site materials.

Mr. Grate and Bench said his employee’s pregnancy was just a couple of months along.

“But you know how it goes,” he said. “They all think they’ll probably want to keep working, but they never do. I’ve been through this with my wife before. Both of them.”

This he confided in a way that made me certain he still thought I was a straight guy and could be spoken to without resorting to diplomatic, PC bullshit.

“I’d say there’s a seventy percent chance she’ll hang it up. So much for my new area rep.”

The second he said it, I could picture my business card. Area Rep. I wondered if I’d go back to apologizing for it the way I used to when I was in real estate. “I mean, come on,” I’d tell myself, “Everyone has to make a living.”

EVEN WITHOUT KNOWING ABOUT MY EXPERIENCES AT THEarcade, most of my friends believed I had a sleazy sex life. I’d made an unwise confession years before that wound up being widely circulated among our group. Long before I came out to anyone, including myself, I was engaging in occasional threeways with a married buddy from work and whatever willing women we could find. We were both on record as being “completely straight,” but things occasionally went slightly further when we managed to meet a game female.

We had some success together, and met a few regular women when the ads I posted yielded fruit. When we couldn’t find someone who would lay us for free, we sometimes met with a hooker who used the name Champain. The misspelling was hers. A deliberate play on words, perhaps, but I doubt it. S&M was never on the table.

Champain was in her early 20s like me. She always said she liked playing around with the two of us. More than once she said that the things she liked best were “Fast cars, chicken fried steak, and getting fucked by two men at the same time.” The way she said it, repeating it word for word on multiple occasions made me believe it really was some kind of motto for her. While I’m certain she was a complex person with as rich an emotional life as mine or anyone else’s, she was decidedly unintelligent, even by our severely reduced standards.

We met her at her apartment once. She said she never had guys over, but we’d seen one another a few times by then, and she trusted us. Her place bore evidence of a potentially unhealthy obsession with the Looney Tunes character Tweety Bird. He was the primary decorative motif. Everywhere, paraphernalia in his honor. Stuffed dolls and books. Framed pictures on the wall. She had a kid who was with a babysitter. It was the first we’d heard about him. At one point, she suddenly stood and shut the door to his room. The place was tidy and organized. I thought it would be different. She was a ditzy girl who actually seemed to enjoy having sex with men for money. I realize this is the sort of rationalization used all the time in the exploitation of women, but it really did appear to be true.

While my buddy fucked her that night, I stuck my fingers inside of her and felt his dick sliding along my hand. When Champain couldn’t see, he reached back and gave my dick a quick squeeze that I recalled frequently for the next several years.

That night, when we left her place, she was in a state of mild crisis. My friend had lost his condom inside of her. Though he didn’t seem concerned, Champain was in an absolute panic. She couldn’t find it. Female anatomy being the mystery it is, I couldn’t begin to imagine where it might have gone or where to recommend she might search for it. Walking to my pickup, my friend pointed out her car to me, recognizable by its dangling Tweety Bird air freshener. I’ve long held that a great deal can be determined about one’s level of taste based on what, if anything, is hanging from his or her rear view mirror. The less the better. Ideally, there is nothing.