Drew Smith - Arcade

I couldn’t see the suit’s mouth on the worker’s dick, but I could see his hand working at himself, and I took out my own dick so I could time my rhythm with his. I could hear the worker getting closer and closer as the sound of the slurping grew louder and more intense. At last, the worker sighed heavily and let go, forgetting himself entirely and letting loose a series of loud exhalations as the suit kept at him until he was really and truly empty.

Then I saw them straighten up. The guy on his knees stood. “Thanks, man,” one of them whispered. Then the other said, “Hey, thank you .” They got themselves in order, pulled their pants up and tucked in their shirts. The guy with the work boots said, “Here, man, take these,” and I heard the sound of him removing his remaining tokens from his pocket and spilling them into the suit’s hand.

I eventually learned that by inserting my tokens at the same time as my neighbors, I could time my exit from a compartment to coincide with theirs. It completed the scene to see the faces when I could. Often they were guys I’d already passed in my rounds. It was interesting seeing who ended up with who.

Sometimes I felt jealous watching the men make their way out of the booths, down the hallway, and out into the world. Particularly if I found one or both of the men attractive, or if one or both had spurned me before connecting with each other. I couldn’t help wondering what it was that made me not good enough. It was a familiar feeling. I’d had it off and on my entire life.

When I was eight or nine, I watched the Olympics with my parents. The gymnasts were competing, and some of them appeared to be almost the same age as me. I was more interested in their performances than I was in the other contests since I was in a gymnastics class and was among the best in my age group. My parents, in a presumably innocent attempt to engage me, persisted in asking my opinions of the athletes onscreen.

Didn’t she do a great job?

Did you see that flip?

What kind of score do you think he’ll get?

I could feel my face reddening.

“I could do that if I wanted to,” I said, the volume and pitch of my voice rising. “If I practiced harder, I could do that too.”

But I had already heard the commentators going on about how many years the athletes had worked to perfect their skills. I had heard about how they were selected in earliest youth and recognized to have abilities possessed by a minuscule fraction of humankind. After a few minutes more, I went to my room and bawled thinking about all the things from which I was already excluded.

Back then, I still clung to the fantasy that I might be a prodigy. It wasn’t immediately clear what my special ability might be, but I knew I must have one. I had the idea that everyone might be a prodigy at something. It was just a matter of finding out what it was you were so unexpectedly good at. I sat at a piano for the first time believing it as likely as not that I would be able to play perfectly without a single lesson. Same for guitar, trumpet, drums, harmonica, tennis, golf, baseball, karate, and tae kwon do. It seemed to me that the next thing I tried, whatever it was, would surely lead to the discovery of an unaccountable superpower-like skill. I was in my middle twenties before, defeated, I finally gave up the idea.

ONE DAY I DROPPED A TOKEN IN THE SLOT AND SETTLED ONa movie and an appropriate volume, then got down to peek into the neighboring booth. There, I discovered a dark figure on his hands and knees peering back at me. Startled, I stood up, feeling like a monkey who had discovered a mirror in his cage. I almost bolted, but something stopped me, and, heart pounding, I lowered my pants and knelt down where he could see me. He watched for a long while before he slowly slid his fingers beneath the wall.

“Come here,” he whispered through the opening. “Come here.”

I felt possessed edging forward along the floor until his spidery fingers finally grasped me. He touched me with tremendous care, stroking me slowly and hyper-deliberately, as if measuring my dick or performing some kind of examination of my erection. My head swam as his hand traveled its length over and over again.

For a moment, it was as if a black cloth had been dropped over my mind. My eyes were closed. I knew I was at the arcade, but I didn’t feel like I was inside of anything. The hand pulled and pulled, and I rested my head against the wall separating us. Gradually, I felt everything begin to rush, all the feeling in my body focused on that one point like the tip of a tornado.

The feeling grew and shifted, and as I drew closer to coming, the whirlwind moved into my chest, where a panic rose. In an instant I found myself pulled from the hold of the spider fingers. Frantic with anxiety like a drug released into my blood, I buttoned my pants, and pushed into the dark hallway and beyond into the main room. I stood catching my breath and leaking into my pants at my usual post, barely bothering to make a show of pretending to look at DVDs. A few men exited the hallway at intervals, each of them glancing up at me as they passed. I couldn’t even guess which of them had touched me.

Later, I’d instruct myself to memorize everyone’s shoes so I’d be able to know who was who at all times, but it was easy to forget to look at them, and even when I remembered to look, it was easy to forget who was wearing what.

CALLING THE COP WAS NEVER EXPLICITLY FORBIDDEN. I understood that it was discouraged, yes. And I understood, obviously, that it was awkward to phone when the kid was around. What no one seemed to appreciate was that it was at least as awkward for me as it was for the kid, and probably more so.

I knew the cop’s schedule, so I knew with a reasonable degree of certainty when he might be away from the kid. Over the years, we’d spoken while he patrolled the town in his cruiser, so it wasn’t such a strange thing to call him, really. In fact, it wouldn’t have been strange at all in any circumstance other than our present one.

He didn’t answer the first time I called, but just before I went to voicemail I heard what I was certain was the sound of him trying to pick up at the last moment. I didn’t know what had happened, but I was certain I recognized a crackle on the line, something going wrong. Whatever it was, it left me with the sense that the cop had just made it to his phone but failed to hit “talk” quickly enough, and in some fifty-fifty lottery of digital telephonies, I had mistakenly ended up going to voicemail when he had actually intended to take the call. I listened to his outgoing voicemail message, then disconnected.

On my second attempt, instead of selecting his name from my phone’s directory, as I usually did, I dialed his number manually. I’d recently found that though my phone would say I was calling his number, when I tried him all I’d get was an abrupt end to the ringing as if the call had connected, “Hello?” I’d say. “Hello, can you hear me?” Then, after a short pause the line would go dead. On one occasion, I rang seven times, and the same thing happened each time. I never did get in touch with him that day. He later told me that his phone hadn’t shown a single missed call from me. Who knew what was going on when technology was involved? Sometimes I really did think it was conspiring against us.

I grew sweaty at the thought that this could turn into another of those episodes, and I’d be trapped calling over and over again in a loop of uncertainty. But the second time I tried him, he picked up on the third ring. When I realized I was hearing his actual, non-recorded voice my eyes welled up instantly. He hadn’t forgotten me. We were still connected. That itself buoyed me, a sensation I desperately needed when we spoke, since remaining upbeat and casual for the duration of an entire conversation was all but impossible for me by that point.