Drew Smith - Arcade

A week or so after the lost condom incident, my friend came to my apartment.

“Don’t freak out, but I have something to show you.”

He undid his pants.

I started getting excited. I didn’t know what was going to happen.

He was in his underwear, and he pulled them down to reveal his dick.

“Come closer,” he said.

I did. He pushed his pubic hair aside and showed me a small, open sore on the skin just above the base of his penis. He had already been to his doctor, who, without running any tests, gave him a shot of penicillin and said it was either syphilis or herpes. If it was syphilis, the shot would clear it up. If it was herpes, it would go away on its own after a while.

For some reason I was the one who had to call Champain, who sobbed and screamed into the phone that she knew for a fact that she was “one hundred and fifty percent clean.” She repeated the phrase over and over again.

A week later she called to tell me that she had been tested and everything was fine. My friend’s sore cleared up, and he never found out what caused it.

I told a friend about one of the episodes with Champain. In a toe-dipping half-confession, I downplayed it dramatically, making it sound like a one time, isolated event. My friend reacted with interest and made a variety of inquiries for further details, so I answered his questions, careful to make the whole thing sound not as though the pursuit of these kinds of experiences was a part-time job, which was essentially what it had become, but like something that happened by a bizarre happenstance, organically and completely unorchestrated. You’ll never believe this funny thing that happened to me.

Though my confessor was a friend I loved and trusted, he could not be relied upon to keep a secret of that type. A week later, I was dining with Dan and Beth, a couple my confidant and I had in common as friends. I thought they were behaving strangely, but it wasn’t confirmed until Dan said, suddenly, “Look, we’re not supposed to mention it, but Mike told us about what you did, and we’re both having a really hard time acting normally around you. So maybe we should just cut the evening short while we process this.”

Of course I knew, but I said, “What do you mean? What did Mike tell you?”

“You know what he’s talking about,” Beth said. “With the hookers and your pal from work. We think it’s completely disgusting, don’t we, Dan?”

“Yeah, we do.”

“That was supposed to be between Mike and me,” I said.

“Well, I think he felt like he needed to talk to someone about it,” Beth said. “And I don’t blame him.”

“It’s not that big of a deal,” I said. “I mean, we’re talking about some threesomes. I didn’t invent some new perversion or something.”

“With a hooker and a married man?” Beth said. “Are you kidding?”

“I had no idea you’d be so judgmental about something like this.”

“Hey, don’t call Beth judgmental just because some people take marriage more seriously than others,” Dan said.

“You don’t even know the guy, let alone his wife. They’re practically separated. What do you care?”

“It’s just a shitty way to behave,” Dan said.

“Exactly,” Beth said. “It’s fucking uncivilized.”

“We’re not saying we don’t want to be your friend. We’re just disappointed.” Dan said. “I think we need some space from you right now.”

And with that I was out the door.

Furious, I called the friend who had betrayed my confidence. I shouted into the phone, threatening to bust his lip, as if I were Norman Mailer.

I didn’t see Dan and Beth for a few months, during which time the rift had to be explained to our other friends, so of course everyone ended up hearing various bastardized versions of the story about Champain and my friend from work.

IT’S HARD NOT TO OBSESS OVER THE STUPIDITY OF YOUNGERdays. I wish it were different and that I could view my former self nostalgically, as an innocent upstart trying to make his way. Instead, my reminiscences play back like scenes from a horror movie.

Surely he won’t go into the basement alone. Not after finding the body in the kitchen. But of course, he — my former self — always does the wrong thing, no matter how oblivious seeming, how laughable.

The scariest part is looking back at the painful lesson learned by my sixteen-year-old self, knowing that he’ll make essentially the same mistake again at twenty-two, then again in a slightly more imaginative, but equally stupid way, at twenty-nine. It can arrive at such a point that one begins to question the tastes of his friends and loved ones.

The only thing that helps me forgive myself is that it’s just so easy to forget. It’s my favorite thing about life. And also my least favorite. When I was still seeing a shrink, we had an ongoing conversation about my fantasy of walking into a crowd of people and firing a gun into the air. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, I just wanted to create a memorable moment for myself and for everyone else, and I knew that, whatever happened after that gunshot, we would remember it. It would be an instance set apart, like nothing else from the rest of our lives, which were passing in a blur.

Recently, a friend reminded me about a summer in college when I worked at a clothing store. “I remember you were embroiled in a whole thing there.”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

“You don’t remember this? Something about an abortion?”

“Oh my God, that’s right!”

It had to do with a guy I worked with. I couldn’t remember his name, only that he wore an orthodontic retainer. He had gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and they had gone to get an abortion despite their supposed religious objections. They had encountered protesters there who had forced into their hands little plastic models of their unborn baby. Could I have been confusing this with a plotline from the TV show Degrassi High? I lent the couple money for the procedure, and the guy cried in the stock room about how much he loved his girlfriend, but how he wasn’t ready to be a father.

How can I learn anything or do anything other than the same stupid things I’ve always done, if I can’t remember the abortion drama that ate up weeks of that summer? I can’t even remember the guy’s name. I thought I’d know him forever after that experience, but today if I saw him in public, I’d probably pretend not to recognize him at all.

I WENT TO A PORN SHOP ATTACHED TO A REGULARnewsstand. I discovered the place while searching for a difficult-to-find arts magazine. The newsstand was listed as a vendor on the magazine’s website. The fact that it doubled as a pornography store was an unanticipated bonus that I discovered upon my arrival.

A few racks were, in fact, devoted to a fairly impressive inventory of newspapers, weeklies, and journals. But just beyond them stood row upon row of shelves, all of them bearing more than their share of pornographic DVDs. The walls were covered in magazine racks, stuffed with the most artless and low-quality skin mags imaginable. The covers were not concealed like the newsstand nudie publications of my youth. Nor were they merely suggestive, as they once had been. They were sufficiently explicit that anyone learning about sex for the first time could acquire a more-than-complete education merely by taking a brief stroll among the aisles.

The room swam in flesh tones, and I almost missed the only other living person in the area as I scanned it. But a slight movement caught my attention and my eye hung on him. He had already seen me. We traded nods then looked away to the carnival of sex on all sides of us.