Drew Smith - Arcade

It was always like that. No one wanted to settle down until he was certain he’d found the best he was going to get. It was perfectly acceptable to say to someone, “I just got here. I don’t want to come yet.” It was perfectly acceptable to say that you were going to walk around and see who else was there. That’s why it felt so good when a guy bought his tokens and then came straight to you without reviewing the options. He knew you were exactly what he wanted.

But then it also felt good when someone had made the rounds and seen all the possibilities and then came back and found you. Which explains the burst of pride I felt when the bull lowered his head in my direction and indicated the door to a particular booth. It was as if he was the coach, who, after surveying all his players on the bench, selected me as the one best equipped for the job.

He went into the booth first, and I followed behind him a moment later. He faced the screen with his back to me. I let him get a look at me before I locked the door. I wanted there to be no mistaking the situation. He turned around after a second and lifted his chin in a gesture of recognition. As I turned to engage the lock, another man slipped into the booth with us. I had noticed him outside. He, too, had been pursuing the bull, though his advances had been absolutely devoid of style. He was furtive, awkward, and creepy. He was at least twenty years older than me.

“Get out,” I whispered to him.

He pressed himself against the wall and shook his head, an eerie grin fixed on his face. The bull didn’t see what was going on behind him or hear over the volume of the porn flick he’d selected.

“Get out,” I said again, but the man didn’t move.

I got the attention of the bull by tapping his shoulder. “He won’t leave,” I said, pointing to the man behind us.

The bull behaved exactly as you would expect. He turned and looked at the guy. He didn’t waste a syllable. “Out,” he said, gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder. The sneak, given no choice, exited, and I quickly locked the door behind him.

I joined the bull. We stood side-by-side watching the video. We both undid our pants. I looked at him and he looked at the screen. I reached over and took hold of him. He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. He didn’t touch me. He watched the screen. “Yeah,” he repeated, as I got to know him down there, tugging lightly.

“Now suck it,” he said.

I hadn’t even had time to say, “I don’t do that much out here” or to confirm and reconfirm his disease-free status.

I thought about trying it out on him, but I knew it would be the end of things. There wasn’t going to be the shared time in the booth together touching and playing, watching one another and getting excited, possibly even climaxing together, possibly even at the same time, or roughly the same time.

I bent down and tried to get a look at it in the dim light to see if it was covered in sores or scars or unusual bumps or ridges. It seemed normal, from what I could tell. I opened my mouth and put it in. He was silent. I sucked for a minute or two. He put his hand on my head and was mostly quiet. Occasionally, he reached over my head to adjust the volume of the video or scroll through the available options when he got bored with what was happening on screen.

I took him out of my mouth and looked at his face. I stood up and jerked him, looking at the screen and wondering what would happen next, wondering if it was my turn. He looked at me, and I could tell he was going to say something. I thought it would probably be something really nice. Guys had already said a lot of nice things to me out there. It might have been the real reason I went out there at all, to hear all the nice things guys had to say when they got you alone, when they earned their shot in a booth with you.

“You gonna suck it or what?” he said.

For a second I imagined he must be joking, but I saw just as quickly that this was not a person who made ironic jokes in which he pretended to be an insensitive jerk as a way of breaking the ice. I could imagine that scenario. I could imagine connecting with someone intelligent and funny who could acknowledge the strangeness of our situation — who might look down and see that I was a person too, and within me a complex world of memories and feelings and pleasures and fears — and say, in a joking way, “You gonna suck it or what?”

But that wasn’t this guy. This guy didn’t make ironic jokes. More likely, he made racist or sexist jokes.

I didn’t say anything else. I put myself away and left. Just outside waited the man who had refused to leave the booth. He slinked in like an insect before the door could swing shut on its springs, and I heard the door lock behind him.

THE COP DEIGNED TO SPEAK WITH ME LESS AND LESS. FORweeks, I’d hardly contact him at all, white-knuckling it on Malcolm’s advice. I recorded each of our interactions religiously on my calendar. The end of the six months was nearing.

I learned from their emails that my existence had become perhaps the only point of contention between the cop and the kid. Their agreement was that if the cop spoke to me, the kid had to be told, which meant a conversation about our conversation, and maybe an argument. It was hardly worth the trouble to the cop, particularly since phone calls with me had degraded to little more than a bizarre, rapid cycling between badly acted indifference and total desperation, as I repeatedly fell out of character.

During this period, I began getting allergy shots twice a week to cope with my allergy to the cop’s cat — a supposed reason why I had never spent the night at his house, and a barrier, I saw, to our eventual happiness together. He’d be so impressed by my thoughtfulness in the end.

I panicked when I realized the two of them were emailing about the kid getting his passport for the cruise, which would enter international waters. If they were to split up before then, the cop was going to have an extra ticket, and I wouldn’t be able to drop everything and join him unless I had a passport too.

I cooked up a phony travel agenda and went to a passport expediter, who would be able to acquire my passport far sooner than the eight weeks that were then standard for a new one. It cost me an extra $400, but I had my passport just two weeks later, with the most fittingly crazed and maniacal passport photo imaginable.

The focus on the kid and the cop, all the errands and tasks associated with getting him back, had the single great advantage that it made it easier for me to cope with reactions to news of my homosexually. My sister called as I arrived at my allergist’s office one afternoon. When I answered, she said, “Well, you’ve always wanted to ruin the family, and now you’ve done it.”

“I can’t talk right now,” I was able to say. “I have a doctor’s appointment.”

MY FRIEND GREG LOST HIS JOB WHEN HIS EMPLOYERdiscovered he’d been spending hours of every shift looking at porn on his work computer. I guess because I was the only other sexual deviant he knew, I was the one he asked to accompany him to a twelve step meeting for sex addicts. He picked me up early on a Saturday and drove us to a church not far from where I lived. We rode an elevator filled with other sheepish men deep into a basement, and followed signs printed with arrows and the letters “SAA.” Greg had told me on the ride over that there was another organization called SLAA, which stood for Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. He didn’t know the difference between the two, but this one was more conveniently located, and anyway love wasn’t his addiction.

It was a big open room with a bunch of stackable plastic chairs in a circle. We were among the last to arrive.