Drew Smith - Arcade

I SAW PEOPLE MENTIONING IT IN THE PERSONALS ONLINE, but I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know places like that existed. In the Missed Connections, there were ads that made clear that men were having sexual encounters of some kind there, in what I pictured as a Wild West of promiscuity. The ads said things like, “The XXX place west of town. We’ve played out there before. This time you came in wearing gym clothes. I had to get back to work, or things would have gone further. Tell me what you said about my shirt so I know it’s you.”

In a few posts, a particular highway was named. I drove out looking for it one Saturday afternoon, feeling adrenalized and nervous. I had probably passed the place a hundred time without noticing it. Aside from the red “XXX” mounted near its roof, it was an anonymous-looking building clad in corrugated metal. It could have been a hastily-erected industrial shop, or one of those oversized fireworks super centers on the side of the highway that are only open a few weeks of the year around the Fourth of July and New Year’s. It looked like the worst possible place to shelter during a tornado. It would have been safer in one’s car.

Pushing the door open, I felt the arcade’s cool air against my face for the first time. I walked in wearing earphones, nodded at the clerk, and began looking around in a tense and jittery parody of “playing it cool.” There were neatly organized racks of movies and a strange glassed-in room filled with lingerie.

I pretended to browse porn DVDs while trying to get my bearings. On either side of the main room were shadowy hallways, but from within the fluorescent brightness of the store, their darkness hid everything. The sounds of porn drifted out, sometimes momentarily blaring as though piped through a bullhorn, then receding quickly. There were things that looked like metal detectors at the entrances to the halls.

I read the signs everywhere. There were some by the front door that said not to enter if you were offended by nudity or material of a sexual nature. There were signs that prohibited food and drink, cell phones, and cameras. There were signs that said not to smoke in the building unless you were in a designated smoking area. On the things that looked like metal detectors, there were signs that said no one could enter a hallway unless they had purchased tokens at the counter. Several signs obviously made in Microsoft Word announced that if one purchased two videos, a third at the same price could be had for free. “Note:” it read, “this only applies to movies $24.95 and under.”

Like a casino, there were no windows or clocks, and there were cameras everywhere. It seemed like more cameras than should have been necessary for a pornography shop, even a relatively large one.

At the front of the store, near the counter, were the magazines. Not the usual ones like Penthouse and Hustler. They carried off-brand publications I had never heard of. Then there were toys and lube and condoms and cock rings and blow-up dolls that were obviously a joke, and expensive ones that obviously were not. There were rubbery flesh-colored mounds made to resemble a woman’s hips, as if her legs had been chopped off just a few inches below her pelvis, and her torso had been cut off just below her belly button. All that remained were her rubber hips and orifices. I once saw a clerk moving them around, and recognized their true heft in the way he lugged them from place to place like sandbags.

I took DVD cases off the shelves and examined their front and back covers, wondering if I was in the wrong place. I didn’t know what I was looking for, what would prove this to be the locale about which I had read. I noticed the other men in the store wandering, looking at me, looking at one another. They would emerge from one of the hallways, peer around, then walk into the opposite hallway or back into the hallway from which they had just emerged. Some of the men were attractive, or anyway they had that quality I like. Most of them looked serious, as if conducting the gravest business at this porn store on the outskirts of town. I observed everything, attempting to go unnoticed in the section marked “Big Tits.”

The clerk watched me. He was in his mid-thirties and wearing a fedora. He looked like a pornography director himself, with dark, lank hair that fell down either side of his face. He gestured for me to remove my earphones.

“Do you need help with something?” he said across the store.

I walked toward the counter, which was on a raised platform two or three feet above the level of the rest of the building. I gave him a confused look and said, “I don’t think I do.”

“Are you sure?” he said. “Maybe you should buy some tokens. For the booths.”

“Booths?”

“The booths in the hallways.”

“Oh. How much are tokens?”

“Four for a dollar. Three dollars minimum.”

“That sounds fair,” I said, “I’ll take three dollars worth.”

“Good man,” he said.

I gave him the cash, and he slid a pre-counted stack of 12 tokens from the countertop into his cupped hand, passing them into my upturned palm. I pocketed them without so much as glancing at them.

I went to the head of one of the hallways. There, inside a plastic wall-mounted case, twenty or so DVD covers were on display. The case was locked with the kind of tiny padlock most commonly seen securing the pages of a young girl’s diary. Most genres of pornography were represented in the case, broken into three main categories: straight, gay, and transsexual.

I reached into my pocket and felt the bulk of the twelve coins. I separated one from the bunch and rubbed it between my fingertips as I stared up at the DVD cases behind the acrylic panel. Finally, I lifted my hand from my pocket and I looked at the token for the first time. Brass and lightweight, about the size of a quarter. On one side, a topless woman was pictured from the waist up. “Heads I Win” it read. On the opposite side, a naked woman’s rear end. “Tails You Lose” it said.

I didn’t even want to spend them. I wanted to have them as a souvenir. I wanted to frame them and hang them in my apartment. I wanted to pass them out to people I knew. If I had never seen one before, it was a safe bet none of my friends had either. Did they have these tokens in the top tier law schools where my friends learned their trades? In doctoral programs? In office buildings? Did they have them in the Montessori Schools where the teachers of my friends’ children encouraged the discovery of varied interests and intelligences in settings that promoted free play and exploration? No, they didn’t have them in those places. But there I was. I had them.

Standing in front of the display of video covers, looking up from the token in my hand, I noticed another sign. This one laminated and also apparently made in landscape mode in Microsoft Word, read: “This is not a Safety Zone. No standing for prolonged periods.” I put the token in my pocket with the rest and entered the hallway through the things that looked like metal detectors. They didn’t register my passing in any observable way.

It was a dark corridor, a hall of doorways leading into about twenty booths, each a little larger than a powder room in a suburban house. But the walls of the booths weren’t made of drywall like a suburban bathroom. They were made of the same material as the cheapest furniture from Ikea or Wal-Mart: particleboard covered in plastic veneer. There were no doorknobs. The doors operated against the creaking of springs, which kept them shut. Above the doors, red circular lights were mounted. About a third of them were lit.