Читать книгу Arcade - Drew Nellins Smith - Страница 8

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THINGS WERE PERMITTED THERE THAT WERE NOT permitted inside city limits. Smoking indoors, for instance. Most of the customers were men, though I saw straight couples there on rare occasions. I saw transsexuals. Always male to female—“M2F” if you’re looking for one online. Once or twice, I saw single women there, but they spoiled the mood a little. I assumed the women who showed up alone were sex addicts. It goes without saying that a great majority of men are sex addicts, or would be if they could manage to get laid. Usually, the straight couples at the arcade just browsed the racks of DVDs or looked at vibrators and lubricants together. The woman would giggle, and the two of them would talk in low tones, the man’s voice pitched high, as if he were interviewing a child. You like this? You like that? Rarely, they would venture into the video booths, which was when things could get interesting.

Single men appeared to peruse the shelves of videos, but most of them were faking. They were just waiting to see who came in the door, occasionally jingling the tokens in their pockets so guys knew they weren’t really exploring Indian porn or Japanese porn or any of the other ethnicities represented on the wire metal racks around which the best view of the entrance could be had.

On either side of the main room were two dark hallways lined with viewing booths—a smoking hallway and a nonsmoking hallway. The corridors were U-shaped and ran parallel on opposite sides of the shopping space. If you entered at the front, you’d walk down the length of the corridor and exit at the back end of the store, emerging into the well-lit emporium, where you could pretend to look at DVDs for a while, or make your way to the opposite hallway to see what was happening there. Or, if you preferred, you could retrace your steps back down the same hallway through which you’d just passed to see what, if anything, had changed since you walked down it a few seconds earlier.

Things that might have changed in the interval:

1. Someone might have exited one of the viewing booths. So there might have been a new guy, a guy you hadn’t run into before, walking through the dim light and the bleachy, musky air towards or away from you. If someone had exited, and you liked what you saw, you could walk towards him and look at him, or you could stay put and look at him as he approached you. And if you looked at each other in a certain way, then you might go into a booth together and put a token in the slot, and pick a movie that would play in the background for sixty seconds while the two of you shared the space in whatever way you chose.

2. A red light might have come on outside one or more of the booths. A red light lit up when the booth’s occupant dropped a token in the slot, thus starting a movie and signaling to the other visitors that the booth was occupied. If you liked, you could walk up to the door and press against it. If you found it locked, you continued walking as if nothing had happened. If it was unlocked, you could enter and see what the booth held.

3. A red light that had been lit before might have been extinguished, signaling that the movie had ended, leaving the booth’s occupant(s) with a few options:

a) He/they/she (in order of likelihood) could drop another token in the slot to get the movie started again.

b) He/they/she could exit the booth.

c) He/they/she could stay in the booth without dropping a token into the slot, which was against the rules.