Drew Smith - Arcade

I wanted to go, but the military guy was holding on to me. “Don’t leave until it’s over,” he said.

While the third guy fucked him, the military guy looked straight into my eyes with his arms around my neck. Then the third guy left, and we were alone.

When the other men were gone, he seemed to come out of his spell a bit. He dressed himself slowly.

“Thanks for being there,” he said.

“Sure. Thanks for letting me watch.”

He left the booth, and I walked out a minute later, after standing in the smell for a while, taking it all in.

I walked around the hallways feeling drunk and uneven. Then I saw him in the opposite corridor, cruising another guy. I’d assumed he had left. I couldn’t imagine what he was looking for or when it would be finished. I watched the two of them go into a booth, and I followed them. I pressed against the door, and found it unlocked. Though they had only bumped into one another two minutes earlier, when I opened the door, I saw the military man bent over and the other man behind him licking his ass.

A couple of days later, by chance, I ran into the military man at an electronics store. We were on opposite sides of a display when we noticed one another. At first, I didn’t remember how I knew him. But then I remembered his blissed-out eyes as those strangers took him from behind. We lifted our chins at one another. Guys like that, you don’t know whether to pity them or what. People would say the same thing about me if they could have seen me in that booth, maybe, even though I was only watching.

Normally, I only pushed against the door of an occupied booth when I knew exactly who I would find inside, but I suspended that rule when it was clear that it was occupied by a group of men rather than an individual. When I could manage to be included, groups at the arcade were my best-case scenarios. As someone who mostly watched, it meant a chance to see a lot more than I might otherwise have seen. As long as my dick was out of my pants, no one cared that I wasn’t participating as much as the others. I’d let them touch me a little, but when they tried to suck me or direct me to their rear ends, I’d shake my head no. No one minded as long as there were plenty of alternatives present.

At the arcade, sometimes you’d knock on the door of a booth filled with people, and they’d open it a crack, take a look at you, and then grant you entry like nightclub bouncers. Sometimes they’d just leave the door unlocked and when they saw who it was coming in, they’d all nod their heads like, “Yeah, man. Come join the fun.”

Sometimes, I’d walk into a booth and recognize that everyone was looking at me with a who-the-fuck-is-this-guy expression. Or they wouldn’t let me in at all. Sometimes, I’d be the only man out there not crammed into a single booth with the rest of the crowd.

It sometimes happened that, having pulled into the parking lot to find it half full, I’d buy my tokens confident that I wouldn’t pass the evening alone. But, upon entering the hallways, I’d discover only one red light lit. Though I could hear several people inside, I’d press against the door and find it locked. Confident that there must be others that I hadn’t yet come across, I’d walk around seeking other possibilities. Then, finding none, I’d circle back and test the door again to see if it had been unlocked in the interval. In desperation, I’d try the doors on either side and find them locked too, even though their lights weren’t lit. Some perverts were already in there watching everything under the wall.

THE NEXT TIME MR. GRATE AND BENCH CHECKED IN, everything was as usual. He asked, as always, to borrow one of the irons and miniature ironing boards we kept at the front desk. Actually, he didn’t have to ask. I remembered to give it to him without prompting, which I hoped would help my case somehow.

He didn’t say anything about the job or about his pregnant employee before he went to his room. And I was alone again in the motel lobby, the fishbowl room where people looked in from outside and saw me at all times, reading, eating, and watching bad television on the tiny TV set beneath the counter.

He had to give me the job. I’d treat it with wry irony, but really it would be the end of shame for me, the way an action hero backed into a corner has to use whatever is at hand to make his escape. At the end of the film it doesn’t matter that he wore a dress for five minutes to blend into a crowd. What matters is that he is free and has completed whatever task he set out to complete, even if in an unconventional and unexpected way.

I’d buy new clothes with the money. Expensive shoes with leather soles. If you can afford them, you actually save money in the end. Maybe I’d hire a stylist who would understand what looks good on me. I’ll feel silly at the time, but I’d always remember his sharp observations about what fits and cuts most suited my build, his tips about the best way to roll up my shirtsleeves. I’d learn which brands were scoffed at by people in the know.

I’d subscribe to all the magazines I wanted and pay for two years up front to get the biggest discounts. And I’d have nights free to read them and to become a smarter and better-informed version of myself. Maybe I’d take private lessons and learn French or something even more frivolous like Swedish.

I’d go out to dinners like a normal person. I’d run into my clients, who would appear in the landscape of the city as if materializing from nothing. They would have been there all along, of course, but now that I knew them as serious consumers of high-quality outdoor products, they would stand out from the crowd.

I’d be easy to spot too, because of my classic and stylish clothes that fit me better all the time thanks to biweekly sessions with my personal trainer, and the great haircuts I’d get at a salon that I’d always wondered about, with its expensive-looking branding and their hair care line displayed in their windows visible from the street. My hair stylist would know the best person in the state for that hair transplant, if I ever got serious about it.

“Trust me,” she’d say, looking at me in the mirror as she touched my hair, “it’s totally worth the cost, and this guy is so good no one will ever be able to tell. Not in a million years.”

Mr. Grate and Bench came to the lobby and asked me to call him a cab. He had read about a restaurant and he wanted to try it out.

I observed, as he waited for his cab, that he was very good at pressing his shirts. “Maybe you can teach me your trick sometime.”

He laughed. “It must be my special talent.”

I could tell he wasn’t going to say anything about it, so I said, “How’s your pregnant employee doing?”

“I’ll find out tomorrow,” he said. “She says she’s showing now.”

“Wow,” I said, “that must be weird, huh?”

“Yeah, it always is for my wife. It kind of makes everything real.”

“I bet.”

“Yeah. Anyway, we’ll see what she’s thinking tomorrow, I guess.”

Then the cab came, and he told me to have a nice night and to take care. I said the same to him, and then I was alone in the fish-bowl again.

One of the day clerks had forgotten to log out of her Facebook account, so I looked up Mr. Grate and Bench. His profile picture was of him and his wife and kids, taken professionally, it appeared. They were seated on a bench on the front porch of their upper middle class tract home in Connecticut. The wife, pretty and brunette, the kids — maybe four and six years old — dressed like their father, in light-colored polo shirts and loafers.

It resembled in no way the life I had envisioned for myself, but it appeared to have its charms. More than the lobby, anyway, where I had to keep a vanilla-scented candle lit around the clock to mask a mysterious odor the source of which no one had been able to locate over the past three-and-a-half years.